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Prologue. Let’s Skip the Introductions: You Already Know Why I’m Here
Picture this.
A middle-aged paisa woman sitting in front of a computer at two in the morning.
On the table there’s an ice-cold Coca-Cola —because warm it isn’t even good for washing a mop—, a phone that won’t stop buzzing with messages from clients, and three notebooks full of ideas I’m going to finish someday.
Or not.
You can’t go around promising miracles in the prologue of a book that exists precisely to talk about the sons of bitches who promise miracles.
That woman is me.
Yenny Astrid Londoño.
If you don’t know me, that’s fine.
And if you do know me, you already know I don’t give a damn what you think of me.
I don’t have a master’s degree.
I don’t have a PhD in economics, consumer psychology, digital marketing or any of those degrees some people put in their Instagram bio so they can charge you more for the same old story.
I don’t give talks in luxury hotels.
I don’t sell five-thousand-dollar mentorships.
I don’t take pictures of myself getting out of a rented car so I can write underneath:
“While you sleep, I build my empire.”
No, sweetheart.
While you sleep, I’m probably answering clients who want to know, at two in the morning, whether a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-peso gift basket includes delivery, a serenade, breakfast, decorations, a photographer, a mariachi band and, if possible, the resurrection of the relationship.
Now that’s the real world.
What I have is many years of selling, creating, going broke, starting over, hiring people, fighting with suppliers, chasing delivery guys, fixing other people’s screwups and looking at my bank account the way you look at the results of a medical test:
scared, but hoping nothing serious shows up.
I’ve had businesses.
Some worked.
Others went to shit.
But they went with style, because I don’t fail just any old way either.
My failures have been such monumental disasters that they deserve a commemorative plaque and guided tours on Sundays.
I read tarot.
I make gift baskets.
I design websites.
I create businesses.
I invent others.
I write books that I kept in a drawer for years because you always think they’re still missing something, until you realize that if you keep waiting for them to be perfect, you’ll die and the notebooks will end up being used to jot down phone numbers.
And, above all, I have street smarts.
Not the kind you get posing in white sneakers in front of a graffiti wall to look humble.
The real kind.
The kind you learn collecting invoices, losing money, trusting the wrong people, working without sleep and discovering that every peso costs more to earn than any guru would dare to admit in one of their videos.
Life taught me to distrust promises that are too pretty.
It taught me the hard way, which is how the lessons that actually stick get learned.
Because when something sounds too good to be true, there’s almost always a hustler on the other side calculating how much they can take from you before you notice.
This book was born on an ordinary night.
I was watching an ad on social media.
A guy appeared with an impeccable tie, a smile straight out of a dental catalog and a car he had probably rented for an hour to shoot thirty videos.
The man swore anyone could make ten thousand dollars a month working just two hours a day from the beach.
Two hours.
From the beach.
Ten thousand dollars.
Those people love the beach.
They never offer working from your living room with the neighbor blasting vallenato, the dog barking and the overdue electricity bill sitting on top of the fridge.
No.
It’s always from a white-sand beach, with a laptop that never fills with sand and a drink with a little umbrella that nobody knows who made.
I, who know what it costs to earn every goddamn peso, laughed.
I laughed because I’ve spent entire nights putting together gift baskets.
Because I’ve had employees capable of turning a twenty-minute task into a six-season Netflix production.
Because I’ve seen delivery guys get lost with the address, the real-time location, a photo of the building and practically a religious procession guiding them.
Because I know a business can go to shit simply because a supplier decided a delivery date was a spiritual suggestion rather than a commitment.
So yes.
I laughed.
But then I kept thinking.
Because I laughed.
Thousands of people didn’t.
Thousands saw that same ad and felt that, finally, someone had come to rescue them.
The solution to their debts.
The way out of a job they hate.
The answer to years of exhaustion.
The secret the rich were supposedly keeping to themselves.
The shortcut nobody had wanted to tell them about.
And they paid.
Of course they paid.
Because when a person is desperate, they don’t buy a course.
They buy hope.
They buy rest.
They buy the possibility of getting up the next morning believing their life is about to change.
And those people know exactly what that illusion is worth.
They’ve measured it.
They’ve studied it.
They’ve packaged it in videos, bonuses, countdown timers and motivational quotes.
And they sell it to you in convenient installments.
I didn’t write this book to make fun of the people who bought.
Some of them already carry enough shame without me showing up to finish beating them with a stick.
I wrote it for the people who are about to buy.
For the ones who already bought and don’t dare tell anyone because they feel like they were the only idiot who fell for it.
For the ones who have the link saved in their bookmarks, watch the testimonials every night and still wonder:
—What if this time it actually works?
I wrote it because I know how to sell.
I didn’t learn sales in a room full of people applauding every time a speaker yelled “shark mindset.”
I learned by selling.
Serving customers.
Listening to excuses.
Collecting payments.
Losing.
Testing.
And understanding that a good salesperson shows you why something is worth it.
A smoke seller, on the other hand, makes you feel like your life is shit and then charges you for promising they can fix it.
I also learned to recognize them.
I can smell them from miles away.
They use different words, but the same script.
One sells cryptocurrency.
Another sells real estate.
Another sells spirituality.
Another sells artificial intelligence.
Another sells how to sell courses that teach other people how to sell courses.
The product changes.
The bait doesn’t.
They always tell you you’re tired because you think like a poor person.
That you don’t get ahead because you have limiting beliefs.
That the system wants to see you fail.
That your family doesn’t support you because they’re afraid of your potential.
And that, by pure coincidence, they have the only solution.
A solution that costs four hundred and ninety-seven dollars and expires in nineteen minutes.
I’m tired of watching intelligent people hand over their money, their time and even their self-esteem to guys who are better at editing photos than at running the business they claim to teach.
Guys whose greatest business success consists, precisely, of selling courses on how to achieve a business success nobody has ever been able to prove they had before they started selling courses.
Because that’s another beauty of it.
You ask them:
—And how did you make your fortune?
And they answer:
—By teaching other people how to make a fortune.
Oh, well then.
The business was selling the map.
Not having reached the destination.
Let’s clear something up before some enlightened soul reads three pages and goes around saying I’m attacking education.
I’m not against courses.
I’m not against mentorships.
I’m not against online education or people who charge for sharing what they know.
I sell products too.
I teach workshops.
I charge for my work.
Because knowledge is worth something.
Time is worth something.
Experience is worth something.
And working for free doesn’t make anyone a good person; it just makes them poorer.
The problem isn’t charging.
The problem is charging for something that doesn’t exist.
Selling results that can’t be guaranteed.
Inventing a need and then showing up, as if by magic, with the solution.
Flaunting a borrowed life to sell a success that isn’t theirs either.
And, when the client discovers they lost their money, telling them it happened because they didn’t believe enough, didn’t vibrate high enough, didn’t have discipline, didn’t manifest properly or let their family contaminate their millionaire energy.
What a perfect business.
If it works, the method is wonderful.
If it doesn’t work, it’s the client’s fault.
The guru never loses.
The one who loses is you.
This book is so that the next time someone shows up promising you’ll get rich in three months, earn like Shakira, retire young, live traveling or attract abundance by writing affirmations in front of the mirror, it makes you laugh.
But not the laugh of someone mocking what they don’t understand.
The laugh of someone who already saw where they hid the trap.
The laugh of someone who watches the countdown ticking and thinks:
—Count down all you want, motherfucker. My card isn’t leaving this wallet.
Throughout this book you’re going to run into me a lot.
I’m not going to hide behind elegant words to look smarter.
I’m not presenting a thesis.
I’m not angling for a seat in the Royal Spanish Academy.
I’m going to talk to you the way I talk in my kitchen.
The way I talk to my sons.
