This is my journal entry from January 30, 2026 — my real, unedited day, shared just as it happened.
Today's the day of massive inspiration. Holy shit, I am absolutely on fire. I wake up with the kids this morning. My son is feeling back to his normal energy, which is great. Then I take the kids to school this morning. We get there in good time, which my daughter's happy with. I have some time to read my son's planet book about the planet Mercury in the car. And then I head straight over to a yoga studio for a class. It's maybe like 45 outside this morning, but I'm in shorts and a t-shirt. Can't be bothered to take more stuff off once I get in that yoga room, which would be like 94 degrees. I roll in there and I'm not happy with any of the places I see to put my mat as I put everything down by the cabinets. And I end up just opting to put my mat right next to the cabinets.
The instructor today goes hard on the power flow. Jesus Christ, like fucking sweating all over the place, sweats flying. And this is the first one of these power classes here I've done in a long time where I feel like I can barely keep up. But I'm super proud that it's so hot in here and I'm in such great shape. I'm able to do this. Those power classes used to kick my ass. And now the fact that I can do this today is incredible. I do notice a woman a couple of mats up from me is the one that I mentioned the hubcap to a few days ago. The hottest one in the class easily. Holy shit. She's gorgeous.
And as the class wraps up, at the beginning of the class, though, there was a girl who smiled at me and I wasn't prepared. She like looked at me and smiled. I'm like, shit, I wasn't even ready to like talk to her, but it did feel good. And I'm looking around for her and I can't find her at the end of the class. I'm like, well, shit. I am putting into practice what I talked about yesterday. And the really hot girl with the missing hubcap, she walks by. So I just stare at her and try and make eye contact. And she actually looks at me and smiles. And I'm like, oh. Wow, well, that really made my day, didn't it? I got to make sure to put my mat down next to her and tell her how attractive she is and see what happens after that. Do I get to meet my second wife or do we get kicked out of the yoga studio? Who knows? We shall see.
But that did feel really good when there's so many girls that aren't even responding to me. Like the woman I'd been talking to has not responded to me still as I'm recording this later. Nothing yet. Nobody else. Like, fuck. Do these girls just get so many messages? They just don't respond? Or is it like they're not interested in me? I don't know. It doesn't matter what's going on with them. What matters is what's going on with me. And my mind is just bursting with inspiration today. It's amazing.
I get home and my sponsor is giving out a medallion to somebody in AA meeting today. But I'm hella late. And that's fine because I'm going to do it right. I shower because I'm so sweaty, still thinking about the woman from class and the kind of partnership I'm really hoping for. And I ate the rest of the bean noodles I cooked last night for the kids and then met my sponsor, even though I was at least 30 minutes late to the meeting. I still got there to hear some of the guy's story. And I ended up chatting with a couple of ladies for 40 minutes after the meeting, which was so therapeutic. They're showering compliments on me. We're all sharing our stories and our situations, and it felt fantastic.
I drove home, and I'm looking at the sheets, which I've been in my new place here almost a month, haven't changed the sheets yet, and my comforter, which is a California king-size comforter for my king bed, has not been washed since I moved out on my own. Thus, I think it's time to wash that today, but my washer is too small to wash that. So I'm looking at going to the laundromat, which of course reminds me of an Eminem song that mentions a laundromat. Yeah, that's how that goes. I'm like, fuck, let's go to the laundromat today. So I have a salad and throw the big comforter in the car. I wash the other two in my washer and I drive to the laundromat. I haven't been to the laundromat. I don't think I've been in a laundromat since I was a teenager when the washer broke at the apartment complex where my parents were renting from these German people. I remember going and playing Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 in arcade back in the 90s, the last time I've been in a laundromat. I roll in the laundromat and there's lots of washers and shit there. I get all kinds of quarters, take a washer big enough for the mat.
And I get slapped with multiple waves of inspiration right before this, right after the AA meeting. I have a vision of writing a book that's addressed to my second wife. I think, you know, maybe actually this is in the shower when I was thinking about the girl at yoga. I was like, you know what I should do? I should just write a book that is like dear second wife or something like that and just talk to a girl about what I'd like in a second wife. And then I could just give that to any potential hostages slash opportunities. And it'd be an incredible way to be transparent and to skip the usual dating process. Someone reads a book like that. Yeah, it might fail 99 times out of 100, but you give 100 a mountain, all of a sudden, somebody's just got to have you.
And then as I'm getting to the laundromat, I put that together with talking to Joe Parys yesterday, and I remember, holy shit, Amazon has ads for books. And the best ads are ads that sell directly in the platform. And then I have this, like, big bang moment in my head. I'm like, holy shit. I need to advertise my books. It's so obvious. Like, that book is a perfect example. Like, I could put a book out that's like, Dear Second Wife, advertise it all over the place, and I might find a second wife anywhere in the country with that book. And that's the kind of book that people would predictably be toxic over. Like some girl might buy that and be like, what a fucking asshole and like do a rant about it on Instagram or some shit and make me a bunch of additional sales and maybe even get it in front of the right girl. Like that's a book that could go viral right there. And the first step would be, well, writing it would be the first step. Then the second step would be to advertise it. Like, holy shit, this is it.
I need to hit these Amazon ads because I know how to do paid ads and I know paid ads work and I know they work best usually if you can sell straight on the platform. As I ranted about in my book, I Was Famous on the Internet, if I tried to send people off of Facebook, they wouldn't go. But Amazon is perfect because I can sell books with Amazon ads directly on Amazon. Holy shit, it's the greatest setup. And what are people doing that are looking for new books to read? They're fucking scrolling on Amazon. They're looking through books on Amazon. They're clicking on sponsored ads on Amazon, trying to find a new book to read, hoping for something different. Especially people have Kindle Unlimited and just ripped through books on there. I mean, they're looking for someone like me. And the advantage I offer is the sheer quantity of books I put out. A lot of authors, ads don't make sense if you have one or two books, especially if those books don't monetize. But I have everything in position. I have 20 some books on Amazon right now. And just my daily autobiography series has five books in it already with a sixth book that just needs to be edited. And this, which I think will be in the seventh book here, this just needs to be edited too. And then with Amazon accounts, people have Kindle, paperback, and audio. It's perfect. It is absolutely perfect.
I can see it now. Yes, yes, I can see clearly now. All I need to be able to do is dump money into Amazon ads and write books. I can test which books get the best results too. I could easily write a book every week or so and just test which one can I make money off of advertising, which one gets me coaching clients. And the key is that I need books that people will go to jerrybanfield.com and actually pay money to talk to me. Imagine me doing a book like Dear Second Wife, advertising the shit out of that, and girls actually pay. Right now on my website, I update it to correspond with this new strategy because if I'm going to advertise books on Amazon across the US, I could be getting people from anywhere. So I update it. I take the event off my website. I switch it to a 30-minute phone call, one-hour Zoom call, and then in-person sessions. I upgraded the one-on-one phone call to $111. The Zoom video call to $222 and the in-person session for an hour and a half for $333.
Can you imagine, can you imagine some girl in like Utah that reads my book and is like, holy shit, I've got to marry this guy. And can you imagine her paying like $200 for a Zoom session and then paying like $300 more to actually come out here and meet me in person? Can you picture me getting paid to date? That shit is so far above the levels where other people are. That is so crazy. And the paid ads are the gateway to that. This inspiration is, this is what I love, that this is why you need your full range of emotions, because, yeah, I had a couple of days where I was down on my business this week, like, I'm fucked, guys, like, I'm fucked, nobody's gonna read these books, it's gonna be the end, and today I'm, like, so high off inspiration. Like that is an idea that is absolutely on such a higher level. It is amazing. I am so excited to execute it. All I need to do is get the rest of my un-effing-myself book done. I'll be ready to go. I've got three more chapters I'll do on that.
This also brings into question how much I want to hand out locally. I definitely want to hand out locally, but I'm thinking Amazon ads should be the foundation of cranking my book sales out. Then we'll also do local targeted handouts or get books handed out locally also to bring in more one-on-one calls, Zoom calls, in-person sessions. I go through Amazon with this inspiration. I create 10 campaigns for my books. In the past, I'd only tested two and I quickly gave up on them, but I wasn't thinking about this the right way. The book advertising doesn't need to be profitable on a single book. If I could spend $50 and sell a few books, that could work out if then I sell some coaching calls here and there. Because then it'll all pay for itself. And then the more books I sell, the more reviews I'll get, the more books I'll sell organically, the more people post about my books on social media, it will snowball.
So I created an ad for I Was Famous on the Internet. And It's Not You, It's the Dating Apps. ChatGPT for President. The Kind Divorce. Is Bitcoin One Big Lie? The Unpolished Truth, Living Alone Again, Author in St. Petersburg, Officer Banfield, Nine Hours Later, and Sober Through Separation. I put all of them at $5 a day budget, so $50 a day. And will they actually serve? We'll see. I put all the bids to whatever it suggested. And the idea is the more books I have, the more I can test different books. And there will be some books. If you do 80-20 rule, there will probably, if I do 10 books, there'll probably be two that work decently in ads. That means if I do 20 more books, I'll probably get four more books that work in ads. The books that work in ads can just sit there and keep bringing in sales over and over again. I can just keep cranking books out. Eventually, if I get 10, 20 different books and I'm advertising all of them and they're bringing in sales on all of them, we could have a big-ass business system. Then I could even afford to advertise losers that don't even directly bring much money in, but they just get impressions. I could eventually work up to thousands of dollars a day on Amazon ads, making thousands of dollars a day in book sales to cover that, and then just filling my calendar with coaching calls and in-person meetups. What a business system. Holy shit.
All this while I'm at the laundromat. There's a dude there who looks like he's having a rough time. He just got kicked out of his mom's house. He's on a phone. He says, hey, bro, you got a phone charger? I'm like, nah. He's like, you sure? I mean, yes, I'm fucking sure I don't have a fucking phone charger. All right. But I get my comforter clean to come back home and get it all set up. I got my bed. I got nice clean sheets finally for the first time in weeks. And damn, I'm so grateful to have this level of excitement and enthusiasm. And I'm grateful I got enough money to get this set up and start working on it. And then the only question is, can we get this thing profitable and cranking cash in before hitting bankruptcy? I'm excited to find out.
After getting all hyped up about my books, I take myself to a movie. My son's not doing soccer tonight because he still wants to rest some. And I decide I'm going to go see Mercy tonight at a movie theater. I've never been to a movie by myself as an adult. And I'm interested to try it. It's cool to just look at the movies and think, what do I want to see? And I thought this movie looks good. I go over and pay $16 to park, pay about the same for my movie ticket and a little bit less than that for my popcorn. Take myself out for a little less than $50. It's really cool. The parking, you just drive in and it automatically opens and closes because I have my car registered and it bills you. It's pretty convenient. I walk into the movie theater and it's mostly empty, although there's maybe 10 people in there. There's probably 40 or 50 seats. I sit down and I'm eating my popcorn slowly, one, two pieces at a time. I get a large popcorn and there's a shitload of previews. I even catch some of the ads beforehand.
And I thought I'd feel kind of bad. Like I was interested to go see this movie by myself to think like, how am I going to feel? Am I going to feel sad that I'm not there with a girl? All these other people are out. But I feel pretty calm and peaceful. I remember the times my ex-wife and I went to the movies together and when I went with the kids. I remember how much fun I had going to the movies with my ex-wife, feeling so grateful that I just wanted to treasure those memories forever. And I've still got those memories. They're still right there. And it's nice to actually just go to the movies by myself. The last time I went to the movies was with my sister and her kids. And I think of that and how much fun I had talking shit with my nephew during the Predator Badlands movie, which I'm just about to edit that section of the book that I'm working on from those diary entries.
I sit and watch the movie and it gets some emotions going in me. It's very sensational, especially since I don't watch TV or videos. Going to a movie is a big sensational experience. And I end up feeling very grateful that I don't need somebody else to go to a movie and that someday I'll be out with a hot girl again and we'll be going to the movies and there'll be that passion and that excitement. But this is nice right now, today. I walk out of the movie theater and the woman that sat next to me with her man sees the hoodie I'm wearing that says, would you like a hug? And she said, look, this guy's giving out free hugs. And she gives me a big hug and then she tells her man. She says, here, you give him a hug too. So me and this guy have a nice hug and then they walk into the bathroom and I walk over to the parking garage.
I drive home and I think, wow, this was a nice evening. I really enjoyed that. And if I'm going to watch a movie in the theater like that, it was cool to, I felt like I was with the other people there. I didn't feel like I was alone because I was watching this movie with all these other people. It was really cool. Normally, I'd be so consumed with whoever I was going with, I wouldn't pay much attention to the other people. But going by myself, I was very aware of all the other people there. And I felt like all of us had went to the movies together. It was really cool. I drove home and then wrapped up and worked on my book some more and had a nice night of sleep, pushing it all the way after 11, going through some book ideas with ChatGPT and editing my book before bed.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.