I was lied to as a child.

I have a feeling you were, too.

I remember sitting in my dad’s old apartment after my parent’s divorce, staring at an old laptop screen with Arizona State University’s website open, wondering what I was going to study and commit to for the rest of my life.

At the age of 18, I was faced with a near-impossible decision. I was forced to know exactly what I wanted out of life when I hadn’t even had a life of my own. I was forced to choose the starting point of the career I would spend the next 40+ years of my life. I was forced to choose something that seemed to “set me up for a good future,” or else I would pay the consequences, literally, with a pile of student loans.

For most people, they choose the career that will make them the most money… but that’s a lie.

For others, they choose the career that people will respect them for… but that’s a lie.

For the rest, they choose the career they think they will enjoy the most… but again, that’s a lie.

You were sold an illusion by parents and teachers who were sold an illusion.

Their degrees, or lack thereof, had little to no impact on their income, status, or enjoyment. A degree may have opened opportunities, but ultimately, it was their personal choices that led to a higher income, status, or level of enjoyment. There are plenty of rich dropouts and broke graduates.

People are starting to wake up to the fact that the conventional path doesn’t work for sensible people.

And as Alan Watts would say, “Sensible people get paid for doing what they enjoy doing.”

If you’re reading this, I’m assuming you are a creative at heart.

You don’t care about making billions, you care about making more than enough money to do whatever you want.

You don’t care about the hustle and grind of the typical entrepreneur, you care about rest, free time, and meaningful work.

But you were lied to.

You went to school, got a job, and realized a few things.

• You don’t know how to monetize your passions, interests, or skills outside of a job. In other words, you don’t understand that making money is a stack of skills like any others you’ve learned, but you banked on your employer to feed you with those skills.
• You learned the skills that would “make you the most money” but realized that you have a hard limit on your earning potential that your employer sets for you. How much you earn depends on the vessel you choose for that skill, and a job usually isn’t the best long-term vessel.
• You are trading time for money when technology will eventually make those tasks more efficient. What you do for work will be less valuable in the future, and you’ll either take a massive pay cut or get fired. Technology lowers the cost of replicable tasks so we can focus on solving creative and human problems.

That’s what I’m here to help you change in this letter.

I want to prove to you that it’s possible to make $1 million doing what you enjoy with simple logic and math. This is a semi-practical letter, but belief comes before action, so we will be chiseling into your mind a bit to rid your thought processes of debilitating beliefs.

I want to show you what to focus on so you don’t get trapped in a new 9 to 5 called client work.

I want to give you full control over how much you work, how much you make, and how much satisfaction you derive from both.

Leveraged Work – The Definition Of A Creative

If the work doesn’t require creativity, delegate it, automate it, or leave it. – Naval

A creative is not someone with a specific skill that a robot will outprice and outcompete.

A creative is not a designer, filmmaker, painter, writer, photographer, or any specific limiting identity.

A creative is someone who engages with the process of life reflected in their work.

A creative is someone who solves problems with whatever combination of skill, knowledge, experience, and inspiration necessary in the pursuit of a goal, usually in the form of a project.

If you work a job you hate as something like a designer, I would argue that you are not a true creative even when your job title and identity say you are (because you’re a fancy “designer”).

You don’t register the job you hate as a priority problem to be solved.

You don’t block out time to do the highest-leverage work, which will remove you from that job and give you more control over your time and income. You aren’t creative enough to solve a real problem, so you focus on doing your work and creating some pretty pixels on a screen to solve a problem that your employer assigned to you.

I am not against jobs, but I see them for what they are: a stepping stone.

A job is useful for acquiring skills and industry knowledge, but it can also harm one’s psyche and breed complacency.

In a job, it is almost guaranteed that there will come a point where you stop solving new problems. You get stuck solving the same problems over and over again. Problems that you didn’t choose to solve in the first place. You get bored and start wasting your time, but by then, you have so many responsibilities and bad habits that you always feel narrow-minded and stressed, so your ability to identify and solve problems independently is incredibly difficult.

Life is an endless string of problems.

Problems are the polar end of purpose, one does not exist without the other.

Solutions to problems are valuable.

When you stop solving new problems, your mind stops expanding.

With each problem you solve, you reach a new level of mind because you have to zoom out into the unknown, collect resources, and use the creative ability of your mind to reach the next stage. This is a key lesson in The Art Of Focus.

In other words, a job, or just your comfort zone, can be the early death of the best version of yourself. In fact, I wouldn’t say it’s an early death. It’s a slow and painful decline into the worst version of yourself. Problem-solving is how you reverse entropy in your mind. If you have no new problems to solve, you slowly drown in chaos, feeling bored, lost, and anxious until it becomes so painful that you are forced to change your situation or accept early death.

I’d prefer that you don’t wait until that point.

A creative is someone whose end goal is leveraged work.

That is, identifying the work that leads to the most results with the least effort.

For most people, the “results” you are looking for are more money, more time, and more fulfillment.

Here are the steps to reaching all of them.

The $1 Million Dollar Creative

I always believed passion was found in a specific skill.

I tried to find that passion in web design, digital art, and programming. Every time, I was left feeling empty.

It wasn’t until I decided to take control of my life, get clear on what I wanted for my future, and start pursuing that relentlessly that I figured out what a creative actually is.

Passion is found in the process of creating your vision.

You can enjoy a skill you use along the way to help, but if you become attached to or dogmatic about that skill by making an identity out of it, you will get trapped.

You aren’t passionate about being a designer, you are passionate about the problems design allows you to solve (until your life and work limit what problems you solve).

Passion is investing energy into a goal. You can be passionate about the journey of mastering a skill, but once you’ve mastered it, that passion fades. You must keep that passion alive by channeling energy into the skills, goals, and projects that will achieve your vision. Your vision is an infinite bank for energy storage.

If you want to reach $1 million as one-person by monetizing your interests, you’re going to have to be okay with learning skills you may not want to learn and doing work you may not want to do.

In the end, that will bring you more fulfillment than never creating your vision because you were too stubborn to learn the skills necessary to do so.

1) Choose A Vision, Not A Skill

If you don’t have a vision, you are lost. You can’t create outcomes, so you are doomed to mechanical living and determined outcomes.

Every decision you make in any domain of your life must be filtered through your vision. That is how you bring meaning to your actions and minimize distractions.

Write down exactly what you want out of life.

Don’t miss a detail, but realize this is an iterative process.

You won’t get it right the first time around, and you probably never will. That’s not the point. Spend 30 minutes generating a minimum viable vision.

Return to it often to add, subtract, and improve as your desires inevitably change with your failures.

Your vision is how you filter what work to do, what skills to learn, and what decisions to make.

Again, if you don’t have a vision, no matter how clear, you are lost.

2) Stack The Future Proof Skills

You’re worried about what career skills to learn that will be relevant in 20 years because you are focused on the viability of the skill, not the vision.

If you want to secure your future, you need a foundational skill stack consisting of:

• Marketing & sales – if you don’t know how to attract and persuade, you will never get what you want, and your only option will be for an employer (or the government) to give it to you.
• Writing & thinking – the ability to communicate the value in your unique mind. The foundation of getting in front of other people.
• Entrepreneurship – the process of taking your future into your own hands, hunting for your survival, and building products that you want to see in the world (that others care about).

When you pair these with the various interests you learn while creating your vision, you become unstoppable. I teach the basics of these in the free One-Person Business Foundations mini-course.

3) Solve Problems With Experimentation

Self-experimentation is the only way to solve your problems for good.

Self-experimentation is the only way to create a unique solution that others can benefit from.

Your job is to:

• Research processes that others have found success with. Thankfully, you can find these with a simple search.
• Experiment with various techniques. Implement the processes you learn and attempt to get results.
• Identify patterns and principles. Note the similarities between each and double down on them.
• Create your own process. Tailor what you learn to your unique lifestyle and situation.
• Contribute to true education by passing it down. Give people education that can’t be taught in schools with a fundamental grounding in critical thinking.

If you’ve solved a problem in your life, you’re qualified to start a business.

4) Become A Value Creator

Today’s vessel for beginning creatives is being a creator.

Not an influencer, a creator. A value creator, to be exact.

Someone who becomes a fountainhead of value based on the interests you love by making them interesting to other people.

You are to become the source for your interests to attract an audience to them.

You do this through:

• Education – teach your interests in a way that helps people achieve a goal toward your vision.
• Entertainment – throw in a dash of personality to attract people like you (the people you can help the most).
• Inspiration – show people what you’ve built so they can see what’s possible.

Social media is not just an app on your phone.

It’s the town square of the new, digital society.

Yes, you probably use it to numb your mind by scrolling meaningless content, but others are using it as education that schools don’t teach so they can reach heights that normal society doesn’t offer.

Value creators are those who dedicate themselves to their interests, take it on as their life’s work to explore them, and distill the information into education.

This is the style of one-person business that I teach.

Creating social media content to build distribution under your name.

In business, distribution = freedom.

An audience = distribution.

Hammer this into your head:

You will not make money (that you control) if you don’t have people who will give you money for the value you offer in the form of a product.

If you never realize this, you have no other option but to work a job where your employer does this for you for the rest of your life.

5) Monetize Your Mind, Not Your Time

Value creators are those who:

• Monetize their minds, not their time, so they can remain one person without limiting their income. One person’s labor can’t scale, but the creative ability of their minds can.
• Research their obsessions and distill their learning with writing, video, and other internet content.
• Get paid for aggregated knowledge and experience in the form of digital products (or physical products once you have the cash flow necessary to sustain that… but everyone should have a digital product that replaces their income and covers their living expenses).

This is what I teach you how to do in my new course, Mental Monetization, to monetize your creative work. It goes live on June 3rd. Preorder before the price increases.

Products are the highest form of leverage.

They sell while you sleep.

You don’t need to spend time fulfilling the value you offer like you do with service or client work.

You build it once and sell it as many times as your skill allows.

6) Turning It Into $1 Million

Your levers as a value creator are:

• Writing – Attracting an audience of people by educating them on how your interests can help them achieve their goals. The writing can be repurposed into posts, a newsletter, a YouTube script, and literally any other kind of content. Start with writing. (2 Hour Writer teaches this).
• Promotion – You won’t make money if you don’t promote your product. Promote your email list on social media. Promote your products on your email list.
• Iteration – Pay attention to the writing and promotions that do better than others. Improve them as you go to increase the effectiveness of them.

This is literally the only thing you need to do to reach $1 million as one person.

You have a product that sells.

You have an audience that’s growing.

If you can continue growing the audience and selling the product… how much you earn is really up to you. It’s just simple math.

If you can make $1, you can make $1 million.

If you can gain 1 follower, you can gain 1 million.

The only trap here is forgetting that you are a creative.

If your audience stops growing, that’s a problem, solve it.

If your product stops selling, that’s a problem, solve it.

If you don’t know how to solve it… skill issue.

6) The Importance Of Rest

You can’t identify new problems with a narrow mind.

Work contracts the mind, rest expands the mind.

At rest, your brain kicks on the Default Mode Network.

We don’t need to get into technicals, but your brain is more active when you are at rest and attempts to connect and spit ideas into your conscious mind.

Heard of “shower thoughts?”

That’s what this process does.

If you want to consistently have great ideas that lead to the highest leverage work… stop working.

Schedule walks in between work blocks. Go to the gym. Block out reading time. Go to dinner with your friends. Do anything that isn’t work… especially thinking about work.

7) F*ck Being Busy

If the work doesn’t move the needle toward your vision, stop doing it.

Busy work is yet another distraction that most people love to fall for.

Your psyche is wired to hunt.

So, work like a lion, as Naval would say.

Or, in my words, use tactical stress.

• Sit, let vision accumulate.
• Wait, until you see the prey.
• Sprint, get the work done.
• Eat, enjoy life and rest.

This goes against everything that we’ve been conditioned to believe. It will take time to accept that this is how creatives work.

Being boxed in a tidy 9-5 schedule is a living hell for creatives and entrepreneurs at heart.

That’s it for this letter, thank you for reading.

– Dan

The post The $1 Million Dollar Creative – How To Monetize Your Interests appeared first on Dan Koe.

We’re in the middle of a second renaissance.

But only a select few people can see what’s going on.

Even fewer people are actually taking advantage of it.

Can you see it?

• The creator economy is growing at an exponential rate.
• People don’t trust traditional jobs or schooling to secure their future.
• People are turning to creators to educate them on the skills necessary to thrive in a fast-changing digital environment.
• AI, automation, and software have made business more accessible to people who want to do what they enjoy for a living.
• People are working less, earning more, and leveraging technology to remove themselves from the old society.
• People are craving human connection online from people with personalities, not glorified search engines who talk about one specialized interest.

These are all connected to the fact that technology has changed the way we work, the opportunities we have for work, and what justifies valuable work.

If you want to do what you enjoy for a living, you’re living in the right time period.

The internet has decentralized wealth generation to individuals who value self-education, personal responsibility, and amounting to something in your life by doing good work.

A few problems have led to this.

1) Specialists compete with other specialists.

A specialist is someone who attempts to achieve a goal with a single interest or skill.

Like a bodybuilder with fitness.

Or only playing one role/class/character in a video game.

Or performing a mechanical string of tasks at a job.

Being a specialist made sense in the Industrial Age but not in the Information Age.

When a bodybuilder gets injured, they either get bored and stop making progress or start from scratch.

When you get countered in a video game, or someone is already playing your role, you are at a massive disadvantage.

When your work consists of the same thing over and over again, not only are you a prime candidate for replacement, but life loses its zest because there is no challenge or novel goal that brings meaning to life… your time shrivels up because all you can focus on is working all day, being tired all night, paying the bills, hoping your family doesn’t leave you, and the rest.

On the other hand, generalists are diverse and interesting.

Most people think that in order to become successful, they have to be really good at one thing.

Social media has distorted how we perceive value.

You don’t need chiseled six-pack abs and a spray tan to impress others and generate attention.

Most people find it impressive to have a tiny bit of muscle mass, be able to do a few pull-ups and have a life outside of fitness.

Pair that with a writing hobby and some psychology knowledge and you open up a world of opportunities from random people on the internet (that you wouldn’t have been able to get in front of in the past).

In the second renaissance, you don’t need to be exceptional at one thing, you need to be average at many.

2) The internet favors the generalist.

When I first started in business I was bombarded with the advice to “niche down.”

The riches are in the niches, so they say.

And don’t just niche down a bit, niche so far down that you only have a small pool of people you can help with the skill you’ve learned.

It makes sense, but in my eyes, it’s outdated advice.

Social media is at the forefront of attention.

Things like paid ads and cold emails – you know, the things absolutely nobody likes doing – require you to get specific on your messaging so you can find, target, and get your work in front of specific people. If you don’t understand this, take my free one-person business foundations course.

As marketing shifts more and more to organic content on social media, this just isn’t the case.

With content, your work is exposed to diverse audiences because that’s just how social media works.

• The algorithm
• Reposts and shares
• Comments from random people

They all launch you into unpredictable audiences.

And, people aren’t on social media to learn or buy (at least when they log on to social media until they come across something beneficial to their lives). They’re there to be entertained. So, you need to adapt your strategy accordingly.

If your message is too niche, people will scroll right past it.

Instead, you have to attract a diverse audience with a range of interests and then persuade them of the importance of the skill you aim to monetize.

If all you talk about is what you sell, people will catch on that fast.

I would rather have a diverse 100,000-follower audience than a niche 10,000-follower audience because I understand how to educate people.

I will teach you how to do this soon.

3) Labor work is more replaceable than ever.

Society has set you up to fail.

We are in the middle of a spiritual war of beliefs.

Older generations haven’t allowed their identity to be challenged with the changing landscape. Their mind still lives in a time when it was smart to go to school, get a job, and work until you die with the possibility of a good retirement.

It’s not their fault… that’s just human nature. It takes time for belief systems to evolve on a collective scale.

The problem is that people will claw and fight so that you don’t change. As much as they say they do it out of love for you, the reality is that their identity is threatened when you do better than them.

The path of the Second Renaissance Man requires mental strength and fortitude.

You must have conviction in your beliefs that you have more potential than getting a job that a robot can replace within 5-10 years.

I don’t need to tell you that most schooling and job options are outdated when you can go to any news or reporting site and see for yourself.

Why Generalists Thrive In The Creator Economy

Only slaves are expected to perform one task for their entire life.

That’s what our current education and employment system reflects.

Wage slavery is a very real thing.

On the other hand, a “free man” is defined as someone who acts on their interests and does many things throughout their life.

If you don’t create a goal, you will be assigned one, and society is great at handing out goals to those who can’t think for themselves.

A generalist is someone who learns all relevant knowledge and skills out of interest of achieving a goal in their life.

This came naturally for me, as I’m sure it has for many people reading this.

I’m grateful I have an audience that can relate to my failures.

So, for those who are in the trenches, I want to provide some clarity.

I failed at dropshipping, e-commerce, SEO, digital art, and more.

But in the pursuit of my business goals, I stacked an irreplaceable set of skills.

One or two skills didn’t bring me much in terms of results.

But five… six… seven skills allowed me to spot and act on profitable opportunities because I had more tools to solve more problems.

Dropshipping taught me branding so I could stand out from bigger brands with low shipping times.

E-commerce taught me advertising and product design so I could be more attention-grabbing.

Digital art taught me graphic design and the nuances of building an audience on social media.

Notice how I didn’t study endless tutorials to learn those skills. I set a goal of working for myself, started a project, and practiced those skills while educating myself along the way.

All of those “failures” were the reason I can do what I do today.

There are 2 reasons why this story matters.

1) Failure Stacking Makes You Irreplaceable

Most people know what “skill stacking” is.

It’s like a diversified stock portfolio.

Rather than investing all of your money in one stock – like a specialist – that sets you up for catastrophe, you invest in various stocks to increase your chances at success.

Even if one stock drops, a few others may go up and you will still be at a profit.

If you were going to be in the NBA or have a platinum album, you would know by now.

Being the best at one specific thing is statistically near impossible.

Now, being top 25% in the few areas you find interesting… that’s pretty easy.

To make this more digestible, let’s reframe “skill stacking” as “failure stacking.”

Acquiring a skill puts you in the mindset that you just need to study and learn all day.

Acquiring a failure assumes that you are actively working toward a goal and gaining actual experience.

• Identify a goal in your life – like quitting your job, finding a partner, or getting fit.
• Start with what you know – you can only know what to learn when you hit a roadblock, so hit one fast.
• Pursue your curiosity – let your experience guide you into new paths to experiment with.

All of these will overlap eventually.

Starting in fitness can introduce you to diet models to try, training programs to test, and lifestyle changes to implement.

Once you get to the top 25%, which isn’t much in fitness, you can explore new routes.

Maybe you want to start a career in fitness, so you start writing on the internet and building an audience.

Again, once you get to the top 25%, which again isn’t much, you can start adding to your results by branching out.

You can study philosophy to add depth to your writing, design to enhance your brand, or really anything as a creator – and that’s why generalists thrive.

2) The Most Profitable Niche Is You

The creator economy – not to be confused with the influencer economy – is characterized by individuals who pursue their interests and document their knowledge.

Nobody wants to follow a glorified search engine that talks about the same thing all the time.

Many creators tell me they are afraid to branch out into new interests because they have trouble understanding how that will work.

All you have to do is look at everyone you follow. Are they talking about one thing? Are they actually?

Or are they giving their opinions, beliefs, knowledge, and snippets of their life experience packaged up into impactful content?

“But Dan, what do I sell then?”

That’s where things get tricky.

How To Earn A Living As A Generalist

The first step to earning a living as a generalist is choosing a career path that doesn’t box you into one specific skill or interest.

In other words, you need to become an entrepreneur.

But that alone doesn’t cut it.

You can easily get trapped in a specific niche with work you no longer find meaningful.

As mentioned, you are in the second renaissance.

Social media is the new town square.

Creators are the new Renaissance men.

Creators are the decentralized education system.

Creators are the new economy.

Stop thinking of a “creator” as some new internet job. Think of it as a part of life. You already spend most of your day on your phone. To act like social media isn’t engrained in humanity at this point is foolish. Being a “creator” is just expressing your value in the digital world rather than being a slave to it on the sidelines.

You probably follow creators for education and entertainment because they present beliefs and opportunities different from what you’ve been told.

Ideas shape society, and it’s happening right before your eyes.

Creators are earning an independent income by teaching what they know by pursuing their interests.

They solve problems in their life and sell the solution.

Some sell stylish blue light glasses to help with sleep. Some sell business advice because college professors probably don’t own a business (unless they are teaching out of passion and sitting on wads of cash), so creators are some of the few qualified to teach it. Some sell productivity systems, psychology practices, and meditations.

If you don’t see this, it’s probably time to unfollow everyone and start searching for new pockets of the internet that create the society you want to see in the world. Your attention is going somewhere, might as well fuel what you believe in (and what you want to become).

Let’s start there. How do you begin earning a living?

Build A General Audience

I’m not a fan of building “niche” or specific audiences.

I am a fan of helping your audience reach a big goal with whatever skills, interests, and ideas help them get there.

When people tell you to build a niche audience in a specific topic, they usually don’t realize that’s not what they are doing.

They say that, and then they go on to give random mindset tips, discuss their beliefs, post about their lives, and discuss their other interests.

Before anything else, why build an audience?

Because you need attention and people if you want to make an independent income.

You can no longer rely on your boss to generate attention with a marketing department that sells their product. You have to do it all yourself.

Building an audience is the most accessible way for beginners to do this. All you need is an internet connection, a few ideas, and the ability to type on your keyboard. I teach this in 2-Hour Writer.

To make this simple:

• Choose a big goal – Is it financial freedom? Is it a fit body? Is it self-actualization? The purpose of a value creator – someone focused on value and education rather than entertainment and looks – is to help people improve their mind, body, business, and relationships.
• List out skills, interests, and beliefs – What do people need to know in order to reach that goal? The combination of these is what makes you unique.
• Frame everything you write through the lens of achieving that goal – If you want to talk about basket weaving for some reason, do it, but talk about how it benefits your life as a fun hobby that helps with creativity and mental clarity.

Let’s say the goal I’m helping people achieve is financial freedom.

I talk about creativity, psychology, writing, and human potential to help people get there.

Someone else can choose something completely different, like performance/health, budgeting, and spirituality.

Both have the same big goal that everyone wants – financial freedom – with completely different ways of getting there.

The problem most creators face is that they either don’t have a goal to frame their content, don’t choose a goal that people want, or choose a goal so small that they attract a small audience.

The bigger the goal, the bigger your potential audience and the more unique you can be.

Make Noise, Find Signal

Most creators struggle to start writing because they don’t know what to write about.

1. Just start writing. Nobody is watching when you have zero followers.
2. If your friends follow you, good. Maybe it’s finally time for them to learn who you really are and potentially join you. And if they don’t like it, maybe they don’t really care about you, and you should find that out now instead of later.
3. Write about all of your interests. Make a lot of noise and let your audience decide what they want to hear more of from you. A few poorly performing posts aren’t the end of the world; it’s data.

Of course, posting good content is only one aspect of social growth. You have to understand social media as a skill if you want to grow. I talk about that skill in How To Actually Build An Audience On Social Media.

Next question: how do I write?

First, make a list of content ideas based on your interests.

Second, focus on the “how” and “why.”

Third, write out the post.

Fourth, filter it through your big goal.

Let’s say I’m writing about psychology.

Some topics include:

• How do I manage my emotions? Create a list of steps.
• Why should I manage my emotions? Think of compelling reasons from experience.

Frame it through a big goal like financial freedom, and you have a post:

How to manage your emotions:

• Become aware of negative reactions
• Pause before you act on them
• Stay quiet or make a better decision

When you repeat this process, you reprogram your mind to be less negative.

Life, money, and relationships will flow with ease.

All it takes is a small mention of your big goal for it to be impactful.

Why are we focused on illustrating the “why” or importance of an idea?

Because people whine a lot and experiment little.

“Dan, how can I talk about my interests if nobody is interested in them?”

That’s not their fault. It’s yours. Your interests aren’t interesting because you don’t make them interesting.

If you became interested in them, that means there’s a series of thoughts and ideas that can make it important to someone else.

You weren’t born with that interest. You were programmed into it. You were persuaded of its importance and adopted it to help you achieve your goals in life.

This does require you to think. It probably won’t be that easy the first time around.

Establish Authority With A Digital Asset

At this point, you are writing quite a few posts.

You should review their performance every week to see which ideas did better than others. It should be obvious which ones they are.

You can look for better writing or more engagement.

From there, you want to make the most of those ideas:

• Turn them into longer-form content like a thread, carousel, newsletter, or video.
• Rewrite that post from multiple angles to consistently get more engagement.
• Bake that topic into your writing routine and make it a part of your brand.

If that topic continues to do well for you, establish a piece of your authority in that topic by creating a digital asset.

Create a free product. Pin a thread or carousel to your profile. Write it down as a potential starting point for a digital product. This is what we do in my new course Mental Monetization to monetize your creative work. It launches on June 3rd when the early bird price increases.

Why do we do this?

So you don’t feel like you have to keep repeating yourself and box yourself into a niche.

A free product will contain almost everything you know on the topic.

Instead of writing endless content on that, you can just send them to the free product or they can read your pinned thread.

This gives you room to continue experimenting with new ideas to diversify your brand and make it irreplaceable as a generalist.

As you make noise and find signal, you will solidify the signal as a part of your brand by consistently repurposing that idea and creating new free products to get people on your email list.

Build A Portfolio Of Income Sources

As a generalist, we can look to a few people for inspiration.

First, there’s Zuby.

He’s a rapper, fitness buff, and political commentator.

With a rather general audience, he promotes his music, fitness ebook, and public speaking gigs. He isn’t boxed into one specific topic and that’s what allows him to stand out.

I’d like to think of myself as another example.

Even though I started out in web design, that didn’t stop me from talking about emotional management and self-improvement.

It didn’t stop me from building more products like a physical planner and self-help ebook (The Path To Power that was complete sh*t but allowed me to get better and eventually write and publish a full book).

As my audience grew thanks to attracting people with big goals of achieving more in their life, I was able to pivot out of web design into writing, productivity, branding, and marketing.

I wouldn’t even say those are my interests. I honestly talk about whatever ideas are on my mind. Because if they are important to me with the goals I have, they can become important to someone else with those shared goals, which is quite a few people.

In brief, launch products around the ideas that do well for you.

Monetize with courses, cohorts, templates, systems, tutorials, or whatever else will help people achieve a smaller goal that helps them get a few steps closer to the big goal.

Every 3-6 months, launch at least one free product and one paid product until you have a brand and business you are satisfied with.

Once you have cash flow, then you can consider building a product that requires capital and a large audience of people to sell. I wasn’t raised in a wealth family. I never had capital to invest. I had to create my own substantial income source to be able to do thing like publish my own book and build a software startup.

That’s how you earn a living as a generalist in a world going digital.

Thank you for reading and enjoy the rest of your day.

– Dan

The post The Rise Of The Generalist (How To Thrive With Multiple Interests) appeared first on Dan Koe.

Look around.

Everyone is stressed out of their minds.

We all want to achieve big things, but it is becoming infinitely more difficult to focus on those big things… so they never get done.

Our mind is flooded with:

• The risk of pursuing your own goals instead of the ones your parents (or friends, or partner, or boss) want for you.
• Being told what to care about – skills to learn, countries to support, foods to avoid – by people with goals that don’t align with your own.
• Thoughts about the job you have to show up to, how much time you are going to waste, and all of the things you won’t be able to do.
• What people will think if you decide to go your own way and take control of your life. What will they think?

These are not easy thoughts to deal with.

If your friends or parents don’t support you – or even try to stop you – that can become incredibly painful. You may lose people from your life. You may lose a part of your identity. That hurts.

The problem is that they don’t know what you know.

They haven’t been exposed to the same information, education, and potential, so they don’t see the opportunity.

Their mind is still programmed with beliefs that serve their outdated goals. It’s difficult for them to believe that your new endeavor will work out because all they know to be possible is what they’ve done.

Parents are very good at this.

They were assigned goals at birth. They pursued those goals and saw results. Their identity was shaped, and so was their mind.

If they don’t continue expanding their minds into adulthood, their minds harden. Things that don’t align with what they know don’t make sense, and people hate what they don’t understand.

This is the first realization you must make:

Nobody is going to give you permission to do what you want.

They weren’t exposed to the information you were.

They don’t have the story that you are telling yourself.

Unless they are developed enough to open their mind to that story, you have to jump out of the nest at some point and trust that you can learn to fly.

Even further, you only have so much focus you can invest in your goals each day.

It’s no wonder why people live in a constant state of stress.

We can’t focus.

We pay too much attention to the goals of others to the point of having zero attention left for our own.

As soon as we wake up, we grab our phones and flood our minds with news, advice, doomsday predictions, and people doing better than us. The only way to find relief is to keep scrolling to make ourselves feel like we are making progress.

The mind craves order. That’s why you feel terrible.

Your attention is not focused on a singular vision for the future so potent that distractions cannot penetrate it.

You only have one option.

Feel deep into your situation.

Realize where your life will end up if you keep going down this path.

Become absolutely fed up with the lack of progress you are making.

Use that negative energy to laser in on the meaningful goal you’ve been putting off… you know, the inner voice that keeps nagging at you.

• “You were meant for more than this.”
• “You have what it takes to be successful.”
• “You don’t have to end up like the rest.”

Seriously, feel into your situation. Stop avoiding it. You have to add to the gravity of what you want to achieve.

The pain of not achieving your goals must outweigh the pain of living a comfortable life.

You must remove the distractions numbing you from the pain of becoming who you were meant to be.

Discipline Comes From Clarity, Not Force

Most people don’t understand self-discipline.

It’s not something that’s supposed to be difficult.

It is the byproduct of knowing what you want and accepting nothing less from yourself. It is the byproduct of an ordered mind. That is, maintaining a clear vision for your future and filling clarity gaps with education and action.

The reason people struggle with self-discipline is because they get distracted from what matters.

• They forget who they want to become.
• They forget what they are capable of.
• They forget the impact they want to have.

You aren’t disciplined because you aren’t the person who would seamlessly achieve the goal they set out to achieve.

Someone whose true identity is a bodybuilder doesn’t have difficulty eating healthy and going to the gym. They just do it.

Someone whose true identity is a writer doesn’t have difficulty blocking out time for idea generation, long walks, and writing.

Someone whose true identity is a gamer doesn’t have difficulty trolling people online, having a doomer mindset, and ruining their health in front of a screen for 8-10 hours a day.

The bodybuilder would see that lifestyle as a living hell. It would be close to impossible for them to adopt the gamer lifestyle without going insane and hating their life. They would be brutally aware of the goals they aren’t achieving.

Each identity has its tradeoffs. They each require sacrifices that allow them to achieve the goals they choose.

That leads us to our first step to becoming self-disciplined:

1) Removing Distractions

Ask yourself:

Do you know why you are doing what you are doing?

Have you asked yourself that question in the last month?

Why are you going to school? Working that job? Building that business? Doing that workout?

Was it your choice? Or was it a goal that was programmed into your head by your parents, friends, or culture?

Audit your life for goals you didn’t know you were pursuing.

Sit with a notebook and write down every single thing you are doing and why you are doing it.

If you don’t have a good answer, that is a distraction. You are wasting emotional energy on someone else’s dreams so you don’t have enough to pursue your own.

If you need help with clarity and are a fan of pen and paper, grab my FOCI Planner.

2) Life As A Game

I’ve been fascinated by the simple concept of anti-goals.

Anti-goals are not goals that you don’t want to achieve.

They are the sacrifices you are not willing to make to achieve a goal.

As an example, if I want to build a billion-dollar company, what am I not willing to sacrifice to get there?

Most people who have such lofty goals pay little regard to what they lose along the way: their health, their family, and their sanity.

On the other hand, I know it’s possible to build that billion-dollar company while being healthy, having good relationships, and maintaining my mental health.

Yes, it will take a lot more time and work, but what else is there to do? Let your life burn in front of you because you didn’t have the restraint or discipline to carry more than one responsibility?

That’s the beautiful thing about anti-goals. They turn life into a fun game.

They check many boxes for flow – the main characteristic that makes us addicted to video games.

• Challenge – A goal that is within reach and tests your skill.
• Skill – If your skill is too low for the challenge, you get anxious. If it is too high, you get bored, indicating that you need to choose a greater or lesser challenge rather than give up.
• Clarity – A hierarchy of greater to lesser goals makes it easier to start moving toward your vision for the future.
• Feedback – You know exactly when you are making progress and that feels good. You don’t feel trapped in a cycle of repetitive tasks that lead to nowhere.
• Rules – Rules or boundaries frame how you perceive the world. Your mind has more space to notice information that aids in the achievement of your goals.

When you turn your life into a game, you become obsessed with progress.

3) Reinventing Yourself

All change is behavior change.

All behavior change is identity change.

So, all change is identity change.

You are what you repeatedly do.

You are disciplined toward the goals that live in your head rent-free at this very moment.

You don’t find it difficult to lay in bed, watch Netflix, and play video games all day.

For many high-performers, that is the most difficult thing in the world. They can’t imagine doing that. The pain of not making progress toward the goals that make them who they are would eat them alive.

With that, your journey will be painful.

You are letting your old self die off.

You won’t want to shed the beliefs and habits that are holding you back.

That is step one. Awareness that difficulty is a good sign. A sign to keep going.

The second step is reprogramming your mind to operate toward new goals that create a new identity.

• Throw yourself into a new environment that aligns with who you want to become.
• Drown your mind in ideas, information, and education that expose you to new goals and ways to achieve those goals.
• View every situation through the perspective of your ideal lifestyle and make decisions accordingly.

Throw yourself into the deep end and teach yourself to swim.

Most people won’t take that leap out of fear.

That’s why we need to talk about self-confidence.

An Unconventional Path To Becoming Self-Confident

My life changed when I started writing.

Not just writing in a private journal – which is incredibly helpful – but a public one toward a big goal for my future.

Writing helped me become confident in my thoughts and life direction by:

• Being exposed to public criticism, forcing me to audit my beliefs.
• Finding friends and connections with shared goals so I stopped feeling like an outcast.
• Practicing a skill and seeing progress with it every single day.
• Failing often to keep me humble and give me new direction that I wouldn’t have normally found.

Writing is not the only way to develop self-confidence, but people get writing all wrong.

They think it’s some type of skill or hobby.

They don’t see it as the thing that makes us human.

We are the only species that can pass down information by documenting knowledge with writing to help those who come after us avoid danger and evolve. Writing is why we make it so far as individuals and as a collective.

Writing started as carvings in caves and has become ideas on the internet.

The carvings were barely seen, but with the internet, you have the ability to change your life and the lives of thousands.

Writing is the intersection of purpose and profit. Don’t underestimate that power.

1) Deconstruct Your Goal

You aren’t confident because you haven’t invested in your portfolio of failures.

You’ve spent too much time residing in the comfort of other people’s paths in life.

You’ve failed to break free from the masses, think for yourself, set your own goals, and achieve them regardless of how long it takes.

You aren’t confident because you don’t have results in anything aside from what’s already been done.

Sit with your thoughts.

What do you really want out of life?

Is it the same boring path as everyone else?

No?

Then the only option is to:

• Pay attention to what you don’t want in life by observing the actions of most people and where those lead.
• Do the opposite of everyone else if you want to achieve something more out of life.
• Think about your future and deconstruct it into goals you will have to achieve and actions you will have to take.
• Educate yourself every single day with material that will help you achieve those goals.
• Block out time for focused work to build out your vision for the future.

Then, start.

Self-confidence comes from doing what you think is uncomfortable, over and over again, and realizing it wasn’t that bad in the first place.

2) Start A Business

If you truly think about what you want in life, starting a business is not optional.

You want autonomy, work you enjoy, and to have an impact on the world so you can fulfill your human need to be a valuable contribution to humanity.

A business is not some capitalistic pursuit to own a private jet and mansion.

A business is how you solve problems.

A business is how you build something of your own.

A business is how you contribute to humanity through value exchange.

A business is how you take back control of your life.

A business is how you develop self-confidence in your interests and expertise.

Most people are programmed to have a negative reaction to the word “business.”

“It’s too hard.”

“Money is evil.”

“It’s a superficial pursuit.”

And then they go on to do the hardest thing of all:

They hide from their desire to reach their potential, self-actualize, and self-transcend by demonizing anyone and anything that would compromise the comfort they don’t even know they are addicted to.

They continue to be a cog in the machine of a business that makes millions selling a product. They cry about how most businesses are unethical, yet they work for one, and don’t realize the only way to combat it is to start their own ethical business.

They say it’s superficial, yet they distract their mind whenever they have the time. They never escape the surface. They never see business as the vessel to dive into the depths that life has to offer on the unknown path.

A business is the storefront of your value.

It is the public display of yourself, your goals, and your values.

Businesses are an extension of yourself.

3) Write In Public

Writing is a superpower.

• You can achieve your goals faster.
• You can attract like-minded people.
• You can start with zero experience.
• You become comfortable with people seeing your ideas.

And, writing is the foundation of media.

Everything you see online from posts to videos to advertisements start with writing.

Media is where the attention is.

If you want to do anything worthwhile in life, you will need your own source of attention.

You can no longer rely on your boss to generate attention, attract customers, and assign you some measly work for a set amount of money to fulfill the product or service to those customers.

You must do all of the above.

Writing in public is the first step for beginners who don’t have capital or experience.

Writing is a zero-barrier-to-entry business model that allows you to build an audience for anything you are interested in.

• Choose 2-3 topics to write about, topics you want to learn about, build a name for yourself in, and turn into a meaningful career.
• Learn through observation. Watch what other’s in those topics are writing about, how they write about it, and why they say things the way they do.

If you think, “I could have wrote this,” then write about it… you don’t need permission on the internet.

If you don’t know where to start, consider enrolling in 2 Hour Writer.

4) Make New Friends

Mastermind:

Multiple minds working together to achieve a shared goal.

In the past, you needed to work hard for connections to make your business a success.

Now, you have access to anyone with the click of a button.

Your success is no longer determined by your socioeconomic status and physical location.

It is determined by who you are connected to and the opportunities they can pass off.

How do you find these connections?

Have a goal you want to achieve.

How do you attract people to that goal?

Starting a business with a mission to achieve that goal.

How do you get in front of well-connected people?

Writing in public to spread your ideas.

What does this have to do with self-confidence again?

Well, it’s kinda obvious.

You won’t develop confidence if you don’t push beyond your limits and fail.

A goal, business, and writing – in that order – are how you continue to repeat this process to infinity. There are no limits except for the ones you place on yourself.

You will eventually hit a ceiling in a job. Someone is in charge of the limits you can reach.

If you aren’t hopping on the evolution train with technology, AI, and the internet by “opening up shop” in virtual reality (the internet and social media) they will make you obsolete.

You make friends by showing up online and talking to people.

Just like you would at a party.

On the internet, you increase your social proof with your brand and ideas.

Outside of the internet, you increase your status with cars, looks, and material acquisitions.

It’s obvious which one leads to a better life.

After 4 years of writing, I can message almost anyone and work with them if I have what they want.

As an example, Gordon Ramsey follows me.

I don’t know what I would need from him, but who knows, something could come of it down the road.

4) Publish Your Work

To understand confidence we must understand stories.

Stories = transformation.

You aren’t confident because you are trapped in someone else’s story. You don’t have a chance to transform into who you were meant to become.

You don’t have full control over your ability to escape the low point of the story, reach the climax, and have a happy resolution.

The path out of a low point is trial and error, the essence of life itself.

Your first attempt at writing will suck.

Your first attempt at launching a product will suck.

Your first attempt at making friends will suck.

The reason 99% of people are cripplingly unconfident is because unconsciously think you just become confident without doing anything that breeds a more stable form of confidence.

Confidence is improvement.

Publish your writing and be called an idiot.

Publish your product and collect the negative feedback.

Put yourself out there and let people expose your flaws.

Only then, once you are aware of the problem, can you know what to improve.

You can’t improve what isn’t published.

You can’t improve if you aren’t aware of the problem.

Dying in your dark hole of comfort prevents you from both.

The longer you decide to stay there, the longer it will take to develop confidence.

You can read this and do nothing with your life because you “don’t know enough to start.”

Or you can finally take the leap and dedicate your life to learning and building rather than expecting everything to be given to you.

That’s it for today.

Enjoy the rest of your week.

– Dan

The post Stop Caring So Much (It’s Ruining Your Life) appeared first on Dan Koe.

But I failed for years before I saw a shred of success.

That’s what I want to talk about in this letter:

• Why I failed (and what you can learn)
• How to start even if you lack confidence and aren’t a 10/10 supermodel
• How to use other people’s authority to build your own (this will lead to the fastest growth)
• Why treating social media like a video game is the key to being a success (this will lead to sustainable growth)

In high school, I would get home from class, go to the gym, and spend my nights watching fitness creators doing what they loved for a living.

Those creators were the friends who didn’t even know who I was.

They didn’t realize the impact they had on my future.

They had no idea that I, a guy in a completely different location, was implementing their advice, copying their mannerisms and lingo, and becoming a person who was no longer programmed by the environment I grew up in.

The negative aspects of social media are obvious.

But few people talk about how life-changing it is to find people you deeply resonate with who are doing what you want to do in life.

And if you have no idea what you want to do in life, you can find creators doing things that you didn’t think were possible (because all you thought you wanted to do was go to college for a degree that promised a high-paying job).

It’s no wonder why 30% of children and 54% of adults in the US said they wanted to become a YouTuber as a career.

This isn’t some delusional aspiration. This is where evolution has led us. People want to do what they love, and when you peel back the layers and discover what social media actually is – a way for anyone to attract an audience to the work they love to do – you realize that it is a path almost anyone can take to shape the future.

Work is going digital. Education is going digital. Commerce is going digital. Society is going digital. As automation and AI disrupt everything we thought was safe and secure, the second lives we live on social media indicate a transition of something larger.

Communication, education, value, meaning, and what it means to be human have evolved.

If you are reading this, I’m assuming it’s because you see that potential. Remember, not everyone is subscribed to this list. Be careful assuming that everyone has this mindset.

No, all jobs won’t disappear anytime soon. And I’m guessing you have aspirations to do what you love outside of a job. So, building an audience on social media is arguably the most secure path you can take.

Before we start, we sold out of the Writer’s Bootcamp in 4 days. If you missed it, join the waitlist for the next one here. (There are no exceptions if you missed this one).

1) Start With Writing

I failed at my dream of becoming a YouTuber.

Why?

Because I had no idea what I was doing.

I never actually learned the skills that comprise the skill of social media. Yes, social media is a skill that houses persuasion, marketing, sales, and psychology.

That’s what most people fail to do… put themselves in the shoes of their readers every single time you create something.

I posted talking head videos on mindset, food challenges, and fitness vlogs.

This was nearly 7 years ago.

I thought it was as simple as just posting content. Wrong.

Time went on, I tried and failed at most business models (like dropshipping, agency work, brand building, SEO, digital art, and photography).

I saw enough success with freelance web design to quit my job, and that’s when I found Twitter.

Long story short:

• I saw others building an audience and landing web design clients without manual outreach or ads.
• I noticed that they weren’t only talking about web design. They were talking about their lifestyle, interests, and web design (or whatever skill you want to monetize).
• I noticed that what made them unique was not their business’s value proposition but their personality. Their unique blend of interests and opinions.
• I noticed that Twitter was writing-based. They weren’t spending time on visuals or video editing. They didn’t have to show their bodies. They were building a business with their ideas, not looks.
• I studied what they were doing and realized I could write the same content. I had very similar knowledge, what was holding me back from doing what they do? (Hint: it was my own limiting beliefs).

So, I took the leap.

Every time I saw a post that I could have written, I took it and wrote it from my own point of view.

Every time I saw a post I disagreed with, I took it and wrote my own opinion on the subject.

Every time I saw a post that was well structured (with bullet points, hooks, line breaks, and flow) I would experiment with that structure by plugging one of my own ideas into it.

In other words, I noticed what worked and did the same thing.

I took a few courses here and there and experimented with the strategies.

In my first year, I gained 10,000 followers (which is doable for most people).

Then, compounding growth kicked in, and I’ve grown to 435,000 followers over almost 5 years.

Nothing happens, then everything happens.

2) Choose To Control Your Growth

The second reason I failed at YouTube is because I like to talk about what I want, not what the algorithm wants me to talk about.

When I discovered the power of writing and Twitter, I realized that this could be my path to finally growing on YouTube.

• YouTube doesn’t have DMs or a repost button that people actually click (it’s hard to manually control traffic).
• Twitter has DMs, forum-style replies, frictionless and encouraged reposts, and the ability to quote post.
• YouTube takes a lot of skill and effort to nail all of the moving parts of video production.
• Twitter is as simple as writing a post in 2-3 minutes and hitting send.

I talk about the only way to grow on social media here. That goes over all of the mechanisms you can game for growth.

With writing, I’m able to test ideas fast and get my network to share them. With writing, I was able to control my growth.

I realized that if I could build an audience with Twitter, I could send that audience to YouTube when I was ready to take it seriously.

Now that YouTube is one of my largest platforms, people think I started there… when in reality, I could have grown only if I had started on Twitter first.

Not only that, writing 50 tweets in the time I’d be able to create one video is powerful.

1 of those 50 tweets is bound to be a good idea.

1 video isn’t worth making if you don’t have a good idea to film about… it won’t perform well.

So, by writing on Twitter, you build a database of good ideas that you can turn into high-performing YouTube videos. Just create the video on the topic of the tweet.

While Twitter may slowly become my smallest audience, it is still the highest quality audience, it’s where I started, and my other audiences wouldn’t be built without it. There isn’t another social platform that allows you to test ideas and interact with a more human feel… I mean, just look at the comments on Instagram. There isn’t even a profile picture. It feels bland and lifeless. You go on Instagram to numb your mind, not expand it. Twitter feels like a conversation.

3) Become a DJ With Ideas

Writers are DJs with ideas.

DJs take songs and sounds from multiple sources to create something new.

Writers take ideas from multiple sources and string them together into something of their own.

Your social media account is your Spotify profile, and your job is to put out music worth listening to.

The beautiful thing about EDM or digital music is that there are no limits. There are an infinite set of mixes that can be played. The same is true with writing.

Artists remix each other’s songs and completely change the song.

This is important.

An artist, DJ, or producer has their own “sound.”

We all love certain artists because of that sound.

In EDM, Excision is very similar to RZRKT, but they have slight differences that make them unique.

Now, if Excision made a country song, I find it hard to believe that much of his fan base would listen to that. They want to hear Excision.

As a writer, your “sound” is your worldview.

Your sound is how your ideas are articulated through the lens of your goals, problems, and experiences.

This is why you are the niche.

All of the ideas you collect and synthesize should be written from your worldview.

Two people can take the idea of personal responsibility and frame it in two different ways.

Someone with an emotional management problem will write about personal responsibility to solve that problem.

Someone with a business goal will write about personal responsibility to reach that goal.

That’s how you turn ideas into your own.

Don’t copy, remix.

4) Leverage Authority

How do you grow as a beginner when you don’t have experience or authority?

Curate, then create.

Use other people’s ideas and authority to kickstart your growth.

The only way to grow sustainably is to attract people to your audience from where they already are.

Where are they?

Other people’s audiences.

Do you know why people make YouTube videos on other popular YouTubers? So that video gets recommended to that audience, and they watch.

Do you know why most YouTube titles sound the same? Because they are trying to show up in the “recommended videos” section of the popular videos with that title.

Do you know why people tell you to comment so much on other people’s posts? Because they have an audience that goes into the replies, see your (hopefully good and not boring) reply, and follow you.

You need to get your posts in front of other people’s audiences rather than relying on the algorithm to spread them.

There are a few ways to do this:

• Write about their ideas and tag them. People like it when you quote them and will want to share your post with their audience.
• Create a thread with multiple ideas from other people and tag them all. Some will repost you, and most will engage.
• Create a post on one authoritative person and use their best ideas to create a high-performing post.

Here’s an example:

The thing here is that Naval or Rogan probably won’t see or repost that thread.

So, it’s wise to choose people to write about who are active on the platform.

If you do write about mega-famous people, you need to get your network to share the post with their audience so it does well.

I teach this strategy in 2 Hour Writer, but I’ll write about it in a future letter sometime.

5) Master Hooks & Topics

Growing on social media is not as simple as writing about whatever you want.

95% of your growth will stem from two things:

• Choosing the right topic to write about.
• Perfecting the hook to get people to read more.

It doesn’t matter how valuable your YouTube video, newsletter, or thread is. If people don’t click to read more, it won’t get read. If people don’t care about what you are talking about, they won’t click. If people don’t see how it benefits their lives, they won’t click.

Social media growth isn’t linear.

Sometimes, you see zero growth for a week (especially as a beginner without an audience to create sustained growth).

Sometimes, you see little growth for a few weeks.

But then, once you hit the holy trifecta (topic, hook, traffic), you double your followers in a day. Nothing happens, then everything happens. But most people don’t have the patience or skill to stick out the highs and lows of building your own thing.

Social media growth is random. You aren’t paying for ads that place your writing in front of the specific demographic of your choice.

So, you need to choose a topic that is broadly applicable. You need to assume that 95% of the people reading your content are beginners.

Even if you have a specific target audience, this still works.

Rather than writing about “how to lead a team of 50 people as a founder,” write about “the skill that will take you from $100K to $5M” and use leading a team of 50 people as a way to frame the lesson you are teaching.

It’s the same idea, just repositioned to reach and educate more people.

You will still attract your target audience, but you will also attract a larger audience that can spread your work to more of your target audience. Getting too specific may hinder more than help. I’d rather have a 100K audience, with 10K of those being my target audience, than only a 10K audience of my target. More leverage, reach, and opportunity.

When you choose the right topic, the hook becomes simple to write. If the hook is difficult to write, you may want to choose a different topic before you spend a lot of time writing.

How do you write a good hook?

• Look over your writing for the most impactful parts of your writing and take note
• Imply a transformation with pain points and benefits to open a curiosity loop and information gap
• Use concepts, big ideas, and processes (like The Eisenhower Matrix or The One Person Business) to create the effect of a unique mechanism
• Try to create a timeframe to achieve the result, like 2 hours, 30 days, or 6 months
• Important: study other hooks and program your mind to think in that structure

Now, use these as a checklist to refine your hook:

• Relevance — how relevant is it to their everyday life? Resolved pains or potential benefits. What’s in it for the reader?
• Awareness — is it simple or complex enough for the level of awareness you are targeting? Will they understand what you are about to show them?
• Effort — how fast will they receive the result (education, entertainment, or inspiration) and is it easy to get?

Run through this again the next time you write a thread hook, tweet, YouTube title, thumbnail text, or email subject line.

6) The Global Video Game

Social media is both a multiplayer game with single-player missions.

As a single player, you must constantly add to your skill set. You should have at least a general understanding of every single skill that goes into building a business. Marketing, sales, web design, graphic design, video editing, writing, marketing, product, etc. Binge-watching 75+ hours of YouTube is a requirement.

Everything else is multiplayer.

You need other’s audiences to grow.

You need people to hold you accountable.

You need a tribe that people can associate you within digital society (social media).

You need to recreate your team’s voice chat to identify where enemies are, share strategies, and help your team win.

You need a mastermind:

Multiple minds working toward a shared goal.

In practical terms, you need to:

• DM people you want to “team up with”
• Comment on people’s posts you want to be associated with
• Form group chats with people to share strategies
• Share each other’s best posts to get more traffic to them

This should be viewed as one of the few ways to control your growth without relying on the algorithm.

This creates a tribe.

When you log on to social media and see an account you like, you can also think of 4-5 more people that they are associated with that you like.

People follow that tribe because they want to join it. They want to work toward the goal as well.

This isn’t as shallow as some “engagement group” that you join. This is your internet friend group that is a requirement to build the business you want to build.

That’s it for this letter.

Thank you for reading, I hope it helped.

Until next week,

– Dan

The post The Best Way To Grow On Social Media (From Zero Followers & Experience) appeared first on Dan Koe.

We are doing things a bit differently at Kortex, and I want to get vulnerable with you.

I want to document building our startup in public so you can learn from our failures and successes (and trust me, we have plenty of failures already).

I want to talk about how we generated $759,900 in 6 months without launching to the public.

The problem is that most people dream of building a massive company, but most of them go about it wrong.

• They think they need startup capital.
• They think they need investors and VC money.
• They think they need to pour a bunch of money into marketing.
• They build the product without thinking about how they will get users or if the idea is good to begin with.

We took a completely different approach.

The good thing about our approach is that anyone can do it.

The bad thing about our approach is that it takes time.

When I landed in Toronto, I wanted to ask our core developers what their biggest lessons have been while building Kortex.

I wasn’t expecting the answers they gave.

I think you’ll benefit from what they had to say.

We will start there, then, I will tell you how to come up with a profitable startup idea and fund it without external help.

Imperfection, High-Agency People, and Building From Scratch

I’ll start with my biggest lesson.

I didn’t realize how complex and costly software development can be.

It’s just a note-taking app, right?

Wrong. We take so much of the software we use for granted. And we aren’t taking the cheap no-code route to deliver a crappy product to you.

We have a burn rate close to $30,000/week.

We’ve removed 3-4 major features already that took months of developer time and energy.

We’ve added major features we didn’t plan for.

We already have a V2 design of the app in the works.

Building the app has been a constant string of problems, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

We have no idea what we’re doing because it’s impossible to guess what problem will pop up next.

So, my biggest lesson is this:

Be okay with doing things imperfectly.

Yes, our costs could be lower (if we didn’t recruit top talent). Yes, we could launch an MVP we aren’t proud of. Yes, we could do a lot of things, but boy are we gaining valuable life experience that will pay off 10-fold down the road.

Our mindset can change, but our goal isn’t acquisition right now. We want to build the app we want to see in the world. An app that will benefit people’s lives on a daily basis like it already does mine (seriously, I’m addicted to it).

Lesson 2) The Importance Of Being A High-Agency Individual

Lesson 3) Learning To Work With A Team As A Lone Wolf

Lesson 4) Building From Scratch Takes More Work Than Working At An Established Company

The Importance Of Building An Audience

Most people don’t even think of social media when they start a business.

They don’t see how it is the biggest “shortcut” to success.

We aren’t building a business in the 2000s. Technology has advanced. You don’t need to put in grueling hours with direct sales, cold outreach, and manually finding potential customers.

Social media is how you:

• Test ideas with content that turns into marketing and products that sell (without spending any money).
• Build an audience of people who want to buy the product when you launch it (because most startups can’t get users).
• Sell a low marginal cost digital product to get results and validate your startup idea before building it.
• Recruit developers, a team, and investors if you want to go that route.

Many people think I just write content to write content.

This is partially true, but I’ve written 40,000 tweets, posted 3000+ more to other platforms, sent hundreds of newsletters, and posted hundreds of YouTube videos.

Because of that, I have data.

I know exactly what ideas pull in followers, catch attention, spark controversy, lead to customers, and get engagement.

I have a database of ideas that I can use as products, inside my products, on my sales pages, and in my promotions. I don’t have to do any manual market research, and I don’t have to put time into building the product to test whether it will sell.

By writing and building an audience on social media, I get to skip the grind that most startups and businesses go through.

Here are a few simple steps to start:

1) Create Your Topic Tree

Write down a list of all of your interests, skills, and ideas you want to talk about.

Don’t worry about getting specific, worry about getting relatable.

Don’t niche down too far just yet. Start broad and applicable to most people.

Examples of applicable topics are ones you see online all the time: productivity, self-improvement, health and fitness, social dynamics, skill acquisition, career advice, business, etc.

If your topic is “leadership for teams and executives” turn that into “self-improvement” or frame it in a way that can benefit more people (without stripping the potential to attract the specific audience you want).

You don’t have to call out teams and executives for them to resonate with content. Write for them, but in a way that others can benefit from, too.

Remember, this is social media. It’s not targeted. It’s random. You have to start broad and funnel people into your expertise.

If you have 100 followers, and your topics are niche, good luck getting your content in front of enough people.

You need a larger audience that can spread your name to reach the specific people you want. It doesn’t matter if your audience isn’t completely filled with potential buyers.

I’d rather have 100,000 people who can spread my name to specific people in their network rather than 1,000 people who know exactly what I do. Especially if I’m building a startup where I need all of the leverage, resources, and connections I can get.

By the way, if you want first access to Kortex, we are running a writing BootCamp limited to 500 people.

You get 1 year of access to Kortex as we teach you how to write on social media to build an audience for your business, work, or career.

The first Bootcamp starts May 13. Check it out here.

2) Make Noise & Focus On Signal

Now, just start writing.

Talk about your interests.

Talk about your opinions.

Talk about your expertise.

Talk about your beliefs.

Teach people the skills you have, the mindset required to see success in your field, and the benefits of doing what you teach.

The more you write, the more data points you have.

Emulate what works.

Build a swipe file of ideas you wish you wrote.

Study the structure of posts and threads that do well.

Literally have 10-20 of your favorite posts open next to you as you write.

Don’t try to write your ideas blindly. You need to write with readability, impact, and in a style that the platform is used to.

There’s a reason all creators talk about similar topics in a similar way… because it works. This changes occasionally and you need to flow with what the market wants.

From there, stick it out for 3-6 months.

Review all of your posts and see which ones did better.

Make those ideas a solidified part of your brand. Write about them more often because they will continue to do well. Include them in your marketing, promotions, and as ideas for products. People want more of that.

When you have enough validated ideas through content, you can move on to the next step.

How To Fund Your Startup

Finally, to answer your question, how did we make almost $800K in 6 months without launching the app yet?

It’s relatively simple, and it’s the same thing I’ve talked about in almost every one of my business newsletters.

We have a team of 9 developers building the Kortex app and 6 creators (including myself) building Kortex University – the side where we teach writing.

Our first priority with Kortex was to generate cash flow so we didn’t have to take on investors or continue to dig into our own money (I invested $500K of my own money as an initial safeguard to fuel development).

We built a digital product with ideas we’ve validated before.

We started building the Kortex social media and email list. Our X and Instagram accounts are almost at 10,000 followers each. Our email list is also closing in on 10,000 subscribers.

Digital products cost very little to build and distribute. I’ve built multiple under my own brand so I know how to do it fast.

In short, we built a program that teaches writing and fueled it with social media traffic.

But, I wouldn’t recommend doing it under your startup first. I would recommend doing it under your own brand, then, after building cashflow and having the skill to build a startup, you can repeat that same process under the startup’s brand.

Here are the steps to take:

1) Write Content, Build A Program, & Do Client Work

You need cash flow.

When you start building your personal brand and testing ideas with content (as mentioned above), you’ll start to get a feel for what you can help people with.

Turn your expertise into a program that helps people do what you’ve done.

As a writer, I help people with writing.

As a health nut, you can help people with fitness.

As a productivity expert, you can help people become more productive.

Yes, you need to actually get good at something before you can help people with a business.

Your job is to build a curriculum and guide people through it 1 on 1 with weekly calls, worksheets, and tasks to get results.

When you don’t have a large audience, it doesn’t make sense to sell a product yet. You need to charge $1000-$5000+ per client.

I’ll talk about this process in a future letter soon.

2) Get Results, Grow Your Audience, & Productize Your Offer

As your audience grows, you have more leverage.

We discussed this progression in Zero To $1 Million As A One-Person Business.

In between these steps, it is your full time job to improve your program to get better results for your customers.

Work with them closely and study their problems.

Results are all that matter. Your results are what will lead to more customers and a profitable startup idea.

And, since you’ve built an audience around this, you don’t have to worry too much about getting initial users. Your clients, customers, and readers are enough validation for the startup idea that stems from building your own brand.

You have more traffic and potential customers in your audience, so it only makes sense to turn a part of your program into a course that more people can access.

You can do this in two ways:

1. A cohort-based course – you have a curriculum, community, and live calls to help guide groups of people through the program. You can charge more for this structure and launch a cohort every 1-3 months.
2. A regular course – this is where you just sell the curriculum as a course. The upside is that it requires very little work on your end. The downsides is that you only launch once and charge a lower price.

Under my brand, I’ve iterated on my products to the point where 2 Hour Writer is my best-selling course.

I have an audience of writers and creators that I’ve helped.

With close to 15,000 students in 2 Hour Writer alone, it makes sense to build a writing app with my system to help make their process better.

3) Build Your Startup & Repeat The Process

You now have:

• Thousands of social media posts to pull data from on what works.
• Dozens of clients that you’ve personally helped get better at what you do.
• Hundreds or thousands of students who can benefit from your startup idea.
• A hyper-profitable digital product business with enough cash flow to start building your product and team for your startup.

You solve the problem that most startups have:

They can build an okay product, but they can’t get users. Therefore they can’t make money. And they don’t have a cashflow generating business of their own that both validates their startup idea and allows them to fuel it’s growth.

At this point, repeat the process for your startup.

Build the social media accounts.

Start testing ideas with content related to your startup.

Build out your value ladder starting with client work.

Get results for those initial customers and productize further into a cohort or course.

Hire a team for both the development and education side of the brand so you can do it faster than before.

With all of this, we can still fail. Kortex could go absolutely nowhere, and we’re okay with that. All of this advice is subject to your skill, not luck.

I hope this was helpful in providing a big-picture roadmap for building your startup.

I’ll talk more about how we are building Kortex as it is built.

Thank you for reading and enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Dan

The post How My Startup Made $759,900 In 6 Months (Without Launching) appeared first on Dan Koe.

I procrastinate… a lot.

But I’ve learned that this is a good thing. Procrastination is my superpower for achieving what most people think is impossible.

I wait until the last minute, but in that last minute, I launch into the flow state and my mind is impossible to distract from the task at hand.

When I do this, the work is of higher quality than if I were to do scattered “planned” work for weeks before.

I have other things to worry about, and if my work isn’t the only thing on my mind, the quality will suffer.

I’ve discovered that this is a character trait.

It’s how some people are wired.

You only focus when focus is needed.

• You are bad at texting people back.
• You rarely did your homework on time in school.
• Client work is put off until the last minute.
• You struggle to make progress in business (because you don’t have someone managing you when it’s time to publish a project).

If this is you, procrastination is your key to getting ahead of 99% of people… if you learn to harness that power.

The work you procrastinate on isn’t real-time like a video game or sports where you get immediate feedback on your effort.

Society has made you feel bad for this character trait. You constantly feel like you are falling behind others because you can’t, and shouldn’t, play the same game as them.

You don’t need to change. You need to understand yourself, structure your life accordingly, and make calculated decisions.

Tactical Stress – Forcing Yourself To Survive

The best decisions I’ve made are the stupidest.

I maxed out my first credit card at 19 for inventory on a business that failed fast.

I signed multiple leases on apartments that I never thought I could afford.

I got rid of everything I owned to fly across the country because I saw an opportunity.

I purchased an expensive software that cleared my bank account as a bet on my business success.

I built a landing page and accepted orders for a product before it was built. I’ve done this with every launch because, one, if it doesn’t sell, I don’t waste more of my time. Second, if it does sell, I’m forced to build it out before the launch date.

Every time I took these risks, I only gave myself two options:

1. Figure it out
2. Be crushed

It was a quarterly powerlifting competition for my mind. I put myself under my mental bench press max and forced myself to lift it without a spotter.

An example I see often in the business space:

“Should I purchase this software or take the free option?”

“Should I buy a course or waste my time learning on my own?”

“Should I start or wait until the pain is too great in my current situation so I end up starting 2 years later?”

The answer is obvious.

When I spent $1,000 on software (when that was the last $1,000 in my bank account), I was forced to learn and build with that software to make that money back.

When I spent $3,500 on a course, I was forced to make the teachings work to make that money back.

When I moved into an $8,000/month apartment, I was forced to increase my income to make that feel comfortable, resulting in $100,000 extra per month in my bank account.

When I made $700K in 30 days from a product that had yet to be built, I was forced to do the best work of my life to build it.

For clarity and those who may benefit, the number was actually $687,886 in May 2023.

A few things happened:

• I created a 2-week-long cohort that was 4 calls long on one topic for $150
• Things like cohorts have scarcity baked in because there is an enrollment date
• I was increasing the price of another course at the time (more scarcity)
• I had the usual sales from my other products
• I used the strategy I will go over later to promote them
• I have a pretty large audience at this point in my journey, and it wouldn’t have been possible without putting 4 years of effort into that

This concoction led to the most money I’ve ever seen in one month.

(Side note: With digital products, you can build fast and do this often. It only took me 4-5 hours to build the cohort material above. With physical products, you have to build them as you sell or put a lot of time into product development, like when I launched my book. This is why I heavily test ideas with content and digital products first).

You’re okay with where you are because you won’t take the risk that forces you to a level you can’t fathom right now.

There’s a myth that floats around occasionally:

Goldfish grow to fit the tank you put them in. But if you keep them in a small bowl, they never grow.

In reality, smaller tanks lead to poor water quality and less room to move freely. So, it’s not that they never grow, it’s that they suffer and die. A slight but important difference.

This is similar to my concept of Tactical Stress:

The conscious decision to force yourself into a do or die situation – knowing that you have the skill to make it work – and have no choice but to overcome your fears. The result is a season of intensity that propels you into the next level of your life.

The purpose of tactical stress is to launch yourself into the unknown, the land of infinite potential. Because if you don’t, entropy takes hold and you slowly begin to drown and suffer until the pain is so great that you have to do it anyway.

When you launch into new situations that can change your life, you become overwhelmed with information.

It’s too much for your mind to digest.

So, you’re forced to be consumed by chaos or to create clarity.

You set a goal that is borderline impossible, make a single decision that forces you to step off the cliff, and turn the resulting stress into a potent fuel that allows you to outwork anybody else. This does a few things psychologically:

• Maintains Perspective – When you are in a do or die situation, you have no option but to focus on your goal. Distractions don’t register in your awareness, so you can’t fall to them.
• Creates A Deadline – Most deadlines don’t work because they aren’t real. If you spend money on something or accept money for something, you are forced to deliver. A real deadline is created.
• Narrows Focus – Survival mode puts you in a temporary state of stress. Stress narrows your focus on the task at hand, which allows you to survive. The only thing on your mind is achieving the goal you set out to achieve.
• Makes Life Enjoyable – Since your goal is top of mind, anything you experience is filtered to aid in that goal. The books you read, conversations you have, and content you consume all “magically” seem to help you. Dopamine floods your brain as pattern recognition gets pushed into overdrive.

If your life isn’t enjoyable or you aren’t making progress, maybe it’s time to take a leap.

This isn’t for everyone, but what’s really holding you back from starting a new life? Quitting your job? Not having a plan B?

Only give yourself 2 options: win or die. And if you understand that success is a result of skill and knowledge, not luck, I have trust that you’ll figure it out.

I don’t want to hear any excuses, because that’s just a prime example of a lack of skill. You can’t control your ego and use your brain to create your own path.

Fabricating Urgency – The Deep Work Routine Nobody Talks About

To start, this will not work unless you take full control of your life.

The reason you show up to a job every day is because your survival is at stake if you don’t. If you want to be free, you have to recreate this effect in your own work. Most people quit because they have nothing holding them accountable to continue writing, building, and selling toward their vision.

Everyone has a desire to be wealthy because they desire to do the work they want to do.

Yet, most people suppress this desire because they’ve been conditioned to believe they don’t stand a chance. Or they just feel guilty for making money because they grew up an environment – physical or digital – that had a terrible relationship with it.

The only reason I was able to do this was because I had full control over my time and income… because I had a business.

Some of these strategies can help you at work, but you need a business to fully leverage the asymmetric payoffs that come from taking risks.

A business gives you the creative boundaries to increase your income as much as you’d like. That isn’t possible at 99.99% of jobs, and I’m guessing you aren’t in the small minority that will make over $500K/year by working up the corporate ladder for 10-20 years when you can achieve that in 1-3 years of focused effort on building your own thing. I’ve had multiple friends and students make that amount in that timeframe by trusting the audience-building and digital product process I teach.

The question now is:

“What exactly do I do when I take a risk that forces me to survive?”

I’m going to walk you through the exact quarterly planning that led to me making the $700K in 30 days.

Repeat this as much as you’d like. You won’t make a ton of money in the first few rounds, but as your skill set and audience for your work grows, you will be surprised at what you are capable of.

0) How I Structure My Days

You’ve probably read about my routine before.

• I build new projects in the first block of each morning (right now it’s my next book).
• I write for the second block of each morning.
• I maintain different aspects of the business for the third block of each morning.
• I go on walks to clarify ideas and set intentions for my work in between blocks.
• I go to the gym as a hard cut-off time for my work.

I have a life to enjoy after work, so I know I have to get my work done in the time I’ve allotted myself in the morning.

It’s counterintuitive, but my health and life take priority over my work, and that makes my work more impactful.

I have to go to the gym at the same time so I can be free in the afternoons, so my work is naturally focused because of this.

1) Quarterly Projects

If you don’t sell your own product, you will be forced to sell someone elses.

There is a mind virus in the online space:

“It seems like everyone is selling something nowadays.”

“Look at this guy selling a product, he’s a sell out.” (I see this under many high level individuals posts).

“Ads ads ads ads.” (I saw this on Ali Abdaal’s promotion the other day).

Yes, silly, you need a product to earn an income. There literally is no other way. That’s how the economy works. Buying and selling. Sure, you can invest money, but where did you get that money? By playing a mechanical role in a company that sells a product and pays you a paycheck in return for your replaceable efforts. And if you don’t make a lot of money, good luck ever making anything substantial through investing.

Ignore the blind hypocrites and launch a product anyway.

Ever since I started my business, I’ve launched a new project every quarter. Why?

• It gave me plenty of ideas to write about relating to the product (because I was fleshing out the outline). I wrote most of the product as tweets and newsletters to test what ideas and marketing angles worked before I launched.
• Product launches are the most profitable part of your products timeline. Like a graph that shoots up fast, drops hard, and levels out at a certain number.
• I wanted to diversify my income streams. When you’re building an audience, one product can do well, but you wouldn’t bet on one stock to make you rich.
• I became more experienced and had something more valuable to launch each quarter. If you’re doing this whole business thing right, you should have something new and better than the competition that you should launch. This leads to a lot of people copying you to capitalize on your good ideas, but you still get most of the sales and reputation. Quarterly launches keep you on top.
• I don’t have to worry about being extremely successful with one launch because I know I’ll be iterating on it within 3 months.
• It gave me quarterly public deadlines to hit. I didn’t have to guess when my next project was going to launch (so I couldn’t get stagnant with my business). If I wanted my income to increase – rather than decrease – I had to launch a product to survive.

People often ask, “What is the one thing that helped you get so far ahead of other people in this space?”

I would confidently say it’s launching a project every quarter.

It built my authority, kept me focused, and prevented me from trying to fuel a dead product.

What kind of products can you launch in such a short time frame?

• Courses
• Cohorts
• Coaching
• eBooks
• Templates

You can build and test these fast. If one fails, that’s fine, build another. If it works, great, start building complimentary products and consider turning that idea into a business that demands more capital or resources. As an example, the success of 2 Hour Writer is what led to the idea of building Kortex. The idea is already validated with sales and engagement because the product and content that led to it were validated.

At the start, these should form the foundation of your brand and build cash flow. Don’t try to get complex with the products you create until you have the resources to do so.

Then, you can plan for bigger products like a software to launch in one of those quarterly spots, but still keep launching other things.

Now, you don’t need to launch an entirely new product. You can:

• Combine products into a bundle and launch that.
• Add a new module to a current product increase your prices – you would promote the price increase “launching” on a specific date.
• Run the same cohort over and over again each quarter. This is probably the simplest way to go about this. I would recommend having different topics for each cohort so you can attract customers with different needs.

By doing this every quarter, I could measure the impact and authority of my brand based on my revenue from the launch.

When I launched a freelancing product around 500 followers, I made around $3K. When I launched a branding product when I hit 10,000 Twitter followers, I made around $10K. 3 years later when I launched a writing cohort, I made $700K. People who only sell one product (and don’t improve it) end up marketing too hard and destroying their trust with their audience while making much much less in revenue.

There is a lot of nuance to product launches. We guide you through it all in the Builder tier of Kortex University.

The Lesson

Your deep work sessions are fueled by your quarterly product launches.

• Embrace procrastination at the start. You have time before the launch.
• Work on the product outline and plan for 1-2 months leading up to your launch.
• Set a public launch date. Set a first promotion date 3-4 weeks before that. Build the sales page to accept orders first. Execute the launch and get the product built.

If you read the last letter on The 12 Rules Of Creation, you understand that these projects are crucial for structuring your life and work. They are the single thing that move the needle toward your vision and goals. If you aren’t building, you’re dying.

2) Public Writing

In online business, you need three things:

1. An audience for your work.
2. A valuable product for that audience.
3. Good arguments to attract people to your audience and product.

Writing is the foundation of all three of those.

I want to harp on this again:

A valuable product for that audience.

If you own a business, this newsletter won’t bother you in the slightest because you are reading it through an enlightened lens.

If you don’t own a business, you may misinterpret or only read it from a one-sided viewpoint, especially if you have a bad relationship with money. You have to zoom out and realize that people buy products because they want them and benefit their lives. This isn’t only about making as much money as possible. It’s about solving a problem in someone’s life that is worth more than what you are asking.

And, I’d also ask you to zoom out and think about all of the useless products you buy that don’t benefit your life and ask yourself why you don’t apply that mindset to other areas. People will spend $100 on drinks without batting an eye (and destroy their health as an outcome), but won’t spend $100 on their skill development (that increases their earning capacity and therefore quality of life).

In 2 Hour Writer (gotcha), I teach the 3-point content ecosystem:

• Write tweets to test ideas.
• Write threads to expand on those ideas.
• Turn any of those into a newsletter to nurture your audience and promote your products.
• Use your newsletter to write new tweets and threads so you never run out of content ideas.

My friend Nick Verge asked about this process the other day. Here’s a screenshot if it helps see it from a big picture.

Writing is the necessary foundation of this strategy. I can’t tell you exactly what to do because I don’t understand your situation, but I can tell you what I do.

If you don’t have a lot of time on your hands right now, you won’t be able to do all of this, and that’s okay. You don’t need to for your first few product launches that replace your income.

• I write for 60-90 minutes every morning. I start with my newsletter and write social posts as the ideas come.
• I promote my newsletter once a day. I don’t post opt-in pages asking people to subscribe. I post the actual newsletter (as a blog post) so people can read it, get value, subscribe, and see the products I promote in the newsletter. This is how I get newsletter subscribers and sell my products whenever I am not launching a product.
• I focus my content during the product launch month. I will write about whatever I want for 2 months leading up to the launch, then write only about topics related to what I’m launching for the remaining month. (This is when I gain the most followers and authority… when I’m dishing out value and launching a product that shows my expertise.)
• I outline and build the product along the way, but am forced to actually finish it before the public deadline.

How do I stay consistent with writing?

Because I understand that if I don’t write, my audience won’t grow, and I won’t survive. I keep myself in a constant state of good pressure that wakes me up in the morning and gets me writing.

If my audience doesn’t grow, my product launch won’t do well, and I’m that much closer to getting a job. Plus, as you build projects, you have much more on the line. If I stop writing now, Kortex as a whole will die. I need money to build it. And I will not let it die.

Once it’s stable, I can take a break, but I’m going to start a new project so my life can remain meaningful and not become mechanical / boring.

Please note that writing isn’t the ONLY thing here. You have to understand how to grow on socials. You can’t just post content into the wind and pray it does well. I’ve talked about this before and will talk about it in next week’s letter.

3) Tactical Promotion

So far our deep work routine is structured as so:

• A public quarterly project that moves the needle toward our vision and goals. This creates a real deadline, but only if you charge for the value you are creating under a business.
• Daily writing to fuel the projects success by building a tiered audience. I write tweets and threads to attract the audience, funnel them to my newsletter, and promote my products after I’ve given enough value.

Now, I’m not a fan of heavy marketing and sales on social media.

I’m a fan of tactical promotions.

• I only promote my products on social media during the last week of launch. This keeps my profile clear of sales for all but 4 weeks out of the year. People like that and often compliment the fact that I’m not “pushy or salesy.”
• I have a soft promotion in each of my newsletters like you’ve seen above. That’s how I fuel previous products I’ve built outside of launches. I think people are tired of hard sales every day in their email and want a lot of value with the choice to buy something. They don’t want to feel forced.
• Leading up to the product launch, I promote more and more each week. Most of my income is made in the 1-2 days before launch because that’s when scarcity kicks in.

That’s my entire strategy.

That’s what holds me accountable to work and write every morning.

That’s how I’ve 80x’d (yes, that’s correct) my income since having a web design job 5 years ago.

If you quite literally plan for iteration and persistence and force yourself to do the work with proper strategies, failure is a myth.

Thank you for reading. Enjoy your weekend.

Dan

The post This Deep Work Strategy Made Me $700K In 30 Days (As A Procrastinator) appeared first on Dan Koe.

I don’t say this to sound arrogant.

But I’ve never had a problem with knowing what I want in the future.

When people say “I don’t know what I want,” what they’re really saying is “I don’t want to do the work it takes to get what I want.”

It’s not that you don’t know what you want. It’s that you know what you don’t want – meaning you know what you want – and are hiding from it it takes to get away from it.

I’ve always known what I wanted because it’s extremely simple to observe society and know what I don’t want:

• A job I hate
• Work I hate
• A body I hate
• A partner I hate
• A mind that hates me

From that alone, it’s easy to figure out what I had to do:

• Become an entrepreneur no matter how many times I fail (it took 7 failures)
• Gain the power to get rid of work I don’t want to do (writing on social media for leverage)
• Go to the gym and work on my nutrition
• Allow those 3 things to open up more opportunities in every domain of life
• Let that path create a peaceful mind from the progressive overload of responsibility. Weights feel lighter as you get stronger.

Everybody knows that some form of this path is what they are meant to do.

Your psyche craves actualization and transcendence. The depth of your being wants these things, but your ego is distracted by things it thinks it wants.

That’s the problem.

You don’t have a way to focus your mind.

You don’t have a plan for your future that has more gravity than the distractions in your life.

You struggle to maintain a long-term time horizon and get trapped in never-ending short-term stress-inducing tasks.

How would it feel to have one single framework that would determine the entirety of your success? One that you can refer to whenever you feel lost?

That’s what we are going to talk about.

The 12 Rules Of Creation

You need a plan. Because if you don’t have one, society does, and they’ve been planning your life for decades. – The Art of Focus

You’ve been assigned goals by society since the day you were born.

These goals went on to frame how you viewed the world.

You learned skills to achieve those goals. You registered opportunities in alignment with those goals. Everything you experience in life is through the lens of the conscious or unconscious goals guiding the systems being formed in your head.

If we want to build a life of meaning, money, and impact, we must pursue our ideal future, create a story worth telling, and pass down that path to those who are ready to receive it.

After a decade of dancing between creative success and failure, I’ve found a big-picture framework that will bring you success in anything you do.

These patterns can be found in marketing, sales, human behavior, peak performance, psychology, stories, games, the structure of billion-dollar companies, successful product development, and anything involved in the process of creating and distributing value.

You will be using this as a guiding light for your life, but I encourage you to meditate on how it can be applied to your business, relationships, and conversations.

Anti-Vision

We start our story with an anti-vision.

The bane of your existence.

The first polar end of the worldview you will cultivate.

A positive-fear mechanism that kicks you into action.

Your anti-vision is the future that you do not want to live.

Start a running note of experiences you do not want to repeat.

• The material you don’t care to learn.
• The work you don’t care to complete.
• The arguments you don’t wish to have.

You won’t get rid of them in an instant.

You are meant to identify them as problems to be solved.

Vision

If you don’t have a vision, you are lost.

You can’t create outcomes, so you are doomed to the mechanical living of determined outcomes.

Every decision you make in any domain of your life must be filtered through your vision.

That is how you bring meaning to your actions and minimize distractions.

Write down exactly what you want out of life.

Don’t miss a detail, but realize this is an iterative process.

You won’t get it right the first time around, and you probably never will. That’s not the point. Spend 30 minutes generating a minimum viable vision. Come back to it often to add, subtract, and improve as your desires inevitably change with your failures.

Mission

Your mission is the most important thing in your life.

It is the bridge between what you do and don’t want.

The path you are forging toward your vision.

Anything that does not align with your mission is to be treated as a distraction.

Your mission evolves with awareness of new beliefs, opportunities, and knowledge.

Your mission requires faith. You can’t see the next step unless you take the first. And once you do, the second may be completely different than anything you imagined.

Standards

You aren’t where you want to be because you are okay with where you are.

You don’t submit to your situation, you accept it so you can move forward.

Standards are absorbed from your environment.

• The friends you hang out with.
• The books you read.
• The media you consume.
• The parents who raise you.
• The teachers who knew it all.

It may be time to make a change and sit with the ramifications.

Goals

Big goals are for direction. Small goals are for clarity.

You don’t need motivation when the task in front of you is so stupidly simple that you can’t help but complete it.

Break down your vision into goals by decade, year, month, week, and day.

They are your guide, not your master.

Be stubborn with vision and loose with details.

Your goals will change as you do, be okay with that.

Projects

Learning comes from struggle, not memorization.

You need a series of tangible projects to build that will actualize your vision.

• Turn your goals into projects.
• Architect an outline.
• Determine milestones
• Set deadlines
• Map out areas of research.

Build, then learn. Start the project, expose your lack of knowledge and skill, and use that as a reference point for your education.

Education

You aren’t where you want to be because you aren’t as smart as you think you are.

With every project, there is a skill set and mindset required to complete the project.

Daily self-education must become a cornerstone habit in your life. If you stop learning, you stop evolving. Opportunities stop presenting themselves, and you get trapped in your current stage of development.

Education is the fuel for experimentation.

Limitations

A fool becomes rich at the expense of everything good in life.

A creative becomes rich at the expense of his choice.

Limitations on your goals force creativity.

The question is, what are you not willing to sacrifice to achieve your goals?

The creative challenge appears when you attempt to achieve a goal without betraying your vision.

You can become rich without sacrificing your family.

You can become healthy without sacrificing your work.

You can become valuable without sacrificing what makes life worth living.

Levers

Every day, you need priority tasks that move the lever toward your projects, goals, and vision from the ground up.

These are often perceived as boring fundamentals without the cultivation of a sense of mastery.

Do what needs to be done, but grip your vision as the anchor into the unknown. If you aren’t making progress, it’s because you aren’t moving levers, even if you think you are.

Writing is the main lever in my creator business (and almost any other modern business). This is what I teach in 2 Hour Writer, and what we help people that want personalized help and feedback with in Kortex University.

Challenge

When a novice plays against a master, neither has fun.

The novice becomes anxious while the master becomes bored.

When your skill is the perfect match for the challenge of a situation, the world goes quiet, and you move forward with grace.

Challenge is the source of enjoyment.

Enjoyment is found on the tightrope between boredom and anxiety. At the edge of your abilities.

The path to meaningful living is often found in a simple shift in perspective.

Curiosity

Be willing to steer off course and discover new potential.

It is too easy to lock ourselves in the mechanical routine we were trying to escape.

Be curious.

Dive deep into your interests.

Let few questions go unanswered.

Avoid getting locked into paradigms and beliefs that narrow your mind on one idolized path.

Your vision is like a battery. You must fuel it with experience, education, and misdirection.

Experimentation

If you only do the same thing as everyone else, you are bound to the results of everyone else.

• Research processes that others teach, the ones they have seen success with.
• Try multiple techniques to see which ones get you the best results.
• Create your own process that you can stay consistent with.

In fitness, try different training and nutrition programs. In relationships, try therapy or self-help books. In business, try cold outreach and organic content.

Avoid becoming dogmatic about the single right way. There is no right way, there is only your way, and that isn’t bound to stay the same as different levels of the game require different methods to complete them.

When you are lost, run through this process.

When your relationships are failing, run through this process. When your business won’t get off the ground, run through this process.

Every successful interaction with reality starts and ends with a clear image of the want, clarity on how to achieve it, and creative execution to acquire rare results.

Making Better Decisions

You aren’t where you want to be because:

• You didn’t make the choices that led to a purposeful career.
• You didn’t make the choices that led to fulfilling relationships.
• You didn’t make the choices that led to a healthy and aesthetic body.

You, right now, are the manifestation of your past choices.

So, if you want to take control of who you become, your choices are of utmost importance.

There are 2 things here:

1. Who you want to become – perspective and zooming out.
2. The choices that will take you there – perception and zooming in.

The good life is created by constant reminder of your vision and programming the identity that would actualize it through aligned action.

Better decisions come from perspective and perception.

Every day, zoom out and remind yourself of what you don’t want. You don’t need to focus on what you want, because that will make itself apparent through your choices.

Hold that frame at the top of your mind.

Do not allow distractions to penetrate it.

Any time a choice comes up, zoom out and align.

“Will this benefit the future I am trying to create?”

Then, be decisive. Make the decision.

Allow failure into your life so you can correct your behavior the next time around.

Awareness is a cure.

You don’t have to quit all of your bad habits. You just have to view them and their consequences through the lens of your vision for long enough.

Dan

The post Disappear And Come Back Unrecognizable (12 Rules To Change Your Life) appeared first on Dan Koe.

The only way to control your income, and therefore your life, is to create a product.

Since the day you were born, you were taught to go to school, get a job, and save until you can retire and finally do what you want.

You were conditioned to obey the authority. To learn things you don’t care about so you can work for people you don’t care about so you can eventually live a life you care about… and with a simple observation of society, that day is unlikely to ever come.

Without realizing it, you were programmed as a line of code in society to sell a product for someone else.

Your entire life has been spent building everyone’s dreams but your own.

The good news is, times are changing.

The decentralization of work has begun.

There are more opportunities than ever.

Remote work is the norm.

Freelance work has increased from 36% of the workforce to 46.6% since 2020.

The creator economy is projected to double from $250B to $480B by 2028.

Thanks to the internet, the power is shifting back to the individual.

I realized this early.

YouTube was just picking up steam when I was in high school.

I noticed that most people were creating content around their skills and passions. They taught others what they’d learned throughout their journey, and their personalities made them unique.

This led me to do everything in my power to do the same.

I started YouTube channels and tried business models like dropshipping, freelancing, and agency work.

I dropped out of college after learning to code and getting a job at a web design agency. With what I learned there, I started my own.

But there was a problem. I wanted freedom. I quickly realized that client work was quite similar to working a 9-5 job.

I was doing freelance projects I didn’t care about for people I didn’t care about.

This led me to social media and Twitter.

In between then and now, I’ve gotten out of client work, work 2-4 hours a day on average, and made $4.1 million in revenue last year with absurdly high-profit margins as a personal brand.

Digital Leverage

Social media has set the scene for anyone to do what they love.

The only people who don’t believe this are the pure consumers. The people who doom scroll, creating more problems in their life, and the people who horde information, but never do anything with it.

Everyone is a creator and consumer.

You text your friends. You have conversations. You have ideas. You create every day.

You purchase products. You consume content (like we have been since the newspaper and radio). You consume every day.

You must consume to create, but if you don’t strike a balance, your mind becomes a jumbled mess of stress and anxiety that blinds you from your potential.

Social media is where the attention is right now. That may change, but the principle still remains:

If you want to take control of your life, you must create and distribute a valuable product where the attention is. You must contribute more than you take from humanity. Right now, that’s on social media, and it’s foolish to think you shouldn’t be competing in this new game.

The beautiful thing is this:

• You don’t need startup capital
• You don’t need a lot of experience
• You don’t need a lot of followers
• You don’t need to worry about saturation
• You don’t have to be neurotic about profit margins, operating costs, or supply chains

Technology has advanced to the point where you can run a one-person business with 90%+ profit margins and 2-4 hours a day of work.

This is what led to me building Digital Economics.

Building Distribution

You need an audience.

Right now, it’s on social media.

Most people think of social media as a silly app on their phone, yet they spend the majority of their life on it.

You’ve still yet to make the connection that it is a massive part of the economy, business, learning, and life in general.

Our ancestors had small audiences for the role they played in their tribe.

As the world advanced through the printing press, radio, and television, how we acquired an audience for our work has drastically changed.

The point is this:

You need a group of people who know what you do and how it helps them. That’s what the business you work for does. That’s the only way to become the CEO of your life.

You don’t need to go knocking door to door. You don’t need to send thousands of cold emails. But you still need distribution for your work.

Right now, you can post your writing on an app like X, have a larger account repost your work, and gain hundreds of followers in a day.

Most people think they can’t build an audience because they haven’t taken the time to learn the sovereign skills of writing and persuasion.

They don’t think they can:

• Write an impactful post by emulating what works (we all start as copy cats, how else do you learn?)
• Write a DM to a large account to offer a form of value (knowledge or money) to build rapport.
• Persuade them to exchange that value for something you want (a repost on social media).
• Or, write a thread about someone in hopes that they repost it because it adds to their social proof (example from the other day, he had others repost this and when I last checked, it got him close to 700 followers.)
• Get tens of thousands of people to see your post, many of them following you.
• Continue the process until you have an audience begging to pay you.
• Launch a product and attain your freedom.

As you practice skills, they decrease in the amount of time it takes to see results.

It will be difficult at first, as all things are, but your time invested will decrease to 1-2 hours a day of writing and self-promotion.

Most people are stuck with the education of a slave, learning a career-specific skill to execute a specific string of tasks for the rest of their life.

They become attached to that skill and refuse to learn anything that will increase their potential.

Don’t be that guy or girl.

If you want to take control of your future, you must build an audience with writing and persuasion – the skills that have been in the toolbelt of the free since the day we carved symbols into a rock.

Building A Product

You can be a freelancer.

You can be a coach.

You can start an agency.

But you still won’t achieve the one big goal you set out to when starting a business:

Full control over your time.

This is the trap of service businesses. They can be useful as a starting point, but I’ve recently changed my mind.

In the past, I recommend people start a service business and progress their way toward a product as they build an audience.

Many succeed with this approach, but even more fail.

They adopt the false notion that you can replace your income by learning a skill in a few hours and scamming your clients for delivering terrible results.

By all means, if you have the right head on your shoulders, start a service business and make some money.

If you haven’t developed yourself in the slightest, you’re better off playing the long term game.

• Improve yourself
• Document your journey in public
• Turn your improvement into a product
• Help others achieve the goals you did

Products are the highest leverage play for those who want full control over their time. Products fulfill themselves and sell while you sleep.

This is why we start with building an audience.

• You maintain a long term mindset
• You are in it for the right reasons
• You set yourself up for decades of success
• You help more people get results with a product
• Your content doesn’t feel trapped and narrow
• You write content to discover what your audience wants (based on engagement)
• You use that as firepower to make your product a success

You have $100,000 trapped in your head.

How do you extract it?

First, understand why people buy a product.

They want to see a transformation. They want to see a slight or drastic improvement in one area of their life.

They want to increase their market value through skill acquisition, productivity, and self-improvement.

They want to make more money, free up time, and increase their quality of life.

So, we start with the eternal markets. Health, wealth, relationships, and happiness.

That is how we position any product we sell.

Now, follow these steps:

• Turn yourself into your customer avatar
• List out your interests
• List out your goals
• List out your problems
• List out exactly how to overcome the problem and achieve the goal

Now you have a brand message, dozens of content ideas, and the starting point of a profitable product.

For potential ideas, these can be anything related to nutrition, training, mental health, spirituality, skill acquisition, productivity, psychology, or anything that you can learn and benefit from in life.

If you haven’t achieved much in your life, that’s the first step.

Yes, you have to get out of your mom’s basement and cultivate some form of value. Shocker.

If you’ve already achieved a goal in your life, you’re set. Package up everything necessary to achieve that goal into a digital product.

A course, coaching, cohort, workshop, template, checklist, system, tutorial, program, tracker, or anything else you’ve seen other brands or creators sell.

You can sell a physical product or service, but in my eyes, everyone’s end goal should be to sell a high-profit digital product that requires minimal upkeep and sells while you sleep. We do want freedom after all, but you need an audience to do that.

If it’s already selling, good. Don’t assume that everyone knows about it. Sell it under the most unique brand you can find – your own – and be the first to introduce people to the importance of that product. It will sell.

Write to your past, current, and future self to attract an audience.

Build a product you’ve used before, but better. Build a product you want but doesn’t exist. Build a product that solves a problem in your life.

Promote the product by illustrating why it impacted your life. Personal experience is what separates you from everyone else. Nobody can replicate it.

We teach this progression with templates, tasks, and personal guidance in Kortex University.

Most businesses fail because they try to solve a problem they haven’t experienced. Don’t be one of them.

Imitate, Then Innovate

You are a copy cat.

Every single idea in your head was either observed or learned by something external to you.

The discoveries you’ve made through self-reflection are only possible because of this.

It is quite stupid to think that you shouldn’t copy other people. Especially if what they are doing works.

Imitation is how we survive.

Everyone is an imitator and innovator.

The innovators create and test new ideas.

The imitators bring those ideas to life and spread them throughout humanity.

Obviously, you don’t just copy-paste what others have done. That’s how you become an outcast. Use your brain and think long-term for a bit.

If you don’t know what to write or create, you have to immerse yourself in the writing or creations of someone else.

Preferably many sources until your mind is overwhelmed to the point of exploding.

That’s what creativity is. The release of tension that results in a breakthrough.

Create a database of writing you love.

Practice writing based on what works, but with your own ideas.

Purchase digital products similar to that you want to create. Study the structure and fill the gaps of your own.

When I created a digital product teaching the skill of web design, I knew quite a bit, so I outlined the product.

But, I had to purchase other courses and discover which parts of mine were missing. Only then could I finish the product and ensure that it was decent.

The rest comes from iteration.

You have to put out writing and products that suck.

You have to look like an idiot.

You have to get feedback as to whether or not your creations are valuable. Only then can you improve, because you wouldn’t know how to improve otherwise.

Write to build an audience.

Launch a product to earn your freedom.

Enjoy the rest of your day.

Dan

The post If You Are Smart, You Have $100,000 Trapped In Your Head appeared first on Dan Koe.

You can work hard at anything but that doesn’t mean it’s useful to the progress of humanity.

This is the delusion of hard work.

You can put 4 years of work into getting a degree.

You can put 10 years of work into climbing a corporate ladder.

And still, you won’t be paid anywhere close to what you want.

So, rather than taking your future into their own hands, you whine and complain.

“I deserve to be paid more!”

“I’ve spent 14 years working hard and this is all I get for it?”

“I barely have any time for my family. I don’t have enough to take a vacation. I slave away with no light at the end of the tunnel.”

The complainers of the world are missing one crucial piece of the puzzle:

The labor theory of value is that you should be paid for the amount of work you do.

To feel as if you have jumped through hoops.

To feel like you deserve something.

But that’s not how reality works.

Money is a unit of value. Value is a measure of how much people care about what you do.

How valuable you are = the magnitude of problems you solve, the results of the solutions you create, and your ability to get people to care about your creation.

If you aren’t happy with how much you make, it may be time to take a brutally honest look at what you contribute to the world.

It does not make sense to pay someone based on the amount of work they do. It does make sense to pay someone based on the level of problem they solve.

Why?

I can work hard for 1 year at writing to become an author, but 1 year isn’t enough to justify $100,000 of compensation.

You only make as much money as other people care about what you’ve done within that year. That is, how your creation benefits them so that they use it to solve a problem, change their life, and bring progress to humanity.

Complaining about not being paid enough is not going to get you paid. In fact, it will probably get you fired or ignored. Or just hated by anyone you come into contact with because they are thinking, “Ok… what are you going to do about it?”

The only option is to take matters into your own hands.

The Irreplaceable Individual

You are worried about what will be relevant 20 years from now because you are dependent on everyone but yourself for your success.

Successful people aren’t worried because they understand what makes anyone successful.

The highest-paid earners are the visionaries, strategists, and innovators of the world.

The highest-paid earners are not those who work hard, nor smart, but leveraged.

If you want to secure your future, you need the traits that allow you to succeed in any environment.

These traits comprise The Irreplaceable Individual:

• Self-experimentation – how to solve complex problems through trial and error and come to your own conclusions.
• Self-reflection – how to understand the motives of your mind, so you can understand the motives of others.
• Self-development – cultivating a valuable mindset and skillset that can help others.
• Self-reliance – how to get what you want by taking responsibility for the outcome of your life.
• Self-education – the ability to gather, make sense of, and utilize information on an unknown subject.
• Self-sufficiency – the ability to sustain one’s ideal lifestyle and acquire the resources necessary to do so.
• Self-mastery – an unwavering dedication to the process of navigating reality.

When you master yourself, you master the world.

If you want to become irreplaceable, you are required to become valuable.

If you want to become well-paid, you must convince people to see that value.

The perception of value changes as the world does.

With the advent of AI, we may not know what the future of value looks like, but we do know that there will be value.

Humans may not be paid in dollars, but may still be paid in prestige, status, and anything else that will run the human economy.

Money as dollars may not persist, but the ability to profit from your creations will.

How To Secure Your Future

Your skill set isn’t valuable if nobody knows or cares about it.

There are 2 issues here.

If nobody knows about what you create, it isn’t valuable.

If nobody cares about your create, it isn’t valuable.

In business, you need a product and group of people who care about that product enough to buy it.

You can place your product in front of people on the internet, but if they can’t see why it benefits their lives, they won’t care about it.

You can have what you believe is the most valuable product, but if you don’t place it in front of people, they don’t have a chance to care about it.

In relationships, you can place yourself in front of a group of potential partners, but if they can’t see where you fit into their life, they won’t care about you.

You can believe you are the most developed individual, but if you sit inside all day, potential partners don’t have a chance to care about you.

1) Become An Entrepreneur

You only gain full control over your time and income when you realize that entrepreneurship is the only path to do so.

At a job, you are not in charge of the product, the tasks you are assigned, or the customer acquisition process.

In other words, your employer is in charge of everything that pays the bills. Therefore they are in charge of your entire life.

Some are more lenient then others yes, and there’s nothing wrong with a temporary job, but I am writing to those who want to eventually be free.

2) Build Distribution

There is one big trap in entrepreneurship.

I fell into it 7 times.

That’s why I failed at 7 business models when starting.

I was so enamored by the skill I was learning. I just wanted to build projects all day. I loved being the architect of the business.

Website, landing page, logo, portfolio, but rarely did I try to actually get customers. You know… the one’s that pay you.

When I did start learning to get customers, it was manual outreach or paid ads. Think cold email, cold DMs, and Facebook ads that I didn’t have the money to run.

Times are different.

You have the ability to build an audience of potential buyers by becoming a one-person media company.

Everyone is on social media. That’s where the attention is right now. Your customers aren’t looking at the TV. Your customers aren’t listening to the radio. Your customers aren’t reading the newspaper.

Your job is to place your business where the attention is right now. That may change in the future, but not any time soon. And when it does, you must be adaptable.

Building an audience with education, inspiration, and entertainment through content is the best way to start a business these days.

You get to prove your value in public, attract a following you don’t have to pay for, and put a product in front of them so you can get paid to do what you want.

Study those who are doing what you want to do. I guarantee they are posting on social media, building a name for themselves, and selling something (because they aren’t selling something for someone else anymore).

3) Learn To Write

The greatest skill of an irreplaceable individual is writing.

It knocks out 3 birds with one stone:

1. It teaches you to articulate your value from reader feedback.
2. It is the foundation of media (how to build distribution by getting your writing shared).
3. It is the morning habit that builds any project you build.

Posts, threads, emails, outlines, modules, advertisements, direct messages, books, video scripts, and the rest all start with writing.

Another bonus is that writing is a meta-skill.

By meta-skill, I mean you can start without experience and stack skills underneath it.

You don’t need to show your body. You don’t need to have an English degree. You write every day with texts and messages.

With speaking or video, you need editing skills and the confidence to not stumble over your words. You need to think on the fly.

Writing teaches you to think clearly in the comfort of your own home (or coffee shop).

This is why I recommend starting your journey on X/Twitter.

Once you’ve got the hand of growing distribution (your audience) you start a newsletter to double your impact. Then, you build a written product and monetize that.

By the way, we hold your hand through this process inside Kortex University as you progress through The Synthesizer, Authority, and Builder tiers.

4) Learn To Sell

Sales = survival.

If you don’t sell your own product, you will be forced to sell someone else’s.

You can complain all day about how “everyone is selling something nowadays,” but you are missing the point behind that.

Yes, everyone is selling something because they have to if they (1) want to survive (2) contribute to humanity and (3) receive money in return.

Another point:

People only invest in what they care about.

Sales and persuasion go hand in hand.

If you don’t learn to sell, you will be disappointed when you put your product in front of a crowd of crickets.

Sales is how you persuade people to see the value in what you have to offer. Persuasion is inspiring people to make a good decision for their life.

The sales process is not inherently sleazy.

It is guiding people through a story, because that’s how humans relate and determine value.

1. You make them aware of a problem.
2. You make them realize how that problem will impact their life if it goes unsolved.
3. You introduce a solution (your product) that can solve that problem.
4. You show them proof that change is possible with testimonials or personal experience.
5. Give them the clarity to act and continue on a new path.

That’s how you write a landing page, run a “sales” call, direct message people, or get people to read your newsletter like I did here.

If you don’t like sales, you may not realize that you are selling people on your beliefs, ideas, and worldview every single day.

Flip the switch from mindlessly manipulating people to mindfully helping people.

5) Learn To Build

Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable. – Naval

Every day, set aside one hour to build a project that actualizes your ideal future.

That is the only way to escape building projects for someone else.

To build, you need technical know-how.

You must either learn to code or learn to use the technology available to you.

What used to take 10 people now takes 1.

What used to take 10 hours now takes 1.

What used to take 10 dollars now takes 1.

You live in a beautiful time where humans can leverage technology to build what they want.

Website builders, email marketing software, AI, social media, course builders, and more.

It is your job to create and distribute value by learning and building on the internet.

If you don’t know what to build, start with:

1. What you already use, but make it better
2. A problem you’ve solved in your life
3. Building what you want to see in the world

We discussed this in last weeks letter.

Turn your adversity into a good story. Turn your story into a brand. Turn your journey into a product.

Enjoy the fruits of your labor and the rest of your day.

Dan

The post The Delusion Of Hard Work (And Why It Won’t Make You Rich) appeared first on Dan Koe.

I’ll be honest.

I’m worried.

I’ve gone deep into the AGI and post-labor-work rabbit hole.

There’s been a few questions on my mind for the past month:

• What can humans do that machines can’t?
• What will the future of work look like?
• What jobs – if any – will persist over the next 20 years?
• What can we, as humans, do to secure an above-average future?

With these problems at the forefront of my mind, I’ve found a few answers that may bring you optimism and clarity as you enter the unknown.

I want to focus on this point that many are worried about:

We don’t know what to teach children because we don’t know what will be relevant in 20 years.

I was worried about this too until I came across a post by Devon Erikson on X that shines light on the issue.

I’ve been binging any podcast I can find of him and reading his new sci-fi fiction book, Theft Of Fire. He is easily becoming one of my favorite thinkers.

I hope one day, once I’ve burned through his work, I can hold a high-level conversation with him on a podcast to share the similarities and differences between our worldviews. For now, I am the student.

On to his points:

Only slaves are expected to perform one task for their entire life.

Our current education system reflects the education of slaves.

They were career-specific skills like growing wheat, herding sheep, and riding a horse.

Today, we are taught to be useful workers. We are taught to obey the authority. We are conditioned to get good grades out of fear of punishment.

A free man is expected to act on his interests and do many things throughout his life.

If you don’t create a purpose, you will be assigned one.

A purpose is a goal. Most people don’t choose their own goals.

A goal implies knowledge and skills that must be learned to solve problems that prevent you from achieving the goal.

If you don’t choose your own goal, you do not choose what you learn or what problems you solve. Your destiny is decided for you because the only potential you know is the one you were assigned.

The difference between the two is how to live, how to think, and how to learn.

True education, not a clone-producing machine we call public school, is an orientation toward how to live and thrive without being dependent on another.

True education does not only teach career skills that produce results by performing specific tasks, but how to think and learn so they could adapt to any situation.

Stop worrying about what career skills AI will make obsolete.

Worry about whether you are training (or being trained) to make ideal-future-aligned decisions, be open-minded and perceptive, and be self-motivated.

Everyone is creative.

Creativity is about achieving any goal with the knowledge and skill available to you, not fancy art or designs.

In other words, you need to learn how to set self-generated goals, utilize the internet, mentors, and the abundance of information you have access to to educate yourself.

Then, you need to embrace trial and error, self-reflect, and experiment to create your own path.

Creativity gives you the power to do whatever you want in life.

Those who don’t realize this gift are doomed to the assignments of others.

The Irreplaceable Individual

It is impossible to know what the future will hold.

All we know is that there will be a way of life that leads to the most satisfaction.

While some aspects of this ideal lifestyle will be unique, like the interests you choose to pursue, the overarching principles of the good life remain immutable, like what allows you to pursue those interests as a sovereign individual.

To discover what these are, we must look at what is not taught in schools.

If schools train you to be a modern slave that performs one task in one career for the entirety of your life, what is the knowledge and skill that sovereign individuals are taught – or teach themselves?

1) The Future-Proof Skill Stack

In Eriksen’s opinion, the seven liberal arts (or “liberating arts,” not to be confused with the ideological monstrosity found in a specific department of formal education taught by those who are not liberated themselves) are, quote:

• Logic: how to derive truth from known facts
• Statistics: how to understand the implications of data
• Rhetoric: how to persuade, and spot persuasion tactics
• Research: how to gather information on an unknown subject
• (Practical) Psychology: how to discern and understand the true motives of others
• Investment: how to manage and grow existing assets
• Agency: how to make decisions about what course to pursue, and proactively take action to pursue it.

I would encourage you to hold these in your mind while pushing into the unknown.

If you prepare yourself with a future-proof mind, what technical skills will be lucrative or useful in the far future are irrelevant because you can adapt as necessary.

To learn the liberating arts, these are the skills I learned:

• Marketing & sales – if you don’t know how to attract and persuade, you will never get what you want, and your only option will be for an employer (or the government) to give it to you. (Rhetoric, psychology)
• Writing & thinking – the ability to communicate the value in your unique mind. The foundation of getting in front of other people. (Logic, research)
• Entrepreneurship – the process of taking my future into my own hands, hunting for my survival, and building products that I want to see in the world (that others care about). (Statistics, agency, investment)

Some may say things like entrepreneurship aren’t a “skill,” but I would argue that any mental process that becomes more efficient with time is a skill.

Everything is a skill, but most people don’t treat their life as a practice.

Nobody can tell you how they write, think, market, and sell. They can only tell you how they do it.

Meaning that to learn these skills, you must embrace a self-experimentation mindset.

Your job is to:

• Research processes that others have found success with. Thankfully, you can find these with a simple search.
• Experiment with various techniques. Implement the processes you learn and attempt to get results.
• Identify patterns and principles. Note the similarities between each and double down on them.
• Create your own process. Tailor what you learn to your unique lifestyle and situation.
• Contribute to true education by passing it down. Give people education that can’t be taught in schools with a fundamental grounding in critical thinking.

With entrepreneurship as your vessel, you set the scene for true education and sovereignty.

With writing and thinking, you continuously create, test, and iterate on the value you have to offer.

You are required to learn practical psychology – marketing and sales – to understand the minds of yourself and your customers.

You then persuade, not force or deceive, to inspire people to care about the value you have to offer.

The future-proof skills are the foundation of Kortex University. My school for becoming a synthesizer in 90-120 days.

2) Technical Know-How

With the foundation of a future-proof skill stack, the next step is adapting to the times with technical skills.

In the digital renaissance, this means:

• Social media – building a name for yourself as your storefront for the value you create. The command center for your business.
• Content – writing or video to educate, entertain, and inspire people to see your value.
• Email marketing – newsletters or sequences to nurture the audience you acquire.
• Visual design – illustrating the vibe of your brand to spark emotion in your viewers.
• Funnel building – creating landing pages, websites, and fueling them with other technical skills like content and email.

The requirements to learn these skills are bound to change as artificial intelligence shakes the industry. They won’t go away any time soon, but the general competition will increase due to the ease in acquiring these skills. Few people will learn the future-proof skills above, those are what will secure your future.

These technical skills are the current vessel for your entrepreneurial ventures.

3) Personal Interests

Now the questions you’re asking are:

• What do I write about?
• What do I market and sell?
• What do I email, design, or leverage technical skills with?

The interests you can’t help but tell others about.

The books you can’t pull yourself away from.

The ideas that flood your search history.

The projects you dream of building but can’t seem to find the time to.

You don’t “find” a profitable niche. You create a profitable niche through persuasion.

Nobody can tell you what niche to go into, they can only tell you the one they went into.

If you understood the future-proof skills, and therefore human nature, you would understand that you can control the perception of your interests.

Interest is generated. Interest is programmed. You are interested in specific things because of how you were raised and the information you were exposed to.

You are interested in them for a reason. That means others can become interested in them with well-placed writing on social media. This has happened to you before. Go scroll the timeline and tell me something doesn’t persuade you to change your behavior.

You spend time, attention, and money on your interests. That means others will spend those same resources on you if you are valuable enough.

Free people don’t choose a niche, they create one.

The Digital Renaissance

Most people don’t try to become the top 5% in any skill because they don’t realize that the 95% is comprised of people who put 0% effort outside of anything they were told to do by their parents or society.

30-60 minutes a day for 6-12 months puts you ahead of almost everyone.

Even that is too much to ask of most people.

Thanks to the decentralized education system being built in front of our eyes (creators on social media teaching paths they’ve gotten results in) you can quickly learn relevant skills that allow you to adapt to the changing career landscape.

In my eyes, it is silly to bank your future on education from those who are employed to be teachers.

I am not talking about general education. That is useful for getting people on the same page. I am talking about further education, when you are at the pivotal moment where you must choose what interest you want to pursue.

If the goal is to be in control of your future, it is wise to avoid education by those teaching how to be free but aren’t free themselves.

STEM education makes sense because it teaches hard skills, but an education in the liberal arts required to be free is learned better by those who have done what you are interested in doing.

Posts, podcasts, videos, courses, and coaching.

Use them to study every skill or interest we’ve discussed in this letter.

Nobody is going to give you the time. You must take it. Set aside 30-60 minutes in a non-distracting block of your day and build the habit. It will be difficult at the start as with anything new. Don’t expect otherwise.

The Domain Of Mastery

Mastery is a blend of creative and specific work.

Mastery cannot be trained, it must be practiced.

You don’t succeed by being smarter.

You don’t succeed by working harder.

You succeed when you possess specific domain-relevant knowledge with a creative vessel for distribution.

I can be smart, with an IQ of 175, but if a bug occurs in a complex code base, how will being smart help me fix that? I need to know a bunch of very specific things about the code base.

Now, I can have specific knowledge of that domain, but if I am not one influencing the vision of that code base, I am not free, and I can be replaced.

It is difficult to replace someone who is highly equipped with specific knowledge, but it can still happen. And if that individual is replaced, do they have the creativity to make that knowledge work for them?

Your domain of mastery contains the skills and interests listed above.

• Entrepreneurship is your vessel – so you are in full control of your future.
• Marketing and sales are your message – so you can inspire people to care about what you do.
• Writing and thinking are your medium – so you can distribute your message in public.
• Technical know-how is the “how” – so you can succeed in the current market landscape.
• Personal interests are the “what” – so you have a craft to pour your heart and soul into.
• Your ideal future is the “why” – so you solve a problem that you have experience with.

An ideal future is born from adversity.

If you listen to the stories of the most successful entrepreneurs (excluding cases of unconscious competence), you will discover a common theme.

They built a product for one of three reasons:

1. To make something that helped them better.
2. To solve a problem in their life.
3. To build what they wanted to see in the world.

Or, even better, a combination of them all.

One suffered from eczema, experimented with all of the products they could on the market, and couldn’t find one that suited them.

The best they could find was a boring, scentless bar of soap.

So, they obsessed over botanicals and horticulture. Studied it like their life depended on it – because it did – and created a soap line that smelled good, looked good, and didn’t irritate their skin.

I, as another example, had trouble with consistent writing quality to fuel my business. Nobody seemed to understand that there was more to writing than just writing.

Since it was the foundation of my business success, and with having a plethora of specific knowledge in that domain, I experimented with other’s processes until I was able to create one that suited my unique goals.

That is how 2 Hour Writer was born. My hyper-successful course.

It may not work for some, but for others, it is the course that changed everything and shaped a huge portion of the creator space as we know it – including many spinoff products with other processes you can try.

Notice the Value Equation from last week coming into play. It starts with a problem, reveals a goal, and sets a potential process to be created.

To wrap this up, technology only continues to advance.

Being scared of it is a great way to ruin your future.

The wise decision is to use it. Dissect it. Understand it.

Allow it to help you acquire skills faster and build your future in record time.

I hope you enjoyed this letter.

It was one of my favorites to write so far.

Dan

The post The Future-Proof Skill Stack (Learn In This Order) appeared first on Dan Koe.