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Decoded Genius distills decades of mastery from the top 0.0001% in every field. From health and longevity to business, AI, and psychology, each episode helps ambitious people shortcut the learning curve and level up their health, wealth, and happiness.
Forget going viral.
I think people think going
viral is the answer.
What changed your mindset
after you found out?
Like, I hit a couple things one.
Nicholas
Cole is the ghostwriter behind over 340
500 CEOs, having built a $10 million
writing empire.
Which raises one question can human
writers survive in the age of AI?
Providing a service will always make you
more money faster than selling products.
Is there a framework
on building a personal brand?
I invested probably 30 hours
into writing this prompt.
AI now does the 80 for me for ever.
What's more important on social media?
The whole game of building
any sort of brand
or business is.
you've generated over a billion views.
You write for people whose names
maybe you'll never get credit for 600
K per month in revenue.
Which one of those three is hardest
to explain to
someone who doesn't know you and why?
Probably the writing for people
that I will never get credit for.
I don't do very much of it anymore.
But I was a ghost writer
for a lot of executives and Silicon Valley
founders and investors and even New York
Times bestselling authors for years.
And I think
whenever I would explain that to people,
especially other writers,
they would think like, oh, that's such a.
It's such a
like you, missed out on the whole
point of writing, which is you're supposed
to get credit for it.
And the thing I like explaining
to other people, especially with
writing services or ghostwriting,
for example, is that, yeah,
I might not get credit for it,
but I got paid in
so many other quantifiable ways.
I got paid to build an insane network.
I know a lot of very powerful
and successful people.
I got paid to learn about every industry
that I was interested in.
Fun little story I like sharing
is one of my first ghostwriting clients.
Was a guy really early in crypto,
and one of the first pieces
we wrote was about Bitcoin and the impact
that Bitcoin and Ethereum
we're going to have on the world.
This was 2016.
I got off that call.
I went and educated myself on it,
put my entire life
savings into a theory, and then turned
like 20 grand into a quarter
million dollars in like two months.
that was all just from like, it's not like
it's not like I got insider information.
He was just like, hey, there's
this new technology you should know about.
And so if you think about that, it's like,
okay,
I got paid to learn about
an emerging industry
from someone who is really smart
and really educated about it.
I got paid in confidence.
I got paid to practice my craft.
Like I didn't have to go get a master's
degree in writing and go $100,000 in debt.
I got paid hundreds of thousands
and then ultimately millions of dollars
to write for other people,
to practice the craft of writing.
So, like the getting credit part,
it's like, okay,
I didn't get credit for a lot of the work
that I did for five years,
but I now have all of those benefits
for the rest of my life,
and that's just hard for,
I think, the average person to understand.
That's crazy.
So really, part of this is like
the benefit wasn't just, oh, I'm right,
I'm ghostwriting.
I'm making some money from it.
It's learning a bunch of different
industries,
networking and learning
from a bunch of different people.
And then you probably made more from that
than you did from ghostwriting itself.
Yeah, completely.
You don't always have to get paid in cash.
I think getting paid in cash is nice.
Obviously, when you are having trouble,
you know, paying the rent
or putting food on the table, you're like,
I need the cash.
But the reality is
there are a lot of things in life
much more valuable than cash.
Connections are more valuable than cash
owed favors r more valuable than cash.
I still do free work for people
all the time.
I've ghostwritten speeches for CEOs
who went back and gave a commencement
speech at their school or something.
I've done that for free.
I've ghostwritten articles for executives
and startup founders for free.
I've done entire like category design
marketing strategies for companies
for free just because I wanted to build
the relationship with the person.
And I knew maybe
I don't know what to ask from them today,
but I will be able to cash in this favor
at some point in the future.
And because I do that fairly often,
I know if I wanted to go start a company
and raise money tomorrow, I would make ten
phone calls and I would raise the money.
You know, if I
if I was looking to build a partnership
with some large company,
I can make ten phone calls,
I can call in a favor
and someone will be like,
yeah, I remember when you helped me
with this other thing.
Favorite training runs the world, people
forget that you can do that with services
and you can do free work for someone
and not get paid in cash and go,
I'll just I'll cash this in later
as a favor.
Wait. Favor trading runs the world.
Yeah, totally. I love I love that.
So you're saying, look,
if you're out there listening
and you have a service offering,
do it for free in exchange for some value,
you're going to get later on
that maybe tenfold the amount of money
you would have made just charging
for that service upfront. yeah.
I mean, you don't
you don't have to get paid in cash.
You can get paid in a testimonial.
You can get paid in referrals,
you can get paid in confidence.
Like, I had so many ghostwriting clients
where I would do free work
just because I wanted to spend more time
with that person, because I wanted to
soak up their thinking.
I got to sit in rooms with billionaires
and people who were leading like unicorn,
Silicon Valley startups,
and people who were managing hundreds
of millions of dollars
or billions of dollars of capital.
Like, I got to hang out with those people
just because I was like,
yeah, I'll be your ghostwriter.
And sometimes I would do it for free,
and sometimes they would pay me.
But like, ultimately the money was
that was like the lowest common
denominator thing.
Like that wasn't actually what
I was getting out of the relationship.
You went from a gaming blog
to a portfolio of businesses.
If you had to draw a map
of how writing becomes
a business, many stages are there
and what happens at each stage.
It's a fun question because yeah,
my background is I was a pro
World of Warcraft player as a teenager.
That game taught me a lot
about breaking things down into milestones
and understanding that when you set goals,
you're not just setting a goal.
What you're really doing is reverse
engineering a handful of smaller goals
that you need to achieve
in order to get there, for example.
And so with a writing business,
the first step is I like thinking of it as
you need to be your own case study.
I think so often people,
especially in the world of writing or
providing writing services, for example,
or even just selling digital products,
people put so much emphasis
on, I need other people's permission,
I need testimonials, I need case studies,
I need success stories.
The reality is,
like I built my whole ghostwriting agency
to hundreds of clients, millions
of dollars in revenue,
and I didn't use a single case study ever.
Every time on a sales call,
if someone would say, you know,
who have you worked with
and how can you prove it?
I would just say, well, as a ghostwriter,
the nature of our business,
we don't talk about who we work with.
But I can tell you,
I've worked with someone
in a similar situation as you,
and if you have any questions
about our service,
I'm happy to answer them.
I would just say that over and over
and over and over and over again.
I never used case studies or testimonials.
The only case study I did use was myself.
So I would say,
I know this works because I'm doing it.
It's like, oh,
I'm going to go straight articles for you.
Well, how do I know
articles will get distribution?
Because I'm writing articles under my name
and I'm getting tens of thousands
or hundreds of thousands of views.
So the first frame I like passing along to
people is whatever thing
you want to provide, you should be able
to point to yourself as the case study.
You want to go straight newsletters.
You should have a newsletter
you want to go straight. Social content.
You should be writing social
content yourself.
there's a reason why.
Like, I don't even market myself
as a ghost writer for books,
but I get hit up all the time.
Celebrities, executives, people
reaching out, going,
hey Cole, I would love for you to co-write
or go straight my book.
Why does that happen?
Well, that happens not because I'm
marketing myself as a book ghostwriter.
It happens because I write books.
I am my own case study.
So like that's the first, easiest thing
for for people to understand in terms
of getting started and building momentum.
most people
who want to start something from nothing,
they get stuck at a stage,
maybe without knowing it.
Right?
Is there a stage that just kills
most careers?
Is it just doing it from the start?
Is it is it something at a later stage?
Yeah.
I mean, most people shoot themselves
in the foot before they've even started.
You know, there's infinite.
We could talk for three hours
just about all the faulty beliefs
that people have around.
Can I charge that much money?
Is this even possible?
Who would hire me as my niche? Too
saturated?
Like just go down the list.
There's 100 things
that people tell themselves
that caused them not to take action,
right?
The primary thing, and this is
this is a big
component of what I talk about
in our premium ghostwriting academy,
which basically trains freelance writers
to reposition themselves as ghostwriters.
And part of that repositioning.
It's not just calling yourself
something different, it's understanding
that you are not just a writer.
You are running a one person
writing business.
And I think a lot of times freelancers
think of themselves as,
oh, I'm just a freelancer.
I just do whatever the other person says.
And one of the big frames
I try and pass along is, no,
you are a one person business owner,
and when you just sort of adjust
and do whatever the other person asks of
you, that's the equivalent of saying,
I'm going to open a pizza shop
and you make pizzas all day,
and then someone walks in and goes,
I'd like a steak dinner.
And you go, oh, okay, you know what?
I'll just go in the back
and I'll have my assistant
run down to Whole Foods
and they'll get a steak,
and I will personally cook
you a steak dinner.
No one would do that. You'd be like,
I run a pizza shop.
If you want pizza, you buy pizza here,
you know, and writers especially.
But this is true for people
in any industry.
They don't think of themselves
as business owners.
They just think of themselves
as freelancers.
So I try to get writers to understand
you are running a business.
That business needs to provide
a repeatable, productized service.
You do the same thing over and over
and over again.
Just like the pizza shop.
I make pizzas over and over again.
then for most people,
if you are a one, if you're a solopreneur,
one person business owner,
and you're providing,
say, writing services,
this is probably also true
for graphic designers or, you know, insert
any other career.
You can typically service
five clients at a time.
we'll just say an arbitrary
number one person business owner.
You have five clients.
So what is the game?
The game is first
I have to fill all five client slots.
So if I have one client
what's my bottleneck?
I need two clients, right?
Two clients
I need four. Ultimately I need five.
Then the second part of the game is now
I need each slot to be worth
as much as possible.
So if you have five clients
and one of them's paying you
a thousand bucks a month and another one's
paying you $5,000 a month, right?
You can see the the problem
is, I need less of the cheap clients,
and I need more of the expensive clients.
Okay, so I need five clients
paying me as much as possible.
Call it five grand a month.
That's 25 grand a month.
That's a home run like you did it.
And then the third level is going,
okay, I might have five clients
all paying me five grand a month,
but how difficult is each one?
Because money is not always the same.
One client might pay you five grand
and be super easy and never have any
edits, and just approve everything you do
and pay their invoices on time.
And then another client might pay you
five grand
and be an absolute nightmare to work with.
So then how do you iterate from there?
Well, then you replace all the difficult
clients with more easy clients.
So then ultimately you have.
I'm a one person business owner
with five client slots.
Each slot is maximized to pay me
as much as possible,
and each slot is filled with a client
that is as enjoyable to work
with as possible.
And then, and only then, should you
consider hiring people and scaling.
does AI make that easier to
to to write faster,
to bring in more people
to structure and organize the business
without as many people?
for a freelancer, does it not apply?
You've opened the door on my favorite
on my favorite topic
right now,
which is which is AI is is amazing.
There's a huge chunk of our business
that educates people on how to use AI.
So I am a believer in the technology
and you cannot automate
something that you can't articulate
to another person.
And so it's very easy for people
to look at this
new technology and go, okay,
I hear everything you just said.
I understand what you just said,
but how do I
and then insert shortcut,
but how do I just use AI?
And the problem with
that is you are trying to shortcut
something that you actually haven't done
yet yourself.
And so what happens is the shortcut
becomes the longer road in disguise.
So can I help you write faster? Yes.
If you understand the thing
you're writing in the first place.
Can AI help you do outreach faster
or at a wider scale?
Yes, if you understand
what good outreach is in the first place.
So I find that especially right now,
and the idea that I've been thinking
about more and more is that I think the
the single most valuable skill,
aside from writing itself,
the single most valuable skill
that someone can build over the over
the foreseeable future
is the self-discipline to keep practicing
and learning the skill itself,
rather than defaulting
to just having AI do it for them.
There's a reason why when I use AI,
I get ten x or 100 x
the output to someone else.
It's not because of AI, it's
because I have done the manual version
so many times that I can prompt it
more effectively, or
I understand if it gives me something,
what's good about it, what's bad about it.
Right.
And so there's this sort of irony
where it's like,
if AI is going to do more of the doing,
the doing of any task,
if AI is going to do more of the doing,
then that means your value
is going to be
in the discernment of the doing.
Did AI do a good job or a bad job?
And the irony about that is you only know
if AI did a good job or a bad job
if you have done it yourself.
And so there's this sort of like cyclical
irony about this new technology.
And I think
we're going to see this great separation
of all the people that start using
AI and stop using their brains.
You're going to experience a very short
term benefit and a very long term drop off
versus all the people that go, I'm
going to continue building the skill
the right way and practicing and using
my brain and doing the manual version.
And then I get ten x or 100 x output
by using AI on top of it.
So the skilled practitioners
that are actually out there
writing themselves,
sending, coding themselves,
designing themselves,
the skilled freelancers
that are actually practicing,
practicing, practicing,
they're going to be able to prompt the
AI better,
and then they're going to be able
to understand what AI gives them
back and say, this is good
or this isn't good versus the person.
That's just saying,
I don't have time to do
this, I'm just going to use AI,
but they're not skilled
at what they're doing.
The quality is not going to be Yeah.
A great example is like
I see writers in our different programs
do this all the time.
I have said what I just said to you
a thousand times,
like I repeat it endlessly and still
there are always people that hear that
and go, yeah, yeah, I'm good.
And then and then they try
to take the shortcut and they use AI
and it immediately gets revealed,
because then they'll show me
a piece of writing
that I know I can see AI wrote 100% of.
And again, the irony is that tweaking it
and taking something
100% AI and just fixing the last
10% is really not that hard.
Like, I look at the piece of writing
and I go, all you had to do was
replace this example, fix this formatting,
reword these three sentences,
and all of a sudden it actually resembles
a really great piece of writing.
The problem is,
you only see those opportunities
if you can write the thing
in the first place.
So for me,
because I've written 5000 articles
and newsletters and whatever,
I see those things immediately.
It's very easy for me to recognize
and I know exactly how to fix and tweak
it, and I can make
those tweaks in four minutes.
And then that is how you get the 1080,
ten of AI, right?
But if you haven't built that skill,
then all that happens
is you get the output
and then you think it's all great,
you don't know what to fix,
and then you're surprised
when someone comments on your post
and is like, that's AI slop.
It's like, well, yeah,
because you you gave up
the highest leverage component,
which was that last 10 or 20%.
guys, we've been so passionate
about finding the biggest geniuses,
and this is just one of the many episodes.
If you want to make sure you don't
miss the next one.
Make sure to subscribe.
All right, let's get back to the episode.
all right, take me back. 2007. You're 17.
You're one of the highest ranked World
of Warcraft players in North America.
You're running a blog
that gets 10,000 readers a day.
Give me a specific day from that era.
What did it look like? Oh, boy.
Well, just just to put it out
there, 10,000 readers in a day back
then was a lot 2007.
I mean, that was like pro
blogger territory, you know?
I mean, an average day was
I guess we should start the night before.
I was probably up until two in the morning
playing in World War craft.
There was this thing called arenas.
So you would play like two on 2
or 3 on three.
I played three on three.
Probably was up until two in the morning
on a school night.
My teammates were Australian,
so that was also the only time of day
because of the time zones in
between school and time zone differences.
And so that's when we would play together
from like 11 p.m.
to 2 a.m..
My parents didn't know about any of this.
I was supposed to be asleep.
This was against the rules.
You know,
I would get like five hours of sleep,
wake up, just force myself
through the school day.
I hated school, I was very bad at it.
Not my thing. Come home.
Let's see. 17.
Yeah. Maybe make a snack.
At some point in the year I was playing,
I was still playing hockey.
I played hockey through high school.
This would have been junior year,
so I had started playing again,
fractured my spine.
That year I had a stress fracture
in my spine, so I had to.
I only got to play half the season.
Fun fact about that.
Our team went on to the championship
and I was out,
I was injured, I kind of knew I was like,
this is probably my last year
playing hockey.
Like I'm never going to the NHL.
And I wanted to go see our team
play the championship and support them
and like, sit on the bench with them.
Right.
But I was so immersed
in playing World of Warcraft that
I thought the championship was on Sunday,
and it was actually on Saturday.
And so Sunday I woke up and I drove there
and I show up and I'm like, ready
to support my team, only to find out
that our team had won the day before,
and I was completely oblivious to it
because I had been playing Wow for like 15
straight hours on a Saturday.
So I, I missed our hockey teams
championship.
and then, yeah, I would probably just,
you know, dinner and pretend
to care about homework for two hours
and then go to bed and play. Wow.
Until two in the morning.
at 17 with 10,000 daily readers.
Did you already think of yourself
as a writer in a weird?
Actually, yeah, I did, I don't know why.
I don't know where it came from.
I am pretty sure in my yearbook
senior year, you had to say,
like you had to give a quote,
you know, or like, what do you want to do?
And I'm pretty sure my senior year quote
was something like, I want to be an author
or I want to write a book,
and I don't know where that came from.
I don't, I don't know why,
but my whole life I've always
just felt like it was the only thing
that I was ever really good at,
and the only thing I really wanted to do.
And blogging and growing up
on the internet, especially gaming,
just seemed like such a logical thing.
You know, it's like I have I have access
to all these people on the internet.
Why don't
I just write and share my thoughts
and then the internet
will distribute them for me.
And it's really funny to see
how our entire portfolio of businesses
now is really just the more mature version
of the thing I was doing when I was 17.
It's all the same things I was saying.
It's like,
you should build a personal brand,
you should build an audience,
you should build a community,
you should scale yourself on the internet,
you should build a library of content.
Like those are all the same things
I was saying as a teenager just now.
The professional version.
Your journalism
professor at Missouri Rest in Peace.
Told a lecture hall
of 500 students
that blogging would never be credible.
Yep, You were already sitting there
with your 10,000 daily readers.
What did you do with that information?
What did you think of that?
I never went back to class after that.
Yeah, that was my first.
That was my first journalism class
at University of Missouri.
And teacher
basically said internet is a fad.
Blogging is a trend.
Real journalism will never die.
Which, like the irony of that
in today's world is, you know, a lot.
And I just sat there and was like,
I wholeheartedly disagree.
I spend like my entire existence
as a teenager, was digital.
First my identity was on the internet.
My identity was not in the real world,
you know.
And so I just I had a hard time
believing that that new reality
that I had watched from, like,
I remember in fourth grade
when my dad helped me set up my first,
like, AOL email account, you know, like,
I literally grew up with the internet
and I just I couldn't
wrap my head around a world
where that didn't accelerate and continue.
So I walked out of that class,
never went back, transferred schools.
A year later, and here we are.
You committed to Quora?
One answer a day, every day for 365 days.
What was the exact rule
and did you ever miss a day?
mean, I'm sure I probably missed a day,
but I really tried not to.
And the rationale for that was at the time
I was really into bodybuilding.
So after gaming,
I'm a very obsessive person, so I always
have to have some sort of obsession.
That's what drives me.
After gaming,
I got really into weightlifting
because I was just really skinny, scrawny,
you know,
all the things when you're a teenage boy,
you're like, I want girls to like me.
So I got really into bodybuilding,
and by that point it was like 2013.
Yeah, 2013, 2014.
And I had completely changed.
I went from like as a senior
in high school, I think I weighed like 100
pounds, maybe just skin bones,
like just, you know, I had celiac disease.
I didn't know I was allergic to to gluten.
So I was always sick.
And I had put on like 70,
80 pounds of muscle.
I was like a completely different human.
And I had again, you know, with gaming
I had witnessed, if you put more hours in,
you get better gear, you get glowy
shoulders, you get a cool staff.
Right?
Bodybuilding was the same thing
just in the real world.
It's like, okay, the more consistent
you are, the bigger
your arms get, the bigger
your legs get, you know?
And so I think getting to experience
that a second time through bodybuilding
really gave me the pattern recognition
to realize you can replicate this
in any other area of your life.
You want, like I understood
the fundamentals of quote unquote mastery.
How do you get really good at something?
And I graduated from college with a degree
in fiction writing I really wanted.
I knew deep down
I wanted my career to be around writing,
and I saw Quora
as just a mechanism to practice.
I didn't really know
where it was going to lead.
You know, it's not like someone said, hey,
if you do this, success is guaranteed.
I just saw it as a mechanism to practice.
And how do you practice something?
Well, you set a daily habit
and then you build
your life around that habit,
and you don't let anything
get in the way of that habit.
And that had served me well with gaming,
and it served me well with bodybuilding.
And so I figured
it would probably serve me
well with writing on Quora
and writing on the internet.
And sure enough, like, it worked.
And a year later,
I was the most read writer
on the entire platform
inquiry is still around, right?
It's still around.
It was rank as high in Google as it is.
It no, it was much
it was much higher from 25th.
Yeah, like 2013 to 2019.
Quora was amazing and they had such.
I'm really bummed that they went
the direction that they did, like no shade
or anything, but they during those years,
they really prioritized
building like a writers community.
They did these really cool writers
meetups in New York.
I went and got to meet lots of the other
big writers on Quora.
That was very motivating to me
at the time.
They did this cool thing.
Obviously they don't do it anymore,
but they would do anthologies each year
where they would actually create
a print book
of the best core answers
on different topics for a year.
And I will never forget,
I think it was 2015.
I will never forget them
sending me a physical anthology
with one of my viral core answers in it.
I felt like I had made it like to me,
I was as big as, you know, Stephen King
or John Grisham in that moment, like I
it was the coolest thing ever.
And and then, you know,
the company went in a different direction.
And I think AI started
and they wanted to do more
with LLM training and it just
it was never the same after that.
But there was a golden period on Quora
that was really special.
okay, let's talk about Reddit,
because if I'm not
mistaken, in a few months, an answer lands
on the front page of Reddit.
You're going viral.
What did that feel like?
What time of day did you find out?
What kind of changed your mindset
after you found out?
Like I hit?
that was my introduction to a couple
big ideas.
Forget going viral like it wasn't
so much going viral that changed anything.
It was what it taught me.
And that's an important
nuance to understand.
I think people think going
viral is the answer.
Like, oh, if only I write or create
something that gets a million views then
and then, you know,
then all these good things happen.
That's not how virality works.
I've gone viral so many times,
it's like, cool for two days
and then it fizzles out.
The more important thing for me
was what I learned from it,
which was a couple things.
One, I it was the first time
that I had really considered
incorporating media into my writing.
So the Quora answer that I wrote was the
answer to a question of something like,
is it possible to change yourself so much
that you no longer recognize yourself?
That was the question on Quora,
and I knew at this point
that the key to Quora was not just
answering the question, but answering
the question in the creative way,
or like by telling a story.
So to answer that question, I put a before
and after photo of myself at the top.
Before it was me and high school,
really scrawny, concave chest,
you know, the whole thing.
And then on the right
was that present day, after I had gotten
into bodybuilding for five years
and I was just shredded and, you know,
8% body fat and 80 pounds
heavier than the picture on the left.
And that before and after,
it's like it almost didn't even matter
what I wrote underneath it
that before and after, as media was.
So I grabbing because those two people
didn't look like the same person.
And then I just told a short story about
that transformation and what it felt like.
And I remember
I wrote it at work and I hit publish,
got on the train, commuted, you know, 45
minutes back to the north side of Chicago.
And by the time I walked in,
my roommate at the time was like,
dude, do you know you're on the front page
or read it right now?
Happened all within like an hour.
And that answer went super viral, spawned
a whole like comment thread of people
being like, he's on steroids.
For the record, I never took steroids.
Not that I have a problem with it,
but never did.
And my biggest takeaway from that was
I realized a couple things.
One, how many people resonated
with my story in bodybuilding?
You have these different body
types, right?
Like you have ecto morphs, you have endo
morphs, you have meso morphs.
I was a just pure ecto morph.
Like, I could eat 10,000 calories in a day
and my body would just burn it all off.
And so I ended up realizing
that I had a unique ability to maybe
speak to that specific type of person,
because
I understood the challenges of like,
how do you put on muscle, etc..
And I realized, okay,
I'm getting all of these emails from this.
A lot of people emailed me,
a lot of people commented on it,
and they all asked the same two questions
what do you lift and what do you eat?
And almost all of them
shared some sort of story of,
I look
like that version of you on the left,
and I want to look like the version of you
on the right, you know?
And so that weekend I stayed up late.
I worked all weekend.
I built my first website,
which is the same website I have today,
Nicholas Goal.com.
I built my first two digital products.
One was here are my workout routines.
The other was here's what I eat.
I was just servicing the demand.
You know, I put them up for sale.
I put the link at the bottom of the
the Quora answer that was still going
viral.
And on Monday morning
I will never forget sitting in.
I was working at an advertising agency
at the time,
and I was sitting at our Monday
morning meeting, and my phone
is just buzzing over and over and over
again was stripe notifications.
And that was my introduction to oh,
there's you don't just have to
work a salary like you can solve
people's problems digitally.
And more importantly,
if you answer their questions,
that was like my biggest learning
is if you answer their questions,
which is the entire point of nonfiction
writing,
you can monetize your answer
to their question.
And that is how I created
my first digital product.
It's how I made my first five grand.
It introduced me to the whole world
of building funnels and sending emails
and making money on the internet,
and the rest is history.
Like that was
that was my gateway drug right there.
That's amazing.
So what that comes down to
is they're going to have questions.
How can I answer them?
But when you said the media,
that was the photos that you included,
meaning if you wrote that same answer
but you didn't include photos,
wouldn't have done anything.
So it's not only so
I mean, in that specific case,
it was showing the transformation
so they can see it visually and then
obviously narrating a story around that.
But the story wasn't really as important
as having the pictures there.
Yeah, I think they both like play off
of each other obviously.
But the media component
this actually isn't something
I've talked about very often,
but the media component of that
is really what inspired me to start
taking personal branding more seriously.
We could spend four hours
talking about personal branding.
I think it's one of the most misunderstood
topics in marketing.
Like, I think people think
personal branding is about getting famous,
or personal branding is about
just attention for attention sake.
But and it's not.
But but the introduction of media
was really me starting to realize that
to be a writer in the digital age,
you don't just have to write.
And I think by expanding my world
view of that and realizing a writer
in the digital age can also incorporate
photos, they can also incorporate video.
These different types of media
actually end up being big differentiators
in a space where most, most writers
are very introverted.
I am an introvert,
but I am a trained extrovert.
But I have trained that part of me
because I see how it can be
a differentiator and a competitive
advantage in the world of writing.
Most writers don't want to start a YouTube
channel or talk about what they know,
or share their frameworks on camera,
or share pictures of themselves, right?
Which raised the question for me.
Okay, so what if I do?
How much more do I stand out?
How much more attention am I able to get?
And not just attention for attention sake,
but attention to my ideas,
my books, my frameworks, etc.?
It's interesting
when you talk about personal branding.
So I recently had on Caleb Ralston,
who worked with Gary
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Alex Hermosa,
and he has a kind of a framework
for building a personal brand.
And obviously in today's age, it's
so much harder to stand out.
I mean, it's about video and photos.
You know, there's so many more people
that want to be influencers
or want to go viral
or want to build a personal brand even.
Is there some quick thoughts you have
or a framework potentially
you have on building a personal brand?
branding
as a topic is obviously one of those.
If you ask ten different people,
you will get ten different answers.
So there are multiple right answers.
I'll share my thinking
on it, which is branding
done correctly
sits in the context of your category.
So just because you have ten cameras,
all super expensive,
capturing high grade video footage, right?
Just because someone has that doesn't
mean that they're going to build a brand
that compounds.
I think people often think
like elevated personal brand comes
with elevated production quality.
Production quality is irrelevant.
The thing that matters is not
are you becoming known?
What matters is are you becoming known
for a niche you own?
Are you becoming associated with a topic?
And that topic can be a large topic,
or it can be a hyper specific topic.
So for example,
my entire personal brand is
built around two words digital writing.
I don't want to talk about writing
in the legacy world from 100 years ago.
That's not what I'm about.
If that's what you're about
and you want to hear the amazing stories
of how Ernest Hemingway
would sit at a cafe and be really inspired
in Paris, I'm not your guy, you know?
But if you want to know how to write
in a world where everyone is hyper
distracted, and how do you get someone
to give you their attention
in an environment that is feeding
you 20 other things at the same time?
I am your guy,
and so part of the most important
component of personal
branding is understanding
what is the topic
that you want to be associated with.
And the more you associate
with that topic,
the more compounding happens,
because every time a new person
gets interested in that topic
or that corner of the internet,
they will inevitably come across you.
One of my favorite examples,
and I use it over and over and over again
in our writing programs, is
are you familiar with Ryan Holiday?
Yes. Okay. What's Ryan Holidays category?
There you go.
He's known for one word stoicism.
Why do you know that?
You know that
because he has a podcast about stoicism.
He tweets about stoicism.
He writes articles about stoicism.
He has a newsletter about stoicism.
He writes a book about stoicism.
What's his next book about?
It's about stoicism.
The reason Ryan Holiday is Ryan
Holiday is because
of the association
he's created within that topic.
But if if Ryan Holiday just posted
like motivational quotes
and showed you what he ate for breakfast
every morning, Ryan Holiday would not have
the same level of quote unquote personal
brand or fame even that he has today,
because his his personal brand sits
in the context of that topic,
just like my personal brand sits
in the context of that topic.
That makes sense.
So from Reddit,
you went from a viral answer
and now you're getting republication
in time.
Forbes,
fortune, Business Insider, Inc magazine.
Right. All in a single year.
What is the specific 10% increment
that changes?
Maybe a bad opener to a great one.
Getting to the point, the whole key
to writing in the digital world is saying
what you're trying to say as quickly
as possible without losing the reader.
So a lot of times with long form writing,
and I remember,
like I studied fiction in college
and we would write short stories
or we would write excerpts from novels,
and then we would read them
allowed in class.
And one of the things that I learned
from that is,
you know, you would
you would be so excited about this thing
you wrote, you're like,
oh, I spent 15 hours working on it.
I'm so proud of it.
And then you read it out loud in class
and you think the first page
is really important,
or you think the second page
is really important,
and it's not until the third page
that everyone in the class
goes, that's where the story starts.
of course, the takeaway from that is,
now I have to go
delete the first two and a half pages.
But I don't want to do that because I love
my writing, you know, or every writer.
That's what they say. I don't want to
I don't want to remove that.
But that would make for a better story.
That would make for better writing.
doesn't matter
if it's fiction or nonfiction.
The the best openers are ones
that grab your attention immediately
and just say what they're trying to say,
like a mechanism I love
and I think about often documentaries
do this all the time.
You ever see a trailer for a
for a documentary like there was one
I watched a couple of years ago?
I think it was called see?
It was,
you know, all about fish
and the things that happen
in, in, in big fishing industries
and the trailer.
And it also happened in the documentary.
But the trailer of that dock
was just hook after hook after hook
after hook after hook.
It's like, did you know?
And I'm just going to make up
random states.
Like, did you know that 27% of dolphins,
when you lower a net into the ocean, die,
you know?
Did you know that? Like, what is that?
That is a hook.
That's a stat hook.
There's a reason why like health
and wellness markets with things like, did
you know that if you have these symptoms
then that might mean, right.
What is that. That's a hook.
And so the more that you can say
what you're trying to say
as quickly as possible
and use some sort of hook,
a hook could be agitating a problem.
It could be listing an unknown
or weird stat.
It could be saying a very strong opinion
or controversial opinion.
These are all like pattern interrupts.
And so you want the first sentence
of whatever thing
you're saying
to be some sort of pattern interrupt.
This is also true for talk
about video scripts.
Like every almost every viral video
now is scripted, right?
Unless it's like a podcast
and you're just clipping it out
like this, people use teleprompters, etc.
a lot of people
now are hip to the game of okay.
The first thing I say
has to be a pattern interrupt.
And that pattern interrupt is almost
always just one of a handful of things
a stat, a question,
a controversial opinion, etc.
so the hook is
one of the most important
parts of writing,
because if you can't capture
their attention and when I say writing,
this is video too short form content.
If if you're creating short form
video content or you're writing
The first thing you're saying,
or first thing you're writing
is either going to make it
or break it for them to either read that
post or watch that video or Yeah, totally.
And there's and there's frameworks.
You're saying that you can take
hook frameworks that you can take,
whether it's your writing on X,
you're writing on LinkedIn,
you're developing a short form script.
And a big part of that is pattern
interruption, aka
grabbing their attention right away
and getting right to the point of what
you know, so they can assume, you know,
they're going to get some value
or whatever from that. Yeah.
I mean, if you don't get their attention,
it doesn't matter how amazing
the rest of the writing is, right?
They're never going to read it.
This is true
for every medium. Books are the same way.
Like there's a reason
why nonfiction books.
All start with this origin story of
I was just like you,
and I had all the problems that you have.
And then one day I came across
something different.
And look at once
I did that different thing.
All these amazing things
started happening in my life.
It worked for me.
I'm going to show you
how it can work for you.
That is literally the intro
to every single nonfiction book, right?
But the reason that
all the nonfiction books start
that way is because they need you,
the reader, to get bought in
to read the other 250 pages.
And so the same logic applies
whether we're talking about a 250 page
book or we're talking
about a 250 character tweet.
Right.
I need I need you to understand why
this is worth your attention
right away at the beginning.
Otherwise the rest of it
could be the greatest thing ever written.
But you're never going to get there.
What are the top?
I don't know, three or top
five hook frameworks that you go to
when you're trying to grab attention?
I mean, it's the ones I just listed out
stats or like really weird
stats or studies or like little known
facts are really good hooks.
So are rhetorical questions like,
do you ever wonder why XYZ?
Like a rhetorical question
is a great hook, or like the advanced
version of that is phrasing it
as a question that is an objection
or something that the target reader
is actively asking themselves.
It's like, how am I supposed to?
How am I supposed to pay off
$20,000 of student loans?
Right?
So the opening hook or question would be,
are you sitting there
wondering how you're supposed to pay off
your $20,000 of student loans?
Right?
When you say that question,
what you're really doing
is you're mirroring this very unconscious
or sometimes conscious voice
that the target reader has in their head.
And when they see that, all of a sudden
they see themselves in the writing
and they go, this is for me, right?
Another one is
just a controversial opinion, and I don't
it doesn't have to be controversial
for the sake of controversy.
Like, I'm not saying, oh, you have to be
political or something like that.
A good example is a lot of
conventional wisdom, and writing online is
you should start a blog that's like what
everyone has said for the past 20 years.
So you want to write online? Well,
you need a blog.
And something I say over and over
and over again for a very specific reason
is if you want to start writing online,
you should not start a blog
that is controversial in the context
of the topic that I write about.
So controversial openers
are just you taking whatever
is conventional wisdom in your industry
and you saying the opposite.
has this always been the way or have?
Were there rules that you were following
when it comes to hooks or writing?
Five, ten, 15 years ago
that are different now?
Know a lot of these things
don't actually change.
Like longer that I, I play this game
and the more advanced businesses
that I build,
and the more my skill develops,
the more I find myself going back to study
really old material.
Like I nerd out reading old sales letters
written by Gary
Halbert, for example,
I've got two huge binders at home
in my house of all his old newsletters,
and I think they're so amazingly written.
And even though they write about,
mechanisms that were more current
than like,
he wrote a lot about direct mail,
for example,
the underlying principles
are the exact same.
How do you get people's attention?
What do they care about?
What are their problems?
What are their hopes, dreams, ambitions?
Desired outcomes?
Like all of those fundamentals
don't ever really change,
but the mechanisms do change.
And the way I like thinking of writing
in the digital world is that each
platform
is almost like its own sub language.
Like writing on X is different
than writing on LinkedIn,
which is different than writing on medium,
which is different than writing a book,
which is different than a Substack
newsletter.
Right?
And so even though they all share
the fundamental principles,
the way you tailor those principles
on each platform is different.
And let's talk about that.
Let's talk about maybe X versus LinkedIn,
for example. Right.
Because you know I write on X,
I write on LinkedIn.
can I use the same hook on both platforms?
Or do I have to tailor a hook
specifically to a platform in some way?
Yeah, the the psychology of the hook
itself will be universal.
Like a question opener works on X,
just like it works on LinkedIn,
just like it works in a TikTok.
Just like an Instagram reel, right?
What's different is, for example,
different platforms
have different word
count constraints or LinkedIn.
If you ever notice,
if you're scrolling LinkedIn on your phone
or just like on your laptop in the feed,
right? It doesn't show you the full post.
It shows you
the compressed opener of the post.
And then if the opener hooks
your attention and you click
See More,
then it shows you the post right?
Which is different than X,
which shows you the whole tweet.
And so that word count difference
and that presentation difference,
even though the underlying psychology
is the same, the hook is the same.
You have to tailor what you're saying
to the constraint of the platform.
What's more important on social media
followers or views?
Neither.
I am on a mission to help as many people
in the world understand that the value
of writing in the digital world
has nothing to do with the metrics.
If the metrics go up, that's great.
You get followers, great,
you get views great,
you get conversions
over to your website. Great.
Like obviously you want all those things,
but that is not the primary measure
for success.
The primary measure for success is
are you building
a library of content in a niche?
Period. Full stop. End of story.
The compounding value
of what you do is in building a library.
How many views your library
or a single piece gets is irrelevant.
How many followers it gets
you is irrelevant, because the library
is going to outlast any performance
of any individual
post for a single day,
or a week or a month even.
And second is when you take the time
to build a library,
the value of that library compounds
in so many other ways,
like every single thing
we're talking about here.
I have written about a thousand times.
The only reason I can speak about it
and articulate it is
because I've written it a thousand times.
So the value of my library was not just
I got views or I got followers.
The value of my library is it crystallized
my thinking such that I can show up.
We can do this podcast, I can do no prep,
and you can ask me any question you want
and I can spit off, you know, an answer
that I've written about a thousand times.
And that's just one way
that's like the media leverage of it.
What about all the times that I monetize
it inside of our writing programs?
What about all the other times
I say it again in books that I write?
What about all the other times
I monetize it with consulting.
So the
the value is not about the social metric.
The value is
am I building a compounding library
in a niche
personal
branding association with a topic?
And is that library
crystallizing my thinking
so that I can leverage my thinking in
lots of other ways?
let's go back.
Inc magazine offers you a daily column
at a penny per page view.
That was yeah, that was a lot back then.
And you say yes.
What were the specific numbers that
convinced you that that it was enough?
honestly, the only number
I needed to feel like it was enough
was that it was more than zero.
Like, quite literally,
I was working at an advertising agency.
I was not making very much money.
I didn't really see a path to how
I was going to make a lot more money
at this advertising agency, or even
just like in that career in general.
I'm sure if I stuck with it,
maybe I'd work my way up,
be a creative director one day, right?
But I didn't see that path,
and I knew that
whatever path was presented to me
wasn't actually the thing I wanted to do.
I wanted to write.
I didn't want to like,
just, you know, work on ad campaigns
and stuff like I wanted to write.
And so when Inc.
offered me that,
the way that their model worked.
This isn't how it is anymore.
But I'll give a little history lesson.
So in 2016, all the major publications
had what were called columnist networks.
And so Forbes had this, Inc.
had this, Business Insider had this, etc.
if you got to be
part of the columnist network,
you usually had to hit
some sort of minimum.
So you had to write, say
like INX was I think 4 or 6 columns
a month was the minimum.
And if you hit the minimum,
they would pay you a penny per page view.
And the page views were not something
that you really had a lot of control over.
Basically
ink or this is true for any publication.
They would have their social channels
like Facebook was a huge social channel
at the time, and every time
a new column would come out,
mine included, they would post it
onto their social channel.
So Facebook, Twitter, wherever
and depending on how good your headline
was, dictated how many people saw it and
clicked through and went to the website.
And a lot of people think
that these major publications,
you're getting like millions of views
on your column.
That's not what's happening.
The site as a whole gets
millions of views.
Each individual piece
gets less than a thousand views.
So when they gave me that model, my first
question was, okay, this is the minimum.
What's the maximum?
Like if I if I write a column every day,
will you accept that?
And they thought I was nuts,
but they were like,
yeah,
I mean more volume the better, right?
Because they're only paying me
on performance.
And so I took
I was already doing that on Quora.
I was like, great.
Now this is just the same thing, but
there's there's a lottery attached to it.
And so I started writing a column
every single day for ink,
and I became one of their top
ten most viewed columnists.
And I had a bunch of pieces go viral.
Fun. Random fact one of my best friends.
I also got him to be part
of the Columnist Network,
and he called me one night and
he was like, I'm working on this article
because I was starting to make like $2,000
or some a month from this,
and I thought that was a ton of money
at the time.
And I was like, this side
hustles crushing right now.
So I got my friend to be part of it.
And he was like,
I want to earn some extra money too.
So he calls me one night
and he goes, I'm working on this piece,
I need help with the title.
And I was and this is, this was like peak.
All of these frameworks
were starting to click for me.
Like I was learning
how to write things that I knew
people would want to read and click on.
And I had a great idea
and I gave him a title and he goes,
that's, that's an amazing title.
Perfect. I'll post it.
It ends up being he posted the next day
and that article with my title,
talk about work.
You don't get credit for That
article ended up being,
I think, either
the number one or like top five,
most viewed,
most shared ink articles of all time.
And because he was getting paid
a penny per page view, they paid him out
something like 15 grand
for the performance of that article.
And that money and that article
is how he bought the proposal
ring for his now wife.
Do you remember the what the title was?
Honestly, I wish I did, I honestly don't.
It was some something about brutal truths
and living life, you know.
was that title framework similar
to what we call hook framework now?
Yeah. Yeah, same same thing.
You're just trying to find ways
to, to communicate those,
those hooks in the title
opposed to the first sentence, opposed to,
you know, anywhere else in the piece.
How long did that ink relationship last?
Did it get to the point
where you're earning
a percentage of what you're earning
at your regular job?
You're like,
I don't even need this job anymore.
Yeah, I wrote for them for like
maybe two and a half close to three years.
ended up getting to a point where it was
about 50% of my full time income.
And once that happened,
that was really what began my thinking of.
I think I can quit my job and start
really going all in on monetizing
my skills as a writer,
because it covering 50% of my income,
and I was doing it
an hour or two at night.
You know,
like all I had to do was just ask, okay,
if I had eight more hours in the day,
could I cover the other half of my income?
And six months later, I quit my job,
and then I fell into the world
of ghostwriting.
And then, you know, rest is history.
Let's go back to the the book. Right.
The fitness book.
That was what you were
monetizing off of core. Right.
And if I'm not
you made at least $5,000 from it.
Yeah. What you saw the first sale?
You mentioned it was your
your phone was beeping
Bing, bing, the stripe notifications
when you looked
at those stripe notifications
walk me through how you felt.
I felt like had just discovered
a part of the video game
that is life
that no one had told me about. I.
It was the moment where I realized
that I had more control
over my earning potential than I realized.
I think this is probably a theme
you're going to cover on your podcast
a lot, too, and it's cool
to see how much content nowadays is
being created and shared to to introduce
people to this way of thinking.
But I mean, just like my parents,
I grew up thinking the way
that you provide for yourself in life
as you go to college and you get a job
and then that's that's it, right?
And selling that digital product made
me realize that there were other options.
And my biggest takeaway
wasn't so much like, oh,
this is going to be
the most successful thing ever.
It was more
there is another option and you don't
really know where it's going to go yet,
but you should explore it.
And so between those ebooks
and then having this column for ink
like that, I started to piece together
these different income sources
and realize, okay, if I'm willing to be
a little entrepreneurial
and take on a little bit of risk,
like ink was volatile.
You know, one month I would have a bunch
of viral hits, the next month I wouldn't.
So my income fluctuated.
So if I was willing to tolerate
some of the risk that came
along with it, risk gives
you more optionality.
Was there a point where this felt like,
okay, maybe that one was luck
or did you end up feeling like,
look, this is something I can repeat.
felt like something I could repeat
because I very clearly saw and understood
what are the inputs and outputs?
I write stuff,
it answers people's questions.
It gets, it gets viewed, it gets consumed.
And then people want more.
They want more answers
to that same question.
They want more examples.
They want more routines to follow.
They want more instruction.
They want more steps.
And that's all products are.
Products are just answering
the question in more detail.
The book was about your body
transformation.
Did selling something that personal make
you feel exposed or you just didn't care?
No. At that point I'd been bodybuilding
and lifting for like 5 or 6 years.
I had my community in Chicago,
you know, I was used
to taking pictures with my shirt off
like I was.
Yeah, it wasn't anything new.
And I had been writing on the internet
for so long, like, I think
one of the one of the greatest gifts
the internet ever gave me
was exposing me to, like,
gaming culture and hate at as a teenager.
You know,
I was a 17 year old writing blogs
that people would comment on being like,
you should go upstairs and kill yourself,
you know?
And I'm like, even as a teenager,
I was like, it's the internet.
Like it's a screen, you know?
And I get why that affects people a lot.
But I think I was introduced to it
at such a young age
in such a competitive environment where,
like, I didn't even really think about it.
It was just par for the course.
So then fast forward 5 or 10 years,
someone commenting
on LinkedIn being like,
I disagree with your opinion on writing.
I'm like,
I don't what, I don't care.
Okay, let's
go to your first ghostwriting client.
If I'm not mistaken,
it wasn't a startup founder.
It was a 60 year old entrepreneur
who just sold his family business
for over $1 billion.
I think he found you on Quora.
And he sent you a Yep.
What did the message actually say?
Yeah, it was something like
he had been running this really,
like, boring family business for 20 years.
They just had a huge exit.
And he was writing a book
about his lessons as an entrepreneur.
And he, you know,
he had made more money than he needed,
and he wanted to give back.
He wanted to share all the things he had
learned, and he wanted to market the book.
And he had seen my writing on Quora, and
he basically said, hey, I'm looking for.
And the term he used, I think was editor.
He was like, I'm looking for an editor
to help me take my book
and turn it into articles on the internet,
which was very similar
to what I was doing at the time.
I was just writing articles on Quora,
and I got on the phone with him
and I told him, like, yeah,
you can do the same thing that I'm doing.
We could cross post from Quora
over to medium, like I had my whole little
strategy at the time,
and he was actually the one on
that call that said to me, oh,
so you're not really like an editor,
you're more like a ghost writer.
And that was the first time
I had ever heard that term.
I had never heard the term ghostwriter
before.
And basically what what we were going to
do was take his book.
And because he had a book deal,
they didn't want him
sharing chapters from the book.
So I would have to take the ideas
from the book and rewrite
them as, like, new articles on Quora.
And he was the one who introduced me
to the idea of being a ghostwriter
and doing that.
We ended up working together
for three years.
He was great.
He ended up being a great mentor
figure for me.
I used to ask him business questions
all the time, especially as I got further
into ghostwriting, and then I ended up
building a ghost writing agency.
And yeah, he was
he was an amazing first client.
And talk about using yourself
as a case study, right?
Like he found me on Quora and just said,
I like what you're doing for you.
Can you do what you're doing for you?
For me?
Do you remember what you charged him?
Oh, man, it was something horrific.
It was something like horrific.
Meaning not enough. Yeah.
Not nowhere near enough.
I want to say it was 12 articles
a month for $1,200.
So $100 per article.
And for context,
for anyone who thinks like, that's a lot.
It wasn't that was a lot of volume.
And second is, as the years went on
and as I ended up
scaling my ghostwriting agency,
we ended up bringing
the number of articles that we would
provide a client down and the price up.
And so we got to the point
where we would charge
five grand a month to write two articles.
So I was starting
I was starting pretty low.
Give me the specific moment
where you understood that
writing for someone else may be the path,
or maybe more lucrative
than even writing for yourself.
So I'm going to I'm going to give you
a super honest answer here, which is,
I don't think that I chose
to get into ghostwriting
because I thought that it was more
lucrative than writing for myself.
I think I got into ghostwriting
because it was
more stable at a
time when I needed stability.
When you write for yourself,
you you have a different level of risk.
Ghostwriting for other people
is pretty simple.
Like you provide a service.
The value of that service
is whatever the other person values
your service, right?
Writing for yourself
is you have a different level of risk in
that you have to be sharing really unique
and compelling ideas,
and then you have to figure out
how to monetize those ideas and monetizing
with, we'll say, the two paths.
You have services and you have products,
digital products, etc.
I think if I had known more back then,
if I knew back
then what I knew today,
I might have doubled down on
what was working with my fitness ebooks
and just been like, oh,
those fitness ebooks are working.
Why don't I build a digital fitness
coaching product or a coaching program?
Right?
But I lacked those skills back
then. I didn't.
I didn't have that.
Ghostwriting as a service
felt like stability
after I quit my job, and all of a sudden
I'm like, I got to be responsible
for my own rent and,
you know, put food on the table.
And providing
a service will always make you more money
faster than selling products.
Because products require attention,
they require an audience.
They require IP.
Like you have to actually have something
unique and valuable in the product.
A service is just,
this other person needs this thing
and they'll pay me to help them with it,
you know?
And so I think that decision was sort
of made out of necessity.
And then as I got into it,
I enjoyed it a lot.
And I got to meet
really interesting people.
I got to talk
to really interesting people.
I thought it was the craziest thing ever,
that I could get on the phone
with someone who,
in any other context would be like,
you want to ask me a question?
It's going to cost
you tens of thousands of dollars, right?
In any other context
and in the context of ghostwriting,
I got to get on the call with them.
I got to ask them any question
I wanted, and then they paid me.
It blew my mind.
And so I think it was one of those like,
I didn't know what I didn't know,
I got started, I enjoyed it, and then it
just kind of kept going from there.
Let's talk about your clients
because you have some amazing clients.
If I'm not mistaken, your clients
include Grammy Award winning musicians,
Olympic
athletes, unicorn startup founders.
Not one of them has ever
publicly credited you.
If a journalist exposed it tomorrow
and published a story naming you
as the writer behind their content,
what happens to your business
To be honest, I don't know that
it makes much of a difference, truthfully.
Like,
I don't put that much emphasis on case
studies and testimonials
because I think that the thing,
the only
thing that any person cares about is not
who else
did you do this for its
will this work for me?
So I can tell you,
you know, I've ghostwritten for all these
amazing people, but but like ultimately,
at the end of the day,
your decision is going to come down to,
okay, that's great that you did that
for all these other people,
but will you be able to do it
in a way that helps me?
And that's that was also
my whole philosophy with sales is like,
I don't need to overwhelm you with case
studies and testimonials.
I just need to articulate
the exact problem you have or the exact
desired outcome that you want,
and explain to you how to accomplish it.
me push back there.
Let's say there is.
Let's you've worked with a unicorn startup
founder, and there's another
unicorn startup founder in a similar
in fintech in a similar space
that wants a similar type of service,
the one that you've already provided.
Don't
you think having that video testimonial
or having something, or maybe just a warm
introduction to that person,
is going to lead you to have
a higher probability of selling client
B that comes along
that looks exactly like that.
That's where you're solving
the same problem. Maybe.
But I will tell you, I have had a version
of this happen hundreds of times.
And it really doesn't matter if they see
that it worked for someone else.
They have their own objections,
they have their own questions,
they have their own nuances.
So all the time, like I would have,
we had a couple of clients
that were multi-billion dollar
B2B companies, like some of the biggest
companies in the world,
and I would have one of them as a client,
the CMO, whoever.
And then I would be talking to
like a competitor,
you know, and I would get on the phone
with a competitor
and be trying to sell them the service,
you know, whatever.
And they would say,
do you work with anyone else like us?
And I would say, yeah, I work
with another company, like just like you.
And they're like, can you tell us who?
It's like, no.
By the nature of our work,
I'm not at liberty to share that,
but I'm happy to answer any questions
you have.
And then they just proceed
to ask questions and they're just like,
okay, well, how do you navigate this?
How do you make this work?
Well, what would you do in this situation?
And if I can articulate to them
exactly what their
what their problem is or what
their desired outcome is, it's
the same thing as having a testimonial,
you know, would it be easy or.
Sure.
But I think what I don't want to get lost
in translation is people thinking
I've trained
like tens of thousands of writers
at this point, and I observe the same
thought patterns over and over again.
And oftentimes when I when I open the door
to it, people are very quick to go, oh,
so what you're saying is my life is easier
with testimonials and case studies.
And that's
I don't want people to interpret.
What I'm saying is that
you think your life will be easier.
It might be easier, like 2% marginally.
Your life will be 100 times easier
if you just build the skill
of articulating someone's problem,
because then they trust you,
then they believe
you're the best person to solve it.
Tell me about digital press.
What is a typical Tuesday look like?
Oh a nightmare.
Oh my gosh. First business.
You know I made every mistake in the book.
it was a great business in the sense
that it taught me a ton.
it is painful to look back on
because I can see, like,
first of all,
I would have been a multi-millionaire
in my late 20s
if I knew a fraction of what I know today.
We burned so much money in that business.
We made so many of the wrong decisions.
We scaled way too quickly.
We scaled from me
and one of my best friends,
who was my co-founder at the time.
We started it in his apartment,
and we scaled to 23 full time
employees
and like 100 clients in 18 months.
And that entire way up,
we paid ourselves modest salaries,
but we didn't take any cash
out of the business.
Every month when we would profit,
we would proactively hire
the next two people, the next two people.
So we were always like,
rolling forward our profit
into the growth of the next month
because we thought, oh, business is easy.
It just goes up forever, you know?
And then in 2018,
like a third of our clients
were all crypto companies.
They were all.
Either blockchain startups
or they were raising money for ICOs.
I don't know if you remember
that whole wave. Initial coin Exactly.
Yeah, the ICO wave, we got so many of them
as clients because they all were trying
to explain really complicated technology
to the average person.
So they all wanted
thought leadership articles.
So like a third of our business
at the time was all blockchain
and crypto companies.
And then 2018 crash happened.
We lost a third of the business
like in a month.
Had to lay off a bunch of people.
It sucked.
But yeah, I mean the average day
it was I'm on sales call for one hour.
And then between that call and my next
call, I'm ghostwriting a piece for the
for a client.
And then after that
I'm interviewing a new employee,
and then I'm ghostwriting another piece,
and then I'm on another sales call.
I was working ten, 12 hours
a day, seven days a week for three years,
you know, then,
if I'm not mistaken, at one point
you shrunk it back down to two people.
Yeah.
Right before the pandemic, it was like
three months before the pandemic.
which was really lucky in hindsight.
made you shrink it back
down to two people?
I was just tired, you know,
and the business wasn't
giving me what I wanted it to.
Like, if you're going to,
if you're going to take on the risk
to to scale a business beyond yourself,
the business needs to reward
you proportionately to that risk.
And I had effectively scaled myself
into an agency
to make less money than I would have made
just ghostwriting on my own.
And what happened was this was like
maybe early summer of 2019.
Me and my then girlfriend, now wife,
she had just gotten laid off from her job.
She worked for a big nonprofit,
and they did a huge layoff
in New York,
and we thought we were moving to New York.
We thought it was a whole thing.
We were living in LA at the time.
She was like, I'm going to get promoted.
I'm like, cool, you know, I'm
going to move to New York with you.
It was a whole thing.
And then they did this huge layoff.
She's like,
we're not moving and moving to New York.
I'm coming back to LA.
And she wanted to take her severance
and travel.
She's she's a big traveler.
I did not want to travel.
I was like stressed out beyond belief
and just wanted to sit in my home
office and work nonstop.
And she was like,
no, you need to take a break.
So we're going to go to Mexico.
So we worked remotely from Mexico
for a month.
We like bounced around.
And the last week of the trip we went to
this place in Mexico called Bachelor.
Are you familiar? Yes.
It's like this really beautiful lagoon,
like super blue water.
People come from all over the world to go
check it out.
Very remote.
We had to drive, like two hours,
sort of in the middle of nowhere.
And we stayed in this tiny little cabin,
if you can even call it that.
Right on the water.
No air conditioning, lots of bugs.
It was the whole experience.
And the next morning
we went out to the water
and I don't know how to describe it.
This is going to sound so woo woo,
but I don't know how to describe it
other than both my wife and I had very out
of body experiences, and
my experience was and completely sober.
By the way, this was just the water
and my experience was all of a sudden
I started reflecting
on the past few years, and I realized that
I had built a life that didn't serve me.
I thought it was going to bring me
somewhere, and it hadn't.
And I had this mentor in Chicago
who used to say, coal building a business
can either be a prison or a castle.
It's the same business.
Just depends on if you build it
and it makes your life better
or it makes your life worse.
And I realized that I had worked
really, really
hard to accidentally build myself
a prison.
And I came back from that trip.
And I remember I met with my co-founder
and our head of HR,
and we were looking at the books
for that past month,
and it was another one of those months
where it's like
you had clients churn and people
didn't pay on time, and payroll was up.
And just like all the stuff you run into
and all the profit
we had worked so hard to stack
for like three months
before that just all just wiped out again
that that month.
And I was like, I'm done.
I just I can't.
This isn't giving me what I want it to.
My dream was to be a writer.
My dream was not to work 12 hours a day
dealing with client problems.
And it's painful to admit that.
I think for a while
I thought, oh, agencies aren't scalable.
And it wasn't until a few years later
that I realized
no, agencies are very scalable.
I just lacked the skill.
What was that skill? You lacked?
Everything like.
I lacked leadership and knowing
the right way to hire and fire people.
Like I had too many underperformers
that I didn't want to fire
and just wanted to keep them on the team.
You know, I didn't understand
the ways that I needed to change in order
to attract better talent. I
did not take the
time to really understand or build
the skill of of operational complexity.
I was winging everything.
Things were really disorganized.
I didn't understand that every time
the business doubles, it's
basically a different business,
and you should deliberately slow down
and pause,
and you should clean up all the things
that have changed
from the last version of the business.
I didn't understand
that entrepreneurship is quite literally
the riskiest thing that you can do,
and so you should be pausing
at different levels and taking money
out of the business to de-risk yourself.
There were,
I didn't understand, offer construction.
I didn't understand packaging and pricing,
like literally go down the list.
I didn't understand it,
and I can only see that now in hindsight.
And I'm thankful
for the for the experience.
But yeah, it was one of those.
It was one of those things where now
it's funny, I'm coming full circle.
And now that I have all of those skills,
Im like, like we just started an agency,
we just started an agency arm and
I'm like, I'm like, give me a round two.
Like, I now know all the things to do
differently.
That's amazing. And congratulations.
Well, thanks.
is this
when you pivoted to ship 30 for 30?
Yeah. So kind of funny timing.
We decided to let everybody go
like three months before the pandemic.
Obviously,
we didn't know that was going to happen.
Pandemic
would have decimated our business.
So that ended up being very lucky.
Me and my co-founder
held on to like 8 or 10 clients
just so we could pay our bills.
I started working on my next book,
which was the Art
and Business of Online Writing,
which has been my most successful
book to date,
the pandemic really gave me an opportunity
I didn't really do a lot in the pandemic.
World of Warcraft rereleased
the original version of their game,
which was actually like, in hindsight,
talk about the most incredible thing
ever, where my childhood
dream, like my
favorite thing ever, got rereleased
at the same time that the world said,
you can't leave your house.
And I was like, say no more.
I don't even want to leave my house,
you know?
So I spent the whole pandemic.
I did nothing, but I go straight for like
2 or 3 hours a day to pay the bills.
And then I just played World of Warcraft
Classic, just.
Just like I was a teenager all over again.
And in a way, I think,
I think after my, my agency experience,
like my soul needed that, I need
I needed to take a break
and I needed to understand
what I did wrong.
And in a very weird way, playing
that game was really soothing for me
in that
it was a lot of time where I was just like
maneuvering my character,
but allowing my unconscious
to sort of process
through everything that had just happened.
And at the end of 2022,
really interesting things happened.
One is I got connected to my current
business partner, Dickie Bush,
and he had just started
or was thinking of starting
a writing challenge called ship 30 for 30.
And then I met these two other guys,
Christopher Lochhead and Eddie Yun,
and they were much further along than me
in business,
and they wanted to start a paid newsletter
on category design.
And I started a company with them
called Category Pirates.
And both of those companies over
the two years that followed, like 2020,
was my don't do anything, just play video
games, you know, take a beat.
2021 I started those two new companies,
and by 2022, they were both multi-million
dollar businesses.
Yeah, if I'm not mistaken, 30 ship, 30
for 30 became
the fastest growing cohort cohort
writing program on the internet. Yep.
at that moment that that happened.
Did you realize I'm not building a course?
I'm almost building a category here. Yeah.
From like day one.
Yeah.
Ship 30 grew very quickly.
We did a million in revenue in year one.
Then we added in an upsell
and we like scaled our distribution
in the second year.
And it did around 2 million in year two.
And category Pirates was a paid newsletter
talking about category design.
Talk about like my tutelage.
It was like getting a master's degree
in category thinking.
I really appreciated that opportunity
with those guys, and we ended up building
a whole multi-million dollar
consulting business.
On the back of it, we would consult
venture backed startups, publicly
traded companies, all on their category
design and messaging.
And then at the end of 2022.
I and beginning of 2023,
I basically had to choose like I had
I had gone from like, I'm
a failed entrepreneur to
now I have two multi seven
figure businesses and I have to pick.
And so I ultimately decided
to double down on Chip 30.
It was just growing very quickly.
I exited Category Pirates.
They bought me out of the business.
And then in 2023 we started our next
writing vertical, which was our premium
Ghost Writing Academy Right.
and 3 million in year one. Yeah. Wow.
Something like that. Yeah. That's crazy.
Yeah, it's done over.
I want to say like 12 or 15 million
total in revenue
in the past 2 or 3 years as an academy
that teaches ghostwriters.
is that just a digital course? What?
It's a group coaching program.
So we have a success team.
We have a team of coaches in there.
We have a sales team.
We have a marketing team
Is that with Dickey as well.
Yep. Yeah.
And there's there's a core curriculum
that we walk everyone through.
Like you need to build these skills.
These are the steps
we are going to walk you through it.
And then there's all sorts of like other
supplementary education
and live components.
So we have like daily live clinics.
You can go and answer questions.
I do a Monday hot seat every year.
I've been doing it for three years.
Anyone can show up, ask questions,
workshop their writing workshop, a sales
call, whatever.
When ChatGPT launched, I assume
most professional writers were terrified.
And then you launched,
if I'm not mistaken, right, with AI?
Yeah.
Give me the specific thing
that you observed in the first 30 days of
kind of using that that made you certain
everyone else was kind of reading
the moment wrong?
I think this is where I'm I'm just now
starting
to feel the benefit of age,
like, I've,
I've gotten to see a handful of cycles
now, like I remember when I graduated
from college in 2013
and I started working at this ad agency,
and at the time the big thing was mobile.
Im sure you remember
it's like everyone went from laptops
and desktops to now
how do I build websites for my phone?
How do I build apps for my phone?
Everything was mobile, and one of
my biggest learnings at that time was.
What it looks like to take something
that is very conventional wisdom
in one industry and take the same thing,
change the context, and all of a sudden
it's not conventional wisdom,
it's brilliant in a different industry.
So I'll give you an example
at our ad agency, a mobile responsive
website for a tech company was like, yeah,
obviously a mobile responsive website
for a restaurant
in Chicago was like, right.
And that was
that was my introduction to realizing that
when you see an innovation
happening in one industry,
the first question you should ask is,
how do I take that innovation and put it
in a completely different context,
where people maybe don't value
or appreciate it in the same way,
or they don't take it for granted?
So I got to see the mobile stuff.
I got to see the crypto stuff,
like I was buying crypto in 2016.
I watched and I've been holding through
that whole roller coaster, right.
I've gotten I saw the blogging.
Like how blogging has changed
over the past decade,
Amazon self-publishing,
all the different ups and downs with that.
So I've gotten to see lots
of different trends,
especially related
to the industry that I play in.
And so when I saw AI, it's the same thing.
It's like the same song and dance
all over again, right?
It's new technology,
and everyone always discounts
the new technology in the short term.
And then it slowly compounds and then it
eats the world and you were left behind.
And so as soon as as soon as charge
came out and I played with it for an hour,
I was like, well,
this is where the world's going.
You talked about blogging.
Is blogging still valuable today?
Highly subjective.
My my personal opinion is no.
I think that you will get
significantly more distribution
just writing on social platforms.
I also don't think that it needs to be
an either or.
Like if you started a blog,
I would still tell you to do all the same
things like take your blog post, chop it
up, put it on X, put it on LinkedIn,
turn it into a real,
turn it into a TikTok, right?
Blogs.
The reason blogs were so big was because
blogs were really a business model.
They were really one of the ways
that you could monetize
writing through Google AdSense.
So what you would do is
you would start a website
and then you would write on that website.
You might rank via SEO, you might link
to the blog from social platforms,
and you would monetize
with Google AdWords on the site.
can still do that, but it's like,
just look at how much the world
has changed SEO way more competitive
now than it used to be,
and also with all the AI content
that's impacting SEO a ton.
Social platforms.
Facebook, for example,
used to be the engine
that drove blog monetization
ten years ago.
Like all the big.
Do you remember the site Elite Daily?
No. Okay.
It was a really big
like millennial Opinion e
site in the early 20 tens.
They arbitrage Facebook
traffic, drove
a ton of it to their their blog.
Their site number went up,
led to a huge acquisition.
Two years later, the site was written off
as completely worthless
because Facebook changed their algorithm
and stopped allowing you
not allowing, but prioritizing traffic
from Facebook to external sources.
Right now, all these social platforms,
they just want you.
Facebook wants you to stay on Facebook,
X wants you to stay on X and scram
once you stay on Instagram.
So a lot of things have changed
over the past ten years.
And also with business model
like the best business model
for monetizing as a writer
is not Google AdSense.
Maybe that was in 2008 or 2010,
but today it's like you can make
so much more money just understanding
like what is a digital product?
How do I self-publish a book on Amazon?
How do I provide a service?
I came across your take on Russian
literature and how it helps with writing.
I want to break that down.
How does Russian literature
make you a better writer?
I mean, the Russians were the best.
They were the best I am,
I am deep down like I love technology
and I'm a I'm a gamer kid, but
deep down, I am a purist
when it comes to writing
and the things that I read and study.
I would rather read and study literature
than whatever the New York Times
Bestseller Book of the week is,
and especially Russian literature.
From like the mid
to late 1800s to early 1900s,
those short stories like Anton Chekhov,
incredible Tolstoy, incredible Nabokov,
which was later like early to mid 1900s
like incredible.
If you want to write like a pro like you,
you study the prose, you know.
So that's
that's what I studied in college.
I studied a lot of Russian literature
in college.
I love it. I think they they had it right.
There are not very many pieces
I come across that are as tight
as some of those pieces that I read
and study and still do and love it.
But yeah, like
one of the one of the controversial things
I tweet often is people saying,
oh, a piece of writing has an in it.
That means that I wrote it.
That just
tells me that you haven't
read a book in a while,
because have been around for a very long
time.
Go, go pick up
any great piece of literature.
You will find em
dashes and I love them as a mechanism,
like I use them in my own
writing constantly.
And so I fear that we are entering more
and more into an age where people stop
reading and stop thinking
and stop using their brains,
and they just go, oh, I'll do it for me.
And yeah, your system isn't AI.
Do it for you.
If I'm not mistaken,
your system is 10% human
idea, 80% maybe AI output 10% human.
Edit yeah.
1080 1080 ten take me through
maybe a piece of content
that you build this way
from start to finish.
Well, again, it goes back to you
can't automate what you can't articulate.
And so
the 1080 ten works when in
the first 10% you can clearly articulate
what you're looking for.
So I'll give you a really good example.
I recently wrote, which is funny
because it's like what skill
do you need to prompt?
You need to write, you know,
how do you how do you assemble
or build really great prompts?
Well, you have to write.
You have to articulate the thing
that you are trying to do.
So I recently wrote a prompt
to write newsletters
like thousand word thought leadership
style newsletters, just like me.
Now, the average person,
if they were writing a prompt like that,
would probably write something like,
I want you to be a newsletter
writing pro,
and I want you to write newsletters like.
And then they would list off
a bunch of great writers, you know,
and when you're writing the newsletter,
I want you to think about it and mirror
this type of content.
And then they, like,
feed it a bunch of examples, right?
That is how
most people think of prompting.
Everything about that is wrong.
Because first of all, you probably don't
even realize that you are asking AI
to replicate things that you don't
actually know how to replicate yourself.
So if you don't understand
how to articulate it,
how is AI supposed to understand?
Right? Second is people.
They don't realize that they're doing it,
but they'll say something like,
I want you to write like.
And then they list off
multiple people, failing to realize that
each of those people actually
have different nuances to their styles.
So now AI is confused as like, wait
a second, this writer does it like this.
This writer does it like that, right?
And then third
they go, here's a bunch of examples.
The problem is example without instruction
is is very confusing for AI.
Now AI has to interpret the examples.
It's like okay great,
I gave you 30 newsletters to read.
But like what
do you want me to do with that?
Right.
So the way that I think about
writing prompts is and I
my like
20 year bet is I think that
if you have enough clarity as a writer,
think that there is
a world where I could write a prompt
that is so incredibly in depth
that I could write something as incredible
as Crime and Punishment, for example,
like Lolita, like incredible novels.
I think that it's possible with AI
if you can articulate
down to the sentence and word choice level
exactly what
you want the technology to do, it's
not that the tech can't do it,
it's that the tech needs to be instructed
at the micro step level.
So long winded preface
to say so
I write this prompt to write a newsletter.
How I write the prompt is I say, I'm
going to train you on my framework
for writing newsletters,
and my framework goes like this.
In the first sentence,
the sentence is a hook.
What is a good hook?
While a hook is one of these six things,
here are the six different hooks.
Here are examples for each hook.
So when you start a newsletter,
it will be one sentence
and it'll be a hook, which are one of
these six hooks, each with an example.
The second sentence in paragraph follows
these rules,
and I do that all the way down the page,
so that every single sentence
of the entire newsletter has.
Here's what it is.
Here's the reason why we're doing that.
Here is an example
so that you have some pattern recognition.
And here are some rules for how to execute
on that example in the right way
or the wrong way.
Down to the sentence level.
I invested probably 30 hours
into writing this prompt.
I now never have to write that version
of a newsletter ever again,
because I have articulated
the thing that I've done manually
with such excruciating detail
that then AI goes, oh, okay,
I just plug in these pieces, right?
That that's the leverage of AI.
It's not AI.
Just do this quick thing for me, right?
And that's the ten.
If I do that 10% 30 hours,
I invest 30 hours into it.
AI now does the 80 for me forever.
And then the last 10% is I read each one
and I go, awesome!
I just didn't like that word choice.
I'm going to I'm going to change
that. Awesome.
I just didn't like that formatting
or that transition.
I'm going to change that.
That is leverage with AI.
I love that.
And are you feeding it back
those edits that you make so
it doesn't make those same mistakes again?
Or are those just small edits
that you're just making on your own?
They're just small edits.
Because what I've learned,
what I've learned with AI is, like,
you have to be very prescriptive
in what you're saying,
and it can execute on those instructions
really well.
But a quick little like if you don't,
if you don't mind me
going down an esoteric rabbit
hole here, at the end of the day,
anything creative writing is a great
example.
Is is inherently subjective.
Part of the reason why people struggle
to get good output with
AI is because there's two different things
happening.
There's the architecture.
It's like, are you writing
the thing that I want you to.
Are you writing an article?
I asked you to write an article.
Are you writing an article,
a newsletter, newsletter? Write.
Each one of these things
has its own architecture.
But on top of that, architecture
are all of the subjective choices.
And what I mean by that is, if I say like
something is really exciting,
I might choose the word exciting
and you might choose the word awesome.
It's the same thing, but that's what
that's what AI is tasked with, right?
Is AI is like,
I want, I want to write this thing.
But at the end of the day, all word choice
and even all sentence
structure is subjective.
And so the goal isn't like, hey,
I got you 80% of the way there.
Here are my edits. I feed you back.
You never make that mistake again.
You have to recognize it
necessarily wasn't a mistake.
It was that AI made a different
subjective choice than you made.
And that's
why your last 10% is so important,
because you will always read something
and go subjectively.
I prefer this adjective, or subjectively
I want a different hook.
You've said AI is going to split
all creators into two groups.
What are those two groups
and which one disappears first?
It's I mean, it's the writers
who don't want to learn the new skill
and stay in the legacy world.
And it's all the writers who do.
It's no different than you're a designer,
you're an artist.
Photoshop comes out, you have two options.
You walk outside
in front of your apartment or your house,
and you shake your hand at the sky
and you say, you know, no Photoshop,
or you learn how to use Photoshop,
and you don't be surprised
when all the new graphic design
opportunities
go to the people who know how
to use Photoshop versus
all the people who don't,
you know, same thing with Instagram.
You're a photographer.
No, no.
Instagram,
social media and Instagram are bad.
Okay, well, all the opportunities
are going to go to the people
who understand this new tool,
this new language, this new community.
Same thing with writing,
same thing with AI.
how much of what you published in
the last year had AI in it?
Yeah, boy,
that's a that's an interesting question
because a lot of what I publish on
my social channels is just remixed
versions of things
that I have already written
about 500 times.
So that's what it's like, what it was
either AI or it was someone on my team.
But like ultimately it's just new
and different
versions of the same fundamental ideas
that I've been repeating for a decade.
you've been building publicly
since you were 17, so almost 20 years?
Yeah, I would say
I probably started taking all of this
seriously when I graduated college,
so probably 2013.
So maybe like 15 years or so.
What has it cost
you building and publicly?
Like, are there
things that people don't talk about?
I don't know, I mean,
I don't think I've reached any sort of
meaningful level of, of fame or notoriety.
You know, I've gotten recognized
like maybe five times over the past
ten years, and they've always been
in really funny, funny places. But,
I mean, I think
the only thing that it's cost me is just.
Just time, time
spent doing lots of other things.
You know, I gave up a lot of hobbies.
I gave up a lot of like,
let's go hang out with friends.
You know, like, this has been a priority
for me for a really long time.
And so you have to give things up in order
to, to achieve the things you want to.
Is there a person in your space
that you look up to?
yeah, there's a handful.
Care to share a name?
give credit where credit is due.
I think the person I study the most
right now is Alex Ramos.
have ghostwritten for,
for so many people, like,
I have gotten to talk to some very smart
people and I think he, by a wide
margin, is one of the clearest thinkers
that I've ever encountered.
I've talked to a lot of really,
really smart, accomplished people
who can't articulate
how they do what they do.
You know, some people call it the Michael
Jordan syndrome, which is like,
you can be the best player on the planet,
but you can't coach, you can't teach.
You know,
I think Hormuz does a really amazing job
of being able to take things
that he has done exceptionally
well in his career, but then go the step
further and actually articulate it.
And as a writer,
that's something I appreciate greatly.
And it's it's a harder skill than people
realize.
It's very it's very hard to sit down
and go, how do I explain
simply to someone else
how to do the thing that I do intuitively?
Do you think that's
why he's blown up as fast as he has?
Yeah.
is that the core secret sauce behind it?
Is it is
there are there other things or is it
that he's actually done built some really
cool, amazing businesses?
You know, he knows what he's talking about
so he can deliver that value.
Is it the marketing around it?
Is it is it because he's a Jim
Brown has nice muscles, you know.
Is it the hair?
What is the beard? What is it?
What's the secret?
I'll.
I'll give you my my subjective opinion
is that I truthfully think, aside from,
you know, to some degree,
you need an element of credibility
for people to listen to you on a topic.
Doesn't
have to be the greatest achievement
in all of mankind,
but it has to be some sort of credibility.
But yeah, I really do believe that
a lot of what he's achieved over the past
five years comes down to his clarity
of thinking and his ability
to write clearly and communicate
clearly everything around it.
High production quality, marketing teams,
operational infrastructure,
all all those things do is scale
the nucleus.
And if the nucleus is unclear or
or not valuable to other people,
you could spend $1 million
a month on distribution and fancy cameras
and marketing.
It's not going to do anything right.
And so that all roads lead back to it's
like what
we talked about earlier, which is
which matters more followers or views?
Neither.
What matters is the clarity of thinking.
What matters is the library of content.
If that is good, if that is clear,
if that is helpful to other people,
if it's answering people's questions,
technology and teams and marketing
and ads and fancy cameras
and everything that scales those ideas.
But I mean, how many people decided
to start YouTube channels, right?
And they're like, I bought a great camera
and I have a cool home setup.
And then they get on
and their first YouTube
video is like, the key to success
is you got to try really hard.
Like at the
end of the day, that's a
that's a commodity content.
Right. And so good for starting.
But the game
the thought leadership personal
branding game is association with a topic
and providing the clearest thinking,
lowest
cognitive load information on that topic.
Okay, let's say
someone just finished this podcast
and they work at a job that they hate.
They have a skill.
What's the first thing
they should go do tomorrow morning?
Sell it to somebody else?
I like thinking of skills,
going back to practicing on yourself.
You know,
you should be your own case study.
I like thinking of services
as dividends on skills.
So when I go provide a service
in order to provide that service,
what do I need to know how to do?
I need to know how to do that
service. Right.
And what's the fastest way to learn
how to do the thing?
You should do it for yourself.
You should do the thing right.
And so it's like
if you have a skill, any skill,
or even if you don't have a skill,
it's like, what's the first step?
The first step is do it for yourself.
And then as you do it for yourself,
you go,
oh, all of a sudden
I'm kind of good at this thing.
I bet there's other people
who would want my help with it.
That was how I got started.
That's
how I've helped thousands of writers
in our different programs get started.
It really is that simple.
let's say they don't have the skill.
It's not necessarily
learning to prompt, it's
learning the skill Yes,
then learning to prompt.
Yeah.
Everyone's like, oh, just
give me the prompt and then I'll go do it.
You want to know what problem
you run into.
You run into a problem
called client asks you a question.
You don't know the answer.
And that's a very easy obstacle
to overcome.
If you you stop looking at, you know, AI
as the oh, I'll click two buttons
and I get the shortcut.
And then millions of dollars
rains down from the sky.
It's like you trying to find
the shortcut is what's holding you back.
But everyone wants the shortcut.
Yeah, I know, I know.
Do you see that
with a lot of your students
and even your clients, maybe. Yeah.
I mean, I try
I try very hard to hammer home
this first principles thinking
I am such a like.
I like using the the analogy of training
with ankle weights.
It's like
if you were training for a marathon.
I had a marathon runner actually.
I shared this in a clip and they commented
and they were like,
actually, that's the worst thing to do
on your knees.
But the analogy stands okay.
If you're training for a marathon,
you would want to train with ankle weights
to make it harder so that when you run
the marathon, it's easier, right?
You take the ankle weights off
and you're lighter and you're faster.
I think the same is true
with any sort of skill.
Development is you deliberately
want to figure out the harder path,
because the harder path forces
you to get better at the thing, faster
the right way.
So that and that harder
path is the shortcut.
But the more you try to avoid that
and you're just like, oh,
this person says, if I click two buttons,
everything works out just fine.
You end up right back where you started.
Is there a world where the people
who own the right words own everything?
Where those creators Yes.
Is that the world we're living in
right now?
It's the world
we're going to keep living in.
This is the topic of my next
book, by the way.
Next book is the Art
and Business of Category copywriting.
Basically, it's this idea that
especially in the world of nonfiction,
but this is true for business, language,
marketing, everything.
The entire game is owning
terms that you are associated with.
This is true at the macro level.
At the category level, right?
If I say what is what is your company?
Do the 1 to 3 words
that you use to describe
your company is ultimately a category.
That categorical association
is the most valuable
marketing messaging of your business.
And that category message trickles down
all the way to the tactical level,
which is if I run a campaign,
a lot of times
people think about individual campaigns
as like, what's our clever saying?
What's our clever tagline?
What's our slogan?
That is the wrong way to think about it.
All of your messaging,
strategic and tactical,
should reinforce that high level strategy
category.
Right.
Like I'll give you a really easy,
easy example.
I have celiac disease. Okay.
Gluten free.
Gluten free is a categorical modifier.
You have bread
and you have gluten free bread.
Those are not the same category.
Those are completely different
categories. Right?
You have milk
and you have almond milk right.
That's dairy free milk.
Thinking in categories
with language is very important
because it's 1 to 3 words that separates
you versus your competitor.
Right.
Like you have mattresses and you have
temperature controlled mattresses.
You have smart mattresses.
That that single word difference is
literally the entire marketing strategy.
And then from that language,
all of the tactical things
you do need to reinforce gluten free.
Here are the benefits of eating gluten
free.
Here are the here
are the risks of not eating gluten free.
Here are the mistakes people make
when they try to eat gluten free, right?
All of the tactical things are really
reinforcing that high level category.
And just to take it like one nerdy step
further, the whole secret to nonfiction,
any nonfiction writing, you write books,
you're a columnist, you're a creator.
The whole secret
is to name and claim terms.
You want to
name ideas you want to name frameworks,
you want to name the things that you do
so that people associate with you.
Like, why are acronyms such a big thing?
Because you create an acronym
and then you're like, oh yeah, that's
the guy who's known for that
acronym, right?
So language is like, we are all playing
this game whether we realize it or not.
And so I forget how you phrase
the question, but like is,
is this the world we're living in? Yes.
And we're going to go on living in
that world because language
is how you differentiate yourself.
Yeah.
And do you think they should people
just starting out or trying to build
an association
with a category to, to themselves.
Should they think about
creating an acronym
or some new name of a category or just,
you know, they want to
they ghostwriting or digital marketing,
whatever they want to get into?
You know,
there's millions of people in digital,
hundreds of thousands of people
in digital marketing associating your name
with digital marketing, like maybe
Neil Patel or some of these other guys
have done maybe difficult.
So maybe go with some acronym
or something else or some
some some other word
associated with category.
Yeah.
So, so to to separate
I like thinking of it
as industries and niches
and then category terms
which are like names of industries
or names of niches.
And so the easiest way to think about
this is to build the skill
of what I call thinking in modifiers.
Bread, gluten free bread.
Right. Marketing.
What's the modifier?
You have digital marketing, right?
Or you have analog marketing
or you have guerrilla marketing.
These are all different modifiers.
So the first thing is I would start
with industry whatever industry marketing
start with, which is like the mega
category, it's the umbrella category.
Then you go down
one notch into different niches, right.
So it's like you could
go digital marketing for
yoga studios in Chicago.
You know,
you could niche down by audience.
You can just down by price point,
whatever the niche is.
And then once you get clarity
on what the quote unquote
niche is, the question to ask
and how you build
compounding association is
what is the name of that niche?
And the name is not something clever.
The name is usually some 1
to 3 word version
of that niche
that people recognize with a new modifier.
That's why this is so common in food.
It's like you see a new ingredient
come out Like cauliflower,
you have pizza
and then you have cauliflower pizza.
That is a new modifier, right?
Instant differentiation.
So I once you start thinking in this way,
you realize
that the whole game of building
any sort of brand or business is
how do I associate my brand
with that categorical name?
I think we gave the people so much value.
Nicholas Cole, thank you so much
for coming on Taco to Genius.
Thanks for having me.
These are great questions.