The One-Person Business Model (How To Productize Yourself Full Guide)

Work less, earn more, enjoy life. That's my motto. That's my value proposition if you were to go to my website. And success is counterintuitive. And that motto has brought me the most growth in my life by living by that motto. Because working less and forcing myself to try to work less and build solutions so that I can work less, rather than just being like, "Oh, you can't work 2 to 4 hours a day, you can only work 8 hours a day." It's like, no, I can work as much as I [ __ ] want to if I build the systems that allow me to do that. And it's just obvious, working less leads to higher quality rest, or more rest, which leads to higher quality work. And so myself and others that are on this whole 4-hour workday kick are usually producing better work than most of the people that are working 12 to 16 hours a day, just being the hustle and grind entrepreneur that is a bit too promoted on social media.

So it's work less, but earn more. Earning more is subjective. It's up to the individual, right? I would say that most people want to earn more, but they want to do it doing what they enjoy. So that's another thing that I live by, another rule where I have to build, I have to create a way for myself to do that and not just expect it to fall into my lap. So earning more is subjective, but over time, I truly do believe that anyone that has the dedication, or at least the will or want and consistency to do what they enjoy for the rest of their life and make a good income doing it, they can do that. Why wouldn't they be able to?

And then the last part of the motto is enjoy life. And that is usually a byproduct of both of working less, resting more, earning more, and just having the time and location freedom to be able to do what you choose to do with your life. That's what I'm all about. And it's so weird when I see people in the comments or other things like challenging this notion. It's like, dude, like, do you just believe that you have no [ __ ] control over your life? Like, yeah, you're not going to have it right now. It takes some time. I could go on about this all day, but like, dude, like, just believe in yourself. As simple as that sounds, just like, work towards a better future for yourself.

But the thing is, I also fell into the trap of one, wanting to live the life of other people, beachfront views and the sand in my toes and a tan, like David Hasselhoff, and sipping coconuts on the beach while working from my laptop. And that was until I experienced that life. I'm not here to kind of [ __ ] on the digital nomad culture. I think it's great. I really do think it's great. But like, who wants to do that? It kind of gets old very quick where you're trying to work on the beach and you can't even see your screen because the glare from the sun, and it gets too hot, and you have to reapply sunscreen, and you're like, I'm [ __ ] thirsty. I'd rather just be inside working.

And so I don't know, that kind of stuff, it's like, yeah, you have to go through trial and error to understand what you want. You have to figure out what you don't want in order to figure out what you want. But you have to understand that the, the glamour and the different lifestyles that people promote, it's for, it's dopamine, right? You're, you're seeing something that you want. And then once you achieve it, if you don't appreciate it and make it a part of your life, then that is going to fade very quickly. The Wi-Fi connection in those areas gets old, the partying and the language barrier, and doing the things that you see on social media as a highlight reel, they really do get old.

And so the purpose of this video, I want to talk about moderation and sustainability because we just talked about how some of those things, or at least the glamorous things, are not truly sustainable. So I want to present a business model that allows you to create your ideal lifestyle through practice, experimentation, and iteration. It's a way to make a creative income source with your skills, interests, and expertise, but it's not limited to people that already have those things. Business in the modern day, with social media and the internet, and it being so accessible and low startup cost, you don't have to pay money to post something online and ask for money in exchange for a valuable service, like a freelance service or consulting service, or even just a coaching call, or something that is very beginner level that you can then build up and increase from there as you gain experience.

And so it's kind of a new path. It's a new business model because of all the technological advancements. But the thing is, is that people still consider it taboo because they aren't in the game. It hasn't been around for that long, but it's here to stay. You're going, if you decide to pursue this way of like social media and digital products and digital services and all these things that are growing and growing over time. There's some statistics about the education industry increasing by XYZ, and you understand that I am an educator, whether I like to label myself as that or not. Uh, every single person on YouTube that is a value creator rather than an entertainment creator is an educator. They are teachers. This is a new method of education that college and formal institutions cannot keep up with because their curriculum cannot be updated to match something that isn't going to put into a job because the school system and just corporate government stuff is all tied together. They're training into one another. And so the internet, it threatens that because it gives the individual the power to make a creative income on their own. And so the education around that from individuals on social media and course platforms and other things, you know, where they are the school system just can't keep up with that.

So that's the main thing. Is it is completely in your hands. And if you do not like that, if you do not value self-reliance or personal responsibility or just taking control of your own life, then this isn't for you yet until you come to the realization that if you want true happiness, those are going to have to become values of yours. So if you're watching this or listening to this, I'm assuming that you are between 18 and 35 years old. That's what it shows on my analytics. I have your age, I have your demographics. I'm going to steal them all and sell it to private third-party software. I'm just kidding. I don't do anything with it aside from look at this. But 18 to 35 years old, and some outliers, I see you. If you're like 40, 50, you're trying to get into this space when you're older, that's [ __ ] awesome. Props to you. But 18 to 35.

Now the problem is that most people don't see those 18 to 35 years as past experience that they can leverage to help other people. You haven't self-reflected enough to see your own value and the problems you've overcome, and that you are genuinely equipped with with information that can help other people that you can educate them on and just help them. So the first thing is that you don't think you have enough experience. The second thing is that you think you're too boring. You think your life's too boring. When this is the cause of social media and what we were talking about earlier with the glamorous lifestyles, you don't need a glamorous lifestyle to do this stuff. You need to be interested enough to make your interest interesting to other people. I always recommend starting with writing, like Twitter, newsletter, blog, even YouTube. I'm reading my newsletter from this. But that's the thing, you don't need to even put your face on the account. You don't have to do any of that. Stop letting the limiting beliefs. What I'm saying is the very thing, first thing I said at the start of this video is that if you want to accomplish something, then you need to build a solution in order to accomplish it. If you want to start a business without having to show your body, then build a [ __ ] business without having to show your body. Like, it's that simple. Stop convincing yourself otherwise that you can't do something because you're not not doing it like everyone else.

And from my experience, the highest paid individuals aren't the ones with the looks and glamour. Those people are banking on sponsorships and other things, and they're not making very much money. I know that the, the people that make the most money are the generalists. They aren't one-dimensional. They're multi-dimensional because they're the generalists that hire the specialists. Everyone tells you to become a specialist when that's the worst thing you can do. Why? Because specialists mean that you do XYZ, you go ABC, you do a specific thing, you do a specific thing, and that is just primed for automation. It's being automated out left and right, right? You are not a robot. You are not I perform this specific task with this specific skill because that's where that's where you get automated, right? That you're able to be trained into that. You need to be a generalist and be able to move artfully and gracefully within a specific domain of interest that you have.

So I guess general rule of thumb is that if you work like a robot, then you are a robot, and you will be outsourced to robots, and your job will be replaced. A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. That is a quote from Robert A. Heinlein.

So even more of a problem than not seeing your own personal experience as valuable is ineffective communication. Because that's all people on social media are doing is just effective and persuasive communication to make their own interest valuable and interesting, or at least perceived as valuable and interesting to other people. That is the skill that you have to master is writing effective communication, and also effective thinking. Because writing is how you clarify your thoughts. The one-person business model has always appealed to me over having employees. A simple website as a storefront, a digital product stack with high profit margins, 4-hour workdays, and potential $1 million years, control over what you work on and who you work with. Hard to beat the one-person business. In my eyes, is for those that value self-reliance, time freedom, and location freedom, sovereignty, autonomy, just being able to do what you want and having enough money to do so while impacting the world and having a purpose behind your life.

So one-person businesses, they use social media for building an audience, building a community, and attracting people of like minds, right? So they have, so they have leverage for the future by building an audience. Because you see a freelancer, and they just send cold DMs all day. Well, it's like, I build an audience, and I can like sell different offers whenever I want, as long as they're helpful to my audience and they want to purchase them willingly. And so they use social media as traffic, and then in order to host their products or their content, or even their newsletter, we use no-code tools, right? Which is just software. So a website builder, maybe a social media scheduler, things like that, where those do specialized tasks that other people got replaced from doing, like social media managers as a whole are going to be outsourced to just software that can do those repetitive tasks at a much, much, much cheaper price. And so that is opening up room for individuals, for solopreneurs, for one-person businesses to have every aspect of their business managed without them having to do anything aside from oversee the software and add their mind or their creative ability to those softwares together in order to create a successful business.

And so another important aspect of the one-person business is lifestyle design. Because if you work for someone else, you have a manager, they manage you. But when you work for yourself, you can sleep until 1 p.m. But are you going to get your work done? If you can get your work done, how are you going to systemize that? How are you going to structure your days for both maximum productivity and maximum creativity? How are you going to design the life that you want to live through trial and error, experimentation, and just self-reflection and understanding the problems that are blocking your quality of life?

So you have to understand as well that there is no saturation in a one-person business. Because if it is a one-person business, it means it evolves with you. I used to sell digital products, and I no longer sell them because I evolved, I changed, I pivoted a bit, and I changed what I offer. I started a different business, whatever it may be. But that's the thing is I desaturated that market because I can only take on so much, right? This is the one-person business model. Is everyone taking their piece of the pie by doing what they truly enjoy? And if everyone did that, you would have to understand that every single interest, every single person is going to study different interests. They're going to explore the, the crevice of reality that they are the most curious about and distill their learnings to the people that want to learn about those things. And so if every, if every single person was authentic and honest with what they wanted to pursue and their ability to monetize that. So let's say I want to start carving out like woodworking and selling cutting boards, right? And so I study woodworking, I study, like, design, kitchenware design, or something like that, right? You can see that like your interests are not the only one that exists. Because that's the trap that a lot of us fall into is, well, like, well, everyone's doing self-improvement, everyone's studying self-improvement, everyone's a programmer. It's like, no, dude, it's because you're interested in those things and you're following the 5 to 700 people that talk about those things only. So that's all that's in your brain. You haven't broken out of that bubble. Or and that's fine, because you're supposed to be exploring that, and you're supposed to be creating your own unique perspective to further understanding in those areas, to educate people in a better way than schools can do.

So there are two paths to starting a one-person business with zero experience. And first, I want you to stop thinking of business as some like billion-dollar company or something like that. Business is what you do. Business is your life's work. Business is the vessel to create your ideal lifestyle while impacting the world at large. So money is a modern byproduct of living with purpose and passing down your teachings. It's self-actualization and self-transcendence. It is a vessel for that. I like to think of it. There's like mindfulness techniques and spirituality. There's Zen techniques for achieving this actualization or enlightenment. For me, because you're not supposed to become ideological or dogmatic about one method to achieving one specific outcome. That's not how it works. Business to me is that method of doing it. It's a way of exposing myself to the world, practicing mindfulness, clarifying my thoughts with writing, and putting out a meaningful message.

And now we're going to bring up the experience thing or imposter syndrome here again. I just want to make it very clear that if you could go to your friend right now and you could teach him about something that you are studying on social media or in school or whatever it may be, you're more than experienced. You're already doing this [ __ ]. You just need to do it in public. So the first path is skill-based. This is the one that most people take, where the common advice is learn a skill, sell a skill, teach a skill, or however within that many, however you would organize those from one to three. And this is great, but as I said, you don't want to end up one-dimensional. You don't want to sell only one skill so that way you're automated. It's a great starting point, but you have to be working to get past that, or else you're just going to be that that freelancer that's making the same income, built themselves into a new 9 to five, consistently on the verge of losing every single client, and just not having a backup or some form of leverage built, like an audience, to pivot and do whatever they want and are able to pursue their genuine curiosities that are going to change and evolve over time.

So path two, the one that I like, is development-based. So the development base is based around the four eternal markets. The eternal markets are where most people are trying to achieve lofty goals, but there are many problems in the way of those goals. Then that's where the most money is made. Those are the profitable burning problems that people have. The four eternal markets are health, wealth, relationships, and happiness. So path one, by choosing a marketable skill, usually only pays attention to wealth. But with path two, it's just built for the business of you, the one-person business, because you quite literally pursue your own goals, which is your brand, which we'll talk about. You solve your own problems as you are pursuing those goals by, uh, researching your curiosities that allow you to achieve those goals faster, which is the content, the information, and the value that you're passing down. And you create a system to help others do the same. So you self-reflect and you look back, how would I have done this better? How can I, how did I do this and what results did I have? Now, how can I help other people step by step in a faster way get to those results? So you're advancing human evolution. You're helping people evolve and trans, or actualize and transcend much faster. And that's why I said business to me is this vessel for self-actualization and even spirituality and self-transcendence. And so that system, that step-by-step system, is your offer or your product. And so that is how you be yourself, improve yourself, and profit off of yourself.

You may be wondering, like, but but Dan, I'm, I'm just starting out. And it's like, you don't have to write posts or create a product where it's like, how to make a million dollars in 3 days. You don't have to do that. You have to pay attention to where you are now, where you're going, and how you're going to get there, right? So where you are now, you may have made $0. And so how do you position your content or your product? How do you position or what perspective are you giving about yourself? So how do people perceive you, right? You can, you don't write a post on how to make a million dollars in 3 days. You write, here's how I'm going to make a million dollars in 5 years. I mean it, you know? And then you give out your plan, and then people follow along because you are a leader, then. And people follow leaders. You are positioning yourself as a leader. You're are helping people achieve the goals that you were trying to achieve, and you're kind of leaving breadcrumbs along the way.

And then path three is both. Both skill and development-based. And this is kind of a given because when you start and you haven't learned any skills yet, this is how you learn fast. If you're going to start on social media as your way of generating traffic, then you're going to have to learn how to design a good profile picture, how to design a good banner, how to write a compelling, compelling bio. You're going to have to learn how to write social media posts. So you could become a Twitter ghostwriter, you could become an Instagram post creator, how, whatever you call that. You could become a video editor, you could design, uh, banners for people. You're building skills as you grow your business. And that means you can help other people grow their business and offer a freelance service. So you can start monetizing pretty close to from the start. And you're doing it in such a way that you're, you're actually getting results for yourself. If you get results for yourself in a real-world setting, rather than just building out portfolio pieces and never getting paid what you deserve because you don't know how to apply your skills to someone's actual business, then you practice your skills on your own business. You build your own website, you build your own landing page, maybe you build a landing page from a for an affiliate product to see how good you are at copywriting. Because then you don't even have to create the product. You just build an affiliate product, build your own landing page, see how good you are at that, and then you can offer selling landing pages for $1 to $2,000 to other creators. You see what I'm saying here? All you have to do is just [ __ ] start.

So now let's go over the four pillars of the one-person business. So for those that want to do what they want and help the people that they can help the most, traditional branding, marketing, content, and offer advice is not going to fit very well. Because in the case of this one-person business that I'm talking about, and in the next video, we'll go over what a value creator is. It's a style of one-person business. And I'm breaking these down because it takes more than just one video to to do. But in this case, the experience model that I'm talking about, you are your customer avatar, you are your brand, you are your niche, you are your content, you are your offer. You are everything. And self-awareness and self-reliance is going to be the greatest skill that you have. And those are the people that thrive the most in this one-person business model. Is those that take responsibility for their future and help others get to where they're going.

So to break down the one-person business very quickly, your goals are your brand. So what, what do you want out of life, and what are you leading people towards? Now, the problems that are standing in the way of your goals turn into the content. So what roadblocks will your followers encounter, and how are you going to help them overcome it? And now there's a lot more that goes into content than that, but that's a great starting point, right? And so systems, or how you solve the problem, turns into a product. So how can they solve their problems faster? Because that's what people want. And now the benefit, how has this entire journey impacted your life? That turns into your marketing. So why should they care about your message, right? Why do I write every day, and how can I turn that into a persuasive argument? Anyone who studies marketing understands that benefits-rich language is extremely powerful and persuasive. So if I wake up and I write, not only to earn an income, think much more clearly, systemize all of my other content, I could go on day, like, all day long. But you can go and look at those benefits and how exactly I'm doing this on any of my landing pages.

So what you do, as I mentioned in a previous video on how to solve your own problems or how to find purpose by solving your own problems, is that that's exactly what you do. You pursue a goal, you solve your own problems, you teach others how you did it, and that's your business, right? And then when it comes to building out a product or a service that you can sell in relation to that, then it just works out. And this is, of course, oversimplified. There's many, many nuances here. But if you take these foundational principles and apply them and figure out and test and experiment and do exactly what I'm telling you to do by figuring it out for yourself, so you actually have unique and genuine knowledge on how to do it, it's going to take time. But that time is going to pay back tenfold, aside from you hiring someone to build your brand for you, because then you're just relinquishing all potential leverage and just power.

All right, so branding is is fairly understandable. That's where you work towards a goal, and that is your brand message. That's what you're helping people do. If your goal is to make a million dollars, then your mission or your message that you can start with and iterate from is helping a thousand people make a million dollars by 2025, right? Who wouldn't want to follow that? So the next pillar, content, is where people have the most problems. It's like, Dan, what do I write about? So let me introduce you to a topic that I talk about in digital economics called the domain of mastery. So what you do is you pick three interests: one that makes money, which is almost any of them, that's just your priority interest; interest two excites you; and interest three is development-based, so like psychology, self-improvement, self-development, metaphysics, philosophy, something that helps you understand just the progression pattern of every single thing anyone could ever do. So you can have a unique perspective on those things by applying spirituality principles, philosophy, psychology, that kind of stuff. And then when you look at this graph, you can break them down into the principles. What are the fundamentals or the principles of each interest and getting results with those in relation to your goal? And then from that, you can break them down into other topics, you can break them down into mentors for inspiration, so the people that you follow and get your advice from, and then the connections, so the connections between all of them and real-world problems. And those are all the starting places that you can start writing or creating content around in a way that is very effective and educational and valuable.

So pillar number three is the offer or the product that you're creating. And no, you don't have to wait to start monetizing. I hate that stupid gatekeeper mindset where people are like, "Oh, you need to be this experienced to start making an income," or "You need to start doing this to start making an income." It's like, no, dude, like, you don't, you don't [ __ ] understand. You're just gatekeeping, and you're trying to like, you're not thinking like, think a bit deeper, right? How do freelancers start making money? They learn the fundamentals of a skill very, very quickly. They start reaching out to people immediately so they can go get real-world, free, real-world feedback. Next, they either charge free or very low cost because their skill isn't up to par to charge $2 to $5,000. And then they gradually work their way up, step by step. And the sooner you start selling something, not only the sooner you can make money, but the sooner you can start failing, and you can start iterating. The first product is always going to be [ __ ]. You just need to get it out. You need to get the [ __ ] out so that you can make it better because you're never, ever, ever going to have a great product the first time around. It's just not going to [ __ ] happen. Put an offer out there, build a digital product, sell a physical product, drop ship if you have to, start a freelance service, start a consulting service, whatever it may be. Put out content and just start getting the [ __ ] out of the faucet so clear water can flow.

So it's like, okay, Dan, but what do I sell? So let me introduce to you what I call the minimum viable offer. There's minimum viable product, but an offer is like all-encompassing. So the minimum viable offer is either a single, a single freelance skill that you sell for five, $500 to $1,000. So that's web design, email marketing, something like that, where a single skill, you're not, it's not a crazy offer, you're never going to be able to charge $5,000 for that, but you have to start somewhere. Or number two, is a single interest consulting service where you sell a pack of four calls for $500 to $1,000. So this is what most people do, and most people get like, get caught up in this. It's like there's some kind of stupid stigma around freelancing where it's like, yeah, I have to do the work, I can't just teach people about it. And it's like, as a creator, me, I hate paying for work. I'd rather pay you to get on a call with me and consult me on how to do a specific thing, whether it's a skill or not. If it's health, I want to be taught. If you're starting an education business, business like this, then don't do a freelance done-for-you service, just offer consulting calls or a digital product. So health coaching, fitness coaching, performance coaching, mindset coaching, life coaching, business coaching, of whatever domain or niche you're in. Those are very broad. You can go a bit more deep into the submarkets within those, like bodybuilding coaching or, uh, neuro, neurohacking consulting, right? What interests you? And you can only find what it is that you want to teach by diving into, uh, your domain of mastery or the crevice of reality that composes the interest you want to explore in this life. But it's not like consulting isn't only limited to those. I'm really surprised that like digital tutoring offers aren't more of a thing. If I learn web design and I want to teach a creator over four calls how to design a great website for themselves, I think that's a great [ __ ] offer. And if I was starting out, I would pay for that. It's the same thing. I'll get on calls for four weeks with you and teach you how to write compelling emails. I'll teach you how to run Facebook ads. It's a consulting offer, and I think those are, uh, much better, much more scalable than a freelance offer.

And so the thing, why we start with a minimum viable offer is that you can start monetizing immediately. You can start reaching out to people in the DMs, you can write a Twitter thread or a post and have others retweet it and then plug your service. So you're getting a thousand to, if it goes viral, a million views on your offer, and you start making money because it's traffic, and it's offers. And so the other thing is, why you start with this is because then you can start fleshing out a digital product and already have results for it. You can teach other people, you can get them results, and you can note the commonalities between like what you're talking about on each call and you package it up into a course, ebook, a cohort, something of that nature that you can then switch to. And so you can stop taking on so much client work as your audience grows, and you can switch to digital product and have more free time.

And so that was just a broad overview of all of this one-person business stuff. I'll go a bit more in depth in the next video, but I want to get more people primed, uh, to this whole idea because I feel like it's, it's not groundbreaking or revolutionary by any means, but it is very important. The internet enables 8 billion monopolies. That is a quote from Naval. Our cliche, a bit too simple, but extremely deep. And I don't know why I am still reading the same thread that he wrote a year ago. Overlord that he is, he is the Lord and savior of all of the basic advice people. But Naval hits a bit different, and he has experienced the back it. I absolutely love Naval. But we're here to talk about just that. We're here to talk about the one-person business model. Why? Because I feel like way too many people have dreams of starting like a billion-dollar company or being the next Jeff Bezos or being the next Elon Musk because that's what we see. And the thing is, is like the gap between where you are now, because I'm assuming you haven't started a business, or else you wouldn't be dreaming of that. The gap between where you are and where they are is causing so much overwhelm because you don't have a way of getting there, right? That is what clarity is. And that's what the lack of clarity is what causes overwhelm and anxiety and just psychic entropy or mental disorder, not a mental disorder, but disorder of the mind in general.

Now, before we start, you have to understand one thing. You have to understand that humans are the only being that can have an idea and make it real. Now, things like chimpanzees and other things, they they use tools, they use other things, but what other being has constructed this world that we live in with our minds? We have constructed the, the school system, the government, religious beliefs. We've constructed language from nothing but images and symbols. Does this not blow your mind? We, we didn't have language at some point in time, right? We had the ability, we had consciousness, attention, focus, and the tools necessary to connect these ideas and make them tangible and just be able to communicate and form relationships with other people. And that's a discussion for a whole other topic about the traps and downsides of all of that, because it controls many people's lives. But I would argue that that is one key to a high quality of life is just leaning into your nature as a creator, as a builder, and actually building things rather than watching other people build things and just do absolutely nothing about it.

You see, self-reliance is possibly the greatest value in my life. It has brought me the most value, as values should. Because when people would tell me, and this is in relation to a one-person business as a creator, I used to be a freelancer. I did coaching for a bit. I did consulting. I pretty much did every one-person business offer under the sun. I, I've sold. I hate talking numbers. What for credibility and authority purposes? I've sold $100,000 plus of almost everything that I went into freelancing, coaching, consulting, digital products, cohorts, everything under the sun. And that's why I talk about this stuff. Because one, I have direct experience with it. Two, I know the steps you should take. And I know that people overcomplicate it way too much. So in pertaining to business, when people were screaming at me to go or to just go and do all this short-form stuff like Reels, which I do, but go and do Reels because it's the future, or hop on this next business model, or do this and do that. And it's like, I already have something good going, and I'm going to go in the opposite direction because success is counterintuitive. And that is also a value of mine is kind of counterintuitiveness and being skeptical. And so what I did was the opposite. When people told me to go short-form, I started writing long-form newsletters. And that self-reliance, me trying to figure things out for myself, has taught me more than any other course, any college, anything. That's how you learn. That's true learning is by directly experiencing something, by not taking people's advice as law, testing it for yourself. And this is not only pertaining to business, this is pertaining to health and any ideology or belief system in general. Is like when someone comes up and is like, "Hey, raw liver is the best thing you can eat." I got stuck in that trap. But it's not like you, you have to see multiple perspectives because that's what life is. Is just a, a conglomeration of perspectives and goals that people are trying to hit, problems and benefits, and all of this other stuff that form a singular perspective that makes someone believe something. And so accepting a specific ideology as law is just closing your mind off to any opportunity you can have.

So back to the topic at hand. We're here to talk about the one-person business model, which I believe is the best, best route for 95% plus of people that want to start a business. Because one, it follows a human progression pattern. You evolve with time, right? So a lot of people that I know, and myself included, they start out in one of two ways that require zero experience. One is skill-based, right? So we're talking marketable skills, so design, uh, photography, email marketing, copywriting, SEO, web design, all of that stuff. You, you know those things, and you've probably learned some of those things. But the next thing, because those are like, you're starting a freelancing business, but what about a coaching business? That is where self-development comes into play. So it's either skill-based or development-based, right? And so this is pertaining to building an audience or just giving value and educating people so they will buy your product or service, your freelancing service, your digital product, your consulting service, whatever it may be, right? So they start with skill-based, and then they educate people on those skills. So if I am a writer, which I am, then I will teach you how to write. I will give out little tips. I will write articles on writing. If I am a mindset guy through self-development, then I'm going to give out mindset tips. I'm going to give out education on strengthening your mind, etc., etc. This falls under the health, wealth, relationships, eternal markets: health, wealth, relationships, and happiness. And then the skill-based is kind of like, you use that to complement your self-development so you can make money a bit faster. Because a high-ticket service like a freelancing offer, you can sell for two to $3,000 once you get good, and then you can sell it through your audience or just reach out directly to people and try to land via cold outreach or something of that nature, and you can make money a lot quicker. So those are the two routes that people go. And from my experience and from my failures, I always recommend people start posting content. Why? Because a lot of people start in freelancing or coaching, and they get stuck in this cycle of like, you have to do manual labor in order to get clients. You have to send cold emails, you have to send cold DMs, and you're not, you don't have a brand that is educating people on those things and building trust and authority without you having to do it in the DMs manually every single time. So you build an audience along the way, and then once you get to a certain point, once you have a certain amount of traffic and a certain amount of brand loyalty and authority, clients start coming to you. And then once your audience gets larger and larger, you can productize your service, reduce your time spent on that client work, and sell something like a digital product. Or if you're in the self-development space, like mindset or health coaching or something of that nature, you can create a physical product. It doesn't always have to be a digital product or a course. It can be something like, as an example, I talk about self-development a lot. I talk about focus a lot. I want to create a coffee brand with coffee and L-theanine, and if I, if I talk about that more and show myself doing that, people are going to buy it because it's something good and something useful in people's lives. And I am the unique mechanism. The personal brand is the unique mechanism, and is why people will buy from me over someone else, is because I have built that connection with you guys by trying to be as honest and transparent about this as possible.

So we're going to walk through what I call the entrepreneurial method, which is just kind of like a spin-off of the scientific method. But we have to understand here, like, how do we apply this before we can actually get into it? So the way that we apply this is for a one-person business, you need three things: you need a brand, which is like your audience in a sense, or like your storefront. It's how you are perceived, right? So you need a brand. And the way you brand is you brand a one-person business based on yourself, right? It's a personal brand, it's a personal business, and it, the brand revolves around your vision for the future and your goals. That is what you are leading people towards, because followers follow leaders, right? So if you are not a leader, then don't try to start a business. So the next thing, how do you attract people to that brand? How do you build a following? Content. And your content is created from your interests, so self-development or skills, which are the skill-based things that I talked about, and you educating people on that, while also throwing in your unique spin here and there, right? Talking about your interest and educating people on your interest and skills, and throwing in your own personal thoughts, your own beliefs, maybe some mindset stuff, maybe what you're doing on a daily basis, right? You entertain, educate, and inspire with your content. And you learn how to write or structure content in a way that catches attention, delivers value on that attention, and then converts the attention to either a follow, or a purchase, or an email subscriber. And then you slowly build leverage over time to get to the point of what we talked about earlier. And now the last thing, how do you monetize? Because people screw this up so much, because it's like, how do I monetize from a platform where it's like YouTube, you can do AdSense, and that's great, I do that. And it's like, other people can do that, but it's not in your control, right? You can be taken down from the platform at any time. And if you don't have an email list or your own product or service that you create, and you control the price, and both the traffic going to it, that is what determines your income. So if you want to actually build an income online, you need to become valuable enough to sell a product or service to a person that is one to two steps behind you, or just has a use case in your life. So it has a use case in other people's lives. If I like coffee, and I use it to focus, then I'm going to create an L-theanine coffee brand and sell it to my audience while talking about productivity and focus. It is that simple, given time and not quitting because you didn't see results after two weeks.

All right, now to the entrepreneurial method, because this is something we do on a daily basis, and it's just like a universal principle that people need to follow in order to not only like increase their quality of life and solve their own problems, but also profit off of that, to profit off of your own self-development and your own skill acquisition. Because that's just the thing, if you are starting out from zero, it's no problem. You talk, you write content about what you're learning. Your brand is your vision for the future. So if you're starting a freelance business and you plan to take that to $10,000 a month, and that's your vision or your goals for the future, then that's your brand. Hey, follow me along as I build this freelance business to $10,000 a month. Now, if you are already valuable, if you've already developed those skills, you've already developed yourself or your mind, then you have a bit more authority, and you already know what you should be talking about and the value you should be creating online.

Now, one thing I want to mention here with content is that you're not trying to reinvent the wheel. Like, you have to be self-aware here. That's what self-reliance is in the one-person business. Is being self-aware. What kind of content do you like to consume? Is it too basic? Or is it unique to you? Or are you reading the same exact [ __ ] thing week after week? People need to be reminded more than they need something new. That's all content is. Is you are joining in and you're giving your own take on the same thing that people are saying that results in growth. If you aren't growing on social media, it's usually because your ego is in the way, and you are trying, you are overcomplicating things way too much, and you're trying to be too fancy or too clever, and you get mad because people are, because you think people aren't as intelligent as you or just don't get it. And it's like, yeah, they don't get it. So listen to the feedback and change how you talk about things so it's actually interesting. If people aren't interested in your interest, it's because you don't know how to make your interest interesting to that person.

So the entrepreneurial method here, it is: you find a problem, you learn how to solve it, you document how you solved it online, you systemize your process, and you share your discoveries. So in a nutshell, you find a problem in your life, right? That's step number one. Is find a problem. Because all stories, marketing, literally everything, the thing that drives human behavior are problems. If I were to read you a story and it started with, "There was a cold spot on the side of the

The bed that opens a curiosity loop, and people want to learn more. You want to learn more. Once you become aware of your own problems, and that they are actually a problem, right? Once you identify a problem, let's say with your health, then you are going to self-educate in order to get there, right? That leads into step two: self-educate.

So, let's say that you find yourself lacking self-esteem. That is a health problem, because one, maybe you don't have muscle mass, or you just don't like how you look. And that is a surface-level problem, right? If you want to understand this from the lens of finding your purpose, I have another video. Um, I would look that up. It's like, "How to Find Your Purpose by Solving Your Own Problems." It's the same thing. You have to solve those shallow, external problems first, and then bust through to your inner core to get to the meaning and purpose of everything. Because we've shrouded over it with all of these comparison, self-comparison to other people, people, and all these things that are creating the shallow problems. But you can't just ignore those. You have to solve them, because that's what most people are struggling with, and that's how you can help them once you actually solve it for yourself, right?

You have to develop yourself and your skillset. So, if you have a health problem, and maybe you need to go and learn how to hit the gym, and then you become good at hitting the gym, or you find this unique take, or create your own system for becoming jacked, or whatever it may be, then you can teach people about that. And of course, use your own head here. Use your critical thinking and understand like, when it's justified whether you can sell a product or not. The people that are going to sell a product will sell a product. So that's on the individual, and I, I just can't help you with that. This is a free video. I'm not talking with you one-on-one. Just have some common sense and be smart about what you're selling.

So, another thing, if you want to fix a money problem, let's say you're a broke college student, and you understand that college is going to give you some money. Yeah, it's going to give you some cash flow, but it's going to be a cap on your income, and you don't like that. So you start a freelancing business. You start learning a skill. See how a problem leads to self-education, which is self-step number two, is learn how to solve it. Uh, then you self-educate, you get results, and then you talk about those results. And then you docu- that's you documenting how you solve it online. That leads into step number three, and that is also how you learn more about yourself and about the skill you're doing, right?

Because if you, the problem here is that people always think they lack experience. And it's like, like, "Oh, I lack, I lack, I I I feel like an impostor when I'm posting content online. Like, I I know a lot about web design, and I'm trying to land my first client, but I can't post about it online." That's just weird. It's like, dude, if you're going to try and make money off of someone by reaching out to them with a freelance service, then why the [ __ ] are you scared to post free content online? It doesn't make sense. The free content online should come first, and should be a way of you distilling what you learned and organizing your thoughts so that other people can benefit from it, and you can build authority to the point of landing a client, right?

So, you have to understand like, people see me now, and you're watching this on YouTube, so it's a bit different. It's not on Instagram, or it's not on Twitter, where I have a much larger following. And like, people see that gap, right? They're like, "Oh, this guy has 240,000 followers on Instagram. It's going to take forever to get there," which it is. But that doesn't mean like, that I didn't see results along the way there, right? Again, you're paying attention to the gap, and that's what's causing the overwhelm, anxiety, and procrastination, rather than the first step in front of you, which is just starting and doing.

So, what you don't see is that I'm a regular ass dude. Maybe I have some cool lighting in the background. And maybe I, I don't know, like, what, what do you perceive of me? How do you think of me? Which I guarantee you, it's not who I am. But how do you perceive me, right? Is there a gap there? Do you see me as a bit authoritative? Because I want to let you know that I'm just a regular [ __ ] dude, right? I identified a problem in my life. I was a young, broke college student, and as exactly what I said earlier, I didn't want to get a job that limited my potential future in terms of how much I could make. So I started learning every single skill that I could under the sun. And then once I saw results with freelancing, I did it kind of backwards of what I'm recommending. Then I started posting online about my results with web design and freelancing, taught people about web design, talked about my self-development journey, talked about mindset, talked about skill acquisition, money, and I grew an audience. I eventually created a digital product showing how I, uh, went or how I started my web design business, and that iterated over time, right?

With the scientific process or the entrepreneurial process, iteration is such a big part of everything. And that's what the one-person business does. It evolves. So, if you are afraid of saturation in this stuff, you have to understand that if you are starting a creator business or a one-person business, there is no saturation. It's kind of impossible because we evolve. I evolved from freelancing to consulting. So I opened up a job in the freelance market after I left it. And then after I left consulting and started the cohort and was doing digital products as I grew an audience, then I desaturated that market, right? That offer that made me a lot of money. I am not selling anymore. So other people can come in and sell something similar and take that spot if they wanted to, right? And now, if I want to transition eventually and just bank on like book sales or start a software company, then I desaturated the market even more.

So, you have to understand that the internet enables 8 billion monopolies. It really does. There is room for everyone because one, you're thinking there's too much saturation because you haven't started. Again, it's a gap. You're guessing what's in between that gap rather than figuring it out for yourself. And so, a side note is, is that someone asked me recently, and they were like, "Uh, I, I'm thinking about growing an audience and talking about my interests and eventually making an income." But how long will it take? And so, like, my question is, if you're going to see yourself doing this for the rest of your life, right? If this is the thing that you want to do for the rest of your life, then why does it [ __ ] matter how long it will take? Because if you're going to come back to it anyways, why not start now? Get the failures that you have to have. They're necessary. You have to have a certain amount of failures to see success. Once you get those out of the way as soon as possible, the sooner you're going to see success and actually be able to do it for the rest of your life. And what happens if you don't do that? Then you're not going to be doing the thing you want for the rest of your life.

So, uh, step number four is to distill things into a replicable process, right? That's what people want. They want step-by-step advice on how to get a specific end result. That's what every single thing does, unless you create like a tool or a product or something that is just useful in people's lives or they want to make. But if you want to make money from the start, you need to just focus on distilling a process or creating a system, right? And so, the way you do this, this ties in with learning and self-education and self-reliance. Because if you hire someone to do this all for you, like if you, if I hired someone or if I paid someone for, uh, fitness coaching, and I just followed their advice to a T, I didn't learn anything for myself. You have to experiment. You have to try different things. You have to see what works for you. You have to find that discovery by figuring it out and struggling and not taking the easy route, so that you can take that and teach it from your own unique point of view.

So, for step number five, is to share your discoveries. Is to give your discoveries or your process to someone that wants to be helped. Now, I want to wrap this video up in step number five by asking you a very difficult question, which is, what is the meaning of life? So, from my own experimentation and self-education and researching multiple different perspectives, you see what I'm doing here, and figuring things out, I've noticed a few patterns. I've noticed kind of a two-step system for the meaning of life. Now, we can't lump this entire question into this, but I just want to spark some thought and awareness in you.

So, the first thing, leaning into the meaning of life, is raising your consciousness. And what that means is actively exploring the unknown aspects of reality. Which means you're not straying away from challenge or failure or the dark areas of the human experience that are going to be there whether you deny them or not. So, you are actively exploring and feeling into your problems, learning how to solve them, and directly experiencing your yourself solving them, so that you get that you get those results, and you truly learn, and you raise your consciousness around that domain of reality. So, you are making the unknown known, the unconscious conscious, by solving your own problems and becoming aware of the unconscious and making it conscious. You're making the unpredictable predictable. So, the unpredictable nature of solopreneurship, you're making that predictable, and you're helping other people get there.

So, the second thing, after raising, raising your own consciousness, is raising the collective consciousness. So, what you're doing is, you are, when you're raising your consciousness, you're creating a map of reality. You're creating a map of the unknown, or what is unknown to other people. And then you teaching it to them helps accelerate the level of the collective consciousness much faster. If you are teaching them, and, uh, of course, basing your teaching and making it known that they have to self-educate and they have to figure it out for themselves as well, and raise their own consciousness, then that is somewhat the meaning to life. And I can attest that it is an [ __ ] incredible feeling when you help someone else get results and solve the problems that they want to solve.

So, you raise the collective consciousness by giving out pieces of your map, by writing online or posting online, right? And so, attracting a following. I, that's what social media is for. And then your products themselves are the map, right? They are the map. You are distilling and like enclosing it into a little zip file to upload in other people's brains. Because then the next thing is like, "Oh, Dan, well, like, what if I, like, people are already selling this thing, and it's already for free online?" And you have to understand like, that only a specific, certain, like, a specific type of person says that. One, the people that aren't in the game of business. Two, they aren't just in the arena. Two, like, they don't have the money to invest in those kinds of products, right? Because what people pay for is aggregation, speed, and convenience, right? That's just everywhere around us. Like, why do you go and buy something that is terrible for your health, rather than just eating the good food you have at home? It's convenience, right? So why would I spend 20 hours filtering through just like fragmented YouTube videos on the internet, rather than just a step-by-step course on how to get an end result and then get it now?

The thing with this is, is that you can't help people that don't want to be helped. Like, if people just twist your words, there's, there's probably some people watching this, the, like, two dislikes that you don't see anymore. I wish people could see them because it's kind of like credibility. It's like, if, if everyone agreed with me, then I wouldn't be saying something that is closer to truth. But I don't know. There's weird stuff with that. But the, the thing is that people don't, people that don't want to be helped, you can't help them, right? So you have to be okay with the hate and the criticism that comes along with this stuff. If people don't want to increase their quality of life and they're stuck in this ego trap, then it's okay. You can't help them.

So, I will end with this. The lips of wisdom are closed, except to the ears of understanding. And that is a quote from The Kybalion. And it just hits. So, the ancient masters are saying the same thing. You can't help people that don't want to be helped.

The state of work is changing. Things are going digital. We know that employers are starting to hire based on an individual's public resume that they post online via content, newsletters, YouTube videos, or anything else that helps display their credibility and authority without you having to try and prove it to the employer. And to add on top of that, people are and have been losing trust in the traditional education system, and they are resorting to internet creators for their future success, both personal and professional. Because think about it, when's the last time that you've heard someone say, like, "Oh, I am so proud. Like, I use everything that I learned in my degree for my job." That's not how things are moving. Instead, I've learned what I know about the gym from YouTubers that talk about fitness. There are infinite perspectives that I can study and become my own personal trainer and my own personal expert. Rather than, I don't have to give that advice to others. I can, if that's something I want to do, and I do for business and spirituality and personal development. But when it comes to the gym and health, I have the full ability to tap into my desire for self-education, and I can become my own personal trainer. I can become my own relationship therapist. I can become my own psychologist. I can become anything that I want to become because there is ample education out there that I don't have to shovel over $40,000 to acquire to become an expert in that field.

And now, client work, like freelancing. When they want to break out of this traditional system of like either employment or other things, people usually go with the freelancing option. They learn a skill, they sell a skill, and they get stuck in a new rat race that they have created for themselves in terms of, "I need to find clients in order to survive, and they're going to pay me this much." And you're a commodity because you're a specialized robot that performs one specific task that other tools are starting to automate out. Because that's the thing is, one thing that a lot of people leave out about freelancing, or what they don't tell you, because I've experienced it, and some people are starting to talk about this, but I was a freelancer and I pivoted out of it because I realized that you need to truly become an expert. And that does not mean being a specialist. If you want to become a web designer, great. That is an incredible first option to go with to start making some money. But in order to charge three, four, $5, $10,000 for a service, to be able to generate wealth and be able to take on less clients so you have more time on your hands, you have to understand that the, the low-ticket freelance jobs are being automated out. I can go and build an absolutely [ __ ] beautiful website for $10 with a specific software. Because that's what web designers are doing nowadays. They are using software, and they're using their mind and their creative ability to apply that software to someone else's business. And because that business usually doesn't have the time to do so for themselves.

And now, I'm a big proponent of the one-person business model. And so, if you're coming into the creator economy, or even for like influencers, and you're trying to sell to these people, because it's the future, and that's what you should do, and it's an opportunity that you should hop on. I'm not saying this lightly. Please note this down. Is that if you want to target other creators and become a creator yourself, you're going to have to go more towards the side of education, right? If you were to come to me, I don't want a website built for myself. I want to learn how to do it. So you can either teach me, or I can go buy a software and learn how to do it myself. But in many cases, I don't want to spend that time to learn how to do this one specific thing just because it doesn't interest me. So I would rather pay you $1,000 to get on a call with me and tell me exactly how to build a website. I don't need this. Don't reach out to me for this. I was a web designer in my past. I can do that specifically fine. But if you find a problem in my business that I'm unaware of, and you make me aware of it, and you persuade me as to why it's going to help my business for me to pay you $1,000 to teach me that step-by-step system that will save me X amount of time wasted, then I may buy from you.

And so, the highest-paid freelancers that do the work for you, they use their creative ability, they use their mind. They don't rely on a software with cool templates and other things to be the main part of their service. They understand a mix, a range of skills that then they can come and build a solution for your business. For example, if I'm having trouble, if a coach is having trouble generating leads, then I'm going to come in and I'm going to say, "Okay, you need a landing page." So I need to know web design. You need, uh, copywriting for that landing page. So I need to understand persuasion, marketing, and copywriting. And then I need to understand their business as a whole, right? Because then they opt in and they get put into an email sequence that has follow-ups and other things. And that's a much better, well-rounded service that fits someone's specific business in a way that will get results. And that is impossible to just outsource to one specific software to do it all for you.

And so, as humans, this is what we do. We have the ability to think and build. We build tools and solutions that make life easier for us. This is never going to stop. We're going to continue doing it. So if you are not a builder, then you are going to be built over, or you are going to build for someone else.

So, that was kind of just an introduction to lay the framework. But in the last video, we talked about the one-person business model, how to productize yourself. And now I want to talk about what I call a value creator, or in some cases, a synthesizer, which we'll also touch on. But the value creator is is a way to go about the one-person business model because there are infinite numbers of one-person business models, right? It's not limited to digital products, information products, courses, coaching, consulting, like turning yourself into a business is what I'm talking about here. And being a value creator is a way of doing that.

So, this is a new career path that the internet has created. I've talked about how 60% of new jobs have yet to be created. They're going to be created by the internet. The value creator, or the educator, is going to be one of them. One that takes it on as their responsibility to research a specific crevice of reality that nobody has explored, or at least explored in that combination, right? You can explore many different interests, and then you synthesize those, you connect those, and you educate other people. You play your role in the shift away from the traditional education system that can't keep up with how technology has evolved.

So, value creators are the people that earn with their mind, not their time. So they can stay as a one-person business without limiting their income. They research their obsessions and distill their learnings with writing, video, and other internet content. They become a one-person media company, right? They build their name on social media with media, so videos, writing, graphics, and then they sell a product from that traffic, right? Because now you have traffic, now you need a way to monetize and send people to. And we talked about that in the last video. Third thing, they get paid for aggregated knowledge and experience in the form of digital products or physical products, if you want, but everyone should have some form of digital product. So that's how they get paid. Is they research these things, they leave out breadcrumbs in the form of content and media, and then they aggregate that information into a step-by-step system and sell that via a digital product or service. And four, they have a heavy focus on educating their audience instead of posting memes, starting drama, commenting on other things, or other things like that. To me, this is very appealing. I like the path of the value creator online because I don't have to worry about starting drama with other people. I get to focus on my me, my message, and what I'm educating people on. And it, it doesn't take flashy looks or other things to actually build an audience. It takes this education of the certain things that you were learning and becoming an expert in.

So, value creators are those that dedicate themselves to exploring the unknown aspects of life, to exploring their curiosity, and they take it on as their life work, life's work, to dissect these crevices of reality that they're exploring. So whether it be self-improvement, marketing, business, spirituality, metaphysics, philosophy, uh, email marketing, whatever it may be, you just have to start and start learning and making connections and letting one thing lead to another by curiosity.

Now, a lot of people get confused here with curiosity, and so do I, because it's not something tangible. It's not something concrete. And for me, I can only explain it based off of experience and feeling. So with curiosity, think of the book that you actually wanted to read. Think of the videos that you actually wanted to watch. The things that were seamless, where it's like, "Man, I'm loving learning about this." So for me, it's a select few books. It's like, "The Power of Now," which I haven't read in a bit. "Awareness," "Way of the Superior Man," "Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, "Rest" by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, and everything Alan Watts, right? Those really resonate with me specifically. They may not resonate with you, and that's a sign. That's a sign that you have to find the people and the writing and the interest that really, really resonate with you, and that makes it effortless to actually study those and makes you want to talk about them.

Because if you're going to post something online, the easiest way I can say as to, "Oh, what do I post?" Post the things that are interesting to you, because they're going to be interesting to someone else. If you're reading through a book and something catches your attention and you're like, "Oh man, that's really good." Other people aren't going to think that. Some other people. So you take that and you distill it for your audience. You synthesize it with your interest or what you're trying to achieve in this life. Watch the other video on the one-person business model, and then that's going to be interesting to them because they are similar to you.

So, it's not about transitioning from consumer to creator. It's about transitioning from consumer to researcher first, because you have to research and gather your own knowledge before you can create with it, right? You have to dissect other things via reading, and then in order to reconstruct them into your own creation or writing or video or newsletter, whatever it may be. Because a, a researcher to me, it implies that you are intentionally consuming information. You have a goal of how to use that information and apply that information. So, if your brand or you as a person are working towards a big goal in your life, and you're researching specific things, let's say you're working towards financial freedom, but you're very interested in spirituality. Well, how is it helping you get there? Right? That's a very unique perspective, and that's a very unique connection that you can make.

Here is a graphic of the value creator. We start with genuine interests. And the skills you need for that are research, learning, and note-taking. Those are things you have to do on a daily basis. So, what are you obsessed with learning? We talked about that. The next thing is creating your unique perspective. If you need help with this, I highly, highly, highly recommend you download my free creative challenge. It's called "7 Days to Genius Ideas." It will change everything. I don't say that in a platitude sense, like, "Oh, it'll change your life." It will [ __ ] change the way you see the world, the world and your content. It'll branch over into content. So, for forming a unique perspective, you need critical thinking, open-mindedness, and self-improvement. Next thing is actually creating value from that. So, how will they help others reach that goal? How will your unique interests and perspectives help other people? And for that, the skills you need are marketing and sales, writing and thinking, education and teaching. And then now that you have value, because you understand how to structure a persuasive message by studying those skills, then you need to distribute that value. So, the next thing is value distribution. Where can they find your value on the internet? So, you need to understand social media, digital tools, and leverage building. And so, if you have to screenshot that graphic and start just generally researching those skills, get the big picture of what they are and how to do them well.

Because here's one other thing, right? I was watching an actualized.org lecture the other day, and he mentioned how like, real, like the school system and government and other things, they're compartmentalized, right? When you go to school to be learn one thing, let's say the biology department, or the chemistry department, or the business department, right? You're, you're limited. You're studying those things only. When reality is not compartmentalized. Business, it's a part of life. All of your life plays into it. And we need more people, we need more synthesizers to come in and research their interest and use that to create an entirely new category. Because like, life isn't compartmentalized. You need to be able to understand the full picture and connect the full picture together in order to help people achieve their goals in life. We need more people that can do that. Because it isn't easy. It is incredibly difficult and fun to research what you want to research and embrace the unknown or the unconventional and uncomfortable path in life. It is 10 times more rewarding. Any platitude will tell you that. And those platitudes, the cliché quotes on like, "Oh, break out of your comfort zone," like, they've lived a long time because they are very, very, very important, no matter how many times they've been conditioned into your head to the point of you thinking that they are boring and insignificant.

So, this, how this all sounds great, but how do you start researching your interests effectively? And that is by exploring the unknown aspects of reality through consciousness. Because reality is infinitely complex, connected, and perspective-based. You are a perspective vessel. The way that you consume information is going to be different from how others consume it. You are going to interpret it based on your worldview. And then if you create with that worldview and you help put it out there, then it's going to be different from other people's perspectives.

So, how do you explore this crevice of reality or part of the unknown? You deconstruct holes into parts, then you reconstruct those parts back into a whole. Because the universe, or God, or infinite intelligence, or whatever it may be, it has divided itself into infinite different parts. It is a whole, and it is a part. And those parts exist because of distinctions, right? It's just infinite different distinctions. And I don't want to get all philosophical here. Uh, we'll dive into that in another time. But you have to understand that the only thing, the only reason that people or things exist, like in the metaphorical, in the philosophical sense, the only reason they exist is because of relationship. It's because of distinction. It's because "I am not this," so "I am this." Right? "I am not that camera, so I am human being." I am not, like, if nothing exists, if you're just floating in a void, you yourself would cease to exist because you have nothing to compare it to.

So, let's make this a bit more practical. So, the first step is, choose an obsession. And with this, don't try to outsource this. You can't just be like, "What's my obsession?" "I don't know." What is your obsession? Have you tried anything? Have you gotten pulled down a rabbit hole before? Like, you have to try a bunch of different things. If you don't know, try. If you don't try, you'll never know. So try literally everything that potentially catches your interest. Because your mind, your ego, will try to distract you from this. If you see something like, "Oh, well, that'd be cool to study or learn on my own," but that video game, that sounds really nice. Oh, that, like, going out with my friends, that sounds really nice. I have nothing against video games or going out with your friends, but if it's distracting you from making progress, then yeah, there's a problem there.

So, if you need a start, starting point, look at your browser history on YouTube, Google, whatever it may be. Look at the last videos you watched, and look at what you naturally consume to learn, not to distract yourself. What do you go on social media to learn? Who are you following that are actually educating others? And how can you emulate them? How can you reverse engineer? How can you deconstruct that hole into parts? How can you reverse engineer their success and follow it? And another thing is to look at your life and see what you do. What have you improved the most in your life? If you're a gym junkie, how has the gym helped you? If you're a runner, how has that helped you? If you're an autodidact or a polymath and you just love researching everything, how has that helped you? How can you help other people become that? And how has it benefited your life?

So, number two is to research that obsession from all angles. So, to do this, you have to follow people that you disagree with that are talking about your topic of interest. You have to buy, let's say, a best-selling book that goes over the fundamentals of that obsession. You need to get the big picture before you can start understanding the tactics and the little details, right? You have to obsess over the big picture rather than the technical details. Don't get trapped in the technical details. View everything from the meta perspective of the big picture of that specific obsession of yours, the thing that you are researching. And you have to come at it from, "I want to understand this holistically. I want to understand all perspectives." If you're a health guy, then study the benefits of a vegan diet, even if you absolutely hate and you're tied to the ideology that veganism is bad. Look at the benefits. See why people do it. Be able to be nuanced and navigate your way through a conversation on health. And then go and look at carnivore. If you are so attached to carnivore, then force yourself to look at the research that disproves carnivore, and vice versa for everything. Look at both sides of the coin. If you're attached to the ancestral diet, then maybe try veganism. Like, break out of your little bubble of comfort that you put yourself in, and continue growing by trying new things and researching the entire domain.

So, the best thing you can do is just learn about it every day. Immerse yourself in that obsession. And people that are teaching about it. Unfollow every single social media account aside from the ones that are putting out good information that you can study. Put books on your desk, uh, queue a podcast for the next day. Literally, just immerse yourself in the information. And then the next thing that you do is you note down golden nugget ideas or your discoveries. So, as you're researching your obsessions, or really anything, it should be, since you're genuinely curious about these things, it should be near impossible to not write down your discoveries or to write down the things that really stuck with you, the things that interested you, meaning they are going to interest someone else.

So, if you need help, one, keep a running note in your phone, and download my free creative challenge. So I give all of this to you. But if you need help, as you're listening, as you're reading, whatever it may be, note down the ideas, anecdotes, stories, or even statistics that really stuck out to you that you're like, "Wow, like that changed my mind," or "Aha, like that's it." It's hard to put this into like tangible words because you can't. But when you get that excitement, that's what you write down. And so, with all of this, when you go to write content, or you go to create a video, or you go to outline a podcast, or something like that, all of these things that you've written down, they're building blocks. You literally just copy-paste them over and you structure an argument about B based on what you want to talk about. And these will serve as foundational ideas for your content. Like, one thing that I do for my YouTube videos is, one, I watch good YouTube videos, and I know what performs well in the algorithm. And I take the title of the video. So, let's say, one that's coming in the future that I'm writing about in my newsletter right now is called "The Power of Being Alone." That's a very hot topic. A lot of people like to talk about that. So right now, what I'm doing is I'm listening to videos on being alone. I'm studying that topic so I can come with a credible argument because I have experience to back it. But I need a way of structuring my argument. And so that's the next thing is that simplifying complex topics will be the greatest skill of the next century. Because we live in an, in an information age, right? There's so many ideas, and people are overwhelmed with what they need to do, right? There's so many different options that you can take for your career or your life. And we need people that can come and organize and simplify this information that's being put out there. Because people are making new discoveries left and right. People are creating new knowledge left and right. And they are distilling it in the form of internet content.

And so, the biggest mistake you can do here, because you're researching your interest, right? You're researching, you're noting things down, but the worst thing you can do is let knowledge outpace execution. You have to apply what you learn. Because you don't learn to write by reading about writing. It's going to help. It's a good guide, but you have to actually practice it, right? You can't study a, a, a senior's level English course if you're in first grade, right? Or you haven't written anything in your life. It just doesn't make sense. It's not going to apply. And you're going to be like, "Oh, crap," and you need to go back to the fundamentals. You need to go back to first grade English and practice. And then you go to need to go to second grade English and then practice. And you need to go to third grade English and practice. And, and if you skip any of those steps, you're not going to learn to write effectively, or it's just going to take you 10 times longer because you're going to try and write like a, a senior in college, and then you're going to have to go back to fourth grade.

But there's also a trap there, because with value creation, you need to make your knowledge valuable, right? There's only so many things that you can like practice tangibly, right? There's ideas that you have to munch on and contemplate and go in walks and let your, uh, default mode network, let your subconscious mind bring ideas to your conscious mind. So you have firepower to write with. You have to sit down, and you have to sit with a topic and just think about it. You have to contemplate. You have to go in. You need to introspect and self-reflect and understand like, "Okay, what is the true value in this message? What has this helped me with in my life?" And now, the next step is absolutely crucial. You need to put your value on the public market. So you need to turn the value that you've created into internet content, and you need to post it because you need data. You need to understand if your ideas are truly valuable or not, or if they are perceived as valuable. Because you can write like Alan Watts, you can write like a philosopher, but if you post it online and you're not growing, and you're not getting any, any engagement, and because of that, you're not making any sales, it's not going to be sustainable. Then how, how are you going to do that for a full-time? You need a balance of internal and external. You need to play the game, the external game, from a place of, "I want to give value."

Okay, so we understand how to find and research our obsessions. But how do we package up that knowledge and turn it into something of value that other people will like, engage, and follow along with? So, the first step is choosing a media platform, because you're going to be distributing your value via media, right? You are going to be composing a message from your knowledge, from your own unique perspective, and distribute it via media. That's all the internet is, right? That's how you reach anyone. That's how you build a readership. That's how you build an audience. There is no way around it. You have to create content. You have to create media.

So, I personally prefer Twitter. That's what I started with. That's what many people in my network have started with. They've grown on there because it is underrated and untapped, and there are just so many different benefits behind starting on Twitter. Because I tried everything before. I tried a fitness YouTube channel. I tried a digital art page on Instagram. I tried paid ads, SEO, all of this other stuff to try and grow my brand. And now I was missing crucial pieces. But when I got on Twitter, everything just clicked. All of my knowledge clicked, and I'm just like, "Okay, I know how to make this work now." And it was easier because Twitter, you need a profile picture, but you don't need to post any images, right? It's, it's an idea platform. It's a platform for ideas and writing, clear articulation, and communication. That's what all of this is. That's the foundation of everything. There's a reason that people screenshot their tweets and post them on other platforms. It's because the message is so valuable and, uh, captivating compared to like an Instagram model that's just in like a bikini. There's something of value there. And those tweets, the screenshotted tweets on any other platform, usually get more engagement if the tweet is good than any other kind of post you could post, right? So it only makes sense to start on Twitter because all you need is the ability to type on a keyboard, and maybe some branding and marketing knowledge on how to create a profile that, uh, makes people want to follow you, right?

But that's not the only benefit of starting on Twitter. The other thing is that the retweet button. That's how you share a post. That's how you get eyes. That's how you get eyes on your content, which is how you grow. You, like, I feel like people are so confused with how to grow. It's like, "I'm posting content every single day." And it's like, this isn't YouTube where those are going to build up and over time, if the SEO is good, then you may gain a following. This is, you need to write good content, and you need to put 100% of your effort, 90% of your effort on getting it in front of other people. And so the retweet button is just a click. On any other social media platform, it's much higher friction to share another post. It's much higher friction to get eyes on your posts, therefore getting them on your profile, therefore for having them follow you. So take that into account. And the comments, right? The comments are just better on Twitter. It's more of a forum, and people go to the comments more than they would on say, Instagram, right? So if you're commenting on Instagram, all you see is like a username and then a line with whatever they're commenting. But if you comment on Twitter, they see your profile picture. So they can tell if you're a creator or not. If your branding is good, they see your name, and they see that you added value to that tweet. So there's just much easier ways to grow on Twitter. And Twitter's just underrated. And it, it is the foundation. Writing is the foundation of everything. If you can write compelling tweets, all of your other social media content will get that much better and that much more valuable.

So, the key with this is to start with beginner-level content. 95% of the market are beginners. If you're watching this, it feels weird to say this, but you're a bit higher intelligence. Like, I try to not make things super shallow. So you're at least looking for depth. You are ahead of people in some area, whether it be from what I taught you, or from what someone else on YouTube taught you. You have information that you can pass down to a beginner level, like very beginner level, right? In the form of actionable advice. That's what every single person does to grow at the start. YouTubers, for example, if you want to become a vlogger, go look at a vlogger's past videos. Did they start with just these random vlogs where it's like, "I bought a new car"? It's like, no, they taught you something. They educated you and provided value relating to something from a beginner level. So if they are a mainly a health guy, then they posted all of the foundations and fundamentals of what they do to maintain their health, or build muscle, or lose fat, or whatever it may be. The same is for writing. How do you get started writing? What's the benefits of writing? What are the foundational principles of writing? What about persuasive communication, right? You need to dissect and understand the certain interests that you are pursuing and dish out actionable advice in the form of the fundamentals in order to grow at the start. That is the content that you are going to be producing on Twitter.

And just be aware of this when you're scrolling on Twitter or Instagram. Don't just scroll and consume the content. That's the consumer mindset. The creator, he takes it, he looks at it, he deconstructs it. Why did this do so well? Why is this type of content performing well? And if this content is performing well, how am I going to take whatever it is here, the essence of this post, make it my own, so I can also grow and play the game? So that's step number one is choose a media platform and just start posting.

In step number two is to learn to capture attention, because that is the name of the game in just this information age, this idea age, where there's too much information, there's too many ideas, everyone's trying to catch your attention. But that's the thing is, you have to get good at catching attention, or else they're not going to read any of your stuff. If you can't stop them to read your post, how are they going to like your post? How are they going to retweet it? How are they going to comment? How are they going to click on your profile to try and find out more? How are you going to catch their attention on your profile? How are you going to lead that attention to your lead magnet? What about your emails? What about a product? What about a service? How are you going to guide their attention throughout all of this?

But the thing here is, you don't have to become a sleazy used car salesman to catch attention. It's like, "But wait, there's more!" No, you don't have to do any of that [ __ ]. You just have to understand and study psychology. And I'll give you

A few examples of like how to capture attention based on psychological principles. So the first is problems, right? If you have studied marketing, if you studied copywriting, if you studied branding, everything revolves around problems. Uh, human behavior revolves around problems. Stories start with problems, right? If you start with a problem, it opens a curiosity gap, and they want to figure out what the solution is, right? So if you can start with a problem that a relatable problem that someone is facing, like, "If you struggle to grow your business," that's just an example, but a problem, right? It's the duality and the like, back and forth and playing the game of problems and benefits, right? So what's the problem? How do you overcome it? What are the benefits? The problem is a good way of capturing attention. And this all takes practice.

So another one is numbers. Numbers, like a statistic. Well, that's the next one I want to go over, but uh, numbers where it's like, "I spent 4,500 hours studying this so you don't have to. Here's what I learned," right? Some, something like that. Numbers, especially on Twitter or even other platforms where it's very text-heavy or image-heavy, it's just a different thing. It's a pattern interrupt that catches someone's attention.

And then the next thing is statistics. So, "99% of people say they regretted something before they died. How do you avoid this?" right? So you can see how that kind of leads into something else. But you're, you're better off studying, um, copywriting for this, like sales copywriting or persuasive copywriting. You can get my 2-hour writer course. I go over all of this in so much more depth. It's, it's like, it's so hard to go over in this video, that's why I created a course. But that will give you everything you need to know. If you want something else to study for free, look up AIDA. AIDA copywriting framework. That will give you, that's a very basic one, but it's very useful, especially for tweets. PASTOR. P-A-S-T-O-R. That is also a copywriting framework that is more long-form that will help you write like Instagram captions, emails, sales pages, landing pages, all of this other stuff and give you like a structure of the sales process. That's another thing you can research is a sales process.

So we've chosen a media platform. We understand that we have to learn how to capture attention. The next thing is to treat yourself as your ideal reader. If you watch the last video on the one-person business model, you know that I'm very big on trying to create something out of this. I'm trying to come up with a term. If you can think of a term for this, I've thought of like "mental monetization," "the business of self." "One-person business" is good, but that's kind of broad. There's nothing specific that's like, "I'm turning myself into a business. I'm productizing myself." I want a name for that. But that's just the thing. While you are your brand, you are your content, you are whatever. I want you to treat yourself as your ideal reader. You are writing or creating value for yourself. Both your past self, where you're giving them advice on how to overcome problems faster, or you're just like giving, giving them encouragement. You remember, uh, like if you can sit back and contemplate and think. This is very big for value creators is solitude and thinking and free-thinking by going on walks, listening to what you want to listen to, contemplating, self-reflecting, all of that stuff. Cuz when you self-reflect and you remember that you were in a low place in life, then you can write to that person. You can create for that person where you are saying, like, this is like a cheesy motivational example, but it's like, "Hey man, I know you're in a hard place. I know you can get past this. Just keep doing what you're doing." It's a cheesy aspect. But if, if you were like, "I remember when I didn't understand this thing in marketing, and now you understand marketing," then give them advice like, "Here are the, the five marketing principles that you need to understand." Catching attention, creating value, whatever it may be. And then you list them off. And that's how you can start creating content. And you can also do it to your current self. If, if you're going through a hard time right now, then give yourself advice. Tell yourself what to do to overcome that. And other people will benefit from it, right? This is a great way of just like personal growth in general. I mentioned in the last video that business and writing and content creation is my method. That is my tool as opposed to like meditation for self-actualizing and self-transcending. And then you can, so on the flip side, if you're not in a bad place right now, if you're in a very good place and things are going well, then tell people why. Tell yourself why it's going well and reinforce that in your own head. Write to yourself to reinforce your own good behavior and to try and fix your bad behavior. And then you can also write to your future self of like, give them, uh, encouragement to keep going or something like that. You get the point.

So in essence, you treat Twitter, or even just social media in general, as your public journal. You treat it as your public note-taking software. You treat it as your public journal and you treat it as your public school for other people.

So the fourth thing, we understand we chose a media platform, capturing attention, writing to ourselves. But now you have to prioritize depth and clarity. Because so many people just get trapped. They get trapped in the social media rat race, right? They get out of the corporate rat race for the social media rat race where they're just so focused on growth. They're so focused on, "Oh, I have to write this kind of content in order to grow." And that's true to an extent. You do have to grow and you do have to kind of shut your ego off and provide value to those that actually need it, even though you think you're too above that level of knowledge. But the other thing is that you need to actually, you have to write and dissect and create depth behind the things that you're truly passionate about because that is how you become an expert.

So I recommend starting a newsletter, right? Everyone should. If you don't have an email list, you're just going to be screwed. You're going to be absolutely [ __ ] if your social media platforms get taken down. They can't take emails away from you. Email marketing. Don't let any limiting beliefs or whatever like, "Oh, nobody checks their emails." And it's like, no, they do. People are making seven figures from email lists alone. Uh, you have to test it out and experience it to know for yourself. But for now, start an email newsletter, right? I go over this in the 2-hour writer again, my writing course and just content creation course. But for the newsletter, this has been the biggest game changer for me in my business. Is one, noting all of these things. So I, I told you about the 7 Days to Genius Ideas challenge where you kind of pick that golden nugget of information that you picked up from researching your obsessions and then you write that down. And then as you're writing those down, you have building blocks for the newsletters, right? So you take a topic that you want to write about, you dissect it with my framework where you break it into goals, benefits, perspectives, topics, whatever. And then you start piecing together a newsletter and you start making connections. Right now, if you want to get very spiritual, actualized.org, he actually has a clip. It's called "Love is Connection." So love, not the, uh, not the ooey-gooey modern notion of love, but like love for, like selfless love, right? Selfless love for everything is connection. It's finding that shared perspective. It's connecting the dots and seeing how reality moves together. And that's really what has changed the game for me with my newsletter. It's like, I study neuroscience and I study philosophy and I'm like, these are saying the same things. How can I put this together in a newsletter? And and that forces me to be able to articulate these things. This is what's helped me so much with YouTube videos is that my thoughts are actually clear now because I'm taking notes on things, I'm dissecting them, I'm fleshing them out, I'm writing them in my own words. I've been writing for a long time, so that's another advantage of mine. But then I'm able to articulate things just so much better. Like you go and watch a YouTube video from even six months ago, let's say like eight months ago, they were nowhere near this level of just articulation. Like it can happen that fast if you dedicate yourself to creating valuable long-form content and opting out of the short-form content rat race while still maintaining that and systemizing that so you can grow. But most of the value and sales are going to come from nurturing your audience in your newsletter. And then that newsletter can be taken and turned into a YouTube video, a podcast, um, or really however else you want to deconstruct it because you're creating all this value. And then you can turn certain points into tweets and all of this other stuff.

So the gist of it is is that becoming a value creator, that may be my name for all of this, becoming a value creator is a very viable and purposeful career path. I feel like I've been working towards becoming this myself for my entire life and I just didn't know what it was, um, or that it was a possibility or other things like that. And it really is. If you stick it out and you stay consistent and you're not going to know what you're doing for the majority of the time. I still don't know what the [ __ ] I'm doing. It's like, yeah, I'm in a much better place financially, mentally, and physically. But it's not like you have a vision for your future, which is important. It's not like you have a vision for your future and then you get there one day and you're like, "I achieved it all." It's like, nope. We're, you feel the same. I'm in the same human body. I have the same human senses and perceptions. And I'm just at a better place. I'm much more calm. Um, I'm much more stable. I'm not acting out of survival as much. And I, I really attribute a lot of that to just writing and creating value not only for myself but for others and having everyone benefit from it. And it's been such like a personal growth journey in itself. So I would recommend, I would say, try it out, right? As, as with the obsession things, like try it out. Stick out that initial like period where you don't know what you're doing, right? Cuz when you start playing a game and if you don't have an instruction manual and you don't know how to play the game, it's not going to be fun. So you eventually pick it up. You pick up on it. So give it two weeks, give it a month, and then see if you become obsessed with it because you probably will. You'll, you'll see that first spark of growth and you'll be like, "Oh [ __ ], this is possible." And then you'll just double down, double down, double down. And eventually, three years later, you'll be at close to 500k to a million followers across platforms. So truly grateful for all of you that are here. We recently passed 10K. We passed 10K on YouTube. I'm so stoked because YouTube is different. YouTube is, I'm dragging on here, but YouTube is very special to me. It's very special to me. It's something I've been putting in work into for a long time. Uh, compared to other social media platforms, it hasn't grown nearly as much because I want to, I want it to be one of those things where I can provide like the most value and like, like aha moments and mindset shifts imaginable. So if I've done, done that for you, one, thank you for being here. I wouldn't be able to do that if that relationship wasn't there, so that connection wasn't there. So I love you guys.

Ever since I can remember, I have always wanted to do what I love for a living. And is that what everyone wants, right? Everyone wants that. But everyone is screaming at them to to do the complete opposite of what they want, right? So go to school, do whatever, you know, you know what you're told to do when you were a kid and what your parents thought was possible, what you thought was possible at the time. You already had some preset future for yourself. And so that's kind of what I did. I started out on that path. I went to college and I partied the entire time. I learned creative skills on the side. I studied all of my interests. I was deep into fitness and nutrition and going to the gym with my buddies during high school. And I also started online businesses like as much as I possibly could. I just tried everything. And then when I got to college, I, uh, started to learn to code because I heard that it was lucrative. I got sucked down that entire rabbit hole. I was listening to coding podcasts. I was deep in that coding community and I loved every second of it. And so that's what I did on the side. I built out coding projects. And as my online businesses continued to fail, I decided that it was time for me to call it quits because one, I had been in college for too long. So I dropped out. I didn't see that going anywhere for me, even though I was like a straight A student in high school. And I ended up getting a front-end web developer job at an at a web design agency. And that paid 50, 55k a year. So throughout this entire time, I had been, I always had a meaningful side project that I wanted to work on. From the ages of like 16 to 25, I was always working on something on the side, whether it be a coding project or a business or learning a skill or just building something out. I did digital art for a long time. I just always had something to fill my time and something that I could apply my learnings to. And the reason I did this is because it made me happy, right? And after studying flow and psychology for a bit of time, I understand that is now, that's because I had a vision, I had a goal, and I was able to focus, uh, my consciousness, if you will, or I was able to absorb myself, be absorbed by the skill that I was learning, the goal that I was pursuing. And it was intrinsically motivating because that skill had meaning to me, or that project had meaning to me. It wasn't someone else telling me what project or what skill to learn. It was by my choice, by my design. Me creating and living in my own reality is what caused me to continue to be obsessed with and somewhat addicted to those projects because that's how it goes. You want to be in flow for a lot of your life. That is arguably the key to life is pursuing your own goals and educating yourself to the point of consistently progressing in those goals. And this is why I believe so many people are unhappy because you could just pull up a random statistic online about how many people set and actually stick to their own individual goals, not what you have been conditioned to want to create for yourself.

So right now, my current projects are my new writing product, which you can find in the description. And that's kind of what this video is about. But it's also getting back into into the gym. I've been in the gym the entire time, but it hasn't been as fulfilling. And so me understanding this and becoming aware of this has made me set a new goal based on performance rather than, uh, vanity. Now, looks are important, but I want to go in and I want to progress on my lifts simply because it's just something I want to do. There's, that's it. And it makes me happy to do that. And I'm actually pumped, right? It's kind of ritualistic to, uh, get into the flow, get in the car, go to the gym, and then just lift a bunch of heavy [ __ ].

So why am I telling you all of this? Is because there is one extremely important skill, and that is figuring it out for yourself. Not doing what people tell you to do, and doing what you want from a conscious mind, not like a med-neocre mind where it's like, "Oh, I can do whatever I want. You want me to jump off a bridge? Okay, I'll go do that." And it's like, that's not what you want. You don't want to jump off a bridge. What do you want? What are your desires? And what is the, uh, either survival mechanism or whatever is pulling you towards those things? About is it good or bad? Do you actually want to do it? Does it align with your values? Do you actually have values? And now what people are telling you to do is not, uh, going to be conducive to what you want. And a lot of the time, you may have to do it for your survival. But at the same time, you need to be pursuing a project on your own that will lead to you being, you having autonomy, and you being able to pursue mastery in the thing that you want to master full-time, right? Not for someone else.

And so another reason for me telling you this is because, uh, a lot of what I wanted to do with my life was deemed impossible because the closed mind of many would like to, they project their opinions and they want to say the things or they do say the things that may discourage you or may pull you down or may lead you down another path. And that is not what you want for yourself. And that is not what I want for you. So this entire thing means that in order to pursue mastery and autonomy, to be able to do what you love full-time, you need to learn a skill that will allow you to monetize those things, to monetize your interests and your passions. And so in this, I'm going to present an argument as to why writing is that skill that will help you thrive no matter, like, no matter whether there's a recession, whether, whatever. We'll, we'll dive into it.

So why writing? First, the back end of the internet is code. The internet runs on code. The front end, what you see, is media, right? And so if you want to tap into the infinite leverage and possibilities of the internet and being able to connect with anyone, then you need to learn one or the other, right? Those are two very extremely broad pathways that you can go down: code or media. But you have to understand that code has gotten to the point where there are no-code tools. Anyone can build a website. Anyone can get on social media and really reach anyone in the world if they are smart enough and know how to network. So I'm not going to talk about code here, even though I was a web developer. But media, right? You have the, you can use code or no-code tools in order to distribute your media fast and to as many people as possible. And that is what captures attention. You need attention and you need people in order to get eyes on your products or services. If you want to make money outside of a job, you need to create a product or a service. So whether that be a course, a physical product, like the bag of coffee, if you want to start a coffee brand, or a service business, so freelancing. We're talking about writing here, so you could freelance with writing. You can freelance with other media-based, marketing-based skills. And what blows my mind is that some people don't see the power in this, right? Uh, what used to take a team of web developers to build out a membership platform for, let's say, a course or even just a community that you build, it would take an entire thing. And now there's a website that you can log on and build one in less than maybe 10 to 60 minutes, right? And do not ask me in the comments which one to go. Go research. You have Google. Start using all of this stuff. And the thing is, is like, how does this not fuel you with like the most insane energy of like, "I can do whatever I want now that I have these tools in the modern world that are on the internet that I can just like literally tap into"? But instead, there's two types of people, right? There's the people that use the internet for distracting themselves, and then there's people that use the internet to build leverage and make an income and spread a positive message and do what they enjoy. And yes, it takes time. But that's the main thing. That is the main differentiator between abundance and mediocrity, right? It's literally a flip of a switch of how you use the thing that's in your hand.

So I talked about how I learned to code, but that's not one of my main reasons for learning to code. I wanted to freelance with that skill. And that meant that I, that it was more so marketing than it was code. So I was building websites with website builders as opposed to just coding. When I did get into freelance, right, everyone tells you, "Oh, you need to learn, uh, this marketable skill. You need to learn e-commerce. You need to learn SEO. You need to learn all of this other [ __ ]." And that's what I did. But there was a problem. There was a reason that I wasn't making any money from these. Is because I was so obsessed with building the actual business, building the website, making it look good, using my design skills, whatever it may be. But then when it came to acquiring customers, that is when everything failed. Then that's when I didn't really do anything right. You don't have a business if you don't have customers. So that once I learned about writing, which is what we're talking about, and marketing and sales, and how they all intertwine, then things started to pick up because I understood, "I need to get my message in front of people and present an argument for my services and promote myself and display my value online if I want access to these opportunities."

So again, why writing? And now you have to understand that media, what people see on the internet and what catches attention, the foundation of media is writing. Tweets or writing threads or writing newsletters, blogs, or writing YouTube videos are from a written script, or at least they do the best from a written script because you can organize the message. Advertisements online usually writing-based. TikToks, Reels, short-form video also, it's like me reading a tweet from my phone, right? That's what I do. Is because the message is more impactful. And I will outperform any dude with six-pack abs and a poor message with my high-impact writing in various mediums, whether that be something like a YouTube video or even, uh, what is it, like a Reel or a TikTok. But but even then, I can just screenshot my tweet, put it on Instagram, call myself a writer because that's what I am, and outperform and grow to 230,000 followers without posting, uh, like a picture of my six-pack or something like that. Even though I could probably beat out some people, but I just like writing. It's more private, right? It's more private and I can dedicate myself to, uh, a craft and a delivering a valuable message as opposed to just joining in on the, the sausage fest online.

So since this is a bit different from my other videos, cuz this one is more actionable, right? Some of my other ones are more abstract, which I enjoy doing. But I want to deliver some more value over the coming weeks, months. So towards the end of my videos, after I give context like that, I'm going to go over step-by-step either process advice or just a framework you can use to actually implement the things that I'm saying into your life and test them and practice for yourself. So these are my nine steps for starting a one-person writing business. And just to, I guess, give social proof or authority because it's important to show that I know what I'm doing. I'm not a writer. I don't have an English degree. I don't, you don't need an English degree. I don't think the world wants English degrees. Writing online, they want good, authentic, and impactful writers, which means high AKA talking about the things you want to talk about and delivering it in your own unique voice like you would be texting a friend. That's what social media is. This is digital writing as opposed to professional writing or academic writing. So I'm throwing a lot of the rules out the window with my writing just because I like to write how I speak and I like to write whether it follows the perfect [ __ ] little writing rules or not. I like to write how I want to write and how I think it will deliver the most impact and the most value. So I'm, I'm just saying here that I average around $40 to $60,000 per month from my writing in about 2 hours a day of that writing. Now, of course, I am also building projects on the side, so I do work longer than that. But overall, if I were to strip away everything except for Twitter, my newsletter, and, uh, Twitter threads, I would retain 80 to 90% of my income simply because I don't really promote on other platforms. And all of my other platforms like YouTube or Instagram, they're all just based off of what I've already written, right? As a writer.

So let's get into the steps, right? So step one is to choose a topic that you cannot shut up about, right? And so how do you find these topics? Well, one, what are your favorite books? What do you enjoy reading? What do you get sucked into? The other thing is, what is your YouTube watch history, right? What are you genuinely interested in that you love learning about and love teaching about, right, to your friends? Let's say you learn something and then your friend asks, "Oh, what's going on in your life?" And you're like, "Oh, well, I'm learning about, uh, I'm learning how to code and I started building this website and it's really cool. Like, have you ever heard about HTML, CSS?" And the thing that sucks is that your friends don't really give a [ __ ] about that. But there's an audience online that does. And they want to hear you talk about it, no matter your experience, because that's all perspective-based. It's like, "Oh, well, I can't get online and say that I'm making $40 to $60,000 a month writing." So what can I do? Well, you can talk about it from a different perspective, right? You can post something as simple as, "Seven things that I learned about impactful writing," right? And then that is angled from a position that not only helps you build authority, but you don't have to fake it and like be try to be this guy that makes a [ __ ] ton of money. You just be the guy that is learning. Brand is what you do. So whatever you're doing right now, that's how you write, right? So if you're learning about something, then you are writing about how you are learning this specific thing and you're teaching what you are learning. So there's a few other ways. That was like YouTube watch history and your favorite books, but your social, your favorite social media accounts that aren't meme accounts or aren't, they're value creators. They create value and they give good advice.

So step number two is to brainstorm a unique perspective. Why? Because novelty catches attention. People like new things. That's why when you go out in nature and you're like, "Oh, wow, this is so beautiful." It's novelty. Or when you read a book and you read someone's unique perspective that completely makes sense to you and changes the way you think about it, that's one dopamine in your brain. That's excitement. But it's caused by a novel perspective. So how do you come up with a novel perspective? I want you to brain dump or write down, based on the topic that we wrote down earlier, common problems associated with that topic, benefits from overcoming those problems, and goals. Common goals associated with that. What are you helping people achieve, right? That's where how-to advice comes in, where it's like, what goal are you helping them achieve? And what problems are standing in the way? Your personal experience is related to that. And now, after that, what you do is you write it as if you were explaining how to get to that goal to a friend, knowing what you do with all of that that context, where it's like, "Okay, well, I'm trying to get to this goal, but the problem standing in the way is this." So how am I going to tell someone how to get there? Because a problem creates the perspective, right? Everyone has different problems, but that's what creates the perspective. It's pretty much what reality or what angle are you looking at this goal from and achieving this goal from? That's a unique perspective.

So step number three is to write 1,000-plus words on the topic. So every single piece of online content, or at least good content, is based around a personal or professional problem. So here's how you'll structure your writing that you can use this thousand words for, let's say, a newsletter or a blog article, or even like an Instagram caption or something like that, where you have a thousand words. It starts with a problem. So you explain the problem. It's called a lead, which comes after a headline. So you explain the problem and you paint a picture of the problem and how it's impacting people's lives. And then next, what you can do is you can either go into straight step-by-step advice on how to overcome that, or you can give some context relating to the benefits and why it is important to overcome that problem to persuade people further to actually take action. So it goes, explain the problem, give context and the why behind why they should solve that problem, and talk about the benefits of overcoming it. So that's paragraph two. And then paragraph three or section three is step-by-step advice on how to, uh, do that. It's the same thing as this YouTube video. All right.

So step four is setting up a blog or a newsletter software. So this is mainly for building authority, right? Long-form content builds authority more than like a short-form tweet or Reel or TikTok. Those are difficult to make sales on. And what people use those for is to drive people to their email list and sell once they've built authority with the depth that they provide in their content and holding attention for longer, right? So I rarely use fancy sales funnels or any of that [ __ ] anymore. I use what I call the 2-hour content ecosystem. So what that is is I write a newsletter every week. I condense that into a thread. I condense the actionable part into a thread, which is actually step five of this. But I condense that into a Twitter thread. And I base my tweets off of that post for the week. And then I plug my backlog newsletter on the blog to under my tweets. So people can read it and not only subscribe to the newsletter there, but purchase my products and services that I plug inside of the newsletter. So you rarely see me promote on the timeline unless I am promoting like a new product, like I am in this video with the 2-hour writer.

So step number five is to repurpose the actionable step-by-step section into a Twitter thread that can be turned into an Instagram carousel, uh, or something else along those lines. But that is usually how you grow on social media to start, um, is through actionable step-by-step content to prove your authority. And people just love lists. And, uh, it gets your brain juices flowing when you write a list a day. So you can do a list tweet where it's like, "How to do this, step, step, step, step, step." And then summarize it in one line. Boom. You're, you're a [ __ ] tweet writer now.

So step number six is learning how to actually grow on a platform, right? Because too many people think or think they're too good to actually learn strategies for social media growth. When it's, it's literally the differentiator between like whether you do what you love for a living or not. And so set your ego aside because it's not just posting good content. If you weren't growing, one, your content probably sucks. Like, good content, yes, is a given. But if it's like, I, you have all of these expectations where it's like, "Oh man, I'm this crazy philosopher and I like to write things so clever, but nobody likes it. It's a problem with them." And it's like, "No, dude, you have no idea what people want, and you have no idea what an impactful message consists of." So the main thing is that you have to understand one, branding. So what makes a good profile? What makes a compelling profile? And what makes people want to follow you? All of this is human nature and human behavior. It's psychology. It's marketing. And then what you also need to learn is how to get eyes on your profile. Cuz you can have the best profile and best content out there, but if you don't know how to to get eyeballs on your profile, then you're not going to grow. So how do you get eyes on your profile? One, and the most effective way is people sharing your content with their audience, right? So this is a retweet, this is a story share, this is a Facebook share, this is a YouTube share, uh, this is a like, people sharing your newsletter, I don't know. But then the, so there's multiple ways to do this. One is networking with other accounts that are similar to you. If you've taken a basic social media growth course, you understand the importance of networking. And you understand that engagement groups are a thing. Now, I'm not a huge fan of engagement groups, but I am a fan of making friends, networking with them, and actually having someone that you can grow with online, sharing strategies, sharing each other's posts. So group of like three to five people that are like your close online friends, because your offline friends probably aren't doing this. So you need a new friend group to help grow with you. So another common way of doing this is commenting on other big accounts' posts because they have a large audience. So if you post a good comment that delivers value and catches attention, this is where you can practice your writing skills. Then people will click on your profile, and if your profile is good, they'll follow you. So another way is to make your newsletter so good that it just gains traction eventually and people start talking about it and sharing it with their friends. It's the same with a YouTube video where you see a long YouTube video and someone shares it and they're like, "Damn, this is so good," and you start building loyal followers from the start. And then a, a less taboo way than you think of growing is by paying for shares. And I'm not talking, I'm not talking paid advertisements like Facebook ads or Instagram boost or Twitter boost or other things like that. It's no. You're paying. It's called influencer marketing. It's extremely important to learn in modern times. And it's really, you pay someone else to share your content, right? They share it, you get your content in front of someone's audience. If they like your content, then they follow you, and you're good to go. I don't like shoutouts. I like just pay someone for shares.

So number seven is to turn the impactful ideas from your long-form content, so your newsletters, into tweets. So my favorite way of writing shorter-form, like punchy content is, uh, the PPP framework that I came up with and that I talk about in my new course, which is Pull, Perspective, Punchline. So first, you pull them in with something that catches attention. Now, this can be so many different things. And I would recommend you study, like, headlines or just how people capture attention or how people lead into the body of their post, right? Where you can use a statistic, you can use a shocking fact, you can use things like the word "you," or you can exaggerate a bit where it's like, "The greatest skill of the 21st century is writing," right? Because people start reading and it's like, "The mo, the greatest skill." Okay, I'm going to continue reading because I want to figure out what that is. So you have to understand what catches attention and what leads people into the valuable parts of your post. So then the unique perspective, or just a different way of framing it, uh, is good. And then after that is a punchline, so something that ties it all together. So I'll give one example here. This is a recent tweet of mine, and it says, "People will spend 10 hours worrying about a task that takes 10 minutes to complete." So not only there, am I starting with "people," which people relate with, right? It's like, "people." I'm, "people." I'm going to read this. "People will spend 10 hours," and then 10 and 10 are also numbers. Those catch attention, uh, with themselves. And this is also a unique perspective on, like, worrying about stupid things, right? So it's spending 10 hours worrying about a task that takes 10 minutes to complete. And that's the punchline in itself as well. So one sentence can have this in entirety. But let's go over a different one, right? So, "Most people will spend 8 hours on someone else's dreams, 4 hours hiding from their own, 2 hours going through the motions, 16 hours awake, 24 hours of sleep. It doesn't have to take 40 years in a retirement plan to realize that a participation trophy isn't fulfilling." So you can see this PPP framework spread out a bit more in, like, longer list-style tweets because I have the first line, "Most people will spend," which catches attention because it's "most people." And then a unique perspective on, like, what people do. And I use numbers to hold attention as well. And then I wrap it up at the end with, "It doesn't have to take 40 years in a retirement plan to realize that a participation trophy isn't fulfilling." And so this is just one of many ways to start writing shorter-form content. The best you can do is really to start reading short-form content, or as with learning anything, you have to imitate and then innovate, where you imitate someone's tweet, right? And you use it as like a soft structure for your own. And of course, do not copy. It shouldn't have to say that, but do not copy or plagiarize people's stuff. You just use it as inspiration and take the structure of the tweet and make your own. And then once you get used to it and practice and realize like, "Okay, this, this is working, this isn't working," then you can start to play around with it and see what works best for you.

So number eight is developing a system, a writing system. So you can use other people's writing systems all the time. And I actually take pride in this because in the 2-hour writer, I help you create your own system. But the thing with this is that if you use someone else's system or framework, that's great, right? And this is what I want you to do, though, because, uh, things like systems and absolute advice and like all of that stuff, it, it strips you of your ability to figure things out for yourself, self-experiment, and come to your own conclusions, which is what makes a real expert. So my best advice is to research different frameworks and systems for writing, or anything. This is a universal principle where you research what you want to do, you find the different perspectives, you create your own. You literally write down steps of like, "Okay, I'm going to do this with my writing," whether it be like the problem, the context, and the step-by-step advice, or like, just when you write at your desk, am I going to try writing in 30-minute blocks or hour blocks, or am I going to write in the morning or at night? And you test and you experiment and you see what works best for yourself. And then you can eventually package up this system and tell people why it works for you.

And then number nine, the last thing, is branch out to other platforms. So once you have validated ideas from, let's say, Twitter, then you can take those validated ideas that have done well in terms of engagement and have helped you grow and take those to other platforms and just talk, start talking about them again because you already know they're going to to lead to growth, right? I grew on Instagram 10 times faster than anyone else because I already had validated ideas that I knew would do well as content on Instagram or LinkedIn or YouTube or even TikTok in some cases, or anything.

So let's recap on all of this and what you can do with 1 to 2 hours of writing a day and considering that you have a product or service that you can sell or you have an idea for one that you can build and fuel with your audience. But eventually, if you want, and you believe in yourself, and you have an abundance mindset, and you understand that the internet is infinite, then you can make a higher monthly salary than, like, one of the world's most highest-paid doctors because they have a cap. There is no room for improvement for a lot of them. So here is a recap: First, choose a topic that you cannot shut up about. Two, brainstorm a unique perspective that you have. Three, write 1,000-plus words in a structured way. Four, sign up for for a blog or newsletter platform and post it. Five, turn the actionable part of that newsletter itself into a Twitter thread. Five is learn how to network and grow on the platform. Six is turn your ideas from the newsletter into individual tweets so you have like a perpetual cycle of content. Next is develop a system for your writing. And then the last one is to branch out to other platforms when you are ready and when you have validated ideas.

Attention isn't the new currency. Information is. Because that's all humans really do. We process information with our senses and then we store it and we use that information to create or destroy. I'd like to believe that the unconscious evolution aligned intent behind modern technology, mainly social media, is to give us the information that we wouldn't normally have access to, thus increasing our potential in life. Information leads to awareness of opportunity. Awareness of opportunity leads to profitable ideas. Profitable ideas lead to positive behavior change. Now, manipulation of information can lead to things like death, destruction, scams, and other things like that. But we're here to talk about something different. We're here to talk about the good sides of information and how you can use information to create a better life for yourself. We live in the age of information. We don't live in the Industrial Age or something like that. We live in a great time because there is an abundance of ideas and just a ton of opportunities for, uh, things that we can pursue. But on the other side, there is an overwhelm of the same things, an overwhelm of information. And so I want you to understand one thing, and that is everything is information. Our genetic code is information. The light we see is information. The words on the screen we read is clearly information. But anything that we sense is information that we use as humans to either correct our behavior or change our behavior. If we touch fire and it's hot, that's information to take your hand away from the fire. Everything is information that we process, understand, or don't understand, or misunderstand, and then use to move better in the world. So it only makes sense that with better knowledge and better understanding and clarity of information, that we will make better decisions as human beings that lead to a life that we potentially love. Everyone has the same big goal that they are trying to achieve, and that goal is to increase the quality of your human experience as much as possible. That's what we're trying to do. If you're on social media, you're trying to get a good feeling, maybe, uh, even a bad feeling, just so you feel something. Our thoughts, emotions, and actions, which are all forms of information, dictate our human experience. And that experience is information in the form of feedback. So it's just a constant information loop that we are going through. And so we're going to be talking about this in the next video when we talk about how life is a video game. But we've also talked about it a few times before, and that is that the mind tends toward disorder because it is a system. Systems, they tend toward disorder because of entropy. And in

In order to maintain order in our minds, we need to consume or receive structured and ordered information that we understand. Because this is what happens, maybe we can't group everything into this phenomenon. But people hate what they don't understand, and that's exactly it. It's not that their mind isn't ordered because they don't understand the information; they are missing a side of the argument. And we're speaking in terms of like communication here, spoken or written language, because there is content and there is consciousness.

So, consciousness is our senses and or the sensory field that we have available to us. And the content is what we can kind of interact with and receive information from to understand. And so, the structure of that content dictates the structure of our consciousness, or orders our consciousness to the point of just feeling good. And so, it's just a fact that anyone can observe that most people use online information as a way to distract themselves through argument, mainstream news, or just flavor-of-the-day drama.

And then there's another group of people, a second group of people, that realize that this is a trap because they observe, maybe they understand that it's leading them, uh, down the wrong path. And they eventually become curious of what the other path looks like, what it looks like to go in the opposite direction and find good information that they can build their life with. And so, if, if you haven't already guessed, uh, by what we talk about in these videos, is we're going to be talking about information products and how to create a good one, because you have $100,000 in your head.

So, we just talked about two groups: the distracted and the curious. But there's one other group that is interesting. They are the ones that are trapped in the negative cycle of consuming content that tells them that new information is bad. And when I say new information, I mean things like courses, right? Courses, we all know that some get a bad rap. Many people that take courses know that there are incredible ones out there that can genuinely change your life, right? Because the thing is, is that the, there's two different ways or modalities of education in this age.

There's the formal education system, which will train you into the employment system that it is directly tied with. And then there is the creator economy, so people putting out free information online after they forge a new path in this world, and they teach you how to do it yourself. So, if you want a career of independence and doing your own thing, you're probably, you may or may not find that in the formal education route, and especially not for free online. If you can think critically and you can find a good person worth investing in for a course that teaches you what they do, or what they've discovered as a better way of doing things, or maybe a new career path that has been created because of the internet, then that could be a very good route to go. And I believe that those are the modes of education that are going to teach you how to do your own thing rather than how to do someone else's thing.

So, my whole point with this is that one, if you have a negative connotation around courses or coaching or just information products in general, one, I would encourage you to go into this video with an open mind. But at the same time, if you're stuck in that mental trap, then don't watch the video, right? I don't want people. It doesn't make sense that you would write off an epoch of existence, the age of information, just because you had one bad experience with a sleazy marketer or some sleazy snake oil salesman, right? Liver King comes to mind here, even though he's not selling courses, but that's for another time. And I don't like getting involved in like the whole drama stuff.

So, to the people that are still here, I want to tell you that you have $100,000 worth of information sitting in your head. You may not right now, but some of you do. And so, in this video, I want to propose a system for you being able to package up this information in a valuable way that can genuinely help other people, a way to use information for good while opening up the potential for more opportunities with other people to profit from, to make a living from. And I, I don't really, I don't think, to me, there's not really a better business model. It sounds weird because the information business is so new, but we just talked about how everything is information and how, um, the only goal that people want to achieve is a higher quality of life, a higher quality of human experience. And it's not like you have to go and build a mega corporation in order to achieve that experience. That's all we want. If we were at peace and we were living perfect lives, then we wouldn't want more, more, more.

So, if we can get more people to the self-actualized and self-transcended stage of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we'd be in a lot better spot. Because it, it's like information allows people to do more things. If I had the right information, I could go and build whatever I want to build, right? But someone has to build it before me and teach me how to do it, or I have to do it myself. But if I'm busy doing my own thing, then I'm going to have to go to someone else for that information. Am I saying everyone's going to do this? No. Am I saying that you can? Yes, because there is a small fraction of the human population watching this video, and there's even an even smaller fraction of people that are actually interested in this stuff.

And just for a bit of credibility, I, I want to give a cliff notes version of my backstory. I've talked about it before, and I'll have to come back and, uh, create a better video of my entire story. But in a nutshell, I tried so many different things. I tried a bunch of different business models. I failed at them because I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't have the compound knowledge and experience to actually make it work. I lost a bunch of money trying to make those businesses work. I ended up getting a job as a web designer, and then I took what I learned there and what I had previously experienced through my failures and started freelancing with web design and funnels. And then three years ago is when I started my creator journey on Twitter, of all places.

And so, on Twitter, I began to kind of pivot my freelance service. I created my first info product, and then I ended up creating three info products within a year. And then at this point, I also pivoted my freelance service to be more consulting for creators. So, rather than web design and funnels for service businesses, it was, um, funnel consulting or just like marketing offer creation and consulting for service-based creators. And so, then, uh, in the second year, I was profitable with all of these, thankfully, and I was growing on social media. And I decided I wanted to start a community, Modern Mastery. Many of you know of it. But I bundled up the courses that I had already created and I put them inside there as bonuses and as like a launch thing. This is a very important point.

So, now, finally, in my third year, I created, after a long story of losing my phone after a night getting drunk and driving back home in the car, I had a bunch of ideas, and I ended up recreating my entire offer stack. So, now it's Modern Mastery, two-hour writer course, a cohort, and that's it. And then the lead magnet, so, seven days to genius ideas, is, uh, my note-taking system that's valuable. And so, there, there's two lessons here, right? Is that one, I feel pretty, uh, qualified to talk about and teach about this stuff. I've made, uh, six figures in my first year with info products, and then I've made it with consulting, I've made it with freelancing, I've made it with almost every, I've made six figures with almost every online business offer there is: done for you, done with you, do it yourself, info products, consulting, coaching, freelancing, all of the above.

And so, the second point is where a lot of people kind of go wrong, where they feel like they shouldn't build at the start or until they build an audience. When I'm a proponent of building immediately, because I learned this through experience, where every single product I built, even the two that just failed miserably and I stopped selling like a week after starting to sell them, is that I was able, had ordered information that I could use elsewhere. I got bad ideas out of my head, not bad as in like bad, but like bad as in unvalidated, and they just didn't resonate with people. I got those out of my head, and I was able to build on top of them. It was like clearing my mind and freeing new way to build on top of that and understand things deeper.

Because the three info products that I created the first year, and I didn't see going anywhere, I didn't just get rid of them, right? Because there's still value there. There was still a lot of value. So, I packaged them up and I created a new offer out of it, and now Modern Mastery has been going for two years strong. So, in, in essence, your first product that we're going to be talking about building, it's going to suck. You just have to get it out, and you have to iterate and build on top of it. There's a quote from Naval where it's like, it's not 10,000 hours, it's 10,000 iterations. So, you just have to build, build, build, build, build.

Now, let's talk about how to extract the value that you have stuck in your brain. Brand is what you do. Product is how you do it. Marketing is why you do it. Do something that improves your quality of life, teach others how you did it, and show them why they should care.

So, in previous videos, we talked about the one-person business model, the rise of the value creator, and then a few others revolving around business. Now, those did pretty well. I feel like most of you are here because of those videos, and so that's why I'm making this one, and that's why I'm going to be making more to dive deeper into certain aspects of those letters, to give you a, a holistic view on this whole one-person business model or creator thing from my lens, because I feel like I have a unique way of going about it that makes it easier for people to actually start and take action and not worry so much about having X amount of experience.

So, in this video, I want to talk about how you can ideate the perfect product while doing what you enjoy in life, or just improving yourself in general, improving your life. So, if your personal brand revolves around what you do, then your product revolves around how you do it. And so, with branding, a brand, it has a goal, it has something that you're leading people towards, right? And so, your brand, in this case, is what you are doing on a daily basis that is going to get you towards that goal. And now, how you do it is the system, method, or process that you used to get better results for yourself, or something that you built for yourself to do what you do better. And this comes from experience and experimentation.

So, I sold a "how to freelance for web designers" product because I made six figures freelancing with web design, right? And so, it only made sense that I knew how to do that. I had my own specific processes for landing clients, for, uh, onboarding those clients, for doing the project management for those clients, and it would make sense for me to put that in a course to help other people do it better. And so, Modern Mastery, I built the community as if it were something that I would have used when I was at the start of my journey. So, I turned, like, a part of it into having daily reminders to knock out your priority tasks, a strategy library, we've done, like, habit challenges and other things like that.

And so, now I also sell a writing product because what I do in order to clear my mind, have a better future for myself, unlock more career opportunities, as I write every single morning, not only to grow on social media, but to network with other people and to just journal. And I had built a 500,000 plus audience across different social media platforms with a two-hour writing habit a day. And so, when I was building that audience, I was creating newsletters, I was writing tweets, I was creating Instagram posts, and I had learned a lot of things that I was directly applying to what I'm doing. So, I had a better way of doing it. So, the "how I do it" is different from other people's because I had my own specific templates for, I created my own specific templates for writing my newsletters, for writing my tweets, and making it easier on myself so I could systemize those things and do them better.

And so, in the case of something else, like fitness, there's people that sell minimalist training programs and are just raking in the cash because if they aren't super into fitness like a bodybuilder and they don't want to train five, six, seven days a week, instead they want to train two days a week. So, they do their research, they experiment, and they create a training program that gets them results. It would only make sense that they help other people do that, other people that are like them, because you are the niche. And so, helping those other people with the system you created, like being in the gym for two hours of a week and still getting these kinds of results, that's unique. And the marketing is laid out for you already, just because you're doing it in a way that, like, you'd be able to market it towards yourself. You'd be able to give people the "why" because marketing is why you do it.

And so, the "why" behind, like, a minimalist training program would be, I only have two hours a week to train in the gym. I still want to be fit. I still want to be healthy. Uh, I still want to work on my business, right? The marketing lays itself out for a person that is very similar to you.

So, in summary, everyone that has productized themselves has done three things: one, they improved their quality of life through personal and professional development. Two, they learned necessary skills and interests along the way to increase their quality of life. Three, they started posting online, regardless of how basic they thought their information was.

So, here are three questions that you can ask yourself to brainstorm a profitable product idea. So, one is, what is the highlight of your day? Is it writing? Is it yoga? Is it going to the gym? What is seamless for you to do and learn about, right? Or what do you do for work? Is there something that you are, uh, very good at that you'd be able to teach other people? Is there something that you have done that you may not think is impressive, but like, you're the only one that thinks that is impressive, or you're so like immersed in a specific community of people that have done that same thing that you think it's just normal and that everyone has done that? And so, a question about that.

The second one, which is, what do you do better than your peers, or what do you do better than most people? Is just that. And the way you can kind of test this is by how you justify you doing that. Like, Chris Bumstead, who's a Mr. Olympia competitor, he mentioned one time that he had to give up the normal life so he could stay home and cook healthy meals or not go out and drink and be tempted by junk food because he had a mission or a goal that he was so dead set on achieving with a specific skill set of his that his friends didn't get. But he knew that it was going to lead to something great. So, if there is something like that in your life that you are genuinely obsessed with, why would you not turn it into something that you can help other people do that are like you?

So, the third way to brainstorm a product idea is to look at who you follow and what they sell. Because I'm assuming that you follow people that you're interested in following, right? You're learning something from some people. If you're watching this video, you're more on, like, I get on social media to be educated rather than entertained, mainly. And so, I guarantee that there are people selling something, right? So, if you like self-improvement and you like, uh, online business and you want to do something like that, then go and deconstruct my landing pages, go look at my emails, go look at all the things that I'm doing, and deconstruct it and figure out how you can reverse engineer and kind of emulate that. And it goes for anything. If you are very big into fitness and you follow a lot of fitness people, what are they all doing that allows them to do that full-time?

And so, bonus number four, for those who haven't started: If you haven't started, you have to be decisive. Pick a path that slightly interests you and just start. Because that will get you to the point of knowing so much faster than procrastinating. Like, it doesn't matter if you don't know what you're doing. It doesn't matter anything. Just continuously learn and build according to what you're learning. Watch the last video on how I remember everything I learned to understand that more.

Here's a graphic, as we always do. At the top, we have knowledge and experience, AKA information, or valuable information in this case, right? That you attain through the journey of self-actualization. Isn't it? Isn't once you self-actualize? It's along the way. And documenting your journey. And then from that, you break it down into your brand, your product, and your marketing, with what you do, how you do it, why you do it. And then that equals a one-person business or self-monetization. It's just a way of framing your knowledge and experiences on online in the form of brand, product, content, with consistent effort to put your name out there and build your own public resume. That's what matters.

And so, I want to reiterate, in what I talk about, I'm not talking about B2B info products. I'm not talking about business to business. I'm talking about productizing yourself, treating yourself as the niche, writing to yourself, building to yourself, and monetizing that way. And now, a lot of traditional marketers don't like that approach. And I, I can tell you, just from my results alone, and the people, the big players that reach out to me asking how to do the same, that it doesn't have to be as complicated as the copywriters and marketers and salesmen make it seem. Because I've done all of that. I've done all of that. And it always sounds weird to say it this way, but I'm making 10 times more that I than I was by trying to follow the copy and sales hacks out there, just being authentic with that skill set, like still using that skill set to create compelling social media posts and sales pages. That's good, but from an authentic lens and talking to a target customer that I know well.

And so, one crucial point here is that when you are building, it has to be done in public. You have to be posting, you have to be building, you have to be publishing, you have to be launching, because you need data. We're talking about giving out valuable information here, and you need data to know if the information is valuable or not. Because starving artists, it's in the name, starving artists like to create what they think is valuable, and they get attached to their version of value, and then they wonder, like, "Okay, why am I not selling anything? This painting is beautiful." And like, nothing against that, if you want to do it as a hobby, that's great. But if you want to do it as a, a full-time thing, then you're going to have to play a back-and-forth game with the market. Because again, like another big good reason behind this is that you're trying to improve people's lives, right? That's a good reason behind this. You're trying to improve people's lives. And if you're putting out these things that people aren't buying, and they're not going through, and they're not reading, and you can't hold their attention, is it really valuable? Like, if it's not getting results, then you're just going to have a bad time. So, you have to iterate and pivot.

Let's dive in and let's break this all down into seven steps on how to create a profitable information product with the knowledge in your head. The first one, which is a given, but it needs to be stated, is to become above average in select skills or interests. Motivation gets you into this game. Learning is what helps you continue to play. Creativity is how you steer. Flow is how you turbo boost the results beyond all rational standards and reasonable expectations. Steven Kotler.

So, we've, we've discussed this many times before, and I, I feel like many of you are already studying and learning and practicing skills or interests. And so, here's something that just most people don't want to hear. If you aren't getting results, or you aren't making money, or you've been putting in effort for a long time, it's still a skill problem. It's because you aren't skilled enough. You haven't put in enough time in the right direction with the getting the right data and iterating to the point of knowing what actually gets results with that skill. Because someone asked me on social media the other day, like, "Hey, why? I've been doing everything that the, the social media growth people say to do. I've been doing all the fundamentals, but why am I not growing?" And it's because it's, it's a skill problem. Because on social media, the common advice is like, comment on big accounts, uh, DM people, and things like that. But if you aren't seeing results, it's usually because you weren't seeing the missing piece in the skill set that's going to make it work. Is it your messaging? Like, if you're, uh, not very good at speaking English, is it your English? Do you need to touch up on that? Like, another weird thing is, like, on Twitter, like, do you put a space before your punctuation when writing, right? Like, how people sometimes write like a question mark with a space before it. And I know that's like a common thing for a lot of people, but when you're doing it in a professional manner online and trying to make an income from it, it's just not going to cut it. You have to have, like, good grammar. And so, that's, those are just a few examples, but there may be something that you are missing in the skill that is preventing you from getting results.

So, step number two is to build something with those skills every single day. So, we talked about this in the last video, so I'll keep this brief, but you learn more when you, you build and learn to apply to what you're building, and then you teach to fill in the knowledge gaps or identify the knowledge gaps you have and fill the, fill in the blanks with learning. And so, if you're learning marketing, then build a brand, or practice on a portfolio piece, or just practice for, do a permissionless apprenticeship where you create something, let's say, like a website for your favorite brand. You can send it to them, sure, but you can also just do it for practice. Now, of course, my favorite way of doing this is a personal brand, because you can create your own website, you can write your own content, you can create your own email list, you can write your own emails, you can design your own profile picture, design your own banner. There is a plethora of the most high-value skills that you can learn and apply to a personal brand.

So, number three is document your learnings, findings, or results. So, my favorite way to think of this is to just think of social media as a public note-taking software, a public journal, and a public school. Because when I'm creating these, or, um, um, when I'm writing a newsletter or something like that, I have everything on Twitter, right? I can do Twitter advanced search and I can just look up the word "valuable" from any of my tweets, and then I just have stuff to go off of. So, it's a note-taking system. Um, it's a journal, 'cause I can put my thoughts, my relatable thoughts, and worries, and ideas, and other things like that. And it's just good to practice writing.

Okay, now, step number four is very important, and that is to experiment for holistic understanding. And so, I've always loved doing things my own way, and my own way is implementing the best teachings from various sources until I have a better way of doing it, or a unique way of doing it. So, fitness being an example is that I used someone's initial program, like StrongLifts 5x5, to get into the gym and start lifting. But then I studied someone like Greg Doucette, who only trains two to three days a week, very different training style. And then I tried Wendler 5/3/1, which is powerlifting. Then I've tried like super high volume, uh, bodybuilding splits. And with that, I have so much different data, and I understand that there are billions of different ways to go about getting one specific result. And that if I can find a way that I genuinely enjoy doing myself, create my own program for me, I could go and package that up and sell it to someone else. I could probably plug it in this video and make a decent income, maybe if I like took off my shirt and marketed myself and like my fitness stuff a bit more, I could. Because I'm a personal brand, that's why I like them so much, is that they're so dynamic. I don't have to stick to a specific niche if I don't want to, as long as I make my interest interesting to you.

And so, the same thing goes with diet. It's like, I've tried If It Fits Your Macros, I've tried ancestral stuff, I've tried veganism, I've tried keto. And from those, I get something new every single time, right? So, me trying Greg Doucette's diet, where it's low-calorie foods, I really enjoyed his anabolic French toast, so I eat that quite a bit. But on the ancestral side of things, it's like, well, I know that liver is very nutrient-dense, so I'm going to incorporate that somehow. And the same thing with like ground beef and eggs and other things. And I gain this big picture understanding that allows me to create 10 times more valuable information than the people that are just trapped in one ideology. The future belongs to those that can deliver holistic, nuanced, but yet interesting information to other people that is valuable in this upcoming century.

And so, this is the way of the synthesizer, or, uh, it is the career path, as we talked about, for self-improver or polymath. It's a way to study all angles of one of your specific interests or multiple interests and talk about your findings, the things that are valuable there, the signal amongst the noise. So, I like to think of creators as DJs or idea junkies. Or idea junkies. They do exactly what creators do, but with music. Like, EDM, or electronic dance music, is something that's relatively new, but new genres and subgenres are being created every single week. Like, there are just so many. And you don't find that in like traditional music. This is what technology has opened for human beings: the ability to be infinitely creative. Because in regular music, you have like jazz, R&B, country, rock and roll, other things like that. But then in, in EDM, or electronic dance music, you have like rhythm, zap step, dub step, grim step, like all of these different things, which are slightly different from each other. They're just minor distinctions between the two, but that's how people separate themselves from the crowd. That's how people stand out because they have the technology to do so. You have the information available to you to become an idea junkie and synthesize an entire philosophy of your own into internet content. So, ideas are the sounds, and then when you mix them together, the content are the songs. So, create your mix, play it loud, and attract an audience.

So, step number five is to iterate on your process for efficiency and results. So, once you have, once you've been doing this, right? You've been pursuing your goals for a better life. You've encountered problems. You're learning the skills to overcome them. Like, you want to make more money, so you learn marketing and you start freelancing, or you start an agency, or you start a personal brand, and you get results. You usually have the information to create your own process for replicating those results, right? If I want to be productive every single morning, then I need to sit down, and I need to write down my three priority tasks, and I need to remind myself of my vision for my future. I need to, uh, close all my browser tabs, and other things. In business, these are called SOPs, or standard operating procedures. So, you are going to write down steps of how you get to a specific result, and then you're going to follow that, and you're going to encounter problems, and you're going to be like, "Oh, that could be a bit different," and then you're going to change that and make it better until it is valuable enough to offer in a product and create a curriculum around.

So, I had an SOP for creating websites for my clients or myself. I just created steps and I turned it into a course, and I filmed videos going over those steps and talking about the nuances. In "Two-Hour Writer," my course, I created a system that allowed me to write newsletters that are arguably, um, more deep and thought-provoking than a, a lot are in the creator space, right? And so, that's different. That's valuable, and people want to learn that. And so, I packaged it up. I put my system in Notion and I built a curriculum around it, and now I can sell that, and it gets people similar results. And so, if you download any of my products, even my free products, you can see this, right? Deconstruct the landing pages. Like, go to the Power Planner, see what I promise, and see the system that I created and turned into a planner. For "7 Days to Genius," these are free. That's how I have creative ideas through note-taking, and I created my own system from that, right? You can use other people's systems as inspiration. I use Smart Notes and Zettelkasten in order to create what I call value notes. And now I'm creating an entire software around that system that I can sell.

So, step number six is to steal marketing and structure that already works. Sell what's already selling. This is the best single piece of counterintuitive advice I've ever received in my career. I created the two-hour writer because I knew how profitable the writing niche was. In my little corner of Twitter, people, I knew people that were banking, like, $2-3 million a year from just running a cohort on basic writing. They weren't promising any kind of money, like, it wasn't a make money online product. Um, it wasn't anything fancy. It was just, "Learn how to write." They had good, compelling copy in a sales page, but they were pulling, like, $2 to $3 million. And so, I'm like, "I write every single day. I'm going to get in on this." And on Black Friday, I did $130,000 in sales in three days.

And so, even with this, to, to make it easier on myself, when I went to go and create a writing product, I would go throughout their funnels, their emails, and their landing pages, and I would take things like the headlines, the burning problems that they talk about, the offer and the curriculum structure, the guarantee, benefits, FAQs, and the rest, the positioning, like them not being "how to make money online with writing." And so, that's just inspiration. That is so much information at my fingertips for me to replicate, clearly not just copy and paste, because I have my own way of doing it, and I have to articulate that. But the structure and the, the "why" behind why that works.

And so, my first product was an ebook on how to freelance with web development. And I created it because I knew it would sell. I had personally bought a freelancing product before. I knew that as a developer, that I was, that I loved buying courses. I could not stop buying courses. It didn't matter if it was the same topic over and over again. And so, that is how I learned that buyers buy again. So, if I simply put a freelancing product for web developers in front of web developers, and it was good, I knew that I was going to make at least some form of an income from it, and then I can iterate and make it better from there and make more. And I also knew that most web developers were buying the courses on like course platforms like Udemy. So, if I wanted to pull in an actual sustainable income, I knew that I would have to create a personal brand and sell to my audience, because then I wouldn't have to deal with that entire competition. Then I have a personal monopoly, which we're going to talk about in two videos from now. But that's pretty much it.

So, step number seven is to build distribution and systemize promotions. So, there are a lot of moving pieces in business. Brand is one of them, but you don't have to change that too much. Once you have, like, your brand, it's pretty much solidified. Product, you, yeah, you're going to update it, and you're going to change it, and you're going to iterate a few times, but it's going to be, um, like, few and far between compared to content and promotions. So, content is for building distribution, an audience, an email list, the community, if you feel like it. And then marketing is distributing your product through promotions, so plugging in your social post, promoting in your newsletter, changing up the angle and the messaging. And the only way you're going to succeed in this great online game is through testing, persistence, and iteration.

Right, with promotions, it's, it's kind of obvious. You put out a promotion, let's say, just one time. You choose a specific angle. So, for writing, I'm like, "Here's a skill you can learn in your free time." Crappy angle, but whatever. And let's say it sells X amount, or it sells nothing. And if it sells nothing, then I need to dig deeper into that, and I need to look, "Okay, how many clicks did that get? How many actually got to the landing page? What tweet was it under? What was I talking about that day?" And then you can slowly start to change things up day after day after day after day until you hit this angle that just sells really well, and then you're moving in the right direction. Then you take that and you make a spin-off of it. Because content and promotions is about saying one validated, valuable thing 1,000 different ways from 1,000 different angles.

And so, this is why it's a game of time and consistency. Because the first year is just, you're going to hit wall after wall after wall. You're going to fail, fail, fail, unless you have prior experience. But in one to three years, and after testing and iterating so many different times, and just having it solidified in your head of what is validated, what is valuable, and what are the best content and promotion angles that you can go for, then that's just like exponential growth at that point, because you're consistently putting out top-notch content and promotions. So, you learn to harness the power of self-awareness and intuition.

So, the caveat here is that you have to start writing, building, and promoting. And if you're anxious or you're fearful about this, you have to remember that the unknown becomes known with time. If you, it's not really like this, but if you threw yourself into the middle of the ocean and didn't really know how to swim, if you were able to breathe and live, you'd eventually learn how to swim, right? That example, but you get the point. And so, you'll have to lean into it at some point, and it might as well be now.

The one-person business roadmap. 99% of creators make this mistake. This is a video in the series that we've been doing on one-person businesses. Business, I, and this one is meant to give somewhat of a roadmap, just along your journey, to know what to expect. Because there's different stages, which we'll dive into. But I, I don't want other people like looking at what other people are doing in business and expecting that they should do the same thing. Because a 100,000 follower account that's making a billion million dollars a year is not going to be doing anything remotely similar to what you should be doing at the beginning.

So, to start this off, this video is sponsored by me, because Digital Economics, you don't have to enroll in it as a cohort anymore. It can be enrolled in as a self-paced course now. So, it's not closed off till February. You can get in at any time. And so, in a nutshell, I'll let you explore if you want to. I'll save the promotion for later, but you can just go to the link in the description, click, see what it's all about. But in short, it's productizing yourself. Everything we've been talking about in this one-person business series, it is systems for doing that with a Notion command center, so templates to just plug and play, create your brand, write content, systemize it, create a product, create a service, make it profitable from the very start with zero experience, and how to promote and automate promotion so you consistently make sales. So, it's growing your brand with content, leading people into your product or service, and then automating that or systemizing it to two to four hours a day so you can continue to grow and monetize with time.

So, now let's get back into it. So, if you're a one-person creator business or want to be, pay attention because I've been in this game for three years now, in the creator game, right? I did freelancing and other stuff for that, so I had a little bit of a head start when I got into the whole creator scene. Now, I've seen accounts that are small and large fall off the map. I've also seen small accounts making $100,000 a month. I've also seen huge accounts with a ton of followers making less than $1,000 a month. And most people see one or the other and just think it's a bad thing. I'm here to tell you that you can do both. You can grow big and you can monetize. Because like the classic saying is that like, you don't want to aim for followers or just grow really fast in followers because then you're not going to be able to monetize because they're very generic. And then it's like, if you understood marketing to any extent, you can raise the awareness level of that audience to the point of being a buyer. And if you stick at a low audience, and you're in that cycle of, "I need to reach out and do manual labor or have some form of system outside of what I've built in order to land clients," I don't see that as sustainable, right? We want to continue to grow and evolve to the point of where we can control our time and income, the things that we work on, and just have complete control over our lives and our businesses, but still providing value and doing what we're supposed to do as a business, but not getting trapped in one specific stage.

So, I'm here to tell you that you can do both of the above, grow big. If you have the skill, it's a skill. It's not luck or just like growing out of nowhere. It's a skill. Social media is a skill. And you can create an offer ladder of valuable products and services that allow you to, uh, pull in an income, preferably doing what you enjoy, because that's what your offer or product should revolve around, and decreasing the time you spent on actually fulfilling that product or service. And so, we do this with something that most people just skip over or don't think about at all, and that is leverage. In this case, specifically, it's digital leverage.

So, I'll paint a picture of what I mean here. And it always sounds self-aggrandizing like when I say it this way, like, but it's just to paint a picture, right? So, I have 500,000 plus followers across different social media platforms. YouTube is one of my smallest. And with that, like on Instagram, I can reach out to, I have multiple celebrities following me. I can reach out to almost anyone and get a reply. Your average freelancer who wants to work with these celebrities cannot do that. And that's part of what I'm saying here is that if you had an audience and didn't even sell through it, or even talk about, let's say, web design as your freelance service, I could get in front of a celebrity and potentially persuade them to purchase web design services from me just in the DMs alone. I can also promote a product or service to my audience and have it reach 10x the followers that I have, because the network effect, right? My promotions and my content are not only reaching my followers, but their followers as well. So, 500,000, and if every single person had like 500 followers that follow me, then multiply that. Or I have multiple people with over 100,000 follower audiences following me, because that's what creators do is just follow each other. And so, I have a lot more potential traffic than just those 500,000 followers. That compounds.

And along with that, I can increase or decrease my income as much as I want to, depending on how much I want to work, what new projects I'm working on, if I want to work on new projects, etc., etc. And just to, like, put a cherry on top, if I really wanted to, I couldn't do this before if I didn't have a lot of followers. And that's why I always find it funny people telling you not to gain a lot of followers. If no one's saying this, you're probably not in the social media circle of people saying this. But, but marketers on social media do say this. So, if I really wanted to, I could make $50,000 in 24 hours. And if I really wanted to push it and like step moral boundaries, which I don't want to do because it doesn't feel good, I could make $100,000 in 24 hours, or even more. And on special occasions like Black Friday, when it's justified, I made $139,000 in the course of three to four days. And I know screenshots can be photoshopped, and you may not believe it, but I'm just putting it out there.

And so, before we dive further, I have to preface once again that this is for one-person creator businesses. This is for people that want to talk about their interests, build an income doing so, not hire many employees, if any at all, and unlock that level of freedom that you can, that technology has allowed the individual to do for themselves. So, this is not for freelancers, or it can be for freelancers if you want to build an audience. But overall, the, the main message I'm trying to put out here is, if you have a goal of your own, and this, this video does not align with your goals, don't let flashy screenshots or other things distract you from the goal. You can still watch it and gain awareness, but overall, just keep that in mind. The internet enables 8 billion monopolies.

To make things simple, your brand as a creator, or your personal brand, is based around what you want out of life, the thing that you are leading your followers towards. And everyone has the same desires. And those desires, or those problems, or those goals, all fall under the eternal markets. This is a very important concept for you to understand. The eternal markets are health, wealth, relationships, and a bonus is happiness. So, the first three of those, health, wealth, and relationships, are survival-based. They're self-actualization-based. And the last one, happiness, is self-transcendence-based. And these markets are where all burning problems exist, because that's like, survival problems are the most burning problems. That's what people are trying to solve, no matter which way they're doing it. If they're starting a business, it's because they're usually trying to fix some part of their survival. If they're buying a nice car, it's because they're usually trying to, uh, survive via status. And so, with these markets, that's how you create a compelling angle for your marketing, or just products, or brand, or content in general, by targeting these relevant, profitable, and evergreen markets. But now, we don't just want a normal.

Old personal brand or Creator, we want a personal Monopoly. Like the naval quote said, a monopoly. Irreplaceable is a good word. But how do we become irreplaceable? By pursuing your genuine curiosity, because that's what makes you, you. And you are the only you on this planet. So if you want a desaturated niche of one, you are the niche.

But the thing is, most people can't pursue their curiosity, at least not consistently or full-time. Why? Because their attention is being manhandled by their base psychological needs. Self-actualization, the hierarchy of needs, that is a need, not a want for living the good life. So your future isn't about competition with others, it's about competition with your distracted mind. Meaning, an exceptional future belongs to those who can master their survival, pursue their genuine curiosity, and pass down what they learned along the way. So improve yourself, solve your own problems, master your survival, document your journey, pursue your curiosity, and separate yourself from the crowd.

How you do this is unique to you. If this helps you understand it more, your story is your brand, right? A story, it has its highs and lows. It has problems that you overcome over and over. It's like an endless story. And as many marketers know, stories are what sell. Stories are just how humans make sense of the world. Transformations with things like sales or the sales process, and you implying a transformation, that is a story.

When you're writing copy or copywriting, it always starts with a lead, which illustrates a problem and agitates a problem. And then it shows you how to overcome it. And then it gives you like testimonials on how to do so for proof. And it's just marketing and sales are just different tactics with a foundation of human psychology that help you, uh, show someone that they can transform, and preferably help them to transform. That is the right way of doing marketing and sales.

There's, of course, like exploitation and manipulation in this to reach a non-mutual benefit, and that's what's labeled as a scam. It's promising a certain thing and not being able to deliver on it. So I'm just putting this out there is that you have to be able to deliver on something. And if you can't, and you don't refund them, that's a scam.

So I always give this example of if I'm pursuing financial freedom as just like a big, broad goal, my path to get there is going to be completely different from someone else's. If I'm going to learn a skill like web design in order to freelance to unlock financial freedom, while another person goes to like a high-paying tech job and then starts investing and then eventually retires. Those are completely different paths. They're completely different stories with different problems, but it helps people reach the same goal. And that story is is valuable to the generation under you. That's what people want to follow along with, right? That's why you watch a movie or read a book is because of an interesting story.

So if you can put yours out online while still distributing like actionable advice and valuable information along with it, then you've, you've created your own personal Monopoly, or mental Monopoly, is how I like to call it. So why is this important? Because that's what we're here to do is self-actualize and transcend. You pass down your lessons and you help others get there faster. And so if enough people do this, just imagine what kind of world we can create. I, I am truly, like, maybe I'm [ __ ] delusional, who knows, but I am like, I feel like I'm putting across a good message here of one, improve yourself, help others improve themselves with your prior experience, and both of you reap the benefits of doing so, right? And so if enough people self-actualize and transcend through this method with business as their vessel to do so, then they open up more people to the potential of creative problem solving, right? Using their minds for something else rather than themselves, right? Selflessness. After you solve your selfish needs, creativity, innovation, and discovery through the pursuit of curiosity are what will take us into the next phase of evolution, whatever it may be.

Build distribution, then build whatever you want in life. As Joe Rogan says, discipline equals freedom. But in business, especially this one-person business, distribution equals freedom. Distribution. This is an important concept. This is a very important concept that again, not many people talk about, right? This falls under digital leverage. But everyone is focused on like the generic social media tactics. Distribution from the lens of a creator business is the potential traffic that you have to send to a product, service, or just like some crevice of the internet, or some internet content, or something. And so there are three types of distribution: there is built, borrowed, and bought.

So you build distribution by growing on social media, right? That's what social media is nowadays. It's a way to gather an audience or readership for the value that you are providing. And the more people you have there, you retain that audience, right? But the next thing you should do is deplatform them because social media can go away at any time. It may not. It may. And especially if you're polarizing and post like controversial takes, you could get canceled from the platform and lose your entire audience. So deplatform them by sending them to an email list, because nobody can take emails away from you, or a community, a Telegram channel, something like that. And continuously feed them into that and deliver more value in depth in those areas. And so that is the most important one is building distribution, right? Because you're not borrowing it or paying for it. It's kind of in your control.

But the next one is borrowing distribution. And this is for things like podcasts, where you can get on someone else's podcast and promote yourself and your products. You can pay for a podcast sponsor, that kind of falls under paid. Um, but other things like, uh, you being mentioned in someone's newsletter, or you doing a guest post on someone's blog, or just someone retweeting you and you getting to borrow that traffic. But at the same time, it's, it's spilling over into your own built traffic when you're doing things like, like you get retweeted or shared on Instagram by a big account.

And so the best way to do this is, we talked about a personal Monopoly, but the next thing is the mental Monopoly, which I like to kind of frame as just having great ideas that people tie to you, right? We'll talk about this more, but it's like when you read your favorite book, or when I ask you what your favorite book is, and you say, "Oh, it's The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle," and then you think of an idea that you learned from that book that you attribute to him. That's what I mean, right? When you put out consistently good ideas that stick in people's heads, when they come across something in their life that reminds them of that idea, they're going to be reminded of you. And that's what makes you unique among the people that are just putting out generic content and quotes.

And so lastly, you buy distribution by like paying for ads, like Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc. You can also pay for shoutouts, but these all like overlap, right? So you can pay for shoutouts from people to borrow their audience and have some of that spill over into yours. But overall, out of all three of those, you should focus on building your own distribution.

So here is an image of my current distribution network, right? So at the top, I, I like to think of a brand as having three pillars, which is growth, authenticity, and authority. So at the top, with growth, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, those are my top-of-funnel like growth. That's how I build distribution is with short-form content on the platforms where it's much easier to control growth with things like shares, as opposed to authenticity in the bottom right with podcast, YouTube, newsletter, even like blog SEO would fall under that. That's where I talk more and like give more actionable advice, but also work in some of my own language. Because podcast, YouTube, SEO, they're much slower to grow, and I prefer to grow with Twitter and Instagram, LinkedIn, and then transfer those over to the podcast, YouTube, or blog or newsletter. And then in the bottom left, to build authority, it's either for me, it's a course, cohort, and community. But for many people, I'm writing a book right now. And for others, it can be more than that. It's just a product that allows people to buy from you, invest in you, them get something valuable in return, and that exchange be meaningful, right? People that haven't started a business before usually think like, "Oh, sales is bad," and they go and buy stuff every day that they absolutely love, right?

And so in the middle of the graphic, the brand revolves around my interests, expertise, and experience. And these all overlap, right? Your income, lifestyle, and freedom are limited by the amount of time your products take to fulfill. So with a projected 62% of jobs being threatened by automation in the next decade, it makes sense that the highest-paid individuals will be the ones that leverage the power of their mind, the creative ability, knowledge, and experience in their mind, right? Right.

So in the last one-person business video, I went over how you have a $100,000 product in your head, AKA based on your knowledge and experience. So you can go watch that one if you want to understand building or creating a product. And so with this, when you have an absurd amount of distribution like traffic built, but you have you only have a service like a freelance service, or agency service, or coaching service that requires your time to fulfill, and not a digital product, or you haven't productized it as you grow in order to free up more time and be able to take on, uh, more customers, and you're going to have a bad time. So if you don't have a product in place as you're growing that will sell, fulfill, and maintain itself while you sleep, then an influx in traffic, let's say from someone mentioning you on a podcast, or you going on someone's podcast, and you having an overabundance of potential clients or customers and you not being able to handle them or take them on, there's, I mean, it's a pretty wise decision by the time you're growing and growing to pivot out of client work or hire someone else on. But since we are talking about this from the lens of the one-person business, it's better to productize and just be able to control your own time.

And so another thing that people skip over is that the more people you help, the more leverage you have, right? This is why I think authors have so much more leverage than let's say, like a $200,000 a month agency, is because their are their ideas are in more people's hands, right? They impact more people and have more dedicated fans. To the point is, and and this isn't all about money, but if they were to go and sell something like a coaching service, they could charge outrageously high prices if they wanted to, or they could just do like an automated or have like a cohort style thing and sell so much more than the people that are doing the direct outreach left and right.

Internet content is idea warfare on mental real estate. Most one-person business beginners don't see internet content for what it is. It's not about catching attention. It's important, but it's not about catching attention. It's not about gaining the most followers. It's not about having the most engagement. It's about valuable ideas. And valuable ideas equal relevant, understandable, and actionable to the point of being spread without personal effort. So the more perspective-shifting ideas that you put out into the world, the more mental real estate in the collective psyche you are going to occupy. Like how an author and let's say, The Power of Now, and how he kind of put mindfulness on the map of a chunk of the collective psyche.

And so if you want help with these big ideas and other things like that, I talk about it all the time and are writer, my writing course, uh, talks about like persuasive writing and idea generation in the practical setting of building a social media audience. So the big problem with all of this is that most creators are encouraged to steal or swipe high-performing ideas. And this isn't a bad thing, it's just overused. Because I do this all the time. I steal ideas from high-performing YouTube videos. So I go to a channel that I aspire to be like and filter their videos by most popular. I go to Medium and look at at their articles because Medium's algorithm gives you content based around your interest. You can get some incredible ideas just by skimming the homepage. And then top tweets. So at TweetHunter or TwiX, you can filter any account's tweets and see what their highest performing topic is. People sleep on Twitter so much, right? Because a tweet, a good tweet that went viral is the perfect newsletter, blog, YouTube headline, right? Or just the start of a newsletter or something like that, or something that can be incorporated in there. So there's more value in the actual newsletter itself.

With that said, we have to understand the evolution of your journey. Because I do think that it is very important that people start with high-performing topics and just growing in general. But as with everything in life, there are developmental stages. So these stages, they have a certain set of opportunities that are available to them that are in alignment with their skills, experience, and expertise. A stage one creator can't send out an email and make $50,000 on demand. It's just not going to happen. Nor can they DM anyone and get a response, right? You have to put in the reps and slowly build authority and leverage over time to the point of you having more opportunities available to yourself. And to preface these, these are all made up. There can be different stages, there can be different aspects of the stages. This is just what I've noticed in the most common patterns that I see in the creator business because I've been doing it for a long time. I've been in contact with thousands of other creators. I know what their struggles are. I know what your struggles are. I'm going to help with that.

So stage one creators, or low leverage creators, this is where every single person starts, assuming that you don't have prior business experience or just have a strategy already laid out for you. And as I said earlier, the people that get into this first stage, or at least start, understand that social media growth is a skill. It can be practiced. It's not just a matter of luck. People grow on social media every single day because they understand what it takes to actually do it. So the first thing that you should focus on as a beginner in your creator journey is high-performing content. You can't just start posting whatever you feel like. You can't just post something because you feel like it's clever or artsy. You have to understand what actually leads to growth. And if you aren't growing, it's not the reader's fault because you feel like they lack understanding. It's because you lack the ability to make your message understandable to them. So the best way I can explain this is to just study high-performing content, right? Go to your favorite YouTube channel, look at filter their videos by most popular, see which ones did the best. Why did they do the best? Question it. Study top tweets. Actually immerse yourself in, follow the social media accounts that you aspire to be like, and look at their content, see which ones do better than others. And, uh, use tools like TweetHunter or TwiX to actually go in and look at their top tweets all around and note common patterns, understand why they did well, and try to emulate that.

So the second thing is to use content templates as training wheels. So almost every single social media course that you'll take has, uh, like templates to structure your writing or your post or your message so that they get more engagement. And so I do this by just copy and pasting certain tweets into like a, a note and then using the structure of the tweet as a way to write other tweets. I use this kind all the time because this was a tweet that did really well for me at the beginning, and so I noted that down and then started moving more in a better direction as I realized what was doing good. So the tweet is right here. I can read it, but you can see that it has a hook. It has three bullet points to hold and keep attention. So it delivers value as well by giving actionable advice, and then it starts to wrap everything up and give a conclusion with a potential pain point that people may face.

So the third thing that you need to focus on is short-form growth and idea validation. So tweets, Reels, TikToks, Shorts, Instagram posts, LinkedIn posts, not long-form YouTube, not long-form podcast, not long-form newsletter yet, or blogs. Because as I said before, top-of-funnel on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, you can control growth a lot more. On Twitter, you can network or pay to get retweets. Same thing with Instagram with shares. Same thing with LinkedIn with comments. And that's how you grow. With YouTube and other things, it takes more time. And you want to attack those platforms with validated ideas that come from Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn. So put out a bunch of ideas on, let's say, Twitter, because you weren't penalized for posting multiple times a day. And then, uh, see which ones do the best as you grow and network with other people and actually try to get eyes on your content. And then take your best ideas, turn them into a newsletter, turn them into a YouTube video, or a blog, or whatever you want to grow on next. And as I said before, the, the way that I grew on Instagram and LinkedIn was I already had viral tweets from growing on Twitter, right? All I had to do was screenshot those with the social proof or the likes and retweets on them, put them on Instagram, go through some form of a growth strategy, or try to get my content shared, and I got 10x a lot more followers than most people would get, simply because the idea was already validated. People saw that.

So what happens if you get trapped in stage one? Well, you end up as an account with a lot of followers but zero loyalty. As most people warn against, if you disappear one day, nobody's going to ask, "Hey, where did Dan go?" And usually they get obsessed with engagement and just never bother to create a product or service.

So stage two creators, or medium leverage creators, once you hit 10K followers or so, you should feel like you have the social media growth game down, and that you can continue growing. And you don't have to wait until this point to monetize. I actually recommend not waiting till this point to monetize. But this is where the real money will come into play. At 500 followers, I had a $3K month. At 10,000 followers, I had a $10K month. At 50,000 followers, I had a $50K month. At 200,000 followers, I had a, scratch that, it was a $200K month because of Black Friday. If this shocks you, good. If it doesn't, props. Hopefully it breaks some people out of their limiting money beliefs. I need to get better at writing tweets. So it's just a baseline, and it sounds pretty [ __ ] crazy. But the reason I put this out there is because I thought $100,000 in one month was absolutely insane. It was insanity, right? And this was like two years ago. But then I saw someone doing the same exact thing that I did, making $100,000 a month. And I know he was being honest about it because I knew who he was and I talked to him on a frequent basis and knew that he was a trustworthy guy. And so that blew my mind. And I was just like, "I want to make $10K a month. I'd be happy with that." And I was. But it's like, I can push more. And it's fun to push more in business.

So the first thing you should do in stage two, and you don't necessarily have to wait till stage two to do this, is to learn direct response marketing. Direct response marketing is the skill that made people like Alex Hormozi rich before they started going all in on brand and giving everything away for free. And now I think you should give everything away for free, but over time with your content, over the course of 12, 24, 36 months. And you can aggregate all of those points for convenience into a product service that people can pay for for speed. That's what people pay for: speed, aggregation, convenience. And so this is the same story for someone like Justin Welsh, who many of you know. We did a podcast together. But he did a similar thing where you study books like Cashvertising. There's a book you can go study, and then start learning on your own. Go down a Google rabbit hole of direct response marketing and copywriting. And and then you get results with that. But then you can start to feel a bit like salesy, right? And so you start to, uh, become self-aware of that and slowly transition into a more authentic voice while still maintaining the principles of direct response marketing, right? Because a lot of people, the principles of human psychology are the same in how to craft a compelling message that leads to sales. But the tactics for doing so in the past, like decade, have been just kind of like wonky with all these sales funnels and countdown timers and, you know, all that stuff that kind of at this point would scream that it is a scam or just less trustworthy, even if it is completely authentic.

So the second thing to do in stage two is to build a high-ticket offer. Why? Because when you're at 10,000 followers, you just don't have a large enough audience to like sustain a, a income for yourself with a digital product or like a low-ticket product, right? So you're better off creating a coaching, consulting, or freelancing service, and that you can work your way up to charging $2,500 to $5,000 by stacking specific skills and applying them to a problem in a specific business, right? It's like being a plumber, but for a business. It's finding a problem because you understand their business as a whole, creating an offer specifically for that, reaching out, presenting the perfect solution to the perfect person, actually getting them results, and then boom, you can take that down the road. Watch my other video on creating a product, turn that system into a product, and you already have results that you can use to sell that product. And by the time that you reach 80,000, 100,000 followers or stage three, then you're in a very good place to monetize from products alone, or just decrease the amount of time you spend on client work.

And so in the first one-person business model video, which I'll link somewhere, I talk about a minimum viable offer. So if you have no idea where to start in terms of creating a service or a high-ticket service that you can sell, I would start there. Watch that video, watch the minimum viable offer part, and start by charging $500 to $1,000, and then slowly work your way up until you can charge more and more. And by that time, you'll know what to do, right? You only need to get past a certain point before you know, like, "Okay, this is what I do next to get more sales."

So between stage two and stage three, you have, you should have, um, you should have enough time and skill to get to the point of landing fourish clients at $500 a month, so $10K a month. Uh, and that kind of matches what I said in the tweet earlier about making $10K a month at 10,000 followers. It's through direct outreach, and certain strategies to actually get people to sign up for a high-ticket service. And by the way, if you aren't interested in digital economics, that has all of these, you can also consider joining Modern Mastery for five bucks. It has a lot of education based on marketing and sales and direct response marketing. But Digital Economics is the more like system-based, pretty much plug-and-play, and just stay consistent with it until you're successful.

So the third thing you do in stage two is to branch into long-form content. So by now, you know exactly what kind of tweets, posts, threads do well for you. You know your highest performing topics. So you want to take these and start creating depth and authority behind them by turning them into a newsletter, fleshing them out, talking about your thoughts behind them, or turning them, and then turning that newsletter into a YouTube video or a podcast, and just getting used to giving more value than like a little 280-character tweet. Because this depth is what's going to lead to more authentic sales, right? You don't have to go, you don't have to stick in the direct response copywriting where it's like, "Lead them down a thread immediately, get them to click, lead them down the landing page immediately, get them to buy," etc., etc. As a content creator, when you're building an audience, it's not like paid ads where you have to retarget them over and over again. They're going to consistently see your content over and over again. And if they're on your newsletter, you're going to raise them up the levels of awareness in marketing to the point of wanting to buy your product. And it doesn't have to be the first time around. If you just stick it out and pay attention to what's going right and what's going wrong, and doubling down on what's going right, then you'll do well.

So what happens if you get trapped in this stage? Stage two is that you pretty much build yourself into another 9 to 5. I see people all the time hovering between 10 and 30,000 followers, and they aren't doing anything related to a product or growing more or maintaining the growth that they built up until that point by incorporating high-performing topics. And they just get trapped in a cycle of reach out to a client, I mean, reach out to a prospect, get a client, not be able, not have enough time to do anything else, and just continuously doing that, living in a state of constant stress because if their client leaves, they're down $2,500 a month. But they don't have the time to continuously build an audience because they're just in the next phase of trying to find that new client.

All right, so stage three creators, the high leverage creator. Most people don't reach this stage because it's impossible without survival mastery, ego development, and multi-disciplinary study. People get locked into the focus on one thing mindset, which isn't bad at the beginning by any means. Build them into the, build themselves into that high-ticket client cycle, and don't they don't pursue complimentary skills or interests that will make them an individual, right? It will individualize them to the point of reducing saturation in the market. I incorporate spirituality and philosophy into my business videos. I guarantee you that's why a lot of you watch this. That's why I stand out amongst other to the people that actually like my content.

So the first thing you do as a stage three creator is to productize, build a network, and leverage the results you have from the high-ticket service that you built. By now, you may have already created a product because you've watched my other video. If so, good work. But if you haven't, at least by now, you should have some results with the service that you've been offering, the high-ticket service, freelancing, coaching, consulting, and you've iterated on that system or just the curriculum or whatever it may be in that high-ticket service to the point of it getting results consistently and you having results with it, right? You've refined the system enough so that you are confident into by productizing it and putting it into a product and accompanying it with a curriculum that teaches people how to use it, and then distributing that in a way that doesn't require your time. So my advice is, take your system and method for getting results, reposition it towards a broader audience, beginner level, because you have a huge audience, you want to leverage that. Use your results as initial social proof to have a six-figure plus launch. And then in terms of networking, you should have been networking this entire time, but you can network with bigger players now, right? You can DM people with 100,000 to a million followers, get on their good side. Let's say I grew on Twitter and I have 100,000 followers, and I want to grow on Instagram. So I reach out to someone on Instagram who has 100,000 followers and I'll be like, "Hey, I'll help you grow on Twitter if you help me grow on Instagram with the validated ideas that I have." And that's exactly what I did, and that's how I have more Instagram followers than I do Twitter followers now.

So the second thing is to refine your ideas and diversify. So the graphic that we showed earlier illustrated that my distribution network or my brand had three key pillars, right? Growth, authenticity, and Authority. So here's another simplified graphic if you want to screenshot this just to keep it at the top of mind. But growth comes from short-form content. Authority comes from product or service results. Authenticity comes from long-form big idea synthesis. And of course, these all overlap each other, right? Don't, don't get narrow-viewed into into one of those that I just listed. They all overlap. It's just priority. So in stage one, 80% more or less of your content should be focused on growth. In stage two, when you have a service that you can offer, you start to incorporate more authority or authenticity-based content and depth and long-form with like writing, YouTube video, podcast, etc. So in stage three, it's time to double down on your best ideas and use them to diversify your audience across different platforms.

As I mentioned earlier, I grew very quickly on Instagram and LinkedIn by reaching out to big accounts on those platforms, showing them I had value with my following and time in the game, offering an exchange of services, shares, or money to help me grow in the most optimal way possible. And I already had content that performed well. You see, I knew which ones led to the most followers. I took that content, I put it on the other platform, and I used the knowledge or help from that other person to grow really fast on another platform. You don't have to start with Twitter, but I'm just telling you like how you can start to do this and branch out. Because most people think it's just like money. Money is how you do it. No, there's social capital. If I have 100,000 followers, that is extremely valuable to someone else that is trying to either promote to that audience or grow via that audience. And I can vet them and see if my audience would actually enjoy that and exchange value.

So the third thing you do as a stage three creator is to prioritize long-form content. So once you reach a point of high, high followers and high income, it's time to reposition yourself more towards a synthesizer, right? Developing those big ideas that stick in people's heads, or the mental Monopoly, as I put it earlier. And you can do this at the start, as I said, all of these are just like guidelines or help you become aware. You can do this at the start, but this is where it becomes very important for the future of your brand so you don't become a commodity. Because people are going to be copying you left and right. I see this all the time on Twitter, Instagram, etc. I have something pop off, and then the next day I see like 10 of the same posts with the same exact thing that I said, slightly different. So it can't be considered plagiarism, but they're not going to make it in the future, I promise you that, because they don't have the creative ability to consistently come up with novel perspectives.

This is best done with long-form, like newsletters, YouTube, podcasts, etc. And in short, you pursue what interests you. You study the big picture ideas of those interests, right? Not the minor details, not the minor nuances. You study the big picture ideas. When you read a book, what's the five huge ideas that they wrote that entire book around? And then you sit with those ideas. You go on a walk, you experience life. And with those, you start to connect the dots through experience and just writing about them and taking note of them and being able to connect them. And I'm building a software to help with this. I wish I had it ready so I could promote it, because it's going to be [ __ ] sick. But stay tuned for the software around content synthesis.

Third thing is, note patterns based on your experience. Connect the dots with long-form content. Create your own versions of concepts, processes, and philosophies. And what I mean by this is, if, uh, uh, many of you know the Eisenhower Matrix, right? So the Eisenhower Matrix is a, a priority matrix. So it's things that you should pay attention to, things that you should forget, things that you should delegate, etc. So if I had something for prioritizing my day, and it made sense, and it was like a system, then I could name it my own, right? The Eisenhower Matrix is just a random name with a valuable idea or concept. And with time, that has grown, and people talk about it all the time. So if I had one that was truly helpful for people, and I distribute it via my content or a book, and then other people start talking about it, that's a contagious idea, and it sticks in other people's heads, and my ideas and my brand grows without me doing anything. It's like a positive mind virus.

And so lastly, take pieces of that long-form content for your short-form content. And this is where things get really fun and fulfilling. This is where I, I didn't come up with the concept of one-person business, but I took it and I gave it an entirely new meaning, right? One-person business just stood for like people operating a business as one person with the technology of the internet. But I turned it into the like, productize yourself, self-monetize, turning you into the brand, truly being a one-person business, and doing what you love for a living, and actually being able to back that with systems that get that result. And that's what makes me stand out among other people that talk about one-person businesses. And I've also named processes, some of you know them from other videos, like intelligent imitation, tactical stress, the unknown, and other things like that. And this comes from applying my interests to my expertise. So spirituality, philosophy, neuroscience, and how that works with online business, marketing, branding, etc. And I have enough exposure and experience and awareness in all of those domains because I'm not a specialist to note common patterns and piece together this, uh, long-form content that is difficult to replicate.

As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own method. So this entire letter was based on principles to an extent, but mostly it was just my method of doing things, right? So don't take it as law. Question what I say. And I don't mean in like a, in a way where you just like write everything out in the comments. I mean, question what I say, test it, experience it. And if you come up with a better solution, create content about it. This is not the only way of doing business, clearly. And so don't narrow in on this and think that it's the only way of doing business. It's not. The main lesson from this entire video should be what I always preach: never stop learning, never stop building, never stop evolving. Don't get trapped in one of the stages. Evolve. Distraction and comfort are the only things that can get in your way. Self-actualize, self-monetize, and self-transcend. That is the end of the video.