If you have multiple interests and you don't know how to manage them, or you don't know what options there are for you in the future, then I have good news for you, because this is the greatest time to be alive.
But in lies the problem.
Society has made you feel like having multiple interests is a weakness.
We all know the story, right?
You go to school, you get a job, you retire at some point, but there is so much wrong with that series of events.
I feel like a lot of people fail to understand that we don't live in the industrial age anymore, but we are still dealing with its consequences.
Specializing in only one skill is certain death, and I feel like we all know by now how dangerous mechanical living is for the psyche and soul.
It's not meaningful, right?
We've made productivity our God and that God has betrayed us.
And I also think that people feel that we are going through a second renaissance.
So you're very excited, right?
You have multiple interests.
You're like oh okay, how do I actually make the most of this?
I see people online and they're doing these cool things.
I get to listen to people who talk about my interests, but how do I do something similar?
You have to understand that your curiosity and love for learning is not a weakness.
It is a massive advantage.
You just need to learn what to do with it.
And I felt the same way for the longest time.
I would just learn and learn and learn and watch tutorials get stuck in tutorial hell.
I would see people online say to avoid shiny object syndrome and I'd be like, damn, I'm right.
In the middle of that, I need to change what I'm doing.
I need to focus on one thing.
And I got my dopamine from feeling smart.
But when I looked back at my life, I didn't really have anything to show for it.
I felt smart.
I couldn't articulate anything that I remembered.
But my life didn't change all that much, and honestly, I just felt like I was falling behind.
In college I tried so many different things because I always had this dream of doing something creative.
But I was going to college, and if college ended and I didn't have a creative income source, then I would have to get a job, and so it's like I need to figure out what I need to do now, and so I just experimented with a bunch of different things, but I didn't stick to one thing, and so that's what happened five years into college one more year than I was supposed to go I had to get a job because I just needed to survive right, I needed money.
But the missing piece for me that I'm guessing is a missing piece for you was a vessel, and a vessel a way to channel your multiple interests into one thing.
That's not what people consider a specialist to be.
That's more of a generalist.
Let's say the definition of a generalist is someone who has an aim for their life.
They have a desired outcome.
They have a future they want to achieve.
And they do all of the things required to achieve that.
We're going to dig deeper into this, but that's such a huge insight that you may not understand yet.
In other words, I needed to do something that could generate an income so that I could survive, but it umbrellaed all of my interests into it.
So if you've ever felt guilty for not being able to pick one thing, if you've been told to niche down when your mind wants to expand, if you've wondered whether there's a path you can take that doesn't lead to the misery you see in everyone else's eyes, this is the greatest time to be alive.
So here are the seven most compelling and practical ideas that i came up with for people with multiple interests.
We'll start by understanding why having multiple interests is a superpower, which is very important, and then i'll give you the practical steps kind of hyper practical.
This is kind of like a full course on how to turn those into your life's work, and this will especially make sense in my next video called the future of work, which is just going to be a huge synthesis of all the research I've done on what the future could look like with AI AGI, etc.
I think you'll like that, especially if you're a creative.
So we have a lot to talk about.
I hope you're here for the ride.
If you're not just save this to watch later, so it pops up again or something, so you don't forget about it.
So the first idea we're going to talk about the three ingredients of individual success and the death of the expert.
And we'll start with a quote from Adam Smith, who had a huge influence on the birth of capitalism.
We'll talk about that in a bit, but the quote is the man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.
So it's funny that he says that because industrial age, capitalism, free markets, employment, etc.
I'm not against capitalism.
I think it's going to evolve into something better, hopefully.
But it's funny that he says that because he's the one who contributed to it, if not created it.
So specialization took over, because in a pin factory, for example, this happened across many different types of factories and lines of work.
One worker doing every step could produce 20 pins a day.
And then many workers each doing one step rather than every step could produce 48,000.
So we built an entire world around this model.
We just siloed people into doing individual repetitive robotic tasks.
And you can wonder, why we're at threat of replacement from robots right now.
It's because humans became assembly lines working nine to five jobs.
And this happened because frankly, governments don't serve the national interest, the interest of the people.
They serve their own interest.
So the opposite of capitalism also isn't the answer.
But the same thing applies here to corporations.
The corporations don't serve the employees interest.
They serve their own and their own interest is profit.
And since that starts to form the base of the economy and just the general culture of the US or the West, then schools were also designed to serve that interest.
Their sole purpose was to create factory workers who were obedient, and the school system hasn't changed much.
So if you want to have specialized knowledge so that you could never run an operation, especially your own operation, then be dependent on schools for your education and jobs for your wage.
Be duped into believing that specialization is what makes a human valuable, when it is clear that the system does not need you specifically to perform that task.
So in lies the distinction.
If specialization makes people stupid, then what makes someone free?
What makes someone sovereign?
And there's three ingredients.
Self-education, self-interest, and self-sufficiency.
So self-education is pretty clear.
If you want a different result from the one that traditional education promises, then you must direct your own learning.
Now, self-interest raises some flags because it sounds selfish and short-sighted, right?
Everyone should be selfless.
That's what you've been told.
But self-interest simply means concerned with one's own interest.
And if that isn't a priority for you, then whose interest are you going to serve?
Especially when your survival is dependent on it.
You're going to serve the interest of the schools, the jobs and the government.
And those interests are not very beneficial to you.
In other words, you need to follow your own interest, because your interest is often beneficial to others.
And of course, this depends on what level of cognitive development that you're at.
But I would assume that most people don't want to hurt most people and I would assume that in the culture and day and age that we live in, most people are beyond that.
And an objection or argument here is that well, if I were, if people just serve their own interest and they would just be scrolling on their phones all day and indulging in cheap pleasures and dopamine and gambling and all this other stuff.
But.
Take take a second and look whose interest does that actually serve?
That is usually not your actual interest, but an interest that you have become addicted to or an interest that's been assigned to you.
And that's usually comes from the corporations who actually own the social media companies that you're scrolling on each and every day, getting sucked into the algorithm and not curating or being intentional about your own feed.
And I'll let you think through the rest.
Now, the truly selfish person, in Ayn Rand's view, is a self-respecting, self-supporting human being who neither sacrifices others to himself nor sacrifices himself to others.
This rejects both the predator and the doormat.
So that self-interest and now self-sufficiency.
The last ingredient is the refusal to outsource your judgment, your learning and your agency.
So if self-education is the engine and self-interest is the compass, then self-sufficiency is the foundation that prevents your life direction from being hijacked.
So the generalist naturally must emerge.
Someone with multiple interests must emerge if they fit into this triad or they develop this triad of traits.
Because self-interest motivates self-education.
You learn things because it genuinely improves your life.
You're not assigned to learn things for the interest of the system that you're within.
And then self-education enables self-sufficiency, because you can only be as sovereign as the domains you understand.
And if you're a specialist, you only understand one domain.
There's a reason you can't run the entire operation.
And why you're kept dumb to that and you're kept siloed.
Because actually think about it.
If you knew how to run the entire company.
It was very clear to you, you understood it, you knew how to do it.
Then why wouldn't you do that?
And last, that self-sufficiency clarifies your self-interest.
So it's like a cycle.
It's a triad, but it's also a cycle.
Because when you're not dependent on others' interpretations, you can actually perceive what serves you.
Most people pursue multiple interests as an escape from their work, but when your interests become your work or your life's work, most of them start to filter out.
So you think you have all of these interest that may not lead to something beneficial monetarily or in terms of money.
But once you actually get on the path, when work turns into play for you, then you tend to drop the interest that just served as an escape and you really start to focus in and clarify what you want out of life.
So you may have too many interest right now.
But once you actually start to get on the right path, as we're going to discuss, they will become so much more clear.
That is the best way to manage multiple interests.
I see these videos on how to manage multiple interests from accounts that I like.
Odysseus, I love you.
But I don't think those people are on the right track.
I don't think creating a note taking system.
As someone with a note taking software, I don't think creating the note taking system to manage all of these notes and other things that don't serve any higher goal in your life, even if it's not directly tied to money.
But if money is a currency of agency, expressing your agency, then money is important because that allows you to discover something more meaningful and to choose that meaningful thing over the options that are available to you right now, in a culture that glorifies productivity as God.
So to prevent a rant, let's get back on track.
When you look at every CEO or creative or founder, they're almost always a generalist, even if it doesn't seem like it on the surface, because they understand enough about marketing to direct it, enough about product to build it and enough about people to lead them.
But they also need to direct the ship.
They need to learn and adapt when circumstances change, meaning they have to learn a lot and they have to go very broad.
They can't go too deep. on one thing aside from their company, but that has its own benefits.
It has the benefit of creating your own unique model of the world, your own unique way of viewing the world, because ideas that cross into different domains, they complement each other.
And that unique way of viewing the world allows you to catch and see ideas and opportunities that other people wouldn't see.
So it's harder to replicate until you actually put in the work of building it And then someone can try to replicate it, but they still don't have the unique way of viewing the world.
They still don't have all of the intersections of ideas that led to the specific decision making that you made.
So you are much more likely to succeed than them.
That leads into idea number two, which is that you are living through the second renaissance and you need to take advantage of it.
So another quote from da Vinci study the science of art, study the art of science.
Develop your senses especially, learn how to see, realize that everything connects to everything else.
The ultimate moat or the final competitive advantage worth paying for, in my opinion, is an opinion.
It is a perspective that only you can see because the uniqueness of your life experience created it.
That may just be the last thing anyone else can replicate.
And since that's always been the case, that's always been the case.
You have to understand that that has always been the case.
Why not prioritize it now, especially when automation is at your doorstep?
This is like forcing everyone to prioritize the one thing that has mattered and will matter.
But how do you prioritize it?
How do you develop it?
By pursuing automation, multiple interests and building something with them.
Actually, it's the reverse by building something useful and learning the multiple interests that you have to learn, because every interest you've ever pursued leaves behind a residue.
Every interest increases the number of connections that can be made.
Every interest expands and increases the complexity of how you model and interpret reality, and the more complex your model of reality, the more problems you can solve, opportunities you can see and value you can create.
Specialism completely halts this process, and your shiny object syndrome has been trying to tell you this whole time.
From birth until now, just think of how complex that is, right?
We take advantage of just every single passing moment, every single thing that's happened to us.
All of the billions upon billions of bits of information that our mind has processed in our own unique location situation, culture.
From the bottom up, there's so many different things influencing how we see the world.
Throughout, from birth until now, you have cultivated a way of seeing things that others cannot access.
AI cannot think this way. until you tell AI to think that way.
So a person who studied psychology and design sees user behavior differently from a pure designer.
Now imagine if they tacked on something else to that aside from just psychology and design.
A person who learns sales and philosophy closes deals differently than the pure salesman.
A person who understands fitness and business builds health companies that MBAs can't understand.
And if you really think about it, this is the exact pattern that showed in the Renaissance and what allowed individuals to flourish.
So we have to consider what made that possible and see if that shows up today, which it does.
So before the printing press, knowledge was scarce.
Books were copied by hand, and a single text could take a scribe months to reproduce.
Libraries were very rare, and literacy was rarer.
If you wanted to learn something outside of your trade, you either had access to a monastery or you didn't learn that thing.
And then Gutenberg changed everything.
So within 50 years, 20 million books flooded Europe.
Ideas that once took generations to spread now moved in months.
Literacy exploded.
The cost of knowledge collapsed for the first time in history, a person could realistically pursue multiple domains of mastery in a single lifetime, and the renaissance was the result.
So whenever someone compares this to ai, they say, oh well, it's not the same and ai does so much more, but the pattern is still there.
There is still something there, and i don't think anyone has figured out what the future is going to look like yet, because it's just prediction, it's speculation, it's imaginary.
So it's worthwhile to at least hold these ideas in your mind, without accepting them as truth, but potentially pursuing them or utilizing these ideas, because they can be useful to your life right now and probably going into the future.
It's better than doing nothing.
When we look at da vinci, he didn't just do one thing he painted sculpted engineered, studied anatomy, designed war machines and mapped the human body.
Michelangelo was a painter sculptor, architect and poet.
So in today's world, unique minds are finally able to operate the way they were meant to.
They were supposed to cross disciplines, synthesize connection and follow curiosity wherever it led.
The printing press was a catalyst for a new type of person to emerge, a person who could learn anything, combine everything and create something that no specialist ever could.
And this is happening again.
So idea number three how to turn multiple interests into a lucrative way of life.
So, as a recap, there are a few things that we know so far.
You have multiple interests, but feel like you can't keep learning forever.
You have a love for interest-based self-education, but have to carve out time outside of your career to do it.
You understand the need to become self-sufficient, but you feel like you don't have value worth paying for yet.
And you need to be able to adapt fast because we don't know what the future looks like.
So the question then, is how do we combine all of these things, or all of our interests, into a way of life, not a way of work, life balance, but a complete way of life, a way of turning work into play?
So I'll try to make this as logical as I can and just boom, boom, boom, tie these things together.
To make money from your interests, you need other people to become interested in them too.
That part is trivial because if you became interested in something, other people can too.
You simply must learn to persuade.
So skill to learn right there.
Persuasion.
Just read a few books on persuasion and it'll naturally catch on.
If you are creating something with that, you need a way for these people to pay you.
In this context, that usually means you need to sell a product because you probably aren't going to find a job that allows you to express your interest, and investing in stocks or real estate to any effective degree requires a good amount of capital.
So, in other words, you need attention.
Attention is one of the blast modes because it's very scarce.
Scarcity is going to survive, right.
AGI can't make attention a commodity, right?
It can provide maybe in the future a basic foundation for survival, right?
We don't have to worry about survival anymore.
The things that we see as scarce right now, a lot of the things will become commodities.
But our attention, there's only so much to go around.
So what's worth paying for in the future?
And as a creative, you may be surprised to hear this, but it's creative work.
Stop worrying about ai copying your image or copying your writing.
We'll talk about this more in i think it's the next video.
Just think about it.
If anyone can write anything or build anything or create anything, like we're hearing right now, especially if you're on twitter, it's freaking everywhere and i i don't disagree with them.
Anyone's going to be able to create anything.
Which ones are going to win?
It's going to be the ones that people know about.
It's the ones that people pay attention to because you can have the greatest product in the world.
You can have your greatest little mobile app or SaaS app.
But if nobody knows about it.
It just ends up like every single other product or SaaS app that's been created in the past that nobody knows about.
It just doesn't go anywhere.
You didn't waste your time.
You learned some stuff, maybe, but you're missing a piece of the puzzle.
It's never only just been build this thing.
It's so much more than that.
And the other thing here is just opinionated work, opinionated creative work.
Would you rather use this vibe coded SaaS app like a Dropbox alternative that isn't being maintained by a large team of people that can handle billions of users?
Are you even going to trust that with your do you even understand the software space?
I didn't until I started building something like a Dropbox alternative with my team team.
But you're acting like people care a ton about the money that they spend on a useful solution in their life and like they even want to build that thing.
I mean, you don't even spend 20 minutes cooking your own food every day for health and nutrition.
You pay 20 to 30 bucks for uber eats to deliver you food.
Humans just want convenience on so many different levels and like people are blowing this way out of proportion as to what's going to happen.
People have more things that they want to spend their time on.
Not everyone in the world just wants to be inside of claude code building whatever suits their needs that day.
Some people will, of course, but not even close to everyone.
So back to the point.
You need to become a creator.
Now, before you cringe and leave, I don't necessarily mean become a content creator, even though I kind of do.
But let's just unpack that.
I mean that the solution to stop creating for someone else because you need them to give you a paycheck is to create for yourself.
Humans by nature are creators who are convinced that being a machine would lead to the American dream.
We are tool builders at our core.
We thrive in any niche because we create solutions to problems.
If a lion were put in alaska, it would not build shelter and clothing, it would die.
A lion belongs in its own niche.
We don't belong in one niche.
Everyone's telling you to niche down, when everyone lives in a separate freaking niche across the world.
It doesn't make sense now.
The second thing is that every business is a media business right now.
And remember, you need attention.
How do you generate attention?
Media.
Where is media?
Where is attention?
Social media.
And that's at least right now.
Things evolve, right?
Social media platforms may not last forever, but something's going to take their place.
And of course, you're going to have to adapt at that point.
So yes, if you have multiple interests, it would be wise, in my opinion.
I don't want to just give a blanket prescription to everyone, but it's so unique.
You should probably become a content creator, but you also have to really think through how saturation just does not exist.
In this way, there's no saturation in you meeting people in real life, right?
There's there's a certain amount of people that you can have as close friends.
There's less people that you can have as friends.
I mean more people that you can have as friends, and there's more people you can have as acquaintances.
There's more people that you can have as people you've met before.
And if you think of your consumption habits, you probably skim past hundreds of posts a day, potentially more.
What about long form, which takes longer to create?
Meaning that that decreases saturation even more.
You maybe read one a day, two a day.
How many YouTube videos do you watch a day?
Four, five.
That's a lot of attention to go around.
And how many videos do you skip?
How many social posts do you skip?
That just shows that there's an attention deficit.
Not that your attention should just be in front of a screen all day, but also most of what you consume just sucks right.
It's not good content.
It's not beneficial to you.
It's not helping you learn.
It's not providing anything meaningful.
There's a massive deficit, deficit of valuable and beneficial and useful content, because just look at your screen.
Look at what you're consuming every day.
There's maybe one or two things, if that, that actually change your life.
Not that you need to change your life all the time, that are actually beneficial to you.
Now, if you don't like the idea of becoming a content creator, just think of social media as a mechanism to do independent work.
Because when we think about that, that covers all of our bases.
If you love learning, great.
Reframe it as research.
And now that's literally your main job.
Most of the things I write about simply come from me learning about my interests and treating social media like I'm taking notes in public.
So you're already spending time learning.
Now just spend that time learning in public and boom, you have the foundation of a business.
If you need to become self-sufficient well, you need a business to do that, and every business needs to attract customers, and you probably don't give two about paid ads, seo or any other form of marketing.
This is what trips many people up, because they are only used to doing one specialized task within a business as an employee.
If you need to be able to adapt going to the future which you do then amazing.
You can build and launch new products to your audience as fast as you can build them.
I personally have a pretty solid audience and if my next product were to fail, i have people who would be willing to invest or work on the team or even just support the next product.
It's not just one and done.
You don't just bust your entire load in one go on one launch And if it fails, then all you're done.
It doesn't even cost you money to post content.
If you're yeah, if you blew your life savings on paid ads and maybe you're at a dead end.
But this is different.
And it goes back to the point of you can build your little vibe coded SaaS company and it may be very valuable.
I'm not denying that they can be valuable.
But if you don't have distribution or an audience, then you're going to be putting in like a marathon's worth of effort into getting capital for it, into getting customers or users, into finding talent and everything else that goes into building the business.
So my point is that no other job or career or path allows people with multiple interests to do all of those things.
So how do you actually start building it?
Where's the practicality, Dan?
What are the actionable steps?
I get it.
Okay.
Idea number four, how to turn yourself into a business.
Now, some of you have probably seen this graphic before on the one person business.
I have an entire one person business playlist, but this has one less thing, right?
So the three pillars which used to be four pillars of a one person business, are brand, content and product.
But how those differ from the traditional business is that your brand are your goals.
So what do you want out of life?
And then for brand, what are you helping people achieve?
For content or media or how you attract people to that brand, that is knowledge.
So what are you learning along the way and what is useful for them to know?
Then for product, which is process.
How did you reach a desirable goal and how can you help them reach it faster?
So Let's break these down.
But first, I'm talking to my younger self here.
I'm talking to my younger self, who was very, I guess conditioned, very programmed to have a negative outlook on money, a negative outlook on business, all these other things.
And it's really unfortunate that the words entrepreneurship and business have become kind of like dirty words that once someone hears them they just shut off.
It's like, no, I don't want to do that.
No, that's for unethical people.
That's for talented people.
I'm not that talented.
That's for people with a lot of money when that's just not the case on any grounds.
The danger in doing that and closing your mind off to it is that you're just closing your mind off to the thing that could change your life.
You're closing your mind off to the opportunities.
You're not able to see them if you reject the the idea that allows you to see them.
So my rebuttal to that is if you've ever helped anyone with any of your interests in any way, then you are qualified to start a business.
It doesn't need to go any further than that.
And the reality is that entrepreneurship is in our nature.
It is modern survival.
We are wired to create and distribute value to a tribe of like-minded people.
Now that tribe is on the internet and you have to find them or attract them.
We are wired to hunt, to explore the unknown, to seek novelty and never stagnate, and psychologically this is the most enjoyable way of life.
We've talked about that before.
But if you study psychology and flow psychology, you will understand that, and even further.
The barrier of entry has collapsed.
I'm not saying it's easy, i'm not saying that you're just gonna be able to go and talk to AI and have it spit out 30 posts and then you post them to social media and instantly go viral and instantly see millions of dollars.
No, it's all skill based.
This is something that you're going to have to learn as well, but you're at an advantage because you love learning things.
It's still going to take time.
I don't care how fast.
AGI is going to speed up things.
It still takes time to get any form of result in life.
If you were to just get it immediately, then it would become a commodity and it'd be the same thing as you scrolling on your phone and it wouldn't bring any meaning to your life.
So There are two paths that you can take when doing this one person business thing or, if it helps, just independent work or creating your life's work.
Path one is skill based.
This is the typical way that people have been telling you to start a business for the longest time online, right?
Pick a marketable skill and then create a product or service around that marketable skill.
And you talk about that marketable skill online and then boom, you make money, I guess.
But the limitation here is the limitation of being a specialist.
You probably don't want to be put into a box.
You don't like feeling limited.
But people do this.
They niche down because they were told that was the most profitable thing to do.
And so now profit is your main interest.
That's where everything else falls under.
That's your incentive.
So, now that you're chasing profit, Productivity is still your God, and you build yourself into a second nine to five, working on things you don't care about, for people you don't care about.
So we're not going to talk about it beyond that because that's not what we're here for.
So path number two is development based.
And you can see this when you go into the creator economy right now.
If you're watching me, you probably watch other people that are on this path.
You can observe it, and these people don't really have a niche that they're pinned down to right.
In one video, i talk about productivity.
In this video i'm talking about business.
I guess i don't even know.
It's like a combination of interests, the things that i learned this week really, or have learned over time.
It's a synthesis of ideas with one overarching topic.
Now, typically what these people do is they focus on one of the four eternal markets and let their interests fall under those.
The eternal markets, where all human problems tend to fall.
So that's where all human value tends to fall.
What's valuable is health wealth, relationships and happiness.
Or even all of them, right?
You can bundle all of those things into the umbrella of self-actualization.
I personally believe that most of the value creators online right now, they all have one niche.
It's just a massive niche.
It's self-actualization.
What makes it unique is how you reach self-actualization or even get close to it.
You don't even have to get there.
It's just your aim.
It's what you're pursuing.
It's what you're helping other people do.
You document your journey there.
You take notes that are disguised as ideas.
Every single person that has the goal of self transcendence or self actualization.
They're all taking infinitely unique paths to get there.
And that's what matters.
That's how you create a unique path.
Someone who learns a skill sells a marketable skill.
There's usually very little paths that you can take along that path.
So these types of creators, they pursue their own goals, which forms their brand.
They teach what they learn, which forms their content, and they help others achieve the goal faster, which is their product.
And the other powerful thing here is that when you take this path, the first path, the skill-based path is encapsulated in it.
It's a natural part of it because you're building your own business, right?
You have to learn all of these things.
You have to learn marketing, sales, brand, content, all of the little strategies.
You need to study these things and you just become inherently valuable when you can do that, because you're learning the things.
That actually gets results.
Not all business owners do this.
Go and talk to a small business and ask if they understand any of this.
They don't.
So if you learn it, you become valuable enough to be paid.
And it may not be from your multiple interests yet, but it can be a stepping stone that leads you into that.
That's incredible.
That's why I love this path so much.
And every time I talk about this I really have to sit and ask myself am i just like promoting this dogma?
I tell people, start a personal brand, become a creator, because it makes a lot of sense to me, and i feel like i start to tout it as this one true way, but then like, the more i break it down, the more it seems like the one true way i don't know how to put it like.
I've heard objections to it and those hold a lot of truth, like well, not everyone can do this, And my answer to that is well, anyone can.
The ambitious people who want to.
Everyone can't do everything, right?
Like there's so many things in life where it's limited to the amount of people that can do it.
But this has more opportunity than most of those things.
And it's all within your control.
That's what I love about it.
Now, the other thing that I love about it is that it flips the traditional model on its head.
So with the traditional business model, you need a customer avatar and you need to niche down to that customer avatar.
But with this model, you are the customer avatar.
And that makes things so much more palatable.
You don't need to understand or learn that much.
Because if you need market research, you just look at your story.
You think back on your life.
So you pursue your goals in life and develop yourself.
And by doing that, you have already validated the usefulness of what you will offer.
And then you help the past version of yourself reach that same goal.
Now, one thing you're going to have to deal with here is a lot of the business gurus like Alex Hormozy.
I love Alex Hormozy, nothing against them.
They will tell you to sell to the rich.
So you may not have been a rich person in your past and that's okay.
That doesn't mean that this way doesn't work.
It's just an alternative route for people who have that like deep desire to do something more creative and spend a lot of their time on what they deem meaningful, not to say that the other way isn't meaningful.
I think you're getting the distinction here.
So it has to be somewhat of a conscious choice, but that also doesn't mean that you're limited in any way to brag, I guess.
Like I've made a lot of freaking money doing this.
It's incredible.
I never would have thought that I've been able to make this much money.
I'm starting a bigger business.
Well, I've been working on a software company for a long time now.
I'm working on a nootropic company More details on that.
That is very cool.
But I wouldn't have had these opportunities.
It's just so cool.
But with that, I'm going to give a caveat.
Don't be a YouTube creator.
Don't be a personal brand, even though I just said that.
Don't be an influencer.
Be you, but in a place where your work can be discovered, followed, and supported right now and for the foreseeable future that's on the internet.
So if we think of Jordan Peterson, regardless of your opinion...
He's not a content creator.
He goes on tours.
He writes books.
He even has like Peterson Academy, which is an online very well done course.
But he leverages social media as his base and he uses the tools available to him to spread his life's work.
He isn't worried about the latest content or idea trend, because his own mind transcends any of the growth strategies that you can find.
The quality and uniqueness and how he says his ideas is what sets him apart.
So your business has to be a reflection of this just uniqueness of your mind.
So how do we make that even more practical?
We need to actually talk about the three pillars, brand, content, product.
So idea five is that brand is an environment.
So I want you to stop thinking as brand.
If you think about it this way, as like your social media profile, right?
Your bio and your profile picture and your website and the cool little brand colors that you have, like mine, are black and white, simply because it's easy, and that allows me to focus on the ideas.
I want you to think about brand as an environment where people come to transform.
Brand is the little world you are inviting others into.
Brand isn't Transcription by CastingWords posts, threads, newsletters, videos, and the rest.
So in other words, your brand is this.
Pause the screen if you need to.
Your brand is your story.
So it would help if you spent a day or even go on a walk and just think about it and think about where you came from.
What is the lowest point you've been?
What are the other lows that you've been?
What have you overcome?
What is your actual story?
What skills have you learned?
What traits have you developed?
What are some of your weird and extreme beliefs?
What do you think that other people don't?
What are your contrarian takes?
What makes you different?
Now, when you're thinking of ideas or content or products, you need to filter them Through your story or through your worldview, which kind of comes naturally once you stop trying to do it, because your worldview is your worldview.
You become a translator of ideas, right?
Because no idea is really original.
We disguise stealing like an artist as research, right?
Where I research ideas that I really like and I learn about them.
And then I kind of translate them.
I have a topic for my newsletter or for my video.
And then I look at what other people have said about that.
And I think about the books that I've read or if I'm reading a book now.
And then I pick and choose ideas and kind of tie them into something new and say them in my own words.
And that alone is unique enough.
So when I say filter things through your story, that doesn't mean that you have to talk about yourself all the time.
Of course, personal stories or personal anecdotes, like I gave at the beginning of this video when I said I used to learn and learn and learn.
I got stuck in tutorial hell.
That's a relatable aspect of this, but that's not necessarily what I mean.
I mean translating.
Now the difficult part for a lot of people and this was myself included is that you don't really think your story is worth telling because you think it's boring or you haven't reflected on your growth.
But it is and you'll come to realize that.
So now the point with everything that i'm saying is that your bio and your profile picture and your website colors they do not matter at all.
If you go on any social media, you're gonna see people with profile pictures that are just like weird scribbles or a singular color like blue or red.
You're gonna go to paul graham's website and you're gonna see that he just has an html website and the formatting doesn't look good at all.
His essays that everyone loves are literally just like the most basic aerial text you'll find ever.
It does not matter.
The quality of ideas and unique perspective is what matters.
So my recommendation for branding or at least to start thinking about your brand is to make a list of five to ten people you respect online.
These are the people that are kind of aspirational, the people you want to become like.
Then you look at their profile picture, their bio and content.
Then you take mental notes of patterns between them.
And then you start formulating what you should do for your own brand with your own little spin.
Now, in all honesty, I wouldn't overcomplicate this, or I wouldn't even really think about it until now.
It's just going to come naturally.
Don't even worry about your brand because a lot of people get stuck on that.
When I teach this and I used to teach it in workshops and other things people just would put off doing anything else until they got their brand right, when it really does not matter.
Because that's not what a brand is.
A brand is what you associate yourself with, the ideas you post over time, the people you talk to, the podcasts you go on.
It's like this accumulation.
It's just how people view you.
And if you break down how people come to view you, then you understand it.
Now, before we get into content, I have written an article on this.
I'll link it in the description.
It's called How to Build a World, the Two-Hour Content Ecosystem. expanded.
So that'll help you understand how brand is a world created through this content ecosystem.
We're not going to actually talk about how to write a newsletter and break that down into smaller pieces of content like I do in that.
But that leads into number six, which is content is novel perspectives.
Now, I've said this for a while now, but it's more prevalent than it will be ever, because the Internet is just continuing to become more and more of a fire hose of information.
And AI isn't helping with that, right?
Anyone can generate anything.
But what that means is that trust and signal are more important than ever.
If you hear me say signal, that means like the opposite of noise, right?
Noisy, a lot of content signals like, ooh, exciting, important, need to pay attention to that.
So, in my opinion, the guiding light for your content should be to curate the best possible ideas in one place.
Your brand is a collection of all the ideas you care about, in your own words, under one account on the Internet.
Now, if you have any plans to do podcasts or public speaking, when you look at the best podcasters or public speakers, you see that they, if you watch multiple of their podcasts, You see that they're kind of just repeating the same five to 10 ideas and they're just exposing their best ideas to new audiences.
That's all they're really doing.
They've refined their ideas enough to know that these are the ones that are the most impactful.
So what you have to do is you have to experiment and try until you have those five to 10 ideas, and then you have to turn those ideas five to ten ideas and to each a thousand ideas, which we'll talk about now.
I really think a metric to aim for in your content is idea density, which means that the amount of high signal, or really good ideas, is just everywhere and that slowly increases over time, with time and effort, and that's what creates a brand that's worth following and paying for, because you just hit the mark all the time.
So the goal of curating ideas to include under your brand should fall at the intersection of one performance, which is ideas that have the potential to do well.
And this is a measure of how much other people will care and to excitement, which is the ideas that give you a sense of excitement, to write about them.
This is a measure of how much you care.
So it's a balance when choosing what ideas to post.
It's a balance of art.
Are other people going to care about this?
Has this done well before?
Or do I have a good hook?
Do I have other things?
And what you care about.
So it's not blatantly copying what works.
It's doing something unique, but also taking into account the principles that are actually going to capture attention.
So how do we do this?
Step one is to build an idea museum.
This is the most useful thing.
In other words, this just means build a swipe file is what marketers call it.
So this can be a document.
It can be a folder in Eden or Notion or Google Docs.
If you don't have access to Eden yet, join the wait list.
We're releasing the next cohort round soon if you don't know what it is.
It's an intelligent drive.
You can store all of your files, PDFs, videos, et cetera.
You can search all of those things by frame.
You can paste YouTube links, social media links.
It transcribes, downloads the video, makes it all referenceable with AI.
So you can put it inside a canvas or a project and it brings this unique way of working.
It's a workspace for your creative work and it allows you to replace things like Google Drive or certain AI apps like Cloud or ChatGPT, and even things like Frame for video editors.
If you need to share videos, comment on them, so on and so forth.
But the point is that you need somewhere to jot down ideas as soon as they come to mind.
This is a critical habit.
So when other people teach you how to create content and I've done this in the past I'll actually link to another thing called the content map, which helps you figure all of this out and creates like a web of content ideas that you can write about.
But people have you focus on like two to three content pillars, maybe even one.
And then you break those down into topics and subtopics and other things of that nature.
That's very useful.
But if you want to avoid all of that, just focus on the ideas that are important to you and share those.
That's it.
That's your entire content strategy.
Now, step two is to curate based on idea density.
So how do you actually start filling this idea museum?
Do you just scroll around?
Do you just think of ideas?
What do you do?
The best way, in my opinion, is to have three to five sources of information that have high idea density.
So what that means is just have three to five sources of information where, when you go to them, you consistently think damn, I wish I wrote that.
And you have to do this without judgment, because something that you think has been said over and over again to the point where it doesn't matter anymore, or something you think is too basic, or that everyone knows this.
Avoid letting any of those cloud your mind.
Just jot down the idea and then you're going to reframe it posted.
So the most idea dense sources of information, in my opinion, isn't just scrolling social media.
It's things like old or little known books.
So, as an example, I have five books that I reread over and over again because the ideas are just so good.
These are where the timeless principles live.
They're untouched by trends.
A second place is curated blogs, accounts, or books.
So these are like accounts that are doing the same thing as you, kind of, sort of, not really.
But these are blogs like Farnham Street, which curate the best ideas for modern intellectuals.
Accounts like Navalism, which curate Naval's best ideas.
Or books like the Maxwell Daily Reader, which has Maxwell's best ideas one day at a time for a year.
And sources like these do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, because you're just being exposed to all of these incredible validated ideas.
Of course, you should discover some on your own, like when you're watching a YouTube video and you spot something in the middle of a video and be like oh, that's good.
Or while you're scrolling social media.
But if you struggle to come up with ideas, go that route.
Now, the third place is just heavy hitting social accounts.
So I personally have a list of maybe five social accounts that always post great ideas.
If I don't have something to write about, I'll scroll through their page for inspiration and find something that I have an opinion on, and then I'll write about that.
Now step three is to learn how to write one idea 1000 different ways.
Because that's all this game is it's you have your five to 10, maybe 20 best ideas, and then you just rewrite those over and over again from all different angles.
And that's even more effective now than it was before, because AI can generate all information right.
People are following you because you don't have all information.
You have a very niche even though it's not really niche when you're talking about a bunch of different things.
It's a niche in spirit compared to AI, because becoming a good writer or speaker isn't only about the idea, but how you articulate the idea.
The idea does a lot of the heavy lifting, but the structure of the idea, how it's articulated, does even more so.
To show you what i mean, just take this post structure.
This is a post i wrote before.
One pattern i've noticed in happy people they're obsessed about maintaining their mental clarity.
So the idea here is that happy people maintain their mental clarity.
The structure is formatted in two parts a hook in the form of an observation and the delivery of what the observation is.
So it seems simple, but One idea with two different structures can drastically change how the idea does.
So ideas are cheap, but articulation of the ideas is expensive and you need to learn how to articulate them well.
As an example of another structure, let's take the same idea.
Happy people are obsessed of maintaining their mental clarity.
So it would look like this.
Happy people are clear-minded people.
They take time for rest.
They focus on one singular goal.
They ruthlessly eliminate distractions.
In other words, happy people are obsessive about maintaining their mental clarity.
It's the same idea, a different structure, and a different impact.
The first one is probably going to do a bit better.
That doesn't mean the second one is bad.
It just shows that this is a skill.
So what I recommend is every idea you come across, for now as you're practicing, write it in a few different ways and post them in that way.
Those two posts that I showed you.
Practically the same thing, but they're distinctly different posts.
So when you come across an idea, you add it to your idea museum or just take it down in your notes and then you turn it into a different structure.
But how do you actually do that?
OK, you go to your idea museum and you look at all of the ideas in there and then you break down the structures of those things and you start to create a second idea museum of structures that you can use.
So you practice this by the first three ideas that you mark down, you break down the structure of how those things work and then you kind of interchange them, right.
Like a three by three matrix.
So you take idea one, plug it into idea three structure, and you practice writing like that.
Now, what I recommend here is just employing AI for help.
AI is very good at helping you learn how to do this.
It's not very good at writing for you and again, we'll talk about that in the next video.
But you can use this prompt, which is do a comprehensive analysis on this social post, the overall idea, how the sentences are structured and choice of words, analyze why people engage with it, why it works so well, what psychological tactics are being used and how i can replicate this style step by step, with my own ideas.
So you paste the prompt, you use something like claude, and then you can either paste one post or maybe one newsletter or multiple posts into it and it's going to create like a little mini course on why those worked and how to replicate it.
And then you take another idea and then you practice and seriously, those are all of my secrets for content.
Congratulations, you just went through an entire course on content creation.
That's all you need.
But of course, there's also the skill of how to grow without relying on the algorithm.
So watch the last video, if you haven't already, which is how to build an audience starting from zero followers.
This is just the last video.
Now, this video is getting long, so we're going to speed things up a bit.
But idea number seven is that systems are the new product.
And I'm also speeding this up because I'm linking an entire guide to how I create profitable products.
And that goes over it much more in depth than I want to do here.
But at this point in time, we are in a systems economy.
People don't want a solution to their problems.
They want your solution to their problems.
There are tons of writing products out there.
So what makes my product to our writer stand out or even Eden?
What makes the software that's going to compete with Google Drive?
That there was a comment in the YouTube video on Matt and Ari, the co-founder's channel, saying that we have no competitive edge, but I don't think they'd use Eden.
And they definitely don't understand where we're going.
Nobody understands that.
That's in our head.
And we could easily get replaced or made irrelevant by Google.
But the difference is that these are hyper-specific systems that I made for myself.
The deeper layer to that is that these are hyper-specific systems that I made for people with the same problems as me.
And no big conglomerate corporation is going to Pay attention to as much detail and effectiveness as I'm going to, or my team is going to for the specific type of person that can benefit from a more specific system.
With Eden, we're kind of toeing the line there, right?
It is more general.
We're trying to encapsulate more.
But at the end of the day, it's for creatives.
It's for creators who have ideas, want to synthesize them, want to resurface them when they need to need to connect them, need to work with them in a project and not have 10 browser tabs open for all of your different research and your books and your AI apps and everything like that.
I mean, Google can't do that because...
Docs, slides, sheets, all of that is isolated.
By necessity, it's in different tabs.
And Google Drive, frankly, just has a terrible UX.
So for two-hour writer specifically, this all starts with identifying and solving problems in your life in a unique way.
So I had trouble having an endless source of content ideas.
I just struggled to come up with content ideas.
And two, I didn't want to waste a ton of time creating content for all different platforms.
So that's why I started experimenting with different systems.
And my goal was pretty clear.
I wanted to write all of my content in two hours a day.
So I had a constraint and that bred creativity.
So I started testing solutions for more content ideas.
I created swipe files, steps to generate ideas that worked for me and templates to use if I still couldn't think of anything.
And then I looked over my week.
This is a very useful practice if you're going to create a product is how does an individual's week look right?
What did I want to do?
How was I going to create content?
One newsletter a week seems reasonable.
Three posts a day, at least on something like Twitter seemed reasonable.
One thread a week seemed reasonable.
Okay.
Do all of these things have to be unique content?
Can I talk about one theme per week?
Can I write the newsletter and then pull social media posts from that?
So on, so forth.
And so I started testing that.
And when you start testing something that you created on like a week-long timescale, then you start to encounter problems.
And then you fix those problems to improve the system.
And then things start to flow.
So doing this, I realized that I could cross-post to just every platform.
Most people won't even try that because they think that people will get mad, that they're repeating themselves.
But frankly, I haven't noticed anything.
Maybe like one person is like, why are you repeating the same content on all platforms?
But they still do well because people are usually just consuming it on one platform.
So why would I waste my time?
To spread my ideas thin and try to create something new for each platform.
That would result in a decrease in quality, Rather than focus on less content with higher quality ideas and do those once a week.
And my hypothesis was correct.
That's literally the foundation of everything that I've done.
And then, from there, I realized okay, my newsletter can go on to my blog just so people can access it if they weren't on the email list, and And then it can turn into a YouTube outline.
And it's like the YouTube video can also go into the podcast.
I literally have all platforms on one piece of content a week that's broken down into the rest.
So, in a nutshell, and without going too deep into it, that's how you stand out in a world of products.
So thank you for watching this far.
I deeply appreciate it.
As I said, all of the links mentioned are in the description.
Subscribe for the next video on the future of work and watch the last video if you'd like to learn how to actually build an audience without relying on the algorithm.
Like, subscribe before you leave.
Again, thank you for watching.
Bye.
