When I was a kid, I always thought that building a business was out of reach because you don't really know any better when you're a kid.
The only thing you believe is possible is what your parents told you was possible because that's the only information you really have access to.
But the Internet itself has drastically changed that.
If you're on YouTube, if you're on any of these platforms, you've been exposed to all of these cool ideas and seeing all of these cool people building cool things.
And that's why I'm making this video because everyone has those ideas.
Those ideas that you think are so good in the moment and you tell all of your friends, you're like, hey, dude, let's go and build the next Tinder but for restaurants so that people can stop thinking of what food to get at night.
But the thing is, is you couldn't build that app.
You didn't know what to do.
You didn't feel like you could build a business because you didn't know what stood between yourself and that app or that business or anything other than, again, what your parents told you, which is getting a job and retiring at 65.
You didn't have the money.
You thought you needed investors.
You lack so much knowledge and skill.
You love the initial idea, but then your mind was flooded with LLCs and S -corps and privacy policies and all this other business bullshit you didn't want to deal with.
I thought the same thing.
I felt lost for a long time because simply I just didn't know where to start.
I didn't know where to look like is there a business course in college that I could take and I took a business course in college and it taught I did.
It left me even more confused.
I had no idea what I learned in that class.
I felt lost until I realized that I didn't need startup capital.
I needed social capital.
But what is social capital?
We'll talk about that soon.
But in short, it's having a good reputation with an audience of people who want to pay you for the value you provide.
Once you have that, you have leverage.
You can become a successful musician without a record label.
You can become a successful author without a publisher.
You can become a successful designer, programmer or polymath without an employer.
You can start almost any business and have the skill and potential customers to make it a success.
You don't have to rely on external funding, investments or anything like that.
You can build a team or network fast.
The best way to illustrate this is how we are building Cortex, right?
We're kind of competing against Notion, Obsidian, other note taking apps, Apple Notes, and I feel like I'm in a pretty good position to do it because I talk about productivity and writing and I see the problems in the space.
I see the problems with the other apps and how I use them in my own workflow.
And since I built an audience, right, social capital, I was willing to take on that large challenge because I know I have people that one, trust me, and two, have those same pain points as me because they have similar interests.
Now, as a side tangent to that, I've actually realized recently that this isn't too dependent on follower count.
I've realized that, yeah, I can get a good amount of people to sign up for Cortex and a lot of people have really enjoyed it, which I'm very grateful for.
But that's not where the power of an audience comes.
My point with saying that is that I don't want to make you feel like you need a million followers or subscribers in order to get some kind of tangible benefit from this so that you can start building the thing that you wanted to build.
The power of social capital or having an audience is the network, the amount of people that are willing to help you build that thing.
It's actually blows my mind that there are people that love Cortex so much that they want to go create videos about it, tell their friends about it, give us feedback, really use and test the app and other things that other people have to pay for or spend a lot of time going to networking events and making
these high level business connections so that they can be referred to anyone else with an audience and the Internet.
I don't want you to think of this as being a content creator.
I want you to think of this as putting your opinions, beliefs, expertise and value on the world wide web where everyone is connected so that you can attract this network that can help you achieve your shared goals.
And that goes even farther to say that I launched a book.
I wrote a book last year.
I thought that was only for big named authors and publishers.
And while I'm not a New York Times best seller, at least this time around, it felt good writing a book and being able to actually get it in people's hands.
That's what authors struggle so much with.
But what about a musician or anyone else that has a skill or interest that they want to earn an income out of or just make a living out of or be supported to do to make something sustainable so that it's no longer just a hobby that you do at night.
When you get home from work, it's something you can do all day.
If you don't have Spotify listeners for your music or your album doesn't do well, you're relying on external sources of traffic to get people to listen.
When you could just build an audience around your opinions, share your music, and then you start to build listeners, the network that likes you.
Not all of them have to like your music or your product.
They just have to like you because then they will be your biggest promoters.
They will distribute it for you.
They will help you with the resources to get it in more people's hands, regardless of your follower count.
And this goes far beyond just individual success.
I mean, look at creators like Marcus Brownlee, MKBHD, where I know he's had some controversy recently, but I believe he became a creative partner with Ridge, the Ridge Wallet.
Or also think how massive companies are giving equity to creators to be the face of their brand, because they either have two options now.
In the age of the internet is either bring up these in -house creators, right?
Little employees that create UGC around their brand, or give equity to a creator so they continue doing their own thing, but they also bring massive traffic to the company itself.
In other words, social capital is the currency of the next generation, not venture capital.
In other words, attention is the new currency, but attention alone can lead to a shallow and vain life.
Social capital, on the other hand, checks all the boxes for purpose, profit, and peace, knowing that you're providing value to the world.
Now there's a massive elephant in the room because we have to talk about why this sounds like that Black Mirror episode nosedive.
And if you haven't seen that episode, I'll give you a brief rundown.
It's about a society that uses a social credit system.
Your reputation and worth are based on this five -star rating.
Think of how you rate an Uber driver after you take a ride with them, you rate a person after you interact with them.
The crazy thing about this is that your rating determines what communities you can live in, what jobs you can apply for and get, what people accept you into their social circle, and so on.
You can imagine that the five -star crowd is just a bunch of rich and beautiful people that all gather around each other.
Now my question for you is does this not remind you of the creator economy?
It can get a bit insane, and while I know there is a good side to it, there is definitely a negative and a bad side.
I remember seeing this meme or this video one time of how this girl cut ties with her parents because they had a low follower count.
That's crazy, but you can see this with people with a lot of followers and people with a little followers.
The people with a lot of followers, they get those brand deals.
They get the equity and the people without much followers are kind of fending for themselves, right?
But I want to break this down a bit further because it can't just all be lumped into all this dystopian black mirror image.
I really think there is something positive here that I see going into the future of what the creator economy is and can be.
So there are three types of people on the internet, and influencers are the main ones that people look up to and they praise and all the influencers get all the attention and all of the special treatment.
But influencers aren't the only people on the internet and they are especially not the only people with power.
So the second type of person is just the consumer.
They aren't necessarily there to contribute to the online space, but they're there to gather knowledge, purchase products, you know, consume in general, entertain themselves, things like that.
They're usually the ones following the influencers.
And then the third type of person is a creator.
This is important because I'm drawing a distinction between an influencer and a creator.
So for that purpose, I want to define a creator as a value creator.
Someone who doesn't consume to the point of being mentally obese and someone who isn't focused solely on vanity, validation, or seeing their number of likes go up.
A value creator is someone who builds their worth based on the value they create, the words they write, the products they build, the problems they solve, the music they produce, the code they type.
In the context of social capital, there's a bit more to the creator story.
They care more about impact over likes, depth over looks, and truth over conformity.
In order to create value, there needs to be an audience, small or large, who perceives their creation as valuable.
Because if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a noise?
Does it impact their life?
No. 1 times 0 equals 0.
So what does a creator have that influencers, celebrities, politicians, and consumers don't?
So now we need to talk about the three pillars of social capital.
How do you build ethical social capital?
Because social capital isn't just about building an audience.
Anyone can create viral TikToks and meaningless means to appeal to the masses and provide nothing to humanity aside from the occasional laugh and cringe.
If you're a writer, designer, programmer, any type of creative, or just an individual who wants to do what they want for a living, social capital is what you must build.
Social capital equals distribution plus reputation plus value.
So starting with that first one, distribution.
There are three types.
Built, borrowed, and bought.
Built is like building a following or newsletter.
Borrowed is like people quoting your book or sharing your post.
And bought is like paid ads or newsletter sponsorships.
The reason most people fail to build an income source out of a job is because they do everything but attempt to get customers.
They build the app and can't get users.
They write the book and can't get readers.
They make the music and can't get listeners.
But if you simply focused on distribution, you'd be able to get your creation in front of other people.
And that's the only way you'll be able to tell if it's decent or useful.
You aren't as skilled as you think you are if nobody likes what you do.
This is a starving artist.
Starving artists like to create just to create.
They don't like to create to serve.
They don't like to create to impact.
They want to do whatever they want and they don't care if it's valuable.
But this isn't about validation.
This is about needing an income so you can sustain your passions full time or else life gets assigned to you.
You'll justify how you have to work a job because nobody likes your work just so you don't have to drop your ego and finally help other people.
I could yell at you all day.
Because of this because you want to write an article and you don't want to use a framework to make it more impactful because that takes away the authenticity from it.
Or you just don't want to strip the quote unquote authenticity in general from it.
But considering you aren't being entirely selfless with that thing and how it impacts another person, you aren't completely dedicated to serving that other person with the article that you're creating by all means possible.
You are conforming to something.
And that's the opposite of the definition of authenticity is conformity.
You're conforming to the little ego that is preventing you from writing with impact.
And in general, I just feel like people latch on to this concept of authenticity too much and then try to conform to that whatever their image of that is in their head when they should just write for impact in a valuable way.
With that said, everyone should build distribution.
In terms of borrowed or bought, you can worry about that after you're started building distribution.
Social media is free.
Writing is free. Both are accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
Once you've built distribution and have leveraged that to earn an income, then think about bought distribution.
If you want to build distribution, consider checking out Cortex Premium.
The premium tier of Cortex comes with a premium community with the Creator Quick Start course, personalized help from Cortex educators, monthly content templates that you can just plug and play, and creator events and more stuff like that.
We haven't advertised this very much.
It's been around since the start of Cortex, but you have to sign up in -app, right?
In -app billing. You go to settings, billing, upgrade to the premium plan.
So sign up for Cortex first, then you can upgrade within there.
And of course you can write all of your content and products and all of this stuff inside of Cortex.
So hopefully I'll see you inside there.
After distribution, right, being able to get your value in front of other people, the second pillar of social capital is reputation.
This is what both influencers, most of the time, and consumers lack is they haven't built reputation.
They don't have trust.
People don't buy their products just because they like you.
This is a major separating factor where I could sell the same thing as someone else.
Technically, I'm selling right now until AI features are out this month and mobile and desktop being able to transcribe YouTube videos and chat with all of that in Cortex.
Right now, Cortex is very good, but if you're not a power user or if you don't care for the connections and tags and capture and having things open in a pane so it's all referenceable, then it may not seem too different from something like Notion to you.
It just seems like another note -taking app.
Of course, I know the power of those things and I like them, but it can get rather confusing.
But the point there is I can build something like Cortex while Notion, this behemoth of a company exists.
But since I've cultivated at least some level of trust with some of you, of course, you can't do it with everyone.
It's a balance, right?
Hopefully 80 -20, maybe 90 -10.
I feel like if you're loved by everyone, that's not a good indicator that you're doing something right.
But the point with this is, is that my content reflects this where I'm not building for everyone and I'm not building to give people a cheap dopamine hit.
I'm not trying to play that game.
I'm trying to play the long -term gratification game where my videos are a lot longer.
They're sometimes even a big podcast length, that's for a reason.
Even when people comment, oh, these could be condensed into 10 minutes.
One, no, they couldn't because you're missing out on the context and the entire purpose of the video.
Two, it's biased towards those who actually put in the time to try to understand it because they're going to get 10x more out of it than some 10 -minute video that they chose to watch because they had 10 minutes to spare.
The thing with those with the very short, dopamine survival -driven videos is that there's one, nothing wrong with them.
That's a step, an actual necessary step in levels of development.
And that's usually why most of my titles are, they're not clickbaity, I would say, they deliver on the promise, but they're more shallow, I would say.
But the thing is if you don't build trust, then they, your audience views you as a commodity.
So the difference here is that value creators focus on depth, creativity, solving complex problems, and long -term gratification by distributing insight that aids in understanding, not confusion and overwhelm.
They earn with their mind, not their time, looks, or labor.
One is infinite, the others fade with time.
One promotes centropy, the others increase entropy.
One is a net positive for humanity, the others are dragging it down to hell.
You can build distribution without reputation, but you're left in an even worse spot.
Rather than not having any users, readers, or buyers, you have a massive audience of people who care about a part of you that will inevitably change.
They don't care about your work and they won't care about you in the coming years.
Now the third pillar after distribution and reputation is value.
Because you can write, design, build, and create all day long, but that doesn't mean it's valuable and it doesn't mean it's worth paying for.
And if it isn't worth paying for, good luck sustaining your passions independently while having a shred of control over the entirety of your day.
Value equals the measure of how much people care about what you do times the magnitude of problems you solve.
Value creators don't just create to create, they create to solve real, tangible problems.
They don't solve imaginary problems that don't exist with cool startup ideas, they solve human problems.
Health, wealth, relationships, and happiness.
They remove the barriers to improvement and evolution from an individual.
You can have distribution and reputation, but if you don't solve the valuable problem, you are a commodity and soon enough you will question the fulfillment that stems from your work.
You will chase quick cash over your life's work just to loop back around as all burnout businessmen do, wondering where your life has ended up.
Now finally, how do we build social capital with those things in mind?
Let's get one thing straight.
Most people don't have an abundance of money to use as a shortcut in life or business.
They don't see a path toward building the life they want because they think they need to work a job, save their money, invest a few bucks here and there, and so on.
But then their dreams end up in the graveyard with everyone else's.
They get wrapped up in responsibilities and consumer culture.
They never build the business.
They never have control over their mornings, afternoons, and nights.
They get trapped in a perpetual cycle of waking up stressed, working with people they don't care about, and going home too tired to do anything productive.
The fundamental misunderstanding is that the world has changed.
We aren't in the industrial age anymore where the only options are to go to school and get a job to live the American dream.
Money isn't the only form of leverage.
Social capital, on the other hand, can be used as leverage to make as much money as you'd like.
You build social capital by building an audience.
What I mean by that last part is that if I have 10 ,000 followers on Twitter and then I want to grow on Instagram, then I can find someone with 20 ,000 followers on Instagram and be like, hey, I have 10K on Twitter.
Do you want to exchange shares in order to do XYZ?
Or you can reach out to someone who has a service that you want, like building a landing page or getting your product shared.
And you can say, I have this many followers here.
Is there a way we can work something out?
I don't have the money right now, but I think you can find value in the audience that I have.
It's the same reason why many businesses acquire other businesses just for the sake of having their customer list.
It's because people, the customers, are the only thing that matters in the business because the business doesn't exist without them.
So the first step to building any form of social capital is to learn a relevant and future -proof skill stack.
And the beautiful thing about building an audience is that it does just this.
So if you don't know what to do with your life or business, build an audience because it will teach you these skills, writing, persuasion, product development, marketing and sales, graphic design, branding, trafficking conversions, and more.
You don't waste time studying one skill that you think will help you become valuable.
You build an audience and let the market tell you if it is valuable.
The other thing is that you don't learn these skills in a silo because that's not how humans learn.
You don't go and study one skill.
You set a goal and then you start pursuing the goal.
And then you look back and you say, oh, I've made progress towards this goal and I've developed these skills.
The thing with that is, is that you engage with nature's compass.
If you're not getting results, then you try something else.
You learn something new and then you get results.
If you never get results, then you've never experimented enough.
You've never tried something new.
There is a way for you to replicate some form of success by doing this.
And finally is that you just, you don't need permission to start.
You simply start building your own personal brand on the internet.
You create your banner bio, email list, and write posts and threads.
You build and sell a product or service, or you can just affiliate for someone else's.
You can take someone else's product or service, get a commission for the sales that you make on it and practice selling and marketing.
If you want to do this with Cortex as a very easy example, the affiliate program will be out soon and then you can create productivity content.
You can create writing content and then you promote your affiliate link to Cortex and you may or may not earn an income depending on how skilled you are.
And then if you want, you can go and you can build another version of Cortex.
Go ahead, be our competition.
It's fun. Or you can create an info product around writing or productivity and then they're complimentary and then you make double the bucks.
The best part is that by the time that you've developed all of these skills, you have an audience where, again, it's not mainly about the people within that audience.
It's about the network that it allows you to be exposed to.
So even if you're not selling something that all of your audience can buy, a small portion of it can, and they can refer you, all of your audience can refer you to other people who can purchase what you do as you grow larger.
The second best part is that you can build an audience around any of your interests.
Why? Because you became interested in them, meaning that other people can become interested in them.
You're not trying to target the people who already have those interests.
They'll naturally be attracted to you talking.
You're persuading people as to why your interests are interesting and worth adopting into their lives.
So that's step one, is acquiring a future -proof skill stack by just starting.
The second, which is more guidance to that, is to start small, accessible, and free, or very cheap.
What I said before could have seemed very overwhelming because you feel like you have to learn all of these skills at once when that's just not how it is.
You are learning them all at once, but that's because they're not standalone skills.
Rather than learning persuasion and marketing and sales and product, you simply learn how to build an audience and you learn all of the other things.
That's the shortcut is just aiming toward a higher, more meta skill.
But if you want a practical way to go about it, this is what I would do.
One is start with writing because you don't need to learn video, audio, or graphic design to write on social media.
Plus, writing enhances the impact of any video script, audio script, or text within a design that you see online.
Two is start with one short form platform.
So X, LinkedIn, or threads by Instagram.
You need a way to generate traffic on a platform where people can discover and follow you.
Things like blogs and podcasts have terrible discoverability.
And three is start with one long form platform.
So I personally recommend a newsletter.
This way you keep a dedicated portion of the following you build.
Then you can always turn the newsletters into YouTube or podcast scripts.
Or you don't have to because Justin Welsh, who's only on LinkedIn and Twitter and has a newsletter is doing just fine and has made over, I think close, almost at 10 million in revenue as one person business, not this year overall, but still a lot in the single year.
Now, why do I recommend those three steps?
Because they act as a forcing function to one, get results quickly, and to learn the skills that actually matter.
If you want your writing to be engaging and impactful, it must be persuasive.
If you want to build your email list, you need a basic understanding of marketing and sales.
The thing is you don't need to formally learn those skills.
You just try, fail, and improve.
If you quit, it's because you don't see it as the only viable option.
You'd rather spend that time distracting yourself from the comfortable life you accepted once you quit.
Now the final step after learning a future -proof skill stack and using writing short form platform long form platform is to build reputation and distribute value.
Most people wait to start selling because they think their audience doesn't want to be sold to.
The greatest thing I did for my personal and business development was selling a product as soon as I started.
That way I had an incentive behind my actions.
I was aiming to earn an income with a product that helped others.
I had direction. I knew that if I wasn't earning an income, I wasn't actually valuable.
And if my income wasn't increasing, my reputation wasn't increasing.
Free content, writing designs, and the rest isn't enough to impact others lives.
They need to intentionally engage in value exchange with you.
They need to invest in a product of yours that solves a problem in their life.
Because if you don't solve a problem in their life, you are replaceable to them and they will not remember you and they will not attribute their results to you.
Now, since I've started, I've built and launched a product, whether that be free or paid or service or anything.
Just anything, launching anything.
I've done that almost every quarter, every three months for the past five years.
These range from ebooks to courses to physical books to physical products to cohorts.
And now the Cortex software itself.
And who knows what's going to come next.
I know that a lot of books are going to come next.
Now, this is difficult to comprehend unless you just do it, but this is what builds your authority.
This is what separates the people that actually grow and are valuable versus those who solely focus on content and begging for donations that don't really get anywhere and don't have an audience that are actually trusting them, because that is how you build reputation.
That is how you give value is by actually building and selling something.
If you're afraid of money or demonize it, because of your limited programming that you think is higher and more spiritual, I cannot help you, as you can't see that there are multiple perspectives to money and many of those are overwhelmingly good.
That's it. Build social capital.
Join the new rich. Check out links in the description for to our writer.
If you want to learn that.
One -person business launch pad, relatively new.
Mental monetization for marketing and sales.
And of course, the Cortex software for tying everything together and managing all of your knowledge.
Thank you for watching.
Like, subscribe if you want.
Bye.
