If you have multiple interests, do not waste the next 2-3 years
How to actually manage multiple interests and turn them into a one-person business.Research, write, and schedule content with your AI strategist (gives you d...
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Having multiple interests is not a weakness
- 00:00If you have multiple interests and you don't know how to manage them or you don't know what options there are for
- 00:05you in the future, then I have good news for you because this is the greatest time to be alive. But in lies the
- 00:13problem. Society has made you feel like having multiple interests is a weakness. We all know the story, right? You go to
- 00:20school, you get a job, you retire at some point, but there is so much wrong with that series of events. I feel like
- 00:26a lot of people fail to understand that we don't live in the industrial age anymore, but we are still dealing with
- 00:33its consequences. Specializing in only one skill is certain death. And I feel
- 00:38like we all know by now how dangerous mechanical living is for the psyche and
- 00:44soul. It's not meaningful. Right? We've made productivity our god and that god has betrayed us. And I also think that
- 00:50people feel that we are going through a second renaissance. So, you're very excited, right? You have multiple
- 00:56interests. You're like, "Oh, okay. How do I actually make the most of this? I see people online and they're doing
- 01:02these cool things. I get to listen to people who talk about my interests, but how do I do something similar?" You have
- 01:09to understand that your curiosity and love for learning is not a weakness. It
- 01:14is 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
- 01:21just learn and learn and learn and watch tutorials, get stuck in tutorial hell. I would see people online say to avoid
- 01:27shiny 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
- 01:33focus on one thing. And I got my dopamine from feeling smart. But when I
- 01:38looked back at my life, I didn't really have anything to show for it. I felt smart. I couldn't articulate anything
- 01:44that I remembered. But my life didn't change all that much. And honestly, I just felt like I was falling behind. In
- 01:49college, I tried so many different things because I always had this dream of doing something creative, but I was
- 01:55going to college and if college ended and I didn't have a creative income source, then I would have to get a job.
- 02:02And 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
- 02:07things, but I didn't stick to one thing. And so that's what happened. 5 years into college, one more year than I was
- 02:13supposed to go, I had to get a job because I just needed to survive, right? I needed money. But the missing piece
- 02:19for me that I'm guessing is a missing piece for you was a vessel. A vessel, a
- 02:24way to channel your multiple interests into one thing, right? That's not what
- 02:30people consider a specialist to be. That's more of a generalist, right? The let's say the definition of a generalist
- 02:37is someone who has an aim for their life. They have a desired outcome. They have a future they want to achieve and
- 02:43they do all of the things required to achieve that. We're going to dig deeper into this, but that's such a huge
- 02:49insight that you may not understand yet. In other words, I needed to do something that could generate an income so that I
- 02:56could survive, but it umbrellaed all of my interests into it. So, if you've ever
- 03:01felt guilty for not being able to pick one thing, if you've been told to niche down when your mind wants to expand, if
- 03:07you've wondered whether there's a path you can take that doesn't lead to the misery you see in everyone else's eyes,
- 03:13this is the greatest time to be alive. So, here are the seven most compelling and practical ideas that I came up with
- 03:20for people with multiple interests. We'll start by understanding why having multiple interests is a superpower,
- 03:26which is very important. And then I'll give you the practical steps, kind of hyper practical. This is kind of like a
- 03:31full course on how to turn those into your life's work. And this will especially make sense in my next video
- 03:38called the future of work, which is just going to be a huge synthesis of all the research I've done on what the future
- 03:44could look like with AI, AGI, etc. I think you'll like that, especially if you're a creative. So, we have a lot to
- 03:50talk 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.
I – The 3 ingredients of individual success & the death of the expert
- 03:56So, the first idea, we're going to talk about the three ingredients of individual success and the death of the
- 04:02expert. And we'll start with a quote from Adam Smith who had a huge influence on the birth of capitalism. Well, we'll
- 04:07talk about that in a bit, but the quote is, "The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations
- 04:13generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." So, it's funny that he says
- 04:19that because industrial age, capitalism, free markets, employment, etc. I'm not
- 04:24against capitalism. I think it's going to evolve into something better hopefully. But it's funny that he says
- 04:30that because he's the one who contributed to it, if not created it. So specialization took over because in a
- 04:37pin factory, for example, this happened across many different types of factories and lines of work, one worker doing
- 04:43every step could produce 20 pins a day. And then many workers each doing one
- 04:49step rather than every step could produce 48,000. So we built an entire
- 04:54world around this model. We just siloed people into doing individual repetitive
- 05:00robotic tasks. And you can wonder why we're at threat of replacement from robots right now. It's because humans
- 05:06became assembly lines working 9-to-five jobs. And this happened because frankly governments don't serve the national
- 05:13interest, the interest of the people. They serve their own interest. So the opposite of capitalism also isn't the
- 05:19answer. But the same thing applies here to corporations. The corporations don't serve the employees interest. They serve
- 05:26their own. And their own interest is profit. And since that starts to form the base of the economy and just the
- 05:32general culture of the US or the west, then schools were also designed to serve
- 05:38that interest. Their sole purpose was to create factory workers who were obedient. And the school system hasn't
- 05:45changed much. So if you want to have specialized knowledge so that you could never run an operation, especially your
- 05:51own operation, then be dependent on schools for your education and jobs for your wage. Be duped into believing that
- 05:57specialization is what makes a human valuable when it is clear that the system does not need you specifically to
- 06:03perform that task. So in lies the distinction. If specialization makes people stupid, then what makes someone
- 06:10free? What makes someone sovereign? And there's three ingredients. self-education, self-interest, and
- 06:15self-sufficiency. So, self-education is pretty clear. If you want a different result from the one that traditional
- 06:21education promises, then you must direct your own learning. Now, self-interest raises some flags because it sounds
- 06:28selfish and short-sighted, right? Everyone should be selfless. That's what you've been told. But self-interest
- 06:34simply means concerned with one's own interest. And if that isn't a priority for you, then whose interest are you
- 06:40going to serve? Especially when your survival is dependent on it, you're going to serve the interest of the
- 06:46schools, the jobs, and the government. And those interests are not very beneficial to you. In other words, you
- 06:52need to follow your own interest because your interest is often beneficial to
- 06:57others. And of course, this depends on what level of cognitive development that you're at. But I would assume that most
- 07:03people don't want to hurt most people. And I would assume that in the culture and day and age that we live in, most
- 07:09people are beyond that. And an objection or argument here is that well if I were if people just served their own interest
- 07:15then they would just be scrolling on their phones all day and and indulging in cheap pleasures and dopamine and
- 07:21gambling and all this other stuff. But take take a second and look whose interest does that actually serve. That
- 07:27is usually not your actual interest but an interest that you have become addicted to or an interest that's been
- 07:34assigned to you. And that's usually comes from the corporations who actually own the social media companies that
- 07:39you'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
- 07:46through the rest. Now, the truly selfish person in Einran's view is a self-respecting self-supporting human
- 07:52being who neither sacrifices others to himself nor sacrifices himself to others. This rejects both the predator
- 07:58and the doormat. So that's self-interest and now self-sufficiency the last ingredient is the refusal to outsource
- 08:06your judgment, your learning and your agency. So if self-education is the engine and self-interest is the compass,
- 08:13then self-sufficiency is the foundation that prevents your life direction from being hijacked. So the generalist
- 08:19naturally must emerge. Someone with multiple interests must emerge if they
- 08:25fit into this triad or they develop this triad of traits because self-interest
- 08:30motivates self-education. You learn things because it genuinely improves your life. You're not assigned to learn
- 08:36things for the interest of the system that you're within. And then self-education enables self-sufficiency
- 08:42because you can only be as sovereign as the domains you understand. And if you're a specialist, you you only
- 08:48understand one domain. There's a reason you can't run the entire operation and why you're kept dumb to that and you're
- 08:54kept siloed because actually think about it. If you knew how to run the entire company, it was very clear to you, you
- 09:00understood it, you knew how to do it, then why wouldn't you do that? And last, that self-sufficiency clarifies your
- 09:07self-interest. So, it's like a cycle. It's it's a triad, but it's also a cycle because when you're not dependent on
- 09:14others interpretations, you can actually perceive what serves you. Most people pursue multiple interests as an escape
- 09:20from their work. But when your interests become your work or your life's work, most of them start to filter out. So you
- 09:26think you have all of these uh interests that may not lead to something
- 09:32beneficial monetarily or in terms of money. But once you actually get on the path, when work turns into play for you,
- 09:40then you tend to drop the interest that just served as an escape and you really start to focus in and clarify what you
- 09:46want out of life. So you may have too many interests right now, but once you actually start to get on the right path
- 09:52as we're going to discuss, they will become so much more clear. That is the best way to manage multiple interests. I
- 09:59see these videos on how to manage multiple interests from accounts that I like. Odysius, I love you. But I don't
- 10:05think those people are on the right track. I don't think creating a a note-taking system as someone with a
- 10:10note-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
- 10:18in your life, even if it's not directly tied to money. But if money is a currency of agency, expressing your
- 10:25agency, then money is important because that allows you to discover something more meaningful and to choose that
- 10:31meaningful thing over the options that are available to you right now. in a culture that glorifies productivity as
- 10:38God. So to prevent a rant, let's get back on track. When you look at every CEO or creative or founder, they're
- 10:46almost always a generalist, even if it doesn't seem like it on the surface, because they understand enough about
- 10:51marketing to direct it, enough about product to build it, and enough about people to lead them. But they also need
- 10:57to direct the ship. They need to learn and adapt when circumstances change. Meaning, they have to learn a lot, and
- 11:03they have to go very broad. They can't go too deep on one thing aside from their company. But that has its own
- 11:09benefits. It has the benefit of creating your own unique model of the world, your
- 11:14own unique way of viewing the world. Because ideas that cross into different domains, they complement each other. And
- 11:21that unique way of viewing the world allows you to catch and see ideas and opportunities that other people wouldn't
- 11:27see. So it's harder to replicate until you actually put in the work of building it. And then someone can try to
- 11:33replicate it, but they don't they still don't have the unique way of viewing the world. They still don't have all of the
- 11:38intersections of ideas that led to the specific decision-making that you made. So you are much more likely to succeed
II – You are living through the second renaissance, take advantage of it
- 11:46than them. That leads into idea number two, which is that you are living through the second renaissance and you
- 11:51need to take advantage of it. So another quote from Da Vinci, study the science of art, study the art of science,
- 11:58develop your senses, especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else. The
- 12:04ultimate moat or the final competitive advantage worth paying for in my opinion
- 12:09is an opinion. It is a perspective that only you can see because the uniqueness of your life experience created it. That
- 12:15may just be the last thing anyone else can replicate. And since that's always been the case, that's always been the
- 12:21case. You have to understand that that has always been the case. Why not prioritize it now? Especially when
- 12:28automation is at your doorstep. This is like forcing everyone to prioritize the one thing that has mattered and will
- 12:35matter. But how do you prioritize it? How do you develop it? By pursuing multiple interests and building
- 12:41something with them. Actually, it's the reverse. By building something useful and learning the multiple interests that
- 12:47you have to learn because every interest you've ever pursued leaves behind a residue. Every interest increases the
- 12:54number of connections that can be made. Every interest expands and increases the complexity of how you model and
- 12:59interpret reality. And the more complex your model of reality, the more problems you can solve, opportunities you can
- 13:05see, and value you can create. Specialism completely halts this process. And your shiny object syndrome
- 13:11has been trying to tell you this whole time from birth until now. Just think of how complex that is, right? We take
- 13:18advantage of just every single passing moment, every single thing that's happened to us. All of the billions upon
- 13:24billions of bits of information that our mind has processed in our own unique location, situation, culture from the
- 13:31bottom up. There's so many different things influencing how we see the world throughout from birth until now. You
- 13:37have cultivated a way of seeing things that others cannot access. AI cannot
- 13:43think this way until you tell AI to think that way. So, a person who studied
- 13:48psychology and design sees user behavior differently from a pure designer. Now, imagine if they tacked on something else
- 13:55to that aside from just psychology and design. A person who learns sales and philosophy closes deals differently than
- 14:01the pure salesman. A person who understands fitness and business builds health companies that MBAs can't
- 14:07understand. And if you really think about it, this is the exact pattern that showed in the Renaissance and what
- 14:12allowed individuals to flourish. So we have to consider what made that possible and see if that shows up today, which it
- 14:19does. So before the printing press, knowledge was scarce. Books were copied by hand and a single text could take a
- 14:25scribe months to reproduce. Libraries were very rare and literacy was rarer. If you wanted to learn something outside
- 14:32of your trade, you either had access to a monastery or you didn't learn that thing. And then Gutenberg changed
- 14:38everything. So within 50 years, 20 million books flooded Europe. Ideas that once took generations to spread now
- 14:44moved in months. Literacy exploded. The cost of knowledge collapsed. For the first time in history, a person could
- 14:50realistically pursue multiple domains of mastery in a single lifetime. And the renaissance was the result. So whenever
- 14:57someone compares this to AI, they say, "Oh, well, it's not the same, and AI does so much more." But the pattern is
- 15:03still there. There is still something there. And I don't think anyone has figured out what the future is going to
- 15:08look 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
- 15:15without accepting them as truth, but potentially pursuing them or utilizing these ideas because they can be useful
- 15:22to your life right now and probably going into the future. It's better than doing nothing. When we look at Da Vinci,
- 15:27he didn't just do one thing. He painted, sculpted, engineered, studied anatomy, designed war machines, and mapped the
- 15:34human body. Michelangelo was a painter, sculptor, architect, and poet. So, in today's world, unique minds are finally
- 15:42able to operate the way they were meant to. They were supposed to cross disciplines, synthesize connections, and
- 15:48follow curiosity wherever it led. The printing press was a catalyst for a new type of person to emerge. A person who
- 15:55could learn anything, combine everything and create something that no specialist ever could. And this is happening again.
III – How to turn multiple interests into a lucrative way of life
- 16:01So idea number three, how to turn multiple interests into a lucrative way of life. So as a recap, there are a few
- 16:07things that we know so far. You have multiple interests but feel like you can't keep learning forever. You have a
- 16:13love for interestbased self-education but have to carve out time outside of your career to do it. You understand the
- 16:19need to become self-sufficient, but you feel like you don't have value worth paying for yet. And you need to be able
- 16:25to adapt fast because we don't know what the future looks like. So the question then is how do we combine all of these
- 16:31things or all of our interests into a way of life? Not a way of work life
- 16:36balance, 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
- 16:43just boom boom boom tie these things together. To make money from your interests, you need other people to
- 16:48become interested in them too. That part is trivial because if you became interested in something, other people
- 16:54can too. You simply must learn to persuade. So skill to learn right there. Persuasion. Just read a few books on
- 17:01persuasion and it'll naturally catch on if you are creating something. With that, you need a way for these people to
- 17:07pay you. In this context, that usually means you need to sell a product because you probably aren't going to find a job
- 17:12that allows you to express your interest. And investing in stocks or real estate to any effective degree
- 17:18requires a good amount of capital. So in other words, you need attention. Attention is one of the blast modes
- 17:24because it's very scarce. Scarcity is going to survive, right? AGI can't make
- 17:29attention a commodity, right? It can provide uh maybe in the future a basic
- 17:35foundation for survival, right? We don't have to worry about survival anymore. The the things that we see as scarce
- 17:41right now, a lot of the things will become commodities, but our attention, there's only so much to go around. So,
- 17:48what's worth paying for in the future? And as a creative, you may be surprised to hear this, but it's creative work.
- 17:54Stop worrying about AI copying your image or copying your writing. We'll talk about this more in I think it's the
- 18:01next video. Just think about it. If anyone can write anything or build anything or create anything like we're
- 18:07hearing 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
- 18:12anything. Which ones are going to win? It's going to be the ones that people know about. It's the ones that people
- 18:18pay attention to because you can have the greatest product in the world. You can have your greatest little mobile app or SAS app, but if nobody knows about
- 18:25it, it just ends up like every single other product or SAS app that's been
- 18:31created in the past that nobody knows about. It just doesn't go anywhere. You you didn't waste your time. You learned
- 18:36some stuff maybe, but you're missing a piece of the puzzle. It's never only just been build this thing. It's so much
- 18:43more than that. And the other thing here is just opinionated work. Opinionated creative work. Would you rather use this
- 18:50vibecoded SAS app like a a Dropbox alternative that isn't being maintained
- 18:57by a large team of people that can handle billions of users? Are you even going to trust that with your do you
- 19:03even understand the software space? I didn't until I started building something like a Dropbox alternative with my team. But you're acting like
- 19:10people care a ton about the money that they spend on a useful solution in their life and like they even want to build
- 19:16that thing. I mean, you don't even spend 20 minutes cooking your own food every day for health and nutrition. You pay 20
- 19:24to 30 bucks for Uber Eats to deliver you food. Humans just want convenience on so
- 19:30many different levels. And like people are blowing this way out of proportion as to what's going to happen. People
- 19:35have more things that they want to spend their time on. Not everyone in the world just wants to be inside of clawed code
- 19:42building what like whatever suits their needs that day. Some people will, of course, but not even close to everyone.
- 19:49So, back to the point. You need to become a creator. Now, before you cringe
- 19:54and leave, I don't necessarily mean become a content creator, even though I
- 20:00kind of do, but let's just unpack that. I mean that the solution to stop creating for someone else because you
- 20:06need them to give you a paycheck is to create for yourself. Humans by nature are creators who were convinced that
- 20:12being a machine would lead to the American dream. We are toolbuilders at our core. We thrive in any niche because
- 20:19we create solutions to problems. If a lion were put in Alaska, it would not build shelter and clothing. It would
- 20:25die. A lion belongs in its own niche. We don't belong in one niche. Everyone's telling you to niche down when everyone
- 20:31lives in a separate freaking niche across the world. It doesn't make sense. Now the second thing is that every
- 20:38business is a media business right now. And remember you need attention. How do you generate attention? Media. Where is
- 20:45media? Where is attention? Social media. And that's at least right now. Things evolve, right? Social media platforms
- 20:51may not last forever, but something's going to take their place. And of course, you're going to have to adapt at
- 20:56that point. So yes, if you have multiple interests, it would be wise in my
- 21:01opinion. And I don't want to just give a blanket prescription to everyone, but it's so unique. It you should probably
- 21:07become a content creator, but you you also have to really think through how saturation just does not exist in this
- 21:14way. There's no saturation in you meeting people in real life, right? There's there's a certain amount of
- 21:20people that you can have as close friends. There's less people that you can have as friends. I mean, more people
- 21:26that you can have as friends. And then there's more people you can have as acquaintances. There's more people that you can have as people you've met
- 21:31before. And if you think of your consumption habits, you probably skim past hundreds of posts a day,
- 21:38potentially more. What about long form, which takes longer to create, meaning that that decreases saturation even
- 21:44more? 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
- 21:50attention to go around. And how many videos do you skip? How many social posts do you skip? That just shows that
- 21:56there's an attention deficit. Not that your attention should just be in front of a screen all day, but also most of
- 22:02what you consume just sucks, right? It's not good content. It's not beneficial to you. It's not helping you learn. It's
- 22:09not providing anything meaningful. There's a massive deficit of valuable
- 22:14and beneficial and useful content because just look at your screen. Look at what you're consuming every day.
- 22:19There's maybe one or two things, if that, that actually change your life. not that you need to change your life
- 22:24all 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
- 22:31mechanism to do independent work. Because when we think about that, that covers all of our bases. If you love
- 22:38learning, great. Reframe it as research. And now that's literally your main job. Most of the things I write about simply
- 22:44come 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,
- 22:50just 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
- 22:57business to do that and every business needs to attract customers. And you probably don't give two [ __ ] about paid
- 23:03ads, SEO, or any other form of marketing. This is what trips many people up because they are only used to
- 23:08doing one specialized task within a business as an employee. If you need to be able to adapt going to the future,
- 23:15which you do, then amazing. You can build and launch new products to your audience as fast as you can build them.
- 23:20I personally have a pretty solid audience. And if my next product were to fail, I have people who would be willing
- 23:27to 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
- 23:33your entire load in one go on one launch and if it fails then oh, you're done. It
- 23:39doesn't even cost you money to post content. If you're just Yeah, if you blew your life savings on paid ads, then
- 23:44maybe 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
- 23:49SAS 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
- 23:56going to be putting in like a marathon's worth of effort into getting capital for
- 24:01it, into getting customers or users, into finding talent and everything else that goes into building the business. So
- 24:08my point is that no other job or career or path allows people with multiple
- 24:13interests to do all of those things. So how do you actually start building it? Where's the practicality, Dan? What are
IV – How to turn yourself into a business
- 24:19the actionable steps? I get it. Okay. Idea number four, how to turn yourself into a business. Now some of you have
- 24:26probably seen this graphic before on the oneperson business. I have an entire oneperson business playlist, but this
- 24:31has one less thing, right? So the three pillars which used to be four pillars of
- 24:37a oneperson business are brand, content and product. But how those differ from the traditional business is that your
- 24:44brand are your goals. So what do you want out of life? And then for brand what are you helping people achieve? For
- 24:49content or media or how you attract people to that brand that is knowledge. So what are you learning along the way
- 24:55and what is useful for them to know? Then for product, which is process, how did you reach a desirable goal and how
- 25:02can you help them reach it faster? So, let's break these down. But first, I'm talking to my younger self here. I'm
- 25:09talking to my younger self who was very, I guess, conditioned, very programmed to have a negative outlook on money, a
- 25:16negative outlook on business, all these other things. And it's really unfortunate that the words entrepreneurship and business have
- 25:23become kind of like dirty words that once someone hears them, they just shut off. It's like, "No, I don't want to do
- 25:29that. No, that's for unethical people. That's for talented people. I'm not that
- 25:34talented. That's for people with a lot of money." When that's that's just not the case on any grounds. The danger in
- 25:40doing 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
- 25:47the opportunities. You're not able to see them if you reject the idea that allows you to see them. So my rebuttal
- 25:53to that is if you've ever helped anyone with any of your interests in any way,
- 25:59then you are qualified to start a business. It doesn't need to go any further than that. And the reality is
- 26:06that entrepreneurship is in our nature. It is modern survival. We are wired to
- 26:11create and distribute value to a tribe of like-minded people. Now that tribe is
- 26:16on the internet and you have to find them or attract them. We are wired to
- 26:21hunt to explore the unknown to seek novelty and never stagnate and psychologically this is the most
- 26:28enjoyable way of life. We've talked about that before but if you study psychology and flow psychology you will
- 26:34understand that. And even further the barrier of entry has collapsed. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm not saying that
- 26:41you're just going to be able to go and talk to AI and have it spit out 30 posts
- 26:46and 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
- 26:52you'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
- 27:00is going to speed up things. It still takes time to get any form of result in
- 27:05life. If you were to just get it immediately, then it would become a commodity and it would be the same thing as you scrolling on your phone and it
- 27:11wouldn't bring any meaning to your life. So there are two paths that you can take when doing this oneperson business thing
- 27:18or if it helps just independent work or creating your life's work. Path one is skillbased. This is the typical way that
- 27:25people have been telling you to start a business for the longest time online, right? pick a marketable skill and then
- 27:30create a product or service around that marketable skill and you talk about that marketable skill online and then boom,
- 27:37you make money, I guess. But the limitation here is the limitation of being a specialist. You probably don't
- 27:42want to be put into a box. You don't like feeling limited. But people do this. They niche down because they were
- 27:48told that was the most profitable thing to do. And so now profit is your main
- 27:53interest. That's where everything else falls under. That's your incentive. So now that you're chasing profit,
- 27:59productivity is still your god and you build yourself into a second nineto-5 working on things you don't care about
- 28:05for 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
- 28:12developmentbased. 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
- 28:19this path. You can observe it. And these people don't really have a niche that they're pinned down to. Right? In one
- 28:25video I talk about productivity. In this video I'm talking about business. I
- 28:31guess I don't even know what it's like a combination of interests. The things that I learned this week really or have
- 28:36learned over time. It's a synthesis of ideas with one overarching topic. Now
- 28:41typically what these people do is they focus on one of the four eternal markets and let their interests fall under
- 28:48those. The eternal markets where all human problems tend to fall. So that's
- 28:54where all human value tends to fall. What's valuable is health, wealth, relationships, and happiness. Or even
- 29:02all of them, right? You can bundle all of those things into the umbrella of
- 29:07self-actualization. I personally believe that most of the value creators online
- 29:12right now, they all have one niche. It's just a massive niche. It's self-actualization. What makes it unique
- 29:18is how you reach self-actualization or even get close to it. You don't even have to get there. It's just your aim.
- 29:25It'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
- 29:32single person that has the goal of self-trcendence or self-actualization, they're all taking infinitely unique
- 29:38paths to get there. And that's what matters. That's how you create a unique path. Someone who learns a skill, sells
- 29:44a marketable skill, there's usually very little paths that you can take along
- 29:50that path. So these types of creators, they pursue their own goals which forms their brand. They teach what they learn
- 29:57which forms their content and they help others achieve the goal faster which is their product. And the other powerful
- 30:03thing here is that when you take this path you're the the first path, the skill-based path is encapsulated in it.
- 30:10It's a natural part of it because you're building your own business, right? You have to learn all of these things. You
- 30:16have to learn marketing, sales, brand, content, all of the little strategies. You need to study these things and you
- 30:21just become inherently valuable when you can do that because you're learning the things that actually gets results. Not
- 30:28all business owners do this. Go and talk to a small business and ask if they understand any of this. They don't. So,
- 30:33if you learn it, you become valuable enough to be paid and it may not be from your multiple interests yet, but it can
- 30:40be a stepping stone that leads you into that. That's incredible. That's why I love this path so much. And every time I
- 30:46talk about this, I really have to sit and ask myself, am I just like promoting
- 30:51this dogma? I tell people, start a personal brand, become a creator, because it makes a lot of sense to me.
- 30:59And I feel like I start to tout it as this one true way, but then like the
- 31:04more 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
- 31:10it and those hold a lot of truth. like, well, not everyone can do this. And my
- 31:16answer to that is, well, anyone can. The ambitious people who want to, everyone can't do everything, right? Like,
- 31:22there's so many things in life where uh it's limited to the amount of people that can do it. But this has more
- 31:28opportunity than most of those things. And it's all within your control. That's what I love about it. Now, the other
- 31:34thing that I love about it is that it flips the traditional model on its head. So that with so with the traditional
- 31:40business model, you need a customer avatar and you need to niche down to that customer avatar. But with this
- 31:46model, you are the customer avatar and that makes things so much more palatable. You don't need to understand
- 31:52or learn that much because if you need market research, you just look at your story. You think back on your life. So
- 31:58you pursue your goals in life and develop yourself. And by doing that, you have already validated the usefulness of
- 32:03what you will offer. and then you help the past version of yourself reach that same goal. Now, one thing you're going
- 32:09to have to deal with here is a lot of the business gurus like Alex Hormoszi, I I love Alex Hormosi, nothing against
- 32:15them. They will tell you to sell to the rich. So, you may not have been a rich
- 32:20person in your past and that's okay. That doesn't mean that this way doesn't work. It's just an alternative route for
- 32:26people who have that like deep desire to do something more creative and spend a
- 32:32lot of their time on what they deem meaningful. Not to say that the other way isn't meaningful. I think you're
- 32:38getting 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
- 32:47I've made a lot of freaking money doing this. It's incredible. I never would have thought that I would been able to
- 32:52make 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 neutropic company.
- 32:59More details on that. That is very cool. But I wouldn't have had these opportunities. It's just so cool. But
- 33:05with 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
- 33:11that, don't be an influencer. Be you, but in a place where your work can be discovered, followed, and supported
- 33:17right now and for the foreseeable future. That's on the internet. So, if we think of Jordan Peterson, regardless
- 33:23of your opinion, he's not a content creator. He goes on tours. He writes books. He even has like Peterson Academy
- 33:30which is a online very well done course. But he leverages social media as his
- 33:35base and he uses the tools available to him to spread his life's work. He isn't
- 33:41worried about the latest content or idea trend because his own mind transcends
- 33:47any of the growth strategies that you can find. The quality and uniqueness and how he says his ideas is what sets him
- 33:54apart. So your business has to be a reflection of this just uniqueness of
- 34:00your mind. So how do we make that even more practical? We need to actually talk about the three pillars brand, content,
V – Brand is an environment
- 34:07product. So idea five is that brand is an environment. So I want you to stop
- 34:12thinking as brand if you think about it this way as like your social media profile, right? Your bio and your
- 34:19profile picture and your website and the cool little brand colors that you have. like mine are black and white simply
- 34:25because it's easy and that allows me to focus on the ideas. I want you to think about brand as an environment where
- 34:33people come to transform. Brand is the little world you are inviting others into. Brand isn't illustrated when a
- 34:40reader first visits your profile. Brand is the accumulation of ideas in your reader's mind after 3 to 6 months of
- 34:46following you. You illustrate your worldview, story, and philosophy for life across every single touch point.
- 34:52your banner, profile picture, bio, link in bio, landing page design, pinned content, posts, threads, newsletters,
- 34:58videos, and the rest. So, in other words, your brand is this. Pause the screen if you need to. Your brand is
- 35:03your story. So, it would help if you spent a day or even go on a walk and just think about it and think about
- 35:10where 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?
- 35:16What skills have you learned? What traits have you developed? What are some of your weird and extreme beliefs? What
- 35:22do you think that other people don't? What are your contrarian takes? What makes you different? Now, when you're
- 35:27thinking of ideas or content or products, you need to filter them through your story or through your
- 35:33worldview, which kind of comes naturally once you stop trying to do it because your worldview is your worldview. You
- 35:39become a translator of ideas, right? Because no idea is really original. We we disguise stealing like an artist as
- 35:46research, right? where I research ideas that I really like and I learn about them and then I kind of translate them.
- 35:53I 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
- 36:00about 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
- 36:05something new and say them in my own words and that alone is unique enough. So when I say filter things through your
- 36:11story, 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
- 36:18of this video when I said, "I used to learn and learn and learn. I got stuck in tutorial hell." That's a relatable
- 36:23aspect of this, but that's not necessarily what I mean. I mean translating. Now, the difficult part for
- 36:29a lot of people, and this was myself included, is that you don't really think your story is worth telling because you
- 36:35think it's boring or you haven't reflected on your growth. But it is, and you'll come to realize that. So now the
- 36:41point with everything that I'm saying is that your bio and your profile picture and your website colors, they do not
- 36:48matter at all. If you go on any social media, you're going to see people with profile pictures that are just like
- 36:54weird scribbles or a singular color like blue or red. You're going to go to Paul Graham's website and you're going to see
- 37:00that he just has an HTML website and the formatting doesn't look good at all. His essays that everyone loves are literally
- 37:07just like the most basic aerial text you'll find ever. It does not matter. The quality of ideas and unique
- 37:12perspective is what matters. So my recommendation for branding or at least to start thinking about your brand is to
- 37:18make a list of 5 to 10 people you respect online. These are the people that are kind of aspirational, the
- 37:24people you want to become like. Then you look at their profile picture, their bio and content. Then you take mental notes
- 37:30of patterns between them. And then you start formulating what you should do for your own brand with your own little
- 37:36spin. Now, in all honesty, I wouldn't over complicate this or I wouldn't even really think about it until now. It's
- 37:41just 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
- 37:48and other things. People just would put off doing anything else until they got their brand right when it really does
- 37:53not matter because that's not what a brand is. A brand is what you associate yourself with, the ideas you post over
- 37:59time, the people you talk to, the podcasts you go on. It's like this accumulation. It's just how people view
- 38:05you. And if you break down how people come to view you, then you understand it. Now, before we get into content, I
- 38:12have written an article on this. I'll link it in the description. It's called how to build a world, the 2-hour content
- 38:18ecosystem expanded. So, that'll help you understand how brand is a world created
- 38:23through this content ecosystem. We're not going to actually talk about how to write a newsletter and break that down
- 38:29into smaller pieces of content like I do in that. But that leads into number six,
VI – Content is novel perspectives
- 38:34which is content is novel perspectives. Now, I've said this for a while now, but it's more prevalent than it will be ever
- 38:41because the internet is just continuing to become more and more of a fire hose of information, and AI isn't helping
- 38:48with that, right? Anyone can generate anything. But what that means is that trust and signal are more important than
- 38:55ever. If you hear me say signal, that means like the opposite of noise, right? Noisy. A lot of content signal is like,
- 39:01ooh, exciting, important. Need to pay attention to that. So, in my opinion, the guiding light for your content
- 39:07should be to curate the best possible ideas in one place. Your brand is a collection of all the ideas you care
- 39:14about in your own words under one account on the internet. Now, if you have any plans to do podcasts or public
- 39:20speaking, when you look at the best podcasters or public speakers, you see that they if you watch multiple of their
- 39:27podcasts, you see that they're kind of just repeating the same five to 10 ideas and they're just exposing their best
- 39:33ideas to new audiences. That's all they're really doing. They've refined their ideas enough to know that these
- 39:38are the ones that are the most impactful. So what you have to do is you have to experiment and try until you
- 39:44have those 5 to 10 ideas and then you have to turn those 5 to 10 ideas into
- 39:49each a thousand ideas which we'll talk about. Now, I really think a metric to aim for in your content is idea density,
- 39:57which means that the amount of high signal or really good ideas is just everywhere. And that slowly increases
- 40:03over time with time and effort. And that's what creates a brand that's worth following and paying for because you
- 40:10just hit the mark all the time. So, the goal of curating ideas to include under your brand should fall at the
- 40:15intersection of one performance, which is ideas that have the potential to do well. And this is a measure of how much
- 40:22other people will care. And two, excitement, which is the ideas that give you a sense of excitement to write about
- 40:28them. 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
- 40:33art and business. Are other people going to care about this? Has this done well before or do I have a good hook? Do I
- 40:39have other things? And what you care about? So, it's not blatantly copying what works. It's doing something unique,
- 40:46but also taking into the account the principles that are actually going to capture attention. So how do we do this?
- 40:51Step one is to build an idea museum. This can this is the most useful thing. In other words, this just means build a
- 40:57swipe file is what marketers call it. So this can be a document. It can be a folder in Eden or notion or Google Docs.
- 41:06If you don't have access to Eden yet, join the wait list. We're releasing the next cohort round soon. If you don't
- 41:11know what it is, it's an intelligent drive. You can store all of your files, PDFs, videos, etc. You can search all of
- 41:17those things by frame. You can paste YouTube links, social media links, it transcribes, downloads the video, makes
- 41:22it all referenceable with AI. So you can put it inside a canvas or project and it brings this unique way of working. It's
- 41:28a workspace for your creative work and it allows you to replace things like Google Drive or uh certain AI apps like
- 41:35Claude or ChatgPT and even things like Frame for video editors if you need to share videos, comment on them, so on and
- 41:41so forth. But the point is that you need somewhere to jot down ideas as soon as they come to mind. This is a critical
- 41:47habit. 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,
- 41:54which helps you figure all of this out and creates like a web of content ideas that you can write about. But people
- 42:00have you focus on like two to three content pillars, maybe even one, and then you break those down into topics
- 42:05and subtopics and other things of that nature. That's very useful. But if you want to avoid all of that, just focus on
- 42:11the ideas that are important to you and share those. That's it. That's your entire content strategy. Now, step two
- 42:17is to curate based on idea density. So, how do you actually start filling this idea museum? Do you just scroll around?
- 42:24Do you just think of ideas? What do you do? The best way, in my opinion, is to have three to five sources of
- 42:29information that have high idea density. So, what that means is just have three to five sources of information where
- 42:36when you go to them, you consistently think, damn, I wish I wrote that. And you have to do this without judgment
- 42:42because something that you think has been said over and over again to the point where it doesn't matter anymore or
- 42:47something you think is too basic or that everyone knows this. Avoid letting any
- 42:53of those cloud your mind. Just jot down the idea and then you're going to reframe it. Post it. So the most ide
- 42:59sources of information in my opinion isn't just scrolling social media. It's things like old or little known books.
- 43:05So, as an example, I have five books that I reread over and over again because the ideas are just so good.
- 43:11These are where the timeless principles live. They're untouched by trends. A second place is curated blogs, accounts,
- 43:18or books. So, these are like accounts that are doing the same thing as you kind of sort of not really, but these
- 43:23are blogs like Farnum Street, which curate the best ideas for modern intellectuals. accounts like Navalism,
- 43:29which curate Naval's best ideas, or books like the Maxwell Daily Reader, which has Maxwell's best ideas, one day
- 43:35at 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
- 43:41like all of these incredible validated ideas. Of course, you should discover
- 43:46some on your own, like when you're watching a YouTube video and you spot something in the middle of a video and
- 43:51be like, "Oh, that's good." Or while you're scrolling social media, but if you struggle to come up with ideas, go
- 43:56that route. Now, the third place is just heavy-hitting social accounts. So, I personally have a list of maybe five
- 44:02social 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
- 44:09that I have an opinion on and then I'll write about that. Now, step three is to learn how to write one idea 1,000
- 44:17different ways because that's all this game is. is you have your five to 10 maybe 20 best ideas and then you just
- 44:25rewrite those over and over again from all different angles and that's even more effective now than it was before
- 44:30because AI can generate all information right people are following you because you don't have all information you have
- 44:37a very niche even though it's not really niche when you're talking about a bunch of different things it's niche in spirit
- 44:43compared to AI because becoming a good writer or speaker isn't only about the idea but how you articulate ate the
- 44:49idea. The idea does a lot of the heavy lifting, but the structure of the idea, how it's articulated does even more. So
- 44:56to show you what I mean, just take this post structure. This is a post I wrote before. One pattern I've noticed in
- 45:02happy people, they're obsessed about maintaining their mental clarity. So the idea here is that happy people maintain
- 45:09their mental clarity. The structure is formatted in two parts. A hook in the form of an observation and the delivery
- 45:16of what the observation is. So it seems simple but one idea with two different
- 45:21structures can drastically change how the idea does. So ideas are cheap but
- 45:27articulation of the ideas is expensive and you need to learn how to articulate them well. As an example of another
- 45:32structure, let's take the same idea. Happy people are obsessed with maintaining their mental clarity. So it would look like this. Happy people are
- 45:39clear-minded people. They take time for rest. They focus on one singular goal. They ruthlessly eliminate distractions.
- 45:45In other words, happy people are obsessive about maintaining their mental clarity. It's the same idea, a different
- 45:51structure, and a different impact. The first one is probably going to do a bit better. That doesn't mean the second one
- 45:56is bad. It just shows that this is a skill. So, what I recommend is every
- 46:02idea you come across for now as you're practicing, write it in a few different ways and post them in that way. Those
- 46:09two posts that I showed you, practically the same thing, but they're distinctly different posts. So, when you come
- 46:15across an idea, you add it to your idea museum or just take it down in your notes and then you turn it into a
- 46:22different structure. But how do you actually do that? Okay, you go to your idea museum and you look at all of the
- 46:27ideas in there and then you break down the structures of those things and you start to create a second idea museum of
- 46:34structures that you can use. So you practice this by the first three ideas that you mark down, you break down the
- 46:40structure of how those things work and then you kind of interchange them, right? Like a 3x3 matrix. So you take
- 46:46idea one, plug it into idea 3 structure and you practice writing like that. Now what I recommend here is just employing
- 46:53AI 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,
- 47:00we'll talk about that in the next video. But you can use this prompt, which is do a comprehensive analysis on this social
- 47:05post, the overall idea, how the sentences are structured, and choice of words. Analyze why people engage with
- 47:11it, why it works so well, what psychological tactics are being used, and how I can replicate this style step
- 47:17by step with my own ideas. So, you paste the prompt, you use something like Claude, and then you can either paste
- 47:22one post or maybe one newsletter or multiple posts into it, and it's going to create like a little miniourse on why
- 47:29those worked and how to replicate it. And then you take another idea, and then you practice. And seriously, those are
- 47:35all of my secrets for content. Congratulations. You just went through an entire course on content creation.
- 47:42That's all you need. But of course, there's also the skill of how to grow without relying on the algorithm. So,
- 47:47watch the last video if you haven't already, which is how to build an audience starting from zero followers.
- 47:53This 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
VII – Systems are the new product
- 48:00product. And I'm also speeding this up because I'm linking an entire guide to how I create profitable products. And
- 48:07that 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
- 48:14their problems. They want your solution to their problems. There are tons of writing products out there. So, what
- 48:20makes my product to our writer stand out? Or even Eden, what makes the software that's going to compete with
- 48:26Google Drive that there was a comment in the YouTube video on Matt and Ari, the co-founder's channel saying that we have
- 48:32no competitive edge, but I don't think they use Eden and they definitely don't understand where we're going. Nobody understands that. That's in our head.
- 48:39And we could easily get replaced or made irrelevant by Google. But the difference is that these are hypersp specific
- 48:46systems that I made for myself. The deeper layer to that is that these are hyperspecific systems that I made for
- 48:52people with the same problems as me. And no big conglomerate corporation is going
- 48:58to pay attention to as much detail and effectiveness as I am going to or my team is going to for the specific type
- 49:04of person that can benefit from a more specific system. With Eden, we're kind of towing the line there, right? It is
- 49:12more general. We're trying to encapsulate more. But at the end of the day, it's for creatives. It's for
- 49:17creators who have ideas, want to synthesize them, want to resurface them when they need to, need to connect them,
- 49:23need to work with them in a project, and not have 10 browser tabs open for all of your different research and your books
- 49:29and your AI apps and everything like that. I mean, Google can't do that because Docs, Slides, Sheets, all of
- 49:37that is isolated. It by necessity, it's in different tabs. and Google Drive frankly just has a terrible UX. So for
- 49:44two-hour writer specifically, this all starts with identifying and solving problems in your life in a unique way.
- 49:50So I had trouble having an endless source of content ideas. I just struggled to come up with content ideas.
- 49:56And two, I didn't want to waste a ton of time creating content for all different platforms. So that's why I started
- 50:01experimenting with different systems. And my goal was pretty clear. I wanted to write all of my content in 2 hours a
- 50:07day. So I had a constraint and that bred creativity. So, I started testing solutions for more content ideas. I
- 50:13created swipe files, steps to generate ideas that work for me, and templates to use if I still couldn't think of
- 50:19anything. And then I looked over my week. This is a very useful practice if you're going to create a product is how
- 50:24does an individual's week look, right? What did I want to do? How was I going to create content? One newsletter a week
- 50:31seems reasonable. Three posts a day, at least on something like Twitter, seemed reasonable. One thread a week seemed
- 50:37reasonable. Okay, do all of these things have to be unique content? Do can I talk
- 50:42about one theme per week? Can I write the newsletter and then pull social media posts from that? So on so forth.
- 50:48And so I started testing that. And when you start testing something that you created on like a week-l long time
- 50:55scale, then you start to encounter problems and then you fix those problems to improve the system and then things
- 51:00start to flow. So doing this, I realized that I could cross-ost just every platform, right? Most people won't even
- 51:06try 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
- 51:13is like, "Why are you repeating the same content on all platforms?" But they still do well because people are usually
- 51:18just consuming it on one platform. So why would I waste my time to spread my
- 51:23ideas thin and try to create something new for each platform that would result in a decrease in quality rather than
- 51:30focus on less content with higher quality ideas and do those once a week?
- 51:35and my hypothesis was correct. That's literally the foundation of everything that I've done. And then from there, I
- 51:41realized, okay, my newsletter can go onto my blog just so people can access it if they weren't on the email list.
- 51:47And then it can turn into a YouTube outline. And it's like the YouTube video can also go into the podcast. I
- 51:52literally have all platforms on one piece of content a week that's broken down into the rest. So, in a nutshell,
- 51:59and without going too deep into it, that's how you stand out in a world of products. So, thank you for watching
- 52:05this far. I deeply appreciate it. As I said, all of the links mentioned are in the description. Subscribe for the next
- 52:10video on the future of work and watch the last video if you'd like to learn how to actually build an audience
- 52:16without relying on the algorithm. Like, subscribe before you leave. Again, thank you for watching. Bye.