It’s the model I’ll use to get to $1M and beyond.

I came up with it after burning out after I hit $15k/mo doing things ‘the right way’.

I won’t bore you with a long story, but let me quickly tell you the problem I had and how the Asset Creator model helped me to fix this. If you’re a creative person who wants to make a lot of money online while doing meaningful work, this is for you.

You see, I went from 0 to $10k/mo and 10K+ X followers in 10 months.

I worked very hard for it, and at first, it felt great. I finally hit the magical $10k/mo. But unlike what I expected, I slowly started to feel worse. By the time I hit my first $15k month, I felt worse than I did when I hit my first $1k month.

This was confusing to me. Everything seemed to be going up on the outside, but everything felt like it was going down from the inside.

• I was more stressed

• I lost my passion for writing

• I didn’t find my work meaningful anymore

So I reflected on it.

Because I used to love being a creator. But at some point, I stopped feeling passionate about it. This was a weird feeling because I still felt like this was what I wanted to do. It was not like I had outgrown it. I still wanted to do this.

But somehow, I went from loving it to tolerating it just so I could make more money.

So I analyzed the last year.

When I did, I noticed that I fell for a trap. A trap that most creators fall for.

You see, when I got into the creator economy, I just wanted to make content and products. And eventually also books. In other words, I wanted to build things that scale. Client work and consulting were never a part of the plan.

In fact, if you’ve been following me for a while you probably know that I hate calls and DMs. But somehow, they had creeped their way into my schedule. It wasn’t aligned with what I wanted to do. But I forced myself to do it because the money was good.

And this misalignment slowly started to wear me down. That’s why I felt burned out. Not because I was working hard. But because I was doing the wrong type of work. The wrong type of hard work feels exhausting. The right type of hard work feels fulfilling.

So a few months later I made a change. I decided that I would no longer do client work and outreach. I would also drastically limit the amount of calls I did and I would only do a small amount of consulting. It was simply costing me too much energy.

This may sound extreme, but I’m ultra introverted according to personality tests:

So calls, and also messages in general, are just a horrible fit for me.

The more out of alignment something is, the more energy it takes to sustain it. That’s why I needed to limit it. Because I used to work 12 hour days with ease and enjoyment, but somehow 6 hour days had become draining.

So I had to come up with a new model. Because the regular stuff that gurus recommend just didn’t fit me. So instead of trying to fit myself into a business, I had to come up with a business model that fit me.

To do this, I went back to why I got into the creator economy. Back then, work felt like play to me. So I decided to design my business model around that.

No more outreach, no more client work, and barely any consulting. I would only focus on content, emails, and assets. And I labelled this as the Asset Creator Business model. Most creators are Client Creators, but I decided to become an Asset Creator.

Here are the main differences:

When I made this change, my energy levels instantly went back up again.

I started enjoying my work again for the first time in months.

No more repeating myself on calls, no more feeling burned out, no more demanding clients. Just creating content, writing emails, and building assets so I could help people on scale while making a lot of money.

To me, it makes no sense to build a business you hate just to make money. You still need to find something to do after you’ve made the money.

It makes more sense to pick a model you love that you can keep working on. It’s ok if it takes a bit longer. When you love what you do, you keep practicing and getting better. And that’s what makes you more money in the long run.

That’s why I developed the Asset Creator Business model.

It allows you to earn with your ideas and assets instead of your time.

In this newsletter, I’ll explain how I plan on using the Asset Creator Business model to make $1M+ online in the next few years. I’ll show you how it works and after that I’ll give you practical steps so you can implement it too if it appeals to you.

Before we dive in:

Don’t forget to subscribe to my free newsletter if you’re reading this online.

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CHAPTER 1

The Asset Creator Business Model Simplified

Let’s begin by simplifying the Asset Creator Business model.

An Asset Creator is someone who earns with their ideas and assets. Not their time.

They solve problems. They turn the solutions into digital assets. And they distribute and sell those assets to the people who have those problems. On scale.

An asset can be anything that solves a problem in a scalable way.

• Ideas are assets.

• Books are assets.

• Videos are assets.

• Visuals are assets.

• Courses are assets.

• Newsletters are assets.

• Other products are assets.

• Tweets and threads are assets.

• Your audience and email list are assets.

You work to build it once. Then it keeps working for you without you (forever). It’s like a micro employee that works for free his entire life after you take the time to build him.

Asset Creators can have many assets, but they have one Core Asset.

This is the asset that you use to help your clients. The goal is to make it as good as possible so that it solves every problem your client has in an efficient way.

People come to you because they want to go from where they are (point A) to their desired state (point B). They can’t get there themselves because there are problems standing in the way. You help them to solve their problems so they achieve the result.

This is what the Core Asset helps with. It’s a productized version of all your solutions that helps your clients to solve their problems step-by-step. You can start small and build it up or you can break it into multiple offers to sell parts of it:

You can take parts of the Core Asset and sell it as courses, cohorts, or workshops (arrow down). Or you can create new workshops or courses and make them part of the Core Asset (arrow up).

The Core Asset is what allows you to save a lot of time and effort in the future.

You build it once, and then you benefit from it forever.

Creating this asset is what will allow you to earn with your mind instead of your time.

Instead of going on a consulting call to explain the same process in the same way for hundreds of times, you simply give your clients access to the asset. Then, you create a plan for them based on their goals and you tell them which parts of the asset they need for this. Then they implement these action steps and ask you for help and feedback via text.

It’s 10x or even 100x more efficient and scalable than a client creator business.

Client creators spend time on a client project. Then when the project is done, they move on to the next one. They made some money, but they spent a lot of time on something that doesn’t compound for them. The Asset Creator Business model solves this problem. You only spend your time on things that compound.

The business gets easier the longer you run it. Every new client improves the asset. Every improvement helps the next client faster. It’s just much more efficient.

This allows you to earn with your assets. Not your time.

Now that you understand how the Asset Creator Business model works, let’s talk about the 4 core pillars you need for this.

CHAPTER 2

The 4 Pillars Of An Asset Creator Business

The Asset Creator Business has 4 pillars:

1. The Content — builds the audience.

2. The Emails — educates the audience.

3. The Offers — monetizes the audience.

4. The Assets — serves the audience.

We take an audience-first approach. Which means that we start by building the audience. Then we set up systems to turn our followers into email subscribers. Then we make them offers for our assets.

So the process is:

Content → Emails → Offers → Assets.

Those are the core 4 pillars.

Let’s begin with pillar 1: the content.

PILLAR 1 - THE CONTENT

We use content for 3 things:

• Growing our audience

• Getting more email subscribers

• Getting inbound leads and clients

That’s what we’re optimizing for. So that’s what we track.

Because you can’t improve what you aren’t tracking.

• For growth → track profile clicks.

• For email subs → track link clicks.

• For inbound leads → track keyword DMs.

If something does well, double down on it. Create like a scientist.

I recommend using Hypefury to schedule your content. It lets you schedule on X, LinkedIn, Instagram, Threads, and even TikTok and YouTube. You can also add auto plugs (links to your newsletter or lead magnet) and auto reposts and un-reposts.

As for the types of content, I recommend posting Primary Topics, Secondary Topics, and Non-Negotiable Topics. These are based on the Customer Journey. This is the path they need to take to achieve their desired outcome. Let’s simplify what it means.

Primary topics are necessary to achieve the outcome.

You can’t get to the outcome without them.

If you’re in the creator business niche, content creation is a primary topic. And if you’re in the dating niche, communicating is a primary topic.

You need these topics and skills to get to the outcome. There’s no way around it.

But here’s where a lot of people go wrong:

Just because you need these things doesn’t mean that you can only talk about this.

You can still talk about almost everything else. And this is where the secondary topics come into play.

Secondary topics are useful to achieve the outcome.

You can get to the outcome without them, but it’s definitely harder.

Topics like mindset, time management, and habit-building are secondary topics.

You can technically get to the outcome without them, but it will be much harder.

Business people who only care about money will usually call these topics distractions, but the smartest business people I know realize the importance of these topics.

And that brings me to the third one: non-negotiable topics.

These are the topics you absolutely want to talk about. Even if they don’t seem relevant for what you are trying to help people with.

Because the truth is that everything is related. You just need to know how to position the thing that you want to talk about in a way that appeals to your audience.

It doesn’t matter what the topic or interest is.

It matters that you make it interesting to your ideal reader.

If I want to talk about chess, I can. But I need to it in a specific way. My audience won’t care if I randomly start giving chess tips. But they will care if I show how it’s relevant for them. I can do this with a metaphor:

The metaphor shows how chess is like something they care about. And that’s why they read it (and care about it). You can do this with literally anything.

You simply take:

1) A topic you want to talk about.
2) A topic your audience cares about.

And then you explain how they are similar or alike.

Good metaphors also make it easier for your audience to remember the lesson.

They’re a powerful tool.

If you link their goals to your interests, they will care about your interests.

This is one of the ways in which you can write about whatever you want while still keeping it interesting to your audience (I explain all the other ways in the X Growth System so check it out if you want to become a full-time creator or writer).

If you use the above you will grow your audience. After that, you need to send them emails and offers. That’s why the emails are the second pillar we’ll talk about.

PILLAR 2 - THE EMAILS

The goal of your content is to get people on your email list.

Because social media may be useful to get traffic, but it’s hard to really educate people there. Most people are distracted and looking for quick dopamine hits, so longer content tends to do worse (except on YouTube and sometimes X or Substack).

That’s why we send them emails.

There are many different ways you can go about this.

Some preach daily. Some weekly. Both work. It’s up to you what you want to do.

The important part is that you send them at least 1 high-quality email per week.

In the email, you can:

• Dive deep into your big ideas

• Explain your ideas and philosophy

• Share stories of you and your clients

• Promote your products and services

• Share strategies you use to get results

It’s basically a place to dive deeper into your ideas. You educate people on what you know and you offer to help them. The goal is to get them to want your asset(s).

Most of my revenue (+80%) comes from email so it’s an important part of the Asset Creator Business model. If you learn to do it well, you won’t have to send DMs or do sales calls.

So pick an email schedule you can stick with. Don’t worry about picking the perfect quantity. You can always pivot later if you don’t like it or if it isn’t effective.

The important part is that you educate them in more depth on the transformation that you can help them with. Then you make them an offer on how they can get more help.

So that brings us to the third pillar: the offers.

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PILLAR 3 - THE OFFERS

Your offer is what you sell. Your product or service is what they get.

Think about it like a vacation.

People buy the beach vacation. That’s what they want. But in order to get there, they need to buy a plane ticket. But trying to sell a plane ticket wouldn’t be effective. It’s the means to the end, not the end they want.

Your offer works the same.

Don’t just make a list of what people get. Tell them what it will help them to achieve.

• Not ‘buy this diet’, but ‘lose 20 pounds in 3 months’.

• Not ‘buy this dating course’, but ‘get a girlfriend in 3 months’.

• Not ‘buy this writing course’, but ‘get 10,000 followers in a year’.

You sell them what they want (the offer). Then you give them what they need to get what they want (the product or service).

The offer is like the packaging. It makes the product or service sellable.

As you recall from the image above, you can sell multiple things:

• Books

• Courses

• Cohorts

• Workshops

• Consulting

• DFY service

I recommend having offers at multiple price points so you can monetize a bigger part of your audience. Cheaper offers also give people a chance to try out your stuff. This can get you more customers. The Value Ladder shows this best:

A common misconception is that you have to build a big audience before you monetize. You don’t. Yes, it makes it easier to monetize. But it’s not required.

Don’t monetize after you build your audience. Monetize while you build.

You can start by creating a Minimum Viable Offer.

This can be:

1. A service that you can sell for $500-$1000 (f.e. web design or ghostwriting)

2. A consulting service where you can sell a pack of 4 calls for $500-$1000

3. An affordable product ($29-$97) that teaches a skill or system

Just tell people what you’ll help them with and how they can benefit from this.

You don’t need a fancy website, funnel, or landing page to start. You can simply start by writing content and sending DMs to people who engage with your content.

This is how you can get started fast. One of my clients got a $2K/mo ghostwriting client this month. He only has 300 followers and started working with me a week ago. He plans on leaving the 9-5 he hates once he hits $3K/mo (which will be soon). He expected it to take 6-12 months, but it can go fast if you have the right things in place.

You don’t need to overcomplicate it. Just think of how you can help people and then make them a good offer. With enough volume you will get clients.

If you want my 1-1 help with this to speed up the process, DM or mail me ‘1M’.

That brings us to the 4th pillar: the assets.

PILLAR 4 - THE ASSETS

The assets are what they get when they buy your offers.

This can be:

• Tools

• Books

• Courses

• Systems

• Programs

• Templates

• Worksheets

Anything you can productize.

The goal is simple:

Solve a problem in a scalable way.

You take what you know and turn it into something people can use without you. That’s how you stop trading time for money and disconnect your time from your income.

Because people pay money to receive value. People receive value when problems are solved. And problems are solved when key information is implemented.

Your asset does this for you without you having to be there.

Asset Creators have one Core Asset.

This is your main asset. The one that takes people from A to B. You keep improving this asset. Every client, every result, and every iteration makes it better. Over time, this becomes your most valuable asset.

Most creators make new stuff all the time. They sell it, and then they move on to the next thing. After a while, then end up with a bunch of unconnected stuff.

We also make new stuff all the time, but we make our new stuff part of the Core Asset so that it keeps getting more valuable over time.

It’s more like puzzle pieces and less like separate blocks:

Then you have smaller assets. I call these Micro Offers.

These solve one or a few specific problems. You can sell them separately and include them in your Core Asset. They help people get quick wins and they bring more people into your world. It also gives your audience a chance to try out a part of your Core Asset to test if it works for them. If it does, and if they need more help, your Core Asset is the logical next step.

Your content is also an asset.

Tweets, emails, newsletters, podcasts, videos, articles.

Especially long-form content like videos, newsletters, and podcasts are valuable. It keeps working after you post it. It builds trust, gets traffic, and sells your offers.

Those are the assets we use.

• You build assets once

• You improve them over time

• They keep working for you forever

That’s how you start to earn with your mind instead of your time.

Those are the 4 Pillars of the Asset Creator Business Model. Let’s end with a short but practical gameplan so you can start building your Asset Creator Business today.

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CHAPTER 3

How To Build Your Asset Creator Business

This is already a long newsletter so I’ll keep this section short and to-the-point.

Here are 10 steps you can take today to build your Asset Creator Business.

1) Pick an outcome.

First, pick a clear outcome.

Decide the exact result you help people achieve.

The more specific and measurable this is, the easier it becomes to create content, offers, and assets that actually convert and help people.

2) Pick a specific person.

Then pick a specific person. Don’t try to help everyone.

Pick one type of person with one main goal so your messaging becomes clear and relevant to the right people.

Who you help, what you help them with, and how you help them is your ‘niche’.

3) Make a list of all the problems.

Next, make a list of all the problems standing in their way.

Break down everything that prevents them from getting the result. These problems become the foundation for your system, your content, and your offers.

4) Solve these problems and create systems.

Then solve these problems and turn your solutions into a system.

Create a clear, step by step path from A to B that people can follow and implement.

The goal is to have every tiny step in there so it’s always clear what they need to do.

5) Turn your solutions into different digital assets.

After that, turn your solutions into different digital assets.

Build your Core Asset that covers the full transformation and create smaller assets that solve specific parts of the journey in a simple and focused way.

6) Build your audience and email list with organic content.

Build your audience and email list with organic content.

This could have been step 1 because you should do this from the start.

Use content to attract the right people, get their attention, and move them into your email list where you can educate them in more depth (to learn how to grow your audience fast, check out the X Growth System).

7) Send daily or weekly emails with offers.

Write daily or weekly emails with offers. Both work and have different trade-offs. Pick the one you can stay consistent with. Right now, I send multiple short emails per week and one deep dive newsletter like the one you’re reading right now. I might change this to 2 deep dives per week depending on what works best and what I enjoy.

It’s fine if you pivot later. The important part is that you provide a lot value, build trust, and regularly show people how they can go deeper with your assets.

8) Make improvements to your asset and sell them as Micro Offers.

You should improve your Core Asset consistently.

Ideally, you make at least 2 new significant improvements to your Core Asset every month. Then you sell those as Micro Offers.

This improves your Core Asset and it gives you new things to sell.

9) Run 1 sprint or cohort and create 1 evergreen course per quarter.

On top of that, you can run 1 sprint or longer cohort every month or quarter.

You can help people to implement a part of your system (for me, this is audience growth, writing, or monetization). This is optional but useful because it gives people another way to get help from you (without you having to make extra stuff).

You can also create 1 evergreen course to help even more people and to get some passive income. This is another asset that can pay you for years to come (and it can literally just be a part of your Core Asset).

10) Keep improving your content, emails, offers, and assets every month.

Finally, keep improving everything.

Your content, emails, offers, Core Asset, and Micro Offers should all get better every month. That’s how the system compounds over time.

Here’s how you can visualize the Asset Creator Funnel (if you’re not on Twitter you can just replace Twitter with the writing platform(s) that you are active on):

In short:

1) Pick an outcome.
2) Pick a specific person.
3) Make a list of all the problems.
4) Solve these problems and create systems.
5) Turn your solutions into different digital assets.
6) Build your audience and email list with organic content.
7) Send daily or weekly emails and/or newsletters with offers.
8) Make improvements to your asset and sell them as Micro Offers.
9) Run 1 sprint or cohort and create 1 evergreen course per quarter.
10) Keep improving your content, emails, offers, and assets every month.

This is the full process.

Build → sell → improve → repeat.

Most people think freedom requires a massive audience or a complex business.

But it doesn’t.

Your goal is just a number.

• $5k/mo = 3 clients at $1k/mo + 20 customers at $100.

• $10k/mo = 6 clients at $1k/mo + 40 customers at $100.

• $30k/mo = 20 clients at $1k/mo + 100 customers at $100.

Just change the numbers based on your goal.

I’m not saying that it’s easy or that you will achieve it overnight. But you definitely don’t need millions of followers to achieve this.

You just need:

• One Core Asset

• Quality daily content

• Multiple Micro Offers

• A simple email system

• An audience and email list

You track which content and emails get you the most growth and sales. Then you stop doing what isn’t working and you keep doing what works well.

That’s all you need.

I’ve had clients with 900 and 4000 followers who hit $10K/mo and I’ve had multiple clients who made a full-time living with only a small audience. And this model helped me to get many 5-figure months myself without ads, cold outreach, or sales calls.

So this is the business model I will use to make $1M+ online. I’m not sure how long it will take, but this is what feels aligned for me so I know I can stick with it long-term (which is what’s needed to hit the 7-figure milestone).

It’s not for everyone, but if you’re a big introvert like me then it might be a great model for you too. If you want my help to build a 6 or 7 figure Asset Creator Business, send me a DM on X with ‘1M’. If we’re a good fit, I’m happy to help you.

That’s it for this newsletter. Talk to you in the next one.

Thanks for reading,

– Stijn Noorman

PS: I only have 2 spots left to work 1-1 with me while I’m writing this. If you want one of those 2 spots, send me a DM on X with ‘1M’. We can get started right away or I can add you to the top of the waitlist the spots are gone. Talk soon.

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How I Can Help You

1. X Growth System. How I grew from 0 to 61,000 𝕏 followers, 100,000+ followers across social media, +100M organic X views in a year, and 6-figures.

2. Work with me 1-1. DM me ‘1M’ (or reply via email) if you’re an entrepreneur or educational creator who want my help yo build a 6 or 7-fig Asset Creator Business.

3. Free Content. I backlog my best newsletters and articles on my website. I also turn them into video podcasts. Click here to subscribe so you don’t miss them. I also post simple self-improvement videos on my other channel. Click here to subscribe.

They fail because they don’t have a system.

A system is a set of actions that produces a result.

The goal is the what. It tells you where to go.

The system is the how. It tells you what to do.

Once you understand how to build a system, achieving your goals becomes much simpler and faster. In this article, I’ll show you how to build one. But first, you need to understand the 4 parts of any system.

Before we dive in:

I built Scientific Creation. It’s a content system that gets you 500-1,000 followers per month in 30 minutes per day. Also works for other writing platforms.

Click here to get started. It’s gone after Monday.

Don’t forgot to subscribe to my newsletter if you’re reading this online. Let’s begin.

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Systems Simplified

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

— James Clear

Everything works through chains:

• You take an action → something happens

• You repeat actions → patterns emerge

• You spot patterns → predictable outcomes

A system is a deliberate version of that process. Everything you do creates an effect. So by changing your inputs, you can change your outputs.

Designing a system means identifying the inputs that lead to your desired outcome, and then measuring and improving them over time.

Most people take random action:

Random action = do something → hope it works → repeat.

System thinkers take calculated action:

System = do something → measure → adjust → repeat.

The difference between most people and systems thinkers is that the latter actually has a process that is repeatable, measurable, and improvable.

All your actions give you data that allows you to improve your system.

Every system has four parts:

Input. Process. Output. Feedback.

Environment too but let’s keep it simple by sticking to these four.

We use systems for lots of things without even realizing it:

• Your workout is a system

• Your writing routine is a system

• Your content process is a system

For most of us, they are unconscious. But all systems follow the same loop:

Here’s what each part means:

• The input is whatever you put in: time, energy, money, attention, raw material.

• The process is what you do with it: the work itself.

• The output is the result: a published post, a signed client, a finished project.

• The feedback loop is how you evaluate your output and adjust your next action.

The difference between a conscious and unconscious system is reflection and feedback. Without feedback, you’re not running a system. You’re just doing tasks.

Feedback is what allows a system to improve.

In my experience, the main difference between creators who fail and creators who excel is that they have a repeatable content system that gets better over time.

It allows you to optimize your inputs, and this will eventually optimize your outputs.

Now let’s break down the 5 steps to build a system to achieve any goal.

System Design (Turning Goals Into Actions)

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.

— Peter Drucker

You can build a system in 5 simple steps.

1) Pick the result.

You can’t build a useful system if you don’t know what you’re optimizing for.

So decide what you want to achieve.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t know where to start.

Just pick what you think is best.

You can (and will) change it over time.

But you can only improve and clarify something that actually exists.

2) Reverse engineer it.

Start with the end goal.

Break it down into smaller goals:

Life purpose → decade → year → quarter → month → week → day.

Then define a few daily actions that move you forward.

3) Find the high-leverage actions.

Not all actions matter equally.

The Pareto Principle, or 80/20 Rule, states that roughly 80% of outcomes (results) come from 20% of causes (inputs). It’s your job to find these 20% of causes.

These are the high-leverage activities to focus on.

In my experience, there are usually 3-5 things in any field that give you more than 90% of the results.

As a creator, these are your content, newsletters, products, and offers.

As a bodybuilder, these are your workouts, diet, sleep, and recovery.

There are lots of things that give you a 2x return on your time.

But there are only a few things that give you a 10x return on your time.

Find these actions and give them almost all of your time.

Prioritize high-leverage actions. Minimize everything else.

4) Organize the actions.

It’s not enough to do the right actions.

You also need to do them in the right order.

It’s like chess.

Moving your queen forward can either be the winning or losing move.

What matters most is when you do it.

Doing the right thing at the wrong time is the wrong thing.

The most important thing is finding the most important thing and then doing it.

Turn your actions into a clear checklist.

5) Repeat and improve.

Review your results regularly.

Feedback is reality telling you what works and what doesn’t.

So listen to it. Once a week, reflect on your results.

Do more of what works. Remove what doesn’t work.

Treat it like a loop:

Test → measure → adjust → repeat.

Treat the process like a scientist.

• Do research

• Set a hypothesis

• Do an experiment

• Analyze the results

• Iterate based on data

This is how your system keeps getting better.

This is how you build a simple system that will help you to achieve anything fast.

Build it once. Improve it over time. Benefit from it forever.

Your goals will tell you what mountain to climb.

Your systems will help you to actually climb that mountain.

– Stijn Noorman

PS: don’t forget to check out Scientific Creation if you want a system that gets you 500-1,000 X followers per month in 30 minutes per day.

Click here to get started. It’s gone after Monday.

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1. X Growth System. How I grew from 0 to 61,000 𝕏 followers, 100,000+ followers across social media, +100M organic X views in a year, and 6-figures.

2. Work with me 1-1. DM me ‘AC’ (or reply via email) if you’re a busy founder who wants my help to gain 10,000-50,000 followers in less than an hour per day.

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4. Free Content. I backlog my best newsletters and articles on my website. I also turn them into video podcasts. Click here to subscribe so you don’t miss them. I also post simple self-improvement videos on my other channel. Click here to subscribe.

Let’s talk about how you can get ahead of 99% of people in 90 days.

No fluff, just practical advice.

You need 3 things:

• What to do (vision)

• How to do it (gameplan)

• Actually doing it (execution)

It won’t be easy. But it is simple.

Most people lack at least one of these. That’s why they stay stuck.

So in this newsletter, I’ll show you how to fix all three. Let’s begin.

Before we dive in:

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The Inner Human Motivators (Heaven & Hell)

‍We get most of our positive emotions from seeing ourselves move closer toward a goal. The more meaningful the goal, the more motivated we’ll be.

‍– Jordan Peterson

If you want to get ahead of 90% of people, you need clarity on two things:

1) Something to move toward (vision)
2) Something to move away from (anti-vision)

This leverages the 2 human motivators (moving toward pleasure and away from pain).

I call this your Heaven and Hell.

• Your Heaven = what you want to achieve

• Your Hell = what you want to avoid

Both need to be realistic. I don’t mean small. It can be massive. But if it’s not likely to happen, it won’t motivate you. Here’s an example of my Heaven and Hell:

My Hell isn’t some extreme scenario where I lose my limbs and become homeless.

It’s slipping back into my bad habits, getting depressed, failing in business, and ending up in a factory job I hate again.

I’ve experienced parts of that before and I never want to experience it again.

That’s what makes it powerful.

This gives you something to move away from.

Your Heaven gives you something to move toward.

It wouldn’t be realistic if my vision was to become a professional basketball player because I’m 27, only 6ft tall (average male length in my country), and I have zero experience. So even if I start working out like Kobe, that’s not happening.

Your Heaven should be something that could happen if you commit long-term.

For me, that’s becoming a bestselling author, financially free, and one of the best educational creators in the world.

Those are massive and difficult goals, but possible with years of focused work.

So define both:

• What you’re moving toward

• What you’re moving away from

Make it specific.

• What do your days look like?

• What skills do you need to learn?

• What habits do you build and avoid?

The more specific you make it, the more motivating it becomes.

It doesn’t need to be a perfect plan. It just needs to be as good as you can make it right now. You will improve it later. But you can only improve something that exists.

As Jordan Peterson puts it, you aim at the highest possible good you can conceive right now. He calls it ‘aiming at a star’. Then you move toward it and adjust as you go.

Each goal (star) gives you more clarity on the next one. You keep improving and eventually, you discover your true north star (your purpose).

Write down your Heaven and Hell. This will motivate you to take action.

That brings us to step 2. You now know what you want to achieve and why you want to achieve it. So now you need to get clear on how you can achieve it.

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Reverse Engineer Your Ideal Future

‍If you do not know to which port you are sailing, no wind is favorable.

‍– Seneca

When an engineer wants to recreate something, he takes it apart to understand how it works. This is called reverse-engineering, and it’s extremely effective for goal-setting.

Here’s how you can use it:

• Aim at the highest possible good you can imagine

• Turn this into a practical long-term goal (10 years)

• Break it down into smaller goals (3y, 1y, 1q, 1m, 1w, 1d)

• Define clear daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly actions

• Execute three key actions every single day

This aligns your daily actions with your long-term goal.

And because that goal represents the highest good you can imagine, it aligns your actions with what you value most.

This gives you the strongest motivation and dopamine while you pursue it.

Now you know what to aim for and how to get there.

Let’s talk about how you can do more work in less time now.

Lion Mode: Achieve More In Less Time

The way people tend to work most effectively, especially in knowledge work, is to sprint as hard as they can while they feel inspired to work, and then rest. It’s more like a lion hunting and less like a marathoner running. You sprint and then you rest. You reassess and then you try again. You end up building a marathon of sprints.

‍– Naval

High performers don’t work all day.

They work less, but they work harder and smarter when they work.

• They get clear on what matters

• They go all-in for a few hours

• They recover and repeat

That’s how they get more done in less time.

I call this Lion Mode.

It has 3 phases:

• Plan → what work is worth doing

• Hunt → deep, focused execution

• Rest → recover so you can go again

It’s not about working more, but it’s about getting more done when you work.

High performers work like lions. They switch between 0% and 100% intensity.

But most people work like cows. They live at 40% all day and don’t get a lot done.

To work like this, you need to design your work environment for success.

This comes down to two things:

• Make it easy to do what you need to do

• Make it hard to do what you shouldn’t do

Here’s what works for me:

• Keep your desk empty

• Turn off all notifications

• Hide bookmarks and minimize tabs

• Don’t multitask or switch between tasks

• No phone, email, or social media before noon

• Stay fasted and caffeinated during deep work

• Use earplugs or noise-cancelling headphones

This will make it easier to focus.

When you’ve done that, you need to work in a few blocks of 60 to 90 minutes.

This allows you to enter flow state.

Flow is a state of deep, focused work where you’re fully locked in on one task.

To get into flow state, you need to pick a task that’s just outside of your current skill level, push through the initial resistance, and don’t get distracted.

So set a goal, remove distractions, and focus on one task at a time for 90 minutes.

Then repeat this a few times per day for maximum productivity.

This will cost a lot of mental energy, so let’s talk about how you can rest properly.

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How To Maximize Your Energy (Active Recovery)

‍After flow, you have to recover. Flow is a high-energy state — it’s neurochemically expensive. Without recovery, you build allostatic load — the body’s stress systems stay activated, performance drops, and burnout follows. ‍Active recovery is any deliberate, low-intensity activity that helps the body and brain return to baseline after high performance.

‍– Steven Kotler

Most people think recovery means relaxing.

But relaxing ≠ recovering.

Relaxation = passive. It feels good but doesn’t fully recharge you.

Recovery = active. It can feel hard but it actually recharges your body and brain.

That’s why you can “rest” all weekend and still feel drained.

It’s simply not enough.

You also need something called Active Recovery.

Active recovery doesn’t always feel good during, but it makes you feel much better after. It clears stress, recharges your nervous system, and prevents burnout.

Here’s a list of the most important (active) recovery habits:

• Sleep

• Massages

• Social interaction

• Walking (in nature)

• Yoga or light exercise

• Sauna and cold showers

• Breathwork and meditation

• Journaling and practicing gratitude

Also eat healthy, work out regularly, and limit cheap dopamine consumption.

If you do these habits, you’ll actually recover mentally (instead of just relaxing).

You don’t need to do them all, but the more you do, the better you’ll recover.

Pick the ones you enjoy most and make them part of your routine.

For optimal recovery:

• 10 minutes per task

• 1 hour per day

• 1 day per week

• 1 weekend per month

• 1 week per quarter

This keeps your body and mind in balance.

So in short, this newsletter can be summarized in 3 words:

Goal → Plan → Execute.

• Goal → create your vision and anti-vision

• Plan → reverse engineer it into clear steps

• Execute → use Lion Mode to do more in less time

This is how you get ahead of 99% of people by working less.

Quick Updates:

I made some big changes recently. Here’s what you need to know:

1) I’m testing a new schedule: 2 newsletters per week (Thursday & Sunday, 14:15 CET). One will focus more on self-improvement, the other on making money.

If you’re not a subscriber yet, click here so you get them for free in your inbox.

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2) I’ll turn my newsletters into video podcasts starting next week. I will upload them on my 2nd YouTube channel. Click here to subscribe so you don’t miss them.

3) I’m bringing back simple self-improvement videos on my 1st channel. Mostly short animated videos but also some deep dives. Click here to subscribe.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please like this post, restack it, and subscribe to this newsletter for more. Talk to you on Thursday!

– Stijn Noorman

PS: Click here to join the VIP list of the Growth Writer for a discount and bonuses when it launches. It teaches you all the writing strategies you need to go from 0 to 100,000 followers, 10,000 newsletter subs, and 100M views.

How I Can Help You

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2. Work with me 1-1. DM me ‘AC’ (or reply via email) if you’re a busy founder who wants my help to gain 10,000-50,000 followers in less than an hour per day.

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We need a few things to make this work:

• Simplifying how focus actually works

• The 3 foundational pillars of focus

• 8 practical steps to fix your focus

Let’s begin.

Before we dive in:

I have a special offer for you that will help you to start gaining 1,000+ X followers and 1M followers per month. The strategies inside are made for X but they also work on other writing platforms like Substack, LinkedIn, and Threads.

I used to sell this for a lot of money, but you can get it for only $29 today. It helped me get 100,000 followers across platforms which helped me to make over $100K in a year.

It’s a limited offer though so it will be gone very soon and I won’t sell it again for this cheap after that. Click here to get it. (if the page says ‘offer expired, you’re too late).

With that out of the way, let’s begin.

Focus Simplified

The man who chases two rabbits, catches neither.

– Confucius

To fix our focus, we first need to take a look at what it actually is.

There are many definitions of focus.

To me, focus is doing the one thing you set out to do.

It’s using your limited mental resources on one thing and ignoring everything else.

Our attention, energy, and time are limited. So to make progress, we need to decide how to use them. This is what focus helps up to do.

You need to:

• Decide what matters

• Actually do that thing

• Don’t get pulled away

That’s the core of focus.

Most people think focus is trying harder. But it’s actually about elimination.

You improve your focus by eliminating options and distractions.

When there’s only one real thing to do, focus becomes easier.

Because focus is like taking pictures.

Only one object can be sharp at a time. Switching takes time to refocus. But you can take two clear pictures. Just one at a time.

Your brain works the same way.

It performs best with one target and loses sharpness when you switch tasks. But if you give it one clear goal, and if you remove your distractions, it will become much easier to focus.

In short:

Focus is doing one thing and not doing all other things.

It’s not forcing yourself to work harder, but it’s removing what doesn’t matter so you can give your limited attention, time, and energy to the one thing that matters most.

If we want to fix our focus, we need to understand the 3 Pillars Of Focus.

The 3 Pillars Of Focus

As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds itself.

– Leonardo da Vinci

In order to focus, there are 3 things you need.

I call these the 3 Pillars Of Focus:

• Clarity. So you know what to focus on.

• Self-discipline. So you can focus on this thing.

• Self-control. So you don’t get distracted by other things.

Clarity tells you what to focus on. Self-discipline ensures you actually do this thing. And self-control ensures that you don’t get distracted by the wrong things.

Each of these topics deserves its own newsletter but I don’t want this newsletter to become too long.

So let’s break down the most impactful stuff you can do to build these 3 Focus Pillars.

Pillar I - Clarity

If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.

– Seneca

Clarity means knowing what you’re trying to achieve and what to do next.

Your brain needs a target.

If there’s no clear goal, your brain can’t prioritize.

Everything feels equally important, so nothing gets your full attention.

When the goal is clear, many decisions disappear automatically. You don’t waste energy wondering what to do. You already know. And this makes it easier to focus.

That’s why you need to:

• Get clear on what you want

• Break it down into smaller steps

• Make a list of practical action steps

That’s how you make it crystal clear what you need to do.

We’ll come back to this later. But first, we need to talk about the second pillar:

Discipline.

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Pillar II - Discipline

Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most.

– Abraham Lincoln

Knowing what to do isn’t enough.

You still need to do it.

That’s why you need discipline. Unlike what most people think, discipline isn’t something you ‘have’ or ‘are born with’.

It’s actually a decision you make.

You choose to do the thing.

That’s all it is.

You need to make that decision for yourself. I can’t do it for you. But what I can do, is make it easier for you to make that decision.

And there are 3 important things that will help you with this.

1. Work when it’s easiest to work.

I’m at my best in the morning. Some people are at their best in the evening.

Get clear on when your energy levels are at their highest. This is the best time to do focused work. I can recommend tracking your energy levels for a week:

When you do, you will know when you’re at your best. And when you know this, you know when your focus as at its peak.

Do your most important work when you’re at your best.

That’s how you make it easier to choose to be disciplined.

2. Pick the right challenge for your skill level.

Flow follows focus, and focus follows challenge. The ideal challenge point is about 4 percent greater than the skills we bring to the task.

​– Steven Kotler

We are at our best when we stretch our limits. So we need to do stuff that’s a little harder than what we feel comfortable doing. When we do, this triggers a flow state.

Flow is a mental state where work feels effortless.

You’re fully focused on one task and you become extremely productive.

It takes some struggle and (activation) energy to get into flow. That’s why it’s so important to have clear, small action steps you can take. When you complete it, it builds momentum and this helps to motivate you and to get you into flow state.

Just don’t switch between tasks because this will usually knock you out of flow state.

3. Limit your dopamine consumption

Almost all of the positive emotion that you will experience in your life will not be from attaining things but from seeing that things are working as you proceed towards a goal you value.​

– Jordan Peterson

Dopamine isn’t the molecule of reward, pleasure or achievement.

Is the molecule of motivation, craving, and pursuit.

When we see ourselves move closer toward a goal we value, dopamine gets released. The bigger and more meaningful the goal, the more positive emotion we experience when we move toward it.

It’s a fantastic system.

But the problem is that modern society abuses this system.

There are all kinds of Dopamine Traps that will give you cheap dopamine.

• Porn

• Drugs

• Alcohol

• Gaming

• Smoking

• Gambling

• Scrolling

• Gaming

• Junk food

It feels nice in the moment. But these traps desensitize your dopamine system by decreasing the number of dopamine receptors in your brain.

This basically means that they make you less sensitive to dopamine.

In other words, you need more stimulation to get the same effect.

And the problem is that stuff like working on your goals, going to the gym, and reading books isn’t as stimulating as the Dopamine Traps above.

So if you constantly overstimulate your dopamine system, you won’t feel motivated to do the work. And that’s why you might think that you have ‘bad focus’.

You don’t have bad focus. You just have an desensitized dopamine system.

I can’t help you to fix in 1 day because it takes time (1-3 months) to fully resensitize your dopamine system.

The graph from the YouTuber AfterSkool illustrates this idea well:

Yes, it’s oversimplified. But that doesn’t mean that the core idea isn’t true. Too much dopamine lowers your baseline. But when you do a dopamine detox, your baseline increases. And as a result, your focus improves.

So limit your cheap dopamine consumption to improve your focus.

That brings us to the third Focus Pillar: Self-control.

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Pillar III - Self-Control

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose.

– Viktor Frankl

Self-control is about:

• Deciding what you want to do

• Designing your environment accordingly

• Being mindful while you work so you don’t get distracted

You need to make it easy to do the good behavior and hard to do the bad behavior.

That’s all it is. And there are 3 important things you can do for this.

1. Focus Design

Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.

– James Clear

Focus Design is about designing your work environment for maximum focus.

It comes down to two rules:

• Remove everything that distracts you

• Add everything that helps you focus

This differs for everyone, but here’s what works for me:

• Plan tomorrow today

• Turn off all notifications

• Isolate during the morning

• Hide bookmarks and minimize tabs

• Use a standing desk to switch posture

• Exercise daily, sleep 8 hours, eat clean

• Don’t multitask or switch between tasks

• Focus on one big action step per work block

• No phone, email, or social media before noon

• Stay fasted and caffeinated during deep work

• Use earplugs or noise-cancelling headphones

• Keep your desk empty (just your PC and water/coffee)

• Work in 90 minute blocks (then recover for 10 minutes)

• Batch-produce shallow tasks into one time block later in the day

• Do your most important work when your energy peaks (usually morning)

• Reduce decision fatigue by eating mostly the same meals, wearing simple clothes, and automating small decisions

The more of these you apply, the easier it becomes to focus.

It works well for me so I can highly recommend trying it out.

2. Practical Mindfulness

What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of controls you.

– Anthony de Mello

Mindfulness may sound woo-woo to you.

And this is probably because you heard some spiritual guru talk about it in a way that didn’t appeal to you. I used to ignore it because of this as well. But in the recent years I realized that it’s actually very practical.

Mindfulness is just the skill of staying present so you can control what you focus on.

That’s all.

I like to think about it as a mental muscle.

You can train it with a simple game to become more focused:

You can just replace ‘focused’ with ‘mindful’ in this tweet.

The best way to train this is with mindfulness meditations.

You just close your eyes. Then you try to stay present. Then a thought comes up that distracts you. Then you notice this. And then you return to the present moment.

That’s all it is.

Focus (and mindfulness) is like a muscle.

Every time you get distracted, and return to the present moment, you make this muscle a little bit stronger. That’s why there are no bad meditations. Just meditations where you do fewer reps. The more you do this, the better you can control your focus.

But there’s still one other key concept you need to understand.

3. Tactical Friction

Anticipate the difficult by managing the easy.

– Lao Tzu

Self-control is about not doing what you know you shouldn’t do. So a simple way to make this easier is to make it harder to do these things.

I call this adding Tactical Friction.

Our brains usually get distracted because it’s an easy, low effort way to get a dopamine kick. But if we make it harder to get this, by adding friction, then we’re less likely to get distracted.

A simple example is checking your phone.

If you have your phone in your pocket, you can check social media within a few seconds. But if you log out of your social media accounts, turn off you phone, and lay it in a different room, then there’s much more friction to checking social media. And as a result, you’re much less likely to check it.

So to control yourself, add Tactical Friction. Make it hard to do what you don’t want to do and make it easy to do what you want to do. Add friction to make bad habits harder. Remove friction to make good habits easier.

That’s it for the 3 pillars of focus.

So let’s end with a quick practical 8 step plan to fix your focus.

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8 Steps To Fix Your Focus

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

― Abraham Lincoln

We talked about example how focus works and how you can get more focused.

So let’s make it practical now with a 8 clear action steps you can take to fix your focus.

1. Get clear on your goal.

Give your brain something to focus on.

When you do, you leverage your brains reward system.

It’ll be clear what you need to focus on.

2. Break it down into actions.

Your goal is what you want to achieve.

Your actions are what you need to do to achieve it.

Reverse engineer the process so you know exactly what you need to do.

3. Track your energy levels for a week

Get clear on when you’re at your best.

When you know this, you know when to do your focused work.

4. Design your environment

Remove the distractions from your work space.

Make it hard to do bad behavior and make it easy to do good behavior.

Use Tactical Friction for this.

5. Plan (the day) before you work

Planning and executing use different parts of the brain.

So plan tomorrow today.

Then you instantly know what to focus on when you wake up.

6. Optimize your habits

You can’t focus if you are not doing well.

So optimize your most important habits.

• Sleep 8 hours

• Eat healthy food

• Exercise almost daily

• Limit cheap dopamine

• Meditate 10min per day

• Take daily walks as breaks

This will make it much easier to focus.

7. Schedule 2-3 deep work blocks of 1-2h per day.

No multi tasking. No task switching.

Just you doing the most important tasks.

This is how you blow past the competition.

8. Rest & recover (passive & active recovery)

Most people work like cows. They ‘graze’ all day. They’re always half-working and half-resting. High performers work like lions. They plan, hunt, and rest. They switch between 0% and 100% intensity. This is how they achieve more in less time.

You can’t always be on.

To be focused, you need time off. But most people think this just means relaxing. It doesn’t. You also need to recover.

Relaxing = passive rest. So doing enjoyable stuff that doesn’t take energy.

Recovering = active rest. So doing stuff that helps you to restore your energy.

Passive rest can be laying on the bank. Active rest can be sitting in the sauna.

Combine both to recover optimally. Because what you do when you don’t work influences how well you can focus when you do work.

So in short:

• Define your main goal

• Break it into clear action steps

• Track your energy and work when it’s highest

• Remove distractions and design your environment

• Plan your next work day the night before

• Optimize sleep, food, exercise, and other habits

• Work in 1–2 deep blocks without switching tasks

• Relax and recover properly so you can repeat tomorrow

That’s how you fix your focus.

Talk soon my friend.

– Stijn

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PS: don’t forget to grab the X Brand Booster. It will help you to start gaining 1,000+ X followers and 1M followers per month. Click here to get it. (if the page says ‘offer expired, you’re too late).

Without good ideas, people won’t click, read, or watch your content.

But most people struggle with coming up with ideas.

So in this newsletter I’m going to share how I never run out of content ideas.

It’s basically a mini course and I created a worksheet for you here.

We’ll cover:

• What your audience actually wants to read

• The only 3 core content pillars every creator needs

• 14 idea generation methods to get unlimited content ideas

In case you prefer watching/listening:

Click here to watch the video version of this newsletter (most recent upload).

Let’s begin.

‘Niche’ Simplified

Before we can create content, we need to know who we are creating content for.

In other words, what’s your niche?

I used to get paralyzed by this question.

But it’s actually a lot simpler than you might think.

Niche = a group of people with the same problems who want the same outcome.

So it has 3 core parts:

• People

• Problems

• Outcome

So your niche is simply:

• Who you help (people)

• What they need help with (problems)

• What they want to achieve (outcome)

That’s all.

You can still talk about almost anything.

You just need to make it relevant for the person who has these goals and problems.

So get clear on who you help and then make a list of:

• The goals this person has

• The problems this person has

• The other interests this person has

This is important to know because it makes idea generation much easier.

I recommend creating a simple worksheet like this:

This is part of my Infinite Ideas Worksheet (click here to get it for free today).

With that out of the way, let’s move on to what you can actually talk about.

Content Pillars

When you know the goal of your audience, it becomes much easier to know what to write about.

You simply write content that helps them solve their problems so they can achieve the goal.

But unlike what gurus tell you, you don’t need to stick to a few narrow topics.

Because your audience doesn’t care about your content pillars.

They care about achieving their goals.

So if your content helps them with this, they will read it.

You simply need to show them how it benefits them.

To do this, I like to break it down into 3 parts:

• Primary topics

• Secondary topics

• Other topics and interests

Understanding the difference is important, so let’s quickly talk about this.

Primary Topics

Primary topics are necessary to achieve the outcome.

You can’t get to the outcome with them.

If you’re in the creator business niche, content creation is a primary topic.

And if you’re in the dating niche, communicating is a primary topic.

You need these topics and skills to get to the outcome.

There’s no way around it.

But here’s where a lot of people go wrong:

Just because you need these things doesn’t mean that you can only talk about this.

You can still talk about almost everything else.

And this is where the secondary topics come into play.

Secondary Topics

Secondary topics are useful to achieve the outcome.

They aren’t required like primary topics, but they make it easier to achieve the outcome.

Topics like mindset, time management, and habit-building are secondary topics.

You can get to the outcome without them, but it will be much harder.

They basically make it easier to get the result.

Secondary topics tend to be foundational.

• A good mindset makes it easier to get fit

• A good mindset makes it easier to get rich

• A good mindset makes it easier to get a relationship

You can technically become rich or fit without a good mindset, but it will be much harder.

That’s why these topics are very useful as well.

You just need to show your audience how the topics are relevant for them.

Let’s take a quick example.

I help people grow and monetize their audience.

So if I write:

“Here are 8 dieting tips to eat clean.”

Then the post will flop.

Because most people in my audience won’t see how this is relevant for their goals.

So they won’t care.

But if I write:

“You’re struggling to write because you can’t think clearly.

Here’s a simple diet that will give you a clear mind so you can write better content:”

Then more people will be interested.

The funny part is that I can still talk about the same 8 dieting tips after this.

But I positioned it in a way that my ideal reader cares about.

Because I showed them that the dieting tips will help them with their goals.

So that’s why they are more likely to read it.

And this is how you can talk about almost anything you want.

Everything is interconnected.

You just need to show people how it connects to something that they care about.

When you do that, they will care.

And that brings me to the third pillar: other topics and interests.

Other Topics

Based on the above you should already understand why you can use other topics and interests.

Because it doesn’t matter what the topic or interest is.

It matters that you make it interesting to your ideal reader.

If I want to talk about chess, I can.

But I need to it in a specific way.

Because my audience won’t care if I randomly start talking about chess.

But they will care if I show how it’s relevant for them.

I can for example do this with a metaphor:

The metaphor shows how chess is like something they care about.

And that’s why they read it (and care about it).

You can do this with literally anything.

You simply take:

1 ) A topic you want to talk about

2 ) A topic your audience cares about

And then you explain how they are alike or similar.

Good metaphors also make it easier for your audience to remember the lesson.

They’re a powerful tool.

If you link their goals to your interests, they will care about your interests.

Another way to talk about whatever you want is with storytelling.

I can tell a story about an experience I had with chess:

And then I can connect the story to a lesson that’s relevant for my audience:

(Here’s the story in case you want to read it).

Do you see what I did there?

I start the story with a hook that makes people curious.

Then I share a short chess story.

And then I connect the ending of the story with a lesson that’s useful for my audience.

• The hook grabs attention

• The story holds attention

• The lesson gives a payoff

In this way, you can talk about basically anything you want.

You just need to connect your story to a lesson that benefits your audience.

Because again: it’s not about the topic.

It’s about how you talk about the topic.

That will determine whether people care or not.

So now that you understand this, I want you to make a second list with:

• Primary topics and skills

• Secondary topics and skills

• Other topics, skills, and interests

Again, you can get my Infinite Ideas Worksheet here so you can just fill it in.

After you’ve done this, you know:

• The goals of your audience

• The problems of your audience

• The interests of your audience

• The primary topics and skills

• The secondary topics and skills

• The other topics, skills, and interests

So you now know what to create content about.

But now, we’re going to talk about where you can find high-quality content ideas.

I’m going give you 14 different ways to generate high-quality content ideas.

When you combine this with the above, you will never run out of content ideas again.

14 Idea Generation Methods

I want to start this chapter with an important insight.

Because in my experience, most people think they can’t use other people’s ideas.

And this couldn’t be more wrong.

Don’t get me wrong.

I don’t mean literally copying people word for word.

That’s obviously wrong.

But I mean taking inspiration from ideas you like.

Because here’s what most people don’t realize:

Even if you try to think of something by yourself without looking at any content, you will still come up with something that has already been written about.

So you might as well look at what’s performing and what resonates with you, and then try to improve upon that by writing about it from your unique perspective.

Because that’s what makes it valuable.

The value comes from connecting proven old ideas and presenting them in a new way.

Almost everything you read online is an old idea.

But the ones that perform well are presented in a new, interesting way.

Creativity is the process of combining old ideas in new ways.

– James Clear

I know many creators with 50K-5M followers and none of them create from scratch.

They have a small list of a few people they aspire to be like.

And they have a large list of cool ideas they encounter.

They just combine those ideas with their own personality, stories, worldview, and perspective to create something new.

Plagiarism is copying from one source. Research is copying from many.

– Austin Kleon

So you don’t need to start from scratch.

You need to make a list of people you like.

And you need to write down all the ideas you like.

Your brand becomes the combination of this.

There are so many amazing people you can learn from.

So take this opportunity.

Save the best ideas you like and try to improve them.

That’s what the best creators do.

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

– Isaac Newton

The Infinite Ideas Worksheet will help you to collect all of this in one place.

So with that out of the way, let’s go over the 14 places where you can find high-quality content ideas.

X Advanced Search

X Advanced Search is one of the best ways to find proven ideas.

It lets you filter someone’s tweets by keywords or performance.

You can use it to:

• Search for high-performing tweets

• Analyze the best tweets from a certain creator

• Search for specific topics from a certain creator

Then you can save the ones that resonate in the Infinite Ideas Worksheet.

Books

Books contain compressed knowledge.

You can get the best ideas from a smart person in a few hours.

One good book can give you dozens of good content ideas.

Highlight interesting concepts, frameworks, and examples.

Then add all your notes to Notion (or connect Readwise with Notion).

Ebooks

Ebooks are usually more practical and niche-specific.

This makes them perfect for idea generation.

Pay attention to checklists, frameworks, and step-by-step processes.

Each one can become multiple posts.

If you want these 2 ebooks on writing and growing an audience, click here or sign up to my newsletter on this page.

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Quotes

Quotes are compressed wisdom.

You can find the best quotes on Goodreads:

You can filter on a topic, person, or book.

Then you can read all the best quotes and save the ones you like.

This is great to find the best ideas from famous people.

Threads

Threads (or carousels) are a collection of tweets (or short posts).

Good threads are deep dives into a specific topic.

Each tweet in the thread contains one core idea.

And every idea is a potential content idea.

Articles

Articles are similar to threads, but the form is different.

Good articles can contain dozens of potential content ideas.

Save interesting ideas in the Infinite Ideas Worksheet.

Then write about these ideas in your own words.

Newsletters

Newsletters are idea goldmines.

Many great creators share their best thinking there.

They are similar to articles but the difference is that you can get them in your inbox.

Videos

YouTube videos are a great way to get ideas.

Make a list of the 10 channels you like the most.

Then make a folder for each channel inside the Infinite Ideas Worksheet.

Now you can create a new folder for every video you watch.

And you can just add your notes here.

This keeps everything organized and it will give you lots of content ideas.

Podcasts

Podcasts reveal how people think.

You hear stories, mental models, and lessons.

The process here is the same as for videos.

Make a list of podcasts and take notes every time you listen.

You can also use NoteGPT to summarize videos and podcasts for you.

This helps to get the core ideas and to determine if the podcast is worth listening to.

Courses

Courses are structured knowledge.

It helps you get from point A to point B.

“Buttttt….. all information is free online! Courses are a scam!”

You can find the law online.

But you still get a lawyer for legal problems.

Because it saves you a lot of time, effort, and headaches.

So yes, you could find all information online.

But the problem is that your time is limited.

And you don’t know what the right information looks like.

A good course saves you time by showing you what information does and doesn’t matter, and how to apply it in the right order.

When you do everything yourself, you save money but pay with your time.

When you invest in a good course, you save time but pay with your money.

It’s up to you which one you prefer.

A good course can save you thousands of dollars in opportunity costs and it’s also a great way to generate ideas.

So when you’re going through a course, make sure you add notes to the worksheet.

AI

You can use AI to quickly understand topics and skills.

I usually ask it about the first principles, mental models, and most common ideas.

When you understand that, you understand the foundation of the topic.

And based on this, you can dive deeper into the ideas that interest you.

Walks

Walking helps you think more clearly.

According to science, it literally makes your brain more active:

You can either listen to a podcast or just walk in silence.

Make sure that you have your phone with you to take notes.

In my experience, the best ideas come when you’re walking.

Storybank

You experience things every day.

So at the end of each day, you can write down the most interesting thing that happened in a storybank.

Write down lessons, mistakes, wins, and moments.

You can use everything that happened as a story.

These stories make your content unique because nobody else lived your experience.

And a second benefit is that you have a bank of all your coolest experiences.

This is a goldmine for content and something to look back on as you get older.

Story Generator

You use a storybank to keep track of stories as they happen.

But you can use the story generator to create stories based on past events.

A story is basically a transformation.

You went from point A (bad place) to point B (good place).

It becomes a story when you share how you went from A to B.

So use the story generator in the worksheet for this:

When you combine all of this, you will never run out of content ideas.

Don’t forget to get the Infinite Ideas worksheet here.

If you want more like this, subscribe to my free newsletter.

Also like, restack, and share this if you found it useful so that I know whether or not to create more newsletters (and worksheets) like this.

Talk to you soon,

- Stijn Noorman

PS: if you want my 1-1 help to build a 6-fig business in 2026, reply AC to this email or DM me AC on Twitter. If you want my system but prefer to do it yourself, check out the X Growth System (price increases soon after I finish the big update).

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3. All Resources: Get all my best workshops, courses, and other resources.

4. Work with me 1-1. DM me ‘AC’ (or reply via email) if you want my help to build a 6-fig Asset Creator business with +50K followers and 10M-100M organic views per year. The Asset Creator model only requires 2-4 hours per day and we focus only on content, emails, and digital assets (no cold outreach, sales calls, or sleazy tactics).

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Step 1 - Goals

For step 1, you need to get extremely clear on what truly matters to you.

“If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.”

– Seneca

You can’t travel to the right place if you don’t know what place you’re travelling towards.

Now this doesn’t mean you need a perfect plan, although that would of course help.

But you don’t need a destination, you do need a clear direction.

If you don’t know this yet, then think about someone who has the work that you would like to have.

This gives you insight into what you would like to do.

It can also be helpful to analyze how you spend your free time, money, and energy.

If you voluntarily spend your most valuable resources on something, and if it isn’t some sort of dopamine addiction, then there’s a good chance that this is something that you could be passionate about.

The hobby that you’re distracting yourself with, might actually be related to the thing you actually need to start doing for a living.

Step 2 - Reverse Engineering

Once you know what direction to move in, you can move on to the second step of the process.

For this, you need to start thinking like an engineer.

When engineers want to build something, they come up with what they want the end product to look like.

After they’ve envisioned this, they reverse engineer the process.

This means that they work their way back from the end.

The cool thing about this approach is that it eliminates all unnecessary stuff from the process.

This way, you’ll know for sure that what you’re doing is actually helping you get closer to what you want to achieve.

This helps to eliminate distractions.

Step 3 - Break It Down

After you’ve reverse engineered the process, you need to move on to step 3.

This is breaking it down into smaller actions.

• Turn the 1 year goal into monthly goals

• Turn the monthly goals into weekly goals

• Turn the weekly goals into daily actions

This gives more clarity on what you need to do on a daily basis.

Make a list of everything you need to do.

Stop focusing on outcomes.

Start focusing on the daily actions that lead to outcomes.

After this, you can move on to step 4.

Step 4 - Leverage List

For step 4, you need to assign a number to all of the activities on the list.

There are 3 options:

• 0x activities

• 2x activities

• 10x activities

This number shows the impact of the action of your progress.

You see, a lot of good activities are actually time-wasting activities in disguise.

Because some activities give you a 10x return on your time while others give you only a 2x return.

When you don’t analyze it, these 2x activities can feel productive because they’re bringing you closer to your goal.

But if you want to achieve more than 99% of people, you need to focus on the 10x activities.

So write down 0x, 2x, and 10x after all of the activities on the list.

After this, you can go to step 5.

Step 5 - Elimination

You now have an overview of all the activities and how much closer they’ll bring you to your goal.

So now it’s time to eliminate most of them.

Eliminate all 0x activities.

They don’t bring you any closer to your goal.

Also try to eliminate as many 2x activities as possible.

This allows you to spend all your time on the 10x activities.

When in doubt, use the EDO System:

Step 6 - Create Systems

That brings us to the next step, and this is making sure you do the 10x activities efficiently.

For this, we need to create systems.

Make a list of the action steps that go into doing the 10x activities.

From start to finish.

For example, if it’s writing a newsletter, write down all the steps you need to take to go from idea to finished newsletter.

After that, you need to remove as many steps as possible while still keeping the system functioning.

When you do this, you end up with an efficient system you can easily repeat to perform the 10x activity.

If you have money to spend, and hate certain activities, you can outsource them.

After this, it’s a matter of staying extremely focused and optimizing your habits.

Step 7 - Habit Optimization

Here’s a list of habits you should implement to maximize your progress.

• Work out daily

• Don’t multitask

• Take walks daily

• Focus on 1 task at a time

• Don’t take alcohol or drugs

• Live like a practical minimalist

• Stop scrolling on social media

• Limit the time you spend on games

• Meditate for at least 10 minutes per day

• Eat healthy food and count your macros

• Don’t watch p*rn and do semen retention

• Create a daily goal list to make sure you stay focused

• Take time to learn from books, courses, and podcasts

• Limit instant gratification activities as much as possible

• Get 8 hours of sleep and have a consistent sleep schedule

• Eliminate distractions and optimize your work environment

• Set your phone on black and white and turn off all notifications

• Keep your information diet clean and only consume content mindfully

You don’t need to do all of this, but the more of these habits you do, the more productive you will be.

If you do all of this you will achieve way more than 99% of people in a fraction of the time.

Step 8 - Energy mapping

The goal is to do the most important work when you’re at your best.

For this, you need to know:

1. The most important work

2. When you’re at your best

The steps above helped you to find the most important work.

So now it’s a matter of doing it when you’re at your best.

To find out when this is, you need to map your energy levels for a week.

This shows you when you’re at your best.

The best way to get a lot done is to do the most important work when you’re at your best.

So get clear on the highest leverage tasks and do them at the time of the day when you’re at your best.

This is how you optimize your productivity but you still need to make sure that you’re working on the right things.

In short:

• Set a goal

• Reverse engineer it

• Break it down into small steps

• Give each step a score (0x, 2x, or 10x)

• Eliminate all 0x and 2x steps that aren’t required

• Create systems to do all the 10x steps efficiently

• Optimize your habits to get the most out of yourself

• Map your energy levels so you know when you’re at your best

After this, do the work.

Ideally in a few deep work blocks of 1,5h-2h.

This makes you much more efficient and it also helps you to develop skills faster.

This is how you get more done than 99% of people in a fraction of the time.

If you found this post useful please repost it so it helps more people.

Talk soon my friend,

Stijn

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How I Can Help You

1. X Growth System: How I grew from 0 to 55K 𝕏 followers, +100M organic views in a year, and built a 6-fig creator business without sales calls, ads, and cold outreach.

2. Aesthetic Writing: Learn the best writing strategies I used to gain 70M organic impressions and 18,100 followers in only 90 days.

3. All Resources: Click here to see all my workshops, courses, and other resources (discounts ending soon).

4. Work with me 1-1. DM me ‘AC’ (or reply via email) if you want my help to build a 6-fig Asset Creator business with +50K followers and +100M organic views per year in 2-4 hours per day with just content, emails, and digital assets (no cold outreach, sleazy sales tactics, or sales calls).

5. Free eBooks. Get my Writing and Twitter Simplified eBooks for free by subscribing to my free newsletter (you also get a bonus worksheet that will help you to build a unique personal brand on social media). If you’re already a subscriber and haven’t received these yet, reply ‘ebooks’ to this email and I’ll send them to you:

In this newsletter, I’m going to show you how to go from 0 to 1,000+ followers on any major social platform in less than 1 hour per day.

This system worked for me and dozens of clients, but before it can work for you, there’s one key thing you need to understand first.

Before we dive in, the X Business System will soon not be available anymore (but customers keep lifetime access and updates). It’s the system that got me from 0 to 6-figures, +55K X followers and +9K email subs. Click here to get it before it’s gone.

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Follower Funnel

This is the Follower Funnel.

It explains how growth works on almost any social platform.

Growth happens in 3 steps:

• They see your content, comments or DMs

• If they like it, they’ll click on your profile

• If your profile looks good, they’ll click on the ‘follow button’

That’s it.

Content, comments, and DMs give you profile clicks.

Your profile converts those clicks into followers.

So to grow, you need to optimize your profile, content, and comments.

Everything else is noise.

On video platforms, great content is enough.

But on writing platforms, you need an engagement system.

I’ll cover that later, but first let’s optimize your profile so that you will actually convert the traffic you get into followers.

Profile Optimization

There are a lot of tiny things you can optimize, but let’s stick to the 2 most important things in this newsletter: your profile picture and your bio.

Your profile picture needs to look professional.

The fastest way is to emulate a picture that you like.

I liked the picture of Andrew Huberman, so I created something similar but still different.

Don’t blindly copy it, but take inspiration from the pictures you like.

Your bio needs to clearly explain how you help people.

I recommend using this simple template:

“I help [person] achieve [result] with [topics]. [social proof + CTA]”

It’s not perfect, but it’s clear and people immediately know what you do.

Example:

Don’t overthink it.

You’ll probably change it dozens of times over the years, so just get your first iteration out there.

Think of it as your Minimum Viable Profile.

You can use this on all platforms and when you do, you will convert at least 10% of traffic into followers. But if your content isn’t good then you won’t keep them so let’s talk about what you should post now.

Content

Content starts with writing good tweets.

After that, we’ll repurpose them to every other platform.

There are only two types of content you need:

Growth content to grow your audience.

Credibility content to monetize your audience.

Growth content takes popular topics and packages them in proven formats.

For example: contrast posts or triad posts.

Post at least 2 growth posts per day if you want to grow fast.

Credibility content is about educating people and showing proof to build trust.

For example: deep dive threads or educational lists.

Post at least 1 credibility post per day, ideally with a CTA below it to get inbound leads.

I post 8 times per day, but 3 posts per day is enough to grow:

The writing formatting of your content is also important.

I call this Aesthetic Writing, and it’s the writing equivalent of video editing.

I explain it in detail in the Writing Simplified eBook that you can get as a gift if you subscribe to my newsletter.

If you want my entire content and growth system, check out the X Growth System or DM me ‘ACS’ on Twitter (or reply to to this email) if you want my 1-1 help.

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Engagement System

Now you know what to post.

But early on, writing platforms give you very few impressions.

So you need to leave comments to put your content in front of more people.

Create a list of 100 creators in your niche.

About 20% big creators and 80% smaller ones.

Leave 25+ comments twice a day.

More works better, but consistency and quality matter more than volume.

Do something you can stick with for months.

Don’t comment too fast and focus on one platform at a time to avoid burnout.

I recommend starting on Twitter because it lets you use X Pro to add your comment list.

For other platforms, you have to make a spreadsheet with account names.

That’s the engagement system.

Now that you understand how to optimize your profile, content, and engagement strategy, let’s talk about how you can turn your tweets into content for all other platforms.

Cross-Platform Growth

Now let’s talk about repurposing.

The idea is simple:

Take a good tweet and turn it into content for every other platform.

Let’s start with the easiest ones.

Substack & Threads

For Substack and Threads, you can just copy paste your tweets.

I use Hypefury (aff. link) to automatically schedule my tweets to Threads.

You can do this with one click:

For Substack, I paste my tweets into WriteStack (aff. link) to schedule them.

That’s all you need to do.

That brings us to the next one.

LinkedIn, Instagram & TikTok

For LinkedIn and Instagram, you can:

• Take your tweet

• Turn it into an image

• Create a slightly longer version

You can do this yourself or you can paste the tweet into ChatGPT, ask for a longer version, and edit it to improve it.

It won’t be perfect, so make sure that you still edit and improve it yourself.

The goal is to get a rough draft that we can edit.

You can also write the longer version yourself entirely (the reason we ask AI to do it is to save mental energy, not to create the perfect post).

Then, you can turn the original tweet into an image using a tool like Tweetpik.

You just paste the link of the tweet in there and you get an image of the tweet.

We’re doing this because posts with images usually do better on LinkedIn and we need an image for Instagram.

You can also use this for TikTok or you can even turn the tweet image into a short video.

I don’t have TikTok, but other people post my content there (and it works):

All of this takes less than 30 minutes per week.

YouTube

YouTube takes more time, but you can still reuse your ideas.

I repost my LinkedIn content as YouTube community posts.

You can literally just copy and paste your post text and image here.

For videos, the simplest option is turning list tweets or threads into list videos.

For example, I turned this list tweet into this list video:

I just created a few slides in Canva:

• 1 intro slide

• 1 slide per point

• 1 outro slide + CTA

Then I recorded it with Tella (aff link) and edited it.

This only took a few hours.

This won’t create viral entertainment videos, but for entrepreneurs and educational creators, it works very well.

It’s a simple system you can use to get started (you can improve production later if you want to).

So this is how you can get to 1000 followers on every platform in 1 hour per day.

It might take a while without comments on most platforms.

With comments, and other growth strategies, you can get there quickly.

If you want to get there faster, check out the X Growth System (price increases soon) and the other resources below.

Talk soon,

Stijn

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How I Can Help You

1. X Growth System: How I grew from 0 to 55K 𝕏 followers, +100M organic views in a year, and built a 6-fig creator business without sales calls, ads, and cold outreach.

2. Aesthetic Writing: Learn the best writing strategies I used to gain 70M organic impressions and 18,100 followers in only 90 days.

3. All Resources: Click here to see all my workshops, courses, and other resources (discounts ending soon).

4. Work with me 1-1. DM me ‘AC’ (or reply via email) if you want my help to build a 6-fig Asset Creator business with +50K followers and +100M organic views per year in 2-4 hours per day with just content, emails, and digital assets (no cold outreach, sleazy sales tactics, or sales calls).

5. Free eBooks. Get my Writing and Twitter Simplified eBooks for free by subscribing to my free newsletter (you also get a bonus worksheet that will help you to build a unique personal brand on social media). If you’re already a subscriber and haven’t received these yet, reply ‘ebooks’ to this email and I’ll send them to you:

There are almost 7B people on this planet. Someday, I hope, there will be almost 7B companies. ‍

– Naval Ravikant

I built a one-person business that hit 6-figures last year.

I hit my first $10K month within 1 year of restarting on Twitter, but the truth is that it cost me over 3 years and $30K in courses & mentorships to figure things out.

Oh, and also a LOT of mistakes.

I have worked very hard in the last few years, but when I reflect on everything that I did, almost 80% of it wouldn’t have been necessary to get where I am today.

Don’t get me wrong, I needed those mistakes to learn, but now that I’ve learned I know what actually matters and what’s a waste of time.

So in this newsletter (or written mini course), I’ll show you exactly how I’d do it faster if I had to start over.

You’ll learn:

• How to actually make money online

• The best one-person business to start

• The best high-income skills to master

• How to pick a profitable niche you enjoy

• The 3 most profitable (eternal) markets

• 8 practical steps to build a 6-fig person business

At the end, you’ll know exactly how to go from zero to 6-figures faster than me.

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One-Person Business Model Simplified

Sensible people get paid for doing what they enjoy doing.​

‍– Alan Watts

The one-person business model is turning yourself into the business.

You are the business.

By improving yourself, you improve the business (and vice versa).

It’s a business model that allows you to get paid to do what you love.

• You pursue your interests

• You solve your own problems

• You sell the solution to others

You literally get paid to improve yourself.

You pursue your curiosity and you help people with similar interests.

Learn a skill. Teach the skill. Sell the skill.

This is why I think it’s the ideal business model.

You have creative freedom, control over your time and location, and the potential to make millions if you stick with it (and if you provide enough value).

Most people, including me, massively overcomplicate it though.

There are actually only 2 things you need to make it work:

People love to overcomplicate it, but this is what it all comes down to.

1) Something to sell = your offer & product or service.

2) People to sell to = your audience (followers + email list).

These are the first principles of online business.

Once you understand how to grow an audience, how to create a valuable product or service, and how to turn it into a valuable offer that sells, you will be set for life.

This is what we’ll talk about in the rest of this article.

In order to build a profitable audience, there are certain high income skills you need.

So let’s talk about the most important high-income skills you need to learn now.

High-Income Skills For Solopreneurs

Learn to build. Learn to sell. If you can do both, you’ll be unstoppable.

‍– Naval Ravikant

I differentiate between 2 types of high-income skills:

‍1) Primary skills: skills you need to learn (hard to outsource).

‍2) Secondary skills: skills you’ll need (easy to outsource).

In an ideal world, you have all of the skills I’m going to explain.

But you have a limited amount of time.

So it’s best to focus on the primary high-income skills first:

• ‍‍Sales

• Writing

• Speaking

• Marketing

You can build a business with just these skills.

• Sales helps to sell your offer and make money

• Marketing helps to make people aware of your brand

• Writing and speaking help to make high-quality content

There’s also some overlap:

• Speaking helps you to sell more

• Writing helps you to create better offers

• Sales makes you persuasive which improves your content

Learning these skills should be your first priority.

If you combine these with your craft, you won’t become a starving artist because you have what you need to make money as a creator.

So these are the primary high-income skills.

But it’s also important to have the following secondary high-income skills:

• AI use

• Design

• Storytelling

• Video editing

These skills are also very valuable.

But they’re secondary because you can build a successful one-person business without them and because they’re also easier to outsource.

You can hire a video editor or a freelancer to design your website.

But it’s harder to outsource sales or writing.

Sure, you can hire a sales rep or ghostwriter, but if you’re starting out, this won’t be realistic (because it’s expensive and you consistently need to write and sell).

If you don’t understand how writing and selling work, you probably won’t make it.

But you can easily make it if you can sell and write, but aren’t able to edit videos or design websites.

So that’s why you want to learn those skills first.

Don’t try to learn them all at once though.

Learning high-income skills is like learning to juggle.

Jugglers start with one ball.

Once they have good control over it, they add a second one.

Then a third. Then a fourth. Then a fifth. Etcetera.

High-income skills are the same.

I recommend starting with writing.

If you can write, you can create content that grows your audience and email list.

This puts you in the perfect position to learn the second high-income skill: selling.

Learn to write. Then learn to build and sell. If you can do these things, you’ll be unstoppable. If you want to master digital writing, check out Aesthetic Writing.

But anyways, now you understand:

1) How a one-person business works

2) What skills you need to make it work

This puts you in the perfect situation to learn the next topic we’ll cover:

Your niche (or lack there of, let me explain)

The Nicheless Niche (Specialists vs. Generalists)

There are usually 2 camps when it comes to picking a niche.

‍1) The specialists. They urge you to niche down as much as possible. If you don’t, you’ll never make money. They prioritize money and have usually boring businesses.

‍2) The generalists. They tell you to write about whatever you want. If you do, people will magically give you money. They prioritize passion and usually barely make money.

I’ve tried both approaches - and both failed me.

As a specialist, I made money but I hated the process.

As a generalist, I liked the process but made no money.

This led me to develop my own approach to it:

I call it the Specialized Generalist.

You specialize in one thing and you still talk about what you want.

But in a way that makes it interesting to other people.

You niche down your offer, but you don’t niche down your entire brand.

This sounds a bit abstract, so let me clarify it with an example.

For this, you need to understand the Customer Journey.

This is the journey that your customer needs to go on to go from where they are to where they want to go to.

In my case, here are the things they need to learn for this:

According to specialists, you should stick to these topics to make money.

And they’re right that I need to talk about these topics to build authority.

But here’s what they miss:

‍People who want to grow and monetize their audience care about much more than just growth and business tips.

You could call business and writing the primary topics.

Because you need these to get the outcome.

But there are also tons of other topics that might be useful to people who want to build a one-person business.

For example:

• Habits

• Fitness

• Mindset

• Productivity

• Emotional control

And many more.

We can call these your secondary topics.

These aren’t required to build a business, but they will make it much easier to build a successful business.

So most people who want to build a business will also be interested in these topics.‍

Because it helps them to achieve their goal(s).

And this is what makes it interesting to them.

It’s not so much about sticking to certain topics.

It’s about showing people how a topic will help them to achieve their goals.

That’s the secret to talking about whatever you want while still make money.

I’m not in the walking niche.

But if I want to, I can talk about it by showing my audience how it’ll help them to achieve their goals.

Like this:

See what I did there?

My audience may not care about walking, but they care about growing their audience, making more money, and improving their health, body, and brain.

So if I show them how walking helps them with this, they become interested in it.

It’s not about the topic, it’s about showing how the topic benefits them.

People don’t care about your ‘topics’ or interests, they care about what these topics can do for them.

So clearly show them how it will help them and they’ll be happy to listen.

But how do you know what people care about?

People figured that out long ago, so let’s talk about the eternal markets.

The Eternal Markets

The 3 eternal markets.

• ‍‍Health

• Wealth

• Relationships

Or the one overarching market: happiness.

You need to pick an outcome that people care about in one of these markets.

Examples:

• ‍Health: getting a sixpack‍

• Wealth: making $5k/mo online‍

• Relationships: getting a girlfriend

Then you identify the problems they need to solve and the primary and secondary skills that they need to develop.

Then you make a list of the topics they need to understand for that and the interests you want to talk about (that could help them).

This will give you plenty of content ideas.

If you need a place to start, it can be helpful to come up with your Ikigai and Brand Ikigai.

Your Ikigai is your ‘reason for being’.

Your Brand Ikigai is your ‘reason for brand’.

I created the Brand Ikigai because ‘Ikigai’ is great, but your Brand Ikigai is more practical when it comes to building your brand.

Make a list for 4 for of the categories and look where they all connect:

After you’ve done this, you’ll have clarity on:

• How to sell

• What content to create

• How you build an audience

So now that you understand all of that, let’s jump into the 8 practical steps you can take to build a one-person business.

How To Build Your One-Person Business

There are 8 steps to building your one-person business.

‍1. Pick a Platform

I recommend you start on Twitter (and Substack for long-form writing).

I started on YouTube and Instagram and it cost me a lot of progress.

X and Substack are better to start on because only need to learn writing.

Not design or video editing.

So it’s more efficient and it gives you the chance to test your ideas.

In the case of Twitter, the people are business-oriented and it’s great for networking.

Substack is good because it’s still in the early stages so it’s a bit easier to grow.

When you start growing on Twitter, you collect a lot of validated content ideas that you can repurpose later to other platforms.

If you want the system that I used to gain 18K followers and 70M views in 90 days on Twitter, check out the X Growth System (paid) or my Twitter Simplified ebook (also free once you sign up to my free newsletter on Substack). It’s made for twitter, but the same principles apply to other writing platforms like Substack, Threads, and LinkedIn.

2. Optimize Your Profile‍

Your profile needs to look professional.

It determines if people follow you and if they see you as competent.

So iterate until it looks like you could have 100K followers.

Include the following 4 things:

If you want to keep it simple, just use this template:

“I help [who you help] achieve [outcome] with [main topics].”

Bonus points for adding social proof.

3. Create Content

The goal of content is to gain followers and customers.

You gain followers with growth content.

• Listicles

• Platitudes

• One-liners

• Social hacking

• Inspirational posts

You gain customers with competence content.

• Stories

• Insights

• Systems

• Case studies

• Educational posts

Use growth content to grow your audience.

Then use competence content to filter out the customers.

The best creators combine both (I explain the 24 best content types I found after +60K tweets in the X Growth System).

4. Network & Engage

Here’s how audience growth on writing platforms actually works:

• People see your post or comment

• If it’s good, they click on your profile

• If your profile is optimized, they hit follow

But at the start, your content doesn’t have a lot organic reach yet.

So you need to leave comments.

Make a list of 100 people in your niche and leave 50-100 comments per day.

Also follow and DM the people you like best to help each other grow.

This is how you escape beginner hell.

5. Create Lead Magnet

A lead magnet helps you to gain email subscribers and potential customers.

It’s usually a small valuable solution to a problem that your audience has.

To make a great lead magnet:

• You start with the goal

• You identify the important topics

• You write down the problems people face

Then you target one small problem and you make a valuable free product that solves it completely (for example my Writing Simplified eBook).

6. Create Offer

You want to create an offer based on the outcome that you help people to achieve.

It needs to include:

• Person

• Outcome

• Timeframe

• Steps to take

• Guarantee (optional)

• Required effort (time)

Then put a price tag on it that makes sense.

And you determine which type of offer you want to create:

• ‍Done For You (DFY) - people pay you to do the work for them.‍

• Done With You (DWY) - people pay you so you help them through the process.‍

• Do It Yourself (DIY) - people pay you for your information so they can go through the process themselves.

All of them work well, and you can even have an offer for all 3 if you want.

I prefer DIY and DWY offers because they scale better (especially DIY offers, but more on that in a second).

7. Build Leverage

Build distribution, then build whatever you want.

‍– Jack Butcher

Leverage allows you to get a bigger outcome with the same inputs.

This image illustrates it best:

You get a bigger return on your input if you push at the place with the green check.

Business is the same.

Which is why we want to build leverage.

So an audience and an email list.

The bigger it gets, the bigger your returns will get as well (without you having to do more).

It takes the same amount of effort to write an email to 100 or 100,000 people.

But the outcome will be 1000x bigger.

Do work that scales.

8. Productize Your Knowledge

When you have enough leverage, and a process that helps people to achieve a specific outcome, you want to productize your knowledge.

Digital products are great because you build them once, and then you can sell them forever.

This is the stage you want to get to because it’ll help you to sell while you sleep.

You make a product, write the salespage, and then you promote it.

Forever (if you want to).

The bigger your audience gets, the more money you’ll make. And the more people you will help.

Check out Productize Knowledge if this business model appeals to you.

So in short:

• Pick a platform (𝕏)

• Optimize profile

• Create content

• Network & engage

• Build a lead magnet

• Create a valuable offer

• Build leverage (audience)

• Productize your knowledge

If you do this, you’ll be able to build a one-person business that hit 6-figures.

Talk soon my friend,

Stijn Noorman

PS: if you want my help to build a 6-fig business in 2026, reply AC to this email or DM me AC on Twitter or Substack. If you want my system but prefer to do it yourself, check out the X Business System (removing this soon but customers keep lifetime access).

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How I Can Help You

1. X Growth System: How I grew from 0 to 55K 𝕏 followers, +100M organic views in a year, and built a 6-fig creator business without sales calls, ads, and cold outreach.

2. Aesthetic Writing: Learn the best writing strategies I used to gain 70M organic impressions and 18,100 followers in only 90 days.

3. All Resources: Click here to see all my workshops, courses, and other resources (discounts ending soon).

4. Work with me 1-1. DM me ‘AC’ (or reply via email) if you want my help to build a 6-fig Asset Creator business with +50K followers and +100M organic views per year. The Asset Creator model only requires 2-4 hours per day and we focus only on content, emails, and digital assets (no cold outreach, sales calls, or sleazy tactics).

5. Free eBooks. Get my Writing and Twitter Simplified eBooks for free by subscribing to my free newsletter (you also get a bonus worksheet that will help you to build a unique personal brand on social media). If you’re already a subscriber and haven’t received these yet, reply ‘ebooks’ to this email and I’ll send them to you:

In this newsletter I’m going to explain a free Twitter growth tool that helped me gain 18K followers and 70M views in 90 days and the best part is that it’s completely free.

I won’t waste your time with fluff so let me tell you what it is and how you can use it to blow up your Twitter following as fast as possible (you can use it to find high-performing ideas for all other writing platforms as well).

Subscribe now

Twitter Advanced Search

The tool is called Twitter Advanced Search.

It’s been around for a long time, but it’s kind of hidden. Most people don’t know it exists or they don’t know how to use it properly.

To find it, you need to go to x.com/advanced-search.

When you’re there, this is what you see:

You can search for words, accounts, engagement, and dates. This can seem overwhelming at first, but there are actually only a few options that matter.

• The words

• The account

• The minimum likes

• The date range

In my experience, you don’t need more than these 4.

With these options, you can basically use Twitter Advanced Search in 2 different ways.

1. Search For Topics

The first way is to search for content with specific words.

Either from a creator you like or just in general.

For this, I recommend entering:

• The specific word (f.e. business)

• The amount of likes (f.e. 1000+ likes per post)

• The handle of the creator (f.e. thedankoe – optional)

When you do this, you see all the tweets of this creator with this specific word (with the minimum amount of likes you entered).

This can be useful if you want to see if one of your favorite creators wrote about a certain topic. If you just want to see high-performing content about this topic, you can remove the name of the creator (and you can change the amount of likes).

As you can see in the image above, Twitter also automatically generates the following words in the search bar:

business (from:thedankoe) min_faves:1000

This is an alternative way of using Twitter Advanced Search (more on this in a minute).

So that’s the first use case. The second one is to find outliers from a certain creator.

2. Search For Outliers

An outlier is a post that gets at least 5× as many views or likes as usual. They can be useful to see what’s currently working well so you can learn from it.

For this, I recommend entering:

• The date range (f.e. the last 90 days)

• The handle of the creator (f.e. thedankoe)

• The amount of likes (f.e. 5000+ likes per post)

The amount of likes depends on the creator you’re researching. I recommend scrolling through their feed first so you can see what their average amount of likes is.

Then enter at least 5x this amount in Advanced Search. If you get too many posts, increase the amount of likes. If you don’t get enough posts, decrease the amount of likes.

When you do this, you see the tweets of this creator that did better than usual in the last 90 days.

The tool isn’t perfect with this in my experience, but it will still show you most of the outlier posts. If the results seem odd, changing the date range usually fixes it.

As you can see, Twitter automatically generates the text in the search bar for you again:

from:thedankoe since:2025-06-01 until:2025-12-01 min_faves:1000

You can also make changes there if you prefer that. Think about it as ‘search blocks’:

• Words → “exact phrase”

• Account → from:username

• Minimum likes → min_faves:[number]

• Date range → since:YYYY-MM-DD until:YYYY-MM-DD

• Combined → from:username “exact phrase” since:YYYY-MM-DD until:YYYY-MM-DDmin_faves:[number]

• Example → from:thedankoe “business” since:2025-06-01 until:2025-12-01 min_faves:1000

It looks complicated but you can just copy it and change the words. Or you can just use the Advanced Search screen if you prefer to keep it simple like me.

When you do this, you’ll grow much faster. But finding high-performing posts is only one part of the growth equation. You also need to learn to write in a way that grabs attention, and you need to learn

I recently uploaded a free course on Twitter growth on my YouTube channel, you can click here to watch it (might remove it later but it’s still free for now).

If you want my entire system that helped me get 54K followers, check out the X Growth System (price increases soon when I add the new version).

The best,

Stijn Noorman

Subscribe now

Share

How I Can Help You

1. X Growth System: How I grew from 0 to 55K 𝕏 followers, +100M organic views in a year, and built a 6-fig creator business without sales calls, ads, and cold outreach.

2. Aesthetic Writing: Learn the best writing strategies I used to gain 70M organic impressions and 18,100 followers in only 90 days.

3. All Resources: Click here to see all my workshops, courses, and other resources (discounts ending soon).

4. Work with me 1-1. DM me ‘AC’ (or reply via email) if you want my help to build a 6-fig Asset Creator business with +50K followers and +100M organic views per year. The Asset Creator model only requires 2-4 hours per day and we focus only on content, emails, and digital assets (no cold outreach, sales calls, or sleazy tactics).

5. Free eBooks. Get my Writing and Twitter Simplified eBooks for free by subscribing to my free newsletter (you also get a bonus worksheet that will help you to build a unique personal brand on social media). If you’re already a subscriber and haven’t received these yet, reply ‘ebooks’ to this email and I’ll send them to you:

In my short time on Earth:

• I made a lot of mistakes

• I have done some things right

• I learned a lot of valuable lessons

In this newsletter, I want to share the 26 best lessons I learned to help you get ahead of 99% in 2026.

Subscribe now

1. Nobody has it all figured out

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

– Socrates

Everyone is just figuring it out as they go.

Most people waste years waiting for clarity. But clarity only comes from action.

You don’t think your way into progress, you move your way into it.

Each step gives you feedback. Each mistake gives you data. That’s how you improve.

The ones who win aren’t the ones who know the most.

They’re the ones who keep going when they don’t know enough.

2. Simplicity is profundity

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

– Leonardo da Vinci

Most people confuse complexity with intelligence. They add more to prove they know more. But true mastery shows up in subtraction, not addition. It’s about removing what doesn’t matter so you can focus fully on the few things that matter.

Charlatans use complexity to hide their lack of understanding. The truly intelligent make things simple.

– Naval Ravikant

Simplicity isn’t the absence of depth. It’s the result of understanding something so deeply that you can express it clearly. The better you understand it, the simpler you can explain it. The simpler you explain it, the better others will understand it.

Average people admire complexity. Smart people admire simplicity. It’s easy to keep something complex. It’s hard to make something simple. Simplicity is true intelligence.

3. Tiny changes will change your life

Getting 1% better will change your life.

Getting 1% worse will ruin your life.

This is because of compounding.

The Atomic Habits graph illustrates this best:

Tiny changes will change or ruin your life.

4. You don’t need a lot to be happy

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.

– Epictetus

Modern life trains you to measure success by possessions instead of peace.

That’s why most people get stuck by chasing the wrong things. They buy stuff they don’t need to impress people they don’t like. But true wealth isn’t owning more, it’s wanting less.

In my experience, you only need a few things to be happy:

• Good food

• Meaningful work

• A nice place to live

• Control over your work

• A hobby that excites you

• Financial stability (or freedom)

• Workouts and walks (ideally in nature)

• Good relationships with partner, friends and family

• Good books, podcasts, and other educational content

Almost everything else is noise. Focus on what matters to you.

5. The best productivity hack is saying no

The best code is no code at all.

– Jeff Atwood

Most people think that it’s rude to say no. I strongly disagree. Saying yes or no isn’t about being kind. It’s about time management. And time management is about spending your time in the best way. And the best way is the one you enjoy, that helps the people closest to you, and that brings you closer to your goals.

Every time you say yes, it should:

• Bring you closer to your goals

• Help the people important to you

• Be something you actually want to do

Because here’s what most people don’t realize:

Every time you say yes to something, you automatically say no to everything else you could do with that time and energy. So you may think it’s rude to say no to one thing, but if you say yes you actually say no to everything except that one thing.

Saying no is a decision, saying yes creates a new obligation.

Saying no saves you time, saying yes costs you time.

Every ‘yes’ is a ‘no’ to everything that’s not that thing. So you should get clear on what you want out of life. Once you know your priorities, you’ll know what to say yes to.

So it’s not rude to say no. It’s the ultimate productivity hack.

6. Social media is a double-edged sword

A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer’s hand.

– Socrates

Social media can either ruin your life or it can make it significantly better.

It will ruin your life if you use it:

• To argue

• To compare

• To hate on others

• To scroll mindlessly

It will improve your life if you use it:

• To build

• To create

• To help others

• To consume mindfully

Social media is a tool. The tool itself is neutral. Just like a knife can be used to prepare a great meal for your family or to commit a crime. The knife isn’t good or bad, but the way you use it is. How you use the tool determines if it’s positive or negative.

If you use it to grow an audience, it will change your life for the better.

If you use it to argue and scroll mindlessly, it will change your life for the worse.

Choose wisely.

7. Don’t try to change other people

I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.

– Socrates

You can change yourself. And other people can change themselves.

But you can’t change other people. Trying to do so will cost you a lot of energy and it’ll only make you feel frustrated.

Don’t do this to yourself. Focus on improving yourself. Help others if they want your help, but don’t try to change others. It’s a waste of time and energy.

8. You aren’t your thoughts

The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the thinker.

– Eckhart Tolle

I’ve been meditating 10-20 minutes per day almost daily for 8 years now.

The main benefit that this gave me is that I realized that I’m not my thoughts. I’m the observer of my thoughts.

Mindfulness meditation create space between you and your thoughts. The more mindful you become, the more you notice that there’s a gap between the thought and the thinker. The thought comes up randomly, the thinker observer the thought.

You are the thinker, not your thoughts. There’s a big difference.

9. People pay money to solve problems

I’m a full-time creator, but the first 2 years of my journey I struggled to make money online. This was because I didn’t understand how making money worked.

Here’s the simplified explanation: you make money by solving people’s problems.

• Money is made when value is created.

• Value is created when pain is alleviated

• Pain is alleviated when problems are solved

• Problems are solved when critical information is applied

People don’t buy products or services, they buy solutions to their problems.

• They don’t want a plane ticket, they want a vacation

• They don’t want a diet plan, they want a body transformation

• They don’t want a business course, they want to earn $10K/mo writing online

Sell them what they want, then give them what they need to get what they want.

10. Consistency is the ultimate unfair advantage

Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

– Aristotle

Most people quit during the bitter part. They expect results before they’ve earned them. But growth doesn’t happen as fast as you want. It takes time, practice, and most importantly: a lot of patience.

Patience isn’t waiting and doing nothing. It’s waiting while doing the work.

Anyone can start with excitement. Only a small percentage can get results.

That’s why it’s easy to outcompete 90% of people.

Just show up every day for 5+ years.

11. Ignore hustle culture, rest properly

Your body is like a phone battery.

It takes days to drain the battery, but only hours to recharge it.

Unless you use it a lot, but you get my point.

If you never recharge it, it stops working.

Your body and mind work the same.

Hustle culture has brainwashed us into believing that working all the time is somehow optimal. But this is simply wrong (believe me, I tried).

I wish it weren’t, but if you don’t rest, you won’t be able to work properly anymore.

Relaxing isn’t enough to rest, you need something called Active Recovery.

‍Active recovery is any deliberate, low-intensity activity that helps the body and brain return to baseline after high performance.

– Steven Kotler

Active recovery doesn’t always feel good during, but it makes you feel much better after. It clears stress, recharges your nervous system, and prevents burnout.

Here’s a list of the most important (active) recovery habits:

• Sauna

• Walking

• Massages

• Journaling

• Breathwork

• Light exercise

• Social interaction

• Yoga or stretching

• Practicing gratitude

• Spending time in nature

• Cold showers & ice baths

• Meditation & mindfulness

• Sleep & NSDR (non-sleep deep rest)

Also eat healthy and work out regularly.

If you do these things, you’ll actually recover mentally (instead of just relaxing).

You don’t need to do them all, but the more you do, the better you’ll recover.

Pick the ones you enjoy most and make them part of your routine.

12. Discipline is a choice

Discipline equals freedom.

– Jocko

I get annoyed when people say:

“I just don’t have discipline.”

They talk about it like it’s a genetic (like hair color or height).

But this is wrong.

Sure, it might be easier for some people than for others.

But everybody can choose to be disciplined.

It’s not about having a certain gene.

It’s about choosing to do what you know you need to do despite how you feel.

Saying “I don’t have discipline” is just a way to avoid responsibility.

It’s an excuse not to take action.

But everybody can choose to be disciplined. And when you do, it will set you free.

13. Take 100% responsibility for your life

The purpose of life is finding the largest burden that you can bear and bearing it.

– Jordan Peterson

Motivational speakers often say:

“Everything is your fault.”

I disagree with the statement, but I agree with the sentiment.

Not everything is your fault.

You don’t pick your place of birth, family, weaknesses, insecurities, and genetics.

But everything is still your responsibility to deal with. Even if it’s hard and unfair. Or rather, especially if it’s hard and unfair. Because nobody is coming to save you.

Not your parents. Not your friends. Not your teachers. Not your government. Nobody.

It’s all on you. And sometimes, it’s extremely unfair, difficult, and frustrating. But this doesn’t change the fact that it’s 100% your responsibility to deal with.

You don’t control the cards you’re dealt. You do control how you play them.

And I can guarantee you that no matter how bad your cards are, there are people with similar cards who still managed to win big.

Winners don’t complain about the hand they’re dealt. They just take responsibility and play it to the best of their ability.

14. Control your mind to control your life

You have power over your mind - not outside events.

Realize this, and you will find strength.

– Marcus Aurelius

You don’t control:

• Events

• The past

• Genetics

• Other people

• The economy

• External opinions

You do control:

• Your focus

• Your effort

• Your habits

• Your attitude

• Your thoughts

• Your reactions

• Your decisions

• Your discipline

• Your interpretations

Focus on what you can control. Accept what you can’t control.

15. Don’t chase money, chase freedom

Making money is nice. Having full control over your time is nicer.

Money is just a tool. Freedom is the most valuable thing it can give you.

• Freedom to control your time

• Freedom to control your work

• Freedom to control your lifestyle

• Freedom to control your location

• Freedom to control your schedule

You can still buy nice stuff. But prioritize freedom first.

The goal of money isn’t to buy stuff. It’s to not have people buy your time.

16. Limit your desires

Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.

– Naval

Desire implies that you lack something.

The more desires you have, the more unhappy you’ll be with your life.

So to be happier, limit your desires to the 1-3 most important things you want.

Drop the rest. It’s not worth being unhappier for.

Having a few strong desires can motivate you to get them. But having too many random desires can make you unhappy.

17. Play Compounding Games

All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.

– Naval

Most people play short-term games. They chase shiny objects and measure progress in days instead of decades.

But real growth takes times. Compounding only works over time.

At the start, it’s slow. But it gets increasingly better.

The key is to pick a game that’s worth playing long-term. This is how you reap the benefits of compounding. Choose an industry you love, a craft you want to master, and people you want to grow with.

Pick an industry where you can play long-term games with long-term people.

– Naval

Every time you change your direction, you interrupt the compounding. So it’s best not to interrupt the compounding process. Get clear on what game you want to play and who you want to play it with. Then play it and let compounding do its job.

18. Build Leverage

“Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.

– Archimedes

You need leverage to disconnect your time from your income.

Leverage is about getting a bigger outcome from the same input.

Take a look at this image. You get a much higher return on your effort when you push at the left arrow. This is because you have more leverage at this point.

Leverage helps you to get more without doing more. It’s a force multiplier.

It’s how some people can accomplish 10x, 100x, or 1,000,000x what others can.

There are 4 types of leverage:

• People (people that work for you)

• Money (money that works for you)

• Code (software that works for you)

• Content (media that works for you)

Code and content are best because you don’t need others for it.

Build leverage to earn with your mind instead of your time.

19. Work like a lion

Work like a lion. Sprint, rest, and reassess. Then attack again. You’re not a cow, grazing all day. You’re a lion, waiting, preparing, then going in for the kill.

– Naval

Everybody talks about Monk Mode, but I use something called Lion Mode.

Lion Mode is about working like a lion.

It has 3 phases:

Plan. Hunt. Rest.

• In the planning phase, you select your target (goal)

• In the hunting phase, you attack with full intensity (work)

• In the resting phase, you recharge completely (active recovery)

The idea is that you either work or rest with 100% intensity. This is how you get the most out of your body.

Most people are always 30% on. High performs switch between 0% and 100%.

Work like a lion, not a cow.

20. Find Work That Feels Like Play

The goal is not to retire. It’s to find work that feels like play to you but looks like work to others.

– Naval

The secret to consistency is alignment.

When your work feels like play, you can keep going forever.

You want to find work that looks like work to others but feels like play to you.

It will look effortful to others. But it will feel effortless to you.

This is the type of work you can do forever.

Most people chase motivation. But the best creators chase alignment.

When you’re aligned, you do what you actually want to do.

When you do what you actually want to do, the work energizes you.

The barrier between work and play fades.

Work stops being work and starts feeling like play.

This is the ultimate unfair advantage.

21. Attention Design

The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.

‍– Bruce Lee

Attention Design is about designing your work environment for maximum focus.

It comes down to two rules:

• Remove everything that distracts you

• Add everything that helps you focus

I don’t know what your room looks like, but here’s what works for me:

• Plan tomorrow today

• Turn off all notifications

• Isolate during the morning

• Hide bookmarks and minimize tabs

• Use a standing desk to switch posture

• Exercise daily, sleep 8 hours, eat clean

• Don’t multitask or switch between tasks

• Focus on one big action step per work block

• No phone, email, or social media before noon

• Stay fasted and caffeinated during deep work

• Use earplugs or noise-cancelling headphones

• Keep your desk empty (just your PC and water/coffee)

• Work in 90 minute blocks (then recover for 10 minutes)

• Batch-produce shallow tasks into one time block later in the day

• Do your most important work when your energy peaks (usually morning)

• Reduce decision fatigue by eating mostly the same meals, wearing simple clothes, and automate small choices

The more of these you apply, the easier it becomes to focus.

22. Reverse-Engineer Your Goals

Begin with the end in mind.

– Stephen Covey

When an engineer wants to recreate something, he takes it apart to understand how it works. This is called reverse-engineering, and it’s extremely effective for goal-setting.

Here’s how you can use it:

• Aim at the highest possible good you can imagine

• Turn this into a practical long-term goal (10 years)

• Break it down into smaller goals (3y, 1y, 1q, 1m, 1w, 1d)

• Define clear daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly actions

• Execute three key actions every single day

This aligns your daily actions with your long-term goal.

And because that goal represents the highest good you can imagine, it aligns your actions with what you value most.

This gives you the strongest motivation and dopamine while you pursue it.

23. Aim at the highest possible good

Jordan Peterson calls this aiming at a star. It’s a metaphor from the movie Pinocchio. In the movie, the character Geppetto wishes upon a star for his puppet to become real. For him, this was the highest possible aim he could imagine.

You aim at what you can see, and as you move toward it, new things come into view that you couldn’t see before. Then you aim higher.
‍
You might start with a foolish aim. But it’s by aiming that you learn to aim better. As you develop, the thing you’re aiming at transforms, because you transform.
‍
You aim at something and as you move toward it, you get wiser. And as you get wiser, you see a better goal in the distance. So you reorient yourself toward that. And that’s how you progress.

‍– Jordan Peterson

This aim is different for everyone, and it takes time to find it.

Don’t worry about picking the wrong star.

Because you will.

And that’s actually a good thing.

Because you learn what’s right for you by experiencing what’s not right for you.

It’s impossible to know what you want without trial and error. So don’t worry about getting this right in your first try. Aim badly, give it your all, learn a lot, and then re-aim.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll miss often — and that’s fine.

You can only connect the dots looking backward, you need to collect them first by moving forward. So pursue a goal to collect the dots. Then reflect to connect them.

24. You don’t need talent, you need obsession

MrBeast was a horrible creator.

• His storytelling was bad

• His video quality was bad

• His audio quality was bad

• His hooks and intros were bad

• His editing and pacing were bad

• His sound design and music were bad

Almost everything he did was bad.

But he still became one of the best YouTubers in the world.

All because he had one thing that others didn’t have:

An enormous desire to become the best YouTuber.

• It’s why buried himself alive

• It’s why he watched paint dry

• It’s why he counted to 100,000

He didn’t have talent. And at the start, he also didn’t have skills or money.

He just had a burning desire to make it work.

Talent may give you a headstart.

But obsession gives you unlimited fuel.

That’s why obsessed people will always beat talented people.

A skilled person knows how to do something.

An obsessed person can figure out how to do anything.

25. Be boring

Most people chase excitement.

• New goals

• New hobbies

• New distractions

• New relationships

• New opportunities

But success doesn’t come from constantly doing new stuff.

It comes from doing the same simple things over and over again.

Eat. Lift. Build. Write. Help. Sleep. Repeat.

That’s how you create freedom.

Success might look exciting. But behind it are years of ‘boring’ days. Because the boring life actually works. And once you start you live it, you’ll realize it’s actually fun.

The boring life is the good life. Start being boring.

26. Become a full-stack human

Don’t be the rich person who’s obese and unhappy.

Don’t be the bodybuilder who’s broke and lonely.

Don’t be the writer who’s skinny and broke.

Become competent in all important areas.

• Get physically fit

• Get mentally calm

• Get financially free

• Get socially confident

• Get spiritually grounded

Become a full-stack human.

26 lessons to get ahead of 99% in 2026:

• Be boring

• Build leverage

• Work like a lion

• Discipline is a choice

• Simplicity is profundity

• You aren’t your thoughts

• Play compounding games

• Become a full-stack human

• Find work that feels like play

• Nobody has it all figured out

• Reverse-engineer your goals

• You don’t need a lot to be happy

• Don’t try to change other people

• Aim at the highest possible good

• Tiny changes will change your life

• Ignore hustle culture, rest properly

• Design your environment for focus

• Don’t chase money, chase freedom

• Control your mind to control your life

• Take 100% responsibility for your life

• People pay money to solve problems

• Social media is a double-edged sword

• The best productivity hack is saying no

• You don’t need talent, you need obsession

• Consistency is the ultimate unfair advantage

• Letting go isn’t something you do, it’s something you don’t do

That’s it for this newsletter. Let me know your thoughts below.

Talk to you in the next one!

Stijn

PS: If you liked this, please like it, restack it, and share it so more people can learn from it. This helps me to grow so I can keep my newsletters free and spend more time to add more free value to future newsletters. Thanks a lot for your support!

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1. X Growth System: How I grew from 0 to 55K 𝕏 followers, +100M organic views in a year, and built a 6-fig creator business without sales calls, ads, and cold outreach.

2. Aesthetic Writing: Learn the best writing strategies I used to gain 70M organic impressions and 18,100 followers in only 90 days.

3. All Resources: Click here to see all my workshops, courses, and other resources (discounts ending soon).

4. Work with me 1-1. DM me ‘AC’ (or reply via email) if you want my help to build a 6-fig Asset Creator business with +50K followers and +100M organic views per year. The Asset Creator model only requires 2-4 hours per day and we focus only on content, emails, and digital assets (no cold outreach, sales calls, or sleazy tactics).

5. Free eBooks. Get my Writing and Twitter Simplified eBooks for free by subscribing to my free newsletter (you also get a bonus worksheet that will help you to build a unique personal brand on social media). If you’re already a subscriber and haven’t received these yet, reply ‘ebooks’ to this email and I’ll send them to you:

He wrote a famous Twitter thread called “How to Get Rich” and thousands of creators used those ideas to build digital freedom.

I’m one of them.

So in this newsletter, I’ll share Naval’s 10 best ideas on getting rich (without luck).

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1. Play Compounding Games

All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.

– Naval

Most people play short-term games. They chase shiny objects and measure progress in days instead of decades. But real growth takes times. Compounding only works over time. At the start, it’s slow. But it gets increasingly better.

The key is to pick a game worth playing long-term. This is how you reap the benefits of compounding. Choose an industry you love, a craft you want to master, and people you want to grow with.

Pick an industry where you can play long-term games with long-term people.

– Naval

Every time you change your direction, you interrupt the compounding. So it’s best to pick a game that you want to keep playing. You can still change if you have to, but it’s best not to interrupt the compounding process. So get clear on what game you want to play and who you want to play it with. Then play and let compounding do its job.

2. Specific Knowledge

Specific knowledge is knowledge that you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you. It’s often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated.

– Naval

You need specific knowledge to get rich. Specific knowledge is something that society wants but doesn’t know how to get. That’s why you can’t be trained for it yet. If you could easily be trained for it, it wouldn’t be specific knowledge. You get rich by giving specific knowledge to society on scale.

Specific knowledge is found by pursuing:

• Your talents

• You passions

• Your curiosity

You find it by doing what you naturally love to do.

Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.

– Naval

Observe what you spend your time on and what you’re naturally good at. It will feel effortless to you but it will look effortful to others.

To develop specific knowledge:

• Analyze your skills

• Combine your skills

• Follow your curiosity

• Observe your actions

• Double down on your strengths

Once you have specific knowledge you can sell it on scale.

Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.

– Naval

Double down on your unique strengths. This gives you the best chance to get specific knowledge.

3. Build Leverage

To sell on scale, you need leverage. Leverage is about getting a bigger outcome from the same input. It’s a force multiplier.

Leverage helps you to get more without doing more. It’s how some people can accomplish 10x, 100x, or 1,000,000x what others can.

“Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.

– Archimedes

There are 4 types of leverage:

• People (people that work for you)

• Money (money that works for you)

• Content (media that works for you)

• Code (software that works for you)

Code and content are best because they’re permissionless.

You don’t need others for it.

So how do you build leverage? Create things that scale.

If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.

– Naval

I can’t code. So let me explain how you can build leverage with content:

• Pick a niche

• Solve problems

• Post daily content

• Give a lot of free value

• Create a valuable lead magnet

• Turn your knowledge into products

• Build up your email list to sell on scale

There’s more to it, but this is basically the 80/20 of it.

If you’re unsure where to start, find your Ikigai.

It’s your “reason for being”. It’s why you exist (your purpose).

I created a new version specifically for creators: The Brand Ikigai

It’s your “reason for brand”. It’s why your brand exists (its purpose).

Here’s how to find both:

It’s also important to get better at writing because writing is the foundation of all content.

• Books

• Notes

• Videos

• Tweets

• Articles

• Images

• Threads

• Podcasts

• Carousels

• Newsletters

The better you can write, the more leverage you’ll build. And the more leverage you build, the bigger your outcomes will be. If you want to master digital writing, check out Aesthetic Writing.

But writing and leverage aren’t enough, you also need good judgment.

4. Judgment

Once you have leverage, judgment becomes the most important. So what is judgment actually? Naval calls it wisdom applied to external problems. It’s about knowing the long-term consequences of your actions and acting accordingly.

Judgment is making decisions. Leverage magnifies the consequences of those decisions. In an age of infinite leverage, judgment becomes the most important skill.

– Naval

Most people worry about how fast they go. But your direction is much more important.

Judgment is about getting the direction right. It’s deciding where to push.

Leverage is about how hard you can push.

Here are some ways to improve your judgment:

• Keep your life simple

• Collect mental models

• Control your interpretations of events

• Focus on the long-term consequences

• Prioritize understanding, not memorization

• Make hard decisions instead of easy decisions

• Focus on the first-principle, always question everything

• Control your emotions, a calm mind makes better decisions

This should improve your judgment. Which will drastically improve your outcomes.

5. Take Accountability

Accountability is about taking risks under your own name. It gives you skin in the game. And it’s how you build up your reputation. This is what you do when you build a personal brand on social media.

Embrace accountability, and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.

– Naval

The biggest personal brands constantly take risks under their own name. Elon, Trump, Kanye, Oprah, etc. Accountability is a double-edged sword. If you fail under your own name, you get the critique. But if you win under your own name, you get the credits.

That’s why most people are afraid of this. But this is also why it’s a great opportunity. It’s ok if you fail as long as you try your best and act with high integrity. It’s not about being perfect. It’s about trying your best and acting with high integrity. When you do this, people will forgive your failures, and you’ll eventually get rewarded when you win.

6. Find Work That Feels Like Play

The goal is not to retire. It’s to find work that feels like play to you but looks like work to others.

– Naval

The secret to consistency is alignment. When your work feels like play, you can keep going forever. As a kid, I could play pokémon on my gameboy for hours. It felt like play to me. It was effortless. The goal is to find work that feels like this as well.

You want to find work that looks like work to others but feels like play to you. It will look effortful to others. But it will feel effortless to you. This is the type of work you can do forever.

Think of the activity that you like to do the most. Maybe it’s a sport. Maybe it’s gaming. Maybe it’s writing. Whatever it is, it’s effortless to you. You don’t need a vacation from it. You could do it forever. This is what works should also feel like. And when it does, it stops being work and it starts being play.

Most people chase motivation. But the best creators chase alignment. When you’re aligned, you do what you actually want to do. When you do what you actually want to do, the work energizes you. The barrier between work and play fades. Works stops being work and starts feeling like play. This is the ultimate unfair advantage.

Do what energizes you. Build around your natural curiosities.

That’s how you stay consistent long enough to win.

7. Authentic Creation

Escape competition through authenticity.

– Naval

Competition is an illusion. We all have our own unique strengths and weaknesses. So it’s impossible to make a fair comparison. The only fair comparison is with yourself.

So compete with yourself. Outperform your past self. Optimize your current self. And compete with your potential self. Funny enough, this is how you maximize your chances of beating others as well. It’s useless to try to beat them. But it’s useful to try to beat your past self. And when you do, you’ll start to beat most others as well.

Authenticity is the only way to win. Especially with AI. Nobody is like you. So nobody can compete with you at being you. They will only become a watered-down version of you. Just like when you try to become more like someone else.

You don’t need to become the best in the world at everything. You need to become the become version of your authentic self. When you’re doing what you love to do in a way that’s true to who you are, you stop competing and start creating.

If you do what you authentically want to do, you also won’t be jealous of others. Because you’re already doing what you are meant to do. So you don’t want to change a thing. You won’t get distracted by shiny objects. You’ll do what actually matters.

Stop competing with others. Start optimizing yourself.

Nobody can compete with you at being you.

8. Develop The Right Skillset

Outcomes come from inputs. Inputs are your daily actions. If you do the right actions well for long enough, you’ll get what you want. So you need clarity, skill, and consistency.

If getting rich is the outcome you want, you need the right inputs for that. Getting a business degree won’t help you with that. You need the right skillset instead.

There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines and business classes. Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.

The ultimate foundations are reading, writing, arithmetic, and persuasion (talking).
Then add computer programming — it’s the closest thing we have to magic.

– Naval

According to Naval, five skills matter most:

• Writing

• Reading

• Arithmetic

• Persuasion (talking)

• Computer programming

These are the high leverage skills. They compound across every field, scale with technology, and never go out of style. If you master these skills, you will get rich.

9. Pick The Right Business Partners

Relationships can either ruin or change your life. Both in real life and business.

That’s why it’s important that you select the right people.

Naval looks at three things to determine if someone is the right fit:

Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity.

– Naval

You need all three for a successful business relationship.

If any of these things is lacking, it won’t work.

• Low energy → laziness

• Low integrity → betrayal

• Low intelligence → incompetence

Find people with high energy, integrity, and intelligence.

They make the best business (and life) partners.

10. Stay Off The Hedonic Treadmill

People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom.

– Naval

Most people never enjoy freedom because they upgrade their lifestyle as their income increases. This is something I never understood.

To me, freedom is the most valuable thing that money can buy. It doesn’t matter how expensive your watch is if you don’t control your time. And it doesn’t matter how expensive your car is if you have to drive it to a job you hate.

The goal of money isn’t to buy stuff. It’s to not have people buy your time.

That’s why it’s important to live below your means. You can still get nice stuff. But prioritize freedom first. When you’re free, you can get the nice stuff while still keeping full control over your time.

It’s not about living like a monk (unless you want to) but it’s about priorititizing what matters. Because you don’t want money. Money is just a tool. You want the most valuable thing that money can give you. Which is freedom.

• Freedom to control your time

• Freedom to control your work

• Freedom to control your lifestyle

• Freedom to control your location

• Freedom to control your schedule

Ensure that your life feels good internally first.

Then worry about how it looks externally.

Focus on what matters.

In Short:

Naval summarizes how to get rich with ‘productize yourself’.

Productize has specific knowledge and leverage. Yourself has uniqueness and accountability. Yourself also has specific knowledge. So you can combine all of these pieces into these two words.

– Naval

It contains the 4 most important parts to get rich: specific knowledge, leverage,, accountability, and judgment.

People can’t compete with you if:

• You build leverage on social media

• You learn how to write great content

• You productize your specific knowledge

In Naval’s words:

Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.

– Naval

In short, here’s how to get rich (without getting lucky):

• Build leverage

• Improve your judgment

• Develop the right skillset

• Attain specific knowledge

• Play compounding games

• Find work that feels like play

• Stay off the hedonic treadmill

• Pick the right business partners

• Take risks under your own name

• Escape competition by being authentic

That’s it for this newsletter. Let me know your thoughts below.

Talk to you in the next one!

Stijn

PS: If you liked this, please like it, restack it, and share it so more people can learn from it. This helps me to grow so I can keep my newsletters free and spend more time to add more free value to future newsletters. Thanks a lot for your support!

Subscribe now

Share

How I Can Help You

1. X Growth System: How I grew from 0 to 55K 𝕏 followers, +100M organic views in a year, and built a 6-fig creator business without sales calls, ads, and cold outreach.

2. Aesthetic Writing: Learn the best writing strategies I used to gain 70M organic impressions and 18,100 followers in only 90 days.

3. All Resources: Click here to see all my workshops, courses, and other resources (discounts ending soon).

4. Work with me 1-1. DM me ‘AC’ (or reply via email) if you want my help to build a 6-fig Asset Creator business with +50K followers and +100M organic views per year. The Asset Creator model only requires 2-4 hours per day and we focus only on content, emails, and digital assets (no cold outreach, sales calls, or sleazy tactics).

5. Free eBooks. Get my Writing and Twitter Simplified eBooks for free by subscribing to my free newsletter (you also get a bonus worksheet that will help you to build a unique personal brand on social media). If you’re already a subscriber and haven’t received these yet, reply ‘ebooks’ to this email and I’ll send them to you:

It’s been 4 years since I made my first piece of content.

It was a YouTube video and it got 15 views (half of which were mine).

Since then, I created:

• 600+ YT videos

• 500+ threads and long-forms

• 57,000+ tweets and comments

• 2,000+ posts for Threads, Instagram & LinkedIn

Last year, I finally hit 6-figures & became a full-time creator, but I’m by no means the fastest or richest and I made a ton of mistakes.

So in this newsletter, I want to give you the best lessons I learned so that you can become a full-time creator or writer much faster than me.

Here are the 24 best lessons I learned after 4 years of creating content:

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1. Focus on inputs, not outcomes

You control your actions. You don’t control the results.

If you focus on what you can control, you’ll get a good outcome.

If you focus on what you can’t control, you’ll only end up stressed.

So focus on good inputs to get good outcomes.​

2. Reverse engineer your ideal future

Get clear on your end goal — then work backwards like a chess grandmaster.

This ensures that every move leads to the outcome you want.

Invest in mentors and courses to speed up the journey.

Set long-term goals for direction. Set short-term goals for action.

3. Don’t reinvent the wheel

Find people who’ve already done what you want to do.

Study the actions, habits, and skills that got them there.

Inputs drive outcomes — so emulate their inputs.

Don’t blindly copy, but steal like an artist.

Combine your best ideas with the best ideas of others.

Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.

- Bruce Lee

​4. Don’t compare yourself to others

Comparison is the thief of joy.

You’re comparing your journey with someone else’s highlight.

That’s unfair.

The only fair comparison is you vs. you.

Outcompete your past self.

Compete with your potential self.​

5. Don’t obsess over your niche

Don’t let people tell you that you need to niche down at the start.

Your niche evolves over time.

Start with your Ikigai:

• What you love to do

• What you are good at

• What the world needs

• What you can be paid for

Build the business you enjoy building and your niche will become clear over time.

6. Leave more comments (X, IG, LI)

On most platforms, content isn’t enough to grow.

You need to escape beginner hell first.

And you do this by forcing eyes on your content with comments.

Comments → profile clicks → optimized profile → followers.

If your profile is good, you’ll convert +10% of people into followers.

7. Start a newsletter from the start

Your social media audience is rented.

Your email list is completely yours.

So promote your email list every day.

Create a high-quality lead magnet to grow your email list. Then make your newsletter extremely valuable so it’s a win-win.

8. Create systems for recurring activities

It takes mental energy to figure out what to do.

That’s why you create a training plan if you go the gym consistently.

Work is the same. If you do something often (like creating content), create a system.

Systems reduce decision fatigue and put you straight into execution mode, which saves valuable mental energy.

​If you want the system that I used to gain 18K followers and 70M views in 90 days on Twitter, check out the X Growth System or sign up for my free newsletter to get my Twitter Simplified eBook (and an eBook about writing).

Subscribe now

9. Learn to grab and keep attention

Attention is the currency of the creator economy.

People pay attention with time and energy.

So you need to give them a high return on attention (ROA).

You grab attention with high-quality hooks and intros. You keep attention with value, Aesthetic Writing, and storytelling.

The best content gives people the highest ROA.

10. Don’t waste time on low leverage activities

Most tasks don’t move the needle. 20% of your actions drive 80% of your results.

But most people focus a lot of time on low leverage activities.

Low-leverage work feels productive, but it’s procrastination in disguise.

Get clear on what moves the needle and actually do it.

11. Don’t multi task, do deep work blocks

Deep work is where you focus on 1 task for 90+ minutes.

Undistracted focus helps you to get into a flow state. You get into flow when the difficulty level matches your skill level.

This is the state in which hard work feels effortless.

12. Optimize your health

In a one-person business, you are the business. So if you optimize yourself, you optimize your business.

That’s why it’s crucial to focus on getting the basics right.

• Eat clean

• Mediate daily

• Exercise daily

• Get enough sleep

• Get the right supplements

Garbage in, garbage out.

13. Don’t just focus on making money

External motivation isn’t sustainable.

If you don’t get what you want, you’re frustrated. If you get what you want, you’ll be afraid to lose it.

When I hit my $10k/mo goal, I didn’t feel joy — just fear of losing it.

Things changed when I focused on work I truly enjoyed.

Don’t let money, followers, or fame distract you from why you do it. Focus on a meaningful mission, not on external metrics.

14. Don’t become a starving artist

Purpose matters most, but income is important too.

If you don’t have a plan to earn, you’ll become a starving artist. So pursue what you love, but also learn to write, market, sell, and build products.

That’s how you turn your passion into a full-time income.

If you want to learn how you can turn your knowledge into digital products that sell on autopilot, check out Productize Knowledge.

If you want to learn how to build a massive audience and how to monetize it to get time freedom, check out the X Business System.

15. Keep your content simple

Make your content simple, concise, and to-the-point.

People are busy and have bad attention spans. So you need to keep that in mind.

You don’t want complexity. You want simplicity with depth.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
‍
- Leonardo Da Vinci

16. Start on 1 platform, then expand

If you start on multiple platforms, your growth will suffer.

So master 1 platform first, then post your winners on all platforms.

I recommend starting with Twitter. It’s faster to write tweets than to create videos.

So use Twitter to test your ideas, then repurpose your best posts to all other platforms.

If you like this newsletter so far, please like it, share/restack it, and subscribe for more

17. Ignore haters, hypocrites, trollers & negative people

You have a limited amount of mental energy.

Don’t waste it on people who are trying to bring you down.

They’re trying to bring you down to their level because they can’t get to yours.

Whoever is trying to bring you down is already below you.

So just ignore them and let your results do the talking.

18. Work in high-energy periods

Map your energy levels for a day.

This shows you when you’re at your best.

The best way to get a lot done is to do the most important work when you’re at your best.

So get clear on the highest leverage tasks and do them at the time of the day when you’re at your best.

19. You don’t need to be perfect

You don’t need to be perfect, you need to be consistent.

If you consistently do the right stuff, you will get what you want.

So don’t think in months, think in years.

Play the long game. It’s the only game worth playing.

20. Don’t wait for clarity

You can only collect the dots by taking action.

You can only connect the dots by reflecting.

If the path is already there, it’s not yours.

It’s someone else’s.

Act to collect the dots, reflect to connect the dots.

21. Productize your knowledge

Client work is fine - if you enjoy it.

But if you want complete time freedom, you need to stop trading time for money.

Digital products let you do that.

They allow you to turn your knowledge into passive income.

This helps you to earn with your mind instead of your time.

Again, to learn how you can turn your knowledge into digital products that sell on autopilot, check out Productize Knowledge.

22. Learn when to pivot, not when to quit

It’s like climbing a mountain.

If your current path doesn’t lead to the top, don’t give up. Change your path.

The goal stays the same, only the route changes. Pivoting isn’t failure — it’s being strategic.

23. Don’t always listen to big creators

A lot of big creators grew when it was much easier to grow.

And a lot of rich people grew fast by leveraging their finances.

This is fair game, but this means that they usually can’t give you the strategies that will work best for you.

So listen to people who are 5 steps ahead of you instead of 50.

24. Use the EDO System

I created the EDO system to manage my time.

• Eliminate what isn’t high-leverage

• Delegate what isn’t enjoyable

• Optimize the rest

It’s simple but effective.

In short:

• Don’t wait for clarity

• Optimize your health

• Use the EDO System

• Leave more comments

• Don’t reinvent the wheel

• Keep your content simple

• Productize your knowledge

• Work in high-energy periods

• You don’t need to be perfect

• Don’t obsess over your niche

• Don’t become a starving artist

• Focus on inputs, not outcomes

• Start a newsletter from the start

• Start on 1 platform, then expand

• Learn to grab and keep attention

• Don’t always listen to big creator

• Don’t compare yourself to others

• Don’t just focus on making money

• Reverse engineer your ideal future

• Learn when to pivot, not when to quit

• Don’t multi task, do deep work blocks

• Create systems for recurring activities

• Don’t waste time on low leverage activities

I hope this article was helpful my friend.

If you liked this newsletter, please like it, share/restack it, and subscribe for more.

Talk soon my friend,

Stijn

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How I Can Help You

1. X Growth System: How I grew from 0 to 55K 𝕏 followers, +100M organic views in a year, and built a 6-fig creator business without sales calls, ads, and cold outreach.

2. Aesthetic Writing: Learn the best writing strategies I used to gain 70M organic impressions and 18,100 followers in only 90 days.

3. All Resources: Click here to see all my workshops, courses, and other resources (discounts ending soon).

4. Work with me 1-1. DM me ‘AC’ (or reply via email) if you want my help to build a 6-fig Asset Creator business with +50K followers and +100M organic views per year. The Asset Creator model only requires 2-4 hours per day and we focus only on content, emails, and digital assets (no cold outreach, sales calls, or sleazy tactics).

5. Free eBooks. Get my Writing and Twitter Simplified eBooks for free by subscribing to my free newsletter (you also get a bonus worksheet that will help you to build a unique personal brand on social media). If you’re already a subscriber and haven’t received these yet, reply ‘ebooks’ to this email and I’ll send them to you:

So I decided to run an experiment:

Posting 240 Substack Notes in 30 days.

So 8 Notes per day.

The goal was to:

• Gain email subscribers

• Figure out what works here

• See if my high-performing tweets do well here too

For full transparency:

I’ve only been here for about 6 weeks, but I have been on social media for years.

I imported about 6500 subs (that I gained via Twitter and other social platforms).

I’ve also written thousands of tweets and hundreds of YouTube scripts.

I know how to grow an audience and how to write content and I didn’t start from zero here so I had those advantages.

That being said, I’m going to show you the results in this newsletter, and I’m also going to explain exactly what worked so you can also gain 1000+ subs per month.

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The Experiment Result

In 30 days, I gained 1367 Substack subscribers.

I also wrote 7 newsletters in those 30 days:

My open rates haven’t been great yet but I’ve been told this is normal in the first month(s) when writing on Substack (if it doesn’t improve I’ll have to clean my list).

But as you can see, I barely gained subscribers from these newsletters.

So almost all of the growth came from the notes.

I analyzed my 240 notes to see what works best and there are 4 patterns that I spotted so far.

Here are the 4 best-performing notes/patterns I found:

1. Listicles

Listicles do well on every platform.

• It stands out

• It’s easy to read

• It grabs attention

Simply start with a short hook that grabs attention.

Then give a list (3 or 5 points usually work best).

And then end with a short lesson.

Example:

You may also notice that I use the ‘stairway effect’ here (start with the shortest sentence and make every sentence a little bit longer).

This is one of the many Aesthetic Writing strategies you can use to optimize your writing formatting to maximize views, engagement and growth.

2. Posts about Substack

On Instagram, posts about Instagram do well.

On YouTube, posts about YouTube do well.

On LinkedIn, posts about LinkedIn do well.

On Twitter, posts about Twitter do well.

Substack is no different.

People on Substack like reading and learning about Substack.

If you know interesting facts of insights, share them.

Example:

Side note: someone copied this note word for word and got 4X the views.

This kinda sucks but it does prove that the post itself works well regardless of the amount of followers you have (the guy who copied it had 500 followers).

Taking inspiration from others is great. But copying word for word is not.

Don’t copy like a fool. Steal like an artist. Then create like an alchemist.

3. Building in public

People follow people.

They care about your ideas and want to follow your journey.

So that’s why building in public works well.

You give them a look behind the scenes.

This boosts your credibility and it shows them what’s possible.

It might feel weird to do at the start, but it can be both educating and inspiring for your readers so I can recommend it.

Example:

4. Connecting with others

The vibe on Substack is very welcoming.

I’m used to other platforms:

• YouTube: you’re on your own and some comments are very toxic

• LinkedIn: people try to act professional and it’s very fake and cringe imo

• Instagram: people try to show off their lifestyle and physique, not their real life

• Twitter: I like it a lot because there are great writers but some people can be toxic

Most people on Substack seem to be more sincere in my experience.

Except the people who copy notes & constantly post “If you’re new to Substack, I want to read some of your work and support you” to boost their engagement.

Most people here value depth over making as much money as possible.

And while I think there’s a healthy middle ground, I like that sentiment.

Example:

Overall, the experiment was a success.

Most notes didn’t do that well, but that was to be expected.

Every ‘failed’ post taught me something.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

– Thomas Edison

I had a few outliers so I will double down on those and I’ll try new formats to figure out what works best.

I’m planning on experimenting with 12 notes per day.

There are usually diminishing returns when you go higher, but I want to test it.

I have thousands of validated content ideas from my other platforms so I’m able to keep the quality consistent without spending too much time on it.

Talk to you in the next newsletter!

The best,

Stijn Noorman

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How I Can Help You

1. X Growth System: How I grew from 0 to 55K 𝕏 followers, +100M organic views in a year, and built a 6-fig creator business without sales calls, ads, and cold outreach.

2. Aesthetic Writing: Learn the best writing strategies I used to gain 70M organic impressions and 18,100 followers in only 90 days.

3. All Resources: Click here to see all my workshops, courses, and other resources (discounts ending soon).

4. Work with me 1-1. DM me ‘AC’ (or reply via email) if you want my help to build a 6-fig Asset Creator business with +50K followers and +100M organic views per year. The Asset Creator model only requires 2-4 hours per day and we focus only on content, emails, and digital assets (no cold outreach, sales calls, or sleazy tactics).

5. Free eBooks. Get my Writing and Twitter Simplified eBooks for free by subscribing to my free newsletter (you also get a bonus worksheet that will help you to build a unique personal brand on social media). If you’re already a subscriber and haven’t received these yet, reply ‘ebooks’ to this email and I’ll send them to you:

99% of writers and creators never make enough money to live off.

Not because their writing is bad, but because they’re missing two things:

1) An audience.
2) A way to monetize it.

Most writers ignore one or both of these, and that’s why they stay stuck.

I used to be the same, but once I built an audience and learned how to monetize it, I was able to build a 6-figure writing business.

The good news is that there’s nothing special about me.

I just used monetization strategies that don’t require a large audience.

In this newsletter, I’ll break down the 8 models that actually work, and I’ll show you how you can start earning no matter how big your current audience is.

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Monetization Strategies

There are dozens of ways to make money as a writer.

But in this newsletter, I want to focus on the ones that are realistic for most people.

So before we get to those 8 things, let me give you the ones that didn’t make the list:

• Books

• Retreats

• Ad revenue

• Sponsorships

• Brand collabs

• Speaking gigs

• Tips / donations

• Affiliate marketing

• Live events / meetups

• SaaS (software as a service)

All of these can work but they usually require a large audience and take much longer to pay off. So I don’t recommend starting with them.

If one of these sounds like your dream business model, don’t let this discourage you. You can still do it, just be mindful that it might take longer because you usually need a large audience or another form of leverage to make it work.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the 8 ways you can make money as a writer.

Consulting

Consulting is the most direct way to monetize expertise.

Someone has a specific problem, and you help them solve it with your knowledge.

They pay you for your time, but it’s not about time.

For them, it’s about:

• Certainty → “Is this the right move?”

• Clarity → “What should I actually do?”

• Speed → “How do I avoid wasting months on the wrong things?”

• Personalization → advice tailored exactly to their context

They pay you to help them to solve their problems faster.

Consulting is usually 1-1 but it can also be in a small group.

If you have some valuable knowledge, you can start selling 1h consulting for $50-$100. As you grow and get more skilled, you can keep increasing your prices.

This may seem expensive at first, but it’s really not. People don’t pay for one hour of your time, they pay for your help to solve their problem(s). And these problems are usually worth far more than what you charge for the consulting. That’s why it works.

In short:
Consulting is a direct transfer of expertise that helps someone to solve their problems.

Courses

A course is a structured path that takes someone from Point A to Point B on a specific topic.

It’s more than “a bunch of videos.”

A good course has:

• A clear starting point (who it’s for)

• A clear end result (what they’ll be able to do after)

• A step-by-step path in between (lessons that teach them what to do)

A common argument against courses is that “all information is free.”

But this misses the point entirely.

People don’t buy courses for information.

They buy them for:

• Reassurance → “Am I doing this right?”

• Clarity → “What do I actually need to do?”

• Order → “In what sequence should I learn this?”

• Speed → “How do I avoid wasting 6–12 months on trial and error?”

You could probably find all information online, but it would take a lot of time and effort.

• Free content is scattered. A course is organized.

• Free content gives pieces. A course gives a complete path.

• Free content gives information. A course helps you make a transformation.

Free content is like collecting puzzle pieces without knowing what the puzzle looks like.

A good course gives you all the puzzle pieces, shows you the final picture, and explains the steps to recreate it.

Information might be free, but it takes time and effort to find it all and to see how all of it is connected.

Courses cost money, but they save a lot of time, effort, and avoid expensive mistakes.

Good courses can save you thousands in opportunity cost.

As a creator, a course is also a very attractive business model:

• It’s infinitely scalable

• You earn with your mind, not your time

• You build it once and you can sell it forever

You do need some leverage to make it work though.

In short:
A course is a repeatable system that helps people achieve a specific result.

Community

A community is a place where people gather around a shared goal or interest.

It’s about connection, support, and belonging.

People join communities because they give them:

• Belonging → “I’m surrounded by people like me.”

• Access → the ability to ask questions and get clarity

• Identity → being part of a group reinforces the behavior

• Momentum → seeing others progress makes you progress

• Accountability → being in a community holds you accountable

• Support → answers, encouragement, and feedback on demand

The value isn’t just the content.

It’s the environment.

For the creator, a community is:

• A brand asset that strengthens loyalty

• A long-term container for your audience

• A direct feedback loop on what people need

• Recurring revenue with high retention (if you do it well)

It’s an effective model, but it’s time-consuming. I had a successful community but had to shut it down because it drained me (I’m very introverted).

Side note: any other 100% introverts here? If you took a personality test as well, let me know your results in the comments!

Leave a comment

In short:
A community is a place where people grow faster because they’re not doing it alone.

Cohort

A cohort is a structured program that a group of people goes through together.

You can think about it as a course with consulting for a set period of time.

It combines the best parts of courses (lessons and a clear path) with the best parts of coaching (feedback and accountability).

People join cohorts because they give them:

• Structure → a schedule that forces progress

• Accountability → others moving alongside them

• Feedback → real-time corrections and guidance

• Momentum → deadlines that remove procrastination

A cohort isn’t just information.

It’s a guided experience designed to create results in a certain timeframe.

For the creator, a cohort is:

• High-impact (your involvement increases results)

• High-value (people pay more for access and feedback)

• High-testimonial (every student hits milestones together)

• High-feedback (you prove your system works and can improve it)

In short:
A cohort is a structured program where you help a group of people to achieve a certain outcome in a certain timeframe with your support.

Workshops

A workshop is a focused session where you solve one specific problem completely.

It’s short, practical, and immediately useful.

People buy workshops because they want:

• Speed → learn something in 60–120 minutes

• Clarity → examples and practical action steps

• Confidence → seeing the process live reduces doubt

• Support → the ability to ask you questions after the workshop

Workshops are a great way to give people a change to try out your stuff.

The commitment is small, the price is accessible, and people can quickly see whether they like learning from you.

They’re also good for you because if someone gets a quick win from a workshop, they’re far more likely to trust you with a bigger transformation later.

For the creator, workshops are:

• Easy to sell

• Fast to produce

• A good way to make money quickly

• Perfect for solving one problem at a time

• A great testing ground for bigger products

You can sell workshops for $50-$200 each. If you want to remove all risk, you can offer a refund if they don’t find it valuable.

I’ve sold 11 workshops to hundreds of people and only 2 people asked me for a refund, so it’s worth it as long as you make the workshops as good as possible (click here to get all my 11 workshops for a $1703 discount).

In short:
A workshop is a focused lesson that solves one problem completely. It’s simple to deliver, valuable to the audience, and easy to turn into an asset.

Digital Assets

Digital assets are small digital products that solve a specific problem quickly.

Examples are eBooks, templates, swipe files, checklists, scripts, and toolkits.

They’re not full courses. They’re more like useful shortcuts.

People buy digital assets because they give them:

• Clarity → proven examples instead of guessing

• Speed → a complete solution they can use immediately

• Simplicity → no long lessons, just the exact thing they need

• Implementation → tools they can plug directly into their work

These products work because most people don’t want to reinvent the wheel.

They want something that removes friction, saves time, and gets results quickly.

For the creator, digital assets are:

• Fast to produce

• Evergreen once built

• Easy to price and easy to buy

• Perfect entry products that turn followers into customers

• Potential bonuses you can use later to increase the value of your courses

In short:
A digital asset is a practical small tool that helps someone do one thing faster, better or easier.

DFY Services

Done-For-You (DFY) services are the most hands-on model.

Instead of teaching someone how to do something, you do the work for them.

Some people don’t want knowledge.

They want outcomes.

And they don’t want to spend time and effort to do it themselves.

People hire DFY providers because they get:

• Certainty → they know it will be done correctly

• Quality → they leverage your skill, taste, and experience

• Energy → the work gets done without them lifting a finger

• Speed → faster results than if they have to learn it themselves

The people who buy these services usually have enough money but not enough time.

That’s why they don’t mind hiring someone to do the work for them.

This model works because time, skill, and attention are scarce.

Examples for writers:

• Ghostwriting their content

• Writing their YouTube scripts

• Writing their sales pages or emails

For the creator, DFY services offer:

• High-ticket prices

• Fast income early in the business

• Direct experience with client problems

• Skills that improve fast through repetition

• Clear case studies that give you social proof

You can earn well almost immediately with this.

It’s also helps you to learn more and to practice a lot, so that’s why it’s a great business model at the start. But the trade-off is that it costs you a lot of time, so it’s not scalable if you do it by yourself.

In short:
Done-for-you services are where you do the work for someone. You learn and earn a lot, but it’s not scalable by yourself so your income is capped.

Paid Newsletter

A paid newsletter is basically a weekly newsletter that helps people to get smarter, healthier, richer, or more productive.

People pay for these newsletters because they get:

• Depth → ideas you don’t share publicly

• Access → a closer relationship with the creator

• Results → systems and strategies that work right now

• Consistency → valuable content arriving on a schedule

A great paid newsletter offers one or more of these:

• Frameworks

• Industry analysis

• Exclusive insights

• Actionable strategies

• Practical breakdowns

• Behind-the-scenes thinking

• A clear theme or transformation over time

It works because people want to stay sharp without doing all the research, filtering, or thinking themselves.

You become their “mental shortcut”, someone who sees patterns, connects dots, and gives them the signal without the noise.

For the creator, paid newsletters offer:

• A loyal audience

• Predictability and stability

• Monthly recurring revenue

• A direct line to your buyers

• A way to test ideas before turning them into products

The downsides are that you need an audience to make a decent living with it and that it’s time-intensive because you need to give them new value every week.

In short:
A paid newsletter is a weekly newsletter that helps people to get smarter, healthier, richer, or more productive. It scales well but it doesn’t pay well short-term.

Practical Gameplan

After reading the above, you probably feel drawn to 2–3 of these models.

My recommendation: pursue the ones that seem like the most fun.

All of them are extremely profitable when done well, and the best way to do them well is to actually enjoy the work because:

• Enjoyment leads to practice

• Practice leads to mastery

• Mastery leads to wealth

That being said, some models are easier to monetize early on.

If short-term income is your priority, here’s the fastest path:

• Build an audience with valuable content on X and Substack

• Start with consulting and/or a DFY service like ghostwriting

• Get great results for your clients and productize your solutions

• Use writing to grow your audience and sell the product on scale

• Sell workshops, courses, cohorts, and digital assets once you have an audience

• Start a paid newsletter or community only later if you have an audience (optional)

That’s what I would do if I had to start over.

But it’s your call.

I just wanted to give you the fastest path to becoming a full-time writer.

You can also ignore this advice and go all-in on whatever feels right to you.

If your desire is strong enough, you’ll figure it out.

For example, I’m focused on digital assets, courses and books right now, even though I could earn far more with consulting and DFY services in the short-term.

But I don’t mind because I’d rather earn “enough” doing work I enjoy than earn “the most” doing work I don’t.

A lot of business people call me crazy for this.

But I don’t care and neither should you.

If the model you’re excited about isn’t “optimal” according to gurus, ignore them.

Do what feels energetically aligned.

That’s what will get you the best results long-term.

I’m curious, which of these monetization strategies feels energetically aligned to you?

Let me know in the comments!

I hope this was helpful. If it was, please like it, restack/share it, and subscribe for more.

Until next time,

Stijn Noorman

Subscribe now

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How I Can Help You

1. X Growth System: How I grew from 0 to 55K 𝕏 followers, +100M organic views in a year, and built a 6-fig creator business without sales calls, ads, and cold outreach.

2. Aesthetic Writing: Learn the best writing strategies I used to gain 70M organic impressions and 18,100 followers in only 90 days.

3. All Resources: Click here to see all my workshops, courses, and other resources (discounts ending soon).

4. Work with me 1-1. DM me ‘AC’ (or reply via email) if you want my help to build a 6-fig Asset Creator business with +50K followers and +100M organic views per year. The Asset Creator model only requires 2-4 hours per day and we focus only on content, emails, and digital assets (no cold outreach, sales calls, or sleazy tactics).

5. Free eBooks. Get my Writing and Twitter Simplified eBooks for free by subscribing to my free newsletter (you also get a bonus worksheet that will help you to build a unique personal brand on social media). If you’re already a subscriber and haven’t received these yet, reply ‘ebooks’ to this email and I’ll send them to you:

In 2023, I quit Twitter after 3 months of almost no growth.

• I posted 3–10 times a day

• I gave away my best insights

• But nothing worked

I only gained 183 followers.

Meanwhile, people with “worse” content were growing fast.

It didn’t make sense.

I was frustrated and felt like I was wasting my time.

So I quit.

But 6 months later I logged in again.

Those same creators had hit 10K followers and $10K/month.

That’s when I realized the truth:

Twitter wasn’t the problem — I was.

My content and strategy weren’t as good as I thought.

So I put my ego aside and started again.

4 months later, I had 2,000 followers.

2 years later, I had 50,000 followers.

Now I make a full-time income as a creator and have helped 85+ clients and 1,250+ customers to grow their audience faster and make more money from it.

I’ve also gained 7,600+ email subscribers and more than 85,000+ followers across social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Substack, Instagram, and Threads).

I’m by no means the biggest or richest creator, but I’ve obsessed over content creation for the past few years so I’ve definitely learned some useful insights.

So in this newsletter, I’ll share the 8 biggest reasons why people don’t grow on social media and how to fix them, so that you can grow much faster.

I’m often using Twitter as an example (because that’s what I currently know the most about), but in my experience, the same principles apply to all other writing platforms as well. So when I say ‘Twitter’ or ‘tweets’ you can assume that it applies to other writing platforms as well. With that out of the way, let’s get started.

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Mistake #1: Not understanding how growth works

When I started out, I thought I growth was simple:

‍“Just make the best content possible. Everything else will take care of itself.”

‍— MrBeast

So that’s what I did. But I didn’t grow.

The worst part was that people with ‘bad content’ did.

It made no sense to me — until I joined a social media growth cohort.

That’s when I learned about something that I call the Follower Funnel:

To grow, people must first see you — then click you — then follow you.

But at the start, Twitter, and other social media platforms, barely push your posts. So you can’t just rely on great content. You have to force eyes on your work through:

• DMs → profile clicks → followers.

• Comments → profile clicks → followers.

• Shares → impressions → profile clicks → followers.

You need these things to get the ball rolling. As your audience gets bigger, you gain more impressions and you’ll have to depend less on these tactics. The quote from

So yes, great content matters a lot.

But early on, growth tactics also matter a lot.

You need both if you want to grow fast.

In short:

Content + Comments + DMs→ Profile Clicks → Optimized Profile → Followers.

Optimize these and you’ll finally grow (check out the X Growth System to learn how).

Mistake #2: Not using tools

When I started out, I did everything manually.

• Posting multiple times a day.

• Reposting and un-reposting all my tweets.

• Plugging my newsletter and lead magnet under my posts.

It was exhausting.

I was always thinking about what needed to be done next.

Then I found Hypefury (aff) - a scheduling tool for social media.

Twitter is the main focus, but it also lets you schedule content on LinkedIn, Threads, Instagram, and TikTok.

I know the CEO and when I asked him if he’d be willing to add Substack too, he said that they definitely consider it if the demand is there (which I’m assuming will be soon since Substack is growing rapidly).

I mainly use Hypefury for:

• Schedule tweets, threads, and long-forms

• Post to LinkedIn, Threads, and Instagram

• Plug your newsletter and lead magnets

• Auto-repost and auto un-post

• Run DM campaigns

• Much more

I’m a minimalistic user, but it saves me hours every week so I can highly recommend using it.

Mistake #3: Not making a good first impression

Imagine you’re scrolling on social media and you see two identical posts.

One comes from a faceless account. The other from a clean, verified profile.

Which one looks more serious?

Exactly.

The post is the same — but the impression isn’t.

And first impressions decide whether people click or scroll.

On social media, you make a good first impression with:

• A blue tick

• A clear profile picture

• A professional name (real or brand)

These are the first things people notice — often before they read your post.

So optimize them.

• Get verified

• Use a clean headshot

• Add your brand colors

The goal is to look like someone with 100,000 followers — even before you have them.

The blue tick isn’t just for show on Twitter. It also gives you:

• 50% fewer ads

• Edit & undo tweets

• Access to monetization

• Higher ranking in replies

• Early access to new features

• Longer videos (up to 2 hours)

• Longer posts (articles & long-forms)

If you’re serious about growth, it’s worth it.

I’m 2 years in and I make my blue tick investment back with just 2 weeks of ad revenue that I get from writing tweets.

Your CV gets you job opportunities.

Your Creator CV (profile) gets you followers and customers.

So make sure you present yourself well.

Mistake #4: Unclear profile

When I started, I thought my profile looked great:

Now I don’t.

It was messy, vague, cringe, and confusing — like most beginner profiles.

And my profile conversion rate showed it: just 5% (10%+ is good.) This means that I only got 5 new followers for every 100 people that clicked on my profile.

The biggest reason?

It wasn’t clear what I actually did.

People only follow if they understand how it benefits them.

So your profile must instantly answer three questions:

1. What do you do?

2. Who do you help?

3. How do you help them?

That’s your value proposition.

Here’s what that can look like:

This bio isn’t perfect, and I will change it again in the future, but it’s clear enough.

If you include these 5 elements, people will understand what you do and why it matters to them, so they’ll be more likely to follow you.

Clarity converts.

Mistake #5: Playing in single-player mode

When I started, I had a single-player mindset.

I just wanted to post content and grow.

But this isn’t how it works at the start.

Especially on writing platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Substack.

Unless you already have a network that can share your content, you need to play in multi-player mode first.

That means engaging:

• DMs

• Replies

• Comments

At the start, comments matter most. They’re how you force eyes on your content.

The fastest-growing small creators leave 50–100 comments per day.

Most people will complain that this is a lot of work.

But smart people will understand that it’s great because it actually gives you control over your growth (unlike other platforms).

A single good comment can reach thousands.

One of mine hit 18K impressions and 213 profile visits:

If you optimize your profile, your conversion rate will be 10% or higher.

So that means a comment like this will get you 21 new followers.

You can check your profile conversion rate on Twitter with a tool called BlackMagic:

Not all comments will do as well as the one above.

But every comment you leave is like a ‘mini-post’ that can get you new followers.

Aim for 50 thoughtful comments per day if you can.

It’s the fastest way to build momentum early on.

If you want to learn which comments actually drive growth — and leave 50+ comments in 30min per day instead of 2+ hours — check out the X Growth System.

Mistake #6: Trying to sound smart

Most creators make simple ideas sound complex.

Great creators make complex ideas sound simple.

You don’t need complexity. You need simplicity with depth.

‍“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”‍

‍— Leonardo da Vinci

Your job isn’t to sound smart.

It’s to make the reader feel smart.

And you make the reader feel smart by communicating valuable ideas in a simple way.

The simpler your writing, the easier it is to understand, and the faster you grow.

‍“If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.”

‍— Albert Einstein

So keep your writing simple and concise:

• Simple so people understand it

• Concise so people actually read it

You can use Chat GPT or Hemingway for this.

I’m not a fan of letting AI write for you. But I think it’s useful for editing your writing.

Write the draft yourself.

Then paste it into Hemingway or Chat GPT.

Hemingway helps to:

• Improve grammar

• Replace complex words

• Make your sentences more concise

• Replace weak words with strong ones

• Shows the readability level of your content