In 2017, I spent a few days traveling through Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands with Richard Dawkins.
If you don’t know Dawkins, he’s a famous writer, atheist, and evolutionary biologist.
He’s written more New York Times Bestsellers than most writers have written books.
He’ll be remembered as one of history’s most influential thinkers.
So you can imagine my surprise when one afternoon he passed around a manuscript of his next book and asked a few of us on the trip for feedback.
What on Earth could I tell Richard Dawkins about how his next book could be better?
The book was a beginner’s guide to atheism written for kids and young adults who were having doubts about the Bible and religion in general.
It was meant to be a sort of guide to help them articulate their doubts.
And after I read the first couple chapters, I realized something…
Yeah, these chapters are absolute fire, but what’s the point if the kid never brings it up to their parents? If they’re going to really build confidence in their new beliefs, they need to ask adults questions and then see how bad their answers are.
The rest of the group chimed in with suggestions, but it was mostly just one form of praise or another.
Dawkins politely nodded along…
“You should add questions at the end of each chapter that a kid can ask their parents at the dinner table,” I told Dawkins.
He lit up.
“That’s a wonderful idea. Yes, I love that,” he said. He asked his girlfriend to write down the suggestion.
It was the only one he wrote down.
“Damn,” I thought to myself. “I guess I can pretty much always add value if I just try.”
A Beginner’s Guide to the Internet’s Opportunity Machine
The internet is a money printer for smart people willing to share their ideas online.
Like any printer, it can take lots of trial and error to get it working. Occasionally it runs out of ink. Sometimes it jams. But when it works, it’s pure magic.
Indeed, if you’ve got an internet connection and a basic impulse to share your ideas, then you picked a great time to be alive. You can take advantage of two unprecedented opportunities:
Neither opportunity is “easy” (you have to put in work over a long period of time) and you’ll need to be pretty enthusiastic about your ideas, but the upside is huge.
Also, these opportunities basically did not exist for all of human history…until now. Lucky us.
1. One-person media companies
A one-person media company is exactly what it sounds like: it’s a profitable media company built around the ideas of a single person with at most one or two full-time employees, and often none at all.
This only became possible relatively recently.
Why Today Is Special
It’s now pretty much free to distribute media thanks to the internet
Smartphones, tablets, and e-readers (i.e. always-on and always-online media devices) are affordable and most people have one on them at all times
Because the internet and internet-connected devices have been widely adopted, it’s now possible to reach nearly any niche on Earth (lots of new audiences!)
Production software and hardware have become wildly affordable and accessible
The internet has created an opportunity to build a media company powered by the ideas of a single person, a payroll smaller than a convenience store, and revenues large enough that the company could trade on the NASDAQ.
It’s not easy to do. There’s a lot of competition. It can take a long time. But this is a post about possibilities, not probabilities.
Let’s have some fun and look at the upside potential of one-person media companies.
The podcast that could trade on the NASDAQ
In 2007, a relatively unknown Tim Ferriss published The 4-Hour Workweek.
The book sold well and, year after year, Ferriss continued to blog and publish books and amassed “a monthly audience in the millions or tens of millions.” (source)
In 2014, he was burned out from writing books and decided to launch a podcast as an experiment.
He used less than $1,000 worth of equipment and distributed the podcast for free across major podcasting platforms.
He was able to acquire an early enthusiastic following thanks to the audience he had spent years building, but it didn’t take long before the podcast reached far beyond his existing blog and book fans.
Today, The Tim Ferriss Show is one of the most popular podcasts on iTunes.
What you might not know is that The Tim Ferriss Show generates enough revenue from advertising that, were it to make a few structural and governance changes, it would be eligible to trade on the NASDAQ as a stand-alone company.
In the last three years alone, his podcast has generated nearly $17 million in revenue.
Here’s a detailed breakdown of The Tim Ferriss Show’s estimated revenue over the past few years:
And it still costs next to nothing to produce the show…
He still uses just $1,000 worth of production equipment and famously leverages internet-first tools and services and a personal assistant to manage the minutiae of his media empire while he’s largely free to focus on content production.
If he took the podcast public, its biggest expense would be the legal and regulatory overhead — not the operational costs of the underlying business.
While the top-line revenue of his podcast wouldn’t blow many NASDAQ companies out of the water, its margins would.
How do one-person media companies make money?
Not everybody can or wants to launch a wildly-successful podcast, and that’s fine.
There are plenty of ways to use the internet to build a profitable media company around your ideas. I’ll break down three popular strategies below.
The first two mostly require building a big audience like Ferriss, but the last one doesn’t and can get to profitability quickly.
1. Advertising and affiliate marketing
Tim Ferriss makes a mountain of money from advertising.
Companies want to pay to get in front of the big audience he’s built and they’re willing to shell out $54,000 for a single ad slot in a single episode of his podcast.
He’s also made a killing with affiliate marketing…
He’ll partner up with a company and get paid whenever his readers or listeners purchase one of their products. You’ve probably noticed these links embedded throughout his blog and email newsletter.
If you can build a huge audience using the internet, you can have an extraordinary, low-overhead advertising business.
It’s not rocket science.
And, thankfully, it’s far from the only way to get paid to share your ideas online.
Many writers or semi-public figures make an envy-inducing living combining book sales with paid speaking gigs.
This used to only be a possibility for people who were already well-known or influential, or an incredibly lucky handful of promising writers who managed to land a book deal.
But now people are using the internet to build their own influence and let the publishers flock to them.
It costs tens of thousands of dollars to get him to show up to your next event — a fee that he’s been able to increase in lockstep with his audience growth.
If there’s a formula here, it goes something like:
Use the internet to build an audience and momentum around your ideas
Roll that momentum into a book deal
Use your book to make money and build your credibility
Use your credibility to increase your speaking fees and help grow your audience even more
There’s a compounding effect of putting out great work
The one big drawback of the book/speaking and advertising models are that they typically need a big audience before they start working well.
There’s a third business model, though, that doesn’t require an army of enthusiastic fans and is filled with success stories…
3. Paid content and online courses
The internet is filled with people you’ve never heard of who are making a living, and in many cases a killing, sharing their expertise on a narrow, deep topic.
They’ll likely never make as much as a Tim Ferriss, but I mean who cares? There are some stunning success stories of no-name people striking gold within a niche.
Adam Wathan is one. He’s built a one-person media company around his programming tutorials, online classes, and e-books.
Check out his sales over the past 4 years (the 2nd tweet below):
Yep +1 have sold $4m worth of PDFs/videos to developers since I started working on my first book in 2016. Developers are an amazing audience 👍🏻
He did not hire legions of full-time employees to help him hit $4 million in sales. He just kept pushing out educational videos and PDFs that he produced and distributed himself.
And, by the way, he’s no Steven Spielberg. Many of his videos are him just recording a screencast for 30 minutes as he debugs some obscure programming issue.
Another well-paid expert is Ben Thompson, whose paid newsletter Stratechery brings in over $2,500,000 each year from tech investors and entrepreneurs who pay for a subscription. (source)
The headcount for his multi-million-dollar-per-year business?
Himself and a personal assistant.
Pure madness.
Here’s the rough playbook:
This is the age of one-person media companies.
Here’s the business model:
• Build an email list. • Grow your list with free content. • Monetize with a subscription. • Fans pay for podcasts, ask-me-anything episodes, and behind-the-scenes videos.
The internet gives you an unprecedented opportunity to turn your knowledge into information products that you can sell to nearly any company or person on Earth who needs it.
4. The swiss army knife approach
In reality, many one-person media companies use a combination of business models.
Despite shunning advertising, James Clear embeds affiliate links for any books he recommends. He also sells an online course about habits.
But therein lies the beauty of the one-person media company…
There are tons of creative ways to turn your ideas into money. You can use whichever ones make the most sense for your particular goal or situation.
2. Pour gasoline on your career
Maybe you don’t want to quit your job to start podcasting, blogging, or recording videos for 40 hours each week.
Thankfully, there’s a much more practical reason why some of us might want to start sharing our ideas online (and you can do it in your spare time):
Sharing your ideas online is one of the fastest ways to gain visibility as an expert or leader in your industry.
I’m not talking about crappy “thought leadership” content…
I’m talking about sharing good ideas that will earn you the respect of your peers and will make other people want to work with you.
Your public writing (or podcast or YouTube videos) are like a calling card for like-minded people to find you.
There are mountains of success stories here…
Holly Whitaker leveraged her blog to close a $10M round of funding for her sobriety school, Tempest.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used Twitter to help go from bartender to the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.
Fred Wilson routinely points to his blog as paving the way for his success as New York City’s leading venture capitalist.
Nick Caldwell, an executive at Looker (recently bought for $2.6 billion), recently tweeted that not writing publicly sooner in his career was a mistake:
Early in my engineering career I would have said code was all that mattered. Not writing sooner was a huge mistake. https://t.co/oVxqLLzhNz
And while it typically takes a while to start gaining visibility online, I’ve seen plenty of exceptions… including a few up close.
When my friend Dan Li started writing a newsletter about venture capital in the pacific northwest last year, it only took a few months before other VCs and entrepreneurs began obsessively reading his work.
Want to follow the latest on the Seattle startup scene? @danielxli has a must-read round up each week that's emerging as one of the best ways (along with GeekWire) to track PNW startups and trends. Check it out here: https://t.co/6q3yVV6mXR
He now has over 1,000 high-profile people in his industry waiting to hear from him each week.
You’ve already done the hard work to learn some important stuff. Why not invest some extra time to share it?
Your knowledge becomes exponentially more valuable when other people know you have it. Take it from this 19-year-old who just landed a dream internship after the CEO of Zoom saw one of his tweets:
Soon after this tweet, the CEO of Zoom @ericsyuan reached out and offered me an internship. Excited to announce that I'll be joining Zoom's security team for the summer. https://t.co/oIITe5Pii1
Oh, and there’s one other thing: by forcing yourself to commit your ideas to paper, you’ll inevitably learn much quicker than your peers who don’t.
It’s a beautiful one-two punch: you become more knowledgeable and you become known as somebody with that knowledge to the people you want to connect with most.
Forget a big audience. You can pour gasoline on your career by building a small, targeted following made up of people who can help catapult you ahead.
Less lucrative (but still valid) reasons to share your ideas online
There are two less lucrative, but still-very-valid reasons to share your ideas online.
Both are worth a quick honorable mention.
3. Sharing your ideas online makes you accountabletocreate
I launched Stew’s Letter primarily as a way to keep myself accountable to write more in general.
I needed a creative outlet and this blog has been a wonderful way of keeping myself accountable to produce something every week.
There is something about having an audience at the other end of this that keeps me more productive than other creative outlets where I’m only accountable to myself.
Publicly commit to share your ideas, start building a small audience, and you’ll produce more than you could have ever imagined.
4. Sharing your ideas online helps you stay in touch with interesting people
Another big benefit of sharing your ideas online is that you get to keep in touch with interesting people at scale.
Every weekend, I sit down, huff and puff and write blog posts about god knows what, and then send my thoughts directly to people that I like and want to stay in touch with.
Some of them inevitably hit reply.
These aren’t people I plan to work with immediately, they’re just interesting people who I would normally run the risk of falling out of touch with.
Maybe there are more efficient ways of keeping in touch with people, but I haven’t found one better than sending out an email to all of them at once every single week.
So… now what?
If you like sharing your ideas, you picked an unbelievable time to be alive.
If you’re willing to put them online, you’ll have access to enormous opportunities.
From building a profitable, low-overhead media company to getting ahead in your career by attracting the people who can help you most… the upside is just silly.
The costs are mostly just your time.
So… open up Twitter, Medium, WordPress, iMovie, TikTok, or whatever, and get to work.
In the mid-1980’s, Richard Hamming, a retired Bells Lab scientist, delivered his famous “You and Your Research” lecture, which summarized his 40-year-long career and attempted to answer the question:
“Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?”
The entire talk is packed with wisdom, but one idea in particular has always stuck with me:
I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most.
But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance.
He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.
Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder.
Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing – not much, but enough that they miss fame.
As somebody who cherishes their heads down time, this was a reminder to occasionally get out of my own head and allow for more serendipity and “interruptions.”
Footnote: Here’s a full version of “You and Your Research” that he gave years later.
A few months ago, I took a copywriting course that completely changed how I approach writing.
I’ve summarized one of the most important (and actionable) ideas below…
Basically, great copy follows the “AIDA” formula:
Attention: Start by saying something that will snap the reader into paying attention.
Interest: Next, peak the reader’s curiosity and give them a reason to read on.
Desire: Create an emotional response in the reader that will prime them to take an action.
Action: Lead the reader into taking a specific next step.
As simple as that might sound, it blew my mind. It makes so. Much. Sense.
So I started experimenting…
I decided to re-share some interesting ideas from my blog that had underperformed in the past using the AIDA formula this time.
Whereas a typical copywriter might be trying to convince somebody to buy something, on Twitter my goal is to get people to like or share my content.
So I tweeted this idea from one of my favorite blog posts to my modest following of less than 1k people using the AIDA formula:
And, sure enough, this tweet brought the juice and out-performed my average tweet impressions by 22x.
Sha-BAM:
Before taking the course, I probably would have Tweeted something kind of interesting, but forgettable like:
But instead, I made sure the tweet followed the AIDA formula:
I tried to design the following experience for the reader:
Attention. This will “forever fascinate” this guy? Must be interesting…
Interest. What did these researchers find out?
Desire. I now feel a visceral sense of curiosity…WTF DID THEY LEARN?
Action.Wow. That’s what they learned. That’s wild. I think my followers would find this interesting too. I’m going to slam that “like” or “retweet” button.
So, yeah. I could have tweeted out a matter-of-fact observation, but it’s less likely that it would have stirred readers into sharing or liking the content.
The exactsame idea can get a wildly different half-life depending on how you communicate it.
So… the next time you’re writing something that you hope will motivate somebody to take a specific action, start by grabbing their attention.
Then, give them a reason to read on.
Then, trigger an emotional response.
Finally, lead them to an action that will gratify that emotion.
(P.s. for anybody curious, this is the course I took)
(P.s.s. If anybody’s curious about that hunter-gatherer story, here’s the one-minute summary)
Here are two big ideas I’ve revisited since being under quarantine.
The World Is A Malleable Place
Many of us are way too cynical.
We think that the world is the way it is and there just ain’t that much we can do about it.
But in my more lucid moments I’ve heeded this wisdom from Silicon Valley legend Marc Andreessen:
The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.
And this from entrepreneur and former Y Combinator president Sam Altman:
A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are.
People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching anywhere near their potential.
We Accept Crappy Circumstances Out Of Pride And Fear
I picked up my old copy of the kind-of-scammy-but-totally-brilliant The 4-Hour Workweek last night and immediately got hit with this truth-seeking missile:
Don’t confuse the complex with the difficult. Most situations are simple — many are just emotionally difficult to act upon.
The chapter was mostly about how our fragile, prideful egos invent clever rationalizations to justify our previous bad decisions.
And whenever we ignore what is true and obvious, we deny ourselves a chance to actually improve our situation.
Just because you are embarrassed to admit that you’re still living the consequences of bad decisions made 5, 10, or 20 years ago shouldn’t stop you from making good decisions now.
If you let pride stop you, you will hate life 5, 10, or 20 years from now for the same reasons.
The passage ends on a zinger quote from British author Colin Wilson:
The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.
Stay juiced and see you on the other side.
When the COVID-19 lockdown ends and you’re legally permitted outdoors again, may you burn bright with the fire of somebody ready to change the world or, at least, themselves.
I am not proud of how many opinions I have about bumper stickers. It’s embarrassing, really.
But may I share one more?
*Clears throat*
“Coexist” bumper stickers are unbelievably stupid.
And, in my kind-of-obnoxious opinion, it’s obvious why…
Each religion makes truth claims about the nature of the universe. Those claims are the foundation of the religion. And the difference between those claims is what defines the boundaries of each religion.
In particular, religions make truth claims about the important stuff:
What the nature of reality is
How humans should behave
So when billions of people split into groups that have different belief systems for how we should live and what the nature of reality is… doesn’t conflict seem inevitable?
It sounds nice to say “coexist,” but isn’t that a pretty unlikely outcome in a system like that?
Why not just put a picture of a lighter next to a can of gasoline with the subtitle “Don’t Ignite”?
Thankfully, many religious folks are good people and respect their neighbors with different beliefs. They don’t take the divisive language and war-mongering in their scriptures too seriously.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not there. It means that they can exercise their best judgment and choose to ignore the dangerous parts of their chosen holy texts. I.e. they can become less religious for everybody’s safety.
I want mankind to live in peace and find a way to cooperate at scale, but if we do so it will be in spite of our obviously-in-conflict religious beliefs.
Instead of making an empty and mindless request for us to all “coexist,” maybe we should continue to put unrelenting critical pressure on our most troubling and divisive beliefs, wherever they may come from.
Footnote:
If you believe “God is energy” or “we all believe in a god, but maybe just have different names” or “I think we’re all after the same thing,” it may be too late to save you.
Consider for a moment that your use of language may be so fuzzy as for nothing to mean anything.
How to think like an entrepreneur and move ahead in the face of uncertainty.
In college, did you ever get so stoned that you became part of your couch?
Stoners call it “couch lock,” but as Scott Adams points out in Loserthink:
You don’t have to smoke marijuana to experience couch lock. We’ve all experienced times when we wanted to get up and do something useful but we couldn’t talk ourselves into it.
Indeed… we all get stuck. And typically it’s not because we’re ripped out of our minds.
Smart and productive people often get stuck for a couple of reasons:
Goal overwhelm: we become overwhelmed when we think about everything that needs to get done to accomplish some huge goal and so we do nothing instead.
Analysis paralysis: we try to imagine the best possible next move, when in reality humans are way too stupid to be able to understand reality perfectly.
Unfortunately, good luck doesn’t come to people who sit around and do nothing. It’s attracted to people who act.
So when we find ourselves failing to take action on something important to us, we can borrow some inspiration from how entrepreneurs think.
When it comes to taking action…
Entrepreneurs take frequent, low-stakes steps towards their goals
While entrepreneurs often have grand, sweeping visions for the future, they think in micro-steps when it comes to execution.
When entrepreneurs don’t know how to get from A to B, they take the smallest step in that direction that is available to them and then see if they can figure out the next one from the new starting point.
“I want to write a New York Times bestseller,” might make you feel impossibly far behind. But opening up a new Google Doc is pretty easy.
And War And Peace, like every bestseller before it, was written One. Word. At. A. Time.
Similarly, if you want to start a company that will revolutionize the food industry but you’re spinning your wheels trying to figure out the “perfect” strategy, maybe you could start small instead:
Why this matters for generalists
Generalists take a cross-disciplinary and unique approach to taking advantage of opportunities.
In the absence of a playbook to copy, the next move can often seem unclear.
We can fight this resistance by thinking like an entrepreneur and taking the smallest possible next step toward our goal.
Question for us
What’s something that’d take us 10 minutes to do today but get us one step closer to something we care about?
Thank you to Chris Sheffield for feedback on an early draft of this. And thank you to Loserthink for the inspiration for this mental model.
Email signatures that look like this should be illegal:
Same here:
And if your email signature resembles anything close to this… welp, it’s the chair for you buddy:
For some utterly-beyond-me reason, signatures like these are wildly common.
Here are three reasons why they are dumb:
1. Most of the content in your email signature is probably useless.
Mankind has apparently forgotten that email signatures are typically included in every single message you send.
What are the chances that every single recipient of this (fictional) guy’s messages needs all of this information?
Email address. You just emailed me from your email address. I clearly already have this.
Street address. What are the chances that I need to know the physical location of your office right now?
Your domain name. It’s probably already in the email address. Also, I can Google your company. Maybe this is helpful in a sales or marketing role if you want to remove friction for somebody to learn about you.
Social profiles. Chances are, your company’s Twitter hasn’t been updated in 6 months and will add zero value to the recipient. Also, nobody wants to follow your insurance company’s Instagram.
2. Long email signatures crowd out… the email content itself.
Imagine trying to schedule lunch with any of the people above.
If you shot back 3 or 4 emails, pretty quickly you’d have the first draft to an Ayn Rand novel.
Yes, sometimes Gmail collapses email signatures so that a thread is easier to read…
But often, Gmail can’t detect the most egregious signatures and so they show up in all their glory in Every. Single. Reply.
Secondly, email apps don’t collapse signatures when you need to expand an entire thread to skim for something. The result: a totally-preventable email signature bloodbath whenever you click “expand.”
3. Email disclaimers are not legally binding.
You know that constitution-length confidentiality notice that your accountant, lawyer, etc. include in the footer of their emails?
One of my best friends has a glorious theory of how to get to know people quickly…
Talk about what you hate.
When we meet new people, we naturally don’t want to piss them off. But that typically gets us stuck in a lukewarm conversation about stuff we kind of like:
Yeah, I like Westworld. That show is pretty good. Dark Mirror is pretty good too. Oh and of course The Office. What a classic. … Blah, blah, blah.
Nobody really learns that much when you agree on everything.
But imagine if a group of people was talking about TV shows and somebody dropped this nugget:
Personally, I hate Dark Mirror. They always focus on the most obvious, but least likely, doomsday scenarios. If the writers were any good, they’d tell more thoughtful stories that maybe we could actually learn from.
Hoo baby. An actual opinion.
The Dark Mirror fans in the group might fire back with more specific reasons for why they love the show.
As everybody makes their case, they’re forced to reveal a little bit more about their worldview and tastes.
That just doesn’t really happen when everybody has a polite conversation about things that everybody likes.
The real magic happens when people take a stand on something they hate.
