5 Ways To Make $1 Million As A Writer - Nicolas Cole

1. 0:00 – 1:38

   Intro

   1. NCNicolas Cole0:00

      You are not the main character of your story. The reader is the main character. The moment you realize that, you realize that you are in the business of serving the reader. People don't buy the asset, right? No one buys a book. What the person's buying is an answer to a question.

   2. AAAli Abdaal0:16

      Hello, and welcome back to Deep Dive, the weekly podcast where every week it's my immense privilege to sit down with authors, academics, entrepreneurs, and creators, and other inspiring people, and we talk about how they got to where they are, and the strategies and tools we can learn from them to help build a life that we love. What you're about to hear is an interview between me and Nicholas Cole, and the main theme of what we're gonna talk about is how you can make money on the internet through online writing.

   3. NCNicolas Cole0:37

      You can make money as a writer, it's just you need to differentiate between are you saying, "I wanna write this," and then you go out into the world and go, "Who's willing to buy it?" Or are you starting in the opposite direction and go, "What do you need? What question do you have, and can I provide it?"

   4. AAAli Abdaal0:53

      He's done basically everything as it relates to making a full-time income from the internet through writing. And so in the video we break down how to get started with this, how anyone can make money writing on the internet, how to build an audience through writing on the internet, and lots of, like, super tactical stuff further in the episode.

   5. NCNicolas Cole1:08

      Anyone can become a writer. All of these skills are easy to learn, and it's possible. You just need to invest the time to learn some of these skills and put them into practice.

   6. AAAli Abdaal1:18

      Thank you so much for coming on the pod.

   7. NCNicolas Cole1:19

      We're... This is it? We're kicking it off?

   8. AAAli Abdaal1:20

      This is it. This is gonna be so fun. Like, we- we've known each other on the internet for the past, like, one year plus, I think.

   9. NCNicolas Cole1:25

      Yeah.

   10. AAAli Abdaal1:25

       And now you're here in London on Thanksgiving break, and here we are on Thanksgiving recording this.

   11. NCNicolas Cole1:29

       I'm so-

   12. AAAli Abdaal1:30

       So-

   13. NCNicolas Cole1:30

       I'm so happy we made it happen.

   14. AAAli Abdaal1:32

       Yeah. Thank you so much for coming down.

   15. NCNicolas Cole1:33

       Yeah.

   16. AAAli Abdaal1:33

       Um, I was thinking, like, you are the kinda, I guess, a professional at

2. 1:38 – 20:47

   Using language to change how people think / how you got into writing

   1. AAAli Abdaal1:38

      making money through online writing, I guess. [laughs] Like, how- how- how do you introduce yourself to people these days? If someone asks, like, "What do you do?" What- what do you- w- what do you say to that?

   2. NCNicolas Cole1:46

      I like to say I use language to change how people think.

   3. AAAli Abdaal1:52

      Okay. [laughs]

   4. NCNicolas Cole1:52

      So I used to- I used to get paid... I- I- I frame it this way. I used to get paid as a ghostwriter.

   5. AAAli Abdaal1:57

      Mm.

   6. NCNicolas Cole1:57

      And as a ghostwriter, or earlier on as a content writer, you get paid to write words. So someone's like, "I'm gonna pay you to write 800 words. I'm gonna pay you to write 1,200 words, 1,500 words." And it took me a long time that- to l- long time to realize that great writers don't get paid to write lots of words. They get paid to write two or three words that then dictate the direction of the 800 words, the 1,500 words, the 3,000 words. So now I focus on using language to change how people think. Writing two or three words, that changes the direction of which way the wind is blowing.

   7. AAAli Abdaal2:32

      Ooh, okay. Definitely wanna dig- dig more into that. Um, I was thinking we would talk about kind of a handful of different ways to essentially become a millionaire through online writing or through writing of some sort. And given that you've done this in various kind of, uh, fields, I feel like you'd be the perfect kind of expert- expert on the topic. Um, but before we go there, you- you have a fantastic book, um, The Art and Business of Online Writing, which I've actually ordered a physical copy on Amazon, which is arriving tomorrow, because we're showing it off in a video, like, on Friday.

   8. NCNicolas Cole3:02

      Oh, cool.

   9. AAAli Abdaal3:03

      So that'll be cool. Um-

   10. NCNicolas Cole3:03

       Oh, thanks for supporting the arts.

   11. AAAli Abdaal3:05

       No, it's all good. I've been- I've been recommending that book to so many people when they ask questions like, "Should I start a blog?" And, "Hey, I wanna make money on this on- internet thing, but I don't really wanna show my face on YouTube. I wanna become a writer." Um, and I just send that book to a lot of people.

   12. NCNicolas Cole3:18

       Mm.

   13. AAAli Abdaal3:19

       But in that book you talk about your origin story, which is, like, a World of Warcraft pro gamer [laughs] or something.

   14. NCNicolas Cole3:24

       Yeah.

   15. AAAli Abdaal3:24

       I- I had a World of Warcraft phase during Wrath and Cataclysm as well.

   16. NCNicolas Cole3:27

       Oh, really?

   17. AAAli Abdaal3:28

       And but, like, I... And I- I always, like, loved the idea of being in a raiding guild, but I could never make it work-

   18. NCNicolas Cole3:33

       Mm

   19. AAAli Abdaal3:33

       ... with, like, my mom calling me down for dinner as a freaking 16-year-old, and then having to leave the raid, and all- all- all of this kind of stuff. So what was your background in World of Warcraft?

   20. NCNicolas Cole3:41

       We-

   21. AAAli Abdaal3:41

       How did- how did the origin-

   22. NCNicolas Cole3:42

       We had the same story.

   23. AAAli Abdaal3:43

       Yeah. [laughs]

   24. NCNicolas Cole3:43

       We had the... First of all, Horde or Alliance?

   25. AAAli Abdaal3:45

       Oh, I was Horde.

   26. NCNicolas Cole3:46

       Okay, good.

   27. AAAli Abdaal3:47

       Yeah.

   28. NCNicolas Cole3:47

       That's the right answer.

   29. AAAli Abdaal3:48

       [laughs]

   30. NCNicolas Cole3:48

       Um, yeah, I was... I, you know, same thing. I was a really hardcore gamer as a teenager, and I didn't know that I had celiac disease till I was 18, so I was really sick growing up. And I also want- I had dreams of playing in the NHL, and fractured my spine when I was 14, and then tried to come back to the sport, fractured it again when I was 17. So those two things, you don't have a lot of other time or options, so I just sat in front of my computer and I got really, really good at World of Warcraft.
3. 20:47 – 22:49

   Your journey to online writing

   1. NCNicolas Cole20:47

      I, I... It's a fallacy to think you're a one-dimensional person. You're not. We all have m- many interests. You can do more than one thing. Most people don't know that I have, like, I don't even know, three poetry books published.

   2. AAAli Abdaal21:01

      Oh, I didn't know that. [laughs]

   3. NCNicolas Cole21:02

      Yeah. Right? Most people don't know that, and that's fine, because I'm not confused about which thing I do because I wanna do it and which thing I do that is my money maker. That's the whole question, is you want to make the niche... If, if your goal is how do I make money, right, you wanna make the niche your money maker, but that doesn't mean you can't do other things. You can. Just don't expect those things to have the same external outcome as your money maker, right? And I think remembering that gives you so much freedom, and it allows you to do all of the things that you wanna do, and you aren't confused about what to optimize to make sure that you can still put food on the table, right?

   4. AAAli Abdaal21:47

      All right. We're just gonna take a quick break from the podcast to introduce our sponsor, which is very excitingly Huel. I have been a paying customer of Huel since 2017, so it's been about six years now that I've been using Huel fairly regularly. I started eating Huel in my fifth year of medical school, and I've been using Huel regularly ever since because, you know, I like to be productive. I have... You know, my calendar is full with a lot of things, and often I don't have the time or don't make the time to have a particularly healthy breakfast or a particularly healthy lunch. My favorite flavor is salted caramel, because for 400 calories you get 40 grams of protein, which is absolutely insane, and you also get a decent, healthy mix of carbohydrates and fiber and fat, along with 26 different vitamins and minerals which are all very good for the body. There's nine different flavors of this to choose from. My favorite is, A, the banana version, and also the salted caramel version. So what I do is I take my two scoops, I put them into my NutriBullet blender-type thing, although you can just use a normal shaker if you want. I mix it up normally with water, but a little bit of milk to add a bit more of a milkshake-like consistency to it, and then I just sip that while I'm on my desk doing my work in the morning, and it ensures that I get a very healthy breakfast in that's nutritionally complete, rather than some high-sugar cereal, which is what

4. 22:49 – 29:00

   How to monetise your writing

   1. AAAli Abdaal22:49

      I would have defaulted to instead. Also, Huel is ridiculously reasonably priced. Like, a meal for 400 calories comes out to 1 pound 68 per meal, which is super, super cheap compared to what the alternative would be if you were ordering takeout, for example. Anyway, if you like the idea of getting these cheap and healthy and nutritionally complete meals in your diet, then head over to Huel.com/deepdive. And if you use that URL, Huel.com/deepdive, they will send you a free T-shirt, which are quite nice, and also a free kind of shaker bottle-type thing with your first order. So thank you so much, Huel, for sponsoring this episode. This episode is very kindly brought to you by Trading 212. Now, people ask me all the time for advice about investing, 'cause I've made a bunch of videos about it on the YouTube channel, and my advice for most people is generally invest in broad stock market index funds, which is exactly what you can do completely for free with Trading 212. It's a great app that lets you trade stocks and funds and ETFs and foreign exchange if you really want to, and one of the great things about the app is that if you're new to the world of investing, you can actually invest with fake money. You don't have to put real money in. They've got a practice mode where you invest fake money, and then it actually tracks what the market is doing in real time. So you can see, had I invested 100 pounds into this thing, what would my return have been X weeks or X months further down the line? Once you've got some comfort with that, then it's super easy to deposit money into your Trading 212 account. You can use Apple Pay like I do initially, or you can use a direct bank transfer. And then once the money's in your Trading 212 account, then you can invest it in basically whatever you want. Now, if you're based in the UK, you might be familiar with the concept of an ISA, which is an individual savings account, which is basically a tax-free wrapper that you can put money in. You can put 20,000 pounds in every year, up to 20,000 pounds, and it resets every April, and then all that money can grow and it's completely tax-free for the rest of your life. And if you wanna sign up for an ISA, you can sign up for one completely for free also on Trading 212. So if you haven't yet filled up your ISA allowance or at least put some money into your ISA for this year, that might be a good step forward. Also, very excitingly, there's a new feature that they've added to the app, which is a daily interest on your uninvested cash. These interest rates may go up or down over time as the economic environment changes, but the cool thing is that you get paid out every single day if you're into that sort of thing. The app also lets you auto-invest, which is a great thing, 'cause then you can automatically invest a percentage of your paycheck into the thing every month. And so if you haven't yet started with investing and you wanna give it a go, then you can download the app on the App Store, and if you use the coupon code ALI, A-L-I, at the checkout, that will give you a totally free share worth up to 100 pounds. It's available on iPhone and Android, and you can check it out by typing in Trading 212 into your respective app store. So thank you so much, Trading 212, for sponsoring this episode I wanna come back to this stoicism, um, stuff in a, in a moment where, and we're t-talk- talking about the field of, like, category design and stuff. But before we go there, um, you said that you decided every day I'm gonna write something on Quora, and I'm gonna do this for the next year. This was, I guess, equivalent, uh, s- equivalent to my, my thing for YouTube, which was I'm gonna make a video every week for the next two years.

   2. NCNicolas Cole25:30

      Totally.

   3. AAAli Abdaal25:30

      And fingers crossed something will happen, but even if not, like, uh, I'll, I'll learn stuff. I'm sure it'll be interesting in some kind of ways. Maybe I'll get, get a few sales for my medical admissions course or something like that. Having now taught, like, you know, a couple of thousand people for YouTuber Academy, and I'm sure you've, you've s- you know, you've, you've done the same thing for, for Ship 30, the writing course. That's a pretty unusual kind of mindset to have. Like, most people I know don't have that attitude of, "All right. I've decided to do a thing. I'm just gonna do it every day for a year." Like, what, what was it about you that made you more inclined to go down that route? And anything that you would... Any advice you would give for people who are struggling with this idea of just committing to a thing and doing it consistently?

   4. NCNicolas Cole26:15

      Well, first of all, it's curiosity. Like, I'm just a very curious person, and I think anyone who makes that decision is inherently curious. But really just stop and think about it, right? No one paid you to go to middle school, but we all have a lot of memories and a lot of lessons learned from being in middle school. No one paid us to go to high school, but same thing. No one paid us to have hobbies growing up, but yet we all look back and are like, "Oh, I learned so much playing a musical instrument," or, "Oh, I learned so much playing a sport," right? We inherently do it. It's just, for whatever reason, there's this fear of choosing to do it yourself. Whereas when you're younger, someone else tells you you have to do it, and there's something comforting about saying, "Oh, well, someone else told me that I had to do this, and so thus it must be the right thing," right? And once you get comfortable making those decisions yourself, you realize that there really isn't any wasted time. No one paid me to get into bodybuilding for six years, but the lessons I learned from that have shifted my life massively. You know, no one paid me to learn classical piano growing up, but I learned a lot doing that. And so all it is is just realizing that the outcome is positive. And even if you did it every day for a year, like extend the time horizon. Your life is long. A year is not that much time, right? And I think the fear that everyone has is, "I'm going to waste time." But then meanwhile, they're just... They go right back, and they're scrolling on Twitter or Instagram. It's like you're already wasting time, right? So there's something about just committing to the process and enjoying the journey and trusting that whatever skill you gain, that skill is probably gonna be universal. It goes back to what we were talking about. You said there's a theme of gamers, musicians, right, getting into... Right, well, what is that? That's just acquiring other skills. It's not really the skill of being a gamer. It's not really the skill of being a musician. It's all the underlying stuff, work ethic, commitment, creativity, right?

   5. AAAli Abdaal28:18

      Yeah. I, I see, I see this a lot with, um, with medical students in particular, where like medics are... And I guess like any kind of traditional career which attracts a kind of risk-averse kind of person who has done well in school, the attitude is always, um, how, like, h- essentially how many CV points am I gonna get for doing this thing?

   6. NCNicolas Cole28:41

      Mm-hmm.

   7. AAAli Abdaal28:42

      And increasingly, and, and it's, it's easy enough in medicine because it's like, okay, cool, when I... If I publish these two papers, then four years down the line when I apply for residency, I'll have an extra two points on my thing, and that will give me an extra 5% boost over the other people that maybe only have one publication.

5. 29:00 – 34:18

   How to find your niche

   1. AAAli Abdaal29:00

      It's a very kind of points-based, like I'm doing this thing because it will look good on my CV further down the line type of attitude. Whereas if I think of, I guess, kind of the entrepreneurs and stuff that I know, they almost never had the attitude of like, "This will look good on my CV." It was almost always an attitude of, "Let me try this out and see what happens, and I'm sure something, something interesting will happen further down the line."

   2. NCNicolas Cole29:23

      Mm-hmm.

   3. AAAli Abdaal29:23

      "I can't, I can't tell you what it's gonna be, but we'll, we'll kind of see what happens."

   4. NCNicolas Cole29:28

      Yeah. It's... I think it's a very rare human trait to focus w- to want to focus on the skill more than wanting to focus on the outcome. I really don't care about a lot of outcomes. I like them. It, it'll be fun when I get there, but I am way more obsessed and interested in mastering a skill-

   5. AAAli Abdaal29:54

      Mm-hmm

   6. NCNicolas Cole29:54

      ... or knowing that if I'm in the same room with other people that are mastering skills, I wanna know that I am able to play at that level or that I'm, I'm able to surpass that level. For me, it's all about skill. It's not about some title, 'cause titles are worth... You know, they matter for a moment, you know? And then two days later, everyone's like, "Oh, that title doesn't matter anymore," right? So it's not the title that you care about. The second thing is when you're first starting out, this is why one of the big goals that we set for people in Ship 30, and especially after Ship 30, we have kind of a, a follow-on, um, area called the Captain's Table, and we go, "The goal is to make your first dollar on the internet." It's not to make a million dollars. It's just you need to make $1. Because if you start there, the moment you feel that there's a different direction that's possible, that's when you become excited about it, right? But all... If you're risk-averse, chances are it's just because you haven't felt that there's another option. But the moment that you feel, "Oh, there is another way that I can go," then it just becomes a, well, are you curious enough to keep going? Or not. And the decision keep going or not is a lot easier than start something totally new or don't.

   7. AAAli Abdaal31:17

      Hmm. Yeah. I've been, I've been doing a bunch of, bunch of writing around this, um, for the book that I'm working on, kind of this, uh, the law of inertia, like Newton's first law of motion that, you know, something, something at rest continues to stay at rest.

   8. NCNicolas Cole31:31

      Mm-hmm.

   9. AAAli Abdaal31:32

      But something in motion continues to be in motion unless acted on by an external imbalanced force. And I often think of that when it comes to, you know, struggling with procrastination or struggling with anything that is just like, it's way harder to get started than it is to just keep going. And so when it comes to like procrastination hacks, if I'm struggling with it, I'll li- literally set a two-minute timer on my phone, being like, "I'm just gonna do it for two minutes." And then I trick my brain into just doing it for two minutes, but then that extends into hours. Whereas the thought of doing something for hours then starts to feel like a real, like, ugh, and just taking that next step. Um, yeah, I re- I, I really like this thing of make, m- make your first dollar. Thinking like the th- th- thinking about it now, like a lot of the conversations I've had on this podcast with other, uh, with, with other entrepreneurs, it's like the moment that they made their first dollar on the internet is the moment that changed their life.

   10. NCNicolas Cole32:14

       Everything changed.

   11. AAAli Abdaal32:15

       And that was, for me, that was like when I was 13 and I was doing freelance web design. I was like, "Shit, I can make money on the internet." It's like my, my PayPal account that I've lied about my age, which li- li-

   12. NCNicolas Cole32:23

       [laughs]

   13. AAAli Abdaal32:23

       ... later got like banned 10 years later 'cause I had to give them my driving license and they said, "You lied about your age 10 years ago when you were 13." [laughs]

   14. NCNicolas Cole32:30

       No way.

   15. AAAli Abdaal32:30

       And I was like, "Goddammit." [laughs] Um, but yeah.

   16. NCNicolas Cole32:32

       I'm, I'm surprised you, if you experienced that so early then that you decided to go to med school. Like what made you then leave that?

   17. AAAli Abdaal32:40

       Yeah. So, um, I decided to go to med school... I di- I didn't say this in my interview at the time, but I reasoned that everyone says university is the best time of your life.

   18. NCNicolas Cole32:47

       Mm.

   19. AAAli Abdaal32:47

       And med school is six years rather than three, so that's cool. And it was between medicine and computer science 'cause I was into the whole coding-y type thing, but I just thought it would be more interesting to be a doctor who knows how to code than to be a dude who knows how to code. [laughs] Um, and so my plan was always like, hey, let me get really good at medicine and then I'm sure with a coding background something interesting will happen in the intersection of like medic- medicine and technology. Um, and it was only as I got kind of further through it where I realized that I cared a lot less about medicine and a lot more about teaching medical students.

   20. NCNicolas Cole33:20

       Hmm.

   21. AAAli Abdaal33:20

       So there's something about teaching that really made my heart sing that like practicing medicine never did, and that's what kinda took me down this avenue rather than that.

   22. NCNicolas Cole33:27

       Hmm. That's really interesting. I feel like you kind of made that decision then of if I have this, not status symbol, but it's almost like an, an intuition on your niche.

   23. AAAli Abdaal33:45

       Mm.

   24. NCNicolas Cole33:46

       Right? There's a difference between being a coder and being a doctor and being a coder doctor.

   25. AAAli Abdaal33:54

       Mm.

   26. NCNicolas Cole33:54

       Right? And it's often at unlikely intersections that opportunity hides. That's why I love looking back on my years as a gamer because pair almost anything with gaming and you have an unconventional niche, you know? And most things actually are like that, is if you take two things that shouldn't be in the same room

6. 34:18 – 47:44

   Advice for consistency

   1. NCNicolas Cole34:18

      and you put them together, all of a sudden you've created a new thing. The problem is we all say we want to stand out, we all say we wanna be different, but deep down we all just want to fit in.

   2. AAAli Abdaal34:29

      Yeah.

   3. NCNicolas Cole34:29

      We all just wanna be the same, right? And so what's hard about creating at unlikely intersections is it f- requires you to be the first one, right? And I'm sure even as you were going through your journey or especially when you were thinking about leaving medicine, you know, there probably weren't a lot of models to look to, right? Which is what makes the decision so uncomfortable is you're like, "I've never seen the thing that I'm about to do before," but that's also where all the opportunity is.

   4. AAAli Abdaal34:58

      Yeah. Yeah. That's a good, that's a good way of putting it. 'Cause I think... Yeah, yeah, at the time my, my intuition was very much that like ... Because like every- everyone I knew was a doctor, and everyone I knew who was a doctor complained about being a doctor. And I was like, "Okay, you know, this, this is, this is an interesting data point."

   5. NCNicolas Cole35:14

      [laughs]

   6. AAAli Abdaal35:15

      Um, and I didn't even know that other careers existed outside of medicine really, 'cause, you know, all my, my mom, mom was a doctor, all of our friends were doctors, just like so, so standard, like-

   7. NCNicolas Cole35:23

      Hmm

   8. AAAli Abdaal35:23

      ... [laughs] amongst the kind of people I hung out with to be a, to be a medic. And I was like, "Yeah, I don't, I don't wanna quit, just be a doctor. [laughs] I wanna, I wanna stand out." And I was like, "Cool, let's, let's..." Like given that medicine is like the only thing I can really imagine, let's combine other things with that. Um, and I think if I, if I think of like, if I think to YouTube channels that have, have like really succeeded as well, it's 'cause they've combined an, an, a niche interest in one thing with an interest in another thing.

   9. NCNicolas Cole35:47

      Mm-hmm.

   10. AAAli Abdaal35:48

       Like there's a channel called TierZoo, which is combining gaming with like, uh, ecology and evolutionary biology to sort of gaming-esque videos around like why are snakes overpowered? And why are lions like, why should lions be nerfed?

   11. NCNicolas Cole36:02

       That's so cool.

   12. AAAli Abdaal36:02

       And just using that kind of terminology, it's got like three million subscribers, like this stupidly profitable business. There's another one, um, Wendover Productions, where the guy's just obsessed with airplanes and like aviation, and he does explainer videos about how airplanes and aviation and like the logistics of Formula 1 and how, what flight they're taking as they move the...

   13. NCNicolas Cole36:20

       Oh, wow.

   14. AAAli Abdaal36:20

       And people just love that shit. It's just like this guy's like super obsessed with aviation but has combined it with an ability to write and an ability to animate, and suddenly no one in the world is able to do that.

   15. NCNicolas Cole36:30

       Yes.

   16. AAAli Abdaal36:30

       And he's carved out this niche for himself that's gotten like four million subscribers on YouTube and makes a business. And it's so hard, I think, like to... If I, yeah, if I just think of the YouTube example, and I, I, I guess maybe similar for writing, to just try and dominate a single word category. Like it's, it's really hard to be a productivity YouTuber.

   17. NCNicolas Cole36:50

       Mm-hmm.

   18. AAAli Abdaal36:51

       It's a lot easier to be a productivity combined with gaming combined with health YouTuber, for example. [laughs]

   19. NCNicolas Cole36:58

       Mm-hmm.

   20. AAAli Abdaal36:58

       Yeah.

   21. NCNicolas Cole36:58

       Yeah. I mean, here's a- another way of framing it is which game do you wanna play? Do you wanna play the competition work ethic game, or do you wanna play the creativity, have fun ... expression game. And if you are trying to compete in an existing category or y- usually a single-word category, all you're doing is going, "I'm better than all the other people here." You know? If you wanna be a doctor, the whole game you're playing is, "I'm a better doctor than all the other people who say they're doctors," right? And that game is predicated on work ethic, long hours, I'm better than you, incremental improvement. Or you can go, "I'm a coder doctor," or, "I'm a educator doctor," right? And you combine it with a different category, you create a new subcategory, and now you're not playing a competition game. 'Cause everyone goes, "Well, all the doctors are over there, and you're a coder doctor-

   22. AAAli Abdaal37:59

       Mm-hmm

   23. NCNicolas Cole37:59

       ... so I can't put you guys in the same room," right? And when you do that, that allows you to then play a creativity game, and now you can go create all the opportunities that you want. And so it's so simple that it's complicated, you know? And it... We can make it sound simple, but I understand why people have the hesitations they do and the fears, but a lot of those fears to me are more underlying. It's, uh, "I wanna be different, but deep down I really just wanna be the same. You know, I wanna stand out, but deep down I really just wanna fit in." And you have to overcome that feeling in order to play the creation game, you know? And that's really hard for a lot of people.

   24. AAAli Abdaal38:39

       Yeah. Yeah, it really is. Like, I think... Yeah, I was speaking to someone earlier, just again on the, on the YouTube example, 'cause I'm just in the middle of this course now. Who's, like, um, a lawyer, like super s- successful lawyer, and has started a YouTube channel which has started to get some traction. And she's, like, really worried of like, "What if people at work are gonna see this?" And it's like she kinda knows that, like, to unlock this dream life where she can do what she wants, she needs to stand out. But at the same time, it's that tension between like, "Oh, but, like, I don't w- I don't want my colleagues to think of me as a loser who started a YouTube channel [laughs] you know, when I had this illustrious law career, even though that's actually what I wanna do."

   25. NCNicolas Cole39:13

       Mm-hmm.

   26. AAAli Abdaal39:14

       Yeah. How do you, how do you... Like, I guess kind of the, the writers that you coach have this kind of issue as well. How do you, how do you approach dealing with it?

   27. NCNicolas Cole39:20

       Yeah, it's the same thing we talk about in Ship 30. And to me, the easiest solution is you just start by being surrounded by other people that are doing the same thing, right? There's benefit to being... I had a, a mentor in Chicago who used to call it hanging around the hoop. You know, you're just going to get better if you hang around the hoop with other people who are getting better-

   28. AAAli Abdaal39:42

       Mm

   29. NCNicolas Cole39:42

       ... versus if you just try and go do it by yourself. And again, we all want to fit in. So if y- the underlying feeling is, "I wanna fit in," and then you try and go do it on your own, that is a very viscerally uncomfortable feeling, right? But if deep down we all wanna fit in and then you are part of a community where everyone is doing that thing, all of a sudden you're going to try to fit into that community, which is going to make it a lot easier to do the thing that you wanna do. So there's something really helpful about just being surrounded by other people. Just like I'm sure you've realized how many inflection points as being a YouTuber came from you just being friends with other YouTubers.

   30. AAAli Abdaal40:23

       Yeah.
7. 47:44 – 50:12

   Hang around the hoop

   1. NCNicolas Cole47:44

      And I did it, and literally every single day for a year and a half, I wrote an Inc. Magazine column. Like, insane level of output, and I was still writing on Quora. And I-

   2. AAAli Abdaal47:56

      And this was while you still had the job?

   3. NCNicolas Cole47:57

      While I still had the job.

   4. AAAli Abdaal47:58

      Mm.

   5. NCNicolas Cole47:59

      So I was... This was, like, approaching peak. It got even crazier in ghostwriting after, but, like, this was approaching the peak of what I could handle in a day or a week in terms of writing. And I ended up bringing in, like, millions and millions and millions of page views for them, and it amounted to roughly... I mean, it's funny to look back on now, but I forget how the math worked out in terms of page views, but I probably was making three to five grand a month writing for Inc. And, you know, I wasn't making that much as a entry-level copywriter, so that was like 50% of my paycheck. And so once I had that, I was like, "Okay, if I had eight more hours in the day," my thinking was, "Could I write two columns a day?"

   6. AAAli Abdaal48:40

      [laughs]

   7. NCNicolas Cole48:41

      You know what I mean? Like, I was like, "Could I just double the input-

   8. AAAli Abdaal48:43

      Yeah

   9. NCNicolas Cole48:43

      ... and double the output?" Um, so that was how I was making half my salary. That's pretty cool. [laughs] That's... There were easier ways to do it, looking back.

   10. AAAli Abdaal48:56

       Yeah.

   11. NCNicolas Cole48:56

       But it was, uh, it was an interesting mechanism at the time.

   12. AAAli Abdaal49:01

       To what extent were... It's a b- b- bit of a random question, but d- to what extent were these w- were these, like, evergreen content? Or, like, was this literally a trade of time for money, or was it actually a trade of... Because I feel like the moment you de-correlate your income from your time input, that's another inflection point that changes the game for a lot of people.

   13. NCNicolas Cole49:19

       Yes. That didn't come until way later. Um- It, there, so I thought that there would be a compounding effect.

   14. AAAli Abdaal49:28

       Mm.

   15. NCNicolas Cole49:28

       I thought as my library grows, there'll be some evergreen effect, and then my average monthly page views will go up. And it did. My average did go up a little bit, but it was not ... There was no inflection point. And so in order for me to keep earning three, four, five grand a month, I needed to be churning out 20, 30, 40 columns a month. So, there was a while, like it was until I got into ghostwriting, which was still trading time for money. It's just, it was a premium-

   16. AAAli Abdaal49:59

       Yeah

   17. NCNicolas Cole49:59

       ... on my time, right? But that inflection point didn't come till later.

   18. AAAli Abdaal50:02

       Oh, okay. All right. So your, you s- so your day job, which I don't think we, we've mentioned yet, you, you were doing copywriting for an ad agency.

   19. NCNicolas Cole50:09

       Yeah.

   20. AAAli Abdaal50:10

       What is copywriting? I only

8. 50:12 – 54:14

   Practical tips for enjoying the journey

   1. AAAli Abdaal50:12

      recently real- like, I was so confused, like g- like copyright with a W where- versus copyright with the R-I-G-H-T.

   2. NCNicolas Cole50:18

      Yeah.

   3. AAAli Abdaal50:18

      And just like com- yeah. [laughs]

   4. NCNicolas Cole50:19

      Copywriting with the W-

   5. AAAli Abdaal50:21

      Yeah

   6. NCNicolas Cole50:21

      ... is, and there's different, uh, definitions for it. M- my job at the time was l- I was doing, like, all the work that nobody wanted to do. You know, I was writing social media copy for brands. I was proofreading proposals to try and land new clients. Like I, anything with writing in this agency is what I was responsible for doing. It was a small agency. The real definition of copywriting is normally in the context of sales copy. So you're specifically writing things with the goal of selling a product or selling a service.

   7. AAAli Abdaal50:56

      Yep.

   8. NCNicolas Cole50:57

      So you're writing landing pages, or you're writing emails or whatever it is, and there's a very specific, I don't even know if you'd call it style, but there's like rules to copywriting and sales copywriting and things that you need to do. You know, biggest thing is benefits, not features.

   9. AAAli Abdaal51:12

      Mm.

   10. NCNicolas Cole51:13

       You know? Even that most people don't know. Don't talk about what you do. Talk about what you're going to unlock for the reader-

   11. AAAli Abdaal51:19

       Mm-hmm

   12. NCNicolas Cole51:19

       ... for the customer, whoever. So my job, quote-unquote, as a copywriter was very basic. It was just sales copy proofread- or, um, social media copy proofreading, stuff like that.

   13. AAAli Abdaal51:31

       Oh, okay. And how much were you earning at the day job?

   14. NCNicolas Cole51:33

       Oh, man, like m- maybe 45K a year salary.

   15. AAAli Abdaal51:37

       Okay.

   16. NCNicolas Cole51:37

       I mean, it was not a lot.

   17. AAAli Abdaal51:39

       Yeah. And so when you started earning the sort of three to 5K a month from Inc. Magazine, that was, yeah, I guess like 50% of your-

   18. NCNicolas Cole51:48

       Yeah

   19. AAAli Abdaal51:48

       ... your thing.

   20. NCNicolas Cole51:49

       And I didn't spend any of it.

   21. AAAli Abdaal51:51

       Yeah.

   22. NCNicolas Cole51:51

       I didn't upgrade my life. I didn't go buy new clothes. I didn't... I just saved it because I wanted that as runway. You know? I wanted to, when I quit my job, know that worst case scenario, I was good for like three months, four months. You know? So each of these were, like, very deliberate decisions along the way, but none, none of it was rash. It's not like I was jumping out the window going, "Oh, I just magically hope this all works out." Like, it was always the next logical step, and, and I tried to minimize the risk as much as possible.

   23. AAAli Abdaal52:21

       We're gonna take a very quick break from the podcast to introduce our sponsor, Brilliant.org. I've been using Brilliant for a few years now, and it's a fantastic online platform for courses in maths and science and computer science. Now, one of my life philosophies is that we should all endeavor to be lifelong learners if we want, 'cause it's good for the mind, it's good for the body, it's good for our general happiness and health, and Brilliant is a perfect resource from this because you can really level up your own thinking in terms of maths and science and computer science without having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on extra degrees or extra courses. Now, the courses on Brilliant are actually great because they take what could be dry topics in maths and science and computer science, and they turn them into really interesting, interactive, and enjoyable kind of experiences where you learn a little bit, and then you apply it in practice, and then you learn a bit more, and then you put it into practice. And it's almost like the system that we used to use in our tutorials back when I was at, at university at Cambridge, where you would learn a little thing, and then you'd be paired with a world-class expert in the thing, and they'd be asking you questions, and you'd be kind of figuring it out together rather than being spoon-fed information like we're normally taught in school. Each lesson on Brilliant is broken up into 15-minute bite-sized chunks, and so wherever you are in your day, you can find a little bit of time, and you can go on the app, and you can level up your brain rather than scrolling social media or whatever the other default activity might be. And it's pretty cool as well because they're constantly updating the library of courses. For example, they've recently released a course, Introduction to Algebra, and this is like a visual representation of algebraic thinking. Now, I thought I understood algebra because I did maths in school, but actually the way that Brilliant explains it with kind of the stories and the puzzles and the interactive exercises you go along, has really given me a new understanding of algebra that I just didn't have before, and that maybe you would need to do, like, a maths degree to actually get that grasp of what algebra actually is and why it's so important. So if any of that sounds up your street and you'd like to level up your thinking and your knowledge in maths or science or computer science, then head over to Brilliant.org/DeepDive, and the first 200 people to click that link which will be in the show notes and in the video description as well, will get 20% off the annual premium subscription. So thank you so much, Brilliant, for sponsoring this episode, and let's get right back to the podcast. Let's say someone's listening to this and they're thinking,

9. 54:14 – 59:00

   1 - Ghostwriting

   1. AAAli Abdaal54:14

      "I wanna, I wanna moonlight as a ghostwriter." What does it, like, what does it physically look like? Is it like you f- you find a client and then you hop on a Zoom call with them and be like, "Hey, what, what do you wanna write about?" Like, how, how does it work-

   2. NCNicolas Cole54:25

      Yeah

   3. AAAli Abdaal54:26

      ... when you were brand new, early?

   4. NCNicolas Cole54:26

      I mean, so there's a ton of nuance obviously, but the simplest way to explain it is recognize that anyone with a business or anyone with a fund or anyone with a profitable product wants to share who they are on the internet because if they build an audience, they are going to attract more opportunity, right? Or they're gonna sell more of their product or service. So first of all, recognizing that potential ghostwriting, quote-unquote, "clients" are everywhere. They exist everywhere. Anyone with a big YouTube channel probably needs a ghostwriter. Anyone with a big podcast probably needs a ghostwriter. Anyone with a company probably needs a ghostwriter, you know? And it's becoming less and less stigmatized. Like, the same way that you go, "I wanna make videos. I'm gonna hire a video editor," well, writing's the same way. You're like, "I wanna write tweets, LinkedIn posts, articles, newsletters," whatever. You're like, "I need a writer." You know? So that stigma doesn't really exist anymore, um, or less and less. The, what it actually looks like is you just get on the phone with the person or get on Zoom or whatever, and you just go, "Okay- Let's forget the whole 30,000-foot strategy. Like this one thing, what do you wanna say? Like just one, it's a tweet, it's a thread, it's an article. I always tried to remind people, like, we're not gonna figure out your entire life mission here.

   5. AAAli Abdaal55:44

      [chuckles]

   6. NCNicolas Cole55:45

      Right? That will reveal itself.

   7. AAAli Abdaal55:46

      Yep.

   8. NCNicolas Cole55:47

      You know? A mentor had, had a great quote, which is, um, "You can't steer a stationary ship." Right? If you're just sitting at your desk and you're just looking out into the world, you can anticipate it all you want, but the moment that ship leaves the harbor, if it starts raining, your, your plan is out the window, right? So I would say that to these people over and over again and be like, "The, the end will reveal itself. For now, let's just focus on what is the one thing you wanna write." And all you're doing is just herding their thinking, you know? You're just kind of whittling it down, um, getting clear on what it is that they wanna say in this one piece. And the process that I did is I would take the phone call, I would record it, and I would use this website called Rev, which allows you to transcribe things. I would get the transcript, and I liked to think of ghostwriting myself as I'm not writing, I'm, I'm deleting.

   9. AAAli Abdaal56:39

      Mm-hmm.

   10. NCNicolas Cole56:40

       So you have a, you have a transcript, and they're giving you all the information, and your job isn't really to sit down and recreate it. Your job is to remove all the tangents and all the fluff and all the things that don't have to do with the one thing that they're trying to say, and then you're just using their words and reorganizing it. That's the way I liked thinking of ghostwriting. And it's a skill, but if you can get good at it, I mean, you can make a killing.

   11. AAAli Abdaal57:08

       Yeah. Like [chuckles] it's only, it's only recently there's the, there's been... So like I work with a ghostwriter for, like, LinkedIn posts and stuff, 'cause it's like I wanna convert my videos where I've already said the stuff into tweet threads and LinkedIn posts, but I sure as hell don't wanna do that myself. So like, "Okay, who wants to, who wants to help out with this?" And now that I've kind of seen what that process of working with a ghostwriter is like, I'm just kind of thinking, like one of the, one of the ultimate side hustles these days is to be, is to be a video editor, 'cause now having tried-

   12. NCNicolas Cole57:41

       Massive

   13. AAAli Abdaal57:41

       ... hiring video editors, it's just an absolute nightmare, and most people are... well, suck at it. And if someone just took my Skillshare class over a weekend, they could become, like, really good at video editing. I'm just like, "Why don't, why don't mo- more people do this?" So anytime people email me and be like, "Hey, I'm a student and I wanna make money on the side," I'm just like, "Look, v- video editing is, like, a good starting point. Teach yourself the skill. Find cl- find YouTubers who need editing," 'cause they all do, especially like podcasts, everything except, like, content stuff. But increasingly, I'm starting to say to people just like, "Hey, you've got two options, video editing or writing." Like act- actually, if you can, if you are good at writing, like if you're a student and you've written essays and you can appreciate what, like, blog post writing is compared to essay writing, there's like zillions of, like the local orthodontist, the local lawyer, the local accountant, they all need ghostwriters, way more so than video editors actually, and it's just, it seems like an incredible opportunity.

   14. NCNicolas Cole58:27

       It's... Yeah, it is incredible. And to be honest, it's even... I even think it's even easier now than even five, six, seven years ago when I was getting into it, which is just think about how many creators there are and how the whole game, if you are a profitable creator, if you have some sort of business or product or service connected to the, to your creation attention engine, right? You need to scale yourself on the internet with words. 50% of it could either be video

10. 59:00 – 1:16:12

    2 - Copywriting

    1. NCNicolas Cole59:00

       audio, and the other 50% is actual words and language. And so the lowest barrier to entry is a writer going to someone like you and going, "I'm gonna take your entire archive of YouTube videos. You've already done the work, and I'm going to extract all of the written content that you haven't created yet." Right? And so as a ghostwriter, it's almost like humbling yourself and realizing you aren't getting paid to sit down and, like, be brilliant and, quote-unquote, "ghostwrite" or ghost think, right? You already did the thinking. The ghostwriter just needs to go through your library and go, "I'm gonna scale you with words." And you can make six figures doing that from your s- you know, bedroom in your sweatpants. I mean, that is not a hard job to get. And the way I like to frame it to people is the easiest and fastest way to do it is to do it for free first. Go find a creator, go find an entrepreneur, go find someone that you think should be scaling themselves with words on the internet, and go, "I'll do your first week of content for free. I'll write 10 threads for you for free. I'll write five blog posts for you for free." If you can do it well, that person will throw money at you.

    2. AAAli Abdaal1:00:16

       Yeah, absolutely.

    3. NCNicolas Cole1:00:16

       Right? The-

    4. AAAli Abdaal1:00:17

       I'm thinking if someone emailed me and was like, "I've, I, I see you've got these 13 Skillshare classes. Your how to study should be a, an e-book. I've written the first five chapters for you," I'd be like, "Oh my God," like, "Join my team full-time. I will do whatever it takes to hire the hell out of you," and, like, no one has ever done that. [chuckles]

    5. NCNicolas Cole1:00:33

       Yes, exactly. And-

    6. AAAli Abdaal1:00:33

       It's so easy. [chuckles]

    7. NCNicolas Cole1:00:34

       And, uh, so funny story. I went back to, uh, I went back to my college maybe, like, five years ago at this point, right a- it was six to 12 months after I quit my job, and I went back to my school, and I was meeting up with a professor, and I saw another professor down the street, and he hap- or down the, the hall, and he happened to be teaching a class at the time. And he was one of my professors, and it was a small class, 15 students, and he was like, "Hey, as long as you're here, why don't you come talk to the class, share some of your lessons learned?" 'Cause he had kind of seen some of my internet writing and was like, "Oh, wow, there's starting to be some traction here." And I go in front of the class and he's like, "All right, Cole, why don't you tell the aspiring writers here, uh, how they can start making money from their writing?" And I literally said, "Don't start by trying to make money from your writing. Do it for free." And everyone in the class looked at me like I was crazy, and my teacher jumped in and he was like, "Well, no, no, no, I think what Cole's trying to say is, you know, uh, charge your worth. You know, charge like an hourly rate or something." And I was like, "No, that is not what I'm saying. I'm saying start for free-" Prove you can do it, and then the opportunities will just waterfall all over you. And the problem with ... The reason people don't do that is because they're so afraid that they're gonna get taken advantage of, or they're so afraid that, um, like, they're doing something wrong. When really, if you offer to do something for free, what you're doing is you're removing all the friction. If someone DMs you and goes, "I wanna write for you, but this is how much it costs," you now have to allocate time and mindshare to think about whether or not that's a good idea, right? Which you don't have the time to do. Any successful person doesn't have the time to do that, at least on command, right? But you can easily remove all that friction by just going, "Hey, I already see what you're doing. I've already consumed 30 hours of your content. I've already extracted these five threads and these five blog posts for it. I want you to read it. Here you go. If you don't have time to read it, pass along to your team, and if you want more of it, let me know."

    8. AAAli Abdaal1:02:36

       [laughs] Mate, this would be, like, literally my dream come true if anyone were to DM me with, with that exact message. [laughs]

    9. NCNicolas Cole1:02:41

       And this, this is what people don't understand is that the free work-

    10. AAAli Abdaal1:02:44

        Yeah

    11. NCNicolas Cole1:02:44

        ... the ROI on free work-

    12. AAAli Abdaal1:02:45

        Like, I'm tearing up at the thought of, like, how incredible it would be if someone actually did that.

    13. NCNicolas Cole1:02:49

        And, and-

    14. AAAli Abdaal1:02:50

        And the amount of emails I get from people being like, "Bro, what's the best business idea?" I'm like, "Goddammit," like-

    15. NCNicolas Cole1:02:53

        Exactly

    16. AAAli Abdaal1:02:54

        ... ugh. [laughs]

    17. NCNicolas Cole1:02:54

        And what, what people don't realize is I still do this.

    18. AAAli Abdaal1:02:58

        Yeah.

    19. NCNicolas Cole1:02:58

        Like, I still, when I meet the right person, I still go, "You know what? Don't, don't pay me for that." Even though I know that they've got the money, and I know that I'm worth the money, and they know I'm worth the money, I still, in the right circumstance, go, "You know what? Don't pay me for it. I'll, I'll do it for free." Six months ago, I met a guy, really successful entrepreneur and investor, and he wanted help writing, uh, his speech. He was giving a commencement speech. And I was like, "I could either charge money for this now, or I can do this for free, and I can call in a favor later." And I chose free because I knew, oh, okay, you know what? I see all these other outcomes that I could get later, and I bet if I do this for you for free, you are going to constantly think about ways to pay me back.

    20. AAAli Abdaal1:03:50

        Yeah.

    21. NCNicolas Cole1:03:51

        Right? 'Cause that's how that type of person thinks.

    22. AAAli Abdaal1:03:53

        Yeah.

    23. NCNicolas Cole1:03:54

        And, uh, the reason I still make that decision is because people don't realize that the ROI on free work is exponential, whereas the ROI on paid work is not exponential. It's just fixed. It's like, "Hey, I'll pay you five grand," right? But I've done so much free work for people over the years that that's why my network is the way that it is, because people go, "Well, I remember when you helped me write my commencement speech, so what do you need? Trying to raise money? Here's 10 people. You know, you trying to do this? Here's the right person to talk to. You trying to ... You have a question about that? You should go talk to that person."

    24. AAAli Abdaal1:04:25

        Mate, it's game-changing advice, like the ROI on free work. I was just thinking, like, I was, I was, I was saying this to a friend, a friend the other day, like, I've, I've worked with, like, of, of the various coaches I've worked with, two, two come to mind. One, uh, and like they were, they were both people I knew, like, through, through the network who were, who were the, who were getting into coaching. And one offered to do it for me for free, and the other one charged me for it. And the one who offered to do it for free, I have sent so much shit his way, so much traffic.

    25. NCNicolas Cole1:04:52

        Of course.

    26. AAAli Abdaal1:04:52

        Plugged his course whenever he's doing a course, plugged all of his stuff, 'cause I feel this profound sense of like, like, ev- even though I could've, I could've easily afforded it, and I knew he was worth it. And, like, ev- like, we, we knew what was going on there, but, like, the fact that he offered to do it for free makes, m- make me, makes me feel so indebted to him, whereas the friend of mine who charged me for coaching, when he asks me to plug his stuff, I'm a bit like, "Ugh," kind of. It's just, it's just ... I mean, even, even though he's a friend, it's a bit, it feels a bit more-

    27. NCNicolas Cole1:05:17

        Totally

    28. AAAli Abdaal1:05:18

        ... yeah, weird and a bit more transactional. I'm like, well, I mean, we- I could charge 20K for a sponsored video, like, kind of like etc., etc. [laughs]

    29. NCNicolas Cole1:05:24

        And here's, here's the ... Exactly.

    30. AAAli Abdaal1:05:26

        Yeah.
11. 1:16:12 – 1:19:20

    Productising yourself

    1. AAAli Abdaal1:16:12

       of our ghostwriters, he's like ... He, the, the, the way he negotiated a pay rise was basically being like, "This thing does not require any input from you beyond, like, 10 minutes a week. You never need to check the things. No one ever complains that this was not written by you. Like, this is saving you a lot of time." And I was like, "Sure, let's 3X your thingy," which was [laughs] what he was asking for, because it was still totally worth it.

    2. NCNicolas Cole1:16:33

       Yep.

    3. AAAli Abdaal1:16:33

       [laughs] Yeah.

    4. NCNicolas Cole1:16:34

       So amazing segue. So we talked about ghostwriting.

    5. AAAli Abdaal1:16:37

       Yeah.

    6. NCNicolas Cole1:16:37

       And we talked about, uh, productising yourself.

    7. AAAli Abdaal1:16:41

       Mm.

    8. NCNicolas Cole1:16:41

       So third being sales copywriting. So the beauty in how you can make a lot of money as a sales copywriter is you wanna div- again, you wanna divorce being paid for the effort versus the outcome.

    9. AAAli Abdaal1:16:57

       Yeah.

    10. NCNicolas Cole1:16:57

        So there's a lot of copywriters, sales copywriters that get paid, like, per asset, you know? So they go, "Hey, I wanna charge, you know, five grand to rewrite your landing page," or, "I wanna charge you, you know, 10 grand to redo your email course," or whatever. And you can easily make six figures doing that. How you break into upper six figures, seven-figure-plus territory is you have to not be compensated for the effort, but for the outcome that you drive.

    11. AAAli Abdaal1:17:24

        How does that work?

    12. NCNicolas Cole1:17:24

        So for example, the way that a lot of, uh, really successful sales copywriters structure their deals is they go, "Okay, let's take a product or let's take an existing funnel. Here's the average amount of revenue that you're doing right now. If I can write things that lift the revenue 25%, 50%, I get a piece of that." So now you're being compensated on the outcome you drive, not on the, I spent 20 hours rewriting the landing page, right? 'Cause if I know how ... There's ... Well, I mean, what's the great ... Is it the Picasso story where he sees the woman in the park and she's like, "Uh, draw something for me." And he draws something on a napkin, and then she goes, "How much should I pay you for that?" And he goes, "10 grand." She goes, "What? It took you two minutes." You know? And he goes, "Yeah, but it took me a lifetime to learn how to draw like this." Right? So if I'm being paid to drive an outcome, it shouldn't matter whether it takes me 20 hours or two hours.

    13. AAAli Abdaal1:18:17

        Mm.

    14. NCNicolas Cole1:18:18

        I wanna be compensated on the outcome that I drove-

    15. AAAli Abdaal1:18:20

        Yeah

    16. NCNicolas Cole1:18:20

        ... not on the effort. And so that's how a lot of, especially really legendary sales copywriters, Gary Halbert, um, Eugene Schwartz, like all, all these guys, how they made their fortunes was they would take a piece of the upside that they unlocked for the business or the product.

    17. AAAli Abdaal1:18:38

        Yeah. And it's so worth it for the business. Like, if someone ... Again, like, uh, like at the moment when we do landing pages and stuff, we do it per, like, effort-

    18. NCNicolas Cole1:18:45

        Mm-hmm

    19. AAAli Abdaal1:18:45

        ... kind of unit. But if someone were to be like, "Hey, look, I will measure your conversion rate [laughs] and, or, or whatever, and I'm gonna aim to double that and I want, like, 10% of the upside," I'd be like, "Hell yes." Like-

    20. NCNicolas Cole1:18:56

        Exactly

    21. AAAli Abdaal1:18:56

        ... that's a, of course that's a trade I'm making any day of the week.

    22. NCNicolas Cole1:18:58

        'Cause it's the exact same thing as a salesperson.

    23. AAAli Abdaal1:19:01

        Yeah.

    24. NCNicolas Cole1:19:01

        Right? You go, "Hey, based on how much new revenue you bring in, we're gonna give you a commission."

    25. AAAli Abdaal1:19:06

        Yeah.

    26. NCNicolas Cole1:19:07

        So you as a writer are basically being paid as a, quote-unquote, "infinitely scalable salesperson."

    27. AAAli Abdaal1:19:12

        Mm.

    28. NCNicolas Cole1:19:13

        And if you can write things that prompt people to purchase or take an action-

    29. AAAli Abdaal1:19:19

        Yeah

    30. NCNicolas Cole1:19:19

        ... you should be

12. 1:19:20 – 1:23:55

    Pricing your service

    1. NCNicolas Cole1:19:20

       rewarded for the fact that you unlocked that outcome.

    2. AAAli Abdaal1:19:23

       How does, how does one get good at becoming a sales copywriter?

    3. NCNicolas Cole1:19:26

       I mean, like anything, you do it a lot.

    4. AAAli Abdaal1:19:28

       Yeah.

    5. NCNicolas Cole1:19:28

       But, um, s- study the greats, you know? I mean, there's a lot of really amazing sales copywriters over the years. My personal favorite's Gary Halbert. I like s- I like saying Gary is what Hemingway would've been if Hemingway had gotten into advertising.

    6. AAAli Abdaal1:19:45

       Okay.

    7. NCNicolas Cole1:19:45

       Him and Hemingway have very similar terse, minimalist styles.

    8. AAAli Abdaal1:19:49

       Right.

    9. NCNicolas Cole1:19:50

       But Hemingway went the novel route-

    10. AAAli Abdaal1:19:51

        Yeah

    11. NCNicolas Cole1:19:51

        ... and Gary Halbert went the, "I'm gonna sell products" route. Um, and also try and sell something yourself. Like, the fastest way you're gonna learn is when you start writing things that prompt people to buy, and when you notice, "Oh, when I wrote this, no one bought, and when I wrote this, some people bought." Right? Y- the, your subconscious is gonna soak up all of those lessons, and you're gonna start to piece together your own framework on, well, how do I get people to buy?

    12. AAAli Abdaal1:20:17

        Nice. Sa- okay, sales copywriting. Um, so you said that kind of your first year as a ghostwriter, or your first few months as a ghostwriter, you were up to, like, 250k a year. But then you said, like, that kind of changed. And, like, what, what, what happened at that point?

    13. NCNicolas Cole1:20:32

        So now I like to ... I [laughs] I call it the valley of death for, uh, freelancers who want to build agencies.

    14. AAAli Abdaal1:20:40

        Mm.

    15. NCNicolas Cole1:20:40

        So what happened was I got up to maybe, like, 20 or 30K a month, uh, as a ghostwriter, and I ... I mean, I was working four hours a day-

    16. AAAli Abdaal1:20:49

        Yeah

    17. NCNicolas Cole1:20:49

        ... talking to really smart people, making way more than I was making as a full-time employee, and having a blast. Like, it was best case scenario. And I was talking to a close friend of mine, and I told him what was going on, and he was like, "We should turn this into a business. You know, think about what you're doing. We can break it apart, so we'll have editors who talk to the clients, and we'll have writers who do the writing." He said, "I will train the editors, and I'll do the phone calls." He was in sales, and, you know, that was a great skill for him.

    18. AAAli Abdaal1:21:18

        Yeah.

    19. NCNicolas Cole1:21:19

        And he's like, "You'll do the writing, and you'll train the writers." And in about 18 months, we scaled that from me and him on his apartment couch to more than 20 full-time employees, couple million in revenue, and, like, 80-plus concurrent clients.

    20. AAAli Abdaal1:21:32

        Mm.

    21. NCNicolas Cole1:21:32

        And we had, uh, I mean, just CEOs of publicly traded companies, Grammy-winning musicians, New York Time best-selling authors, like, all over the board and in every industry. And the problem was ghostwriting is such a subjective skill. You know, you're not selling plastic widgets. You're, you're, you're writing something that the person on the other side goes, "I wanna put my name on that."

    22. AAAli Abdaal1:21:56

        Yeah.

    23. NCNicolas Cole1:21:56

        "That reflects me." And the misunderstanding that people have is ghostwriting is often not ghost thinking.

    24. AAAli Abdaal1:22:04

        Yeah.

    25. NCNicolas Cole1:22:04

        Right? So these people aren't saying, "Think for me."

    26. AAAli Abdaal1:22:06

        Yeah.

    27. NCNicolas Cole1:22:06

        They're saying, "I have my ideas. I just need you to clean it up-

    28. AAAli Abdaal1:22:10

        Yeah

    29. NCNicolas Cole1:22:10

        ... and scale it," right?

    30. AAAli Abdaal1:22:12

        Yeah.
13. 1:23:55 – 1:32:50

    3- Sales copywriting

    1. NCNicolas Cole1:23:55

       disheveled and stressed.

    2. AAAli Abdaal1:23:56

       Yeah.

    3. NCNicolas Cole1:23:56

       They were all in the valley of death. And I ultimately came to the same realization. We got, uh, two and a half, three years in, and I was stressed out of my mind, and there was a point where I ended up in the hospital with shingles 'cause I was so stressed.

    4. AAAli Abdaal1:24:09

       Mm.

    5. NCNicolas Cole1:24:09

       And I was on painkillers and on antibiotics in my bed interviewing, like, the next two full-time people and the next full, two full-time people, and I was just ... I'd had enough. And I had this talk with my co-founder, and we were like, "Let's be done. Let's just fire everybody. Go back to just you and me."

    6. AAAli Abdaal1:24:27

       Yeah.

    7. NCNicolas Cole1:24:28

       We had been paying ourselves half of what I was making before. You know, we were in the valley of death.

    8. AAAli Abdaal1:24:34

       Yeah.

    9. NCNicolas Cole1:24:34

       And I was like, "I'm done." And so, uh, very weirdly, six months before the pandemic, we let everyone go. We scaled the business back to just us two.

    10. AAAli Abdaal1:24:43

        Yeah.

    11. NCNicolas Cole1:24:43

        And then the pandemic hit, you know, five, six months later, and if we hadn't made that decision, the business would've been dead-

    12. AAAli Abdaal1:24:50

        Mm

    13. NCNicolas Cole1:24:50

        ... for sure.

    14. AAAli Abdaal1:24:52

        Have you, have you come ac- across a guy called Daniel Priestley? He's written a book called Oversubscribed and Key Person Of Influence and, like, stuff.

    15. NCNicolas Cole1:25:00

        The name rings a bell, but not familiar.

    16. AAAli Abdaal1:25:02

        So, so we had him on the pod, um, a few months ago, and he's actually in London as well, and, and, and, and he's become a friend, a friend and mentor. He has a s- a, a, a model that's almost identical to yours, just coming at it a different way.

    17. NCNicolas Cole1:25:13

        Hmm.

    18. AAAli Abdaal1:25:13

        The way he phrases it is that kind of zero to three people is like, okay, whatevs. Three to 12 people, that's where you're, you're either a struggling boutique or you're a lifestyle boutique, and the difference there is if you have 100K per revenue, uh, 100K revenue per employee, you're a lifestyle business. You're, like, living the dream, fun, freedom, flexibility. So from, like, 300K to 1.2 million if you have three to 12 people. And then for him, 12 to 40 people is the desert where companies go to die.

    19. NCNicolas Cole1:25:41

        Yes.

    20. AAAli Abdaal1:25:41

        Where you're too big to be small and too small to be big. And beyond 40 people, it's like, okay, now you're in performance business territory where you've already got all the systems and processes and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if you're optimizing for fun, free- freedom, flexibility, cap your team size at 12. And what we have found is that when we had, like, 18 to 20 full-time employees, it was a nightmare. Now that we have 12 full-timers and everyone else is a contractor, it's such a breath of fresh air. I feel like I have zero stress. I spend all my time e- just writing, writing or filming or doing podcasts, which is what I love, and 0% of my time in meetings. But there was something magical about ... Something, like, magically bad about having Kind of 18 to 20 full-time employees where everything just felt like it was going to shit. [laughs]

    21. NCNicolas Cole1:26:19

        Yes.

    22. AAAli Abdaal1:26:20

        And that seems to mirror your experience as well.

    23. NCNicolas Cole1:26:21

        It's the same thing.

    24. AAAli Abdaal1:26:22

        Yeah.

    25. NCNicolas Cole1:26:22

        And, you know, it's kind of a, a whole separate nuanced conversation, but oftentimes ... So I'll say, I'll speak for myself.

    26. AAAli Abdaal1:26:31

        Mm.

    27. NCNicolas Cole1:26:32

        The mistake that I made was I equated success with headcount. So to me, it was like my ego w- h- I was proud of myself when I said, "Oh, we have 15 full-time employees. We have 20 full-time."

    28. AAAli Abdaal1:26:47

        Yeah.

    29. NCNicolas Cole1:26:47

        "We have 23 full-time," you know. And you start to realize that, A, that's a horrible measure of success, 'cause you're literally bragging about the fact that your overhead is going up and your profitability's going down.

    30. AAAli Abdaal1:26:57

        Yeah.
14. 1:32:50 – 1:41:12

    Building an agency

    1. NCNicolas Cole1:32:50

       But if you're a writer or you're really great at a specialty skill set, you're better off just scaling and increasing your earnings and charging more-

    2. AAAli Abdaal1:32:59

       Mm

    3. NCNicolas Cole1:32:59

       ... and working with higher and higher quality people than you are going, "Well, let me scale horizontally."

    4. AAAli Abdaal1:33:04

       Yeah.

    5. NCNicolas Cole1:33:05

       You know what I mean?

    6. AAAli Abdaal1:33:06

       Yeah. One of, one of the ways I think about this, which kind of really h- actually helped shape a lot of decisions in the business, is that if I won the lottery or if I took money out of the equation, how would I wanna be spending my time? And I found that, like, when we had 20 people on the payroll, the ways I was spending my time were radically different to how I wanted to be spending my time.

    7. NCNicolas Cole1:33:27

       Mm-hmm.

    8. AAAli Abdaal1:33:27

       Whereas now that we have basically the same people but, like, half of them are contractors and the other half are, are employees, now I'm spending all my time doing the things I actually want to be doing. Um, and I, I find that this is a good ... So, so really I know, I know people who just really enjoy writing, who a- actually want to do writing. They don't wanna manage an agency of writers. They wanna do the writing 'cause it's fun.

    9. NCNicolas Cole1:33:47

       Right.

    10. AAAli Abdaal1:33:47

        Yeah.

    11. NCNicolas Cole1:33:47

        I was that person, and it took me ... Yeah, it was a hard lesson to learn, like, I don't wanna manage 20 writers, you know? I'm really good at what I do.

    12. AAAli Abdaal1:33:55

        Mm.

    13. NCNicolas Cole1:33:56

        I, I just wanna be paid a premium to do what I do.

    14. AAAli Abdaal1:33:58

        Mm. Nice. Okay, so, so far we talked about kind of five different ways to make seven figures as a writer. We talked about, um, writing as a service, like ghostwriting, and how essentially by just starting for free, doing it for someone really well, they'll g- they're gonna throw money at you and also throw referrals at you because, you know, it's just a thing in the world of business that people who are successful know other people who have made, made lots of money and who need the same thing.

    15. NCNicolas Cole1:34:21

        Mm-hmm.

    16. AAAli Abdaal1:34:22

        So that's just, like, easy e- easy enough, in, in inverted commas. We've talked about productizing your service and turning it into more of like, well, a- a- agency/digital products. We talked about sales copywriting. We had, like, paid, paid newsletters. What's the deal with that?

    17. NCNicolas Cole1:34:36

        Paid newsletters are ... They're both an, an older category and now it's being reinvented, uh, by Substack. So all a paid newsletter is is you just being paid for your ability to scale a certain type of idea, framework, um, news, w- whatever the benefit is to the reader. And so when someone goes, "I'm gonna start a paid newsletter," they think, oh, just because it's a paid thing, I'm going to make money from it. No, that's not the case. That's like saying, "Just because I wrote a book, people are gonna buy it." People don't buy the asset, right? No one buys a book. No one buys a paid newsletter. What the person's buying is an answer to a question. They're buying a certain type of outcome, and the paid newsletter is just a way of delivering that or scaling that. So to me, there's really only two types of paid newsletters that work. You either have timely newsletters where the, the benefit is you're saving me time. So you as the newsletter creator go out there and you're gonna dig through all the information. You're gonna do the research. You're gonna round up all the statistics and the facts-

    18. AAAli Abdaal1:35:47

        Yeah

    19. NCNicolas Cole1:35:47

        ... and, you know. And you're ... I'm paying you to go do all of that time, and you're gonna compress it down for me. And because you're saving me so much time, I'm going to pay you for that.

    20. AAAli Abdaal1:35:57

        Mm, like trends-

    21. NCNicolas Cole1:35:58

        Exactly

    22. AAAli Abdaal1:35:58

        ... the Hustle newsletter. Yeah.

    23. NCNicolas Cole1:35:59

        So that's, that's one side of the barbell. And then the other side of the barbell is the complete opposite. You go, "I want access to quote-unquote insider information. I want expert-level insights." So this person is a domain expert. They're going really deep, and you are ... It's almost like you're paying to get the, "I want coffee with you" at scale, right?

    24. AAAli Abdaal1:36:22

        Yeah.

    25. NCNicolas Cole1:36:22

        So someone's like, "I'm an expert in this thing. You pay me 10 bucks a month, 20 bucks a month, whatever it is, and you're getting access to my frameworks, my-

    26. AAAli Abdaal1:36:30

        Mm

    27. NCNicolas Cole1:36:30

        ... insights, my ... And I'm gonna take you down the rabbit hole."

    28. AAAli Abdaal1:36:33

        Yeah.

    29. NCNicolas Cole1:36:34

        And that's the barbell. You're either in super timely or super timeless and shallow or deep, and any newsletter that sits in the middle ... Like, the biggest mistake is people go, "Subscribe to my newsletter." Nobody cares about your newsletter, right? They care, is this a trade for time, I'm paying you to save me time, or is this a trade for expertise, I'm paying you to shorten my growth curve?

    30. AAAli Abdaal1:36:57

        Ah, yes. So, like Ben Thompson, The Stratechery's of the world-
15. 1:41:12 – 1:47:13

    4 - Paid newsletters

    1. AAAli Abdaal1:41:12

       end of your, on the end of your balance sheet.

    2. NCNicolas Cole1:41:14

       Totally. Yeah, it's di- there's different, uh, models and mental models for each one, and also it just depends on which business you're in and are you, are you okay with the business that you choose, you know? Like for example, I love writing books. You can make millions of dollars writing books, but it's a lot easier to make millions of dollars-

    3. AAAli Abdaal1:41:32

       Selling ads

    4. NCNicolas Cole1:41:34

       ... providing a service-

    5. AAAli Abdaal1:41:34

       Yeah. [laughs]

    6. NCNicolas Cole1:41:35

       ... or, you know-

    7. AAAli Abdaal1:41:35

       Yeah

    8. NCNicolas Cole1:41:35

       ... like being a ghostwriter as a service or productizing yourself or building a course or an education product. So it's possible to do all of these things. It's just is it the thing that you actually wanna spend time doing? And that, to me, is the more important question, you know. Like, are you playing the game that you wanna play?

    9. AAAli Abdaal1:41:53

       Yeah. Yeah, I was, I was, I was speaking to another, um, entrepreneur friend the other day, and, um, uh, one, a, a dilemma that I put to her was that, like, yeah, I feel like, you know, now that we're, you know, this YouTube channel is at least somewhat successful, there's all these, like, different ways of making money, and I just, like, don't really know which w- like, which ones we should be going for. And the analogy that she used was like, she was like, "Oh, you know, the, the way, the way I think of this is that there's all these different, like, money clouds in the air, and you can make any of them rain. But the point is you just wanna figure out which ones align with what you actually want to do and your own values. And then you just ignore all the other 99% of them and just dec- actively decide these are the ones I'm focusing on."

    10. NCNicolas Cole1:42:30

        Yeah. Yeah.

    11. AAAli Abdaal1:42:32

        Sick. Cool. So writing books. How does one make money through writing books? [laughs]

    12. NCNicolas Cole1:42:37

        So the big, the big question with this is self-publishing versus traditional publishing.

    13. AAAli Abdaal1:42:42

        Mm.

    14. NCNicolas Cole1:42:43

        So just for a little context, so most people don't know that a conventional publishing deal goes like this. They give you an advance. That advance is predicated on your existing audience, right? It's often not the quality of the book.

    15. AAAli Abdaal1:42:59

        Mm.

    16. NCNicolas Cole1:42:59

        It's your existing audience. And how the deal structure works is they'll probably give you a, we'll call it 8% on the really low end, 15% on the high-end royalty. So the real way to think about it is the advance they're giving you, they're buying 85% of your book. So imagine your book is a business. An investor comes along and goes, "I want to buy into your business. I'm gonna take 85%, and I'm gonna give you this advance." The advance for most people, I mean, I'll say probably the average is somewhere between 10, 20K all the way to maybe 100, maybe 2 to 50K. Anything above that, you have a giant audience or you're a celebrity.

    17. AAAli Abdaal1:43:46

        Yep.

    18. NCNicolas Cole1:43:46

        Like, period. And anything below that, the reason they're giving you that is because your audience is growing, and they believe that you will be bigger tomorrow than you are today.

    19. AAAli Abdaal1:43:56

        Yeah.

    20. NCNicolas Cole1:43:56

        So it's worth asking the question, if a publisher's willing to give you that, why are they willing to give you that? And if they're gonna give you 100K, that means they think they can make a million.

    21. AAAli Abdaal1:44:08

        Mm.

    22. NCNicolas Cole1:44:09

        So keep that in mind when you're, you know, thinking about your deal. The other side of it is self-publishing. Most people don't know how easy self-publishing is. You can do print on demand on Amazon. You upload your book. Anyone can do that. Every time a book gets sold, you get your share. And if it's a print book, all Amazon does is they extract their printing cost. So say the printing cost is $3, so they're selling the book for 10. They extract the 3, 'cause that's what it costs them to print. They ship it to the person, and then you get your split, something like 65%, you know, or whatever it is. Um, and that's how self-publishing works. And so there's a bit of an irony in the sense that you are only gonna get a publishing deal if you have an audience, but if you have an audience, you could and should just self-publish because you're gonna make more money. And it's important to do the napkin math on how many copies do you need to sell if you're only getting 15% of every sale or if you're getting 65, 70% of every sale on Amazon or 100% on your own site. And after you do the math, you realize you need to sell, like, close to 10 times more books with a traditional deal than if you just self-publish. So oftentimes you will make a lot more money just self-publishing. And the only time, in my opinion, the only time you should take a traditional publishing deal is ... There's three criteria. There's ... It's either a personal development book, it's a personal finance book, and you are swinging for, "I wanna write a New York Times bestseller or Wall Street Journal bestseller." And by the way, the only way that you're gonna hit that list is probably if you're writing a personal development book or a personal finance book, 'cause that's the vast majority, right? And even further, if you want a chance at hitting that, that list, be prepared to spend a lot of your own money as well. So to me, that's the only time you should be playing that game is like, "I've got everything in place. I wanna swing for the fences. I wanna do this thing," right? If not, if you just wanna make money, self-publish.

    23. AAAli Abdaal1:46:16

        A lot of this stuff, like, I mean, I guess maybe not ghostwriting, sales copywriting, prioritizing your service, but certainly paid newsletter and writing books and certainly selling a course and stuff all seem to be predicated on building an audience. Uh, I know this is a huge ass question, but, like, how does one build an audience with online writing? What's the playbook? [laughs]

    24. NCNicolas Cole1:46:37

        The, the starting point is if you wanna build an audience, don't focus on building an audience. I mean, the, the fallacy that people have is, "If a gazillion people are following me, then I can do something," and that's really not how it works. How it works is you are consistently delivering something that's valuable to people, and then they follow you as a result, right? And so ... And, and the other point is just because you have a big number of followers doesn't mean that they're the right kind of followers, right? Doesn't mean that they're the people most likely to then

16. 1:47:13 – 1:49:48

    Moving from 6 figures to 7 figures

    1. NCNicolas Cole1:47:13

       go buy a product or service, right? So if you start by going, "I just want to build an audience," well, if you build an audience around one thing and then you go and launch a product or service or business that is unrelated to that, those people aren't gonna convert, right? So if you're just out here making memes, getting half a million followers, and then you're like, "And here I'm starting a ghostwriting company," like, there's gonna be a mismatch. And so the whole key is you wanna take a ... This is, like, the biggest thing that we share with people in Ship 30, which is you wanna take a data-driven approach. The whole idea behind digital writing is that you've accelerated your feedback loop. So legacy world of writing, Hemingway sits down. He spends four years writing a novel. He sells it to a publisher. He has to wait another 18 months for it to get published, then he has to wait another 12 months for the magazine reviews to come out, and then he has to go to a pub down the street, and then he overhears some person being like, "Hemingway's novel was terrible," right? That's the feedback loop. Whereas today, the feedback loop is I have an idea. I write a tweet, a thread, an atomic essay, a LinkedIn post. I publish it, and I get feedback three minutes later. And if you do that and you constantly take a data-driven approach, every time you write something, you should be learning who is this resonating with? Is this something I wanna keep writing about? Every time you see a breakout data point, you go, "Oh, maybe I should double down on that," right? And you just keep accelerating your niche over and over and over again. I'm sure as you've been making videos over the years, you started to recognize, "Oh, when I make this type of video, the chart goes up and to the right."

    2. AAAli Abdaal1:48:44

       Yeah.

    3. NCNicolas Cole1:48:44

       "And when I make this type of video, it flat lines or it goes down."

    4. AAAli Abdaal1:48:47

       Yeah.

    5. NCNicolas Cole1:48:47

       And intuitively, you and every other creator goes, "I'm gonna keep doing the thing that's working," right? And so what we try and educate people on is just make that decision conscious.

    6. AAAli Abdaal1:48:56

       Hmm.

    7. NCNicolas Cole1:48:57

       Right? From the very beginning, notice what's working, and you can accelerate your feedback loop and your growth curve by just doubling down on the winners and cutting the losers.

    8. AAAli Abdaal1:49:06

       Hmm. Yeah. We g- we get this problem a lot in our, in our YouTuber course where people get so hung up on what's my niche, and I always try and ... Like, the way, the way I describe it is, like, you know, uh, uh, the architect approach versus the archeologist approach, where it's like an architect has the plans for the whole house before they lay a single brick, whereas an, whereas an archeologist, like, kind of goes to one site. They do a bit of digging-

    9. NCNicolas Cole1:49:29

       Oh-

    10. AAAli Abdaal1:49:29

        ... and then they go to another one-

    11. NCNicolas Cole1:49:30

        ... that's a great framework

    12. AAAli Abdaal1:49:30

        ... dig some more, digs ... They go to another site and then are like, "Oh, shit, I've struck some gold." They keep on excavating. They, they, they dig some more. And unless you are, for example, a, uh, sort of in, in the world of YouTube, a kind of Matt D'Avella, where you've been making documentaries about ... documentaries on Netflix for 10 years and you already know how to make a bang

17. 1:49:48 – 1:57:41

    5- Writing books

    1. AAAli Abdaal1:49:48

       video. Even then, he did a lot of archeologisting to get to his niche. Or a Peter McKinnon, where it's like, "I've been a photographer, videographer for 10 years, and now I'm gonna teach the thing." N- at that point, maybe it makes sense to sort of come in with, like, actively thinking like, "I'm gonna stand out in the space of photography tutorials." But for most other people, especially while you're learning the craft and figuring things out, like, you just gotta throw loads of spaghetti at the wall or dig in loads of sites, and the ones that seem to stick, you double down on those and kind of keep your mind open.

    2. NCNicolas Cole1:50:15

       It's the way ... We, we call this lean writing, so just you acknowledging that you are not the genius at the table, right? Just create data points and double down on the winners. It always looks cleaner from the outside. But what most people don't know, okay, so Ryan Holiday is a great example. Ryan Holiday was a marketer, right? And his first book was about marketing, and his second or third book, same thing, was about growth hacker marketing. Then he goes and writes this blog post for Tim Ferriss called Stoicism 101, and the blog post goes crazy, and he gets all these emails, and he gets all this feedback and data saying there's something interesting about this. So he goes, "I'm gonna double down on it," and he writes a book called The Obstacle Is the Way. He even tells this story. He goes, "I didn't get a very big advance for The Obstacle Is the Way," right, 'cause it was new and it was an unproven data point. And the publisher goes, "Well, we're valuing you as a marketing writer, and you wanna write about this new thing." And now he's the best-selling, most well-known stoicism writer in the world, right? So it looks really clean from the outside. They're like, "Oh, you constructed this from the beginning." That's not true. He literally just created a data point, saw that it won, and doubled down on it.

    3. AAAli Abdaal1:51:26

       Yeah.

    4. NCNicolas Cole1:51:26

       Most people don't know, same thing about Mark Manson.

    5. AAAli Abdaal1:51:28

       Yeah.

    6. NCNicolas Cole1:51:29

       Right? Mark Manson didn't sit down and go, "I'm gonna write this insanely amazing, bestselling book," you know, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, right?

    7. AAAli Abdaal1:51:35

       Yeah.

    8. NCNicolas Cole1:51:36

       But what happened is the publisher goes to him and goes, "Well, you have a big blog. You have a big audience. Uh, you should write a book." He goes, "Great. What should it be about?" They go, "We don't know. What's your biggest, most viral blog post?" He goes, "Well, it's a blog post called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck," right? And what did he do? He just expanded the blog post into a book. There are so many examples of lean writing out in the world, and it's just from the outside, as consumers, we think it's this beautifully orchestrated-

    9. AAAli Abdaal1:52:02

       Yeah

    10. NCNicolas Cole1:52:03

        ... everything's perfect from the beginning. It's not.

    11. AAAli Abdaal1:52:05

        Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think the, the other cool thing there is that even though Ryan Holiday and Mark Manson are, like, decamillionaires by this point from their various things, still most people have not heard of them.

    12. NCNicolas Cole1:52:16

        Yeah.

    13. AAAli Abdaal1:52:16

        And it's just like, you, you know, I was, I was, I was at a dinner the other day, and I just casually throw the name Jordan Peterson, and, like, half the people are like, "Who's that?" I was like, "What?" [laughs]

    14. NCNicolas Cole1:52:24

        [laughs]

    15. AAAli Abdaal1:52:25

        Come on. [laughs] And when I mentioned Ryan Holiday, like, amongst, like, normal people, like, almost no one has heard of him.

    16. NCNicolas Cole1:52:31

        Yeah.

    17. AAAli Abdaal1:52:31

        And it's just like this guy's, like, stupidly successful and just, like, making tons and tons and tons of money doing the thing that he loves and working four hours a day and spending time with his family on his farm. Decamillionaire probably, and, like, most people haven't heard of him, which is, like, very, like, uh, a, a comforting thought-

    18. NCNicolas Cole1:52:45

        Yeah

    19. AAAli Abdaal1:52:45

        ... that you don't actually need to be, like, Ed Sheeran levels of famous to, to make loads of money and have a really successful career.

    20. NCNicolas Cole1:52:51

        I was gonna say, there's, there's a positive takeaway from that-

    21. AAAli Abdaal1:52:54

        Mm

    22. NCNicolas Cole1:52:54

        ... which is you don't need that many people. Paid newsletter, great example, right? You don't need that many people to start making six figures as a writer, you know? If you're self-publishing books, you don't need that many people buying your book for it to start being really profitable for you. So that's part of what I love. Again, no one, no one educated me on that. I had to figure a lot of this out on my own. But what I love sharing with other writers is realizing that you don't need to be JK Rowling to live an awesome life. You know, you don't need to be this insanely bestselling, "I smash all these records." Success is a lot easier if you just focus on a small number of people-

    23. AAAli Abdaal1:53:30

        Yeah

    24. NCNicolas Cole1:53:30

        ... focusing on solving their problems, answering their questions, and using writing as the vehicle for scaling that information.

    25. AAAli Abdaal1:53:37

        So let's say someone's listening to this and they're like, "Cool, I wanna get started with writing online," um, and they might have come across the advice that I was actually peddling a few years ago of, like, start a blog. How do you feel about starting a blog these days? [laughs]

    26. NCNicolas Cole1:53:50

        Ah, my fave- my favorite question. Um, blogging is the digital equivalent of being a legacy writer. You know? It's you think ... Again, what is a blog? It's your website. You think you're the important part. I ... There's a saying I love repeating to, uh, writers in Ship 30, which is, "You are not the main character of your story. The reader is the main character."

    27. AAAli Abdaal1:54:14

        Nice. I like that.

    28. NCNicolas Cole1:54:14

        And the-

    29. AAAli Abdaal1:54:15

        Gonna steal that

    30. NCNicolas Cole1:54:15

        ... the moment you realize that, you realize that you are in the business of serving the reader, right? That is literally what you are being paid to do. And so a blog is like, well, what is that? It's the writer going, "I'm super special. Here's my fonts. Here's my website. Here's my writings. Here's my color scheme. Here's my pictures," right? The reader doesn't care about any of that, point A. They care about what you can do for them. Point B is there's no distribution flywheel. So how is anyone gonna find your writing? The only people who know your, about your website or your blog are your mom and your dog, right? [laughs] So it's ... You have no mechanism f- to get in front of readers where-
18. 1:57:41 – 2:05:20

    Lean writing

    1. NCNicolas Cole1:57:41

       time you show up with a blog post, that's what you're doing. You're like, "Hey, I throw really great parties, too," and everyone's like, "No, I wanna stay at the pub. It's amazing here."

    2. AAAli Abdaal1:57:48

       Mm.

    3. NCNicolas Cole1:57:48

       Right? Everyone wants to stay in Twitter. Everyone wants to stay in LinkedIn. So you should be writing in the environment, and then sure, your site is where your best work can live, but that's not what's gonna drive the result.

    4. AAAli Abdaal1:58:01

       Hmm. Okay. So write on Twitter, write on LinkedIn. Am I just ... Okay, so let's say I'm writing on LinkedIn and I'm like ... Okay, so firstly, how do, how do I decide? Twi- Twitter versus LinkedIn versus Quora versus Medium. I know this kind of changes over time, but right now-

    5. NCNicolas Cole1:58:15

       Yeah

    6. AAAli Abdaal1:58:15

       ... what's the snapshot?

    7. NCNicolas Cole1:58:15

       They, they go through different, uh, peaks and valleys, but, uh, both either are great. Uh, Twitter and LinkedIn I think have the best distribution right now. Um, but it doesn't ... To me, it doesn't really matter either/or. I love when people go, "I don't think my niche exists here." It's like there's hundreds of millions of people on these platforms. It exists. It's just you haven't figured out yet how to reach people.

    8. AAAli Abdaal1:58:38

       Hmm.

    9. NCNicolas Cole1:58:39

       Which leads to the second question fallacy, which then the person goes, "Yeah, but I can't reach them unless I have an audience."

    10. AAAli Abdaal1:58:45

        Hmm.

    11. NCNicolas Cole1:58:45

        Okay? Social platforms have changed. People don't understand how a social platform works. It doesn't matter if you have 100,000 followers or you have 10 followers. What happens every time you write something is the social platform feeds it to a small number of people. So it goes, "We're gonna show this to 25 people," and based on the ratio, based on the number of people in that small group that interact, if it is above the majority, we're gonna show it to more people, and if it's below, we're not gonna show it to as many people. So that's how you have someone who, you know, you, me, anyone who has a larger following, it doesn't matter if you have 100K followers. 100K people aren't seeing your content. The only way that it's getting distributed is if the thing that you wrote keeps crossing the next threshold where the platform goes, "This is worth being shown to more people," which means everyone's on a level playing field. You don't need a huge audience. It's just about the quality of what you're creating.

    12. AAAli Abdaal1:59:43

        How do you figure out what to create? Like, someone listening to this is like, "Oh, okay, so I, I guess I should, I should write on Twitter. What, what the hell am I gonna write on Twitter or LinkedIn?" [laughs]

    13. NCNicolas Cole1:59:50

        So we have a ... There's a really great, like, beginner framework that we, uh, share with people, uh, right in the first week of Ship 30, which we call for who so that. So every time you sit down to write, who are you creating for so that they can do what? Okay, so before you write a single word, at the top of your page, you should write for who so that. Okay, so for who? So this is writing advice for beginners so that they can outcome, outcome, outcome. So that they can build an audience, accumulate tens of millions of views, make their first dollar online, right? And if you just start from the for who so that over and over again, you're in great territory. And the thing that I, uh, is important to remind people is it's not that you make that decision once and then that's the only thing you can do. This is not a marriage decision, right? Seven years ago, I was writing about bodybuilding on the internet. Nobody cares now. That's fine. Uh, you can change over time, but if you start every single thing that you create with the for who so that framework, then you can test different audiences. You can test different outcomes, and then you take that data-driven lean writing approach, and you go, "Well, every time I write for who so that here, it performs well, and every time I write for who so that over here, it doesn't perform well." Well, what should you do? Well, double down on my winner, cut my loser.

    14. AAAli Abdaal2:01:14

        Mm.

    15. NCNicolas Cole2:01:15

        Right? And all of a sudden it removes all this pressure of you have to sit down and be the genius in the room and go, "What's your niche?" Just let the data tell you, right? The data told Ryan Holiday stoicism is where the opportunity is. The data told Mark Manson, hey, you know, life advice and the subtle art of not giving a fuck is where the opportunity is. Just follow the data.

    16. AAAli Abdaal2:01:35

        Yeah. Yeah, I guess at that point peop- like, a, a question that I often get is that, "But what if I don't like what the data tells me?"

    17. NCNicolas Cole2:01:43

        Hmm.

    18. AAAli Abdaal2:01:43

        "What if, like, what if I don't want to pander, pander to the audience?" kind of thing, and like, "What if I actually do want to do all this other, these other things that I'm more interested in?"

    19. NCNicolas Cole2:01:52

        You can do that.

    20. AAAli Abdaal2:01:53

        Yeah.

    21. NCNicolas Cole2:01:53

        You know? Is ... [laughs] Like, again, you have the freedom, and an important thing to remember is just because something performs well doesn't mean you have to do that. So I've written things that have gone viral that then the next day I was like, "That's cool, but that's not really what I wanna write about."

    22. AAAli Abdaal2:02:11

        Hmm.

    23. NCNicolas Cole2:02:11

        Okay, great. Push it to the side. Create some new data points. See what happens, right? That's ... Again, it's not a marriage decision. You can keep experimenting. You can keep evolving.

    24. AAAli Abdaal2:02:21

        Yeah. I have a friend who is doing this kind of method with her YouTube channel, and she's kind of thrown some spaghetti at the wall, seen what sticks, doubled down on the stuff that sticks while still kind of doing a l- little bit more spaghetti throwing. Uh, and she had a video go viral on a topic that she didn't really ... She was like, "Uh, I mean, the video's gone viral, but, like, I actually don't think I want to make videos on that particular topic." But the concern is, have I ... I- I have now gained an audience of, like, 10,000 pe- an extra, uh, like, h- 25% of my subscriber count is now, has now come from that video, so therefore, like, am I kind of shooting myself in the foot by ignoring that, that segment of the market? And I guess I, I, I kind of had this qu- problem when I, like, a year into my YouTube channel, I made a video about how I take notes on my iPad Pro, and all of a sudden, half my subscribers were from that, from that one video. And I was like, "Damn, I used to be a how to get into med school channel, and now I'm a freaking tech, tech YouTuber? What the hell is going on there?" And often found this struggle between, like, trying to imagine the mass of the audience and be like, "Oh, but, like, some of them are, like, kind of 13-year-old girls doing their, like, school exams and wanting to learn how to study a bit harder and be motivated, and the others are the 38-year-old tech bros wanting to l- learn about the latest iPad.

    25. NCNicolas Cole2:03:33

        Mm-hmm.

    26. AAAli Abdaal2:03:33

        What the hell is going on?" Like, how, how would you approach that kind of thing?

    27. NCNicolas Cole2:03:36

        Yeah, there's ... That's why so much of this is like being exposed to different ways of thinking, because these are all just decisions. One of the things that Cora taught me, and I love this framework, is the size of the question dictates the size of the audience.

    28. AAAli Abdaal2:03:52

        Hmm. Nice.

    29. NCNicolas Cole2:03:52

        So for example, how big is the audience of person who wants to get into med school? That is way smaller than the size of audience that goes, "How can I improve my note-taking ability?"

    30. AAAli Abdaal2:04:07

        Hmm.
19. 2:05:20 – 2:06:55

    How to find your platform

    1. AAAli Abdaal2:05:20

       school admissions anymore, but I used to seven years ago when I made money off the back of that.

    2. NCNicolas Cole2:05:23

       Right.

    3. AAAli Abdaal2:05:23

       And now it's just like, "Oh, whatevs."

    4. NCNicolas Cole2:05:25

       Yeah.

    5. AAAli Abdaal2:05:25

       Like, I guess, like, you don't really care to write about bodybuilding anymore.

    6. NCNicolas Cole2:05:28

       Exactly.

    7. AAAli Abdaal2:05:28

       Even if it maybe started to do well, you'd be like, "Hey, actually, I, I've got different interests than-"

    8. NCNicolas Cole2:05:33

       This is my thing.

    9. AAAli Abdaal2:05:33

       Yeah.

    10. NCNicolas Cole2:05:34

        Yeah, and you have to ... You wanna do the thing ... You're always gonna be more successful when you do the thing that you actually wanna do. So that's why, again, you kind of have to divorce yourself from the, well, just 'cause it's getting more views doesn't mean that it's better, you know? What's ... I, I like thinking of it as which is connected to your business?

    11. AAAli Abdaal2:05:52

        Hmm.

    12. NCNicolas Cole2:05:53

        Right? If, if your business is, like, YouTube, although it changes with CPM and stuff, but, like, with YouTube, it's more views equals more money.

    13. AAAli Abdaal2:06:01

        Hmm.

    14. NCNicolas Cole2:06:02

        Right? So I would understand someone going, "I wanna optimize for views."

    15. AAAli Abdaal2:06:07

        Yep.

    16. NCNicolas Cole2:06:07

        MrBeast makes very str- [laughs] strategic decisions to optimize for views, right?

    17. AAAli Abdaal2:06:12

        Yeah.

    18. NCNicolas Cole2:06:12

        But if your business is, uh, you know, I wanna teach you how to start writing online, or I wanna teach you how to become a ghostwriter-

    19. AAAli Abdaal2:06:18

        Hmm

    20. NCNicolas Cole2:06:18

        ... right, you actually don't care about views. Views is a pointless metric. I care whether people are engaging, commenting, what questions do they have?

    21. AAAli Abdaal2:06:26

        Hmm.

    22. NCNicolas Cole2:06:26

        Am I answering the right questions? Am I moving those people into some sort of education that's gonna help them?

    23. AAAli Abdaal2:06:31

        Yeah.

    24. NCNicolas Cole2:06:32

        Right? So you have to understand which metric and which lever is tied to the actual business that you're in.

    25. AAAli Abdaal2:06:36

        Yeah. And, uh, I guess when you're ... What, what, what do you do when you're starting out where you don't yet have that business?

    26. NCNicolas Cole2:06:42

        Da- You just test-

    27. AAAli Abdaal2:06:43

        Yeah

    28. NCNicolas Cole2:06:43

        ... data points, right? 'Cause what I always like paying attention to is ... So views and, and likes is kind of which way is the wind blowing. Is there interest in this direction or this direction? But comments

20. 2:06:55 – 2:14:40

    How to decide what to write

    1. NCNicolas Cole2:06:55

       are where you really start seeing what people need help with.

    2. AAAli Abdaal2:06:59

       Hmm.

    3. NCNicolas Cole2:07:00

       So one of the big things I like pointing out to people is if one person comments on your video with a question, the average person or the average creator just goes, "Oh, someone commented," and then they, like, walk away and do whatever. But that one question is your first potential customer.

    4. AAAli Abdaal2:07:15

       Hmm.

    5. NCNicolas Cole2:07:16

       DM them. Talk to them. Ask them, "What do you need help with?" And if you just start interacting with those people, they're literally going to tell you the business to build, 'cause they're literally saying, "If you just solve this problem, I will give you money."

    6. AAAli Abdaal2:07:28

       What do you ... I'm, I'm just throwing random questions at you here, 'cause this is great. Um, what do you think are, like ... Um, okay, so if someone has a field of expertise like you ... I mean, at, at this point, you've been writing for 10-plus years, and so it's easy enough for you to give advice on writing. What if someone listening to this is maybe, I don't know, early 20s, just graduated university, started their first job, and feels like, "I don't really have any skills. I don't really have any passions. I guess I, I go home and, like, watch TV, but, like, as everyone else does. Like, what ... Like, how do, how do I figure out what ... " But, but they want to build this business on, on the internet, and there's this sort of gap between, like, where they're at and seeing people who are experts allegedly sharing opinions on stuff where they feel like they don't have any expertise to share opinions on stuff.

    7. NCNicolas Cole2:08:14

       Hmm. So, uh, in Ship 30, we call this the two-year test, although it can also be the two-day test or two-hour test, you know? When you were in fourth grade, you didn't want to learn from people who were in college. People who were in college seemed like adults to you.

    8. AAAli Abdaal2:08:31

       Hmm.

    9. NCNicolas Cole2:08:31

       You know? They seemed like your parents. Who you wanted to learn from was the fifth grader. 'Cause you were like, "Hey, what's fifth grade like?"

    10. AAAli Abdaal2:08:37

        Mm-hmm.

    11. NCNicolas Cole2:08:37

        You wanted to learn from the person who's just a little bit ahead of you. And so when you're thinking about things to share, you wanna use this two ... We call it the two-year test, where it's what are all the things that you've learned over the past two years? What are all the experiences you've had? What are all the pivotal moments? What are the lessons, you know, the mistakes, the tips you would give?

    12. AAAli Abdaal2:08:54

        Mm-hmm.

    13. NCNicolas Cole2:08:54

        Right? And all you're doing is you are creating for the version of yourself two years ago.

    14. AAAli Abdaal2:08:59

        Yeah.

    15. NCNicolas Cole2:09:00

        You are the fifth grader telling the fourth grader, "Here's what you can expect."

    16. AAAli Abdaal2:09:03

        Yeah.

    17. NCNicolas Cole2:09:03

        Right? And if you just do that, that is the cure for imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is you trying to do the two-year test forward. You're like, "I'm gonna pretend I'm two years in the future." You're not there yet, right? Your ideal reader or viewer or listener is two years behind you or two hours behind you. What did you just learn how to do? Great, turn around and pass it to the person who doesn't know how to do that thing yet. That's the easiest solution.

    18. AAAli Abdaal2:09:28

        Yeah. It's, it, it's great how a lot of the, this stuff really converges on the YouTube advice as well.

    19. NCNicolas Cole2:09:32

        It's the same thing.

    20. AAAli Abdaal2:09:33

        'Cause like, like, like the thing I tell people is like, if, if you're struggling with your niche, figure out what have you learned in the last three years or five years or 10 years, depending on how old you are, um, that you could potentially teach to someone who's in, who's in that position. And so even now, even though, like with, with me, I, I get emails from people in their 30s and 40s and 50s and stuff being like ... Or people coming up to the street of all ages, um, saying that your videos are helpful. I find it very hard to imagine what I could possibly say that would be useful to a 45-year-old with kids, 'cause it's like, what the hell do I know about [laughs] productivity for people with kids? And I just, still just imagine myself speaking to someone who's, like, 25.

    21. NCNicolas Cole2:10:06

        Mm-hmm.

    22. AAAli Abdaal2:10:07

        Um, but there's that thing, I think, in, in 12 Immutable Laws of Marketing that, that the target is not the market. Like, you can speak to one person, but actually your market could be a lot bigger than that.

    23. NCNicolas Cole2:10:16

        Yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a great sales copywriting adage, which is if you write something for everyone, you write something for no one. You know? You- Your goal is to write or create something that is so specific it's universal to all the people that are like that person. So whenever you're thinking of, "I wanna build an audience," you shouldn't think of a mass of people. You should think of one person.

    24. AAAli Abdaal2:10:40

        Mm.

    25. NCNicolas Cole2:10:40

        What is their name? Where do they live? What problems do they have? What are they interested in? And if you're clear about that, you're gonna attract all the other people who are like that person. But if you just think, "I wanna build an audience," you're in the mindset of, how do I get everyone? Y- First of all, the more you try and get everyone, the more you get no one. Second of all, you don't need everyone. It's what you were saying. You don't need Ed Sheeran level of success, right? You just need 1,000 people. It's the famous essay, A Thousand True Fans. Or Legion, I think, was the one who wrote A Hundred True Fans, right? You just ... You don't need as many people as you think.

    26. AAAli Abdaal2:11:15

        Yeah, it's like, um, I often ... When, when people ask about this niche thing, uh, th- there's a story that Tim Ferriss told where he was like ... He, he, he really struggled with writing The 4-Hour Work Week, and then he decided to write it in a Gmail compose window to, like, two of his friends.

    27. NCNicolas Cole2:11:30

        Exactly.

    28. AAAli Abdaal2:11:30

        And it's that ... That, that just made it so easier [laughs] so much easier, 'cause it feels like you're writing to a single person rather than trying to imagine a, "Well, analytics tell me my audience is, like, 15 to 54, living in, like, the UK, the US, Australia, India, China-

    29. NCNicolas Cole2:11:43

        Yeah. [laughs]

    30. AAAli Abdaal2:11:43

        ... probably China." Uh, like-
21. 2:14:40 – 2:17:05

    What if I don’t have expertise?

    1. AAAli Abdaal2:14:40

       the thing I tell people for YouTube is do the, one video every week for two years, and I guarantee that'll change your life, but I can't put any numbers on it. I can't tell you whether you'll get 10K, 100K, a million followers, or even if you'll get monetized at all. But I can just tell you it'll change your life, and that kind of more like long-term thinking without really being wedded to a particular outcome is at least how I approach the YouTube stuff. How, how do you think about that for, I guess, Twitter, LinkedIn?

    2. NCNicolas Cole2:15:02

       Yeah, I mean, so if we really wanna talk about it as a, like, hedge on your time, energy, and effort, the best, the best measure for success in writing online is just thinking about building your library. So every time someone comes to you with a question, every time someone goes, "Hey, what do you think about X?" Notice how often you repeat yourself. So when you go have a coffee meeting, how many times do you say the same tidbits about yourself? How many times do you explain, "Well, this is my thought process on making videos. This is how I think about solving these problems," right? Every time you're saying that, you are manually doing the work.

    3. AAAli Abdaal2:15:44

       Mm.

    4. NCNicolas Cole2:15:45

       Writing online or making videos or having a podcast is your ability to scale that in the sense where now every time someone asks you that question, you don't have to repeat yourself. You go, "I, I already wrote about it over here." So remove the audience, remove the how many followers, remove the email list, remove the money. Even still, just creating things on the internet allows you to scale yourself digitally. So then the question just goes, do you think that there's benefit in scaling yourself on the internet? Everyone's gonna go, "Well, yeah, of course there is," 'cause now you have a library that you can point to over and over and over again. That's like the greatest hedge on it all.

    5. AAAli Abdaal2:16:21

       Yeah.

    6. NCNicolas Cole2:16:21

       It's not wasted time or effort.

    7. AAAli Abdaal2:16:23

       What sort of success stories have s- have you seen from people that you know who have done the writing online thing?

    8. NCNicolas Cole2:16:28

       Oh, huge. I mean, we have tons coming out of Ship 30 now where it's like they take the frameworks. We have so many people who have built audiences bigger than me on Twitter. That's best case scenario. I love seeing that because then that proves, hey, these things that we're teaching, they work. You just have to put them into place and, you know, we've had people get tens of millions of views, insanely viral Twitter threads, build audiences of 100K, 200K, 300K, launch their own products, start making money on the internet, made their first five grand, 10 grand, 20 grand, 50 grand.

    9. AAAli Abdaal2:16:57

       Mm.

    10. NCNicolas Cole2:16:57

        Like, it all ... It is all possible, but for me, the reason why, like, someone can build

22. 2:17:05 – 2:51:07

    Identifying your target market

    1. NCNicolas Cole2:17:05

       a bigger audience faster than me almost always has to do with the category they're playing in.

    2. AAAli Abdaal2:17:12

       Mm.

    3. NCNicolas Cole2:17:12

       Right? So for me, if my business is writing education, I don't care if I have 50K followers or 100K or 200K. I care about what is the conversion rate of the number of people who come in, they learn about these frameworks, and then they come over and decide to participate in the business, right? If someone else goes, "I wanna write about personal finance," or, "I wanna write about personal development," you can easily build an audience 10 times bigger than me, and that's fine. But I hope that you connect it to a business that's related to that audience.

    4. AAAli Abdaal2:17:48

       Yeah.

    5. NCNicolas Cole2:17:48

       Right? So it all depends on what game you wanna play and how are you measuring that success.

    6. AAAli Abdaal2:17:52

       Mm.

    7. NCNicolas Cole2:17:52

       But it's ... All of this stuff is ... You know, when I was in school, my teachers, which I always found weird and ironic, but they always said, "Not everyone can become a writer." And I kind of sat in class and I was like, "Well, then why are we all here?" And I think legacy writing has this elitism to it where it's like not everyone can do it, and you have to suffer, and you have to stack rejection letters, and, you know, you're al- you only are rewarded if you're brilliant. And like, it's ... There's all this red tape.

    8. AAAli Abdaal2:18:19

       Yeah.

    9. NCNicolas Cole2:18:19

       And the world of digital writing now is anyone can become a writer. All of these skills are easy to learn, and it's possible. You just need to invest the time to learn some of these skills and put them into practice.

    10. AAAli Abdaal2:18:31

        Fantastic. Cole, thank you so much. I think this is a good place to, to end this. Th- there is still so much to talk about, category design, your, uh-

    11. NCNicolas Cole2:18:38

        Next time

    12. AAAli Abdaal2:18:38

        ... the snow, snow leopards and all that kind of stuff, which I, I read recently, which was sick.

    13. NCNicolas Cole2:18:42

        Oh, cool.

    14. AAAli Abdaal2:18:42

        Um, yeah. Where can people learn more about you? Where can people find you?

    15. NCNicolas Cole2:18:46

        Uh, Twitter is probably the easiest, uh, uh, point now. Nicolascole77. Um, my we- See, I don't even point people to my website.

    16. AAAli Abdaal2:18:54

        Yeah. [laughs]

    17. NCNicolas Cole2:18:54

        There you go. And, uh, and if anyone wants to start writing online, take, uh, the next cohort of Ship 30 for 30.

    18. AAAli Abdaal2:18:59

        Good stuff. And we'll put links to all of those in the video description, and perhaps you could even hook us up with a discount code or something for Ship 30.

    19. NCNicolas Cole2:19:05

        I got you.

    20. AAAli Abdaal2:19:05

        Nice. We'll put all of that in the video description and the show notes, wherever you're watching or listening to this. So we'll definitely do a round two next time we're in the same geographical location again. Uh, I'm planning to visit the US sometime in the new year, so we'll, we'll hook up.

    21. NCNicolas Cole2:19:15

        Let me know. We'll get Dickie together. We'll do it in Miami.

    22. AAAli Abdaal2:19:17

        Oh, that'd be so good. Um, thank you so much. This has been wonderful.

    23. NCNicolas Cole2:19:19

        Thanks, man.

    24. AAAli Abdaal2:19:20

        Cheers. All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching. Uh, do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.

Episode duration: 2:19:51