How to create your dream job

This letter is written in 2 parts. The first part gives a brief overview of the daily routine of a creative entrepreneur since you must understand that creatives cannot work like an industrial worker and yet still need to maximize their output, the second part is a more general outline on how to build an audience online so you can channel this routine to create your dream job.

At this point, if you've been reading my newsletter for a while (over 17,000 subscribers now!), you know how much I emphasize thinking creatively and pursuing entrepreneurship.

I've talked about some of the mental barriers that keeps people stuck in a 9-5 employee state of mind where their output for 8 hours can be less than a creative's output of 2 hours.

Let's talk about how this can be achieved practically.

The routine

Mornings are for building

Afternoons are for consuming

Evenings are for emptying your mind

Let's break this down.

The whole point of owning your own business is to work less, earn more and have more fun.

As a consequence, you don't want to be stuck inside your own business where you have to work 16 hour days just to keep the lights on.

To combat this, a creative will dedicate the first few hours of his day (first 2 hours for me) to the highest leverage, needle-moving tasks he can find.

Waking up early is a definite. Get the highest leverage task of your business done before the world wakes up. For most online businesses, this will be creating organic content.

Afternoons should be spent drowning in information which has to do with your exact roadblock right now.

This doesn't necessarily have to be business related but it should be directly applicable to you right now, otherwise it's just learning for the sake of learning.

I personally also use afternoons for meetings where I don't have to play an active role.

Evenings are for relaxing, journalling and assimilation of everything you learned that day. I know this sounds snow-flake but if you don't write down this stuff, including exactly what you have to do in tomorrow's lever-moving time block, the days will start flying by and those lever-moving tasks will not be done.

Writing is the highest leverage activity

Everybody would love to have an audience so that they get paid for doing what they love.

It makes complete sense, even established businesses are trying hard to create a following online.

For solo creators, there is no saturation, because your personality and interests separate you from everybody else

But to create that audience, you need to put yourself out on the Internet via video or writing.

Having done both, I recommend writing for beginners.

It has many advantages.

You can do it anonymously. You don't ever have to show your face if you don't want to.

It's less resource intensive and more flexible. You can Tweet from your phone anywhere whereas you usually have to be in a certain environment with certain equipment to film videos/reels/etc.

But if everybody wants to create an audience through their writing (certainly feels that way on X or LinkedIn), how do you stand out?

What separates good writing from bad writing?

Having earned thousands of dollars from my writing, there’s a lot of nuance I can go into about the difference between good writing and otherwise.

But in broad terms, good writing is persuasive writing. It polarizes, it causes an emotional reaction. This can be a positive or a negative feeling.

It draws certain people to your brand while pushing others away.

How do you write persuasively though? Do some people just have “it” and others don’t?

In my experience, the biggest difference between good writers and bad writers is volume.

Not vocabulary, not domain knowledge… volume.

You write often → You get good

That’s about it really.

By now, you should have started to get a mental construct of how to create your dream job on the Internet.

Your first and most important task is to create an audience.

To create an audience, you must write persuasively.

To write persuasively, you must write a lot.

Lots of tweets, lots of threads, lots of LinkedIn posts, lots of newsletters.

Don’t feel like you have to limit yourself to just one niche. You’re a human being with lots of interests, other people who have the same interests as you will be attracted to you via multiple shared interests.

Once you create an audience, you can do whatever you want.

Run ads, sell a product or a mix of both.

From here is where you have fun.

Best of luck