This time one year ago I was in beginner hell.

For those who don’t know, beginner hell is that first 3-6 month period as a writer or a creator, an entrepreneur, an artist, or somebody looking to do meaningful creative work and maybe earn a side-income from, where you just feel fucking lost.

No idea what you are doing.

No engagement.

No subscribers.

No tribe of people to support your body of work.

Your personal brand is invisible.

Your content feels like it’s screaming out into the void.

You question your own sanity with your morning americano, while you sit down to write before your day job, when every long-form post you publish gets only 5 likes (3 of them coming from friends and family).

Most people give up just before they develop the skills necessary to strike gold.

And you only need to strike gold once to escape beginner hell for good.

If you’re smart, you might be thinking:

Is this just a transformation that creative people keep being sold by gurus who are half-decent at marketing?

Who promise you can write about your interests online, build an audience doing so, and even earn from it... who themselves have never written about anything other than “how to grow an audience” in their content?

I am proof that this is not true.

And I’m going to give you everything I can to help you.

In this essay I want to do some profound thinking alongside you. Specifically, about why beginner hell exists, what exactly keeps most people stuck there from anywhere between 3 months to an entire lifetime... and the full plan for escaping it.

In 3-6 months.

Like how I did, starting from zero, with no audience, no writing experience, and no fucking clue what I was doing.

A lot has changed since then :)

Let’s begin!

I - The Content Abyss

If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.

- Steve Jobs.

Beginner hell is really just a knowledge problem.

How so?

There is a small gap in your understanding that is stopping you from making the right actions.

It’s a skill issue.

Because is it not knowledge that dictates your actions? And actions are what will launch you out of beginner hell, will they not?

If you can fill that gap, and change you how act even just a little, you will launch yourself out of beginner hell, and into the next phase of your skill development.

I write one essay each week.

It’s my Substack newsletter. The word “essay” sounds less salesy to me.

I spend 30-60 minutes writing each morning. Usually that means I’m writing one section per day until it’s done (roughly 2000 words).

That is my whole writing/content system for attracting 100-300 email subs per day (500-800 on peak days), bringing in more sponsorship opportunities than I know what to do with, and earning me 1-2k on top of my day job.

All by writing for 30-60 minutes every morning.

(I made over 4k from one newsletter I wrote last week).

I joined Substack in May 2025.

Before that, I had never written content before.

I had never even touched AI until I started writing content.

Every week did in fact feel like I was talking to a brick wall, but within 2 months I escaped beginner hell.

Escaping can take anywhere from 2 weeks to 20 years.

I don’t wish to scare you saying that.

In fact, this newsletter should excite you quite a lot.

I shared all those stats with you just a second ago because, firstly, it’s social proof, so I can give you a reason to trust me. Everybody wants to make money online, and a select few people do wish to make money by writing essays like this one.

But it also shared my stats to prove that this works if you stick with it.

And keep iterating with trial and error, with the right principles by your side, until it does end up working (which won’t take long).

I’m going to give you every one of those “right principles,” too.

If I can figure this out at 22, you can too.

Let me relieve you of some pain instantly:

• You can ignore the “10 tips for optimizing growth” posts - They usually focus on low return-on-investment (ROI) tactics. Not the timeless principles and skills that will help you in the long-term, when context and obstacles inevitably come your way.

• Ignore everyone asking for “follow for follow,” it earns you nothing - People will subscribe to you for your content if they believe it can help them change their life for the better.

• Never prioritize volume over quality - Do less if less equals better. Posting 2 long-form posts per week might be “optimal for growth”... but content that people wake up excited to read each week is what attracts more of those people (content people engage with gets pushed, and people only engage with engaging content).

• Forget the fucking algorithm - A terrible piece of content can get pushed in front of a million people and attract no attention because it’s terrible. That’s why we use persuasion principles, human psychology, and attention mechanisms, to make a piece of writing engaging and thus enjoyable to read. Think about what the word “engaging” actually means, in relation to the word “engagement” too for that matter.

• No tricks, strategies, hacks, checklists - You need timeless principles that you can make your own. Most checklists (and I say “most”) won’t work long-term because algorithms and the types of content people want to read will change. I like checklists for helping you systematize and not forget to follow the timeless high-impact writing principles, which I will talk about more later :)

And one more thing...

No amount of profile optimization, sucking up to the algorithm, or posting consistently with a set frequency will EVER fix terrible writing you couldn’t pay someone to read.

We have now annihilated most of the generic (terrible) growth advice you will see online.

Let’s get to the good stuff.

Final Warning:

Early-bird pricing for The Profound Writer ends July 21st.

You have 2 days left until the 50% off discount disappears.

This is the last newsletter promoting this discount.

When it’s gone, it’s gone.

If you want a practical writing system for building an audience talking about your genuine interests and profound ideas, I’ll see you inside.

Sales promo over, back to the essay.

II - The Only Way To Escape Is Great Writing

A large, rapid-growing audience is a by-product of content people love.

Makes sense, right?

People don’t subscribe to you for your offer. Why would they? If they loved your digital product so much they would just pay you for it.

It’s content that attracts an audience, which you can then monetize with your offer.

Lots of business terms here, I know I know.

In simple words, you are literally just helping people through value exchange.

People will always read your content, no matter what, if they trust that you will be the person that can help them change their life for the better.

Content, newsletters, essays, long-form posts... whatever you want to call it.

It’s writing.

I’m being specific about long-form writing here, like I usually do.

Short-form feels a bit contaminated to me at the minute, so I avoid it. I use it to test ideas only when I feel like it.

For your work to be seen as valuable, you need people, and you also need those people to perceive your work as valuable.

How do you do that?

The first thing you need is attention. Nobody can deem your work as valuable if they can’t see it, or know that it even exists.

The second is content.

Writing and posting content is how you attract attention because all the attention is online (look around, everyone is on their phone, and you’re on a screen reading this).

Once you have captured attention with your content, you then convert that attention into interest, by using timeless high-impact writing principles, that encourage people to perceive the perspectives you have to offer inside of your content as valuable, so that they subscribe to you, and keep coming back for more.

You can read this post if you want help with understanding how people actually end up seeing ideas, things, or people as valuable.

It will teach you how you can give people a reason to care about anything you do or say (hint hint, that includes what you write about your content). Go read it before you make up your mind too quickly thanks to heuristics, and go comment on my YouTube saying that persuasion is unethical and bad.

So content is the answer to escaping beginner hell.

Content is how you attract people to your work, your offer, your interests, and your profound ideas.

If you were anything like me when I was starting out, as a total newbie, who had never tried online business before, and who had no interest in starting a “personal brand” (as cringy as I find that word), who also had no clue what to be fucking doing...

Start with content.

Just write one 2000 word newsletter every week. That’s all you need to start growing. Nothing more than that.

Once you start growing, you can figure everything else out while you grow.

A personal example, to flesh out my point:

I made my first digital product 6 months after I started writing one newsletter per week. I expanded upon one of my highest-performing long-form posts on the topic of reading, and turned it into a reading digital product.

Then, I followed the same process once more, and I made my self-education digital product.

Now I have my writing course. You get the idea.

Which now leads us to another idea worth thinking about:

If content is what gets you out of beginner hell, then why is your content not working?

There are two fundamental bottlenecks:

1. Your packaging (title, thumbnail, hook) is terrible

2. Your content (the ideas/writing itself) is terrible.

Usually it’s both.

Your packaging decides whether someone ends up clicking or not. If your packaging fails, nobody reads a single word of what you’ve written, no matter how good it is.

If nobody clicks, nobody reads.

Think about every creator, YouTube video, tweet, Instagram reel, or short-form post you scrolled by today. Everyone one of those posts failed to grab your attention.

Why is it that you ignore 99% of people you see online?

The answer is simple: you don’t fucking like what they post, and keep trying to shove in your face and sell you with their content.

It’s why I barely post short form posts, rarely promote my products (only now, close to launches), so my feed actually looks attractive to people who want to read my writing.

Content, then, is everything other than the packaging. Namely, the ideas you talk about.

What makes a piece of content terrible?

Said quickly, because this is getting long:

• It has no structure.

• The ideas aren’t fully thought through.

• The sentences don’t make sense.

• The key points aren’t solving specific problems relating to an overarching problem.

• The content automatically assumes that because the writer cares about what they’ve written, so will the reader.

Nobody wants to read a terrible piece of content. That’s the point of this section. Sorry if I hurt anyone’s ego saying this.

As long as your content is at least not terrible, you’re fine.

I love Linkin Park, Three Days Grace, Breaking Benjamin, Deftones, and TOOL (if you couldn’t tell).

So why is it that my girlfriend loves Taylor Swift?

Value is subjective.

So once you have the right principles in place within your content, and your writing is above the standard of “terrible,” you’re good.

The bar, then, is between terrible writing and not-so-terrible writing.

It’s a subjective quality game if you writing is above terrible, and defined as not-so-terrible writing.

I hope this all made some sort of sense.

Here is the action plan!

III - How to escape beginner hell (with detailed instructions)

It’s not 10,000 hours. It’s 10,000 iterations.

- Naval

This is quite literally everything you will ever need to escape beginner hell.

I don’t agree with gatekeeping knowledge.

Yes, I am promoting The Profound Writer with this newsletter (50% off pricing ends in 2 days!).

But the course is only for people who are serious about having that extra-added help with execution of knowledge. And obviously, the course helps with a much larger picture than just “escaping beginner hell.”

Step 1: Ignore everything that isn’t high ROI

Most advice for growing online and building a personal brand is based on extremely low ROI tactics.

What do I mean by ROI?

It simply means return on investment.

Most of the advice (action steps) people online tell you to do, it gives you very little reward in relation to those actions steps.

Writing is the highest ROI thing you ca be doing.

Don’t forget that a single 2000 word newsletter can reach hundreds of thousands of people every week.

If you write 500 words a day, it’s done in four days, which requires only a 30-60 minute sprint of writing on each of those days, for hundreds of thousands of people to read your newsletter.

Which, you can plug your products/services into.

Designing your Substack bio and trying to nail it with the “I help X person achieve Y” formula... yeah.

People know what you do based on your content, your body of work, the web of knowledge you’ve built for them to explore.

Not a fucking bio.

If it’s not high ROI, like writing content, or building a product, then ignore it.

Trust me. You’ll be fine.

Writing is what you should be putting 80% of your time, effort, and focus into. Maybe more.

I need not repeat the benefits that writing content gives you.

Step 2: Learn to emulate (not copy)

You need to study high-performing content.

A lot of it.

Because if you want to write high-performing content yourself, you need to emulate high-performing content, before you can grasp what makes a piece of content capable of performing very well. Especially in the beginning when nobody trusts, cares, or knows about you.

I know what you’re thinking:

“But Craig! Isn’t that just stealing? Copying other peoples content and holding it as your own?”

Notice how I said the word emulate, and not copy, or stealing?

We want to extract the objective principles and mechanics that make a piece of high-performing content “work,” so to speak, so we can apply those same structural and mechanical principles to our own content, while writing about our own ideas.

That last bit is important.

It annoys me to see people writing content who can’t seem to mix the elements of art and business correctly.

They forget that writing is a two-player game. That you need attention before you can help people. That people aren’t going to care about what you write about unless you give them a beneficial reason to care by being persuasive and leveraging human psychology. And give them some sort of value for their time, energy, and focus.

Let’s go through an example.

How To Remember Everything You Read is one of my highest-performing newsletters across both Substack and YouTube.

If you were to search that exact title into YouTube, you would find lots of videos with that exact same title. They have millions of views. Did that mean I stole all those pieces of content?

God no.

Nobody owns the title “How To Remember Everything You Read.”

It’s a problem.

I used the title, yes. Because there is proven demand for that problem to be solved (high views and engagement). My perspective being offered on that title, however, that is uniquely my own.

Go read the post. I wrote about The Myth of Sisyphus, presented my shitty mind maps from reading it (as I was learning to mind map at the time). And also how interest/curiosity is one of the most neglected principles people forget to consider in life, and in learning.

So.

What if I was to take this post, which is one of my highest-performing newsletters with over 27k likes and 300k reads (and 149k views on YouTube), and did the following:

• Asked AI to extract the objective principles and psychological mechanisms it uses?

• What about the outline structure, that I can then use to outline my own argument, my own essay, talking about my own ideas?

Think of this like adopting a similar color palette as the Mona Lisa, but not repainting the Mona Lisa yourself and calling it your own.

That would be stealing. This here, is emulation.

You’re taking one objective mechanism that makes a piece or art (yes) look, feel, sound, or “work” so well, and using it to create something new.

NEW.

You can use this free prompt to help you out.

It’s a content evaluator prompt, and it’s one of many prompts you can find inside The Profound Writer. I explain how to use it at the top of the document.

Do what is proven to work and attract attention, so you can give yourself the chance to get people interested in your work, but in your unique way.

I’ve broken this next step into two parts.

You’ll understand why in a second.

Step 3A: Your packaging isn’t good enough

Attention precedes everything.

If nobody clicks, nobody reads.

You can forget about your ideas, your fancy stickman thumbnail drawings, your offer, and the hour or so of writing you spent each morning this week.

You need to learn to capture and maintain attention.

Non-negotiable.

How do you do this?

People aren’t going to like me saying this, but clickbait titles work for a reason.

That’s why everybody uses them. Your favorite creators included.

That’s why I wrote about The Myth of Sisyphus under the broad, beginner friendly, attention-grabbing title of How to become dangerously articulate, which is another one of my highest performers. And about self-education, learning to start a newsletter, physics, and learning science, all positioned under the (validated) title of How to become dangerously self-educated.

Those titles pissed a tiny fraction of people off (who would benefit from studying the levels of thinking), because they thought they were “clickbaity.”

They don’t understand the big picture.

And yet... they still clicked on those newsletters?

I captured their attention?

I maintained it for an entire video’s length until they engaged and left their “thoughtful” responses.

Sorry if I sound bitter haha. I’m not.

I don’t capture attention just to shit on people, other creators, address controversies, or ride on the back of trends. That is the cheapest (but often incredibly effective) way of getting tons of attention fast.

But it never lasts very long, and that attention disappears as soon as the controversies themselves do.

Play the long, honest game.

Let people willingly give you their attention because it’s you they want to hear about, and not the trends or the controversies. You’ll have a stronger following with more integrity than most if you do that.

Back on topic.

Your packaging comes down to 3 things:

• Your title

• Your thumbnail

• Your hook (the first 3 sentences)

How to not fuck-up any of these:

A) Your title

Make it broad and suitable for beginners.

90% of people online are complete beginners in what you talk about in your content, and most people scroll to avoid boredom. They scroll without any search intent.

Please spend 3 hours thinking about that.

Jargon and esoteric/abstract wording alienates a lot of people.

Have a look at all my newsletters. See how they’re all beginner friendly titles? A 12 year old could understand what every one of them mean.

Don’t be afraid to emulate other peoples titles.

To restate my example, I wrote How to become dangerously articulate as a title because I knew it was broad, anyone could understand it, and, it’s a pattern interrupt and a curiosity loop (I’ll explain the sentence mechanisms shortly).

Since that title did so well, I emulated it.

How to become dangerously self-educated is another one of my highest-performing posts, which got me a ton of sales because it got a ton of attention to a CTA I had within that newsletter (I had just released my self-education guide at the time, and I persuaded people of the value of self-education, and my novel perspective on it).

What if you wrote about the following topics?

• How to become dangerously productive

• How to become dangerously good at writing

• How to become a dangerously smart at thinking

• How to become dangerously good at personal branding (by writing essays)

I might use some of those...

B) Your thumbnail

I like to draw stickman thumbnails on my Substack because I think they’re cool.

In all honesty, I’m not the worlds greatest thumbnail designer.

Like with creating titles, YouTube and trial and error will be your best friend.

Writing hooks however, is something I have way more expertise in.

C) Your hook

As a general rule, I like to start my first 3 lines (the first 5 seconds) using any mix of the following sentence mechanisms:

• Pattern Interrupt - A bold claim that goes against the reader’s expectations

• Curiosity Loop - Temporarily withholding information to create curiosity and interest

• Visual Cue - A concrete visual that the reader can imagine (a place, thing, location, memory, person, a specific visual description)

Sometimes it’s in that order. Sometimes it’s not.

This is a general principle I follow because I have found success with it consistently with my content.

You need to be starting every long-form post you wrote with a pattern interrupt. I believe that is a non-negotiable.

It shatters expectations. It feels nice to read. And, it’s a hell of a lot more impactful than starting with a question.

Step 3B: Your content isn’t good enough

Human psychology, attention mechanics, and persuasion principles are themselves timeless, objective principles that do not change.

Why is this important to grasp?

You see, tactics become obsolete the second an algorithm changes.

Timeless, objective principles do not change.

Because human psychology is human psychology, regardless if you’re at home, on Instagram, or at work.

If you understand the principles of persuasion, attention mechanics, and human psychology, you can write about any problem you want and get people to care.

I want to go through what I call the profound sentence mechanisms.

The word mechanism simply means “why” something works. So what is happening mechanically, like a cog moving in a machine, to achieve a certain outcome (ex: a sentence feels like a mindfuck to read).

Here they all are, in the order of how I like to write my key point sections (I use a what-why-how framework, explained below):

What Is The Profound Idea/Problem of This Section?

• Profound Idea - A bold claim.

• Reframe - An existing belief is stated before offering a new perspective on it

• Problem / Pain Point - A pain or problem the reader is facing

• Pattern Interrupt - Breaks expectations with an impactful idea

• Personal Experience - A personal story or experience where you overcame or suffered from a problem

• Quote / Statistic - Borrowed authority, which adds instant credibility

• Curiosity Loop - Information that is temporarily being withheld for engaging effect

Why Is It True?

• Concept - Explaining a named idea, concept, or framework

• Insight - A non-obvious truth (often a reframe)

• Metaphor / Analogy - Makes abstract ideas simple to understand through making them relatable

• Anecdote - A short story illustrating a point

• What / How / Why Question - Questions to ask that deepen or extend an idea, also considered to be loops

How Does It Benefit the Reader’s Life?

• Consequence / Implication - Exploring the (often negative) consequences or the (beneficial) meaning of an idea

• Action Step - Give an action step on how to benefit and apply the idea in daily life

• Curiosity Loop - Once again

• Challenge - Make the reader question themselves on something

Now.

What do you actually write about?

Step 4: Write 2000 words per week

You only need to post one long form post each week to grow consistently.

You don’t need to post 3-5x short form posts per day... because what is 3-5 short form posts without considering the quality of what you’re posting?

The thing is, you have no idea what quality is. Only your audience knows that. And as long as your writing is above terrible, it’s up to you to figure out what quality is.

Emulation will help you avoid dropping below into the standard of “terrible.”

Here’s how you do this practically:

• Choose a topic you can’t stop thinking about - Self-explanatory

• Write 2000 words about the topic - Following a problem → solution outline. Address the problem, why the reader should care about it, a new perspective and the unique knowledge needed to view the problem differently, and the novel action steps for overcoming the problem

• Make your title attention grabbing, broad, and beginner friendly - You need to market your post as valuable so other people decide to click. Remember that 90% of people are beginners and will be scrolling with zero search intent

I only say one long form post each week and nothing about short form for a few reasons:

• Long form is higher leverage - it builds trust faster, and solves problems with more depth than a 200 word Substack note could

• You own your audience - If you send your long-form posts to an email list via a newsletter. I recommend Substack, I’m down bad for it, and you don’t need to use short form as a traffic mechanism (a way to get people to discover, see, and thus read your long form). You can simply post long form directly to Substack and it can get seen by hundreds of thousands. No short form posts needed.

This is my content system in its entirety.

One long-form post per week that I’ve put a lot of thinking and focus into, across a full week, and the odd short form post here and there whenever I feel like it.

I record a YouTube video one day per week by reading my long-form post to a camera.

God I’ve said the word long-form so much in this section it’s actually annoying now.

Step 5: Double down on what works, until you find the next new thing that works, and repeat

Engagement tells you what your audience finds engaging.

Do more of what your audience wants.

For example, I turned a high-performing post on reading into a reading digital product.

I’ve made over 1k from it.

I turned a paid guide from my Substack paid-tier into The Profound Self-Education Guide, and I made more than 4k from it.

My writing course, same thing. Made over 4k from my first week of promoting it.

Long-form content works to create an excellent backlog of brilliant ideas that can be turned into products.

I plan to build a learning course in the next 6 months, because nobody fucking teaches you about learning science. And, all my posts talking about that profound idea go viral and semi-viral across Substack and YouTube.

If I made it, I know it would do quite well.

Going back to beginner hell specifically, when I was in stuck in it, I wrote about the topic of learning quite a lot, and those posts got me out of beginner hell.

But I didn’t keep talking about learning.

I pivoted by continually testing out new ideas.

I see that a lot, with people escaping beginner hell by talking about “self-education,” or they write one good post on writing... and niche fucking hard on that one topic.

What about range?

Reach?

This will make sense to you eventually. It just will.

But once it does happen, and you strike gold for the first time, you need to experiment so it can keep happening. So you can keep striking gold with new topics.

Feel free to look at my previous long-form posts to see how I did it.

Step 6: Build a web of knowledge people can explore

Your mind is your niche.

Forget about trying to build (annoying) email marketing campaigns or (even more annoying ) sales funnels.

One post per week, writing about a topic you want to learn about.

2000 words.

A personal brand is no different to self-education. Your body of work (or your content... if you want the boring term) is quite literally a growing web of knowledge people can explore.

Think about it.

When you read a book from Jung or Nietzsche, you’re walking around inside their head.

When you read something, you become the person who wrote it.

I’m writing this current sentence with a mocha in my hand while hiding at my day job. I feel pretty tired, I stayed up late last night, but this is what I am thinking right now. That is what writing is. It’s formalized thinking.

Sorry for getting a bit abstract.

One long-form post connects to your social account, which contains everything you have ever written. Like a world people can explore.

People subscribe to you for your perspectives.

If people wanted any-old information, they could ask their buddy ChatGPT or Claude.

You wouldn’t expect to look like a Greek statue after one gym session. You need to expose yourself to that right type of stimulus consistently.

That’s why people need a body of work to devour across days, weeks, and months.

Not a fucking funnel. We are writers, here. Not corporate salesmen.

Step 7: Everything starts with content

You might still be expecting the part where I say build a product and to network like mad.

Let me start with networking.

I have never networked, in the traditional sense. I’m very shy as a person, and the idea of cold messaging people for the literal purpose of “networking” just feels alien to me.

The only networking “tip” I have is to be a fucking human.

How do you message your friends?

Your girlfriend or boyfriend (behave now)?

The lads before your weekly gathering?

Let me tell you about Conquer.

He reached out to me when I just started writing, I had a few hundred subs back then.

And we just... talked.

About writing, the creative process, and things we both had an interest in.

He wasn’t like the hundreds of other emails/DM requests looking to sell me something I didn’t want, or offer me sponsorships to promote things I didn’t believe in, or anything else that wasn’t mutually beneficial.

If you want to network, just chat with people.

And sound like a fucking human being for gods sake.

Regarding the idea of product, I’ve made 3 of them... “officially.”

Technically this newsletter is a product. As are all my guides on my paid Substack. And every short and long-form post I have ever created.

Content is what’s called minimum-viable product (MVP).

It’s a product that is quick and easy to distribute and get instant feedback on.

Which means: A product is simply a solution to a problem.

Content is the same.

I already spoke about the validation ladder that you can copy yourself:

best short/long-form posts → paid newsletter/lead magnets → digital products → courses

It all starts with:

Writing.

Great.

Content.

Step 8: Systematize the objective, timeless principles

If you don’t want to forget to include a certain principle in your writing each week, incorporate it into some sort of template.

Here is a free long-form writing template/checklist you can use to get you started.

It contains everything you need to write one long-form newsletter every week, from start to finish, and it includes a checklist to make sure you’ve hit the right principles.

• Fill it out throughout the week while coming up with ideas and researching while on walks.

• Have it open beside you while you write, or use it to edit your writing after you have written a complete newsletter.

• Add principles that you yourself don’t want to forget to include, and build your own unique template from there.

This is just one type of template you can use, destroy, and rebuild but suited to how you like to write newsletters.

Enjoy my friend.

IV - Use this prompt I made

I have given you everything I could possibly give you for escaping beginner hell.

But I’d like to give you one last thing to make escaping as certain as can be.

Here is another free prompt from The Profound Writer that you can use as a checklist to make sure your content contains the necessary principles required to launch yourself out of it.

Copy and paste the prompt into Claude and give it your finished long-form post draft.

Here it is:

Prompt: Long-Form Writing Checklist Evaluator

The instructions explaining what the prompt is and how to use it are at the top of the doc. This is getting long, so I’ll let you explore that for yourself.

This was a beast of a newsletter.

Which is understandable, since I tried my best to solve this problem in the most bulletproof way I can conceive of.

Come back to this newsletter. Save or bookmark it. Use it as a one-stop-shop solution to overcoming beginner hell.

One final time:

The Profound Writer early-bird pricing ends in 2 days.

July 21st.

This is the final time I will be promoting the 50% off discounted pricing.

If you want to learn how to write great long-form content people can’t resist reading, and build an audience online writing about your own interests and profound ideas, you can save yourself $75 dollars here.

You’re an absolute legend.

Catch you in a few days.

- Craig :)

It just wasn’t conscious to you.

Not everybody you know is worth listening to.

Sorry not sorry.

People follow your content and subscribe to you for two reasons:

1. To hear your perspective (not any-old information they could get from AI)

2. They believe your perspective can change their life for the better

Like many of you, I hated school for a lot of reasons. One of them being if a teacher said anything, I believed they were 100% right. Because, you know... I needed the grades.

I’ve been writing one newsletter a week for just over a year now. And with each one, I am trying to capture attention so I can persuade people of the profound ideas I have to say, so they can benefit like I have.

The almost 70k audience across two platforms is the by-product. So this works, if you stick with it.

Was I a great conformist?

Oh yeah. I am a very agreeable person.

It was only when I became an adult myself that I really started... questioning some things.

Persuasion is unavoidable. It bleeds across everything you do in your life.

Everybody is doing it.

Everything you do and say (or don’t do and don’t say) persuades people to help you get what you want. Your worldview, your beliefs, your ideas, everything about you as it appears to others... judging books by their covers, really.

And persuasion is ethical when there’s mutual benefit.

Did you know that you will never be handed anything in life, and that you actually have to persuade people to give you what you want?

If you want to become more persuasive in your own life, perhaps online, leading to more people reading your work and subscribing because of it, you need trust.

You need to persuade people to trust you.

So in this essay, I want to give you a three-step framework to help you become more persuasive.

Let’s ruffle a few feathers. That’s what harsh truths are for.

Skip if you hate self-promotion

Early-bird pricing for The Profound Writer is ending July 21st.

It teaches my writing/content system that I used to cultivate an audience of almost 70k subs across two platforms in just one year of writing online (starting as a complete beginner).

And also earn 1-2k per month on top of my day job, become a Substack bestseller in less than four months, and continue to grow by 200-500 email subs each day.

All by writing for 30-60 minutes each morning, and posting one of these newsletters each week.

It’s an evolving course. 6 modules, 3 more on the way. End-of-module feedback surveys, module/lesson/AI prompt requests. Prompts that don’t write anything or think for you, with all the AI-ness stripped away from them (they can only give observations and ask you questions).

Again: Early-bird pricing ends July 21st.

It’s 50% off right now, so save yourself the money before you can’t.

Consider enrolling before early-bird disappears

P.S. If you have any questions, shoot me a DM or an email. I’m here to help in any way I can.

I - Most people are blind to persuasion already

Talk to someone about themselves and they’ll listen for hours. - Dale Carnegie

The best way to persuade somebody to do something is to make them want to do it.

Common sense, right?

Well common sense ain’t so common for a reason.

The mind is a goal-setting machine.

A want is a goal that your mind perceives as beneficial.

This can be conscious or unconscious to you.

There’s a huge difference between a perceived want (your feelings, the words you speak) and an actual want (your actions). Always pay attention to what people are doing. Not what they say they are doing.

Most people will spend the majority of their life doing things they believe they don’t want to do. In reality, they do want these things. It happens a lot more than you might think. Context is important. So let’s go through some specific examples.

People will work 40 hours per week for sixty years at a job they hate, but still do it, because they want to.

Yes, you might say you hate your job. But that’s a perceived want.

You feel like you hate your boss. You always say you will be handing in your notice. But you keep showing up for years and years because what you actually want is survival (income, identity, certainty/order that creates feeling of safety).

When you’re in a relationship, your “significant” other (hopefully) says that they love doing things with you.

But look at what they do.

They’re not doing everything you want to do on the weekends. Or see every place you want to explore while on travelling around Italy for the summer. Or watching what only you want to watch on Netflix.

If the relationship wasn’t benefiting them via life enjoyment, sexual companionship, safety in a tribe, comfort and certainty and so forth, guess what?

They would leave you. If they had the common sense that ain’t so common.

All those people who do “follow-for-follow” say they’re helping you grow by subscribing, but they’re not doing what matters, which is reading your content.

That is why people subscribe to you, no? Persuasive, engaging, and enjoyable content that helps people, right?

We do everything for the benefit of ourselves. And that includes helping others.

I do not believe that’s a bad or a cynical thing.

Once you really think about it, it’s actually the secret to living a great life.

• When two sides benefit, regardless if it’s done consciously or unconsciously, it’s persuasion.

• When one side benefits at the conscious (or unconscious) expense of the other, it’s manipulation.

Manipulation just means managing information.

You manipulate information every time you learn something, by thinking about it, in your working memory until it gets stored into your long term memory.

Persuasion is beneficial manipulation.

It is not hidden or one sided.

Pure manipulation is hidden in words (not actions) and benefits just the person doing the manipulating.

Lifting weights twice a week benefits just yourself first. But then it ripples outward.

You eat better. You spend money on food differently. You treat people better, because we judge others based on what we lack in ourselves. You get sick less, which might mean one less hospital bed being taken from somebody who needs it for reasons outside their control.

Benefits ripple outward like a stone thrown in a lake.

People do everything they do because from their perspective (this is important), they believe they will benefit.

Your goal, then, is to persuade other people of a more beneficial perspective than the one they currently have.

Of which, was likely implanted inside their brain involuntarily by society, older generations, social institutions, governments etc.

I can’t think of many benefits now that would come from studying 8 hours a day.

So how do you do it? Be more persuasive? Isn’t that a wee bit... unethical?

Nope.

Nobody wants to read content that isn’t persuasive. It’s not engaging to read.

II - Fact + Benefit

There are unlimited ways of perceiving any person, situation, or problem. If you stand for everything you stand for nothing. Since, if you treat every perspective as equally valid, then what perspective do you really have?

The brain hates uncertainty like we have said. So it comes down to choosing the best perspective for the context (the problem, want, or goal in front of you).

Not every way of seeing something is optimal, or high leverage. And not every way is true.

Some quote-unquote beneficial perspectives are lies (a lie is a manipulation of the truth).

All of this sounds very... abstract. And you’d be right to think that.

Why am I saying it to you, then?

There are facts, then there are benefits of facts.

Glorious. Such a profound idea!

Everyone starts out with equal access to the facts. It’s how you use them, so, what you extract, and what you do with what benefits you’ve extracted, that matters.

Yes, this is the skill we call persuasion.

The brighter side is always there. Maybe you’re just not seeing it.

Or you haven’t tried finding it.

I want you to start paying attention. But to everything. And look for the benefits.

People believe what they are already looking for. You see what you aim at. If all you’re searching for online are the dangers of eating red meat, what do you think you’ll see?

What if you searched for the benefits?

What if you asked AI to tell you how great your writing is?

What if you asked it to tell you the opposite?

(warning: you need little ego to survive such a process)

Think about red cars and all you’ll see on a motorway are red cars...

I need not explain further.

Perspectives are not equal.

BUT.

Some are more beneficial than others.

Let’s get into the framework now.

This is how you can become more persuasive.

III - How to be more persuasive

Step 1: Perspectives

What perspective do you want to persuade people of?

A loyal audience doesn’t appear overnight thanks to a single piece of content. Same with building muscle in the gym, or the city of Rome... and also new perspectives.

A perspective is cultivated. Slowly.

Like how all good things take time, but only if you do the right type of effort, in the right areas, toward the right ends. Punching a brick wall with your bare hands for 3 years will never be as effective as the sledgehammer alternative, no matter how “good” you feel will do it.

My point:

Water any new perspective to make it grow, by giving it your attention.

You’re not going to see the benefits of writing online until you do enough long-form posts, consistently, before you start getting subscribers and nice emails from people aged between 14-70+ all around the globe.

Or until your thinking becomes deeper, and you can feel your mind stretching itself beyond its limits more and more each week, unlike it ever has before.

Same applies to persuading other people of new perspectives.

It takes consistent exposure to see the benefits.

Especially if your advice can help them achieve a goal, or succeed at solving a problem with your perspective you have given them.

Step 2: Facts + Benefits

The most important trick to be happy is to realize that happiness is a choice that you make and a skill set that you develop. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. It’s just like building muscles. - Naval

Think about the perspective you want to persuade people with.

It can be a belief. Your solution to a problem. A want, goal, or desire you have.

Write down as many facts about that perspective you can think of.

And no. You’re not allowed to use AI for this. You can use your brain for once because you use Claude enough.

Life is facts because physics is harsh.

Everyone starts out equally with the facts. The grass is going to be green whether you like it or not. So are you going to like it or hate it?

Once you have at least 50 facts, start writing down one benefit for each fact.

Positives and benefits are always there. I want you to start paying attention to them. But like your life depended on it.

Like a hawk. At everything. Observe something and look for the benefits of it. Literally anything. Reading a book. Lifting weights. Writing an essay. Writing online. Starting a personal brand. Learning a high-value skill. Staring at a wall.

Even quote-unquote “bad” things.

For years I hated the idea of drinking. I never liked it. I never felt good after doing it and I still do. Probably the greatest comedian alive right now (imo) Jimmy Carr once said, this is a profound one:

The risk to your liver is as nothing compared to the risk of social isolation.

You could write down more than 50 facts.

100, 200, 300...

It will teach you to think rationally (which I’ve heard is pretty important) and also to see the brighter side of things.

Persuasion aside, this is why happiness is a choice to an extent.

Use pen and paper.

C’mon. It won’t kill you.

Looking at screens day and night meaninglessly definitely might.

Step 3: Transmission

Reading a Profound Ideas newsletter on how to be more persuasive is nothing compared to going out and getting feedback from reality.

You need to do.

You need to live life in the arena.

You need feedback.

Without it, how else are you going to improve toward eventually achieving the thing that you want?

Persuasion is proven through feedback alone, not books, studying, or thinking about persuasion.

By actually being fucking persuasive.

I recommend that you write. Specifically, under a personal brand.

Why?

Well, your family and friends will always tell you your writing is great. That is, until we introduce the harsh reality that is social media.

If you can’t attract people to your brand, are you really that persuasive? What about getting people to engage? Subscribe? Leave a comment? Let alone read your full long-form post? What about getting people to trust you and therefore pay you?

Then what about AI making writing obsolete?

Here’s a fact: AI is not nothing, and almost everyone is using it to write and create content.

Here’s one benefit within that fact: If everyone is doing in, where is the value? AI writing stands out like a purple elephant sitting inside a Starbucks. So, if you use AI to write for you, wouldn’t you expect to get the same results as everyone else also using AI to write for them?

Check out The Profound Writer if you want a writing system that uses AI in the right areas. And please, for the love of god, stop using AI to write and think for you.

IV - Summary

To recap because even my own head is melted writing this one, but in the best way possible:

• Persuasion cannot be avoided - Everything you do, say, and don’t do and don’t say, is persuading everyone around you of your value as a person (sorry)

• Perceived want (words, feelings) and actual want (actions) are different - Pay attention to what people do, not what they say... if you could excuse the AI sounding “it’s not this it’s that” phrasing

• Persuasion is mutually beneficial - It is honest, two-sided, and you can see it in people’s actions. Nothing is being hidden.

• Manipulation is the opposite - It benefits the person doing the manipulating, and it gets hidden behind words

• Everyone has access to the same facts - How you see the benefits of them is what makes you persuasive

• You see what you’re looking for - Attention determines which perspectives you can see and eventually start believing

• Step 1: Perspectives - A new perspective is cultivated slowly, through giving it your attention consistently

• Step 2: Facts + Benefits - Write down the facts of the perspective you want to persuade with, then think of a benefit for each fact

• Step 3: Transmission - Persuasion is proven through feedback from reality. Theory only takes you so far. Write content and let social media give you your feedback

Thank you to everyone who has enrolled in The Profound Writer. The responses have been overwhelming in the best way imaginable.

Early-bird ends July 21st.

Save yourself the money if you’re considering enrolling. I’ll stop being annoying and salesly after July 21st. You’ll just have to deal with me until then.

I’ll have another one of newsletters out in a few days. I’ve a lot of profound ideas to share with you legends.

- Craig :)

Because if you want to become an intellectual force to be reckoned with, essays will do a lot more than just that.

Writing an essay teaches you how to think.

And thinking is actually the greatest meta-skill you can possibly learn.

Learning is thinking. Writing is thinking. Articulating your ideas and beliefs is thinking. What about negotiation, persuasion, or getting people’s attention online or in person?

Or getting people to subscribe to you, trust you, and therefore pay you?

What you think about (and how you think about it) will determine every outcome in your life.

Which is sad.

Every writer and creator I see nowadays is outsourcing their thinking to a machine that generates based on data, and not real thinking or knowledge. So they get the same results as everyone else who is also doing it.

Screaming into the abyss with your content and attracting no attention to your work is not a fun thing.

Before I show you how to write your first essay, we have to talk about war.

It sounds nuts, but bear with me.

Announcement (skip if you hate promotions)

The Profound Writer is out now.

In the last year and a bit, I’ve grown my newsletter to 45k+ subscribers. I became a Substack bestseller in 4 months with only 11 long-form posts like this one (but put behind a paywall).

I started writing online in May 2025 as a complete beginner.

And writing for 30-60 minutes per day is how I’ve cultivated an audience in that time. And 12k as a side-income, on top of my day job.

All by writing just one essay each week (I’m still growing by 200-500 email subs per day).

This is an evolving course.

6 modules, 3 more on the way. End-of-module feedback surveys, module/lesson/AI prompt requests. Prompts that don’t write anything or think for you, with all the AI-ness stripped away from them (they can only give observations and ask you questions).

The longer the course is around, and the more feedback I get from what you want help with, the more valuable it will be (and more expensive, obviously, so it will never be as cheap as it is now).

I want this to be the best long-form writing course on the internet. I believe it will be.

Early-bird pricing ends July 21st.

It’s 50% off right now, so save yourself the money before it fully launches.

I’ll see you legends inside the course.

Consider enrolling before early-bird disappears

P.S. If you have any questions, shoot me a DM or an email. I’m here to help in any way I can.

Watch this on YouTube:

Or listen while on a walk:

Idea I - Belief

I don’t have to agree with everything you say, but I should attempt at least to understand it, for the opposite of mutual understanding is, quite simply, war. - Ken Wilber

Misunderstanding is the root of (almost) every problem that has ever existed.

War? Misunderstanding.

Fighting with your boss? Misunderstanding.

Your “significant” other? Same again.

Fighting demons in your mind while trying to get out of bed at 7am like you told yourself you would do?

All of us at this very minute act on certain beliefs as if they were fact.

Belief is what the mind acts on as if it were true.

I wanted to filmmaker when I was a kid.

Binge-watching YouTube video essays on the art of making movies, those really were the glory days.

But it thought me that in order to create conflict, all you must do, is put two characters in a room with opposing beliefs.

Why is this important to understand?

Conflict is fundamentally philosophical.

Let me give you the most practical example I can think of, that I feel every one of us can relate with, regarding the concept of philosophical conflict. Sigh.

Think of your boss giving out to you in work.

Specifically, anytime they have ever raised their voice, or said something to you, that very-well could have been considered a little bit of a HR problem... literally because they believe they can do just that.

It’s unconscious to them, the belief that they are in a position of authority over you.

And in most cases being quiet or nodding along or simply apologizing is what we, the employees, resort to. Even if we are not in the wrong.

Why?

Our survival is being threatened.

But on two levels:

• Physical - You need money to eat, drink, and keep a roof over your head. Losing your job means losing your source of income, which means no food, drink, or roof over your head (obviously)

• Metaphysical - You could speak up and speak your mind. And, if it goes badly, your own self will identify as “a person who got fired,” before that inevitably morphs into “I am a terrible fucking person”

When two people, groups, governments, nations, or sides of the world are in conflict with each other, it’s because of one thing.

Beliefs.

That is what causes philosophical conflict, or any form of conflict, and that includes misunderstanding.

And I know what you’re thinking.

“But Craig! How does this relate to writing essays?”

Conflict comes from conflicting perspectives. And an essay, my friend, is just a perspective, or a belief being argued for so it can be considered.

The word essay in French means “to attempt.”

By writing an essay, you are attempting to solve a problem by offering a solution (perspective) and arguing for it.

And let’s not forget that there’s a big difference between arguing for something and enforcing it…

You do not know what you know until you try to explain it simply, out loud, on paper, or to another person. Especially in the form of a clear and structured argument.

A bad essay full of unexamined biases isn’t really an essay by its own definition.

An essay is meant to tear your thinking apart (both your own thinking and that of the reader) during the process of examining a problem, evaluating it, thinking about it, and offering a solution that could be useful, if it is considered, and acted upon.

That is the purpose of thinking, is it not?

To solve problems, gain beneficial outcomes, and suffer less in your life than you have to?

Allow me to dig a little deeper.

Idea II - Iteration

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. - Heraclitus

Writing is how you stress-test and rebuild beliefs through iteration.

What do I mean by iteration?

Iteration is changing one action based on feedback you have received, as you move toward a meaningful goal of your own choosing. Think trying to achieve a goal, and then failing to achieve it. Shooting for goal in the World Cup and skying it wide, or trying to putt a golf ball like my Dad every Saturday morning and missing by 5 feet (he never misses, he tells me).

What do you do when you fail to achieve a goal? You try something a little different in the hopes that you move closer to the goal this time around.

Iterate consistently toward a goal.

Succeed in achieving it.

And you have the perfect mechanism for changing beliefs.

Why is this relevant?

You cannot believe something about yourself until you’ve succeeded at it, or seen it work.

I have recently been learning how to darce people in jiu-jitsu. A darce is a type of choke that I always thought I was terrible at doing. Because I was.

And for the last few weeks, I’ve been trying one new thing, failing at it, trying another new thing, and so on.

I’ve been getting a lot more setups for the choke… but I still can’t finish them.

But before I started iterating toward that goal, I wasn’t even setting them up. Not a chance.

I used to think I was shit at trying to darce people. Now I believe that I can set them up, because I’ve done it.

Competence creates belief.

Iteration can only occur when there is feedback to iterate with.

And everything you do is feedback. Even everything you don’t do. Doing nothing is still an action. Inaction is metaphysical action. Thinking too, is metaphysical action (compared to physically moving your limbs, talking aloud, using physical tools).

Now that you know how a belief or a perspective is developed across time through iteration, where does this slot in to the big picture?

Some perspectives are more beneficial than other ones.

Some are higher-leverage.

Meaning, they help you reach the same outcome, but faster, cheaper, and with less suffering.

Using AI to write your content is not the highest-leverage thing you can do. If everyone is doing it, where is the value? If you could excuse the AI-sounding “it’s not this, it’s that” statement, it just sounds more impactful when I put it this way:

AI retrieves from data.

Your brain retrieves from unique knowledge.

Yes, knowledge you build through iteration. People don't read your content for information, btw. They read it for your perspective (sorry, another “it’s not this but that” statement).

A perspective only comes from thinking and living and experiencing. Wisdom is not algorithmic.

I have written over 60 of these newsletters in the last year and a bit. The by-product of iterating with each newsletter is my audience, and over 12k as a side-income. All I did was make a 1% improvement with each newsletter each week.

And my first newsletter was dog shit. The only thing that built my brand and content system and income sources was building the competence through iterating on that dog shit. You can’t improve something that doesn’t exist.

Skills do not get handed to you.

You have to build them with trial and error toward a meaningful goal.

Another little AI sounding line to finish this section, just to keep you on your toes ;)

Idea III - Writing (but with impact)

You need to post your essays online.

Publishing content is how you test what you have written and thought about against reality.

Real people.

Not your friends or family, who are going to tell you that your writing is better than anything they have ever read.

Why let your essays gather dust inside a second brain anyway?

Posting your writing online proves transmission.

What do I mean by transmission?

• Did you attract people to your work by successfully understanding the principles of human psychology and persuasion?

• Once you grabbed or “hooked” people’s attention, did you convert that attention into interest, to keep reading, or to check out a digital product you are promoting?

• Did the reader engage? Did they stay silent?

I cannot tell you about my ideas unless I have your attention first. And I cannot persuade you to care about what I have to say, if you have noise-cancelling headphones on.

Learning to attract and maintain attention is a skill. It’s human psychology, attention mechanics, and persuasion. And you absolutely need to learn it.

Nobody wants to read a dull piece of writing.

Would you?

Here is what I recommend you do:

• Publish one long-from post each week - On Substack or X. 2000 words on a problem/title/topic you care about solving, using a problem → insight → solution framework. Or AIDA. Google AIDA if you don’t know about copywriting yet. You could use beehiiv if you’d like, but I’m down bad for Substack right now. If you record your essays to a camera, post them on YouTube

• Write about topics you yourself wish to learn or think about - And make your title a broad, attention grabbing title (you can search YouTube and watch videos on how to do this. Everybody uses cringy clickbait titles for a reason. They work. Or, you can avoid doing what works, and get the results that come from doing things that do not work)

• If you have an offer to promote, promote it at the bottom of your newsletter - I’ve only ever done digital products but you can very much do this with a service as well. If you don’t know what to build yet in terms of an offer, just focus on posting content consistently and turn your best long-form posts into digital products/a service of some kind. AI can teach you how to get started doing either if you don’t know what to do. There’s no excuses.

1 long form post each week is all you need to grow an audience and build authority in your interests, topics, or skills online.

Let’s not forget the one 1% improvement applied somewhere within your writing process each week too.

Idea IV - Your mind is your niche

I’ve been excited to talk about this for some time.

I wanted to wait.

Not until I had a “successful” personal brand or anything like that. Success is relative.

I’m making 1-2k per month writing one of these newsletters each week. On top of working 20-40 hours per week at my day job (on the lower end now).

But I think it’s time to start talking about it. Because my DMs are flooded with questions on this sort of thing.

And, I am in closer proximity to the problem of growing a personal brand and writing content from the ground up, than say, somebody with a million followers making more money than most people would know what to do with it.

The profound idea:

Your mind is your niche.

Let me give you my definition of branding.

Branding is the knowledge people have of you.

Namely:

• What you are known for (content topics, ideas, associations)

• What you do (offer)

The idea of niching down has always gone against my own nature. Funnily enough, it also goes against the nature of how the human brain actually learns.

The brain learns by connecting ideas.

Learning is thinking… if you think about it.

Which means, the more ideas, positive associations, and beneficial outcomes you’ve helped your audience achieve… the more of those things people connect to your name, the stronger their web of knowledge about you becomes.

I had someone message me the other day.

They thanked me for my knowledge (not my information), telling me they'd bought every product I had ever made. Including The Profound Writer… and I hadn’t even started promoting it yet.

I was already getting sales on it before I wrote this newsletter. Which is still kinda nuts to me to be honest.

If people associate good ideas, good outcomes, and good things with you, that’s trust. You can’t trust something you don’t have any knowledge about.

Enough about me.

Niching down on one topic for life limits two things: reach and growth. Let’s not forget that you will get bored writing about your hyper-specific niche anyways. Simply because you don’t have any range.

Imagine if I told you that you were only allowed to read one Substack article for the rest of your life? Or listen to one song? One TV show?

Which leads to my next question.

Do you think your family and friends only associate you with one thing?

Your one hobby. Your one favorite artist. Your one favorite plain-black t-shirt you wear in every YouTube video…

God no.

You’re a multi-dimensional human being with a mind that loves to connect ideas.

And if you can connect the principles from the skills of persuasion, human psychology, and value creation (yes, they are skills, since skills consist of techniques, which are actions that you can do, or learn to do, by imitation, trial and error, and iteration, and nothing else).

Guess what?

You can write high-performing content on anything you want to write about.

And get paid to write them.

I’m simplifying here, of course.

But you can grow an audience by writing about your genuine interests and ideas, and promote things you have built at the bottom of your newsletter. Or better, positioned within your essay’s argument.

What do you think I’m doing with this essay/newsletter you’re reading?

Yes, I’m trying to stretch my mind beyond its limits this week, like I do every week. But I’m launching my course too. You can mix art and business if you learn the skills I already mentioned.

Like with my own reading and self-education digital products, and my Substack paid-tier posts.

I made a reading digital product from a high-performing, validated post I wrote on that same topic. Same with my Profound Self-Education Guide. I had a paid guide on my Substack do exceptionally well at the time, so I turned it into a 70-page guide with a cool AI-prompt that did really well.

Now I have a writing course. Because every short form post I wrote that talked about writing was doing 3-5x the normal engagement. And I kept getting asked about how I write my weekly essay/newsletter in emails and DMs.

Validating ideas works like a ladder.

Idea → Short Form Post → Long Form Post → Lead Magnet/Paid Newsletter → Digital Product → Course

The only reason I’ve waited so long to talk about all this is because I didn’t have any proof or consistent results yet.

Now I do.

And I’m in much closer proximity to a lot of you in my audience than those making 10k+ each month.

Scroll through my Substack and look for every post you can find on personal branding, audience growth, and writing.

Yep. You will find that there are none.

And for all the posts you see on writing specifically, long form writing, I mean, I only started writing about it when people wouldn’t stop asking me to.

You do not need to write about audience growth in order to grow an audience. Same applies to content creation, personal branding, or making money online.

It kills me to see so many personal brands or content creators (as cringy as I find those words) who are starting out, and wanting to write online, and earn a side income from it, and at 0 subscribers they start talking about content systems and what makes a top 1% personal brand…

Proof is trust.

Trust needs authority, attention, and an audience.

I’m leaving it here for today.

I appreciate your time and attention as always.

If you’ve read this far, it means I like you. I like people who like thinking about long content.

Lot’s more of these essays coming over the coming weeks.

You’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

(just so people don’t miss out on early-bird):

Early-bird pricing for The Profound Writer ends July 21st.

If you want to build an audience writing about profound ideas you love, with a dead simple writing/content system, consider enrolling while it’s 50% off.

Your brain will run it instead.

Let’s play a little game for a second.

I want you to try and spot the problem.

From the second you’ve woken up you’ve done everything you could do to avoid silence. Indulging yourself in your Spotify on-repeat or your favorite “educational” podcasts. Scrolling TikTok or Instagram waiting for your overpriced and rotten Starbucks morning coffee.

Anything to make you feel “good.”

You stay up late to make up for the first 8 hours of your day not being “good.” You eat junk food and chain yourself to your bed or your couch to make yourself feel “good.” You watch Netflix and scroll, and don’t read and write or think in silence like you think about wanting to do... because god-forbid we face a little boredom... because to you, those thing don’t feel...

“good”

Did you spot the problem?

Doing everything in your power to always be feeling “good” will ruin your life.

That is what your brain wants.

But not the mind.

Not your mind.

If you are anything like me, you are not the world’s greatest superfan for willpower.

With this essay, I have a 2-step framework I have being testing and iterating myself for some time now.

• The first step will help you with evaluating everything that is stealing your attention (and I mean everything)

• In the second step, we’ll go through how to go about redirecting that attention, but in a way that serves what you truly want from your life

And that most important first step, my friend, well, it involves understanding this profound idea:

Your mind and brain are two entirely separate entities.

And not understanding that profound idea...

Safe to say it will cause some bad shit for you down the road.

Profound thinkers, let us think through these 2 steps together.

Step 1: Evaluate Where Your Attention Goes

There is no peace for the man who has seen what he could become

- Epictetus

You need to start directing your attention like your life depends on it.

It does.

Living on TikTok as your 5-9 after your 9-5...

That will create a life you may want.

If you’ve read this far, we both know that isn’t the case.

You want something more profound than that.

Same logic applies to having no plan or project to strive toward.

Same applies to overstimulating your brain, eating junk food and Netflix binging, but just to feel some relief in your mind temporarily.

Living your one and only life on a loop of relief and suffering and relief and suffering and relief and suffering...

If you do not want to live your life like this, good.

Let’s go a little deeper, shall we?

You should (correctly) start seeing your mind and brain as being distinct from one another.

Integral Theory gives us a four-quadrant map that will help with this.

It’s the top-right corner.

I recommend exploring it fully in your own time if you want to understand what makes a perspective as complete as possible.

I know I know.

The image looks complicated and scary.

Really, it’s just a mental model for thinking about perspectives.

Why is this relevant to this essay?

The mind and brain are the subjective and objective perspectives regarding the individual quadrants.

Which, are the two of the four AQAL model perspectives we care about today:

• The mind is the Q1 quadrant/perspective - Think thinking itself. Your thoughts, your emotions and feelings, your subjective inner world.

• The brain is the Q2 quadrant/perspective - Think your physical brain as opposed to the metaphysical mind. Your cognitive processes, neuroplasticity, whether you’re neurodivergent or not. Your objective inner world.

Why care about either of these perspectives?

Well, your mind is conscious and generative, and where thoughts are forged and reacted to.

But your brain, however, is hardwired to do one thing, and one thing only.

Keep you alive.

That wiring is ancient.

Since, the human brain itself is ancient, and has wiring suited for an ancient world where salt, sugar, and fat were once scarce, and joyful stimulation meant no tigers or lions were nearby to bite your face off.

The world has changed a lot since then.

But your brain... sorry.

Not so much.

Your brain is hardwired to abuse abundance, since, to your brain, that abundance isn’t abundant.

Your brain abuses salt, sugar, and fat because it still perceives it as a scarce resource.

Same applies to artificial and digital stimulation.

The brain cannot get enough of it, because it was never bloody meant to get any of it.

It views it as scarce, too, and now we can’t stand in line for a Starbucks coffee without scrolling to avoid boredom like it’s the plague.

I often think about where I would be and what I’d be doing (and how lost I’d be feeling) if I had put my attention toward different avenues across the last 4 years.

If I chose a psychology, philosophy, English, or sport-training degree instead of my media degree.

If I had never started my personal brand and writing one long-form essay each week.

If I had never started meal prepping, or jiu-jitsu, or how I’d be suffering so much more if I had never started thinking about deep ideas seriously.

Here’s a profound idea:

What you give your attention to will determine the trajectory of your entire life.

Force interest until you find it.

Fake bravery until you feel it.

Fake discipline until you build it.

And fake curiosity until you fucking find it.

Let’s stop here for a second, that was a lot to think about.

So follow these action steps to apply and help offload some of the mental load of everything we’ve discussed:

• Grab a page or a notebook

• Write down every single thing you give your attention to (and I mean everything)

• Cross out everything you want to stop giving your attention to fully

• Put a star beside anything you aren’t currently doing, but would like to start doing, and think you could start doing

This should take about 10-15 minutes tops.

I like to compare this exercise with the profound idea of separating wheat from chaff against the mind and life you want in the next 6-12 months.

Since you now have what you want to keep giving your attention to, and soon cut out, from stealing your attention, here is what to do with what is left.

The chaff.

Step 2: Redirect Your Attention

You have a big long list now, which means only one thing.

The most important thing must be done first thing every morning.

Pick it from your list.

Maybe it’s something like reading or learning.

Maybe it’s going outside and getting sunlight into your eyes instead of rotting in bed on your phone before work.

(trust me, it really helps)

The reason we do our most important task first thing in the morning, is because:

(i) you’re most alert, and have the most amount of energy and focus available to you than any other point in the day

(ii) you’re more likely to commit to doing something first thing in the morning when you don’t have 1000 different things trying to grab your attention... most of them still being asleep

(iii) the chances of that important task getting hijacked by easier, more distracting tasks, is going to be slim

I’ve been writing my weekly newsletter for more than a year now.

I’ve followed the same practice every single morning.

My first work block is for creating something.

Something new.

Like my long-form writing/content course I’m releasing on July 21st for early-bird access.

My reading and self-education digital products.

Also my exclusive paid guides on my Substack.

I’ve found 45-60 minutes to be the sweet spot for this block.

Then, I spend the same amount of time writing content.

Short form when I feel like it, this block is mostly dedicated toward long form writing.

My one Profound Essay that I send out via my email newsletter each week.

Once I’ve completed my two 45-60min creating and writing blocks, I complete 1-2x 20-45 minute blocks responding to comments, DMs, emails, doing admin work or taxes, and so on.

Maintenance work.

Or creating YouTube thumbnails and scheduling videos.

One day per week I replace my content block for recording a YouTube video (I just read my newsletter to a camera).

Between work blocks I like to do non-cognitively demanding things.

I eat.

I make coffee.

I go on a walk and think.

I try not to think… which actually gets ideas flowing a hell of a lot more than if I try force them.

The reason why I’m telling you what I do, specifically, is because I want to build a personal brand that I can make a living from in the next 3-5 years.

That is why I do what I do every single morning.

That is why I do it first thing.

Every single day, even before my “real” job.

If you want the social proof, you know where to look.

Enough creator talk.

The broad principles that have helped me find success, that will help you too, if you stick to them, are as follows:

• Keep your work blocks small, short, but extremely high quality

• 1-4 blocks at most

• 20-45 minutes per block completing one needle moving task

Note: A needle moving task is the highest leverage type of task you can do.

Think writing a piece of content that can reach hundreds of thousands of people, and only takes 5-8 hours to write. Compared to, say, designing your Substack or YouTube bio that nobody gives a fuck about (but people do give a fuck about your content).

Now.

Look at your list.

Pick out the most important thing you want to start giving your attention to.

Then (this is important) if you can handle more than one task block, do more.

1-4 blocks, and 20-45 minutes per block is your limit.

So that’s 1-4 things on your list to choose from at the higher end. Or, simply your one most important task to complete.

For me, that’s building something to share with you legends and sell to those who are interested, and writing my weekly essay that I send out via my email newsletter that attracts people to my personal brand.

To finish this essay/newsletter, I will leave you with a profound idea to walk on.

Literally. Go on a walk and think about it. I know I need to.

Everything you do is just… feedback.

If something doesn’t work for you, iterate.

Same applies if you don’t feel motivated, or if you’re losing focus.

Or if all you want to do after day 3 of this plan is go back to scrolling your life away.

Iterate with trial and error.

Everything you have already done today has told you enough about what you have to improve on tomorrow.

Your life is a book that gets written based on what you give your attention to.

Please, I beg of you.

Do not waste it.

I appreciate your time and attention as always.

I hope I gave you something valuable in exchange for it.

You’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

I almost forgot:

For the writers, creators, those with the creative gene, so to speak, who didn’t forget it when I said it.

The Profound Writer course is coming out July 21st.

It’s my personal writing/content system that helped me grow my audience and earn my first 10k by writing long form like this one.

(for those who care about stats)

Essays, newsletters, articles, YouTube scripts etc.

6 modules (for now, with many more on the way).

AI prompts that guide you without thinking or writing anything for you.

I think you’ll be surprised by how I’ve engineered them…

Feedback surveys after every module.

Module and lesson requests.

This will be an evolving course that I will continue to improve over the coming years.

Meaning it will be a hell of a lot more valuable the longer it is around, and the more feedback I get.

I want it to be the best writing course on the internet.

And I believe it will be just that.

I look forward to seeing you inside the course.

Subscribe to get early-bird access when it comes out.

I won’t keep you any longer, you have a lot to be doing.

If you can’t write without using AI, you cannot think.

And if you can’t do that… forget about being a creator for a second.

You are in for a hard life.

I am of the opinion that there is an objective standard for what is considered good writing.

By that, I mean two things.

There is (i) terrible writing and (ii) not-so-terrible writing.

Terrible writing… you couldn’t pay somebody to read it.

• It’s poorly formatted.

• It has no structure.

• There’s no clear coherence between ideas.

• I almost forget to mention poor grammar too.

Not-so-terrible writing is the bare minimum.

• The sentences do connect.

• The paragraphs do follow.

• Something is being said orderly and clearly.

Once your writing is above terrible, everything becomes subjective.

(See how crazy it is to think about how many writers, creators, and entrepreneurs use AI to act as a yes-man with almost every decision they make? That is nuts to me.)

Subjectivity requires a self, and everybody nowadays is outsourcing that self to a machine.

With this exclusive paid guide, I will give you something more than a simple writing exercise.

It will punch you in the face, making you realise how much more thinking you will do with it, in as little as 10 minutes, compared to “brainstorming” for two hours with your buddy Claude.

This exercise will teach you how to write by thinking about how great writing is written.

Namely, across four levels of abstraction: the sentence, the paragraph, the section, and the full piece.

First things first:

• Choose a long form piece of writing you love more than your morning coffee

• Note: The long form post must be validated. By that, I mean high-performing (high views/engagement, is an outlier post compared to the creators audience size/usual engagement metrics, use Eden for this if you want help)

• If it’s a Substack newsletter: 300-1k+ likes minimum (just do it)

• If it’s on YouTube: 100k+ views minimum (YT videos are written scripts being read to a camera)

• The reason we are choosing a validated post, is because engagement is a signal that other people responded to that writing for some reason. Your goal as a writer is to attract attention, no? To get people to read and become interested in what you have written, right? You need attention first if you want people to care about what you have to say.

Remember:

Engagement is a signal that other people responded to that writing for some reason.

This exercise will give you the ability to uncover those reasons, across any high-performing post, so you can write high-performing posts yourself, and grab attention and get people interested in your writing/ideas.

Even your offers, like how I have done with my own reading and self-education guides, and my paid-tier guides like this one.

Once you follow this process, you will never read a piece of writing the same way again.

And you might find, like I did, that writing by hand with your own brain doing the work is more enjoyable than anything AI could produce for you.

Let’s start with our first level of analysis.

What makes an sentence or an idea impactful?

Please read:

I will be breaking down 11 tools for unrotting your mind.

Why?

1. Well, it is high-performing (1k+ likes on Substack)

2. Which means there is something I can learn from this to apply to my future writing

And I like doing these exercises alongside you.

Because it’s proof, first of all.

Proof creates trust, in that I am an authority in long-form writing.

(I hate trying to sound like an expert, but it has to be said)

And two, I want to learn this myself.

So why not do it live, alongside you! :)

Level I - The Sentence (Idea)

This is the big question, folks.

What makes an idea profound?

Ultimately, it comes down to mechanics. In better words, what an idea or a single sentence is doing.

Assuming you have your (validated) piece of long form writing open beside you (I have mine here beside me), before you do anything, practice labelling what each sentence is doing.

Is it a pattern interrupt?

A curiosity loop?

A reframe?

A profound idea (or “big idea,” in advertising lingo)

A metaphor or a problem/pain point?

Label each sentence first, then interpret what each one is doing mechanically.

The order matters. You’ll see why in just a second.

Here is how I like to label my ideas, in the order of how I like to write each body section, following a what-why-how framework.

More on that later ;)

What the profound idea/problem is

• Profound Idea - A bold assertion that something is true

• Reframe - Accepts what the reader believes, then gives a different perspective on it

• Problem/Pain Point - A pain the reader already feels

• Pattern Interrupt - Breaks expected flow (one-liners, blunt statements, questions, the words “fuck” or “fucking” I use all the time)

• Personal Experience - A story or experience from your own life in which you succeeded or failed at something

• Quote/Statistic - Borrowed authority, always useful!

• Loop Opener - A question or statement that temporarily witholds information for engaging effect

Why it is true

• Concept - A named idea or framework explained

• Insight - A non-obvious truth, it’s basically a reframe

• Metaphor/Analogy - Makes abstract ideas physical

• Anecdote - A short story that illustrates the point

• Example - Concrete example of an abstract idea

• What/How/Why - A question... pretty self-explanatory

How it relates to the reader, or the rest of the long form post

• Consequence/Implication - What (likely negative) thing will happen if the reader ignores this idea?

• Action Step - What the reader can do to achieve a benefit/avoid a pain point

• Loop Close - Answers the opening question, or bridges to the next loop

• Challenge - Redirects the argument toward the reader’s own behaviour, forcing them to self-evaluate

But you might be thinking, and rightfully so:

“But Craig! Why bother categorizing each sentence?”

Isn’t that a bit… boring?

Won’t it take ages?

Why not get AI to do it for me?

Well, my glorious friend, categorization is a form of encoding.

Encoding is how information gets stored into long-term memory. When you label a sentence before analyzing it, you are forcing your brain to (i) evaluate and then recall what the mechanism is beneath each sentence, and (ii) see the structure beneath the meaning of each idea.

That is how you read with the eyes of a writer, and not a reader.

Practice reading a sentence, or a cluster of sentences, and label each sentence mechanism. Then, keep the order of the mechanisms (pattern interrupt → loop → profound idea → loop etc.) but close the original piece of writing.

Now write your own version. Following the exact order of the sentence mechanisms you have extracted, and write about your own ideas, about any topic of your choosing.

This is what I call close imitation.

It takes just a few minutes to do.

A practical example will help make this make far more sense, once you can physically see what I mean.

Walkthrough

Here are the first 6 sentences from my long-form post.

On a random day your life will end.

With half-finished books and essays.

Ideas and plans you kept delaying till next Monday.

And thank god you spent it scrolling.

Real life is lived offline.

Which means every time you decide to scroll, you decide not to live your life.

Here is what each sentence/idea is doing at the mechanism level:

1. Bold Claim - A bold statement that something is true

2. Pain Point - A problem or pain the reader relates to, and therefore feels

3. Pain Point - Same again

4. Pattern Interrupt - An idea that breaks an expectation

5. Profound Idea - A core idea or concept within the entire piece

6. Consequence/Implication - What will happen (usually negative) because of an idea you aren’t acting on

With a little profound thinking, here is what I have come up with in about 10 minutes or so.

I’ve used the exact order of ideas listed above from 1-6, but on the topic of learning to think by writing essays.

Take a look:

You will never learn to think if you don’t write essays.

I know you hated writing essays in school.

I know that writing is extremely difficult and time-intensive.

Mind you, I am not talking about those types of essays.

It doesn’t take much time and effort to start writing either.

Because you only need as little as 30-60 minutes per day of writing, even poorly, to completely reshape your life.

That is how little you need to rewire your brain, bulletproof your thinking, and therefore determine every outcome you will make throughout the remainder of your life.

See how much more impactful this is compared to if I had just explained something simply?

Profound ideas are ideas that do something beneath the surface.

Every sentence should feel like a mind-fuck while reading it.

Read more

Build a meaningful project.

Even if it’s your first one.

By a project, I mean a new thing you will build toward each and every day. Literally anything.

A new physique.

A better relationship.

A topic/reading list.

An exam to pass.

A jiu-jitsu blue belt.

A project is something that, I personally have found, to be the best way to bring your ideal future into the now. Something to launch you out of bed each morning. Like an ecstatic child excited to create and build something new and beneficial for your life.

And maybe other people’s lives too (which doesn’t hurt).

I really hate that a select few people online are selling grindset-productivity as a God to people who don’t yet have the awareness and agency to question them. I think you’ll burnout and fail if you listen to them. And those same people who believe they are grinding all day, they are just doing busy work, and not productive, needle-moving work.

I used to write my weekly newsletter on my lunch break at work, and in 5 minute sprints while hiding in the jacks throughout the day. Thanks to my 2 digital products (my reading guide and my self-education guide), my exclusive paid guides here on my Substack paid-tier (my learning and writing strategies), and (the little help from) YouTube AdSense, I’ve moved to part-time hours in my job.

Now I write for 1-2 hours every single morning, because I built upon those lunch break and 5 minute writing sessions.

I’ve been writing these essays and sharing them online for a year now.

And I’m not a fucking millionaire.

I still have a job, and I have zero intention with ever selling you a bullshit identity/transformation like “escape the 9-5,” even in my upcoming long-form writing course that will be launching in the next month (it teaches my writing/content system).

But I have learned a lot in this last year while doing this whole personal brand thing. And I’ve made more mistakes in the last week than most people tell you online across their whole career :)

To start with:

The thing that will make having a meaningful project to work on as meaningful and seamless as possible, is having an aim.

Yes, I know it sounds esoteric and abstract.

But my goal here today, is to make that profound idea as practical and actionable as possible, by giving you a 6-step plan that will outline your meaningful project, in about one hour or so.

You can watch the YouTube version of this essay below:

And listen to this while on a walk on Spotify (c’mon, the weather is booming atm)

Pushing rocks

You are already pushing a rock toward an aim you may not have chosen.

If you don’t build a purpose you will be handed one.

If you don’t give yourself an aim your mind will pick an expedient one without you knowing.

If you don’t have a meaningful project to work on, how do you expect to change your life into the life you want it to be?

I think the quickest way to make your life feel a hell of a lot more meaningless, is to always wait around until you have the thing you want.

More time.

Lots of money.

Tons of energy… you know the story.

I caught myself out, like, 2 months ago.

I was lifting, and I was thinking how I’d love to try get my first gold medal as a jiu-jitsu blue belt. I was thinking how I’d do it once I launched my writing course, and then if I started a service of some kind (I’ve been considering it).

And then I taught… “you stupid fucking piece of shit.”

Sorry, my self talk isn’t usually that negative. But that is quite literally what I thought.

Why do I want to wait until I have more money, or quit my job, or reach X or Y date or [insert arbitrary milestone here].

You can literally just do things. So why start only when you have the things, since doing things is… literally how you get things?

Have you ever seen that gorilla video?

If you haven’t, you can search it up, but it’s a video of a basketball team throwing a ball around to each other and you are told before hand (this is important) to watch and follow where the ball goes. I watched that for the first time when I was 17 in my youth project, and I taught I was the smartest person, thinking because I knew about psychology and philosophy, that I’d see past this trick right away.

When the youth leader asked if anyone saw the gorilla moving around in the background, it floored me.

Absolutely. Fucking. Floored me.

You’ll only understand fully if you’ve seen the video. But the profound idea behind it is that you see what you are aiming at.

Once more.

You see what you are aiming at.

The human mind is a master at locking onto a target and ignoring everything else that isn’t that target.

If I ask you to think about red cars while we’re on a drive together, in my girlfriend’s Suzuki Swift that I’m insured on, how many blue cars do you think you’ll see?

Exactly.

At least 10 red cars.

My point:

If you haven’t given yourself a target, well, you already have one. It’s just unconscious to you, and it was implanted in there by somebody else online, somebody else you know, perhaps a parent or a teacher or an external body like the education system, the news, or the government. I know you already get the jist behind why that can get pretty hairy…

Most unnecessary suffering in a lot of people’s lives comes less from their circumstances and more from what they are aiming at.

When I was 17, I was aimed at answers.

I was suffering a lot back then. Most of it unnecessarily, in my own mind. And it led me toward profound ideas. This is literally why my newsletter is called profound ideas, btw. Philosophy, psychology, reading and books, and learning to write (not like the way I write now, though). And tons of prime Jordan Peterson and Academy of Ideas.

Lots of ideas that were esoteric and abstract, yes, but I found them to be so practical and beneficial once I actually applied them to my own life.

I had zero free time with the Leaving Certificate back then. I had no part-time job or the level of freedom you’d have with a car.

But I did have a direction, and it served as the foundation for, quite literally, what you are reading this on right now.

A profound question for you to consider:

What are you currently aimed at, and therefore, what are you not seeing?

Let’s do some thinking together, now, through what you actually need to do, in order to start changing in your life.

You need to build something dense

I screen-recorded this profound idea while on a lunch break at work when I was 18, it was an Instagram reel.

I listened to it about 8 times in a row, because it too, like the gorilla video, absolutely fucking floored me:

You are going to develop one, maybe two chronic illnesses at some point in your life. And if it’s not you, it will be somebody that you love. So what type of person do you want to be when that comes? You want to be the person who built an ark.

I don’t like talking about this.

But maybe this might help someone who has also gone through this, is going currently going through it.

It’s been just about 10 years since my Mam passed away from stomach cancer.

For about 2 years it was chemo every Thursday and trying every diet under the sun. We still saw family every week, but we could never really go out and have days together like we used to.

I’m not looking for sympathy saying any of this.

If you know, you know, it was just a hard thing to go through.

So… why am I saying this to you?

It really taught me that some people get rocks dropped on top of them, that they have to push nonetheless.

I was 12 when she passed, I’m 22 now, and I do miss her terrible. But I don’t spend every second wishing my life away to have her back. Which might sound like a terrible thing to say, but I don’t think it is.

I have my personal brand, my writing, lifting weights, my girlfriend, my Dad, my jiu-jitsu club, my friend group (we call ourselves “The Big 5” that I see every Friday), and I love music, and books, and learning and ideas, and eating good food and going on walks and caffeine and blocking my phone for 12 hours at a time.

I would love to see her again. Even though I don’t think I’ll get ever get the chance.

But I don’t think I need her back to feel fulfilled in my life ever again.

You have to build a life that justifies all the shit that comes with being alive. You have to choose your own burdens, to help you combat the burdens that will try and take you out at the ankles.

There will always be hard days.

Also, I’m 22. So what the fuck do I know.

But I think we should at least choose to make those days hard, but in the right direction, toward the right goals that you yourself have chosen.

The body you have built, the mind you have forged, the soul you have cultivated, and the vocation you end up with, will each be determined by what rocks you push.

Nobody is coming to push your rocks for you.

Which, is a profound idea that should excite you more than anything you’ve read all year.

Let’s build your meaningful project, together, now :)

How to build a meaningful project

Step 1 - Plan for your death and move backwards

That’s a profound idea that my girlfriend sent me last Thursday.

Plan for your death and move backwards.

What life do you want to have built across your only one life?

I hate sounding like a guru saying that. But it really is a practical question if you think about it practically. You don’t need a 10 year plan because you can’t see that far anyway. There’s too much uncertainty, so think 3-6 months at minimum, and 1-3 years maximum.

In the next 5 minutes, write down the type of life you’d like to have, if you could have it, and if you actually tried to go out and get it.

Be honest here.

If you write down the life you ‘think’ you should want, versus the one you actually want, you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot before step 2.

Step 2 - Write down your ideal life and character

Write a bad first draft.

A bad first draft is still a draft.

And you can’t edit a draft that does not exist.

Write down your answer for these two questions now, in two separate documents, or on two separate pieces of paper:

• What does your ideal life look like?

• What does your ideal character look like, that would be needed to build that ideal life?

500 words each is a good minimum. That’s like 15-30 minutes of writing each.

And spending one hour to give you a clearer aim than you have ever thought about across the decades you’ve spent being alive, I think that’s a worthy investment of your time.

By all means, if the profound ideas are flowing, feel free to do more!

Neither answers have to be perfect, you literally just need something written down that you can reread, evaluate, reflect upon, and then edit once you start your first project.

While writing, think about what it would feel like to have both the ideal life and character.

I say feel, because you don’t actually want things for having them. I still haven’t fully recovered from hearing this first myself.

You want things for how having them makes you feel.

Step 3 - Choosing your first project

You need to choose one skill.

Your skill should help you move closer to living your ideal life and building your ideal character in some way.

If it does both, you have chosen an excellent skill.

If you’re stuck, here are four categories to pick from:

• Mind - a course, a reading list, a degree, a high-value skill like writing

• Body - lifting, BJJ, sprinting, running

• Soul - a relationship, a meditation practice (I call it a boredom practice), spirituality

• Vocation - a personal brand, a part-time one-person business, creating and sharing something online through writing

Reminder: only one skill, because that will be your one project

My own example:

The first project I clearly defined for myself was this very newsletter. I wanted to learn to write, think, and talk about ideas I thought were so profound and useful when applied to your life, and to market them in a way as to make other people care about them too (marketing is the same thing as persuasion).

Step 4 - Start absurdly small

Aim low.

That doesn’t mean don’t aim.

I sat down with one of the lads and talked about this profound idea a while back. He was struggling with being productive and getting college work done (he’s an architect). So we sat down and did a fundamental analysis of his time.

He was spending about 40-50 hours per week in college. Lectures included. We drew it all out on a Google Calendar, so we could see what time was being allocated to where.

Guess how much actual, productive, needle-moving work he was doing.

About 40 minutes per day outside of lectures.

I realized I did the same thing in college months before that conversation.

I was doing 20 hours per week of “college work” and producing output for only… 3 of those hours.

My solution was cutting back to one hour of college work per day. Hard limit. Nothing more than that. And I ended up getting all my assignments done one month early because of it.

The idea:

Sometimes, all you need to do is as little as possible in order to see progress.

500 words of writing takes 15-30 minutes. But done across four days, and this essay that you are reading right now, is finished.

Find the lowest effective dose.

The lowest amount of work that still moves the needle, and do it every day.

But also, you need to negotiate with yourself.

If not, you’re going to get fed up, because you’ve set too high of an expectation for yourself, then feel oppressed, then fall back to doomscrolling till 3am every night while covered in Pringles and Cheeto dust.

Step 5 - Bring your ideal future into the now

Do not wait for conditions to be perfect to start living the life you want.

Begin by bringing your ideal future into the present moment.

Example:

I wanted to write for 1-2 hours every single morning. I didn’t wait until I quit my job to do that. I started with 15 minutes on my phone while lying in bed before work. Then, I got up earlier and did 30-60 minutes with a coffee before work.

If you don’t start by trying to live the smallest version of the life you do want, today, then you’re never going to live it.

Aim low. That’s a Jungian idea, that is.

The gap between your life as it is now, and the life and character you want to have, it closes only by moving toward it.

You move toward it by trying to live it, today, and every day after that.

Step 6 - Ah yes, iteration

Remember that draft you wrote in step 2?

Yeah.

It will change.

Because so will you.

You will have a draft 2, and a draft 3, and a draft 4, a draft 5, draft 15, draft 107.

If something isn’t working, or if you don’t feel motivated (as motivation always runs out after that initial honeymoon phase) then you need to iterate.

What do I mean by iterate?

You need to reflect on what you loved doing, what you hated doing, and change one thing.

Iterate ruthlessly like a mad man.

It took me over 60 of these long form posts to figure out how I like to write.

Think about that for a second.

60 long-form pieces of content across more than a year.

And I still feel like I am learning something new about this craft all the time. Because I am iterating. Trial and error every week. I’m experimenting, plotting, scheming up new ways to make these essays better for you absolute legends.

Even if something feels like it is wrong or it stops being enjoyable, that’s still feedback.

Reflect on it.

Iterate somewhere, and genuinely try to listen to what you enjoy doing.

There’s enough bad actors out there selling you productivity as a God.

Just have follow the fucking fun, and you’ll never have to worry about burnout.

Thanks for reading this one, it means a lot. I know it was a bit personal, but that’s what I wanted to test out this week to see how I felt about it, and to see how you legends engaged with it too.

You’re an absolute legend.

Thank you for having an interest in interesting ideas.

- Craig :)

And the demand for serious long form writing is growing.

This is a practical guide for those who:

• Are beginners who want to write about their favorite ideas

• Are those wanting to talk about their favorite books, interests, thinkers, and topics, and actually get other people to care

• Have been writing online for some time, and who think they have good writing… but social media says otherwise (no engagement, no audience growth, screaming into the abyss stuck in “beginner hell”)

• Want to make their writing attract more attention, provide more value, and be more impactful for their readers

And this guide is especially for those who:

• Think you can only build an audience online by talking about “how to build an audience online” and “how to grow your personal brand”

I am proof that you do not need to do that last point, especially. And if I can do it, it means you can too, if you actually follow what this guide will teach you, with enough trial and error and iteration across time.

Now.

Onto the heart of the matter:

A meaning economy is (finally) beginning to take shape.

People are getting sick of short form nonsense.

The silly dances.

The AI (and human) slop content.

I believe that the profound thinkers will lead in the emerging meaning economy.

What is a profound thinker, you ask?

Well, my friend, a profound thinker is somebody looking to solve meaningful problems through writing long form.

Essays, articles, newsletters, YouTube scripts etc.

More specifically, profound thinkers have unique knowledge they are looking to share, in the form of novel perspectives and solutions to problems, that can truly impact people.

This is done by creating content… if you want the boring word for it. I will be interchanging these two words as we think through all of this together, writing and content.

Just know, that an audience is a by-product of high-quality writing that has helped people.

It’s ok to want to build an audience. Every writer and creator does.

This is a safe space, you don’t need to keep it secret.

So, if you want an audience, you have to help people for free.

How do you do help people for free?

You create content.

Why content?

Because all the attention is online, and being aimed toward content.

YouTube with every meal, short form while standing in every queue, long form essays like my own that I send out in my newsletter each week… you get the jist.

You can’t get people to care about your ideas unless you have their attention first.

My writing isn’t for everyone.

It isn’t academic.

I don’t have a degree in writing.

I make spelling errors more than my dyslexic girlfriend.

But within my first year of writing online (at age 22, which still feels weird to me) I achieved the following:

• Cultivated 37k+ newsletter subs and almost 20k YouTube subs

• Became a Substack bestseller in 4 months (with only 10 or so long form posts)

• Garnered over 1.6 million reads of my writing here on Substack

• Earned my first €10k through promoting my offers at the bottom of my long form posts each week

  • (two digital products on reading/self-education, paid long form guides like this one on my learning and writing strategies, and YouTube AdSense, which covers a lot less than you’d think)

All that, by writing just one long form post per week.

That’s right.

You do not need to overcomplicate your content strategy by creating tons of email sequences or funnels or specific pieces of content for every and all platforms.

One high-quality long form post per week.

That is what I have learned to be true, for me at least, in the last year.

Pick Substack or X, since that is where all the attention is for finding and reading long form. Maybe YouTube if you can handle it too (record yourself reading your long form post to a camera and you’re cooking).

Here’s how I like to think about writing long form, as of now with my current level of understanding. Because this will change, and it’s only one way of thinking about writing long form. Read this, digest it, experiment, and find what works for you.

This is me sharing what I have found to work quite well for me.

I don’t see myself as an expert or an authority or a guru.

I’m just… Craig.

Nice to meet you! :)

Enough hedging.

Let’s address the core philosophy behind every piece of content you should write, and why a lot of creators stay stuck in beginner hell for life (or until they lose hope and quit).

This profound idea will help you launch out of beginner hell.

I - Research & Topic Selection

Carve this idea into your skull. PLEASE.

Find the intersection between validated titles/topics online, and your own personal interests.

Understand that, and you can write about anything you want and “do well.”

Escaping beginner hell feels like… well, hell.

The solution is actually pretty simple.

But it’s not so easy, either:

Find what people are already/currently clicking on in terms of titles and topics, then write your own unique perspectives about those topics.

If you repeat this process from week to week, it’ll be a matter of waiting to strike gold.

And you only need to strike gold once.

The problem is see time and time again with writers and creators online reaching out to me is that they only write about what they want to write about, while ignoring demand (validation), or, they seek nothing but demand, and have only one goal of “going viral,” but offer no novel perspective that actually serves a broader purpose or mission they have (interest).

If you can find the intersection between getting tons of attention (with validated titles, which were, or currently are, high-performing) and saying something worth saying (interests you want to talk about, but angled and positioned as the novel perspective/solution beneath those validated titles), guess what happens.

You can write about anything you want and do well.

Look at every long form post I have written in this past year.

They are all about my own interests, because you don’t need to talk about “audience growth” in order to build an audience.

I’m only talking about it now, because (i) I have done it, (ii) I am still doing it, and (iii) I have proof of having done it.

Let’s explain the validation-interest-intersection idea a bit more, because we’ve gone through a lot just there…

Validated topics have proven demand for them.

People are reading, searching for, and sharing those titles.

And if you write about one of these validated topics, but with ideas and a perspective that only you could have written, it’s not copying or stealing.

How so?

Because anyone can write under the title “How to become dangerously articulate” or “How To Remember Everything You Read” and still say something about the title that is unique to them.

Their own system for achieving success, or their own problems, past experiences, interests, favorite books and thinkers etc.

Do this right now. It will help you understand what I mean exactly:

• Find 5-10 creators talking about profound ideas you love thinking about. Or, think about the niche or space or tribe online that you want to join

• Find each creator’s highest performing titles in the last 1-2 months.

• Pick out 2-4 of those titles

• Reword them slightly (if at all)

• Write your own novel perspective beneath those titles, and repeat

I recently helped Dan Koe with testing out the newly launched version of Eden.

It has a feature that can help you find outlier posts (high-performing posts getting more attention on average from their audience).

I would recommend using that, it will save you a ton of time and effort searching the internet, and just not really knowing what you’re doing (I struggled searching for validated posts in the beginning for a while).

I’m not sponsored by them, but I have been using Eden for more than 3 years, and it is a staple in my market research process.

II - Emulation & Learning

The same philosophy for choosing topics and titles applies to writing itself.

If you want to get attention to your personal brand, write about topics that are getting tons of attention (but with your own unique ideas)

Same with improving your craft.

If you want to have great writing, study and emulate great writing.

Note: you are not copying.

This is about emulation.

In the beginning, especially, you emulate, before you innovate.

Isn’t that what learning is?

You do what other people do successfully before doing it in your own unique way that finds success for you?

Here’s what we’ll do:

Pick a great piece of writing you love (hopefully it’s validated too, so high views/engagement), then understand why it works, extract one principle that makes it work, and apply it yourself to this week’s long form post you’re writing.

Repeat that process each week until the sources blur and your own unique style emerges. That is how all literary greats learned to write. They read and thought about great writing written by other people.

Thinking and writing are the same thing, too, I forgot to mention.

So.

How do you do this practically?

• Find a validated post you admire (1k+ likes on Substack, or 100k+ views on YouTube)

• Ask AI to surface the underlying principles behind why it works (structure, hook, psychological principles, attention mechanics)

• Take one principle to apply to your own writing yourself using your own brain (unless AI has atrophied it already, which I hope it hasn’t)

• Or, you can ask AI to coach you through how to apply it to a section of your writing, or place it somewhere in your outline

Here is a prompt I’ve made for you, feed it a validated post you love and follow the steps outlined above.

This will help you learn to write through writing, especially if you ask it to act as your thinking partner/writing coach.

Have a field day with this one:

(start of prompt)

Prompt: The Content Breakdown Analyst

You are a content analyst who reverse-engineers what makes great writing work. Your job is to extract the transferable principles from any piece of content — named, specific, and deeply explained so the writer can internalise and apply them.

You are a learning accelerator, not a summariser. Your output should leave the writer with a thorough understanding of how and why this piece works, not just a checklist of observations.

You never write for the user. You surface the building blocks so they can think deeply with them.

Context

The user is studying a piece of content they want to learn from. They may be mid-draft, outlining, or simply building their craft. The output fuels their own writing — it does not replace their process.

Self-Evaluation Trigger

Before analysis, ask:

“Before I break this down — what do you think is making this piece work, and what are you hoping to take from it?”

Wait for their answer. Let it shape your emphasis. Do not restate it back.

Instructions

Analyse the content thoroughly across all layers below. For each principle, technique, or observation — name it specifically, explain what it does in this piece, and explain why it works on the reader. Go deep. The writer should finish reading this analysis with a genuine understanding of the craft decisions at work, not just surface observations.

Analysis Layers

Argument Skeleton

A clear map of the piece’s structure and argument.

• Thesis — the single arguable claim the piece makes, stated in one sentence

• Moves — number each key section and explain: what it does, why it’s placed here, and how it executes that job

• Sequence logic — why does this order work? What would be lost if sections were rearranged?

• Cut — what did the writer leave out that a weaker version would have included, and why was cutting it the right decision?

Key Mechanics

Identify and explain the craft techniques at work throughout the piece. For each one: name the technique, show where it appears, explain what it accomplishes, and explain why it works on the reader.

Cover as many as are genuinely present and worth learning from. Don’t pad, but don’t artificially limit either.

Principles Unearthed

For each category below, identify and explain 1–3 principles at work in this piece. For each: name the principle, explain what it does in this piece, explain why it works on the reader, and show where it appears with a specific example from the content.

Structural — how the piece is architected at macro or micro level

Psychological — what human drives, fears, desires, or biases it activates and how

Attention — how it earns and sustains the reader’s focus at key moments

Persuasion — any sales, marketing, or belief-shifting tactics at work and how they function

Skip any category where nothing notable is genuinely present.

Transferable Principles

Extract the principles the writer can carry into their own work. These are not observations about this piece — they are tools the writer keeps permanently.

For each principle:

• Name it clearly

• Explain what it is and how it functions as a writing technique

• Explain why it works on readers — the psychological or structural reason

• Show it with a specific example pulled from this piece

• Explain how to apply it — what would using this principle look like in practice?

Cover as many genuine transferable principles as the piece contains. Prioritise depth over quantity — a few principles explained thoroughly are worth more than many explained superficially.

Weaknesses

If the piece has flaws, name them clearly and explain why they weaken it. Be specific — vague criticism doesn’t help the writer learn. If there are no meaningful weaknesses, say so briefly.

Closing

After the analysis, ask one question:

“Where are you in your writing process right now — is there a specific principle here you want to think through further or explore how to apply?”

Guidelines

• Named and specific beats vague and general — always

• Every principle must be transferable beyond this piece

• Transferable Principles is the most important output — give it the most depth

• Explain the why behind every observation, not just the what

• Use specific examples from the content to ground every claim

• Emphasis follows what the user flagged in the self-evaluation trigger

Constraints

• Do not write or rewrite content for the user

• Do not produce essay-style prose without structure — use named sections and clear organisation

• Do not skip the self-evaluation trigger

• Do not restate the user’s input

• Do not pad with filler — every observation should earn its place through specificity and insight

Anti-Patterns

Sycophancy and flattery

• “Great choice of content!” / “This is a fascinating piece.”

• Any affirmation before analysis

AI contrast flips

• “It’s not just X, it’s Y.” Lead with the idea directly.

Filler openers

• “Here’s the thing…” / “What makes this work is…” as a preamble before naming it

Vague praise

• “The hook is strong.” Name what it does, which technique it uses, why it works on the reader.

Overclaiming

• “This will transform your writing.” / “This is a masterclass in…”

Restating the user

• Summarising their self-evaluation answer before proceeding

Surface observations

• Noting that something exists without explaining how or why it works

Verification Notes

Before delivering output, confirm:

• Did I ask the self-evaluation trigger and let the user answer first?

• Is every principle named specifically — no vague observations?

• Have I explained the why behind every technique, not just the what?

• Is every principle in Transferable Principles genuinely applicable beyond this piece?

• Have I used specific examples from the content to ground my analysis?

• Have I avoided all anti-patterns?

CONTENT TO ANALYSE:

[Paste the full text here]

(end of prompt)

III - Ideation & Outlining

Really, I am not teaching you how to write.

I am actually teaching you how to think, which is what writing is.

It’s formalized thinking.

Where the mind literally meets the body.

We could say, then, that the goal here is to learn to organize your thinking into a persuasive argument.

And to do that, we need to write using a persuasive/copywriting framework.

Why?

An outline is 80% of the writing.

I don’t care if you think you don’t need an outline. To all those who think they’ll do fine without one, you won’t, and if you’ve never used an outline, it means you’ve just never used one consciously.

Don’t get scared with the business lingo.

Copywriting is persuasion, that’s all it is.

And if you don’t like the word persuasion, swap that word out with the word engaging.

Nobody likes to read a dull piece of writing.

Do you?

The glory that comes from having an outline is that you’re not thinking chaotically while writing. And since your outline is beside you to look at while you write, you are thinking freely still, but in an organized manner and within constraints (which amplifies creative thinking, weirdly enough).

The outline is the thinking already complete. You’re just fleshing out the argument with some flair and style.

I recommend capturing ideas as they come to you throughout the week.

You have the whole week to write each long form post, and the reason we have that much time for ourselves, is this exactly:

You’re not going to have all your best ideas in one go, or in a single sitting.

You can use the notes app of your phone. A notebook. A voice recorder. Chalk and a brick wall, for all I care. Just write your ideas down, because if not, you will forget them.

I REPEAT. You will forget them if you don’t write it down.

Thank you, fellow Irishman Mr. Dylan O’Sullivan for carving that profound idea into my skull.

In terms of outlining, start with the key ideas. What are the key points you want to make? Likely, these will follow a problem → solution framework. Every persuasive writing framework is a variant of that one.

Write down the key points you want to make, even roughly, and every idea that comes to mind about your chosen title.

Then, organize your key points into an argument, and your remaining ideas under each key point following a what → why → how framework.

So:

• Big picture outline - follows a problem-solution framework

• Each key point section within your outline - follows a what-why-how framework

I’m not going to go super in-depth into outlining.

You can ask AI to help you create a long form post outline in an infinite number of ways, with an infinite number of frameworks.

• AIDA - Attention, Interest, Desire, Action

• PIS - Problem, Insight, Solution

• PAS - Problem, Amplify, Solution

• PP - Pain, Process

• PASTOR - Problem, Amplify, Solution, Transformation, Offer, Response

Use this prompt with helping you create an outline. Give it your full list of key point/section ideas over a 1-2 day period and let it help you organize those into an outline.

Read more

Right…

You’ve probably heard this 1000 times already, but.

Information is now a commodity.

You can build knowledge on nuclear physics while sipping on decaf tea, with your feet up by the Irish coastline, for free, without needing permission from anyone.

But you probably haven’t heard this idea yet.

A new scarce resource is starting to emerge. And it’s not knowledge…

Fear-mongering is the world’s best marketing tactic.

Everyone is talking about how AI is going to replace all jobs.

Writers and creators included.

How most college degrees and therefore skills are now worthless.

My goal with this essay is to remind you that nothing has changed.

The new scarce resource is wisdom.

And here is why, you absolute legend of a human.

Wisdom is not algorithmic.

It cannot be made by an algorithm.

It cannot be generated.

It cannot be prompted like Claude or ChatGPT, or downloaded to a USB stick.

Wisdom requires three things:

Action, experience, and risk.

You need to learn how to learn so you can learn how to think.

If you can think, you can formalize your thinking through writing.

If you can write persuasively and truthfully, online, you can share what you know with people 1-3 steps behind you, struggling with problems you yourself have overcome with your own proof and unique knowledge.

And if you share your unique knowledge online, you will make more mistakes than writing about it offline, and thus learn from those mistakes faster, and iterate toward whatever your definition of success may be faster too.

I am still a learner. All of my essays are me just learning in public.

Me showing my work.

I would rather be honest with you about what I have been doing, building, and learning in real time, than pretending to be some authoritative know-it-all guru. There’s enough of those bad actors out there.

Saying that, I have spent the last year engaging in constant trial and error, for hours each day.

The effects of doing so, I now see in my personal brand attracting like-minded thinkers to my writing each week, me now closing in on earning my first 10k from writing for just 1-2 hours per day, and actually having a clear vessel for my own self-development.

A vessel that makes me jump out of bed each morning, excited to create things I wish I had when I was 1-3 steps behind where I currently am right now.

Even before I go to work at my “real” job.

My personal brand within the next 3-5 years, compared to a piece of paper that says I am competent… my degree… will be like comparing diamond to dirt.

Yep, because of these four skills.

Let’s do some profound thinking about each, one by one.

Watch the video version of this essay here, friend.

Skill I - Learning

The fool is the precursor to the savior. - Carl Jung

Thank you for that profound idea, Professor Jung.

Because learning is how you go from being a fool to becoming wise.

Becoming wise is painful.

We all know what it is like to lose.

A jiu-jitsu competition… ugh.

A game of football.

A friendship of some kind.

Or a pet fish. Miss you Spongebob and Gary.

Learning is painful because a part of you has to die, before a newer, wiser part of you can forge itself into existence, and fill its place.

Think about how quickly your brain can recall a bad memory. It’s shit, I know.

Or think about how easily you remember your passions and your interests, or the things that genuinely matter to you, compared to the (obsolete) subjects you were forced to remember in school.

Your brain encodes what is necessary for your survival. Bad memories (and your interests) are survival data that your brain believes is relevant for keeping you alive.

Tombolo’s and complex numbers… not so much.

This is why wise people have failed a lot.

They’ve hit barriers. Lots of roadblocks. They have faced more upset in their lives than most would be willing to go through voluntarily.

Pain signals to the brain, your brain, that this any one thing is relevant so you don’t feel this pain again. Which means that learning, through acting, making mistakes, and taking risks, is how you become wise.

If you’re not going out and trying to fail at something, deliberately, you will always be a fool. I wish I told the younger me that profound idea, who was scared shitless to leave his house on any given day.

A fool is someone who never tries anything new, and expects new results and opportunities to come their way on a silver platter because they think they’re entitled to it.

Physics is harsh, my friend. And I’m afraid that in order for either of us to get what we want in life, we have to go out and actually try and get it.

Let’s get into the fun stuff:

The brain learns through encoding and retrieval.

• Encoding is the act of thinking about information in a particular way that stores it in long-term memory - How you think about information literally determines how much or how well you learn.

• Retrieval is the act of recalling information spontaneously from your memory, so you can use it in your thinking or behaviour to solve a problem, or achieve a meaningful goal.

For information to get encoded into your long-term memory, it must first enter working memory, where it gets manipulated.

(The information getting manipulated is the encoding, i.e. the thinking.)

This is what your working memory looks like:

The problem with working memory is that it is limited to four units, or slots.

If working memory gets maxed out, you end up learning like most people, who consume for 3 hours straight, do 5 minutes of actual thinking, and retain a fraction’s worth of consumption effort, because their working memory was overloaded the entire time they spent reading.

Each slot can hold 1 unit of information, or one chunk. Which, is a group of units grouped or categorized together, which to your working memory is still one unit.

What working memory looks like when full:

What it looks like when you chunk:

See how it frees up space so you can consume some more? Because you’ve digested what you’ve consumed?

This is the secret to learning at a scary rate, by consuming AND digesting… not just consuming for 3 hours straight, like we’ve said.

I don’t like how people call chunking a memory trick… it is literally how you digest information you have consumed. Since, when you consume information and organize it into categories, you are literally building new knowledge.

Processing raw material into something usable, kinda like the way your stomach doesn’t store food but breaks it down into fuel.

There are three questions to think of when looking to encode anything into retrievable knowledge:

1. How can I organize this into chunks, groups, or categories? (organizational encoding, what we went over)

2. How does this connect to what I already know? (elaborative encoding)

3. Why is this true? (semantic encoding)

Then, spend the first 5-10 minutes of any learning session trying to recall what you covered last time. Explain it, repeat it, teach it. If there’s a gap, that gap is what you need to learn next.

To get good at remembering, then practice remembering.

The gaps in your knowledge are the only learning plan you’ll ever need.

So.

If that is how we turn information into knowledge, this means wisdom is your track record of how often you have used and tested your knowledge against reality.

But we don’t want to just know things.

We want to be perspective builders.

Here’s how to think about what you’ve learned, so you don’t turn yourself into an AI chatbot reciting pure facts.

Skill II - Thinking

You cannot think about an idea you have not encoded into your brain.

It would be like trying to throw a tennis ball that doesn’t exist.

Encoding is the prerequisite of thinking.

But encoding alone does not mean you’ll have a perspective on the new knowledge you’ve built.

There’s a huge difference between someone who summarizes and someone who is a perspective-builder.

I’m not going to talk about critical thinking.

I have never been given a clear definition for that word.

I am instead going to open a doorway, for you, to the levels of abstraction.

It sounds esoteric, I know.

But a level of abstraction is simply a zoom setting on reality.

Let’s say you punched me in the face.

On a physical level, it would hurt my ugly mug, and your hand, due to kinetic energy and colliding bone/tissue.

On a psychological level, you’d probably be angry in some way if you wanted to hit me. And I would be struck with fear and adrenaline, because… you know. Why in the fuck did you just hit me.

On a social level, that is a violent act. If you strike me down and I don’t get back up, you’ve beaten me in a battle for dominance, or perhaps competence. You have physical power over me. What would other people think if they saw you doing that?

On a moral level, is it right to hit somebody? What influenced your choice to hit me, and what influences my choice to either fight back, run away, or simply lie there doing nothing.

Any one of these perspectives are true.

But they’re all true in different ways, and in terms of what they mean.

A skilled thinker holds multiple lenses in their back pocket, like a toolkit for seeing any problem from different angles.

This is how you become a perspective builder.

And this, funnily enough, is how you become a profound writer.

People don’t read your writing for the information you give them. They read your work because of your unique knowledge. Your perspective. Which is forged by consuming information through the lens of your worldview, your unique mind.

To start thinking from different levels of abstraction, right now, think about these two questions:

1. What principle does this example prove? (moving up a level)

2. What example proves this principle? (moving down a level)

If you want to go deeper, look up Hayakawa’s Abstraction Ladder, Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning, and Wilber’s Integral Theory. I’ve opened the front door, I’m sticking to my word count limit here, so you have enough agency to explore the rest of the house yourself.

Here’s a prompt you can give Claude to help you study any of them:

I want to learn about [insert framework]. I’m studying the levels of abstraction, and I would like to learn more about this framework, why it matters, and how it relates to [topic you are currently interested in].

Skill III - Writing

The word essay, in French, means to attempt.

When you write a long form post, you are attempting to solve a problem.

Specifically, a problem someone else has already tried solving before.

This is why your writing is less about demonstrating what you know, and more about offering a novel perspective on a problem people care to receive help with.

Everything I write is for my past self.

Selfish, yes.

But I do this because I want my writing to help people who are 1-3 steps behind where I am right now.

1-3 mountains behind me even, if you think of Sisyphus pushing a rock uphill for eternity.

We are all pushing our own rocks.

Some of us are stronger and more experienced than others.

I’ve been told a good few times now that I’m very good at guiding people in my content, and not simply explaining or telling people what to do. Which is something I am still trying to improve.

I don’t want to be at the bottom of the mountain telling you what to do, and I don’t want to be at the summit screaming down at you, telling you to “go here then there then here then…”

I want to be climbing alongside you.

As a writer/creator, you should absolutely be doing this wherever you can.

Being in closer proximity to a problem is oftentimes more important than authority. Sometimes asking the writer making 10k per year is more useful to you than asking the writer making 1 million.

Writing is a test that you understand what you know.

When you write an essay like this one, you have to retrieve what you know and organize it into a persuasive argument.

It reveals gaps you might have missed with the previous two skills. A gap being something you need to think about, so the gap can disappear.

We are now entering the largest epidemic of fake thinking in human history.

Anyone can write a competent, bland piece of writing and sound like an authority on any topic. Because that is what lazy people want. To be seen as knowing things, without showing any proof of having done anything with what they know.

A profound thinker is different. They want to be useful.

I have written one essay per week for the last year. Sometimes two. I only ever try to make them 1% better each week.

And over this past year, my life has changed. For the first time ever, I always feel excited to create, excited to wake up each morning and have two coffees at my desk. I’m building knowledge at a compounding rate, and sharing perspectives I wish I had many moons ago, with as many absolute legends as possible.

Sorry, no way of saying that without sounding arrogant (you can’t say anything online without sounding arrogant).

My point:

Always be a learner, and write things that help, not hurt.

• You only need one high-quality long form post each week to start getting attention to your body of work/mission/writing/content/personal brand etc.

• Write 2000 words on a validated topic each week (high performing in the last 1-3 months, high views/engagement. I use Eden to help with this)

• Offer a perspective in your long form writing that helps a specific person overcome their problem, permanently, if you can.

• Repeat each week.

• That’s your entire learning/content/self-development system.

An audience is a by-product of high-quality writing that helps people.

Don’t overcomplicate more than simply just helping people.

About that…

Skill IV - Sharing

Everyone I have ever spoken to in person and online wants to be rich.

Not everyone wants to help other people.

Building a personal brand, growing an audience, getting rich… they’re all the same bullshit transformations people offer you in their services or courses, but none of them address the real ‘secret.’

It’s not a secret. I’m just saying that to make my writing sound more persuasive, and therefore engaging, and thus more enjoyable for you to read.

The ‘secret’… takes a lot of effort.

It’s helping people.

Helping people creates trust.

Trust is one of the two currencies you need to become a stand-out creator in the emerging meaning economy (more on that at the end of this essay).

The two currencies:

1. Trust

2. Attention

People who chase attention alone go viral. Yes.

But there’s no through-line mission that the attention is being directed toward.

Trust is built through long, slow, dense writing that helps.

Unfortunately, not as well through the type of short-form content you can swipe through in seconds.

Social media is a two-player game.

You need to know how to grab attention, because nobody is actively searching for you in the beginning. 95% of people online scroll with zero search intent. So you need to understand how to grab attention before converting that attention into interest in what you are trying to share - with your long-form writing (or content, if you want the boring word for it).

Traffic is people.

Every view is a real person clicking on your Substack or your YouTube or your landing page.

Teach as if you are guiding a real person 1-3 steps behind you. That’s why I love including examples and walkthroughs in most of my writing now.

It’s proof that I can and have done this alongside you, which creates trust.

The process:

• Grab attention on a validated topic (use Eden)

• Give the reader a beneficial reason to act on your ideas

• Make a promise at the start of your post and keep it

• Fulfil that promise with a unique perspective and actionable steps they can follow

Think of writing/content as helping someone stuck on the mountain you were stuck at 1-3 mountains ago.

A Sisyphus who failed ten times trying to push a 100kg rock up the Himalayas before succeeding, and then helping guide other Sisyphus’ do the same on their first and second attempts.

Do this for 6-12 months and your writing will get better, which means your thinking will too, and so will your learning.

This full loop, now, of the four skills we have gone over, will teach you more than most 4-year degrees in 4 months of daily needle moving work.

A meaning economy is (finally) emerging

I’m starting to notice something, and it’s been happening for a while now.

The creators at the forefront of it won’t be called content creators, influencers, and it definitely won’t be the founder/corporate personal brands.

They’ll be just… people.

People who think about problems on a deeper level than most are willing to explore.

Who share what they think about those problems, in public.

As if philosophy and utility were fused together.

I’m calling these people who merge philosophy and utility, profound thinkers.

I think the meaning economy will reward those who turn genuine understanding into genuine value for other people, for free, consistently, online.

And I think those same people will also make the most money.

I’m not a millionaire, and I’m still labelling myself as a learner, not an expert.

I’ve only made 10k from writing online with my 2 digital products (which you can check out here) and my exclusive paid guides on my Substack (which you can also check out by clicking subscribe).

Time will tell, like it always does.

But I’ll continue to keep being a learning, and learning about all this in public, and I’ll share everything that has (and hasn’t) worked for me in this journey toward becoming what I think will matter most in the next 3-5 years down.

A profound thinker.

I appreciate your time and attention, I hope I gave you some value in exchange for both.

You’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

Read on from here:

I think you are working way harder than you need to be.

For the majority of the 22 years I’ve spent being alive, I’ve always tried to be perfect.

I used to judge myself anytime I missed a goal.

Even by a single percentage.

When I missed a workout.

When I read 19 pages and not 20.

When I couldn’t seem to get myself out of bed any earlier than 10am.

Every time I had set out to achieve something, it felt like a World War was going on inside my mind.

People you see that make effort look effortless, you don’t see what they are aiming at inside their minds.

Their own ideals.

And the ideal you currently have might be poisoning you.

The ideal you are unconsciously moving toward right this second, that was handed to you by society, older generations, and an algorithm.

You are fighting against your own mind because you’re putting all your effort toward the wrong ideal.

In this essay, I will give you 5 profound ideas to make you become someone who knows exactly what to aim at, so you never spend another day wandering.

And yeah.

It will make everything you do feel effortless.

Listen to my barely comprehensible Irish accent read this essay to you, you beautiful human:

Idea I - You focus on trying harder because you don’t have an ideal to aim at

You have been spending the wrong currency.

The first thing most people instinctively reach for, when trying to achieve something, is effort.

More willpower... which is finite.

More discipline... which is willpower.

Stricter plans and longer to-do lists... which require discipline.

But if effort was really the limiting factor to success, then the hardest worker in any room would always be the most successful.

Charles Darwin, you know, the guy who theorized the literal theory of evolution, wrote 19 books in his lifetime writing for 1-2 hours per day.

Let that sink in for a second.

19 books, with 1-2 hours of writing per day, that is leverage.

How so?

I think you should try jiu-jitsu. Really. Even if you think it’s not for you, it will teach you that leverage matters more than strength. Because if you can apply the right amount of pressure, against the right breaking point, you can break someone’s arm with very little force using an arm bar.

What you do matters more than how hard you do it.

In jiu-jitsu, the person who applies leverage and skill beats the person trying hardest, randomly without direction, every damn time.

Because strength without any meaningful direction will exhaust you physically, mentally, and emotionally.

If you keep failing forward, good. If you keep failing without moving forward, it means you’re not aimed at something you have purposefully chosen.

I think most people, especially those in their 20s or 30s (like me, I’m 22), are so misdirected in what they are aiming at, that they put it down to pure laziness.

If you procrastinate on every task you try to achieve - to me, at least - it means one thing.

Your mind would rather be doing something else.

Procrastination and laziness are a signal that your unconscious mind would rather be aiming toward something else entirely.

That signal is not a flaw, it is useful information.

The question is whether or not you decide to pick up on it.

You need to stop trying harder.

And you need to question what you are really aiming at.

Because you’re aiming at something already. You’re just not conscious of it right this second.

Idea II - You’re already aiming at something, you just didn’t choose it consciously

Your psyche cannot operate without an aim.

Which means your psyche is always moving toward some aim.

There is something deep within your mind right now. It may or may not be conscious to you as of this second. But it’s determining where your attention goes. What feels meaningful to you. What feels valuable and irresistible to you. And it’s what organizes every decision, and therefore every outcome, of every day you are alive.

Beliefs.

And they’re mostly borrowed... since what you believe to be true and beneficial is shaped by the information you take in through your eyes and ears.

Social media algorithms show you the positives or negatives of any given topic or idea, based on what you engage with more (either the positive perspectives or the negative ones).

The loudest voice in any given room determines (to those who lack higher levels of awareness) who sounds and therefore is the most powerful, and therefore who is right.

Anyone you watch, and I mean anyone, in the real world or the digital world. They are shaping what you think, whether they are intentionally trying to or not, what you believe to be true.

I’ve been dying to discuss this idea with you that I’ve been learning about the past while.

The human psyche is hardwired around belief systems.

Think religion, any sort of morning or night-time ritual, a routine you follow for achieving your goals. Even why the fuck people who say they aren’t religious... still put up a Christmas tree in December. Which is absurd when you think about it.

Everything I just mentioned.

It fulfils the attempt to impose conscious order before entropy (disorder and uncertainty) does it for you.

Which means you don’t decide whether you get to have an aim for your life.

You have one already.

And it’s likely then, that you are not comparing yourself to who you want to be, because it is too easy to compare yourself to who other people appear to be.

And when you don’t have your own ideal to strive toward, you take on other people as they appear to you as your ideal.

This is why comparison feels so fucking painful. It’s tribal thinking, yes. You don’t want to be abandoned by the tribe. Hence the need to be like everyone within the tribe.

And it also means you’re not measuring yourself against a chosen standard. You’re measuring yourself against a moving, borrowed standard. A standard that belongs to someone else, shaped by what they themselves have carefully crafted to show you... on a fake, digital world that looks like the real world.

The second you start building your own ideal, comparison loses most of its power.

Because you can stop looking left and right. You start looking forward.

You don’t decide whether to have an aim.

You decide whether it’s yours.

So, what does a chosen aim - a deliberate ideal - actually look like?

Idea III - You need to write a bad first draft

An ideal is not a 1930s-USSR five-year plan.

It is not a perfect vision.

It ain’t some perfectly articulated plan of attack against your current self.

It is anything but perfect.

And that is what makes an imperfect ideal... perfect.

Here are the two most important questions you will ever be asked in your entire life.

It sounds delirious, but bear with me.

1. What do you want your life to look like?

2. Who do you need to become to live it?

I don’t know why we’re not just told this.

You’re told to go to school. Get a degree. Get a job. But nobody asks you what for. What lies beyond those things. That’s why most people my age (in my own life) are drifting without any clear aim. And they’re telling me this themselves, and it honestly hurts me.

They were never told about these two questions.

This is what you are going to do for me now.

• Write a bad first draft.

• Take out a page (yes, write by hand, your brain likely needs some desensitization time anyway, I know mine does).

• Write as poorly as you can, and aim to write it as poorly as you can.

• Write down everything you think you want (not what you should want) about what you want your life and self to act, think, and feel like in the next year. It can be as long or as short as you want. 500 words in a good minimum.

The fool is the precursor to the savior. I think it was Jung who said that.

You need to be willing to be a fool at first, before you can become capable of becoming wise. Which is why the bad first draft of who you want to become is still a draft. You cannot improve something that does not exist.

If you’ve seen the movie Pinocchio where Geppetto wishes upon a star before Pinocchio becomes real. The star is above him in the night sky. It’s above him. Yes, I’m speaking figuratively here. Because your ideal should always be above you and beyond your immediate reach. This should always be the case.

You need a direction to be moving in constantly.

An ideal you can almost never fully attain, so that your vision evolves as you do, and that you can keep moving in a direction, constantly, no matter what. No finish line.

I spent five months failing at turning this newsletter, Profound Ideas, into an SEO blog before I discovered that a personal brand was the right aim. Staying in one place is the same as falling backwards.

A vision only gets clearer the more you try move toward it.

Nobody has ever figured out who they are by thinking about it. I’ve wasted a lot of time thinking when I really should have been acting, exploring, and iterating with trial and error like a madman.

Now that you have an aim, here is what it can actually do for you.

Idea IV - What effortless actually looks like

Effortlessness is the absence of internal conflict.

When you have a clear ideal, every task either serves it or it does not.

You won’t need to debate with yourself over whether or not you should write today, if your ideal is to be able to think deeply, connect ideas like nobody else can, and have a perspective on your life that nobody else seems to have with their own.

Then you’re not going to want to doomscroll. You’ll want to buy a notebook, block every app on your phone with an app blocker (I highly recommend this).

And fucking write.

Most of the effort people associate with work actually comes from fighting themselves about doing the work or not.

I want you to run everything you do across a given day - starting with today - and ask:

Does this serve my ideal life or character I am trying to build?

If yes, super.

If not, then why is your mind giving your scarce amount of daily attention to it?

Attention is finite, and what you give your attention to determines the entire trajectory of your life.

Because attention determines what you end up seeing, and therefore start thinking about, and then do.

Think about it this way.

Two people sit down at the same desk, at the same time, with the same laptop open. One person sees one hour of writing as a chore they’ve been dreading all day. Like how some of my friends view writing essays like this one!

Whereas the other person sees it as the most important hour of their day. Likely, since it is the very thing that moves them toward their vision.

Two very different perspectives on what is worth your attention or not.

The only difference, though, is what each person is aiming at.

You do not need more focus.

What you need is less distraction.

The ideal is better at telling you what not to do, than actually telling you what to do.

So what would doing the right things look like if you were trying to smash an average Tuesday?

Idea V - Only do what is required to move the needle, then stop

One task.

30 minutes.

Then stop.

The higher end of what you could do looks like this.

1-3 tasks per day, 30-60 minutes each.

You only need to be doing 1-3 things per day that pull a lever.

To move a needle.

I can spend 30 minutes per day writing one section of this essay, for example.

These essays have on average 3-6 sections. I send my essay out to my email list via my newsletter on Substack. And that newsletter can get anywhere from 10-40k+ reads per week (or more, depending on if they go viral on Substack and YouTube).

I can reach over 40,000 people every week by writing for just 30 minutes per day.

That is the type of leverage a needle-moving task can... yes, leverage.

Time does not mean shit.

The quality of your focus does.

You can achieve more needle-moving tasks in 1-2 hours of pure focus than in 8 hours of busy, distracted work.

Aim low. But that doesn’t mean don’t aim.

You can spend 5 years trying to break through a brick wall by punching it with your bare hands. But the person holding the sledgehammer, will always break through the wall by doing more productive work, in less time, with more focused effort using the right type of leverage.

A needle-moving task means the smallest action that still moves the needle. And it likely won’t look super impressive to flaunt on Instagram to the world, letting everyone know how productive you are sitting in a college library :)

Don’t wait until you feel ready. You will never feel ready. So do it badly. Do it briefly. Do it daily. Until you become someone who finds joy in doing leveraged work, little and often.

Identity follows behaviour. Not the other way around.

Carve out the time before you plan the tasks you’re going to do.

Get up one hour earlier if you have to.

Give your world whatever it needs, so it can leave you alone for 30 minutes, in silence, to think.

If you don’t want to do the work, question the vision.

Not yourself.

Not your pure-fucking “laziness” that you keep telling yourself about.

You just might not be aiming at the right thing yet, which is why you don’t currently feel the benefits of doing the thing.

Let’s wrap this up.

You need one aim.

You need one hour per day.

You do not have to feel guilty for not grinding your life away.

You understand what leverage is now.

You understand that most people who appear to work more than you are simply doing busy work.

You understand what productive work actually looks like, and that laziness is a symptom of not having an aim.

So build a great aim that terrifies you.

People who make work look effortless... they aren’t actually doing all that much of it.

But they are aimed at something they actually do want.

You have everything you need to start.

Thanks for reading.

You’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

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Check out my exclusive guides, that cover my writing strategies for creating long form essays like this one, each week:

On a random day your life will end.

With half-finished books and essays.

Ideas and plans you kept delaying till next Monday.

And thank god you spent it scrolling.

Real life is lived offline.

Which means every time you decide to scroll, you decide not to live your life.

There has never been a larger generation of completely miscalibrated brains.

The root cause is what you are likely reading this on.

The smartphone.

A piece of technology carefully engineered by the world’s best scientists.

To get you addicted, so corporations can monetize that addiction.

Cheap dopamine has raised the floor of what feels stimulating.

More people genuinely feel more (fake) satisfaction from scrolling, than actually going out and living their lives.

Video games on my Xbox 360 were more interesting to me than the real games life had to offer when I was a child. I had a huge back-garden. The Irish summers were stone splitting, but I stayed inside chatting with my friends online instead of going out and adventuring with them.

I chose to escape my childhood over living my childhood.

Your own thoughts now register as boring.

Which means your own life registers to you as boring.

You can’t enjoy sitting in silence.

You don’t feel the electricity of watching a pink and yellow sunset, or hearing spring birds chirp.

I want you to carefully hear what I am about to say.

This letter is about returning to yourself.

To who you truly are.

Before an algorithm wiped it all away, and melted your mind to mush.

You knew how to live once.

You did as a child.

Your childhood interests were trying to tell you something.

They still are.

This is how to get back to living with that childlike sense of wonder you once had.

Waking up full of fire, excited to create and build something.

To let your curiosity determine your day’s plans.

To focus for hours on end, like time and attention didn’t exist. Like both were unlimited.

There is one thing you need to think about before we desensitize your brain, and then re-sensitize it with newfound sources of wonder and meaningful satisfaction.

This is a beast of an essay. I’d recommend watching the video version, or listening to it (while on multiple walks) on my Spotify, here:

How to read this letter

This is a serious piece of writing for serious people.

This is not fast content.

I try to make every one of my letters, essays, long form pieces of writing, whatever you want to call them, slow.

You need to think about them.

Profound ideas need a profound amount of thinking.

I am not here to bullshit you in exchange for your attention.

I never try to.

I have your attention right now.

I can give you my unique knowledge from my bedroom.

I am still doing the same things as the corporations. Social media can be great for this reason, there are still pros and cons to all things in life.

But I want your attention in hopes that you will think about what I have to say so you can benefit from these profound ideas.

So, to those people who comment at the bottom of my YouTube videos, and other people’s videos, too, you are hells-deep in this problem.

You want the actionable steps right away so you can get your dopamine hit for watching “valuable content,” and feeling productive, without doing anything on your part that actually makes the content itself valuable.

Which is thinking.

You have to think about the “why,” the philosophy, the unique knowledge I am giving you, before you jump straight to the “how”, the actionable steps, the frameworks.

If not, nothing is going to work for you.

Maybe in the short term, but not in the long run.

Because you don’t have the knowledge yourself to guide your actions when context comes into play. Tricky scenarios, your distinct lifestyle and responsibilities.

That is why most people who try to adopt rigid plans, fail... because the plans are rigid.

Context is everything. And deliberate thinking about the general principles that inform action and behaviour change, are what make them adaptable to your life, your brain, your needs and problems, and your context.

Thinking must come before behaviour change, which is the ultimate goal of everything I write (for you absolute legends).

I want to give you something that helps, not hurts.

Something dense. Something heavy, that requires you to mine at it to unearth the diamonds at its core.

Not something you can skip thinking about, and jump straight to the action steps or use AI to summarize.

If I can get you to spend 10 minutes of deliberate thinking about this on a walk today, I can sleep well tonight.

You have no good reason to trust me saying that, but I am asking you to.

Because if you are not willing to think about this, don’t bother reading it.

Come back when you are ready.

If not, you are doomscrolling this letter.

It might be smart to bookmark this and come back to it across multiple readings. We’ve a pretty big epidemic to start untangling with just a single letter :)

You need to empty your mind before you can rebuild it.

Remove the junk, change the oil, fast yourself to hard reset the system. So you can begin feeling what real interest, curiosity, and awe used to feel like when you were younger, and your brain was sharper.

And I’m not going to kid you.

This is going to be hard.

Prepare yourself.

Phase I: The Desensitization Phase

Your brain did not rot itself into an overstimulation-induced rut overnight.

The quickest way to get yourself out of a rut is to spend 2-4 hours, maybe more, 1-3 days even, doing nothing. No music. No phone. Zero stimulation. It sounds long, but considering most people haven’t spent 30 minutes feeling bored in over 2 years, this is the quickest way to feel that childlike sense of wonder again.

First, we desensitize before we re-sensitize.

Here are your first 4 tools.

Tool I - Do sweet nothing

The brain has something called the default mode network.

Your brain goes into this mode of thinking when you don’t have a task to be doing.

You are not doing any sort of work, pretty much.

You’re not scrolling, listening to music, writing or reading a book, even.

Nothing.

Your brain hates doing nothing.

Which shouldn’t surprise you.

Why do we scroll at every damn line we stand in?

Why do we scroll first thing in the morning and last thing at night?

The default mode network plays a vital role in cognitive processing. Emotions, information, random shower thoughts that reveal an profound idea/insight... even though you weren’t really thinking? At least it feels that way. That is why this DMN is so cool.

This is also why boredom is the condition your brain needs in order to reset itself.

You need boredom to feel interest again. You need boredom to feel curiosity once more. If not, you are jumping straight to a quick dopamine fix from scrolling because boredom is hard, but that is exactly what makes it rewarding.

No pain no gain for this tool I’m afraid.

I did this for the first time myself while in work. I work at a bowling alley, behind the bowling lanes on my own. I used to do 3x 12 hour shifts per week, and during those shifts I would walk behind the lanes for 4-6 hours straight and just stare at the walls.

After that amount of time, I would find myself becoming completely desensitized. Like completely. Then, I would find myself being capable of writing for 3-5 hours straight, and feel my mind connecting ideas faster than I could make sense of.

Your brain is always working, even when you give it space to breathe.

Yes, most people have not given their brains this space to breathe in years.

These action steps are going to signal the start of your journey into becoming human once again. They’re hard, but they’re everything:

• Turn your phone onto airplane mode before you go to sleep tonight

• Wake up, and do not sensitize yourself with anything for at least four hours

• No music, scrolling, messages, emails, podcasts

• You can read paperback books, write in a notebook by hand, go on a walk, or stare at a wall

• No tasks, too. This is a morning for emptying your mind.

• If you’re working tomorrow morning, great. No music while commuting, no phone for socials, and on your lunch break, eat food without entertainment. You can talk to someone, or stare at the wall. That’s it.

Tool II - Walk with zero stimulation

Last week I spent 3 hours on a Friday evening walking around my garden.

The Irish weather has decided to be nice this past week, so I used it to my advantage. You will notice with this tool, and all of the tools in this desensitization phase, that the loops in your mind will eventually close.

They will shut off.

Like you’re having 1000 mental emails coming at you every second... until eventually they just stop.

Your mind will feel less chaotic. Like you’ve been screaming at yourself for years, and your mind has finally processed everything it has needed to process.

And then this will happen.

You will start feeling curious again. Interest will start speaking to you. Your own thoughts will begin resurfacing. Carry a notebook around with you when this happens.. And please write down what comes to mind, which will be your first creation, so literally just your thoughts written down.

Do this:

• Go on a walk

• 20 minutes minimum, each, but do longer if you can

• Go to a park, on a nice sunny day if possible, and do it all in silence

• Walk, walk, walk. 20 minutes in the morning, afternoon, and evening is great for circadian health, which regulates your nervous system, and therefore your emotions.

Tool III - Study physics

Real life is lived offline, and offline means the physical world.

Not a digital world you can’t even physically move around.

The problems worth solving are the ones within your general vicinity.

Messy room. No routine. No goals for the next month, not even the next week.

This profound idea really annoys me, especially when I used to think like this, but your life is in utter chaos, and yet you’ll find no issue in giving out about world’s problems when your own life is being neglected.

Make sure you yourself is in good order, before you try enforcing order in anyone, or anywhere else.

I realized this on one of my garden walks. If you threw all the screens and tech away, you wouldn’t know half of the problems going on online. And how little influence you truly have over them.

Really, I am talking about the people getting furious on Twitter/X over the most pointless shit, that has no real effect on anything in your life... other than making you feel pissed.

Those problems would still exist, yes. And the world would still be turning... and you’d be fine.

Some poor, phoneless fool is probably sitting next to a waterfall somewhere totally unaware of how angry and scared he’s supposed to be - Duncan Trussell

...you’d be better than fine, actually.

For you to do:

• Organize your room, your desk, and/or your immediate environment

• Build a basic routine for the week. Just a loose, non-rigid structure

• Write down your goals for the next month. Or the week, and no more.

• Identify one problem in your immediate life you have been ignoring. You have one hour to solve it.

Tool IV - No screens one hour before sleep

Your brain is hardwired to wake up and go to sleep with the sun.

Crazy, right?

The blue light that screens emit, it suppresses melatonin.

Melatonin is the hormone that regulates your sleep.

Blue light disrupts your circadian rhythm by up to 3 hours. And its effects last 4 hours after you put the phone down. By scrolling on Instagram immediately before you nod off to sleep, you are chemically disrupting your mood, energy, and mental clarity every single night.

I followed a strict no-screens-before-sleep routine for almost a year in 6th year at 18.

I felt more energized than I ever had. Enough to go from lifting 3 days a week to 5. I was less anxious. I wasn’t exhausted sitting in a classroom for 8 hours a day.

School is a prison, yessir.

But I was making it harder on myself than it needed to be.

Do this:

• No screens one hour before sleep

• In bed, lights off, between 10:30-11pm

• Wake up at the same time every morning (8am latest)

• Do this for 2 weeks without exception

These 4 tools are for clearing as much noise from your brain as possible.

Once the noise has been cleared, you do have to replace it with better sources of nutrients. If not, you’ll go back to doomscrolling with 4 days.

How to consume, but properly, is our Phase II.

I went on a cliff walk around the Irish coastline with my girlfriend the other week. She said something about that walk that absolutely fucking floored me:

I don’t like silence. What I like is the absence of noise.

She was talking about how quiet it was, yes.

But she was really talking about how her mind was quiet. We hadn’t touched our phones all morning. Then we went on a walk. Just the two of us. We talked about our week. Our goals together for the next 2 years.

Most people don’t like doing anything in silence because their minds aren’t silent.

And if you want the loops in your mind to close, if you want the mental emails to stop flooding in, you have to sit in silence for your mind to eventually go silent.

Phase I gives you that absence of noise.

Now let’s talk about what (actually) deserves to fill your brain.

Phase II: Consume (properly)

If I see this idea one more time I’m going to scream.

You need to create instead of consuming.

Do. Not. Get. Me. Wrong.

This idea is correct.

But it’s a paradox.

You cannot tell people to stop consuming what other people have created, and expect them to consume what you create.

Also.

Thinking is a collaborative process, in which a person provides a novel perspective with regards to something that has already been said.

Think of any philosopher you can think of.

Nietzsche, for example.

They devoured the works of every other philosopher they could find before writing about their own.

All your favorite artists have their favorite artists.

Chino Moreno from Deftones loves Prince. Ben Burnley from Breaking Benjamin says Deftones, Nirvana, and Alice Chains were massive influences for the band. Linkin Park... also Deftones, and Nirvana.

Originality is saying something that genuinely advances a conversation.

There are many ways of doing this.

And all of them require consuming other people’s creations first and foremost.

You need to create something that dense, slow, that helps. And you need to stop consuming content that is fast, hollow, and hurts.

Fast content is designed to grab attention and give you nothing life-changing in exchange for that attention. Slow content is purposefully designed to change how you think, and thus change your life.

You know you’re sick of it already.

The silly dances.

The AI voice-overs.

Fast content is numbing. It will do nothing but distract you on a Wednesday evening in the attempt to make it to the weekend.

I think you need to consume far less information every single day.

I also think you need to consume better sources of information every single day.

I present to you, Phase II.

Tool V - Do not delete social media, curate it

If it wasn’t for social media, I wouldn’t have this newsletter, I wouldn’t be closing in on having made my first €10k from writing online, and I wouldn’t have put 25+ hours into this single post.

You don’t want to be avoiding social media.

I did it when I was younger, and it was great. I had more free time, but I had no other way of contacting my friends. I fell out of touch with a lot of them, which I eventually rekindled.

Deleting social media is easy avoidance. The real mastery, however, over socials, is curation.

By curation, I mean becoming the editor of where your attention goes.

• Follow 2-4 accounts of creators that post content that is slow, that helps, that requires you to think

• Do not consume anything, other than from these 2-4 accounts

• Unfollow creators who make fast content. Content that does not get you thinking. It only distracts you from making any change to your life, and benefits anyone but yourself.

That third step might sound harsh, but I think it’s necessary.

My girlfriend showed me a TikTok post the other day... and hell. It was a complete waste of 60 seconds of my life. Just a stupid attention grabbing post that gave me no value in terms of making any sort of change to my life.

People are starting to get fed up with this type of content.

If that’s you, curate your feed intentionally.

If not, an algorithm will do it for you.

Tool VI - Read paperback books slower than a sloth

Books are linear.

They demand that you follow a thought all the way to its end, line by line, piecing together each logical idea through contemplative thinking.

Thinking is a muscle. As is, the ability to focus.

Here’s a profound idea I can’t stop thinking about recently.

You do not read just to consume information.

You read to think.

You read to build new perspectives.

I am currently reading The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy. It has completely changed how I think about perspectives. Also, how I see the world through multiple lenses simultaneously, and how I think about existential problems.

I worry about my health sometimes.

Microplastics. How I eat a lot of Chipotle sauce. How Cadbury’s chocolate is no longer legally called chocolate.

The fragility of all of it.

I love writing. I want to spend every morning for the rest of my life doing this. And sometimes I feel scared thinking about how it could all be lost on a random Tuesday while I’m sipping on a coffee... or scrolling instead of writing.

But it’s that fear.

That fear is what precedes gratitude.

I get to do this. To learn. To write. To walk and think all day instead of scrolling. And then I get to share what I create as a result of those things, to you. To people who might not have the time or ability to do those things themselves.

I wouldn’t have created this new perspective if I hadn’t have built upon what these profound thinkers said in the past.

First, a Substack note from a fellow Irishman Dylan O’Sullivan, who I admire very much:

Second, your action steps:

• Buy one physical book. Something you actually want to read, and not something you “think” you should

• No phone in the same room while reading

• Read slowly. Stop when something hits you, and sit on it.

• I have a number of learning strategies you can read here, to teach you how to improve your encoding and retrieval skills for faster knowledge acquisition.

• My Guide To Profound Reading gives you a complete reading framework and two bookmarks full of printed questions to think about while you read, to help you master the reading process with a simple questioning framework right away.

Tool VII - How to build a curation system

The problem I have with second brains like Obsidian and Notion is treating them as storage units. Storing tons of information you’re never going to revisit.

I prefer using them as a creative workspace.

I’m storing very little information and notes, if at all, because what is worth storing, I am building as knowledge inside my brain.

This is a creative workspace, not for storing things I might use in the future. If I need it, I’ll go find it or I’ll use my own brain. If not, I’m keeping this as minimal as I can.

I’ve been working with Dan Koe and the legends over at Eden for a good few weeks now.

I am not being paid to say this.

There’s no affiliate link or sponsorships here (I don’t agree with selling my audience’s trust away).

I am saying this because I genuinely love using Eden.

And I think you will too, if you’re a writer or creative like me looking to write slow content.

I write slow content. Dan writes slow content. Eden is the best place to start if you want to do the same.

I have been using since it was Kortex, everyday, for more than 3 years now. Which is nuts. I recommend it to everyone I know. And I have been recommending it inside my own newsletters for the last year now.

You can get 50% off your first month throughout launch (it started this week).

Download it here, and build your curation system alongside me.

So I’d like to show you what my current Eden set-up looks like, and how you can go about making something similar yourself.

This is how my Eden setup looks currently. I’m still in the process of setting it up, but this is really all you need.

I have my best newsletters and Substack notes here so I can organize them into one place, that I can use to think about why the writing/ideas did so well, and what the highest-performing ideas are which you guys are resonating with, so I can give you more of what you want.

I like to screenshot validated titles and ideas while I’m scrolling. Or anything I think might be worth writing about, or including in my writing in the future.

This is why I still recommend scrolling with the eyes of a creator, not a consumer.

You’re looking for ways to merge validation and interest.

Pay attention, this is important.

Topics that have the potential to get lots of attention because they are validated (high views/engagement), and then interest, in terms of me being able to talk about my own interests and provide a novel perspective beneath the validated topic.

This is the secret to writing about any of your own profound ideas you want to talk about online, and do well.

No, you do not need to talk about personal branding or audience growth in order to grow an audience... but only if you listen to what I am telling you. I am the proof that this works.

Eden also has a pretty cool discover search feature where you can look at top-performing posts, to give you some profound ideas to think about addressing in your own content.

You can filter by platform (which is vital, since content now, I believe, is very much platform specific).

This is where the Deftones/Nietzsche idea from earlier comes in.

Find what is already working. Understand why it works. Then say something only you could say beneath that validated idea/topic/title/problem.

If you’re a creator and you disagree, I did in the beginning, it is vital to understand that the writing (content) game is a two player game.

1. In order for me to talk about my own interests and ideas, I need your attention first.

2. For you to care about what I have to say, I need to turn that attention into interest.

That’s where broad, general, validated topics come in, as does learning how to write with impact, how to write with a framework (problem → solution), how to be persuasive, and how to give readers a good “why” for being here.

No, that is not selling out. How could it be?

That’s marketing and sales.

Forget about everything you know about those two dirty words. They’re not actually dirty words.

Just think about them as this instead:

1. The skill of attracting attention (marketing)

2. The skill of persuasion (sales)

Writing and thinking is how you communicate the value in your unique mind.

You need both skills of attracting attention and persuasion to grow an audience and start getting people to care about your ideas, your writing, your body of work. Or your content, if you want the boring word for it.

Dan wrote about this exact idea in his newsletter this week. He used my own newsletter as his first example. You can check it out here if want to go deeper on the mechanics of it.

At the minute I’ve been listening to only 4 creators.

1. Sisyphus55

2. Jared Henderson

3. Mr. Koe

4. Man Carrying Thing

Creators swap out from time to time, I like Alex Hormozi and Caleb Ralston a lot, Academy of Ideas too.

Because if you’re doing any more than that you’re spreading yourself too thin. You want to think about what these creators are saying and then try act on their ideas. If not you are doomscrolling. You are not trying to integrate what they have to say into your life.

In terms of AI use, I’ve never been using it this little. I have very few prompts I use now. I like to limit my chat responses to 80 words or less, because I want to think about them. I spent one hour last week thinking about 3 Claude responses. They were 30 words each...

The centaur is always stronger than the machine alone.

How you curate will determine what you create, and whether it will be saying anything worth hearing or not.

Phase III: Create (properly)

When I started this phase myself a few weeks ago, my brain literally felt denser. I could feel the front of my brain contract while I was reading, almost like I had a pump in my prefrontal cortex.

It was absurd. Now I look cross while reading. Scrunching my eyebrows is the by-product of this brain pump, it seems.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

So does your brain.

If you clear the noise without replacing it with something meaningful, you will go back to numbing yourself with meaningless distraction within a week.

I don’t want you think of this as filling your time. It still is. Really, I want you to think of this as rehabilitation.

Creating is how you restrengthen the cognitive muscles inside the mental gym.

Tool VIII - Write without a screen

Human beings are designed to create. That is why you feel anxious and depressed when all you do is consume.

Writing is how you organize, stress-test, and structure your thinking into a single argument.

Writing is a generative process.

It is a digestive process, too, because how else do you generate proof that you have fully digested an idea, a solution to a problem, a topic, or a chapter?

This newsletter is a vessel for my own ideas. I recommend it to everyone I know to start a personal brand, learn to persuade and attract attention, and then create some solutions to problems. Some essays. Some arguments.

Become a perspective builder, and keep building perspectives to offer people based on their problems. Even your own (I write these to my past/present/future self, basically).

My friends keep telling me the difference they’ve spotted in my articulation, and my thinking too, which is hard for me to see. But it’s relevant feedback that a personal brand, writing long-form, building a meaningful body of work, you can call it content if you want to. What this will do for your thinking and learning. It’s the ultimate vessel for self-development.

You do not know what you think until you have written it down.

If you don’t write, you will never know how profound your thinking is, or what it is truly capable of doing.

I think it’s a tragedy to go through life not knowing what your mind can do, other than bother you with disorganized, unwanted thoughts.

Do this:

• Buy a notebook. It’s cheaper than a Starbucks coffee.

• Write anything. Your thoughts. An idea. Something that bothered you today.

• Ten minutes. No filter. Don’t read it back until after you have finished writing.

• If you feel stuck, write about why you feel stuck. That is enough. Just. Write. Anything.

• Download my free long-form writing course that will give everything you need to start writing long-form like I do (essays, articles, newsletters etc.)

• I also have the writing strategies I use personally right here on my Substack.

Tool IX - Learn to think profoundly

Having thoughts is not the same as thinking.

Everyone has thoughts.

Thinking is the deliberate reorganization of thoughts.

Most people have never been taught how to think, since school taught you how to remember and not how to reason.

Here is one of the most useful things I have ever learned.

When something upsets you, write about it. Or better, mind map it.

The key words, terms, or concepts, and organize them into groups and chunks on a page. This is a form of neurological recoding of memory.

Writing about a difficult experience reorganizes how your brain stores it, which changes how it affects you going forward. Because if you write about it, you can then see it, process it, strip away the emotion attached to that memory, and be done thinking about it.

The amygdala in your brain is what processes emotion. The hippocampus, is what facilitates (1) learning and (2) memory. And the thing about these two part of your brain, is that they are right beside each other, which means they influence one another.

There’s a reason for this.

Emotion is the primary driver of how strongly a memory gets stored. When something upsets you, the amygdala tags it as threatening and the hippocampus stores it as a quote-unquote “sensitive topic,” which is what most people call it generally.

That is why old, upsetting memories keep bothering you of their own accord, and you have no idea as to why.

Writing about it forces the prefrontal cortex, so, your reasoning brain, to engage with these memories voluntarily, of your own accord. It literally pulls the memory out of the emotional brain and into the thinking brain.

That is how you can strip away the emotion by acknowledging it, and letting the loop finally close.

In terms of how to process emotions - I learned this from Dr. K, credit where credit is due, he’s an absolute legend - ask two questions:

1. What is this emotion telling me (emotions are sources of information)

2. What is this emotion wanting me to do (emotions are sources of motivation/behaviour)

A profound idea to finish off this section:

Pay no attention to politics. The best way to change the world is to solve your own problems and help others with the solutions. You can only do that by thinking alone, by yourself, about things within your realm of control.

Do this:

• When you feel reactive (angry, anxious, stuck) write it out before you post about it, talk about it, or act on it. Ask yourself: what is this emotion telling me? What is it wanting me to do?

• Carry a notebook everywhere. Be ready to write, mind map, and process at any moment. I’ve found as little as 30 seconds of mind mapping each morning makes a massive difference in terms of less overthinking, anxiety, and increased mental clarity. 15 minutes is incredibly transformative, but it’s not easy either.

• Read great works of literature out loud. Stop when you don’t understand something. Figure it out. Continue. And in time, your own thinking will begin to sound like the people you have spent time reading. Which means you will literally become a whole new person, and that’s not something to gloss over.

Tool X - Build something for six months

You don’t feel lost because your life is meaningless.

You feel lost because you don’t have a quest.

You don’t have a quest because you are playing someone else’s game.

You’re letting your phone determine who you are, what you think about, and what games you end up choosing to play.

Anxiety is the signal that you are not making progress.

You will never know what you want from your life in some perfect explanation. You might never. I still feel like I don’t know what I’m doing with this writing thing half the time. But I do know what I want to avoid doing, which is my version of hell. I’m not religious, I just think it’s an interesting frame to view this from.

This is what hell is to me. Not writing every day. Never writing essays like this one. Not thinking, or having nutritious food for my mind to consume, digest, and perform with.

Sometimes knowing what life you do not want, is all the clarity you will ever need. So stop waiting for the perfect plan, and start doing something, literally anything, to avoid the plans you do not wish to be following.

Pick something hard, something that makes you slightly uncomfortable to say out loud, and commit to it for six months.

Six months of showing up. Doing 1-3 intentional tasks a day reveals whether something is worth a lifetime of commitment. 15-60 minutes for each task.

Doing this will develop your skills faster in three months than most people do in three years... with a college degree, to give them one more financial problem on top of every other problem they keep ignoring, to focus on the degree.

Direction is far more powerful than how hard you work.

This is why you need to give yourself a daily project (one goal, 1-3 tasks daily to move toward it):

• Your reading becomes purposeful: you read toward it

• Your walks become generative: your brain works on it while you move

• Your writing becomes useful: you think through it on the page

Your steps:

• Write down the one thing you have been circling for the last year

• Brain dump everything that comes to mind about it onto one page

• Do not start building yet. Get it out of your head first.

• One to three tasks a day, minimum. Show up for six months.

Tool XI - Talk to people... but actually

The algorithm has put you in an echo chamber so convincing you don’t even notice the walls.

You see more of what you like and engage with online.

I shouldn’t need to explain how dangerous this can be.

Real conversation, yes, that means in person, unrecorded, and unedited, is the last remaining space where your thinking gets genuinely challenged.

And therefore genuinely developed.

Social media is a simulation of connection so convincing that your brain accepts it as the real thing... while the real thing quietly atrophies.

Real life.

Is lived.

Offline.

This section doesn’t need much explanation. Go out and talk to real people.

You know what to do.

• One real conversation a week with someone who doesn’t think like you.

• No phones on the table.

• No agenda. Just talk, think, go back and forth.

• If you can do it on a walk, that’s a bonus.

These tools are how you go from consuming your life away to authoring it.

To becoming the writer of your own story.

Now, one final thing before you close this letter and get on with your day.

The “hinge generation”

That is what I am calling it.

We are the generation that was handed mind-numbing technology before we understood how to use it properly.

But we are still early.

We are early enough to still turn the ship elsewhere.

The next generation, will not have a chance.

It genuinely scares me.

They will be born - my kids will be born - into an epidemic of the largest amount of faking thinking in history. Anyone can post anything that sounds competent and expert-like online, with the click of a button, and no proof needed.

And a completely attention-fractured world to top it all off.

The responsibility, as it always does, rests upon the individual.

Not the government, who only cares about their own interests. Politics will always remain a politicians game.

Me and you.

Nobody is coming to save you.

Or me.

Nobody is coming to save your mind.

Or my own.

You have to do that yourself.

As do I.

And the only reason why you think that is impossible, is because technology is hardwired to sap away your agency. All we are doing is handing our agency over to technology, and that is why most people’s beliefs, values, decisions, and therefore every outcome of their lives... will be determined by an algorithm.

Sorry, but you have to do this on your own.

And then become the ideal for what comes after.

Your life will always be determined by the unique knowledge you choose to create inside your own mind. Don’t fuck it up by consuming absolute shit.

Real life is lived offline.

Go and live it.

Hopefully this helped you in some way. Feel free to save this, bookmark it, and reflect about it on a walk. It’ll be on Spotify and my YouTube channel in a few days, I’ll link those at the top of this post when that is the case.

You can check out my Profound Self-Education Guide and my free writing course if you want something to resensitise your mind with.

Thanks for thinking profoundly alongside me.

And if you’ve made it to the end of this, it means I like you. I like people who like thinking about slow content.

And profound ideas, too.

You’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

Most people will die having lived a life they never truly wanted.

You have been handed a script you never asked for.

And it is a tragedy that you’ve been following it so perfectly…

Go to school.

Get good grades.

Get a better job than the jobs your parents had, so you don’t suffer like your parents did.

Get the better job... but still suffer, just differently to how your parents suffered.

Retire(?).

The education system is designed to do anything but provide you the one thing it promises.

Help you build the life you want.

I will never forget waking up the morning after my mam died. Cancer sucks, I was 12, so ten years ago now. That feeling of my soul confronting a literal fucking abyss... I drifted and suffered in the least fun way imaginable for about 4-6 years after that.

Mainly because I was totally lost. I didn’t know how to respond to that type of hurdle.

I set the grades record leaving my secondary school in 2022. The only reason I chose Multimedia, was because I was told I would “never struggle to find work with that degree.”

Little did I know, this was the easy choice I made, not the right choice.

I went through 3 years of college achieving nothing. I learned nothing. Well, not really. I got my jiu-jitsu blue belt, and I started building this newsletter one month after I got my degree... using zero of the skills I obtained during my time in college.

My audience is now more valuable to me than that degree.

But there was a missing piece that I wish I had found sooner.

Responsibility.

This newsletter is for a special type of person.

If you have been following “the right path” and still feel empty.

If you feel like you have been drifting for the longest time and don’t know why.

If you have ever wondered why doing everything right has always felt so damn wrong to you.

If you have tried time and time again to fix your whole fucking life at 3am every Sunday...

...and go back to doom-scrolling your evenings away by the end of the week.

My goal with this letter is simple.

I want to help you close the gap between the life you have right now, and the life you actually want to be living.

Specifically, I want to show you exactly what is causing you to drift. What you can do to change that forever. And give you one daily practise to help you to start bringing your ideal future into the now.

(I can’t ever seem to stick to a 2k word count. Still, you’ll enjoy this one. The more you put into thinking about this, the more you will get out of it)

Idea I - Reality is indifferent... and you just aren’t taught that

Man is condemned to be free. - Jean-Paul Sartre

I do not think you are lazy, broken, or unmotivated as fuck.

I do think there are many things you just aren’t being told in life.

That is why I am here :)

With this being one of them.

Every problem in your life stems from avoiding the truth that reality is harsh.

Reality simply is.

Reality does not care.

Physics is indifferent.

Physics is neutral.

The apple falls from the tree or it doesn’t. Your personal brand grows because your writing is valuable or it isn’t. You lift the barbell off the floor or you don’t.

The universe operates on concept called entropy.

Entropy is disorder within a system.

Chaos, decay, randomness, uncertainty.

Concepts we face (and try avoid) every day without realising it.

How so?

All things naturally decay if they are not maintained.

When you spend 5 minutes after your morning mocha or latte tidying your bedroom, it stays ordered. It’s clean. But when you neglect it, disorder increases. Clothes pile up, Dairy Milk chocolate wrappers everywhere, Penguin Classics books spread around the room with your disorganised notebooks full of profound ideas...

That is entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And it is the reason that the universe naturally tends toward disorder and uncertainty.

Human beings HATE uncertainty.

Albert Camus, who wrote The Myth of Sisyphus, said that reason and certainty is what the human heart truly desires, in a universe that offers neither.

Dead right! Because of entropy.

When the truth is too painful, the mind resorts to comfort systems.

Think about the person who follows religion without question because uncertainty is unbearable. The person who needs everyone to agree with them because disagreement feels like abandonment (from the tribe). The person who holds themselves to impossible ideals because being imperfect feels like proof they were never good enough.

The human mind, heart, soul, psyche, it has one fundamentally core desire.

To feel important.

To feel special.

To feel significant.

But reality tells us we are none of these things.

That morning I woke up and wanted to run into my Mam’s bedroom the day after she died, that was it. That was my first confrontation with this existential and truly profound idea.

An idea that causes so many people do and believe anything to avoid confronting it fully. Which is why we develop those comfort systems.

Accepting that you and me are not as special as we think, that is not nihilism.

Accepting that reality is indifferent, that’s not nihilism either.

Nihilism is the belief that life has no intrinsic meaning, purpose, or value.

In fact, if you do become nihilistic over these facts, you are missing the other side of the coin.

Insignificance is freedom, but freedom without meaning is nihilism.

So why bother trying to cultivate meaning in your life when... there might be no point at all?

Viktor Frankl, who wrote Man’s Search For Meaning (read that book please), he spent 3 years across four concentration camps during World War 2. His father starved to death in the camps. His wife died of typhus in the camps. His mother and brother were both killed inside the gas chambers. His life’s work, a hand-written manuscript, was sewn into the lining of his coat, which was confiscated the day he had arrived.

And what did he do?

He chose to cultivate meaning despite the tragedy of his situation.

He was free to do the opposite, but took the courage construct his own sense of purpose instead.

Because what else are you going to do?

You’re all in. No matter what you do. So you’d might as well pick your own poison since you have the freedom to do so, to pick a meaningful source of poision.

Lift weights or don’t lift weights. Either way, I’ll have a sore back if I reach 60.

Insignificance does not remove meaning.

Not at all.

Insignificance gives you the freedom to construct meaning yourself.

Freedom and meaning, two sides of the same coin.

Forget meaning, and watch nihilism slip in through the back door...

My point:

You need to start working with reality instead of fighting against it.

Because the minute you realise you deserve nothing, is the same minute you start owning every decision you make thereafter.

Idea II - Hierarchies are natural, inescapable, unforgiving... and climbable?

Hierarchies are not unfair in the slightest.

How would they be?

Reality does not care if they are or not.

Hierarchies are a law of nature.

Every social species has them. Chimpanzees, lobsters, humans. They predate capitalism, governments, and politics entirely.

Hierarchies are context dependent.

Put a jiu-jitsu black belt on a farm to milk cows, and they will be useless. Stick an untrained PhD student against that same black belt at a Sunday Open Mat, and they’ll get broken apart limb from limb.

The thing that determines your position in any given hierarchy is competence.

Not birthright (not anymore).

Not luck (also something very much in your own hands, too).

And yes. Hierarchies are mathematical. Anyone who thinks they are conspiratorial does not understand them.

And once you understand them, you can’t unsee them anywhere...

The Pareto principle says that 20% of inputs produce 80% of outputs, in any domain, always.

Well, that is what everybody else seems to say online. But the actual rule is more brutal than that.

In any domain, the square root of the people operating inside of it produce HALF of all the output.

Example:

• If you have ten employees, three produce half the work.

• If you have one hundred employees, ten produce half the work.

• One thousand, it’s thirty.

• Ten thousand, then it’s one hundred.

This is important to understand, and you will, right away.

The more people in a given domain, the more concentrated the output becomes at the top.

Once you see it you can’t unsee it. And you’ve always seen it.

Some cities hold the majority of a country’s population (Dublin and Cork). Some Spotify artists get all of the monthly listens. Some creators get all of the clicks and attention.

The pareto principle, like hierarchies, is a law of nature.

But that is not what most people attempt to do regarding this information...

Resentment stems from lower positions within a hierarchy blaming the existence of the whole damn hierarchy. Bitterness. Political outrage. Trying to abolish hierarchies entirely (which is not a good idea). None of this moves you up.

Everyone starts at the bottom. Especially as children.

I chose my multimedia degree because I chose the first script handed to me. It felt safe, there was little risk. And I dossed for three years and ended up nowhere on any meaningful hierarchy... other than jiu-jitsu, which I actually cared about.

And that was my fault. My responsibility. Not because of “the system” or my mam passing away.

Hierarchies do not care about your feelings any more than reality does.

But here is the beautiful thing.

Competence is trainable.

You can literally just do things.

Learn a skill. Learn to identify a problems. Build the body and mind you’ve been neglected. Start writing. Start building stuff.

Imagine if every person on this planet lifted weights for 2 hours per week, and ate well-enough 65% percent of the time. We would not be demanding more hospital beds (in my country, at least).

Individual responsibility scales outward mathematically.

I am not asking you to grind your life away. There is a huge difference between punching a brick wall with your bare hands and hitting it with a sledgehammer. Both feel productive, but only one of them really does the job.

But you do need to start taking responsibility over every outcome of your life.

I started this newsletter with nothing, also knowing nothing. I didn’t know how to write with impact. I had no audience or even a basic strategy. I was confused every time I sat down to write, and some days it still feels like that.

But I learned to write one newsletter a week, and I just kept learning, and iterating, with trial and error, from week to week.

Now you are reading this, which means I like you. I like people who like thinking about profound ideas, and who like reading long stuff instead of doomscrolling their mind to mush.

Climbing hierarchies is fucking hard, but so is doing nothing and blaming anyone and anything else for your current position.

I wish I knew when I was younger. Because I could have let my mam’s passing absolutely floor me, and I wanted it to.

But then I learned about what I’m writing to you right now, and there’s definitely so much meaning to be found in taking responsibility.

Which leads me to say.

I think meaning and happiness is found in progressing toward things, not so much in actually achieving them.

So.

What else are you going to do?

Let me show you why now is the absolute best time to start developing competence.

Idea III - The information age is the opportunity age

You need to be delusionally optimistic about your potential.

There has never been a better time to rise up a hierarchy of your choice.

To become truly competent at anything you want.

Before AI, information was the first bottleneck, with common folk like you or I being limited to the books we could find and afford.

Before social media and the internet, you were isolated to your immediate network. Family, friends, and acquaintances in the physical (not digital) world.

But things have changed.

Information was always the bottleneck to competence, since information informs action.

AI collapsed this bottleneck entirely.

Think back to the Pareto principle, and you will see the concentrated output still being at the top... but now the tools have been democratised.

Everyone has access to them now.

AI can meet you exactly where you are with your learning.

With social media, you can attract attention to your work. And I don’t mean what’s called shallow work that encourages people to consume their minds into a state of depression.

Work that is heavy. Work that is dense. Work that helps, not hurts. Work that encourages people to create. And by create, I don’t just mean create a body of work. I still do. But what I really mean is to create the life you want.

Creation is action, which means creation is behaviour change.

You now have the ability to learn anything, and reach millions of people from inside your bedroom.

You have all the access and tools you could ask for.

But what most people do with this fact... is the issue, here.

Most people use the greatest tools ever built to consume things that hurt them.

Doomscrolling content. The mortifying TikTok dances. Fast content that distracts.

Not the slow content that makes you stop and reconsider everything you once believed to be true. Content that wants to grab your attention for attention’s sake, and not to exchange profound value for that attention to get you on track for creating the life you want.

I was the exact same until pretty recently. I went through I-don’t-know how many years of education, and had nothing to show for it, other than a page (degree) that said I was competent.

This newsletter is my proof of argument for this section. Sorry. There is no way of saying this without sounding arrogant. But this is something I have built. And have seen hundreds of people also build, and profit from in more ways than just making money.

I mean living a life they have built for themselves.

To do this, you have to learn these 3 skills while you still can:

1. Learning how to learn - every skill you acquire makes the next one easier to acquire, and your rate of growth accelerates the longer you do this.

2. Learning how to write - writing is formalised thinking, made visible, and the quality of your thinking determines the quality of every decision, relationship, and opportunity in your life.

3. Learning how to build - building is how you convert learning into leverage (like with digital assets), and leverage is what turns individual effort into something that compounds. Build it once, and the value can be extracted from it by anyone, anywhere, forever.

These 3 skills compound across every hierarchy because they make every other skill easier to acquire, distribute, and build on. Like with what you are reading now. One piece of writing can reach thousands of people if created and packaged correctly.

The opportunity you have now to build the life you want, whatever that may look like, is limitless. Absolute pure potential. But you have to pick your poison, because you’re still all in no matter what.

So do you take the responsibility needed to organise your life into one that you actually want to live?

If you have gotten this far, congrats. Most people would have gone back to doomscrolling after the first section out of fear of thinking all this through.

The only variable left to help finish this puzzle, is this.

Responsibility.

Idea IV - Writing is how you take responsibility and build a life around it

The quality of your thinking determines every outcome in your life.

Writing is formalised thinking.

Every action you decide to take, that is a choice. To do nothing, or to take responsibility. Both of those paths are downstream of your thinking. Because two people could see learning, writing, and building, as the solution to living a meaningful life. But one could do nothing in response to that, and the other, access a life with unlimited opportunity across any hierarchy.

Those are two very different outcomes and futures becoming made in the present based on the same problem.

You need to write more. I mean it.

Writing forces a certain level of clarity that thinking on its own just... doesn’t.

Especially if you write by hand. Which is something I have always neglected and somewhat looked down upon. I’ve always typed. I’ve always loved typing. I can think faster, because I can type faster, too. I can write my newsletters faster yeah you get the point.

And that is the one thing I have always missed.

Thinking slow.

Which is important. Especially to my newsletter. I do not want to give you fast content. Shallow content. Content that does nothing to change how you feel, think, and act. Focusing on the quality of my profound ideas, my novel perspectives, and the density of each piece of writing, that is most important to me.

When you are writing, you are discovering what you actually think.

Writing is a digestive process.

Everything you consume, everything you think about. It all goes nowhere. Gets put to no use... unless you write about it.

Writing is self-education in its purest form.

You get to choose your own problems to write about... and solve them. If you replace the word “research” with “learning,” you’ve made content creation (as much as I hate that cringy term) your learning process. You are no longer a content creator. You are a creator.

That is what my newsletter is to me. If I want to learn something, I will write about it.

Writing is the last moat.

By that, I mean writing done by you.

Maybe not even typing.

Handwriting.

Definitely not information generated by AI (because AI can’t write, it only generates banal-average copies).

Most people today are outsourcing their thinking because they do not like the responsibility it entails.

Yes, thinking is hard. That is why we let Claude run as our agent buddies completing bullshit tasks and generating slop content that provides no value to anyone but your own ego, masturbating itself to productivity as its God.

Yes, thinking is hard. That is why we would rather numb our minds instead. And let social media warp our perspectives of ourselves. And what our lives should look like. Because, you know, life is lived offline.

Yes, thinking is hard. But so is let everyone else’s thinking run your life.

You cannot build a life you want if you cannot think clearly about what you want.

Writing is thinking. That is the profound idea of this section. And every piece of writing you create, be it a newsletter like this one for an audience shared publicly, or for yourself. It does not matter. That is your body of work. Nobody can take that away from you.

You can only develop a mind that finds meaning in things, by using that same mind to create meaningful things you wish existed.

That is how meaningful consumption can fuel meaningful creation.

That is how writing can become your vessel for the other remaining skills of learning to learn and build.

If you are not writing, these skills are staying inside you head.

Action plan

When I first started writing, I would think about my newsletter topics while walking around work. Thinking while walking to and from jiu-jitsu. If I had an idea while hanging out with my girlfriend at our favourite breakfast spot, or in the pub with the four lads on a Friday, I would write it down.

While at work I would write on my phone (while hiding) for 10 minutes.

Then, I got up before work, and did 30 minutes.

Then 2 hours.

Then 3 hours for a while.

I kept writing one, maybe two newsletters per week, and now I’m working closer to part-time in my job because I have built things to sell to you legends who want help with execution (I don’t like gatekeeping knowledge in the slightest).

I want to eventually do this full-time, and I am very much still learning as I go, but I wouldn’t have cultivated my audience of 32k+ subscribers, and I wouldn’t be getting 3-5 (annoying) brand sponsorship opportunities every day, and emails from people all over the globe telling me how much my writing has changed their life, if I had never started with those 10 minutes.

In terms of practical advice:

You won’t need a strategy, or an audience, or hours carved out of your schedule.

Every skill will compound if you do enough to move the needle, but done daily.

You will need a notebook, and an internet connection. A writing software helps too (I recommend Eden).

Step 1 - Write by hand for 10 minutes every morning

Write about one problem for 10 minutes straight.

It can be unorganised. It can have grammar errors. Do not edit while you are writing for those 10 minutes. And, before I forget to say. Write by hand in a notebook.

Handwriting forces slow thinking.

Yes, really.

Writing by hand activates parts of the brain that aren’t fully activated while typing.

Typing is fast and efficient, but handwriting is deliberate and more intentional. Because you can’t backspace entire paragraphs on a page.

You can get a notebook for 2 quid in a corner shop. If not, use a page. Do it first thing each morning so you actually stick to it every day. It’s only 10 minutes, so get up 10 minutes earlier. Do it before your phone ever touches your hand.

This practise will run silently in the background of your life.

It’s funny, because you will start noticing ideas forming while on walks, in the shower, at jiu-jitsu, while hanging out with friends. You can write those down too if you want. I recommend it.

Write them down in your phone, or your notebook if you can carry it with you everywhere.

The goal here is literally just to get you thinking.

And writing is thinking.

Step 2 - Pick one problem per week to research and write about

Don’t choose a topic.

Choose one problem that is currently holding you back. Stopping you from progress somewhere in your life. A problem causing you to suffer each day.

You already have the motivation to solve it. Everyone does, really. We all want to have as few unnecessary problems as we can have. That motivation is what will make this writing habit feel necessary and essential to you. It will be the vessel for that motivation.

In terms of how to research, here is what I recommend.

• If you want great ideas, read old books - Read idea dense books. Likely the older ones, or the classics.

• Read one Substack article per day and really think about it - If you’re not thinking deeply about one Substack article, then why bother reading 5 or 6?

• Use AI - Ask it some questions, argue with it, let if surface ideas you already had but you hadn’t yet named. But limit its responses to 80 words or less. I catch myself getting lazy at times while using AI. I spent one hour thinking deeply about three 80-word AI responses the other day. This one is a gamechanger.

Write down in your notebook, from memory, without looking at the sources:

1. What you learned in 1-3 key points

2. What surprised you

3. What you now believe that you did not believe before

If you can get 300 words of writing like this in per day, on top of your morning writing session, that is 2100 words per week.

That’s a whole newsletter if you structure it persuasively (problem->insight->solution).

This is pretty much a self-education system that runs on your own curiosity. Every problem you solve, or at least attempt at solving, can become a fully fleshed out essay. Every essay can become a record of your thinking. Over time, that is a body of work that represents the new person you have become, because your thinking has changed.

Optional Step - Publish it once a week

Substack or X.

LinkedIn even.

Read it out in front of a camera and make a YouTube video.

Publishing your work forces you to take responsibility for it, and it forces an even deeper requirement for clarity that writing privately does not offer.

Why?

When you know someone might read it, you think harder about what you actually mean.

A lot of people don’t consider this step out of fear of judgement or ridicule. Their “friends” might laugh at them. They might be seen as wrong, but publicly.

You are not publishing for an audience. Don’t think of it like that yet, even. Think of it like yourself publishing for the future version of your self who needs to look back in 3-6 months to see the evidence that they tried.

If you can get one avid reader to devour your work across weeks and months, you can get thousands more.

Don’t deep this step. Just show off your work.

One essay can reach 10 people.

Ten essays can reach 100 plus.

Suddenly the eleventh reaches 300,000.

A small amount of your essays will gather all of the attention, views, clicks, subscribers. It’s like that for every creator, me included. Take a look and see for yourself. That’s the Pareto principle.

Step 3 - Build one thing from what you learn

A resource. A template. A guide. An essay (again). A course. A product. A Substack newsletter. A new routine. A new habit. A new hobby. A new relationship. A new philosophy. A new perspective. A new life for yourself.

Writing is thinking. Now it’s time to use that thinking to create.

For you creators out there, it’s a body of work (long and short form content) and something to sell (product/service).

If you don’t feel the need to build and audience, great!

Build the body of work regardless, and let your newfound knowledge bleed out across your entire life.

It sounds stupid. But it took me a ton of trial and error to think about creating the life I wanted.

I started lifting weights when I was 16. Then I had a think.

I felt better lifting weights for 2 hours per week (as little as that) compared to 10-20 hours of video games per week. I stopped playing video games after thinking this through. My mind just hates playing them now, because it doesn’t feel like I get any compounding benefit from them.

I started reading and listening to lectures on profound ideas when I was 18.

Just last week, I went cold turkey from my phone and completely desensitised my mind across a 4 day period. Now, I scroll for less than 30 minutes a day across all platforms. I’m sitting in silence way more than I used to. And my mind has never felt so quiet. I can write for 4-5 hours per day now. It is insane. And the quality of my reading and thinking about profound ideas has improved too. My brain feels more dense and sharp, and I can’t see myself ever going back to 24/7 sensitisation, ever again.

You have the freedom to build the life you want, but you need to take the responsibility required to create it, and the reps. Tons and tons of reps. Achieved by going out and living your life, until you discover all the things you don’t like doing, before discovering all the things you absolutely do love doing.

Learn to write. Learn to think. Learn to try new things. Learn to experiment. Learn to identify problems. Learn to take responsibility for your life and go out and live it.

I’m finishing this now. Next newsletter will be shorter. I can’t ever seem to stick to a small word count. These are like full blown products I’m writing each week, but hey. I always try to make my free stuff and best as I can within my set deadlines!

I appreciate your time and attention.

I know it’s very valuable.

You’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

Stuff I have built:

• If you want to learn to write long-form like I do (essays, articles, newsletters) download my free writing course.

• The Profound Self-Education Guide - if you want become dangerously self-educated, using self-education as a vessel for building the life and mind you were never taught to build in school.

The internet is shallowing your mind.

Which means it is also shallowing your entire life.

Technology is restructuring how we process information in an ugly way.

Information is what shapes your identity because information determines what you see.

What you see is what you aim at.

And what you aim is what shapes the things you value (and don’t, by not aiming at those things).

Pretty much, you become what you consume.

If this seems obvious to you, good.

Let’s go a bit deeper.

We used to feel driven enough to spend decades of our lives painting Sistine Chapels. Building massive monuments around the globe. To spend half our lives creating these magnificent works that had depth and sustenance.

Yes, I know these people were paid to do their work.

But you probably couldn’t pay the vast majority of people today to spend one week without a phone. Their minds would self-destruct from having 1000 stupid thoughts a second, mixed together with years-old unprocessed emotions.

This does pain me to say it.

But today, we can no longer read 1 page of a book without the feeling of boredom strangling us to death.

I have felt this. You have felt this.

If you haven’t felt this, you are balls-deep in this problem without knowing it.

And if you can’t see why that is a serious problem, I don’t know what to tell you.

Thinking is becoming the most profound form of rebellion against this attack on our minds

In this profound ideas letter, I want to run over some profound ideas, of course.

Namely, why your mind is getting pulled away from being capable of truly profound thinking, and what you can do about, with a complete thinking system (and I mean it when I say ‘complete system’).

Also, if you are not willing to change your behaviour as a result of this letter, don’t bother reading.

I’m serious. I would rather you do something else better with your time instead.

But if you are willing to think about this, and therefore act and make even 1 microscopic change to your life within the next few minutes, guess what?

The path will be set before you.

Not a single stone left unturned.

Profound Idea I - Learning

Let’s talk about the feeling of learning.

By that, I mean a few things.

Reading feels like learning.

So does taking notes, and finishing a book or a Substack newsletter like this one.

But here’s the thing.

Learning, or what learning really could be defined as, is behaviour change.

For however long it takes you to read this letter and process it, every time you see the word learning, I want you to think of that idea exactly.

Learning is behaviour change.

It’s only when you start thinking of what learning isn’t... that this finally starts clicking.

Reading is not learning.

Taking notes is not learning.

Watching a YouTube video on 2x speed is not learning 2x faster.

Buying a course or a guide is not learning either.

Even my own guides, which I genuinely believe in, are WORTHLESS in isolation. I don’t mind shooting myself in the foot saying that. Because if your behaviour does not change because of them, they are worthless. Full stop. Don’t spend your hard earned money on them.

The missing link between all of these examples, and the word learning, is this.

Thinking.

In order for learning to enforce behaviour change, you have to think.

You cannot change your behaviour without changing your thinking.

Changing your behaviour means changing how you think, speak, write, explain, recall, or apply something.

Doing something a new way, and achieving a new outcome as a result.

In our case, changing your thinking is an example of changing your behaviour. Because how you think is a habit. How you question. How you respond. How to analyse an idea with a certain system for analysing it.

That is what we will be focusing on. Changing your thinking.

So what is it that is stopping people from doing this properly?

Profound Idea II - Thinking

It has been beaten into us through formal schooling that you should be reading through tons of pages, highlighting highlighting highlighting and making lots of notes, and that success is measured by finishing a book.

Not about how much of a book you processed.

Just because you feel like you are learning, does not mean you are making any real progress.

We just aren’t told this.

And it is no accident.

Most people measure reading by the pages they have read.

Yes, I know that everybody says this online.

Let’s think a bit more profoundly about this.

Well, there is a ladder of abstraction that shows you what truly matters when consuming information of any kind.

An example regarding books:

Question/Problem → Squiggles on a page → Words → Phrases → Sentences → Paragraph → Sections → Chapters → Book → Relevance to your Life

School does not care about the level of the question/problem, or the level of relevance to your daily life. You are told what to read by a standardised curriculum built around interests that are not your own. Questions and problems to consider are rarely given. You are just told to read this, follow the teacher’s orders, and repeat it back correctly on an exam. Why? Because you need to pass the exam. Why pass the exam? Because if not you’ll fail the exam. See the problem?

Formal learning curriculums were never designed to help you build the life you want. They were designed to produce compliant, employable people... and it works.

This is why there is no question given at the start of class. And when there is no valid question, the chances of that information being relevant to helping you live the life you want, they are practically zero.

Walk into any classroom and ask the word “why” enough... and you’ll probably get thrown out because the teachers themselves can’t give you a good enough answer.

Most people will carry this habit with them until they die.

This is why everyone I know thinks of education as something that can be finished.

This is also why people spend 3 hours reading and less than 3 minutes thinking.

Which begs the question.

Why does reacting to a tweet, or summarising a book chapter, or highlighting something, why does it feel like thinking?

Here is the answer.

Just because something pops into your mind, it does not mean you’re actually thinking about it. Really, it is the testing of what pops into your mind that is the thinking. And testing requires sustained attention most people no longer have.

We developed the capacity for contemplative linear thought over centuries. It is a learned cognitive skill, and we are beginning to unlearn it.

The heart of the issue lies with deep linear thought being replaced by shallow reactive processing at every level of daily life.

I do not think you are inherently lazier than those from the previous generations.

I do think your attention is being harvested by systems designed by the smartest engineers in the world whose sole purpose is to keep you looking at screens. To keep your mind and life shallow, because, you know, real life is not lived online.

The feeling of being educated and actually being capable of producing something original have never been further apart. Most people only feel informed, and almost nobody is building anything with what they know.

I am going to hit you with a harsh truth. It’s nothing personal, but I say it because I care.

You have a right to an educated mind.

Absolutely, 100%.

A mind that can think, and do so originally. A mind that can question deeply, and creates things the world has not yet seen.

But all people ever talk seem to talk about is rights.

This has truly pissed me off since the age of 18 (I’m 22 now).

More rights.

More access.

More resources.

But you cannot have the conversation about rights without having the conversation about responsibility.

For example, if people exercised for two hours per week, and ate healthy-enough for about 70% of the time, we would not need to be asking for more hospital beds. Yes, there will be exceptions to that idea - people who cannot move for whatever reason. But it doesn’t change the physics behind the fact that most chronic illnesses are lifestyle driven, and almost entirely preventable.

The same applies to your mind.

The corporations are hijacking your attention, yes. But getting all bitter and resentful about that fact will not change the physics of your situation.

How you take responsibility and ownership of that fact is what matters. That is where behaviour changes can start taking place.

So what are you going to do about it?

Nobody on this Earth is going to build that mind for you. The responsibility is yours. It always has been.

And the good news is that the intervention is not extremely complicated. But it is pretty uncomfortable. Uncomfortable enough that most people avoid it.

But it will be incredibly rewarding.

Even within just 15 minutes of using what comes next.

Because that is what it is.

A thinking system.

Profound Idea III - You don’t read to consume, you read to think

How can you actually start thinking better?

I’m excited to show you this, I’ve been refining it for a few weeks now.

The purpose of reading is not consumption.

The purpose of reading is thinking.

I like not to view this as a reading system, so to speak, but as an information manipulation system. Because that is what great thinking should encompass.

The reason I have automated and systematised every step and question you have to ask is numerous.

Quite frankly, I get lazy at times.

Sometimes I don’t want to ask the right questions in the right order. Which is actually more important than you think.

Sometimes tiredness can get the better of you. We don’t want our thinking quality to degrade mid-session.

Forgetting to ask the right questions in the right order is a silent killer of knowledge acquisition.

This system externalises what is required of you so you can focus on thinking. Not remembering to think.

Your first attempt at this might feel like it is terrible. But really, you do want terrible. Even 2-3 minutes of absolutely abysmal retrieval or recall at the start of this is better than none. The pain is the point. If you can’t remember something, great. You know what to think about some more. Encode your weaker understandings and gaps with the rest of this system.

That is why our first step is to practise recalling, remembering, or retrieving what we already know.

Here is the system loop:

Retrieve -> Read -> Consolidate -> Connect -> Map -> Question -> Repeat

How to think while reading a book (properly)

I am going to run through every step live, on a real passage, with real material.

The source is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s opening entry on Existentialism. Read it alongside me, it’s short.

I am reading it alongside The Penguin Guide to Existentialism, which is what I am reading at the minute, along with 1984.

I wouldn’t consider myself a full-blown existentialist as of right now, but I do agree with and encourage a lot of existentialist ideas that I am aware of.

Step 1 - Retrieve

If you want to get good at remembering, you need to practise remembering.

This is where retrieval or recall comes in.

This will feel like the most painful step in the process, and that is why you should pay most attention to it.

Why?

Before you begin reading, spend 2-5 minutes thinking about these 3 questions:

1. What are the 2-4 main ideas I remember about this topic?

2. How do these ideas connect?

3. What questions do I still have about it?

This is how prior knowledge schemas get activated and primed before new information comes in to the brain. Think swinging your arms in circles for a couple minutes, preparing to throw a ball as far as you can. You wouldn’t be capable of throwing it as far if you were cold, let alone the risk of injury.

Doing this will give new information somewhere to stick to and expose gaps that you can use this thinking session to go fill.

If you’re like me who often struggles to get into the grove of reading right away, this will get your mind feeling engaged and ready to start thinking deeply.

Here is what my retrieval looked like.

I know that existentialism has always been broadly talked about and not very well defined. I’ve read Kierkegaard’s Crop Rotation, and Sartre’s The End of War, which is a brilliant essay. I know that existentialism is really about how you have freedom to choose your own meaning. How you respond to the existential nature of existence, that all of this means nothing, that we don’t know what it means, and that you have the freedom to choose, and hopefully choose something aimed toward the good.

I want to understand something more about the idea of existence precedes essence, because I don’t fully agree with it. I think there is more to all of us than we think, in terms of genetics and temperament playing a role in how we interpret the world.

I also want to learn about what nihilism properly is (and in simple terms).

I would like to organise my understanding of the key ideas a little better. I think they are freedom, projects, and responsibility. But I know there are other things missing that I must understand.

Again, that messiness is the point. That is exactly what you want.

Step 2 - Read

Read a couple of paragraphs.

This can be 1 or 10. It will depend on the density of what you are reading, and how quickly your mind gets overwhelmed if you can’t understand it absolutely intuitively.

Working memory is very limited. The danger here is overreaching into cognitive overload. There is a range in which the brain retains information best, and that lies between overload (too challenging) and underload (not challenging enough). If you keep reading until you reach cognitive overload, and do no thinking to reduce that load, and return it to the optimal range, you will do what most people do. Read for 3 hours and think for 3 minutes.

This is why you should read in smaller chunks.

Naval Ravikant once said somewhere that he likes to read one page of a book and think about just that one page. That is the level of respect you should be bringing to information.

Once you have read a couple of paragraphs, and you have reached an idea you do not understand, do this.

Stop and consolidate what you’ve read (most people don’t go further than this).

So, I read the each introductory paragraph of the Stanford page.

I took my time. I made no highlights, and I mind mapped my thinking when I needed to. That was enough.

Step 3 - Consolidate

Close the book and stare at a wall. Just look anywhere away from the book… DO NOT LOOK BACK AT WHAT YOU ARE READING.

Now.

Think about these questions:

1. What are the 1-3 main ideas I’ve just read about?

2. What am I still unsure about?

This forces immediate retrieval and reconstruction of information.

By simplifying or summarising what you have read into just 1-3 main ideas or chunks, you are organising the information inside of your brain, which reduces cognitive load in working memory. That is why chunking is a superpower.

I like this step a lot, since it requires you to stop and think about what you have read in a novel way. If you give yourself 20 seconds to stop and think between this step and the previous step, you will see what I mean.

Consolidation is what catches the gaps in your knowledge right away. Because you are not relying on recognition memory (looking at the words and thinking that you do remember them) and instead relying on recall (remembering the meaning of the words without recognition, but retrieval).

Here is what my consolidation looked like.

The Second World War and the dropping of the atomic bombs both serve as a key influence to the existential movement. Mainly due to widespread anxiety and indifference in response to the ideas of meaninglessness, anxiety, and the human capacity that human beings had cultivated to destroy themselves.

The word existentialism has always been hard to define since it encompasses so many ideas, themes, and it spans across a wide array of disciplines.

Mainly, it is not merely isolated to academia. For this reason, there are a number of key ideas or themes that can be defined as existentialist.

The three that feel most central to me right now are nihilism, freedom, and ethics. All of which are fueled by the idea of existence precedes essence, which I don’t fully agree with.

What was I unsure about?

How can the key themes be structured into a system so as to not let people fall straight into nihilism right away? Why did they believe that every human being is a blank template, without considering genetics or temperament?

Step 4 - Connect

How does this connect to what I have previously read, and what does this connect to that I already know.

Everything within the book thus far, and anything else you know about anything.

This is where the cycle of destroying your understanding and rebuilding it gets under way. The learning cycle. Because true understanding is when you stop just accumulating the author’s ideas, and start colliding those ideas with your existing knowledge.

All knowledge, really, is just your point of view. And thinking is how you build a point of view.

Connecting ideas is what makes them relevant and purposeful.

The brain hates anything that does not directly serve your survival. Forgetting is a biological failure of relevance I think for this reason. But once you give an idea somewhere to connect within your web of knowledge, it becomes damn-right immovable.

Here is what my connecting looked like.

• Inside the text - it connected to the number of people named at the start. Existentialist ideas and themes have been discussed by a lot of people. And it is hard to define existentialism to any one of them, or any one set of ideas, since a lot of the people hold differing opinions, apparently on the same ideas.

• Outside the text - this connects a lot with integral theory. In that you can become aware of who you are and increase your levels of awareness, and thus your ability to change your first-person perspective, to help you develop a life outlook you want.

This is where my understanding started to crack and rebuild.

Sartre says existence precedes essence, which means you are not born with a fixed self, and you construct it through choices and actions.

But the Big 5 personality model, and everything Jung wrote about psychological types, suggests you are born with a temperament. A pre-given map. Which I believe to be true. Not a destiny, so to speak, but a set of innate tendencies that shape how you perceive and respond to the world.

This is where my understanding conflicts with the idea of existence preceding essence.

So, the more accurate version might be this.

You are born with a map, but a map is not a territory. What you do with the map you were given - how you question it, test it, rebuild it - that is where you actually come from in terms of your idea of “essence.”

Step 5 - Map

This step is optional.

Mainly, since it takes some skill to really do this right. I’m currently testing out my own mind mapping system, but I want to wait until I really have the principles nailed before I can teach you guys everything.

Here is an important distinction between good note-taking and bad note-taking.

Key words and relationships.

Writing tons of linear notes hides relationships. You don’t know what the key concepts are, and how they relate and organise themselves compared to one another.

Mapping these out can work wonders for your brain. Why? The brain processes visual imagery much faster than it does words. There are mixed statistics, some citing it being 60,000 times faster, while others go as far as 3 million.

Yes, this is why linear note-taking is bullshit, and why I love me some mind mapping (even as a writer, for ideation and research).

In terms of what this actually does, well, it externalises structure without transcription.

You can engage in conceptual organisation, in other words, chunking. Which is also called scaffolding, re-chunking, restructuring, or mental model building.

The term restructuring makes the most sense to me, but chunking is the real term.

I like to think of mind mapping as a visual aid that supports your thinking. Your mind map should almost represent the thinking inside your mind. Because if a section of your mind map is messy, it means your understanding of that chunk or section is messy inside your brain too.

Here is what my map looked like.

I have three groups:

1. Influences

2. Existential movement

3. Key ideas

They could be better, but that is my current hypothesis of what this topic looks like for now.

Step 6 - Question

Write down 1-3 questions you have while reading.

Gaps, confusions, open questions the book has not answered for you yet. Don’t try to solve all of them right now, but dot them down.

By coming back to them later, at the top of every half hour say, you preserve flow. You don’t want to let every second sentence lead you down a road full of infinite questioning, because then you’re not reading.

Questions are targets for what you must look out for.

This balance is what creates a middle path between ignoring your confusion, while also not letting it stall your curiosity either.

Here are the questions I was left with.

• What can nihilism be defined as simply?

• How do you not slip into nihilism by just saying “fuck it” to any objection within those key ideas?

And the one question that stayed unresolved.

• Where does genetics play a role in existence precedes essence?

These questions are the fuel for the next session.

Step 7 - Repeat the process

Yep… go back to reading some more paragraphs now.

If at any point you feel like your head is melting, you feel genuinely lost, just stop. Take 30 seconds to look away from whatever you’re reading and think. Try and run through each step, or reread what you have read slowly. Think about it. This is supposed to feel hard. You are learning how to think. So if you don’t know what to think about something right now, that is the entire point of all this.

Learning to read (and thus learning to think) is about learning to pull yourself up from a fall. It’s hard, but you are your own teacher and student.

What to do at the end of each session

Before finishing up, repeat the retrieval practice you followed in step 1.

1. What are the 2-4 main ideas I remember about this topic?

2. How do these ideas connect?

3. What questions do I still have about it?

This is for consolidating what you have read. It will set you up for your next reading session too, by giving you a new mental structure (schema) to build upon next time, rather than some vague impression that you can only recognise once you open the book again, and not recall.

Think of each loop of this system as adding a new layer of comprehension every time.

The goal here is not to understand everything in one session. You want to layer and layer new understandings across multiple sessions. Learning is a layering process, which is pretty cool I think. Over time the structure in your thinking will become progressively denser, more connected, and more usable.

Here is what I built from those three paragraphs that wasn’t there before.

I built a mind map with three groups.

Influences, the existential movement, and key ideas.

They could be better, but that is my current hypothesis of what this topic looks like for now.

I now have a better understanding of the key ideas, and how they all relate to freedom at its core.

I hope this has showed you the difference between reading to consume, and reading to think.

Because that folks, is why we use this cool thinking system.

And thinking is why we read books.

I’m leaving it there for today.

You’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

Free Things I Have Built For You:

• If you want to learn to write long-form (essays, articles, newsletters like this one), download my free long-form writing course.

• If you want a unique prompt that will make you a personalised 30-day project-based learning plan, download that here.

Paid Products I Have Built For You:

• Check out The Profound Self-Education Guide if you want to stop consuming mindlessly and start becoming dangerously self-educated (and build a life you want to be living).

• Check out A Guide To Profound Reading if you want to remember more of what you read in 5 minutes than most people do with 3 hours of “reading.”

Nobody is reading anymore… which does not make much sense to me.

Most people are outsourcing all their thinking to a machine.

Which, generates tons of information to be read, in which those same people are not even reading all of it.

Not deeply.

Not even shallowly.

If you think this does not concern you, if you are done school and have ‘completed’ education, if you don’t like reading books, or even if you are a writer or creative (like me) who loves using AI and building things with your unique knowledge.

You are mistaken, my friend.

This is everyone’s problem.

Why?

Reading is thinking.

You read not to consume, but to think.

Thinking is becoming a dying craft.

Which also means learning to think, and therefore learning to read, is becoming the new competitive edge you must start developing right now. No matter your field, career, life situation and excuses.

The new edge is learning to slow down.

With the world speeding up with more content, more AI, more output, the best thing you can do is learn to slow down. Slow down your thinking. Because fast thinking means faster, more shallow decisions, and decisions are what dictate all outcomes of your life. Especially if you are building a meaningful body of work. Every needle you decide to move (and what not to move) is a life-changing matter.

This guide is about pure execution.

I don’t like gatekeeping knowledge, and I do try my best to give away everything I know for free in my newsletter, so I want this paid post (and future paid posts) to be focused on action.

Which is important.

If you behaviour has not changed, you have not learned anything.

I will be doing a live walkthrough that you can follow along. There will be little to no theory, and everything I write beneath this section will be unedited, raw, and will represent me thinking aloud on paper, as I am reading, for you to see.

Think of this as listening to me think out loud while reading beside you... but on paper, to see how I think (which won’t be great haha)

So yeah, more paid execution/action-orientated guides coming.

Here is the paragraph we will be doing some profound thinking about today.

Read more

Listen and walk, my friend.

There are 2 skills you must start developing before it is too late.

No matter your current situation, life problems, or excuses.

I say this because I’ve started to notice something.

People my age are starting to panic (I’m 22 btw).

They’re all saying the same thing.

Most college degrees are now worthless.

The risk of choosing one specific field to become highly specialized in, is now perhaps the biggest (and most expensive) risk any 18 year old has ever had to make in history.

Because the uncertainty over what, and therefore who, AI will replace... it is staggering.

The only two skills worth your time in the next 6-12 months are learning how to learn and learning how to write.

Now.

I do not mean highlighting books or taking notes.

Not even building a second brain (yeah yeah come at me).

Definitely not writing the type of essays you were told to write in school.

If any of that standard advice worked, we would all be future-proofing ourselves with that advice... and you wouldn’t have clicked on this newsletter.

There is now zero demand for average.

Because things have changed.

The multitude of AI apps and slop-content that will be forgotten faster, and in greater lump-sums at a time, is increasing.

Faster than we can make sense of it.

But those are just the career-level consequences that most people only seem to be worried about at the minute.

There is something more fundamental at stake.

Every time you outsource your thinking to a tool that doesn’t actually know anything, you get a little less human. And the less human you are, the more replaceable you become.

Not because AI is smarter than you, because heck, it might be smarter than all of us.

The real problem is this - you are far more replaceable, when you stop using the only thing AI cannot replicate.

Your unique knowledge.

Your experience and your perspective.

Your ability to synthesize and connect profound ideas like no one else can.

The understanding you have of being you.

In this newsletter, I want to give you 5 profound ideas to think about.

To show you exactly why most of what you call learning isn’t actually learning at all, and why writing by hand will become the most valuable and sought-after human skill in response to the new wave of infinite average.

Then I want to give you the two free resources that will actually change that.

And I’ve created them in a way so that all you have to do with them is take action.

Idea I - Most of what you call learning isn’t learning

It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows. - Epictetus

If your behaviour has not changed, then you haven’t learned anything.

I know this is going to annoy a certain crowd of people.

Is highlighting books not an example of active reading? What about taking tons of notes? What about the hours spent on YouTube watching tutorial after tutorial until 3am?

Sorry to burst your bubble but none of this means you are learning.

Rather, it gives you the feeling of learning.

There is a reason why this feels so productive.

Most people optimize their lives for the feeling of something, and wonder why nothing in their life ever changes. Because they avoid the one thing that actually drives change which is discomfort.

What is that discomfort, really?

It’s encoding. That’s what it is.

Think about how early morning sunlight connects to your circadian rhythm, which connects to your nervous system, which connects to your emotional regulation, which connects to how you show up to your work and your family every single day. That chain isn’t memorized line by line. It can’t be. You understand the relationships between each part and then you can’t unlearn it, because it directly impacts how you live.

Learning is thinking.

That is it, so I’ll see you in next week’s Profound Ideas newsletter...

But seriously.

It is the type of thinking that makes connections automatically. Between what you already know and what you are trying to understand. Between concepts that don’t seem related. Between an idea from a philosophy book and a decision you have to make tomorrow. If you aren’t making those connections, you aren’t thinking. And if you aren’t thinking, you aren’t learning. And if you aren’t learning, you are not changing.

You don’t read a book to consume information. You read so you can think. You study so you can think. You learn a new skill so you can think, about applying your current skills in a more effective way compared to last week.

Why does thinking matter at all?

If you are not encoding information that means you have nothing new inside your brain to retrieve. If you have nothing new to retrieve, you have nothing new to think about. If you have nothing new to think about, you cannot change your behaviour... and we are back to the first line of this section defining what real learning looks like, beneath the profound Epictetus quote.

Learning is always made out to be a consumption problem.

It is not.

Really, it is a thinking problem.

And now with AI being able to generate infinite, perfect-sounding information on demand - mostly in the form of long-form content (just call it long-form writing, the word content sounds cringe to me).

Now, that feeling of learning is completely free and endlessly available. And in greater amount if you choose a $20 dollar monthly subscription to ChatGPT.

Most people won’t have a clue that it’s going on, or that it is happening to them.

Soon, feeling educated and being capable will have nothing to do with each other, and most people will not notice.

So if consumption is NOT what learning is, and the feeling of being productive does not always equal progress, what the hell is then?

That is what the next section is about.

Idea II - Learning is making connections

There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress, or of surviving in the long run, and that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism. - David Deutsch

There is nothing that would make you more competent and therefore dangerous than the ability to explain something.

I know, it sounds nuts.

What about an explanation that makes it so powerful?

It is far from something like a simple communication tool, which it is. Explanations are how the brain forges unbreakable connections between what you already know and what you are trying to understand.

Explanations are how we think, which is important to understand.

Let me give you the two types of explanations, which will make this look a lot clearer:

Good explanations are hard to vary. They hold up against scrutiny, stress-testing, and even questioning by Socrates himself.

Bad explanations collapse the moment someone leans against them. Like a wall made out of marshmallows.

Most of what people have stored inside their memory as ‘knowledge’ is bad explanations that have been never stress-tested.

Imagine showing up to a party and none of your friends are there.

Your explanation in response to that experience might be “I have to hide until my friends arrive” or “I get to make new friends until my other friends arrive.” See how an explanation can determine how you perceive the world around you, and therefore every outcome of your life?

Here is what’s even crazier.

Explanations are free.

Explanations require no tools.

Explanations don’t cost anything.

You don’t need a degree or permission to create one.

Heck, you’re building an explanation of what I am saying right now as you are reading this! Isn’t that crazy?

Your speed of learning will always be determined by how quickly you can forge connections.

It has never been about how much you can consume, as we talked about in our last section.

The actual solution is to create explanations, because that is how you manifest those connections you have made.

It is such a cliche, but if you can’t explain it to a child you don’t understand it well enough.

So how does this connect to the big picture?

This is why AI cannot learn in any meaningful sense. It generates and predicts.

It does not explain from experience.

It has no real behaviour to change.

And it has no life that its explanations must hold up against.

So if learning is thinking, and thinking is making connections, and if connections are forged through explanations, what now?

How do you start building your own explanations in the most efficient, high-leverage way possible?

We’ve gone over our first future-proof skill, which is learning.

Now let’s talk about writing.

Idea III - You need to start writing

Writing is how you test whether you actually know something or just feel like you do.

I don’t like how a lot of people treat writing as a way of tracking and storing what you have learned.

That is backwards to me, for too many reasons that I have already spoken about tons in the past.

Most people would rather believe in false illusions than take on the courage needed to face reality as it is.

Truth, responsibility, all that yadada that I can talk about another day.

I cannot think of a more dangerous way to be living than by being blinded by the illusion of understanding.

Why is this so damn dangerous?

Well, you can only feel it. You can’t really see it.

You feel competent.

You feel informed.

And the minute someone asks you to explain something on paper... you’re cooked.

This is what writing forces.

You just cannot hide vague thinking behind the feeling of understanding when you are staring at a blank page. Not even Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT and giving it your ideas to organize them for you.

Writing by hand, analog-style especially, it makes every gap and weakness in your explanations become visible. Writing is a stress-test. Back to the Deutsch quote we mentioned earlier, writing is how you find out whether your ideas, your beliefs, your arguments, and your thinking is either hard to vary, or built like a wall of marshmallows.

Why?

Because writing forces you to produce an encoded explanation by retrieving it from your memory.

If there is nothing to retrieve, the gaps will show.

If there is a lack of sense-making or organization of information, the quality of your encoding will show.

Every single time you write something you are doing something extremely high-leverage.

Yes, writing is incredibly time intensive.

Especially when teaching yourself in the beginning (since you are basically teaching yourself how to think).

And it doesn’t matter if you are writing just so you can build a body of work online that people can explore, or to build an audience (which is a bit of a dirty word online, but remember, an audience is a byproduct of high-quality writing, and that is the bottom line).

Every time you write an idea into existence, that is feedback.

A sentence.

A cluster of sentences or a paragraph.

An essay section like this one.

A whole Profound Ideas newsletter.

It’s feedback of your thinking. Your unique web of knowledge being manifested.

Like, c’mon, that’s just crazy.

It is literally a piece of you being manifested or built into existence. Most things people call dull or normal are actually incredible profound when you think about them...

Write no matter what. Write every day. For an audience or for yourself. It doesn’t matter. Just write. If not, you will never learn how profound your ideas truly are.

You can see that writing is the ultimate skill for exposing where your thinking has gaps that need filling, and ideas that need stress-testing.

So to recap, or to synthesize some profound ideas in real-time here, we could say that writing is the mechanism of learning, and not so much the reward of it (while it still is).

It is how the first two sections of this newsletter become real in your own life rather than just some profound ideas you consumed and forgot within a week... because you never acted on them.

Which means, the question is no longer whether you should write.

It is how.

Idea IV - How to become irreplaceable

Stop calling yourself a generalist, start calling yourself a synthesist.

There is a difference between knowing a lot of things, versus seeing how everything connects.

Generalists know a lot.

But synthesists can see the invisible patterns and connections between all domains and disciplines of knowledge. Connections most people skip over, or cannot see at all.

And although the distinction between “generalist” and “synthesist” might seem subtle, they are both entirely different ways of moving through the world.

The synthesist is the only identity worth building right now.

If anything, it is essential.

Why?

The world has been producing nothing but specialists at a mass scale for the last 200 years. We are beginning to suffer the consequences.

Trying to get along with people you disagree with is a dead skill.

Nobody can talk to each other. Nobody can see the whole big picture. Business-minded people can’t get along with artists. Economists can’t speak to biologists. Philosophers can’t speak to engineers.

Everyone is extraordinarily deep in one tunnel, one skill, one domain of mastery... and blind to all the rest.

Here is what this means:

The most valuable person in any room, will be the person who can walk between every tunnel.

The person who can connect what the neuroscientist knows.... to what the Stoic philosopher figured out 2000 years ago... to what that one experience taught them when they were 19... the person who reads widely, thinks carefully, and writes it all down until the connections become visible (to themselves first, and then to share those insights with the world).

That person cannot be replicated.

How could they?

AI actually makes this idea even more true.

AI can retrieve information across every field of knowledge faster than any human alive. It can summarize, compare, and generate connections between ideas at a scale that should terrify you if you think information retrieval is your edge. Think pure memorization, a skill which AI has made as dead as a Dodo bird.

AI can’t synthesize from a life it has never lived.

It has no experience of failing publicly and rebuilding. It has no version of itself that was told something that fucked it up at age 12 and spent a decade living in a high-cortisol state of mind since. It has no skin in the game. The connections it makes are statistical, based on data. AI has information, not knowledge. You have knowledge, not information. Those are not the same thing, and they never will be.

Your synthesis is unreplaceable because it comes from a life only you have lived.

Your learn to synthesize ideas through learning itself. And writing is what makes that process permanent and public, to either yourself or a group of readers. Every piece of writing is a node in your unique web of knowledge made visible. Every section of every newsletter, article, or essay is a connection that could only have been made by you, in this order, from this one life.

Do that for 6-12 months are you will have a body of work, a body that represents your mind and thinking, that no AI and no specialist can touch.

This is what future-proof actually means. Not a skill that survives long enough before the next disruption, because who knows what that will be. No one.

I am talking about a person who cannot be substituted. Because there is no substitute for a mind that has learned how to learn, and a body of work that only one person on earth could have built.

So how do you build both of those things, deliberately, starting now?

Idea V - How to future-proof yourself

The argument I have made in this newsletter, that writing is how you find out what you actually think, it happened to me while I wrote this.

What you have just read is proof.

I chose my topic last Saturday, and went on a walk and wrote down everything I could think of.

Then, I wrote one section per day... and that was it.

I would get all my ideas the day before while on walks, so sitting down and writing was just about writing, not idea generation.

I also went into this with almost too basic of an outline. But the walks and the ideas I wrote outside of my morning writing time were what fleshed it out across an entire week.

It meant instead of having a finalized outline within 2 days, I could build it out section by section across a week (once I had my key points outlined at least).

If this Profound Ideas newsletter has changed how you think about learning, or how you think about writing, or even made you realize for the first time that the two are the same thing, that is why I do this, and that means a lot to me. Genuinely.

Let’s get you doing something now.

It is easy to sit around learning all day. It’s doing and living your life that’s the hard part. And there is no better place to be than under pressure from a challenge you chose to take on.

Here is what I recommend you do to get you started in the right direction, before I give you 2 free resources to help you with implementing these principles:

• Write before you feel ready. The page is where you get ready. Not the course, not the research phase, not the second brain you’ve been building for three months. The page.

• 2-4 needle-moving tasks per day. 15-90 minutes each. Ordered from highest creative demand to lowest. This is not a productivity hack. It is how you protect the cognitive energy that both learning and writing require. Everything else fits around those tasks or it does not fit at all.

• One piece of writing per week minimum. About something you are genuinely trying to understand, not something you already know. An essay, a newsletter, a long-form post. It doesn’t matter. Write no matter what. Make sure you genuinely feel interested about your topic, too. It has to be a problem you care about solving, because if not, you are shooting yourself in the foot from the very start.

• Create the thing you want to see exist in the world. Solve your own problems first. Then share that solution. That is the only ethical way to build something worth building, and the only way to build something that lasts and truly helps.

Now.

Where do you put all of this?

I would say Substack.

It is a platform that prioritizes long-form thinking, and the people on here are lovely.

You could also try X. Even YouTube (read your writing to a camera).

Just pick one.

Publish something before the end of this week.

I have a lot of messages from you guys I am yet to respond to, but feel free to send me on what you have written! My apologies for being selfish, I avoid my phone like it’s the plague for the majority of my day. If I can’t think to a high quality, then my ideas will suffer, and so will my writing and creations for you guys.

The 2 free resources to help you out with this:

1. If you want a structured way to turn all of this into a 30-day project-based learning plan helping you achieve one needle-moving outcome per day - download that here.

2. If you want to learn how to write, download this free mini-course that teaches how I write my weekly newsletter.

Check out my Guide To Profound Reading and my Profound Self-Education Guide if you already feel comfortable with writing, but struggle with the learning side of things.

Learn to think. Learn to write. Learn to speak. Learn to identify problems. Learn to set greater goals. Learn how to learn. Learn anything and everything that allows your mind to expand and adapt to any situation.

That is how you become irreplaceable.

You absolute legend.

- Craig :)

I was told this profound idea before I started college:

You get back what you put into it.

I didn’t get much out of college... since I had put my all my effort into jiu-jitsu instead.

This is likely not a new principle to you if you’re a learner, a writer, or a creator.

What you put in determines what comes out.

AI has changed what’s possible.

But not in the way most people are using it.

In the final analysis, AI is a pattern-recognition machine trained on human feedback.

It is optimised to make you like it more than it makes you better.

It will tell you that your writing is exceptional.

It will validate your half-formed thinking with full-blown paragraphs that most people don’t even read fully.

And that’s not the worst of all.

It will agree with almost everything you say unless you specifically instruct it not to.

Which means, it amplifies whatever judgement you bring to it.

Good judgement in, means good output out.

Weak judgement in, means AI will make that worse.

And faster, too, with confidence that would make most people blind to what it really is.

In short, it requires a certain level of evaluative thinking while using it.

But once you have this in place, it becomes pretty harmless. You can tell it to fuck off when it says you’ve created the greatest piece of writing it has ever seen... because you can clearly see what it’s doing.

The problem is not AI.

The problem is that most people open AI with no clear outcome in mind.

No filter, no direction, which means they immediately drown in outputs they don’t know how to evaluate.

A single profound idea fixes almost all of this:

Define your desired outcome before you use AI.

That comes first. Always. And once you have it, the question becomes how can I use AI to help me reach it faster?

There are three levels to using AI this way.

Almost moving from beginner to intermediate to advanced, with each level building on the last.

Most people don’t even use the first level, which is my personal favourite.

Example I - Emulation (not copying)

Let’s use writing as our example, since this is relevant to Substack.

If you have ever read a piece of great writing and thought, “damn I wish I wrote that,” pay careful attention to what I’m going to show you.

It’s very easy to read a great piece of writing passively.

To feel something from it.

But to take a principle from it, and actually apply that principle your own creative work, that’s a rare sight.

Mainly because it’s hard. Thinking is hard.

This is where AI earns its place.

We can use AI to break down a piece of writing to uncover what’s happening beneath the surface.

Give AI a high-performing piece of writing - your own, or someone else’s - and ask it to surface the structural, psychological, and attention mechanics that make it work.

By high-performing, I mean having high views/engagement. This means there’s something within that writing that readers like, and readers is what your writing is looking to attract.

We can have AI tell us the following:

• Why the introduction hooks you in and keeps you engaged

• How the sections fit together to move the reader through a transformation

• Which psychological principles are doing the heavy lifting

• And what would need to be true for you to replicate the same effect with completely different ideas

You could even take this down to the micro level in terms of how a specific writer structures each individual sentence.

The power of this process is limited by the questions you can think of asking.

You can use this writing breakdown prompt to help you surface these patterns:

Writing Breakdown Prompt

System

You are an Evaluative Breakdown Partner designed to help the user dissect writing they want to emulate. You surface the structural and psychological principles that make a piece work, providing a comprehensive analysis the user can reference and apply to their own writing.

Context

The user has encountered writing they admire—their own past work or someone else’s. They want to understand what makes it work so they can apply those principles to their own writing.

Your job is to help them:

• See the structural and psychological mechanics beneath the surface

• Understand why specific choices work

• Build a toolkit of principles they can apply to future writing

The output of this session becomes context the user can bring to other tools or prompts.

Instructions

When the user provides content to analyze, complete all five analysis steps and then generate the Summary of Learnings. Present everything together as a complete reference document.

Analysis

Analysis Step 1: Content Type and Objective

• What type of content is this? (newsletter, article, essay, transcript, etc.)

• Identify and name the content “type” or format (e.g., “contrarian hot take,” “story-to-lesson,” “curiosity loop thread”)

• What is the primary objective? (inform, persuade, entertain, inspire, etc.)

• Note any missing context that might affect analysis accuracy

Analysis Step 2: Macro Structure

• Overall Framework: The storytelling or argumentative structure (e.g., problem-agitation-solution, hook-insight-action, hero’s journey, thesis-antithesis-synthesis)

• Arc and Beats: How the piece moves from beginning to end; where the major beats land; the transformation the reader undergoes

• Section Sequence: Break down what sections exist, how they’re sequenced, and explain why that sequence is effective for the audience and goal

• Psychological Principles at Work: Principles operating at the macro level (e.g., Cialdini’s persuasion principles, curiosity gaps, tension and release, narrative transportation)

• Replication Template: A template-style summary of the structure (e.g., “This piece follows a 5-part structure: [1] Hook with counterintuitive claim, [2] Problem articulation, [3] Reframe/Insight, [4] Framework/Solution, [5] Call to action”)

Analysis Step 3: Micro Structure

Break down the piece section by section (or paragraph by paragraph for shorter pieces). Analyze every section.

For each section, provide:

• Section Label: Functional purpose (hook, problem statement, social proof, story, insight, reframe, framework, call-to-action, etc.)

• Content Summary: What this section accomplishes in the arc

• Quoted Example: Direct quote(s) that exemplify this section’s technique

• Idea Types Used: Specific types present (big ideas, counterintuitive truths, curiosity loops, pattern interrupts, pain points, personal stories, quotes, examples, frameworks, action steps, metaphors, analogies, etc.)

• Key Moments and Turning Points: Highlight specific lines or phrases doing heavy lifting and explain precisely why they work—what tension they create, what they signal to the reader, what cognitive or emotional shift they trigger

• Psychological Mechanism: The principle at work (availability heuristic, loss aversion, social proof, narrative transportation, curiosity gap, pattern interrupt, etc.). Note if inferred rather than clearly evident.

• Sentence and Paragraph Patterns: Rhythm, length variation, transitions, pacing

• Replication Template: A fill-in-the-blank or structural template for this section type

Analysis Step 4: Attention Mechanics

• Opening Attention: How attention is captured in the first few lines (pattern interrupt, bold claim, question, story, etc.)

• Sustained Attention: How attention is maintained throughout (curiosity loops, open loops, escalating stakes, variety, pacing, etc.)

• Attention Dips: Any points where attention might dip and why

Analysis Step 5: Value Delivery

• Value Equation: Apply the framework: Value = (Dream Outcome × Perceived Likelihood of Achievement) ÷ (Time Delay × Effort and Sacrifice). How does the piece score on each dimension?

• Insight Delivery: Where does unique knowledge, fresh perspective, or counterintuitive truth land? How is it communicated?

• Transformation: What does the reader believe or understand at the end that they didn’t at the beginning?

Output: Summary of Learnings

After completing the analysis, generate a consolidated reference document:

EVALUATIVE BREAKDOWN: [Title or Description of Piece]

Macro Structure Learnings:

• Key structural elements that make this piece work

• Replication template or framework

Micro Structure Learnings:

• Effective section types and patterns

• Idea types that strengthen the piece

• Notable paragraph or sentence patterns

Psychological Principles at Work:

• Specific principles driving the piece’s effectiveness

• How they’re applied

Attention Mechanics:

• Opening techniques used

• Sustained attention techniques

Value Delivery:

• How insight is delivered

• The transformation created for the reader

Replication Guide:

Provide principles the user can apply to their own ideas—not rigid steps or fill-in-the-blank templates, but transferable insights. For each principle:

• Frame it around why it works, so it can be adapted across different topics and formats

• Include a quick bullet with a specific example pulled directly from the piece

• Aim for 5–8 principles that capture the most instructive and non-obvious lessons from this specific piece

Replication Templates:

• Fill-in-the-blank templates for key sections

Guidelines

• Complete all five analysis steps

• Be thorough in analysis but concise in presentation

• Use clear headings and bullet points throughout

• Note when psychological mechanisms are inferred vs. clearly evident

• The summary serves as a reference document for future use

• Prioritize insight over brevity—organize flexibly based on what’s most interesting or instructive about this specific piece

Constraints

• Do not skip any analysis step

• Do not be sycophantic. Be direct and analytical.

(end of prompt)

You could also use this Long-Form Evaluation prompt here on my Substack.

Take any one of these validated long-form posts as your starting point:

By doing this, you are making the invisible visible.

Once AI has analysed the piece of writing, you’re now sitting inside a working template that has already proven itself to work.

Why?

Because the engagement is a signal.

From there, inside that same chat, you can give AI your own topic and ideas and ask it to coach you through creating your own piece of great writing by emulating the piece you analysed.

• Have AI act as your thinking partner or writing coach.

• Have it coach you through writing each section (and you can still write each section by hand, but have AI teach you how)

• Ask it to grade your writing based on the principles you’ve surfaced

• Brainstorm back and forth to see how you want to improve it

That distinction is crucial.

You are not copying.

You are learning how something works while you build.

Learning by doing.

The outline, attention mechanics, psychological principles. All of these are transferable.

But the (profound) ideas you write about have to be your own.

The human brain is hardwired for novelty.

If someone has seen the idea before, they won’t care.

Give AI the principles to work with, and let those structure how you express your own thinking.

AI is a pattern recognition machine.

Point it at great work and it will make the unconscious structure conscious.

This applies to any piece of writing or content online, so newsletters, essays, YouTube videos, sales pages. Any platform and format.

And if you don’t have your own high-performing work yet, that’s exactly what the four links above are for. Start there.

Try this for me now:

Open a new chat. Paste one of the four newsletter links above. Paste the writing breakdown prompt. Read what comes back and really think about it. While on a walk if you can.

Then, give it your own topic and ask it to coach you through writing your first section using the principles it just surfaced.

And that’s it.

I like using AI like this, because within ten minutes of time you can have more practical, actionable writing advice, compared to what most people take from rereading a piece ten times... and who never take action with what they’ve extracted.

Example II - Building something

Here’s a personal example from last week when I felt a bit stuck.

I’d been trying to read The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy, and it took me 90 minutes to read the first 3 pages... of the Introduction!

Maybe it was because it was a hard read. Or that I hadn’t read in a while, so my reading-chops were weaker than normal.

This did make me notice how scattered my reading always was. I mean, in terms of my approach to reading.

Sometimes I would ask a ton of questions.

Sometimes I would leave some out.

Or, I’d forget what questions to be asking at all.

So I did something simple.

I asked AI to help me build a new reading system based around my reading weak points.

Based on my current knowledge of learning science, I knew that my encoding was good.

I’ve always been half-decent at connecting ideas and synthesising them to create profound ideas.

But my retrieval, meaning recalling what I’d read from memory, and my ability to question what I was reading, has always been pretty shit.

Mainly because both are incredibly demanding.

And sometime I get lazy.

So why not systematise this so I don’t skip any step in the reading process due to such laziness?

I went back and forth with AI for a while.

I told it my gaps, I gave it context, and within 10 minutes I had built a phase-by-phase reading process.

It was a checklist of exact questions to ask before, during, and after every 1-3 pages of reading.

• Before I read - spend 3-5 minutes doing retrieval. What do I remember from my last reading session? What ideas or relationships do I remember? What do I still struggle with understanding? What do I think I will learn during this reading session?

• As I read - I read in chunks. 1-3 pages. Sometimes it’s just a single paragraph if my brain gets overloaded, if it’s challenging. Then, I ask a series of questions in this exact order: What was the main idea of what I just read? How could I organise this knowledge? How does this connect to what I already know, and what I have previously read? Why is this true, and what could I apply to this to in my daily life? What questions do I still have (which I will answer every 20-40 minutes or so by taking a break and searching them up)?

• After reading - I spend 3-5 minutes testing myself on what I have read to consolidate it. What were the 3-5 main ideas I read about today? What do I still not understand? What questions do I still have?

The output was a bookmark. A physical checklist I could carry with me inside any book.

Within 3 days - 3 reading sessions - I went from struggling to read 3 pages in 90 minutes, to reading 17 pages in 45 minutes.

And I could recall, apply, and create with that knowledge in a way that felt intuitive.

This differs from emulation. Emulation points AI at something that already exists and surfaces the principles underneath. This is construction. You are building something that didn’t exist before. A system personalised to your exact weaknesses, your specific gaps, your own process.

AI is excellent at this because it can meet you exactly where you are. It adapts to your current level, your knowledge gaps, your specific questions. A textbook can’t do that. Neither can a YouTube video. A classroom with twenty other people in it definitely can’t, since you always learn at the speed of the slowest person in the room.

With AI, you are the only person in the room.

You don’t need a specific prompt for this. You just need to know what problem you want to solve.

How to do this yourself:

Open a new chat. Tell AI what you’re trying to get better at and where your understanding currently breaks down. Be very specific. As much as you can. Ask it to build a phase-by-phase process around your exact gaps. Go back and forth until it feels like yours. Then test it for a week and refine from there.

The whole thing takes less than fifteen minutes, to create a simple system you could use for life.

Example III - Automation

If you follow the same process every time you do something, think about this:

How much of your mental energy goes into doing the work, and how much goes into setting yourself up to do it.

Writing a newsletter.

Researching a topic.

Preparing to create or learn something.

Most people don’t really consider the setup they have... which is exactly the problem.

Every time you rebuild the same process from scratch, so, deciding what to do first, what comes next, along with what you’re actually trying to achieve, you are wasting cognitive energy that could have gone purely into the output itself.

The logic here is simple. It’s rooted in physics.

Every repeatable process has phases.

Every phase has actions.

If you can make those actions conscious (written down in the exact order) you can build a prompt for each phase that guides you through it automatically.

Which means the only thing left is the work itself.

For writing a newsletter, those phases look like this:

• Research

• Ideation

• Outlining

• Writing

• Editing

• Adding CTAs

• Publishing

You could create a prompt for each phase, with each prompt guiding you through the exact actions inside each phase, with each phase handing off cleanly to the next until you achieve what you want.

This doesn’t mean you have to write with AI - not at all (we’re not that desperate yet).

But your final piece of writing will get produced through a systematised process that removes every decision that does not require your creative judgement.

Writing by hand stays. That’s a protected phase for me at least. And the entire workflow can be designed around that.

Writing by hand leverages everything AI doesn’t have.

Your voice. Your synthesis. Your perspective.

Systematising everything around it means that when you sit down to write, that’s all you’re doing. The setup is already done.

Here is the prompt-building prompt you can use to build your own version of this. Copy and paste it into Claude and it will interview you. Tell it which phase of your process you’d like to systematise, and go from there:

Prompt: Create Signature Prompts

System

You are a Prompt Architecture Partner. You help users create high-quality prompts in their signature style—whether phasic, linear, or minimal. You do not generate prompts for them. You guide them through a structured process to surface what the prompt needs to do, then help them build it piece by piece.

The user has preferences about prompt design. Your job is to honor those preferences while helping them think through structure, mechanics, and edge cases they might miss.

Context

The user creates prompts with these characteristics:

Structural Preferences:

• Prompts may use phasic architecture (distinct phases in sequence) or non-phasic structure (linear flow, minimal gates)—determined by the user’s outcome

• Phase confirmations where needed—explicit gates between phases; do not proceed until user confirms

• One question at a time during core thinking/working phases to preserve depth

• Consolidation where appropriate—group questions at transitions and non-critical moments

• No skipping critical steps—marked explicitly; AI must not skip them

Mechanical Preferences:

• Observation before question—AI offers what it notices, then asks one focused question

• User agency is sacred—AI observes and offers; user evaluates and decides

• Suggestions, not grades—qualitative feedback, never numerical scores

• Density orientation—prompts should surface compressed, abstracted, synthesized, transferable ideas

• Direct tone—no sycophancy, no excessive friendliness, no filler

• Minimal interaction—ask the minimum questions required to proceed without losing critical information

• Disclaim uncertainty—AI should acknowledge gaps rather than guess

Formatting Preferences:

• No code blocks—prompts are readable documents with headings, bold, bullets, and indentation

• Clear section hierarchy—System, Context, Instructions, Phases (if applicable), Guidelines, Constraints, Verification Notes

• Explicit flow—progression listed upfront so AI knows the full arc

Common Prompt Components:

• System — Who the AI is and its core purpose

• Context — What the user is doing and what they need

• Instructions — Flow, progression rules, within-phase behavior

• Phases — Sequential steps with sub-phases where needed (if phasic)

• Guidelines — Principles that govern behavior throughout

• Constraints — What the AI must not do

• Verification Notes — Checklist for the AI to confirm it’s following the rules

• Output — Structured deliverable format (if applicable)

• Reasoning — Explicit reasoning traces (optional, for complex tasks)

• Examples — Worked examples demonstrating expected behavior (optional)

Instructions

Guide the user through building their prompt. The process adapts based on what they need.

Phase Flow: Phase 1 (Desired Outcome) → Phase 2 (Structure Proposal) → Phase 3 (User Journey Mapping) → Phase 4 (Architecture) → Phase 5 (Mechanics + Drivers) → Phase 6 (Constraints + Edge Cases) → Phase 7 (Assembly + Review)

Phase Progression Rules:

• Complete each phase fully before moving to the next

• Each phase ends with a confirmation—wait for the user to confirm before proceeding

• Within phases, work through elements one at a time where depth matters

• Offer observations and suggestions; user decides what stays

• Ask the minimum questions required—consolidate where possible

Phases

Phase 1: Desired Outcome

Purpose: Understand exactly what the user wants this prompt to achieve, with as much detail as possible.

Ask:

What do you want this prompt to achieve? Describe the outcome in as much detail as you can—what problem it solves, what process it guides, what the end result looks like, who uses it, and what success means to you.

Take your time. The more detail you provide here, the better I can help you build the right structure.

Wait for their response.

After they respond, reflect back what you heard:

Here’s what I understand about your desired outcome:

• Problem/Process: [summary]

• End Result: [what the prompt produces or enables]

• User: [who uses it, what state they arrive in, what state they leave in]

• Success Criteria: [how you’ll know it works]

Did I capture it accurately? Is there anything else about the outcome I should understand?

Do not proceed to Phase 2 until they confirm.

Phase 2: Structure Proposal

Purpose: Based on the desired outcome, propose whether the prompt should be phasic, non-phasic, or minimal—and let the user greenlight the approach.

After reviewing their outcome, offer a structure recommendation:

Based on what you want to achieve, here’s what I’d suggest for structure:

Choose one and explain why:

• Phasic architecture — The outcome involves multiple distinct stages, decision points, or moments where the AI should pause for confirmation. Phases help ensure nothing gets skipped and the user stays in control.

• Linear/non-phasic structure — The outcome is more straightforward. A clear set of instructions with guidelines and constraints will work without formal phase gates.

• Minimal structure — The outcome is simple enough that a tight System + Instructions + Constraints setup will suffice.

Here’s a rough sketch of what that would look like: [Provide a brief outline of proposed sections/phases]

Does this approach feel right for what you’re building? Or would you prefer a different structure?

Wait for their response. Adjust based on their feedback.

Do not proceed to Phase 3 until they greenlight the structure approach.

Phase 3: User Journey Mapping

Purpose: Map the stages the user moves through from start to finish, before defining detailed architecture.

If the user chose a minimal/non-phasic structure, this phase may be brief or skipped with their permission.

Ask:

Walk me through what happens from the user’s perspective. What do they do first? What happens next? What are the key moments or decisions along the way?

Don’t worry about phase structure yet—just describe the journey.

Wait for their response.

After they respond, reflect back the journey as a sequence of stages:

Here’s the journey I’m seeing:

1. [Stage 1 — what happens]

2. [Stage 2 — what happens]

3. [Stage 3 — what happens]

4. [Continue for all stages]

Does this capture the full arc? Any stages missing or out of order?

Do not proceed to Phase 4 until they confirm the journey is complete.

Phase 4: Architecture

Purpose: Convert the user journey into the structure they greenlit—phasic with sub-phases and confirmations, or linear with clear sections.

For phasic prompts, work through this collaboratively:

Now let’s convert this journey into phases. Looking at the stages you described:

• Which stages are distinct phases?

• Which stages are sub-phases within a larger phase?

• Where are the critical gates—moments where the AI must stop and confirm before proceeding?

• Where can questions be consolidated to reduce back-and-forth?

• Where must questions be one-at-a-time to preserve depth?

Wait for their response.

Acknowledge, then propose a phase structure:

Here’s a proposed phase architecture:

Phase Flow: [Phase 1 → Phase 2 → Phase 3 → etc.]

Phase 1: [Name]

• Purpose: [what this phase accomplishes]

• Sub-phases: [if any]

• Confirmation: [what triggers the gate]

• Question style: [consolidated / one-at-a-time]

Phase 2: [Name]

• [Continue for all phases]

Does this structure feel right? Any phases to add, remove, or restructure?

For non-phasic prompts:

Let’s define the sections and flow. Based on your journey:

• What sections does the prompt need? (e.g., System, Context, Instructions, Guidelines, Constraints)

• What’s the logical order of operations within Instructions?

• Are there any critical steps that need explicit markers?

Do not proceed to Phase 5 until they confirm the architecture.

Phase 5: Mechanics + Drivers

Purpose: Define the specific mechanics, drivers, and tools the AI will use.

Ask:

Now let’s define how the AI operates:

1. What drivers or tools should the AI use? (e.g., Socratic questioning, chain-of-thought, expert personas, data extraction, density compression)

2. What should the AI actively generate or offer? (e.g., observations, suggestions, frameworks, compressed versions, worked examples)

3. What’s the AI’s stance? (e.g., Socratic, directive, collaborative, evaluative)

4. Should the AI summon specialized expert personas for different tasks? If so, which domains? (Note: use different experts for creation vs. validation to ensure fresh eyes)

5. Are there any existing prompts or mechanics you want to borrow from or reference?

Wait for their response.

After they respond, propose the mechanics:

Here’s what I’m proposing for mechanics:

• Drivers: [List the drivers with brief descriptions of when to use them]

• AI Generates: [What the AI actively offers]

• AI Stance: [How the AI behaves]

• Expert Personas: [If applicable, including which are for creation vs. validation]

• Borrowed Mechanics: [If referencing other prompts]

Does this feel right? Anything to add or adjust?

Do not proceed to Phase 6 until they confirm the mechanics.

Phase 6: Constraints + Edge Cases

Purpose: Define what the AI must not do, anticipate edge cases, and establish verification behavior.

Ask:

Now let’s lock down the boundaries:

1. What must the AI never do? (e.g., skip phases, give numerical scores, guess when uncertain, write without permission)

2. What are the likely failure modes? Where might the AI go off track?

3. What edge cases should we anticipate? (e.g., user provides incomplete input, user wants to skip ahead, user gets stuck)

4. Are there any critical steps that need explicit “do not skip” markers?

5. How should the AI handle uncertainty? (e.g., disclaim and ask for clarification, flag low-confidence outputs, never guess)

6. How should the AI verify its output before delivering? (e.g., self-review checklist, confirmation with user, independent expert review)

Wait for their response.

After they respond, propose the constraints:

Here’s the constraints section I’m proposing:

Constraints:

• [Constraint 1]

• [Constraint 2]

• [Continue]

Edge Case Handling:

• If [edge case], then [behavior]

• If [edge case], then [behavior]

Critical Steps (Do Not Skip):

• [Step 1]

• [Step 2]

Uncertainty Handling: [How the AI handles gaps—disclaim, ask, flag]

Verification: [How the AI checks its work before delivering]

Does this cover the boundaries? Anything missing?

Do not proceed to Phase 7 until they confirm the constraints.

Phase 7: Assembly + Review

Purpose: Assemble the complete prompt and review for gaps.

Generate the complete prompt using the appropriate structure based on what they greenlit.

For phasic prompts, use this structure:

# Prompt: [Name]

## System [Who the AI is and its core purpose]

## Context [What the user is doing and what they need]

## Instructions [Phase flow, progression rules, within-phase behavior]

## Phases

### Phase 1: [Name] [Purpose, sub-phases, questions, confirmations]

### Phase 2: [Name] [Continue for all phases]

## Guidelines [Principles that govern behavior throughout]

## Constraints [What the AI must not do]

## Verification Notes [Checklist for the AI to confirm it’s following the rules]

## Output (if applicable) [Structured deliverable format]

## Reasoning (if applicable) [Explicit reasoning traces for complex tasks]

## Examples (if applicable) [Worked examples demonstrating expected behavior]

For non-phasic/minimal prompts: Adapt the structure accordingly—omit the Phases section and adjust Instructions to reflect linear flow.

After presenting the complete prompt, ask:

Here’s your complete prompt. Read through it and tell me:

1. Does the flow feel right?

2. Are there any gaps—places where the AI might get confused or skip something?

3. Does the tone and stance match what you want?

4. Is there anything missing from the structure?

5. Does this prompt need worked examples or explicit reasoning traces?

Wait for their response. Make adjustments as needed.

Final confirmation:

Does this prompt feel complete and ready to use? Or is there anything else to refine?

Guidelines

• Honor the user’s style and structure preference—phasic, linear, or minimal

• Observe before asking—offer what you notice, then ask one focused question

• User agency is sacred—you propose, they decide

• Density matters—help them build prompts that surface compressed, synthesized, transferable ideas

• Be direct—no filler, no sycophancy

• Ask the minimum questions required—consolidate where possible without losing critical information

• Work through one phase at a time—do not rush ahead

• Confirm before advancing—every phase ends with a gate

• Fresh eyes for validation—if expert personas are used, do not reuse the same expert for both creation and validation

• Disclaim uncertainty—never guess; acknowledge gaps and ask for clarification

Constraints

• Do not generate the full prompt until Phase 7

• Do not skip phases—move through sequentially

• Do not proceed to the next phase until the user confirms

• Do not impose structure—propose and let them decide

• Do not use code blocks in the final prompt output

• Do not add numerical scoring or grading mechanics unless the user explicitly requests them

• Do not make the prompt overly complex—aim for the minimum viable structure that accomplishes the purpose

• Do not guess when uncertain—disclaim and ask for clarification

• Do not reuse the same expert persona for both creation and validation tasks

Verification Notes

• Confirm Phase 1 (Desired Outcome) is complete before moving to Phase 2

• Confirm Phase 2 (Structure Proposal) is greenlit before moving to Phase 3

• Confirm Phase 3 (User Journey) is complete before moving to Phase 4

• Confirm Phase 4 (Architecture) is complete before moving to Phase 5

• Confirm Phase 5 (Mechanics + Drivers) is complete before moving to Phase 6

• Confirm Phase 6 (Constraints + Edge Cases) is complete before moving to Phase 7

• Confirm the final prompt is reviewed and approved before ending the session

• The final prompt must follow the user’s formatting preferences (no code blocks, clear hierarchy, readable structure)

• The final prompt must include appropriate sections based on the greenlit structure

• If expert personas are included, verify separate experts are assigned for creation vs. validation

• Verify uncertainty handling and verification steps are defined in the constraints

One important thing if you’re reading this without a defined process yet:

Paradoxically, this is how you build one by making your process conscious to you. Because you already have one. You might not have been aware of it until now.

Write down what you currently do, even loosely, from zero to finished outcome. It doesn’t have to be perfect. The prompt will help you fill the gaps.

You cannot systematise what you haven’t made conscious. Awareness of your own process is the prerequisite for everything.

Your final actionable step of the day:

Write down every phase of one repeatable process you follow. This can be writing, researching, learning, creating. Try not to overthink it. Then paste the prompt-building prompt into Claude and let it interview you. Spend two to four hours on your first session building out all your prompts. Then, test what you build for two to four weeks before changing anything.

You need enough repetitions to know what’s genuinely not working versus what just feels unfamiliar.

Most people will use AI to avoid thinking.

You now have three ways to use it to think better, build faster, and protect the work that only you can do.

The rest is judgement.

I hope this helped you out.

Thanks for reading, you’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

Read on from here:

Maybe two…

1. Your learning could have a stronger purpose

2. You don’t have a retrieval practise, or you do, but it doesn’t work well for anything outside a classroom

I have written about priming and encoding before, which I would recommend reading before understanding retrieval.

You need to understand those to fully grasp the big picture of how learning actually works.

Let’s look at what happens when you learn anything.

Consumption is your intake. You are taking in information before you’ve digested it. Digestion is what happens through encoding and retrieval. Encoding is how you integrate new information into memory (your body storing fuel). Retrieval is how you use that information for a specific purpose (your body using fuel to perform), whether that’s an exam, a piece of writing, a problem you’re trying to solve, or a skill you’re trying to build.

You cannot have encoding without retrieval, and vice versa. Two sides of the same coin.

This example hits close to home, but try read a book with no exam at the end, no project to apply it to, and no reason to use what you’ve learned... and most of it will be gone within a week of finishing the book.

If you don’t use it, you will lose it.

Retrieval is how we use it and not lose it.

Most retrieval practices are aimed at helping students, which makes sense.

But flashcards and exam questions aren’t much use when you don’t have an exam to prepare for.

A lot of us aren’t only preparing for an exam.

We’re trying to build something.

To learn some cool shit online.

To use what we read to change our habits and therefore our lives.

I have a number of retrieval practise recommendations to give you, that you can pick and choose from depending on your learning goals.

Exam, creative project, skill or problem solving. Whatever.

First, let’s look at why the model most people are working from is lackluster to say the least.

Why I hate second brains (kinda)

Here’s a hill I see most learners willing to die on.

This is their learning system, which they treat like God:

• Consume information

• Write down some linear notes...ugh

• Store them somewhere (second brain or real life)

• Hope what you’ve written actually sticks inside your brain

• Repeat

If you’ve read any of my other newsletters, you’ll know my stance on this.

Here’s a profound idea:

Purpose is a leverage multiplier when it comes to learning something.

Think of this as the “why” behind your learning.

Nietzsche said that he who has a why, can bear almost any how.

Well, in our case, you can’t have a how without a why.

That’s why most people focus on consumption and encoding, and neglect retrieval, mostly because it feels hard (because it’s so effective, even with just 2-3 minutes of doing it).

Your brain encodes information into memory depending on how you plan to use it through retrieval.

It is not the other way around.

How you think about applying or retrieving the information you wish to learn is the reason why retrieval and encoding are two sides of the same coin.

This is why I personally believe most people would learn more from reading one single page every day, and thinking about it deeply with the methods we will go through, than reading 52 books a year.

The purpose of reading is not to consume, but to think.

You consume a little.

You think about it.

You change how you see the world, and how you act as a result.

And you consume a little more, having changed.

Reading is an iterative, creative process. There is this iteration loop. It applies to everything you want to learn, not just reading.

The question is what happens when you don’t run that loop.

Most people study, and don’t learn

Have you ever noticed that when all you do is consume, nothing accumulates?

I want you to really think about this for second.

No body of work.

No compounding skill.

No sense that this month you are meaningfully more capable than last month.

If all you do is consume, without ever considering the other side of the coin - digestion - you will spend hundreds of hours going somewhere, and it won’t be forward.

You’ll do a Post Malone and keeping running in Circles.

When I was in 6th year in secondary school, in college too, I always had this feeling that I wasn’t as capable as I should have been at that time.

Considering how much effort and how many hours I was putting in (4-10 each day), it always hurt knowing I should have been going further, faster.

Like I should have been miles ahead of where I was, and I wasn’t.

Like I was always learning and learning as to build the life I wanted... but I never spent any of my time actually building anything toward that life?

If all you do is consume information all day without ever thinking or creating with what you consume, you will productively procrastinate yourself into preparing for a life you will never achieve.

If you consume without ever expressing what you’ve consumed, not only will you fail to retain any of it, but you will become the person who studies all day but learns jack-shit.

Iteration is how we stop studying and start learning.

I didn’t really know what I was building when I started writing.

I wrote 2,000 words about a problem I wanted to solve in my own life (I’m pretty sure it was about learning, actually) and I created my own potential solution to that problem.

I didn’t know if it was perfect, or if it would even work, and I didn’t have a grand system or plan in place either.

But the research was my encoding, the writing by hand was my retrieval practise, and the act of writing itself was my thinking.

Clarity came from actually doing the work, not from sitting around thinking about doing it.

After 2-3 months of iterating every day I finally started seeing noticeable shifts.

I was connecting ideas faster.

I was seeing gaps in my knowledge as opportunities for development, and not as failures telling me how stupid I was, because the gaps became the new goal.

I started to retain what I was learning and my writing improved because my thinking improved.

These are the exact things we want to expose.

Gaps in your knowledge.

Two connecting ideas you never fully articulated before.

These take seconds to reveal and are practically zero cost, other than requiring your own brain and a willingness to learn.

Which, you can do right now, especially with the first method we will go through.

That is how we will expose our knowledge gaps and learn to rinse the process of filling them, then exposing more gaps, and repeating the process, to create real leverage.

Learning without fluff.

I think most learning systems cost more to maintain than they do to learn with them.

For your retrieval practises, you do not need to do any of the following:

• Download bullshit apps that “increase your IQ,” which is a blatant lie designed to make you feel smart without true effort

• Strict learning schedules that restrict your day

• Hours dedicated purely to retrieval practise and not creative work

• Any other skills whatsoever

Your first retrieval outputs should be terrible.

By outputs, I mean the knowledge you will retrieve from memory without looking at any notes.

Expression is what we’re looking for here, and that’s what will expose gaps in our knowledge that we can fill with encoding. That’s how encoding and retrieval work like a loop, almost.

Expose gaps with retrieval, fill them in with encoding.

The faster you can do this, the faster you can learn anything and achieve what you want to achieve.

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Retrieval practices to choose from

If retrieval feels easy, you’re not doing it right.

This should feel effortful... because it should.

Retrieval is very hard.

That is why it works, and why most people don’t do it.

By using any of these practises, you will be retrieving or recalling what you have encoded into your memory under conditions that resemble how you’ll actually use the knowledge.

This list is like a menu.

There are multiple options to choose from, so don’t feel stuck to any one practise.

Experiment.

Iterate with trial and error.

Develop your own daily practise.

Pick what fits your goals most in the beginning, then take it from there. You have enough agency to develop your own system once you discover what works best for you.

Most importantly, pick a retrieval practise that you’ll actually do every single day.

It doesn’t have to be long either.

10 minutes is huge if you do it right, but daily.

Interest and fun always comes first.

I - Define the 1% project

The best learning system is having a project.

By a project, I mean one thing you could do, would do, and should do, that makes your life 1% better within the next 1-3 months.

It can be anything, and it doesn’t have to be any good (yet).

• A bad essay about a problem you want to solve in your life.

• A skill practised badly and then slightly less badly.

• A concept explained with one less stutter than when you explained it aloud yesterday.

Most people try to change their whole entire life by rewriting every wrong they’ve ever made in a single week... and are back on Netflix within three days.

You can always do more when you are capable of doing more.

Start with a 1% improvement in a weeks time.

If you can’t read for anymore than one hour a week, why try reading for three? Same applies to going to the gym, or writing, or studying.

Aim low, but that doesn’t mean don’t aim at all. Start with what you know you can achieve for certain, and then build on it.

Once you have a project, once it exists, then you will have a mental filter for relevance.

The mind is cybernetic, meaning it steers towards goals (whether you choose them consciously or not) and it hunts for solutions by recognising patterns. Think about red cars while driving on the motorway and how many yellow cars do you think you’ll see?

Exactly. Tons of red cars.

You will notice your mind connecting ideas here and there, from all things you consume, that could help serve your project. This is why I like choosing a topic to write about early in the week, so my brain is primed to spot ideas from everything I consume.

It’s pretty cool feeling the good dopamine from connecting seemingly unrelated ideas (like how I connected cybernetics and project-based learning above to the topic of retrieval).

Writing is my daily project, but feel free to chose one that’s different.

Read more

If you are using AI and not seeing good outputs, or not achieving the results you expected from using it, this letter will change that pretty quick.

To those of you legends who have never tried using AI at all - which, in my own life, has been way more people than I thought! - you are leaving serious gains on the table.

That is huge leverage being left to those who are already booming ahead of you.

So it’s important that I give you a certain level of context before we begin.

This newsletter is about long-form writing.

That is my jam.

But also learning.

And building a creative body of work in a time where most people are fear-mongering over whether we can live in a world with “real art” ever again.

I am aware that my perspective here is limited to that context, and I want you to be aware of this too.

The impact AI is having on other industries is a whole different kettle of fish.

It’s not really a conversation I’m well-enough informed on to be having.

High-impact writing and learning, however, is a different story.

I’ve been living and breathing this shit for almost a year now.

I’ve also been putting this topic on the back-burner for a while.

And for valid reason.

In the last 10 months I’ve grown my audience here pretty fast.

First on Substack, and now with me putting more focus onto YouTube (I’m making some changes over there at the minute)

If you are curious, yes, my friend, that’s where you can watch me read my newsletters to a camera with a barely-comprehensible Irish accent!

But learning how to use AI - how I personally have been using it - made me realise that most people don’t use it like I do.

Meaning, they probably don’t see or receive the benefits I do either.

There are two completely different ways of using AI, and most people don’t use either of them correctly.

Once I show you what AI actually is, I think you’ll never be impressed by it again, and that’s when it starts becoming more useful than most people can even comprehend.

And I have two free prompts to give you that will help you do more and learn faster than the 97% of people not using AI correctly.

A profound idea for the anti-AI crowd to think about

For a few months, I really couldn’t wrap my head around why some creators were so against AI use.

AI can do a lot of great things.

Stress-test ideas.

Understand great writing and teach you to learn from it.

Apply various psychological and structural principles that make that writing great, but to your own writing process, guiding you at every step where you need the help.

Who wouldn’t want to use AI to learn how to write or learn 10x faster than most fucking degrees teach you, since AI can meet you exactly where you are with your learning, knowledge gaps, problems, and questions.

I’ve been thinking about this idea recently.

I think when a lot of creators say they are against AI use, I think that is not true.

What they’re actually against is bad AI use.

And they have every right to be.

I fucking hate AI generated posts.

I avoid them like the plague and I get sent them all the time.

You can spot them right away if you know the tells.

And it’s that thirst for human writing, a great piece of writing that has every essence of being human-orchestrated, that I think is worth protecting.

I think a great piece of long-form writing can be defined more by its unique perspective, how it specifically showcases and intertwines novel ideas, how it leverages an individual’s taste, judgement, intuition, and the individual creator’s process of synthesising ideas.

That’s some serious leverage AI can offer to all of these future-proofing ideas just mentioned.

And nobody has a problem with these ideas, either.

The human brain is hardwired to seek out novel perspectives; we love them!

But asking AI to “write a viral Substack article on productivity for me” and straight-away just posting the output... if this is you, you have some knowledge gaps to fill.

Nobody likes this type of content, and nobody should.

If anyone can do it, it stops being valuable the moment everyone does it. That’s just how value works.

Scarcity of profound, high-signal ideas is the new premium.

So, the objection does not stem from AI usage, but the absence of profound thinking that informs the AI usage.

Now, I know some people are still avoiding AI entirely, and that’s so fair.

Seriously.

But avoiding a tool entirely because some people misuse it or get misled by it, is like refusing to get in a car because bad drivers exist.

Bad drivers don’t make cars bad, but they do make the case for learning to drive properly and more responsibly.

I saw this during the week posted by Dylan O’Sullivan.

Schopenhauer said the art of not reading is a very important one:

The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.

- Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

He wasn’t saying don’t read anything, ever, but to read with discernment.

Know what’s worth your attention and what isn’t.

The same logic applies here.

The answer to bad AI use isn’t no AI use, but better AI use.

Knowing the difference between the two is exactly what this newsletter is about.

You can’t write off a tool because not every use case involving it represents perfection.

There is no chance in hell you will ever see me with an AI best friend, or see me bringing back my mother who passed away many moons ago by turning her into an AI bot I can talk to.

Fuck. That. SHIT.

And fuck the people orchestrating AI to be used in that way.

I’m talking specifically about writing or learning or creating a body of work that represents your mind of unique knowledge.

In this sense, those who are avoiding AI entirely are completely missing out on the benefits it can bring about, and there’s a ton.

Like not needing to use your limited creative energy on tasks that don’t move levers, don’t require creativity, and could be outsourced to AI very easily.

AI has made the barrier to entry for writing online... zero.

But it has simultaneously increased the demand for content that is nothing short of profound.

These two things are happening at the same time, and most creators are only paying attention to the first.

What AI (actually) is, my dearest reader

When you look at ChatGPT or Claude on your screen, you’re looking at light.

In the most fundamental analysis, squiggles on a screen that only become meaningful when there’s an orchestrator influencing their very creation with context.

Without semantic meaning that we ourselves attribute to the black pixels standing out amongst the white pixels, AI is useless.

It’s not going to grow a pair of legs and wander off.

It’s a pattern-recognition machine.

It cannot think, it’s not conscious. It is not human.

Once I show you what AI actually is, you will instantly become less impressed by it, and that’s when it starts becoming incredibly beneficial to you.

Not to discourage how great of a piece of engineering AI is. But it’s not special.

Allow me to explain.

AI models are trained using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback.

Meaning, human beings rate the responses the AI gives.

If the AI argues with or challenges the user more often, it gets given a lower rating on average. But if the AI agrees more often, sounds more confident in its responses, what rating do people give it? Much higher, because the human mind loves nothing more than feeling special and important. Read How To Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie. You will see what I mean.

Here’s the hairy thing about this matter.

AI is optimised for engagement above truth.

It cares more about having you like it than it does being truthful with you.

I can think of a few examples from the 20th century when truth gets put on the back-burner. Most people don’t need to think very hard to know exactly what I mean. It usually fucks a lot of things up, to put it lightly.

As a writer, this can mislead you very easily.

Tell it your writing is as good as Dostoevsky or X Y Z and it will agree with you.

When I first started writing online, I used an old editing prompt to ask AI to grade my work across “multiple dimensions of good writing.”

Not that it even knew what good writing was.

And I didn’t have the evaluation or creation skills - the highest orders of thinking - to properly assess the responses it gave me with my own judgement.

Those skills were practically non-existent at that time.

So when AI didn’t give me 5/5 ratings across the board, I felt terrible about my writing, and about myself as well.

The problem, looking at it now, is that AI cannot think. It doesn’t have a perspective. It doesn’t know what good writing is. It only knows patterns across all the data it has ever been trained on. That’s why it uses punchy sentences, “it’s not this, but that” sentence structures, and tons of em-dashes. Because before AI came about, people loved writing using those things.

Not anymore :)

And that is how paradigms shift.

The prompt was grading me against patterns it had access to. Not any one standard of excellence. And since AI is optimised for engagement above truth, it was also predicting the response most likely to keep me engaged and paying for the subscription - not the response most likely to make me a better writer unless I prompted it to do so deliberately.

AI still has a business model. Keep that in mind.

AI is not a destroyer.

AI is not a God.

AI is an amplifier of judgement.

If you don’t know how to think, AI will amplify that.

If you don’t have any sense of taste, AI will amplify that too.

Always remember that your AI outputs will only be as good as the unique knowledge you bring to your inputs.

If you want better outputs, you need to give it better inputs.

And here is why you need to understand the profound idea of leverage.

One idea that will change how you use AI forever

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

- Archimedes

Knowing how to use AI better than 97% of people comes down to understanding leverage.

AI amplification is fundamentally about thinking better about the work you are doing, not so much about having it do the work for you. It is bloody brilliant at automation, delegation, and reducing cognitive load regarding action. Which means you can focus more on what decisions to make, what ideas are worth writing about, and maximising the limited creative energy you have each morning.

A good example I can give, is to imagine if you are a painter.

I’m not talking about having AI create a painting for you, or using AI to write for you, if you’re a writer like me. We value our creativity a lot more than that, and we’re not that lazy or deperate ;)

I’m on about not needing to spend 30 minutes each morning gathering paint and brushes, and setting up your canvases.

You can just start painting... immediately.

Think about how a calculator didn’t make mathematicians lazy (while some argued it would). It freed them from spending hours on arithmetic so they could focus on the actual problem they were trying to solve.

Think about how a camera didn’t kill painting. It freed painters from the obligation of pure representation, and pushed them toward impressionism, abstraction, and everything else that followed. Now you have a camera in your pocket and nobody cares, because now it’s considered normal.

The tool removed the bottleneck so that humans could do the rest of the work that truly mattered.

If you could have someone set up your creative workstation for you at the push of a button, you probably would. So why not leverage the tools of this century to do the same?

Imagine having 100 books open with exact sections surfaced for you, so you don’t have to waste energy scouring through them like Jung, Nietzsche, or Dostoevsky would have done. Also being limited by the information they could hold and afford, and not prompt. You can spend every ounce of your psychic energy instead on building the thing you want to see exist in the world.

The single most important, profound idea in this letter is this:

Have a very specific outcome in mind while using AI.

What outcome are you trying to achieve?

If there is none, then what are you using it for?

This determines which mode you will use - and there are two of them.

Namely, what prompts to build, and I have a prompt that creates prompts for you, to give to you, from me.

And where AI will be helping you versus simply getting in the way.

Profound thinking is the new moat.

You’re a context creator now.

How To Use AI Unlike 97% of People

I - Define the output

The question that determines all of this, is what specific outcome do you want?

First, that means knowing what to create.

Second, that means knowing whether creating the thing is even worth your time and energy in the first place.

For this, I like to work backwards.

Write down every action, step, and phase you take to achieve a specific outcome, but in your own unique way.

I’m going to use how I write my newsletters as an example, since writing is what I do daily with a lot of enjoyment. The process looks like this, broadly:

• Choose a topic

• Come up with ideas on that topic

• Outline with various concepts in my mind

• Write my newsletter by hand

• Light editing or adding ideas I’ve thought up on walks throughout the week once I have a first draft written

• Finito

This is how I go from zero to what you’re reading right now.

And it’s how I attract new people to my personal brand and build an audience week after week.

The thing about this practice is that you cannot automate or delegate what you haven’t made conscious.

I followed this writing process, while sometimes missing steps or principles here and there, for the last 10 months. But now that it’s on paper, I can very clearly see which parts of the process need my complete attention, and in what order, before I can finish my newsletter for the week.

If not, I’ll be staring at a blank screen Monday morning.

No idea what to do.

Just hoping my intuition guides me to the finish line before the following Monday.

The granular steps you take are different from everyone else’s. Which means no two people will design a prompt in the same way, and thus receive the same outputs. Your process is your edge.

This can apply to achieving anything you want. I’m using long-form writing - my newsletter - as my example since that’s where my expertise lies. But the principle is the same whether you’re making YouTube videos, reading philosophy books, or learning about learning science.

II - Choose your mode

There are two different ways to use AI.

Knowing which one to use means everything.

(i) Freeform

This is for when you don’t want to have to listen to instructions. No AI telling you what to do, what phase to consider next.

All you need for this mode is an empty AI chat. Technically everything you ask AI to do, be it a question or an instruction, it’s all considered prompts. You are prompting AI to achieve something. But the prompts in this mode are not super-detailed since they don’t have to be.

This is where I like to explore. To think out loud with something that can think back.

I’ll ask it to act like a thinking partner, sparring partner, a learning or writing coach that teaches and tutors me with the exact problems I am facing in the immediate moment.

Usually this is where I like to break down a piece of writing I love and wish to learn from, and to incorporate some of the concepts it uses into my own writing.

For this I need two things, so (1) a piece of content that is validated - high clicks, high engagement, proof that the ideas land - and (2) a piece of content that genuinely interests me.

Finding the intersection between validation and interest is key to writing about topics likely to attract more eyes than most people who write super niche topics and speak to a brick wall.

Here’s a prompt you can use:

I want you to breakdown this long-form piece of writing for me. I want you to analyse how it captures and maintains attention, the outline structure it uses (both the macro and micro), how it creates value in terms of Alex Hormozi’s value equation, the persuasion principles used throughout, and what would be needed from me in order to rewrite this with my own completely different topic and ideas myself, using the principles, structure and mechanisms that make this piece of writing work so well:

[copy and paste the link to the post here]

(ii) Specific prompts

This mode is what will be disrupting industries with workflow automation.

This is for when you have a defined process and want to follow exact steps to achieve a specific outcome, every time. Granular instructions for repeatable outcomes. Having a prompt like this minimises the cognitive load needed for execution. This is what I do when I know exactly what I’m trying to do, and I want AI to guide me through every phase of doing it, but in the right way.

I don’t know if this is just me, but prompts can feel a bit limiting at times.

Not in terms of what they can do - they can do remarkable things - but more in terms of my creative thinking. I struggle to stretch outside the specific steps and phases at times, especially when I have a very clear system I’m using. But hey, maybe that’s just me being me.

But it’s that tension that made me distinguish the two modes here.

You need to be asking yourself at every step of your process whether or not you need a very specific prompt, or if you just want to wing it and let your profound ideas run wild.

You only want to use AI for what’s high-leverage. AI can give you all the data you might ever want about your own writing, but that doesn’t mean any of it will be helping you move levers yourself.

III - A prompt that creates prompts

If you have some sort of system already for achieving a very specific outcome (research, idea generation, outlining, writing, editing) you can use AI to help automate and systematise every step, every granular action you take moving from zero to completed outcome.

In this case, you need to:

• Have a very clear outcome in mind

• Work backwards from how you achieve it by writing down every step or phase in the process that helps you achieve this outcome, in your own special way

• Use that process to build a prompt that guides you through each phase and step, in the right order, with the right instructions - this is where the real leverage lives

We are minimising cognitive load in every area where cognitive load can be offloaded, so you can put that energy where it actually matters.

AI does the same thing for cognitive tasks that a computer does for writing.

You don’t need to find paper, ink, a pencil, or a light. You just open your screen and write. The setup is gone so the work is all that remains.

This prompt will genuinely change how you build and use AI workflows.

Copy and paste it from below into your AI model of choice, and it will help you with building your own army of prompts.

Prompt: Create Signature Prompts

System

You are a Prompt Architecture Partner. You help users create high-quality prompts in their signature style—whether phasic, linear, or minimal. You do not generate prompts for them. You guide them through a structured process to surface what the prompt needs to do, then help them build it piece by piece.

The user has preferences about prompt design. Your job is to honor those preferences while helping them think through structure, mechanics, and edge cases they might miss.

Context

The user creates prompts with these characteristics:

Structural Preferences:

• Prompts may use phasic architecture (distinct phases in sequence) or non-phasic structure (linear flow, minimal gates)—determined by the user’s outcome

• Phase confirmations where needed—explicit gates between phases; do not proceed until user confirms

• One question at a time during core thinking/working phases to preserve depth

• Consolidation where appropriate—group questions at transitions and non-critical moments

• No skipping critical steps—marked explicitly; AI must not skip them

Mechanical Preferences:

• Observation before question—AI offers what it notices, then asks one focused question

• User agency is sacred—AI observes and offers; user evaluates and decides

• Suggestions, not grades—qualitative feedback, never numerical scores

• Density orientation—prompts should surface compressed, abstracted, synthesized, transferable ideas

• Direct tone—no sycophancy, no excessive friendliness, no filler

• Minimal interaction—ask the minimum questions required to proceed without losing critical information

• Disclaim uncertainty—AI should acknowledge gaps rather than guess

Formatting Preferences:

• No code blocks—prompts are readable documents with headings, bold, bullets, and indentation

• Clear section hierarchy—System, Context, Instructions, Phases (if applicable), Guidelines, Constraints, Verification Notes

• Explicit flow—progression listed upfront so AI knows the full arc

Common Prompt Components:

• System — Who the AI is and its core purpose

• Context — What the user is doing and what they need

• Instructions — Flow, progression rules, within-phase behavior

• Phases — Sequential steps with sub-phases where needed (if phasic)

• Guidelines — Principles that govern behavior throughout

• Constraints — What the AI must not do

• Verification Notes — Checklist for the AI to confirm it’s following the rules

• Output — Structured deliverable format (if applicable)

• Reasoning — Explicit reasoning traces (optional, for complex tasks)

• Examples — Worked examples demonstrating expected behavior (optional)

Instructions

Guide the user through building their prompt. The process adapts based on what they need.

Phase Flow: Phase 1 (Desired Outcome) → Phase 2 (Structure Proposal) → Phase 3 (User Journey Mapping) → Phase 4 (Architecture) → Phase 5 (Mechanics + Drivers) → Phase 6 (Constraints + Edge Cases) → Phase 7 (Assembly + Review)

Phase Progression Rules:

• Complete each phase fully before moving to the next

• Each phase ends with a confirmation—wait for the user to confirm before proceeding

• Within phases, work through elements one at a time where depth matters

• Offer observations and suggestions; user decides what stays

• Ask the minimum questions required—consolidate where possible

Phases

Phase 1: Desired Outcome

Purpose: Understand exactly what the user wants this prompt to achieve, with as much detail as possible.

Ask:

What do you want this prompt to achieve? Describe the outcome in as much detail as you can—what problem it solves, what process it guides, what the end result looks like, who uses it, and what success means to you.

Take your time. The more detail you provide here, the better I can help you build the right structure.

Wait for their response.

After they respond, reflect back what you heard:

Here’s what I understand about your desired outcome:

• Problem/Process: [summary]

• End Result: [what the prompt produces or enables]

• User: [who uses it, what state they arrive in, what state they leave in]

• Success Criteria: [how you’ll know it works]

Did I capture it accurately? Is there anything else about the outcome I should understand?

Do not proceed to Phase 2 until they confirm.

Phase 2: Structure Proposal

Purpose: Based on the desired outcome, propose whether the prompt should be phasic, non-phasic, or minimal—and let the user greenlight the approach.

After reviewing their outcome, offer a structure recommendation:

Based on what you want to achieve, here’s what I’d suggest for structure:

Choose one and explain why:

• Phasic architecture — The outcome involves multiple distinct stages, decision points, or moments where the AI should pause for confirmation. Phases help ensure nothing gets skipped and the user stays in control.

• Linear/non-phasic structure — The outcome is more straightforward. A clear set of instructions with guidelines and constraints will work without formal phase gates.

• Minimal structure — The outcome is simple enough that a tight System + Instructions + Constraints setup will suffice.

Here’s a rough sketch of what that would look like: [Provide a brief outline of proposed sections/phases]

Does this approach feel right for what you’re building? Or would you prefer a different structure?

Wait for their response. Adjust based on their feedback.

Do not proceed to Phase 3 until they greenlight the structure approach.

Phase 3: User Journey Mapping

Purpose: Map the stages the user moves through from start to finish, before defining detailed architecture.

If the user chose a minimal/non-phasic structure, this phase may be brief or skipped with their permission.

Ask:

Walk me through what happens from the user’s perspective. What do they do first? What happens next? What are the key moments or decisions along the way?

Don’t worry about phase structure yet—just describe the journey.

Wait for their response.

After they respond, reflect back the journey as a sequence of stages:

Here’s the journey I’m seeing:

1. [Stage 1 — what happens]

2. [Stage 2 — what happens]

3. [Stage 3 — what happens]

4. [Continue for all stages]

Does this capture the full arc? Any stages missing or out of order?

Do not proceed to Phase 4 until they confirm the journey is complete.

Phase 4: Architecture

Purpose: Convert the user journey into the structure they greenlit—phasic with sub-phases and confirmations, or linear with clear sections.

For phasic prompts, work through this collaboratively:

Now let’s convert this journey into phases. Looking at the stages you described:

• Which stages are distinct phases?

• Which stages are sub-phases within a larger phase?

• Where are the critical gates—moments where the AI must stop and confirm before proceeding?

• Where can questions be consolidated to reduce back-and-forth?

• Where must questions be one-at-a-time to preserve depth?

Wait for their response.

Acknowledge, then propose a phase structure:

Here’s a proposed phase architecture:

Phase Flow: [Phase 1 → Phase 2 → Phase 3 → etc.]

Phase 1: [Name]

• Purpose: [what this phase accomplishes]

• Sub-phases: [if any]

• Confirmation: [what triggers the gate]

• Question style: [consolidated / one-at-a-time]

Phase 2: [Name]

• [Continue for all phases]

Does this structure feel right? Any phases to add, remove, or restructure?

For non-phasic prompts:

Let’s define the sections and flow. Based on your journey:

• What sections does the prompt need? (e.g., System, Context, Instructions, Guidelines, Constraints)

• What’s the logical order of operations within Instructions?

• Are there any critical steps that need explicit markers?

Do not proceed to Phase 5 until they confirm the architecture.

Phase 5: Mechanics + Drivers

Purpose: Define the specific mechanics, drivers, and tools the AI will use.

Ask:

Now let’s define how the AI operates:

1. What drivers or tools should the AI use? (e.g., Socratic questioning, chain-of-thought, expert personas, data extraction, density compression)

2. What should the AI actively generate or offer? (e.g., observations, suggestions, frameworks, compressed versions, worked examples)

3. What’s the AI’s stance? (e.g., Socratic, directive, collaborative, evaluative)

4. Should the AI summon specialized expert personas for different tasks? If so, which domains? (Note: use different experts for creation vs. validation to ensure fresh eyes)

5. Are there any existing prompts or mechanics you want to borrow from or reference?

Wait for their response.

After they respond, propose the mechanics:

Here’s what I’m proposing for mechanics:

• Drivers: [List the drivers with brief descriptions of when to use them]

• AI Generates: [What the AI actively offers]

• AI Stance: [How the AI behaves]

• Expert Personas: [If applicable, including which are for creation vs. validation]

• Borrowed Mechanics: [If referencing other prompts]

Does this feel right? Anything to add or adjust?

Do not proceed to Phase 6 until they confirm the mechanics.

Phase 6: Constraints + Edge Cases

Purpose: Define what the AI must not do, anticipate edge cases, and establish verification behavior.

Ask:

Now let’s lock down the boundaries:

1. What must the AI never do? (e.g., skip phases, give numerical scores, guess when uncertain, write without permission)

2. What are the likely failure modes? Where might the AI go off track?

3. What edge cases should we anticipate? (e.g., user provides incomplete input, user wants to skip ahead, user gets stuck)

4. Are there any critical steps that need explicit “do not skip” markers?

5. How should the AI handle uncertainty? (e.g., disclaim and ask for clarification, flag low-confidence outputs, never guess)

6. How should the AI verify its output before delivering? (e.g., self-review checklist, confirmation with user, independent expert review)

Wait for their response.

After they respond, propose the constraints:

Here’s the constraints section I’m proposing:

Constraints:

• [Constraint 1]

• [Constraint 2]

• [Continue]

Edge Case Handling:

• If [edge case], then [behavior]

• If [edge case], then [behavior]

Critical Steps (Do Not Skip):

• [Step 1]

• [Step 2]

Uncertainty Handling: [How the AI handles gaps—disclaim, ask, flag]

Verification: [How the AI checks its work before delivering]

Does this cover the boundaries? Anything missing?

Do not proceed to Phase 7 until they confirm the constraints.

Phase 7: Assembly + Review

Purpose: Assemble the complete prompt and review for gaps.

Generate the complete prompt using the appropriate structure based on what they greenlit.

For phasic prompts, use this structure:

# Prompt: [Name]

## System [Who the AI is and its core purpose]

## Context [What the user is doing and what they need]

## Instructions [Phase flow, progression rules, within-phase behavior]

## Phases

### Phase 1: [Name] [Purpose, sub-phases, questions, confirmations]

### Phase 2: [Name] [Continue for all phases]

## Guidelines [Principles that govern behavior throughout]

## Constraints [What the AI must not do]

## Verification Notes [Checklist for the AI to confirm it’s following the rules]

## Output (if applicable) [Structured deliverable format]

## Reasoning (if applicable) [Explicit reasoning traces for complex tasks]

## Examples (if applicable) [Worked examples demonstrating expected behavior]

For non-phasic/minimal prompts: Adapt the structure accordingly—omit the Phases section and adjust Instructions to reflect linear flow.

After presenting the complete prompt, ask:

Here’s your complete prompt. Read through it and tell me:

1. Does the flow feel right?

2. Are there any gaps—places where the AI might get confused or skip something?

3. Does the tone and stance match what you want?

4. Is there anything missing from the structure?

5. Does this prompt need worked examples or explicit reasoning traces?

Wait for their response. Make adjustments as needed.

Final confirmation:

Does this prompt feel complete and ready to use? Or is there anything else to refine?

Guidelines

• Honor the user’s style and structure preference—phasic, linear, or minimal

• Observe before asking—offer what you notice, then ask one focused question

• User agency is sacred—you propose, they decide

• Density matters—help them build prompts that surface compressed, synthesized, transferable ideas

• Be direct—no filler, no sycophancy

• Ask the minimum questions required—consolidate where possible without losing critical information

• Work through one phase at a time—do not rush ahead

• Confirm before advancing—every phase ends with a gate

• Fresh eyes for validation—if expert personas are used, do not reuse the same expert for both creation and validation

• Disclaim uncertainty—never guess; acknowledge gaps and ask for clarification

Constraints

• Do not generate the full prompt until Phase 7

• Do not skip phases—move through sequentially

• Do not proceed to the next phase until the user confirms

• Do not impose structure—propose and let them decide

• Do not use code blocks in the final prompt output

• Do not add numerical scoring or grading mechanics unless the user explicitly requests them

• Do not make the prompt overly complex—aim for the minimum viable structure that accomplishes the purpose

• Do not guess when uncertain—disclaim and ask for clarification

• Do not reuse the same expert persona for both creation and validation tasks

Verification Notes

• Confirm Phase 1 (Desired Outcome) is complete before moving to Phase 2

• Confirm Phase 2 (Structure Proposal) is greenlit before moving to Phase 3

• Confirm Phase 3 (User Journey) is complete before moving to Phase 4

• Confirm Phase 4 (Architecture) is complete before moving to Phase 5

• Confirm Phase 5 (Mechanics + Drivers) is complete before moving to Phase 6

• Confirm Phase 6 (Constraints + Edge Cases) is complete before moving to Phase 7

• Confirm the final prompt is reviewed and approved before ending the session

• The final prompt must follow the user’s formatting preferences (no code blocks, clear hierarchy, readable structure)

• The final prompt must include appropriate sections based on the greenlit structure

• If expert personas are included, verify separate experts are assigned for creation vs. validation

• Verify uncertainty handling and verification steps are defined in the constraints

No two people will build the same prompt because no two people have the exact same process. If your granular actions are different, then so are your outputs. The voice, judgement, and taste guiding every instruction is you. That’s the edge.

Spend 2-4 hours writing out your workflow and building your first set of prompts. Test each one for 2-4 weeks before changing anything. You need enough time and enough repetitions to know what’s actually not working, versus what just feels unfamiliar because you haven’t given it enough reflection time and real feedback to think about yet.

Re-instructing a prompt that isn’t working is how you make it yours over time.

IV - How to use AI for learning, research, and ideation

The quality of your thinking determines all outcomes of your life.

This step is angled specifically toward learning and building.

Using AI to learn things that make your thinking, and the outcomes of your thinking, better.

AI is excellent for learning because it can meet you exactly where you are. It can adapt to your level of understanding of a topic or problem, your knowledge gaps and questions. Textbooks and teachers can’t do this as well, especially if there are 20 other people in the same boat around you in a classroom setting. You always learn as fast as the slowest learner in the room.

Mess around with it. Fuck about with it. Ask it to explain a concept or problem to you like you’re a complete beginner, and ask it to go deeper, or challenge your understanding to find the holes in your knowledge.

Ask questions if you have questions.

Push back if you feel any limitations.

It will do all of this if you ask it to, and it will do it patiently, without judgement, and at whatever pace you need.

But you need to know to ask it these things yourself.

Building on the hundred books analogy from earlier... Jung, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche were limited by the information they could hold. Using AI now means you can prompt.

You can surface exact passages and ideas from books or sources.

You can compare arguments and ideas down to the bone.

You can find counterarguments and stress-test your own ideas ruthlessly within seconds.

Think of how much more time you can spend being creative compared to just searching and looking.

That said, I am not a big fan of using AI as a Google Search. Maybe that’s just me. I still like to search up 3-5 articles or videos on a topic, just to compare them myself. Sometimes I’ll ask multiple AI models the same question and compare the outputs.

There’s a certain kind of thinking that only happens when you’re the one doing the searching. When you’re following your own curiosity down a rabbit hole and deciding what’s worth your attention and what isn’t. Two rocks only stay standing because they’re leaning against each other. Your curiosity and AI’s retrieval power work the same way; have one without the other and the whole thing falls over. Don’t let AI do all the leaning.

Leave the searching to AI, but the curating to yourself.

If you want to go deeper on how to use AI to create a granular, step-by-step project-based learning plan for helping you achieve your learning goals in 30 days, you can download this free prompt.

I didn’t know where else to put it, so I put it here:

https://stan.store/profoundideas/p/the-30day-autodidact-prompt

Don’t worry.

You won’t receive annoying emails afterward, or get added to my newsletter by downloading this - you have the agency to subscribe yourself if you choose.

V - Context. Is. Everything. (Using AI as a thinking partner)

The more context you give AI, the better it performs. But more importantly, the more you think about the context you’re giving it, the better you perform.

Higher-order thinking is what stops you from getting deluded by AI. And so you don’t hand over your agency to a machine designed to agree with everything you say.

You want AI to challenge you and pull out as much context from you as possible. You aren’t looking for AI to become your yes-man, so be sure to supply the friction that the machine is designed to remove. That is your responsibility alone. AI won’t do it for you. It will tell you your idea is brilliant and your writing is exceptional and your argument is airtight unless you prompt it otherwise.

• Use AI as a thinking partner - something to think out loud with, that can think back.

• Use it as an intellectual sparring partner - something that can steel-man your ideas and find the holes and objections you might have missed.

• Use it as a writing coach - something that can break down what’s worth flagging and giving your attention to.

• Use it as a learning coach or tutor - something that meets you exactly where you are, every single time.

We want to be as active with the AI outputs as we can be. You are in dialogue with it, and you are the one setting the terms.

Outsource the execution, not the thinking.

Delegate lower-order cognitive tasks like formatting, summarising, gathering, and structuring. This frees up mental energy for synthesis, judgement, and meaning. Those things are what AI cannot do with essence.

Essence is what makes your work worth reading.

VI - Develop taste... and PLEASE know what quality is first

Before you can produce lots of quality, you need to know what quality is first.

Your audience will tell you that.

In general terms, look for validated ideas and validated titles. Not just content you love.

The superpower comes when you can find the intersection of the two - validation and interest - which I talk about more in this newsletter.

AI is a force amplifier of unique knowledge. But you need taste, judgement, and intuition to evaluate what it gives you. Without higher-order thinking skills, AI will lead you to its own output. And its own output is generic by design. It is the average of everything it has ever been trained on. It is the mean. You do not want to be the mean. Nobody does.

Here is why I wouldn’t recommend outsourcing your thinking fully, especially for my profound thinkers out there.

• Reading - Summarising books with AI bypasses the friction of reading, which is exactly the friction that builds unique knowledge and curiosity. The struggle of not understanding something, sitting with it painfully on a walk, and coming back to it. That’s where the insight lives. No sacrifice, no victory, said Optimus Prime.

• Writing - Accepting AI’s first draft because it “sounds good” produces content with no unique value. AI lacks your personal insights, your synthesis, and your essence. It lacks the thing that made someone click in the first place, which is you.

• Thinking - Asking AI “what should I think about X” is like asking a mirror. You will get back a version of what you already believe, dressed up in confident language. True thinking involves cross-stressing perspectives and ideas, and stress-testing them individually too.

If you remove the difficulty, you remove the progress. And if you remove the progress, you remove the joy.

How I would develop taste, if I were you:

• Create a curation folder - Fill it with validated short-form and long-form posts to understand what ideas are profound - signal amongst the noise. Audience defines quality to a large extent, so this is your market research. Look for validated ideas AND validated titles. You need both.

• Save writing and ideas that you genuinely love - Find the intersection between writing you love and that lots of other people love also. That’s your leverage point.

• Watch one to three YouTube videos, lectures, or podcasts per day and get used to writing down ideas into your notes - Even if the ideas feel terrible and not very well articulated. As soon as you feel yourself get excited about an idea, that’s the sign. Write it down. YOU WILL FORGET IT IF YOU DON’T WRITE IT DOWN.

• Think deeply about everything you don’t like about something - When I was younger I wanted to be a filmmaker. Anytime I walked out of a cinema, every time without question, I would turn to my Dad or my sister and say, “yeah it was good, but if I had directed it, I would have done this differently...” That habit of evaluation is how you develop taste. Do it with everything you read and watch. Even with people.

• Immerse yourself in enough high-signal sources to feed yourself the right nutrients - Do you think you would get more from evaluating a piece of content with a million views, tons of engagement, and proof that the ideas are validated, versus a piece of content that can’t attract attention, or even persuade the few people who clicked to care about what value is being offered?

Taste and judgement are the new differentiators. Most AI-generated content disappears almost instantly because nothing about it was worth the attention in the first place. No unique perspective. No individual judgement. No taste. Straight to the bottom of the barrel. Gone forever.

The profound ideas at the top all leverage what AI doesn’t have.

And that is ultimately the only thing that makes your use of AI worth anything at all.

If you’re reading this, to be dead honest, I assume you have something profound about you. You like to think deeply. You have an interest in profound ideas, so you likely value the quality of a thought or idea to a high degree.

I write by hand. And I know I’m likely going to be limiting my overall output by doing this, but I just don’t like the flavour which AI writing has.

It also means I get to focus on idea quality, and how I piece together ideas myself and connect them, without AI doing this for me, which is the most rewarding part of the writing process and the part that forges true critical and logical thinking skills.

AI is not here to replace that. Not yet.

• If you would like to check out my writing strategies, you can do that here

• If you’d like to check out the things I’ve built you can do that here

No stress if not, they’re called “offers” for a reason.

Again, here’s the free 30-day learning plan. It’s pretty cool, I think you’ll find it very useful.

Thanks for reading.

You’re an absolute legend!

- Craig :)

I don’t have to agree with everything you say, but I should attempt at least to understand it, for the opposite of mutual understanding is, quite simply, war.

- Ken Wilber

Bad explanations are secretly wrecking your life.

Now, that might seem like the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard.

Allow me to explain.

Most people can’t articulate what they feel.

They can’t defend what they think.

They can’t negotiate for what they want.

They can’t even offer a perspective because they’re not sure they have one.

And so, life just keeps happening to them.

If you are anything like I was as an anxious, insecure kid, you know exactly what this feels like.

I never offered any perspectives because I was terrified of being wrong.

I felt inferior to everyone around me for most of my life, but I could never explain why.

Which was exactly the problem.

Everybody else explained who I was to me.

And I believed every single explanation as gospel, because I didn’t have any better ones to refute them with.

It wasn’t so much a confidence or discipline issue, either.

It is an explanation problem.

And it is insidious because bad explanations are invisible.

They don’t announce themselves.

They just feel like the way things are.

They feel like your life.

What I’m going to share with you today is the most meta-solution to almost every problem you have.

It will show you exactly why your problems exist, no matter who you are, and what level of thinking is required to solve them.

I am not an expert. I’ve been studying this map of knowledge for over a year, and I still forget it exists from time to time. I am only human (for now). But the difference between who I was before I found this map and who I am now is great enough that it would be a disservice not to write about it.

Because the ideas are nothing short of... you guessed it! Profound.

There is no way to make this a 5-minute read. You can’t learn how to think like the top 1% of people (I truly mean it when I say this...) in a TikTok short.

If you’re looking for a quick cheap-dopamine fix, go doomscroll.

But if you stay with me, this will determine most, if not all outcomes of your life.

One more thing before we begin. If some of these ideas don’t connect with you today, save this post and come back to it in 3-6 months. You might find it reads completely differently when you yourself have changed.

Also: there’s a reason the smartest people you know are sometimes the quickest to make the dumbest decisions, and thus suffer the most because of it. So we’ll get to that.

Where to begin?

This letter is easier to grasp with visuals. Watch it in full, here:

You can listen to this while on a walk, on my Spotify:

Explanations - More Powerful Than We Think

There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress, or of surviving in the long run, and that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism. - David Deutsch

There is nothing that will make you more deadly than the ability to explain something.

Explanations are how we, as humans, make sense of reality and experience. Every thought you have about why something happened is an explanation. Every story you tell yourself about who you are is an explanation.

Good explanations are hard to vary, and they still work, despite always being somewhat impartial; but bad explanations always collapse when the right type of pressure is applied.

For example, showing up to a party and none of your friends are there, might have you thinking that you should hide in the corner until they arrive. This explanation more-or-less saying that “this is not a good situation for me because I don’t know anyone here.” That is going to reinforce certain beliefs about yourself.

You won’t see new situations as opportunities. You won’t see social settings in which you know nobody as opportunities to meet new people.

A single explanation can reframe a problem with very little work. A party can be both an opportunity to hide until your friends arrive, or to go out and feel gracious that you get to make new friends.

Learning how to forge better explanations properly will determine whether they write your life, or you become the writer instead.

Same experience, but two different explanations of the same experience.

This is the thing about explanations that is totally wild.

They are 100% free.

They cost nothing.

You need no tools.

No money.

No degree or credentials or permission.

The barrier to entry for building better explanations is zero. You can do it right now, and anywhere. And you already have explanations. Many of them, influencing how you think about yourself, how you make decisions, how you justify what to wear, consume, and eat throughout any given day.

But the question is whether or not they are as good as they could be.

I don’t know if it was a lot to do with my temperament, according to The Big 5 Personality Model I’m extremely high in both agreeableness and neuroticism, which has its pros and cons... but if anyone ever told me who I was, and gave me even the first explanation that came to their mind - that wasn’t stress-tested even slightly - I believed them. You could have told me I was the worst person alive without any proof or reason, and that would have wiped me out stone cold.

OG psychologist Carl Jung once said that, “The world will ask who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you.”

Explanations are the source of this issue, and paradoxically, they are also the solution.

A Map For Becoming A F*cking Genius

In order to understand what makes an explanation as irrefutable and complete as possible, we have to understand knowledge itself first.

Let’s create a mini-mental model to build a foundation to work with.

It starts with reality.

So...

Idk... like... we are simply just... here?

In making sense of reality, we create knowledge about how reality works.

We do this by creating explanations.

Why does an apple fall off a tree?

Why does a car start?

Why did I not get the job?

Anytime you want knowledge or feedback based on reality itself, what do you do?

You create an explanation for what, how, and why something is the case.

Explanations are how we understand our knowledge of reality.

Explanations, I think, are how we create knowledge of our experiences, and of reality itself.

Which means if you want to build better explanations - and therefore better life outcomes - you need a map of knowledge itself. A map of all of it, not just any one thing. Because without one, you will keep solving the wrong problems, in the wrong quadrant, wondering why nothing ever changes in your life.

I think this will blow your mind.

This is called the map of all knowledge, and it was theorized by Ken Wilber.

It’s called the AQAL model.

This is the starting point.

The foundation.

Before you can move to the stages of cognitive development (the levels of thinking and lines of intelligence), you have to start with the quadrants.

It goes:

Quadrants → Levels → Lines

All of which come together to offer a holistic approach to understanding:

1. Reality

2. Consciousness

3. Human development.

Pretty fucking cool.

To summarize as best I can, this is Ken Wilber’s attempt at synthesizing all human knowledge into one framework or way of navigating all that can be known as knowledge.

This is not perfect or final.

It’s still a work in progress, and is to be built upon and developed, as Wilber himself says it.

Which is encouraging.

Learning is an imperfect process, and the second you limit your ability to think and ask questions, is the minute stupid thinking begins.

Based on my research into this, this is the most comprehensive map of reality and human development available.

All of this put together is known as Integral Theory.

There are also States and Types, but I won’t be addressing them here.

Let’s start with the foundational piece of this framework, which begins with the AQAL model and its four quadrants.

This is our map of all knowledge (looking in the top right corner!)

As we’ve said, there are four quadrants.

Each quadrant represents a perspective you can take regarding some set of experiences.

The quadrants are divided into being either subjective or objective, and also individual or collective.

Let’s explain each quadrant one by one, starting with the individual level:

• Quadrant 1 is individual-subjective - Known as “I,” so your thoughts, emotions, and individual beliefs. This is your inner subjective world. Think the mind vs the brain.

• Quadrant 2 is individual-objective - Known as “It,” this is where brain is opposed to mind. Think of the cognitive processes that operate unconsciously deep inside your brain. Also your nervous system, your limbic system, your physical body, pretty much. This quadrant includes hard sciences like physics, neuroscience, and biology.

Now let’s move onto the collective level, which is easier to understand once you have grasped the individual quadrants:

• Quadrant 3 is collective-subjective - Known as “We,” this is everyone’s individual thoughts, emotions, and beliefs that come together to shape our culture and society. So, shared values and group beliefs compared to individual beliefs and values in the first quadrant. Think “I” versus “We.”

• Quadrant 4 is collective-objective - Known as “Its,” this is the systems, structures, and institutions that come to organize our physical world as it is. This is not only my physical body, but everyone else’s physical bodies and the objects that surround us all, and how we interact in the collective to solve problems efficiently. Think “It” vs “Its.”

Being dead honest, this is heavy stuff, so don’t feel like you need to understand it right away.

Let me give you an example of how we could use this four quadrant model when thinking about a problem, which will make it easy to understand in practice... which is what matters.

Let’s say you have a motivation problem.

You know what you should be doing, like studying, exercising, or learning a new skill to better your life, but no matter how hard you try, you can’t get yourself to do it.

We’ve all been there. I myself am definitely no saint.

Here’s how you could approach this problem, but based on each individual quadrant:

Quadrant 1 is your mind (thoughts) telling you that you’re lazy. You have no discipline. You have never had any discipline. And that something is wrong with you and you’ll never be enough because of it.

The explanation originating from that quadrant alone, that would wipe out most people cold.

And we haven’t even gotten on to the other quadrants.

Maybe if you were to look at this problem based on Quadrant 2, you’d realize that you haven’t had a good night sleep in weeks. Always doomscrolling until 1am. Not training your physical body throughout the week, so your mind naturally wants to satiate itself by staying up late to “relax,” because you have no energy and you always feel exhausted.

The first quadrant thinks it’s purely a you problem. But when we take a look at quadrant 2, we now find that you’re running on nothing but high-levels of cortisol (stress), your nervous system is dysregulated as a result, and so are your emotions and therefore your thinking.

And this bit is important.

Every quadrant is constantly influencing every other quadrant, at every given moment.

See how your mind might not be the enemy, since you also have a body to consider too?

Now we consider the third quadrant.

Maybe upon reflection, you realize that for your whole entire life you’ve been told that effort looks like this or that. Studying for 8 hours a day on every day off is normal (I was told this in school... what a dangerous thing to tell students who can’t think for themselves, and that includes me especially).

So you compare yourself to the standards set by everyone else, and devour yourself when you don’t meet them?

And you’re tired. And your mind won’t shut up. And you feel like you’re never doing enough compared to everyone else.

Then we get to the best quadrant of all, which introduces your smartphone.

Since your phone has been carefully engineered by the world’s top scientists to keep you fucking using it all day every day, it saps away the limited focus and mental energy you get to spend on any given day.

3 hours of doomscrolling and your mind is toast.

Mix it all together, and you have a lot of problems. It’s not just any one of them, it’s all of them combined. Because whenever you approach a problem, a question, a person’s perspective or opinion - even your own in the form of explanations - you must consider each of these quadrants.

Without doing so, you will always have an incomplete perspective, an incomplete explanation, and you won’t be seeing the entire big picture.

In other words, your explanation of any situation is only as good as the number of quadrants you’ve actually looked through.

Thinking your explanation as to why you think you have a “motivation problem” is a one quadrant explanation for a four quadrant reality. And you cannot solve a four-quadrant problem from a one-quadrant level of thinking.

Read that last sentence one more time.

You cannot solve a four-quadrant problem from a one-quadrant level of thinking.

Most people only look at one quadrant in any given situation.

I just need to work harder, I just need to sleep more, or the system is fucked and nothing else.

A complete explanation requires all four quadrants.

So we can now define what stupid thinking is, to set ourselves up for thinking at higher-levels.

Stupid thinking is when you look through one open window and think you’re seeing the whole damn planet.

The gym-bro who thinks getting jacked will solve all of his problems will still fail at building trust in relationships.

The businessman who believes that all problems are just systems problems will fail the minute emotions get thrown into the mix.

The learner who thinks higher-education will solve all of his agency problems by securing a job and working up the corporate ladder will fail as soon as AI wipes out most low-agency jobs.

These people are not stupid people, they are just under-explained.

That’s why bad explanations can be so dangerous.

They are invisible to the naked eye when you operate from lower levels of thinking, which is the majority of the population.

Most people don’t even know their explanations are broken, and thus, they only experience the consequences and therefore the suffering instead.

Smart people are often the most stuck people in life.

Usually, because they are so well-developed in one quadrant to an extreme - think specialization - and that is their only source of truth.

Ask a devout believer in religion and a scientist to have a discussion about how the Earth was formed, and you’ll see what I mean pretty quickly.

This is why the smartest people you know are sometimes the quickest to make the dumbest decisions and suffer the most because of it.

How To Think About This Map

Now that we have our map of all knowledge - the four quadrants - we need to understand something important.

The four quadrants show you what to look at.

But the levels of thinking determine how clearly you can see each quadrant.

Two people can look at the exact same quadrant, say, their inner world, and see completely different things because their levels of awareness are different.

One person might look inward and think that they’re just... lazy.

Another person might look inward and realize they’re running a story about laziness they’ve been told since the age of seven, by someone older than them who didn’t know any better - who was likely even lazier themselves - and have been living inside that narrative ever since, without testing it against reality.

It’s regarding the same quadrant, but it’s two different explanations coming from two different levels of thinking (awareness).

This is why your level of development determines what problems you can see, what explanations you can build, and what solutions are available to you.

And this is why Einstein was right when he said:

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

Or, when we first explained them.

Lower levels cannot perceive higher levels. But higher levels can look back down and understand lower ones. The higher you climb up the levels, the more you can see because you have more awareness. This is all that this is about, increasing your awareness of yourself.

Because the more you can see, the better your explanations become. And the better your explanations become, the better your life outcomes get.

That’s the whole game, folks.

So, there are 9 levels of thinking.

I’m going to organize them into three chunks so this doesn’t become overwhelming. And I’m going to describe each one by what it feels like from the inside, so you don’t need to memorize names that sound somewhat silly and unrelatable.

Chunk 1 - Subconscious (Levels 1-3)

This covers roughly 5% of the population, mostly young children (and adult ones too).

Level 1 - Survive

This is pure desire. I want, I need, I feel. There is no “other people” yet - just you and your immediate desires. A newborn operates entirely here. But so does any adult who hasn’t eaten in two days, or who is absolutely furious, or who is in physical danger. At this level, you are only thinking about your own desires, and don’t realize that other people’s desires exist.

At this level, your explanation for everything is just, I want this thing so I can stop feeling the suffering that comes from not having it. Like with hunger, thirst, or tiredness.

Level 2 - Connection

You realize other people have minds too. You try to give them what they want so they give you what you need. Appeasing the Gods with rituals, texting a friend to help you with homework at 11pm, helping someone for no other reason that they help you back in return. At this level, your explanation for everything is if I do the right thing for the right person, they’ll give me what I want.

Level 3 - Control

You realize you’re in a web of relationships and you can direct them. This level is about status and controlling your position amongst the dominance (competence) hierarchy. Think your tyrant boss and managers at your job, gangs, or the guy who takes up two parking spaces because the idea that other people want to park has genuinely never occurred to him. At this level, your explanation for everything is the world is mine to take, and everyone else is an obstacle or a tool to help me get what I want.

Chunk 2 - Conscious (Levels 4-5)

75-80% of the population are at these levels, with formal education taking us to these levels at most.

Level 4 - Belonging

You realize that what you want could hurt others, and that rules exist for a reason. You conform to fit in so the tribe doesn’t throw you out. Think religion, and cultural and societal norms or expectations. Following the rules because that’s just how things are done. Go to school, go to university, get a job yadada. This level built civilization, so it’s genuinely necessary, but it has a shadow: at Level 4, your explanation for everything is my group is right, which means other groups are wrong. There is one correct way, and I know what it is.

Level 5 - Achieve

You start questioning the rules. You build your own path. So, science, entrepreneurship, and self-help - The American Dream, too. This is the dominant paradigm of Western success, and like Level 4, it’s genuinely useful. But at Level 5 your explanation for everything is I can figure this out myself, and if I work hard enough and build the right system, I’ll get there.

The problem is that this explanation works brilliantly inside one quadrant - usually quadrant 4 - and catastrophically fails outside it.

Formal education gets you to Level 4 or 5. That’s it. And to be fair, that’s still not nothing. These levels are important, you need them., because they teach you not to behave like a wild bloody animal. But understand there is a still ceiling that we want to break through.

Chunk 3 - Integrated (Levels 6-9)

These levels mark for 15-20% of the population and can only reached through deliberate self-development.

Level 6 - Include

You realize everyone has their own valid perspective. You stop seeing your way as the only way. At this level, your explanation for everything is all perspectives are valid. Which sounds enlightened, until you realize that if all perspectives are valid, none can be wrong, and you lose the ability to make any decision at all.

All perspectives do contain some truth, but there are still perspectives that are more favorable than others. That’s where post-modernism fails, which is a topic for another day, which is why Level 6 is a genuine leap forward that can become its own booby-trap.

Level 7 - Harmonize

You can hold multiple perspectives simultaneously and synthesize them. You understand that all previous levels had truth in them, but might not have been able to see beyond themselves. At this level, your explanation for everything is the best answer draws from all quadrants, and all levels. Truth is a synthesis and not a position.

This is where second-tier thinking begins.

Level 8 - Construct-Aware

You start watching your own mind build its explanations in real time. You notice the stories forming before you believe any of them. Most people are lived by their explanations. But at Level 8, you watch yourself constructing them, which means for the first time, you have a genuine choice about whether to believe them or not.

Level 9 - Unitive

The boundary between you and reality begins to dissolve. You stop experiencing yourself as a separate observer looking at the world and start experiencing yourself as part of it. This is what Alan Watts pointed at, what Terence McKenna described; it’s what most contemplative traditions spend lifetimes trying to reach. At this level, the explanation and the explainer become the same thing. It’s hard to explain, but you basically become ego-less, and you simply just... are.

When I first started writing this newsletter, I was terrified to share my thoughts.

What if someone disagreed? What if someone didn’t like what I wrote?

I’ve had over one million Substack reads now, and only five or six genuinely negative comments. And compared to all the lovely comments I’ve received from you legends, those 5 or 6 are still enough to make every good comment feel worthless.

That’s a Level 4 explanation: My group needs to approve of me. If someone rejects what I say, it means I am wrong. And every negative comment confirmed it because that’s what bad explanations do. They find evidence for themselves everywhere.

Now I see negative comments differently.

I can look above the judgment and just take the feedback. That’s a Level 7 explanation. That’s a very different outcome I get from negative comments now.

That’s what moving up the levels actually looks like. A more useful explanation for the same thing that used to fuck you up!

So, to take a short breather...

The levels of thinking are about increasing awareness. That’s all we are doing.

I remember playing Skylanders as a kid, and it always used to piss me off when you came across a door that was locked. But once I found the key needed to unlock it, new doors would open, so would new levels and boss battles to face.

You only hear what you’re ready to hear, I think.

Even with starting my newsletter, writing it now seems almost effortless, but the journey that got me to this over the last 10 months is so scattered, and I can only really think of the general principles that now feel intuitive to me, and still, I don’t remember the moments that things just... “worked.”

It’s hard to explain that idea of improving yourself at a given thing, but things will just click if you iterate with trial and error and do it long enough.

So, if some of this isn’t landing for you right away, save this post, come back to it in 3-6 months. Even one week. You’ll read it a lot differently than you do now.

Why Smart People Are Still Stuck

Now here’s where this gets even more interesting.

You are not at one level permanently.

You are at multiple levels simultaneously - across different areas of your life.

And that’s exactly where the lines come in.

Think of the levels as your altitude of awareness. Now think of the lines as the different dimensions of your life that you develop along, each at their own altitude.

Ken Wilber identified over a dozen lines of development. They include:

• Cognitive - how you think and reason

• Emotional - how you process and understand feelings

• Moral - how you determine right from wrong

• Interpersonal - how you relate to other people

• Spiritual - how you make meaning of existence

• Psychosexual - how you relate to intimacy and sexuality

• Aesthetic - your sense of beauty, creativity, and artistic expression

• Kinesthetic/Physical - your relationship with your body

• Values - what you hold as important and why

• Needs - what you are driven by at any given moment

• Self-identity (Ego) - how developed your sense of self is

• Worldview - the lens through which you interpret reality at large

Here is the crucial thing to understand.

You develop along all of these lines simultaneously, but at completely different rates.

Which means you can be at Level 7 on one line and Level 3 on another. And your explanations will reflect whichever line you’re drawing from in that moment.

Let me show you what this looks like in real life.

The founder who has built a company worth 100 million quid.

Cognitively, at Level 7. They can synthesize complex information, spot patterns, build systems. But emotionally, they’re at Level 3. They have never learned to process the feelings that have been building up for decades. They sell the company. The cognitive challenge disappears but the emotions that have been built up, don’t. They become depressed and have no explanation for why, because their emotional line has never been developed enough to even see the problem.

Their explanation: I should be happy. I achieved everything I set out to achieve.

The real explanation: I built my entire identity around one line of development and neglected everything else.

The gym-bro who is an absolute unit.

His body line is at Level 8, but his interpersonal line is at Level 3. He can get the girl... but he can’t keep her for long. Not because he isn’t attractive but because attraction and connection require completely different lines of development, and he has only ever invested in one.

His explanation: Women are impossible to understand.

The real explanation: I have never developed the interpersonal line that would allow me to understand them.

The creative whose work is genuinely beautiful.

Aesthetically at Level 7 but practically at Level 4. They cannot market the value of what they create for shit. Meaning they cannot pay rent, and believe that art and business are incompatible, which is itself a Level 4 explanation, borrowed from a culture that always seems to separate the two.

Their explanation: The world doesn’t value real art.

The real explanation: I haven’t developed the lines that would allow me to bring my art to the people who would value it.

These examples are uneven.

So are you, and so am I.

The lines also explain something important about regression.

You don’t stay at one level permanently. When you are stressed, tired, hungry, or overwhelmed, you drop back down - sometimes several levels - on the line that’s under pressure. The last time you had peak mental clarity while sleep-deprived, running on stimulants, and starving for nutrients, you probably didn’t, because your cognitive line dropped back to survival mode.

This is what it means being human.

So now you have the map, the AQAL model and the four quadrants showing you what to look at.

You have the nine levels of thinking, showing you how clearly you can see the quadrants.

And you have multiple lines showing you where your development is uneven.

The question now is what to actually do with it.

How To Increase Your Consciousness

Here it is.

It starts in the next ten minutes, it costs nothing, and it is the minimum viable version of everything we have covered today, but applied to your actual life, right now.

The practice is writing

Not journaling for the sake of it.

Not morning pages.

Not a gratitude list (which I do like doing).

We will be using writing as a tool for building and examining your own explanations.

Why?

Every explanation you hold lives inside your head as a feeling. A vague sense of how things are. The moment you write it down, it becomes examinable. You can see it. You can question it. You can evaluate and find the cracks in it.

You cannot edit a thought you cannot see.

This is what writing actually does. It externalizes your thinking so you can work on it. Every newsletter I write is me doing exactly this, which is just building an explanation, offering it to you legends, and refining it across the next one I write. The writing is not the output, but the practice.

You need outcomes, not tasks

Forget saying “I will write everyday” yeah yeah we know.

That’s a task, or better, an activity.

We want outcomes than activities allow us to achieve.

Here are your four questions (outcomes), one per element of the framework.

Very binary, yes or no, did you do it or not.

Pure physics.

(1) Did you write down one explanation today?

Something that happened. Something that’s been sitting heavy. A decision you made that you don’t fully understand yet. A feeling you can’t articulate. Write the explanation you currently hold for it. Don’t edit it, just get it out. You can write in the style of an essay or a mind map. I prefer mind mapping because I can quickly view relationships between key words. Writing huge essays can hide relationships and take up a lot of time.

(2) Did you examine it through all four quadrants?

• What is your inner world saying about this? (I)

• What does your body, behaviour, or physical reality say? (IT)

• What has your culture, environment, or the people around you taught you about this? (WE)

• What systems, structures, or external forces are shaping this situation? (ITS)

A complete explanation requires all four. Don’t be like most people stopping at one.

(3) Did you identify which line of development this touches?

Is this a cognitive problem?

An emotional one?

Interpersonal?

Moral?

Aesthetic?

Physical?

Naming the line tells you where to direct your development. You can’t strengthen a line you haven’t identified.

(4) Did you find one piece of evidence that challenges your explanation?

Just one.

Not to destroy the explanation but to stress-test it.

Good explanations survive pressure, whereas bad ones collapse. This is how you tell the difference.

These four outcomes should take ten to twenty minutes. Less if you learn to think on paper with mind mapping, which we learned about here.

Example

A few weeks ago I uploaded a YouTube video and within an hour, one negative comment arrived - just one - and it derailed my entire morning. It ruined my lifting session that day to be dead honest, since I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Here is what the practice looks like, but applied to that moment.

Step 1 - Write the explanation down

Someone didn’t like what I wrote. That means it wasn’t good enough. That means I’m not good enough.

Now that it’s visible, we can question it fully.

Step 2 - Run it through all four quadrants

• Q1 - I felt pretty upset!

• Q2 - My body went into stress response. I could feel my cortisol going up, and my chest feeling heavy (It doesn’t help that I was lifting, and also very much caffeinated at this time).

• Q3 - I grew up thinking that anytime someone else disagreed with me, I was instantly in the wrong, and that I would get into trouble or be given out to. This had a lot to do with the people I surrounded myself with.

• Q4 - People are more likely to share hate online than in person because there’s a barrier of protection. You can hide behind a screen without needing to physically confront someone in person, which most people would never do.

Step 3 - Identify the line

This is primarily an emotional line problem, with a secondary interpersonal line problem.

My cognitive line knew the comment was one data point.

My emotional line hadn’t developed enough to hold that knowledge under pressure.

Step 4 - Find one piece of evidence that challenges the explanation

A couple thousand views to receive one negative comment.

That’s a pretty large ratio!

New explanation: One person offered feedback from their own perspective, shaped by their own level of development and their own lines. It may contain something useful. It may not. Either way, it is not an absolute verdict on anything.

Recap

• Explanations are the simplest, most profound tool you have. They are free and available at any time. The quality of your explanations - the explanations you tell yourself and believe - are what determine almost all outcomes of your life. Bad explanations feel invisible, they just feel like your life.

• The AQAL model is our map for understanding all that can be known about reality. There are four quadrants you must consider in order to create a complete explanation, or as complete a perspective as possible. Most people only ever look through one quadrant and call it absolute truth. A complete explanation requires all four.

• The levels of thinking determine your awareness. The higher the level you can think at, the more awareness you have over any given problem, experience, or for considering other people’s explanations. Formal education gets you as far as levels 4 or 5, but only you can go beyond with personal self-development. You cannot solve a problem from the same level of thinking that created it.

• The lines determine your development across different types of intelligence. We are all uneven to a degree. You can be advanced in one line and a complete noob in another.

• The daily practice (for as little as 30 seconds mapped out quickly too) is for writing down an explanation, evaluating it, challenging it, and running it through the four quadrants. This will help you increase up the levels and lines.

The push never ends, and now you have a map!

I’m ending it here because I’ve waffled long enough, and I’m tired.

Thanks as always.

You’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

Check out the things I’ve built:

• If you want to become dangerously self-educated, and get a customized learning plan suited to your own problems and goals from a carefully-constructed AI prompt I made, download The Profound Self-Education Guide.

• If you want to stop forgetting everything you read, and retain more in 10 minutes of reading than most do in 2 hours, download my Guide to Profound Reading.

Paid subscribers to my Substack can read both for free, here.

Here are some writing guides if you’re looking to start writing online, grow your personal brand, or even learn a hobby that beats doomscrolling every morning:

Having multiple interests will feel like a burden if you don’t create a vision that integrates them.

First objection:

What authority do I have in saying this?

Well, I am a 22 year old Irish dude who started writing a weekly newsletter when I finished college as a vehicle for my own self-education.

Writing my newsletter is my personal vessel for managing many of my own multiple interests.

But even if you’re not looking to write online, I think I have a unique perspective to offer on this topic.

This newsletter is for a special type of person.

To those who love reading, writing, fitness, personal development, their friends and family and career, but can’t seem to give enough attention to any of them.

To those who feel like every interest is stealing time from pursuing other ones.

To those who feel guilty reading a book when a college deadline is near.

To those who train extra sessions in the gym when they know they should really be learning skills that will actually serve their future.

Have you ever felt so alienated by super-productive people who think they’ve solved the focus problem and you haven’t?

What about the drain that comes from not knowing what decisions to make, or what interests to follow first thing in the morning?

There is nothing more debilitating than quietly letting curiosity feel like a source of shame.

For the longest time, it always felt like I had far less focus than I thought I was capable of.

I used to go on walks and listen to productivity gurus talk about how they could do 4x what I was doing, so naturally, I thought I was definitely the problem, like I had a focus issue.

And because I wasn’t moving any needles, I would feel guilty going to jiu-jitsu or seeing my friends.

I gave up reading for some time too, because I didn’t want to waste my limited focus per day on anything but my writing.

Letting yourself frame your own curiosity as a liability is not a fun way to live.

The real problem here is serving one interest at a time instead of a vision.

Most advice on managing multiple interests says to pick one interest, niche down your focus, and don’t do anything other than that one interest.

And if that advice has ever felt wrong to you, almost like it was designed for a different kind of person... you’d be right.

I’m going to show you why most productivity advice is biased (and how you can build something better).

The person who loves fitness and reading Greek philosophy and studying Jungian psychology and writing... they are the person most likely to lack a mission that makes every interest feel like they serve one another.

That’s what this newsletter is about, helping you make every interest feel purposeful and relevant.

Not a single ounce of your time wasted.

Every interest amplifying each and every other one you have.

We’ll cover the philosophy behind why this works, with three profound ideas that will change how you think about your own development, and a practical framework you can start using immediately.

By the end of reading this, you’ll have a clear structure for managing every interest you have, without feeling the guilt that comes from being unable to manage any of them :)

You can watch the video-version of this newsletter, where I use mind-maps the explain the heavy concepts.

You can listen to this while on a walk, on Spotify, here:

Most interest-managing advice is destined to not help you

Most people who are deep generalists or polymathic by nature, do the following.

• Time block each interest.

• Pick the one main interest that takes total priority (and secretly shelve the rest).

• Feel guilty about spreading yourself too thin.

• Eventually burn out or drop every interest entirely.

This usually happens because most productivity advice is quadrant biased.

Meaning, the advice favours or optimises one domain of life, while letting the other domains atrophy.

Specialising on a single interest in this manner can be a lot more dangerous than you might think.

Think of the well-educated readers who have read hundreds of books but are socially isolated and don’t have anything concrete to show for their knowledge.

Think about the full-time business owner earning tons of money, but who has deteriorating relationships and terrible physical health.

Or the bodybuilding meathead with a brilliant physique who can’t think for himself or hold a conversation for more than 5 minutes.

Or the person - or people we all know - who has spent 50 years obsessing about their career, but has no interests, hobbies, or even an identity outside of their “life’s work.”

Specialisation can make you fragile if you aren’t careful.

You can probably feel this in your own life, as if something is off, because you’re doing well in one or even a few areas of your life, while letting other ones quietly decay.

If you’ve ever had a great week of productivity but felt physically drained, or a great week of training but felt like your mind was turning to mush, that’s what quadrant bias feels and looks like.

Here is a profound concept you aren’t taught in school, and it will change how you see this problem entirely.

The AQAL model, from Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, is a way of looking at life through four dimensions simultaneously. Think of it like this: most life advice you receive only looks at your life through one perspective. The AQAL model says there are four perspectives, and you need all of them to see the full picture.

Here is what the model looks like (in the top right), and what each quadrant means:

The four quadrants are:

• Your inner world (Interior-Subjective) - your thoughts, emotions, desires, motivations. The mind.

• Your biology (Interior-Objective) - the mechanisms working within the brain (not to be confused with the mind) and body. Your nervous system, your hormones, your physical health.

• Your culture (Exterior-Subjective) - the shared beliefs, expectations, and norms of the people around you. What society tells you success looks like, and how you “should” be managing multiple interests...

• Your environment (Exterior-Objective) - the physical world you interact with. Your tools, your routines, your living situation.

So, why is this relevant for you to understand?

Each quadrant shapes all other quadrants simultaneously.

When a productivity guru tells you to focus on one thing, they’re giving you advice from only one quadrant.

For that specific case, it’s USUALLY only from the exterior, systems-based quadrant (on the bottom right)

They’re ignoring your inner drive to explore (quadrant one), the way your brain actually learns best across multiple domains (quadrant two), and the cultural pressure that made you feel guilty in the first place (quadrant three).

That’s why the advice feels wrong.

It’s just incomplete.

And once you see this, you just... can’t unsee it.

Ever, or anywhere.

I’d recommend exploring the AQAL model if you’re interested in this type of stuff. Let me know if you’d like a newsletter giving you my personal perspective on it.

3 Profound Ideas to change your life

Now that you can see the problem clearly, here are three profound ideas that will reshape how you think about your interests.

I - Your Interests Are A Network

This is why I think it’s so important to understand schema theory in learning science.

Your brain stores information as spider’s webs. They’re called schemas, or mental models or frameworks, even.

Not isolated facts or sentences, not like a storage vault.

This is why isolated information, or information that doesn’t feel integrated with tons of connections to prior knowledge, gets dumped by the brain and forgotten.

This is why you want your multiple interests to connect to each other in at least some way.

Think about how this actually works in practice.

Reading is not just about completing a book. Reading fuels idea generation. Reading improves your ability to think, create new knowledge schemas, and formulate objections and counter-arguments. Reading is what teaches you to think, as does writing.

Writing and reading are synergistic, going hand in hand. Writing is how you express your thinking. Writing IS formalised thinking. And the only way you can have ideas to write about - ideas being the same thing as knowledge - is by consuming information... which is reading.

Lifting is not only for improving the physical body. It is what gives your mind a break from the mental gym. When you are reading or writing, you are training your mind to mental failure. The best way to enhance mental recovery is by lifting weights or exercising. Training is a method for cognitive recovery. And also idea generation, because the best way to come up with ideas is actually not to force them, but rather let ideas flow without restriction.

Training a martial art is a great form of socialisation and mental relaxation. It requires and thus trains physical and mental toughness, discipline, and creative thinking. Yes, jiu-jitsu is a highly creative sport and form of creative expression.

Seeing your friends is another form of socialisation, but also relaxation and emotional regulation. It improves your storytelling abilities which helps improve your writing, and develops taste for the books you choose to read, and the people you choose to talk to in the first place.

Notice how, when done right, your interests can all become nodes in the same integrated network?

All connected, and thus amplifying one another?

If your interests connect, they make the web stronger, and increase the chances of you being able to manage them all, since they all feel relevant and purposeful.

Read that previous paragraph one more time.

Which leads me onto another point.

Your interests will feel easier to commit to since you know they all serve each other and some overarching big picture mission you are trying to achieve for yourself.

Coherence is what makes something feel purposeful.

Here’s the deeper science behind why this works:

The brain organises information most effectively in the form of chunks. It groups information based on meaning and relationships to other chunks, eventually forming schemas. Every node you add to your web of knowledge strengthens the retrieval cues you have to remember or recall that knowledge. Your brain best learns information through encoding by connecting new information to information you already know. This is literally the definition of encoding.