For some reason my brain has never been good at it.

I used to skip it, and would get lost in editing hell for days (sometimes a full week) at a time.

Creativity will always strive if you give yourself some rules to play within.

That is what an outline is, a creative constraint.

I want to teach you how to outline a long form post with your own brain.

No AI.

Specifically, so you can write long form posts that actually perform well, consistently, without spending days feeling stuck staring at a blank page, or editing like mad.

Here’s how this guide will help you achieve this:

• First, I’ll tell you why we outline (as per the learning science, of all things).

• Then I’ll show you:

  • How I come up with key points to write about

  • How I think of structuring those key points in the form of a highly impactful and persuasive argument

  • How I think about writing each key point section

• Lastly, I have an outlining drill/exercise you can follow for executing on the knowledge this post teaches.

I - The Importance Of An Outline

If you already use outlines to help you write, great.

If you don’t, or you think outlines are stupid, pointless, and act like a fiery pit of decay for your quote-unquote “honest writing,” guess what?

You are always writing with an outline.

It just isn’t conscious to you, and it will vary in terms of depth or fidelity.

In order to build knowledge, information must get encoded into memory.

This happens in 3 ways:

• Organizational Encoding - Grouping, categorizing, and organizing related information into chunks or parts. Outlining itself is literally about deciding what parts make up the problem your title poses, and solving them in a logical order (section by section).

• Semantic Encoding - Understanding “why” something works, is true, or happens to be the case, in terms of mechanics. Each key point you make not only states a claim, but explains why it is true, and how it benefits the reader if they understand why it is true.

• Elaborative Encoding - Connecting new information to prior knowledge. The most novel and thus engaging key points to read stem from connecting an idea from one domain to a problem in another.

Reading and writing are analogous.

Research is no different than learning, which means if you don’t have ideas it means you lack knowledge.

You can’t recall or write about a topic you don’t understand or know of.

When you create an outline, with your own brain, it means that your own brain is creating a structure for grouping, categorizing, and STRUCTURING information it already has encoded.

Outlining is how you organize your ideas into an argument you are trying to communicate to your reader.

In this case, you are arguing for a perspective (your ideas) on a problem (topic, title, headline) that you think would benefit them if they those chose to act on it (solution to the problem).

I wish more people knew this.

The people clicking on your content are almost always beginners in your topic. They are scrolling without search intent. They are looking for something to entertain them while waiting in line for a coffee, or while chilling on their 30 minute lunch break.

People don’t naturally care about any idea unless they see a clear benefit in caring.

Your outline has to showcase those benefits clearly, taking them from being unaware of the problem to being convinced of your solution.

That is the sole purpose of the argument you are structuring.

II - Pick A Title/Topic

All my best long form posts get written by first choosing a title.

The title is 70% of the content game.

If nobody clicks, nobody reads, which means you don’t grow or have the chance of growing.

I like to choose a title (or create one of my own that I think has a good chance of doing well) based on two principles:

1. Validation - Titles or title structures that people are already proven to click on. The posts have higher views and engagement than normal, compared to other videos the creator has posted.

2. Interest - I will write about my own genuine interests and profound ideas but angled and positioned UNDER that title as the solution to it (there’s no difference between a title and a problem people care to learn about or have solved)

I wrote this post titled “How to become dangerously articulate.”

Because the title structure worked so well, I decided to emulate it for other topics:

Is a title guaranteed to do well?

No.

It’s about doing what you can for increasing the chances of you hitting a bullseye. You’d rather not try and hit a bullseye in the dark, with your eyes closed, while drunk, and have the dart board moving on the wall… while you yourself are spinning in circles.

Validated titles and topics prove there is a demand to hear more about those titles and topics. The problems and thus solutions to those problems. So why not talk about those titles and topics with your own novel perspectives, ideas, and interests?

Do what works, because it works. Don’t try and reinvent the wheel.

I’m talking about titles and title structures here.

Not stealing what other people have to say about those titles (the content/writing/ideas themselves).

What YOU might have to say about a validated topic is what makes it your own.

For now, choose a title to write about, or even a broad topic.

If you want to find validated titles to write about, Eden has excellent research features that I absolutely swear by.

Let’s talk about choosing key points to say about that title.

III - How To Think Of Key Points To Write About (And Structure Them Persuasively)

I can’t tell you exactly what key points to make about any title you’ve picked.

I am not you, and you are not me.

Key points are the chunks (parts) that make up the problem your title is promising to solve.

The issue now, is that most people either have no key points outlined (so they stare at a blank screen and think “writer’s block” is a real thing), or they have too many key points, which causes them to ramble.

Either way, the outline isn’t doing it’s job.

Let me break this into 3 parts.

(a) The What-Why-How Thinking Framework

This is how I think about and process anything clearly.

Clear thinking must happen before deep thinking.

• What - What is the proposition, claim, or insight? (Define the thing, and its parts too if there are some)

• Why - Why is it true? What is the mechanism, evidence, or the premises? (think semantic encoding)

• How - How is it relevant or beneficial, and how would I solve this problem in my own unique way?

Let me write out a quick example:

Let’s say my title is “You need to start writing.”

The first key points that come to my mind, are:

1. Writing is formalized thinking (What)

2. Thinking is how you solve problems and suffer less (Why)

3. How to think about any problem and solve it faster and more efficiently through writing (How)

I like to keep my key points to 2-3 at most. Sometimes more if I have a lot to say about a title.

Notice how my key point order follows a natural problem → transformation (solution) progression? See how logical it is since we’ve went from what to why to how?

We’ll discuss this shortly in more depth.

(b) Where Ideas For Key Points Come From

If you don’t have ideas… once again… you lack knowledge.

You can’t recall and thus use an idea that hasn’t been stored in your long term memory. A key point is a claim about your title. You have to pull it from memory. If you don’t have ideas encoded about the topic, or ideas adjacent to it, nothing will come out.

It’s like trying to run a tap without a water supply.

The fix will always be to go fill up the water supply.

Read a book. Listen to a Substack article. Watch a video. Talk with AI. Talk with human beings.

You’re looking to find that missing chunk. Which means when it’s time to sit down and write or outline, it’s there inside your brain.

This part gets interesting, actually.

If your title is about topic X or topic Y, the obvious key points are the ones everyone automatically associates with those topics.

Those are fine… but they won’t make your writing stand out.

Because every other post about topic X or Y makes those same key points.

The key points that make a good piece of writing great come from knowledge that is somewhat connected to the topic, but not in a way that seems obvious.

You could connect a philosophy book to articulation, or learning science to building a personal brand, or even a principle from neuroscience and connect it to writing.

See how I’ve connected learning science to outlining with this very post?

You’ve likely never seen that connection get made before, between how the brain learns… and outlining, of all things.

See how elaborative encoding makes this piece feel novel and thus interesting and thus engaging to read?

Create a key point outline early in the week.

Even if it’s just the title and 1-2 key points.

Everything you consume and do away from your desk will be feeding on it subconsciously.

You’ll read a random tweet, or a paragraph from an old book, and notice it maps perfectly onto your outline.

Or you’ll be at jiu-jitsu, talking to people, and a single idea that you overhear will spark an array of ideas that connect to your title.

This only works if the outline exists before you sit down to write.

Outlining and writing in the same sitting means you only get to write about what’s already in your head.

(which might be enough, but this is worth mentioning nonetheless)

Be ready to write down any ideas that hit you away from your desk!

(c) How To Structure Your Key Points Persuasively

Once you have a list of potential key points, order becomes crucial.

This is what distinguishes teaching information and offering a transformation.

You’re not just stating any old information you can find using ChatGPT. There’s no value in that anymore. What you’re doing is structuring a novel argument that comes from your unique perspective on that any old information, that moves the reader from where they are now to where they want to be.

I’d like to give you 3 basic copywriting frameworks that do this (research/study these in your own time with AI):

• PAS (Problem → Insight → Solution) - State the problem, twist the knife on why that problem hurts, then present your key points as the solution. This works well for “How to fix/solve/achieve X” titles.

• AIDA (Attention → Interest → Desire → Action) - Hook the reader’s attention, build interest with a novel concept or profound idea/insight, create desire by showing them the beneficial outcome, then give actionable steps. I love using this framework, it’s dead simple and highly impactful.

• PIS (Problem → Insight → Solution) - Every copywriting framework is a variant of this. Even the two above. This is how I think of writing all my long form posts. Lay out what most people do wrong, offer a new/novel perspective on the problem, then share the action steps that solve the problem.

Here’s an example of how my last newsletter outline for How To Live A Deeply Intellectual Life looked like using AIDA.

• Attention (Hook): People are losing the ability to think

• Interest (Key Point 1): Surface-level thinking became the new normal because overstimulation raised the threshold for what your brain finds worth thinking about.

• Desire (Key Point 2): The three levers of profound thinking (curation, curiosity, creativity) as a model for taking control of your intellectual life.

• Action (Key Point 3 - Framework Section): 11 action steps organized under those three levers which are small enough to start today.

Your key points must follow some logical progression from problem to solution. The framework you choose simply determines the basic structure of that progression.

IV - The Profound Outlines Drill

I’ve given you all the knowledge needed to become a master at writing outlines.

Becoming better and faster at outlining comes from volume.

Not theory.

Reading about how to outline will only take you so far. You need to act on what you’ve read. If not, this has all been a waste of your time.

Follow this drill to write lots of bad outlines first, before you can start writing great ones quick.

Read more

Safe to say things are getting serious.

I don’t mean to scaremonger saying this, but.

We are losing the ability to stretch our minds on a collective level.

This absolutely should frighten you.

Most people don’t read books anymore.

Most people would rather have a Wikipedia article summarized for them.

Most people would rather let a phone tear their focus in 100 different directions within five minutes of waking up… than to enjoy the bliss of that first golden hour of being awake.

And most people think they’re still thinking.

Just know I say… most people… as a signal of hope.

I never wanted to be a writer.

Which I’m happy is no longer the case. I just turned 23, and I’m sitting here at 11:24am, sipping my first americano of the day, with documents full of profound ideas, and bullet point outlines, scattered across tabs on the monitor to my left.

Since I was a teenager, I’ve always had a thirst for profound ideas across old books and YouTube video essays. I would spend every spare second of thinking time building my second brain, anytime I wasn’t doing maths homework or finishing my undergrad thesis.

I’ve always had a strong desire to be a deeply intellectual person. More importantly, I’ve always wanted to live like one.

To spend my days reading.

To spend my days thinking.

Writing, and creating solutions to problems that might help me suffer less on a day to day basis.

I used to view writing as a torture method that was tedious and draining to my brain. And school has a big effect on why most people still think this.

Those same people have never used writing to stretch their mind beyond what they believe, simply to test if they should still be believing in it.

This essay is about regaining what our generation is starting to lose.

I have 2 profound ideas to share with you, and a plan you can start today, for living a life for maximizing your intellectual capabilities.

A deeply intellectual way of life.

It’s our responsibility as the hinge generation to not lose our intellectual faculties.

Who knows what “geniuses” will be running the world that our kids will live in.

You’ll have to think with this one.

But don’t worry, we’ll think through it together.

Idea I - How surface-level thinking became the new normal

Profound Idea: Stupid thinking begins when questions stop being asked.

It has never been easier to feel informed while understanding nothing.

There are a number of forces at play here:

The dominant emergence of short form content, engineered phone addiction, and AI outputs you can skim in seconds.

But do you know what every one of those forces do?

They make the appearance of understanding feel effortless.

I am here to remind you, and myself, in writing this…

…that the actual cognitive work needed to understand something has not changed whatsoever.

Not.

One.

Bit.

You can get a Wikipedia article summarized for you in seconds. You can watch a 60-second reel that “explains” how to learn anything fast like a Grade-A student. Heck, you can ask AI to breakdown the structure and mechanisms beneath this exact piece of content if you want. And when you’ve done those things, you feel like you understand it.

Nah.

Being informed is not the same as being enlightened.

Knowing what claim is being made in an information source, is not the same as knowing what the claim is and understanding why it’s true, and how it’s relevant to other claims.

Profound Idea: Surface-level thinking lives and dances around like a jolly ol’ clown within that gap between knowing and understanding.

There are some general traits to beware of here:

• Surface-level thinking is black and white - You’re either pro or anti AI, right or left, or believe any one thing is wrong or right with absolute certainty.

• Surface-level thinking is quick, tribal, and a means to an end - There isn’t a more a dangerous, self-limiting idea than thinking of education as something to be ticked off or completed. Let alone in just one 4 year period, or when a governing body says you are “competent” now, in the form of a piece of paper.

• Surface-level thinking is when you have no direct control over your water supply of information - How much is flowing, and where from.

These traits are symptoms that you are skipping the deep and important contemplative work.

How so?

Profound Idea: Overstimulation increases the threshold for what gets perceived as stimulating and thus interesting to your brain.

Who needs to feel bored when you can whip open Instagram reels or YouTube shorts while waiting in line for a coffee?

Long walks. Reading hard shit. Mind mapping for an evening or two each week. Training your focus by narrowing in your field of vision at a singular dot on a wall for 20-60 seconds (try it).

This would sound and feel like death to an overstimulated mind.

An overstimulated mind will always reach for surface-level thinking because it’s the easier and faster kind of thinking.

I actually wrote the outline for this by hand just for the thrill of testing myself, and seeing where I could improve my thinking. It’s only when you step away from all forms of digital technology (AI especially) and let your mind think (alone, uninterrupted, with no tools but your own brain) that you realize how hard thinking is, and how little of it you actually do.

“Ok Craig. So why give two shits?”

Our water supply of information has been poisoned by surface-level thinking and therefore surface-level ideas.

AND it’s overflowing.

Which is not something to let slide (please resist the urge to skim past this here) because human beings are tool builders at a fundamental level.

We build homes to keep us warm and protect us from nature. We create systems to help us achieve positive outcomes that would help us in our day to day lives. We create solutions based on the materials… the information… we have available to us.

Clear, simple, basic thinking has never been more valuable.

And you need to be deliberate about every single thing in your life if you expect to combat this.

You need contemplation.

It is the one thing every force of modern life is actively fighting to take away from you.

Idea II - The three levers of profound thinking

What you let into your brain, and how you think about it, determines what goes out.

This determines your life.

Everything you consume today will downstream the thoughts you have later today, tomorrow, and in the future. If you consume creative, productive, and profound ideas, your work will be creative, productive, and profound.

But if you input is shit?

Profound Idea: Focus is the removal of options, and surface-level thinking begins when curiosity disappears.

The purpose of living an intellectual (deliberate) life is to take as much control over your intellectual faculties as possible.

My writing has suffered recently because I’m not learning as much. I thought it was because I was doing too much writing (output). Nope, my input had decreased without me being aware of it. Now that I’m aware of it, I can give my attention to it, think about the problem and solve it.

Why is this relevant?

Ideas need to be diverse and abundant.

That is what leads to original, new, and novel ideas.

Profound Idea: I personally see originality as a progression or furthering of an idea.

Nietzsche read the works of Plato. I learned jiu-jitsu first from my coach who has his black belt. We go to school and learn of these complex explanations of how certain things happen to be true (from books, lectures, PowerPoints) so we can understand them, before creating our own explanations of those same truths.

I encourage you to try do 10 hard rounds of jiu-jitsu on no fuel. Or to read a chapter of a book after being awake for 36 hours.

You need a high-quality input source (information) in order to process information to a high-quality (thinking), to go out and do something high-quality (create).

Which leads me onto what I’m calling the three levers of profound thinking.

Because a contemplative life consists of three parts: what goes in, how you process it, and what you do with it.

Each part has a lever.

(1) Curation - the input lever

Curation is the filter for what enters your mind.

If you don’t curate your feed, algorithms will do it for you, which will thus determine what you expose yourself to, and therefore focus on and think about.

Pretty spooky.

Curation is like putting a dam before the overflowing content pipeline of sludge and slop.

Without it, you are handing the first stage of your thinking to an algorithm that has one purpose, and that is to keep you scrolling (attention > understanding).

(2) Curiosity - the processing lever

Be curious, not judgmental. - Ted Lasso

Yes, I know that idea is originally from Walt Whitman, and no, I will not quote him, because quoting Sir Lasso literally proves my point on originality.

Curiosity is the antidote to ignorant thinking.

People who judge simply aren’t curious. And we judge people based on what we lack in ourselves (or what we consciously or unconsciously perceive to be lacking in ourselves).

Curation controls what goes in to your mind. But curiosity determines what you do with it once it’s there. Think receiving information vs actually thinking about it, or “consumption” vs “digestion” in the learning/self-education niche online (my roots).

(3) Creativity - the output lever

Create something.

A routine, a relationship, a body of work people can spend weeks and months exploring. If you don’t create a life for yourself, you will be handed one. You have to go out and build it.

You need to create a routine. Create some systems. Create a plan to go to the shops and buy a notebook and make a template for planning out your days.

Of course I’m going to mention writing.

Profound Idea: Writing is a voyage of discovery into the unknown and murky waters of your own mind, to shine a flashlight on what you believe to be true.

I actually wrote a 2000 word draft of this newsletter and realized I wasn’t happy with it.

I discovered what I thought by writing, and then writing again, which is why I was late getting this out.

Depth matters more now than volume, anyways, since everyone insists on posting cadences and “the right method” for content. The secret lies in doing less but better.

That’s a lot we just went over.

In sum:

• Curate your input.

• Process it with curiosity.

• Create something from it.

Repeat the cycle for as long as you are breathing and you will live a deeply intellectual life.

The deeply intellectual life: control your input, sharpen your processing, and raise the quality of your output

So we need to improve two things: focus and thinking.

I am not going to think here for you. In fact, I’m only giving you a line or two at most for each action step. Because I want you to practice what we have been preaching inside our minds here, me as I write this, and you as you’ve been reading this.

You need to curate sources. Do your own research. Explore different perspectives and compare/contrast them.

You need to think and figure this out for yourself.

Curation - control what enters your mind

Step 1: Subscribe to 5-10 creators at most

If not, your feed will do it for you, so be deliberate about whose ideas you want entering your mind (what you consume will determine the opportunities and problems you see).

Step 2: Ignore all social media for 3 days straight

I don’t care. Just do it. Use an app blocker if you have to.

You’ll have your curated subscription feed ready for you once you’ve desensitized yourself completely.

Step 3: Once your 3 days is up, keep social media deleted off your phone (laptop only)

Keep WhatsApp or any communication platforms only. Just no scrolling. If you need a social platform, only use it at a computer.

Step 4: Download an app blocker you can’t turn off

I swear by Opal, although the recent updates have made the app feel clunky to use. I use this for blocking Spotify mostly, and email access.

Curiosity - process what you consume

Step 5: Read paperback books

15-30 minutes a day is huge. Reading is a meditative practice that literally improves focus by forcing you to narrow your gaze to one word at a time while you read.

Step 6: Be bored a lot

If you can do 3-4 hours on a weekend or day off, great. An hour is optimal each day, even once a day split into two 30 minute chunks.

Step 7: Music for just an hour each day.

I don’t care. Block it when your limit is up.

Step 8: 15-30 mins a day of using your cognitive faculties

Reading paperback books. Mind mapping on paper. Journaling or writing by hand. Lecturing on a topic to an invisible audience while walking around your local park.

Step 9: Meditate

I like the Waking Up app.

Creativity - do something real with your thinking

Step 10: Give yourself a meaningful problem to solve each week

45-60 mins first thing each day (if you can) working on one project (build a newsletter, learn to write long form, learn to draw or read, understand learning science, build an intuitive comprehension of Existentialist philosophy or the art of cooking steaks).

Anything.

Step 11: Buy a notebook to plan your days

I plan my day simply:

2-4 high ROI tasks first thing, 45-90mins per task (I’ve been testing this the last while), which gets me to about 3-4 hours of deep work per day

I’ll leave you with that.

Go on a walk. Think about what we thought through together.

That is how I suggest we start reclaiming our minds by actually using our minds.

Curate.

Question.

Create.

I value your time and attention a lot more than you realize.

Thank you for having an interest in profound ideas like I do.

You’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

If you’d like a complete system for writing long-form about your interests and ideas online - and build an audience doing so - check out The Profound Writer.

You can read on from here:

Let me tell you about this profound idea, so we both don’t have certain regrets lying on our death bed.

Listen while on a walk:

Most people will waste their lives focusing on the wrong things inside their head.

Thoughts about painful past mistakes we regret.

Thoughts about stressful future happenings that might happen.

Desires of hunger and short term pleasure to escape facing those thoughts.

A chaotic list of tasks that need to be finished, and open loops that come from any unfinished tasks.

I have experienced every one of those points in my 23 years of being alive.

I wanted to be a filmmaker when I was younger. I loved making short-films, Lego stop-motion movies, and writing terrible screenplays on my summer holidays (Christopher Nolan was my intellectual hero).

I never struggled with getting a dopaminergic rush of ideas. But they didn’t always feel nice.

I’ve always struggled with my mind. It feels like overthink everything and feel everything too deeply. I know I know, that seems to be the universal story that everybody tells about their own mind…

I shouldn’t say “mind.”

I should say what you focus on.

Attention, if it is left sitting idle, without a clear vessel for it to steer against the wind, will cause suffering deep within your unconscious mind.

For me, deep down, all of it WAS creative energy that was causing me to suffer. Which makes attention and focus even more paramount if you’re a creative person.

How can you unfuck your attention span?

How can you take full control of your mind?

How can you learn how to focus (once and for all) so you never have to read another “fix your focus/attention span/stop procrastinating” listicle ever again?

I have 3 ideas to share with you about why nobody can seem to solve the problem of attention and focus. We will think through them together.

And then I’ll propose an action plan (woohoo) for living a deeply intellectual life.

Idea 1 - What you focus on IS your life

People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable clients. They make a mountain out of a molehill, fuss about unnecessary things, are too passionately in love with somebody who is not worth so much attention, and so on. There is a kind of floating charge of energy in them which is not attached to its right object and therefore tends to apply exaggerated dynamism to the wrong situation.

Marie-Louise von Franz

I don’t think there has ever been a larger generation of minds with their attention being so damn misdirected.

Listen.

You were not made to have your attention get torn in 1000 different directions within 5 minutes of waking up.

How can one control their attention, then? Is it even possible?

Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love - is the sum of what you focus on.

Everyone loves citing that line from Cal Newport in his book Deep Work. I’m a big fan of Cal, don’t get me wrong.

But do you know who Cal got that quote from? There are 3 important words that come before that line in his book:

As Gallagher summarizes: “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love - is the sum of what you focus on.”

Let me tell you about Winifred Gallagher.

When Gallagher got diagnosed with cancer, she made a conscious decision to not let the diagnosis direct her attention to any “what ifs,” and instead, she made an effort to focus on the good things in her life, in the present moment, because she knew the present moment was the only thing that was certain.

That idea helped her through her treatment. And it became the thesis behind her book Rapt.

Your life is the creation of what you focus on - and what you don’t.

Winifred Gallagher

Gallagher didn’t have absolute control over her circumstances, but she did have absolute control over what she attended to. Which changed her entire perspective on experiencing what it meant to be alive and human.

Back to the opening line of this essay...

What you focus on creates what you become.

But what is “attention?”

What does it mean? Like, on a deeper level than most people are willing to explore? Because we throw the word around left right and centre... while we’re still being bear-trapped by our phones?

Let me show you.

Idea 2 - The origin of the word “attention”

The word attention comes from the Latin word ad tendere.

Which means “to stretch toward.”

Anytime I personally think of the word attention, I think to physically attend to something. I attend to my writing routine every morning, my chores, my responsibilities.

One of the (many) definitions of the word attend, is “to be present.”

Attending implies being physically present, yes.

Paying attention implies making a transaction.

You pay attention, or you sacrifice your attention for one thing at the expense of attending something else.

See how this all starts making sense?

To focus is to hone in on something. Focus being a spectrum. Like the tip of an arrow head, when you are constricting your vision to one point (one dot on a wall, one tab open, one task, one present moment).

Or it can widen. In which you let your focus wander (often called creative thinking, where “shower thoughts” come from via the brain’s default mode network).

And “to stretch toward,” implies reaching for something you want.

What you focus on, attend to, stretch toward, and pay your limited attention for, at the expense of other things... is what determines everything in your life.

Who you are.

What you think.

What you feel.

And what goals you achieve.

There is also no difference between attention and love.

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone Weil

I like this idea. When you love somebody or something, you attend to it.

Attention, or focus, is the most profound form of generosity and rebellion. You rebel against what you don’t want to have happen in your life by focusing on the opposite things.

Think having a vision and an anti-vision.

A life you want to attain (7-9 hours of sleep daily, no screens after 10pm) and thus avoid (exhausted all day, splitting headaches when you wake up, can only write later in the day).

If you focus on things making you miserable, what will you see? Really think about that for a second…

What are you currently attending to and stretching toward with every second of your time across every day and week? You can quite literally find an answer to that question (it’s one of our action steps, actually!)

You need to protect your capacity for focused attention like your life depends on it.

It does.

So why can’t any of us actually do it, then?

Idea 3 - Depth is the new moat

Every writer and creator has written about focus and attention at some point.

I think the reason is simple.

We view attention and focus as a means to solve our productivity goals.

But what about identity?

Being super productive will solve all your productivity problems. Just like how having lots of money would solve all your money problems. But meaning, happiness, fulfilment, and enjoying your life with content in every present moment?

Different fucking story.

If you are so smart, why aren’t you happy?

The market (social media platforms) currently face two very modern problems:

1. People are consuming content without paying much attention to what they are consuming - They read or listen passively, not actively. They think they are thinking. And they numb their minds with doomscrolling short AND long form content... yes, you can doomscroll a long form post or video. Wake up.

2. The cost of creating content is practically zero - AI can write it, post it, and “optimize” it... which means the amount of content (or advertising, in better words) competing for people’s attention online is about to go vertical.

And if you’ve looked online at all recently, you can clearly tell that the people creating that slop content, aren’t giving much of their attention to the final product either...

How paradoxical.

People are getting sick of this.

Volume is no longer an advantage. If it were, posting 3 newsletters per week and 10 short form posts per day would mean you are winning. Which naturally means:

Depth is the new moat.

Depth of ideas, perspectives, synthesis and novelty. If everyone is doing volume, do depth. Do the opposite. If you understand market sophistication, you’ll know that people get sick of seeing the same things that used to “work.”

This is why I only post one long-form essay (newsletter) a week (and post short form when I feel like it) about what I’m learning and thinking about that week (philosophy, psychology, learning science, books I’m reading, and now writing).

In 15 months, that cultivated over 50k+ newsletter subs, and 75k+ total subs across two long-form platforms.

If I give myself a full week to write a newsletter, it means I can put more of my attention and thus thinking power toward it across DAYS.

Not 3 hours, hit send, and wonder why nobody reads the damn thing.

Your competitive edge as a creative person is the quality of attention behind the work.

Readers can feel it.

And attention, my friend, is quite literally a practice.

How to live a deeply intellectual life

Run an audit on your life

You could track everything you do across a week in a calendar to see where your focus is going, and what exactly you’re focusing on.

But I’d rather give you something you can do now this second.

Some of us don’t have all week.

Take out a page and write down everything you do. Or at least everything you think you do. Work, relationships, hobbies, morning and night time routines...

The purpose of this little audit is to see what’s filling your time (and therefore taking up your attention) and ruthlessly cutting everything that does not serve what you want from life. I’m not asking you for a perfect life plan here either. We all know certain things we’d love to start doing… and what things we could and should be doing to benefit us.

Here’s a short list as an example, for me:

• Writing content (newsletter, short form)

• Building digital products/paid newsletters

• Walking (idea generation) while listening to educational content, podcasts, lectures, articles etc.

• Lifting weights

• BJJ

• Meal prep

• Scrolling on Instagram…

Aha!

I didn’t like that last one on my list, so here’s what I did with it.

Turn your iPhone into a block of metal

I’m halfway through a 2 week experiment.

I activated grayscale mode on my phone. Which means it no longer has any colors on it (my phone is very uninteresting to look at and thus attend to now).

I deleted all social media apps off my phone. I can only access Substack, YouTube, and X on my computer.

I blocked any access to emails and turned off all notifications on my phone. Yes, all of them. Except for phone calls and WhatsApp for close friends and family. I use Opal to block Spotify, my email provider, and Audible, for when it’s time to work or enter the default mode network. Which is the brain’s network for feeling bored (great).

The reason I’ve done this… and I’ll be as honest as possible, as I always try to be, is this:

I want to be a writer.

My newsletter is growing by hundreds of email subs per day, and I’m building the version 2 of The Profound Writer, and I just made a plan for the next year’s worth of content for my paid newsletter. And I want to run a cohort at some point in the next 3-6 months teaching people how to write long-form like I do.

Doomscrolling on Instagram does not help me serve that goal. So I’ve removed it. I can scroll on my laptop if I want. I’m yet to do it.

Focus is the removal of options.

Which means I have a competitive edge over every other writer and creator not doing what I’m doing. Which is why I keep getting DMs asking me about why my idea quality is so high.

I do what I can to give myself as much thinking power as possible for thinking about what I write about.

And living life in a meaningful and deliberate way involves cutting out anything that doesn’t serve your goals.

Start creating!

Anything.

Software. An app. An essay. A newsletter. A body. A mind. A relationship. A routine.

How can you not be excited to wake up and avoid your phone all day when you have the chance to create something new?

I recommend writing.

Long-form, I mean. Essays, articles, newsletters… that’s my area of expertise. In particular, writing long-form about your genuine interests and deep ideas, but in a way that can capture and maintain attention, while also persuading people of the value of your interests and ideas in a clear way.

I recommend spending the first 30-90 minutes of your day building something new.

Most people won’t be awake, and there’s a type of self-care that comes with carving that time out of your morning, before work, even, to devote to yourself and moving the needle toward the life you want for yourself.

One needle, one day at a time.

Focus on one thing at a time

Every morning I write down my 2-3 highest priority tasks in my notebook.

My thinking being:

What is the highest ROI (return on investment) action I could do today?

In simple words, what tiny action would bring about the most results? Think the 80/20 rule, what 80% of outcomes come from 20% of your actions.

That becomes my first task of the day (for me, that’s building digital products/paid newsletters, because that’s how I earn a living doing this full time now).

Then, I build my day around single-focus time blocks.

What do I mean by this?

When it’s time to write, I write. When it’s time to do jiu-jitsu or hang out with my girlfriend or see the lads every Friday night, I don’t think about writing.

The purpose of a calendar is to allocate time for focusing on one thing. Every hour. You need something scheduled in.

Here’s what I did yesterday for example:

I didn’t follow it down to the second. But I did try my best - I’m only human - to focus on just one thing per time block. That’s why we use a calendar, for designating focus.

Outwork everyone by being bored

Your best ideas come from being bored.

Boredom is the space that lets your brain make novel connections, so it can stir up the most profound ideas to write about. Which, is what you want. Depth is the moat, remember?

If you don’t want the same results that everybody else gets, don’t do what everybody else is doing.

That’s why I’ve turned my phone into a Nokia, pretty much, so I can write more, and with a better quality of ideas than everyone else pumping out slop. If you want social proof to show that this works, you know where to look.

For aspiring writers/creators looking to start writing online, here are some free templates and checklists you can check out that I currently use:

• My long-form writing checklist - So I don’t forget to include the objective/timeless principles that make my writing highly impactful

• My profound idea generation template - How I capture, organize, and generate deep ideas to write about each week before outlining

I’m halfway through the outline for the next version of The Profound Writer. If you want to build an audience and a meaningful body of work writing about your own interests and ideas like I do, I share my full writing/content system inside the course. Feel free to see if it’s for you by clicking here.

I’ll be working through my list of paid newsletter topics too. If you want to join the paid-tier before the price increases at some point in the next few weeks, you can do that today.

Apart from that, that is all for this week.

You are, as always, an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

Read on:

Knowledge.

How do you build knowledge?

Well, you expose yourself to new ideas you have never encountered before, through research.

Research is no different than learning.

Which is why this prompt will excite you.

Learning that feels purposeful always starts with a meaningful question. That is what writing is. An answer (solution) to a question (topic, headline, problem etc.) you feel a deep and curious desire to solve.

This prompt can be addictive to use, and make researching incredibly fun. Like how all learning can be, when you let your curiosity run wild, like a child who has just discovered that questioning is a thing.

This prompt has two modes.

The first will synthesize and analyze your research sources for the week.

Assuming you have a long-form topic to be researching, thinking, and writing about every week. The reason why behind letting AI synthesize sources, is so you can spend more time thinking and less time organizing. Spending 2 hours scanning through 4 different articles to find 3 tiny paragraphs is not acceptable anymore.

The second mode is for letting AI do its own research, into a topic of your choosing. It will help you discover novel concepts to write about (that other people won’t think to write about) which will make your writing stand out. The human brain loves novelty.

Using this prompt will feel like you’re talking to an infinite library full of books. Cool, right?

Copy and paste it into Gemini. I find I get better outputs using it for researching, than with Claude or ChatGPT.

And one more thing.

If you are handing this prompt multiple articles, essays, or YouTube transcripts, you might need to hand over each source one at a time. Especially if you do use Gemini.

I trust that I don’t need to teach you how to do that.

Here’s the prompt:

Read more

I’m only 23, but writing on the internet has changed my life.

I’m not a millionaire. I don’t have millions of followers across every platform. I have 49k newsletter subs and 24k subs on YouTube.

But I built both of those in the last 15 months writing about philosophy, psychology, and whatever profound ideas I happened to be thinking about each week.

And for reasons I honestly can’t explain, my newsletter still grows by 300-500 email subs every day.

I never liked the idea of building a personal brand or having my face online. Let alone the fear of being ridiculed over what I had to say. I’ve made 10,000 mistakes in the last 3 months when it comes to writing these newsletters each week, but I’ve also gained a lot of insights I’m excited to share.

If you’re looking to write about the books you’ve been reading, or something you’ve been learning or thinking about deeply, or your own genuine interests and ideas on the internet, and at least have a small corner of the internet that cares, this is a great place to start. Especially since I’m in much closer proximity to those starting out than most people teaching this.

If you’re stuck in “beginner hell” screaming into the void with your content each week, and you’re about to quit because you think social media has everything to do with luck... yeah. That’s not true.

All of this, is a skill.

Skills can be learned.

Here are 3 profound ideas I’ve been thinking about this week, to give you a big picture understanding of what writing will bring to your life. Then I want to put those ideas together into the content system I currently use, so you can actually follow it as a normal person like me.

And I have a free long-form checklist (at the bottom of this newsletter) you can copy and paste from my workspace directly, to help you start writing long-form like I do.

Listen to my barely comprehensible Irish accent here:

Idea I - Write to think clearly

Everybody thinks they’re great at thinking until they write.

Writing is formalized thinking.

A lot of people are destined to live their entire lives with thoughts they can never properly express.

It is shocking to me that with access to infinite information, we might end up being the dumbest generation that has ever lived. We consume more information than any generation in history on a day-to-day basis... and when the moment comes to actually say something about all that information?

we say fuck-all :/

Writing by hand might be better than typing.

It forces you to slow the fuck down. There is no way of writing on paper without having to hold information inside your brain for longer, and to manipulate, stretch, and organize it carefully, as you write each word.

It’s like taking one step at a time, in the dark, with nothing but a small wax candle in your hand, not knowing where you are going until you take each step.

You can discover what you understand about yourself, everything that has ever happened to you in your life, and the world around you, simply by testing your ability to explain what you believe to be true.

You do that by writing.

If you live in Ireland like me you’ll still see stone bridges that were built a few hundred years ago in perfect condition. But whether or not those builders could have explained why the bridge stands, or would remain staying up until 2026...

Good explanations are hard to vary.

By that, I mean if a tiny detail in an explanation were to change, the entire explanation would fall apart.

A builder of stone bridges, who understands the physics behind why an arch is even possible, they would have an explanation that is hard to vary. But what if you got a builder to copy the last builder they saw, with no explanation as to why arches work?

One small error, and their bridge would fall apart.

Writing from an outline is still just... you giving a more detailed explanation of the outline. Every sentence, every idea you write about is you testing whether or not you can explain it fully, so it can stand on its own two legs and not fall apart.

And explanations can always keep getting better. I still can’t fully wrap my head around why we’re floating on a rock through space. And whatever all this is... such a beautiful thing!

Here is a framework I’ve been using to straighten out my thinking:

• What is the claim?

• Why is it true?

• How does it benefit your life?

I wrote about this framework in How to become dangerously intelligent.

I love drinking an americano while I write every morning.

Caffeine helps sharpen my focus. It acts as a great antioxidant, which helps that I’m experimenting with intermittent fasting at the minute. And over the last 14 months of writing online it has become a strong signal to my brain that it’s time to drop into focus and write something profound.

My own understanding feels tested as I write this section while sitting in an Airbnb hut.

But is writing just a tool for thinking?

No.

It has a second purpose...

Idea II - Write to become high-value

Everything you think and do is already persuading people of your value as a person.

Whether you look after your health or not, or whether or now you smile at people or avoid eye contact. Whether you go out and do things with your life or sit inside all day scrolling or playing Xbox (I’m looking at you, 16 year old Craig).

People are already making judgements about you based on what they see.

Writing is a tool for thinking, yes. Writing is also a tool for communicating what you think so it can be perceived as valuable. Not everything you think or do is inherently valuable to other people. People only see things as beneficial if benefits are shown.

Society is built upon the principle of mutual benefit.

Before money existed, people traded goods because both sides saw something beneficial in the exchange. People exchange value for value, but value is subjective. It depends upon a person’s goals, desires, and problems.

If you can solve a problem for someone, reduce their suffering a little, or help them reach an outcome they truly care about reaching, that is value. But they need to know that the problem and solution exists in the first place.

Pay attention to this part:

If you can’t articulate clearly the value of what you think, don’t expect other people to see that value clearly themselves.

Ah yes. The starving artist.

They starve because they don’t let people see a clear beneficial reason for viewing their art and paying for it.

If you expect your content to stand out amongst the hundreds of thousands of hours being pumped out every day, now with AI like a slot machine, which is why I always give myself a full week of thinking to write one of these newsletters, learning to capture and maintain attention is a non-negotiable.

Same with communicating the benefits of what you think, once you have people’s attention first.

I can’t help you if you don’t know I exist, and I can’t get you interested in what I have to say if you have noise-cancelling headphones on.

Writing is a two-player game.

I write my titles to grab attention and sound attractive to new people who might have never heard of me before. I explain my ideas simply and clearly, not cleverly, as if somebody has never read them before, and is hearing everything I have to say for the first time.

Why would I torture you into reading massive unedited blocks of text full of jargon? It’s a pain in the ass (and mind) to read.

Communicating the value of what you think requires three things:

1. A problem to solve

2. A beneficial solution you can bring about yourself

3. Your unique way of moving from problem to solution

That third thing comes specifically from your genuine interests and ideas.

That’s why I’ve used explanations as my example for why writing is a form of thinking. It interests me, and I first came across it from David Deutsch :)

I recommend you spend some time thinking (writing) about your explanations to some problems you can solve. Create your own unique solutions that you couldn’t get from ChatGPT, and stress test your understanding of them.

AND THEN.

Learn to communicate why those solutions are valuable to other people.

Which leads us to a third purpose of writing.

Idea III - Write to create leverage

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. - Archimedes

Long before the printing press was invented, the communication of valuable ideas was done primarily through spoken word.

Socrates hated the idea of writing. He thought it would weaken the mind’s capacity for memory and genuine understanding. And yet we only know he said any of this because philosophers like Plato wrote it down...

Then the Gutenberg press came along and it decentralized knowledge. Before that, you would have needed a scribe or a monastery to copy a single book, word for word, by hand. Now anyone can pick up a printed text, and receive ideas from any mind, dead or alive.

This pissed off a lot of elitists (obviously). The internet did the same thing.

I was listening to Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom podcast with Naval during the week. I wanted to hear Naval’s perspective on mindfulness and meditation (something I’ve been learning about recently).

In the past, Naval has defined the three types of leverage as such:

• Labor - Other people working for you

• Capital - Money to fund the work you do

• Media & Code - Content or programs that get built once, and can keep working and reaching people forever

Labor and capital require permission. You need people to agree to work with you, and you need people to willingly give you their money in exchange for value (product/service).

Media and code are different. They don’t require permission.

I’m not going to talk about code because I have no experience with it, and I won’t teach something I don’t have experience with. With media however, you can write a long-form post like this one, talking about ideas you’ve been learning and thinking about, and let it be seen by millions of people.

I am not a fucking millionaire.

I am still in the process of building my personal brand, we’re 15 months in! I’m writing about this today because, in all honesty, I wanted to learn more about it. But Naval’s ideas are spot on, and I think they’re worth thinking about seriously.

I began my newsletter as an SEO blog.

Back then, I would’ve rather spent (and I did spend) hundreds of hours building a faceless blog from scratch... than starting a personal brand. I was petrified of sharing my ideas online. Even though I always dreamt of being able to articulate myself in an impactful way, as to help other people suffer less in their daily lives.

I have always had a profound interest in deep ideas, and thinking about them always had such a beneficial impact on how I lived my life. And living in the area I live in, the amount of people who had an interest in that kind of thing was slim, apart from a few friends. I never really thought I could have built a following or a business talking about them.

Especially now, when everyone online is selling how to build a personal brand or an online business or start writing online... so few of them talk about genuine interests and ideas in their content.

It’s the circular logic fallacy.

People making money only by teaching others how to make money.

People teaching how to grow an audience, by only writing content about how to grow an audience, which is how they grew their audience...

Where are the interests? The profound ideas? Isn’t this why people are actually joining the creator economy?

• I began writing about learning and the books I was reading.

• I had built a few thousand followers within 3-6 months.

• Then I started writing about learning science, The Myth of Sisyphus, and deep ideas that were self-improvement focused. Next thing I knew, I was a Substack bestseller with hundreds of email subs coming in per day.

• Then I pivoted. I focused more on philosophical ideas, self-development, and now, I’m focusing more on long-form writing. Only because I don’t stop getting asked about it.

And because I have proof that you can write about your interests and ideas and actually build a fucking audience. There’s no circular logic here. It’s all I keep seeing everywhere else, and it pains me that people don’t see it too.

My YouTube and Spotify need more work.

I recently joined X.

I’m positive I can build a following there too, because of iteration and educated trial and error.

I have found one long-form post per week to be all you need. That’s all I’ve needed, and I think it’s enough to build a small corner of the internet for fellow legends to become profound thinkers.

Writing has three purposes:

1. Thinking

2. Communicating value

3. Leverage

So how the fuck do you do this, while still working a full-time job like I used to, having an actual life, and without needing to wake up at 5am and hitting a cold shower living that “entrepreneur lifestyle?”

The Profound Long-Form Content System

Step 0: Give yourself a corner on the internet

Substack gives you your own website, a short form feed, and an email list.

You could skip posting short form there entirely and just post long form. That is why I like it.

I’m down bad for Substack for lots of reasons, but the obvious ones are that you don’t need to build a website from scratch (like I wasted time doing). Which means you don’t need to learn to code or host a website on your own either.

It takes 15 minutes tops to sign up. You could also join X, since that is where people are reading long-form too, and post your Substack newsletter on there as an X article.

Sign up, write one long-form newsletter each week, and publish it. Repeat that loop of write, publish, write, publish, write...

Simple, and free.

Step 1: Choose a title to write about each week

The title is 70% of the content game.

If nobody clicks, nobody reads.

Make it broad, beginner friendly, and attention grabbing.

Think of your title as a doorway to a house. You can talk about your niche and esoteric ideas once you’ve gotten people through the door, but you need to get people in the house first before encouraging them to explore the house themselves!

Find the intersection between validation and interest.

What do I mean by this?

Find the intersection between what you’re genuinely interested in and what a broad audience would care about (if you wrote about that title).

90% of people scrolling on social media aren’t looking for anything specific. They want to discover something that attracts their attention. And those same 90% of people are beginners in what you talk about.

Explain your ideas and concepts to them as if it’s their first time hearing them.

Write your title with the reader in mind.

A recent example:

I wanted to write about a thinking framework I had been testing known as the what-why-how framework. If my title were “The what-why-how framework explained,” that’s not likely to grab attention. I might read it, but I’m not everyone.

So I positioned it as How to become dangerously intelligent.

It did quite well.

And that title was inspired by this post title, which is one of my most viewed long-form posts ever: How to become dangerously articulate.

For finding high-performing titles and ideas, I use Eden. The market research features are unbelievable. You can find tons of validated titles to write about within minutes. I save high-performing titles to a folder and scan through it when I’m looking to write my newsletter each week, for anything that sparks my interest.

Once you have your title, next up is knowing what to actually write about. If you nail this, you nail the outline, and the outline is 80% of the writing process.

Step 2: Never run out of profound ideas to write about

I go on walks for 20 minutes one to three times a day. This is my time for researching (learning) and idea generation.

You already have all the material you need to start writing with.

Think of coming up with ideas under the following three types of proof. What I call the profound proof taxonomy:

• Past problems you’ve solved

• Present problems you’re solving right now

• Future problems you’re thinking about solving

Solve your own problems. Write about the solutions.

This is all I’ve been doing for the last 15 months.

You don’t need to be an expert to write about something. Not really. You need to be interested, but you also need to show relevant proof about where you currently stand in relation to what you are writing about.

I wrote a newsletter talking about learning science and mind mapping, and I showed a couple of mind maps I had drawn that week in my content as proof. Which creates a ton of trust, because I have shown my work.

Show your work!

You will only run out of ideas when people run out of problems.

Which won’t happen.

Step 3: The writing process, briefly

I don’t like using AI to write for me.

It takes all the fun away, and you can spot AI content from a mile away. Although, I do think you should absolutely be using AI for researching, brainstorming, stress testing ideas, and outlining fast as lightning.

Like laying down the foundation so you can start building on it quickly.

My process briefly:

I have a long-form checklist that I hand to an AI chat.

It describes what my final piece should be doing in terms of mechanics.

3-6 key points, start each newsletter with a pattern interrupt, hook is 100-300 words etc.

I’ve broken down my best newsletters (and my flops, we love a good flop!)... and compared them, then doubled down on what works, so I can keep doing it each week.

Really, I love using checklists because (1) I won’t forget to include a principle every time I write, and (2) they are objective standards. None of this whole “AI being a sycophantic yes-man.”

It means you don’t need tons of prompts or agents or any of that complicated bullshit.

You have one, evolving checklist document, that says “do not forget to include these principles for each newsletter.”

If I want to experiment with something new (like storytelling, this week) I will give the checklist context on what brilliant examples of storytelling looks like, so I can extract those principles, and make sure I don’t forget to include them next week.

I’ve updated my current checklist at least 15-20 times in the last 2 months.

Right now, I’ve been researching, brainstorming and stress testing ideas, and outlining all at the same time.

I used to use individual prompts, which do have their place when you’re starting out. Prompts are excellent training wheels. But really, those phases I mentioned are levels. They should be happening all at once if you’re a skilled writer.

Now I’m experimenting with having a rough outline of the key points I want to make, writing a really shitty draft quickly, then fleshing out and stress testing what I have written across the week.

I spend about 30-60 minutes per day writing my newsletter.

I was late getting this out, I can already feel my thinking quickly starting to dip as I write this. But hey! It’s feedback for next week. I already know I spent too long this week researching THEN ideating THEN outlining THEN stress testing the outline... and by then half the week was gone and I hadn’t written a single section yet.

My point:

I’m dropping the one-phase-at-a-time approach for the simultaneous approach.

Mistakes are good for feedback.

Anyways. If you can nail the outline, the writing happens itself.

Step 4: Write one section per day and live your damn life

I write one section per day.

Each section is about 500 words. If I get into a flow I’ll do more. But I don’t force more than that.

I write first thing in the morning. I wake up at 8am because I’m a normal person. No cold showers for me, thank you very much.

I go on walks. I consume lectures and podcasts and articles on my title. I think. I let myself feel bored. I lift weights, do jiu-jitsu, see the boys every Friday night and watch Game of Thrones with my girlfriend.

I live my damn life.

And when an idea hits me while I’m doing something random, I write it down, and add it to my outline or newsletter directly each morning. Or I hand all my ideas over to Claude and start brainstorming.

You will always get your best ideas when you’re not trying to force them.

500 words takes roughly 30-45 minutes of physically writing. I mean, that’s so doable. I’m sure your screen time analytics would love you for swapping Instagram or TikTok scrolling out for this.

A full newsletter by the end of the week without sacrificing your relationships, your health, or the things that make your life worth living... in 500 words a day.

Step 5: Make your ideas impossible to scroll past

You can write about any topic and have it do well if you understand this:

Angle your novel ideas underneath a broad, beginner-friendly title.

You can persuade people as soon as they walk through the door.

Your unique perspective comes from your genuine interests. No two people will write the same 2000 words, about the same title, because they both have had distinct life experiences, and thus both have novel perspectives on life.

Start with a problem the reader can feel.

Show them the impact of that problem on their life if they don’t solve it.

Give them your solution that is built from your own experience (proof) and interests.

Make the benefits visible. People only see things as beneficial if benefits are shown.

Write simply, not cleverly.

Explain your ideas as if the reader has never encountered them before, and is hearing everything you have to say for the first time.

Step 6: Grow by studying what works

Study what performs well and what doesn’t.

Read other people’s high-performing writing as a researcher. With the eyes of a creator, and not a doomscroller.

Ask yourself why something grabbed your attention and what structure it used. Then try it with your own ideas.

Emulate the principles and mechanics. Not the ideas themselves. Please!

I know people give out about clickbaity titles. But they work. I’ve had a ton of people literally comment under my posts saying this is not a clickbait piece of writing, he’s actually trying to say something here.

Yes. Because I got their attention with the title and gave them my profound ideas once I got them through the door.

It also means you can be a breath of fresh air for people who do click expecting a clickbait post, by actually having something of value to offer with your unique perspective.

Imitate mechanics.

Structures, principles, and mechanisms.

Turn them into a checklist you can keep following each week.

Here is my checklist I’ve been talking about, you can copy and paste it directly from my workspace here for free. You’re not signing up for anything, just use it and go write something great!

If you do want to subscribe to my newsletter, you have the agency to do that yourself.

You’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

P.S

If you want to write long-form (essays, articles, newsletters etc.) for building an audience writing about your genuine interests and profound ideas, join 170+ students who’ve already enrolled in The Profound Writer.

Continue learning:

Intelligence is not an IQ score.

It has nothing to do with how much you know.

It has nothing to do with your genetic makeup or how lucky you are.

The world is designed to make you consume and comply rather than think and create.

Of course you’re going to let “smart people” tell you what being smart means.

There are plenty of “intelligent” people who hate the career they’ve been building their entire lives. Who don’t have a spare cent to their name. Who don’t feel remotely comfortable in their own body and mind. Who have no friends, hobbies, deep interests or curiosity for living.

And are absolutely dead-fucking miserable.

And there are plenty of dumb people who are extremely happy, healthy, and wealthy with a lot more things than just money.

I am writing this essay for a select few people.

To those drifting through life believing they will never feel smart.

To those who never saw themselves as one of “the smart kids.”

To anyone who feels they have this frustrating inability to think deeply, articulate their beliefs and opinions clearly, and organize their disorganized, chaotic thoughts.

In this essay, I will give you a 3-part framework for thinking clearly, and therefore more deeply, and overcoming any problem that life throws your way.

True intelligence is the ability to think.

True intelligence, which we will talk about, is a habit.

It is the ability to distinguish appearance from reality, and thus pick apart reality, to get what you want out of life.

You have the same fundamental brain as every mathematician, physicist, polymath, and philosopher genius who has ever lived.

You only think you’re incapable of thinking because you have never thought about thinking in the correct way.

Until this essay.

Watch this here (recommended):

Or listen while on a walk:

It starts with one thing

It is inevitable that we face problems, but no particular problem is inevitable.

- David Deutsch

Everything (eventually) falls apart.

Your body will weaken if you don’t strengthen it. Your relationships will disappear if you don’t maintain them. Notice how your bedroom always gets messy, even when you don’t consciously do anything to make it messy?

Yeah, because you’re not consciously doing anything to keep it clean either.

The default state of the universe is chaos and uncertainty.

Physics is harsh.

It does not care about who you think you are, how you feel, or how much you hate cleaning your room. And if the baseline state of reality is decay and disorder, that leads us to the following profound idea:

life is problems

This is why Jordan Peterson (regardless of your opinion) always used to say that life is suffering, and therefore a tragedy. Problems will always appear out of nowhere, randomly, and try take you out at the knees if you don’t have a defense against them.

We’ll get to that defense mechanism in a second.

Problems are also infinite.

No matter how much you think you want that new shiny object or that new goal that will finally make you happy once and for all... once you get it, there’ll be a new problem making you unhappy.

For every problem you solve, a new one appears.

Greek mythology had the Hydra. A beast with multiple snake heads. And if you cut off one head, two more would regrow to take its place.

The Greeks knew what they were talking about...

Here is our definition of intelligence.

Before any “intelligent” people start complaining at me, who themselves use IQ or grades as a shield for their own identity, and psychological survival, so they can feel higher status than those around them, by defining intelligence as something static, instead of going out and testing their quote-unquote intelligence against reality, and defining it by real-world outcomes.

IQ and grades become super useful there, I’m sure...

Intelligence is habit.

Intelligence is adaptation.

Intelligence is behaviour change based on feedback.

Intelligence is not repetition, no, but iteration.

Really, we can say that intelligence is just... thinking.

Everything I just mentioned results from thinking. Thinking is how we solve problems and create beneficial solutions that help us get what we want. Solve problems, suffer less than we have to, impose order against chaos.

Thinking is the defense mechanism, the shield, or the counterforce against the decaying, chaotic, and uncertain nature of reality.

I hate repeating it.

This quote has been beaten to death online.

But Naval, he’s just so fucking right:

The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.

- Naval Ravikant

If you do not think that thinking makes this profound idea true, you have some thinking to do.

The “what-why-how” framework

If intelligence is getting what you want out of life, and there is no difference between intelligence and thinking, then we must learn how to think.

I’m not going to teach first principles thinking, systems thinking, or any other mental model that doesn’t give a fundamental, big picture approach for thinking about anything and everything in a simple way. Without needing to know which of the many models to use and when etc. etc.

You can use this model (framework) to think about anything in an intelligent way.

And it’s so damn simple.

Really, all you need is this one framework for helping you think clearly, before thinking deeply, and thus straightening out your thoughts, half-formed opinions, and beliefs that have been implanted in your mind by external sources (school, parents, governments, algorithms).

This is how you can use thinking to get anything you want out of life, solve any problem, and suffer less.

Step 1: What (Make a claim)

What do you believe to be true?

Pick a problem that’s bothering you right now.

Think of how your health, career, or relationships are looking. Or think of a question you thought of on a morning walk, or a topic you can’t stop thinking about.

Write down, think, or state aloud what you believe the solution is.

Be bold here. Be wrong. It doesn’t matter.

For example:

• “Writing is the greatest skill I could be learning.”

• “I need to quit my job.”

• “I need to go on more walks.”

These are just claims.

A claim is an idea someone believes to be true about the structure of reality. Very abstract, I know. In relatable terms, you are stating a belief from your perspective.

Nobody else has your perspective. Nobody else has been shaped by what you’ve been exposed to. Information sources. People. Your algorithm. Where you live, who you live with, and what you do every day.

Nobody has the complete big picture (what’s called epistemic humility), and this is why war, conflict, and misunderstanding is a universal thing. People disagree because of differing beliefs, which is what your perspective is. It’s a world-view. Made up of a set number of beliefs, or claims, that you believe to be true about the world.

Enough explaining.

Start with a claim. Don’t try to be right or perfect. Just get it out, so you can get what you think out of your head and into words so you can actually examine it, as objectively as you can. Most people skip this, let alone the why and how parts.

You can’t say you believe something to be true if you can’t say what you believe clearly in the first place.

Say the thing. Poorly even, at first. Then test it.

Step 2: Why (Test the claim)

Now ask why is the claim true?

You need reasons.

This is where stupid thinking starts falling apart.

You can say you should learn to write... okay. Why?

Because you can’t think? Because you don’t know what you think? Because you want to build a body of work, a personal brand, or start accruing wealth through creating digital assets by writing?

Or did you just look at a motivational, philosophical YouTube video that romanticized the writing process for you inside your head?

Think of this step in the thinking process as cutting away dead wood. Separating wheat from the chaff.

Like a sculptor, sculpting away at a block of marble to test whether the marble itself is solid enough to create something valuable from it.

Some reasons will hold up, while others will die away. Which is the point. We’re looking to remove as much dead wood as we can (you’ll realize while doing this that you are mostly dead wood, and that most of what you believe to be true just isn’t true whatsoever).

I call this “the rule of 3”:

If you can’t give three reasons as to why you think something is true, you need to think again about the claim you’re making.

Probably the ultimate way to check if you’re acting based on a feeling you mistook for a thought...

Step 3: How (Make it useful)

You have your claim, and your reasons for why it’s true.

Now what?

Well, how would it be beneficial to your life? How is it relevant? How is it important, and what other claims, facts, or profound ideas does it connect to?

Example:

“If you learn to write, you learn to think. Thinking is what determines every outcome of your life.”

Great!

How do I start writing? 30-60 minutes a day? In the morning? On paper, a phone, a laptop?

This is how you turn thoughts into a plan for action. Which I have heard is an important thing, for actually going out and getting what you want out of life...

My example

I recommend writing while doing this. Everyone thinks they’re good at thinking until they write...

This is the claim I’m making:

Learning to write long-form content (essays, articles, newsletters etc.) under a personal brand is the highest-leverage skill you could develop right now.

That’s my what. Now for the why and how.

Here are three reasons as to why this is true.

1. Writing is formalized thinking - You can’t write about something you can’t explain aloud. Anytime you do stumble or get “writer’s block...” you research. You learn. You consume great writing so you can write something great yourself. Writing is also how you communicate the value of your knowledge, which is what you think. Writing, then, is the ultimate thinking and communication tool there is.

2. Writing builds a body of work that people can’t help but explore, and as a by-product, an audience to support your work, along with deep expertise and online authority - Long-form is more dense compared to short-form. A newsletter like this one can be read 10 years on from now, whereas short-form disappears pretty quickly.

3. AI cannot replace a human perspective - It does not have one. It can generate words words words... but what about experience? Trial and human error, mistakes, or lessons learned by YOU? A long-form post is an attempt at solving a problem from your unique perspective. The word essay literally means “to attempt.”

Cool.

How do you go about writing, then?

• Start a newsletter - Choose Substack. Or use X. If you record yourself reading your newsletter to a camera you can post your video to YouTube and podcast platforms like Spotify

• Choose one topic to write about each week - Hopefully it’s (1) validated, and a high-performing topic (which proves lots of people are clicking on this topic to hear a perspective on it), and (2) something you are genuinely interested in learning about yourself. I talk more about this in this long-form writing guide on my Substack.

• Write your perspective on the topic - What is your relationship with the problem? What do YOU have to offer in terms of a potential solution? Even this newsletter I have written isn’t 100% “right.” But it’s a perspective based on what I currently know now. Which will change in a weeks time!

• You need only one long-form post each week to grow - 2000 words each week

A routine for increasing intelligence

Go on a walk for 20 minutes, 1-3x a day

Walk with a question, problem, topic, or title/headline for a long-form post in mind

Think about it using the what-why-how framework

Come up with 3-5 key points on the topic

Run each of those under the what-why-how framework

If you have an idea, run it through the damn framework.

I’m not asking you to do this for hours and hours a day. But I do want you to do this for hours and hours across months. I would say this isn’t marathon it’s a sprint, but really it’s a marathon’s worth of daily sprints.

Sprint, then recover.

Think as hard as you can, then wait until tomorrow to go again.

It doesn’t take 10,000 hours of doing this to become a genius-level thinker. It’s 10,000 iterations.

Sorry for the AI-sounding “it’s not this, it’s that” pattern. It just sounds more impactful when I put it that way.

Intelligence is a habit you can choose to start implementing into your life right this second.

Pick a problem you are currently suffering from.

Think about it.

And smash it against the brick wall that we call reality.

I really appreciate you being here. I value your time and attention a lot more than you realize.

You’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

If you want a complete long-form writing system, for building an audience writing about your genuine interests and profound ideas, join 170+ writers and creators who have already joined in The Profound Writer.

Check out more writing strategies:

If you prefer Spotify:

I can’t help but think that most people are miserable because of one word.

Expectations.

I used to sit in my first class of the day back in school, at 8:52am with my eyes all crusted, listening to a teacher I didn’t like, talk about ideas that weren’t fucking profound to me.

Repeat that five more times and that’s a hard school day for anyone to sit through.

I didn’t like school. What I was learning wasn’t interesting to me. I didn’t want to feel forced into learning (obsolete) subjects that were quote-unquote important.

Just so I could pass an exam, that would tell the system everything it needed to know about what I was capable of progressing onto...

Ambition can look like laziness to other people when it isn’t being aimed in the right direction, I think.

Doing hard things can actually be pretty easy.

But there are 3 profound ideas you need to understand, for this to make any sort of positive impact on your life, starting from today.

The reason you don’t think that now is because the expectations you have of yourself are fucking you up.

And in this essay, we are going to think about this together.

Idea I - You’re not aiming low enough

Modern man can’t see God because he doesn’t look low enough. - Jung

I’m not religious, but that’s a profound fucking idea.

People don’t set the expectations they have for themselves low enough.

What do I mean by this?

You see, an expectation is a standard for success. Happiness is when your expectations are exceeded. And where this applies to doing hard things, is as such:

Find your limit, then back off by 20-30% so you can sustain that limit across time.

There is nothing stopping you from working at 100%.

Perhaps 120% or more, for every second of every day.

Then again...

Burnout happens when you exceed your mental ability to recover from doing hard things.

Mental muscles fatigue like physical ones do. Try training every body part in the gym for 10 sets to failure every day and get back to me (if your nervous system doesn’t give out before then). The mind works the same way.

There is a point of diminishing returns with everything good in life.

After 2500 words of writing each morning, my focus drops, my brain feels cloudy, and my decision-making becomes half-assed and my idea quality worsens.

It’s only surface-level ideas at that point. No profound ones :/

Which isn’t great considering I quite literally earn my income with my mind. I digress.

• Your energy is finite.

• Your attention (quite literally, what you attend to) is finite.

• Which means your time is also finite.

If we use training your physical muscles as an example, what we can take from that, is the idea that sub-maximal stress applied with the correct form, targeting the right muscle, across time... is optimal for long-term adaptation.

What do I mean by this?

You need to do extremely hard things, but in extremely small amounts, extremely often.

500 words of writing per day is next to nothing. It takes what, like 15-30 minutes?

But 500 words that consist of profound ideas that have been thought about for days, and not 3 hours, stress tested, and written in a way that is impactful and persuasive and engaging to read... a 2000 word newsletter like what you are reading is done in 4 days of “hard” work.

And I’m still doing the same amount of work each morning as when I had one just subscriber. I believe it was my girlfriend :)

My Dad always used to tell me this.

Anytime you do an exam, just aim for 1% more than last time.

He never asked for more of me than that. And now, I think, it’s fully clear to me as to why this is such an important idea that you need to wrap your head around.

1% improvements and little wins add up in a way you could not possibly imagine.

Let me give you a profound idea that will floor a lot of people.

Idea II - This is your fault

Every man is not only responsible for what he does but what everyone else does. - Dostoevsky

Working on one small project for 30-60 minutes per day will create more positive outcomes than you could possibly think of, that bleed out across your entire life.

Here’s a profound idea I’ve always loved thinking about:

Everything you do affects what everybody else does.

I want you to really think about this.

Imagine if you lifted weights twice per week.

There will be exceptions I know I know. But again, really think about this.

You build some muscle, which is a beneficial thing. A large muscle is a stronger muscle, which makes basic physical exertion feel like a breeze. Walking up a flight of stairs feeling unscathed is no joke.

Your joints feel stronger too. Your heart pumps blood more efficiently. Let’s not forget the improvements in insulin sensitivity, and deeper sleep, and that new baseline level of energy you bring to everything you do in your life.

Everything.

If you’re a writer or a creative person, you’ll know how important the idea quality of your work is.

Think of how much sharper your thinking would be thanks to all those benefits?

How much clearer and better articulated your sentences would be. Because you’re not sitting crusty-eyed at a desk, wishing you could lie in bed for a few more hours, to make up for the late night you had staying up till 3am, because you were too tired from the day before. You can see how that toxic loop is self-perpetuating.

You get perceived differently with a more muscular frame.

Sorry, but status and how we are perceived by others is still an important factor for feeling a deep sense of meaning in your life. It’s ok to want to look muscular, and therefore more attractive, and to be perceived as such.

I was the world’s skinniest, insecure 16 year old... and I am definitely no model, with my ugly mug and receding hairline, nor will I be the next Mr. Olympia.

But I do what I can do, with my own standard and my own limit I MYSELF can sustain, and have sustained, because I’ve been lifting for 7 years now. Which is what matters.

To wrap up these benefits, you can do more of everything across a longer time period, thanks to the increased longevity these benefits bring about. You model a standard for everyone else who sees you with those benefits. Friends, girlfriend, your Dad who has tennis and golfers elbow (he’s feeling better now).

The harsh truth:

How many hospital beds would be freed if you did this?

For people who need it for involuntary reasons?

Reasons outside of their direct influence or control, all because you decided to pull your act together?

I say that harshly because I like speaking harsh truths to myself sometimes.

You will know 1000 people in your lifetime.

This means two things:

1. You are one person away from a million people

2. You are two persons away from a billion people

Everything you do has a ripple effect. Like throwing a mossy stone in a silent lake.

Doing nothing and staying inside playing Fortnite all day, alone, persuades people who do (and don’t) know you to keep giving their attention to other people.

Scrolling seems harmless, till you learn it keeps you on social media platforms long enough until you get shown advertisements (yes, corporations monetize your scrolling).

Posting a single piece of content online can influence hundreds of thousands of people. Even a single profound idea is enough to shatter a disease-like perspective, a cancer in the mind for somebody who is suffering.

And, content stays online forever.

Anyone can view it, and attracting attention to your work and persuading people of its value is quite literally a skill. Every morning you practice at it, having reflected on feedback, and iterated with trial and error until you find success, guess what?

You increase the impact of your ripple.

I have your attention now, do I not? That’s 14 months of trial and error learning to write with impact.

“But Craig!”

Yes my fellow legend.

How on earth has this anything to do with having a project to work on?

I’ll show you (we’ll get to the action steps soon, I promise)

Idea III - If you can’t do it for a year, don’t do it

I am going to use writing as an example.

Firstly, since it’s relevant to Substack. Also because I am a writer (now full-time, I quit my job last week) and it’s where my authority and expertise lies.

200 words of writing per day for 365 days straight will always beat 1000 words every 2 weeks. The arithmetic always wins here.

500 words is about one section of one of my newsletters.

I call them my Profound Essays. The word newsletter sounds salesy, but yeah, I send these out weekly to my email list - newsletter.

3-4 days and it’s donezo, like we thought about.

(It’s funny, I am thinking as I am writing this, and you are thinking to yourself by reading what I have written? How profound!)

But it took me a lot of trial and error over 14 months to fully realize this principle. When I started wrapping my head around the whole “writing under a personal brand” thing... as cringy as I find the word personal brand... I never had a word count limit per day.

So my routine was all over the place.

1500 words here. 483 word there. 3 days off... what was I writing about again?

So what I realized was, after tons of stupid mistakes, was to give myself an expectation so low that achieving it would almost be certain.

500 words.

As much as I hate seeing the phrase, “it compounds,” because it’s a phrase AI-writing always uses, here goes: the benefits do compound.

It’s the Matthew principle. An economic principle that basically says those who have everything, more shall be given, and those who have nothing, all shall be taken.

Why care about this profound idea?

It is easier to keep improving toward a goal once you have started.

There will never be a greater jump in progress than moving from zero to one.

If you can bench 100kg how easy do you think it would be benching the empty bar? You’d be repping 20kg like it’s a feather. Not going to jiu-jitsu one week, and doing just one session the next, that’s a 100% improvement in comparison. And yet we annihilate ourselves when we don’t perfectly follow a 16 hour routine planned down to the second.

Aim lower.

Here’s the action steps.

How to do hard things, but properly

I want to give you broad principles here.

Which, you can apply to any context to suit your needs.

Also because I’m trying to condense my writing into a lower word count. My 5.6k word mini-course on escaping beginner hell in 3-6 months was a lot of work, and fun.

(thank you for your DMs, I’m grateful you guys got tons of value from it).

• Start with a time block - 30-60 minutes needs to get carved out of your schedule. Preferably each morning. If you don’t know what project to be working on yet, good. You have this block for figuring it out. Attention precedes time, and time is what lets you direct your energy and focus toward one meaningful goal.

• Choose a goal to achieve - In 90 days. One deadline with a clear outcome. Something tangible, measurable, and concrete. Ask AI to help you brainstorm a goal. I’ve been experimenting with this myself currently, I like to choose one quarterly goal from one domain of my life at a time. By that, I mean having your life organized into categories (mind, body, soul, vocation is the simplest one). Choose one category, and one goal for it. I’m working on my mental health at the minute with journaling. Before that it was launching The Profound Writer.

• Find your limit - My limit for writing content or building products each morning is about 2 hours. Any more than that and my brain feels too fatigued, which starts disrupting other areas of my life, which is not good (obviously). In this case, writing content (my newsletter) for 45 minutes, going on a walk, then working on a project I can monetize for 45 minutes (ebook, template, lead magnet/paid-tier Substack post, course)… that is my limit.

• Then back off from it- By 20-30% so you can sustain it. Writing is very hard. As is physical training, or doing chores, or having no goals and doing nothing all day. All you need is high quality work that moves a needle done daily. What is one thing you could do, that would pull a lever or move a needle one step closer toward your ideal life in 3 months time - NO MATTER HOW SMALL - that you could do for 30-60 minutes a day, one day at a time?

• Negotiate with yourself - Seriously. You need to cut a deal. There are more unconscious forces within you than you think, like desire, interest, curiosity, motivation, things you have little control over. This is why we aim low in terms of our goal, and also why we aim low regarding the standards we have for ourselves. If you hate waking up earlier than 9am, if you’re like me, you might need to compromise with yourself and agree on starting with 8:50am. Even if the philosopher inside you thinks that 6am starts are noble and more serious for creating your life’s work.

• Keep iterating - Sprint, then recover. I keep using the gym as an analogy, but really. You don’t train biceps to failure and go back 6 hours later to do it again? You train hard, you recover, you consume nutrient dense food, you sleep, you reflect on your workout, what worked, what didn’t, you keep your feedback inside your brain, you manipulate and stretch and warp it with your own brain, so it encodes into your memory (this feedback), and you definitely try your best not to ask AI to organize everything for you, and to tell you what the answer is (right away, at least).

I’m currently messing around with a writing workflow. I got this written in 2 days. I am loving it, and I’ve been meaning to say this.

I look forward to being a vessel for the writers and creators I’ve been speaking to. Or those starting out looking to write online or build a personal brand talking about profound, deep ideas you have. I’m doing this full-time now. So I’ll keep letting you guys know about what is working for me (and not). I have some big things in the works.

I appreciate your time and attention a lot more than you might think.

You’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

Keep reading onward for some more profound ideas:

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 :)

Subscribe now

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.”