And the corporations doing everything they can to control your mind are winning.

…but we all know this by now.

And deep in the back of your subconscious mind you know it’s stopping you from reaching your intellectual potential.

Yes, attention spans are not as strong as they once were.

It’s all to do with “the phones being bad.”

We get it.

I am here to show you something different.

There’s this old essay you likely haven’t heard of…

A man named George Orwell tried to warn us about this. If you don’t know who he is yet, don’t worry, you will. Because if you feel like you are wasting your best thinking hours scrolling, I’m here to tell you one thing.

Your thinking could be way more powerful than it currently is.

I am also not here to give you a lecture on your screen time analytics. But knowing that you’re a reader of my newsletters in particular, I assume you have a lot of ambition and curiosity in your life, and that you’re someone who knows their thinking could be sharper, deeper, and more structured.

Coming home from a job you hate to scroll five hours of your day away doing nothing is obviously a problem. You don’t need me to tell you that. But most people keep doing it anyway.

And that’s the thing.

Orwell wrote about this a long time ago, and he knew why your thinking feels worse than it should, and the exact habit that reverses it. So in this Profound Ideas Letter, we will think alongside each other, about why the ability to think clearly, deeply, and as a unique individual is currently declining.

Then, I’ll give you the single skill for reversing that decline, with a routine you can follow with 90 minutes of your day.

Yes, I’m not going to lie and say this will be the easiest commitment in the world.

If you wanted easy or comfort you’d be doomscrolling instead of reading this far.

But expecting to become as profound a thinker as all the greatest philosophers who ever lived with anything less than that, is exactly why we’re in this scary situation to begin with.

Idea I - This is not a new situation

Tell me if this sounds like you:

You come home from working a job you hate, and because you’re too tired to do anything else, you pick up your phone and spend hours lying in bed scrolling. And you’ve been tricked into believing that this is a form of relaxation.

I’m no saint by any means, but.

Deep down you know it’s not what you want to be doing with your life.

Let’s talk about that essay:

In 1946, a man sat down to write an essay about why the English language was dying.

That man’s name was George Orwell. And by the English language, he meant thinking.

The essay is called “Politics and The English Language.” And to prove Orwell right, it’s actually not the easiest essay to read. Go figure. But his argument is simple:

Bad writing makes bad thinking easier, and bad thinking produces bad writing… an so on.

It’s a destructive loop that feeds itself. Simply because the effect starts becoming it’s own cause.

Now what does this mean exactly?

Orwell uses the example of a person who feels like a failure. Because they feel like a failure, they drink alcohol to numb their pain. And because they drink, they feel like even more of a failure, which causes them to drink more… and so on.

The behaviour produces the condition that reinforces the behaviour.

Pay attention to this part:

Orwell had his reasons for believing that the quality of writing and thus the quality of people’s thinking was on the decline.

Those reasons being (1) political and (2) economic.

Stay with me here. This is extremely relevant to you.

Governments would use vague language to hide what they were actually doing. Terms like “pacification” meant bombing villages. The term “transfer of population” meant forcing millions of people off their land.

Language was being used as a tool for making any behaviour sound reasonable through being vague.

Newspapers also had to be made fast, which determined the quality of the writing itself. And because they were cheap, everybody would read them.

But what are the specific traits to be aware of in terms of poor writing/thinking?

Orwell outlined four major principles:

1. Reaching for other people’s phrasing (words) instead of your own

2. Making simple ideas sound, feel, or appear complicated

3. Using big words to make it look like you actually have a clear claim to be making

4. Using meaningless words to associate yourself with a group of some kind

His point:

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

It’s deceit.

That is what Orwell was warning us about.

And here’s how we’ve butchered that warning :)

I’ll keep this quick.

• Social media ad revenue exceeded $200 billion in 2025 - Exact figures vary depending on the source. It should be common knowledge that platforms are incentivized by engagement alone and not the quality of your engagement. They want your attention first above all else.

• Short form content is engineered by design - According to a meta-analysis of 71 studies with close to 100,000 participants (go on, Google the source), more short form consumption correlates with poorer cognitive performance in attention AND inhibitory control.

• Literacy is collapsing - There’s too many excellent videos on this topic already.

• AI is the amplifier - Producing content has zero cost, meaning volume of content produced is exploding, while the quality of thought, profound ideas, and novel insights are decreasing.

And with AI models getting trained on AI outputs (getting pumped out across the internet every day), the information source gets contaminated with more “average.”

Meaning AI trains itself on its own mediocre outputs, which means the model collapses, with AI outputs losing even more accuracy, nuance, and creativity.

Orwell’s loop is happening.

Right.

Now.

And faster than you’d think.

If you’re spending anywhere between 1-5+ hours per day consuming content that is designed to hold your attention in short bursts, and giving you zero value in return for that attention, you are training yourself to think in fragments.

What you do shapes everything else you do. The input shapes the output. That’s the loop we’ve been talking about, that cause and effect cycle.

So... what can you do about this?

Idea II - Writing is the solution

And I am not talking about the type of writing you had to do in school growing up.

Nobody is telling any of us why we should write.

But properly.

Even in university, like with all profound ideas too, there’s just so many things that we aren’t fucking told. Sorry I get passionate about this…

And that is why I’m here.

Here is why you should write, and read it twice for me:

Writing forces you to organize your thinking into an argument, and nothing makes you more dangerous than your ability to create arguments

Wow wow wow, slow down there.

“But Craig! What’s with you using the word “dangerous?” Do you mean PHYSICALLY dangerous?”

Let’s take this from a metaphorical angle.

There’s a big difference between a journal entry (writing down your unstructured stream of thoughts onto a page), as opposed to creating a structured argument (like with an essay).

An argument differs, simply because it consists of one core claim, some reasoning to support that claim, and some reasoning on why your claim should matter to the reader.

Sure why are you even reading this?

If you can’t articulate what you think within a clear structure, a structure that moves the reader from understanding the problem to understanding the solution, guess what?

You have no idea what you’re talking about, or what you actually think to begin with.

Why is that?

According to the learning science, the brain loves to chunk (group) information into parts. Writing forces you to take chunks or groups of information and to sequence them in logical order. And the wonderful thing about this, is that most of your ideas won’t survive the structuring process.

Which is the point.

Most ideas are stupid ideas.

Really. Most of your thoughts I mean. And why is this important to think about?

It means that bad ideas can die so you don’t have to.

Only the strongest, sturdiest, and most bulletproof ideas get put down onto the page. THOSE ideas are the ones worth considering.

And here’s the other thing about writing.

It slows your thinking the fuck down. It’s easier to let vagueness pass in a conversation. Because with writing, every word is a choice. Every exact word. Every sentence, paragraph, and every problem you choose to write about. How that all comes together to influence how you live your life. Reading is more like input (writing is output). Conversations give no pause for deliberation. Meditation is better at training attention than articulation, and journaling is just rambling without a structure.

Writing is the only process that forces precision at every level of analysis.

The level of the word.

The sentence.

The paragraph.

The section.

The entire piece, its topic/problem, and how that impacts your actions in the world.

Fear and laziness do not live in the specific. They live in the vague. Yes, I’m using an “it’s not X, it’s Y” sentence structure, and no, AI did not write or come up with this idea. I hand wrote it, and we’re allowed to still use that sentence structure!

You can’t fail at something that you haven’t given a criteria for success. Which is why vague plans feel safer, and vague ideas too making you feel smarter (because nobody can challenge what you’re saying if they don’t know what it is you’re saying).

Writing obliterates vagueness.

It forces you to say exactly what you mean, and then you have to look at it, evaluate and analyze it, and decide whether or not you believe it to be true.

My point:

Writing is a confrontation with what you actually think. It’s not just any high-value skill, tho it is. And most people will avoid learning that skill for the same reason they avoid having hard conversations with loved ones, enemies, or even with themselves.

It reveals things you’d rather have left unknown.

This is why AI writing is bad. Using AI to write means you’re skipping the confrontation yourself. You’re generating words that are not yours. You’re not slowing down or thinking clearly. Or choosing your words precisely, like an axe being sharpened with a stone in your hand across thousands or repetitions.

Because your words are perhaps the most powerful thing there is about you as a person.

Writing with AI removes the last chance to discover what you actually think.

And I’m not anti AI. I love talking with it, asking it questions, and asking it to prompt me with questions. I’ll think and ponder and evaluate what I think while walking through my favorite park on a Tuesday afternoon, once my work is done for the day. But that’s a different skill (using AI). It requires knowing what you’re looking for and how to ask for it.

It needs thinking first.

And you learn to think by writing.

There is nothing that would make you more dangerous than learning to write.

A person whose thinking is precise enough to build an argument, defend it with four arguments ready for every one counterargument, and change how other people act, that is what makes you extremely dangerous.

Why?

It means you can’t be dismissed, outmaneuvered, manipulated, bullied, or ignored.

So my final question to you, is.

Do you want to be vague and weak? Or do you want to be articulate, competent, and thus dangerous beyond comprehension?

So what do you write about, then? How often should you write and how much?

What happens when you do start writing one essay per week?

Idea III - Write one essay per week

Writing one essay per week is the greatest vessel there is for self-education, self-actualization, and self-improvement.

My friend:

You are an aiming mechanism.

If you don’t tell your mind what to aim at, it will aim at something itself. And it will always be the fastest, easiest, and most pleasure generating thing it can get its hands on first.

If you give yourself one essay to write every single week your brain will have something to feed on. Your subconscious I mean, and it will do so during every second of your existence. You’ll connect ideas in a way you would never have expected otherwise. And you will reach insights you wouldn’t have reached without having that weekly deadline.

Life is problems. Everybody has them. And you know for a fact that if you could solve your one biggest problem that’s causing you all your misery and suffering right this second, you would. I know I would.

Writing is how you work on your own problems.

How so?

The word essay, in French, means “to attempt.”

That is what you are doing when you write an essay or a long form piece of writing. You are attempting at solving a problem by offering a novel perspective. When you write one essay per week, you’re choosing to be a perspective generator.

What is a perspective generator?

Well, they are a profound thinker who creates and articulates original perspectives on a set schedule. Almost like it’s their full time job. I like to think of the word “perspective” as a structured argument for how to see a specific problem. Perspectives are offers, not laws. Because no perspective is 100% right or wrong. They all have some truths to them, and that’s what makes them a “perspective.”

It’s also what makes them more and more valuable than at any other point in history.

Bad thinking begins when you take perspectives as law. Good thinking begins when you learn to build them, hold them lightly, and refine them when cracks start appearing.

A perspective generator is a master at crafting better and better answers, responses, opinions, and ways of seeing the world, as opposed to the “guru” (think in business, religion, spirituality) who has the one and only answer.

Which is why you need to post your writing online.

Now before you cringe and leave over the idea of becoming a content creator (because you’re not… not really).

You’re not posting for the sake of clout, not even subscribers or money (not yet).

You posting because you need feedback.

Where is the value in having an essay stored inside Obsidian or Notion? To let it gather dust? If you’re doing that, you’re talking to a brick wall. There’s no value in doing that for yourself. Let alone others.

An essay that gets posted online, however, is a conjecture thrown into the world to see if it survives.

A conjecture being an opinion, conclusion, or perspective.

See?

Another reason to post online is to test if you can capture attention. I’m being serious. Can you hook people in successfully? Can you persuade someone to keep reading? To actually consider your perspective? If you can’t do it online then why think you could do it in a room full of strangers, or in front of your friends and family (who will lie and tell you it’s good because they care for you).

You.

Need.

Data.

Feedback from reality.

Because you need to know if the ideas survive or if they die.

Information is available to everyone. AI is a thing now. Before that, it was Google. A perspective, however, is information organized through experience and structured into an argument. That’s what wisdom is. Moving from data, to information, to knowledge, to understanding how and when and why to apply what knowledge due to your own lived experience.

Yes. That’s wisdom.

AI can’t give you a perspective. It can only give you information, and they will never be the same thing.

I’ve written about this before, about writing being high leverage if you can build an audience.

Putting all else aside (the opportunities that having attention can give you), a larger following online means you have more reach, and can receive more feedback. More feedback means better thinking. Better thinking means better writing. And at some point the distribution does compound, because you’ll be doing the same amount of writing every day even if you have 10 newsletter subscribers or if you have 10,000.

I’ve written about 100 newsletters since May 2025 and I have close to 100,000 people across two long form platforms. And it was by writing one essay each week that I’ve now become able to survive off of my digital products and paid newsletters now. I’ve declined every opportunity to do client work (for now) and I still get more sponsorship and affiliate opportunities than I know what to do with.

All from writing one essay per week.

I don’t like talking about business to be dead honest. I still feel like a fish in a smaller pond when it comes to it. The money is nice, but it’s really just a by-product.

Writing one essay a week will change how you think, what you believe, how you relate to people, and how you feel.

The primary effect of writing is that you become a clearer, more precise, and more dangerous thinker.

You just also happen to build a vehicle for building your life’s work in the process.

Here’s exactly what you need to do to write one essay every single week.

Idea IV - How to write your first essay

Step (1) Choosing what to write about each week

Choose one topic to write about. You’ll do this at the start of each week.

I define a topic, as being the one core problem you’re actively trying to solve in your own life.

I wanted to write about Orwell’s essay because I myself had been reading it for fun. And this is just one perspective on that essay (as imperfect as it is).

You see, a lot of people never get past this first step, and think writing is pointless, or whatever, simply because they don’t choose to write about a problem that’s killing them.

Cause why bother?

Interest is by far the best leverage you have in your life. If a problem really grips you, and it feels like you can’t let it go, you can bet that you’re going to feel exhilarated learning and researching about it while you outline.

AND, if the problem is real to you (because you can’t argue your pain away with logic, for example) then you won’t ever run out of (1) motivation and (2) topics to write about.

Your reader’s will feel this in your writing too. Which helps with keeping them engaged.

Pick one problem to solve. Make sure you can say it aloud in a single sentence that a 12 year old could understand.

Make one claim about that problem.

Then, have a think about what your solution to that problem might be. This is where your perspective really starts to emerge from your thinking.

Step (2) Spend 30 minutes thinking before you write

I like going to the park for this.

Go on a walk and think. You can open AI on your phone, no need to type, and simply start talking back and forth with it. Talk through your topic/problem you’ve chosen to write about. State your claim, along with any other ideas or angles you have, and tell AI to push back while helping you create a 2000 word outline.

If not you’ll write a 6000 word piece you can’t publish within your 7 day deadline.

I almost forgot.

Read the AI responses out loud and respond to every single one.

Why?

Well dictation forces articulation.

You cannot hide in vagueness when you are speaking. You have to be specific and clear. With AI, you’re thinking back and forth with an intellectual sparring partner. You’re still the one doing the thinking, too, because you are talking.

I love AI in the sense that it can hold context (what I have previously said) and surface things I might have missed.

But mainly because it can compress feedback loops.

What does this mean?

You have a conjecture. You get criticism about it, and thus revise it, and you repeat that loop in seconds, and not days.

This step is about organizing your input. Your raw material, if you will. Your ideas.

Ask AI (I recommend using Claude for all this) to help you build a 2000 word outline using a problem → solution framework.

And don’t go over 2000 words!

Step (3) Write for 30-60 minutes straight

NOW sit at your desk.

Write directly from the outline you have made. Vomit out a first draft. You will likely be 20-50% over your word count. Again, that’s fine, as long as you cut once you’ve finished your first draft.

If you get stuck staring at a blank page it means your outline wasn’t fleshed out enough. It could have been more solid. Because the outline is 80% of the writing process, and if you nail that, you’ve done all the hard word.

If you need to, go back and clarify or stress test any sections of your essay and continue on with writing.

DO NOT use AI while writing.

You need the slowing down, and the precision that comes from making every single word choice with your own damn brain.

Which is the purpose of thinking.

This step, now, is for crafting your raw material into a structured argument.

Which means you have 30 minutes of thinking and 60 minutes of writing per day. Which also means you’ll be creating a higher quality finished product by not switching back and forth between the two modes of thinking (context switching ain’t good for the brain).

All you need open beside you is your outline. Even if it’s inside an AI chat, you’re not using AI at all. You. Are. Writing. And with no tabs open. No email either. Keep your phone downstairs or in a separate room.

Just get the first draft written as quickly as possible.

You will probably feel the urge to edit while you write, please don’t. It’s a pain in the ass. And that’s an understatement (take my word for it).

You can edit once the first draft it out.

Step (4) Send it out!

Now it’s time to feel the relief.

And publish your essay online!

Do it on Substack and/or X.

Simply because that is where people are, all over the globe, to go and read long stuff like this very newsletter.

Your essay is complete once it meets reality.

What do I mean here?

Well… are people reading it? Are they clicking onto it? Do people like, share, or repost it? Do they agree or disagree?

You’ll get more and more data from week to week as your audience grows.

Which is great. You can’t get that from inside of Obsidian or Notion.

Pick one day of the week to post it, I like a Saturday because I have jiu-jitsu at 12pm on Sunday mornings, so I can’t really do much writing on Sundays.

Review your data after 2-3 days, even as far as a week after posting. Open rates, read rates, responses… it’s all inside of Substack. Note what worked, what didn’t, and do more of what worked.

I would urge against putting this off.

Posting online, I mean.

Writing for 6 months without posting because you don’t feel ready is totally missing the point completely. You won’t ever feel ready, you just have to do it until you stop not feeling ready.

Post the damn thing. Believe in yourself, and have some faith in your own thinking. There’s enough slop going around now that people already have full faith in, so why doubt yourself?

I teach my full writing process inside The Profound Writer.

2 new modules have just been released for those already inside the course. I’ll be moving it over to Eden, which is why I’ve been writing content so little. I’m basically rebuilding the course for the 5th time now (ughhh) but it will be worth it.

I’ll leave it there for today, you’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

I have these writing guides on my Substack:

Being consistent will ruin your life.

There is a massive hole in the online space talking about this right now, and it’s far from a laughing matter. You can get dangerously consistent at waking up a 5am, going to the gym, maintaining a few relationships, reading before bed, writing online and building a Substack newsletter.

Even then.

Most people who do become dangerously consistent… if they can even manage to build that consistency to begin with… they become highly skilled at doing things that don’t matter.

Not a single.

Fucking.

Bit.

Yeah yeah I know, it’s important to be consistent. Don’t be stupid. Every successful Silicon Valley founder has sworn by it. Every great writer has questioned their sanity before resorting to something as small (and powerful) as writing 6 pages a day, like Stephen King does.

Then you have every philosopher who ever lived. They all swore by the power of walking, consistently, multiple times per day. And who are you to judge them?

When I first started writing online last year, when I wanted nothing more than to grow an audience, I wrote one long form post per week because that’s what everybody else online told me to do. But it wasn’t until I knew exactly what to be doing CONSISTENTLY with my writing every morning that I started growing like mad, by hundreds of newsletter subs per day.

And I still am.

Because consistency only becomes a superpower when you’re consistent at the right things. And I can assure you. At least 90% of what you’re doing to achieve your goals (no matter what those goals are) is a waste of your time.

So in this Profound Ideas Letter, I want to think about 3 ideas alongside you. Specifically, why most of the consistency advice on the internet is destined to help you move backwards, not forwards.

We’re going to think about why volume always comes before quality. How to find the one constraint in your life that’s holding everything back. And then how to build a feedback loop that makes improvement guaranteed to happen.

Hold on to your butt.

We have some profound ideas to discuss.

Watch the video here:

Idea I - Learning Is Error Correction

I don’t know why we aren’t just told this.

Maybe I should write it out with a black Sharpie, directly above my bed, so it’s the first thing I see when I wake up each morning.

Read this twice for me:

You won’t know what your errors are unless you do volume, and if you’re not fixing errors, you’re not learning.

I don’t know why it is.

But the mind is a master at wanting to make improvements before it has done enough of something to know what needs improving.

Let’s turn to physics for a second.

Physicist David Deutsch has written a lot about the power of explanations.

What does this mean exactly?

You can put an explanation out into the world, test it against reality, have reality push back, then refine your explanation and send out a new and improved one.

An example, because this is very abstract:

I love footsweeps. It’s a type of takedown in jiu-jitsu/judo where you literally sweep someone by their feet (you can find a video on YouTube, you’ll see why anyone would love achieving a successful footsweep instantly).

This is why I’m saying this.

You can watch tutorial videos on how to hit a footsweep all day (and I have) about foot placement, hip rotation, leverage points and technique. But timing (knowing when your opponent’s weight has shifted and knowing the exact moment the attempt the footsweep) will only ever reveal itself during live rounds.

By making errors while doing. Because errors and mistakes live in the doing.

The average time it takes to achieve a jiu-jitsu blue belt is 1-2 years. Because that’s how many sessions worth of mistakes you need to fix.

You won’t know what good writing is until you’ve done enough writing to start seeing patterns. I’ve written close to 100 newsletters by now. Just to give you the harsh truth as to how many reps you need before understanding where you can start improving things within your writing process itself.

The Beatles played over 250 nights in Hamburg clubs, often for 4-5 hours a night, before they got huge and became The Beatles that everybody came to know. But before that, they had only ever done one hour sessions and about 60 gigs in total.

If you haven’t done enough of the thing that you wish to master, it means one thing:

Any judgement you make about yourself is based on insufficient data.

You wouldn’t read one paragraph of a hard philosophy book, fail to understand it first time around, and assume you just can’t read full stop.

So why are you evaluating your current ability before you’ve put in enough reps to have anything to evaluate?

You need to do lots and lots of reps so you can gather tons of data.

Right… but not all data matters equally.

Which means you need a filter.

Idea II - Find Your Constraint, Then Nuke It

There are two parts to this idea:

The first, is understanding what a constraint is and why you always have one.

The second, is about how to destroy your constraint once you find it, and how to keep doing this while your constraint keeps moving.

Which is natural, as you’ll soon see.

(a) There’s always one constraint holding you back

This applies to any domain of life.

Health, wealth, relationships, happiness.

“But Craig!”

Yes, you beautiful human.

“What do you mean by a constraint?”

A constraint is the one singular thing limiting the current output of an entire system.

Every system always has just one.

Your life has one right now (your life being one complex system of systems).

In his book Theory of Constraints, Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt tells a story of how he first realized this profound idea. He was on a hike, with a group of scouts, and he realized that the person who determined how long it took for them to finish their 10 mile hike, was always going to be the slowest walker in the group.

Not the fastest walker.

The answer to speeding up the entire group was always going to be to put the slowest walker at the front of the group. And to redistribute everyone else to support him at the front.

The profound idea:

You need to find your slowest walker and stick a fire under their arse.

maybe don’t do that… but you get my point (hopefully).

Any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion. - Gene Kim

The truth of the matter is that most of the “work” you’re doing right now is not your constraint.

Which means most of your effort is not producing any actual progress.

Think of the one thing holding everything else back. The one thing that, if solved, would move everything else forward.

Most people simply don’t do this, and resort with going straight to working harder. Which is how you end up wasting more of your time to still end up with the same results.

If you don’t know what to work on, I will always recommend writing.

Writing is how you think, learn, articulate and sharpen your beliefs and opinions, and communicate the value of your ideas. Both in person or online.

Even if you don’t care about building a personal brand through writing online, although the time has never been better. Especially with long-form being pushed a lot more now on Substack and X. Since it keeps people on the platforms longer, which is what the social media companies want.

I started writing long form a little over a year ago and now it’s my full time job. So it’s definitely life changing if you stick with it. And I’m still doing the same amount of writing per day as when my girlfriend was my only subscriber.

And there really isn’t a nicer practice than carving out some time for yourself before the world has woken up, to sit down with your favorite coffee, and to try with all your intellectual resources to articulate on paper what you believe to be true about yourself and the world around you.

Enough writing talk.

How do you solve your constraint?

(b) Do volume to find your constraint

Volume is the diagnostic.

You do lots of reps.

Then, you read the data to find your slowest walker.

I’ll use newsletter writing as my example because it’s what I know most about, and I’m obsessed with it.

If you’re not getting views it means your packaging isn’t working somewhere (validated topic selection, hook sections, your titles and thumbnails). I actually have a hook-writing mega-guide for my Substack paid-tier readers that can help you nail your hook/opening sections for long-form with a cheat sheet included. Check that out if that’s your current constraint.

If you’re not getting engagement (likes, shares, reposts etc.) it means your content quality needs work. The body sections, your ideas themselves, or your actual writing itself. And if you’re not getting conversions (clicks onto a landing page for a product/service) you need more or clearer CTAs. Your promotions need fixing.

That is all there is too it.

And you work through it in that order too, from clicks → content → CTAs.

My Dad always told me (and still does) to track my hours worked everyday. Especially since this is my full time job now. But that isn’t how writing a weekly newsletter works.

You track output.

It’s the same 30-60 minutes of deep work per day. But I’m reaching far more people now (you can see the numbers for yourself).

The effort hasn’t changed because it’s a different kind of leverage, and the constraint being to know what to point my time at every morning.

That which you most need will be found where you least want to look. - GOAT Psychologist, Carl Jung

Once you find your constraint… and I’m not going to lie to you here either…

The work to fix it is usually very fucking boring.

It’s not sexy. Nor exciting. Usually it takes longer than a couple days (more like weeks or multiple months). But you have to be consistent. That’s what discipline is, so sticking to the one outcome you’ve defined as being your constraint, no matter how long it takes to solve it.

At the minute my constraint is getting the V2 of The Profound Writer out and it took me a month to get through 3-4 modules, and it’s going to take another month or so to finish it. And it does feeling boring at times, sure. But it’s my constraint and I have to stick with it until it moves (either to my landing page, my traffic etc.)

I don’t think that anything you work hard toward should be a sprint OR a marathon.

You should think of reaching any goal as collecting a marathon’s worth of sprints.

One hour of deep work a day… but first thing, everyday, across 365 days, aimed at targeting your constraint.

And finding it isn’t good enough unless you check whether you actually make progress on it or not.

Here’s how to do just that.

Idea III - You Need A Feedback Loop

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. - Richard Feynman

There is always a feedback loop running with everything you do in your life.

The question is whether or not you’re directing it or not.

I love this idea:

You’re already generating data with everything you do. I’ve been generating 23 years of data from my 23 years of being alive, across… yes. Everything. How you feel when you wake up. How your body looks in the mirror. How your relationships feel. That’s all data. It’s all feedback. And maybe you don’t lack data. Most of us lack specific data (which is what our first section addressed).

What if the problem is that you’re just not looking at it?

Or worse.

You’re creating all these narratives and stories that cover it about your own work that aren’t even true to begin with.

Let me tell you a story.

I wrote a newsletter while I was Interrailing around Europe with my girlfriend.

We went across Germany and Italy. Lots of wine and pasta, and I accidently ordered a T-bone stake without knowing how much it was going to cost (a lot. a lot was the answer)… but I wasn’t happy with that newsletter. The trains had no WIFI so I couldn’t really write since my drafts weren’t saving. Which meant I had to rewrite sections. I just wasn’t happy with it after a while.

Until I looked back after 2-3 months at the post.

The engagement was 4-5x my usual engagement. Which is not nothing. It’s data. It’s feedback that despite the fact that I wasn’t happy with it… you were. My audience, I mean. Because you don’t know what “good” or “high quality” means. Only other people (your audience) can tell you that through how they engage (likes, comments, shares, DMs).

Although my intuition said it was shit… the data said otherwise. I should have looked at the data before making a judgement myself. Which is what I’m doing with The Profound Writer, I’ve sat down and studied every long form post I’ve written, extracted what worked and what didn’t across every post, and I’ve rebuilt my writing system around that.

I hate sounding like this is a sales pitch (it honestly fucking kills me) but I’m excited to share the next version.

Enough unfiltered rambling:

This is how you learn to be more reflective.

You ask: What’s the next action to solve my current constraint?

A single 1% improvement - somewhere - every week.

Action steps!

Framework: How To Become Disgustingly Consistent

Step 1 - Defining Your Constraint

What is the one thing holding everything else back from making progress?

If you know what that is, great. You’re ahead of most people.

If you don’t, guess.

I am not joking. Pick anything. Three years of aiming at something, even if it’s the wrong thing, beats three years of aiming at nothing. You will course correct and gather data regardless. And you’ll realize “oh shit, it was actually this other thing the whole time.”

But you will only realize that because you moved toward something. As opposed to doing nothing.

I’m speaking to you through a psychological perspective here.

If you have no idea what to be doing with your life, and you have no sense of direction, purpose, meaning, or no clarity on what truly matters to you (in order to live a meaningful life every granular thing you do must matter) then the worst thing you could do is sit around and do nothing.

Again - pick something and let volume teach you what you should have picked.

If you have no idea where to start, here’s a prompt you can copy and paste into Claude. Use the dictate feature and talk with it back and forth while on a walk:

Interview me to help me find my single biggest constraint. Ask me questions one at a time about my goals and current situation across health, wealth, relationships, and work. After 5-10 questions, tell me what you think my single biggest bottleneck is and why.

This is the bare minimum and it takes 10 minutes tops.

Every day without a defined constraint is a wasted day. You’ll improve things that don’t move the needle and you’ll keep thinking that you’re working harder than everyone else (or you won’t) and you’ll still get nowhere.

Defining it badly still gives you the most important thing you could ask for:

Direction.

You can learn more about my goal-setting philosophy (The OAATI Model) by reading this newsletter.

Step 2 - Find Your Minimum Viable Volume (MVV)

Stop trying to do so much.

When it comes to building muscle, there’s what’s known as your minimum viable volume.

Which basically means the minimum amount of sets, reps, and intensity you must do in order to make the smallest amount of progress each week.

I’ve been lifting weights for 2 sessions per week for the last 2 years. Cause I always thought I was lifting 3-4 days per week… until I looked at the data (my Google Calendar) and saw I was only lifting 1-2 times. So I gave myself the bar of 2 sessions. And in 5 weeks of doing that consistently, with HALF my usual volume (what I would normally do in terms of exercises/sets in a session) I packed on 3kg of muscle.

Insane.

Same thing happened in college. I thought I was doing 20 hours of work per week, until I looked at my actual output and saw it was closer to 5 hours. So I cut my limit to one hour per day of focused work (assignments, studying, readings etc.) and I got everything done that semester a month and a half early.

The idea applies to anything you could think of:

Gun to your head, what is something you could sustain with 100% certainty across a full year without failing?

For me, that’s 2 sessions in the gym each week and 60-90 minutes of writing per day.

Which is no small feat. Since, the brain is deadly at overestimating what it needs to do, and at underestimating what consistency at a low volume actually produces. Lower the bar to something you will actually do every single day, and watch the tiny 1% improvements across 52 weeks stack up like mad.

You will become unrecognizable if you give 365 hours across 365 days toward one thing (constraints).

Step 3 - Close The Loop

After every deep work session, I want you to think:

What’s the next action to solve my current constraint, and has my constraint moved?

I like to walk for 10-20 minutes after my work blocks. You need to let your brain actually process what you just spent an hour or so doing.

Example:

Let’s say your constraint is learning or reading.

You want to self-educate but you have no idea how to read (and thus think).

Your MVV is 30 minutes of reading, 4 days per week.

On your walk after each sessions you think about your next action.

Maybe on Monday you realized you were reading too passively. So on Tuesday you start summarizing each paragraph into one sentence while you’re reading. Then by Friday (the following week) you notice you’re retaining more from reading in the morning than at night.

That’s two tiny adjustments made across two weeks (summarizing paragraphs as you go, reading in morning>night) based on pure data.

The loop is to do the work, reflect, then adjust.

Without engaging in this loop you end up repeating the same week 52 times and that’s a year of your life done. You’re gathering data, sure. But you’re not making adjustments based on the most important data relating to your constraint. And if you’re not adjusting, that means you’re not learning.

Learning is behaviour change.

I’ve been experimenting with brainstorming back and forth with Claude through speaking, not typing, and I must say, it’s a bloody game changer. Because with a notes app it’s so easy to offload your thinking, and then never go back to what you’ve written down. But with AI, the likes of Claude can give you a response you must evaluate, which forces iteration across these really short feedback loops.

All in all, consistency is probably the greatest meta-skill there is.

But only if you’re consistent at doing the right type of work. When you’re aimed at the right wall you wish to knock down, generating errors you can learn from, but with a loop that proves that you’re learning.

I never like the idea of telling anyone to “just be disciplined” because most people’s lives are so incredibly complex. It’s vagueness that’s the enemy more than anything.

So use this specific advice. It will help you.

If you take one thing from this, writing is where I’d point you. Yes, I think you should start a newsletter (I’d need a whole newsletter to run over the benefits). But you need to learn to write if you ever want to learn how to think. It’s how you learn to persuade. It forces you to articulate what you believe and test whether it has any ground. Every other high-value skill (selling, teaching, leading, communicating) improves when your thinking gets sharper.

Writing is thinking, and thinking makes you deadly.

I value your time and attention so much.

Sorry for being inconsistent with these as of late (ironic given the topic haha).

But I’m now halfway through The Profound Writer 2.0 releasing within the next month.

If you’d like to view the current version of the course before it disappears, feel free to see if it’s for you. It will help you write long form that’s better than 99% of the slop you see on Substack, YouTube, and X these days.

I appreciate you.

You’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

Check out these new mega-guides for writing long-form that people (actually) love reading:

Your hook writing needs work.

It’s a painful thing to put one full week, along with all your intellectual resources, into a 2000 word personal essay, X article, or Substack newsletter, only to have nobody care about it. It almost seems unfair.

But there’s only so much attention to go around. I could be doing 99 other things than writing this sentence right now.

Which means you need to understand how to capture and maintain attention if you want to become a successful writer (you literally have to attract an audience).

This guide will be a little different than you’d expected.

This is specific to written content (not visual).

Which should excite you a lot.

All you need is words.

And your long form writing platform of choice (I recommend Substack, I’m still new to/experimenting with X). Don’t forget a keyboard, your brain, and the right profound ideas to guide you.

I want to give you as many hook writing principles as I can. No templates, or “50 proven hooks to steal” that stop working once everybody starts using them, which makes them lose their punch and effectiveness for attracting readers, and most importantly, keeping them.

With this writing guide, you will learn to write opening sections that capture attention and keep people reading toward the very end.

First, we will define what a hook actually is and what it does neurologically. Then, I’ll break down a recent high performing hook of mine, give you some live examples, and a hook writing cheat sheet at the bottom of this guide to help you take action on all of this.

No matter the topic, all of this still works.

I’ve written close to 100 newsletters, and the question I get asked more than anything else is how I write hooks that are so unlike anything else people have read.

This guide will show you.

What is a hook?

This is my definition of a hook:

It’s the first section of your long form post. The first 300 words or so, including the first 1-3 lines (the first 3-5 seconds).

A hook must achieve two things:

1. Capture attention

2. Maintain it once it’s captured

But how does this actually happen inside your reader’s brain? Well, human beings have a reflex known as the “what is it” reflex. Also called the orienting response. For example, if you were to see a bush shaking in the wild 1000 years ago…

What is it?

A fluffy white bunny rabbit munching on a nutritious carrot?

A starving tiger that would love to bite your face off?

This response is rooted deep in human psychology. It has two phases:

1. Stop what you’re currently doing (scrolling)

2. Look at the thing that made you stop (the title/thumbnail, or “packaging” as its called)

Every piece of content you scroll through online is trying to trigger this response.

Short form (X tweets, Substack notes).

Medium form (Instagram carousels, X threads).

Long form (Substack newsletters, X articles, YouTube videos, podcasts).

Mechanisms like pattern interrupts, curiosity loops, and visual cues are vehicles for triggering this response deep inside your brain.

But here’s the thing though.

Mechanisms specific to capturing attention and maintaining it, they both affect two different cognitive systems.

How so?

Novelty captures attention. But it doesn’t maintain it very well.

All the hook advice you see online teaches how to capture the reader’s attention in the first 3-5 seconds… but what about the remaining 300 words? The remaining 25 seconds?

This is where habituation comes in. Which states that any stimulus repeated enough times becomes less exciting to the brain. Our brains adapt, basically. Think having that first square of chocolate, having not eaten any in a week, compared to the last bite. It never hits the same (tho we all wish it did).

This is why I won’t be giving you any “proven hook formulas” because they’ll eventually stop working. Human psychology won’t, however. So I’m here to teach you the timeless stuff you can apply to any topic you’re writing about.

It happens to me a lot, where I’ll be reading a Substack article that sparked my interest and my brain will start to wander. I will start skimming. It’s like I’m reading mindlessly, and my eyes are moving but my brain is elsewhere?

Yeah.

Your readers will do this too if your hook isn’t following the “what is it” reflex correctly.

When you write a hook section, please make sure your first 1-3 lines capture attention, and that the rest of the section maintains it.

I like to think of a hook as beginning a shift from how everyone views the topic/problem/title you are writing about to a more novel perspective on it.

Capture stops the reader from scrolling.

Maintain starts the perspective shift that runs through the rest of your long form piece.

Knowing what a hook does, then, leads us onto the question of what principles let you write one for any topic.

Let’s explore that now.

You need principles (not formulas, frameworks, or templates)

A formula tells you what to write.

A principle tells you why something works so you can write something that’s novel, impactful, and will inspire other people to copy you.

Which makes you an authority (you will always stay at number 2 if you keep copying the person at number 1).

You might have read this idea before. You know, where you learn from lots of different people and information sources, trying lots of techniques and methods until you synthesize them, or they merge into a unique voice or process that’s your own?

Same applies here.

Principles that YOU layer and combine in way that is unique to you, will always outperform rigid structures and templates that stop working once everyone copies them.

I realized long ago that my highest performing long form posts all started with pattern interrupts and opened a curiosity loop within the first 1-3 lines. So instead of copying the structures of those sentences, I started emulating the mechanisms. I’d write a pattern interrupt as my first line, maybe write a second one for the second line, or open a loop, or write a visual cue, or I’d start with a loop… and so on.

You can read anything I’ve written in the past 3 months.

I guarantee that I am using at least some combination of those mechanisms as my first three lines.

Written hooks only have words. Which is why you can’t really steal a hook format from a YouTube video and expect it to work just as well on paper. Because it’s a lot more than just paper usually (visuals, audio, speech, graphics, tone of voice etc.)

Back to habituation:

When everyone copies the same hook writing formula (or any writing formula for that matter) the reader’s brain stops responding. It becomes adapted to it. There’s no novelty. The first person using the formula got results… cool. And then the 100th person afterwards will get nothing.

This is why I don’t like using AI to write for me. It’s trained on common data patterns (formulas) and it writes based on past data that has proven to work.

“it’s not an x problem, it’s a y problem.”

Fuck off. Politely.

Do you see the issue here?

Nobody likes reading that sentence structure anymore. People even jokingly call out the likes of George Orwell and Fyodor Dostoevsky online for “using AI” because of that sentence structure!

When you sit down to write a hook, think in terms of what mechanisms might you use but in your own novel way.

Not template structures.

Sorry if this felt intuitive to you already. I just wanted to press on it before I explore the mechanisms fully.

Because when you know why a pattern interrupt works, you can create one that nobody else has seen before.

More on that now.

How to write the first 300 words of any long form post

Every good hook layers multiple attention mechanisms at any one time.

There are two types of mechanism specifically.

Capture Mechanisms (Interrupts Attention)

• Pattern Interrupt - Break expectations of what comes next

• Curiosity Loop - Withholds information temporarily

• Visual Cue - How you writing looks on the page affects how it feels to read (a massive block of text vs a nice mix of short sentences, medium and longer sentences, and sentence clusters)

• Bold Claim - A statement of conviction and confidence that forces the reader to agree or disagree

• Stakes - Makes the reader feel what they lose by not reading on

• Specificity - Numbers, exact scenarios/examples/situations (details stop scrolling faster than vague claims!)

• Direct Questions - Forces the reader to think and answer to themselves

Maintain Mechanisms (Keeps Pulling You Forward)

• Open Loop - An unresolved question/piece of information being running across an entire section/piece, promising some sort of payoff

• Pacing - Short sentences create urgency whereas long sentences create depth (vary them!)

• Story/Anecdote - The reader starts experiencing as opposed to processing boring old information you could find anywhere on ChatGPT

• Repetition - Deliberately reusing words or sentence structures conveys intentionality and importance

• Writing In The Second Person “You” - Sounds like you are addressing your reader directly

• Transitions - A question, loop, or bridging sentence that carries into the next section of your long form piece

There is no set order, here.

The goal is to be capable and skilled at layering these mechanisms… in whatever way you want! Get creative with this.

For me, I usually start with writing my hook section. I would probably advise against this. But I love the process of layering all those mechanisms to create my own string of them, as opposed to writing from templates and such. I also like writing the hook without fully knowing what my final argument is going to look like. Which means I’ll usually come back and flesh it out more at the end.

I will give you some broad principles to consider however:

• Be bold and clear, not bold and clever - Being specific will qualify the reader. They’ll know if your long form post is for them or not.

• Start with the problem - I like to start by exploring how most people view the problem, before I provide my own novel perspective on it, and then giving action steps for implementing that perspective into your life. Problem → solution is all this is. Your hook should make the problem deathly clear and specific.

• Experiment, experiment, experiment - Write one long form post each week so you can get lots of data. Feedback. What posts have higher engagement? Are there any patterns across your highest performing long form posts? Always do more and more before trying to improve or doing something new.

You should read back your first 300 words (especially the first 1-3 lines) as if you are meeting yourself for the first time. You’re scrolling on a random Tuesday, waiting in line for an overpriced coffee, looking for something to cure your boredom temporarily.

If what you’ve written wouldn’t grab your attention then, rewrite it until it does.

When editing your hook section (I learned this as a filmmaker in my past life from video editing): if in doubt, cut it tighter. And if you think it’s tight enough, cut 20% more.

You can use AI to help you stress test for the mechanisms objectively. By that, I mean have you included them yes/no. Leave craft, voice, and style to your own taste (are the mechanisms present as opposed to how do they sound if they are present).

The cheat sheet at the bottom of this guide lists every mechanism for quick reference while you write.

Example (full hook breakdown)

Here’s the opening section we’re breaking down.

Read it first by clicking that link (Substack). Then come back here and see what’s happening at the mechanism level.

Each mechanism has been labelled for you. Just so you can physically see how I think of writing a hook section and opening lines, on a piece that performed very well on Substack and YouTube.

Reading about mechanisms is nice, but seeing them layered across actual pieces of writing is how you learn to recognize them in your own writing and in others’.

As you read through the labels, pay attention to how multiple mechanisms can layer or stack on single sentences. Can you notice where the hook shifts from capturing attention (at the start) to pulling you forward (starting at “Most people don’t read…”)

Opening section of How To Live A Deeply Intellectual Life:

image of books now being summarized by AI, people losing the ability to think (pattern interrupt, visual cue)

Safe to say things are getting serious. (pattern interrupt, curiosity loop)

I don’t mean to scaremonger saying this, but. (curiosity loop, visual cue)

We are losing the ability to stretch our minds on a collective level. (stakes, bold claim)

This absolutely should frighten you. (stakes, second person “you”)

Most people don’t read books anymore. (stakes, repetition)

Most people would rather have a Wikipedia article summarized for them. (stakes, repetition, specificity)

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. (stakes, repetition, specificity, visual cue)

And most people think they’re still thinking. (pattern interrupt, repetition, stakes)

Just know I say… most people… as a signal of hope. (pattern interrupt, curiosity loop)

(image of a stickman carrying books into a pile of them lit on fire) (visual cue, pattern interrupt)

I never wanted to be a writer. (pattern interrupt, curiosity loop)

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. (story/anecdote, specificity, visual cue)

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. (story/anecdote, specificity, social proof)

I’ve always had a strong desire to be a deeply intellectual person. More importantly, I’ve always wanted to live like one. (story/anecdote, pacing)

To spend my days reading. (pacing, repetition)

To spend my days thinking. (pacing, repetition)

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

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. (story/anecdote, stakes)

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. (pattern interrupt, bold claim)

This essay is about regaining what our generation is starting to lose. (open loop, stakes, promise)

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. (open loop, promise, plan, second person “you”)

A deeply intellectual way of life. (pacing)

It’s our responsibility as the hinge generation to not lose our intellectual faculties. (stakes, bold claim)

Who knows what “geniuses” will be running the world that our kids will live in. (stakes, curiosity loop)

You’ll have to think with this one. (direct question, second person “you”, curiosity loop)

But don’t worry, we’ll think through it together. (pattern interrupt)

You might be wondering:

“But Craig, what about MY topics I want to write about?”

Don’t worry friend.

I got you!

3 live examples (writing hooks for ANY topic)

With the breakdown above showing how the mechanisms/principles can work across an entire hook section, now I’ll show you how they might transfer to completely different topics.

You’ve seen what a full section looks like, so for brevity’s sake, I’ll just do the first few lines for each topic. Specifically for capturing attention.

Topic 1: Why most people’s note taking is a waste of time

Most of your learning is fucking pointless. (pattern interrupt, bold claim)

And everything you think is making you smarter, is actively holding you back. (stakes, curiosity loop)

Nobody tells you highlighting books is a waste of time. (pattern interrupt, bold claim, stakes)

Writing 70,000 words of notes in your second brain only to let them gather dust, never to be seen again. (specificity, visual cue, stakes)

Podcasts on walks, or while driving to work in the morning, that go in one ear and out the other. (specificity, visual cue)

It’s all mental masturbation making your ego happy. (pattern interrupt, bold claim)

Here’s what I think actually works. (curiosity loop, open loop)

(this is the actual opening to this piece, which did extremely well)

Topic 2: You don’t need more discipline, you need clarity

You should declare all out war against any and all vagueness in your life. (pattern interrupt, bold claim, second person “you”)

I’ll tell you a story. (curiosity loop)

I was super ambitious as a kid. (story/anecdote)

I’d spend every free second outside of homework learning about anything that sparked my interest. (story/anecdote, specificity)

Learning. Writing. Deep thinkers who spent a lifetime thinking about profound ideas. (pacing, repetition)

And I don’t know why we just aren’t told this, but. (curiosity loop, visual cue)

Here goes: (curiosity loop, pacing)

All of your life problems exist in the vague. (pattern interrupt, bold claim, second person “you”)

Topic 3: The internet is making you less creative, not more

Sorry. (pattern interrupt, pacing)

But all that technology you’re using probably isn’t going to make you any smarter. (bold claim, stakes)

Not as much as you think it is, at least. (second person “you,” stakes)

Creativity is a funny thing. (curiosity loop)

Parents and teachers love telling us that “everybody is creative.” (stakes, specificity)

But it’s actually a blatant fucking lie. (pattern interrupt, bold claim)

Here’s the thing about creativity, right. (curiosity loop)

Are these perfect?

God no. They’re first drafts I vomited out. I have little to no idea where these sections might go, or what I’m setting up with each of those (in terms of a payoff at the end of each piece).

But it’s proof that the principles work if you can get creative and really think about applying them yourself.

I’ve been testing out this hook writing cheat sheet for a while now, and it’s quite literally all you will ever need for writing hooks that leave readers stunned.

You can use it as a job aid (to have open while you write) and a checklist for editing hooks yourself. Or you can hand the entire document to Claude, and ask it to run the checklist for you, or use the prompt at the bottom for brainstorming, stress testing, and refining what you do have.

How you use the cheat sheet is up to you.

I’ve included it as a PDF download too, or you can copy and paste it directly from this guide.

Use this cheat sheet

The PDF download:

Read more

Or you already have.

I have a feeling this is going to piss some people off, because I’m only 23 at the end of the day, so who am I to tell you anything about how to live your life. But the hairy reason behind why I am doing this is because 65% of adults never make it past the third stage of psychological development.

There’s five stages btw.

Most of you reading this still view education as something to be completed.

Which is why most people plateau in life at 23 as soon as they leave college.

Walking around at 60 with the mental capabilities of a 23 year old is a sight nobody wants to see. Yet we see enough of it.

I can hear people in the back already, saying we live in “The Information Age,” where you can ask AI anything and get the answer, and that everybody has access to the information that could make them $100k per month ye ye we get it.

Let me ask you a question then.

If you have all this information, then why aren’t you happy? If you’re so smart, why can’t you solve all your problems and suffer less than you already do every day? Why is it, that every time you get that 2am spark on a Sunday night where you want to (finally, once and for all) rebuild your life… within 2 weeks you’re back to your old habits of self-sabotage and self-destruction?

I might have an answer.

With this essay, I want to open up the bonnet of your mind (and my own mind, in writing this) so we can tear apart what’s underneath that bonnet together.

To see what parts are rusting, what parts need replacing, and what parts we can upgrade together.

Because you don’t need more information if the very thing processing that information needs upgrading.

You just need to give me the next 15 minutes if you want to escape Stage 3 once and for all, and launch into Stage 4, and thus the next stage of your life.

You’ll be excited to hear the benefits of joining the select few living at Stage 4.

But first, here is why the majority of people will never move beyond Stage 3.

Idea I - You don’t need more bloody information

To start, a quote from Albert Einstein:

We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.

If information isn’t the problem here, what is?

I’d like to take a second and turn to the lazy ambitious types.

You know, the select few who struggle with knowing (1) what to do, and (2) actually doing it.

I get it.

Anytime I have felt this in my own life I’ve always turned to more information. Or more habits to try out, at 8:00am once I jump out of bed with my own crusted eyes taking a full hour to completely open. And willpower (which I never realized runs out eventually). I never addressed the thing receiving that information.

The mind.

The self-help book genre is dying. Which I find interesting.

I’m not sure if it’s to do with AI being readily available to anyone with a screen. You can ask AI to make a detailed, personalized plan for you based on James Clear’s Atomic Habits that would cost as little as some coffee granules in the grand scheme of things.

Information is losing its value.

And despite the fact that life has never been as good as it is now, with all its opportunities, especially if you’re writing and posting content online under your own personal brand, people are not becoming happier, healthier, or less “fucked up” by their own definition.

It’s like we’re going… backwards.

Here is something that should bother you.

Two people can read the same book, and it can change one person’s life and do jack-shit for the other.

But it’s the same information?

Yes… but there’s something else that is different.

Two people can listen to the same song and get two totally different experiences from it. Anytime I listen to Deftones or TOOL my heart gets fired up, and I want to do hard jiu-jitsu rounds. But to my girlfriend, it’s just screaming.

It’s the same input of information but two different structures making meaning from it.

Not everybody consuming the same self-help content is processing the advice with the same mental structure.

So you don’t need more information. Be happy about this. You can close Claude now and take a walk outside to relieve the strain from your eyes and brain.

Robert Kegan spent over 30 years studying how the meaning-making structures in our brains actually develop.

Here is what he found.

Idea II - Kegan’s five stages of development

I’ll boot through this quickly enough.

You need to understand what stage you are at before I give you action steps for implementing any of this. You wouldn’t expect to hit a bullseye on your first time picking up a bow and arrow in Minecraft.

So pay attention.

The first two stages can be gone through briefly.

Stage 1: The Impulsive Mind (early childhood)

There’s no difference between you and your impulses.

You are your impulses.

There is no separate sense of self, or “I” deciding whether or not to act on them.

Think back to when you were a young child and you were hungry. My primal ass always went straight for some Dairy Milk chocolate and a cup of Lyons tea.

Everyone moves past this level.

Stage 2: The Imperial Mind (roughly 6% of adults)

This is where you start developing a strong sense of your own needs.

At this stage, you view other people as either a problem or a solution for helping/preventing you from achieving your needs.

Selfish, yes. There’s a lack of empathy at this stage. Self-interest is the first type of interest here.

Most people move past this in adolescence, although this stage can poke it’s head out when you’re stressed (same with Stage 1 if you’re hungry or thirsty, for example).

Stage 3: The Socialized Mind (about 58-65% of adults)

Here is where we get to the good stuff.

Carve this sentence into your skull:

At Stage 3, your identity gets shaped by people around you.

Family. Culture. Friends. Algorithms.

Which makes sense. It means you’re fitting in with the tribe (because getting abandoned by the tribe meant certain death thousands of years ago).

So you’re better now at empathizing, cooperating, and maintaining relationships…

…but you let them shape everything about you.

This is where things start getting spooky.

Your sense is self IS those external inputs. There is quite literally zero gap between who you think you are and what other people say/think about you.

They’re the same thing to your Stage 3 mind.

Human beings are imitators. We learn by imitating. But we don’t voice our individual opinions (usually) because thinking as an individual always means risk of being abandoned by the group. Although you have to risk offending in order to say something worth considering, but not at this stage.

I like the idea that the definition of sanity is acting like everyone else.

So let me ask you.

The code that’s running inside your head. How much of it did you actually choose?

In a tribal society with one set of rules, one god, one leader, that was all fine. Stage 3 was good enough.

But modern life demands self-direction.

You need to be skilled at handling conflict and making decisions that nobody else can make for you.

Stage 3 is not as good for handling modern life.

Profound Idea: Creating your own values feels impossible because your mind is literally wired to outsource them.

Your goal is to reach Stage 4.

Stage 4: The Self-Authoring Mind (roughly 35% of adults)

The hallmark of living at Stage 4 is having an internal compass.

What does that mean?

It simply means you can look at expectations and claims people make, evaluate them, and decide whether you agree or not.

Easier said than done. Here is why this is relevant to you:

At Stage 3, you ARE the feedback.

But at Stage 4, you can HOLD it.

I remember back when I did my livestream with Dan Koe talking about the long-form writing process, I talked about how anytime a post of mine got less than 300 likes on Substack, I would feel like I failed to write a good post. And Dan really opened my eyes when he said it’s better to not look at your writing in terms of low engagement meaning you did a shit job… and instead see it as feedback.

Why am I saying this?

Well, those are two ways to look at how a piece of content performs:

1. I could spiral for a week thinking I’m not good enough because I got less likes than usual

2. I could take that as feedback to learn from and improve with by 1-5% next week

Kegan says that this transition from Stage 3 to Stage 4 can feel like a partial death of self. Which is what learning is. You have to cut away any dead wood, and you separate wheat from chaff.

You have to let your bad ideas die so you don’t have to.

Abstract, I know. But so profound!

I used to be the world’s greatest conformist when I was a kid. If anyone disagreed with me, ever, I always took that as proof that I was in the wrong. Every time. Even if the facts punched me right in the face. I still wouldn’t have believed them.

Which is why I spent most of my childhood terrified of the outside world, and other people, and it’s why I used to stay inside all day playing Minecraft when I should have been out making mistakes and adventuring.

I’m happy that’s no longer the case now. And now I’m writing on the internet, which I would not have been able to do 3 years ago let alone 9.

Stage 5: The Self-Transforming Mind (only 1% of adults)

This is where you can step back from your own system and see its limits.

You can hold multiple perspectives (like a profound thinker should be capable of doing) without needing to pick any one of them.

Which is a real superpower.

I love this idea from Ken Wilber:

Nobody is smart enough to be wrong 100% of the time.

OOF.

Floored me so hard when I first read that, that I laughed aloud!

Without having a mental model in your head first, taking action on any of this is pointless. You wouldn’t drive a car without fuel and a destination in mind, you know? But now that you know the theory, you have some new knowledge…

How do you act on all this?

And launch yourself into the next stage of your life?

Idea III - How to move from Stage 3 to Stage 4

A part of yourself must die for a new part to grow.

That’s an old, ancient idea, rooted deep in all major religions, and also neuroscience and human biology/psychology.

No I will not cite sources. Because this idea couldn’t be any more fucking true than it already is.

This ain’t some hack or some small weekend project.

Neurons that fire together will wire together, which means this shit takes time. Imitation patterns are physically wired into your brain. So going against your programming (the code you’ve been running on all these years) will take sustained effort to fight against the tide for a while.

Until the waves start moving in your favor.

Step (1) - Identify your current stage

Before you can change anything about yourself you need to know one thing.

What stage you’re at this very second.

Kegan says it too (common sense being uncommon here) but most of us believe we are at a higher stage than we actually are.

Think how often people overestimate - and also underestimate - their abilities in relation to all sorts of things…

I want you to think about these 5 questions right now.

Yes. Right now.

1. Do your opinions change depending on who you are talking to?

2. Do you avoid saying what you actually think, because you’re worried how people might respond?

3. Anytime somebody criticizes something you do, does it feel like criticism about what you’ve done, or about you yourself as a person?

4. Do you know what you believe about money, relationships, having a career, and being successful, but in a single sentence about each?

5. Anytime you have to make a big decision in your life, do you need assurance? Is the first thing you do always to ask someone else what they think?

If three or more of these sound like you, you’re at Stage 3.

Don’t stress. Most people are and that’s ok.

We’ll go through what’s necessary for getting you up to Stage 4.

Step (2) - Write down every belief you can think of

I recommend you do this tonight before bed.

Open a notebook, or grab a page and pen, and pick one domain of your life:

• Health

• Wealth

• Relationships

• Career

• Identity (this is probably the best one to start with)

Write down every belief, opinion, or thing you value, anything you genuinely believe to be true about that domain. Filter nothing, be as honest as possible. Nobody else can see this, which is why we’re doing it on paper.

Examples:

• I am not a confident person.

• People view me as inferior compared to everybody else.

• I should have my career and my life plan finalized by age 25.

• I don’t think I am capable of socializing or making new friends.

• I value writing and learning every morning.

• I don’t value doomscrolling my free time away.

This exercise is crazy.

I don’t know why we just aren’t told to do this.

You will not believe (pun absolutely intended) how many bullshit beliefs you let determine every outcome of your life. Simply because you (1) never got deathly specific about what you believe as opposed to living in vagueness, and (2) thought about each belief for anything longer than 5 seconds with clear, basic thinking.

Here’s how you’ll stress test and destroy every one of your self-limiting beliefs.

Step (3) - Question each belief

What, why, and how.

I want you to run every belief, opinion, and value that you can think of through the what-why-how framework.

In order:

1. What claim do you believe here? - State the claim in one clear, simple sentence that a 10 year old could grasp easily.

2. Why do you believe it? - Is the belief true? Or do you feel like it is? What premises support it? Can you give at least 3 reasons? Are they your own reasons or somebody else’s reasons?

3. How does this help you live the life you actually want to be living? - Is it relevant to where you want to be going, or where someone else has been telling you to go this whole entire time?

An example: I need to wait until I feel ready to start writing content online.

Clear claim. But is it true?

Well, you only learn by doing. You won’t get feedback on what’s working and what isn’t unless you post. You also don’t know what “good” or “high-quality” is. Only an audience can tell you that. You can’t build an audience without writing content. Because an audience is a by-product of content people consistently love to listen to, read, or watch?

And if you want to grow your brand, or promote a product or service, you need attention. Attention is online. All of it. So you need to post content to get eyes on what you’re promoting so you can make a living out of this.

See how we annihilated a weak belief in just two paragraphs?

Go on lots of walks and have fun with this!

Step (4) - Do 1-3 tasks per day

They must be Stage 4 tasks only.

What do I mean by this?

There will always be a gap between what you say you value and how you actually behave.

The only way to close that gap is through your daily decisions. The average person does anywhere between 7-14 things per day. If you can nail the first 1-3 of those things, tasks, I mean, you will be making some serious ground.

Do this every night:

Before bed (I like using a notebook) plan your 1-3 tasks for the next day following these three rules.

1. The first task should always be solving your current constraint - the one thing that, if solved, moves everything else forward.

2. Every task is high ROI (return on investment) and needle-moving only - no busy work please. Productive work only!

3. Track your time on task (TOT) in your notebook beside each task - Forget about time blocks and just track how long it took you to complete each task. Like with the stage of development we initially think we’re at, most people have a horrific sense of how long it would take them to do something like write 500 words or one section of a long form post like this one.

Beyond those 1-3 tasks, you should be doing other Stage 4 micro-habits.

Like saying what you actually believe to be true in conversations. Or making a plan for your mornings off without checking what everyone else is doing first. Criticism, too. Next time you receive some, think whether you can support it with reasons before making a reaction.

These are tiny tiny movements. I say tiny twice for a reason.

Moving to Stage 4 is a marathon. I like to think of it as a marathon’s worth of sprints, and not just one single dash to a finish line done once. You needed repeated bouts of high quality effort done across months.

Yes. MONTHS.

Practice repeatedly, until the new wiring takes over.

Step (5) - Give your mind space to rebuild itself

Give your default mode network room to do meaningful, contemplative work.

Which, is the brain’s network for being bored, processing information, emotional regulation, and receiving insights (think shower thoughts).

Be bored. A lot.

Start by going on walks without music. No stimulation. No distractions of any kind. If you learn to sit with your own thoughts, for long enough, in time they will start serving you. You’ll start having ideas once again. You’ll start developing an extreme sense of clarity that will shift you into the next stage of your life. All by being bored, which is pretty insane.

I wrote more about this in my essay on living a deeply intellectual life. It will help you live a life for maximizing your intellectual capabilities (and not becoming an intellectual degenerate).

You are all in no matter what you do.

So why not make the most of it?

Nobody will ever come to save you. You’ve heard that idea enough online I’m sure. So take absolute responsibility over everything you do and examine here.

I appreciate your time and attention a lot. I hope you found value in reading this (of course).

Also:

The Profound Writer 2.0 will be releasing late October / early November.

I’m yet to confirm an official date, but I can’t wait to release the first major updates to the course.

You won’t believe what’s coming.

Which means this is your last chance to access to current version of the course, which you can check out here.

You’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

Read on from here:

Until I found these five words, that is.

To not waste your time here:

All the advice on how to achieve your goals is so complicated and vague.

And all the advice online only gives you tiny pieces of a much larger picture.

People are addicted to doing things that simply don’t matter.

Some people swear by deep work. Others swear by time blocking. Some promise that analog is superior to digital. Or no, digital will always be better than analog, because you have the newest productivity app or software getting vibe coded each day. What about Notion templates, and morning routines! Wait… no morning routines? Which is it?

Sorry.

They are all tiny nodes in a spider’s web. Individual pieces to a big picture puzzle that are pointless in isolation.

Most people will spend their lives doing pointless things that feel productive.

You’re doing it already.

You’ve done it today, yesterday, and you’ve wasted more hours than you can count across your ten fingers.

All your life problems exist in the vague. Because fear and laziness don’t live in the specific.

You’ll believe you’re lazy if you don’t have a plan.

You’ll live your life in fear unless you clear the fog in your own mind.

These five words are your guiding light for clearing that fog.

Outcome → Activities → Actions → Time → Iterate

I call it The OAATI Model (pronounced “oat-ee”).

This newsletter has a single purpose:

Give you absolute clarity on what to do for achieving anything.

I can’t promise this will be the most emotionally investing piece of writing. We have lots of logic to run over.

This will be dull for a lot of people.

Which is why a lot of people will never achieve a single one of their goals, ever, and live an 80-year life of quiet desperation.

The only thing I can promise is that you’ll have everything you need to build upon what I’m going to give you.

Here’s how you can achieve any goal with this model:

1. Define one clear/measurable outcome

2. Break it into activities, lists of single actions, and time needed to complete each action (so you can time block with a calendar)

3. Test every part, and cut what fails

4. Find your one constraint limiting you from launching into the next stage of your life

5. Systematize everything else

6. Iterate and course correct until you achieve your outcome

Ready to have absolute clarity on how to achieve literally any goal?

Me too :)

Let’s do some profound thinking together!

Listen to this while on a walk you beautiful human:

1 - There is no difference between a goal and an outcome

(a) What is a goal?

Let me ask you.

When you have a goal, what appears in your mind?

Well, it’s a vision of reality.

It’s an image of something physical, tangible, and measurable.

Have you ever heard of a man named Stanley Kubrick? He’s considered to be one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived. Kubrick once said a very profound idea, that if it can be thought of, it can be filmed.

You’re allowed to view your goals in the same way.

I’ll tell you a story.

I was catching up with my dad during the week, and I was telling him about The OAATI Model. I used a relevant example for him.

Golf.

I haven’t played much golf, and I’ll try keep this brief. Just so I don’t bore you if you haven’t either.

I actually think using an example of something you do find boring actually reveals a lot more about goal setting that you might realize.

If you have what’s called a single handicap in golf, you’re considered a golfer.

Put simply, a golf handicap is a number that measures your golfing ability so that people of different skill levels can compete fairly against each other.

The single outcome (goal) for this example is 9.9.

Remember.

This is a clear and tangible outcome.

You can see and measure it.

See how unvague it is? It’s more concrete than a brick wall.

The insight:

You need one outcome.

It can be anything. Learn to write high-impactful long form content under a personal brand, get to a single handicap in golf, cook nicer fillet steaks, build some fucking confidence that lasts longer than 30 seconds, watch Game of Thrones as fast as possible (especially the last season)…

ANYTHING.

But is has to be one thing. The clearer you define the outcome the better. It can iterate and evolve, so you just need any outcome to begin with.

Direction is more important than having a perfect outcome to begin with. But it still has to be a single outcome.

(b) How to pick your goal

Have you ever heard of a man named Sisyphus?

I never go too long without mentioning this book, I’ve written about it a lot.

Sisyphus is that guy who got condemned by the Gods (ya know, as you do) to push a rock up a mountain for eternity. And just before it reaches the top, it will roll back down again, every time, repeating for the rest of… you get the idea.

Let’s use Sisyphus as our role model here.

You need a mountain.

The top of the mountain is your outcome. That’s the summit.

The bottom of the mountain is your current pain. That’s your baseline. Whatever suffering you will continue to endure unless you start climbing.

You need to pick a heavy rock to push. Like Sisyphus.

And you need to choose your own mountain. It’s all well and good pushing a rock around in circles. But going in circles will never lead you anywhere other than in a circle.

You need to push upward as opposed to around.

(c) Define your goal (and its opposite)

How do you define your outcome, the top of the mountain you’ll be climbing?

Well, you ask yourself some questions.

• What would it feel like?

• What would it look like or appear like in conversation or a specific setting?

• What would you be feeling, thinking, saying, and doing?

That’s your summit… but what about your baseline?

You invert your summit.

Flip it.

• What would it NOT feel like?

• What would it NOT look like or appear like in conversation or a specific setting?

• What would you NOT be feeling, thinking, saying, and doing?

Motivation comes from urgency. Which means you need an enemy to run from.

Profound Idea: Sometimes the best way to launch yourself into a new way of life, is to give yourself a fire under your arse that actually gets you sweating a little.

Think of exactly what you do not want.

Reverse engineer why that failure would have happened. What mistakes were made? From there, make your version one mountain. Think of this like a first draft you know will get destroyed, rebuilt, and always keep evolving.

Something specific enough to act on and start getting feedback from (which you can use to evolve it as you yourself evolves through iteration).

Our first step is to define one outcome.

Then define the bottom of your mountain to climb away from. The outcome you don’t want.

My 23 years of being alive has taught me so much and so little. However, I personally believe there are voluntary, meaningful, and better problems, as opposed to involuntary, avoidable, and worse off problems.

I’d much rather take my pick from the first boat as much as possible.

You have to pick your poison, because either way, you’re all in.

If you don’t have a mountain, if you can’t define your baseline and summit, if you can’t give yourself just one single outcome to aim at, good luck.

I don’t know what to tell you if you can’t start with that. Even a poorly defined single outcome at first.

Just choose one, then do this.

2 - Every outcome breaks down into activities, a single list of actions, and time

(a) What to do once you’ve picked a goal

The outcome always comes first.

You work backwards from the goal you want to achieve.

Which will lead you onto the next few letters of the model:

• Activities are categories of work that each consist of a list of single actions in sequence

• Actions are the deathly specific tasks within each activity

• Each action takes a distinct amount of time (you time block or use a calendar to schedule time to complete actions)

Notice, finally, how every other productivity system only ever gives you fragments of this big picture?

That objective big picture is what nobody seems to talk about… for whatever fucking reason. Or in a clear, simple way at least.

Back to the golf outcome we had:

Single handicap is the goal. The 9.9 handicap.

Although I don’t know much about golf (it’s been years since I’ve played), while talking to my dad, I myself broke that outcome down into three activities:

1. Driving the ball from the tee spot

2. Getting the ball to the green

3. Putting the ball into the hole

This is far from being a perfect breakdown of activities.

But it’s done.

You can’t iterate (improve) something that does not exist.

More on iteration later friend.

Listen.

If I myself had more reps from playing golf, which means more feedback from reality, I would have broken down the activities list with more confidence. I’d have more confidence on what single actions I would need to make too for each activity. I really want you to understand this idea.

Your ability to break down your goals into its parts improves as your experience does.

Experience requires feedback.

You need to do things.

Live your life. Reflect on your mistakes. What went well or not. Then you iterate somewhere across those five words across the OAATI model.

This entire model is quite literally everything you need to achieve your goals.

The only other thing you need is iteration so you can course correct.

(b) Two types of action steps for achieving any goal

What about each activity itself?

Well, you have a list of single actions (an example will do wonders for you here).

There are two types of action steps:

1. Rigid Steps - These are mechanical. Like editing a checklist, organizing your calendar, or brushing your teeth all the way from grabbing toothpaste to cleaning those sparkly whites

2. Loose Steps - These are creative. Think idea generation, painting (as opposed to mechanically taking out your paints, brushes, and canvas) or live rolling in jiu-jitsu

Both types of steps are specific, but neither is vague.

Vagueness is the enemy, not specificity.

There’s two sides of the internet that love to go to war with each other. The productivity group love to systematize everything, and the creativity group assume they live hollow lives, and feel shallow on the inside because they live like robots. They don’t do anything for the sake of itself… which is why the creativity group usually get nothing done, and can’t market the value of their content for shit, and don’t achieve as many real world outcomes as opposed to the productivity group. On the surface, it looks like a battle for success and wholeness between the two groups - and that you can’t have both.

Wrong.

Understanding the distinction between rigid and loose steps is what integrates both sides here.

Productivity and creative freedom.

If you understand that rigid steps build the foundation for creativity, flow, and adaptation, you will win.

Rigid steps can’t be ignored. Things like making a long-form content template or checklist, or curating topics to write about, or making a system for how to go about outlining a long-form post, those things can be systematized.

They don’t require creativity.

But they build the groundwork to let you dance upon, and be creative about what you write about in your long form post, or how you let your taste define the finished product, or what key points you choose to place within your outline.

Rigid steps maintain order so that creativity can dance chaotically and freely.

Another example, just to send this point home.

I am a jiu-jitsu blue belt. A shit one, to say the least.

The rigid steps, for me, involve showing up twice per week, warming up with these weird hip stretches I do (or not warming up at all… yikes!) and drilling a specific footsweep I want to work on that week.

The loose steps are where I get to let loose.

You can’t script what happens in a live round. You can’t predict it. Do you think anyone can predict exactly what might happen in a boxing match or a UFC fight? No, but the rigid steps serve the unpredictability. The creativity.

How I engage with my opponent, how I respond. Do I wrestle or pull guard, do I attack the legs or look for a triangle choke?

My point is that principles and chaos are allowed to meet.

You will become more creative and to a higher quality once you give yourself constraints.

(c) The more skilled you are, the less action steps you need to track

The more skilled you are, the fewer actions you need, or the less specific you have to be about doing them.

This is all built upon the philosophy of SOPs (standard operating procedures).

An SOP you’re running for the first time writing a Substack newsletter from blank page to published post might have 80 steps.

I’m being serious.

But an expert might only have 50 steps after cutting, asking “why am I doing this” at every action and activity, and separating the wheat from the chaff after iterating that SOP (to improve it based on data/feedback) after writing 10 long form posts and getting tons of feedback doing so.

All of this probably seems very overwhelming for you right now.

But please know that all things you’ve never tried before feel like that.

Profound Idea: New things feel uncomfortable at first, until you do more of those things, before getting better at those things.

Once it’s written down once, the entire SOP from activity one, action one, to the final activity and last action, you never have to do it again.

You only have to improve it from there.

Write it all down, every activity, list of action steps (rigid or loose), and the time it takes to complete each activity, even if none of it is perfect at first. Do it in a word document in Notion, Eden, Obsidian, or the notes app in your phone.

You only need one document. It’s that little.

Then you can improve it. Because it exists now.

I promise that you will not believe how much clarity you will gain. Let alone how much progress and iteration and thus learning and self-development you can do in 2-3 months with a single SOP document.

One word document for achieving one meaningful outcome you’ve kept failing to achieve until now.

3 - Test each part by asking what, why, and how, and cut like a maniac

(a) Ask yourself what-why-how for each activity

That was heavy, what we just went through.

As I always recommend, you should listen to this on a walk or on multiple walks.

For what actions you take, so, the rigid and loose types beneath each activity, use the what-why-how framework.

1. What is this action?

2. Why am I doing it?

3. How does it move me toward my outcome in relation to where I am right now?

This is how you (1) build out your action steps when starting all this, and (2) how you maintain it during iteration.

The reason you can’t move forward within any domain of your life, is almost always because you’re doing actions that you can’t explain WHY you’re doing them.

I want you to pause and think about what I just said for 20 seconds…

(b) Example: me being an idiot

Let me tell you a little story.

I was building a learning system for a long time. 2 months at least. And all I kept doing was building and updating the system, trying to make it perfect. But I wasn’t reading. I wasn’t reading books. I had no feedback because I was doing everything but move toward my outcome… build a broad but intuitive understanding of the books on my reading list.

Using the what-why-how:

• Why am I updating this system right now? So I can improve my comprehension skills while reading.

• Does doing this right now move me toward reading more and understanding more books? No, because I’m not actually implementing enough and getting real feedback that would justify making updates to my system.

So why fucking do it?

That was the aha moment for me.

(c) This works for abstract goals, not just physical goals

What’s the difference between the two?

Think “improve my confidence” as opposed to “build this IKEA shelf.”

You just need to be incredibly clear and precise with defining your summit (what would confidence feel like to you, look like to you and others, and appear like to you and others in conversation?) and your baseline (the opposite of your summit answers).

Then you would break those down into activities, with each activity having a single list of actions.

Then you test the life out of each one by asking what-why-how WHILE you are going out and following the damn actions and activities with your time.

It’s harder, dirtier work to do this than with say a physical, concrete outcome.

You need to be even more specific and clear about what success looks like for achieving an abstract goal, compared to a physical goal (getting a single handicap is more measurable than a 50% improvement in confidence).

But the model still works. You just have to be willing to do the dirty work that is necessary.

Here’s something that annoys me (that most people cannot do).

Most people can’t state what they believe clearly, let alone why it is true or how it is relevant.

So do this for me now:

• Take your current list of actions for each activity (assuming you defined those, even poorly for now)

• Question each activity by asking what, why, and how

• Then question each action within each activity by asking what, why, and how

• Cut or restructure anything that fails that test

You can read more about how to use the what-why-how thinking framework for making your thinking clearer, and therefore more deadly, by reading this post (once you’ve finished reading this one).

4 - Most of the work you’re doing is absolutely, totally pointless

There, I said it.

What you need is to find your constraint instead.

(a) Theory of Constraints

In his book The Goal, written in 1984 (and it’s still relevant today), Dr Eliyahu Goldratt outlined his concept known as the theory of constraints.

It states:

Every system has at least one constraint limit it’s performance, and improving that constraint is the only thing that improves the whole system.

Goldratt got this idea while on a hike with boy scouts. He noticed that the slowest walker determined the pace, and thus the arrival time of the entire group. Speeding up the fastest walkers wouldn’t have done anything… but the slowest walkers?

Glorious. It’s almost too good an analogy to use.

Find your slowest walker and light a fire under their arse.

Maybe don’t do that… I’m being metaphorical here trust me (haha).

Your activities and actions are the scouts. One of them will always be the slowest. ALWAYS. And when one of them no longer becomes the slowest walker, another one will.

That is the theory of constraints.

Guess what?

The what-why-how framework will help you find yours.

(b) Example: me being an idiot (again)

When I was in secondary school I spent four hours each night studying from 6pm to 10pm…

“studying”…

I say studying and not learning.

I never identified the specific gap between where I was and where I needed to be, in relation to what the curriculum required.

You know those learning outcomes you see at the start of each chapter of your school books?

Or the learning outcomes they talk to you about once, in one 15 minute conversation at the start of the school year, and forget to mention again or even call back to while teaching, and instead give you vague instructions on what you need to be learning, and why it’s relevant, in their eyes, and not based on what you are very specifically getting tested on at the end of the year…

Yeah.

If I had found my one constraint (either a subject or concept that was limiting my progress the most) I could have spent one hour learning each day, and spent the rest lifting weights and playing guitar and doing anything else.

I made a painful mistake (a time costly one too) of sacrificing quality of work for the metric of hours worked.

(c) Strategic thinking is finding your constraint and destroying it

Pointless work is a symptom that you have not found your constraint.

I had my last ever shift at my job last week and I’m officially a full-time writer.

My job right now is nailing down the one constraint limiting my business right now - there’s only ever one at any given time - and nuking the hell out of it.

This is my definition of strategic thinking.

• You have an outcome in your mind.

• You find your single point of leverage for achieving it (across your activities and lists of actions for each activity).

• And you ignore everything else.

Focus is the removal of options, in my eyes.

Quality should never be sacrificed for volume, not ever. I’d rather you write 500 words of a long form post and let your idea quality be great, rather than writing for 3 hours straight and publishing when your brain is fried and wondering why nobody reads or clicks.

Profound Idea: Less is more when less is aimed at your constraint.

But how do you systematize the work that isn’t the constraint, so you can spend more time dealing with it?

5 - If it doesn’t require deep thinking, systematize/automate/delegate it.

(a) More → better → new

Here’s a framework I fucking love from Sir Alex Hormozi:

More, better, new.

You can’t figure out what needs to be better without feedback. So you do tons of reps. Then you improve based on the data you get from doing those reps with systematization, refinement, and incorporating leverage using AI.

And only when the activity is maxed (you don’t know how to better any parts of it) that is when you experiment with trying new things… which almost always causes an initial 20-40% drop in performance.

What’s the insight here?

Profound Idea: You can only systematize or bring in leverage somewhere to what you’ve done enough times to understand.

You need reps. Then you systematize. THEN you test in tiny increments. 10% here and there, ask “what ifs,” and trial and error.

Iteration.

Back to my reading system example. I was trying to 10x the efficiency of a process I didn’t have enough reps in. I needed to be reading more books, before making it better, before trying anything new.

I’ve done the same with prompt libraries and checklists within my writing workflow, but they’ve always felt incomplete to me (which is why I’ve always dumped them after 2 weeks) because I was treating these tiny components as if they were the complete system.

(b) The SOP is the complete system

The SOP is the complete big picture, whereas prompts and checklists are pieces within it.

That’s why you used the what-why-how framework for each part of more, better, new.

SOPs, templates, checklists, AI prompts, meal prepping, batching content creation, recording yourself doing a process once, these things are all examples of systematizing the setup. So all that’s left is doing the work itself.

Enjoy it!

You won’t need to remember to take out your paint and brushes and canvases, that part will be part of your SOP so you can enjoying painting.

The SOP is the highest form of systemization because it contains everything.

Outcomes.

Activities.

Every list of single actions within each activity.

Time needed to complete each action.

Checklists or prompts for various activities (and completing actions in less time).

Iteration.

(c) How to actually build and iterate your SOP

I like using a notebook to plan my days so I don’t rely on tech all the time.

I’ve systematized how I outline my days:

starting with my 2-3 tasks, then my midday responsibilities, then any other brain dumped ideas or tasks, so I can focus on the ideas themselves, and not constantly having to build out this structure each day.

That outline structure took me dozens of reps to build. Now I can plan my day in minutes as opposed to dossing around for half the morning figuring out what to do inside my head.

My point:

Something that might have taken 80 hours to build, and a hell of a lot of mental effort, now takes 10.

AI is not infinite leverage. As a lot of people love to go around saying.

It’s about 4-8x times more leverage if you know where and how to use it correctly.

Where is AI actually useful?

Well, for building and updating SOPs with feedback you’ve written down in your notes on your phone.

The basic system for updating and iterating SOPs:

• Write down feedback you get on your phone (what feels good, what doesn’t, if you skip parts or if parts feel irrelevant, write it down!)

• Hand that written feedback to an AI chat, including your one word document that outlines your SOP from start to finish, and has everything written from single outcome to the time it takes for each action

• Keep iterating that document while following it across each week, across your time blocks, and repeat

And now for the final concept that makes this entire model run…

6 - Iterate weekly with short feedback loops

(a) What is iteration?

Strategic thinking is iterative thinking.

Your thinking should always come back to one part of this model.

If it doesn’t, that means you’re not thinking strategically.

What does iteration mean?

It looks like this:

Do something -> get feedback (data from reality) -> reflect on that feedback -> adjust how you act next time -> do something with a degree shift toward your outcome

You only need to be moving a percentage or two each day or week toward your outcome. These tiny, high-quality needles being moved compound like crazy across months and years.

I like how a lot of this is pure physics.

Physics is harsh. You either win the competition or lift the weight in the gym or you don’t.

Always always always reflect on feedback and keep testing your SOP in relation to your outcome.

(b) The walk back down

Sisyphus was condemned to push a rock up hill for eternity.

We all know that story by now. Everyone talks about it online.

But what if the most important moment is his walk back down?

His “hour of consciousness” as Camus calls it. Where he’s fully aware of the activity he’s doing, and keeps doing it anyway?

Camus wrote we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Because happiness doesn’t come from the outcome itself but from taking the risk and responsibility of moving toward it.

Iteration IS the walk back down the mountain.

You reflect.

You see what worked.

You make an educated adjustment.

You push again.

The SOP is the route up the mountain (your goal/outcome), and the walk back down is your review of the push (iteration).

No matter what you do you’re pushing a rock.

You are aiming toward various outcomes in your life even if you haven’t consciously chosen any.

Whether it’s voluntary, meaningful, chosen outcomes, or involuntary ones, because you never decided to do the dirty work of getting more specific than most people are willing to be, about what defines your definition of living a successful life.

You’re all in no matter what you do.

Pick your poison.

(c) The dirty work nobody wants to do

It’s not 10,000 hours.

It’s 10,000 iterations.

10,000 feedback loops. Learning loops.

Iteration does not mean repetition. Repetition is mechanical.

Iteration means doing something, pausing, reflecting, seeing how well it worked, making an adjustment, and going again ten thousand more times.

My golf breakdown wasn’t perfect. For me to make it better I would need to play lots of golf.

I’d keep improving it.

If I had more reps and feedback I would’ve broken it down better.

All good and bad thoughts or feelings are feedback.

Profound Idea: All good and bad thoughts and emotions are feedback.

Getting rejected is feedback, as is losing the jiu-jitsu tournament or hating going to the party or the pub last weekend.

There’s a cool idea from spiral dynamics (a model for how humans develop in response to problems) which states that people encounter the same problems at different levels of development, but with new levels of understanding from accumulated feedback.

In simple terms, you face the same problems constantly, but every time you face them, again and again, you’ve evolved, so you confront them with more knowledge, understanding, and perspective for solving them successfully.

Instead of going around in circles you move up. Like a spiral.

If you lost motivation after a week of doing all this, that’s feedback. You might not be doing relevant activities or actions, or you just need to grow up and do the work. The work might just need doing. This is likely.

None of this is a fancy Notion template or productivity app. Which is why most people don’t want to do it (and would rather choose Notion templates and productivity apps that make you feel productive instead of being productive).

It’s ugly. It’s actually very boring and not sexy. It requires the dirty work of writing down your outcome super clearly. Every activity, every single action, every time for each action, and iterating each based on feedback.

But it works in a way that would make you question the online productivity space itself and how fucking pointless most of it is.

Keep capturing feedback on your phone in a notes app. One document, call it “Feedback.”

Hand it to an AI chat along with your SOP document.

That should be one doc too.

Update your SOP weekly.

Do it in minutes, not hours (thanks to AI).

Always experiment with adding and cutting away 10% here and there, and please remember that this will never be perfect. There’s no finish line with this because it will keep evolving as you do.

You will not believe how much clarity you will gain from doing this.

Let alone how much you can achieve in 2-3 months.

I’ve given you my knowledge.

So how can you act on it as efficiently as possible right this second?

I’ve made an AI prompt that will guide you through making your very first SOP for achieving one specific goal you have.

It will guide you through every step so you can just focus on executing with what you’ve learned.

You can keep that same AI chat somewhere safe and let that be your chat for updating your SOP weekly with feedback. It might take you a while to create your SOP, and it won’t be easy, but hey. Nothing that’s worth it is easy. Which is what separates most people from a select few people.

Here it is.

Thanks for reading.

You’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

P.S

If you’d like to understand how I write these newsletters each week (for Substack and YouTube) you can check out The Profound Writer. It’s an evolving course for those looking to learn how to write long-form content people can’t help but read.

Feel free to check that out by clicking this sentence.

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.

Oh yeah. This is in video form you beautiful human!

Listen while on a walk. You know the drill ;)

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.

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