3 ways to use writing to get ahead of 99% of people

Think clearly, be more articulate, become high-value.

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.

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 :)

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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.

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