How To Learn & Master Any Topic through Writing
Writing one essay per week will change your life.
This is a continuation of How to do Research for Long Form (Essays, Newsletters, Articles etc.).
I highly recommend reading that post first. It will teach you how to find validated topics to write about, build angles and reframes, and create unique perspectives.
This is about the writing (and learning) system now.
In my first 10 months on Substack, I cultivated an audience of 26k+ newsletter subs, over 1 million reads, became a Substack bestseller in 4 months, and created two digital products that both make me a nice part-time income.
I am not a fucking millionaire.
And I hate every creator pretending to act like one.
But I achieved all this by writing one long form post per week.
That’s one piece of writing per week that could help change your life.
Even if you’re still working a full-time job like me.
Not a complicated funnel or email sequence.
Not hundreds of unique pieces of content across every platform imaginable.
There are tons of content creation systems out there that optimize for tiny details. If anything, that just increases the chances for overwhelm, burnout, and the chances that you’re not doing what’s necessary to move the needle every day.
One high-quality long form post. It really should be that simple.
But you need to understand the mechanism beneath why this can work for you.
This does work if you understand it, and more importantly, if you stick to it.
I don’t think of my newsletter in terms of just getting it finished and sent out, but rather in terms of the process of writing itself - and what that does for my brain.
Writing is how I think.
Writing is how I learn.
If I want to learn something, I’ll write a newsletter about it. If I’m reading something, it’ll find a way into my writing.
Reading, learning, writing, and creating content are all expressions of the same fundamental skill that most creators don’t address directly.
Thinking.
One long form post per week is the greatest container that forces all of them to feel integrated and connected. They all serve and build each other up if you do this right.
This guide is a content system, yes. But it’s really a thinking system that happens to attract readers who want to think just like you do, and learn about what you are learning in real time.
Whether you’re a seasoned writer or a complete beginner who wants to start writing online, this guide will help you. My thinking behind this guide is to write something I wish I could have read when I started 10 months ago.
Let’s get into it!
It’s all just... thinking?
The quality of your writing will be determined by the quality of your thinking.
When creators talk about having ideas to write about, what they really mean is having knowledge to write about.
In the creator space, it’s called having ideas.
In learning science, it’s called knowledge.
You build knowledge by encoding and retrieval. Read my reading and learning guides if you want to learn how to leverage both.
How you think determines how you build knowledge.
Meaning, thinking shapes what and how you write.
Have a think about what thinking can give you. Just for a second.
If you can make better decisions, you will suffer less than from making stupid ones. If you communicate the value of something clearly through writing - which is formalized thinking - you can persuade, negotiate, attract, and maintain attention. If you can see what other people miss, avoid what traps people fall into, and articulate what others can feel but not express, think about the leverage that could give you?
Not being able to think means you have no control over anything in your life, and you’re leaving everything in the hands of other people’s thinking.
Now think about what improves your thinking ability.
Reading is how you think from new perspectives. When you read a book, you become the author. You take in raw material to fuel more thinking. The wider and deeper you read, the more connections your brain has to work with while writing each morning.
Learning is how you turn information inside books into knowledge inside your brain. Forget passive highlighting or taking notes - I’m talking about encoding. Wrestling with ideas until they become part of how you view the world. Research is just learning with direction. It sounds boring, but it shouldn’t be. It’s what gives your curiosity a compass.
Writing is your retrieval practice. If you don’t have ideas to write about, it means the information never got encoded into your memory. You don’t have ideas because you don’t have knowledge. It’s impossible to write a newsletter about something you do not know about - unless you outsource everything to AI or write a very shitty article (they’re the same thing, really). Writing forces clarity. It exposes knowledge gaps. Ideas you never fully articulated. Connections you hadn’t made. It even helps you make profound connections in the moment while writing by hand.
Content is all of this being shown in public. Content is your proof. Proof that you’re learning, thinking, and that your unique knowledge can help someone else move from where they are stuck to where they want to be.
Reading, learning, writing, and creating are all expressions of the same skill: thinking. One weekly long form post is the ultimate vessel for improving all of them.
I don’t like the word content creation. I don’t even like viewing myself as a content creator.
I see myself as a thinker.
All I’m doing is solving my own problems and sharing the solutions online. And I do that by doing what I love - reading, learning, writing, and creating cool shit.
This is what I mean when I say a content system is a thinking system.
You are developing the most important life skill you have, with audience growth being a byproduct of doing that in public.
Your unique knowledge - your ideas, synthesis, perspectives, and connections only you could offer - is what moves people from their problems to their desired outcomes. That is your niche.
You don’t need a topic-based niche. You need a web-based niche.
All you are doing is building and sharing your own unique web of knowledge, one long form post at a time, that helps people get from where they are to where they want to be.
Your niche is those looking to adopt your unique knowledge and use it to help change their lives for the better.
Your job as a writer is to shape that knowledge into something people can use. You do that by writing online.
Profound thinking
Most content advice tells you to take notes on everything.
Build a second brain.
Hoard information in folders and databases so you never lose an idea.
I do not do that.
I would rather encode information inside my brain as knowledge than do what most creators do, which is hoard thousands of notes but have none of them inside their mind as expertise.
This is why research is learning for me, not collecting.
When I consume a book, a podcast, a YouTube video, I’m not extracting highlights into a notes app. I’m connecting ideas. Turning them over. Asking how they connect to what I already know. The goal is to make the information part of how I think, not part of a filing system I’ll never look at again.
This is what makes synthesis possible.
When I sit down to write, I’m not looking at a wall of saved notes trying to piece something together. I’m pulling from knowledge that already lives inside my head. I consume widely - books, podcasts, YouTube, conversations, my own experiences - and I hold it all in my mind while looking for connections across the big picture.
Similarities. Contrasts. Gaps. Ideas from completely different domains that share a hidden thread.
The goal I have with every newsletter I write is to generate a perspective that didn’t exist before. Not in any single source, but in the connections between them.
That’s what I call profound thinking.
It’s not about having the smartest take. All I’m doing is offering a unique perspective I’ve hand-crafted with my own taste.
I don’t take linear notes during research because I don’t want to fragment my thinking into bullet points. I want the ideas to stay fluid, to collide with each other, to form something new. When that synthesis produces an original idea (something I hadn’t thought of before) that’s when I write it down. Those synthesized ideas become my outline.
This is why I always have prior knowledge to make connections with. Every newsletter I write adds another node to the web of knowledge inside my head. The more I encode, the richer the connections become, and the more original my perspectives get.
You can develop this. Creating content is a learning system if you treat it like one.
Consume with intention. Don’t passively scroll. Ask yourself how what you’re reading connects to what you already know. Look for the thread between a psychology concept and a business strategy. Between a philosophy book and a content creation problem. Between your own lived experience and a profound idea you encountered last week.
The connections are always there. Profound thinking is the practice of learning to see them, even between ideas that are only somewhat related.
That’s where novel ideas come from.
One long form post per week
This is what every week has looked like for me. I’m generalizing to give you the densest first principles to take away immediately.
Let’s say it’s a Monday.
Days 1–2: Research and outlining
This is where I do the bulk of my learning.
I go on walks. I listen to everything I can possibly consume - audiobooks, podcasts, YouTube videos.
I’m being extra careful anytime I scroll, hunting for ideas with the eyes of a creator, not a consumer. I’m not scrolling passively, but looking for validated ideas I can incorporate into my writing. Interesting angles, or anything that makes me stop and think “oh fuck, I wish I wrote that.”
I screenshot or write down my own synthesized ideas into the notes app on my phone.
When I feel like I’ve overloaded my mind with enough information and am ready to start piecing together an outline (what I want to say and how I want to solve a topic problem) then that’s the whole process.
The outline does 80% of the heavy lifting.
Because I’m not staring at a blank page each morning. I have a rough outline in my mind, ideas I’ve written down on walks which I’ve added to my outline, AI chats to ask questions to. All of my ideas are organized into the outline, so all I have to do is write it.
How I structure the outline:
The structure of every post depends on who I’m writing for.
Specifically, how aware they already are of the problem I’m solving.
If my audience is unaware (they don’t even know they have this problem yet) - I’ll spend the entire first section on the severity of the problem before offering a single insight. I need to educate before I can teach.
If they’re problem-aware (they know they’re stuck but don’t know why) I skip the education and go straight to the insights that make a new perspective click for them.
If they’re solution-aware (they’ve seen other approaches but haven’t found one that works) - I briefly acknowledge the problem, then differentiate my angle. What am I offering that they haven’t seen before?
This is what dictates my outline.
I like to view an outline as an adaptive structure based on where the reader is starting from.
Within that structure, I use one of these frameworks depending on what the piece needs. There are more copywriting/persuasive writing frameworks you can research, but these are the ones I use mostly, with the last being my own creation:
Problem → Insight → Solution - when the reader needs to understand the problem deeply before the answer lands
Attention → Interest → Desire → Action - when I’m building toward a specific outcome or call to action
Hook → Insight Sections → Framework → Promote - my default for most posts, where the bulk of the value lives in 1–3 insight sections with examples and walkthroughs
The awareness level tells me how much to front-load; the framework tells me how to sequence what follows.
Quick Tip: I usually try to find the intersection between (1) what I want to learn this week and (2) a validated topic I’ve seen while scrolling that people are actively reading and engaging with. Read my research guide at the top of this post to learn more. It’s key to writing whatever you want and doing well.
Days 3–5: Writing
I aim to write 1–2 sections per day. 500–1,000 words.
I am always messing around with my writing process. For a while, I would write a full draft without any editing. Then for some time I would write and fully edit one section per day. I recommend experimenting.
In the beginning, I would recommend writing the whole newsletter without judgement. Just get the draft written. You can learn to evaluate and edit afterwards.
Be careful about constantly switching between convergent and divergent thinking - that’s why I recommend writing without editing first.
I give myself 30–60 minutes every day doing this. Sometimes 90 if the ideas are flowing. I never try to write perfectly while I write. I’m usually making connections and synthesizing ideas in the moment, which helps me consolidate what I’ve learned.
Using AI as a learning tool, not a writing tool:
A better way to use AI than simply having it write for you, is to help you learn.
That includes learning to write.
I have a Long-Form Breakdown Partner prompt that I use to deconstruct newsletters I love, and wish to learn from or emulate. I paste in a piece that performed well, and AI extracts the structure, the hook mechanics, the idea sequencing, and the psychological principles behind why it works. Then, I use that breakdown to understand why it worked, and I build my own outline by hand using what I learned.
In sum, I study what made the writing so profound.
AI is an excellent tool for gathering information that you can then build knowledge with. I fucking love the prompt I’ve linked, it’s crucial to improving my writing craft without using AI to write for me.
Day 6: Editing, visuals, scheduling
I try not to spend too long here.
