How To Thrive With Multiple Interests

Multiple Interests Are A Superpower

00:00Traditional education in hyper specialization is a way to make people subservient to the dominant paradigm or system. Study the generalized principles of nature and be a deep generalist. It's insane to think that you should know what you want to do with your life by the time you turn 18 years old.

00:12What you want to study, what career you want to pursue, how your life is going to end up most of the time is just like your parents, a job, a spouse, a mortgage, a few vacations, a few nice dinners, maybe a cat or dog, maybe some kids, maybe not.

00:26Because you know the economy. At least that's what you're supposed to do. That's what society wants for you. But you're different. You have multiple interests. If you're anything like me and yes, I shave my head again, we'll talk about it in the next video.

00:43Focusing on one thing is just the bane of your existence. You can't do it. You have multiple interests. You can't help yourself. You want to explore the full range of the human experience. You want to acquire as much knowledge as you can. But people in society, maybe not directly, have convinced you that this isn't going to lead to anything great in your life.

01:04And I'm here to tell you that that is a complete lie, because everywhere you turn, it just seems like your parents, your teachers, your friends or whoever it may be shoot you down when you bring your ideas and your interest to them. Or they say that shiny object syndrome is bad or something that you shouldn't do, and they may even throw subtle jabs at your dreams and aspirations because they say they want what's best for you, but in reality, they want what's best for them.

01:32They want you to pursue the safe route, become a doctor. Become a lawyer, do something respectable. Get a high paying degree. They drill your mind into this little box that they can understand. But you hate it. Little do they know. Having multiple interests is a superpower going into the future of work.

01:43And as we're going to talk about, I believe it's the singular edge that will make most people stand out. What used to be the safe route is no longer safe at all.

The 3 Differentiators – Agency, Taste, and Generalism

02:02If you have multiple interests, you need to learn one how to differentiate yourself from everyone else. Because having multiple interests, it's kind of chaotic, right? You don't know how to make sense of it and package it up in a way that is valuable.

02:13That leads to you getting something in return. So we're going to talk about the three differentiators right now, which is agency taste in general ism. And then later in this video, we're going to talk about how to turn your multiple interests into some kind of path forward in life.

02:29It could be a career. It could be a way of making an income, a way of sustaining your multiple interests, building a life that allows you to explore and understand these things and share them with other people. So let's start with this classic quote from Robert Heinlein.

02:45A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog on a ship, design a building, write a sonnet. Balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying. Take orders. Give orders. Cooperate. Act alone. Solve equations.

02:57Analyze a new problem. Pitch manure. Program a computer. Cook a tasty meal. Fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. Something fun. As I was reading through that, think about how many of those can you actually do? I think I hit on quite a few, but it made me realize that I need to learn a few.

03:13So comment if you how many of those that you hit. I personally can't change diaper now. In the early to mid 1800s when America was industrializing and needed to educate large numbers of immigrant children, educators like Horace Mann traveled to Prussia to study their system.

03:31This Prussian education system was designed to create obedient soldiers, compliant citizens, civil servants, and well-behaved workers. It accomplished this with its focus on mandatory attendance, training for teachers, National curriculum and testing for students, division of students by age, and the concept of grade levels.

03:50And if you're anything like me, a little part of you just died reading that. The thing here is that students were taught how to work, not how to think. So impressed by its efficiency and standardization, Horace Mann and others implemented many of these methods in American schools, particularly in Massachusetts, which became a model for other states.

04:07Now doing further research into this, Horace Mann didn't want the whole like slave mentality to be brought over. But if we just look at the school system, that's kind of a byproduct of the system itself. It doesn't matter how hard you try to avoid that.

04:20That's just the system. That's a property of the system. But there's an important point here. Since you do not fund the school system, you do not control what is taught. You're told to read this and memorize that. And if you don't, then your industrial age parents will scold you and threaten to ground you, and then you can't pursue your own interest or go hang out with your friends or explore.

04:44So it's you're getting, double the pain even further. And the crazy thing about this is that this education system has to bias the bottom quintile. In other words, you are forced to learn at the same pace as the dumbest 20% of the people in the public school system.

05:02And this is extremely destructive. I don't we don't even have to talk about that, because if you understand how the mind works, you understand that your mind absorbs the relevant information according to the goal that is at the top of your mind.

05:13And if your goal is to get a degree in job, that's the main, overarching like homing mechanism for your mind that's been coded into your head, sent for 18 years of your life. That's what you're doing whether you want to do it or not. You're just going with it's unconscious to you, right?

05:26You don't even have to think about it. You just do it. But since you're doing that, your mind is narrowed. It has a narrow point of view. That's what a goal is, is a point of view. It's not something that you achieve. It's a way of viewing life.

05:43So when those goals frame what information you can even pick up, your destiny is to become replaceable, because you're not going to learn the multiple interests that allow you to be free. As an example of this, if I want to start a business, I really want to start a business.

05:57That's the only thing I can think about. Then everything I perceive, the conversations I have, the books that I read, even if it's some weird self-help book or fiction book, I'll pull lessons out of it that apply and help me achieve my goals.

06:09But if you're going to school or you're getting a job or whatever it may be, you're doing the same thing. But for those goals, the real kicker here is that since those goals are not your own and you didn't think them through, the information that is programing your mind is creating an identity that you didn't create because you didn't create the goals that your mind operates on.

06:28So think about that for a bit. Here's the point. Society wants you to be a specialist because useful work or serve society. But every single person you admire is not a specialist. Specialists are tools. Tools get replaced. AI is doing the replacing.

06:40Every free and successful person is a generalist, a polymath, even if they put on the guise of a specialist. Like if you are thinking of someone where it's like, oh yeah, that's a they're very good at one thing. What allows them to be good at that one thing.

06:59How do you even know about them? Because they had other traits, qualities and skills that allowed them to make that one thing work. They understand that in order to actualize a grand vision that they create for their future, they're going to have to learn and do many things throughout their life.

07:12One path, one static, known defined path that many people have gone down before does not cut it, but general ism. General ism alone is only one piece of this equation. We are going through a second renaissance. We have the power of Einstein and da Vinci in our pockets.

07:31The individual will not. The institution has more power than ever to thrive with multiple interests. But still, people aren't doing anything. It doesn't matter how many interests you have. It doesn't matter how much of a generalist you are.

07:43If you sit around and do nothing, it's useless. But it's not because you're lazy or you lack creativity. You have those things. You know you have those things. It's because you and most people and myself included, it's not something that just goes away.

07:55It like has residual. There's residue that still needs to be cleaned up for kind of your entire lifetime. But our minds have been programed for 20 plus years and continue to be by a society that benefits from our stupidity. So in the future of work, you need to drastically change how you think about the future.

08:14General ism is a must. You have that right.

How To Develop Taste

08:19You have multiple interests. You're okay with learning many things, but the next piece of the puzzle is taste. So let's talk about how to cultivate it with a quote from IRA Glass, and I'll let him say it so I don't butcher it. It may be long, but really listen closely here because I resonated hard with this.

08:36Nobody tells people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me. Is that all of us who do creative work, like, you know, we get into it and we get into it because we have good taste. But it's like there's a gap that for the first couple of years that you're making stuff.

08:48What you're making isn't so good. Okay. It's not that great. It's it's trying to be good. It has ambition to go, but it's not quite that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your your taste is still killer and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you.

09:00You know what I mean? A lot of people never get past that phase. I like people at that point they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste.

09:15They could tell what they were making, wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it felt short. It didn't have this special thing that we wanted it to have. And the thing I would tell you is everybody goes through that and for you to go through it, if you're going through right now, if you're just getting out of that phase, you got to know it's totally normal.

09:32And the most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you're going to finish one story, because it's only by actually going through a volume of work that you're actually going to catch up and close that gap, and your the work you're making will be as good as your ambitions.

09:50Like, I took longer to figure out how to do this than anybody I've ever met. It takes a while. It's going to take you a while. It's normal to take a while and you just have to fight your way through that. Okay, that's one of those quotes that's just like you store forever and you come back to and look at because it just hits very hard.

10:11So I want to see if I can articulate this point well. So stick with me. Intelligence is no longer a differentiating resource. AI models continue to get better and better, or the price of those models gets closer and closer to zero. Everyone has all the answers they could ever need, and yet 99% of people don't realize or utilize it because intelligence has proven to be a poor resource in isolation.

10:34There's more to the story of success now. This is where it gets tricky. Listen, AI is replacing specialists roles because predictable outputs come from predictable inputs. Since many jobs are repetitive series of tasks that lead to noncreative outputs.

10:46I can do this good enough, but when you add another layer of abstraction or multiple, the number of outputs that can occur are infinite. I only gives you one unless you refine it or tell the AI to refine itself. The thing is, that's probably not the best output, and it's absolutely not the one that will garner the love and attention of the supporters who consume the output.

11:13Because most AI generations right now are slop. Now, I'm not anti-air. If you watched the last video on the death of the content creator, which was a play on the death of personal brand, both my videos, you'll understand what my viewpoint on I actually is.

11:25I mean, we're putting it inside of cortex. I'm not anti, I'm anti quick fix. I'm anti outsourcing your thinking and just becoming a drooling blob of flesh. I'm anti being used by machines. I'm pro using machines. Now it may sound like I'm repeating myself here if you watch those previous videos, but just stick with me because we need to illustrate a point here.

11:50Let's say you want to write a book, and you can also think about building a software or designing something, or any type of other creative work. Right now you can have I spit out a book if you want to, and you've played with AI a bit. So let's say that we want to write a book, How to focus so we can open up Claude Sonnet 3.5.

12:10You give it a purpose as a ghostwriter. You give it your writing style, tone and voice. You give it the target audience. You have it. Create a table of contents based on pain points of that audience. For each chapter you can have it include something like a relevant story, main insight, actionable steps, and a novel concept like time blocking.

12:28And along with that, you can go and study other books and look for patterns within them and then be like, okay, this one has a metaphor. You can kind of create these building blocks that the AI can use to craft, a compelling, an attention grabbing narrative within a book.

12:39And then you can give it previous ideas you've written about on focus or whatever it may be. You can create and refine the outline for each chapter, and you can finish the book and refine it to your liking. Now take 1000 different people and have them write a book on the same topic.

12:57Every single final output will be different from the other. Do you see where taste is starting to come into play? One book can be written a thousand different ways and 1000 different people can interpret that book in 1000 different ways. The point is, it doesn't matter if I can write a book or build a software or design a website or whatever it may be with a human behind it, right now.

13:18So it's the human anyway, because that's not what makes creative work successful. That's also not what makes people care about the creative work, which is necessary if you want the creative work to actually be valuable. So with this, you have to understand that multiple interests are merged with taste, that anyone can create anything that you have the power to do all of these different things.

13:38You have the multiple interests, you have multiple goals. You see your life going in so many different ways, and you can test and experiment with so many different ones of those. Now, because technology has made doing things so accessible, you can embrace your nature as a generalist and tie things together with taste.

14:00But what makes a book a brand, a software, and any other creative pursuit work is not the ability to create that thing, but how you synthesize multiple various ideas from different disciplines in a way that nobody could have thought of. A book on how to focus takes a completely different shape when you're at the pillar of it with your personal experience and emerge in something like philosophy, psychology, metaphysics, spirituality, whatever your interests are, think about it.

14:27What's an interest? Just a random, weird interest that you have. Now think about how that can fit into a book called How to Focus, and it probably can. Are you seeing where I'm getting at here is that things can be created in so many different ways, but it's your multiple interests that come together to create that thing that is unique.

14:50The good thing about this is that most people had their tastes blunted by schools and jobs. And since you have multiple interests, you are at a major advantage here because you didn't let school prevent you from studying beyond what was defined for you to study.

15:01You love to explore the unknown. So we have general ism. We have multiple interests. We understand taste. And I want to reiterate that you need to practice it like you actually have to do things in order to, get that taste cum. When I first started on Photoshop, it's like, obviously I had good taste and I would see people creating things that I wanted to create, but when it came time to create them, it just didn't work.

15:25It didn't look that good. I would, I would post it and I'd be kind of confident in it. But then over time, as you gradually learn these little tiny things, the the details is where things start to stand out. That's when you start to really cultivate it is you have to practice beyond general ism and taste.

Agency: Employment VS Entrepreneurship

15:43We need agency and to illustrate agency we need to illustrate employment versus entrepreneurship, because it's sad that business and entrepreneurship have become dirty words. We have a pretty immature definition of them, and for most people, when they hear those words, their mind just starts to flood with self-doubt and alarm.

16:03They think things like that requires a lot of money to start. I'm not talented enough to do that. Charging people for money. That sounds like a scam. I don't know how to create an LLC or do my taxes, so I'm never going to learn. Sounds boring.

16:15No, I'm not here to talk about entrepreneurship as a role or a title or something that's reserved for talented people. I'm here to talk about what it actually is, which is a state of mind. It's a state of consciousness. The difference between an employee and an entrepreneur is the difference between low agency and high agency.

16:33In this context, high agency individuals are those who create their own goals and actively pursue them without permission from another low agency. Individuals are those who are assigned goals and pursue them because they don't have a mind that allows them to see any other option.

16:44True agency can only be developed when you blame yourself for every problem, even when you're not at fault. An entrepreneur is often an employee, but an employee is rarely an entrepreneur. At top companies, the most sought after employees are those with high agency.

17:01The people who just go and solve the problem and deliver some kind of value. They just do it. They don't need their handheld. They're an entrepreneur in mind. But as I've said before, the jobs of the future will be reserved for the elite, the top 1%, the NBA of jobs.

17:21The entry level is going extinct because replaceable work is replaceable. So the main option in my eyes, for those with high ambition and multiple interests, is to create your own path and the only way to do that is by becoming an entrepreneur.

17:37No matter how long it takes for your dreams to gain traction, you have multiple interests. You're going to be exploring this stuff anyways. You might as well try to make it all work in some entrepreneurial endeavor as your vessel for your multiple interests.

17:49You're doing it anyway. Just bring that extra layer. Try to do it in a way that allows you to sustain your lifestyle and control your lifestyle. Now I'm going to throw up a graphic here just so you can look at it as I'm saying these next things, because it's easy to lump me into the camp of all 9 to 5 are bad.

18:01When that's not my belief at all. However, I do understand psychology to a reasonable extent. As a child, there is a magic to life because everything is new. You are constantly improving, evolving and taking on new challenges that make life worth living.

18:19Schools simulate this desire to hunt for good dopamine by providing a video game like progression to learning. And when you accept your first job, it's challenging at first. You develop skill to cure your anxiety. Then when you reach as far as that career ladder will allow you, the challenge and novelty ceased to exist.

18:36Your days turn into a blur of repetition. This is incredibly damaging to your psyche. You get stuck in the defined, the known, and you can't escape because a monthly paycheck is addictive and you max out your lifestyle to fit what that paycheck allows.

18:44So for those who want more out of life, the only way out is entrepreneurship, right? Schools, jobs. They're kind of like a video game at first. That's what makes life worth living is you can reach the next level. Grade one, grade two, grade three.

18:56You can get a few promotions. You can get a raise. You're acquiring skills, you're evolving, you're expanding. But then one day that just stops. And since most people aren't going to get the elite jobs that allow them to continue up the ladder, that you, you have all of these skills and interest, just break off and do your own thing.

19:12So you're in control of the novelty, meaning fulfillment of your life. You are literally only afraid of survival. You're afraid of not making money. You can't. You're thinking too generally, too abstractly. So you're thinking from the amygdala.

19:24You're not thinking specifically. You're not actually thinking through, okay, what can I do? How can I actually do this? And creating a plan a plan is a surface area for luck. It's something that evolves. It's something that brings order and clarity to the mind.

19:37And once you have a plan, then your anxiety tends to fizzle down and you start to see that you can do it. Now, obviously don't do anything stupid. Although I personally would. I quit my job. I move into places that I can't afford all the time because it forces me to stretch and grow.

19:51And most people are afraid of that because they'll sink and swim. Okay, so we have the three differentiators, which is general ism, taste and agency.

How To Turn Your Interests Into Income

20:03Now we need to learn how to take our multiple interests and turn them into a life that we want. Or in this case, it's turning your interests into an income. Because whether you like it or not, you need an income to survive in order to pursue your multiple interests full time.

20:20So if you're not okay with making money or you're hiding the desire to make money even though it's the lifeblood of society, then I can't help you any further. Sorry. You're probably not going to find a solution to your problem. So let's start with this.

20:31This is a little clip from Chamath. I would focus on the content creator side of things because I believe that's where the puck is going. That's a much more important shift in how we all consume information. Content in our entertainment. So the final problem is this you have multiple interests.

20:43You're developing taste, you're ready to increase your agency, but you have no idea where to start. And if you're young and haven't been doing this at all, the only places you know to look are like freelance markets and job boards, because you haven't learned and educated about how to do your own thing.

21:04And the thing with those is, is that those are known past. That's no different from a job. If someone can give you the work, if you weren't hunting for the work, if you weren't attracting the work, then it's replaceable and it's you're probably not going to get paid as much as you deserve.

21:17So rather than giving you a singular place to look or some kind of tactical step that everyone else gives you, and you can go and find and try, I'm going to guide you

Choose A Meta Path

21:29to creating your own path. So that's what we start with. Step number one is to choose a meta path. What a meta path is, is a path of paths. So a meta path is like okay, we need to climb this mountain. But there are multiple different ways to climb the mountain.

21:41And the way that you climb the mountain is unique. It may take longer, it may take shorter. I want to give you, a meta path that anyone can take, because the greatest mistake you can make is boxing yourself into a specific model, like starting an agency business or an e-commerce business, or some kind of other, like niche model like Amazon Print On Demand.

21:59Those are great things to learn, but only to acquire relevant skills and knowledge to advance along your meta path. What I'm saying is, I don't want you to operate as like, oh, I'm this agency owner, and that's all I do. That's all I know. You're a CEO, you're the director of your life and an agency could be a way of getting to that.

22:21But if it's not, then you're probably on the wrong path. Now. A better route, aside from pursuing those models, is to zoom out a layer and to view the principles that make all of those models work, because once you understand those, you can create success and whatever you want to do, and you don't have to put a label on it.

22:34So if you want to do your own thing, you need these three things a valuable product or service, a way to attract people who care, and the skill to make people care. And thanks to the internet, all of these are accessible to those with an internet connection.

22:48You can build a product or service with relative ease. You can write a book or an e-book or a guide. You can start a cohort based course around your interest. You can build a software with AI assisted coding and learning. You can dropship if you want to, although I don't think that's the best model to go after, although people are doing it well.

23:07But we talked about this in a previous video. A full guide to creating your first profitable product, and those are the best options for a beginner who hasn't done anything before and wants to get the grip of creating a product and learning to monetize their interest.

23:19And if you don't have an excessive amount of money to invest in something like physical products or a physical location or whatever it may be, then digital products, media or code, media or software, podcasts, books, courses, whatever it may be, software, an app, things like that that require that are pretty, I would say, easy to get into.

23:39That takes a lot of skill and you still have to learn a lot, but those are what you can get into that don't really cost too much money to create. Software can get up there, of course, depending on what you want to build, but the options are there.

23:56I like media based products first, then go into software, then go into whatever you want. So once you've launched a few media based products around your interests, you now have data on what works and you have some money to invest. So at this point, you can take the Justin Welsch route and you can chill out with a multimillion dollar info product business.

24:13And I'm not talking about the make money online courses. I'm talking about something more sophisticated around your interests. You don't go to Skillshare and Udemy and think all these are all just get rich quick scheme scams. No, media based products are important.

24:26They're the education of the future creators or the decentralized educators. So people like Justin Welsch, that was his path. He got burnt out working as an executive at a tech startup, and then he took his skills and expertise, turned it into consulting, then turned it into media based products like courses for him, which could also be cohorts or an e-book or a book itself.

24:45And now he has time for family. He doesn't have to continue building products they sell on their own, and he doesn't have to do any fulfillment. He can work for 2 to 4 hours a day. Plus, writing on social media to attract an audience to his products or services that help that audience.

24:57And he can spend time with his family and live a good life. Or you can go the route that I've been going, where I went that route, and I could have pulled back and chilled out. But I'm young and I want to do more. And I like how personal development and business development are intertwined and how business can be, vessel for personal growth for me.

25:20So I started cortex and I'm like, okay, what's holding me back from building a team? Why am I so focused on this one person business thing? And so I started building it, and I started realizing my own faults, and I needed to improve myself and become a better person and be able to provide for my team and make sure that we have a product that's going to feed the team and allow us to survive and hopefully provide something beneficial to the people who are using the product.

25:40Now, the problem again here is that anyone can build the thing. You can build a note taking app or writing app right now if you wanted to, but not everyone can attract people to that thing or allow them to care about it. That's where most coders, creatives, or authors fall flat.

25:58They build a cool app, or they write a book or they create art, but they can't get people to care. They can't get customers. But thankfully, we have the internet and you can build an audience. And social media is the new media. You don't have to try to get on the radio or TV or a billboard.

26:10You can be like Devin Erickson, who we had a very popular podcast with on this channel, who was the author of a fiction book, Theft of Fire. He used to be a programmer, but then he thought, okay, I've wanted to write a science fiction book for my entire life.

26:23So he started writing one, and when he started to go look for publishing deals, I actually don't know if he look for publishing deals, but he decided to just sell it himself, because even if he got a publishing deal, he would still have to sell the book, the publishing, with help with distribution and other things like that.

26:41But now, with Amazon and all of these different technologies that allow you to distribute the book, you don't need a publisher. You need to go out and sell. You need to go out and express your opinions and interests and beliefs online and to attract people to your work.

26:54It's not just about info products. It's not just about science fiction books. It's about music. It's about any of your multiple interests that you want to build an audience around. Being a creator is interest agnostic. It's not just about self-improvement and philosophy.

27:10Because you follow me and you're in an echo chamber. There are creators creating about every interest on the face of this earth, because the creator economy cannot get saturated, because being a creator is an extension of yourself. The internet is the public town square.

27:23It's us connecting with each other and removing the physical limitations of connection. Stop thinking about social media as just this app on your phone when it is the way forward. If you get caught up in the half perspective that it is all toxic, you're going to lose and you're not going to make your creative work a success.

27:43The thing is, none of this is anywhere close to being easy. That's the entire fucking point. You're going to have to learn more skills, going to have to learn how to attract people, how to write, how to persuade, how to market, how to sell.

27:56You're the CEO. You need to learn every single skill that requires you to operate a business, along with your multiple interests that you're learning. You need to become a generalist. You need to have taste. You need to be able to package up and deliver signal.

28:13To attract people. You need to merge art and business, as we'll discuss to hone in on that, you need to attract people to your interests in your creative work. In other words, you need a medium and a message. Writing and speaking are the medium.

28:27That's how you communicate with people. You either write posts, threads, newsletters, products, ads, emails, articles, etc. or you speak to a camera to get your message out to people who may benefit from it. Psychology, marketing, sales, and persuasion can help form your message.

28:37You need to write or speak in a way that captures attention, articulates value, and builds trust. If you want to learn more about this, go watch the Futureproof Skill Stack video or the $1 million skill stack. There's a few of them, but if you want to learn how to write, how to turn one idea into seven days of content that allows you to attract an audience to your creative work, then consider enrolling in the Writers Bootcamp, which is a cohort for cortex or writing software that we run every quarter or so.

29:06This one starts on March 4th and enrollment closes on that date. So that was long. But that's the meta path. Being a creator is the meta path. That's how you can make any business model work. You can be a creator and an agency owner. You can be a creator and a, e-commerce store owner.

29:25You can be a creator and a teacher or running a cohort. You can be a creator and you can build a software. Elon Musk is a creator. All of the people that you look up to understand the power of sharing their voice and message online to attract people to their life's work.

29:37That's the meta path. So step number two. Once you're on the meta path,

Intersections Are Your Edge

29:44you need to understand that intersections are your edge. Because if everyone builds an audience, how do you stand out? Well, this is only a difficult question because you aren't your authentic self. If you were and everyone else on this planet was, everyone would be unique.

29:58In other words, if everyone were to become a creator and all of those creators were their authentic self, meaning they solved their own problems and sold the solution, then we would enter some form of a digital tribal era. It would be composed of small, self-sustaining tribes that would form in each person.

30:09In it would be able to help others within that tribe with their own uniqueness. This is already happening. You don't need a lot of followers. You need a few hundred people who support your work and need what you offer. You really don't need a lot of followers in order to just replace the income that you want to make or live a decent life, or make your enough amount of money.

30:34If you want to take it further, then you have the agency to do so, but you don't have to. I'm not saying that everyone here is going to gain a million Kajillion subscribers. I'm saying that everyone can have enough to sustain the life they want.

30:46The other thing is that with followers, with how social media works, a lot of people aren't in the game, so they don't understand how it works. But the internet, it evolves. A few hundred people follow you and then after 4 or 5 months, they stop.

31:01They take a break, and by that time a few hundred more are following you, and then they stop and take a break. My audience probably isn't 4 million plus people. It's probably maybe 100,000 people that listen to me consistently. And that's more than I need personally.

31:12But I'm not going to like, like chop myself off from creating things that people like and coming to watch that thing. So thing is, you evolve, your tribe evolves. The internet is a constant flow of attention, and if you aren't in it, your creative work doesn't make it.

31:32The problem is that we conform, we copy other people. We lack vision for a future in the agency to make it a reality. So here's what I want you to do to discover your uniqueness. First is write out your story. Where were you a few years ago?

31:44What was your mindset then? What was the major turning point? What skills did you learn? Where are you now? Can you help others do the same? Second is write out 10 to 20 interests. Pull out a notebook and write down 10 to 20 things you love studying.

31:54Want to study or slightly interested in three? Write out three pain points for each. Under each interest, write down three problems or pain points that you have faced or others faced relating to those interests. And fourth, connect the dots.

32:07Draw lines between parts of your story, your interests, and the pain points, and you'll be amazed with how many things connect. My writing or videos can't be replicated with AI unless I'm the one manning the AI, because my edge is my personal experience and how I blend business and philosophy.

32:29AI isn't in my head. It doesn't have access to my state of mind. It doesn't have access to my experience. Therefore, that's the only mode. Doing nothing with your life is still a bad option all around. It always has been and it always will be.

32:42So the only option is to do something with your life because you can talk about the same topic as everyone else, but your experience, what you do is what brings a fresh and unique lens to that thing. By doing nothing, by never failing, by never just moving.

32:56Throughout life, when you have nothing better to do, you don't give yourself the chance to be unique because you aren't. You haven't done anything. The second thing here is that I am focused on attracting people with similar interests. Why?

33:08Because I know I can help them in some way. If you want to do the same, take what you wrote above. Write one article or post for every pain point you list it out. Sprinkle in your personal story throughout your writing. Bacon connected ideas to synthesize unique ideas.

33:27And of course, be persistent. Remember, you have taste, but it doesn't reflect in your work until you practice for years and know a few years is not a lot of time. Considering you spent 18 plus years being drilled into something you don't want to do, a few years of effort is absolutely nothing.

33:39You don't want to commit because you have something better you could be doing. When all that involves is numbing the pain with cheap pleasures to escape your current situation, the only thing you should want to do is get out. Now, the last and final thing is to merge art in business.

Merge Art & Business

33:57So here's a quote from Nouvel. To build product, make something people want to create art. Make something you want the best. Do both because with all of this, it's sad that people can't come to terms with the fact that business or entrepreneurship or being a creator can be a very fulfilling thing.

34:10Because happiness is a two sided coin, the creativity required to make progress in contributing to something greater than yourself, in other words, becoming valuable, ensuring that value with the internet, anyone can do this and reap the rewards of doing so.

34:24You merge art and business when you make something you want, and share it with people who have similar interests, because they will probably want it to write content for yourself. Treat the internet as your public journal. Put effort into getting that spread to more people.

34:36Build a product you would buy, use, and benefit from given time. You'll do very well for yourself. Thank you for watching again. You can join the writers Boot camp that starts on March 4th or start using cortex, which is a writing note taking an idea capture app.

34:51Not a mobile app, just an application as a whole on your desktop. The mobile app is coming soon, but check the links in the description for all of those things like the video. If you liked the video, subscribe if you want the next video, thank you for watching.

35:04Bye!