Compounding Your Knowledge and Credibility with Dickie Bush | Mind Meld Podcast #46

When you have a creative outlet, everything becomes an idea to write about. And what that means is you need to be able to capture ideas anywhere because they're going to hit you everywhere. When you give your mind the ability to have ideas anywhere and the comfort and confidence that they'll be revisited in the future, it's like a faucet. It's just everything. You're gonna come up with them everywhere. So to enable that, you need to be able to capture them everywhere.

Okay, Dickie Bush. Welcome to Mind Meld, man. This is awesome.

Hey, Josh. Thanks for having me. I'm stoked to be here. It's gonna be a lot to jam on today.

Dude, there's a lot to get through. Like, you've been doing some awesome stuff, but I know you know that I have to ask this, so we're gonna start with this, get it out of the way. With a name like Dickie Bush, does that get you into any trouble ever, man? Like, does that put you in any predicaments?

No trouble. Some people think it's a parody account, but no, that's, uh, my, my real name's Richard. So, uh, Dickie Bush, you know, kind of flows nicely. You can't give it up and you won't forget it, that's for sure. So, uh, no, no, it's fun.

That's funny, man. It's so true. Like, that's— you will not forget it. Like, I remember first coming across you on Twitter, and I think this is where this all started. I think that's where, like, all these amazing things have happened for you over, like, the last couple years, maybe even, maybe even just the last year where things just, like, skyrocketed for you. So I mean, I guess for people listening who are not on Twitter as well, I'd love for you to kind of explain that story of how you started Ship 30. And maybe like, just, you can even go back a little bit, like for your backstory and what you've been up to and how you got to do online writing and grow on Twitter like crazy.

Yeah. So, you know, if you go back, you can kind of trace my online journey to January of 2020, where I came into the year feeling a bit I wouldn't say stuck, but just, you know, working a full-time job and I really loved it, but just had a lot of things I was reading and listening to and exploring and learning a lot of things that I felt like I wasn't putting into practice. And so I take notes on podcasts or books or whatever and kind of on that journey of improvement, and they just end up in a Notion folder kind of in the back forever, right? Never to be put into practice. So I went into 2020 and said, What's some of the work I'm already doing that could potentially expose me to some of this internet upside I'm reading all about and listening to and seeing? So I started a weekly newsletter and I wrote that. It was really to my mom and roommates for about the first month and a half. It was really just, I'd put together almost a forcing function for me to just clarify podcasts and books, whatever I did that week. And I did that for about 8, 9 months, wrote a little bit on my blog, just kind of exploring what it meant to write online and play around on the internet, really, just as a way to explore things I was interested in. And did that for 9 months and found towards— so I committed to doing that for a year. And this is kind of the boring part of the story that a lot of people will glance over, but Really just committed to showing up for a year and said, what good's gonna come from this? If I do it every week for a year and nothing good happens, worst case, I understood the things I was learning a little bit better. Best case, I guess what's happened is definitely a best case. You get to meet incredible people, new opportunities, have fun as hell, get to learn, teach others, and just kind of explore this world all through the lens of sharing things that you're doing. So That was a story up until about September, October of 2020. I don't know if you want to just go right into Ship 30 from there, but really was, I got to a point where I didn't have a very good feedback loop where I was kind of writing on a blog, wondering if people were interested in what I was actually saying. And so I said, I need to up my cadence from monthly to daily. And so I wrote a Twitter thread of whatever podcast I listened to every single day for 30 days. And I did that from September to— or really it was August, September of last year, so 2020. And I had never felt more energized to wake up and think and had this just creative mechanism that was unlike anything I'd ever experienced. I was getting to interact with the people I looked up to because I'd summarize what I listened to and they'd respond to me, and it was just a great time. And from that, I got to experience just the benefits of Doing something every day, building a habit, all kind of with this exponential multiplier that is writing on the internet. And that spawned a tweet from a random walk. I was on a walk. I said, well, I really enjoyed doing this for the last 30 days. I wonder if there's anyone else who'd want to do it with me for the next, because one thing I found was it was almost impossible to do on my own. I needed people around me supportive, all that. And so I just tweeted out there. I said, hey, does anyone want to write with me every day for 30 days? And so for, I guess, fast forward a little bit for anyone unfamiliar with Ship 30, it's a cohort-based course teaching you the fundamentals of writing online. So zooming all the way forward to kind of where we ended up to what we're talking about now, to back then, it was just a very challenge-based idea for people who wanted to do it with me. And the response was overwhelming. And 4 days, 5 days later, we had a bunch of people on Slack. And we're spamming, uh, writing on the internet for the next 30 days. And that was the initial cohort.

Dude, that is awesome. That's such a great overview of like how everything kind of happened. Because I would just remember that come up when you're like posting on Twitter. I think that's when I started following you. Because I remember that moment where you're like, hey, who wants to do this with me? And like, it's just so cool to like build a community around that, right? People who want to like learn how to do this effectively. 'Cause like, you're really a big testament to that too. One of the reasons why I started this podcast and stuff, just like to meet people, put content out. And I was like, I don't really have like a goal in mind. I'm not trying to monetize this really. It's just like, I really wanna put out content, be creative. Like what would that cadence for a podcast? For me, it made sense to do it weekly. And I think you were, you started doing it like, just like you could start it weekly, then you do it daily and then you're like, hey, now let's just give it a challenge of like 30 days. So I would love to hear like why you chose like 30 days. Just like, just keep it neat in a month. Is there a reason you didn't do like 90 days or like, hey, just a week? Like what was the reason for just starting at 30?

I think 30 to me is enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel on day 1. 90, it's like, oof, you're not having a good time on day 15 because you're not 50% of the way there. You're, you know, 16% of the way. And 30 was just 30, 30 days a month. I think it was August 1st. I was like, oh, clean month and just get it going.

And so what really like spawned your thinking to do this? Like even just putting out podcasts. So like you were just mentioning that you have a day job and like you're doing other things. Uh, we can get into a little bit of that later on, but like not too much obviously, but like you do other things. Like you're not, or at the time you didn't see yourself as a writer, so you were consuming the content. I just wanna know like what like spawned in your brain to be like, hey, like I want to actually put this out there. Like what was the reason for it in your mind?

The reason was 100% selfish at the time was I wanted to better understand all the work I was doing. And I knew that I'd felt and experienced that the first time I wrote a Twitter thread summarizing a podcast. Having a creative mechanism that forces you to share something concisely with other people reading is the ultimate way to stress test your thinking, to learn effectively, And to make sure you're actually not just consuming for the sake of consumption, consuming for the sake of output, whether that's a personal result, whether that's sharing something with other people. This just— and I was so guilty of it because you listen to a podcast and be like, oh, I learned a ton there. I read a book and it's like, oh, I really absorbed that. And then it's like, go write about it. And you quickly see all the immediate gaps in your thinking, your understanding. And so it was really just a creative or personal forcing function for me to learn more effectively.

Man, that makes so much sense. Cuz like, you know, people always say if you wanna learn something, you teach others. And writing online is basically just teaching others. Cuz like you can either listen to the podcast or I can read your Twitter thread and I'll get the same information. I mean, it's just in a different way, which is so interesting. And for you, like you did the newsletter and Twitter, what are your thoughts on both of those formats? Like obviously Twitter, you have to be more concise. Does that bridge over into newsletter writing? Like, do you find yourself writing like you're tweeting, or like, how has that influenced the way you write now?

There's a ton, uh, there with Twitter, newsletters, all that. So let me think about it. To me, Twitter is the place to go to get immediate feedback on your ideas. You are putting them out there in this feed and people can respond. You're gonna immediately know If something resonated, you're gonna immediately know if you were wrong on something. People are gonna let you know that for sure.

Oh

yeah. Versus a newsletter, it's a little bit slower. Yeah, they can reply, but you're consuming it with your emails, right? So every medium out there where you put your writing has a different audience, a different cadence of understanding for them, their different context, right? So I think Twitter is beautiful to teach you to write concisely. I tell people who wanna learn to, to write copy effectively, to start writing tweets, because you have a built-in constraint. You got 280 characters, you're competing for attention just like you would, and you have to distill ideas concisely. So it's kind of everything. Does that spill over to writing effectively? I think it does, because conciseness, ability to attract attention quickly, not bore people, all that— I think the more you can learn to write tweets, you're gonna be a, a better, effective, a more effective writer across every spectrum. So, um, in terms of the trade-offs of should I start writing tweets? Should I start a newsletter? I think people get way too caught up in the tactics of it all and you just need to start something and then get going.

Yeah, totally. And I, it's what the first thing that brought, brought to my mind there was the difference between, cuz I'm more of like a visual creator, the difference between like YouTube and like TikTok or like Instagram Reels, like more and more people are viewing the short-form content. You need to be more concise. So even the writing going into scripting or like ideating on how you're gonna talk about a certain subject, like we're all on TikTok, we're all on Instagram nowadays. It needs to be super concise, super quick. So it makes sense that Twitter would be that sort of breeding ground for that.

And, and on that point, I, I, I have a theory or thesis that I'm working out on the future of content is a barbell. Where it's either going to be hyper-concise, short, potent ideas, or ultra-long-form, in-depth, ultimate guide style novel, etc., right? Where this middle ground where people, you know, the 1,000-word blog post that is nothing but bloat and you're kind of filling a word quota and all that, I think is going away. Because 99% of blog posts could be single tweets and get the same thing across. And most few, very few ideas should be expanded into an ultimate guide style or a book or whatever it is. But the ones that are and should be, it should be, there should be more incentive to put those big ideas together. And so I think if you're striking that middle of the barbell, that's how I encourage writers right now.

Ooh, and it's funny, again, I didn't want to get too deep on this kind of stuff, but one of my questions for you was how are you thinking about writing in relation to investing? Because I guess what you do professionally, we don't have to get too deep into details there. But like that term, I know just from, you know, reading like Taleb, I know that that is an investing term, the whole barbell thing. A lot of people talk about barbell investing. So I'd like for you to go deeper on that idea, man. Let's jam this out a bit. Like, this is so unexpected. It's really cool.

I think barbells are everywhere. So one of my personal kind of values is this idea of polarity, where I think you should be always on or always off, fully on, fully off, fully engaged, fully disengaged, giving it your all, giving it— And I think that's where all the opportunity lies in just about everything. It's in the tails. So you can apply that to just about every area of your life. I think relationships, You want very few deep, dense relationships, and then a bunch of hyper superficial ones that you keep in contact with. But the, that kind of messy middle where you talk to them every once, whatever is, I don't think there's much value there. I think the value in just about everything lies in extremes. So yeah, it's really a barbell strategy. Like you said, investing, something I try to apply just about everywhere. And content is the current lens that I'm looking at it through.

Wow. Yeah. It's like you have a ton of followers obviously that you engage through maybe by replying to them in the tweets and the threads there. And you just have like some really, really deep, strong, actual relationships. But I mean, like there's, it's unlimited how many, um, followers you can have. And I obviously the idea with like any kind of social medium is you're trying to build as many followers as possible on that one end. That's an interesting idea, man. I'm gonna, I'm gonna use that, uh, in my thinking. Cause that makes so, so much sense. A lot of people are kind of in it. Or like they're one foot in, one foot out. I like the idea of just being all in or nothing. Like that's pretty intense. And, and on that note, that's kind of where I can see the idea for Ship 30 comes in. It's like you're going all in for 30 days. What happened before that? You can be all out. Whatever happens afterwards, you can be all out. So I wanna know, man, like when you conceptualize that, do you have that same thought and how have you seen people create outcomes from that? Do you see people continuing it after the 30 days or do you see them like ending it after 30 and saying, I was all in, now I'm all out?

I think the way, and this goes back to, I don't know who said it originally, but it's kind of work like a lion, not like a cow, where I think Naval, Sean Peery, I've seen a bunch of people talk about this. Yeah. And you should be sprinting or resting. And I think to build a habit like writing, you have to sprint. You have to do it every single day and kind of immerse yourself in it. And we see a lot of different outcomes based on that. We have some people who go 200 days. It, to them, This was the thing they needed. They have no interest in publishing long form. They love this feeling of creating an asset every single day. They sit down with one idea, they flesh it out, they have their time of day, they hit publish, they get their day going with momentum. And then we have some people who say, that was way too much for me. I'm glad I did it, but I'm going to stop and I'm going to reevaluate my cadence. And we help people kind of find the right cadence for them based on their goals after the course. So I think it's a— the way we talk about Ship 30 and writing every day for 30 days versus kind of the common advice of a weekly blog post or weekly newsletter is it condenses every emotion into a 30-day sprint that you could possibly feel over a 2-year time horizon. You're going to feel burnt out at some point, whether that's on a 2-year horizon and you feel burnt out after 6 months or it's 30 days and you get to that on day 10 and you're like, oh my goodness, I have 20 more days of this. I can't believe it. I think it accelerates the feedback loop of, we have so many writers who come in and say, I'm going to talk about productivity tips. And about 6 days in, they're like, I can't believe I thought I wanted to write about that forever. I just said everything I need to say, and now I'm on to biotechnology. You explore all of your interests in a very quick format. So I think there's a lot there to giving it your all for 30 days and then reevaluating, resting, and reflecting afterwards.

Dude, that's insane. That makes so much sense. Just condensing your learning into a 30-day period where otherwise you'd have to do it over a year or a couple months, whatever it would be if you're only doing it monthly, just putting in more reps quicker makes so much sense. And I do wanna ask you, man, so like these people who have gone through it, I'm sure you've seen people from all walks of life, all types of professions. You've probably seen it all at this point. Who have you seen that has just like gained the most out of it, like professionally, personally? And then on the flip side, what was something or someone who had surprised you that has gone through the program?

So we've had about— what's so interesting is we're, I think, total number that have gone through something like 1,800 right now. And we're still so early in the journey, because for Of those, our June cohort was 300-something and August was up there as well. And October is 400 and change. So where we're at is everyone's kind of at that early part of the inflection curve and we can see it. We have people launching their first products, starting their own business. And so the way we're thinking about it right now is it's almost like angel investing. Where in a few years there's going to be dozens and hundreds and hopefully thousands of people who say, I just published my first book. It all started with Ship 30. So that is something that is really cool and kind of compounding right now. So I don't want to go specifics on who I think's crushing it and all that right now because so many are right at that really exciting point where they're right there. And we've had What's so interesting, and one of the cool parts is there are a few that we do a lot to kind of track how people do during the 30 days, make sure we're intervening if they're falling off, etc. And there are some who after day 5 or day 6, they just disappeared. We didn't hear from them for a month, 2 months, and we're like, oh, that's just one who it wasn't for them. And then they come back and say, hey man, I latched onto a golden nugget in that very first week. I had an idea, I got what I needed, and I ran with it. And I just— and they go to a completely different platform. It's like, I have a 40,000-person following on Facebook and I share tips. I think George Cisneros is a great example of this. Launched on Facebook, has a ton of followers there, and that was where he was. And we're like, we never would have seen it. So those are the kind of unexpected things that I'm very excited about happening. But for the most part, it's people still figuring it out, getting going, and we have this We have it set up where if you launch something, you can reach out directly to me and Cole, uh, and send it to us, say, hey, I just launched this. We'll hype it up. And seeing those people say, I can't believe I just, I started a business. I started a newsletter. I have this many subscribers. So we're at that early point, but a lot of exciting things ahead.

Yeah. Wow, man. That's so awesome. That's very unexpected. You know, like you're writing for like a week and you're like, yeah, I already got what I needed. We expect them to keep going. That's interesting. Also, I wanted to bring that up because, uh, I actually didn't know that Cole was your partner on Ship 30 until like maybe a week or two ago. I don't know how, but it just kind of slipped through my radar, but I've been following his work for years. How'd you guys get connected?

So he— we met actually almost a year ago to the day, and it was kind of very unexpected. We were put in contact with someone who I'd become friends with on Twitter. So that speaks to the serendipity of this. Our first Zoom call was a year ago. We've met in person one time over the last year, which is crazy, the craziest part about the internet by far. So he joined the January cohort of Ship 30, and I was very cognizant of, at the time, I didn't have that great of an understanding of how this all worked. What I was good at was building a writing habit. That was the origin of Ship 30, was I will help you build a writing habit because it was a problem that I solved. in the last year. He has been writing online since 2014. He's been all over Quora, Medium, blog on World of Warcraft. I mean, just absolutely crushed, literally wrote the book.

Huge writer.

Right. Everywhere, everywhere. And so it was just this perfect match where it's like, look, I have all these people who want to start writing. They've started. Now how do we get them going? How? And I wanted to learn from him. You have this wealth of knowledge. I still learn from him every single day. So we partnered up in for the February cohort and have been partners ever since. And I could not picture Ship 30 going any other direction other than just flat because I knew the limits of what I could put together. And so I've gotten to learn a ton from him. Now we're coming up with our own frameworks and just, it's been a great partnership.

Dude, that's awesome. Okay, so for anyone listening, I'm just gonna make a mental note of this now. Um, I'll put the link in the description to Nicholas Cole's stuff. Do you think his website would be the best place to point people to?

Yeah, I think there or Twitter, probably Twitter at this point.

Okay, I'll link you guys to—

You'll, you'll go down the rabbit hole from there.

Yeah, yeah, I'll definitely ask you to put me in touch with him later on to, uh, pick his brain on this as well. That'd be super cool. Or even both of you guys at the same time. It'd be really cool to see how you guys interact and how your ideas clash and combine and just, you know, synthesize. So that'd be super cool, man. But, um, yeah, because I wanted to ask you, like, like, were you a writer before? I mean, obviously your big thing was building the habit, so that totally makes sense you'd bring Does he go by Nick or does he go by Cole?

He goes by Cole. So his first name's Cole, but online Nicholas Cole.

Okay.

So you'll hear me call him Cole and people are like, oh, who's that? And I'm like, oh, okay.

Okay, great. That makes total sense. So yeah, it makes sense that you'd bring Cole in and you guys would kind of learn from each other and share both sides of your knowledge with people. But like, did you learn like writing before? Like, did you— were you trained? Like, did you learn it in school? Were you even remotely interested in it before? How did that come about?

I just, I actually wrote a Twitter thread on this yesterday of kind of recapping the way I think about learning something. And I knew nothing about writing online. I was a math and computer science major in college. Pretty much taught me nothing to do with writing. I took one writing class as a freshman. I hated it because you had to hit a word count, all that. So I wanted to learn about writing. And so the best way, as I found with podcasts, And just listening to things was I needed to write about it. So I started studying the best writers. And I think this goes to writing advice. In the very beginning, you have to build credibility somehow. And in the very early stages, it was just me exploring the best copywriters and the James Clears, Mark Mansons, Tim Ferrisses, these common authors that are really taking a bottoms-up approach to the way they're writing. And I just immersed myself. I listened to what they said, read everything they had. And then going back to this creative forcing function, I wrote about it, I shared it, I distilled it. And the result after about a year of immersing myself in this is I've become a somewhat credible source on writing. And if you'd have told me 18 months ago that it's like, that's what people are going to think you are good at, I'd say I'd laugh because I was horrible at it. But You know, I learned, I call this the way I think about sharing anything and learning anything online is something I call the 2-year test. And a lot of people, they say, I wanna start writing. And they'll, they go, well, what am I gonna write about? I don't know anything. And my first answer to that is, yes, you do. And to think about it, there, I think at any time you should be writing about 2 things. Something 2 years ahead of you that you want to learn more about, and some to people 2 years behind you solving the problems that you've solved during that time. So I'll take an example of Ship 30. I wanted to learn about copywriting specifically, so I started writing a ton about that and learning, and I studied all the greats and wrote threads on it and all that and kind of immersed myself. So that was my forward 2-year test. Now I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of it. At the same time, I was writing about how to build a writing habit, something that I had done myself very specifically that I knew how to teach and knew how to talk about. And so at any time, you're kind of moving yourself across this continuously. And this is the beauty of having this habit is I pick a topic, I learn about it, I distill it, and then 2 years later, I know a bunch about it. Now I'm going to put it and repackage it and frame it for someone 2 years behind me. Here's all the mistakes I made. Here's what I wish I had. Here's, you know, where to start, what to not focus on, all that. And you're just— you have this endless spectrum to explore and you're going to learn along, meet people, build an audience in the process. And that's really the playbook I've been executing on for the last 2 years.

Wow. And it works like it clearly frickin works, man. Okay. The other thing is like, we're talking about compounding knowledge here at this time too. So at what point when you're talking about like teaching people 2 years behind, what happens, man, when you're like 50 or 60 years old, you have all this stuff, it's probably stored in your quote unquote, like second brain, we can get into that later. I'm really interested in that. You know, like what happens when that's all exponential, and it's all compounded, and you're like teaching your kids or like, you know, teaching people who are in their 20s when you're like 60. Like, it's just like an unlimited amount of like, just knowledge. I'm wondering how you will like distill that. That's going to be insane.

I'm hoping I distill it along the way, such that it's all there, right? If it's all there, and it's already done, then I have this collection of here's everything I studied every year for the last year. I'm a big, big, big journaler. I've written in a journal, both digital and physical, just about every morning and night for the last 4 years. And we're right at that point now where I have every morning I pull up my journal and it auto-populates with that entry from 3 years ago, 2 years ago, and a year ago.

What app?

And the most— I use Roam. I used to use Notion. I used to have it hand-journaled. I had them all transcribed and uploaded and then put them all into Roam. And I think, who knows if that's the right one, but I just have all the raw material somewhere. And it gives me this— I have this vision of being 60 years old and sitting down and looking over my journal entries for 40 years. And that thrills me. I wake up on a Tuesday and it's like, here's this day for the last 40 years. That to me is one of the coolest ideas of compounding that there possibly is. So big, big, big journaler, highly recommend it if you've never done it. But anyway, that's the way I think about it.

Dude, that blew my mind though. It's so true. Holy shit. Like, just like recording your thoughts, your ideas, your life. Have you ever thought about vlogging too? Because I'm just thinking about these vloggers, like even Casey Neistat, who did it like daily. And then you go back, you know, this whole idea of like, you know, you can see your life flash before your eyes on your deathbed. Like, people can literally do that now because they have so many like videos and photos on their phone. Do you like journal like that way on your phone too? Do you take a lot of photos and videos?

That— I actually don't. You know, I think I could do a better job incorporating photos and like a picture of the day or a vlog or something like that. I think if you want to get real futuristic, I think it'll be passively done for us at some point, right, where our days are kind of auto-cataloged and it'll be very easy to do. But for now, I think, uh, I'll stick with just the handwritten.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And also, it's gonna help you flex the writing muscle too, right? More than anything, I think that's kind of like the the idea. So, so you write it all in Roam now. So is that kind of where you store everything? What's your process for daily journals? And then also like when you come across something on the internet or like an article or a podcast, I'd love to know how you capture that and categorize it so you can make it useful.

Hmm. So I've, we can link to it. I've written a, a couple things on my idea capture system, and to me the important thing When you have a creative outlet, everything becomes an idea to write about. And what that means is you need to be able to capture ideas anywhere because they're going to hit you everywhere. And it's kind of this chicken or egg problem. So what do I mean by that? When you give your mind the ability to have ideas anywhere and the comfort and confidence that it will, they'll be revisited in the future, it's like a faucet. It's just everything. You're going to come up with them everywhere. So to enable that, you need to be able to capture them everywhere. So I have— it's not here right now, but a notebook next to my desk, a whiteboard in the shower, a quick capture app. I use the Drafts app on my phone. I go on a lot of walks and just always capture everything into kind of a Drafts folder. At the end of every week, I sit down and I parse it out. So I'll put it into Roam. I kind of have this idea inbox of Here's everything I read, listened to. I'll recap. I don't write the newsletter anymore, but I'm still in that habit of kind of looking for these single ideas and what I can do with them. So it all syncs up into Roam from there. And I'll sit down at the beginning of the week and say, I want to put out this amount of content. I want to write these 3 things. I want to write 2 threads, whatever it is. And then kind of just brainstorm of— I never stare at a blank page because I always have something refined. During a morning walk, a night walk, whatever it is, 3 or 4 bullets here or there, all you need to kind of get started for me. So as long as I'm having those and comfort that those 3 bullets are going to be— I will revisit those in the future. My mind just kind of goes at all times. So sometimes that, like, if I look down at my notebook right now, the number of just dots I have here of little things I thought about during the day, I'll go capture those later. Uh, sometimes it gets a little bit too much, but for now it's working.

Yeah. I was gonna say like, is, is there a point where you're like, hey, you could capture everything. Is there a point where like, hey, like, no, like I either don't feel like it or hey, it's too much. Or it's like overkill. Did it, does that ever cross, cross your mind?

Uh, just about every single day where I get the, I call it like the review scaries where I've captured too many things and I'm like, I don't even wanna go dig into those because I know I captured too many things. Uh, so actually it's like a very stupid problem to have, but it's a good problem. It is one I have sometimes.

Better have more ideas.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's true. That's true.

Yeah. And where did you learn this whole process, man? 'Cause I know there was like the whole Building a Second Brain cohort. There's like Rite of Passage. Did you go through any of these courses?

I didn't go through any of the official courses, but I've learned a ton from those guys. I mean, I, I went down the rabbit hole of all their stuff and But what I think I did a good job of was quickly capturing what are the big ideas they're saying and then getting it to work for me. I think a lot of people will get caught up in some of those systems and say, that's my new project is making sure that that's optimized. And that can turn into a rabbit hole in and of itself where you end up never getting started because your note-taking system isn't ready. And so for me, mine is still very, very unpolished. It's probably suboptimal, But I'd rather be suboptimal and moving quickly than optimal, but kind of lagging along.

Yeah, man, that's so true. Like you just wanna be able to do the actual work. It's all about the output and not really this process. Cuz like, I think there's this like idea, I think it's called, um, or like this term, it's called like mental masturbation basically, where you're like spending all this time like rearranging your Notion and like Roam and like all your tags and like you're like migrating notes from one system to another. Like you feel like you're doing work, but you're not doing shit.

Yeah, I have a very good and potent framework that I keep in mind to remember this. So I once heard a story of these 2 fishermen, or, well, future fishermen. They said, I want to learn how to fish. And so the first one says, okay, I'm going to learn to fish. I'm going to go get the nicest rod I can get. I'm going to go buy a new fishing boat. I'm going to go Pick up every book on the topic. I'm going to go hire a fishing coach. I'm going to make sure I have everything in place to get started fishing. And he went and did that for 4 or 5 months and then felt really good about getting ready to fish. Takes his boat out and he gets there and there's no fish in the lake. And what happened was the first fisherman had already sucked it dry. That first fisherman on the first day said, you know, Maybe I could go do all this planning, but I'm just going to grab the shitty rod I have here. I'm going to put a hot dog on it and I'm going to go start fishing. And for the first 3 days, nothing worked. Then he found a spot that had a little nibble. He iterated, he moved, and from there he found out what worked, had a new fishing process. And by the time the other guy got his boat out there, this guy had caught every fish in the lake, started a fishing education business, a restaurant, and done everything there, right? So this idea of grabbing a shitty rod and start fishing, is so potent in my head of anytime I feel like I need to make a plan, have everything sequenced all the way, every single step, it's nope, just get started and figure out as you go.

Oh man, that is awesome. That's like the perfect story to illustrate that, right? Like that's with anything. I mean, that's obviously like a, um, uh, a zero-sum type game, right? Where it's like you're racing to the end, which like there's a lot of things are happening right now. Like, I mean, there's a whole race with, um, Cryptocurrencies, with the metaverse, with like Facebook rushing there. But like with something like writing, I guess the only person you're really letting down is yourself, right? It's just like you could have done it in a week, you could have done it in 30 days, but you waited like 6 months, you waited a year, and then you kept putting it off, kept putting it off. You tried to find a perfect system. That's interesting. It's all about speed. Just get it done. That's, that's crazy.

It's speed. It's, it's really speed, but a tight feedback loop. You don't want to be going fast in the wrong direction, but you want to get moving and then figure out the right direction to go. So I think that, again, anytime you have— if you find yourself with a once I get blank, then blank, you're probably off the path. It's not ever a once this is right, then I'll get going on this. Once I hit this, then I'll do this, right? Because the goalpost is always going to move. I think you could apply that once I get blank to just about every single area of your life where once, once things slow down, then I'll start that side hustle. Or once my— this is my ongoing joke— once my note-taking system is ready, then I'll start writing, right? Those, those are always going to move. They're always going to go and the timing will never be right. So again, grab a shitty rod and just start fishing.

I love that so much, man. So what, what advice would you give people who wanna start a side hustle? Cuz like Ship 30 for you is a side hustle right now anyways. What are your, what are your advice for people who wanna like do this? Like the timing will never be right. Like you're still working another job. Like how would you say people can balance this and get started? And then, you know, once you do get started, how do you balance it with the other stuff you have going on in life?

I think you wanna find something that doesn't feel like a side hustle or extra work or anything. So I spend most of my day. looking at charts and predicting economies and thinking about the macro and all that. And writing for me was almost a break where it was never extra work. It's still not extra work. And it's the reason I'm able to do all that I do is I never sit down at the end of the day exhausted. I'm energized. I wake up every morning excited to— that I'm grateful that I get to work on multiple things. And I think if you're looking around and saying, what is a side hustle? All it is, is you're helping people solve a problem that you've already solved. And this goes back to the 2-year test where if you want to start a side hustle, look at things you know, things you've done, problems you've solved. And the internet guarantees there are millions of other people on that exact same spot as you with that exact same problem. The more specific you can get, the more you can go out of your way to put your ideas in front of them, make it clear that, hey, I've had this problem, I've solved it. Here's the benefits I've unlocked from it. So in my example, it was, I've been where you are. I wanted to start writing. I didn't know where to start. I procrastinated. I had distractions. I had imposter syndrome, all of these things. Ship 30 helps you overcome them. And that was me solving a very specific problem for a very specific type of person that was just earlier than me on their journey, right? So if you're thinking about starting anything, You can really just probe to say, what do I wish I had a year ago? And then go make that thing. Because there are millions of other people who, if you can distill it correctly, would love to have that problem solved. And there's probably a market for it.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's the internet, right? There's like a million, probably billions of niches. Like there's anything that you can possibly think of exists on the internet. And so I do wanna bring it back then from the beginning. And what you're talking about is like, Participating in this like unlimited upside of the internet. When did you first learn about that? Where did you first see that this was like a thing that was happening? And then like, what was that thing that kind of pushed you to like jump on this? Be like, hey, I know that this is on the right path. This is going to be participating in the next wave of the internet. I just wanna know like what that was for you that kind of clicked in your brain.

I don't think it was anything that clicked all at once where it was more just, I kind of dabbled. I saw other writers and people I looked up to, and I kind of looked and said, well, how do I look up to them? Well, they're putting things out there into the world and I'm consuming them, right? So if you want to reverse engineer that and have other people look up to you and you help them and you solve their problems, right, you have to do the same thing. And it was clear that this internet, uh, I mean, we're talking like the internet just came out or something, and I still think We're early on people recognizing it. If you ask your high school friends, how many of them are writing on the internet? I bet 1 out of 100 say it. And so for anyone who thinks that we're saturated, we're not. But yeah, it was more just an awareness of where was I spending my time? It was consuming, consuming, consuming. So someone somewhere was on the other side of that benefiting from it, and how could I get myself on that side of the fence?

That makes sense. And then who were like the creators? So you mentioned like a bunch that even like that I'm very familiar with, like, you know, the Tim Ferriss of the world. Um, you mentioned like James Clear. So I think maybe we're just on like the same side of a Twitter, but also probably before that, just like on the internet and all these creators, like I have all those same probably books that you've read all in here. Like these are like bestsellers for a reason. And it's like this almost like this personal or self-development sort of niche or like subculture within the internet? How did you like learn about that? I'm always interested to hear how people like fell into this because for me it was like almost like an awakening moment. Like I wasn't into this kind of personal development sort of stuff, but then I know that as soon as I did and I went on this journey, it literally was a journey and my life has been so different after that.

Yeah, it really came for me, uh, when I stopped playing football or graduated from college. So I played offensive line in college. I was 280 pounds. My, my job was to be as big and as strong as possible at all times. And so I really faced this question of when I stopped playing, I like to say there was 2 ways I was gonna go. I was either gonna weigh 380 pounds or 180 pounds. And I had about 6 months to figure that out. And during the first 3 or 4 months, I was clearly headed in the wrong direction because I kept everything up that I was doing and just had stopped playing football. So that wasn't gonna trend, trend well. And I really had to rewrite my life's operating system in a way. For 20 years, my job was to wake up, go to class, go to school, eat, and work out to get as big and as strong as possible and try to get good grades along the way. And that really changes when I graduated. I moved to New York City, right? I knew I wasn't going to be able to live at that weight forever. Like, I had to do a lot of things to kind of re-engineer myself. And so that's how I stumbled down the rabbit hole of The Tim Ferriss's, I listened to every episode, right? I went deep and just immersed myself. I said, if I'm going to get better and just improve the way I do things, my personal just way of operating, I have to learn from these people who are clearly— and so I've kind of been down that rabbit hole ever since for the last, call it, I guess, 4 years now since I graduated.

Geez. Okay. Yeah, that makes total sense. I love that term that you said, like the life operating system. So obviously it's like the, I guess the operating system is like the habits that you have, the tools that you use. And I guess like, just like your environment. I mean, you could cut, there's probably a lot more, but it probably like boils down to that. What would you say like was like the biggest change for you? Like when you're dealing, dealing with all that, like you just said you moved, was it like creating new habits? Was it like new tools that entered your world? I wanna know just like, what were the things you think actually catapulted you To like make that change?

I think it came to tracking. So I started tracking the things I did and wanted to do every day. So that came from habit building. It was journaling, right? I look at anything that I wasn't doing 4 years ago when I was very just oblivious to everything that I wanted to improve. So journaling, exercise, eating right, right? Not that I wasn't exercising and eating right, but for a completely new goal where I was no longer trying to eat 5,000 calories and squat 500 pounds. It was, I had to turn that around completely. And it really, it was just more an awareness that you're gonna have to change. So it was habits, waking up early, like all the kind of basic bro sciencey stuff, but it worked for me. And at the end of the day, like I'm all over that kind of thing. I mean, the book, one of the books that probably had the most profound change when I look at some of the things I do every day was Own the Day, Own Your Life by Aubrey Marcus.

Amazing book. Yeah.

Again, a great book. Right. And a lot of the things probably not that true, like not untrue, but you don't need to have salt water within 15 minutes of waking up every day, but I do it every day. You don't need to take a cold shower, I still do it, right? All these little things that was kind of instilled in me as I was developing this new way of doing things that has stuck. So yeah, the rabbit hole is deep and I dug into Stoic philosophy, those kind of things that are now ingrained in me that when I talk about it, it's actually fun to kind of jam on it because you get caught up in what you've done in the last year. But really for me, it's been a, it's a 3 or 4 year journey. It's kind of just graduating college and entering the real world and, and here we are.

Yeah. And that's exactly it, man. I'm, that's why I'm really glad that we get to jam on this kind of stuff. Cuz it's not often that you find too many people that are into these sort of things that are about this kind of stuff. And like you said, it's the internet that kind of enables that for us. There's like the Twitter was the network that kind of connected us to this. And I'm so grateful. That you agreed to come on this podcast. We can chat about this stuff. 'Cause like, there's not so many people— think about your hometown or even like in a city, like there might be people there, but it's gonna be so hard to find them unless they're on these social media platforms and they're actually putting it out there. So I guess this all comes back to like, you are interested in this stuff and you put the signal out by distilling what you are reading and you're learning about and putting it out on the internet. Then someone like me sees that signal and I'm like, oh shit. This guy's cool. He's doing some awesome stuff. I need to go chat with them. And a friend of mine calls that putting up the bat signal. So it's like interesting that like, as you're kind of distilling that into like, here's all the shit I learned, putting up the bat signal, here's the shit I'm into, take it or leave it. And that's really cool.

It's a— it— I say that the internet has democratized access to friendship. So, so what do I mean by that? If 20, 30 years ago, If the people you went to school with didn't see the world the same way as you, they didn't have the same interests as you, people in your neighborhood or around, you were kind of out of luck, right? You had nothing to turn to, no one to talk to, no one. It was difficult, right? You had to shape your— right? It was difficult to be unique. But the internet not only allows you to be unique, it rewards it, right? If you go on and you be your authentic self, you are rewarded because There's no competition, right? There's no one else talking about or interested in your unique set of interests. And so that's going to attract so many people. And no longer do they have to be even in your neighborhood or school. They can be anywhere on planet Earth. And again, you have to be easy to find. So you had to put those ideas out there. And I love the bat signal because it's— you get to create your own bat signal, right? It's, here's what we're looking for. If you're like this, and most people won't, and that's the point. Everyone should be able to make a choice. Everyone can make a choice when they come across my Twitter profile and say, I want to be— I want to follow this guy. I want to be friends with him. I want to interact with him because you position yourself clearly with your body of work and whatever you've put out there.

Yeah, man, that's huge. So this is kind of like just unlocking more like literal nodes in my brain. That's why I love doing the podcast and chatting with like Incredibly bright people like yourself, man, because it, it really is just putting everything into perspective here. It's like, hey, like why would you write for 30 days? It's like, well, you need to put up the bat signal that many times for people to find you. So my question for you is like, how did you grow on Twitter? How did people find you? And I mean, the answer's clear. I mean, maybe there's more to it, but it's just by putting it out all the time. Do you think there's something else to it? Like, did you, do you think there was something else that maybe attributed to like rapid growth and growing an audience? Was there something else you did? Any other like tips? Or was it purely just, you know, putting in the reps and just doing the work?

I think it's a good mix. So at the end of that 30 days, I had a thread, I wrote it on Balaji Srinivasan in September of 2020. And I went to bed with, I think, 700, 800 followers. And so this was probably the 26th day, I think, of threads that I'd written. And for like 10, 15 in a row, I mean, talk about crickets of the internet, just nothing, like nothing, no likes, no, really very little. I mean, I had 500, 600 followers and nothing. And so for a lot of people, they would've given up at that point. And I just made the commitment to 30 days. I'm like, look, this is good no matter what. Again, it goes back to nothing but upside where if it didn't go anywhere, I was going to be okay because I was better understanding, but if it blew up, right? So again, at this point, what, I'd written a newsletter for 35 weeks, had probably 300 newsletter subscribers, and I wrote a thread on everything I could read about biology. I was fascinated by him. Hit publish, went to bed, woke up the next day, Naval had picked it up somehow and it went viral, a couple thousand likes. And this was huge for me at the time. I went from like 500 to 2,000 followers. My new— I dropped my newsletter link at the bottom and was like, hey, I write a newsletter. And went from— I like to say it took me 40 weeks to get to 700 subscribers and 12 hours to double that to 1,500. Because people were like, wow, this guy can concisely distill it. And that is, you have to put in the reps because you need more shots on goal, right? You need more opportunities. And so for those 29 others that didn't go viral, I wrote them because that 30th one was going to. And I think that that is something a lot of people miss. You just need to get more reps out there because you don't know. I had no clue that that was going to be different than the other ones, right? There's probably no better or no worse written than anything out there. But again, it was just that consistency showing up and you get that upside convexity every once in a while.

Wow, man. I did not know that. That's okay. So there's 2 things I really want to get into there because again, I can already see the investing mindset in there. The idea of like you know the VC mindset of you invest in ten startups, so nine of them can blow up and one of them does really well. It clearly makes sense here, right? The more shots on goal, the more likely you're actually gonna get in. The other thing too here is just like it just kind of blows my mind, right? Just the the exponential and compounding growth curve of the internet. I'm sure you've seen the Jack Butcher graphic where it's like nothing, nothing, nothing. This is pointless, and then just. Explodes and that just happened to you. And it's just like, you have to be, have to, I guess you have to put the right signal up at the right time and have the right person see it. Right. 'Cause it's in your case, Naval, and it's almost like surfing where like, for like 90% of the time, you're kind of just sitting on your surfboard waiting for these waves to go. And then finally, like the perfect wave comes and you're ready there. So you're just like, okay, I'm gonna get up and you just ride the wave. Like that's, it blows my mind, man. Like just the level of just— Astonishing compounding that happens on the internet that just doesn't happen anywhere else.

Exactly. And so for anyone who's sitting on the sidelines trying to get involved, you just got to go. You got to get out there. And I love the wave metaphor. It's a luck metaphor, whatever it is, whatever you got to read and whatever sets that just spark in motion, you got to jump on it.

Agreed, man. So as a macro investor, and now we're looking at the internet, if you were to sort of bet on the internet or you're just looking at the internet as a whole, What are you seeing as the macro trends here? I mean, we're obviously seeing the whole crypto, NFT, DAO, all this kind of stuff going on. Is there something else that you're looking at or you see as a whole when— because obviously you're really good at spotting larger trends and these macro trends. So what do you see about the internet right now as a large trend?

I am fascinated with the Web3 space. I think we are moving towards a world where middlemen are eliminated. So the rent collection of Web 2.0, I think, is going away. I think we're very, very early to kind of even wrap our heads around what's happening. There's obviously a fervor in the space. To me, it's people are going to be spending more and more of their time in digital spaces, and that's the inevitable trend to bet on. So what does that mean? You're going to build an identity, right? Whether that's pseudonymous, whether that's your real self, I think there's a lot of different things that could happen there. I mean, look, we're just at, I think the next 5 to 10 years are going to be the most interesting time of building generational wealth in history because of the reallocation of different business models, the upending of things. We are just seeing more and more change faster and faster. So I don't know where it's heading because you can't predict an exponential curve like this. But all I know is we're sitting in the middle of an exponential curve. And so shit is gonna keep changing. And that means being ready to pounce on opportunities, staying liquid, staying mobile. All those things I think are gonna pay dividends over the next 5 to 10 years.

Ooh. Okay. Interesting. I'd love for you to expand on that, on just kind of, I guess that's like the, there's a term for it, the optionality, the optionality approach. Is that sort of what you're thinking? Like, hey, just, Don't go again, that all in or all out mentality, like just stay liquid, wait for that perfect opportunity. Or what are you thinking? I mean, cuz again, you're right. You can't predict what's going to happen. There'll be, it'll be moving to a certain trend, but you can only just be ready to take the opportunity. So how do you suggest that we can do that? We can actually take those opportunities.

Obviously, if I knew, I, I'd probably be in Barbados, not on a podcast, if I could, if I could predict all those things. Right. So. The thing is to me, again, setting yourself up to seize opportunity means not bogging yourself down. I think there's— you can get caught up trying to do too many things at once, trying to keep up with too many things. Just know that I think it's hard. It's definitely a hard trade-off of when you go all in on something, when you keep making small bets, and it's all about what you're optimizing for. So I'm lucky to be a single 25-year-old with no external responsibilities, so I can pretty much live how I want. And that is a completely different way of going about things if I was 40 and had 3 kids and a mortgage and all that, right? So it's a— it's definitely a personal kind of thing wherever you're at. You just need to figure out what you're optimizing for. But I have no, no real sage advice other than I wish I knew because then I'd be not here.

Well, I'm glad you didn't hit it big just yet, Dickie. We get to have this conversation. I'm super grateful.

That's right. That's right.

Guess what? We'll be looking back on this, or at least I will in 5, 10 years and be like, fucking got it right before, before he took off.

That's right. That's right. There we go. Before I disappear.

Exactly. He's like, he's gone, man. He's sold off Ship 30 as like some kind of internet franchise crypto thing. I don't even know. Eventually, yeah, you're gonna expand to the TikTokers and like podcasters, and it's just gonna be a whole other thing. You're gonna start an online university or something. Like, that's so interesting.

Who knows, man? I can't look that far ahead. That's what's fun about this is the last year has really been like a weekly thing. It's like I get up every day, I try to execute with aggressive patience, knowing that whatever I'm doing is gonna work out in the long term, but no patience to do anything in I guess, just to fully flesh that, I live by this aggressive patience idea where I know I'm on the right track. And so I can keep a long-term view. But every single day, it's like, I gotta execute, I gotta put a brick, lay brick down, lay some kind of foundation down and know that if I'm on the right path and executing really well in the short term, that the long term kind of takes care of itself.

Oh, man, that's such a great mindset. Because a lot of people, you're right, do get too bogged down thinking about the long term, like, You know, why is everyone asking us, what's your 10-year, 20-year goal? What's your vision? It's like, I don't even know what's going to happen in 5 years. You're like, you're creating a world for someone you don't even know yet. Like they don't exist.

No, the, the idea of having a 10-year goal, like a tangible goal is laughable. You have no clue what is gonna happen. So to me, it's gotta be input driven. Like I wanna be, I know what, like, let's look at this. Where do I want to be in 10 years? Well, I want to be healthy as hell. I want to be in tremendous shape. I want to be happy. I want to have deep, strong relationships, right? None of these are going to be, I want to own this or have this much or whatever it is, because you don't know what conditions are going to create those things. And so it's got to be just almost high level where you can glance at it and say, I'm on the right path. And today I'm going to execute on today.

And I can see the Stoic philosophy shining through there on you. It's exactly—

yeah, I know that. See, it's ingrained. It's ingrained, right?

Yeah. Have you read the new Ryan Holiday book?

I have not. No, I've heard good things about it, but really the only 3 I've read on, on Stoicism are the, the big 3, Meditations, Letters from a Stoic, and the Enchiridion, I guess, from Epictetus. And those 3 are just— I usually keep a copy around here. It's not next to me right now, but Um, there's so many notes in that one. Um, yeah, it's just, it flashes through everything I do.

Yeah, that's awesome. I can tell, I can tell like even all your writing, like you're just taking those ideas and those foundations and bringing it in. That's really cool, man. I love that. Um, okay, so we're heading up to an hour. How are you feeling, man? Do you want to keep going for a little bit or do you want me to head into some of these final questions?

I'm good. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever you got, let's keep going.

Dude, I really love this. I'm really, uh, really grateful for you to, uh, To share your time here and have this conversation with me, man. This has been awesome so far. I know for sure I've learned so much from this, so I'm hoping I'll be able to distill this. And then I create a lot of clips and then maybe I can send you some good notes and you could do a little thread 'cause you're way better at distilling shit than I am. But I can give you a ton of video clips.

Yeah, man.

Yeah.

Oh, huge. Really? That'd be perfect.

Yeah. And that's kind of what—

'Cause I think I've had some good monologues in this one.

Dude, yeah, you have like 3 where I'm like, I'm noting that, noting that. That's gonna be a clip For sure. So that's kinda like the value add why I love to do this podcast so I can like give you content, right? It's like free content that you don't have to take time to think about it. You don't have to edit it. It's like, hey man, here's free content for you. And that's where I love, you know, getting back into the whole internet thing. It's like creating these like transformational rather than transactional relationships where like, like we just randomly met on Twitter. You agreed to do this conversation with me. I'm like, this is awesome. I wanna make it worth your while. I want this to be something that you'll walk away from. I don't want to just be like, hey, come on my podcast. Like, I want this to be like. Something that's really cool, right? Like you said, like building friendships, which is so crazy to me. I never would've thought, even though, you know, you and I grew up on the internet basically, I never really thought you would meet with strangers and actually become like friends with these people, like you with Cole, like for the, probably the best example.

Oh no, without a doubt. And I think you are spot on with the more that you can turn your value add of someone coming on your podcast to a value add for them. Right? Because we're here right now and I love going on them because I just like talking about this stuff and I can point people towards it, right? There's going to be, if you're listening to this and it's 2023, shoot me a message because that's fucking cool as hell and that shows the power of this. But again, from your side, it's like, oh, not only is it going to be worth your time, but it's going to be well worth your time because I'm going to give you more value. That's such a cool, I think every podcaster should take notes on that because if I'd go on just about every single show if the value add was not only is this good for you, but here's 10 clips that you can go post. And I did all the work for you. Like, wow, that's cool.

That's awesome. I appreciate it. And then on the other side of that, I'll be posting it too. So like a whole other audience will see you and they'll be able to go see what you're doing, man. So I guess this is a good time to take a little break of just like, you know, if people want to learn more about you, they want to learn more about Ship 30, where would you point them to? Where would— where should they go to connect with you? And learn more about what you're doing?

So I spend too much time on Twitter. You can go to @DickieBush. That's D-I-C-K-I-E-B-U-S-H, all one word. In terms of where to point people for Ship 30, so what we have is we— over about 2,000 people have gone through Ship 30 at this point, and we just got around to kind of distilling some of our best frameworks, and we put them into this 13,000-word ultimate guide to Start Writing Online, very specifically for people who want to get started. So you can go to startwritingonline.com and download that ultimate guide for free. It's got a 7-day email course. It'll take you through it. And that I think is kind of where we're pointing people right now because it just gives them that, oh, I didn't even know what I didn't know about this world. And we, we wrote it in a way where it was like, again, solving your own problem. What do I wish I had a year ago? This guide, because it takes you through everything you need to know.

That's awesome, man. So on that note too, then what has Cole taught you? Because you guys connected and he probably showed you a lot of this stuff. What has Cole taught you about, uh, writing that obviously he's teaching everyone who will be going through this, but you specifically?

I, I mean, everything, right? Just the ability to understand specificity, I think, is what Cole does the best of explaining that when you try to write for everyone, you're writing for no one. And the key to standing out online is to solve a specific problem. I think I'd inherently done that a little bit of getting people started building a writing habit. That's a very specific problem, but how to use headlines to write specifically, how to make sure your words come off specifically writing with one person in mind. And he just has this brain for understanding connection with a reader where you're almost writing with an empathetic lens through, I understand your problems, I'm helping you, I'm solving you, I'm solving your problem. And using that lens to frame your writing is almost helpful. It should be helpful. And that's definitely the biggest thing.

That's awesome. So when you're writing, who do you have in mind? Like, are you thinking of a specific person? You mentioned like kind of writing for someone 2 years behind you. Are you just Thinking like, hey, here's a 2-year-younger me, or who are you thinking about when you're writing?

Yeah. I, so I call this pinpoint writing and pinpoint writing is writing for one person to solve one specific problem, to unlock one specific benefit. And you do that by leveraging one specific emotion. So at the top of every single thing I write, I write, what problem am I solving? Who has this problem? Why is it a problem? What have they tried in the past? Right? What those 2 are kind of the same question. And then what benefit is it unlocking? And you, at that point, you're just having a conversation, right? From that, you write a headline and it's, here's the problem solving, who it's for, what it's doing, what it's unlocking. And from there you just kind of can talk it out, right? So the more specific you can be where I'm writing this for the one person who has wanted to start writing online, but is over— always overwhelmed with the fear of being judged. And so they never get started. That's a very easy conversation to have. And then in the headline, you very clearly say, how to overcome imposter syndrome so you can finally start writing. 99.999% of people, that's not going to resonate with. But for the 0.0001 who say that and say, that's me, you've just built a new lifelong fan. And that's what writing does is you compound those people who see you solve something so well for them that they have nothing but loyalty to everything you write in the future because, wow, that provided so much value for me. I bet everything else you do does something helpful as well.

Yeah. Yeah, no shit. So dude, okay. So where is your mindset then? Where do you pinpoint the whole niche versus like going a little bit more broad? Like we, we talked about it before where like, just be yourself and every human being is pretty complex. There's this and that we're interested in. So many different things, so many things happen in life, but then you're like, okay, like you wanna talk about one specific thing. My, my problem, I guess, in the past has been about niching down. What is your thought on that? Do you need to talk about one specific topic or can you just like kind of cycle through things? What, what do you think about?

I think at any time you should have a general audience and a niche audience. And this is one of the key frameworks that we teach. Now what that means is I'll, I'll, I'll walk you through an example and we can link to the Twitter thread I wrote on this of how I advise someone who's starting writing online, where say I want to write about productivity tips. What most writers are going to do is they're going to go and write 10 kind of commodity advice blog posts on the Pomodoro Technique or the Eisenhower Matrix, right? That's what they think people want to read. But every reader's going to come across their profile and say, why should I listen to you? And in the beginning, you don't have any credibility. So you need to build that credibility somehow. And the way to do that without niching down too much is you build up what I call— this goes back to barbells— a barbell of credibility, where you say something either hyper-specific, almost uncomfortably specific, or you lend on expert credibility. So let's look at 2 examples. If I want to write about productivity advice, instead of writing Here's what the Eisenhower Matrix is. I say, here's how 10 billionaires use the Eisenhower Matrix. I curate information on that general topic from experts, from productivity wizards. Then people come and view my profile. I could have one post, and if it says how to use the Eisenhower Matrix, they're probably going. But if it says how these 10 billionaires use the Eisenhower Matrix, it doesn't matter what I am because they're— if Elon Musk does it, that, or if Elon Musk does it, that's good enough for them. And so they'll read it. And then if I do a good job distilling it, I build credibility points with them. And so boom, I built a little bit of a reader. Now on the other side, niching down is instead of saying how to use the Eisenhower Matrix, you say how middle market SaaS portfolio managers or portfolio or product managers can leverage the Eisenhower Matrix. You say something so specific That the only true— every single reader on earth knows whether or not that's for them. And for, again, 99.999, doesn't matter. But for the 0.001, that's like, wow, I'm a middle market SaaS PM, this is super helpful for me, you've built a little bit of an audience. So at the same time, you're building an audience of people who see you as a trusted source of curation that's not niched down because you're talking about a general topic. And then you're also building a tight feedback loop of individuals who see you as a trusted source on a niche topic. From there, you can expand in both directions across the barbell, right? For the general advice, you can start to talk about a little bit of your own opinion on things, not just this expert opinion. And since these people see you as a trusted source, they're going to say, okay, I— he was really good at curating this, I probably care what he has to say about this. And on the niche side, it's Wow, they were interested— this product manager was interested in productivity tips, he's probably interested in self-improvement tips, or whatever it is. And you can expand all these different directions. But it does start with being hyper-general, curating an expert, and hyper-niche with something so specific to you that you've escaped that credibility argument entirely, because you're so specific That you're the only person that could be credible on that topic. So I think people get confused with, oh, I have to niche down, niche down, niche down. You have to if you want to say anything that's going to resonate with people, or you need to borrow a bunch of credibility because you can't live in this middle world again, like we talked about with barbells of, I want to write about, for me, for me, for me. I think when people say, oh, I just want to be authentic, That's an escape for saying, I'm not being specific enough. And it's only when you up that specificity that you can really unlock the benefits. So that's kind of a long-winded way of saying that there's a couple approaches you can take, but that I think is— and look, the reason I wrote this thread up was it was the exact playbook I used. I curated all the best writing advice from Gary Halbert, Eugene Schwartz, Tim Ferriss, James Clear, all these guys are Dug into the writing process, and that was me borrowing credibility. I did it in a way that was more concise than anyone else. And then I solved a very specific problem of building a writing habit, right? And I built this barbell of credibility, and now I've been kind of spanning that spectrum for the last year. Now I get to explore, people trust me on this, I get to make my own frameworks up, right? I get to expand into other topics. And it all started with, with that barbell.

Man, I love that. That actually makes so much sense. And just having that example, like, I mean, also your story there makes so much sense. And my mind started kind of spinning where it's not just with writing, but it's like we're seeing a lot more YouTubers and people on TikTok. Again, I think all this stuff that you've been talking about when you're writing or coming up with the ideas for the content, it works so well for video as well. Do you ever think about that? Like, I mean, obviously you, you're not like a video guy, you're a writing guy, but if you were to give some sort of advice from like what you've been learning and what you've been distilling and teaching over the last year and transferring that into video, where that's like where the internet's kind of like really heading, you know, most content consumed will be video. And most people who are even writers, they ended up doing video at some point because it's just like, it makes sense for the platform and for discoverability. What would you think about, like, if you were to do it yourself, if you were to give advice to someone like me who's going to be doing videos, like, what would you say? would be the best way to tackle that?

I would say you do the exact same thing with writing because you're gonna have to write out every single video and then you record it.

Exactly.

Right? There's almost no— there's no change. You're gonna do the exact same thing, but instead of writing, you're gonna take it— it's harder, right? 'Cause you're gonna have to do all that writing anyway, but then record, right? You're just adding an extra layer and you're probably gonna be rewarded for that extra work. It's a lot harder to, I think it's harder to gain traction as a writer than a YouTuber despite that, because it's just extra work relative to the amount of written content that's out there.

Agreed. It's a whole other bar that's been raised, right? And we talked about earlier, all these people making mistakes, well, not really making mistakes, but making these assumptions of like, oh, I can't do X until Y. Well, how many people have said that? Oh, I can't do YouTube until I get like the best camera, the best lighting. And there's like, So many more barriers to that entry, even though the barrier is so low nowadays, but people in their minds keep creating all these barriers to entry.

Again, look, we, we, what's cool about this conversation is we keep coming back to things we talked about where the number of people who don't start a YouTube channel because they think their studio's not just right. Go watch MKBHD's 100th video where he hit, you know, 1,000 subscribers and he's like recording on a Motorola.

Yeah.

He, he didn't wait till he had a perfect studio. He just got started and look at him now.

It's all about just getting started. I love that advice. Um, yeah, man, I wanna get into these final questions. I have some really interesting sort of like generalized questions for you now that we're over the hour hump. So again, man, I really appreciate you.

Cool. Let's do it.

Yamming with me, me here, man. I really appreciate it. This has been awesome. Like seriously, dude, like there's so many things here that like, you know, I sent you my Notion doc before, like so much stuff that we just went off on. That is so unexpected. And that's, I love that. That's when I know it's been a great conversation. So thanks, man, for being such a great, uh, conversationalist with me.

Uh, I'm excited to listen to this one. I think I've, I've, we've talked about some cool stuff that really, this has just been a writing exercise for me. I'm gonna go transcribe some of these and they're gonna be new ideas for me. And so this has been really fun.

That's awesome, man. Okay, so final questions here. What is your best Productivity advice for anyone trying to get anything done?

I think we, I think we talked about it. Just get started on it. Stop planning. You, I'm always amazed at the amount of work that I can do with 1 hour set on a timer, this cube timer I got right here. So get a cube timer, set it for 60 minutes, and do whatever you're uncertain about, and the rest will take care of itself. You just have to get started on whatever you're doing.

I love that. And then flip side, best creativity advice you have?

That's got to be, take a 60-minute walk every single day. If you can get outside for 60 minutes with either it's a podcast or you go on an aimless walk or whatever it is, that I don't think people have fully wrapped their heads around the power, the creative power of just pacing. And something about that just steady, low-intensity Just gets the creative juices going. And like, I think 99% of everything I write is either thought about, listened, or outlined while on a walk. And I sit down once I know exactly what I'm gonna say because I've already kind of riffed on those ideas for, for plenty of hours before that.

Man, that's awesome. Nothing like literally getting the brain juices flowing, going for a walk. That's fantastic. And, uh, exactly putting those together, where do you think that productivity and creativity intersects? You've talked about these ideas and capturing ideas and then just like outputting them. Would you like— I think they're two sides of the same coin. How do you think they intersect?

I think the writing process is a mix of productivity and creativity. So what do I mean by that? I think there's two sides, and I just talked about both of 'em, where for me, you need a lot of aimless creativity where you're free to capture ideas and a trusted system to go about that. So For me, that's on walks, that's journaling, that's whatever. But then you need no boundaries on that. You can't force creativity in that way, but you can force productivity. And I think having all those ideas out there, you still need to sit down and hash them out. And that to me needs to be done every day on a cadence at the same time, the same place with no distraction. So it's this striking a balance of I give myself enough lack of constraint to go out and explore, But then I know that I'm gonna wrangle that all together because I do this every day from 6:45 AM to 8:00 AM. And that's pretty much what I do, where I know I have the freedom to explore ideas and the productive time to kind of hammer them together.

That's awesome. I love that, man. That's really, really good advice. And, um, I just wanna know, so you're kind of in the middle of this cohort now. You guys are growing, um, as a company or as like a side hustle, I guess it's technically a business at this point. And, you know, you're still working. What kind of challenges are you facing right now, kind of with those balance or just like life in general or your creativity?

You know, I think what's a good problem to have is that I think there's a ton of opportunity around and picking and choosing where to apply efforts on any given day can feel like a stretch, right? I think anytime you have your own project that you're working on. There's technically infinite number of things you could be doing at any time. And you can get kind of on a treadmill of, I gotta be always optimizing, always fixing, always doing this. And so it's that finding that balance of putting in enough work, but it being enough on any given day. And for me, that could just be keeping a to-do list where I actually check off everything I've done and make sure that I reflect at the end of the day and say, yes, you could keep working, you could keep doing this, but Today's enough and you get back on it tomorrow and you do that tomorrow. And that to me is the biggest struggle of like, when do you strike the balance of this is good enough? And I don't think you're ever going to find it, but that's why we do this, right? And I like to say that some of the problems I have now, I would have begged to have months ago, years ago, right? I have too many exciting things to work on. Imagine that. So it's just a gratitude most times where I try not to have too many. quote unquote struggles because my struggles are laughable compared to some of the other ones that other people have. And I, so I try to step back and say, just shut the hell up and you really don't have any problems right now.

Exactly. Just putting it into perspective. And once again, the Stoic philosophy coming through, man. I love that. Um, okay, so if you had a $1 billion advertising budget that you can send a message across every social platform, Google, YouTube, all at once, everyone on their device, their computer, billboards, they'll see your message. What would you send out?

So is it just one message?

One message?

Or is it a full campaign? One, one message? I think it's got to be the timing's never going to be right. Just get started. Right? The number of people who have— if you executed on every single idea that people are intending to do in the world right now, 99.9% of them would be good, beneficial for the world, and we should get going on them, right? But so many people, there are these artificial barriers. So just that subtle reminder, like, hey, if you're looking for that, that shining message that says permission to get started, you know, here it is.

That's awesome. That's really cool. I think that really sums up, puts a nice bow on the whole conversation. I think just like your philosophy and your mindset on content creation, that Definitely boils it right down. So that's really cool. Um, okay, so final question, what is something that you're super excited about? I mean, you got a lot going on, man. Like, I don't want to hear about the challenges. Like, obviously it's not too bad. What are you, what are you excited about?

I mean, I, I'm excited about every, every single damn day I get to wake up and work on things I'm passionate about, enjoying, loving, meeting crazy people, interesting people, just having a blast doing it. So I think the next, like I said, the next 5 to 10 years are just such an exciting time of acceleration, technology, opportunity, everything, right? So I hope I bring the energy and come off with that excitement because look, there's just never been a better time to be doing what we're doing. If you're listening to this right now, you are in such an incredible position because you probably have AirPods in, you're using the internet and right, the number of things that can go right just based on that I know that about you is very good. So take that for what it's worth. I think that the amount of opportunity that's out there right now, everyone should be excited. So for me, it's just getting to execute. I get to work on a business, work on investing, everything I love. So excited about just about everything right now and fun to reflect on that.

That's awesome, man. That is super exciting. I'm really excited for you that you've kind of found your stride here, that you found a really great thing that, uh, it seems like you were searching for. It's like, this is obviously still just a stepping stone into like the next thing or whatever that is. But I, what I love about your mindset is you're not really thinking about that. You're just thinking of the day-to-day. Here's what I'm doing now. Let's just execute, do the best I can, be the best I can be, and just take it day for day. So man, I really appreciate it. Your mindset has just been so refreshing and just so exciting. So I really appreciate you coming on the podcast and chatting with me, man.

Hey, thanks for having me. And anyone who listens to this, if anything resonates, my DMs are open on Twitter. Hit me up. I would love to hear from you. And again, thanks for having me. This has been a blast.

Absolutely, man. And I guess just one last thing before we can get going. Do you have other resources that you can point people towards other than your Twitter? I know your Twitter's just like jam-packed with resources. Um, the Ship 30 site, anywhere else you can point people towards?

No, I think that's it. startwritingonline.com will be a good one if you're, if you're trying to dig into some of these things. My newsletter's linked on my Twitter if you want to follow along with that and just hit me up. DMs are open. Love to chat. Love to hear from you. If any of this resonated, let me know.

Absolutely. And for everyone listening, there's going to be tons of show notes and links in the description. So for most of these things we're talking about, I go pretty hardcore on all of the show notes and links and everything. So pretty much everything we've talked about will be in the show notes and those links there. So you'll be able to find everything we've talked about. So there's no problem there. Dickie, once again, man, this has been an absolute pleasure. It's been so awesome to chat with you and hope we get to do it again at some point or our paths cross at some point. This is awesome, man.

Absolutely. Let's put a pin in it and do it a year from now. Hopefully we're listening to this beforehand. And if you're listening to this a year from now, hope the year went well and, uh, we'll do it again.

Awesome, man. Take care, everyone. Thanks for listening.