How Shiny Object Syndrome Cost Me Millions of Dollars

I want to end by sharing a little story with everyone that exemplifies this. Okay, here, here's what taught me the importance of not taking all of the work and time that you've invested into learning something or building some skill for granted, and why you should consider not moving on to the next shiny object until you have successfully monetized that thing. Okay, so let me share a couple quick little data points. So when I was a teenager, I was one of the highest ranked World of Warcraft players in North America. I played very competitively. I had one of the first big popular gaming blogs on the internet, and by the time I was a freshman in college, I was like basically like talking to sponsors and getting ready to compete in like the one of the first in-person, like, professional league World of Warcraft tournaments. Okay? And at the very last minute, you know, like, the tournament sort of fell through and sponsors were hard and nobody was really willing to pay that much money. And I was in college and I was starting to have other interests. And I had invested 4 and a half years of my life into this game and was very, very good at it and had built an audience around it. I had a very popular gaming blog on on like gameplay strategies. And in 2009, my freshman year of college, I decided, you know what, my heart's just not in it anymore. And I don't know, like nothing has really happened yet. I'm gonna move on. I'm gonna like do other stuff. So I quit. One year later, the esports world started. This was when like esports first really began. It was 2010. And all of the players that I played with and against competitively— this is like 2 or 3 years after YouTube launched, because YouTube came out in like 2007, somewhere around there, maybe a tad earlier, but like mid-2000s. All of the players I played with and against all launched YouTube channels. Esports sponsors poured in, started sponsoring tournaments. A couple years after that, Twitch came out, so they started streaming. And all of a sudden, within like 3 years, by the time I was, I was done with college, I watched all of the people that I played with and against go on to make millions of dollars competing and playing the game that I was just as good at as them. They all had sponsors. They all had huge YouTube channels. And I just sat there and I was like, wow, if I had stuck with it just a little bit more, I would have been at the very beginning of that whole wave. And who knows where my life would have taken me? Okay. Story number 1. Story number 2 is in the process of all of that, I picked up a new interest, which was bodybuilding. I got really into fitness. Completely transformed myself. I was like super skinny, scrawny, didn't know I had celiac disease when I was a kid. And I got into bodybuilding like right around like 2009, 2010. And within the span of like 4 years, I went from being like, I weigh 100 pounds and literally don't have an ounce of muscle anywhere, to like full transformation, put on 70 pounds of muscle, friends with a bunch of bodybuilders and powerlifters in Chicago. Like, it was my whole life. And in 2014, uh, I started writing on Quora, and I had my first Quora answer go mega viral. And the Quora answer was about my physical transformation, and there was a before and after picture, and it was like me as a teenager and then like me a handful of years later. Looked nothing like each other. Went mega viral, front page of Reddit, and I spun up two ebooks. It was my first digital product. It was my workout routines and my nutrition routines, and I plugged it in that Viral Quora answer. Those ebooks are how I made my first $5,000, $10,000 on the internet. And then I stopped. I wrote those ebooks, and like a year later or so, my, my interest started changing again, and I had gotten this job at an advertising agency and I was starting to get really interested in the idea of entrepreneurship and I was taking my writing more seriously and I was trying to finish my first book and all of a sudden fitness started kinda going down on the priority list. And I was like, you know, I'm just not as passionate about this as I used to be. So after those two ebooks, I never did anything else. Later that year, I might be dating myself. I'll see if anyone here knows this reference. Does anyone know or remember the brand Kino Body? It's K-I-N-O Body. He was this young 20-something dude. He's like, "Yeah, Greg." Okay. Later that year, Greg basically created a whole same type of business we run now, low-ticket digital product, high-ticket coaching, et cetera. Basically taking the same exact positioning I had used. I'm not saying he like stole it from me. I'm just saying like it was the same market, you know? And he— it was a whole business around like you were really scrawny and now you want to put on muscle. You're an ectomorph and now you want to put on a bunch of muscle. And I remember sitting at my job at this advertising agency in like 2015, 2016. And I read some article, maybe it was like in Forbes or something, and it was about his business. And he, he, the article was something like, you know, he's like, oh, I'm making like, you know, $200,000 a month or whatever it was running this business, teaching ectomorphs how to put on muscle. And I remember sitting there and I was just like, you got to be kidding me. Like, I had this all figured out. I just didn't know all the other skills. Like I knew the, I had the knowledge, I trained hard, I looked the part, I understood the workout routines, I knew how to eat, I had all the knowledge, but I didn't have all the surrounding skills, which were like, okay, and so how do you monetize this? What are digital products? What's high-ticket coaching? How do you build a funnel? I didn't have all that yet. Right. So then third time. All right. Now the story ends. Third time I go and build a ghostwriting agency. Right. I spent 3 and a half years building this ghostwriting agency. We scaled it to millions of dollars in revenue, hundreds of clients. And on paper, it was very successful. But that agency, I, instead of taking money out, which I should have done, I should have been a millionaire building that business, but I didn't. I took every dollar that that agency made and I repoured it into the agency so that we could keep growing, keep growing, keep growing. And we ultimately grew too fast. And then I was like, um, I got ahead of my skis and we had to scale it all down. That's why I know about these problems so well, because I made all of those mistakes. And I end— I decided to scale down my ghostwriting agency. This is like 2020, right? Right before the pandemic. And I remember sitting there and I was like, I've made this mistake 2 times in the past. I made it with gaming and I made it with bodybuilding. And now I have all this experience with ghostwriting. And if I'm not careful, I'm going to move on to something else and I'm gonna chase the next shiny object and I'm not actually gonna cross the finish line. And I missed out on the millions of dollars with gaming and I missed out on the millions of dollars with info products and bodybuilding and coaching on the internet. And now the third time, like, I'm not going to let that happen. So then Dickie and I connect, we start Ship 30. Very quickly after that, we go, we should launch a ghostwriting program because, Cole, you already have all the knowledge. PGA went on to become the fastest growing business I've ever built and went from zero to like $5 million a year in the span of 8 months. Biggest business I've ever built, fastest growing business I've ever built. And to date, it's been our largest vertical by a mile. And I share that story with everyone because at the time when Dickie and I were talking about building PGA, my first response emotionally was, I don't want to do that. Emotionally, I'm tired of talking about ghostwriting. But I know from previous experiences that when you do that at the 1-yard line, you miss the pot of gold at the end. And I was like, I'm not doing that this time. And so I made a different decision. I took the emotional component and I was like, Cole, put it to the side. Find the positive. You have people to help. You have a lot of valuable knowledge. You can pass along all of your learnings to a lot of other writers. You can have a huge impact. It might not be the most exciting thing to you, but it will be very helpful. And you're at the one— you're at the one-yard line. Like, don't make this mistake a third time. And so I didn't. And so I share all of that because that— yeah, that meme is exactly it. Is you, you have to recognize the amount of knowledge that you accumulate when you do something for a prolonged period of time. And everyone makes the mistake, myself included, of moving on because it's, it's no longer novel. It's not fun the way that it was fun when you first got into it. And everyone makes the mistake of moving on because it doesn't feel novel, failing to realize that you are, you are at the 1-yard line. And you are about to enter the realm of, and now I get the big reward at the end. And now that I've learned that lesson, like, I don't do that anymore. So that's my ending story for today. Happy Monday. Thanks everyone for showing up. I hope this was helpful. Good questions. Um, please take advantage of the hot seats, submit your questions ahead of time, and I hope you have a great week. Hey, by the way, if you're brand new to the world of ghostwriting, maybe you've heard the term but aren't really sure what it is or how it's different from copywriting or content writing, check out premiumghostwritingblueprint.com. It's in the description below. Okay, this is a free masterclass that I've put together for writers who want to monetize their skills and love for writing with ghostwriting. This is what I did, and ghostwriting completely changed my life. It's how I quit my job. It's how I quadrupled the amount of money I was making. It's how I've gotten to work with so many smart, amazing people, but also have time for my own writing, like writing this book, The Art and Business of Ghostwriting. Anyways, check it out. If you're at all interested in making money from your writing, I would really encourage you to get into ghostwriting, and this free premium ghostwriting blueprint in the description below is the best place to start.