Millionaire Writer Rules: 22 tough-love truths

Millionaire writer rules. Rule number one, you can't steer a stationary ship. Alright, so this is actually a piece of advice that a mentor gave me back in Chicago. He said, cole, you can't steer a stationary ship. Meaning there's no point in overthinking. Oh, well, should I do this? Or this? You know, but what happens if I get three steps down the road? So many people try to solve problems they don't have yet. You know, they imagine what their life's going to be like 100 paces away when they haven't even taken the first step. So the whole big idea here is you literally can't improve something that isn't in motion. And this might sound really simple, but I've coached thousands, tens of thousands of writers at this point. And you would be amazed at how many writers love trying to solve problems they don't have yet. Okay, so the metaphor I like using is imagine if you said, cole, I really want to get good at basketball. Like, great, I'll see you at the gym tomorrow. You're like, no, no, no, no, I don't need to go to the gym. I just want you to tell me, like, how, how does Kobe do that turnaround jump shot? Like, you're not even in the gym. You're not even showing up to the gym. So why are we talking about these advanced tactics? And everyone loves jumping to what's the advanced thing, what's the secret thing, what's the growth hack, what's the shortcut? But you literally can't improve something that isn't in motion. So step one, you can't steer a stationary ship. Writer rule number two, volume wins. Okay, so a little saying that I love sharing with writers is the right way to write is often okay, so there is no point in sitting down and overthinking every single word or every single thing that you're trying to say. Volume wins. Everything is more successful with more volume. And a faulty belief that a lot of writers have is they sit back and they go, well, no, I want the one book that I write to be my magnum opus. You know, I've seen so many CEOs go through this, they think I gotta write one book and it has to represent my entire family legacy forever. You know, I. And that's not a real thing. It really is not that serious. You would be so much better off hitting publish more often. You know, if you look at some of the greatest creative producers ever, you know, Mozart, Beethoven, Leonardo da Vinci, all of them produced hundreds, thousands, thousands upon thousands of pieces of work Right. So they created these masterpieces through voluum. They didn't say, oh, I'm only going to create one thing and then it's going to be this perfect creation. No, they created a ton and then we just happen to love, you know, 10 out of the thousand things that they created. Rule number three, create more than you consume. So if you want to be a creator in any sense of the word, doesn't matter. If it's writing, music, art, painting, drawing, graphic design, doesn't matter. You should be spending more time every day creating than you are consuming. If at any point you are consuming more than you're creating, you are not creating, you are not being a creator. What you're doing is you're getting really good at consuming and that's fine. You know, a lot of times people say, oh, I consume to study my craft, fine. But if you aren't combining that with a high output volume of creation, then all you're doing is just getting better and better at consuming. Your taste might be going up, but your ability to create is staying the exact same. So I am a very big believer. You know, as much as I love reading and studying literature and studying other writers, not a single day goes by where I am reading and consuming more than I am writing and creating. Real quick. If you want to write online but aren't sure where to start, click the link in the description of this video and check out startwritingonline.com this is a free masterclass I put together sharing all of our most helpful frameworks for beginners, like proven hooks to capture your target readers attention, where to write online to get the most distribution on your work and little growth. Hacking tips to build your social audience and email list faster. Over 100,000 writers have gone through this free masterclass and many even send us emails afterwards thanking us for sharing such valuable information for free. So click the link below this video to check it out and make this year the year you start seeing success from your writing online. Rule number four, consume what you want to create. So this is building on rule three, where if you're going to take time to consume other people's work, you know, if you're going to study your craft well, you actually want to be consuming the very thing that you are trying to create. So this is something I've really noticed with myself with writing. If I am in the middle of writing a nonfiction book, I get a lot out of reading other people's nonfiction, whereas if I'm working on a fiction book, then the best thing that I could do for myself in that chapter would be to read other people's fiction. So whatever thing that you're trying to create should also be the thing that you are consuming. And, you know, I'm at a point in my career now where the thing that I'm creating is changing on a daily basis. I have. I have a lot of switching costs between different companies and different projects, different initiatives, different. And one thing that's really helped me is that every day before I go into creating a new or different thing, I first take a little bit of time to consume some version of the very thing that I'm trying to create. You know, if I'm working on a new digital product, I'm going to go consume one of our old digital products or someone else's digital product so that I can anchor my mindset there. Whereas if I wake up and I'm working on fiction, I might start that morning by reading someone else's fiction. So I'm a very big believer in these two rules together. You know, create more than you consume. And if you're going to consume something, you want to consume the very thing that you're trying to create. Rule number five, practice before you play. So what this means is, especially when you're in any sort of creative field, writing is a good example. Everyone has no problem prioritizing the fun stuff. You know, like, playing is easy. I heard a great quote the other day, which is, if you're doing something that you enjoy, you don't have to be disciplined. Discipline kicks in as soon as you have to do something that you don't enjoy or maybe is a little more tedious or a little more boring. And so practice before you play, for me is a really good reminder that, yes, I might want to do something fun and enjoyable, or I might want to work on a project that really has grabbed my attention. But before we go do that, we need to do the things that need to be done. And oftentimes the practice component is doing something that's a little boring or a little tedious. But this is where this is the moat. You know, whoever can tolerate the most boring work wins. So, yes, give yourself time to play. You know, give yourself time to explore that shiny object that's grabbing your attention, but don't constantly jump to the fun thing and skip over the necessary but maybe boring or tedious thing. Rule number six, simplicity is velocity. So this is just a truism in life, but business in general, the simpler something is, the faster it can move, the more complex something is. The more friction, the slower it moves. So whatever your goal is doesn't matter. If you work for yourself solopreneur, you have a business entrepreneur, you employ other people. It really doesn't matter. The entire game is all about making things as simple as possible. You could distill that down to if you just want to be a writer. Well, what do you want to write? Okay, so pick. I want to write a newsletter or I want to write a book. Okay. What is the simplest path to you doing that thing consistently every single day, no matter what? And what you're looking for are all of the little things, all the little complexities that get in the way of that simplicity. Because the simpler something is, the faster it can move. So whenever I'm working on something or I'm building some new writing business, I'm always asking myself, what is the simplest version of the thing that I'm trying to do? And how can I be ruthless in removing things that create friction? Because friction is complexity, and complexity slows things down. Rule number seven. This is a personal favorite of mine. Every day that you don't write, you practice not writing. So again, sometimes the simplest lessons are the hardest ones to learn and hardest to internalize. Every day that you write, you are practicing not just writing, but the habit of writing. Every day you don't write, you are actually practicing the opposite habit. You are practicing not writing. And as time goes on, well, one day, two days of not writing, a week of not writing, a month of not writing, a year of not writing, all of a sudden, you've gotten pretty good at not writing. Which is why the more days in a row that you don't write, the harder it is for you to get back to, oh, it's been so hard. It's been so long since I built my daily writing habit. Well, yeah, because for the past year, you've been practicing not writing. So I really like. You know, this clicked for me right out of college when I got my first job as a writer. And I really realized, you know, if I wanted to make a living doing this thing, I was going to have to prioritize it. No matter what, I was going to have to figure it out. And if I didn't, then every day that went by, I was going to be practicing the opposite, which is I'm practicing not writing. I'm practicing not achieving my goals. So I love this little reframe. This is something that I pass along to every single writer in all of our different writing programs. Every day that goes by, you are practicing One of two things. Building the habit of writing or you are practicing not writing. Rule number eight, if you can write fiction, you can write anything. So this is actually something a teacher of mine told me in college because I was studying fiction writing. They said, cole, if you can write and understand the mechanisms of fiction, every other type of writing is very easy. And in a lot of ways, I agree. I agree with that professor of mine, because as soon as I graduated with a degree in fiction writing, I got into business writing. And I remember starting to write for PR companies and advertising agencies. And I thought, this is so easy. Like the mechanisms in nonfiction are so easy compared to the mechanisms in fiction. But I would tweak this slightly. I think, yes, fiction is incredibly important and valuable, teaches you a lot about the art of the craft. But what teaches you just as much, and what I've seen arguably more versatility in is if you can write copy, if you can write things that sell people, you can write anything. And I've actually found that by studying copy and studying copywriters, I have seen my storytelling techniques and my own fiction improve dramatically. And something that I've never understood is why these two worlds are kept so separate. You know, you have the literature, fiction world over here, and then you have the business y markety world, copywriting world over here. And I think both sides of the fence would benefit greatly by studying each other, you know, and so I feel like, you know, I would tweak this slightly. Yes, you can. If you can write fiction, you can write anything. But I would also say, if you can write copy, really good copy that sells people and is actually profitable, every other type of writing is very easy. All right, Rule 9, word count is a poor measure of value. So this is something I really learned ghostwriting for founders and executives. At the end of the day, the client, the reader, the customer, they do not care how many words it is. You know, they don't care if it's 700 words or 1400 words. What they care about is, what are you saying? What is the piece saying? And more importantly, what is the value of reading that piece? You know, a nice little exercise I love taking writers through is putting two different listicles side by side and going, okay, if you clicked on this piece and it was teaching you how to start writing on the Internet, and the first three pieces of advice were, you really gotta try, you gotta not give up, and you gotta follow your passion, you would read that and go, that was not worth my time right now. Does the word count have anything to do with it? No, of course not. What matters is what the words are saying. And so a mentality that I notice a lot of broke writers stay caught in is they measure their value by word count. You can see it in their business model. You know, these writers on upwork will charge per word. Well, the number of words is not what's important. What's important is, can you help someone else, in this case ghostwriting for other clients? Can you help them say something different? Can you help them articulate something that is so valuable that it's worth someone giving their attention for 30 seconds or a minute or in a book, you know, hours, Hours and hours? So I remind writers of this all the time. Word count is a very poor measure of value. All right, rule number 10, start with the big idea. So let me tell you a quick story. When I lived in la, I became friends with arguably the most successful sales copywriter on the planet today. His name's Craig Clemens. He built a very, very successful company off of his ability to write and write ads. And one day I was up at his house. You know, we would do these writing sessions together. We'd sit in his office. He had this house up in Hollywood Hills, and we would just sit down and write side by side. And I remember one afternoon we were writing. We both. We turn on a timer. We both sort of went into our own individual worlds. And an hour later, he goes, how was the writing session? I go, oh, it was really good. It was really productive. I got down, like, over a thousand words. You know, going back to our previous rule, word count is a poor measure of value, right? So I was like, oh, I got around a thousand words. I'm feeling really productive. Go. How is it for you? And he kind of takes his time to answer, and he goes, good. You know, I think I've almost got the headline figured out. And that experience completely changed the way that I thought about writing. You know, up until that point, I was so anchored to writing, and productivity is all about how many words you can write, you know? But again, word count is a really poor measure of value. That writing session with him and after talking with him about it made me realize, no, where you should spend the majority of the time is actually with the big idea. And the big idea is, could be if you're writing an article, that's the title. If you're writing a newsletter, that's the subject line. If you're writing a book, that's the main title and subtitle. If you can't succinctly say the big idea in one sentence. You're not going to know what you're trying to say in a thousand words or 10,000 words or 100,000 words. So one of the best lessons you know, that I've learned from one of the most successful sales copywriters on the planet is you always want to start with the big idea. And after that day, I completely changed my writing process. I started spending way more time on the front end, thinking through the idea, brainstorming different titles. With every book that I write Now, I spend 100 hours thinking about the positioning of the book and the main title and the subtitle before I even write a single word. So you should always start with the big idea. Rule 11, when you write something for everyone, you end up writing something for no one. So this is an old copywriting adage, which is every time that you write, you want to think of not a crowd of people, but one very specific person. And again, going back to, you know, this sales copywriting mentor that I had, Craig, one of the things that he really passed along to me is before you write something, before you write an ad, before you write a landing page, before you write an email campaign, the best thing that you can do is to actually create an archetype in your mind of the type of person that you're trying to reach with your writing. Who is your ideal customer right now? Everyone's heard this, but they don't really know what that looks like. So. So a process that I ended up stealing from Craig is what he would do, is he would tell me he would write like a 5 to 10 page autobiography about that person, you know, and so he would try and get in their head and go, okay, so who is this? How old are they? Where are they from? What do they care about? What are their hopes and dreams? What are their biggest problems? What things have they tried in the past that didn't work? You know, what are the faulty beliefs that they carry around with them? And you really have to get inside this person's head. And what, what Craig would do, and I've since stolen it for myself, is I go and write an entire first person draft from the perspective of this person. Here's who I am. This is what I care about. This is what I really want. This is what I'm struggling with, right? And what that allows for is that when you write copy, when you write emails, ads, landing pages, you don't want to try and speak to everyone. You want to speak to that one specific individual. And when you do that The Internet's job is to go find you all the people in the world that are just like that archetype. So it's a little bit like a rule of opposites. When you try and write something for everyone, it ends up being very surface level, very vague, doesn't resonate with anyone in particular. So you've written something for no one. But when you write something for just one specific individual person, like even give them a name, well then the Internet goes, I got my marching orders. I know exactly who you're looking for and I'm going to go find all of the different versions of that person I on the Internet around the world. 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 premium ghostwritingblueprint.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 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. All right, rule number 12, you always want to speak in benefits to the reader, not features about you. So I've done a lot of work in Silicon Valley and I've ghostwritten for a lot of different Silicon Valley and heavily venture backed startups. And something that never ceases to amaze me about that entire ecosystem is even though they create really beautiful products, they tend to really struggle with articulating what it is they do. Many of these SaaS platforms, and again, like venture backed companies, have a really hard time getting out of this way of thinking. Where they speak in features, they're like, here's what's so cool about our dashboard. Here's how much effort we've put into building this product. If you pull back and notice all of that language is really them talking about themselves. Here's how cool we are. But that's not what the reader cares about. That's not what the user cares about. The user only cares about one thing. What do you do for me? And so everything that you communicate should be, here is the benefit of the thing that we've created for you, not here is how cool the thing is that we've created. And let me talk about myself or ourselves. All right, So a very easy example would be, let's say you're a fintech platform. Instead of saying we have the most up to date real time dashboard, who cares? That's about you. What I want to know is if you say to me what our real time dashboard is so accurate that you customer will never question where your money is going at any given time in the month. Right now, that's a benefit to me. So if you could take this to heart, and this is not just about copywriting and writing ads and landing pages. I mean, you can apply this even to storytelling and fiction. It's like if you were trying to sell a story or sell a book, you would want to position it as well. Here are all the cool things that you can expect in the story, right? You want to speak in benefits to the reader, not features about why you think you're so cool. All right, rule number 13. Tangibles are worth more than intangibles. So this is something that took me a very long time to understand. And honestly, you know, I've read every book on copywriting and ad writing under the sun, okay. And I've never really heard anyone articulate it this way. So once this clicked for me, I thought, oh, this is really helpful. And I always pass this along to writers in our programs. Intangibles are things that you can't hold, you can't measure them, you can't feel them. Right? Something tangible is something that you can hold. It is something that you can feel. And if you notice, most people speak in intangibles. Most books make intangible promises on the COVID Most landing pages speak in intangibles. So an example would be like, I will help you live your dream life. You can't hold. Live your dream life. You can't measure live your dream life. Right? That is intangible. You make it tangible by speaking in objects or experiences, things that you can touch or feel or measure. So instead of saying, I will help you live your dream life, an example of going from intangible to tangible would be, I will help you retire with a million dollars in the bank by the time you're 60. Well, that is very tangible. You either have the million dollars in the bank when you're 60 or you don't. Right? And so every time you're trying to communicate something, you should always be asking yourself, wait, am I falling back into intangible language? And if so, how can I make what I'm trying to say tangible? All right, rule number 14, this is building on the intangible, tangible idea, which is you also always want to make sure that you are making objective promises and not subjective promises. So, for example, a subjective promise would be I will help you get healthy. Get healthy is very subjective and we can stress test it by just asking the question, okay, if we go find 10 people on the street and we ask them all to define what get healthy means, we are going to get 10 very different answers. That means it is subjective. It's open to interpretation. The goal is to always be speaking in objective promises, right? So you wouldn't just say, I, I will help you get healthy. You'll say, I'll help you lose 15 pounds of fat and gain 5 pounds of muscle in the next 16 weeks. That is very objective. If you ask 10 people to mirror back to you, what is the promise? They will all say that same promise right back to you. And it's objective because you either lose 15 pounds of fat and gain 5 pounds of muscle in the next 16 weeks or you don't. And if you notice, objective promises are not only easier to understand, but we value them more. Whereas subjective promises, inevitably you're sort of left confused. You don't know exactly what you're getting. And this once this clicked for me, I see this everywhere. And I think part of the problem and why so many writers emulate what's out there is because we're surrounded by it. We are surrounded by communication that is intangible and subjective, and it's wrong. So just because you see it in a bookstore or on a magazine or in an ad doesn't mean that it's good. Good, Right. Instead, what you're always aiming for is how do I make this tangible and how do I make the promise objective? All right, rule number 15, the reader is the main character, not you. So what this means is even if you're talking about yourself, even if you're telling a story about yourself or something that you've experienced, you always want to frame it as. And here's what you can take away from that reader. Here's why I'm telling you this. Here's why it is beneficial to you to listen. So I'll give you a simple Example, if I was to say, I'm going to tell you about writing online and then all I did was just tell you stories from my life, inevitably you would get bored. I can still tell you those same stories though, by combining each story with. And here's what that means for you. Right? So I might tell you a story about how I first got started writing on quora back in 2013. But then if I transition into. And here's what that taught me about this thing that you care about, and, and let me walk you through the things that I learned so that I can help you accomplish the same goal. Well, now the reader is the main character. So yes, I'm able to talk about myself, I'm able to share stories, I'm able to share lessons, you know, mistakes that I made, but I can always bring it back to as a benefit for you. You are the main character. You are what matters. This video is a great example. You know, yeah, I'm throwing in stories or I'm talking about things I've experienced or learned, but I'm constantly bringing it back to. And here's the takeaway for you. Here's what you should do with it. All right? Rule number 16, the size of the question dictates the size of the audience. So this is something I learned writing on Quora way back in 2013, 2014, 2015. Quora was a question answer social platform. And so you would find questions in the feed and then you could write answers. It was like a more modern day version of Yahoo. Answers, you know. And what I learned writing on Quora is that the size of the question dictated the potential reach of the thing that I wrote. So a very easy, simple example would be notice the difference between the question, how do I make more money versus how do I make more money as a nurse living in Baltimore? Well, the more specific the question, the smaller the target market, right? The smaller the number of readers, whereas the bigger the question, the more readers you can attract. Now, the challenge in the little asterisk with this rule is that a lot of times people think the takeaway is, oh, then I shouldn't write things that are niche. I should write things that are very broad. That is not the takeaway. The takeaway is just understanding as you answer different types of questions. Don't expect, if you answer a really niche question to have some sort of mainstream viral success, you know, and similarly, don't expect to answer a very broad question and expect really niche resonance. Right? It's more about understanding. Okay, where am I playing? What type of thing am I writing? And how do I temper my expectations, depending on the size of the question that I'm answering. All right, rule number 17, the entire game of writing. This took me a decade to understand. The entire game of writing is to say what hasn't been said. So, a very simple example, and I love using this exercise with writers in our different programs. Let's say I asked you to write an article about how to have an effective morning routine. And let's say some of the things that you came up with were, you know, you got to set an alarm. You got to jump right out of bed. You should start with some stretching. You should drink some water. You should have an espresso. You got to stare at the sun. These are all things that we've heard, and not only have we heard them, but we've heard them a thousand times. And so what happens is, often writers will write something on a topic, and they will say the same 10 things that everyone has always heard about that topic. And then they question they don't understand why their writing isn't getting visibility. And really, it's because you don't understand what the game is. The game is to say something that hasn't been said yet. So whenever I'm walking writers through this exercise, I call it the tequila test. Imagine if I wrote a morning routine article, and the very first piece of advice, I said, hey, in order to have a really effective morning routine, step one, as soon as you roll out of bed, take a shot of tequila. Whether or not you agree with that, you. It doesn't really matter. What matters is that I just said something that probably in every morning routine article you've ever read has never been said. And that is the game if you really want to understand. Like, how do you differentiate yourself as a writer? How do you bring people into your writing and motivate them to want to give you their attention? The entire game is about saying things that haven't been said. And if you don't know what that is yet, or if you go, oh, that's really hard. Well, yeah, welcome to the game of writing. You know, that is fundamentally the craft. If you can't say something that hasn't been said, the next best thing to do is to say what's already been said in a new and different way. Give it a different name, wrap it in a different framework, call it something different. The more that you can repackage existing ideas in new and different ways, the more they look new. And I'm sure you've seen this, you know, you see someone basically say the same thing that's already been said, but they repackaged it in a new and different way. They gave it some sort of term, and all of a sudden everyone gravitates to it. Well, yeah, that's. If you can't say something new, then just say the same thing that everyone has said before, but repackage it in a different way. All right, rule number 18. The most important sentences of any paragraph of any section of any chapter of any anything that you're writing. The most important sentences are the first sentence and the last sentence. So you want to think of these as the bookends. Your first sentence is really important because that's what motivates the person or the reader to go, yes, I want to give you my attention. Right. So your hook has to be really compelling. But the very last sentence is the last thing that they're left with. So you also want the last thing that you say to either open a new loop in the reader's brain, right. Create more curiosity, or leave them with something that is thought provoking, or leave them with this feeling of resolve. Right? They committed to giving you their attention, and now they've carried themselves all the way to the very end. And you don't want to just like, not give them anything to end on. Right? You want the last sentence to be just as impactful as the first sentence. So whenever I sit down to write something, I actually don't write linearly. The very first thing that I do is I write a V1 of the first sentence and the last sentence, because those are my bookends. I know where I'm starting and I know where I'm going, and then we fill in the middle. Rule number 19. In the digital age, skimmability is readability. If your work is not skimmable, no one is going to read it. An example that I love using, even though I'm, you know, a literature nerd at heart, and I love reading the classics. Go to the New Yorker's website and pull up an article and you will feel how cognitively difficult it is to read an article on their site. Why? Because their articles are not formatted the way that we read today. They are formatted as if we're still reading in the 1950s. You know, it's big, blocky paragraphs. It is impossible to skim. You literally can't skim them. And as a result, it's no wonder that most people don't read those types of pieces. Right? And so if you want the majority of people to enter your writing. If you want to make your writing accessible, then you have to make it skimmable. And the way that you make it skimmable is with bolded subheads. It's with bulleted lists, it's with section dividers. It's with things that grab your attention. You know, bolded sentences. You want to be able to. I like thinking of it like reading with very little cognitive load. How do you make it as easy as possible for the average person to skim what you've written and go, oh, I understand what they're saying. That's the whole game of writing in the digital age. All right, rule number 20. I think this one might be my favorite one. Your value is the value of your value to the reader. Okay, so let me slow down, because it's not just like a quippy saying. Let me explain what this means. Your value as a writer, how much money you make, how valuable you are to your ecosystem, to your readers, to the industry that you're trying to serve. Okay? Your value is the value of what you provide. So the value of your value to someone else. Now that someone else could be a client, it could be a customer, it could be a reader. You know, it could be a fiction reader. It doesn't really matter. Your value and everything that you get paid to do actually has nothing to do with your effort. It has nothing to do with how much time you spend on it. It has nothing to do with how much of your heart and soul you poured into it. All of your value is predicated on the value of what you give someone else. And so if you're writing, going back to some of our earlier rules, if your writing is just saying the same things that the person has already heard a hundred times or a thousand times, then your writing does not possess much value. You are easily replaceable, which is why so much of the game of writing is trying to figure out, okay, well, wait, what do I know about the world? What are my perspectives that are actually unique? Right? And that's. That's a very easy thing to hear, but it's actually very hard to put into practice. The entire game is trying to figure out, okay, so how do I say something that is actually different? How do I help someone do something that solves a valuable problem or unlocks a valuable outcome? And if you can do that, then you will be paid proportional to that problem being solved or that outcome being unlocked? So your value is the value of your value to the reader. By the way, if you're Brand new to writing online and want a really easy place to start, I recommend reading the Art and Business of Online Writing. I wrote this book after I'd been writing online for over a decade and accumulated over a billion views on my work, monetizing my writing in all sorts of unconventional, conventional ways. And I wrote this book to give other writers like you a way to skip all the lessons that I had to learn the hard way and start seeing success from your writing a whole lot faster than I did. So if writing online is something you're thinking about or something you're actively practicing, I recommend picking up a copy of the Art and Business of Online Writing. All right, rule number 21. If you want to learn what sells, then you should sell something. I think so many writers sit there and ask themselves, you know, well, how. How am I supposed to build this thing? Or, how am I supposed to learn how to do xyz? The way that you learn is by trying to do it yourself. If you want to get good at copywriting, well, try and sell a product that you created on your own. Nothing's going to teach you more about copywriting and how to write things that sell than you trying to sell something to other people. You know, you could read every copywriting book you want on the planet. You might understand it in theory, but you're still not going to get how to actually put all of these different mechanisms into practice. So if you want to learn how to write what sells, then go and try and sell something on your own. And it doesn't. It's not a marriage decision. You know, it's not like, oh, this one product is going to represent you for the rest of your life. Just try it, and then you will learn very quickly. Oh, that didn't work. All right, let me try something new. Let me try something new. And lastly, very last rule. The business model is the goal. So this is something that took me a really long time to understand. It is a fallacy to think I really want to do this thing over here, this type of writing, but I'm going to make my money in a different business model. And then when I make my money over here, then I'll be able to do this other thing. And that's not what happens. Whatever the business model is ends up becoming the goal, because the business model is what's paying you. So your goal has to be tied to the business model. Right? I can't say, oh, I want to win the Pulitzer Prize, and I'm going to get there by building digital education programs. No, those are two completely different things. And if I want to go work on winning the Pulitzer Prize, right. I'm going to have to give up a lot of other things in order to achieve that, because I have to make that business model the goal. What I can't do is pick a different business model and try and make money over here and think that that path is gonna get me to this completely different goal. And I think this is something that. It takes you a long time to internalize this. It took me a decade of trying different things and thinking, oh, I'll make my money over here, but that'll allow me to do this thing. And it never works out that way. So I've really reframed this to myself to just remember, whatever business model you pick ends up defining all of the actions that you take. Cause that's the thing that's paying you. So be sure to pick the business model with a lot of clarity and be conscious of the decision that you're making, because the business model will end up dictating the goal.