My Daily Routine from Broke to Millionaire Writer

Someone in our Premium Ghostwriting Academy asked me recently how my daily and weekly schedule has changed over the years. So what my schedule was like When I was 24 years old I was working a full time job and writing on the side versus when I was 26 I quit my job and I went all in on ghostwriting compared to when I was 27. I started scaling myself into a ghostwriting agency compared to when I was 28 and at that point I was managing 23 full time writers, editors, salespeople running a multi seven figure ghostwriting agency and then compared to when I started ship 30 with Dickey and then Typeshare and category pirates and now Premium Ghostwriting Academy and how today we manage a team of around 20 people that does around $7 million per year as a portfolio of our different writing related businesses. And so if I'm being totally honest, my routine has changed tremendously over the years. As I'll walk you through certain years had great rout routines and other years had horrible routines. And I'm going to end this video explaining some of the things that I've learned going through so many different seasons of life and business over the past 10 years. And real quick before we dive in, a meta concept I just want to share is the reason people obsess over routines so much is because fundamentally we all understand that we have the same number of hours in a day. You know, Jeff Bezos doesn't have more hours than you do. He just figured out how to get more out of his hours than you've figured out how to get out of your hours or I figured out how to get out of my hours. So we all fundamentally have the same resource. That is time is the core resource. Which means a lot of success comes down to your ability to do three different things. One is know the right things to work on. Another is making the time to work on them because you might know what they are, but you're just not making the time to do it. And then third is working on the right things in the right order. And this is something that took me a very long time to understand. A mentor of mine used to say all the time, if you give 10 entrepreneurs the same resources, they might all start in the same place, but they will end up in radically different places and unlock completely different outcomes from each other. Five will go bankrupt, two will build okay businesses, two will build really incredible businesses, and one will become a billionaire. But they all started in the same place and they were all given the same resources. But because each person chooses to work on different things, and more importantly, chooses to work on things in a different order. That is what allows them to unlock outsized returns. And so whenever you hear people talking about what is the perfect routine, first of all, there is no perfect routine. Second of all, the routine that works for one person might not work for someone else. And third of all, the goal is actually not really to build a routine. The goal is to figure out those three things. What is the right thing to work on right now? How do I make sure that I create the time to work on it? And then what is the next correct thing? Am I doing these things in the right order? And the order matters. It matters more than speed. It matters more than anything else. And so I'm going to walk you through these different routines and schedules that I had over the past decade so that you'll start to see how things changed depending on what I felt was necessary or the priority at that time. So let's go back to age 24. So this was 2014. My schedule at the time was extremely rigid. So what it looked like was wake up around 6:30 in the morning, shower, get ready as quickly as possible. I was really into meditation at the time. So I would always try and do at least a 10 minute meditation every morning. That was, it was very important to me in that life chapter and I was really interested in it. I wanted to be sitting down and eating breakfast by 7am usually something very simple like a bowl of oatmeal took me two minutes to make. You know, at the time I didn't have Internet in my apartment. And the original reason why I didn't have Internet was because after I paid my rent, after I bought groceries, and after I bought my monthly train pass so I could commute to and from work, I literally couldn't afford it. I did not have an extra $70 a month to pay for Internet. So during breakfast and every other time I was in my apartment, I would just read. I would just read or write. And over time I got so used to that. And I started to realize how much more productive I was by actually not owning Internet for that chapter of my life that I set a go to myself saying, I will not allow myself to get Internet until I publish my first book. And that's what I ended up doing. I didn't have Internet for four years and I ended up publishing my book four years later. And then I finally got Internet. So small little tidbit from that chapter. My goal was to be out the door by 7:20 in the morning. So I could catch the 7:30am train. I would commute an hour to work both ways. So I'd leave around 7:30 and I'd get. I was living up north in Chicago and I had to commute all the way down into the middle of the city and then into the West Loop. Usually took an hour. So I'd get there around 8:30, get to work around 8:30, spend the first 30 minutes, you know, making coffee, organizing my stuff for the day, getting ready for whatever meeting I had at 9am with the team, that sort of stuff. And then I would work from 9am till about 5:30 or 6pm and all day. I mean, I learned a lot in that job. I was working at an ad agency. It started to click for me. You know, I didn't enjoy it at first, but it started to click that I was getting paid to learn so many skills that I was ultimately going to need to know how to do. You know, I started out as a very entry level copywriter and I would proofread documents all day long and I hated it. It was so boring. But then I reframed it to myself and went, well, Cole, if you want to be a writer, you should probably get pretty good at editing and close reading. So treat this as practice. So that helped me, you know, have, have a more conscious relationship with my work. Then I started getting into social media. Content writing for clients. I hated it. I was doing content writing for like coconut water brands and random clients that I like, really was not interested in. But then I reminded myself, well, Cole, you want to make it as a writer and writers should probably know how to write on social platforms, right? So then I was like, okay, I might as well treat this like I'm acquiring a skill. I ended up playing just about every single role you could play at this small ad agency, talking to clients. I eventually did sales, client management, internal, like hiring, hiring documents. I ended up playing every single role. And every time in that moment I thought it was a waste of time and I was like, wow, spending all day, every day doing all this stuff that I'm really not interested in. I just want to write. And then I didn't realize that I was acquiring all the skills that I would later use to build all of the businesses that I've built since then. So I just. Little side note for you, whatever you're doing right now, you probably underestimate how many different skills you're acquiring and how you are getting paid to acquire those skills. Which again is why I'm such a big Proponent of ghost trading because ghost writing allows you to practice and allows you to get paid to learn all of these skills. So then I'd work until you know, 5:36pm Usually around 4 or 4:30, I would grab my second cup of coffee. That was actually my halfway point in my day, which you will see. So I'd recaffeinate around 4pm Usually around 4:30 or 5, I would pull up a quick Quora question. I didn't have Internet in my apartment, so I would sit at the office around 5pm I would find a Quora question that I wanted to answer and then I would write an answer to it. And that's how I started writing on the Internet. I mean started writing on the Internet after college. I mean I had been doing it since I was a teenager, but that was when I started to really take it seriously. I do that real quick. Then I try and catch the 5.30pm train, sometimes 6pm, another hour. So I wouldn't get home till like 7. While I was commuting the hour in the morning and the hour in the late afternoon, this is when I would read. And at 24 years old, 25 years old, this is when I started to read the most that I've ever read in my life because I had two hours a day where I was just sitting on a train. And so I just devoured books and I studied fiction in college and this was really the first time that I started reading nonfiction. I read a lot of, of business books, self help books. Simon Sinek. Start with why. Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich, Dale Carnegie, how to Win Friends and Influence People. I just, I just went down the list and I was probably reading a book a week and so it was commuting time, you know, but I, I made it productive and so I, I did a tremendous amount of reading in those years. Then I'd, you know, get home around 7pm, I'd eat a quick snack, I'd head to the gym. I was really into bodybuilding at this point. I was very into bodybuilding in college. I was like a year out of college at this point, just starting to get into the real world and I still wanted to keep that habit. I was also in great shape and really healthy. And you know, it was important to me that I at least go to the gym for an hour, hour and a half a day. So I'd eat something real quick, go to the gym, be home and eating dinner by like 8:30. And then my goal every night was to be sitting down at my desk either eating dinner or having just finished dinner by 9pm and, and then from 9pm till about 11pm, sometimes midnight, if I was really flowing, sometimes only 10 o'. Clock. You know, I'd only get an hour in if I was just exhausted from the day. But those last two or three hours of the day were the only hours that I really had fully to myself. Aside from going to the gym and just keeping my body working, those, those were my only productive hours for anything that I wanted to work on. And I was living up north in Chicago. I was living in a very rundown apartment. I didn't have air conditioning, I didn't have really any furniture. I had a bed and a desk. And that was literally it. And very quickly after graduating and entering the real world, I started to realize that if I didn't reinvest that little bit of time into myself, my life was just going to be waking up, getting on a train for an hour, working all day, getting back on a train, coming home, having dinner, watching TV or YouTube, going to sleep and doing it all over again. And that was just not enough for me. And I felt really stuck in this position where I wanted to make more money, but I really didn't want to make more money doing something that I, that I didn't love. I was so determined to figure out how to build a life around writing. And yes, there was writing involved in my work, but really it was, I was showing up to a job and I, you know, I would bounce around and I would sometimes use writing, but I was just at the whim of whatever the agency needed and it really wasn't the thing that was my true passion. So I had to figure out how to make my passion profitable. And that is a very hard thing. And the only conclusion that I could come to is I have the last two hours to myself and I can either squander those hours or I can reinvest them very deliberately. And so this was essentially my schedule from age 23, 24, right out of college, 25, 26. I basically lived this way the whole time. And my whole goal, every single day, it was like I would wake up and the whole day was just, I have to get through this, I have to get through this. I have to get through this all the way until 9pm and then I could sit down and go, now I can do my writing. And at the time, just to show you how little I knew at the time, my writing, aside from starting to write on Quora and sort of doing that, you know, 20, 30 minutes a day right after work. The writing I was focused on was writing my first memoir called Confessions of a Teenage Gamer. And I had no idea what it looked like to make money as a writer. All I knew, and all I thought was that if you wrote something really great, if you wrote a masterpiece, somehow the world would reward you. And so I spent those four years deprioritizing everything else so that I could write this memoir, which is.