Nicolas Cole On Writing with AI & Limiting Beliefs Of Writers (Future of Learning & Work Podcast)

I was a pro World of Warcraft player as a teenager. I wrote a book about it called Confessions of a Teenage Gamer. It was about me being one of the highest ranked World of Warcraft players in North America and also spending the first 18 years of my life being undiagnosed with celiac disease. I was really sick growing up, so that was kind of a weird coming of age experience, was being really competitive on the Internet and then going to school and being very introverted and shy and sick and all these things. I studied fiction writing in college, Columbia College, Chicago. That was really interesting. People always ask me if that's where I learned to write. I say, no, that is where I learned to read my work out loud. And that has been a really helpful skill for me. I think reading your work out loud teaches you a lot about your voice, about phrasing and rhythm and cadence, and all of these important aspects of the craft of writing. After college, I got a job as an entry level copywriter at an ad agency. I was really into bodybuilding at the time. I still have the email where they said, you have the job. And I said, great. Is it okay if I bring four meals with me to work every day so that I could get my meals in and keep bodybuilding? And they were like, ah, that's a very weird email. But sure, I guess so. My early 20s was working at this ad agency in Chicago. I. I would write, copy and proofread proposals and do all sorts of stuff by day, and then I'd bodybuild at night. That's also where I got my start writing on a site called Quora. For those who don't know, Quora is a really big, basically like a social Q and A platform. And the unlock for me there was. I realized that all the most viral Quora answers were stories. They weren't answers. So someone would ask the question, what it's like, what's it like to be an entrepreneur? And the answer wouldn't be a literal definition of entrepreneurship. It would start with, you know. The first sentence is like, you know, when I was 18 years old, I sold my first company for $3 million. And three years later I was sleeping on my friend's couch, broke and homeless. And you're like, well, now I have to read, I have to read the story. And so Quora became a real jumping off point for me in terms of writing on the Internet. That's where I found some signal and ended up launching my first digital product, which was a bodybuilding ebook. That's how I Made my first couple thousand dollars on the Internet. A few years later that led to me falling into the world of ghostwriting. When I was 26, quit my job at an ad agency, started ghostwriting, ended up building a ghostwriting agency to a couple million in revenue. Full time staff of editors and writers and like 100 clients at a time and all sorts of stuff. And then in 2020, very coincidentally, right before the pandemic, I was feeling very, very burned out. We had scaled really quickly. Ghostwriting was an extremely subjective service. You're not selling plastic widgets, you know, that's a really hard thing to scale. And my co founder and I made the decision to scale it back. We let everyone go. We fired 95% of all our clients. We reverted back to a two man shop, took a year off, wrote a book called the Art and Business of Online Writing. That led to me meeting my current co founder, Dickie Bush. We run a cohort based writing course called Ship 30 for 30. And yeah, I think that takes us to today. It's been a long and winding road, but that is the nutshell of all the different some writing and non writing related, meaningful milestones.

And we're going to dig into all of that and the future that you haven't covered yet. I do want to go back to the very beginning though. Gaming is how you got your start in writing indirectly. You were a writer on a blog called Game Riot. I'm curious if you go back to that point in time, what it was about writing that resonated with you as opposed to any other means of expression.

Well, it certainly wasn't the only one. I grew up in a very musical household. I played classical piano for 20 years. There was a point where I thought I really wanted to be a musician and a rapper and a hip hop producer. And there's all like I had all sorts of music ambitions and I, I've always just loved writing. I've been an avid journaler since I was a kid. I don't really know why, it just made sense to me and. But the thing about gaming, like the real unlock for me there was this blog. It was very ahead of its time. It was 2007 and this blog was a gaming specific blog, but it was like a social blog. And so every person who created a profile there could rack up points and there was a leaderboard on the front page. True to gamerform, you know, there was a leaderboard on the front page and whoever had the most read pieces of that day made the leaderboard. And so my Introduction to writing and writing on the Internet was literally a writing video game. And that, you know, being a gamer was extremely compelling to me. It was. I was not the kid reading novels and hoping to be Hemingway Hemingway one day. Like, my introduction to writing was, oh, if I write something that gets more attention, I'm going to make the leaderboard on the front page of this gaming website. And so I feel like that really shaped how I have thought about writing. And I continue to think about writing. I continue to think about it on the Internet as a video game. There's rules to the game. You have to like any game. You learn the rules, you learn how to bend them. You know, you learn how to do things that other players don't know how to do. And so, yeah, gaming really shaped my whole perspective and point of view on now. Everything that I do is basically built on that point of view. It's all based on it being a game. You're. You're using these platforms to gather data. Every person on the Internet is creating a character for themselves, whether they realize it or not. You know, so very gaming focused, for sure.

It comes out in your book. Very, very apparently as well. If we Fast forward to 2014, 2015, 20. You had mentioned that you were a writer on Quora, but what you, I don't believe you mentioned is that you were the top writer on Quora for two or three years running, and you did that by posting consistently every single day for years. Can you talk about your journey on Quora, in particular, the moment where you felt like you got your break and kind of what it took to get there?

Yeah, Quora was. Someone asked me this question recently, which was like, in hindsight, did I know what I was doing? You know, like, did I have a plan with all this? And the truth is that I really didn't. When I first discovered Quora, the question I was, I was asking another gaming friend of mine, he was a really big YouTuber at the time, and the question that I asked him was, okay, if gamers and video makers and vloggers have YouTube and models and photographers and foodies have Instagram, like, where do writers write? You know, it was 2013 and there was really no, like, good social writing platform. Like, Twitter wasn't really that, and LinkedIn wasn't that @ all yet, and Facebook wasn't that. Like, it just. There was a hole there. And he was one who pointed me in the direction of Quora. And so my challenge to myself was, I'm going to write an answer every day on Quora, I'm going to use it as a creative writing exercise. Best case scenario, something happens. I didn't even know what that something was going to be. I just kind of figured if I write actively on this social platform, people are going to read it and something's going to happen. Worst case scenario, I spend a year practicing my craft. Like, that's not that big of a downside. You know, I wanted to get better at writing anyway. And so the truth is, I didn't really know what I wanted out of it. I just kind of started, and slowly but surely I learned which questions, AKA which topics I was best equipped to talk about, and also which ones were most interesting to readers. Like, at the time, I thought because I was very into bodybuilding, one of the first kind of buckets that I tackled was I would answer all these questions like, what do you eat as a bodybuilder? Or if you're trying to get bigger arms, what arm exercises do you do? And it didn't take me very long to realize that my answer to those questions wasn't special. Like, a lot of people could answer that question. And in many ways, I was not the most qualified person to answer that. I might have an answer, but I certainly wasn't the answer. But meanwhile, other questions that were more around habit or mindset and people asking, like, how do you develop confidence? Or, how do you overcome insecurity? Or, how do you stay focused on your goals? And. And I would answer these questions with personal stories of, you know, I struggled with depression as a kid, or I struggled with a lot of insecurities as a kid, and this is what worked for me. Those started going viral. And so all of a sudden, I started kind of to develop this framework for myself of, oh, let me try and write about lots of different types of things, and then let me see which ones are grabbing and what people are interested in. And just by following the data, I kind of got a sense of what people were interested in hearing about specifically from me. And even. Even though a lot of those topics I don't even write about anymore, it was the starting point. It was at least somewhere for me to grab. It was like a foothold, you know, simultaneously.

On Quora, you found that stories are a great vehicle for delivering a message, but then also, as you just communicated, you found that there's a more scientific approach to writing that allows you to kind of hone your skill set, build an audience faster. How do you balance the art and the science of writing?

You know, any of the, like, the The Leonardo da Vinci's, I think, would say, this is. The more that I. The more I write and the more time goes on, I actually see them as the same thing. I see them as inextricably linked. Because if you're writing, if you just ask yourself what's happening in your brain, you know, when you go to write a headline, when you go to write a first sentence or a first paragraph, what's literally happening in your brain is you're just cycling through pattern recognition. You're just saying, well, I've tried writing a first sentence like this in the past and I didn't like it very much, or people didn't like it very much. But when I wrote it this different way, I liked how that sounded more. I'm going to do that again. Right? That's literally what's happening in the brain. And so when you become aware of the fact that art is really like under the hood, art is pattern recognition. And so when people say, how do you balance the science and the art of it? To me, they're actually the same thing. They're just talked about in different ways. And so it's so funny. I was driving home from the gym yesterday and I saw this guy sitting next to, like, on my way home, I passed this railroad and I saw this guy sitting on the railroad with his car in park and his feet kicked up and he was just kind of staring at the clouds. And I had this moment where I like romanticized that because I'm really busy and I work a lot and I'm like, wow, how nice. Could have been so great to just drive next to this railroad, kick your feet up and stare at the clouds. What a beautiful day. And what I literally said to myself is, I bet I would come up with so many great ideas doing that. But then I started to challenge that thought and I was like, but I'm also overwhelmed by ideas right now because I have so much data now, all of these social platforms telling me what's working and what's not. And I think there's a room. People like to romanticize this idea of sitting in a field or sitting next to the train tracks and kicking your feet up and staring out into the distance and going, that's how I come up with my best ideas. But the reality is, whether you're staring at the clouds or you're staring at a computer screen, you're still just doing pattern recognition. You're just asking yourself what's working and what's not. And so, yeah, I don't know the more time goes on, the more I start to think that art and science are the same.

They're interwoven to some degree. On the note of pattern recognition, you described kind of how artificial intelligence works under the hood. In recent months, there's been kind of a massive amount of news and conversation around the impact of generative AI on writing and other creative endeavors. What's your take on how AI is going to impact writing? And is it for the better or for the worse?

You know, I think the for better or for worse becomes a highly subjective, moral conversation, but I tend to be more of a realist with those types of things, which is, I guess we can debate for better or for worse, but either way, it's happening, you know, so. So either you can yell at it or you can embrace it. Either way, it's happening, you know, is point A. Point B is, especially as someone who grew up on the Internet, I've never been intimidated by technology. I always just see it as an addition. And, you know, the same thing happens if you. If you go back in history, right? The same thing happened when you have hunter gatherers and someone comes along and goes, we should start farming, and everyone starts losing their minds and goes, you want machines to do the work for us, Right? It's the same thing. And even more recently, Instagram or Photoshop, right? Like, does the average photographer use black and white film anymore? No, of course not. Does that. Did Instagram mean that all of a sudden photographers went extinct? No, it created more photographers, right? Or Photoshop. It's like, are we still drawing cartoon characters by hand? Sometimes, but most of the time, no. Does that mean that designers are all out of a job? No, Photoshop created more designers. So I see AI, especially in the world of writing. I've been watching Twitter and everyone thinking like, this is the end of the world. And as a writer, you know, you're just done for. The reality is AI is going to replace the bottom 10% of jobs that were already commodities. And so you didn't have any leverage or power in that position anyway. So, fine, it automates away the bottom 10%, but it's just a tool. And what it's going to do is it's going to force writers and a lot of other people. You see it happening with engineers too. All of a sudden, coders are going to become commodities as well. It's going to force a career decision of, do you want to try and compete against technology for the doing? Because the technology is going to write better code than you. The technology is going to be able to write research in text form better than you. So do you want to compete on the doing or do you want to ascend and focus more on the thinking and the frameworks and the direction and the strategy? And you are the one training the AI. You view AI as your own personal employee or intern or assistant. And you're in the thinking business. You're not in the doing business. And all of the highest paid people, all of the people at the top of their craft or their industry are all in the thinking business. You know, this, this dynamic already exists. All it's going to do is just accelerate it and make people choose which. Which side of the spectrum are you on? So the, the. I guess my long winded answer is no, I'm not intimidated by it. I'm very excited by it. And I'm very excited at all of the boring parts of my craft that I spend hundreds or thousands of hours doing over and over and over again. Now I can just train AI to go do it so I can spend more time doing the highest leverage, most creative part of my craft, which is the thinking and the idea and the direction.

As a sidebar, you and Dickie did a mini course or guide on how to best leverage AI technology in your writing. We'll drop that in the show notes. I want to dig into ship 30 for a little bit and I want to start with how you and Dickie met and the origin story of ship 30.

Very cool origin story, actually. So I had a amazing mentor in la. He's a renowned copywriter. His name's Craig Clemons. And I remember I was feeling, this was after my ghostwriting agency and I was feeling a little burned out and kind of unsure about what I wanted to do next. And we went on this hike together and I was venting to him, just being like, I don't really know what I want to do. I have all these skills, I don't know what to do with them. And he had built multiple companies earlier in his career that were education, info, product companies. And he was like, cole, you're crazy if you don't do some sort of writing course. Like, nobody knows as much about writing on the Internet as you do. You have all this knowledge. You need to just go build a course. Like, there's no reason why that won't be successful. And he had done it multiple times. So this wasn't a, like, it might be. It was like, you have everything, you just need to go do it. And that was a very zero to one conversation for me. But of course, like most people, I sort of didn't know what to do with it. And so I started just experimenting with, okay, if I was to put together a curriculum, what would that look like? What are all the things that I could pass along to other writers? And then a few weeks later, very randomly unprompted, Craig, who had also recently connected with Dickie via Twitter and kind of their own relationship, sent both of us a cold email going, and all the email says, I still have it. I'm gonna put it somewhere at some point. All the email said was, I don't know why. I just feel like you two need to know each other. And it was a very like, when the universe speaks, you listen, you know, And. And Dickie and I, I think, had two conversations. He had just started chip 30 for 30. It was basically just an accountability group. It was, we all want to write. We just are here to hold each other accountable. And I was telling him I was thinking of putting together this whole curriculum and all these things I wanted to teach writers. And we just kind of looked at each other like, well, this would make sense if we teamed up. You bring the education. I'm creating the infrastructure for accountability. I think this could really be something. And almost like unprompted, like, had two conversations and we just went all in and decided to give it a go together. And now, two years later, ship 30 is, you know, the biggest and fastest growing cohort based writing course on the Internet. It was super random. Like, I don't even know what to make of it. It's just one of those right place, right time, right person, right opportunity.

Serendipitous, but also a result of compounding efforts in both of your lives, I imagine, that just kind of culminated in that serendipity. The program costs $1,000. It's 30 days. I think you get 10 live sessions. There's a lot going on behind the scenes with community and such on the surface. And I'm sure you've heard this before from people. People might scoff at it and say, oh, what am I really paying for? Couldn't I just do this on my own? Couldn't I just write 30 pieces of content this month by myself? What is the program really selling? And more importantly, delivering on that these folks are missing.

It's a great question. I mean, the brutally honest response is, whenever someone says, what am I really buying? Couldn't I just do this on my own? What I literally say is, if you could do it on your own, you would have Already, right? I mean, if you think you can do it on your own, don't buy it. You should go do it on your own. Like, in no way are we trying to twist anyone's arm. It's just if you thought you could do it by yourself, you would have already. Point A and point B is, you know, we attract lots of different types of writers. Everyone from, I've never written anything on the Internet before, ever. Blank Twitter account, never made a social profile, ever. All the way to people who are like, I've written multiple books. I. I've been writing for 30 years. I have all these accolades and credentials, but I want to uplevel my skill. Like, there's things about writing on the Internet that I'm not too sure of. Every single time, whenever someone walks in, maybe they purchase and then they send me a message or something and they go, I'm skeptical. I don't know if this is going to teach me anything. Every single time afterwards, I get another message from them going, I had no idea. All the things I didn't know, like, thank you for pointing all of this out. And I would say the two primary benefits are, one, it's the. If you could do it on your own, you would already. It is that accountability that is very transformational for people. There's a reason why when people finish ship 30, they literally say this was life changing. Because the hardest thing for everyone is we all know what to do. The problem isn't knowing what to do, it's actually doing it. So when you're able to be part of something that forces, that holds you accountable, you're almost not like, pressured in the bad way, but you're surrounded by this group of people where, when everyone's moving in one direction, you feel so compelled to move in that direction as well. So it's the accountability part. And then it's also on the curriculum side. Like, I'm not exaggerating. I don't think there's very many people on planet Earth that have written as much on the Internet as I have. I've developed a lot of frameworks and a lot of ways of thinking about this game over the past 15 years. And so I just know when someone says, well, I don't think I'm going to learn anything new, it's like, yeah, you are. Because I could go look at your profile and see seven things that you could immediately improve on once I point them out to you. And so it is a cool blend of, yes, you're learning, but it's very, very Oriented around putting it into action.

You've seen thousands of wannabe writers, many of which who, after they came through the program, are now writers come through the program. What are the top one to three self limiting beliefs? You see time and time again with these writers?

Number one for sure is this idea that you're not a writer until you accomplish X. Most, most people don't even know what X is. When you ask them, okay, what's the accomplishment? They can't name it. They just think, I need to get somewhere in order to be a writer. I fundamentally believe that that is false. My belief is the moment that you hit publish, you are a writer. Doesn't matter if you hit publish on a tweet or a book, the moment you hit publish, you are a writer. And I think explaining that to people is very liberating because it removes this pressure of I need to suck and I need to be an imposter and I need to be a nobody for eight years. And then I finally produce a magnum opus and everyone celebrates me and one day I wake up and I'm finally a writer. You know, I just, I don't think that that's real. So that's number one. Number two is people thinking I don't have anything to write about. Every single person. Okay, I'll say it differently. If you really don't think you have anything to write about, then you should never have any conversation with anyone for the rest of your life because you have nothing to share, right? And once you point that out, the person's like, oh, well, that sounds ridiculous. You're like, yeah, every single person has something to share. And the framework that we give in ship 30 is called the two year test. Meaning you're right. The easiest place to start is to write for the version of yourself two years ago. What are all the things that you know now that you didn't know two years ago? Because though you two years ago looks at you today like an expert. So don't over complicate it. Like, did you move in the past two years? Great, explain how to move across the country. You know, did you acquire a new skill? Great, explain how you acquired that new skill. It's like the fifth grader explaining to the fourth grader what fifth grade's like. You know, and the fourth grader is like, tell me all about fifth grade. You know, you take that information for granted. And then I think the third is this idea where people think, I've written about something once, I can't write about it ever again. And another Giant missed opportunity. The Internet. And digital writing actually thrives on the opposite. When you find something that resonates, you should write about that thing a thousand different ways. I found writing on Quora that there was a phrase, there was a sentence that every time I wrote this, inherently the piece got more viewership and it was a data point for me. And every time I would start a piece with, when I was 17 years old, I was one of the highest ranked World of Warcraft players in North America. Every time that hooked people because it was such a random, weird, like, why are you telling me about your achievement in an mmorpg? And I used that one sentence hundreds of times. And I'd be like, when I was 17 years old, blah, blah. Here's what that taught me about work ethic, here's what that taught me about friendships, here's what that taught me about competitive gaming, here's what that taught me about habit building. Here's what that taught me about. And I just recycled that over and over and over again. And so often new writers go, well, I wrote one thread about this topic. I guess I'm done. It's like, no, you're not. That's the tip of the iceberg. You should go rewrite that a hundred more times. Because people need more examples, they need more steps, they need more reasons, they need more benefits, they need, like, we never stop learning about whatever we're interested in, period. If you're interested in something, you want more of it. So you're not done. You just started.

Those are great, useful, straightforward, in some cases, kind of contrarian. On the third bullet point, I would say that on the point of data driven, kind of templated approach to writing, that's done largely for the purpose of engagement. I think there's a lot of pushback on that style of writing, especially on Twitter and LinkedIn where you and I hang out, where you have, for example, these threads with very perceptible hooks, like, you see what people are doing, it's transparent. I did it, admittedly a couple years ago, have steered clear of it more recently. What do you say to people who think that that style of tweeting or posting on LinkedIn is inauthentic and a little gamey?

I'm going to take this in a different direction, which is. So, yes, digital writing is a game, and inherently there are rules to games. And you learn when I do this, I have a higher likelihood of quote, unquote winning than when I do this. So that's, that's a baseline. So, like Whether you agree with it or not, the data says certain types of hooks work better than others. So take that as a fact. It's not an opinion. But what I will say is my mentality on this, I take a much longer view. And most people, whenever they start doing anything, they immediately want to rush to the end. And so, classic example. Because I grew up playing music, right? Most kids that start playing piano or violin or guitar, the first thing they do is they're like, teach me how to play Freebird, right? They just. They want to skip to the end, like, teach me how to play the cool song that everybody knows, right? Well, my mom didn't do that. My mom's a musician. My mom's like, no, you are starting from the very beginning. You are going to learn your scales, right? So everyone else is like, I'm rushing to go play Freebird. And I'm like, all right, what's a C scale? What's a D scale? What's an E scale? What's an F scale, right? And when you start in that very beginning part, everyone's perception, of course, is like, oh, well, you're just playing a scale, and there's nothing impressive about that in the beginning. And then because you learned the fundamentals, three years later, you're playing Beethoven. I was playing Beethoven when I was nine. You know, I was playing Mozart when I was nine, you know, And I remember going to school talent shows and other kids playing, like, jazzy chopsticks and, like, cool songs, and I would just get up on the piano and rip. And people would be like, I don't understand. It's like, well, yeah, because I started with the fundamentals, and then you build on the fundamentals. And so when people look at these hooks or these beginners on Twitter, that's kind of like looking at someone in the very beginning of their journey and going, oh, that's cringe. It's like, well, yeah, everyone in their first year is in that phase, right? So don't discourage them, right? Help give them the fundamentals and help teach them. And that's why I see it. Every cohort we run with ship 30, day one, there's always someone who's like, give me the viral Twitter hook. I'm like, that's not going to help you learn your scales. I promise, 30 days from now, you're gonna be able to build really cool things on these fundamentals. And so, yeah, again, I take a much longer view where whenever people kind of get into the whole, like, this is cringe, that's cringe. It's like everyone's just learning. They're just on different points of the journey. And so if you're an educator or if you're someone who knows and you're trying to pass along your knowledge, your goal is to pull people faster. And the way that you pull people faster isn't actually teaching them to play freebird, it's teaching them the fundamentals and then they can build on those skills faster over time.

This long term thinking is seen time and time again in your writing. And your advice. Is your music education solely what you would attribute that to? Or do you think there's something more innate that you were born with? Because that's not a common trait.

Maybe, you know, maybe I'm the old soul and I've learned this in another lifetime. I don't know. But I think I just. What I really recognize, like, you know what's cool, we just saw LeBron pass Kareem for the most points scored in the NBA ever. And when I see things like that, the only thing I think about is that in order to achieve a goal like that, you need to be consistent over like a 20, 30 year period. And so my whole life, I've always been fascinated by success stories like that. And so a big part. It's funny, my dream as a kid was I wanted to play in the NHL. I really wanted to play. I grew up playing hockey, and I got really injured in high school. I fractured my spine twice. And you're not going to the NHL if you're dealing with a spine fracture in high school. And so at a. At a really young age, I almost like, gravitated to the idea of being a writer because it's one of the few crafts where I feel like you could literally do it until you die. You can't play sports until you die. You can't even be a CEO when you're like 85, right? But you can write pretty much right up to dementia, slash they put you in the grave. And the reason that has always been so cool to me is because I go, wow, how much more could I achieve? How much better at my craft could I be if I'm able to do it over 80 years? As opposed to an athlete who maybe could only do it over 30 years, you know, or an extreme athlete who sometimes you only have like eight years to do your craft. And so I don't know. I don't know if that's innate. I don't know if that's trained. I've just always been really, really fascinated by this idea of like, even today, for everything that I've done, I feel like a total beginner. And all I think about is just, I cannot wait to see what I'm producing. At 80 years old, I'm going to be an animal because I know I'm going to keep practicing for the next 40 years. That's what's so cool about it to me.

Choosing writing, in part because you could get an extra few decades out of it to hone your craft is a meta take on long term thinking.

Totally.

That's fascinating. Ship 30 doesn't just help writers, it uses writing also to help people clarify their thinking, find their voice, find their topic, and whatever they want to do. Specifically for people who want to reach other goals using writing like myself, I'm interested in podcasting. What advice would you give to those folks about how to approach their writing?

Yeah, I mean, the biggest unlock for me in the past few years has been that great writing is not really about great writing. The best writing is the clearest thinking because you could, you could have the most beautiful sentence in the world, but if you're just saying the same thing that everyone else has always said, that's not great writing. And I think what I. Not that I was taught this, but I think it's just kind of the, I don't know, the context that you grow up in as a writer. Everyone thinks that being a great writer is all about what adjectives you choose. Like, how beautiful of a sentence are you writing? And the reality is that all the writing that changes the world or all the writing that shapes people's thoughts, beliefs, opinions, it's writing that presents new and different thinking. Like, yeah, sure, the sent. We can debate whether the sentences are beautiful or not, but that's not what makes it good. That's not what makes it special. What makes it special is you're going, no one has ever said this to me before, or no one has ever said it to me in this way before. And so, yeah, we see podcasters, YouTubers, public speakers, managers, all sorts of different archetypes come through ship 30. And whether or not they are consistent with their writing or build a daily writing habit or really do anything publicly with their writing, like all of that would be great. But again, I'm a purist in this sense. The fundamental is build a writing habit for yourself. Use writing as a vehicle for yourself to clarify your own thinking. You can amplify that thinking through voice, and on podcasts, you can amplify it through text. And sharing your writing, you can do it through video and applying it to your YouTube channel, it really doesn't matter. But all of it comes back to clarity of thought, period.

Ship 30 is a, in my opinion, a masterclass in marketing, branding, community building. For those who aren't familiar, there's two. Two examples I'll give. One is everybody who's participating in the program or has in the past puts a little ship emoji in their name on Twitter. And then also everyone posts their atomic essays, which are screenshotted essays in their tweets and hashtag or mention ship 30 for 30. I think you guys might be the last people who are using hashtags consistently, but you're doing it effectively. How intentional have you been about marketing and branding and community building? And what advice would you have to people who are trying to do something similar, a similar program?

That's a great question. I'm going to say very intentionally and totally accidentally at the same time. I mean, I remember, I think the ship emoji idea came really early on. I just know that it was Dickie's idea. And the moment he said it, I was like, that's genius. And I'm pretty sure it just came from somebody in one of the early cohorts going, how can we tell who the other shippers are on Twitter? And we were like, that's a good question. How can you tell? Maybe we just tell everyone to put the ship in their bio, you know, And I feel like ship 30 in itself, it's very meta because the way that we've built ship 30 is doing all of the same things that we explain to other people how to do. Like, ship 30 is a case study in write, publish, see what resonates, double down, expand, use data. You know, how we've made all of our decisions have literally come from, is this what people need? Great, we'll solve that problem. Is this what someone's asking for? Great, we'll solve that problem. And I think I have a. My own. I mean, I'm certainly not a branding person or even a designer. I mean, I can't draw my way out of a paper bag. But the one thing, the one strong opinion that I have on design is that I think design in and of itself is totally subjective. What one person thinks is great, another person thinks is trash. Right? So debating, should this be this color or this color? Should this be gloss or not gloss or should this like. I think all of that is just one giant exercise in mental masturbation. Like, a lot of it is subjective and you don't get anywhere. The one thing that I do think is important to nail on a design or branding side is cohesion and cohesion, specifically around the category that you are trying to build and the problem that you're trying to solve. So what I mean by that is, you know, is ship 30s branding. Amazing. I don't know, like, one person would go, yes, it's the coolest thing ever. And another person goes, it's super amateur. And you guys look like a bunch of kids running around with ship emojis on Twitter. Right. Both of those opinions are probably correct, but they also don't matter either. Right. The only thing that matters is the category that we are interested in building is we want to help a million people start writing on the Internet. It's for beginners. Right. Well, what's an easy metaphor for understanding as a beginner, how to get started? Well, you can't steer a stationary ship. You can't sit on the harbor all day strategizing. You gotta just get your ship out into the water. Right. So the only thing that matters is, are you using branding to further reinforce the category that you're trying to build? We're trying to help beginners get started. Get on your ship, get started. Great. And then we can debate whether the colors are great or whether it looks good or not good. None of it matters. It's all subjective. And as long as all of the things that we're doing all are cohesive and reinforce that category that we're building, then mission accomplished.

Sure. You get this question a lot. And I imagine it's part of what has birthed the new course or program you're working on around ghost writing. What are some of the overlooked writing opportunities or niches that you see today? Whether it's within copywriting, ghostwriting, self publishing, newsletters.

So, first of all, I believe there has never been a better time in history to be a writer, period. I mean, every person's ability to write and distribute their writing, monetize their writing, and also get paid to write for other people. Today is literally the best day in history to do that. So baseline, and there's a gazillion opportunities that I think are out there for writers. But I will say my number one is as a service, helping curate and rewrite great content for other people. So what I mean is, if you have a YouTube channel, you are producing a ton of content, but only on the medium of video. You could easily just 2x everything by hiring a writer and having that writer extract content from your YouTube videos and turning it into tweets, LinkedIn posts, threads, Medium articles, whatever. The same thing with a podcast. You're creating all of this amazing content, you're interviewing all these amazing guests. You should easily turn all that into text based content, right? If someone has a book, the book shouldn't be the only time that you explain the content. You should hire a writer to extract all the main points, turn it into short form content, right? You do keynote speeches. Well, that shouldn't be the only time that you give that speech. You should turn it into text based content. So if I was, I mean, if I was an 18 year old today, there's a good chance I just wouldn't go to college. Because if I was an 18 year old and I understood that all I would do is, the first thing I would do is I would do it for free. I would prove that I could do it well. I would find someone who I wanted to learn from, someone whose content was really interesting to me. Someone so like kind of a mentor from afar. And I would hit them up and I would go, hey, you produce a lot of great YouTube videos, or you have an amazing podcaster. You've written seven great books just for free. I want to go through, I'm going to create six months worth of social text based content for you. Let me know what you think. And then after you make that person super happy, first of all, if you prove that you can essentially just rewrite and recurate all of their insights again, you can do that. Well, they're gonna throw money at you, period. They just will. Because finding a good writer to do that is right. Like everyone needs that right now. Second, then you go leverage that happy free client and you go pitch other people on that service. If all you did was that at 18 years old, you could easily make 10 or 20 grand a month doing this. And it's like screaming in everyone's faces as a golden opportunity. And that's just one of them. Like there's another dozen of opportunities for writers like that. And I think people really, really underestimate how valuable text based, high quality content is. And I don't, I. It's like the weirdest thing. People just look at it and then go, yeah, I guess people need that, but everyone provides that. And then they think that everyone provides it. And then meanwhile, there's way more demand than supply and there's all these opportunities out there. I don't know, I just, yeah, I'm like constantly overwhelmed with how many things I could do as a writer.

Yeah, it sounds like you have no shortage of ideas, prioritization is the problem. Or, and resources, I'm sure the bottleneck. On that note for ship 30 or whether outside of that in your own kind of personal ventures, what do the next year and decade look like? What are you focusing on? What do you want to build?

Yeah, so I've got my shiny object list in the background which I'm getting better and better at just putting things there and going, life is long. I'll get there eventually. We just actually closed enrollment on our first beta cohort for our ghostwriting intensive where we're gonna train writers on how to ghostwrite 5 day educational email courses for other people. The reason why I think this is such an interesting opportunity is because so many people with either companies or if you're a creator or anyone trying to build any sort of email list, what most people do is they just say subscribe to my newsletter. And as a result then the reader doesn't know why the reader doesn't, doesn't know what's in it for them and they get horrible opt in rates. And the easiest way to bridge people from your rented social audience over to your own email list is not to say subscribe to my newsletter. It's to give them something free and valuable and teach them and show them that you know what you're talking about. And a really great mechanism and vehicle for doing that is an educational email course. And so we're going to train ghostwriters on how to create those and sell those as packaged assets. And to be perfectly honest, building that out is probably going to dominate the next year. I'd like to build a lot of other assets around that. Like that's the primary product. I'd like to have a lower tier book on ghost writing just for people who are interested in it and new to it and want to learn more about it. And then we're probably going to also have some sort of backend community for that as well. Where as ghostwriters land more clients and become more successful, they're going to need support. They're going to want to know, well, how do I scale this into an agency? And as someone who very quickly grew ghostwriting agency and had hundreds of clients and hired all these people and like I, I learned all those lessons already, so I'm anticipating, basically I'm walking into this year going any other idea, just put it on the later list and commit this whole year to building that out and then wherever, and then we'll check in at the end of the year and we'll see where we're at.

I ask every guest the same final closing question, which is, what's one question you'd leave me and the listeners with whether to ruminate on or to act on?

So I'll give a quick, quick context. I am a big believer in inner work, personal development. I've been in weekly therapy for 14 years. I don't think you ever reach a point where you stop working on yourself. And I think that even though a lot of the hard skills and the education for any skill is important, ultimately the point of failure is usually yourself. It's whether or not you're taking action, whether or not you are able to confront the fears that are holding you back. You know, it's a barbell. It's like, yes, do you need to learn how to write headlines? Yes. And do you need to overcome the fact that deep down you're struggling with perfectionism and you're afraid to put anything out? Also yes. Right. And so I guess the question that I would ask is, why are you waiting? Whatever it is that you want to do, why are you waiting? And don't accept the first answer because the first answer is probably, well, I don't have time this week. Okay, ask again, why are you waiting? Second answer is probably, like, well, I've been trying to. I've just had a lot going on. Okay, ask again, why are you waiting? And after you get to the eighth or ninth time of asking the question, you'll realize that the real answer, why you're waiting to do anything usually comes down to you being. Getting in your own way because of some faulty belief. Right. I'm afraid that I'm going to put out the wrong thing. I'm afraid that people are going to judge me. I'm afraid that if I hit publish and I don't like it or someone disagrees with me, I'm stuck with that forever. And so much of ship 30, I feel like even though we do a lot of teaching on the hard skills side is really us nudging and encouraging people to get out of their own way and realize that all those beliefs are your own doing. They're all faulty. And all you need is encouragement. Like, I firmly believe any person at the beginning of any, Any path, any skill, any, anything you don't actually really need to know. Like, what's the tip to writing a viral headline? Or what's the how do I fast track? No, all you need is encouragement in yourself. That's the only thing that you need. The moment someone gave that to me is when I started becoming successful, I just needed someone to believe in me. That's literally it. And so yeah, I like that question a lot of why are you waiting and ask yourself it 10 times.

Nicholas, thank you so much for taking the time. This was a blast and looking forward to following along with ship 30.

This is awesome. You asked some really good questions, so thank you.