The Death Of The Personal Brand (& The Future Of Creative Work)

Personal brands are no longer personal. What used to be a beacon of hope for those who wanted more out of life—the personal brand or becoming a creator—was that thing. As the creator economy started to emerge, more and more people wanted to become actual creators because they saw that it was a way to do what they wanted.

With the power of the internet, more people could do that. A personal brand or a creator was this thing that allowed you to go whatever path you wanted, embrace your curiosity, display your skill set, share your interests, and attract people like you who wanted to support your work. It was a way to take your current skill set, put it online, and remove all of the limitations that the traditional path and job market allowed for.

So, that’s what we’re here to talk about, because the personal brand and being a creator has strayed far from what its original path was. Now, when I was a teenager, I was deep into fitness, and I remember watching a few small creators online when YouTube was first gaining popularity. I would consider this the golden age of the creator economy—it was a peak in authenticity, where people were just picking up cameras to share their passions and teach what they had been learning.

People like Matt Ogus, Chris Lavado, and others in the fitness industry at the time come to mind when I think of this. The power behind this is that those individuals had such a strong influence and impact on the direction of my life. I was just this kid who came home from school and played video games all day, cooked frozen burritos at night, chugged five Dr Peppers, and then woke up early just so I could maintain my rank in Halo 3 so that my other friend didn’t pass me.

I was a kid with massive ambitions but didn’t have the knowledge or even the awareness of how to make those ambitions a reality. I just knew that I wanted something more, but the only thing I knew at the time was that I wanted to become an anesthesiologist because it paid a lot, right? I was just told my entire life, “You need to go to college; you need to go to college,” and so that was what was on my mind.

That framed my perception, and every piece of information that I soaked in—everything at school and everything I did—was directed toward going to college and becoming an anesthesiologist. My search history for like a week was just looking at different universities, checking out their majors, and then searching for the top-paying degrees that I could potentially go into because I didn’t want to spend eight to twelve years becoming an anesthesiologist. So, I can’t thank those creators enough for changing the direction of my life, and I hope that I can be that person for a lot of people.

I would say that’s one of my driving forces behind actually creating these videos. With this video, I’ve kind of re-sparked my desire to at least help create what you would call a second Renaissance of these creators. Not that I want to be the guiding light for them; I just want to be a role model and share my passions and the things that I’m learning throughout life.

Hopefully, that changes the direction of some of your lives. So, my lesson for you if you want to join me on this path is to create the content you want to see in the world and build the product you want to see in the world. All of the other skills come secondary.

All the marketing, the sales, the writing—those things come under that vision; they help actualize it, but they are not the driving force. Because the thing is, people are starving for this—they’re starving for depth on the internet. They think it’s just filled with toxicity and memes and all of these things that don’t matter, but they can’t pull themselves away from it.

Social media has drastically changed my life and how much I’ve been able to learn and do, because it’s just a library of value and information, allowing you to learn and do almost anything that you want. So, that’s what we’re going to learn in this video: it’s not how to become a personal brand, but how to stand out with unique ideas and create your life’s work. Because today, we have influencers, creators, and personal brands.

These are concepts that have begun to carry a negative connotation with them in the eyes of the public. There isn’t really a difference between them; they’re just people that post content online, and they’re all relatively similar. But when you hear the word influencer, personal brand, or creator, a part of you kind of dies.

So, if we want to avoid these things, first we need to understand them. We need to create these concepts so that we can move in a different direction, or at least use them as some kind of frame to shape our decision-making. The first one: influencers.

The defining characteristic of an influencer, from what I’ve observed, is that they don’t sell a product of inherent value. They garner attention with looks and gimmicks to pitch often destructive products to the underdeveloped masses. They don’t educate, entertain, or inspire toward solving a real problem in people’s lives.

No, we don’t need more Lunchables or Mreast bars that are just contributing to making the population obese and sick. We’re at this critical turning point in history where attention spans are decreasing, processed food is just handed out like candy, and the role models who have the most attention are not attempting to. .

. To do anything about it now, I'm not saying that they should. I'm not one to tell them what to do; I'm one to say that if we want to change it, we also have to garner attention, and we have to become the people that try to lead in a positive direction by doing something purposeful and fulfilling.

Now, with all of this, don't get me wrong here: you know that I don't think selling a product is bad; it's the only way out of selling a product for someone else (a. k. a.

working a job), and of course, jobs aren't bad either; they're just stepping stones. The point is that work is a necessary part of life, and money is a tool that has allowed us to transcend our survival. But the thing is, at least try to have a shred of positive impact.

Now, let's talk about creators. I personally love creators, and I would consider myself a creator at times, but most people are content creators; they're not reality creators. Most people have a myopic view of the word "creator"; they don't see it as the literal word "creator" that holds so much depth and meaning.

They see it as, "Oh, I need to post content today, or else I'm not going to get engagement, and then I'm not going to make sales," and they're stuck in survival mode. They start out with good intentions, but then they quickly become slaves to content templates, and they can't have a single critical thought or original idea that allows them to stand out. They don't have ideas worth copying; they're the ones that do the copying.

They see social media and the algorithm as some formulaic thing that you need to study, dissect, and understand. And while that's true to an extent, you're missing the depth behind it. You're missing that all of that is shaped by human nature, and by diving a bit deeper, not only can you understand it more and get better results, but you also open up this world of depth that allows you to find meaning in what most people see as superficial.

And that's true for many areas of life. The other things that they do are just comment under large accounts—not because they like the ideas of the large accounts, but because they want to get the people that are following the large accounts to follow them. Now, of course, again, these things aren't bad; I'm just saying for almost everything we're talking about, we're missing the other half of the perspective.

We're missing the meaningful part of the perspective here. The same thing goes for engagement groups. Engagement groups have become like the weird child of the creator economy that people just think are bad things to do.

But then when you actually zoom out and think about it, when you were in school, you worked with your friends on your homework; you strategized with each other to achieve a goal. When you're in business, you find business partners to work with; you reach out to your network, and you get advice when you don't have it. You help each other grow your own businesses or projects, and that's what a "quote-unquote" engagement group is.

It's like going into a Call of Duty lobby, arguing against another tribe, and helping your team do better and communicating with each other. It doesn't have to be this shallow engagement group type thing. It has to be—and this is a requirement for your success, not only online but in any area of your life—to make friends that you work with to grow whatever it is that you're doing.

The lone wolf mentality doesn't work in a social setting. What sucks about this, to an extent, is that I'm partially to blame for contributing to this because I teach social media; I teach writing, and I teach how to capture attention. But I do feel like I'm rather explicit and nuanced with how to go about these things and bring this meaningful perspective to them.

So my challenge for you is not to write these things off, but to try to find the depth behind not only my teachings but other people's teachings—especially on short-form social media. Now that Twitter and Instagram and Reels and TikToks are taking off, you have to understand that just by time and character limitation constraints, it’s going to be shallow. If you are going on top-of-funnel social media, you have to be able to think with depth—not them.

And as we'll talk about in another video—and kind of in this video—long form is how you actually stand out. Long form is how you actually make a change. Long form is how you stop relying on social media algorithms for the security of your future, and you start owning your audience in something like an email list.

But we'll talk about all of those things later. Now, let’s touch on the last one: personal brands. There are influencers, creators, and personal brands.

Personal brands seem to be an archetype that is simply obsessed with making money and don't care about anything other than that. They become glorified search engines by choosing and sticking to a niche, and their followers churn. They don't actually grow an audience because they're so focused on the high-performing topics or just the same topics over and over again that funnel people to their email list or their product or their funnel.

And whatever they say online doesn't matter as long as that funnel is growing and as long as they’re making money. It's just constant. They're just like this vessel, this empty vessel for people to run through and get put into a product, and there's no depth behind it.

So, before we move on, of course, this isn't necessarily. . .

Bad, but the question to ask yourself is: Are you helping people do something that actually matters? Because in order to do that, you can't stagnate; you must personally continuously improve and evolve. Because if you understand entropy, you understand that by stagnating, or doing nothing, or staying the same, you aren't doing any of those things—you are declining into chaos, you are unraveling, and that thing isn't going to last very long.

You're going to be a flash in the pan, just like most people are building right now. But again, there’s nothing wrong with that. Temple Run and Flappy Bird were great games on your phone; it's good, quick pump-and-dump cash.

But is that really what you're here for? So let's talk about the opposite. Let's talk about the vision.

Where do we want to take this whole creator thing? What do we want to be? What is the path to doing what you want and having a fulfilling line of work?

Don't be a YouTube creator, don't be a personal brand, don't be an influencer. Be you, but in a place where your work can be discovered, followed, and supported right now and for the foreseeable future. That's on the internet.

The internet is a tool; social media is a tool; software is a tool. If you think these things are toxic and negative, that's a direct reflection of yourself. Algorithms show you more of what you pay attention to.

Social media, for the right people, is the singular thing that will change their life. If you believe it's toxic, you close yourself off to that reality, and you can't help but wonder why your life is so toxic. So in a nutshell, where we want to go with this is the ultimate goal of getting paid to be yourself.

These new forms of technology—everything coming up: AI, social media in general, the internet in general—are tools to help showcase your work, your art, and your experience so that others can benefit from it. As an example, Jordan Peterson isn't a content creator; he isn't an influencer; he isn't a personal brand. That's not his title, that's not his role, that's not his identity.

He goes on tours, he writes books, he leverages social media as a base. He uses all of the tools at his disposal to further his life's work. He isn't worried about the latest content idea or trend, because his mind outperforms any of those.

The quality of his ideas and his critical thought is what sets him apart. And this is regardless of your opinion on Peterson's highs and lows over the years—this is just true. You didn't start on this path to become a quote-unquote personal brand on the internet.

You started because you wanted freedom, autonomy, meaningful income, and the ability to write, speak, and create about the interests that spark a fire in your soul. I'm not proposing that you quit because social media has become what it has; that only means it's easier than ever to stand out, even if you feel like you're late. I'm proposing that you aim higher because I personally don't see social media as this shallow place with online business models galore and cheap advice.

I see it as a new way of life. As I've illustrated many times before in previous videos, you're already online most of the day; you're already here. Why not just change your perspective of it and change what you're doing so that it actually benefits you?

The problem is that you don't know what value you provide, how to stand out and how to shift focus with the time you're already spending on the internet to make your creative work a success. You have knowledge and skill that other people can benefit from. That's not a false statement; you do.

You could help another person right now. That's all you need. Now, by the way, in terms of creating your life's work or doing all of this stuff, or seeing the creator economy in a different light, or building a one-person business, I would check out my course, Digital Economics; the link is in the description for that.

The question now is: How do you pursue your life's work on the internet? So if you understand the levels of purpose that we talked about in the last video, "The Brutal Truth About Money," you understand that your life's work, at some point in the job-to-career-to-calling evolution, will require you to start a business. Now, if thinking of a business or a one-person business as independent work helps you swallow that pill, then please do that.

When I mention things like the internet and business and these things that may cause you to close your mind off, because you haven't been exposed to the information that shows you what those things are, that's when you should think about it more critically and try to see the depth behind those things. Is the internet just this shallow thing that you open on your phone and get distracted in all day? No.

The first thing you need to create your life's work is a positive aim for your life. Because here's the thing: You don't need to know what your life's work is right now, and realistically, your life's work isn't something you maintain 100% clarity on. At times it's crystal clear, but this is often hopeful delusion, which isn't bad, but necessary for intense bursts of progress.

At other times, you have no idea what you're doing, but you're still moving toward a positive aim. Your life's work is an ecstatic sentence that you can articulate to others as something impossible. Your life's work is in the unknown, and by nature of the unknown, it's unknown.

If it were known, you fell off your path to find security in someone else's. You create your life's work through experimentation and evolution. Your brand content and products won't stay the same; they will change as you discover new goals for yourself.

But you won't discover those goals unless you start and pursue your current ones. So, if you aren't sure how to orient yourself in a positive direction, deeply understand what you don't want in life. An anti-vision that brings clarity to your vision: Is it a job you despise?

Then your aim is to create more enjoyable work and learn everything necessary to achieve that. Anything else is a distraction. Is it being overweight and unconfident?

Then your aim is the opposite of that. Get mad at yourself. Two quotes that explain this quite well are: "That which you don't hate, you tolerate," by Malcolm X, and "No tree can grow to Heaven unless its roots reach down to Hell," from Carl Jung.

So, the first thing you need is a positive aim for your life. The second thing you need is a way to attract an audience. Now, the thing here is that the term "followers" has lost its punch, and we're going to talk about this in a future video about how followers don't matter anymore.

You see it all the time; someone can go viral on TikTok, make a million dollars, and then just continue to repeat that, and they only have 500 followers. So, in terms of followers, I prefer the term "readers," but since not everyone identifies as a writer, let's just call it an "audience," because that's a first principle of business: you need people in order to pay you for what you do in your business—the value you provide. If you don't have an audience, you don't have a business.

Now, there are a few beautiful things about the internet itself. First, how far your work spreads is a skill that can be learned and practiced, not just luck. Second, there are people who relate to your anti-vision and for your future, meaning you can attract people to the things you talk about.

The third thing is that it's free and accessible, and the majority of the population has access to it. So, if you're trying to attract people to your work and one of your first options isn't a free and accessible platform on the internet, then you're doing something wrong—unless you know exactly what you're doing. This video isn't for you if you just know exactly what you're doing.

I'm personally of the belief that social media was created from a deeper desire for human connection, sharing your knowledge, and solving problems at scale. Now that it's here, and because of shallow human distractions taking over, not too many people see it as that; they don't see it as a vessel to pursue their life's work. You're telling me you have indirect access to nearly everyone in the world, and you don't think any of them can benefit from what you have to offer?

Yes, it takes development and skill acquisition, but once you truly see the potential for everyone to have a business in this global decentralized economy, it's hard to pursue any other path. As Naval said, there are almost 7 billion people on this planet; someday I hope there will be almost 7 billion companies. Now, of course, this is just speculation for the future, but it seems to be the way things are going.

You can also have a company/business and work a job, or do what you currently do, or whatever it may be. We don't know if we're going to end up in a world with UBI, but even then you're still going to want to work because it's a natural part of life. So, the only option then is to actually finally pursue your passions.

What I'm trying to encourage you to do right now—the point here is that the internet is how you attract an audience to your life's work. An audience, large or small, with small being enough to make more than enough money to be fulfilled, is not optional because you weren't working for a company that attracts an audience for you. You just play this specific role that you were hired for and that you can be replaced for.

The audience doesn't have to come from social media, but it is going to come from media like paid ads or podcast sponsorships, or whatever it may be. Social media is just the free and readily accessible route that I believe should form the foundation of all the other things because you can test content on social media before you decide to blow money on ads with it. So, you have a positive aim for your life.

You're improving; you're developing; you're gaining value. And then you're attracting an audience to that value. Now, the third thing you need is a project turned into a product.

Projects are how you achieve the goals in your life; projects are how you build a solution to a problem; projects are how you guide experimentation, education, and skill acquisition. Profitable products provide a transformation; they solve a problem to help you get closer toward a goal, like I talk about in mental monetization. So, if you aren't building a project every single day that pushes you toward your vision for the future, you are playing a losing game, and your attention automatically gets drawn to the projects of others.

So you can make money and survive—build more projects. It can be a program that helps you get in shape; it can be a planner that helps you stay productive; it can be a Cortex or a Notion system that helps you write content, take notes, track progress—almost anything. And either way, templates are always beneficial to include in some kind of a product.

So, if you want to include a template or a worksheet or whatever it may be… May I be considered using Cortex, especially when we eventually offer an affiliate program? It's just a free app; it's free for life unless you have a team or other things. The point here is that if you attract an audience with a similar personality and a similar vision for the future as you—aka, you are the niche—then the projects that you build for yourself to achieve your own goals can easily be turned into products that other people pay for.

That's how you productize yourself. The second point is that if you're just using other people's solutions throughout your life and not experimenting with your own or creating your own—like a fitness program, a meditation program, or a writing system, or whatever it may be—you need to start experimenting with your own way so that you can pass down better ways to do things. And that's how things improve.

We're not creating products to completely solve the problems in people's lives because that's not on us; that's on the person that has the problem. It's up to them if they want to solve the problem. We're simply giving things to people to experiment with to make that process more efficient over time.

We're gradually increasing the efficiency that comes from evolution and helping contribute towards that. So, you have a positive direction, you're making progress, you're becoming valuable, you have an audience that you're attracting, and you have a product. So, you have a way to actually make money.

The fourth thing you need is experimentation, iteration, and persistence. Because throughout this entire journey, you never land on that one specific thing. I've launched 10 products, 10 free downloads.

I've had a few hundred YouTube videos, 50,000-plus tweets, and I think like 1,200 Instagram posts. I've done thousands upon thousands of iterations on my content. You don't just post one tweet and then get famous.

You don't just make one product and then get rich. The first thing of anything that you do is going to suck, and the longer you delay that, the longer you're delaying actually creating something good. The most powerful mindset you could adopt here is to just put the thing out—just publish the thing, get the feedback, and then improve.

Once you publish the thing, your journey isn't done; that's the start of the journey. Okay, we understand the very big picture of how to pursue your life's work now, as a personal brand or creator, or these things that we talked about that have lost their punch and lost their direction. We need to learn how to set ourselves apart.

We need to learn how to not become those things; in essence, we need to learn to be ourselves, but in a structured way so that it actually makes sense to people. Because you can go and be yourself when you're talking to someone else, but they may not like it. You need to learn how to be creative and constrain things.

Creativity is in the constraints. Creativity isn't freedom and chaos; it's the limitations that you impose to create that art. To start with this, the four pillars of creative work are brand, content, product, and promotion.

These are the things that are shaping how you distribute your value to the world. These are the boundaries within which you can start to get creative. Because most people focus on the skill, and then they have no idea how to monetize it, so they become a starving artist.

The second problem is that most people just don't know how to stand out. They start, they buy a few courses, and then they never branch out of what the courses teach. The courses aren't meant to be your mind; they aren't meant to take over; they aren't meant to be an ideology or dogma that you stick to.

They're supposed to help you reach a certain stepping stone, like a job. If you become a slave to the teachings from a course or a video that you learn, it's the same; you're not out of the Matrix; you just put yourself in a new Matrix. So, the first one, brand—brand is an environment.

Stop thinking about your brand as just your social media profile picture, or your banner, or your bio, or the designs of your website. It's everything. It's the world that your readers are coming into with you.

Brand is an environment where people come to transform. You attract people to a vision for the future; you help people move away from an anti-vision. You illustrate your worldview, story, and philosophy for life across every single touchpoint: your banner, profile picture, bio, link in bio, landing page design, pinned content, post threads, newsletters, videos, and the rest.

Brand isn't illustrated right away when the person just visits your profile; brand is the accumulation of ideas in your reader's mind after 3 to 6 months of following you. Just have some self-awareness. When you follow someone else, you're like, "Interesting, okay, I'm going to follow," and then you start to get their content.

You start to form an opinion about them; you start to identify with certain things that they say, and then you can kind of decide, "Hmm, am I in alignment with this person's goals? Should I continue following them, or am I not, and are they ruining my life? " So, when you're thinking of ideas or creating content or building products, whatever it may be, you have to filter that through your brand vision.

People will buy from you even if you have the same products at a higher price point as your competitor. So that was brand—it's kind of abstract; it's out there. But you just have to understand that brand is created as you do things, as you launch products, as you write content.

It's not just your static—like when people look at your. . .

Profile—that's not what your brand is. Your brand is the little digital house that you are inviting people into, and the rooms are your content and everything like that. Your profile picture and your banner are the door of the house.

So, the second thing that we need to understand is content. How do we write good content that stands out? Because content, you need that to build an audience.

Even if you're doing paid ads, you need to write the content. Even if you're creating a YouTube video, you need to write the content of the script. If you want to learn how to write any of those things, consider joining the Writers Boot Camp that starts October 28th for Cortex.

People don't follow information; they follow perspectives. Ten people can talk about the same old topics, but one of them can say it in such a way that brings an entirely new meaning to it. Perspectives are infinite.

Sometimes, it's not about coming up with a completely different idea; sometimes, it's about talking about the same idea but from a deeper lens. This is what I've done with my YouTube videos, and I think that's a driving part of my success. I take these ideas that perform really well—ideas that seem kind of shallow on the surface—but I know there's something deeper, and then I write to dissect that.

I form a deeper philosophy around that, and that's what people have told me they like; they like that my content leans more toward depth. So, if you want to stand out, find ideas that are already working. Save ideas from books, social media, podcasts, and videos, then turn them into an original idea by changing the perspective.

But how do you change the perspective? For knowledge work and creative work, and doing all of this stuff, you need to learn how to think with impact. So, along with Cortex, the second brain software note-taking and writing software that we built, we have created this system called Cor Notes.

Now, this is nothing new; if you've taken my "7 Days to Genius Ideas" free course, that won't be a thing anymore. You have to take the Second Brain course for free inside of the Cortex community. Over 70,000 people have learned this system, and it helps them turn any idea into their own original deep idea.

This is a note-taking system for writers, creators, and marketers—not people who just want to save the same information that they read. They want to transform the ideas into their own creative firepower that can be used as Legos for whatever content they create, be it a newsletter or whatever it is. So, here's what you do: you don't need to use Cortex; it's free, and there are templates and stuff, but you don't need to.

You just need to learn how to think like this. The first thing you do is have an idea. This can come from a conversation; this can be from a video you watch.

Pull something from this—pull the death of the personal brand as an idea, pull "brand as an environment," or "content is novel perspectives," or "how to think with impact. " Just take any idea, and now you’re going to pick three to four of the following things and flesh that idea out with these: 1. Problem: Illustrate a problem associated with the idea and how it impacts people's lives.

2. Goal: Write out desirable goals people want to achieve to overcome the problem. 3.

Example: A personal experience or tangible example to help people understand and ground the idea. 4. Benefit: The benefits of overcoming the problem and achieving the goal.

5. Process: A step-by-step process for overcoming the problem and achieving the goal. 6.

Concept: A word or name that helps make sense of everything above. Take an idea, fill out three to four of those things, write it down right now, and you'll see how much more powerful it is to think in that way. I almost always start anything I think about with a problem.

If I have an idea, I immediately think, "What's the problem related to that? " and that leads to so many good content ideas because problem is the inception of gold. That's how you frame someone's mind; that's how you capture attention; that's how you show whether or not the idea is valuable from the start.

When people are receptive to an idea, they understand the problem. When you watch a video like this, you usually start with the problem because it qualifies whether or not the video is for them, so they can stay or they can leave. So, if you understand persuasion or content or marketing, you understand how powerful this thinking system can be.

If you do this with multiple ideas and start to connect them together, you're like, "Holy crap! I know so much more than I thought I did," and I finally feel like I can write about this stuff articulately. If you want to see examples of those, I have the Cor Notes template and an example in the description.

Another thing with this is that one of my most popular YouTube videos, which led to 200,000 subscribers in just a few months, was the "One-Person Business Model: How to Productize Yourself. " The one-person business is a concept from the Cor Notes; "How to Productize Yourself" is a process from the Cor Notes. So, in order to create my content, I just pull from those blocks.

It's like, "Okay, 'one-person business' sounds cool. 'How to productize yourself'? Put them together in a title, fill out the content of the video with the notes.

” Now you don't just— you can just write one sentence for each of those things, like problem, goal. . .

Benefits, example, process, concept—but of course, it helps to just continue expanding on it. These notes aren't done; once you're done with them, you're meant to capture more ideas into them and flesh them out deeper, and make more connections. Then, once you have them, you just string them together into your writing or take individual elements and turn them into social media posts.

So, we've talked about brand; we've talked about content. Both of those I have other videos on if you want to go more into detail with them. The next is how to think, which is kind of how you write content in itself.

Now, the next thing we need to understand is that education is the new marketing. You can't write or sell whatever you want because you don't understand how becoming interested in something works. People aren't just born interested in something; they're slowly exposed to ideas, from beginner to advanced, until they become interested in that thing.

First, they're exposed to why they should care about the thing. Second, they're exposed to how a pain or problem is affecting their life. Third, they're exposed to a solution or goal that creates a desire to change.

So, in other words, people don't find your topics or your writing or your content interesting because you don't use the C. R. O.

T. E. system that we used earlier.

You don't talk in problems, goals, examples, benefits, processes, and concepts. When you start talking about a new topic, establish interest by writing content about why it's important to your brand vision, making people aware of pain points in their lives, and giving actionable steps to overcome those pain points. Create a free guide that goes over all of the above; turn parts of that guide into posts, threads, newsletters, videos, etc.

Your job isn't to find a niche set of customers on something like social media where most of your content is being shared to random people who don't care about you. Your job is to create customers with constant education and brand awareness. That's what a lot of people don't understand: you're being spread to random people on the internet.

Having a niche isn't going to help you much aside from picking a few people up from that. What if I just pick up more people by talking a bit more broadly and then educate them into a niche? Now, the last thing we need to understand is that systems are the new product.

So, we understand a brand; we understand content; how to attract traffic; we understand marketing; how to market a product. And now, systems are the new product. We need to understand how to create a product that people actually want.

At this point in time, we're in the systems economy. People don't want a solution to their problems; they want your solution to their problems. There are tons of writing products out there, but what makes something like "Two-Hour Writer" special?

It's a system that I created through experience. It is novel and original, and sure, it's pulled and learned from other people's teachings, but the way that I created it through my own experience is what sets it apart. It doesn't teach a bunch of academic writing nonsense that didn't help me at all.

I'm not including things that didn't help me in my journey because I had a few problems when I started writing. First, I had trouble having an endless source of content ideas. Second, I didn't want to waste a ton of time creating content for all platforms, so I had to start experimenting with my own system.

My goal for the system was clear: write all of the content I need to in under two hours a day. That way, my audience growth is handled, and I can focus on building better products and enjoying life. So, that's the first step to creating a system—having an extremely clear goal.

What is the desired outcome? In what time frame? What's the problem you're solving?

So, I started testing solutions to have more content ideas. I created swipe files, steps to generate ideas, and templates. If I still couldn't think of anything, I mapped out exactly what I was going to attempt to write each week: three posts a day, one thread a week, and one newsletter a week.

During that process, I realized I could cross-post my writing to all social platforms. This is a public thing; you can see it happening right before your eyes. I do it every single day.

I also realized that threads could be turned into carousels, and newsletters could be turned into YouTube videos. If the system didn't flow, I would try new things the next week. From there, I realized I could copy-paste my newsletter to my blog, embed the YouTube video in that blog, promote my products in that blog, and turn that blog into more content ideas.

Then, I could link that blog under my content each day. This led to more newsletter subscribers, YouTube subscribers, and product sales. I realized that if everything I did was newsletter-centric, that's all I had to worry about for both growing my audience and promoting my products.

So, that's how you stand out in a world of copy-paste products, brands, and content. Yes, it takes time and experience, but now that you have the awareness, you can actually start to work towards it. You may not escape what we talked about earlier about influencers, personal brands, creators, etc.

, but you have something to work towards. That's what you do. This doesn't change in an instant.

So, that's it for this video. Thank you for watching! Like, subscribe, links in the description—check that stuff out.

Bye!