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I want you to imagine the future with me.
A world where:
- Creators are the new teachers.
- Online courses are decentralized schooling.
- Individuals pursue their interests and teach those with a similar personality, creating a better learning experience.
- Education is more efficient, affordable, and results-oriented than a conformist public school system.
- Anyone can choose courses and creators that align with their personal goals. They aren’t locked into one area of study that breeds narrow-mindedness and dependence on society for a job or paycheck.
- More people embrace deep generalism and become polymaths, which are prerequisites to becoming a free-thinking individual.
- Learning, teaching, and earning collapse into one ideal and meaningful lifestyle (thanks to advancements in technology and the spread of information.)
You’re experiencing this right now.
You are currently reading a letter with information that could change your life (and wouldn’t dare be taught in schools because it would break you out of their system, they wouldn’t benefit from it.)
In my eyes, this is the future of education, entrepreneurship, and work as a whole.
All signs point to it.
In this letter, I want to show you a path that anyone can take to secure their future.
This is not a path where everyone does the same thing.
It is a path where people can pursue their interests and lean into the story that makes them unique. A path where everyone – within reason – gets paid to be themselves in a world where robotic jobs are being automated left and right.
If you watch the video, I’ll handle most objections you have about this being a viable path for most people.
Of course, this is just a prediction, but the data is overwhelming, and predictions can come true with enough attention and effort to create that reality.
Let’s take a look:
First, from Stripe, creator growth isn’t stopping any time soon.
(These images are pulled from Hosun’s X thread on a similar topic. This is my take on it, which we’ve discussed quite a few times in the past, but it hasn’t been as refined as this time around.)
The way I see it, creator growth is the only logical option going into a world where AI and automation make meaningless work optional.
While social media may change, the desire to pursue your interests and get paid for being yourself remain. And if you haven’t noticed, evolution is about solving problems. It’s taken a lot of technology to guide evolution to this point, but we’re on the verge of solving the problem of doing work you hate. Of course, the principle still remains that none of this will be given to you.
This life is reserved for the polymaths, autodidacts, and those with an unquenchable thirst to acquire a diverse set of irreplaceable skills.
Let’s go further.
A graph from SignalFire illustrates that there are now 50 million content creators. Beyond that:
- Freelancers compose 46.6% of the workforce (increasing substantially from 36% in 2020).
- The creator economy is projected to double from $250B to $480B by 2028. People think they are late to the party when it’s just getting started.
- The economy favors profitable business models. Tech enabled businesses like creators can operate at 95% profit margins with digital products and services – causing more development in that domain for new platforms and tools.
- Big companies are requiring leaders at their company to be active on social media for brand reputation. Less corporate marketing, more human marketing.
Corporations are beginning to opt for contractors and creators as workers and marketers.
In short, the future favors the individuals, small teams, and progressive companies who stop trying to lock people into lives they hate. People will push back full force now that they have the technology to do so.
And that’s the other thing…
Technology has evolved.
You don’t need a team of 10 developers to build a website now.
You have no-code drag-and-drop tools that help you build it fast.
You don’t need to pay for billboards or spots on the radio. You simply post content to attract people to your creative work and business.
Most people think AI is going to replace creative workers.
If it does, maybe you deserved to be replaced and aren’t as creative as you think you are.
AI only enables intelligent people to do more as an individual or team. People are building viral apps over a weekend and writing content faster than ever. The quality of those apps and content are dependent on a wide array of skills that can’t be made up for by typing into ChatGPT.
This is a superpower for generalists and polymaths.
But it goes even deeper.
Smart People Shouldn’t Go To College
Knowledge not found in schools is the source of money not found in employment. – The Art Of Focus
People are losing trust in the institutions and ideologies that failed to give them the secure future they promised.
Schools narrow your mind on the illusory status of a nice job and large paycheck.
Religions narrow your mind on a singular cultural perspective that fails to make sense of reality.
Jobs narrow your mind on a replaceable and repetitive string of tasks that won’t be worth what you’re being paid now as technology advances.
For those who value self-education and personal responsibility, you are quite possibly experiencing the most important time of your life.
For those who can’t think for themselves or open their mind to new perspectives, you will probably suffer for the coming years until you hit rock bottom – which forces a perspective shift and growth.
In Ego Development Theory, a lower stage of development is the conformist stage. A stage where people can’t think for themselves. They need to be accepted by the tribe. So their mind sees religion and other ideologies and institutional dogma as law. “Bible thumpers” for more than just the bible.
It seems that as new generations gain more of a collective voice, the conformist stage – mostly occupied by boomers – is slowly starting to fade out from the general population. More people are occupying higher stages of development.
This is hidden importance of social media and the internet.
Social media has set the foundation for the distribution of education, meaning, and work.
The lines have blurred. No central institution has control over one in any given culture.
Personal brands on social media teach their interests, share their belief system, and make an income doing so by providing a product or service under their brand.
Why is this such an important turning point in history?
- Anyone is free to share their interests and beliefs on the internet.
- Anyone is free to self-develop, acquire new skills, learn from others, and contribute to humanity by providing their own product or service.
- Education determines an individual’s potential, and if that education is dominated by a school system with an agenda that doesn’t account for the individual’s goals and development, we are entering a new Golden Age.
Education shapes the future because it shapes human behavior. You become what you consume.
Education expands your perspective and allows you to spot opportunities in unknown territory.
Education is programming. You’ve been educated your entire life. But you didn’t choose the source of that education… until now.
In other words, we’re entering a human economy.
A connected economy that finally reflects natural patterns.
A purpose economy where people can choose to learn from those with a shared vision and goals.
Why does this work?
Because people have different needs for understanding.
Many of you are here because you resonate with what I say and teach.
Others despise me, yet they get similar information from a different perspective, and that’s okay. It’s a difference in personality and teaching style.
The traditional student was assigned goals that left them dumb and replaceable. They were assigned a teacher. They were told to pay an outrageous amount. To take out loans that would be impossible to pay back. Drowning them in high interest that keeps their mind trapped in survival mode due to the stress. They try to solve that stress by getting a job, making their life even worse. By the time they know it, they either forget that they were meant for more or get overwhelmed by how much work it will take to dig out of that mess.
The modern student can choose their own goals, find a teacher, invest in their own education, and once they’ve achieved that goal, they can evolve as all things do to the next one, or they can fulfill their higher needs of becoming the teacher and passing down what they’ve learned.
How are you going to create anything worth distributing if you don’t become a person of value?
Yes, to join in on the new, hyper-profitable economy you will need to do something with your life.
But, conventional education won’t cut it.
The current school system is just that, a system.
A system that molds you into the workforce.
It teaches the obedience and skills necessary to work a job in the old economy.
If you want to make money in the new economy, then obviously you must seek education from those who have results in that domain.
Courses, coaching, and content from brands and creators that have created those ways of making money.
While many people think of these as scams – and many can be since the area is new and hasn’t fully self-corrected per evolution – the worst thing you can do is avoid learning from those who are creating the future in front of your eyes.
New jobs are being created left and right.
The ones where boomers will tell you to “get a real job.”
Creators are forging a new path, creating value, building teams, hiring high-agency individuals.
The creator economy is the new school system. Becoming a creator is the new career path. A holistic career path that allows you to pursue and monetize any interest you deem meaningful and important.
Set a goal.
Find creators you resonate with.
Drown yourself in the information they provide.
Watch new opportunities register in your awareness.
Act on them like your life depends on it.
The One-Person Media Company – Your School System
If you understand evolution, you understand that individuals, industries, and life itself oscillate between unity and division.
Centralization and decentralization.
This is a generalized principle of reality.
Like the ocean evaporating into droplets, condensing in the clouds, and once it’s heavy enough, raining back down to nourish plants, serve other beneficial ecological functions, and repeat all over again.
We are entering an era where the pendulum is swinging from institution to individual.
Entropy and wealth are two polar ends.
As uncertainty or disorder increases, the more opportunity and resources you have to build wealth. Wealth is increasing order through value creation. Like turning wood into a house (low value into high value).
All of this philosophical nonsense is to say that we live in a time of deep uncertainty and distrust for institutions’ grip on our minds. But that’s not a bad thing. It simply means we have more information, more ideas, more resources – like no-code tools that other value creators have birthed – and more abundance to work with as individuals.
Let’s break down how this works:
1) The Future Of Entrepreneurship
Social media is where the attention is right now.
Social media is a free technology that has radically changed how we learn and acquire knowledge to improve our quality of life (for value-focused people… lower-development people focused on memes and toxicity shouldn’t be your focus).
Social media is how you join the future of work.
Yes, I believe that on a long enough time scale what we do to generate wealth will evolve from physical to digital.
Physical businesses have online stores and audiences to expand their reach and provide more value.
Corporations are breeding “in-house creators” to bring more personality to their robotic company.
Individuals like Ali Abdaal – our productivity overlord – left their job as a doctor. He posted med school videos and the market told him they wanted his productivity advice. So, it was a no brainer for him to lean into what held more value – considering they did surgery on a grape – and in return makes more than 10 doctors combined.
2) Become A Value Creator
If we observe evolution’s arrow, let’s assume that the goal of reality is to unify consciousness.
We can assume this direction by noting patterns of increasing wholeness.
Matter to biology to psychology to spirit – each transcends and includes another.
Atom to cell to molecule to organism.
Letter to sentence to paragraph to chapter to book.
Materials to infrastructure to surface to house.
All intelligent life is moving toward higher orders of unity by creating value. Or, creating wealth to combat disorder and uncertainty from entropy.
As one self-develops, they move from ego-centric to socio-centric to world-centric to cosmo-centric. They expand their circle of concern. Their desires shift from selfish survival to selfless contribution.
So, who is this whole “creator business” thing for?
In my eyes, it’s those who land between the Achiever to Strategist stage and above. A little under half of the population. Achiever seems to be the general self-help crowd, Expert seems to be the “go to school, get a job, retire” crowd.
It’s for those who love to learn, have results with specific skills or interests, and want to learn into their natural desire to help others and evolve.
It’s not that everyone can’t do this. It’s that it won’t even register as an opportunity from most people’s perspective. It won’t make sense. In lower stages, their needs are different – concerned with survival and self. They don’t care about this stuff.
The Achiever stage is most people that have been introduced to and understand the importance of self-improvement and value actualization.
The beautiful thing about a creator business model is that it is stage-agnostic for the most part.
It can be used as a forcing function to move from conventional to post-conventional.
As I’ve tweeted before, “Self-development is a gateway drug into entrepreneurship because you realize that improving others is the next level of improving yourself.“
At higher stages, contributing to mankind becomes a top priority and desire. Since money and wealth are anti-entropic, creating value (products) and spreading knowledge (content) is a viable way to fulfill that desire. Getting paid to be and actualize yourself.
A last point:
Humans find meaning and enjoyment at the edge of their abilities. When the flow of information is maximized. When they feel as though they have the skill to take on higher challenges.
So, if we consider ourselves creative vessels for reality to flow through, that is what a creator business is.
We learn, create, and teach.
We solve our own problems and sell the solution to increase the tail end of wealth and contribute to the unification of consciousness.
3) Your Public School And Ecosystem
Let’s ground this in practicality.
We got a bit out there for a second.
You need 3 things to build a value creator business that is focused on education and improvement over memes and mindless entertainment like that of a typical influencer.
- Brand – An extension of yourself. How you display your mind online. A way for people to find and follow your perspective.
- Content – How you distribute education, knowledge, and wisdom to help others around your skills and interests.
- Product – A system for helping people solve a problem and achieve a goal.
Your brand is the world you are inviting people into.
The perspective you are helping them adopt.
The goal or level of development you are helping them reach.
While this is illustrated in your bio, profile picture, and brand design, I believe content plays the largest role.
Your brand is the culmination of ideas in your audience’s mind over the course of 3-6 months.
Now, we want our content to be in accordance with reality.
Interconnected and organismic.
Not quick and fragmented sales funnels that make you feel like sleazy marketer doing everything you can to maximize profits.
Not that you can’t do that, or that you shouldn’t at lower levels of development that you need to grow through (please don’t confuse “lower” with bad when they are necessary), but I’m assuming you are pursuing this line of work because you want something deeper than that which you are currently aware of.
In other words, we are building a content ecosystem.
We are carving out our little pocket of the internet for people to join, learn from, and evolve beyond to the next.
I do this by:
- Writing social posts every day
- Posting those across all platforms
- Taking the top-performing ideas
- Expanding them into deeper newsletters or threads
- Posting my newsletter on my personal blog / site
- Turning those newsletters into video and podcast scripts
- Linking my products throughout for people to discover
- Embedding my videos in the corresponding blog
- “Plugging” that blog on all social platforms
Since I’m only focused on writing posts and newsletters (and sitting down to read them to a camera once a week), this doesn’t take more than 1-2 hours a day. It’s a very efficient system. Of course, building and experimenting with a product takes more time, but once a digital product is built, you don’t need to do much upkeep.
This creates a cyclical and interconnected “school system” for people to explore and get what they need according to their goals.
Of course, we only have so much space here, so if you want all of the systems to do this, I teach them in Digital Economics – a life’s work masterclass.
4) Sell High-Value Products
Warning: this may get long and complex, but will provide a meaningful perspective to selling a product.
The future of entrepreneurship is a blend of education, meaning, and value exchange.
You can see it all around you already.
Individuals are creating anything from courses to clothing to software to holistic physical products that help rather than hurt humanity.
When I say “sell high-value products” I mean this:
Sell a product that aids in people reaching new stages of development. New stages of consciousness. New levels of mind. Help people remove their limits and expand their sense of self.
There are infinite ways to do this, so I’ll leave that to your creativity.
But if you want my opinion, education products are the best place to start.
- They’re nearly free to create and distribute. You can start with something as simple as an eBook and let it evolve into more complex courses or cohorts with time.
- Physical products can be helpful, but a physical product isn’t necessary for change. Education and awareness is an absolute necessity and pre-requisite to any kind of behavior change.
- They are profitable and scalable. High margins, no overhead costs, and no shipping or supply chains. This creates a high-leverage lifestyle. You can live how you want.
- You build cash flow first and validate future product ideas. You can build your next startup without investors and already have an audience of potential buyers.
Starting with education, to me, seems like the most straight forward, fulfilling, and truly impactful approach to having an impact on the world.
Not to mention, the economy favors the profitable and the market demand is high for education in an uncertain world.
“But won’t it get saturated?”
Not really.
We talked about entropy as a universal law.
As more options and uncertainty increase, so does the potential for wealth creation. Resources increase. Efficiency increases. Evolution is forced.
Of course, the landscape may drastically change over the next 10 years, but that’s why we build an audience, develop ourselves, and put us in the right position to both spot and take advantage of that change.
But right now, live learning tools are more widely accepted like Zoom. More people are investing in further education outside of schools. E-learning is being adopted at an accelerated rate. The general market and opportunity for education has gone exponential.
On the topic of saturation, why would people buy from you over someone else? Aren’t there enough info products on the market?
If we look back at the stages of psychological development, I believe there isn’t enough education until everyone reaches the unitive stage or higher, which is unlikely to happen in a long time.
Now, the most profitable products right now are those that help people reach or go beyond the achiever and pluralist stages.
In the context we’re concerned, the achiever and plurarlist stages can most easily be spotted by those deep in self-help, professional development and business, cultivating relationships, emotional management and regulation, and beginner levels of spirituality.
In other words, the eternal markets we’ve discussed before. Health, wealth, relationships, and happiness.
This is why social media and YouTube are flooded with these kinds of videos. Because those are the stages where most of the population (interested in self-development) reside.
The thing is, these videos and content aren’t focused on helping people move to the next stage. They’re focused on horizontal growth within that stage rather than vertical.
You can target higher stages, yes, but understand that they are going to be more difficult to attract. The percentage of people who occupy higher stages are smaller (until an increase in behavior changing education / awareness changes that.)
How do you create a profitable product?
- Choose a medium – eBooks, paid newsletter, a course, a cohort, coaching, etc.
- Choose a domain – your product can have a blend of topics, but it’s main focus should be on health, wealth, relationships, or happiness.
- Sell to your past self – reflect on a problem that you’ve solved in your life. This can be as simple as a budget worksheet or teaching a skill (wealth domain), fitness program (health domain), or even a productivity system.
- Sell what’s already selling, but better – research what’s currently selling on the market and make it your own.
- Experiment with a unique system – test a plethora of other’s methods (like training programs or productivity planners)
- Map and build your product – create an outline that solves a big problem and helps customers reach a desired outcome in their life.
- Filter everything through your own perspective – remove information that doesn’t align with your goals. Include information that helps people adopt your perspective.
Mental Monetization can help more with this.
Next, people learn best from those at their stage or those a stage or two above it who can look down and create a map. Your map is your product.
Other people can sell a similar product and talk about the same thing, but some people will never find them. You don’t follow someone for what they teach, you follow them because of their personality and goals.
I can search online for a web design course, but what if I don’t have the initial interest in web design to begin with? What if I’m introduced to it from the person I follow? At that point, the only person I’m buying from is that specific person.
It doesn’t matter how saturated the market is when you create a market by exposing them to their next level of self-development though your product.
I’ll end the letter here.
It’s getting a bit long and we probably need to cover some of these topics in another letter specific to those topics.
In the meantime, if you want something else to read, I think this letter on Value Creation will help you understand what makes a product profitable.
Until next week,
– Dan
