A small announcement before we start.
By popular request, the next Writer’s Bootcamp starts March 4th.
Initially, we were waiting until Kortex AI features were in to start the next cohort, but we will simply add on calls during this bootcamp for those who join as those features release. (You also get all curriculum updates for life).
So, if you want to create your niche of one, write about your interests, and build an audience as a way to future-proof yourself going into the future, view past student results and enroll here while the early bird price lasts.
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Traditional education and hyperspecialization is a way to make people subservient to the dominant paradigm / system. Study the generalized principles of nature and be a deep generalist.
Daniel Schmachtenberger
It’s insane to think that you should know what you want to do with your life by age 18.
What you want to study.
What career you want to pursue.
How your life is going to end up.
Most of the time, it’s just like your parents.
A job. A spouse. A mortgage. A few vacations. A few nice dinners. Maybe a cat or dog. Maybe some kids?
Maybe not… you know… the economy and all that.
At least that’s what you’re supposed to do.
That’s what society wants for you.
But you’re different.
You have multiple interests.
Focusing on one thing is the bane of your existence.
You can’t help yourself. You want to explore all that life has to offer. You want to embrace the full range of the human experience.
But everywhere you turn, parents, teachers, and even friends shoot you down as you try to go your own way.
They say you have “shiny object syndrome” as if that’s a bad thing.
They throw subtle jabs at your dreams and aspirations (because they want the “best for you,” but not if it’s better than them).
They want you to pursue the “safe” route. Become a doctor. Become a lawyer. Do something respectable. Get a high-paying degree.
They drill your mind into this little box that they can understand, but you hate it.
Little do they know, having multiple interests is a superpower going into the new future of work.
What used to be the safe route is now the least safe of them all.
The 3 Differentiators – Agency, Taste, and Generalism
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Robert A. Heinlein
In the early-mid 1800s, when America was industrializing and needed to educate large numbers of immigrant children, educators like Horace Mann traveled to Prussia to study their system.
This Prussian education system was designed to create obedient soldiers, compliant citizens, civil servants, and well-behaved workers.
It accomplished this with it’s focus on:
- Mandatory attendance
- Training for teachers
- National curriculum and testing for students
- Division of students by age
- The concept of grade levels
If you’re anything like me, a little part of you just died reading that.
Students were taught how to work, not how to think.
Impressed by its efficiency and standardization, Mann and others implemented many of these methods in American schools, particularly in Massachusetts, which became a model for other states.
Since you do not fund this school system, you do not control what is taught.
You are told to read this, memorize that, and if you dont, your Industrial Age parents scold you and threaten to ground you (so you can’t talk to friends or pursue hobbies or interests).
Even further, the standardized education must bias the bottom quintile.
In other words, you are forced to learn at the same pace as the dumbest 20% of people in the public school system.
This is extremely destructive.
Because if you understand how the mind works, you understand that you only absorb the information that the goals that frame your mind allow.
And if your goal is to get a degree and get a job, your destiny is to become replaceable because you have not learned the multiple interests that allow one to be free.
Here’s the point:
Society wants you to be a specialist because useful workers serve society.
But every single person you admire is not a specialist. Specialists are tools. Tools get replaced. AI is doing the replacing.
Every free and successful person is a generalist. A polymath. They understand that in order to actualize a grand vision, they will have to learn and do many things in areas of life that are undefined.
But generalism is only one piece of the equation.
We are going through a second renaissance.
We have the power of Einstein and Davinci in our pockets.
The individual—not the institution—has more power than ever to thrive with multiple interests.
But still, people aren’t doing anything.
It’s not because they’re lazy.
It’s not because they lack creativity.
It’s because their mind has been programmed for 20+ years by a society that benefits from their stupidity.
In the future of work, you need to drastically change how you think about your future.
Generalism is a must, let’s talk about taste.
How To Develop Taste
I was going to summarize this quote, but i don’t want to do it injustice:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
Ira Glass
Let me see if I can articulate this.
Stick with me here and read carefully:
Intelligence is no longer a differentiating resource.
AI models continue to get better and better while the price of those models gets closer and closer to zero.
Everyone has all answers they could ever need (and yet 99% of people don’t realize or utilize it… because intelligence has proven to be a poor resource in isolation. There’s more to the story of success).
This is where it gets tricky.
AI is replacing specialist roles because predictable outputs come from predictable inputs.
Since many jobs are a repetitive series of tasks that lead to non-creative outputs, AI can do this good enough.
But when you add another layer of abstraction, or multiple, the number of outputs that can occur are infinite. AI only gives you one unless you refine it or tell the AI to refine itself. The thing is, that’s probably not the best output. And it’s absolutely not the one that will garner the love and attention of the supporters who consume the output.
Most AI generations, from most people, is slop. The dead internet is being filled with slop nobody cares about.
As an example, let’s say you want to write a book.
You can also think of building a software, designing a website, or any other type of true creative work.
Right now, you can have AI write a decent book on “How To Focus” with a few well written prompts.
- Open up Claude Sonnet 3.5
- Give it a purpose (ghostwriter)
- Give it your writing style, tone, and voice
- Give it the target audience
- Have it create a table of contents based on pain points of that audience
- For each chapter, have it include a relevant story, main insight, actionable steps, and a novel concept like “Time Blocking”
- Give it previous ideas you’ve written about on focus
- Create and refine the outline for each chapter
- Finish the book and refine it to your liking
Now take 1000 real people (using AI or not) and have them write a book on the same topic.
Every single final output will be different from one another.
One book can be written 1000 different ways.
And 1000 different people can interpret that book in 1000 different ways.
The point is this:
It doesn’t matter if AI can write you a book, build you a software, design a website, write a million social media posts.
Why? Because that’s not what makes creative work successful.
That’s also not what makes people care about your creative work.
Write all the books you want with AI. See how far it takes you. Most people love to blabber about how AI is going to replace everything as an excuse to not do anything with their lives as they have been with any excuse they’ve been able to grasp onto for the entirety of their lives.
Doers do. Most people don’t. We’ll talk about that next.
For now, realize that multiple interests are merged with taste.
Anyone can create anything. They can embrace their nature as a generalist if they so choose.
But what makes a book, a brand, a software, and any other creative work is not the ability to create that thing, but how you synthesize ideas across various disciplines in a way that nobody but you could have thought of.
A book on “How To Focus” takes a completely new shape when you tie concepts in from philosophy, psychology, metaphysics, and spirituality rather than just self-help.
Since most people had their taste blunted by schools and jobs, you’re at a massive advantage because you didn’t let that stop you from studying beyond the defined. You love to explore the unknown.
The entry level will go extinct because beginners have taste, but can’t make it real. They haven’t practiced and failed enough as Glass pointed out in the quote above.
In the future of work, high paying employment will be reserved for the highly skilled. Those who can do many things and have an acquired taste.
But frankly, most people won’t get those jobs.
They will be few and far between.
Like getting into the NBA, reserved for the 0.1% elite.
A pipedream.
So if you have multiple interests, and you have taste, there’s one more piece of the puzzle.
Agency: Employment VS Entrepreneurship
It’s sad that “business” and “entrepreneurship” have become dirty words.
For most people, when they hear them, their mind is flooded with doubt and alarm:
- “That requires a lot of money to start.”
- “I’m not talented enough to do that.”
- “Charging people money? Sounds like a scam.”
- “I don’t know how to create an LLC or do my taxes, so I’m never going to learn. Sounds boring.”
I’m not here to talk about entrepreneurship as a role or title or something that’s reserved for talented people.
I’m here to talk about what it actually is:
A state of mind.
The difference between an employee and entrepreneur is the difference between low-agency and high-agency. In this context, high-agency individuals are those who create their own goals and actively pursue them without permission from another. Low-agency individuals are those who are assigned goals and pursue them because they don’t have a mind that allows them to see any other option. True agency can only be developed when you blame yourself for every problem, even when you’re not at fault.
An entrepreneur is often an employee, but an employee is rarely an entrepreneur.
At top companies, the most sought after employees are those who solve problems without permission. They just do. They have agency. They don’t need their hand held to do something valuable.
But again, the jobs of the future will be reserved for the elite.
So the main option, in my eyes, for those with high ambition and multiple interests, is to create your own path, and the only way to do that is by becoming an entrepreneur (no matter how long it takes for your dreams to gain traction).
Now, it’s easy to lump me into the camp of “all 9-5 jobs are bad!” when that’s not my belief at all.
However, I do understand psychology to a reasonable extent.
As a child, there is a “magic” to life because everything is new. You are constantly improving, evolving, and taking on new challenges that make life worth living.
Schools simulate this desire to “hunt” for good dopamine by providing a video game like progression to learning.
When you accept your first job, it’s challenging at first. You develop skill to cure your anxiety. Then, when you reach as far as that career letter will allow you, the challenge and novelty cease to exist. Your days turn into a blur of repetition.
This is incredibly damaging to your psyche.
You get stuck in the defined. The known. And you can’t escape because a monthly paycheck is addictive, and you max out your lifestyle to fit what that paycheck allows.
For those who want more out of life, the only way out is entrepreneurship.
To dive into the unknown. Embrace uncertainty. Accept the infinite string of challenges that bring the child like magic of high highs and low lows back into your life.
And if you have multiple interests, you’re in a great spot.
How To Turn Your Interests Into Income
I would focus on the content creator side of things because I believe that’s ‘where the puck is going’. That’s a much more important shift… In how we all consume information.
Chamath Palihapitiya
The final problem is this:
You have multiple interests.
You are developing taste.
You are ready to increase your agency.
But you have no idea where to start.
If you’re young, the only real places you know to look are job boards and maybe freelance market places.
So rather than giving you a singular place to look, because a singular known path won’t do you any good, I will guide you to creating your own path to turn your interests into income.
1) Choose A Meta Path
The greatest mistake you can make is boxing yourself into one specific model.
Like starting an agency business or eCommerce business or some other random niche model like Amazon print on demand.
Those are great things to learn, but only to acquire relevant skills that help actualize your vision. Just like a job.
A better route is zooming out a layer to discover the principles that make all of those models work.
Because once you understand that, you can create success in anything you choose to do.
So, if you want to do your own thing, you need 3 things:
- A valuable product or service
- A way to attract people who care
- The skill to make people care
Thanks to the internet, each of these are now accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
You can build a product or service with relative ease:
- You can write an eBook
- You can start a cohort based course around your interests
- You can build software with AI assisted coding and learning
We talked about this in depth in the How To Package And Market Your Knowledge letter.
Those are the best options for a beginner who doesn’t want to invest an excessive amount of time and money into building a traditional business.
Once you’ve launched a few of those products, you now have data on what works, and you have some cash to invest.
At that point, you can take the Justin Welsh route and chill out with a multi-million dollar info product business as one person, or you can go my route of using those as the starting point of another product that demands more resources, like Kortex.
The problem here is that, again, anyone can build anything.
But not everyone can attract people who care about that thing.
That’s where most coders, authors, or creatives fail. They build a cool app, or write a book, or create art but they can’t get customers, so they fail.
Thankfully, you don’t need paid ads, billboards, or to get on a TV talk show to drive traffic to your business anymore.
You simply start posting about your knowledge and interests online.
You get in front of an audience.
You can either build, borrow, or buy an audience.
Since we want accessible, affordable, and high leverage, the greatest area to focus your attention right now is on building an audience. This is done on social media until the next social layer of society emerges.
“But Dan, everyone is becoming a creator and talking about the same thing.”
Wrong. You are in an echo chamber.
Being a creator is interest agnostic. You can talk about anything you want as long as you can make it persuasive.
You don’t have to talk about self development or philosophy or business. You just think you do because you have similar interests as me (that’s why you read these), so maybe you should build an audience around those. Not everyone has those interests.
Everyone is becoming a creator because that’s how you, as an individual, take back your sovereignty. There are business and consumers. Creators are both. So yes, that market will be absolutely massive and comprise much of the new economy.
The thing is, none of this is anywhere close to being easy.
You need the right skills to both attract an audience and make them care about who you are and what you do.
In other words, you need a medium and a message.
Writing and speaking are your medium.
You either write posts, threads, newsletters, products, ads, emails, articles, etc. Or you speak to a camera to get your message out to people who may benefit from it.
Psychology, marketing, sales, and persuasion help form your message. You need to write or speak in a way that captures attention, articulates value, and builds trust.
If you want help with this, the next Writer’s Bootcamp starts on March 4th. It will help you create your niche of one, write about your interests, and learn the skills to build an audience as your “moat” for the future.
2) Intersections Are Your Edge
If everyone builds an audience, how do you stand out?
Well, this is only a difficult question because you aren’t your authentic self.
If you were, and everyone else on this planet was, everyone would be unique.
In other words, if everyone were to become a creator, and all of those creators were their authentic self, meaning they solved their own problems and sold the solution, then we would enter some form of digital tribal era. Small self-sustaining tribes would form and each person in it would be able to help others within that tribe with their own uniqueness. This is already happening.
You don’t need a lot of followers. You need a few hundred people who support your work and need what you offer. And, as the internet goes, those few hundred people will filter in and out every month or two allowing you to sustain what you do. You evolve, tribes evolve, the internet is a constant flow of attention.
But we conform. We copy other people. We lack vision for our future and the agency to make it reality.
Here’s what I want you to do to discover your uniqueness:
- Write out your story – Where were you a few years ago? What was your mindset then? What was the major turning point? What skills did you learn? Where are you now? Can you help others do the same?
- Write out 10-20 interests – Pull out a notebook and write down 10-20 things you love studying, want to study, or are slightly interested in.
- Write out 3 pain points for each – Under each interest, write down 3 problems or pain points that you have faced or others face relating to those interests.
- Connect the dots – Draw lines between parts of your story, your interests, and the pain points. You’ll be amazed with how many things connect.
My writing can’t be replicated with AI (unless I’m the one manning the AI) because my “edge” is my personal experience paired with philosophy paired with business.
I can talk about the same topic as everyone else, because that’s where the attention is, but my content stands out because of how I frame it.
Second, I am focused on attracting people with similar interests.
Why? Because I know I can help them in some way.
If you want to do the same, take what you wrote above.
Write one article or post for every pain point you listed out.
Sprinkle in your personal story throughout your writing.
Bake in connected interests to synthesize unique ideas.
And of course, be persistent.
Remember, you have taste, but it doesn’t reflect in your work until you practice for years.
And no, a few years is not a lot of time considering you spent 18+ years being drilled into something you don’t want to do. A few years of effort is absolutely nothing.
You don’t want to commit because you “have something better you could be doing” when all that involves is numbing the pain with cheap pleasures to escape your current situation.
The only thing you should want to do is get out.
3) Merge Art & Business
To build product, “make something people want.” To create art, make something you want. (The best do both).
Naval Ravikant
It’s sad that most people can’t come to terms with the fact that business can be a very fulfilling thing.
That happiness is a two sided coin:
The creativity required to make progress and contributing to something greater than yourself.
In other words, becoming valuable and sharing that value.
With the internet, anyone can do this and reap the rewards of doing so.
You merge art and business when you make something you want and share it with people who have similar interests, because they will probably want it too.
Write content for yourself.
Treat the internet as your public journal.
Put effort into getting that spread to more people.
Build a product you would buy, use, and benefit from.
Given time, you’ll do very well for yourself.
– Dan
