How I plan to get rich and famous
You're broke because you're cerebral, breh
They say that your income, or your net worth, is a reflection of the value you provide to the world.
Right now, I’m broke.
I know being broke is part of the journey to getting rich (because it’d be worse to be stuck in region beta), especially as a writer, but I think it’s about time—you’ll know this is what’s been going on in my head if you’ve kept up with my recent posts—that I start providing value . . that I start solving people’s problems.
That’s really all it is. That’s really all it takes to get rich. I mean, it’s not exactly apples to apples—I don’t really buy into the whole “if you’re broke, then you’re worthless” philosophy. And I do think there are a lot of scumbags who’ve made a lot of money—who “provide a lot of value”—without really making the world a better place. But generally, I think it’s true: solve a lot of people’s problems or one really big problem, and you’ll likely find yourself with some money in your pocket.
Now, I’m not discouraged by the fact that I’m currently broke (if anything, I’m just frustrated) because I haven’t exactly tried as hard as I could for months and years on end to make as much money as possible. I’ve tried, instead, to become as good of a writer as I could possibly be. And it’s not that I haven’t tried to make money at all; I certainly have, and I’ve failed. I’ve just not done all I could—I’ve not “gone all in”—to achieve fame and wealth or whatever.
Easy fix. I’ll just try.
I have realized recently, however, that there is something I have done wrong, something I’ve got to adjust in this journey of mine if I am to be rich and famous. And it’s due in part to the fact that my primary goal has been to become as good of a writer as possible.
I’m not saying I’m a genius or anything, but I will say that I am quite a cerebral, thought-oriented person (other Substackers, I suspect, may relate), and consequently have profoundly over-complicated the money-making and problem-solving process.
If you’re like me, you aim to “solve” life’s most fundamental, important, complex problems. You want to do your best to be the best, to dig the deepest, to see what’s really going on, and what really needs to be done.
And while this approach has progressed me leaps and bounds within, it is counterintuitive to, I don’t know what to call it, business?
It’s counterintuitive to making money. Making money, I’ve learned, doesn’t have to be so hard. It doesn’t have to be so complicated. It can be incredibly simple and, if I dare say so, easy.
As I was driving around last night, after having wrapped up my Uber Eats deliveries, on my way to pick up some food and head home to eat, I thought to myself, “What problem am I capable of solving?”
Clearly, this subject has been on my mind for several days, and for some reason, it roused me in that moment. My first instinct was to grab my phone and conduct an internet search . . . I wanted to type into Google something like, “what problems do people need solved most today?” or “what are the best ways to make money online right now?” . . . It’d have been far from the first time I’d done this sort of fruitless research.
But I restrained myself. Partly because I was driving a car. But also because after having done this same thing over and over again intermittently for I don’t know how many years, I realized this approach was clearly (1) not going to give me the answers I needed and (2) insane (we all know by now the definition of insanity).
And so, not wanting to be classified as insane (it may be too late to avoid that), I turned off the music, forcing myself instead to sit there in silence and ponder, what problem could I solve?
I realized I already had everything I needed.
Clearly, having not yielded the holy grail I’d delusionally sought for so many years, no search would somehow open my eyes to something I’d overlooked all this time. Because I’d looked just about everywhere. And I had all the skills, all the know-how, all the energy. I didn’t need something else, something out there.
I am plenty capable, as any 25-year-old should be, of solving tons and tons of different problems. My biggest barrier now, I could see, is that my perpetual search for the most perfect, deep, and profound problem imaginable is clouding my judgment and subsequent ability to pick one thing and execute. I have clearly been stuck in analysis paralysis, overthinking my way to oblivion.
I don’t need anyone else to tell me something. I don’t need any more information. I don’t need to struggle anymore. I don’t need to practice some skill any longer. I just need to take action. On one thing.
The other thing I realized in this silence is that—as noted in my recent return podcast—I need to “go all in.” I need to be able to go to bed each night saying I had done everything I could possibly do to move the needle forward. Because, throughout all these years, I hadn’t; I’d done, instead, probably something closer to between 40 and 70 percent each day.
It’s not because I wasn’t working hard enough, or because I was lazy. It was because I wasn’t working intelligently—because I was, once more, overcomplicating everything, trying to solve as big and complex a problem as possible.
Was this avoidable, though? Could I have, from the start, simplified everything? Have I wasted a whole bunch of time? I’m not exactly sure.
It’s hard to see things so simply at the start of a journey. Because it actually takes a lot of experience and hard work to simplify problems. At the beginning of any journey, all one really has is the ability to work as long and as hard as possible. You don’t have the skill, knowledge, clarity, perspective, and subsequent leverage you have after grinding away at something for five years. And because of this, it is incredibly difficult to feel like you’re making progress—and, therefore, very difficult to work all day, every day.
Now, part of moving the needle forward is just sheer grit. We all know that. But on the other hand, we do need to feel like we’re progressing.
I’ll explain.
Our brains do not want us to continually work at something—to continuously put effort and energy (burning calories) towards something—if it doesn’t see us making progress . . . if it doesn’t see that our labor will eventually yield fruit. Because doing so, for how we’re designed, would be counterintuitive to survival (because we’d be wasting precious calories doing things that wouldn’t yield a worthy reward for our input).
And so, when your brain feels you should no longer work at something because that endeavor is not yielding the fruit you were hoping for, it discourages you (I don’t exactly know how—I’m sure it releases some sort of neurotransmitter).
The longer you work at something, though, the better you’ll get at it, at moving the needle forward, and the more time you’ll be able to put into it each day, because your brain, seeing you’re making worthy progress, will release more chemicals (idk, serotonin or dopamine or something) urging you to keep going.
So, you see, the longer I’ve done this, the more I’ve been able to feel like I’m going all in. At first, writing on my blog for 2 hours a day felt like I’d done all I could. Now, 4 hours is a very short day for me.
I’ve arrived at a point in my journey now where, as I said, I have everything I need, and could work practically all day if I wanted to. And so, it is the case that I’ve simply gotta grit my way through these next however many months or years. I’ve got to go all in.
So what problem to solve, then? What am I going to do?
I’ve struggled with this for a long while. Again, in part, because I have always wanted to solve the biggest problem possible. Indeed, I once wrote a book called “Figure It Out” to help people figure out what to do with their lives (even though I hadn’t really figured out what to do with my life, lol). But also because—and I think a lot of people struggle with this on their “entrepreneurial” journey—it’s hard to see or to realize what you’re good at, or what you do regularly that other people struggle with.
It’s very difficult to see, for example, that tons of people might find the way you make your fruit smoothie incredibly enlightening and whatnot. Or that your method of organization—which is second nature to you—is exactly what someone else needs but doesn’t know how to implement . . . I don’t know, you get the point. It’s hard to see what you can’t see.
Or so we think . . .
This, right here, is where the magic happens. This, right here, is where so many people, where I, have failed.
For some reason—perhaps it is our world’s perpetual inundation with information—people have lost not their ability, but their will for critical thought. They prefer to outsource it because they want the answers right away. They don’t want to have to work their way through obscurity.
People simply aren’t willing to sit down and address something, one thing, for as long as it takes to solve that thing. Everyone is so quick to throw their hands up and open Google, just as my reflexes had tempted me to in my car last night, in search of answers, rather than slowing the hell down and brainstorming and looking within.
It’s as simple as this, people: if you just sit down in peace and quiet and try to do something, just one thing, for long enough, you’re gonna get it done. I’m not saying it’s gonna be easy. I’m just saying you can do it. Stop overthinking and start executing.
If you are trying to figure out what problem to solve, just one, and you sit there and think and write and map your way through it all without looking up YouTube videos and random blog posts about 5 steps for this and that, drowning yourself in a whole bunch of unnecessary stimulation, you will, much more quickly than you think you could get the answer you need.
There’s no one way to go about it all. Just try to do it. You’ll either cultivate clarity, at which point you’ll be able to take action, or you’ll realize which question you’ve got to ask next, which information you need next, what sort of research you need to do next.
You can figure out, you see, if you just lock yourself in a room for a couple of days, or even just a couple of hours, which problem you’d like to solve (or anything, for that matter).
I write all this now because this is the process I have been and am working myself through. I’m not preaching, I’m sharing—granted, in a preachy way—the steps I’ve walked myself through throughout the past however many hours.
So, for the third time, what problem am I going to solve?
Well, I’ve realized that I have—just as you have—already solved a lot of problems. And I’ve realized that I’m already good at several things. I don’t, as I said, need to figure anything else out. So here’s what I’m going to do:
Each day, just as I have planned and have been doing, I’m going to write a post. While it’s not, I promise, all gonna turn into a bunch of “Here’s five steps to pulling your head out of your ass” crap, I am going to make much more of an effort not to post about butterflies and other musings . . . I’m going to write, instead, at least on some days, with the audience in mind.
I don’t want to start sounding like some money-Twitter guy—I’m certainly going to maintain the voice and style I’ve worked so hard to cultivate throughout the past however many years. But I am going to write more intentionally, in an effort to, in short, solve problems and provide value. The subject matter will vary, of course, and I don’t exactly have any sort of plan, or “content calendar.” I’m just going to keep on working my way, one at a time, through whatever problem I feel most inspired to address that day (today, as you know by now, it was how am I going to get rich?).
This is something I’ve thought about for a while now . . . For much of my writing journey, I’ve mostly just kind of rolled out of bed and typed out whatever I felt like typing. This will no longer be the case, not because I’m going to plan a whole bunch of crap out, but because I will be moving forward as a writer with a little bit more, as I said, intentionality. (On some days, though, if I feel I’ve got to write about butterflies, then I very well may; I refuse to see this whole newsletter thing as work. It’s not work. It’s play.)
(It sort of feels like this has been a long time coming—in that the beginning of my journey was just a whole bunch of chaos, a big ol’ shit show, and now I’ve emerged from it all, dust and rocky particles flying off me, shooting in a particular direction towards some other planet. Idk. The point is that I sort of had to work myself through a whole lot of obscurity before I cultivated this clarity I now have. And because I have this clarity, I’m moving with intentionality, in a single direction, and so each step I take will proceed logically from the previous.)
Some of these posts will be free, and some of them will be paid. I’m going to try and do one per day, five days a week, though I don’t know how possible that’s going to be, especially once I work my way to bigger, deeper problems. I suppose at least some of this stuff is eventually going to amalgamate into bigger modules or products or something . . . Meaning that I will, for example, post a whole bunch of times throughout some given month about, I don't know, “How to get really good at writing,” and then, when I feel I’ve poured my heart out as much as I could in regards to that subject, I’ll throw it all together in some tab, so that my readers know where to click to solve that particular problem of theirs. I’m just guessing.
As time goes on, as I provide more and more value to readers, and as my “niche”—or what particular problems people should come to me for—becomes more clear, more and more people will subscribe to my newsletter, and eventually, once they feel they’d be getting more value than $6 a month by taking out a paid subscription, some will start giving me money in exchange for access to my paid posts.
That’s right—if I (if you) can provide just a little more value than a single latte each month with my words, I will (you could) soon find myself (yourself) with “paying subscribers.”
I figure some of these problems I address will not be as popular, and that others will be incredibly popular . . . At which point I’ll—similar to how, for example, Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck started as a blog post and performed so well that he turned it into a book—expand upon those things in one form or another.
I really love writing, and I think it’s an excellent medium for solving problems.
But it’s not the only medium for solving problems. It’s a great place to start. But it’s not an end all be all. Both for me and for you. I do want to write my whole life. I’d love it if I could accumulate thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of articles throughout my lifetime on this newsletter, along with some books. But I do want to work my way to more tangible problems someday. I want to, for example, start some movement, or non-profit to clean up all the litter in America.
I’ll get there eventually. Writing is just my starting point—the medium through which I’ll first make my own money solving other people’s problems. I’m good at it, and it gives me flexibility, and it’s scalable, and it has practically no costs.
So, for now, these posts will be the main medium through which I provide value and solve problems. I’ll provide as much value as I can for free, and the rest of it will go behind a paywall in The Good Stuff.
Before I know it, I’ll be rich and famous.