Shadowing Practice: The Writing System That Saved My Brain (Learn Faster & Think Clearly) - Learn English Speaking with Video
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If you don't know what skill to learn, learn to write, even if you don't consider yourself a writer, or even if that thought has never crossed your brain.
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Because writing teaches you how to think, how to learn any skill fast, and how to attract an audience that supports your work,
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which is absolutely needed if you want to build your own business or just do any kind of independent, creative, or meaningful work.
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And in the age of AI, thinking, learning, and distribution, or getting your value in front of other people
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so you actually have the chance of being paid are timeless skills.
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Writing allows you to practice them all while building digital leverage as a byproduct.
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Now, I never thought that I would become a writer.
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I still don't even call myself one, but that's what I do on a daily basis
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because as a business owner or someone who wants to start and build their own thing, that's what you do.
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You market, you advertise, you write captions, you write posts, you write emails.
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Literally any type of communication you do with your customers or your business partners comes down to writing.
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So if you actually incorporate that as a daily habit and practice to make it better, then that's a great thing because that's what the entirety of your business hangs on.
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And I don't even look the part.
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I don't look like a writer.
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I'm just a big dumb meathead who fell in love with deep ideas.
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And by all measures, writing as a simple morning habit has completely altered the direction of my life
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and the direction slash outcome of my mind.
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Because when I was a kid, I would always look up to people who were very articulate with their thoughts, and I never thought that my brain was capable of doing the same thing.
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People like Jordan Peterson, Alan Watts, etc. And I just thought that my brain didn't work
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that way until I started writing and I could actually feel myself getting smarter and more articulate.
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And beyond being able to think and learn faster, writing is a modern form of leverage that anyone has access to.
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That's what we're going to go over in the first section of this video.
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And you're going to walk away and be like, holy shit, I had no idea that writing something so simple that we all have access to can be so powerful.
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As many of you know, my entire business was built on one to two hours every single morning of writing, because how do you get customers in today's world?
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Writing.
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So in this video, I want to show you my system for capturing ideas and writing content worth reading, but I also want to show you why this path is more viable than ever
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and why it will transform how your brain interacts with reality.
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And yes, it really is that deep.
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So let's begin.
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First, we're going to talk about old leverage versus new leverage.
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And this is the secret to modern success.
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Let's start with a quote from Daniel Presley.
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I'm sure many of you know who he is.
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He is a great dude.
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The biggest leverage is no longer capital.
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The biggest leverage is enterprise, the ability to run a great business, and in particular, the biggest leverage is personal brand.
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Having a big audience, as soon as you've got enough people paying attention to you, you have this enormous form of leverage.
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And the reason this is, is because the rules of wealth creation have fundamentally changed.
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The assets that drove income in the industrial age, like property, factories, machinery, physical goods, are being replaced by digital assets,
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audience, personal brand, IP, content, data, software that are incredibly cheap to build, more scalable, harder to tax, and compound while you sleep.
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The only requirement to building leverage for yourself in today's world is a good idea
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and the confidence to post it on the internet.
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The problem and where the opportunity lies is that most people are still conditioned by industrial values.
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They still think for some reason that going to school, getting a job, and retiring at some age is the safe and secure route when it's the least safe and secure route.
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And the same holds true for building leverage for yourself, for increasing your ability to generate wealth.
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Old leverage comes from physical, tangible assets.
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So you can think a house, a factory, a Rolex, a fleet of trucks, a warehouse of inventory, or gold.
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You buy them and then let them appreciate or generate income.
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Old leverage is linear and local.
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So a factory can only produce so many units per day
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and a house can only be rented to one tenant at a time.
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Now, don't get me wrong.
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Leverage is leverage and old leverage can be a very good thing.
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But most people, especially beginners, just don't have the capital to invest in these assets.
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You're probably not going to buy real estate anytime soon
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if you're in thousands of dollars of student debt and you probably won't buy a Rolex until your business does increasingly well.
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And that's the beautiful thing about living in today's world is that leverage is no longer available to only those with capital.
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And the Other important thing is that physical assets are going to be the first thing that governments find, tax, and seize if wages collapse,
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which is more likely today than yesterday because AI can swiftly do that, leading to governments expanding social safety nets.
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Governments are much less likely to seize an email list of 1,000 to 10,000 people
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or a library of content or a best-selling book.
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Yeah, you can sell your house for $100,000, but you can also just send a well-written email to your email list
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and make 10 to $100,000 if you know what you're doing.
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New leverage comes from intangible digital assets.
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So an audience, personal brand, IP, data, systems, or software.
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These are the leverage of the newly rich media, data, and code.
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Content can be written once and seen by millions of people.
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Software can be created once and serve millions of users.
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The things that you use every day, social media and apps or software, the things that are becoming more accessible to you to actually create and build,
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you're watching people build leverage in real time for their future, doing something meaningful most of the time.
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And for most people, writing is the most accessible and practical form of leverage.
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You can learn to code, but if you cannot attract people to care about the product you built, then nobody will use or pay for it.
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Writing is the leverage that unlocks other forms of leverage.
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Everything you see is essentially writing.
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You have social media captions, DMs or messages, advertising, social posts, emails, web page copy, video scripts, articles.
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That's the other thing is even if you want to do video in the future, but you don't have the time to edit or you're not confident enough to be in front of the camera yet,
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start writing because then you'll have a backlog of scripts
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that you can use or you'll just be so much better at grabbing attention than the next person.
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And when you do start creating videos, you're going to be miles ahead of the people who didn't practice articulating or organizing their thoughts on paper through writing.
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And if you can build an audience on a writing platform like X, Substack, Threads, etc., even Instagram, all of my posts are just written posts in the form of an image,
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then when it comes time for you to get on YouTube or do a podcast or do other things like that, you have an audience already built that you can say, hey, here's my YouTube, here are my videos,
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and then your audience grows so much faster on YouTube.
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That's exactly what I did.
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And I'm just an introvert.
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It's so much more appealing to just sit down
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and enjoy the creative process of writing for one to two hours every morning while sleeping well,
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knowing that it is essentially fueling my entire business and life's work or whatever kind of work I want to do.
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The other thing is that you won't see these digital assets on a business's balance sheet, but they represent 90% of the S&P 500's value.
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Kim Kardashian, Taylor Swift, Ryan Reynolds, Mr. Beast, Elon Musk all have massive audiences and personal brands,
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but you probably don't want anything near their level of fame.
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And that's perfectly fine
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because you don't need millions of followers to make this work This is like one big thing
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when I talk to beginner creators They think it's they have millions of followers
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or they have nothing personally I replaced my freelancing income at around 5,000 followers.
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My buddy Randy is a fitness personal trainer
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and at 10,000 followers He was making well over a hundred thousand dollars a month because again, he knew what he was doing.
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He studied.
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He invested in his education.
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He learned the skill of business and marketing and sales that allowed him to do that.
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People hear that, oh, $100,000 a month, and they think that's absolutely absurd.
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That's on the low end for business.
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Like, you're still in this employee mindset of I get paid for my time, not my value.
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And you have a poor relationship with money that changes how you perceive it.
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And so you hear $100,000 and you think that's not even close to possible for me.
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And that's completely fine because you probably don't need that much.
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And as I said, that's on the low end for like a business that's doing well.
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So if you just want to replace your income, that's not far off.
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That's three to six to 12 months of focused learning
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and effort and skill acquisition and showing up every day and actually putting your thoughts out there and trying to grow.
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The point is that people drastically overestimate how much is actually required for them to win.
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And so they psych themselves out.
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They get paralyzed.
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Analysis by paralysis, a paralysis by analysis, because all they see is these out of touch celebrities and influencers with millions of followers because that's all they follow.
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So I'd be stupid if I didn't mention this here, but that's exactly why we run the creator boot camp where you turn your interest into an audience that pays you.
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You walk away with clarity on the topics that you can talk about, a content system that runs on 60 minutes a day, and one idea that becomes a week of content.
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General enrollment for this is closed, but it is still available for those who sign up for Eden on the pro plan
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So if you want to join a community of other creators
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that are doing the same thing as you and learn everything
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that you need to start Then check it out with the link in the description
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or go to Eden.so slash boot camp Now the next thing
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I want to talk about is how writing completely shifts your brain
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and your life And this is super hard to explain
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but writing goes so much deeper than just putting your pen to paper and like drawing little scribbles obviously.
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It shifts your mind to see the world in a more meaningful way.
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You make more connections.
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You receive more good dopamine through those connections.
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You notice more in the world.
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Conversations become a source of inspiration.
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Your thoughts become filled with ideas you're wrestling to understand.
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You notice more detail in life rather than living on the stressful surface.
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And so in my eyes, there are four key benefits to writing.
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The first is that writing rewires how you think.
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And the core mechanism here is forced linearity, which is just a fancy way of saying that you can feel like you understand something in your head,
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but writing forces you to collapse it into a single stream.
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Thinking without writing is like walking through a forest where you can see every direction, while writing itself is like driving on a road through the disorienting mess.
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You have to decide where you're going, which turns you're going to make, and whether or not you want to take the scenic route and how to navigate back if you get lost.
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In other words, writing is the apparatus for thinking.
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It's the gym where your mind is built.
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So those who are very into health and fitness
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and go to the gym to strengthen their body and make sure it's healthy, but you're not writing for your mind, you need to make that connection.
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So you may feel like you understand your feelings
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or the counter arguments going on in your head or even your own values and beliefs.
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But until you actually write them out, I can almost guarantee that you don't understand those things and
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that someone else either planted it in your head
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or you adopted beliefs and ideologies without question
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and now they're dominating your mind and taking control of your life
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and yes it is that serious now benefit number two is
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that writing increases pattern recognition and therefore it increases dopamine good dopamine
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and there are a few layers to this the first is
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that by writing regularly you build an external record of your
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thinking you are able to quickly reference what you've written in
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the past as a way of articulating your current thoughts better it It helps you think with clarity.
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And I'm not talking, you actually go and reference the thing.
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I'm saying since you wrote it down, since you wrote the newsletter or the article or even just the journal entry,
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that is now more of a part of your mind and you're able to say those things in a more clear way.
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Now, the second layer is similar to what's called the photographer's eye.
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So for a photographer, after a few years of serious practice, you start to see frames and compositions in everyday life.
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So the world doesn't look the same because you go to a mountain range, you're on a hike, and then you can see something that other people can't.
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You start to compose the scene in your mind like you were taking a picture, and you start to think and appreciate the scenery that much more.
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With writing, you notice this when you're speaking with other people, when you're having a conversation in other people's writing, in the books you read.
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It opens up a deeper appreciation for the art in your life.
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Now, the third layer is that you notice ideas you normally wouldn't have.
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And this is just how the mind works.
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But when you have a goal or a project that you're working towards, your mind kind of conspires in your favor, so to say.
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Psycho-cybernetics, it notices the things that are going to aid you in achieving your goal.
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The problem is that most people have unconscious goals.
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They haven't made their goals conscious, or they haven't set their own meaningful goals that actually trump the unconscious goals.
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Many people set conscious goals, but their unconscious goals that other people set for them are still more conditioned into their brain.
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So their conscious goals don't really mean anything.
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There's no gravity to them and you let them go immediately.
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That's what most New Year's resolutions are.
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But for someone who has been conditioned since childhood that they should go to school and be a good student,
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the idea of starting a business isn't even going to register in their brain because it's a threat to who they are.
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They're going to notice the ideas and the opportunities that allow them to advance through the traditional school, job, retire path.
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That's just how it works.
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It's the same phenomenon where if you take me and take you and we read the same book, different ideas are going to stick out to us
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and we're going to see different ideas as more important and we're going to remember them.
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We're essentially going to read two entirely different books just by how we interpret it.
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And that is all because of the goals and projects that are framing how we perceive situations.
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So for me, I have a newsletter that I write every single week
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that turns into this YouTube video and turns into other content.
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But that is my sole focus.
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That is the important goal for my week.
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And so when I go on walks or I listen to conversations, ideas just pop up out of nowhere and somehow connect themselves to my newsletter.
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And that's how my newsletters and writing become very unique is
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because I'm not just sitting down and writing it all at once there.
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I'm collecting ideas just by living my life since I have the newsletter as a top of mind goal.
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Your mind is like a heat seeking missile toward its goals, but you actually need goals
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or else you're going to be a heat seeking missile toward the goals that society assigned for you.
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And that's horrible.
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So writing is one way out of that mess because you actually have a project to focus your mind on.
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That's actually the entire learning process as well.
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That's how you learn most things.
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So benefit number three is that writing helps you articulate your thoughts as we've touched on.
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But most people walk around believing they understand things that they don't,
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not because they're dumb, but because they've never been forced to externalize the thought and actually look at it.
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Writing is not only a tool to improve communication, thus improving most other areas of your life, but a tool to expose whether or not you actually know what you're talking about.
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And that's what most people are afraid of when it comes to writing.
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They're afraid of the struggle that comes from doing something meaningful.
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They just want to coast by and enjoy their life
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and hopefully make some money even though they're not putting much effort into it.
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And of course, they end up in a mediocre life because they're running on autopilot.
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They don't choose their struggle.
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Again, they're assigned their struggle.
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They want the writing or the creative work to be easy.
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They want all of the ideas to just come to their head immediately.
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They don't want to sit down and stare at a blank page
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and be forced to research and learn and Find what their actual beliefs are
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so they can write it out and that leads to the important next benefit
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Which is that writing helps you learn faster and the future belongs to those who can learn the fastest
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Because if the gap between where you are
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and where you want to be is knowledge is learning is Understanding how to do the things
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that gets the result of the person you want to be
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then the person that learns fastest is the one who gets to that point the fastest.
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The person who doesn't learn at all after graduation, which is what most people do.
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They go to school, they graduate, and then they never learn a thing again for the rest of their life.
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They're just going off of their preset knowledge.
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Writing is the antidote to that because 80% of writing is research and learning.
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Writing is both a form of teaching and understanding.
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In learning science, there's the protege effect, which shows that students who teach material retain it better than students who merely study it.
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The cognitive load required to figure out how to explain something to someone else forces deeper understanding, better organization, and identification of gaps in knowledge.
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I'm not exaggerating when I say that I learned more in six months of writing
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when I started out than I did throughout the entirety of college or the entirety of high school.
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And I'm not talking about like learning basic English and learning how to write letters on a page.
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I didn't really need to learn basic history because I wasn't that interested in it.
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I didn't even apply myself and learn it.
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And now since I chose to write about history in some of my newsletters, I understand it so much better than I did just sitting in a lecture at school.
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You look at Daniel Schmachtenberger who talks about this quite a bit.
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He didn't go to school.
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His parents taught him how to read, how to write, and how to just generally operate within society according to their values.
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But outside of that, learning is the process of life.
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Learning is what you do when you're actually pursuing something meaningful and building something meaningful.
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You learn what you need to learn and you become 10 times more articulate when you do it that way.
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Lastly, writing demands that you understand.
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So you read something, you feel like you get it, then you try to write about it and you realize that you can't.
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And most people think it's because they aren't qualified to write about the topic, which is bullshit.
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You can write about an idea just like any other person on planet Earth can, just like you can speak it to your friend right now.
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You can go and tell your friend about the idea that you heard about.
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If you can do that, you can write about it.
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That's a limiting belief that stops so many creators and writers when it's just nonsense.
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You're just creating invisible gatekeepers in your head out of fear of actually doing the thing and publishing your thoughts.
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But that's actually a good thing, is not knowing how to write it because you don't truly understand it,
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because that exposes the gap and it gives you the thing to learn next
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that you would have never have found if you didn't try to write what you have learned.
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Now we're gonna talk about the writing system
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that I use to generate ideas people can't help but read and I'm going to go over my general system.
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This isn't going to be a course.
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I have plenty of other videos, plenty of resources, the bootcamp like I mentioned.
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If you want the full step-by-step process and all of the theory
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and the slides and all of the information you need along with the practices, then go and find it elsewhere.
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This is a broad overview to just see if you're even interested in it.
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Now, when it comes to ideas, I've never been the most organized person.
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I actually think building a second brain
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or a system for your ideas is like a false god because systems succumb to entropy.
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They fall apart with time.
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It's always going to happen.
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I don't care how perfect your notion system is for capturing ideas.
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It's going to fall apart one day.
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It's so cool to you right now.
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It's not going to be in a year.
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You're going to grow up you're going to evolve.
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You're going to try a new system, and then the same thing is going to happen.
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So just get over it.
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Embrace the mess.
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Embrace the chaos.
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That's where I've honestly found the most success is just embracing the chaos, which doesn't have to be completely chaos, and just jotting ideas down in the same place.
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Just having a place where I can put ideas down so that at least they're recorded somewhere.
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And of course, ideas get lost all the time.
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I can't find them all the time because that's not really the problem.
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If you need to remember it, then it's not important.
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And if it's important, you'll remember it.
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The act of writing it down is just the act of putting your thoughts into words.
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So I've found that great writing or content on the internet
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that actually gains traction
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and doesn't disappear into a black hole of nobody caring about your work boils down to a few things.
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You need one topic or theme for the week.
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For me, that's my newsletter.
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You need a place to quickly jot down ideas.
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You need a way to capture inspiration.
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So social posts, YouTube videos, sub stack articles, et cetera, PDFs, images.
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You need to understand how to package the hook or title
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so that people actually want to read it because writing or content is like a gift.
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You have the actual contents, which is what you want to say.
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Then you have the packaging, what makes other people want to open it and see what's inside.
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And last, you need to effectively pull from your ideas, inspiration, and research while you're actually writing or creating, because that's why you jot down the ideas in the first place,
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is to reference them while you're writing.
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So my system is just that, and we're going to go over it.
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So the first step is how to pick what to write about.
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And this one always throws everyone for a loop because they just want to, they've been told to niche down, they don't know what to talk about, they're afraid to talk about multiple things, even though they have multiple interests,
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and if they have multiple interests, Almost every other human being on the planet can have multiple interests.
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Like i'm not only interested in business
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Neither is any other businessman on the planet They can people
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can become interested in something stop limiting yourself to what you can talk about
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if you find it important That's unique because you interpreted it
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and decided to post it That is all the niching down you need
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because you are not an animal That dies
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when they get put into a different niche or environment like a lion
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that gets put in alaska You are a human who learns, builds, and adapts so that they can thrive in any niche.
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So I operate by two principles when I pick a topic.
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First, is it something that I find important or worth sharing?
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Because by simply filtering an idea through my perspective and not overthinking myself to death, it becomes unique.
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I have a specific identity, and I'm probably not going to speak to soccer moms in their 40s no matter how hard I try.
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By just talking about what I find worth sharing, it will attract the people I can impact the most.
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The second principle is, is it packaged or framed in a way that grabs attention?
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Because as a writer, that's what you do.
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That's your job.
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There's journaling and then there's writing.
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You grab attention.
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Otherwise, your writing doesn't get read.
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The way you do that in today's world is by studying what's working on social media
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and applying the structure and principles to your hook, your title, your structure, etc. I'm subscribed to the Substack subreddit
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and I got a notification the other day
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and it was just a person that was complaining about their work not gaining traction
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but they don't want to do what it takes to gain traction.
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They're like, oh I love the writing.
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I just love the writing aspect of it but it's not picking up.
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Why is that?
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I don't want to conform my voice to these hooks
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or these structures or whatever it may be but they can't see that they're contradicting themselves.
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They want to be a writer, but they don't care what people think, but they also want people to care about their writing, you have to understand
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that refining your voice for it to be impactful to other people is not sacrificing your authenticity or your voice.
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It's called improving your voice so that you become a better writer.
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Before I go on a large tangent and rant, that's just social media growth in a nutshell.
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That's what you do.
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And the simplest way to do this is to just research before you actually write the thing, before you post the YouTube video.
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Look at titles that work.
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You need to expose yourself to what works over and over again
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so that your pattern recognition system just knows what to write like it's second nature.
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You need to read good tweets, viral, maybe not viral tweets, high-performing tweets over and over.
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You need to read more sub-stack articles that have done well and ask yourself, why did this do so well compared to mine, compared to the ones that didn't do well?
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You just have to study and learn.
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That's what you do.
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And what that does is it shows you and teaches you what the market is already paying attention to.
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Because if you were to start a business, are you going to go and start something completely new?
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You.
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I'm talking about you, not some special genius person.
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No, what you do when you start a business is you do what works and you make it your own.
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You can go and sell your productivity journal because people actually buy those, but you add your little spin to it.
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It's exactly what you do with content.
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You do what works, but with your own spin from your own voice, from your own interpretation.
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So there are a few ways to do this.
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Well, I'm going to show you how to do it in Eden.
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What I'm going to show you is free to do.
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You don't have to pay to do any of this, but you can do it anywhere.
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You can do it in notes or wherever you want to capture ideas to, but you can paste links into your library and just store the ideas here on your phone too.
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You download the iOS app that's on TestFlight.
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You hit the quick capture.
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You jot an idea down.
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It comes in looking like this.
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You can add as many as you want, and you can paste social links as well as you scroll and find them on the timeline.
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So that's the one way you do it is
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when you see a video that's doing really well or an idea that you want to save, you save it in a place where you can preferably find it later.
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But as I said, if it disappears, that's fine.
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But then the next thing you can use is an outlier tool.
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So there are tools like one of 10
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that offers like you can look at what's trending on YouTube and there's others like that.
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But there's also the Discover Feed in Eden.
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It's a tool.
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This is what writers use.
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They use research tools to actually research the market if they don't want to do it manually.
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But of course, you can do it manually.
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And one of my favorite things to do is to look for a specific creator
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and then go to their actual account and then filter their content by top liked.
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This is especially good if you're trying to get on YouTube
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and find YouTube titles or just angles that people are already paying attention to.
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And then you can see people's top YouTube videos or top posts
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or top notes or top articles or top tweets or top Instagram reels or carousels or whatever it may be.
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And then if you want to learn how to actually recreate it, just hit the reverse engineer button and then say, hey, I want to recreate this with my own idea, and then you're good to go.
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And that's exactly what I did for this video and the newsletter that I wrote previously for this.
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The topic that inspired this video was a video that got like 700,000 views, and it was called The Notebook System That Saved My Brain.
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I looked at that and I'm like, huh, what about the writing system that saved my brain?
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What about the writing habit that saved my brain?
373
And the title may not reflect that right now, but it was a good starting point for the idea
374
that I could then write about and of course I can craft the the title
375
and thumbnail later on if I come up with a better idea
376
that may or may not work because none of this is guaranteed.
377
So once you have something to write about what I personally do is create one project for the entire week
378
because I post one newsletter to Substack
379
which is also an article on Substack I copy paste
380
that to x articles which gets posted there as well copy-pasted that eventually turns into a soft YouTube script,
381
and then the YouTube video gets uploaded to podcast channels, and then I can use the original newsletter for tweet ideas throughout the week, or as ideas just come to mind,
382
I can write the tweets as well, and then those get cross-posted to Substack Notes, and then I turn them into images that I can post on Instagram and LinkedIn,
383
and then for some of the tweets that I really like, I'll just sit in front of the camera and read the tweet to the camera, and boom, now I have reels,
384
TikToks, and shorts, and it only took an hour or two every day.
385
And frankly, any more content than that, I know there's Alex Ramosi and other people who just want you to push more and more and more volume, but everyone's doing that, right?
386
If you want a competitive advantage, do something different.
387
Tone it down.
388
Increase the quality of the things that you're doing and make them impossible to ignore.
389
Add a bit of scarcity to your brand so people aren't just overloaded with it.
390
They have to wait for you to actually post something.
391
And when they do see something from you, they aren't used to it.
392
It's a dopamine hit for them when that's not happening for any other creator that they look at.
393
So when I have the topic that I want to write about, I create a project around it.
394
I create a board.
395
Of course, this can be a Notion page.
396
You can write wherever you want.
397
But now what I do, once I have the topic, is I'll create an outline note.
398
And then inside of here, I'll just write out certain things that I think should be in here.
399
This isn't even close to fleshed out.
400
It's just the ideas that came to mind so that I could start to create some kind of structure.
401
Then inside of the board itself, I paste links to YouTube videos inside of here
402
that I think would have good ideas that I could use inside of the newsletter.
403
And then I can have AI chats open alongside me as I write and just ask questions when I need them, or I can reference videos from inside of the board.
404
If I create a new chat, click on this video, and then I just ask it for questions to pull the ideas
405
that I need from inside of it.
406
And then I can quick capture ideas into this board as well
407
so that I can just have them with me as I'm writing, which is honestly a dream come true for any writer.
408
You know how valuable this can be.
409
And then when it comes to generating title ideas or things like that, I just reference the newsletter in the chat.
410
And then if I want them to be data backed, I can have it search for a specific creator's titles, or I can reference swipe files inside of my board because I've saved ideas before.
411
So I have an entire database of YouTube videos and titles that I think work really well inside of here.
412
So I can look through these
413
when it's time to generate ideas for how I want to actually package the newsletter or YouTube video that I'm putting out.
414
So, so far the entire process is just capture ideas as they come to mind and save inspiration, save the posts that you like, that did really well, that have good title structures,
415
that have good ideas in general, jot down your own ideas, and then you create one topic per week and just have that as a project, a central project where you can put all of your research.
416
You can create a note.
417
You can add a bunch of links in there if you want, or you can create a board and just paste everything in, and then you can write with your research alongside it.
418
And then all you really do is you just outline, write, and repurpose as we kind of sort of discussed, but outlining and learning how to structure newsletters,
419
that's like a topic for an entirely new video.
420
So instead, what I found in the Eden Discord, someone created a guide for my top Substack articles for how they're structured.
421
And what I did is I took those
422
and I turned it into a prompt
423
that will ask you for what you want to talk about and then help guide you to creating your first newsletter.
424
So if you actually want to use that prompt, there's a link to it in the description.
425
And that alone will help you write your first newsletter if you want to, or your first article or your first YouTube script or whatever it may be.
426
So that's the entire system.
427
Walking, reading, and about 60 minutes a day of writing forms the foundation for some of the most future-proof skills, learning, thinking, and earning independently.
428
So I'll leave it at that.
429
I'm happy to expand on it more in the future, but if you want to watch more on it now, I'd actually highly recommend watching my last video,
430
which goes over how to pull psychological levers to get people to pay more attention, and that complements writing very nicely.
431
Thank you for watching.
432
Links to the boot camp and prompt in the description.
433
I'll see you in the next video.
434
Bye.
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Video
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How Writing Transforms Thinking—and Why It Matters for Your English
The video shares a relatable story: a self-proclaimed "big dumb meathead" discovers writing as a tool to sharpen thinking, build a business, and communicate clearly. This scenario mirrors how learning English with videos can transform your own skills—whether you’re aiming for IELTS speaking practice or everyday fluency. Just as writing unlocks mental clarity, consistent speaking practice (like shadowing) unlocks linguistic confidence.
Useful Chunks & Collocations to Master
- "Altered the direction of my life" – A powerful phrase for describing big changes (e.g., "Learning shadowing altered the direction of my English progress").
- "Fundamentally changed" – Perfect for emphasizing shifts (e.g., "The shadowing technique has fundamentally changed my pronunciation").
- "Completely altered the outcome" – Use to highlight results (e.g., "Daily practice completely altered the outcome of my speaking tests").
- "Incredibly cheap to build" – Adapt for skills: "Shadow speech is incredibly cheap to practice—all you need is a video!"
- "Compound while you sleep" – A vivid way to describe growth (e.g., "Skills from shadowing compound while you sleep, improving even when you’re not practicing").
Your Shadowing Challenge: Try It Now
Take 2 minutes to practice the shadowing technique with a short clip from the video. Pause after each sentence, then repeat it aloud, mimicking the tone, speed, and stress. Focus on phrases like "the rules of wealth creation have fundamentally changed"—notice how the speaker stresses "fundamentally." This is english speaking practice that works: by copying native patterns, you train your brain to think and speak like a pro. Do this daily, and you’ll soon feel your own clarity and fluency "alter the direction" of your English skills—just like writing did for the video’s creator.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if it's important, you'll remember |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has never crossed · you've written · haven't made |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | being paid · was built · being replaced |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | someone who wants · people who were · people who didn |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.