You cannot pay anyone to do this for you.
This is not an online course.
I will not make you smarter "in 5 minutes a week."
You will not make a million dollars in 6 months.
(Without Being Cringe)
3 years ago, I was screwed.
I quit my job as a professor to pioneer a new kind of academic life on the internet, but...
I was failing.
My plan was to read, write, and teach full-time with complete freedom.
I studied all the business books, I listened to all the podcasts, I took some online courses. But I was still failing.
I "built an audience" and launched a bunch of "products," but my audience wasn't growing, the money wasn't enough.
I hated myself.
Did I really spend 15 years getting a PhD and publishing research just to become a random loser on the internet?
I was constantly working on my business to "make it" as a full-time independent scholar, but I was constantly frustrated, worried, distracted, and scattered: I could hardly read, think, or write at all.
That's when I learned the most important lesson of my life.
Today, I read and write for 2-4 hours just about every day. I'm not famous or wealthy but I publish essays and books that are read and discussed privately by thousands of high-IQ readers, including billionaires, politicians, and artists you've probably heard of.
I research, write, and publish anything I think is true (and interesting).
I cannot be "cancelled."
I have not made millions of dollars (yet) but I will earn $200k for the first time this year, while living the ideal lifestyle I first set out to build 5 years ago.
So what changed? What did I learn?
I will tell you the single most important lesson I learned, but first I will tell you about my mistakes.
Anyone who sets out to build an audience by writing is not worth listening to.
It's fake because they will say and do anything to win new followers, which means by definition they are not seeking the truth.
For many years, I thought I had to "build an audience" to become a great writer who is widely read and well-paid.
I honestly thought it was the main requirement to succeeding as a writer.
But every time I sat down to do the work of "audience building," something felt wrong.
It felt fake. It was not rewarding. It felt like drudgery. A chore.
And I never had any particularly interesting or good or real ideas or thoughts or discoveries when I was focused on audience building.
Then I started looking carefully at people who are good at "audience building."
People who are good at "audience building" are FAKE and CRINGE!
I'm not trying to be mean, just objectively: These are simple people who do not know many things deeply, they are not CALLED.
They're usually just energetic, extroverted personalities who strongly desire money, power, and success. You know the people I'm talking about.
I'm not saying I'm better than those people (I'm constantly succumbing to vanity, pride, avarice, etc.).
My point is just that I'm a different kind of beast.
If you're reading this, you are a different kind of beast.
I could never get myself to do "audience building" very well, or for very long.
I never once did meaningful work within that paradigm.
I never once earned an important follower with that paradigm.
I was depressed because I thought there was something wrong with me.
I thought I was stupid. All these random bro's are building big audiences. I studied philosophy and political science and history professionally for 10 years and I was getting beat by a bunch of dorks 2 years out of their Finance degrees!
I wanted to shoot myself (I would never, suicide is a sin!!!!). But I wanted to!
But then I discovered the alternative to audience building.
As soon as I decided to quit "audience building," my work improved drastically.
I started making real discoveries, having fun, and publishing way more consistently.
I felt more proud of myself, and felt confident in every social situation. Because I stood for something.
I officially quit "building an audience" and that's when my audience really started growing.
To this day, I've never built an audience.
The most brilliant and prolific academic I ever met writes all of his books and papers in a zillion Microsoft Word documents.
The most successful people usually don't even have to-do lists.
The most productive people do not have regimented calendars.
"Productivity" is a false dream sold to people who are distractable and WEAK.
Productive people are productive primarily because of genetics!
There is only only important and actionable lesson we can take from the life of productive people:
Focus on what's most important.
Focus is the true version of what productivity gurus are selling.
They sell "productivity" instead of Focus because Focus is free!
There is no advice! You just do it!
If you really know what is most important and you focus on that, you never need any productivity system or tool.
Because you're only doing one thing!
You don't need a calendar system: Every day you just have to do one thing!
You don't need special writing apps: All that matter is the words!
The only reason you would ever care about "productivity" is because you don't care enough about the one most important thing.
If you simply know what is the most important thing to you, then you have nothing to learn about productivity.
The only thing you have to do is focus. And focus requires no learning!
If you're focused, you can move slow.
You can even be lazy.
If you're focused on writing a book that you really believe in, and you have three hours available for writing today, you could spend the first two hours in the bathtub if you want to. Or staring at a wall. Who cares? As long as you're focused! And as long as you write one decent page in the final hour.
If you do that every day for the rest of your life, you will die in the 99th percentile of writing output!
Focus let's you be unproductive, slow, and lazy—AND STILL DESTROY THE COMPETITION!
Of course, the million-dollar question then becomes: What should you focus on?
I will tell you, but
Online courses can be great, but they are FAKE and CRINGE!
I've taken some online courses containing great information, created by smart and honest people.
The thing is... They're not actually courses, they don't really teach you.
They INSPIRE you!
They should not be called "courses."
Online courses should be called "Expensive Drugs!"
A course is just some lights on your computer screen, a collection of people, a bunch of EXCITING REMINDERS about what you already know you want to be doing!
Hey, don't get me wrong: If you're in a rut, maybe it's worth it to pay someone 10,000 dollars to remind you things you already know.
But that doesn't make it a "course," which is why online courses are FAKE (and CRINGE).
Instead of selling you a course, I will just remind you right now what you need to be doing right now!
You can get all the value of a $10,000 course right this minute simply by following my simple directions right now.
Let this moment be the moment that everything changes.
You already know that you are called to be a writer!
You already know that this is your life's mission.
You already know that you're neglecting your highest calling.
(That's why you're still reading some guy talk about computer drugs.)
You know exactly what you need to do, and online courses are an expensive way to NOT DO IT.
Many online writing courses graduate thousands of writers every year.
How many of them are producing deep, genuine, and interesting writing today? Almost none.
You don't need another course to finally focus on your life's mission starting right now.
Everything a course can do for you, I am going to do for you right now, on this page.
If you think audience-building, productivity, and online courses are fake, just wait until you learn about careers.
Careers are faker than Kim Kardashian's gluteus maximus, and cringier than a bunch of faggots (a faggot is a bundle of sticks).
Some people say that writing online is good for your career, but if careers are fake then who cares?
Given accelerating technocapital, any career can disappear overnight.
Or you can get fired for wrongthink, whatever.
It's not just that careers are unreliable now, it's something much bigger:
Real success today means freedom from the old career model.
We have a new digital aristocracy.
There are people who think and live brilliantly—and THAT'S IT—that is their job.
They have plenty of money, they get invited to the best parties, and they choose to work for fun.
They can get paid gigs, or form a partnership, or get investors, in whatever sector they want to get involved in.
These individuals have the greatest lives in the world right now—and none of them have careers.
Writing corny blog posts to advance your career is dumb.
Writing publicly with courage simply to pursue the truth is NOBLE and POWERFUL.
If you write the real truth honestly and consistently, you'll never need a career.
Do you actually have what it takes?
I have no f*cking clue! Probably not.
I'm just telling you how it works.
For the 1% of you who can pull it off.
Over the past 2,500 years of Western civilization, it has been observed by virtually every great thinker of every age that money is the root of evil.
From the Bible to Shakespeare, it has always been known that money is the root of everything FAKE and CRINGE.
Until about 1970, at which point people decided that money is the alpha and omega of human life (they were wrong).
Today, money is more artificial than ever, as the US government just prints it without limit. Something like 80% of all US dollars were created, out of thin air, in the past few years.
Because money is fake, acquiring it is not as difficult as it might seem.
There is actually an over-abundance of money in the world. Just sitting there. It has nowhere to go.
Do you know what's not over-abundant? Smart people with good ideas.
Wealthy people WANT nothing more than to give money to smart people. They literally scour the globe looking for people to give money to.
If you want money, first recognize that it's fake.
Then just get smart and discover a secret truth!
Once you do that, you own something literally more valuable than all the money in the world.
Then people with money will just give you money (because it's fake and cringe and they literally have nothing else to do with it).
I'm not kidding, you'll have to turn them away.
Nobody will tell you this anymore but... There is only one objective reality, and it is accessible to human reason.
It's confusing, it can be paradoxical and mysterious.
The damn thing wiggles when you poke it (so it's hard to get a clean read on it).
But it's possible to increase your comprehension of reality.
Whoever comprehends reality the best, wins the game.
The cool thing is that we have tons of free, open-source tools for understanding how reality works.
Smart people in the past just wrote it down.
They had to watch whole nations disappear, they had to watch their friends and family die, they had to experience prison and disease and war and worse, to discover how reality works.
But they wrote those discoveries down.
In plain language.
You can just read them (in the comfort of your home).
And then you will know way, WAY more about how reality actually works.
All of the most common ways to ruin your life are based on error and illusion (believing something is REAL when it is actually FAKE).
This is why the Bible says: "The truth will set you free."
Instead of audience-building, you find real, non-trivial, and non-obvious truths about how the world works—truths that most other people do not know, or do not believe.
Focus replaces productivity.
Understanding critical elements of reality even 1% better than your peers will make you more successful in all areas of life.
If you develop those truths, and tease out all the implications, consistently and courageously in public, your words will attract a small but exceptional crowd of the most thoughtful and intrepid people.
The most powerful people in the world are always searching for under-appreciated truths. They read voraciously. The smaller your audience is, the more you will interest these people, because it means their competitors probably haven't heard about you yet.
If you can find some secrets, and write about them honestly, your ideas will eventually magnetize a disproportionately elite network of thinkers, artists, founders, hackers, and investors.
You might only have 500 "followers" on social media and your email list, but the small private network you magnetize can easily be worth millions through the projects, partnerships, and opportunities it can generate over the course of your life.
If your ideas are being read by even a small group of thoughtful and powerful people, congratulations: You're successful.
What? Did you want to earn a million dollars in 6 months or something? Fake. And cringe.
Many of the greatest writers in history never got to enjoy even a dozen thoughtful and powerful people in their audience!
If you can make it this far, then you just have to stick with it: You have a shot at long-term influence.
Why? Because it's only tiny groups of thoughtful and powerful people who write the history books.
One million people on TikTok are not going to write a history book together. But maybe one of your smart friends will.
More practically, you can create your own job at someone else's company (as a researcher or consultant or some other word that this kind of person makes up), or launch your own company, or find investors, or monetize your writing—whatever.
But it's all because you focused, you found and developed some hard-earned truths, and you quit being fake (and cringe).
To start, all I need from you is ONE HOUR, EVERY SINGLE DAY, FOR THE NEXT FIVE DAYS.
That's it. But you have to commit 100%.
I will tell you exactly what to do, but you have to promise you'll do it.
If you feel called to focus on your writing, enter your email below.
(No charge, no strings attached, no spam, etc.)