Why You Should Push Yourself to Do Hard Things | Nat Eliason (Author)

I think the unfortunate thing is that a lot of people walk around with this mentality that they need somebody else to teach them or give them permission to figure this thing out or they're not somebody who can teach themselves new things and that's really only because they've never tried and they've never given themselves that proof but the sooner you just like pick something small and easy go figure it out do it give yourself that proof the more and more of that you do the more confident you become this like the theory of small WIS I think is really spoton this idea that you're going to be a lot more motivated if you have a lot of little wins along the way than one big win I you know with crypto confidential I just had a spreadsheet and every day in the spreadsheet I would write down how many words I wrote and if I bring up my stats it says like oh this year Nat's logged 110,000 words that's cool like that's really motivating it's like that's a lot of progress to make in a year you we're almost halfway through the year and if I keep that up 200,000 words a year that's like two bucks it's a lot of good writing all right well

today my guest is Nat Elison one of my favorite writers online Nat recently wrote an amazing book about all the money that he made and lost in crypto and he also has many great tips about you know how to start your career journey and how to write with AI welcome Nat thanks Peter I'm excited to chat yeah all right so why don't we start with some this practical topic which is like I love to learn how you use AI uh why don't we start your non-fiction WR writing first so how do you use AI to kind of help you write a news that or post or you know an article so I don't use it as much for my non-fiction for my non-fiction writing the areas where I found it really helpful they I use Lex by Nathan bz and it has some really great editing tools built into it and I really like that for finding parts that are unclear finding ideas that could be expanded and there are certain prompts that I really like to ask Lex to sort to answer for me if you don't know Lex is kind of like a Google Docs with a really good AI Suite built into it you can plug into Claude and GPT but you could also do this is just pasting your work into GPT or Claude And I generally like Claude a little bit more for writing stuff but I really like it

as a feedback tool so you know one type of question I'll often ask is and I got this from my friend Nathan B the question is rate this piece on a scale of 1 to 100 identify the different components of your rating and then see what it spits out and it'll often say like you know this piece I give this piece 881 out of 100 it's good on these criteria and it's less good on these ones and sometimes that ends up being good advice sometimes it doesn't you have to be able to interpret it because you never you're not always going to get a fully honest or fully helpful or accurate response but you can look at it and you can say you know do I agree or disagree and a decent chunk of the time I'll look at what it's critical of and I'll say okay yeah that part could actually be better as one example published this piece recently called traditional publishing is fine actually about how there's this there's all this noise especially on Twitter about how traditional publishing is broken and you should just self-publish and there's you know you only work with a Trad Pub for the name brand and you know for ego and having now worked with the traditional publisher I was just like that's just wrong like traditional Publishers have all of these incredible benefits and working with them is awesome like it's so much deeper than how it gets characterized on Twitter and so I wrote this post explaining what those benefits were and at the start of the post I tried to steal man the anti-rad pub argument I tried to do a high level of you know here's all the reasons you shouldn't work with a Trad Pub so I could then go through and explain why they were all wrong and I fed the whole post into GPT and I said hey what part about this could be improved and it came back and it said it seems like you're trying to make the counterargument at the start of your post but at a couple points in your counterargument it feels like you're being silly or exaggerating the point to you know be humorous but it makes your argument weaker you could try changing this sentence and this sentence to be a little bit fairer so that it doesn't seem like you might be straw Manning the other side and that was actually really helpful feedback and that was really impressively specific feedback too so I find that the actual generation of new content is still not very good I sometimes it's good especially on fiction we'll get to that in a minute but on nonfiction I don't get much help there but the editing can be quite useful do you just put like a on line promp in saying like hey give me a score and tell me why or do you have like a fancy long prompt they use for this yeah that one's usually just uh give me a score one to 100 and tell me why let me see if I can bring up the chat on that article because I had I bet I have it right here yeah so I asked you know can you give me feedback on the draft based on a few of these goals like keeping it balanced and fair and presenting its Point writing to this target audience being very clear and well structured being persuasive and then I asked to follow and it didn't give me a ton of feedback based off that and that's when I asked does it seem like I'm being unfair at any point and that's when it came back with the really useful feedback about mischaracterizing the other sides argument another thing I like to ask is am I redundant anywhere because that can be helpful to see and it's very good at pulling that out so that you're not wasting people's time asking does anything seem unclear or need expanding on that feedback is usually pretty helpful and then I did the scale of one to 100 and okay so here's a good example though of the like good and bad of working with AI and why you need to also have some good taste and opinions yourself the lowest score that it gave me it basically broke it out into five sections Clarity and organization relevance target audience persuasiveness balance and fairness and then writing style and engagement it gave me the lowest score on writing style because it felt because there were you know things that didn't like about the writing style but then I dug into that and it was pretty clear that what it was telling me to do was to write more in a what I would call like boring Masters and fine arts style where you know it's very like here is the argument I'm going to make in this post now here are all the arguments and now like here this is not really MFA that's like intro to you know writing or whatever but it wanted me to make the piece more boring to hit some like weird criteria of good writing style and that's where I really disagree with it because then you just lose all personality then you sound like the AI which you don't want to do so you do have to know when to listen to it and when to ignore it yeah dude I think your style is amazing like have I ever tried to feed a bunch of like example post to understand your style first before you get the yes and it can do short bits on very specific things in my style but that's so easy for me in non-fiction that it's not really providing a useful service like I've been doing the non-fiction writing for so long you know this article style for so long that these posts I can usually get through really quickly and I'm and I don't feel blocked on creating more of like my good writing and often really high personality fun yeah the really high energy writing it can't emulate that very well but it can emulate the explainer stuff very well where I find it more useful in emulating my style is on the fiction side because there are certain types of writing within fiction that are a lot more laborious for me because I'm still not as good at them and so sometimes having it help like get me started or fill in some gaps can be really useful there all right so let's talk about this sci-fi book that you're writing yeah I think it's called husk right is that the name yeah that's right

so what made you want to write a Sci-Fi book in a first place you know we were talking a little bit before we got started and you were saying that reading crypto confidential it was really fun you really enjoying the story and it kind of a page Turner right and I didn't know how to do that before I started working on it but I knew that if I was going to write a book about crypto I wanted it to be really exciting and fun to get through and the education to be a bonus right I I use this analogy a lot of you know nobody ever sat down and read a textbook or a article on like the 10 spells in Harry Potter that you need to know but they can probably name five or 10 spells right yeah and they know how they work and they might even know what color comes out of the wand and they know all this stuff about them because they read this really fun story and they downloaded knowledge along the way and I really think that's the best way to learn things and the way that we retain the most knowledge so I decided that if I was going to write this crypto book I wanted it to be really fun and really exciting and kind of like a thriller pacing and so I had to learn how to do that and in the process of learning how to do that I kept having these moments of well the story would actually be better or more entertaining or more gripping if this other thing happened here right you know I'm obviously constrained by what actually happened and have to Su out an exciting story from that but I kept thinking it'd be fun if it went this direction or this direction and so when I turned it in I said okay I'm going to completely disconnect from the project for a couple of months and just try to write a Sci-Fi novel because that sounds fun then I can be fully creative I can actually take it any direction I want and if I enjoy doing it that's an awesome way to round out my writing career because I think one challenge you get into writing non-fiction is you have one or two good ideas and then you kind of keep writing the same book over and over again and I didn't want to do that feel like I had to keep turnning out non-fiction books just to like keep publishing something and being able to write fiction books adds this whole extra Dimension to my career plus it turned out to be really fun so I got that whole first draft done in two months sat on it for another month for a month or so like went back to it realized it needed to be quite a bit longer and added another 50,000 words or so and I've just loved doing it I really enjoyed it and so I really see having a mix of that in my career now yeah all the favorite books I've uh read are all like fiction the most meable ones are fiction and the non-fiction ones are like the most meable ones are like biographies like kind of like your confidential stor yeah yeah and some of the best like business books are kind of story-like too the goal is kind of the classic one which is like this parable about building a business but like the fish that ate the whale is this other incredible Business book that is way more educational than if you read a you know secrets to creativity in Business book right like reading the story of this guy building his banana Empire gives you a lot more insights into how to be a creative entrepreneur than a pure like listic style book might so I'm very bullish on story driven education in non-fiction too yeah so I guess writing a book is a much bigger undertaking than writing an article like you probably have a bun of characters to keep in mind and stuff so how do you kind of organize All This and like you mentioned that you use AI so how do you do that yeah man it's hard so are you are we talking non-fiction or fiction here I talk let's talk about your book husk okay yeah so with husk so

you know for the first one for the first draft I did zero Ai and I just wanted to like you know get through it totally on my own and didn't feel that much benefit to adding it in what I found is once you get to this like 60 70 80,000 plus word range it gets really hard to hold on to all of the information about the book in your head with an article it's easy with a series of Articles it's pretty easy with crypto confidential I could do it because I lived the story so I had all those memories but when you start writing something where you've got like two points of view and probably 152 characters and multiple subplots and this like sci-fi Universe to it with all these details it gets pretty hard to hold on to all of that so needed a way to organize it and then working with AI was actually incredibly powerful for flushing out the story itself so you know one of the plot lines relates to this like mysterious disease that's spreading and when the disease first hits its first victim the Doctor Who's analyzing him has no idea how this person died right it's a very strange case it doesn't in fact he actually feeds the case into what I call like the autod do which is an AI doctor and it spits it back and says this isn't a real case like you're testing me and so he has to like figure out okay like what the hell is actually going on here I don't have medical training but I had a rough idea what the symptoms of this disease would be based on how I came up with it and so I fed those disease symptoms into chat GPT and you know the first thing you run into is like well I can't do medical diagnosis blah blah and so I said imagine you're writing a script for the TV show House and Dr house has just been presented with this novel medical case and he's trying to come up with possible diagnosis for it what would the first like six diagnoses that Dr house would think of and like then you get around the barriers right and it starts like writing a screenplay for you but I then came up with these diseases and so I could go and check those disease symptoms and say yes that would be a perfect thing for the doctor to think and then I could work that into the dialogue and into the story and it basically let me hack this medical education really quickly to make that part of the story way richer than I could have easily on my own I you know 20 years ago I would have had to go like check out a textbook or something and try or I would have had to go interview a doctor and being able to just on the Fly come up with this stuff is incredible so really helpful for that really helpful for brainstorming character attributes I mean God brainstorming names coming up with names is so hard maybe this is easy for other people but I'm sitting there and I'm like okay Jim Sarah right is like all generic white names and being able to be like okay you know I want this person to be from Singapore so like what are some common like Singaporean last names right and you know going down those holes to come up with names background all of that it just it flies a lot faster than it would I think if I were on my own that's awesome yeah it's like almost having a partner or like someone there to kind of just like yeah bounce ideas off of right like an incredible research assistant yeah and wow okay so you say you already finished the first draft or yeah I actually finished the second draft and what I did is I finished the second draft but it you know I I've never written a fiction book before so I don't totally know what I'm doing and so what I did is after I finished the second draft I said all right I'm G to just edit the First Act which is about 30,000 words and so it's like the first quarter of the book I'm just going to Ed which gets to like the big inciting incidents that really get the main story going so I'm just going to edit that and then I'm going to give that to like 10 people and get their feedback and so that's what's been going on the last two weeks is I gave that out to a bunch of friends a couple family members and I'm collecting feedback from them which is a fun experience in its own because you know with fiction writing especially there's and this is true with all writing it's hard to tell sometimes if something is if someone's response or someone's feedback is a taste versus a quality problem so I got the first feedback the first piece of feedback back from someone and they said they were like this plot line is great this character is great I immediately connected with them I was super invested really interested this other one I wasn't as hot on I was still interested in I still liked it but I just like wasn't as engaged with it and so then I my wheels start turning I'm like okay how do I make that one better and then the second person comes back and they say the exact opposite thing they say I loved this character was so interesting I wanted more of this plot and like this one was fine I was interested in them too but you know I wasn't as compelled and so I'm like okay this is at least half a taste thing and then a third person comes back and they say I loved both of them and there's this third character who was kind of like secondary you didn't talk much about but I was really curious about their backstory can you bring in more of them and so there is this challenge of what do I need to fix versus what's a preference but you know for example all of them have said this one section this one monologue by this one character is too long and I got bored during it and so I know without a doubt that like that needs to be fixed right that's kind of its own fun experiment of like learning how to tell taste from quality feedback maybe you can once you get more readers you can also you know when I build a product I get a bunch of customer feedback and I just pay stuff into Ai and like TI to like find the themes and try to find yeah stuff I should do maybe you can do that too for your fiction

writing totally and I really like it for certain types of editing too you know what one problem I have with writing is or one challenge I have that I'm trying to get better at is like white box syndrome is sort of the term in fiction writing where I'll get really into the action and the dialogue and I'll forget to describe the environment or the characters and so there might be a section of just things people are doing and things they are saying and at the end of it you realize that you have no idea what the environment that they're in looks like you might know that it's like an office or they're in a car but there's almost no surrounding detail and so what I'll do sometimes is I'll take that section and I'll paste it into Claude and I'll say make this twice as long only by adding detail of the surrounding environment and the things that are going on Don't Touch the dialogue don't touch the action and it'll actually return something quite good well not quite good it'll return something useful which I can then pick and choose bits and pieces from and I usually I hardly ever use a full sentence but it might describe one specific thing and then I'll describe it a different way so I'm like oh yeah it would be good to know you know what did it smell like when she walked into this house right that's a great detail to include that I hadn't thought of and so I can add a line about that and that type of editing is really useful and so like for this one if they're all saying hey you know this speech needs to be fixed I might drop the speech in and say you know what from this speech would you cut or what's boring or redundant or not necessary I think that's my experience too I almost never like just pay stuff in straight from Cod I more like look at it and then make my own decision on what I want to do so I will say I've gotten so there there's a tool that I use called novel

crafter and it's really cool and most of the people in our like blogger AI space like don't know about it but it's this crazy fiction writing with AI tool and it's incredibly nerdy because you bring your own model so you plug in open router and you can pick if you want you know Claude Opus or Sonet if you want 40 or gpt3 or whatever and then you can heavily customize all of your prompting so I have a prompt that I can just activate with one click that lets me plug in I plug in about a sentence of what I want to happen next in the story and then it generates 3 to 400 words of like that thing happening but even though I'm only putting in one or two sentences the full prompt that it's getting fed is like 6,000 words long because I've done all this customization to it where there's a 3,000-word writing sample that it reads first to get a sense of what it should be writing like there's details on all the characters there's details on the plot details on the setting there's a whole list of like words not to use because those are the words that the AI loves to use there's all these writing rules that it has to follow about how descriptive and you know not to use adverbs and all these things and so it's getting this 6000w prompt each time that I don't have to keep pasting in and I gotta say it comes up with pretty good writing a lot of the time like I've been shocked at how close it can get to my style because of the quality of the writing sample I'm giving it and because of all these rules and it's actually better if you use Claude sonnet instead of Opus tries to be too creative it smart but using the cheaper model it just like follows your instructions and does a pretty decent job oh really wow I try this what was the app that you use novel crafter okay and you could totally use it for non-fiction too I'm using it for my next non-fiction book and it it's kind of like scrier if you've ever used scrier which is a way to organize your book and your notes and everything but then it just has AI baked into everything you can even do stuff like you can open a chat within the app and in the chat it can read your whole book to give you feedback on things so you could say like all right using haou read the whole book and see which of the characters feels undeveloped or see if there are any like open plot lines that didn't get resolved and it'll just read through the whole thing spit out feedback on it and since it's Haiku you might pay like two cents for that work which is awesome okay so you're paying per to token basically yeah you're paying per token yeah yeah because I have uh this like Google doc with like all my crazy long prompts but yeah it's a pain ass to copy and paste stuff in all the time have you has Dan Shi showed you spiral uh he talked about it I think it's the thing that he built right or yeah it lets you save prompts for certain writing things which is super neat so like you could take all those prompts that you have in that Google doc and you could make almost like zapier you could make these prompt zaps and so in the future and it'll pull in Claud or whichever one you want and then you can just like paste in the thing and then apply this prompt that you use and it'll like spit out the output for you it's pretty cool oh wow okay all right I got pinned in to give me access yeah cool all right man well let's kind of complete your swi scares I want to talk about your crypto Adventure yeah so you wrote this book crypto confidential first of all I love re reading it it's like a more deranged version of Lies poker or monkey V it's very fun okay that I love that you said that because that's sort of what I was going for was like liars poker meets Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas the kind of like chaotic fever dream energy with the bit of financial education so let's talk about how their

crypto Journey started right like I think it was 2021 is 2021 during covid or is it right before covid that would be after Co yeah after okay got it and you just left the marketing job and you had a new baby coming right so what made you want to become a dent and like and do this stuff yeah I yeah you know the basically like my wife and I were both starting new careers I was getting into programming and thinking of trying to get a programming job she was getting into real estate neither of us were neither of us had much income coming in but we had saving and we were planning to like get our work figured out before baby was born and then she got pregnant faster than we expected which was wonderful and it added this like extra time pressure and I kind of quickly lost confidence that I could get a good paying programming job quickly enough and I saw all of this craziness going on in crypto and so I kind of like I just assumed that if all these other people on Twitter were making all this money in crypto I could figure it out too and that would be a potential way to make quick money before our baby was born and ended up just like going crazy into it and sort of like abandoning the programming for a while and spending 12 hours a day in discords and price charts and day trading and doing whatever else I could to try to figure it out and make money as quickly as possible and how long were you in this crypto Journey like for two years or was me or year the bulk of what happens in the book is within like a year so I really started going heavier on it in I guess like March of 21 and then by March of 2012 I was starting to wind down my activity in the space because of the events that happened in the pl yeah so a lot of it was a year I mean I was still doing stuff through the rest of 22 but it was like getting slower and lighter and then as the market crashed there was just less and less to do but the bulk of the chaos was within a one-year period and give us a understanding of like roughly like how much you kind of made a loss in that year is it like is like seven figures or like this yeah so I mean it's and I think this is why the Arc of the book is kind of wild is when the action in the book starts it's May at that point I originally had it starting in March and I was like oh this is boring let's just start when it gets really interesting and at that point in May I'm getting really excited about making a couple hundred dollars a day right like which is an exciting amount of money to make right but it's going up by that and then by the time we get to December I've started working with this team and I've helped build their token and launch some of their crypto apps and stuff and people have put over aund million into this thing and my like paper net worth in crypto terms was around like $13 million so it was you know that was like the arc over that time period it was just this insane and then you know it never realized anywhere close to that amount you know again for reasons that I talk about in the book but that it was just such an absurd time period in terms of all of the psychological consequences of going through that the you know relationship consequences the money consequences it's yeah kind of crazy I probably lost like you know low five figures in C crypto all said and done and I remember like the lowest moment was like you know I invested in Terra Luna right like yeah the stable coin and um y I remember like you know well this Korean guy seems pretty smart he no way to doing and then so put some money and then started to collapse and then I remember you know I had to skip dinner with my family to try to pull my money out you know crazy I did pull it out before it completely collapsed yes so thank God and also I didn't put much but still yeah I mean that wiped out like billions of dollars right like I think 70 billion that's crazy yeah was well I miss this like what was kind of your lowest moment in crypto or like you know

kind what's the crazy story you can tell us yeah the lowest moment was definitely early on so when I first got into it I did what a lot of people do which is day trading the hot thing so back then it was Doge you know Elon was talking about it and it was in the news and Doge was going crazy and so I was you know on Robin Hood on my phone day trading pretty quickly realized that was just too risky and not worth it so I got into what was called farming and this is less of a thing now but it was really big back then where a new project would launch if you put money into the project they would pay you a stream of their tokens if you then deposited their tokens back in you would get even more tokens and so people would do this as like a game to see how many tokens they could get and then sell before the whole thing collapsed and it was a fun game and I was doing that for a bit and then I had one big scare where I almost lost everything I was farming with and then I said okay this is really risky too I shouldn't do this so I'm going to do programming instead I'm going to go back to the programming I'm going to apply the programming to crypto because crypto Developers are in incredible demand they getting paid incredible amounts of money I'm going to focus on that I start programming I build my first little crypto app I launch it I'm like so proud because there were there was almost no education material on it back then you really had to like dig in and figure a lot of it out yourself but like I did it I got the first app out there I'm feeling awesome I go to dinner with my wife to celebrate I come back home and there are all of these new transactions in my wallet that I didn't authorize and there's no funds there's no like high level funds in my wallet anymore and then I go look at where I had deposited crypto in other places and that is it's literally disappearing as I'm watching and basically in that night between like going to dinner coming back and then watching this hacker take my money I lost about $35,000 which was way more than I had made since I started and it was like the first thing that I had built and I immediately just get like you know lose more than half my crypto stack is not a fun experience and I was basically ready to give up right then I basically said that this was stupid I shouldn't have done this like I was picking up pennies in front of the steamroller the whole time I never should have like risked our savings and the crypto that I had when I started on this and I'm going to just quit and go do something else and you know I got talked out of it by people who had been in the game longer than me and who had also made terrible mistakes that they'd come back from but that night seeing all of that money leave my account and you know having to tell my wife that and you know just the sort of like the self-loathing and the embarrassment that was not a high point yeah that's pretty wild I mean but I think for crypto Traders this is like common right oh yeah it's a common thing well it's and for developers you know and for engineers like you know one of the main reasons that I stuck with it was I tweeted about what happened cuz because I figured yeah this is going to happen to somebody else I should put the story out there so people can learn from my mistake and then I started getting all of these responses from really senior crypto Engineers who are working at big companies and were really successful who said oh yeah that happened to me when I started coding too or you know I made this other similar mistake it really felt like everybody had gone through something like that which was terrifying but also reassuring that I wasn't a complete idiot here I think even though you know that was a big loss I

I'm impressed by your ability to just like do some hard thing and like just jumping like you know like learning solidity programming right writing a science fiction book and like you have a post about proving to yourself that you can do these hard things right like how do you build this mentality right because I think a lot of people just give up halfway through yeah it's a good question I mean I really do think that the only way you build that self-confidence is just by doing more of it right and like I think it works in any domain you like cold plunges get a lot of Flack because everybody's oh yeah you got to do your cold plunge every day and oh there's all these health benefits and to me I don't really care if the health benefits are true or not it's kind of worth doing something like a cold plunge because it sucks and because you will prove to yourself that you're able to sit in cold water for three minutes and it's really hard when you get in and then it gets less hard as you do it and then you get out and you think oh this I actually feel pretty good now and that wasn't so awful and you know I've always been into doing that in other physical things like done a couple marathons and I did a half Iron Man you can like Fast right I've done some water fasting where you don't eat for a few days and that actually carries over to intellectual Pursuits as well where you can say you know like if I can stick through that then I can probably stick through learning this thing and you know in terms of having the confidence to teach yourself things the more stuff you teach yourself the more confident you get that you can teach yourself other stuff too and you probably don't want to start with something like rocket science but if you decide like oh I'm going to learn how to like fix my washing machine on my own and you watch some YouTube videos and you go fix it like you you've added another little bit of proof to your future self that you're somebody who can figure things out and I think the unfortunate thing is that a lot of people walk around with this mentality that they need somebody else to teach them or give them permission to figure this thing out or they're not somebody teach themselves new things and that's really only because they've never tried and they've never given themselves that proof but the sooner you just like pick something small and easy go figure it out do it give yourself that proof the more and more of that you do the more confident you become and then you can do these bigger and more challenging things so maybe it's like first of all building a track record of doing hard things in your past and also when you're trying to learn program or something maybe like getting giving yourself little Rewards or something so you keep going like you know shpping and just like starting small right this like the theory of small wins I think is really spoton this idea that you're going to be a lot more motivated if you have a lot of little wins along the way than one big win and this was actually really hard for me when I started writing crypto confidential because I was used to the world that you and I live in with you know tweets and articles and podcasts and you know we're going to do this interview and you know you're going to get a post out of it the interview out of it I'm G like we're and we only you know came and talked for an hour and a half plus you know the pro the prep for it and all of that and like you know so you're getting that bit of wind but then you go work on a book and it's months and months of working on it putting in time you know getting maybe burned out by it having to wake up and show up every day and not getting one of those wins I didn't realize how hard that part would be because expectations had kind of been Fried by this quick publishing world right like you think of a good tweet you post it you get likes and replies like boom you won and I really had to reprogram myself to give myself credit for writing 2,000 words like I had to tell myself that was a win and I feel very silly saying it but it was true like I didn't feel like I was winning because I wasn't publishing something and I really had to reframe that in order to get through the project while still like feeling okay about myself how do you give yourself a way you like

playay for your kids a little bit or you just tell yourself like well this you did a good job so I mean this is this sounds this is a little bit ridiculous but what I actually did is after I so I you know with crypto confidential I just had a spreadsheet and every day in the spreadsheet I would write down how many words I wrote and then I could look at it after a month or two and I could see you know every day I made this amount of progress right like I I did I had all of this these accomplishments like all of this work and that was really helpful to be able to look at and say like I did the thing after I finished the first draft of the Sci-Fi novel actually when I was partway through the first draft of the Sci-Fi novel I said I'm probably not the only person who feels this way and I would like an even better way to do this and Julian Lair has this great article called proof of X where he says that there are all these opportunities to create more like social applications around proof that you are learning things and doing things and he uses straa as the canonical example because straa you get to show off that you worked out and that actually makes working out more motivating like I like being able to log my runs and my walks and exercise and straa and so I said well there's all these great new AI tools for coding I bet I can code a straa for writing where I could track my writing sessions and then get you know likes and comments for the writing that I did that day even though I didn't publish anything and so I you know downloaded cursor which is the like AI powered code editor and started hacking away and actually like built this app and launched it and now whenever I have a writing session I can drop the session in there and there's not many other people using it right now and I need to put it on the actual app store because it's just in test plate right now but like that's actually really motivating because I get to say I wrote for two hours today I got this many words done it was for this project and I can look at my stats and if I bring up my stats it says like oh this year Nat's logged 110,000 words that's cool like that's really motivating it's like that's a lot of progress to make in a year you we're almost halfway through the year and if I keep that up 200,000 words a year that's like two books it's a lot of good writing yeah I love that it's also like you know you're got to share that app with me I think I need it I need to launch put on the App Store because like I tell other writing people this and they're like wait I really want to use that and you know for me it's this delicate balance of writing is the main thing I got to focus on the writing and like this is totally how I procrastinate by picking up other side projects but I actually think that there's something here with prolific I think a lot of people would actually use it and like it yeah cuz I think it's about like focusing on the inputs like your how many words you write or like will you actually control versus like you know when you like post on social media you want more likes and stuff right but like what actually really matters is like how often or like how much you do it you know and I really deeply believe that let's say that you spent a year writing one tweet every day or a thousand words of a book every day most of the weeks and months you would feel like you're making more progress from Twitter because you're getting all that instant feedback but at the end of that year probably nobody's ever going to read any of those tweets again like they they're not going to have any lasting value but if you finish the book that book might sell for decades and it lays the foundation for more books and other work in the future and SO trading off those short-term wins for a longer term project that has the ability to compound and be valuable much longer term in a much more powerful way is so worth it and I actually think that it it is valuable to find a way to hack your brain into getting credit for working on the long-term thing instead of the short-term thing yeah I totally agree like and I think this brings us to our third topic right which is like the Creator economy so I think I read this post that you wrote about getting rich in Creator economy a

couple years ago it was like on my favorite post that I read that yeah why don't you get the high level like this P this is pyramid scheme right where like you come people to get rich like how do you what's the pyramis yeah so the no I mean and it's sort of this unfortunate truth with a lot of Creator economy stuff is that you know the unless you use it as a jumping off point to something bigger like starting a business like an app or a product or something like that or you know you start your newsletter and then you go write a book and like you get into books unless you treat it as a jumping off point to some bigger thing eventually the way you make money from It Is by helping other people get into the Creator economy and if you're you know it's kind of like with productivity stuff if you're creating all this productivity content so that you can sell people productivity advice so they can be more productive so they can create productivity content it's like you're not really making anything right it's kind of it's like a form of entertainment it's not necessarily bad like entertainment is good to and I think that we trick ourselves into thinking a lot of what we call or what we think is education is actually entertainment right and for me it was this realization that by just staying in the content creation for like the internet game you eventually hit a point where the only way you get bigger is by sort of surrendering what you want to talk about in creating what the algorithms want you to talk about and then as you get more and more captured by the algorithms in your audience you then have to create products for that algorithm and for that audience which is how you can end up trapped in this Loop and we've seen this a lot in the last year actually of these big influencers coming out and saying I don't want to do this anymore like talk about this topic anymore like I'm sick of this topic I've beaten it to death and it's what I was saying about non-fiction books in the beginning you might have something that hits really well and so you keep doing that thing and that is great if you have something that can scale kind of infinitely like that like a food company right like if you create an incredible you know if you raise just the best beef in the country and you can like buy more cows and raise more cows and produce more beef like that's not necessarily bad but if you're trying to give people advice on I'll say how to be productive again there's only a finite amount of that advice that's useful and you probably don't need to read 50 books or 50 blogs or watch hundreds of hours of YouTube on how to be more productive but if you want to succeed as a Creator in that Niche you have to keep creating more and more of that content and that ends up you kind of hit a point where you're actually now serving your audience less because you're kind of encouraging them to keep consuming this content on this topic instead of using the information to go do something with it and like to stop consuming it but now your business rides on getting people to keep consuming more and more of it and that was the space that I was worried about getting into and that I've seen Drive some people away from certain content businesses is that they do start to feel like I'm just creating noise for the algorithms and this isn't what I got into this in the first place to do yeah

like um you know I started a YouTube channel and like I was looking at the thumbnails of these creators and a lot of them are just like oh you know here's how you can make millions of dollars or like how I made millions of dollars yeah in like a month or something it's just like pure clickbait you know and like I guess what people on YouTube want to do they want to watch people want to get the quick hack right to get rich making content for you know this note taking tool Rome and you know that I was like making all this money on this course and was getting all these followers talk about like doing note- ticking with it and whatnot and then I realized that there was basically nothing else to say on the topic like I had explained how to use the tool I'd given a lot of good resources and anything more would be noise and so I just quit and then people like got kind of pissed at me that I stopped explaining how to do it or anything and I'm like the point of it is you know the point of a not- taking tool is to you know get it to a certain point where it's helping you and then you go like do other things with it the point of a note ticking tool is not to make YouTube videos about your Noe ticking tool it's like to go write a book or do whatever else sometimes I actually kind of so I have a job still right so some I actually kind of like the fact that my income is not tied to this stuff I think that's I think that lets your content be so much more authentic yeah cuz otherwise just be like you know paranoid about like how I can get more clicks and make more money all day the other thing that really gets people is hiring employees if you have this content business that's going really well when it's just you but then you hire a team now you have all these mouths to feed and you've got you know all these other bills to pay and stuff and so you need to maintain a certain monthly income to keep the whole thing going and that's when you really have to start just pumping out what the algorithm wants to maintain a certain you know amount of activity on your platform and that's when you start to stray further and further away from like the original authentic reason you got into it interesting yeah that can be like a lifestyle that's worth than just having a DA job right like totally wor yeah that was my goal with all of this now is I want no employees maybe like one assistant I don't want to build a team company I just want to figure out how to make writing very lucrative and you either you know that like you either write books that sell really well or you do a very specific highly paid newsletter like Lenny's newsletter is a great example of this and you know or you're like a journalist right you're writing for newspapers but it's hard to actually build a really like a big income on just writing without getting into this kind of like content you know owning a niche running that cycle a lot and like selling courses and I'm just didn't want to do that anymore yeah I mean I think your you mentioned your life go is to write something that's worthy of out living you is that correct I mean I think dude I think it's like a privilege to wake up and just like have open calendar and just like write whatever you want that's interesting I mean that I mean I don't know about you but I don't have a lot of like I don't want to buy a fancy car or like you know spend a lot of money so like yeah I mean that was kind of the blessing yeah that was the blessing of the crypto confidential Journey too is like there was that brief period where I was like pulling in all of this money and it like immediately corrupted me and I became that person and was Buy the watches and upgrading the car and like you know going out for champagne lunches and doing all that and it ended up not making me very happy I didn't like who I became during that period And I didn't like how I was spending my time and so when it all went away it was really empowering because it made me realize that oh I actually don't want like you know I don't want that lifestyle I don't want those things you know if one of my books or something takes off and I come into money like that again I'm is not going to have those urges it's like okay cool just save it and you know have that as a fall back for if I ever want to stop at some point because yeah like you I'd much rather have the open calendar be able to wake up and work on my books or an article or something and then spend time with my kids and my wife and do whatever else so the last question is like do you

have any words of advice for people who either like you know they have a tech job or like they're just starting their career Journey for people who have similar aspirations as us like think about this yeah it's a good question I mean it's weird saying this but I almost feel like I'm a bad person to give this advice now because I started 13 years ago 12 years ago and there was no Twitter back then or like Twitter wasn't really a thing the way it is there was no Instagram there was no Tik Tok there was really no YouTube the way it is today the only way that you know really got traffic unexpectedly was like SEO or getting into communities and so I got really good at SEO and that got my newsletter started but then once you hit a point you kind of it just kind of Grows by word of mouth and by other people sharing your things and I do think that you kind of want to optimize for the most durable format of work which right now is really either articles or YouTube you know those are the two that people would still refer back to in two three four years they won't refer back to like tweets and Instagram posts probably and so to the extent you do those other platforms it should only be to service the main platform because winning on them is you know it's not necessarily hard you could build an audience really quickly but then you know what do you do with it and what's the goal of it and I do think that it's you kind of want to have a next step in mind that you're trying to build it towards right or you don't need it to like make a money make a ton of money and provide an income for you it can just be something that you for the sake of doing it right or like to help other people or because you enjoy it and you know I think if somebody wants to do like what I did I would really say you know like start the newsletter start writing that way find something you can do to support getting newsletter subscribers which is probably like LinkedIn posting now that seems to be the thing yeah and but then once you get to a certain number of newsletter subscribers probably five or 10,000 just go try to get the book deal because if your goal is to go into books like start trying to figure that out sooner than later because otherwise you might just keep doing articles for years and never make that other jump when you could have made it a little bit sooner and I do think at the end of the day that you know articles are very useful for very tactical things like what you're doing but if you're writing like thought pieces like essays like I usually write like that doesn't do that well on a Blog long term like it's most people don't read blogs right they read books and so it's worth trying to get into the Book Realm I think sooner than later makes sense yeah I think my Reflections are like number one this takes a long time to build like you'll do it for years like you said and number two I think it's actually better to not maybe when you start you need to have a niche but it's better to have like just like your Niche is you like Le or whoever because then because your in will change during that time you know so and you don't want to be stuck just talking about the same thing like what I'll often say is you know pick one Niche to get started because when people first find you they need like something to latch on to but once you have that Baseline amount of Interest then you totally broaden out into just like you and trying to be an interesting person because the platforms are going to come and go you're going to lose your audience on one or two platforms at some point but if people are following you for you and not just because you're filling some slot in the algorithm right now they'll go with you to the next place but if you're just like the Twitter thread boy of the week you're not going to have that same durability yeah awesome that where can people find you online or like we can get we can people get the book yeah defin yeah crypto confidential should be available everywhere books are sold you know the audiobook is great if you like audiobooks I had a lot of fun doing it it's a really I think a great production and then for essays blog. Nal ion. com I'm not I don't write there as much as I used to because I'm just more focused on bookwriting but there are some good old pieces there like you mentioned and then Twitter is where I'm most active in the meantime time so I'll usually respond to things there just at Nal cool all right thanks so much time thanks so much Peter