I Don't Want to Give Content Creation Advice Anymore, So I'm Pivoting
I hope you stay to see what's next
To be one hundred percent honest with you, I’m burnt out.
I don’t want to give content creation advice anymore.
Hell, I don’t even want to be in the category of people who constantly talk about content creation.
You know the types:
“Helping you become your favorite creator so you can teach other creators how to be creators. Did I mention I help creators?”
I’m done with it.
The internet is littered with people giving vague advice on how to become a successful content creator.
I can sum it all up in one blog post:
Create a ton of content
Engage with people on platforms regularly
Study the top creators in your niche
Solve people’s problems, alleviate their frustrations, and stoke their desires
Use clever hooks, headlines, and introductions
Remove the fluff from your content and get straight to the point
Wait for time to let compounding do the work and explode your channel through network effects
Stick to profitable topics like health, wealth, and relationships
Create the type of content you can monetize by teaching others
Do the work for years at a time until you get big.
There’s really not much else to it. Either you’re going to do the work required to create content, iterate over time, figure out something to sell & sell it, or you’re not.
I no longer want to be a part of this world.
wrote about this in his blog post called How to Get Insanely Rich in the Creator EconomyHere’s a quote from it:
We want a strategy that we know will work, which is why your goal is to feed the algorithm. To figure out not what people like but what TikTok and YouTube and Twitter like so they put you in front of the scrolling masses who can subscribe to you. You thought you were breaking out of having a boss? Hah, no, your boss is now the codebase of hungover 20-somethings in San Bruno. Good luck getting a promotion.
He goes on:
The reason it’s hard to make money off the initial audience of followers is they’re not motivated to spend money.
They’re following you for entertainment. […]You’re the jester, dancing for the court’s entertainment, holding out your hat at the end, hoping for a gold coin.
But you can do better than that. [….]While continuing to grow your audience, you start sprinkling in content about how to grow an audience. You talk about how you cracked the algorithm, what types of content are working for you, what headlines, hero images, and things like that are moving the needle.
How much of this do you see online right now?
‘Creators’ who are wet behind the ears and start teaching you how to create content. They get their first 1,000 followers then teach you how to do it. As they grow, they just teach you what they did to get to the next milestone of followers. All the while, nobody really actually makes money from their own content. Instead, 100 percent of it comes from teaching others.
It’s really just one big circle jerk.
I made a full-time living just by writing my own stuff for three years straight before I thought about teaching others. And even though I have the experience and results to feel qualified to teach, I feel like spending all of my time doing that misses the point of why I started writing in the first place.
My favorite period as a writer was when I was just making my living as a creator without teaching anybody anything about how to do it.
I wrote about the things I was really interested in —self-improvement, psychology, culture, and the human condition—weaving in my personal experiences with the things I was learning and implementing.
I want to get back to that because it was, you know, fun.
This isn’t fun for me.
I can write a new post teaching you how to be a creator, every single day until the cows come home. But I’d be mailing it in. I have been mailing it in.
There are plenty of other creators who will give you vague advice about how to be a creator. I’m pivoting the direction of this newsletter.
Inevitably, that means some of you will no longer be interested in reading, which is totally understandable. I suspect a good number of you will, though, so stay tuned.
We are living in a world of commoditized content. I want to get back to doing some real writing, flex my creative muscles, and show you what I’m really capable of.
So that’s what this letter will be from now on. It will be my personal playground for sharing ideas that are interesting to me in the hopes that they’ll also be interesting to you.
One week I might write a self-improvement post, next a personal essay, and yes, from time to time there will be advice on things like writing and creating content.
I just don’t want to do that one hundred percent of the time because it makes things stale. I’ve written about content creation for a solid year in this letter, so you can go into the archives and learn pretty much everything you need to know about the game.
So from now on, if you want to read content from someone who is no longer keeping themselves in a rigid box, stick with me. Just by reading, you’ll learn how to do the same for yourself.
In the echo chambers I seem to find myself in online, everybody seems to sound like everybody else. Every blog post, tweet, reel, TikTok, etc, seems like a remix of a remix of a remix.
Few people are providing real value by talking about lessons learned from real-life experiences, sharing uncommon ideas, and actually going out of their way to step outside the box a little bit and try to be, you know, interesting.
So that’s my new mission with this letter.
It’ll have a new name.
I’ll be writing new stuff.
We are headed in an entirely new direction.
I hope you stay to see what comes next.
"I don’t want to give content creation advice anymore."
I can relate to that a lot. I've been working online for most of my adult life. 25 years this fall. I used to want to help everyone. Took a lot of years to realize not everyone is ready or willing to be helped. Glad you're pivoting to something that lets you enjoy what you're doing again. In the long run, life is short. :)
So exciting! I remember the one where you have been writing the same post for so long because people don't listen to your advice. It's instant gratification syndrome- so many people don't want to put in the work