Every word you write is a vote for the person you want to become. I’ve figured out a way for every word to make me wiser, richer & future-proofed.
It’s called Brandwriting, but it started as notes in my diary.
Now, the more I write, the more I increase my earning potential.
But why did a diary become the unlock?
A diary is a record of your life and thus becomes the roadmap to anyone looking to live a similar life.
Diaries have been kept throughout history by everyone from kings to philosophers.
Even sailors.
But sharing your diary is a new practice. For most of human history, it wasn’t the path to riches.
It was the path to death.
From Sailors to Surfers
Let’s rewind to a time when sharing your diary was treason.
In the 1400s, Europeans lost their link to fancy silk and spices from India & China. The Portuguese thought they should probably build some better boats and go around Africa.
On one of those boats, 2 guys named João & Tristão (rhymes!) went for a ride along the coast of Africa.
A storm blew them off course, into the surging and vast Atlantic Ocean. They thought they would be lost in the abyss, but instead ran into a previously unknown island. They called it Holy Harbour in gratitude, but nowadays we call it Madeira.
They wrote the rough location of the down in their diaries to share with their nation when they got home.
Europe has its first colony.
This would be the start of a race that would send Europeans to all edges of the world.
In this new age of exploration, sailors explored the world using diaries containing charts and landmarks and seaways to get them to remote lands of wealth.
If these diaries fell into enemy hands, the crime was treason and the punishment was death.
In the modern age of abundance, sharing your charts isn’t met with death, it’s met with reward.
We’re not sailors, but surfers of the web.
And the more we share, the more we earn.
What’s changed?
Capitalism
A couple centuries after thos Europeans planted flags all over the world, they inadvertently folded them into a new system.
That system was capitalism. And it was the path out of brutality.
By a sheer stroke of brilliance.
Instead of falling apart due to greed, the system works because everyone acts greedy.
Here are the principles:
- We are interconnected with others
- These connections form a market that can be brought from & sold to
- We can only sell what the market wants
- Each sale creates a signal of what is valuable to society
- Everyone organizes themselves around creating or harvesting that value
- We also decided that cooperation extended into coordinating the buyer and selling beyond the individual level
- We called these businesses
Like it or not, this is the is the most clarified idea of cooperation we have.
While nowhere near perfect, we have A/B tests throughout history to bolster this case. One needs only look at West Germany vs East Germany, South Korea vs North Korea, to see the relative prosperity & cooperation that capitalism drives.
Along the way, we decided that businesses could be considered people under the law.
We still spend a lot of time arguing whether this is good or bad.
What is not discussed, is how a person could be considered a business.
You Are A Business
Thinking of yourself as a business just means you’re applying the principles of the free market to your decisions.
- You are interested in what is valuable to others
- You acquire that value
- You are ready to sell that value
You are still a human, but human existence is complex and we exist on multiple planes:
- The physical
- The relational
- The spiritual
And the commercial.
In the physical world, you are the whole of a heart, mind and 4 limbs.
In the commercial world, you are composed of 4 pillars:
- Product
- Marketing
- Distribution
- Operations
The Product
In the age of the web, free products proliferated.
You can now access the world’s largest search engines, creative software and video-calling apps for free.
But soon, the harsh truth came to be known to all of us.
If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.
We soon found out our data, our thoughts, interests, tastes and habits were being sliced, diced and packaged into products for sale to those who wanted to actually sell to us.
This was a revelation, but is now just another footnote in our changing world.
But there’s a lesson here you shouldn’t forget.
If you can be someone else’s product, you can also be your own product.
You can take back control.
If you’re worth something as a few data points, in aggregate with millions of others, you’re worth something on your own as well. And reattached your person to your demographics is a value-additive process.
If you are your own business, the product is you. It is the sum of your experiences, knowledge, opinions and skills.
Everything you forget is a discontinued feature.
In the world of business, this means that 1/4 of your business is already built, and will continue to be built better now that you are aware of it.
But that doesn’t mean 1/4 of the hard work is done. It just means that you can allocate your scarce resources to the other 3/4s more vigorously.
You are the sailor, and the treasure.
You still need a ship.
But before you build one, you need to know where you can sail to sell this treasure.
Marketing (Why We Buy)
- We need things, but we have a hard time knowing those needs ourselves
- As society has gotten more complex, we’re increasingly unsure what we want
- We thought we wanted info, but now we have the words info in our jean pockets and no one things we’re better off for it
- We’re wired to gorge on food due to the scarcity of our primitive origins. Now we’ve solved for scarcity, but can’t help ourselves
- Because we’re bad at knowing what we want, business can’t rely on us to see their value, they need to convince us
- That’s the birth of marketing
- Of course, we can also be convinced of non-existent value
- Marketing claims are as old as markets
- In the perserved ruins of Roman Pompeii, there exist adverts of Scaurus and his fish sauve, boasted to be the best in the empire
- Claims have been tossed around to compel sales forever
- But if you repeat a claim often enough, it evolves
- The claim gets tied to who you are
- And if you’re a business, that claim becomes a part of your brand
Brand
Your brand is the collection of claims that distinguishes your goods from the rest of the market.
Thus, your words become the bricks that build the house of your personal brand.
A strong brand means your product stands on its own. The term comes from the branding of cows by ancient egyptian ranchers.
By burning a distinctive symbol into the animal’s skin with a hot iron, they were enforcing their claim.
If a cow was stolen, anyone could tell who’s it actually was.
If your brand is strong enough, no one can steal your claims either.
You stand alone.
But how do you do it?
If you always talk about your veganism, you are branded as a vegan.
If you x, y. (plus one more).
Your diary, written, video, audio - is a documentation of your being. With careful editing and exploration, it can become the only marketing you need.
Any brand is useless if you don’t distribute it.
But how do you distribute something that isn’t proven.
That’s the beauty of a You Business. The more your distribute, the better your product gets.
Distribution/Sales
So you’re a sailor, with treasure and a destination where people will buy.
Where do you get a damn ship?
You write one into existence.
In the modern age, the distribution is all digital. No longer do you need to sail halfway around the world to sell to the king. You, a serf, sell to the other serfs.
The same platforms that turned you into a product are happy to let you productize yourself and sell to others. As long as you’re happy to be the barnacle hanging onto their whale
Attention.
You bring them attention, then you can slice off a hide for yourself.
The ways to attract attention are many, but they all come back to writing.
Scripts are written. Courses are written. It is the easiest and most flexible way to start getting distribution.
Getting your product (yourself) out to the market
You don’t have an old-fashioned résumé anymore! You’ve got a marketing brochure for brand You. Instead of a static list of titles held and positions occupied, your marketing brochure brings to life the skills you’ve mastered, the projects you’ve delivered, the braggables you can take credit for. And like any good marketing brochure, yours needs constant updating to reflect the growth — breadth and depth — of brand You.
We use the ultimate biz distribution tool, writing.
When you’re promoting brand You, everything you do — and everything you choose not to do — communicates the value and character of the brand.
- Tom Peters
I would change this to be ‘everything you write’
Writing
If you’re a business, you must bring yourself to the market (i.e. market yourself). The best way to communicate yourself is to use the medium that all your ancesters have used - writing.
Somewhere in the last 5,000 years, writing became associated with academics instead of business.
But It is no coincidence that the earliest known pieces of writing from ancient Sumeria were to document crop yields and create contracts. Writing and biz are intertwined
Writing supports the distribution of the ideas it conveys.
Beg for the chance to write the report — because the hand that holds the pen (or taps the keyboard) gets to write or at least shape the organization’s history.
- Tom Peters
The hand that holds the pen writes the history.
But we’re not in ancient Sumeria. We’re in modern America. We live in an age where machines can write for us. Is writing just a modern day version of clothes washing, where a machine replaces it outright?
Not if you’re writing the right way…
Writing in The Age of AI
Try an exercise.
Why bother writing if AI can do it for me?
Now replace the word writing with thinking.
Why write, if you are a better talker or teacher? The strength of writing is because (find benefits of writing)
What if you could get paid clients to pay you more by being yourself? That’s the power of writing with authenticity instead of automation
Writing about something teaches you about what you know, what you don’t know, and how to think.
- Farnam Street, Why Write?, 2023.
Writing also ends up being your product development. The more you put your ideas down, the more you must scrutinize the output.
There is another important element to writing that often gets overlooked. Writing requires the compression of an idea. When done poorly, compression removes insights. When done well, compression keeps the insights and removes the rest. Compression requires both thinking and understanding, which is one reason writing is so important.
- Farnam
Compressing something makes it faster, smaller, cheaper and exciting. This is how writing can turn junk into a big idea. Big Ideas can added into a brand to turn it into a better Brand.
AI won’t replace human writers, it’ll only make the remaining human writers more valuable:
A world of common thinking available on demand will tempt people to outsource their thinking and disproportionately reward people who don’t. In the future, clear thinking will become more valuable, not less.
In a world of average writing available on demand, every organization will start communicating like a big one… Bandwidth will be filled with common ideas, verbose communication, and ambiguous jargon. In the future, information will become even more of a substitute for thought than it already is.
If more information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.
- Derek Sivers
The proliferation of information hasn’t made us any better of. It’s implementation that matters. Become the writer that can compel others to action. If you can compel someone to buy with your words, you can compel them to make a better world for us all.
Operations
Here is the desk I worked at for years.
It may look like NASA or a wall street trader, but it’s the desk that runs an airport.
For 18 hours a day, I coordinated airplanes, workers and passengers in a delicate dance that transported 100,000 passengers a day.
I know complexity. I have a love-hate relationship with it.
That’s why I love the operations that make a one-person business suceed.
They’re the same that make you as a person succeed.
Systems.
Starting with systems for growth.
Write To Grow
Before you can write to convince others, you need to write to compel action within yourself.
This starts with mapping out your brain as it works. This is called journalling.
- Journal your life
- Assess your life
- Make goals and state opinions
- Accomplish goals and test opinions
- Journal your progress
- Reassess
This is how your acquire skills, knowledge and wisdom through writing.
Writing is the scaffolding for your product.
Once you have the first semblance of a defined persona (or product) you need to sell it
Write To Sell
There’s no point learning anything there isn’t demand for.
Even if that demand is only internal to yourself.
But I doubt if you’re primary desire is monkhood that you would still be reading this manifesto.
Once you’re starting building your personal product you need to sell it online.
But you’re not necessary going after cash. You can go after the next best thing.
Attention.
Attention is upstream of cash, but it’s on the way there.
Write in public and bare out everything you believe would be valuable to others.
It’s up to your skills of persuasive writing to ensure others perceive the most value from what you have to say about yourself.
But writing in your journal won’t cut it in the 21st century. You need to become partner with the machines that exist.
Tools of the Future
- PKM - a home for your knowledge, or a home for your product
- AI - not to outsource ideation, but to outsource friction
- Social media - distibution
- Atomic thinking - measurement of progress - analytics, the only system you need
- spaced repetition (forgetting curve) in content - remind yourself what you know & remind others what you’re working on
- We need to be reminded more than we’re taught
- The tools of the future will change everything. All the pictures in this article are of an AI generation
CTA
So how can you take advantage of this diary > dollars pipeline
- Write your diary and sell it
- Help others do the same
- Create better ways to distribute the diaries