How to turn your love for learning into a one-person business

Having multiple interests is not a weakness like people make you believe

I’m a very obsessive person.

When I become interested (truly interested) in something, nothing else matters.

Focus becomes seamless. I could “work” 24 hours a day if I didn’t value sleep. It’s all I think about. It’s all I learn about. It’s all I want to do.

I’ve gone through these obsessive cycles many times in my life. First, it was fitness. Then spirituality. Then digital art, photography, and web development. Then psychology, various branches of philosophy, and various “high-value” skills like direct-response marketing and advertising.

But there’s a problem.

If you love learning, and if you have multiple interests, society may have convinced you that trait is a weakness. And you may believe them, because you can easily spend all your time learning and never getting results through doing.

It’s understandable why they think that, though. Most people still have a worldview influenced by the industrial paradigm. They fully believe that becoming a specialist, getting a job that requires you to perform a mechanical string of tasks for 40 years, and retiring at an age where your money can’t be put to great use outside of buying material objects because you were deprived for so long is still the best route to take in life.

I can confidently tell you that your love for learning is a superpower.

It signals that you are high-agency.

It signals that you have a unique point of view.

It signals that you have everything required to turn your interests into a modern source of income.

In this letter, I want to break it all down.

• Why people who learn quickly and have multiple interests are already ahead of most of the population

• How you already do 80% of the work required to make an income (that is, you already research, you just don’t think of it as that)

• Your options to start earning a side or full time income, preferably by discovering and pursuing your life’s work (yes, it’s that deep)

• I’ll provide prompts and templates that help you start making sense of what you want to do

Let’s begin.

Why learners and improvers have more leverage than ever before

Code and media are permissionless leverage. They're the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.

— Naval

You, as an individual, have more leverage than ever before.

Leverage, in this context, is the multiplier between input and output.

A small action can create a disproportionately large effect, and technology continues to increase the power an individual holds.

Think about it.

When social media became a thing, one person could post an article, a video, a tweet, and reach millions of people. The radio didn’t allow that. Television allowed that, but not for the everyday person who just had something interesting to say. Physical mail definitely didn’t allow that.

This is still possible, but the market has become more sophisticated. Now it requires a touch more skill and strategy.

Now AI is a thing, and the ability to code has been democratized to a large extent. Most average people can build a small-scale digital product, accompanied by a full marketing funnel that used to take teams of dozens of people to build and maintain. This was always possible with information products, coaching, freelancing, and other low-risk business models that one person could operate and make a living from, but now you can do so much more.

Paul Musso, for example, has built a modern philosophy school.

He quite literally teaches philosophy on Substack, and his paid tier includes weekly lectures people can attend.

I’ve talked about this in Purpose & Profit, but I see the good parts of the creator economy as a decentralized education system.

Passionate individuals dive deep into their interests, pull out the compelling parts, make them useful, and teach them. Most people these days get most of their education (related to their goals, not their parents) from places like YouTube and social media, from the creators they resonate with.

The entire business model is: Improve yourself, then improve others.

In other words, if you have interests to talk about, you have a way of building an audience. You have traffic. You have leverage. The difficulty lies in talking about your interests in a way that captures attention and makes them want to follow you.

This is why we built Eden, by the way. It makes it near impossible to not generate ideas worth writing about, and then actually write them. You can study creators, reverse engineer their content, find your unique voice / intellectual signature, and write content that only you could write. You can get 50% off your first month here.

If you understand how to package up those interests into a product or service people will pay you for, you have a way of monetizing that audience. You have a business.

How to turn your love for learning into a business

To the point: you teach your interests.

Or you turn what you would have taught into an implementation tool (as we’ll discuss).

Yesterday, I had someone ask me for advice on what to monetize.

They said that they were trying to do videography for personal brands in the real estate niche. He said, in an ideal world, he wanted to be doing more creative and artistic filmmaking.

I asked if he was making content for his own brand.

He said no.

To me, it was obvious. He should express his artistic side through his own videos and teach videography to personal brands, since he already has some experience in this area. Not only would he attract clients (because the top dogs don’t have time to do it themselves, but they now see this guy as an authority in videography), but he would build a broad enough audience to monetize with some form of education product around videography. Most creators don’t know how to edit, so I think it would work well.

That’s only one example, but the same probably applies to you.

You don’t have a lot of capital to invest, you don’t care to fundraise, and you probably just want to do something creative and meaningful.

For people who love to learn, here’s the gist of what a “business” would look like for you:

• You study your interests. They are inherently valuable because you value them, meaning someone else can value them, and many already value them. (No, people can’t just ask AI, because they often don’t know what to ask.)**

• You learn how to package them. You aren’t Marcus Aurelius. Writing fortune cookie tweets isn’t going to get you anywhere. You must understand attention mechanics and engagement psychology. (Now that you know what to ask AI, research that).

• You weave in your unique voice. Because your audience doesn’t care if you have new ideas. They want your opinion, your point of view, on an idea that works. If you don’t know what that voice is, build it in Eden.

• You turn yourself into the business. Your brand, content, and product all stem from your interests and the transformation they can provide.

Your sole job is to become a researcher and a vessel.

Seriously, you must consider it your full-time job to research. That’s what writers, creatives, and visionaries do. That’s what Peterson does. That’s what Huberman does. That’s what Marcus Aurelius and all your beloved figureheads of the past did. They probably don’t care about being a “personal brand,” but they do care about their interests, so creating content (which was once just considered “writing” before it took the specific form of media on the internet) is their chosen vessel for earning income.

They read weird books. They find themselves in esoteric rabbit holes on the internet. They curate idea sources they love and save them in a safe place. They question what most people think, gather multiple perspectives, and synthesize a unique one. They jot down thoughts like mad scientists. They are all idea workers. They hunt for ideas and share the best ones. 80% of writing comes from research. The other 20% is structuring and writing it the way only you would.

The question then is, how do you actually create a tangible brand, content, and product?

Your brand is the transformation

When you think of a person you admire, why do you admire them?

Because they have changed your life in some fundamental way.

Their content or product led to a change in behavior.

They first changed your mind, then your actions, and you associated the results of those actions with that person.

James Clear convinced millions of people to adopt tiny habits that went on to make big changes.

Jordan Peterson (in his prime) convinced millions of young men to take responsibility for their lives and pursue meaning.

Alan Watts helped people stop taking life so seriously.

Naval Ravikant taught people the power of digital leverage.

If you heard an idea from Naval, and then noticed the outcome of that idea in your life, you would attribute that outcome to Naval.

So, your brand, as a person with multiple interests, is how you help people change their lives with those interests. The more people you help, the stronger your brand becomes.

Now, people get stuck on this all the time.

They think they need the perfect bio, tagline, or value proposition.

In reality, you don’t need to actually say any of those things. People may read your bio one or two times. Your brand is invisible. It’s an image in people’s minds that accumulates as they read your content, buy your products, change their behavior, and tell other people about you.

All you really need to do is answer 3 questions and have them guide most of your content:

1. Who can you help the most? (What does their life look like now?)

2. What has changed your life the most? (What interests do you see as important?)

3. How can you help other people do the same? (What about their mind and actions need to change, and how can you help them change?)

You don’t need to put the answers in your bio. You never even have to tell people your answers. You simply have to write the content and create the products that help others change. Your brand is created through your content and products.

However, if you struggle to answer even the first question, here’s what I would recommend.

The person you can help the most is your past self.

What situation were you in? How did you get into the interests that helped you change? How can you help people go through the same transformation, faster?**

Don’t think too hard about this, it will refine with time.

Your content is the map

I talk to a lot of people who want to start writing.

As you might guess and as you may have experienced, their problems revolve around the same issues.

They don’t know what to write. They don’t know how to write it. They don’t know what makes their writing different from everyone else’s. They don’t know why people would listen to them over someone else. They don’t see themselves as experts, but don’t understand that experts aren’t the only ones who have audiences. You can build a “student” style personal brand, too. You just learn, research, and share what you found without claiming any results until you actually have results.

I like to think of content like this:

You have your brand (who you help and how you help them change their life).

Now, you treat content like you’re the programmer of a video game.

You have point A - where your audience is now - level 1.

You have point B - where you can help them get to - level 100, or 50, or 10, or 2.

(And even if you aren’t at level 100, you’re allowed to grow. You should grow, actually. You’re the leader here. That’s why you attract “followers.” Entrepreneurship is self-improvement in disguise.)

To make this simple, any idea or content is free game if it lands between point A and point B.

It may help to quite literally draw this map on paper. Add point A to one side and point B to another, then start filling in the middle with topics and ideas:

• Write 2-3 broad topics, like health, psychology, or business (these are your content pillars, your main interests).

• For each of those topics, write 2-3 more sub-topics

• For each of those sub-topics, write 2-3 pain points, principles

Let’s say my brand is to help people become future-proof (it is).

That’s my niche, so to speak. I attract anyone who is interested in the way that I, personally, help people become future-proof.

Then my entire goal with content is to find great ideas and align them with that throughline.

If I’m studying my interests, like flow psychology, and I find an idea I love, like how psychic entropy causes the mind to slowly become disordered with time unless effort is put into maintaining a meaningful hierarchy of goals, then the first question I ask myself is this:

“How does this apply to becoming future-proof?”

And through that question alone, I now have a unique content piece. I am not copying the idea one-to-one. I am applying it to a new domain, from my own voice and perspective.

That’s content creation in a nutshell for people who don’t want to just follow trends and do the latest tiktok dance.

You study your interests, you hunt for great ideas, and then you ask “How does this apply to [my map/mission/brand]?”

However, there’s a bit more to the puzzle.

You still need to be able to package and structure your content.

By "package," I mean the right hook, title, or headline that gets people to click.

Then you need the right structure (intro, body, conclusion) to keep people engaged.

I’ll talk about those in a future letter, but for now, again, that’s why we built Eden. If you are or want to be a creator/writer, consider it the new staple in your workflow. You can discover proven ideas, reverse engineer them, and apply them to your own ideas quickly.

Because if you can’t get people to click and stay, who is going to see your product? Who is going to pay you for what you offer?

In other words, how are you actually going to do what you love (learning) in a sustainable way if you’re always in survival mode and selling a product for your boss rather than yourself?

Your product is the tool

When I first started on social media, I was a web designer.

I started writing on Twitter because I wanted to land clients without doing the exhausting cold outreach I was used to.

As I got clients, and as my service evolved (as my own knowledge did), I found people were coming to me not because they wanted a website, but because they just didn’t have clarity on their brand, content, and product.

So, I helped them, and there was a two-year period where I considered myself a brand advisor. That’s what my web design offer turned into.

The biggest question then was: “Okay, if I write about all these ideas and interests, what do I sell? It feels like I’m giving everything out. People won’t have a reason to buy my product if they already know it all.”

Typically, people just love getting into their own heads.

People just buy things. They probably don’t remember everything they read from you. And they are even more likely to never implement it. Just because you’ve talked about it doesn’t mean people aren’t going to buy something.

There is a better way to think about it, though.

I like to think of my products as tools or systems that help them get from point A to point B.

As an example, I can talk about writing all day. I can teach how I write newsletters, content, and generate ideas. But a tweet or newsletter is usually not the best medium for teaching an entire system through modules, worksheets, templates, and the like.

So if I create a product, like ‘2-Hour Writer,’ that can be the complete system for implementation. A daily set of actions, backed with education, that someone can use to get results.

And if you don’t care to sell an info product because everyone told you they were a scam and you were dumb enough not to question or think, then you can build a software. But again (I’ve learned this through 3 years of failure so far), it needs to be a system. Yes, you can probably vibe code small-scale software quite well if you have agency and understand the iterative process. You love learning, so you should be able to just start building it and ask the AI questions along the way. You can literally start with “How do I start building a software/app/tool with you,” and it will suggest steps. Then you keep doing that until you have a v1. You just ask the question that you’re wondering when you encounter it. The first version will suck, as all first versions do, but you can quickly iterate to the point where it is quite good.

The creator economy, when it comes to monetization, is a systems economy.

You don’t build the next note-taking tool (tried that).

You build the software that helps them do what your info product would have told them to do.

For Paul Musso, with his philosophy school, he could build a learning platform. Or he could keep doing what he’s currently doing, but build a philosophy AI app that helps people think more deeply as a daily practice. Or an app that’s similar to what daily devotions are for those who study the bible. Have daily philosophy lessons that people can make a part of their routine. Who knows if that would sell out of the gate, but that’s what the process of trial and error is for.

For myself, it could be packaging up a part of my workflow. Finding validated ideas, studying why they work, and filtering them through your mission to create your own perspective. That’s what Eden does at this point (yes, I’m promoting it a lot today because we just launched it and there’s a welcome offer, and the MCP is going out soon).

With all of that, this wasn’t a hyper-practical letter.

Because I don’t think that’s what you need.

You just need clarity that this path is viable.

Once you know that, you can figure out the rest, because you love learning.

This letter was just meant to be the spark to show that it is possible.

I’ll write more about this in the future, but until then, I’d encourage you to go down a rabbit hole on brand, content, and online business.

Thank you for reading.

– Dan