The writing habit that saved my brain (and my future)

One habit = learn faster, think clearly, earn more

If you don’t know what to learn, start writing.

Even if you don’t want to be a “writer.”

Writing teaches you how to think, how to learn any skill fast, and how to attract an audience that supports your work, which is absolutely needed if you want to build your own business, or just do any kind of independent creative/meaningful work.

In the age of AI, thinking, learning, and distribution (getting your value in front of other people so you actually have the chance of being paid) are timeless skills. Writing allows you to practice them all while building digital leverage as a byproduct.

I never thought I would be a writer.

I don’t even look the part. I’m a big dumb meathead who fell in love with deep ideas.

By all measures, writing, as a simple morning habit, has completely changed the course of my mind and life. It has helped me articulate my thoughts, calm my mind, find opportunities outside of the traditional job market, and is the single thing that fuels the success of my work and business.

In this letter, I want to show you my system for capturing ideas and writing content worth reading, but I also want to show you why this path is more viable than ever - and why it will transform how your brain interacts with reality.

Yes, it’s that deep.

Let’s begin.

Old leverage VS new leverage: The secret to modern success

The biggest leverage is no longer capital. The biggest leverage is enterprise — the ability to run a great business. And in particular, the biggest leverage is personal brand. Having a big audience. As soon as you’ve got people paying attention to you, you have this enormous form of leverage.

– Daniel Priestley

The rules of wealth creation have fundamentally changed.

The assets that drove income in the Industrial Age (property, factories, machinery, physical goods) are being replaced by digital assets (audience, personal brand, IP, content, data, software) that are incredibly cheap to build, more scalable, harder to tax, and compound while you sleep.

The only requirement to building leverage for yourself in today’s world is a good idea and the confidence to post it on the internet.

The problem, and opportunity, is that most people are still conditioned by Industrial values. They somehow still believe that school → job → retire is the most certain, safe, and secure when that couldn’t be any further from the truth.

The same holds true when it comes to building leverage, and thus creating wealth, for your future.

Old leverage comes from physical, tangible assets.

A house, factory, Rolex, fleet of trucks, warehouse of inventory, gold. You buy them, then let them appreciate or generate income.

Old leverage is linear and local.

A factory can only produce so many units per day, and a house can only be rented to one tenant at a time.

Don’t get me wrong, leverage is leverage, and old leverage is still a great thing.

However, physical assets are going to be the first thing that governments find, tax, and seize if wages collapse, which is more likely today than yesterday because AI can swiftly do that, leading to governments expanding social safety nets.

Governments are much less likely to seize an email list of people who know who you are, a library of content, or a best-selling book.

New leverage comes from intangible, digital assets.

An audience, personal brand, IP, data, systems, software. These are the leverage of the newly rich. Media, data, and code. Content can be written once and be seen by millions of people. Software can be created once and serve millions of users.

For most people, writing is the most accessible and practical form of leverage. You can learn to code, but if you cannot attract people to care about the product you built, then nobody will use or pay for it. Writing is the leverage that unlocks other forms of leverage.

You will not see digital assets on a balance sheet, but they represent 90% of the S&P 500’s value.

Kim Kardashian, Taylor Swift, Ryan Reynolds, Mr. Beast, Elon Musk - all have massive audiences and personal brands.

But you probably don’t want anywhere near their level of fame, and that’s a great thing, because you don’t need millions of followers to make this work. With 6-12 months of focused effort, you can find yourself in a wildly different life than you are now.

Personally, I replaced my income around 5,000 followers (about 6 months in) because I actually took it seriously. My friend Randy, a fitness coach, was making $100k a month at around 10,000 followers, because he invested in education, studied marketing and sales, and implemented everything as if his life depended on it.

The point is that people drastically overestimate how much they need to win, because all they see is out-of-touch celebrities on their timeline.

That’s why we teach how to find what you want to talk about, create your ‘personal monopoly,’ and write high-impact content in our bootcamp. You still have time to join the next live call we’re doing.

But the benefits of writing stem far beyond that.

How writing completely shifts your brain & life

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

– E.M. Forster

It’s hard to explain... but the act of writing is much deeper than putting pen to paper.

It shifts your mind to see the world in a more meaningful way.

Conversations become a source of inspiration. Your thoughts become filled with ideas you’re wrestling to understand. You notice more detail in life rather than living on the stressful surface.

In my eyes, there are 4 key benefits to writing:

1) Writing rewires how you think

The core mechanism here is forced linearity.

Which is a fancy way of saying that you can feel like you understand something in your head, but writing forces you to collapse it into a single stream.

Thinking without writing is like walking through a forest where you can see every direction, while writing itself is like driving on a road through the disorienting mess. You have to decide where you’re going, which turns you’re going to take, whether or not you want to take the scenic route, and how to navigate back if you get lost.

In other words, writing is the apparatus for thinking. It’s the gym where your mind is built.

You may think you understand the feelings, counterarguments, memories, or half-formed analogies in your head, and even your values and beliefs, but unless you write them out, I can almost guarantee you don’t.

2) Writing increases pattern recognition

There are a few layers to this.

The first is that by writing regularly, you build an external record of your thinking. You are able to quickly reference what you’ve written in the past as a way or articulating your current thoughts better. It helps you think with clarity.

The second layer is similar to the “photographer’s eye.” After a few years of serious practice, you start to see frames and compositions in everyday life. The world doesn’t look the same, it has another layer of depth.

With writing, you start noticing structure in an argument, a metaphor in a mundane moment, or the narrative arc of your average day. Writing trains a specific kind of attention that bleeds into everything.

The third layer is that you notice ideas you normally wouldn’t have.

When I have a newsletter planned for the week, or just know that I need to write a tweet today, my mind will naturally help me notice ideas that help achieve those goals.

It’s the concept of psycho-cybernetics - that your mind is like a heat seeking missile towards it’s goals, and will help you notice the tools you need to achieve them (the problem is that people don’t actually have conscious goals they care about, they have unconscious goals assigned to them, and since their path is planned for them, they don’t have to do much aside from show up to school and work, so they are missing this layer of life).

3) Writing helps you articulate your thoughts

Most people walk around believing they understand things they don’t.

Not because they’re dumb, but because they’ve never been forced to externalize the thought and look at it. Writing is not only a tool to improve communication - thus improving most other areas of your life - but a tool to expose whether or not you actually know what you’re talking about.

That’s what most people are afraid of.

They don’t want to feel the struggle that comes from doing something meaningful. They want it to be easy. They want all the ideas to just come to their head immediately. They see writing as something that everyone knows how to do, so they don’t appreciate that it is a skill just like anything else, and takes effort to improve.

Which leads into the most important point.

4) Writing helps you learn faster

The future belongs to those who can learn the fastest.

And unfortunately, most people stop learning after they graduate high school, and it shows.

You must learn in order to achieve a goal, so if you want to achieve any goal outside of the three society planted in your head at birth, then you must self-educate, and if you want to enhance that process, you must write.

Writing is both a form of teaching and understanding.

In learning science, there’s the “protégé effect,” which shows that students who teach material retain it better than students who merely study it.

The cognitive load required to figure out how to explain something to someone else forces deeper processing, better organization, and identification of gaps in knowledge.

I learned more in my first 6 months of writing online than I ever did in school. I’m exaggerating, but what I mean is that I learned much more about the things I care about. I could feel my mind changing shape, and I was closer to being like the thinkers that I admired as I was growing up. My younger self thought my brain was just too dumb to speak intelligently. Turns out, I just didn’t practice.

Last, writing demands that you understand.

You read something.

You feel like you get it.

You try to write about it.

You realize you can’t.

Most people think it’s because they aren’t “qualified” to write about the topic, which is bullsh*t. You can write about an idea just like any other person on planet Earth can. You’re just creating invisible gatekeepers out of fear of putting your ideas in front of other people.

But now you know exactly where your understanding breaks.

That’s when you go back and learn. You research. Then you continue writing.

The Writing System I Use To Generate Ideas People Can’t Help But Read

I’ve never been the most organized person.

I’ve tried the second brain apps. I’ve tried doing everything inside of AI.

But I always found myself going back to jotting down ideas in a long-running note. Of course, ideas would get lost all the time, but I don’t see that as a problem. If you need to remember it, it’s not important, and if it’s important, you will remember it.

I’ve found that great writing (or content) that actually gains traction and doesn’t disappear into a black hole of nobody caring about your work boils down to a few things:

• You need ONE topic or theme for the week

• You need a place to quickly jot down ideas

• You need a way to capture inspiration (social posts, YouTube videos, Substack articles, etc)

• You need to understand how to package the hook or title so that people actually want to read it

• You need to effectively pull from your ideas, inspiration, and research while you are actually writing or creating

This is what that looks like in the form of a system.

It may seem complex, but we’ll recap at the end in a simple way.

1) How To Pick What To Write About

I don’t care about niching down.

You are not an animal that dies when they get put in a different niche or environment, like a lion in Alaska.

You are a human who learns, builds, and adapts so that they can thrive in any niche.

I operate by two principles when picking a topic:

• Is it something that I find important or worth sharing? Because by simply filtering an idea through my perspective and not overthinking myself to death, it becomes unique. I have a specific identity, and I’m probably not going to speak to soccer moms in their 40s no matter how hard I try. By just talking about what I find worth sharing, it will attract the people I can impact the most.

• Is it packaged or framed in a way that grabs attention? Because as a writer, that’s what you do. You grab attention, otherwise your writing doesn’t get read. The way you do that in today’s world is by studying what’s working on social media and applying the structure and principles to your hook, title, etc.

This is social media growth in a nutshell.

Many people want to feel like they’re a super creative writer, and they want to be super authentic bro, so they don’t package their ideas in a way that the market actually wants, so they never get traction on their work. In other words, they never get paid, because it feels icky to them, so they continue working on someone else’s dreams so their boss can get paid. They want to impact people so badly yet refuse to do the one thing that allows that. They see it as sacrificing a part of their identity rather than acquiring a skill that increases their usefulness.

The simplest way to do this is as follows:

Before you write, research what’s working on social media.

Because that shows you what the market is already paying attention to.

You can do this just by scrolling social media and saving posts that are doing well, or you can use a research tool for it that pulls all top-performing posts into one place.

As an example, this letter is titled “The writing system that saved my brain (and my future).”

I had previously seen this post in the Discover feed of Eden and saved it to one of my boards, it’s called “The Notebook System That Saved My Brain.”

In other words, I saw what people already signaled that they wanted, took the topic I wanted to write about, and merged the two together. This is when you use a research / inspiration library tool like Eden, or you can scroll social media manually and attempt to find high-performing posts.

2) Create One Project For The Entire Week

I post one newsletter a week on Substack.

That long-form piece gets posted to X articles, turns into a soft YouTube script, and the YouTube video gets uploaded to all podcast platforms.

I’ve tried twice a week, but my brain operates better when it has time to think and gather inspiration around one topic.

My entire week revolves around the topic. When I read a book, ideas stick out that fit the topic. When I listen to a video on YouTube, the same happens. Ideas come to mind for that topic.

Those idea become research for the topic I’m writing about, and the newsletter becomes the source of social posts for all platforms.

In other words, I write one piece a week, and it becomes content for all platforms. This has drastically improved my thinking, because it isn’t scattered all the time.

This is my entire idea capture and content system.

What do you actually do here?

Create one place a week to save ideas to.

I create one board in Eden (which I talk about a lot because it’s the only app that can do all of this in one place), and that’s where I jot down ideas, paste social links, add articles and videos, and even upload books as PDFs so I can ask AI to pull ideas out of them so I don’t have to go searching manually for them, or even worry about highlighting them.

I’m writing this, right now, in that board.

With all ideas and inspiration in one place, it makes it easy to have this open as I write, or just create a chat and connect a post, PDF, or link to it to pull the idea out of it.

If I post ideas when I’m away from my computer, I just save them to the board on mobile, like a YouTube video I watched, and then I can chat with it to get the idea I wanted out of it.

Note: I do have multiple boards called “Favorite Ideas,” “Validated Ideas,” and “Personal Ideas.”

I save posts I love to favorite ideas.

I save posts that have gone viral to validated ideas.

I save personal notes or thoughts to personal ideas.

A mix of all of these creates a great piece of writing (yes, your favorite writers research, save inspiration like their lives depend on it, and mash it together to write their pieces).

I can chat with any of those to give me headline variations, angles, or post ideas that I can then pop into the scheduler.

3) Outline, Write, and Repurpose

I am not going to go into the actual writing process. That would take an entire bootcamp to go over.

However, someone broke down my best newsletters and turned it into a prompt that helps you outline your own in an engaging way. It will ask about what you want to write, then help you gather ideas that can go into the outline.

As mentioned, here’s what I do:

• I create a board or place to save posts, ideas, and videos (this is the research portion of my writing)

• I create an outline document to start organizing the ideas

• I have all of that open next to me while I write

• I post that as a Substack and X article

• I block out an hour 1 day a week to record that as a YouTube video

• That YouTube video goes to all podcast platforms

• I use the article to generate post ideas throughout the week

• I promote my Substack a few times a week under my other content so it grows

That’s the entire system.

Walking, reading, and about 60 minutes a day of writing forms the foundation for some of the most future-proof skills: learning, thinking, and earning (independently).

I’ll leave it at that, and am happy to expand more on this in future articles.

– Dan

If you want to read more, I’d recommend these to get better at writing: