How to Be a Content Creator While Maintaining Your Sanity

Readers crave authenticity, and no one can be you.

When you put your creations — products, websites, courses, subscription- based content, ideas — on the internet, someone may take all of your ideas and try to pawn them off as their own. It won’t matter because most people will not put in the work required to make themselves a success, even with your content.

Creating content on a reliable schedule is never easy. Many don’t see what’s behind the curtain. 

No one will stick to content creation if they don’t both love it and love the work involved in creating.

Create empty space in your workweek. This is when your best ideas will flood in.

Have one or two days a week where you just think. It’s only after we are bored that our best ideas hit us, like lighting. 

The principal-agent problem is a straightforward concept and can be found in most intro microeconomics texts. 

The smaller the organization, the more people feel like a principal. The less you feel like an agent, the better job you’re going to do for the principal. When you are the principal, you are the owner. You care and will put out quality work.

Sometimes you have to hire people for a job that takes you too much time to complete because you lack the skill to complete the task efficiently. 

You can apply compound interest to anything in life, not just in the financial context. 

Put time into writing, and that effort will compound over time thanks to the internet, SEO, and algorithms.

Most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term, so you get paid in the long term.

The best example of this is investing in your 20s. If you’re compounding at 30% for thirty years, you end up with thousands of times your money over time. Yes, you have to give 20% of your paycheck to a retirement account and forgo expensive meals out with friends and the $200 shoes you’re dying for, causing suffering in the short term, but you reap long-term rewards.

A mental model is simply someone’s thought process around how something works in the real world.

 If you want to build better mental models, read philosophy, science, math, engineering. If you do not like a book you’re reading, put it down.

Writer’s block is the equivalent of, I don’t want to write today. That’s it. Writer’s block prevents us from creating in many sneaky ways.

It prevents us from creating in the form of boredom, fear, anxiety, thinking we are not enough, social media scrolling, believing we’re imposters, self-doubt. Successful content creators know resistance well and have developed a way to combat it.

Haters are people sitting on the sidelines who don’t do but criticize. If it is clearly a comment for the sole purpose of being nasty, don’t give it any attention. 

If a reader makes a respectful comment but disagrees with your premise, then it’s reasonable to take time out and respond. People have different opinions. That’s the beauty of life.