A couple of months ago I wrote my story on here (coming out of the healthcare industry making decent wage, going into landscaping and a new agro- and biotechnology degree). I wasn't consistent with content creation after following Ali Abdaal's PTYA (cohort 1) course. Now I'm 3 years down the line and might give it another shot, in Dutch this time. I'd like to run my company as a media company for marketing purposes (Gary Vee told me to). Content will ofcourse be about landscaping, gardening, installs, etc. I pivoted my content on other socials already to Dutch, just documenting what I was up to, studying, projects, job-related stuff. Well today I landed a landscape install of 21.5k square feet/20k square m totalling approx. 300k in revenue and recurring revenue for maintenance up until 3 years afterwards. Stoked and scared. Now on to figuring out how project management goes. If this goes wrong it might cost me more, but hey...live and learn. My key takeaway: don't be scared to jump, You'll regret you've never jumped sooner. Go for whatever project you have in mind and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Link to Part 1 In Part 1 I explained that the consequences of every action you take are much larger than you realise, due to 2nd, and 3rd order consequences. But like Stoicism taught me: In life, there are some things you can control and other things you can't control. So in this post I want to talk about one of the things the led to me closing this deal that I couldn't control. --- For the past decade, the META for consultants/internet marketers/coaches was "to make money, run ads". One of the most prominent figures in this space, Sam Ovens, scaled to $36,000,000 year through Facebook Ads. And did all of this WITHOUT creating ANY content. In fact, content was considered time-consuming and a 'treadmill' that you didn't want to hop on. But then things started to fall apart. Sam revealed that although he was MAKING $36m/y, he was also SPENDING $36m/y. That means that when things were the most stressful and complicated... he took home $0 profit. --- Very interesting, but is it cool if we zoom out for a second? No business operates in a vaccum. Every business operates in a macro market. Sam is part of the "online business" market. And this market is an absolute red ocean. The best of the best marketers find themselves in this space. And many have had decades to cement their name as the market leader. - Tony Robbins - Grant Cardone - Jay Abraham - Dean Graziosi - Sam Ovens - Iman Gadzhi - Alex Becker You'd think it would be near impossible for a new entrant to join the market and take up market share. But yet, when I asked my friend Bas (who, for credibility, makes $1m/m) , "who is best positioned in this market to make the most money?" He replied: "Alex Hormozi" WHAT!? How on earth did all of these top-tier marketers leave such a huge crack in the marketplace that could allow Alex to join and dominate?

Making money through content creation is possible. But it's hard, and takes a long-time. If you're a beginner content creator, you know this more than anyone else. When I was in that stage I was constantly worrying I'd never make it. I questioned whether I was good enough. And it's tough to stay consistent when you're not seeing results. There are two groups of people in this community: 1. The big boys. Established creators/consultants/entrepreneurs making good money 2. The beginners. People who, no matter how hard they try, aren't seeing the results they want This message is for the second group. There's many people in this community that want to make a living in the creator economy, but are struggling because of how tough it is. I've been thinking about this for a while. But the thought came to the surface again when I watched @Ali Abdaal's last video. Ali was asked "Do you recommend being a creator as a career path?" His response: "Hell no." (For context, Ali has 2,000+ customers for his Part-Time YouTuber Academy, so I trust his answer.) Now, I know what you're thinking... "Fuck." But please, please don't think this way. There's a light at the end of the tunnel. In fact, there's a light at either end of the tunnel. LIGHT ONE: Just keep going Read the first sentence of this post again. Just because succeeding is hard and takes a long time, doesn't mean it's not possible. And once you make it, it's all worth it. Quitting shouldn’t be an option. LIGHT TWO: Earn to learn There’s a great article called the Ladders of Wealth Creation (see image attached). It explains there are four ladders to wealth creation: 1. Time for money 2. Service business 3. Productized services 4. Selling products It explains that “the potential earnings increase the higher up each ladder you climb. But the difficulty increases with each move as well.” Selling products, productized services, or starting your own service business is possible. But it’s hard, and it takes a long time.

Describe it in ONE WORD, or a short sentence if you’d prefer, what you feel when you consume my content. Whether it’s tweets, my posts here in Synth School, or my YouTube videos… I’m curious to hear your answers. Please drop a comment before you read the other comments (so you’re not unconsciously biased).

As a 32yo it's not always easy to explain the knowledge game to my generation. I feel like we fall between "being glad to have a J.O.B. (Just Over Broke) and staying with the company for as long as possible" and "there's more out there, I guess". I'm trying to perfect my synthesizing and here's my current system: 1. Consume deliberate content in line with my own goals, aspirations and interests. For me, anything to do with landscaping, ecology, landscape architecture, gardening, etc 2. Take notes in Obsidian (read "Smart Notes", by Sönke Ahrens) to convert them to small entities. 3. Link as much small ideas together. 4. Research scientific papers concerning the content I consume (I'm up to my eyeballs in papers on soil health and the effects on a landscaping investments by clients). Forming a research question can be a huge help in narrowing down a niche topic. Using a framework like PICO, PEO, SPIDER, SPICE, ECLIPSE helps forming a qualitative question to research. Using Boolean operators in search engines using the terms you come up with while forming the question is key. 5. Use Research Rabbit to find similar papers/content. 6. Add all to Zotero Reference manager and link zotero to Obsidian 7. Highlight interesting points in Zotero and export to markdown in Obsidian.v Convert to solitary ideas you can connect to the rest of you data. 8. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes it helps to consume content about stuff you know, stuff you don't know. More importantly are those small gems of content about stuff you don't know you don't know. Down the rabbit hole you go. If I want to synthesise: look something up in Obsidian. You can just click and drag your smart notes in a new file, order the information so it makes sense, make the paper flow. Tadaaa. Done. I might overthink all this, but I'm still iterating on this system. Any tips, advice, concerns are helpful. Thanks for reading.