Hey Reader,

Have you ever followed someone on an epic journey like rebuilding a boat or walking across a country?

I find myself checking back on things like this because I want to know whether they were able to pull it off. When Kelsey Pfendler rowed solo to Hawaii it was fun to see her content. Then when she smashed the world record, it felt like everyone was cheering her on.

When I get asked me how to be successful as a content creator, I encourage them to go on a public journey.

The best way to be interesting online is to do interesting things offline.

So today I want to share some examples of people who have set out on an interesting quest and shared the journey so you might feel inspired to do the same.
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Do interesting things offline

When hospitality entrepreneur Isaac French was on my podcast, he told me about a rail car his dad found in the spring of 2020. It was a 120-year-old car that he bought for $3,000—which was, in his words, a cat infested wreck.

They hauled it to a hilltop in rural Idaho where he and his brothers spent five months restoring it.

Then he spent about a day writing a thread about the whole experience.

That thread did 20M views in two days. People like Brian Chesky, who runs Airbnb, and Paul Graham, who started Y Combinator, even showed up in the replies. He was also getting national press for it.

Isaac said the one phrase people really latched onto was “cat infested wreck". That ended up drawing a lot of controversy and views.
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Join the one percent

The hard part for Isaac was actually restoring the rail car. The easy part was simply telling the story and documenting it.

This is what I call the 1% Rule:

• 90% consume what others make
• 9% take action on what they learn
• 1% document and share as they go

Glo Atanmo is also one of the 1%—not the wealthy elite, but those who actively pursue their dreams and document the journey.

She fell in love with travel after studying abroad. When she got back to Europe through an internship, what changed her life was sharing what was happening in real time.

She didn’t wait until after the fact when she had a neat and tidy story to tell. As a Black woman, she noticed the travel space lacked people who looked like her. So she wrote about what she was experiencing and shared while she was in the middle of it.

That transparency turned into a business and her first email launch brought in $50,000 in seven days.
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Pick a number and show up

Saying you’ll do something forever is a great way to guarantee you’ll never start.

Delphine Le Grand decided to post every day on LinkedIn for 100 days. She started at around 2,400 followers and ended up with 20,000 followers by the end.

Would you show up once a day for a hundred days if it meant you’d get similar results?

Having a fixed time frame like that gave her something to count down to instead of a habit she was obligated to keep for the rest of her life. Of course, she did keep posting beyond the challenge she set for herself.
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Launch before you’re ready

Chenell Basilio runs Growth in Reverse, where she takes apart how big newsletters grew. Last June she tried it on herself.

“I thought, what if I did a daily newsletter that would run for 30 days? I could share one growth lever per day, and each would feature a different creator and thus, be a cross promotion in itself.”

She didn’t spend a ton of time planning it out. She said she just started and launched it on a whim and built the parachute on the way down.

Thirty days later she’d added 3,714 subscribers.
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Compress the timeline

At age 53, Trent Dyrsmid decided he was going to fly for an airline. If you don’t know, commercial pilots are forced to retire at 65, so it’s rare to start as late as he did, because the process takes such a long time.

But he set out on a public journey to become the fastest pilot to go from just a private pilot with 100 hours to being hired by a regional airline as a first officer in under 24 months.

And he not only accomplished his goal in 23 months, he did so while documenting the journey on his YouTube channel where he has over 75,000 subscribers—many of whom pay for his courses on accelerated flight training.
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Take on something too big

In 2018, Brent Underwood bought a ghost town called Cerro Gordo. It’s a 380-acre abandoned mining town up in the California desert. Fun fact: I actually own about 10% of it, so I’ve watched it develop from the beginning.

In early 2020, he posted a video explaining that he’d put his entire life savings into bringing the place back to life.

Then the American Hotel, the centerpiece of the whole town, burned to the ground.

This was tragic, but people were so invested in the story, his YouTube channel blew up and passed a million subscribers in two years. Today, the channel has over 2M subscribers.
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Name the goal, then start

This last story is my own. I realize there’s a good chance that, although you may have read my newsletter for years, you may not have heard it.

On New Year’s Eve in 2012, I announced the Web App Challenge. My goal was to go from zero to $5,000/mo from a web app in just six months.

It all started as a simple idea. I budgeted $5,000 of my own money and and I blogged every step of it.

By July of 2013, I’d finished at $2,480/mo, which was roughly half of what I’d set out to achieve.

So it was a failure, technically.

But what you may not know is that “failure” went on to become a company you may have heard of:

Kit.

Today, the company does over $50M in annual revenue.

All from a little challenge I set for myself that I documented publicly.

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You don’t have to do something crazy like buy a ghost town.

But pick something you’d do even if nobody was watching. State your goal and put a date on it. Then share what happens as you go.

You never know what might happen.

If you enjoyed these stories, there are many more like it in my upcoming book, The Ladders of Wealth.

You can pre-order it today »​

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PODCAST

How to ACTUALLY Sell a Creator Business

After 18 years of building Smart Passive Income, Pat Flynn sold the business and Liz Wilcox is the new owner. The two of them sat down with me to walk through the whole process—including why Pat decided it was time to let go.

Selling a creator business raises a whole set of questions. Pat shares the steps he took to make the business sellable and how he and Liz planned the transition so the audience felt supported.

We cover:

• How do you know when it’s the right time to walk away?
• How do you value the business?
• Who do you sell it to?

And how do you make sure the business can thrive without you?

​Watch or listen to episode »​

Have a great week!

—Nathan

P.S.

Kit is hiring a Studios Manager for Kit Studios Chicago. If you know someone who might be a good fit let them know: Learn more »​