Hey Reader,

Have you ever seen another creator with a worse product than yours become more successful?

It’s easy to look at someone like that and think, oh, they just got lucky. But that’s not a very useful mindset, because then all you can do is hope you get lucky too.

When I was 17, I heard Jason Fried, who co-founded Basecamp, describe making money as a skill. It changed my entire worldview.

I’d actually take it one step further:

Everything you want is behind a skill you can learn.

Once you see success as a function of skill, you can work backward from any goal.

Let’s say you want to make $75,000 a year from an online business—and you want to be able to work from anywhere and get to this point within the next 12 months. Instead of waiting to get lucky, you can make a map of the skills you’ll need to learn.

First you need an audience. You could look at all the ways to grow one and figure out which are the right fit for you. Maybe you focus on Instagram growth and bringing people back to a Kit email list. Then you need to turn those subscribers into customers. Written out, the first few skills might look like this:

1. Basics on camera
2. Copywriting and hooks
3. Driving people to an email list
4. Email copywriting
5. Setting up products
6. Automations

You could then list out maybe five skills in each category. When you break the whole goal down, you’ll have something like 30 skills you need to learn. Some of those you might dedicate three solid weeks to, and others you can knock out in one week.

Put it all together and you have your own roadmap. And that’s basically how to get lucky.

It’s simple, but not a lot of people do it.

Check in on yourself every once in a while. You might find you’re making good progress everywhere except on camera. So then you’d set aside an hour a week just for that.

Luck surface area is an idea coined by Jason Roberts. Your odds of hitting a bullseye far away are pretty slim—unless your target is the size of a barn.

If your network were bigger, you’d have a better chance at luck. The same goes for having more followers or being better at selling. But equally important is being able to take advantage of opportunities when they come.

My book, The Ladders of Wealth, comes out in March (thanks for pre-ordering!), so I’ve been asking my author friends what advice they have for me. One of my calls was with Ramit Sethi. He’s one of my favorite creators and someone I’ve known for a long time.

“Alright, Ramit,” I said. “I know all of these content creators who run big podcasts, but I hate asking for things. How do I write the pitch?”

“You’ll figure out that part of it,” he said. “What I’m worried about is what happens when you get on the show.”

His advice was to focus on media training. If I make it onto a show like Diary of a CEO, he said, my stories need to be polished. I need to be able to tell them in 30 seconds or two minutes, depending on the context. Otherwise I might get a big opportunity and not be able to make anything of it.

That gave me a whole new set of skills to learn. Media training was just the category, so I broke it down. I listed out all the stories I might tell, and I’ve been rehearsing the different lengths using flashcards. I do a two-minute version and then a 30-second version.

I’m still not good at it. But the good news is I have about four months before the book launches to improve.

Try this with a goal you care about. Write out every skill you’d need to reach that goal, then find the one that’s furthest behind and spend an hour a week getting better at it.

Every hour you put in makes the target a little bigger. And when you get your lucky break, you’ll be able to make the most of it.

​

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How to Grow and Monetize a Newsletter in 2027 (Full Strategy)

Chenell Basilio reverse engineers how the biggest newsletters grow. She spent 40 to 50 hours a week on her deep dives, which took her newsletter from three readers to 21,000 in 10 months.

She says newsletter growth comes down to five levers, and growth tactics are only one.

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• The landing page that converts at over 40%
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• Six ways to make content people can’t believe is free
• How one writer gets paid 5 to 10X for sponsored deep dives

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X ARTICLE

5 Principles That Helped Me Generate 50 Billion Views

When you open YouTube, there’s a good chance you’ll see a thumbnail Paddy Galloway helped make. He’s worked with MrBeast and been part of more than 50 billion views, and he keeps his five principles for YouTube on a sticky note on his desk.

I love the first one. He says at least half of a video’s success comes down to the idea, title, and thumbnail. His team will brainstorm as many as 500 ideas just to find one good one.

This goes right along with what I was talking about earlier. When a channel blows up, it’s easy to think the creator got lucky. But here’s another instance where it comes down to skills.

​Read article »​

—Nathan