Nicolas Cole

90% of what we are taught about entrepreneurship is wrong.

It's people parroting thinking they heard from someone else but never lived themselves.

Ignore these 8 business clichés to get richer, faster:

3 days ago | [YT] | 46

Nicolas Cole

If you don't see yourself doing it for 10+ years, it's probably not worth doing.

4 days ago | [YT] | 25

Nicolas Cole

My book sales only generate ~2% of my total yearly income.

But my books have also:

• Attracted hundreds of thousands of readers
• Clarified my thinking for our products & programs
• Led to speaking gigs, consulting opportunities, etc.

Sometimes, monetization isn't linear.

5 days ago | [YT] | 31

Nicolas Cole

Brutal truth for writers:

Just because you took the time to write it, doesn’t mean anyone owes you their time to read it.

6 days ago | [YT] | 4

Nicolas Cole

People who "hate sales" have the luxury of hating sales.

When "sales" is the only way to put food on the table for you & your family, you don't even think about whether you "like it" or "hate it."

You just do it.

1 week ago | [YT] | 4

Nicolas Cole

Lifestyle changes that have changed my life:

1. In bed by 9pm. Asleep no later than 10pm.
2. No caffeine for the first 90 minutes of the day.
3. Stretch or read before checking email/starting work.
4. An espresso in the morning. No caffeine after 12pm
5. Gym, every day, 4pm.

1 week ago | [YT] | 2

Nicolas Cole

There are only two ways to create something Original.

- Say something different.
- Say the same thing in a meaningfully different way.

An example of the former would be Pythagoras saying, in 500 BC, “The earth is round. Not flat.” These are six Original words. Six words that fundamentally changed the way human beings perceived the world. Before Pythagoras, no one had “thought that thought.” As a result, we now (centuries later) still associate those six words with Pythagoras. This is the epitome of “ownership.”

An example of the latter would be Aristotle, a century and a half later in 350 BC, essentially saying “the same thing” but in a meaningfully different way. He proved Pythagoras’s round-earth theory through empirical and observational evidence—pointing to lunar eclipses, horizon lines, and changing constellations.

This is the art of writing.

It’s not to manually type words. It’s also not to repeat Commodity Ideas (“conventional wisdom”) and call them your own. It’s to think deeply about a small number of topics and use writing as a mechanism for understanding. But as you understand each Commodity Idea, you should not remain attached to carrying the burden of repeating those chosen Commodities manually yourself. That’s what the robots are for. And you should feel empowered knowing you are continuing to focus on the next-highest-leverage task at hand: making new connections, forming new hypotheses, and thinking different thoughts, in pursuit of pushing your area of interest further than you found it, creating something Original.

Large Language Models are miraculous machines. But they are not going to replace the need for human beings to “think different thoughts.” And if writing is the most effective mechanism in human history for crystallizing one’s thinking, then AI is not going to replace writing as a skill anytime soon. Besides, in order to use AI, you have to know how to prompt. And in order to prompt, you have to know how to… what? You have to know how to write.

You can’t automate what you can’t articulate.

My hope is these Large Language Models will reduce the amount of time we spend as a society writing and re-writing Commodity Content, and give our Personality Content leverage, so we can spend more time thinking and writing what hasn’t been said *yet*.

4 weeks ago | [YT] | 42

Nicolas Cole

If language is an open-source operating system for communication, then most combinations of words and groupings of words are Commodity Content.

If Commodity Content was never yours to begin with, then spending your finite time here on earth manually writing and re-writing the same Commodity Ideas in slightly different variations out of pride for “doing it yourself” is not a symbol of purity, but a Scarlet Letter of stupidity. You are making the conscious choice to write the wrong things.

Personality Content is the unmade data set. It is also one of the only forms of differentiation, association, and “ownership” in the age of infinite text-based Commodity Content. Time spent writing and re-writing Commodity Content, past a baseline level of proficiency, is low leverage and unnecessary. Time spent writing and re-writing Personality Content is higher leverage and additive to the long-term value of your Digital Brain.

But when all conventional wisdom has been said, and “how you became yourself” has been sufficiently articulated in your library of content (your Personal Language Model), what is left? What do you say when there are diminishing returns in repeating yourself, and a machine can repeat the same stories, insights, opinions, and lessons from your Digital Brain, infinitely, without needing your continued involvement?

All that’s left is the creation of Original Content: thinking thoughts that haven’t been thought before, and making connections that haven’t been made before, to say things that haven’t been said before. And I would posit nothing would have a bigger impact on the collective intelligence of our society than having exponentially more people spending exponentially more time “thinking different thoughts,” opposed to endlessly repeating and manually writing the same Commodity Ideas over and over again in the hope of establishing those words as “theirs.”

You do not create something Original simply because your brain thought the thoughts, or your fingers clacked the keys. You also do not create something Original simply because your creation consumed time or effort. Original means additive. It’s new. It’s net-positive. It’s moving the world forward in some big or small way, identifiable to you.

1 month ago | [YT] | 26

Nicolas Cole

AI writes in a Commodity Content Voice.

It’s not that it’s wrong, and it’s not that it’s “AI Slop.”

It’s simply Commodity Content written without any Personality Content, resulting in a Commodity Voice.

The same way you cannot expect AI to write non-Commodity Content without a library of Personality Content to pull from (your Personal Language Model), you cannot expect AI to write in a non-Commodity Voice when you haven't written in a non-Commodity Voice yourself (and then stored that writing inside your Digital Brain). That’s not to say you must learn to joust a pen like Jane Austen, but you should at least have some baseline awareness around the qualities of your distinctive voice should you ever hope to recreate it—either yourself, manually, or with the help of a robot, automatically.

That said, I have been teaching writing for over a decade. I have helped tens of thousands of people start writing online. And I find this fixation of voice in the writing world to be utterly unproductive. Just because “you” wrote it does not mean it has a voice. And just because a sentence has a Commodity Voice does not mean it’s bad—or worse, is “AI Slop.”

Commodity Ideas and Commodity Sentences are somewhat unavoidable across every industry and topic. There are only so many ways you can say the same Commodity Thing—just like, no matter how creative you get with dynamics and ornamentation, there are only so many ways to play a scale on the piano or film a scene of a movie. Voice is a minority element, and a much harder variable for differentiation.

The everyday person would be much better off acquiring unique life experiences (non-Commodity Content), and then writing about those unique life experiences (Personality Content).

1 month ago | [YT] | 19

Nicolas Cole

There is a misconception that when you write something, the mere fact “you” wrote it (as in, your fingers typed the keys) means it is in your voice—and that is not true.

Commodity Content has a universal Commodity Voice.

For example, who said this sentence?

“I woke up, made myself a cup of coffee, and got to work.”

It should be obvious this sentence cannot be attributed to any individual person. That’s because there is nothing *identifiable* about it—neither from its content (what it’s saying) or its “style” (how it’s being said). And yet, the vast majority of people would like to believe that when they write these 13 words (as in, their fingers click-clack on their keys), not only are the words “theirs,” but they are in “their voice.”

But ask the average person to articulate what makes their voice “their voice,” and what you will often receive back is a word salad of bundled, non-specific terms and phrases:

- “It sounds like me.”
- “It’s to the point.”
- “It’s clean. I like it.”
- “That’s how I would say it.”
- “Because I wrote it!”

But none of these are correct.

Your voice is not what you think it is.

“Voice” is a term we use to represent 3 smaller variables that show up in our writing and speech:

1. Vocabulary: Your voice changes depending on whether you say, “cool” vs “exquisite” vs “dope.” That’s because vocabulary is a reflection of your identity, and sends all kinds of signals to readers and listeners about who you are and how you see the world. For example: choosing academic words over conversational words, or saying “Chi-Town” instead of “Chicago” in a sentence. These vocabulary choices often have little impact on the sentence’s meaning, but do change your perception of the writer or speaker’s identity—adding unspoken layers of communication.

2. Rhythm: Your voice also changes depending on the cadence of your speech patterns. William Faulkner notoriously wrote in long, verbose sentences, whereas Ernest Hemingway more favorably wrote in short, terse sentences. Rhythm is the combination of sentence length, punctuation placement, and vocabulary—the three together creating what is known as “tone.”

3. EDAN: Explanation, Description, Action, Narration. What is the purpose of your writing? Better yet, what is the purpose of each individual sentence? Your voice is not a static decision. Your voice can change sentence by sentence. Are you someone who likes to Explain (tell)? Do you prefer to Describe (show)? Do you speak in Action? Or do you hypothesize in Narration? Voice is the combination of what you say (content) and how you say it (style).

As a result, you do not “find” your voice (as many people would like to believe, forever on a quest of linguistic enlightenment).

You *create* your voice—the same way a painter creates new colors through different combinations of Red, Green, and Blue.

1 month ago | [YT] | 27