Early 20s Syndrome: 9 Money Mistakes Keeping You Broke

Summary

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Coffee With Cole: The Digital Writing Podcast

Episode Summary

Episode: Early 20s Syndrome: 9 Money Mistakes Keeping You Broke
Host: Nicolas Cole
Release Date: February 13, 2026
Special Guest: Mike Chatfield – Sci-Fi & LitRPG Author

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Nicolas Cole hosts a content-creation marathon and sits down with prolific sci-fi and LitRPG author Mike Chatfield. While the podcast promises a focus on money mistakes people make in their early 20s, this particular session (as per transcript) leans more into the behind-the-scenes business of digital writing, lessons from creative entrepreneurship, annual goal-setting, and craft wisdom from two industry veterans.

Listeners get a transparent look at Cole’s business trajectory, recent experiments, and the drive behind his creative and professional goals for 2026—along with candid reflections on the ongoing learning curve of writing and entrepreneurship.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Massive Content Creation Day & Behind the Scenes (00:00–02:55)

• Cole kicks off the episode amid an ambitious content day: six long-form videos, 20 shorts, and a slew of ad content.
• Mike Chatfield is introduced as a LitRPG author with 60+ published books, now transitioning from indie to traditional publishing with his upcoming tour for "The Two Week Curse."
• Emphasis on the importance of volume and relentless output in creative work.
  • Quote [01:34]:
    Cole: “Just to reset your bar. Okay. Not six—six D. But also... volume wins. You know, just free time. Right, right, right. Volume wins. Volume wins.”

2. The Creative and Business Journey – 2025 in Review (02:55–05:33)

• Cole offers a transparent recap of his business’s 2025 numbers:
  • Revenue: $8,155,862
  • Ad Spend: $964,230 (a sharp increase on prior years)
  • Team Growth: From 12 to 34 members
• Honest reflection on scaling pains—investments in team and content, expanding platforms, and learning hard lessons.
  • Quote [03:37]:
    Cole: “This past year was definitely a year of paying down some ignorance debt. There were a lot of things that we went into it thinking, oh, this will be so easy. And I have to keep reminding myself, anytime you think something's easy, it's not. It's gonna be hard.”
• Major investments: increased webinars (monthly, moving to twice a month), and a major three-day challenge event.
• Eyes set on business maturity and utilizing new team capacity in 2026.

3. The Writing Process, Collaboration, and Craft (05:42–08:29)

• Cole and Chatfield bond over writing milestones.
  • Chatfield notes the immense work behind every book, plus extra effort on creative details like custom graphics and book design.
  • Emphasis on iterative improvement—learning “two, three things from each book.”
  • Quote [07:08]:
    Chatfield: “When I started writing, I was just like, I'm just gonna keep writing more and more books and if I learn two, three things from each book, then it just gets better.”
• Cole gifts Chatfield his first non-fiction memoir about ranking high in World of Warcraft, reflecting on nostalgia and how creative works age.
  • Quote [07:37]:
    Cole: “Every year I reread it and every year I look back, I'm like, whoever wrote that was cooking at the time.”
  • Quote [08:07]:
    Chatfield: “Like, we all have these like, segments of our lives. Where we look at, we're like, man, that was such a cool segment of our lives.”

4. Lessons in Content & Marketing (08:29–09:51)

• Cole recaps advice from Hormozi’s workshop:
  • “Your ads will perform better if you base them off what's already working organically.”
• A look into the day’s production process, teamwork, and learning curves during filming.
  • Focus on improving efficiency and minimizing mistakes with the expanded team.

5. Personal & Business Goals for 2026 (09:56–end)

• Cole transparently lays out his goals for the coming year:

  • Writing:
    • Log 700 hours of creative writing (2 hours/day)
    • Publish 2 fiction novels
    • Publish 2 nonfiction books (one, “Writer Career Paths,” due in March/April)
    • Next “Art & Business of Writing” book in the pipeline
  • Business:
    • Aim to break $10M+ in revenue (reach eight figures)
      • Quote [10:56]:
        Cole: “I really want to cross that eight figure mark... Even just for myself. Like, know, okay, now I know what goes into building an eight figure business.”
  • Personal:
    • Continue health investments: personal training, physical therapy, peptides, vitamin IVs, NAD, and sleep optimization
    • Priority on family—hopes to become a dad in 2026.
      • Quote [12:32]:
        Cole: “Me and my wife have been trying to get pregnant, you know, and I’m really hoping that this is the year. I would love to become a dad this year... I feel like the only thing that's really left is, you know, start a family and take that next step.”

• Cole reflects on his sense of readiness—having built business skills, self-trust, and systems to sustain high output and avoid burnout.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote or Moment | |-----------|----------|-----------------| | 01:34 | Cole | “Just to reset your bar. Okay. Not six—six D. But also... volume wins. You know, just free time. Right, right, right. Volume wins. Volume wins.” | | 03:37 | Cole | “This past year was definitely a year of paying down some ignorance debt. There were a lot of things that we went into it thinking, oh, this will be so easy. And I have to keep reminding myself, anytime you think something's easy, it's not. It's gonna be hard.” | | 07:08 | Chatfield| “When I started writing, I was just like, I'm just gonna keep writing more and more books and if I learn two, three things from each book, then it just gets better.” | | 07:37 | Cole | “Every year I reread it and every year I look back, I'm like, whoever wrote that was cooking at the time.” | | 08:07 | Chatfield| “We all have these like, segments of our lives. Where we look at, we're like, man, that was such a cool segment of our lives.” | | 10:56 | Cole | “I really want to cross that eight figure mark... Even just for myself. Like, know, okay, now I know what goes into building an eight figure business.” | | 12:32 | Cole | “Me and my wife have been trying to get pregnant, you know, and I’m really hoping that this is the year. I would love to become a dad this year... I feel like the only thing that's really left is, you know, start a family and take that next step.” |

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Segment Timestamps

• 00:00–02:55: Content Day setup, team introductions, and Mike Chatfield’s prolific author journey
• 02:55–05:33: 2025 business recap—revenues, ad spend, team growth
• 05:42–08:29: Book design, craft process, author gifts, reflections on creative output
• 08:29–09:51: Marketing lessons and production wrap-up
• 09:56–end: Cole’s personal, creative, and business goals for 2026; closing reflections

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Episode Tone & Takeaways

Tone: Open, enthusiastic, self-reflective, and collaborative.

Takeaways:

• The podcast provides an unfiltered view into the disciplined, iterative process behind successful digital writing and business growth.
• Themes of scaling, learning from mistakes, the value of pushing creative output, and prioritizing personal health & growth are woven throughout.
• It’s not just about building a business—but building the skill and capacity to sustain creativity, lead a team, and move forward intentionally.

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This episode is especially insightful for:

• Aspiring digital writers and authors
• Entrepreneurs scaling creative businesses
• Listeners interested in the interplay between creative process, business metrics, and personal growth

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Transcript

[A]

Foreign. We are kicking the year off with our most ambitious content day yet. We've got, I don't know, six long form videos scripted out, 20 shorts, 30, 30 ads. We got a buddy here, special guest. I'll introduce you to here in a second. And yeah, you know, we got big goals for the year. I'm going to recap some business numbers from 2025 if you're curious. You want to know how we did, and then I'll talk a little bit later in this video about some of my goals for the year ahead. Mike, you want to say hi to the people?

[B]

Sure.

[A]

We are in the presence of greatness today. This is Mike Chatfield. He is an extremely successful sci fi fantasy litrpg author. You have a big book tour coming up, which is exciting. What cities are you going to?

[C]

So we're going to be doing east coast, west coast. We're going to be doing this for the two week curse, which is awesome because we finally got a trad published deal, which is amazing because, like, going from indie to trad is so, so difficult. Yeah, it's like going from, you know, starting with, hey, how do I string together these sentences, how do I make these paragraphs to how do I finish a book? Right.

[A]

How many books have you written, you think at this point?

[C]

Okay, so I think I published 60 books.

[A]

And then 60 books. Just to reset your bar. Okay. Not six, six D. But also the.

[C]

Other thing is, is like there's so many books that I've written but never finished, so there's probably like another like 10, 20, right?

[A]

It's that 100. That is an insane level of output.

[B]

And.

[A]

And again, just to reset your bar, volume wins. You know, just free time. Right, right, right. Volume wins. Volume wins. So, yeah, we were having lunch and I said, we're doing these content days. If you're in town, you should just come by, see how we film our content. Things that maybe he could pick up for his content. Things I can learn from him as I start to explore fiction. So, yeah, love having you. Thanks for coming.

[C]

Thanks for having me.

[A]

Cheer.

[B]

What are we looking through right now, Huey? We're trying to set this teleprompter up right now, but I had it the wrong way. So there we go. Nope, I had it the right way.

[A]

Very small thing. I am gonna move that pool cleaner because you can see though.

[B]

You gotta.

[A]

Not be afraid to get your hands dirty, you know? All right, let's see what's better. Testing my eyesight here. Yeah. Are you. Is it. That's. We're gonna try it. Okay. If not, we can also push it forward. We might. We might need to bring it a t. All right, so quick recap of 2025, just to give you some context. So in 2025, we did $8,155,862 in top line revenue. That might sound like a lot, but at the same time, we also spent $964,230 on ads, which is way more than we spent the year before that. And we nearly tripled our team. So we went from 12 people to, I think we're up to 34. So revenue went up, costs went up faster. So this was definitely a big year of reinvesting in the business. We made a ton of investments in team and increasing quality of content and expanding platforms, ramping ads. These were all things that we weren't really doing two years ago. So this past year was definitely a year of paying down some ignorance debt. There were a lot of things that we went into it thinking, oh, this will be so easy. And I have to keep reminding myself, anytime you think something's easy, it's not. It's gonna be hard. Anytime you think, oh, I won't have to spend that much money on this, you end up spending like, 10 times more than you thought. You know, anytime you think something's gonna happen really quickly, it doesn't. It takes a long time. Another thing we did this past year was we ran a ton of webinars. This was the first time that we really ran webinars to cold traffic from ads. And. And we did a monthly webinar almost every month this past year. And we ended up ramping that to two webinars a month. And then at the end of the year, we ended up running this whole big, like, three day challenge that was basically like a longer form webinar. So we did a ton of stuff in 2025, and it was a successful year in the sense that we learned a lot. But I think our goal for 2026 is we really want to try and push the business to the next level of maturity. You know, like, now we have all of these things in place. We've expanded the team, we've expanded capacity, we've expanded our skill set. That means that the ceiling, in theory, is way higher. So we've created all this space. Now we got to grow into it. So big year ahead. Let's go.

[B]

That looks great.

[A]

Get writing clients. 2026 challenge. Oh, oh. First lit RPG novel.

[C]

Oh, dude, congratulations.

[A]

Actually, we changed the they Kind of messed up the printing because you see how this isn't centered.

[C]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

So I ended up removing the border because it looks like a card, you know, But I removed it because, like, the printing was just too variable.

[C]

Wait, this is a deck builder?

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Oh, nice.

[A]

Yeah, I love. So the same guy who designed the COVID is the guy who, who did all of the dungeon crawler Carl cover redesigns.

[C]

Oh, hell yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

He did a great job. Looks, looks really cool. And then inside we did like buttons and stuff. So it's got that, you know, sort of gamer analog, eight bit feel.

[C]

It's awesome. It's hard to tell how much work it takes to do all of that.

[A]

Oh, a ton. Yeah.

[C]

Because everything, like every graphic has to be custom made. Especially, like, you've got these like, title parts here.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Like, yeah, any of this, all of that has to be custom made. And then someone, as they're like, going through, has to put in every single, like, part, which is just like super fun.

[A]

So check it out. I mean, I think my next one's gonna be way better, but first one, first one's the hardest.

[C]

You know what the thing though, is, is, like, it's. When I started writing, I was just like, I'm just gonna keep writing more and more books and if I learn two, three things from each book, then it just gets better.

[A]

Yeah, eventually you'll get good.

[C]

Yeah. And yeah. And I was like, you know what, like, after 10, I might be able to like, understand how this writing gig works. And it honestly is like, every single time it gets better. But every single time, like, when you read your own stuff, you get surprised with the level of like, who wrote this? Like, this is a really good book. And like, if you're far enough removed from it, you're like, I don't know, it's like really fun but weird.

[A]

Okay, so on that note, so second gift. This is, this is the first book I ever wrote. It's non fiction. It's a memoir.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

But it's about how I became one of the highest ranked World of Warcraft players in North America. Yeah. And this is, to date, this is my favorite thing I've ever written. And I have that same experience anytime. Every year I reread it and every year I look back, I'm like, whoever wrote that was cooking at the time. So I think as a gamer lit RPG writer, you'll enjoy it a lot. Oh, no.

[C]

Like, and it's, it's super cool. Like, we all have these like, segments of our lives. Where we look at, we're like, man, that was such a cool segment of our lives.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Like, what. What the heck of, like, what was going on at the time, but also, like, living in that moment. I think that's, like, stories. You get to live with it, right?

[A]

Yeah. Yeah.

[C]

But no, appreciate it.

[A]

I hope you enjoy it, bro.

[C]

Yeah, no, I will definitely be reading these. I gotta go. I gotta go fly, so I will be doing that.

[A]

Do your thing. Yeah. There you go. Two new reads for the plane.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

When I was in Vegas with Hormozi's team at the workshop, that was like, one of the biggest things they were stressing to us is your ads will perform better if you base it off of what's working with organic. And it sounds so simple and obvious, but I feel like the challenge is being disciplined enough to build up. What's the status?

[B]

What's going on right now? We got one more horizontal.

[C]

Right.

[B]

This is the last one of the day. I thought we were actually. I thought we were actually doing less than last time, but we're doing more. We're just a lot more efficient. So what do you think, Orion? We're locked in.

[C]

Almost done.

[A]

Anything go wrong today? Nope.

[B]

Gone flawlessly.

[A]

Just perfect.

[C]

Everything is perfect.

[A]

10 out of 10.

[B]

We love the natural light in here. It's been pretty easy for our.

[A]

For us.

[B]

Made our job easy.

[A]

Yeah, this is a great spot. Aside from starting outside, actually. So that was the big. So we started with a, you know, difficult, you know, high, high sun in.

[B]

The morning, but, you know, we figured it out.

[A]

Yes, sir.

[C]

Little learning curve in the beginning. Yeah.

[A]

Maybe throw in what that shot looked like just by the end, by like 0.7. I was like.

[B]

Foreign.

[A]

We're almost there. End of the day, we've. We've gotten through a ton of long form, a bunch of VSLs, bunch of things. Promoting our upcoming Get Writing clients challenge. But real quick, I guess just to end, I wanted to share some big goals that I have for myself and for our business in 2026. This is a good accountability mechanism for me, and also this will be cool to look back on and see if I achieve them. So one of my big goals in terms of writing is to actually log. And I was doing the math on this 700 hours of creative writing practice. So that is. It might sound like a lot, but it's actually not. So that's two hours per day, seven days per week. So, I mean, two hours a day, that's. That's light work for me at this point. So really, it's just about consistency and protecting that time. I also want to publish two fiction novels this year. So that's a big goal of mine is starting to trend more and more in a direction of fiction. And then also two nonfiction books. I already have one that's done. I'm hoping to publish that in March, maybe April. I'm aiming for March. It's called Writer Career Paths. And then ideally I want to write the next art and Business of Writing related book. I won't share what it is yet, but the next book in that series later this year. Business goals. Our big goal is to hit eight figures in revenue this year. You know, we've been at the 7 multi 7 figure range for a long time. Last year we did, you know, 8 million. Our goal this year is to break 10 million. I think there's something very psychological too about, you know. Yeah, I know how to build a seven figure multi seven figure business. But I really want to cross that eight figure market even just for myself. Like, no, okay, now I know what goes into building an eight figure business. So I don't really have any particular reason for that goal other than I just know that we're capable of it and so we should do that and then life goals, honestly, just like stay healthy. I've really dialed in my health a lot over the past couple of years. I've invested a ton in personal training and physical therapy. I've been experimenting a little bit with peptides. I've been doing like vitamin IVs. I've gotten really into doing IVs with NAD. I'm not a scientist, so go down the rabbit hole and learn about that yourself. But I really am a big fan of NAD for recovery. And I've also my sleep, like I got an eight sleep temperature controlled mattress. I have, I think it's called Drowsy. These really nice eye masks. I put that thing over my eyes and I am out. I have a really nice silk pillowcase. Like I've invested a lot in my bed and every night I crawl into bed and I turn to my wife and I just go, I love my BE much. So it is worth investing in your bed. I mean that's where you spend like a third of your life, you know, so health and everything. I've been feeling really good. Really. The big goal is me and my wife have been trying to get pregnant, you know, and I'm really hoping that this is the year I would love to become a dad this year. You know, I turned 36 here in a couple months. I really feel like I've crossed that threshold where I've built up enough skill and I trust myself to monetize that skill. I've proven to myself that I can provide for myself and provide for the family that I'm trying to build. Over and over and over again, I've proven to myself that I know how to build businesses. I feel like the only thing that's really left is, you know, start a family and take that next step. So I'm really, really hoping that happens this year. So positive intentions for that and otherwise? Yeah. I mean, 2025 was great. Learned a lot of hard lessons in terms of building and scaling and growing our business. But overall, this is the healthiest I've ever felt, the sharpest I've ever felt, the most dialed in I've ever felt, the most that I feel like I can push myself and work really, really hard and still not get burned out and show up and do it another day, the next day, the next day, the next day. So I'm feeling really dialed in now. I just. It's like we just got to keep building new skills, keep reinvesting in ourselves, and keep growing. So this has been a great day. We're going to wrap up in here, and I will see you next time.