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Here's my exact morning routine. First, I go on a walk for 30 minutes and then I start writing for 90 minutes. After that I eat a small meal, go on another walk, respond to a few messages along the way, go to the gym, then start emails, meetings and other non creative work. Some days, of course, I record videos, but we'll save that for later. Now the importance of this is that this routine, 30 minutes of walking, 90 minutes of writing, is responsible for generating over $10 million now. Oh, $10 million. Why am I even saying that? Because one, people want to make money. There's no shame in that. It's okay if you want to make money. Second, is that me mentioning that number helps grab attention? Right. It gives me some form of authority or whatever other psychology we're going for here to get people to watch the rest of the video, to understand why 30 minutes of walking, 90 minutes of writing and can absolutely change your life. And I'm going to prove that to you. And that's the only time I'll mention money. Just under, well, I'll kind of mention it, but understand that's why I mentioned it. So to some that's a big number, right? 10 million, obviously a lot of money. To others that's not much. If you've been in business for a long time, that's like a good amount of money. But obviously with a business you want to make more. Now the thing here is this may sound out of bounds for a lot of people, but you have to understand the power of, of this routine. The reason I'm telling you about this routine is because $10 million is just like the end point. Right. I've been doing this routine for the past five or so years and at first it led to $10,000, then a hundred thousand dollars, then a million dollars. And that's the incredible thing, is that your income can scale, your income can increase without doing more work, right? Right. If you've watched the four hour workday or you've watched my other content, you understand what I'm getting at here. But so many people feel like they have to grind for 12 hours a day like every other entrepreneur, when I don't think that's the case at all. So if your goal is to make more money, which is most people's goal, because your work bills, status and sense of control over your life depend on it, you're in a safe space here. You can care about money, but if nothing in your morning routine directly generates income, you're doing something wrong. Most people's morning routines are just filled with a bunch of random habits that someone else, probably someone on YouTube, told them to do. Or their routine is unconscious and they think that they don't have a routine. Hint, that's still a routine. But the point here is that most routines are unintentional, hidden forms of procrastination. A powerful routine, no matter how long, decreases cognitive load and allows you to streamline achieving your one true priority. The world's most successful people leverage routines to automate repetitive yet necessary behavior and focus their limited mental energy on the right tasks. That's how important this is. If you get this one thing right, you can finally start achieving your goals. You can finally start pursuing your life's work. You can finally start making money. If you don't want to go the money route, you can finally start losing weight. Whatever it may be, the principles still apply. We're going to use money and writing and walking as examples here to explain what the routine is. But we need to understand the depth of it first. So let's talk about this. We'll just call it the two hour routine. Now, the first question you're probably asking is like writing. Writing? Really? So you just journal for 90 minutes every morning and you make money And I mean, when you say it like that, yes, actually that is kind of what's going on. But to spare you the hundreds of thousands of words I've written on this before and and created videos on this before, I want to just share my weird little life philosophy in a nutshell with you. This philosophy, and therefore this video, is specifically for creative or ambitious people who know they are meant for more and want to pursue their life's work. So here's the condensed philosophy. Humans are creators. Not content creators per se, but people who leverage the tools and technology available to them to solve problems, build solutions, and attract a group of people who can benefit from those creations. Value exchange is a pillar of a meaningful life. Solving your own problems and contributing the solution are the two master keys of happiness. Today we have the Internet and AI. Incredible tools that most take for granted or use in a way that destroys their own life and others. Anyone can learn anything, build anything and earn accordingly if they have taste, agency and a sense of responsibility. Ideas are the new oil. Digital media is the new Real estate. Creators are the new interest based education system that teaches the leading edge that can't be taught in schools. So why writing? Because personally, I've always had the desire to do something creative, right? I never really wanted a job. That's just me. If you Want a job, do you? I'm talking about me and people like me. I wanted to do something that had some kind of positive impact, right? I wanted to feel at least decent about making money. And the thing here is that the Internet exposed me to many opportunities that would allow myself to do this. And after failing at seven different online business models, I landed on web design, got a job, and started freelancing on the side until I could eventually go full time with that. Now, I always thought that social media was for unique or talented people who could articulate their thoughts or people who were super funny. But around this time, I saw other people talking about web design and landing web design clients. So I decided, why can't I do that? And I started on Twitter while doing this, of all places. And that's important because that's when I realized the power of writing. I learned that writing is a meditative process. Writing is how you practice thinking. Writing is how you document your growth. Writing is how you attract supporters to your work. Writing is the foundation of media like video scripts, marketing, web pages, et cetera. I never thought that I would become a writer, and I'm not a great writer by any means. I understand psychology. I'm not good at grammar or articulating sentences in a poetic way, or academic writing or English writing. I'm simply. I've. I've become good at articulating my ideas and the point I'm trying to get across. But I quickly realized that if I wanted to combine learning, thinking, and earning, which are the traits of highly successful people, into one singular morning habit, this was the way to do it. And I mean, beyond that, it serves the purpose of a meditative practice, because writing can be like journaling or some form of catharsis, and even serves the purpose of something like a cold shower, because actually sitting down and doing it is difficult. So it's a very efficient and holistic approach, overarching habit that you can do in the morning. Now, what does this have to do with journaling? Well, I realized that brands and creators, the good ones at least, were just sharing the most important things in their head. Their brands, their social media profiles were just their public journals, their head or personality, or how they perceive the world and collected an intersecting set of ideas that nobody else could replicate was their competitive edge. So when I started to treat my social media account as a public journal, or where I take notes, work started to feel like play. Now, how does that make money? Well, first you need to understand that there is a new class of assets before the Internet. We had traditional assets like real estate, gold, silver stocks and fine art. And now we have digital assets that revolve around media and code. Now, digital assets are different because anyone can build them. You can go and build a digital asset today. You don't need capital or connections or to be in the right physical location or go to the right college, or have the right credentials or status to purchase fine art or get into real estate or buy the right stocks or get gold. You can build the digital asset by just doing things. What that means is that you can quite literally start building wealth right now and increasing that wealth. And as your skill increases, these digital assets are skill based assets. So we have media and code, but code as great of a skill I think it is. And I mean, I am building a software, I have a team of coders. Without media, code kind of becomes worthless because nobody can be attracted to it and little money can be made if no one sees the code or buys the code or the software or whatever you're building. So I decided to stick with media, right? I was a web designer in my past. I studied code for a decent amount of time. I just slowly realized that media was the more creative route and potentially more impactful route that I wanted to go. Now, media in the digital world are things like videos, podcasts and posts. If they are valuable and you understand the mechanics of social media, newsletters, algorithms and things like that, you can attract an audience of people. It doesn't matter if you want to write a book, build a software, make music, do public speaking, create a course, offer a freelance service, or sell handcrafted crafted cutting boards. You need to get that in front of others and persuade them of its value. And the most accessible, low cost and high leverage way to do that is with digital media, specifically writing. Now, of course, you don't have to be the person that creates media or rights, but if you're just one person starting a business on your own, and you're not already on a team, or you don't have a company where you can hire someone to do this for you, then media is an incredible place to start. So what you do is you write and you build your own brand in public and you gain some kind of authority because you are getting better in public and people can see that. And whether or not you sell your own product or start your own business, that is all. For all of the reasons we just went over, this is the most in demand skill right now. Not necessarily writing, but the umbrella above writing, which is media. If you can generate traffic or attention. You will not get replaced. You will make as much money as you want to if you are good at that skill and you can actually do it. Because if you're actually good at it and you can get a post to do well and people see that, then they're going to hire you. If you are pitching yourself, it's kind of obvious. If you can master media, you can make as much money as you want. So it's now obvious why I write for 90 minutes in the morning. Now why do I walk for 30 minutes in the morning? This video isn't about walking, but if you insist Walking is low friction and gives you one single thing to focus on when you get out of bed. Walking burns calories, increases insulin sensitivity, and improves health markers across the board. Morning sunlight is beneficial for circadian response and thus sleep. Sleep is the best nootropic. All of the above Reduce stress Stress is the mind killer. Walking puts your body on autopilot so your mind can solve problems and birth ideas. Going outside pulls you away from distractions inside, acting as a creativity block that gives you uninterrupted time to think and learn. I do most of my reading and listening on a walk, which doubles as research for my writing. And if it's too cold outside, good. Now you have a way to train your mental strength and most of the world's most renowned businessmen, creatives, and ancient philosophers swear by it. Walking. And who are you to question them? Walking, as stupid as it sounds, is such a holistic habit. It's writing and walking. Like you take all of the benefits of all of those things combined and holy crap, what else do you need in a morning routine? You cover all bases without filling your morning with all of these disjointed little habits that are stacking up into one but not moving you any closer to your goals. So now that's the routine in a nutshell and why we do it. Now let's talk about the intricacies of the routine a bit. So this routine has a few critical parts. I have an idea I want to write about. I have a soft outline for a newsletter. Those are what I think about on walks. And I normally have a lecture or audiobook for my walks. And I jot down any ideas that can be used for my writing in my notes. That is my entire ideation and research process. The best, most energetic writing comes from experience. When I sit down to write for 90 minutes, I'm not just sitting there with a blank head wondering what to write. I already have all of it written down in my notes from my walk, because I listen to stuff that sparks an idea, or the idea is in the thing that I'm listening to. Most writing just comes from research, right? If you don't know what to write or what to create, it's because you're not researching things. You're not reading, you're not listening, you're not searching on perplexity nowadays or AI or other things and forming all of those ideas that you gather into a compelling narrative. A narrative in this case doesn't have to be a fictional story or even a story about a person in general. It just has to follow a problem and solution flow. Now, there are quite a few caveats here, so I'll explain those. But after my walk, so the first 30 minutes, I wake up, I drink water, I go on a walk, and then I shower, sit down, start writing. What do I start writing? I start with social posts, right? Because that's kind of like another idea generation mechanism. So my walk, it gets the juices flowing. I'm researching, I get back, I start writing social posts. And those allow me to write shorter ideas without worrying about the long one. So I take my research and I flesh those ideas out into bigger ideas that get put into social posts. So after that 30 minutes of social post writing, and it goes into 60 minutes of newsletter writing. Now, when I state that, that's where I start to lose people, because they don't understand the value of newsletters and don't understand that it's not just a newsletter that you're writing. So let's talk about newsletters and their function in this. The first point here is that newsletters are the new audience. And the first objection to that is, well, nobody checks their emails anymore. And that's exactly what someone who isn't in the arena would say. Because if that was the case, my newsletter analytics wouldn't be double my YouTube analytics with 900,000 fewer subscribers. Yes, you read that correctly. Frankly, most people just suck at writing newsletters. Or all they want to do is write about their deep thoughts without caring or providing tangible value to the reader. So they get stuck in this noble loop of being mad at the world for not caring about their writing, which reinforces their inability to make money. They don't want to change, they don't want. If you want to achieve any form of success, you need to strike a balance between art and business. You must care about what you do, but so must other people. You must play the attention game and learn to play it well. Now, contrary to popular belief, you can capture attention and be helpful at the same time. In fact, you can't be helpful unless you capture attention. Okay, back on topic. Why are newsletters so important? First is that algorithms have switched to an interest graph. Social media followers don't mean much because anything can go viral. But having followers is a slight advantage. This means direct access to your audience has shifted to email lists and communities. But emails are still lower friction than joining a community. Platform platforms like Substack have integrated newsletters with a social feed, so people don't only get emails, but notifications on their phone and a better reading experience. And last long form content is how you build trust and talk about your deeper thoughts. Because social media biases surface level content, so those make sense to most people. But many are still missing the real power of a newsletter. First, if you're a one person business, it would be stupid to write original content for every single platform. You wouldn't have the time or you'd be writing all day. And due to the nature of focus, you wouldn't be writing anything high quality, because quality comes from focus on one idea and dissecting it. So instead, you write the best possible content you can, you write the best newsletter and then you write the best social posts, and then you reformat all of of those things for every single platform. You take your newsletter and that becomes a YouTube script. You take your social posts from X or threads or whatever it is, and then you cross post them everywhere to LinkedIn. You turn them into an Instagram carousel, or you turn them into a real script or short script or a TikTok script, and then you record it in front of a camera and post it. Don't worry about people consuming the same thing across all different platforms because people benefit from, from repetition of your most quality ideas. When you listen to an artist, a music artist, you listen to their best music over and over and over again. That's what you are as a creator or writer. People don't read one of your posts from three years ago and then understand everything that you're about. You have to repeat yourself constantly from new angles. And now the other thing here is that the more you write newsletters, the better you get at them. And you can test the title and the thumbnail beforehand because it's the title and the thumbnail of the newsletter. Now the funny thing here is that people always think that I have this massive content team. Like they'll reach out to me and be like, hey, does your team do this, this and this? And they're asking me questions about my team and it's just me and my editor. I do all of the content, right? I record the videos, I write all of the posts. I literally write one to two posts a day and I write one newsletter a week. That's all of my content. It's nothing more than that. It just seems like I do a lot because I'm everywhere, because I do what I just told you to do. Now, I would recommend watching some of my other social media videos because just posting isn't going to get you that far. You actually have to understand, I've mentioned it in this video, but you have to actually understand the mechanics of social media and the algorithm and attention and other things. You can't ju. You can just start writing and get better. But most people start writing and they don't understand that if they aren't growing, something's wrong. And so they just keep posting and getting the same amount of engagement and they don't realize that that's an error that should be corrected and through education, experimentation and practice. So you can start posting. But if you aren't going anywhere, you need to continually study social media marketing, persuasion, etc. And implement and experiment with the tools and tactics that you're learning until you start to see results. And then you double down on those results, repeat the process. Boom. Now you don't have to buy a course. Now, the second thing about why newsletters are important is because they're going to make you the most money. That's where you promote your products or services. So my strategy is very simple. Every single thing I publish online leads back to my newsletter. I link to my newsletter on all platforms once a day. Sometimes I forget, of course, and my newsletter is where I pitch my products or services. Since my newsletters are somewhat long, deep and valuable by my standards, even if people don't buy from me, they still get something out of it. This removes most of the sleaziness from sales and keeps the focus on value first. And since my newsletter gets turned into a YouTube video, those promotions naturally carry over when I tell you, hey, check this out in the description. That's because I've already done that in my newsletter. Now, if you want to understand how I write newsletters, check out the link in the description to a post I have on substack about writing a newsletter as a beginner. And I'll link a few others there too. So we understand newsletters, but what about social media? Right? Because the morning routine is kind of like 30 minutes of walking 30 minutes of social post, 30 minutes of newsletter writing. And that's the foundation. That's literally just how you make money, right? You, you can build a product and that's going to take some time, but once you build the product, all you have to do is send traffic to it. You need to be just focused on distribution and brand, which is writing content every day and making sure that you're continuing to grow. And then you promote the product. And the more, the better you are at generating traffic or building an audience, the more money you make on the products or services that you've built, or affiliate offers or sponsorships or whatever it may be. So you're saying that that all makes sense, but you've been writing for however long and your newsletter isn't growing. And that's the newsletter trap. It's actually the long form trap in general because it applies to YouTube and podcasts and newsletters. You start writing them because someone like me persuades you of all the benefits. So you prioritize only that without understanding the complete system. And then you get discouraged when you keep writing into the void. Newsletters are like blogs. When you post a blog, it kind of just sits there and does nothing until you send people that blog. And yes, SEO is a thing, but I haven't cared about that, so I'm not going to even attempt to teach it. I want instant feedback. I don't want to wait months for traction. The point is, one of your sole priorities for the longevity and success of your brand is getting people to subscribe to your newsletter. Your newsletter is your core audience, the people who trust you and want to support you. Newsletters only grow if they are physically placed in in front of other people. And it is extremely unlikely that they will grow just because they're good. Either you have to generate traffic and promote your newsletter to them, or someone needs to read your newsletter and enjoy it so much that they share it with their friends or their audience. So you need to play both the shallow and the deep game, right? YouTube, podcast, newsletters, that's the deep game. The shallow game is social media. That's where you attract a broad audience. Then you put your newsletter in front of them on a consistent basis. If you stop putting it in front of them, it stops growing. When it comes to YouTube, I posted for like five years, inconsistently given that, and I didn't know much about YouTube. I posted inconsistently for five years and it didn't go anywhere. And when I started writing on social media, after I started freelancing with web design, I Realized that I didn't have to play the YouTube game because I was building an audience on short form and I could lead them to the long form. I could just promote my YouTube. That's what got me to 10,000 subscribers. And then one video popped off and now YouTube is kind of self sustaining. Now, if you don't know how to write social posts, I'll also leave link in the description to articles that I've written on those so you can start practicing. But now we need to talk about, okay, how does this actually make money? If two hours of writing a day consistently grows your audience and you have a product or service that people want, your income increases as your audience does and you don't need to increase the amount of work you do. Of course, this is variable, right? If you're a freelancer or a coach or service business and you have clients, the more clients you get, the less time you have. So you have to understand the how to productize, right? If you're. You get to the point where you have so many clients that you can't take them on anymore, and then you either hire a team and continue growing the service business, or you productize down and you start doing a community or a cohort or a course or some kind of other tool or a software or something of that nature. Because if you have a successful service business, you have money and you can do that. But as your audience grows, then you productize down and you get your time back. I work more than two hours, but what I'm saying for the entirety of this video is that this two hour routine is the literal backbone of anything that I want to do. Most people don't actually study the skills that allow them to succeed at being a creator. Instead they see a youtuber or Twitter account that they like. They decide they want to start writing, which is great, and then expect money to just magically appear. They pray that YouTube, AdSense or Instagram's monetization features will pay them enough to do it full time. Now here's the thing. I've tried those monetization features. With my audience size 1.7 million on Instagram, I make about 300amonth while generating almost 6 million impressions per month. That's just insane. So if you actually want to get paid, you need to build a product or service and promote it every single day or in your newsletters every single time you write them. If you have a product or service and most of your audience sees that you can make 10x to 50x more than any platform would Ever think of paying you and just for posting on it? A good metric is aiming for 50 cents to a dollar per follower per month. If you can't hit that, your product stack needs a refinement or you need to study marketing and sales more. So how do you promote? First you write social content, then you send people to your newsletter. Then you promote one to two times in your newsletter and then you promote the newsletter with your links inside of it or the promotions inside of the newsletter on social media. The other benefit here is that if you do this, you aren't selling directly on the social media timeline, right? You build a lot trust in the audience that chooses to follow you because you aren't selling all of the time. You give people something more to read, right? You sell them on your newsletter and why that's beneficial to them because it is. It's valuable. It's long. But that has links to your products or services inside of it. So people can go view those, purchase those from a place of trust, right? This is. This doesn't have to be a click funnels countdown timer to get people into this scarce mindset. You're going value first, trust first. And lastly, why I like this so much is that it's antithetical to what most people tell you to do. And if most people are doing it, that either means that it's saturated or people are used to it or the market sophistication is high and it doesn't work as well as it used to or it's going to stop working pretty soon. Because I personally don't sell anytime that I can. I want to play the long game and that's not for a lot of people. If you need cash and you need it fast, you can either get a job or you can study customer acquisition strategies for a service business like an agency or freelancing and just grind that out. So that's kind of it. That's the two hour routine. 30 minutes of walking, 90 minutes of writing. That's the baseline of any kind of business you would want to build ever. And your income increases without your work increasing. Makes sense. I hope it does. If it doesn't, leave a comment. I can make another video before you leave. Like subscribe. It's just two buttons. And consider watching the next recommended video or just going to my channel and checking out a video that piques your interest. So thank you for watching. See you in the next one. Bye.