I'm going to have the new part of this on Monday so look at for that.
As far as conviction -- I overthink everything too. But what I typically do is force myself into situations where I have to take an action. And that mans spending a lot of time in a state of discomfort.
In 2015 I was only making about $30k a year. I heard about digital nomads. I knew a lot of them were making 10x more than me and living my dream. So I decided to book a 1 way ticket to a city where tons of them were gathering.
If I hadn't of done that, I wouldn't have met people who showed me that I could have been getting paid more for a skillset I had already developed nicely and therefore I wouldn't have increased my pay for the first time.
Over time I have continued this cycle of taking large, scary actions that force me to make a desperate decision despite how much I'd rather just overthink it and do nothing.
I realized that I'm confident in the fact that if I don't know something -- I can find out. And, if I take a massive, uncomfortable action I can not only deal with the discomfort, but I'll figure out some fucking way to rise to the occasion.
That doesn't mean I don't overthink. It doesn't mean I don't second guess myself constantly. It doesn't mean I'm not a bundle of nerves.
It just means that I have the capacity to say "fuck it" and jump out of the plane despite all of that and figure out how to build a parachute on the way down or die.
And almost always, I've found that taking large uncomfortable actions is the best way to FORCE yourself to figure it out if that makes sense.
Agreed with the previous comment about this being more exciting and more value than I expected when I signed up. I’ve worked by way though everything now and very pleased and looking forward to what’s to come.
One thing I will say I’ve noticed since I have been incorporating AI into most of my work, is now when it’s down (which admittedly isn’t often), it seems like such a slog to write “normally” again.
Now I know I could just use a other tool (currently I exclusively use projects in Claude), but it’s just an interesting observation about how within only around 6 months of regular use I’ve come to take that cognitive offloading for granted. Have been thinking I should write some stuff exclusively without AI, but then that brings me to my next point…
The other thing that’s kind of odd is I’ll often rewrite or heavily edit 50-70% of my AI-generated draft. So thinking out loud here, I feel like I’m still flexing my human writing muscle enough, but then at the same time wondering if I’m doing something “wrong” with my prompting.
Short form I tend to rewrite less - more just choose and/or mash up and tweak the best of a few iterations. But long form, like blog posts and case studies, I’ll always write my own intro/lede and do all the headings, subheadings, and a rough idea of what I want to go in each first. Then I take the output and kind of copy and paste, rewrite, and add in my own sections as I go along - almost like a real time collaboration.
Anyway, not sure there’s a question or even useful insight in all that. Most of all, I actually just find the whole process fascinating and very much enjoying having a more balanced conversation about this all.
If there’s one thing I’ve taken away from your content on AI so far William, it’s that there’s no shortcut to prompting that makes it easy to get AI to spit out great outputs that require minimal editing. It still requires deep research, big ideas, and detailed, thoughtful prompting to get even a solid first draft to work from
I'm in the same boat. But I always hated writing short form stuff anyway. Because it was a slog to write. It wasn't necessarily difficult to write because my brain could go more or less on autopilot, it was just time consuming.
I often found myself wishing I could take my whole broad idea that I already could see in my head from start to finish and just vomit it on the page and that's what AI let's me do.
I mean if you have ever worked with researchers, ghotwriters, juniors and more you're basically doing the same thing -- explaining to them what you want and then delegating. It's really similar.
And I find it frees me up to focus more on the things I really want to focus on which is idea generation and tweaking.
Somewhat unrelated question (no sure where else to ask, really):
When working with royalties, how do we know/make sure businesses pay us the agreed amount? How do you even know how much money a business pulled from your promo in the first place?
I know you said this is a handshake business where mutual trust must be implied, and I want to confirm if it's the same thing here.
With a lot of the clients I work with, the stats of a promo (for example in a slack channel) are posted every day. "We got this many visitors, we got this many sales yesterday, we got this many upsells, we got this conversion rate."
That's because data is everything in this industry. If all the writers and marketers don't know what's happening with the stats, then nobody can make any informed decisions on how to pivot, what to write next, or what to test next.
If something fails to reach certain benchmarks everybody wants to know why and how to do better next time.
If something is exceeding in sales everybody wants to know why the audience responded so favorably and how to capitalize on it.
So because the data drives everything and is vital to everyone's success, you pretty much always know how much money your efforts are generating and also typically have access to the data yourself.
That's not always the case. Sometimes the client you're working with will just share data with you as you ask for it (if it's like a one-off project). But still -- the numbers are so important that nobody has a reason to "hide" it from you.
If a client is not telling you what's happening with a promo run far away. They probably don't even know what they're doing.
This is getting way more exciting that what most of us initially had in mind and signed up for. Loved your reference to Mad Men and how you drew that all time classic onto this modern day 'AI Canvas'.
Gaaawd, this is fucking amazing!
Can't wait for the next part of the masterclass.
A lil bit of side-question here...
I noticed that you speak with a ton of conviction and confidence... even when you're unsure about something.
I'm pretty sure that has been a major key to your success in business.
Were you always that way?
If not, how did you cultivate that bulletproof confidence?
How do you stay confidente even when the road ahead seems unclear?
Whether it's for a new high-stakes promo you're writing...
Closing deals with clients in an totally new industry you know nothing about...
You get what I mean.
How do you bolstered up the courage to start asking for bigger fees and working with the big boys?
Because no matter how much you know about getting clients and writing copy...
If you lack cojones, you're toast in this biz.
And I'm a chronic over thinker, that wants to shake that bad habit.
Thanks!
Keep up the amazing work.
Richard
I'm going to have the new part of this on Monday so look at for that.
As far as conviction -- I overthink everything too. But what I typically do is force myself into situations where I have to take an action. And that mans spending a lot of time in a state of discomfort.
In 2015 I was only making about $30k a year. I heard about digital nomads. I knew a lot of them were making 10x more than me and living my dream. So I decided to book a 1 way ticket to a city where tons of them were gathering.
If I hadn't of done that, I wouldn't have met people who showed me that I could have been getting paid more for a skillset I had already developed nicely and therefore I wouldn't have increased my pay for the first time.
Over time I have continued this cycle of taking large, scary actions that force me to make a desperate decision despite how much I'd rather just overthink it and do nothing.
I realized that I'm confident in the fact that if I don't know something -- I can find out. And, if I take a massive, uncomfortable action I can not only deal with the discomfort, but I'll figure out some fucking way to rise to the occasion.
That doesn't mean I don't overthink. It doesn't mean I don't second guess myself constantly. It doesn't mean I'm not a bundle of nerves.
It just means that I have the capacity to say "fuck it" and jump out of the plane despite all of that and figure out how to build a parachute on the way down or die.
And almost always, I've found that taking large uncomfortable actions is the best way to FORCE yourself to figure it out if that makes sense.
Agreed with the previous comment about this being more exciting and more value than I expected when I signed up. I’ve worked by way though everything now and very pleased and looking forward to what’s to come.
One thing I will say I’ve noticed since I have been incorporating AI into most of my work, is now when it’s down (which admittedly isn’t often), it seems like such a slog to write “normally” again.
Now I know I could just use a other tool (currently I exclusively use projects in Claude), but it’s just an interesting observation about how within only around 6 months of regular use I’ve come to take that cognitive offloading for granted. Have been thinking I should write some stuff exclusively without AI, but then that brings me to my next point…
The other thing that’s kind of odd is I’ll often rewrite or heavily edit 50-70% of my AI-generated draft. So thinking out loud here, I feel like I’m still flexing my human writing muscle enough, but then at the same time wondering if I’m doing something “wrong” with my prompting.
Short form I tend to rewrite less - more just choose and/or mash up and tweak the best of a few iterations. But long form, like blog posts and case studies, I’ll always write my own intro/lede and do all the headings, subheadings, and a rough idea of what I want to go in each first. Then I take the output and kind of copy and paste, rewrite, and add in my own sections as I go along - almost like a real time collaboration.
Anyway, not sure there’s a question or even useful insight in all that. Most of all, I actually just find the whole process fascinating and very much enjoying having a more balanced conversation about this all.
If there’s one thing I’ve taken away from your content on AI so far William, it’s that there’s no shortcut to prompting that makes it easy to get AI to spit out great outputs that require minimal editing. It still requires deep research, big ideas, and detailed, thoughtful prompting to get even a solid first draft to work from
I'm in the same boat. But I always hated writing short form stuff anyway. Because it was a slog to write. It wasn't necessarily difficult to write because my brain could go more or less on autopilot, it was just time consuming.
I often found myself wishing I could take my whole broad idea that I already could see in my head from start to finish and just vomit it on the page and that's what AI let's me do.
I mean if you have ever worked with researchers, ghotwriters, juniors and more you're basically doing the same thing -- explaining to them what you want and then delegating. It's really similar.
And I find it frees me up to focus more on the things I really want to focus on which is idea generation and tweaking.
Gold as always Will, learning a ton.
Somewhat unrelated question (no sure where else to ask, really):
When working with royalties, how do we know/make sure businesses pay us the agreed amount? How do you even know how much money a business pulled from your promo in the first place?
I know you said this is a handshake business where mutual trust must be implied, and I want to confirm if it's the same thing here.
Many thanks for your stupendous work.
With a lot of the clients I work with, the stats of a promo (for example in a slack channel) are posted every day. "We got this many visitors, we got this many sales yesterday, we got this many upsells, we got this conversion rate."
That's because data is everything in this industry. If all the writers and marketers don't know what's happening with the stats, then nobody can make any informed decisions on how to pivot, what to write next, or what to test next.
If something fails to reach certain benchmarks everybody wants to know why and how to do better next time.
If something is exceeding in sales everybody wants to know why the audience responded so favorably and how to capitalize on it.
So because the data drives everything and is vital to everyone's success, you pretty much always know how much money your efforts are generating and also typically have access to the data yourself.
That's not always the case. Sometimes the client you're working with will just share data with you as you ask for it (if it's like a one-off project). But still -- the numbers are so important that nobody has a reason to "hide" it from you.
If a client is not telling you what's happening with a promo run far away. They probably don't even know what they're doing.
This is getting way more exciting that what most of us initially had in mind and signed up for. Loved your reference to Mad Men and how you drew that all time classic onto this modern day 'AI Canvas'.
Thanks!! I am running a bit let on Part 2 but I'll have it up soon (probably Monday).