How to turn your love for learning into a one-person company
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Editor's note: Rather than mechanically repeating within the old paradigm of the industrial era, you can turn your broad range of interests into the most powerful modern digital leverage. This article is produced via translation and compilation.
I am extremely obsessive and addicted by nature.
When I am (truly) interested in something, everything else ceases to matter.
Then full concentration comes naturally. If I did not need to sleep to stay alive, I could even "work" 24 hours a day. It occupies every corner of my mind. It is the only thing I want to learn, and the only thing I want to do.
This cycle of obsession has happened many times in my life. It started with fitness, followed by spiritual practice, then digital art, photography and web development. Later it extended to various branches of psychology and philosophy, as well as various "high-value" skills such as direct response marketing and advertising.
But there is one problem.
If you love learning and have a wide range of interests, society may have led you to believe that this trait is a weakness. And you may have believed it, because you can easily spend all your time learning without ever putting what you learn into action to deliver tangible results.
However, this line of thinking from others is completely understandable. Most people's worldview is still deeply influenced by the industrial era paradigm. They firmly believe that the perfect life path is to become a specialist, find a career that requires you to perform mechanized repetitive work for 40 years, and then retire at an age when long-term scarcity leaves you with no use for money other than buying material goods.
But I can tell you with full confidence: your love for learning is a superpower.
It means you have extremely high high-agency.
It means you own a unique perspective.
It means you already have all the conditions required to turn your interests into a modern source of income.
In this article, I want to break all of this down completely.
Why people who learn fast and have broad interests are actually already ahead of most people.
Why you have actually completed 80% of the work required to earn income (that is, you have been doing research all along, you just did not realize it counts as research).
The options you have to start a side hustle or full-time income stream — ideally by discovering and pursuing your life's calling (yes, it is that profound).
I will also provide some prompts and templates to help you clarify what you really want to do.
Let's get started now.
Why Learners and Improvers Have Unprecedented Leverage
Code and media are permissionless leverage. They are the core leverage behind the newly wealthy. You can build software and media that continue to work for you even when you are asleep.
— Naval
As an individual, you have more leverage at your disposal than ever before.
In the context of this article, leverage refers to the multiplier effect between input and output.
A tiny action can produce extremely huge repercussions, and technology is constantly amplifying the power that individuals can control.
Just think about it.
When social media rose to prominence, a single person could reach millions of audiences by posting a single post, video or tweet. This was impossible in the radio era. Television could achieve similar reach, but it was never accessible to ordinary people who only had slightly interesting ideas. As for paper letters, that was completely out of the question.
This explosive power still exists today, but the market has become more mature and discerning. Nowadays, it requires more skills and strategies to make use of it.
With artificial intelligence all the rage today, programming capabilities have been largely popularized and democratized. Most ordinary people can build a small-scale digital product with a full set of marketing funnels — something that used to require a team of dozens of people to develop and maintain. While low-risk business models that can be operated and sustained by one person, such as knowledge products, consulting coaching and freelancing, have always been feasible, you can achieve far more than that now.
Take Paul Musso as an example, who founded a modern philosophy school.
He basically teaches philosophy on Substack, and his paid subscription service includes lectures that users can attend every week.
I have discussed this in Purpose & Profit, but in my opinion, the positive side of the creator economy is precisely a decentralized education system.
Passionate people dive deep into their interests, extract the fascinating parts, make them practical, and pass them on. Nowadays, for most people, the vast majority of their education (the education that truly relates to their own goals, rather than their parents' expectations) is obtained from YouTube and social media, from creators whose ideas resonate with them.
This entire business model can be summed up in one sentence: improve yourself, then improve others.
In other words, as long as you have interests you can talk about, you have a way to build an audience base. You hold traffic in your hands, and you have leverage. The real difficulty lies in how to share your interests in a way that grabs people's attention and makes them want to follow you.
If you know how to package these interests into products or services that others are willing to pay for, you have a way to monetize that audience. You have a business.
How to Turn Your Love for Learning into a Business
To put it bluntly: teach what you are interested in.
Or turn the content you were going to teach into a practical, executable tool (we will discuss this later).
Yesterday, someone asked me for advice on how to choose a monetization project.
He said he was currently trying to shoot videos for personal brands in the real estate sector. He added that ideally, he actually wanted to shoot more creative, artistic films.
I asked him if he was creating content for his own personal brand.
He said no.
The answer seemed obvious to me. He should show his artistic side through his own personal videos, while teaching personal brand owners video shooting skills, since he already had certain experience in this field. This will not only help him attract clients (because industry leaders do not have time to shoot their own videos, but will now regard him as an authority in the video field), but also allow him to build a sufficiently broad audience base, which can then be monetized through some kind of teaching product around video shooting. Most creators cannot edit at all, so I think this will be extremely popular.
This is just one example, but the same logic most likely applies to you too.
You do not have a large sum of capital to invest, you are not interested in seeking sponsorship or financing, and you probably just want to do something creative and meaningful.
For people who love learning, the so-called "business model" generally looks like this:
You dive deep into your interests. They are inherently valuable, because you value them, which means other people may value them too, and many people actually already value them a lot. (Do not say you can just ask AI directly, because they often do not even know what questions to ask in the first place.)
You learn how to package them. You are not Marcus Aurelius. Posting chicken soup sentences on Twitter will get you nowhere. You must understand the attention mechanism and interaction psychology. (Now that you know what questions to ask AI, go research this.)
Inject your own unique voice. Because your audience does not care if you have a completely original theory. What they want is your own perspective and take on a valid idea.
Turn yourself into the business. Your brand, content and products all stem from your interests and the transformation these interests can bring.
Your only responsibility is to be a researcher and a vessel that carries value.
No kidding, you have to treat research as your full-time job. That is what writers, creatives and visionaries do. Peterson does it, Huberman does it, Marcus Aurelius and all the sages you admire in the past did it too. They probably did not care at all about being a "personal brand", but they cared about their interests, so creating content (which before the advent of internet media was simply "writing") became the vessel they chose to monetize and earn income from.
They read all kinds of obscure books. They dive into niche, obscure rabbit holes on the internet. They collect their favorite sources of inspiration and keep them well organized. They question what most people think, draw on the strengths of others, and then integrate their own unique insights. They record their ideas as fanatically as mad scientists. They are all transporters and processors of ideas. They hunt for ideas and share the best of the best. 80% of writing comes from research, and the remaining 20% is structuring and writing it in your own unique way.
Then the next question is: how exactly do you build a visible brand, content and product?
Your Brand Is the "Transformation"
When you think of someone you admire, why do you admire them?
Because they have fundamentally changed your life.
Their content or product has led to a change in your behavior.
They changed your mind first, then your actions, and you attribute the positive results of those actions to that person.
James Clear convinced millions of people to develop tiny habits, triggering huge transformations in their lives.
Jordan Peterson (at his peak) convinced millions of young men to take responsibility for their lives and pursue meaning.
Alan Watts helped people stop taking life so overly seriously.
Naval Ravikant taught people the power of digital leverage.
If you pick up an idea from Naval and later see the effect of that idea in your life, you will attribute that outcome to Naval.
Therefore, as a person with broad interests, your brand is about how you use these interests to help others transform their lives. The more people you help, the stronger your brand will be.
And people always get stuck on this point.
They feel they must have a perfect personal bio, a catchy slogan, or a rigorous value proposition.
In fact, you do not need to state any of these out loud. People will probably read your homepage bio at most once or twice. Your brand is intangible. It is the image that gradually builds up in people's minds as they read your content, buy your products, change their behavior, and recommend you to others.
All you really need to do is answer the following three questions and let them serve as a guide for most of your content:
Who can you help the most? (What is their current life situation?)
What has changed your life the most? (What interests do you consider to be crucial?)
How can you help others do the same? (What changes do their mindsets and actions need to go through, and how can you help them make those changes?)
You do not need to write the answers into your bio, or even reveal them to anyone ever. You just need to focus on creating content and products that actually help other people transform. Your brand naturally takes shape through your content and products themselves.
But if you find that you cannot even answer the first question, here is my advice:
The person you can help the most is the version of yourself from the past.
What kind of situation were you trapped in? How did you come across the interests that helped you get out of that situation? How can you help others complete the same transformation faster?
Do not overcomplicate it. Time will make the answer clearer little by little.
Your Content Is the Map
I have come into contact with many people who want to start writing.
As you would expect, and may even have experienced personally, their confusion often revolves around the same few old problems.
They do not know what to write. They do not know how to write. They do not know how to make their writing stand out. They do not know why people would listen to them instead of experts. They do not see themselves as experts, yet do not understand that experts are not the only group that can build an audience. You can also build a personal brand with a "learner" persona. You just need to learn, research and share your new discoveries, and there is no need to claim you have amazing achievements before you actually get results.
I like to understand content creation this way:
You have your brand (who you help, and how you help them transform their lives).
Now, think of content creation as if you are a programmer for a video game.
You set Point A — the audience's current situation — which is Level 1.
You set Point B — the place you can lead them to — which can be Level 100, or Level 50, Level 10, or Level 2.
(Even if you have not reached Level 100 yet, you can still keep growing. In fact, you must keep growing. You play the role of a guide here, which is why you attract "followers". So-called entrepreneurship is nothing more than self-improvement in a different outfit.)
In short, any inspiration or content that falls between Point A and Point B is a theme you can freely explore.
Drawing this map out on paper will do you a lot of good. Write Point A at one end of the paper, Point B at the other end, and then start filling in various themes and ideas in between:
List 2-3 broad core themes, such as health, psychology or business (these are your content pillars, that is, your core interest areas).
For each of these themes, break them down into 2-3 secondary sub-themes.
For each sub-theme, write down 2-3 pain points or fundamental principles.
Suppose my personal brand is to help people build core competitiveness for the future (which is actually what I do).
That is my niche, so to speak. I attract all people who are interested in the way I help others build future competitiveness.
Then the overall goal of my content creation is to find brilliant inspirations that fit perfectly with this core line.
If I am researching my interests (such as flow psychology) and come across an idea I really like — for example, "mental entropy will cause the mind to gradually fall into disorder over time, unless we deliberately put in effort to maintain a meaningful hierarchy of goals", the first question I ask myself is:
"How can this idea be applied to 'building future competitiveness'?"
With just this one question, I end up with a unique piece of content. I am not copying the idea one-to-one, but applying it to a new field and infusing it with my own voice and perspective.
For people who do not want to follow the trend blindly and jump on the latest viral TikTok trend, this is the essence of content creation.
You dig deep into your interests, search far and wide for brilliant sparks, and then ask yourself: "How can this be applied to [my map / mission / brand]?"
However, the puzzle is not yet complete at this point.
You also need to learn how to package and structure your content.
"Packaging" refers to using precise hooks, titles or lead paragraphs to attract people to click.
Then you need a reasonable structure (introduction, main body, conclusion) to keep readers focused and keep them reading.
Because if you cannot even get people to click and stay, who will see your product? Who will pay for what you offer?
In other words, if you are always stuck in the "survival mode" of struggling to make ends meet, spending all day selling products for your boss instead of for yourself, how can you sustainably do the thing you love (learning)?
Your Product Is the Tool
When I first started gaining traction on social media, I was a web designer.
I started writing on Twitter (now X) because I wanted to get clients, and I did not want to do the kind of exhausting cold outreach that I used to do.
As I took on clients one after another, and my services iterated (my understanding of things was also upgrading at the same time), I found that people came to me often not to build a website, but because they lacked clear planning for their own brand, content and products.
So I helped them sort out their ideas, and for two full years, I positioned myself as a brand consultant. That is what my original website building services evolved into.
The most tangled problem back then was: "Okay, if I write out all these ideas and interests completely, what should I sell? It feels like I have given away all the valuable content for free. If people know everything about it, who will buy my product?"