You can earn an income equivalent to a full-time salary with only 5,000 followers: Why is writing the most lucrative leverage in the AI era?

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Editor's note: The most anti-cyclical asset in the AI era is not real estate, but public expression. Writing is not only a thinking filter, but also a lever for ordinary people to leverage commercial benefits at zero cost. This article is translated content.

If you don't know what to learn, start with writing.

Even if you don't want to be a so-called "writer".

Writing teaches you how to think, how to master any skill quickly, and how to attract a group of audiences who support your cause — these are indispensable capabilities if you want to build your own business, or even just engage in some independent, creative and meaningful work.

In the era of artificial intelligence, thinking, learning and distribution (presenting your value to others to get opportunities for monetization) are core capabilities that will never go out of style. And writing not only allows you to temper these three abilities at the same time, but also helps you build digital leverage along the way.

I never thought I would become a writer.

I don't even seem to have the temperament of a literati. I'm just a big, seemingly dull "giant" who is deeply addicted to profound thoughts.

From all perspectives, this simple morning habit of writing has completely rewritten my thinking pattern and life trajectory. It not only helps me express my thoughts clearly and calm my restless mind, but also opens up new opportunities for me outside the traditional job market — it is the core engine that drives my career and business to success.

In this letter, I not only want to show you my system for capturing inspiration and creating high-quality content, but also clarify to you why this path is more feasible now than ever before, and how it will reshape the way your brain perceives reality.

Yes, it's that profound.

Let's get started.

Old Leverage vs New Leverage: The Secret to Modern Success

The most powerful leverage is no longer capital, but enterprise operation capability — that is, the ability to run an excellent enterprise. Especially, the biggest leverage at present is personal brand with a large audience. Once you win the attention of the public, you hold this powerful leverage.

—— Daniel Priestley

The rules of wealth creation have been fundamentally subverted.

Physical assets (real estate, factories, machinery and equipment, physical goods) that drove income growth in the industrial age are gradually being replaced by digital assets (audience, personal brand, intellectual property, content, data, software). The latter has extremely low construction cost, extremely strong scalability, greater difficulty in taxation, and can continue to generate compound returns while you sleep.

In today's world, the only threshold for building leverage for yourself is a good idea and the confidence to publish it on the Internet.

The problem and opportunity at the same time is that most people are still bound by the traditional values of the industrial age. For some reason, they still firmly believe that "go to school → work → retire" is the most certain, stable and safe path, but the facts have long been completely different.

The same logic applies to building leverage for your future and then creating wealth.

Old leverage comes from tangible physical assets.

Houses, factories, Rolexes, truck fleets, full inventories, gold. You buy them and wait for them to appreciate or generate returns.

Old leverage is linear and limited to the local area.

A factory has an upper limit on its daily production capacity, and a house can only be rented to one tenant at the same time.

Don't get me wrong, leverage is leverage after all, and old leverage is still valuable.

However, if the wage level collapses — which is more likely than ever as AI is rapidly replacing human labor, forcing the government to expand the social safety net — physical assets will be the first targets to be investigated, taxed or even confiscated by the government.

In contrast, it is extremely unlikely that the government will confiscate a mailing subscription list that recognizes your value, a content library, or a best-selling book.

New leverage comes from intangible digital assets.

Audience groups, personal brands, intellectual property, data, systems, software. These are the core leverage of the new generation of rich people: media, data and code. A piece of content only needs to be written once, and it can be read by tens of millions of people; a software only needs to be developed once, and it can serve millions of users.

For the vast majority of people, writing is the most accessible and practical form of leverage. You can learn programming, but if you can't attract people's attention to the product you developed, no one will use it or pay for it. Writing is the golden key to unlock all other forms of leverage.

You won't see digital assets on the balance sheet, but they account for 90% of the total value of the S&P 500 Index.

Kim Kardashian, Taylor Swift, Ryan Reynolds, Mr. Beast, Elon Musk — all of them have massive audiences and huge personal brands.

However, you most likely don't want that level of fame, which is a blessing — because you don't need millions of fans to make this mechanism work for you. With 6 to 12 months of focused effort, you will be on a completely different life trajectory from the present.

For myself, when I accumulated about 5,000 fans (it took about 6 months), I achieved replacing my original salary with writing income, because I was really focused on operating it. My friend Randy, a fitness coach, reached a monthly income of $100,000 when he had about 10,000 fans, because he was willing to pay for learning, delved deeply into marketing and sales, and implemented it with a desperate, life-or-death attitude.

The core point is: people greatly overestimate the resources and chips they need to succeed, because their social media feeds are full of those lofty, unrealistic celebrities.

However, the benefits of writing go far beyond that.

How Writing Completely Reshapes Your Brain and Life

"How can I know what I think until I see what I say?"

—— E.M. Forster

It's hard to fully explain in words... but the act of writing means far more than putting words on paper.

It will change your thinking perspective and allow you to gain insight into the world in a more meaningful way.

Daily conversations become a source of inspiration; your mind is filled with ideas that you are trying to fully understand; you begin to capture more subtle corners of life, instead of floating on the shallow surface full of pressure all day long.

In my opinion, writing has four core benefits:

1) Writing reshapes your thinking circuits

The core mechanism is "forced linearization".

To put it plainly, you may think you know everything in your mind, but writing forces you to sort out and condense those messy thoughts into a smooth logical main line.

Thinking that is not written down is like walking through a forest where there seems to be roads in all directions; and writing itself is like opening a clear road in this confusing chaos. You have to decide where the destination is, where to turn, whether to choose a scenic route, and how to turn back when you get lost.

In other words, writing is the processing instrument of thinking, the gym for forging your mental abilities.

You may think you understand the emotions, rebuttals, memories, or immature metaphors in your mind, even your own values and beliefs — but unless you write them down word by word, I can almost guarantee that you haven't really understood them thoroughly.

2) Writing improves pattern recognition ability

This includes several dimensions.

The first level, by writing regularly, you build an external archive library of your own thoughts. You can quickly retrieve the words you wrote in the past, so as to explain the current views more accurately, which helps you maintain a high degree of thinking clarity.

The second level is similar to the eye of a photographer. After several years of focused training, you will see composition and frames at any time in daily life. The world is no longer plain in your eyes, but shows another layer of depth.

For writing, you will start to notice the logical structure of a discussion, the metaphors contained in ordinary moments, or the narrative arc in daily days. Writing trains a unique attention pattern that will subtly penetrate into every aspect of your life.

The third level is that you can capture whims that are easily ignored on weekdays.

When I have a newsletter writing plan for this week, or just clearly know that I need to post a tweet today, my brain will naturally help me capture those inspirations that help achieve these goals.

This is the embodiment of "Psycho-Cybernetics" — your mind is like a heat-seeking missile locked on a target, which will automatically help you capture the tools needed to achieve the goal (the problem is that most people don't have explicit goals they really care about, they only have implicit goals imposed by the outside world; since the life trajectory has long been arranged, there is no need to think too much except to go to school and work on time, they naturally miss this layer of experience in life).

3) Writing helps you express your thoughts clearly

Most people think they know a lot in life, but they don't.

It's not because they are stupid, but because they have never been forced to "externalize" their ideas and examine them. Writing is not only a tool to improve communication skills — and then improve most areas of your life — but also a touchstone that can nakedly expose whether you really know what you are talking about.

And this is exactly what most people fear.

They don't want to endure the struggle that comes from doing something meaningful. They want to be relaxed, hoping that all inspirations will emerge in an instant. They think writing is a skill that everyone can do, so they fail to realize that it is a skill like any other, which also requires hard work to improve.

This naturally leads to the most critical point.

4) Writing helps you learn faster

The future belongs to those who learn the fastest.

Unfortunately, most people stop learning after graduating from high school, and this lag is fully revealed in the future.

To achieve your goals, you have to learn. Therefore, if you want to achieve any goal outside the three standard paths engraved in your mind by society since you were born, you must educate yourself; and if you want to make this process more efficient, you must write.

Writing is both a way to teach and a way to understand.

In learning science, there is a "Protégé Effect": compared with students who simply memorize by rote, students who teach knowledge to others have a more solid grasp and memory of the material.

The cognitive load required to understand "how to explain to others" will force the brain to process at a deeper level, build a more complete organizational framework, and accurately identify its own knowledge blind spots.

In the first 6 months after I started writing online, I learned more than I had learned in school before. This may be an exaggeration, but what I really mean is: I have accumulated extremely deeply in the fields I really care about. I can clearly feel that my thinking is being reshaped, and I am gradually approaching those thinkers I admired while growing up. When I was young, I thought my brain was too stupid to say anything insightful; later I realized that I just lacked practice.

Finally, writing strongly requires you to achieve real understanding.

You read some content.

You feel like you get it.

You try to write it out.

You find you can't write it at all.

Most people think this is because they are "not qualified" to discuss this topic — which is total nonsense. You are as qualified as anyone on this planet to articulate a point of view. You just put up an invisible barrier in your heart because you are afraid to show your thoughts to the public.

But now, you have accurately found the place where your understanding is disconnected.

This is the opportunity for you to go back to study again, consult materials, and then continue to write.

This Writing System Makes My Content Hard to Stop

I have never been a very organized person.

I have tried second-brain applications, and I have tried to bet everything on AI.

But I always find that I will eventually return to the original way — jot down inspirations in a long-term notepad. Of course, ideas are often lost, but I don't think this is a problem: if an idea requires you to remember it deliberately, it is probably not important; and if it is important enough, you will never forget it.

I found that excellent writing (or content) that can really attract attention and not be left in the dark depends on the following points in the final analysis:

• You need to determine a theme or core issue for this week

• You need a place to record inspirations quickly

• You need a set of methods to capture inspirational materials (social media posts, YouTube videos, Substack articles, etc.)

• You need to know how to create fascinating entry points or titles that make people have a strong urge to read

• You can efficiently draw nutrients from your ideas, inspirations and research results when you actually start writing or creating

Turning these into a system is roughly like this.

It may seem a little complicated, but we will sort it out in a very simple way at the end of the article.

1) How to choose a writing theme

I don't care about the so-called "vertical segmentation track" at all.

You are not a lion that will freeze to death if you are thrown into Alaska, and you can't survive by changing the environment or field.

You are a human being with the ability to learn, build and adapt, and you can thrive in any field.

When choosing a theme, I follow two principles:

• Is this content that I think is important or worth sharing? Because as long as an idea is refined through my personal perspective without excessive internal friction in thinking, it will become unique. I have my specific identity labels, no matter how hard I try, I probably can't impress the group of mothers in their 40s who accompany their children. Therefore, just pouring out what I think is worth sharing will naturally attract those who are most easily influenced by me.

• Can its packaging or presentation framework catch the eye? Because as a writer, this is exactly your responsibility — you have to win attention, otherwise no one will read your words. In today's era, the way to achieve this goal is to study what is popular on social media, and skillfully integrate these structures and rules into your entry point and title design.

This is the essence of social media growth.

Many people are always obsessed with being a super creative creator, pursuing the so-called "absolute authenticity", so they refuse to package their ideas in a way that the market likes, resulting in their works never getting attention. In other words, they can't make money, because they think marketing is disgusting, so they can only continue to work for other people's dreams and make money for their bosses. They are extremely eager to influence others, but stubbornly refuse to take the only measure that can achieve this goal — they regard it as a compromise to their own identity, rather than a skill training that can greatly enhance their own value.

The easiest operation steps are as follows:

Before writing, first investigate which content on social media is becoming popular.

Because that represents where the market is currently focusing its attention.

You can directly browse social media and save those posts with explosive data, or use a research tool to gather all popular content in one place.

For example, the title of this article is "The Writing System That Saved My Brain (And My Future)".

Before that, I saw a post on Eden's recommendation page and saved it to the panel, its title was "The Notebook System That Saved My Brain".

In other words, I observed the interest preferences that the public had already expressed, then combined it with the theme I wanted to write, and seamlessly integrated the two. This is the beauty of using research/inspiration library tools like Eden; of course, you can also manually browse social platforms to search for popular