Writing is the best skill you can invest on today's era.

I'm saying that with absolute confidence. In today's world, if you know how to write—you'll thrive. Much more than you can imagine.

Personally, not a long time ago—I found writing to be boring and the thought of improving it as a skill with the hopes of even making it my main source of income to survive have never even once crossed my mind. I was introduced to writing at a very young age (I assume most people are too, including you), and the writing that I was introduced to was in the form of the widely dreaded essays.

A lot of the students, including me hated writing essays. When my teachers instructed us to write at least around 4+ pages of essays explaining one topic or idea in many different ways—my mind instantly shuts down. Just the thought of it makes me so bored out of my mind that I was even willing to pay my classmates to write it for me.

Naturally, I've brought that thinking to my early young adult years. Those were the times when I never considered learning proper writing and I thought that in order to be a successful writer—you had to be very creative and talented, and I believed creativity was not something that you could train or improve.

I was not aware of the things that writing could do for me or you or anyone. Then I got obsessed with self-improvement, and over the course of my journey—it led me to writing. I got introduced to the benefits and nuances of writing. I quickly realized that almost all (if not all) the people I look up to, writes. So I started to associate writing with success. All the limiting beliefs that I had on writing were all destroyed and I now have a fresh perspective on how writing can change my life and how it changed other people's lives.

By the time you finish reading this letter, you'll gain a fresh perspective on writing and how you could use it to change your life or others'. But first, let's start with the reason why not everybody's doing it today.

The Unexplored Potential Of Writing

People underestimate writing.

Most people don't see that writing can be a form of mental therapy. In fact, it's the most accessible mental therapy one can do. You can do it anywhere and it's free.

Before I discovered writing as a therapy, my mind was chaos. It was all a jumbled up pile of thoughts and ideas that were all just lying around, waiting to be forgotten and wasted. I didn't have an outlet to turn it into something more and I also sucked at communicating those thoughts because I didn't have the ability to articulate it.

This was all the result of a mentality that I've developed myself through my judgement of reality—which is thinking that writing is irrelevant in today's modern era. I used to think that there are a lot more impactful skills out there to learn instead of writing—and compared to those skills, writing is far more harder and is only for those people who are born creatives.

Most people have shackles

Most people—and a high chance that it includes you too, thinks that writing is old school. They'd prefer being a teacher, doctor, lawyer, engineer, or any other mainstream professions that society imposed unto them—instead of being a writer that curiously explores their own interests and the unknown. Their limiting beliefs puts a shackle on them that keeps them from doing something that has the potential to fulfill and give meaning to their lives.

Sure, most people you see having success with writing are majorly composed of authors—and ever since childhood, most of us have associated authors as someone who's born creative and talented. We quietly accepted the false reality that creativity is out of reach for those who are born with the lack of it. This belief has kept people chained to a job they hate and blind to the possibility of writing as a source of income.

Candy jar of dopamine

People find writing and writers boring.

The world has now become an instant gratification candy jar. It's a jar full of unhealthy, sugary, and cheap dopamine snacks that does nothing but damage people's mental health. And the worst thing is, you're the kid that knows no better and that's why you keep coming back for more.

You ate too much candy and now your brain has lost its ability to find the joy in the small things—small things that when accumulated and refined—could change your life and others'.

It’s never been easier to do nothing, stay mediocre, and keep your life on the path of certain failure.

The Power Of Writing

Writing directly affects your mental health, personal life, professional status, and communication skills.

If you try to, you can find many people that don't know how to communicate clearly—also don't know how to write effectively. Thinking is a skill that is deeply associated with writing, and thinking can be improved simply by using your brain more.

Thinking is a requirement for you to be able to communicate clearly—which then in turn is a valid way to measure one's skill in communication. Being able to think and communicate clearly, allows you to organize your thoughts and speak it out—and this also affects your mental health positively by giving you an outlet.

Your personal life and professional status will then follow the wave of benefits once you have the communication skills dialed in to build connections, nurture relationships, persuade and influence others while your mental health is giving you the mental clarity and the right mindset you need to steer towards the right direction.

Writing is a viable income source for anyone

Writing can replace 9–5 jobs. I've seen people do it.

But unfortunately, there are still a lot of people who have deeply rooted limiting beliefs when it comes to topics like these. They don't believe in themselves to have the ability to write. They let society choose their path for them and it has convinced them to believe that it's the most viable path because that's the only thing they can do and it's the safest way to do it.

In the digital world, writing can be used to build a digital social leverage by displaying your expertise in your specific field or industry. Writing is being used to find and attract people that shows interest in your field and by doing that—it'll allow you to have your own little piece of the pie in the digital world, a.k.a. your own monopoly.

These past few years, there have been a rise of digital creators. People who all have different stories, some quit college and some quit their fulltime jobs to write and build their dreams in the digital world.

The Best Thing You Can Do For Yourself Is Learn How To Write

If you learn high-value skills, becoming rich is inevitable.

For me, writing is the best high-value skill out there. It is the foundation of every business skills that you need to succeed.

• Sales

• Marketing

• Sales Pages

• Copywriting

• Scriptwriting

• Ghostwriting

• Audience Building

• Personal Branding

I could go on and on, my point is—if you want to succeed in business and win back your freedom so that you can actually live your life, you should learn how to write. If you are depressed, miserable, living life mindlessly and aimlessly—you should learn how to write.

Writing will be boring at first

If you've never written for yourself before, especially long-forms like essays, newsletters, articles or blogs—it'll be extremely boring at first. I remember the first time I started writing and building for myself, on my very first long-form writing, I stared at a blank page for so long thinking of what to write and the boredom was so painful.

One thing I did at the time that helped me overcome it is by thinking of the benefits of writing. What can writing do for me? It helped that I was also in the rabbit hole of self-improvement at the time so the benefits of writing was what really pushed me to keep writing. Thinking about the improvements in terms of:

• Mental clarity

• Thoughts articulation

• Critical and creative thinking

• Speaking and communication

Made me fall in love more and more with writing. I now find it super fun, it's like playing a game when making connections on all the things I've researched and random thoughts I come up during a Default Mode Network. (more about DMN here https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/basics/default-mode-network)

I lowkey found philosophers to be super cool. The way they come up their ideas and how they articulate it in a way that makes it intriguing, impactful and have influence over other people's lives. I thought that if I could achieve a similar skill by learning how to think and write, that's more than enough reason for me.

Now this is completely out of the blue but I also used to play games, especially MMORPGs. In those games, there's a feature that you can build your character and choose a job class for them. During those times, I would have this inner feeling that attracted me towards choosing intelligence based job classes rather than the common agility and strength based ones. I think that I now get why I was leaning towards those types of characters.

How I learned writing

First thing you need is to learn how to generate ideas.

Idea generation, research, and writing goes hand in hand. Ideas make writing faster because you'll have more talking points, original ideas, and unique perspectives. One thing to note is it's very important to have your own touch to it—people follow your unique perspective and originality. In one of my previous newsletters, I wrote a guide on how to generate unlimited ideas here and make it your own so you don't just copy other people's ideas. Check it here Thinking Is A Superpower (How Thinkers Are Getting Ahead In The Digital Era)

When you master generating ideas, you'll:

• Remove writer's block.

• Save time on the actual writing.

• Form your own unique perspectives and original ideas.

• Have an efficient idea generation, research, and writing process.

I'm not a fan of just going straight to writing without first fleshing out talking points on the topic. It works for other people, but it's not for me.

Second thing is the actual writing process.

The process I use to write looks like this:

It's pretty self-explanatory.

• Outline - You flesh out talking points about the topic. By talking points, I mean your big ideas, arguments, personal experiences, facts and research to support your arguments, processes and frameworks.

• Write - Actually writing what you outlined in a proper writing structure.

• Edit - Editing what you wrote. Removing parts that are confusing, and correcting any spelling and grammatical errors, and overall just making sure that your writing flows well for your readers.

• Publish - Sharing your writing either to your newsletter list, website, or a social media platform.

I'm putting together a free course that teaches all of these and dives in deeper and I plan to release it soon. People who are subscribed to my newsletters will be the first ones to receive it so stay tuned.

I'll emphasize this one more time

If you are:

• Overwhelmed with your thoughts

• Lost and don't know what to do with your life

• Aware of your potential and know that you can do so much more but don't know where to start

• Or just looking for a skill to invest time in

I highly suggest that you learn how to write.

And don’t forget to have fun with it.

– James