The One Weird Thing Most People Don’t Know About Being a Full-Time Creator | RP 110

The One Weird Thing Most People Don’t Know About Being a Full-Time Creator

There are a lot of things most people don't know about being a creator or online writer.

For example, did you know...

• The top 10 writers on Substack collectively earn $20m a year (Backlinko)

• 90%+ of creators today use AI in their workflow (Epidemic Sound)

• 66% of creators only do it part-time (Linktree)

For creators in the industry, this stuff is intuitive.

But to those who haven't lived "a day in the life" of a full-time creator, some of these might come as a surprise.

Whenever I tell folks “I work for myself” or “I’m a blogger,” I often get mixed reactions:

• “Oh, so that’s how you get to travel a lot!”

• “That’s cool! What do you write about?”

• And of course, “So how do you make money?”

I’ll answer this last one later. But first, here's the weirdest thing most people don't know about being a full-time creator:

Most folks who make a full-time income as creators, only create content part-time.

When I first began writing online, I thought being a full-time creator meant I had to spend 20+ hours writing and 20+ hours on distribution a week.

I would spend all morning slaving away over the weekly newsletter. Then I’d spend the afternoon either (a) catatonic on the couch, or (b) refreshing feeds trying to make Twitter work for me.

These days my days are more manageable. Here’s my most recent timesheet:

As you can see, even with a content cadence that would rival that of entire content teams, I only write 3-4 hours per day.

OK, funny story about that huge blank space on Wednesday. (And I promise there’s a moral at the end.)

I didn’t wake up until 1pm on Wednesday and didn’t get to work until 3pm.

Not because I was out late. In fact I’d done everything possible to set myself up for a productive day the night before.

• I had set my alarm for 6:30am

• I read for an hour before bed

• I went to bed at 11pm

Until I woke up at midnight from the second worst episode of PMS I’ve ever had.

Only when the waves of pain subsided for a couple of minutes was I able to drag myself to the medicine cabinet to pop an Advil.

But by then I was awake, upset, and hungry. So of course I ended up ordering BBQ skewers at 2:30am.

I ended up falling back asleep at 3:30am… And not waking up until 1pm.

My entire day was shot.

But I was still on track.

Thanks to my writing systems, I only needed to work 2 hours.

• I had already outlined my essay the week before. Even groggy, I had no problem writing and publishing it that day.

• I had already batched my tweets for the week. Even if I didn’t add any to my queue, they went out like clockwork.

My followers didn’t know I was out of commission.

I didn’t plan on a sick day. It just happened.

But it was business as usual for my little content machine.

Moral of the story?

Writing is hard. But it doesn’t have to be painful.

And it certainly doesn’t have to take 40 hours a week (unless you want it to).

According to Linktree, 52% of creators who make between $50k – $100k spend less than 10 hours creating content.

This makes sense if you study creativity. It's not possible to do write and do creative work for 8 hours a day. Nor is it sustainable or fun to work 40 hours a week (there, I said it).

Take Justin Welsh, for example.

Justin teaches solopreneurs how to grow and monetize their personal brands.

As of May 2023, his one-person business made $4M in revenue with a 94% profit margin. For those asking, “So how do you make money?”…

$2.34M (or 60% of his revenue) comes from two digital products:

• LinkedIn OS is a course to help thought leaders grow and monetize their personal brand on LinkedIn ($150)

• Content OS is a course that teaches creators and entrepreneurs how to build a content system ($150)

(Go check out Justin’s tweet for his other income streams.)

(Disclaimer: I haven’t taken these courses, nor is this a recommendation of them. I’m just using them as examples and linking out to make it convenient for you. Justin also has not paid me to talk about his work.)

Even with these numbers, Justin basically works 4 hours a day, like I do. (In fact, I probably work more than him!)

He’s also a great advocate for working hard to show up for the people in your life.

Of course, Justin spent 5+ years building his business and designing his life to be able to work just 4 hours a day. He probably spent a lot of late nights grinding when he was starting out.

But that’s beside the point.

My point is this:

For me, I'm building an online media business not so I can work 40 hours a week. I'm doing it so I have the freedom to exercise my judgment and say yes to the things in life that matter to me.

• To figure out how to build leverage, so I can grow my business without working more.

• To say yes when my parents ask if I want to spend 1.5 months with them in my birth country.

• To reduce my hours (even more!) in the summer months so I can play competitive ultimate, travel for tournaments, and hang out with friends and family at the cottage.

What steps can you take so you only write for 10 hours a week?

Or a better question: What will you do if you could only work 10 hours a week?

😉 You're welcome

A selection of interesting links & fun recommendations. It gets random.

• 🐦 Former Morning Brew CEO gets real on what it’s like to have a life-changing exit young exit. Alex was 28 when he sold Morning Brew (he’s 30 now). Achieving big goals like selling a business or winning an Olympic gold medal is great, but it also comes with a different set of problems.

  Go deeper on purpose beyond achievement with David Brooks’ book The Second Mountain.

• 📚 The Happiness of Pursuit by Chris Guillbeau. Filled with inspiring true stories of folks who embarked on life-changing projects, this book will inspire you to pick an item from your bucket list and actually go for it.

  I read this when it first came out in 2016. It set me on a path to design a life that lets me pursue long-term travel. I reread the book this summer as I embarked on a new quest: to read 100 business books in 2 years as part of my personal MBA (more on this in a future newsletter).

  Many of the folks featured in Happiness ended up writing books themselves: Ultralearning by Scott H. Young, Level Up Your Life by Steve Kamb, and Life from Scratch by Sasha Martin. I’ll be checking them out next.

• 📚 Turning the Flywheel by Jim Collins. This short, 55-page book taught me how to build a flywheel— a business that runs and grows itself without my presence. It breaks down what a business flywheel looks like, how to generate initial momentum, how to keep it going, and finally, how to spin-off multiple businesses without damaging the initial flywheel.

  Complement with Brad Stone’s The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon and Andy Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive.