X (Formerly Twitter) Is Leverage To Scale Your Personality
“If you’re looking towards the long-term, you should ask yourself, ‘Is this authentic to me? Is it myself that I’m projecting?’ And then, ‘Am I productizing it? Am I scaling it? Am I scaling with labor or capital or code or media?’ Making money should be a function of your identity and what you like to do.”
Updated September 25, 2023
I’ve been treating X like a business since the beginning of 2020. Here are the organic results (no paid promotion) over the last 7 days:
Current as of 09/25/2023
I’ve exposed my thoughts to more than 40K people around the world in a week.
Progress, certainly, but I kick myself for not starting earlier. I created an account in 2009 and, for the last ten years, have used it primarily to get hockey news. I’ve been wasting the potential of one of the most powerful (and free!) tools at my disposal.
X (Formerly Twitter) is digital leverage to scale your personality.
What is X? X is digital leverage to scale your personality.
Leverage just means tools that magnify your efforts. Types of leverage include:
Labor
Capital
Code
Media
X is a form of media (mass communication). It allows you to scale your personality - your thoughts, ideas, skills, and beliefs - for free to people around the world.
Internet media has a critical intrinsic characteristic that makes this possible: there’s no cost to reproduce it.
Whether I have one follower or one million followers on X, the cost for me to tweet is the same: the energy to come up with and type out my thought. Then it scales without any cost of reproduction to anyone with an internet connection.
Why would someone want to scale their personality in this way?
Your personality & expertise is a product you can sell.
You can transform your personality into a product – something you can eventually monetize at scale. Naval Ravikant discusses this in his blog, How To Get Rich, in a section called “Productize Yourself.” Naval writes:
“[The word] Productize has specific knowledge and leverage. [The word] Yourself has uniqueness and accountability. Yourself also has specific knowledge. So you can combine all of these pieces into these two words.
If you’re looking towards the long-term, you should ask yourself, “Is this authentic to me? Is it myself that I’m projecting?” And then, “Am I productizing it? Am I scaling it? Am I scaling with labor or capital or code or media?” It’s a very handy, simple mnemonic.”
X allows you to scale your personality. The next step is to productize yourself. Build something you can sell and then use X to scale that authentic product, which is just an extension of who and what you are.
Jack Butcher has built his business, Visualize Value on this premise. He has managed to productize his personality and design skills into a group of products that represent Jack’s point of view. Then he scales it with a price tag. The results have been staggering. I’m a happy customer of Visualize Value myself, and he’s found a formula that works for him.
No matter what you are interested in, there’s someone else who’s interested in the same thing as you.
One question people ask me is what makes me so special that I think anybody would care what I have to say on X. My answer is always the same: nothing. There’s nothing special about what I have to say. And for ten years, that was the reason I didn’t Tweet.
And then I realized that just because I don’t think I have any profound insights, doesn’t mean I can’t provide value to someone.
That’s the insane power of the internet - no matter what your passion is, there is always someone interested in the same things you are.
When you talk about the things you’re interested on X, that media is looking for like-minded people 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for as long as it lives online.
You will be astounded at the number of people who are interested in the same thing you are once you get going. But you only learn that after you start.
You are both a teacher and a student.
Another reason why many people don’t scale their personality on X is that they feel like they don’t “know enough” about a subject to share ideas consistently.
This is a terrible reason because you will never feel like you know enough about something. There’s always something more to learn.
Jack Butcher has a great insight that puts this into perspective: you are both a teacher and a student all the time.
There is always someone in front of you who has just learned what you are about to learn. And there is always someone behind you who is about to learn what you just learned.
That’s reason enough to “learn in public” on X - an idea from David Perell.
Wealest.com is a great example of this. I am not an expert in wealth creation. I’m not rich, but I’m learning the mental models to get there in realtime and writing along the way. And people seem to find value in that!
You don’t need to be an expert to teach. You just need to productize the lesson in such a way that someone behind you will understand it.
You only need a few Hundred Dedicated fans to make a living by scaling your personality.
I recently did a breakdown of my living expenses. The number I came up with was about $4,700 USD per month or about $75,000 / year. That’s how much my wife and I need to make to live in Los Angeles and maintain the quality of life we currently enjoy.
About how many products would I need to sell to make a living for a year?
Let’s say I can productize enough of my expertise (writing and producing) to sell a product for $100. I need to find only about 750 people in the entire world in a year who find my product worthwhile enough to purchase it!
That’s doable! You only need hundreds (NOT thousands) of dedicated fans who will purchase your product to make a living doing what you love
Start now.