Four Universal Principles to Create Your Content Empire

How To Avoid Mediocrity and Develop Your Own Superpowers As A Content Creator

You have one chance to live your life as fully as you can. Telling your own stories and creating content is the best contribution you can make as an individual.

Here is how I view the new digital ecosystem now. Here are my three observations and suggestions.

1. You need to create your own game on the Internet

You can design games, create our own blogs or podcasts or YouTube channel, or raise funds on Kickstarter. You can write a book and share your voice with the world. You can create your own lifestyle brands on wellness, health, productivity, or creativity. Or you can create fresh and exciting digital products (training, courses, experiences, etc.). You can use crowdfunding to kickstart your ideas or projects.

2. Content creation has become the king of all professions

We live in a world where ideas can change people’s lives. What we think of a career is quickly changing and content creation has become the backbone of every career. Whether you are a teacher or a lawyer, you can now share your own experiences and teach the secrets of your work to others.

Today, there are also a lot of opportunities and tools for monetizing your creations and sharing them with the world. Even if you do not have an audience, you can build your own audience from scratch using Medium, YouTube, Patreon, or Kickstarter. If you want to create an online course, you can use Thinkific or Podia. If you want to publish and sell an online book, you can use Gumroad. If you want to sell your art online, you can use Etsy. And then there is Substack, Instagram, Twitch, TikTok, and more.

3. You can create your own content empire on the Internet

The passion economy that we are now witnessing has created a set of new industries — all based on content creation. You can now monetize their thoughts, skills, passions, hobbies, ideas, and art. You can use videos, blogging, podcasts, visuals, sketches, and other media to come up with amazing ideas. You can combine your artistic passions, entrepreneurial ambitions, and intellectual pursuits to create fresh ideas and content.

Digital content creation has now become a true profession. You are now a one-person media company. You are now an Internet entrepreneur. You are now an influencer. You are now a blogger. You are now a YouTuber. So, you need to create a consistent stream of content to build your personal brand on the Internet.

A Thought Experiment

Imagine where you would be in just 6 months if you wrote one page every day, you created one visual, and you spoke one minute on video:

• You would have 180 pages written on your Medium.
• You would have 180 visuals/pictures on your Instagram.
• You would have 180 videos uploaded on your YouTube channel.

This would make you a totally different person. I am a living example and proof of this!

My Story: My Journey of Content Creation

Here is my story: I have aspired to write practitioner articles for the last 15 years, but I have always procrastinated on this. “One day, I will start writing a book,” I said, and that day never came. I felt like an utter failure and gave up hope.

I then decided to develop small positive habits and do them consistently every day. I doodled every day for one year, and this journey enabled me to create an inspiration book based on doodle exercises to increase self-awareness and creativity. If I had started with an ambitious goal of writing a book, I would have never achieved finishing this book. However, I tricked myself into creating consistently and moving with very small steps.

The next big step for me was to create a habit of regular writing on the Internet. The Coronavirus lockdown has enabled me to make a radical decision: I would write regularly on Medium during the lockdown period. I would try to write and publish a minimum of 1 article every 2 days — however small, messy, crap, and insignificant that article might be. During the last 10 months, I have written 240 articles on Medium.

I would have never guessed that I could write so many articles. I have come across a diary entry from early 2019 where I told myself to write one article every month! This goal was not inspiring, so I ended up not writing for several months. When I decided to pursue ‘an impossibly high’ goal of publishing 240 articles in 10 months, I felt more intrigued and took this as a serious game to challenge myself. It worked really well. Each article was a different experiment and I failed in most of the experiments. However, I have learned tremendously. I feel that I am on track to become a serious writer, thinker, and experimenter.

I have used the same method for kickstarting my YouTube channels. Just did it. No tricks, no gimmicks, no techniques. I just made a decision and then recorded our Skype or Zoom conversations with my sister and friends. I did not think hard or strategically. I just started shooting these videos twice a week and these meetings are already on my calendar. This is the simplest that it can ever get. Having used this method, I now have more than 270 videos uploaded. More than 250 of these videos were created during the last 10 months.

What did I learn from my journey? What are the biggest lessons I have learned as a content creator?

Here Are The Biggest Lessons I Have Learned As A Content Creator:

Let us kickstart this masterclass now — here are the biggest lessons I learned as a content creator.

When you are creating content, your goal should be to provide the best response to the question that you are grappling with. This is your superpower as a content creator.

There are four universal principles that will guide you in your journey of content creation. If you follow these four principles, you will be able to create your own digital content empire.

You can curate and craft the best digital contents if you follow the following principles:

1. Principle of Deep Learning, Surprise, and Astonishment

• Inspire and astonish yourself first, so that you can inspire and astonish your followers. Put love, effort, and dedication into everything you do.
• Hunt for the most interesting stuff. Spend time every day for learning new things that excite and surprise you. Surprise yourself by challenging yourself to write in domains that you are curious about, but do not feel qualified for. What do you wish to explore? Surprise yourself and your brain through the power of curiosity. For example, I have started writing about transdisciplinary topics outside my comfort zone including Mars, neural laces, doors, a squash, GPT-3, singularity, BTS, panarchy, entrepreneurship, and corporate spiritual responsibility.
• When you are curious, you become a relentless learning machine. You get excited and want to explore the topics in more depth. As you read more, you get momentum and want to learn even more. Your super-power then becomes sharing your excitement with your readers.
• Inspiration comes after hard work, not before. Force yourself to write, produce, learn, innovate, and create. Make your content very useful, practical, focused, and specific.
• Manufacture curiosity, surprise, humanity, and virality. Become a master storyteller using multiple media. Cultivate surprise by incorporating unexpected insights or observations. Use humor to make your content enjoyable.
• Slow down and do some analysis to deliver the highest quality and depth you can deliver. Learn everything that you can. Read lots of books outside your discipline. Amaze yourself with new knowledge and try to incorporate these into your writing or content.
• Put yourself in the shoes of your readers and make your pieces more compelling and useful for them. Do not waste any sentence — each sentence should say something focused, fresh, and useful. Make your content simple, memorable, fun, inspirational, or surprising.
• Rewire your brain to reinvent yourself. Develop a better version of yourself every day. Your brain has amazing capabilities of limitless learning and neuroplasticity. You can change your definition of yourself. You can rewire your brain to learn fast and achieve fascinating things. It all starts with changing your inner conversations with yourself.
• Learn to do things that will help you upgrade and improve your skills in writing, designing exercises, blogging, capturing attention, and building your own audience. Develop your skills in positioning, marketing, and storytelling.
• Think of content creation as publishing, not marketing. Your job is to tell good stories that engage, inspire, or provoke. Try to find your own niche where you can make a unique contribution.
• Try to crack the art of writing titles with value hooks that capture attention. Understand what makes your content really interesting and potentially viral. Where are your purple cows? The best of your content will come from your own experiences.
• Your aim should be to create something that you will be proud of. Be so good that they cannot ignore you.

2. Principle of Persistent and Consistent Hard Work (Showing Up)

• When you have a good content idea, you need to act on it immediately. You have a few seconds to act on it — otherwise, you will miss your chance.
• The secret is to act now. Whatever you want from life, you need to take an action for it right now. Start small and do it now. You can change your life instantly. It is a simple decision. If you want to be healthy, do 5 push-ups now — that’s it. If you want to be an artist, start creating your art right now, right away.
• Do not wait for inspiration — it is not coming. You first do the work, and inspiration comes in later anyway. If this means you need to eat the frog first thing in the morning, do it by all means.
• Change starts in very small increments. You can build positive habits by starting small and giving yourself a lot of opportunities for small experimentation every day. Develop a consistent routine of writing and creativity every morning. Do not break the chain and make sure you write every day.
• Show up each day even if you do not feel like creating or writing. I do this by setting myself a very tiny writing goal every day. I make my goal so small that it is very easy to accomplish. For example, I will write for a minimum of 15 minutes every day. Or, I will write a minimum of 100 words every day. Starting small will give you the confidence and the momentum you need. Creating is difficult and you need to approach your creativity routine with a sense of patience and self-compassion. You need to develop your own system of creativity and productivity that works for you.
• Stop making excuses. Go for the seemingly impossible. You have nothing to lose. Start small and start right now. Success comes to those who act first.
• The secret is in one line. One sentence at a time. One doodle at a time. One drawing at a time. One small step at a time.
• Do not expect quick returns, virality, or victories. Your growth as a writer and creator takes time. Do not give up. If you are at the early stages of your journey, it is easy to be discouraged and give up. Hang in there and focus on improving your game and your creative journey.
• A nasty voice inside your head will keep telling you that you suck. Do not listen to that voice. Keep working and keep creating. You can best transcend your inner critical voice by giving it a name —consider giving it the name of a person that you despise. The best method to overcome this voice is by focusing on the process of creation. Even if it is crap, you need to continue writing and creating.
• Do not break the chain. Write or create every day — even if you work for 15 minutes. Change starts in very small increments. You can build positive habits by starting small and giving yourself a lot of opportunities for small experimentation every day.
• Start small. Even the journey to Everest starts with a small step. Focus on creating that one sentence.
• Write lots of articles. Provide yourself a lot more opportunities/chances to thrive. Some of this is purely probability theory — you are just increasing your chances (probabilities) with each post.

3. Principle of originality and authenticity (Finding your voice)

• You need to be your authentic self and own it. You have life experiences, interests, desires, curiosities, and perspectives unique only to you. Tap into them.
• You will tell your own stories, create your own personal brand, and connect with your own fans and tribe. Build on your own experiences in order to find your own voice and philosophy.
• Do not compare yourself to others. This is your journey and yours alone. Compete with only your former self and no one else here on Medium or elsewhere. Are you getting better every day?
• Write from your heart. Develop your storytelling skills and your own voice. Discover why you are writing and what it is that you want to share about your life and your experiences. What are the meaningful stories of your life? Make your stories interesting and engaging. Make sure you are adding value to your readers.
• People do not follow you because you are smart and you know it all. They follow you because you are curious and passionate about the topics that you want to explore. Your followers want your story, your independent thinking, your unique perspective, your packaging, and your take on the issues. Give them what they want.

4. Principle of compounding and long term thinking (playing the long game).

• Forget the career ladder and start creating your own assets. It is never too late to follow your interests, curiosities, and passions. Use your imagination to create your own creative assets and share them with the world. Your curiosity and imagination are your biggest tools and weapons.
• Remember that content creation is a marathon and you are playing the long game. If you really want to get lucky in the long term, you need to provide yourself a lot of opportunities for experimentation and failure.
• Remember that content creation is an investment in your future. Each of your articles on Medium can make money. Each article you write is an investment and an asset — it will bring you value, benefits, or dividends in the future. The same principle applies for other platforms such as YouTube or Twitch or Instagram.
• Your goal should be to produce at least 500 pieces of content. Do not expect short term results and treat your content creation process as a marathon.
• Give yourself a lot of opportunities for failure. Do the one thing you think you cannot do. Fail and try again. Learn and get better each time.
• You will get better eventually, but this is a numbers game. In order to be original, you need to write and produce a lot. For example, I have created 240 posts on Medium and I feel as if I am a different person now. I feel that I am learning, progressing, and innovating. And that is what matters. You are running a marathon, so don’t focus on short term returns or rewards. Focus on the big picture.
• You need to find your own 1000 fans and create an emotional connection with them. Your reader should think that your piece is written specifically for them. Provide a lot of value to your fans and readers.
• Success is about how you create value for other people and how you inspire them. Figure out which social problem you are trying to solve and how you will contribute to the lives of other people.
• Create your own unique and authentic path, rather than following others.
• Iterate and build lots of ideas and solutions. Originality comes from thinking independently and creating a huge volume of ideas and work.
• If you really want to get lucky in the long term, you need to provide yourself ample opportunities for failure. Celebrate your failures and use them as learning opportunities. Develop grit and resilience to get back up after each failure.
• Celebrate your successes, even if they are very small. Your Medium journey improves incrementally — you need to celebrate small achievements and build on them.
• Be clear and flexible in your definition of success in your life. This involves imagination and improvisation. For example, I have decided that I will aspire to a new level of greatness and creativity in my life. I am now doing all the creative and entrepreneurial activities I have neglected up to now. I have been challenging and developing myself as an artist and as an entrepreneur during the last two years. When I look back on my life, I want to tell myself that I lived life as the best version of myself. This requires a radical, fresh, courageous approach. It involves a lot of play, experimentation, foolishness, and curiosity.

• What are the creative activities that will revitalize and refresh you? To find these, try to remember what you loved doing during your childhood. How can you reclaim your childhood creativity? Can you go back to your childhood and re-enact some of the activities that provided you joy? Ask yourself: Do I have enough joy in my life? If you do not, you will turn to bad habits such as consuming excessive sugar, alcohol, porn, etc. All of these are addictions that arise from feelings of boredom, loneliness, and alienation. The solution: You should have more joy, relationships, friendships, contentment, and connection in your life.
• Most people never finish the long term marathon. You will need to hang in there, be persistent, and continue loving what you do. If you really want to make a lasting contribution in your field, you need to give yourself a decade’s worth of experimenting and creating. Start with a challenging goal you can achieve in 6 months.
• Start small and give yourself hundreds of chances for failure. This is the best recipe for achieving your personal renaissance and growth. If you want to be a renaissance person, you need to continuously learn, adapt, take risks, do a lot of experiments, and provide yourself lots of opportunities for failure. Sir James Dyson tried 5126 times and he failed each time — until he invented Dyson’s bagless vacuum cleaners.

Review of Four Principles (Take-aways):

• 1. Principle of Deep learning, Surprise, and Astonishment (Follow Your Curiosities and Become a Learning Machine).
• 2. Principle of Persistent and Consistent Hard Work (Start Small, Show Up Every Day, and Do Not Give Up)
• 3. Principle of Originality and Authenticity (Cultivate Your Own Voice)
• 4. Principle of Compounding and Long term Thinking (Play the Long Game and Compound Yourself).

Bonus Principle: Conduct 10,000 experiments

Conducting 10,000 experiments in a field is now hailed as the new recipe for innovative success. Renaissance people and inventors thrive by doing 10,000 experiments. Whatever your passion is, you need to create a huge body of work to make a big contribution, and this means creating thousands of pieces of your work. This is the golden recipe for content creation.

Joe Rogan created 4000 episodes of podcasts which were downloaded almost 200 million times. Creating this huge library made him the king of podcasting and Spotify paid Joe Rogan $100m to license his contents.

From Leonardo da Vinci to Mozart, from Edison to Einstein, prolific inventors and geniuses allowed themselves to do thousands of experiments. Einstein had 2332 patents on his name. Einstein published more than 300 papers. Leonardo started every day with a list of things to learn that day — from geology to optics.

Companies such as Facebook, Zara, Google, P&G, or Amazon are known to conduct hundreds of experiments each month. The great majority of these experiments result in failure, yet they continue experimenting every day. They all know that experimentation is the only way to go forward.

How many experiments are you conducting every day? How many opportunities do you give yourself to fail every day? How many new, fresh, and exciting things are you learning every day? These are the true measure of innovativeness and success in today’s world. You need to continue experimenting until you reach 10,000 experiments in the field(s) that you want to contribute to.

See yourself as a work of art — always in progress. Reinvent yourself so that you can tap into endless opportunities in learning, growth, experimentation, and creativity. Keep improving and compound yourself. Will you get better every day? Will you keep creating better writing every day?

As James Altucher suggests, if you improve at anything 1% per day, by the end of the year you’ll become better at it by 37 times (1.⁰¹³⁶⁵ = 37.7834343329). This illustrates the power of compounding. If we apply the law of compounding at work, achieving 10% more every day means your output, productivity, or contribution will be double of your co-workers every seven days.

When you apply your attention to the same issue or domain every day, you will get much better in just a couple of years and you will be unstoppable.

Imagine your best future self after 10 years. Imagine you have created your own content empire. Start acting like that person today. Where do you want to be in 10 years? Do not leave it to others to choose your destiny. Make a plan, and work toward it. Take a small action every day, consistently. You need to think and act for the long term and not give up on your dreams.

Here Is Your Final Food of Thought

Please take out your notebook and write yourself a letter, responding to the following questions below:

If you had only nine months left to live, would you do what you are doing now? What would you create? Why does this matter to you? Have an honest conversation with yourself on what matters to you. What will you create now? What is your greater purpose and mission? Why? Prioritize that and say no to all other things.

Thing big: There are fascinating things that only you can bring to the world. Fresh, exciting, and original things. What are they?

Act small: How can you take a small action now towards making these happen? How can you continue taking small steps every day? How can you continue your adventure every day without quitting and without breaking the chain (of creating)? What will you bring to the world out there?

Fahri Karakas is the author of the Self-making Studio. You can explore more here.