Overview

Learn how to create high-quality, viral content you love creating and that you’re proud of with daily video lessons from the world’s top thought leaders and longform explainers.

Think Masterclass for thought leaders, except you're also guided by a world-class coach who helps you apply the lessons step-by-step.

Blockbuster Blueprint is a newsletter course taught via curated video clips of top thought leaders and creators like Malcolm Gladwell, Ray Kurzweil, Michael Lewis, Elizabeth Gilbert, Seth Godin, Anne Lamott, Cal Newport, Ray Dalio, Ryan Holiday, Mr Beast, James Clear, Glennon Doyle, Mark Manson, Jim Collins, James Cameron, Adam Grant, Tony Robbins, Brené Brown, Simon Sinek, and many more.

Over the last 10 years, I’ve written hundreds of posts and articles that have been read tens of millions of times. I credit a large part of my success to studying the best practices of the world’s top thought leaders, noticing patterns, making them my own, identifying the right sequence to master them in, and then experimenting with them.

The problem?

It takes time. I’ve spent thousands of hours doing the research and analysis. With Blockbuster Blueprint, I give you the shortcut to replicate my research. I find the best clips, summarize them, add context, and help you apply them in the right order. Most of the time, to get unstuck or achieve a breakthrough you just need to hear the right thoughts in the right context at the right time.

Finally, Blockbuster Blueprint is more than just a newsletter. It’s a course delivered through a newsletter. Collectively, each email lesson walks you through the entire process of manufacturing ideas that change the world. They encompass everything from strategy, research and ideation to packaging, production, and promotion. It provides a holistic approach designed for transformation, which means it also touches on the skills, mindsets, habits, paradigms, mental models, and workflows of the greats.

How It Works

1. The Internet is a cornucopia of knowledge.
   

2. But that knowledge is noisy and fragmented.
   

3. This leads to info overwhelm…
   

   • Curation. It takes endless hours to find high-quality video, podcasts, articles, and books. Then, it takes even more time to find the best clips and excerpts within. All the while, there are constant distractions from ads and interesting content that isn’t educational.
     

   • Application. It takes endless trial and error to apply these lessons in the right order and in the right way to achieve our goals.
     

4. This is where I come in.
   

5. I…
   

   1. Search the Internet for the top videos of thought leaders talking about the thought leadership process.
      

   2. Prioritize and extract the best video clips and throw out the noise.
      

   3. Summarize the key ideas in the clip so you can easily understand and apply them.

Bottom line: Over time, I walk you through every step of the thought leadership process including strategy, research, ideation, idea packaging, content production, publishing, and promotion.

Why Subscribe In A Nutshell

• Learn from the world’s top thought leaders for the price of two lattes.

• Get bite-sized content so you don’t get overwhelmed.

• Get daily content so you get compounding gains.

• Go from thought leadership as a black box to a predictable, repeatable system.

• Get everything you need to create ideas that get traction and make an impact.

• Get your daily dose of quality inspiration and food for thought.

Why Enroll In The Paid Version

By becoming a paid subscriber, apart from the daily nuggets you also get:

1. Big picture support (Monday) on each video lesson to help you apply it to your life.

2. Blockbuster booster (Thursday) that includes tools, templates, and tutorials designed to help you gain instant traction as a thought leader. Each bonus alone is designed to be worth more than the price of the monthly membership.

3. Live calls (occasional) with me where we do a content teardown. During these teardown calls, we analyze the patterns of a top-performing piece of content online in order to understand what works and refine our own taste.

Here’s the breakdown on each:

1. Big Picture Support (Monday)

Achieving success in any domain is like putting a 1,000-piece puzzle together .

First, there are hacks, habits, workflows, mindsets, strategy, paradigms, tools, and decisions one needs to become aware of, practice, and master.

Next, it’s important to do these things in the right order. Doing the right things in the wrong order is a common failure mode.

The problem with how content on the internet is delivered is a few-fold:

• The puzzle pieces are thrown at you without context (ie - what to do, when, and how).

• It’s like pieces from multiple puzzle sets are thrown together, and it’s hard to know what pieces go to which set.

• There are missing pieces you aren’t even aware of that you’re not receiving.

This visual captures the situation:

This is why there is an information overwhelm epidemic.

That’s where Big Picture Support comes in. Rather than just sending a new video lesson everyday without context, I give you the big picture.

In other words, I connect all the video lesson to the larger journey of mastering thought leadership. This is equivalent of me giving you the cover to the puzzle set so you can see how everything fits together.

Big picture support includes:

• How to action steps and exercises to implement the ideas from videos.

• Links to related resources and tools.

• Links to how the step fits into the sequence of other steps.

• A deeper explanation of the importance of the step and timing of when to apply to it.

2. Blockbuster Boosters (Thursday)

Example boosters include:

• Look over my shoulder walkthroughs. Receive behind-the-scenes content of me confronting and thinking through the most difficult thought leadership challenges as I create my own longform articles and these video lessons.

• Don’t reinvent the wheel stats. See graphs, spreadsheets, and analysis of the first 100 days of me posting videos on LinkedIn. Don’t recreate the wheel through trial and error. Get access to the same information that I have so you can learn from 100+ hours of my experiments instantly. 

• Step-by-step video clip tutorial. Learn how to record, produce, and publish a video clip on your topic of expertise in 60 minutes.

• Tools tutorial and recommendations. Learn about the tools I use everyday along with step-by-step advice on the exact features I use.

• Get my research notes. Get access to dozens of pages of research notes (resources, experts, keywords, big ideas, excerpts) that I create while writing my own articles.

3. Live Calls (Occasional)

Live calls typically fall into the following themes:

• Q&A. I answer your burning questions about thought leadership.

• Getting Stuff Done. This call provides you with the accountability and support you need to search for, produce, and publish one video clip on your social media by the end of the call.

• Connoisseurship. We collectively analyze the patterns of a blockbuster piece of content that I curate. This process helps you understand the deeper patterns of what works online and helps you refine your taste and voice.
  

Who Am I?

Over the last 15 years, I've spent 10,000+ hours deliberately studying, practicing, and teaching the craft of modern thought leadership.

My longform, research-based articles have been read by tens of millions of people in top publications like the Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Inc., Entrepreneur, Forbes, and TIME while also generating millions of dollars in revenue.

Students in my yearlong thought leadership program have used insights from the course to 100x their readership, get published in top publications like Scientific American, and win major multimillion dollar deals. I teach every single class live, so I know what students find helpful and what they don’t.

To my knowledge, no one in the world has been as deliberate as I have (see my research process below) and the results in my writing and those of my students speak for themselves.

I’m so passionate about thought leadership, because I know that one idea can literally change the world. It can inspire personal transformation. It can change culture. It can turn elections. It can leave a dent in the universe.

I became a voracious reader when I was 16 when the ideas in books changed my life. I remember the revelation of reading these books alone in my bedroom in the middle of the night and knowing in my bones that my life was forever changed because of them. I’m passionate about paying this feeling forward. I can think of no better way to spend my time than to curiously explore new, mind-bending ideas, reveling in those ideas with like-minded learners, and then sharing them with others so I can see the same fire come alive in them.

Examples Of My Past Writing

• 5-Hour Rule: If you’re not spending 5 hours per week learning, you’re being irresponsible (1.4M+ views)

• People Who Have “Too Many Interests” Are More Likely To Be Successful According To Research (726,000 views)

• Warren Buffett: “Really Successful People Say No To Almost Everything” (636,000 views)

The Research Process I Used To Develop My Expertise On Thought Leadership

Every “guru” out there claims they’re an expert, but few actually are. As a result, it’s easy to actually get information which slows us down rather than speeds us up.

To build a system for thought leadership, I broke it into its 5 core components. Then, I broke those components into 16 stages, and then I broke those into 140+ steps.

Next, I methodically identified the top performers of each skill, identified the patterns in their work and watched interviews of them talking about their process. From there, I integrated what I learned into my own framework and tested it with my own writing.

For example…

• Titles. I spent 1,000+ hours studying the most viral titles, and then I did 4,000+ A/B tests to see which patterns actually worked the most in practice.

• Ideas. I analyzed the top 100 bestselling nonfiction books of the last 60 years in order to understand the patterns of how the most long-lasting, viral ideas stand the test of time.

• Visuals. I collected and analyzed 500+ visuals to understand how create images that make ideas more attention-grabbing, easier to understand, and easier to share. And so on.

After proving the system myself, I created a ghostwriting agency in 2015 to see if the system worked with other niches, platforms, and personalities. It did. People who had hundreds of views on each article suddenly started getting tens of thousands. My clients were published in Entrepreneur, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Inc., and Fortune.

Finally, I proved it via a cohort class I started in 2018. I’ve now taught five small cohorts of experts to rise above the noise, make an impact, and build their business with blockbuster articles. I’ve now put 25+ hours into researching, teaching, and iterating on every single lesson. Students from the course have 100x’d their readership, gotten published in top publications like Scientific American and Forbes, and won major multimillion dollar deals through writing and ideas they developed during the program.

Over the years, I’ve shifted more and more of my time to helping experts craft their own blockbuster articles. We’re about to start our 6th cohort of our year-long, transformational Thought Leader School.

I only teach 25 students in my live program, because I want the programs to be transformative and for students to get personal attention. This newsletter course is the first time I’m consistently sharing my thought leadership lessons to a broader audience.

My Personal Story

I’m a lifelong education entrepreneur and learner who loves to share what I learn with others.

I started my first business in high school with Cal Newport. We spent $500 of our first client contract to buy books, because we had almost no idea what we were doing. Since then, I’ve read over 1,000 books and spent many thousands of hours listening podcasts, taking courses, watching YouTube videos, and scouring the Internet for the best content to help me learn faster and grow as a person. I’ve used this knowledge to grow several successful businesses and be recognized as a top entrepreneur by Ernst & Young, Inc., BusinessWeek, and the White House.

My writing career began when I started journaling. When I was 18, I started writing in my journal for an hour every single day. I noticed that when I put my thoughts on paper, I seemed to learn faster and think more clearly.

After a year of journaling, I started sharing my writing with friends. After good feedback, I started writing for publications. After awhile of writing, I started to get invited to speak. While I gained a little traction, my writing never took off though.

It wasn’t until I adopted the blockbuster philosophy on writing that I gained real traction. To learn more about how the blockbuster philosophy changed my life and how you can apply it to your writing, read Blockbuster: The #1 Mental Model For Writers Who Want To Create High-Quality, Viral Content.