While most people fight to learn “in-demand” skills, smart people are learning rare skills instead

by Category Two
Accelerated Learning
While most people fight to learn “in-demand” skills, smart people are learning rare skills instead
Picture of Michael Simmons

Michael Simmons

I teach people how to learn.

When self-made billionaire investor Ray Dalio wanted to understand changing world events, he didn’t just look at the latest news. He became an amateur historian and spent months looking back at cycles going back hundreds of years — something almost no one else does.

When Bill Gates wanted to grow Microsoft in the early 1990s, he didn’t just study the latest industry news and business books. He studied science. A 1994 interview is telling:

Interviewer: Do you dislike being called a businessman?

Bill Gates: Yeah. Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe 10% to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t want to put it on my business card.

Interviewer: What, then?

Bill Gates: Scientist.

Similarly, when Elon Musk thinks about what CEOs need to know, he doesn’t put business skills near the top of his list. Instead he says:

“The path to the CEO’s office should not be through the CFO’s office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.” — Elon Musk

What’s going on here?

How is it possible that three of the top investors and innovators in human history say that business skills aren’t the key to business success? It’s like saying the key to parenting isn’t parenting skills? Or that the key to gardening is not gardening skills?

It makes you wonder:

What do they see differently about selecting skills to learn than others? Or are these just quirky people who enjoy exploring their curiosities?

To answer this question, we need to think about what a quirk is. For something to be a quirk it needs to be unique and inconsequential.

What I found is that the opposite is true here:

• Dalio, Gates, and Musk think the same. Although they have unique quirks on the surface, at a deeper level, they all think differently in the same way (more on this later).

• They are not the only ones. Nearly all top .0001% innovators and investors share the same thinking pattern.

• Their “quirk” is one of their keys to success. Many of them have sworn by this (more on this later).

What I will argue in this article is that Elon Musk, Ray Dalio, Bill Gates and other top performers have an incredibly unique and effective approach to selecting skills to learn that we can all apply to our own lives.

This is important because skill selection is the archimedes lever of learning. Or as Tim Ferriss succinctly says:

“Material beats method” — Tim Ferriss

With poor skill selection, we drown in the sea of humanity’s knowledge. All of the effort we spend learning and applying what we learn are muted at best or wasted at worst. On the other hand, if we master the ability to select skills, then just 100 hours of learning could have a life-changing impact. The difference between the two harkens back to this famous Stephen Covey quote:

“If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.” — Stephen Covey

To connect the dots of Gates, Musk, and Dalio’s unique approach to skill selection, it’s critical to look at a few more dots — this time from Warren Buffett, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, and Howard Marks…

What self-made billionaire investors and entrepreneurs understand that others don’t

In 2010, I made two of the most consequential learning decisions in my career.

First, I decided to learn from the world’s top investors based on the premise that we are all investors and that the core mental models that financial investors use to make investments could be used in my life as well. After all, we all invest our time and money into skills, relationships, projects, and jobs that we hope will have a big payoff in the future.

Second, I decided to raise the bar of who I learn from. After reading Fooled by Randomness, I realized that luck plays a much larger role in most people’s success than I had thought and that most successful people care to admit. To select people who were successful primarily because of skill, I added the following filters:

• They are in the top .0001% of performers. Because I was studying investing, this meant that they were self-made billionaires. In other words, they had been able to turn their knowledge into incredible real world success, and they weren’t born with silver spoons in their mouths.

• They are not one-hit wonders. In order to narrow down on those who were successful primarily because of skill, I narrowed down the list to those who had a multi-decade track record of increasing success. They weren’t just in the right place at the right time one time in their life.

• They’ve extensively and eloquently shared their lessons with the world. Next, I narrowed down the list to people who have written books, have been interviewed extensively, or shared their thoughts publicly in other ways so I could learn from them.

• They made their money ethically. Not by rent seeking or breaking the law. And often have been very philanthropic.

When I added these filters, I immediately saw the skill selection pattern. Sometimes, removing the noise is everything. For example, it is hard to see the letter hidden within these dots until you move the dots that are a little more red.

Below are a few examples of the dots that connected everything for me:

“You want to be greedy when others are fearful. You want to be fearful when others are greedy. It’s that simple.” — Warren Buffett, founder of Berkshire Hathaway

“In order to get into the top of performance distribution, you have to escape the crowd.” — Howard Marks, founder of Oaktree Capital

“The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve.” — Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and Facebook

“Outsized returns come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right.” — Jeff Bezos

Put simply, each of these innovators and investors are saying you should focus on investments that are rare & valuable. In other words, you should focus on the star below if you want big profits and impact…

I call this model the Outlier Algorithm:

To be an outlier, you need to be a contrarian who is smarter than the market.

Ray Dalio captures the essence of the algorithm with the following quote:

“You have to be an independent thinker because you can’t make money agreeing with the consensus view, which is already embedded in the price. Yet whenever you’re betting against the consensus there’s a significant probability you’re going to be wrong, so you have to be humble.” — Stephen Covey

The Outlier Algorithm sounds obvious on the surface, but it’s profound when you go deeper. So, let’s unpack Dalio’s quote…

If you make an investment that everyone already agrees is great, the price will be higher, because more demand increases price. As a result, you will have a lower return on investment. Similarly, if you select a skill that is already popular, learning it won’t give you an advantage over others. Rather, it will simply help you catch up. For example, imagine a recruiter is hiring for a job. If you’re the only person with the skills needed, you can command a premium. If your skills match everyone else, then you’re a commodity.

On the other hand, if you bet against the consensus, you will likely be wrong because the consensus is right most of the time. For example, in financial markets, 90% of professional investors do NOT beat the average of the market. In other words, someone who has spent years investing full-time will regularly underperform amateurs who simply put their money into the S&P 500 Index — a basket of the 500 largest companies listed on US stock exchanges. The same is true for learning. If you want solid returns, simply learning skills everyone says are important is probably a solid bet. But, tautologically, if you want to be in the top 1%, you need to think differently than 99% of others and be right. You can’t expect to follow the herd and somehow beat the herd. Or as Dr. Seuss said even better:

“You have to be odd to be number one.” — Dr. Seuss

So the trick is to be right when others are wrong and this isn’t easy.

Looking back on it, the Outlier Algorithm didn’t just help me learn faster, it actually helped me transform at a deeper level…

Applying the outlier algorithm to learning turned my world upside down

The biggest change I noticed right away is that learning hacks that were obviously good now seemed obviously bad. For example…

• Reading the latest bestsellers

• Staying on top of industry news (that everyone else was following)

• Checking social media daily to see what industry influencers were saying (another thing everyone else was doing)

Without knowing it, I had been primarily focused on popularity. My hidden logic was: If others liked this, it must be good.

With the Outlier Algorithm, my logic was inverted: If others liked this, it may be worth becoming familiar with, but I can’t use it to make a big profit or impact.

To drive the point home, ask yourself this question…

How much would you pay for a procedure that would save your life if you were guaranteed to die without it?

Intuitively, you might say that you’d give away all of your money for it. Afterall, what matters more than being alive, right?

But, when you add how many other people have a skill to the equation things change. Let’s say everyone in the world knows how to administer the life-saving procedure, and it’s easy to perform.

Now, you’d only pay a few dollars in this case!!

The skill is valuable, but not rare, and because it’s missing rareness, others will pay less for it. Furthermore, someone learning the skill will ultimately make less of an impact than they would if they had learned how to perform a life-changing procedure that no one else knew how to do.

With the Outlier Algorithm, my learning sources started to look more like this:

• Academic articles

• Disciplines outside of my field no one else was even aware of

• Licensing proprietary data

• Deep relationships with insiders in fields who might not share certain insights publicly

• Mental models (abstract value that is harder to value)

After applying these to my life, I noticed some big shifts in my career. As a writer, I could suddenly write about ideas that others hadn’t even heard of. This helped my writing stand out. As a result, my writing started blowing up. Within a few years, I went from zero to tens of millions of readers in top publications like Forbes, Fortune, TIME, and Harvard Business Review — something I couldn’t have even imagined before.

At a deeper level, applying the Outlier Algorithm facilitated a deeper transformation within me. In many ways, learning rare & valuable skills is following the Hero’s Journey — the most common archetypal myth that has existed across all human societies throughout time.

This essence of journey is:

• Individuals stepping away from the tried of true path of their culture

• Going into the depths of the unknown to reinvent themselves

• And then bringing that learning back to their culture so it can evolve

We follow the same journey each time we learn a rare and valuable skill. When we choose to not follow the consensus, we begin a loop of the Hero’s Journey. We go from the known into the unknown. When we finally find something more valuable than the consensus and share it, we end one loop and set the stage for a new loop. Looking at the Outlier Algorithm this way helped me feel less alone and crazy. It made me feel part of a lineage. And it gave more meaning to sharing what I know with others.

Finally, with the Outlier Algorithm, I could now decode the quirks of many top investors and entrepreneurs.

I could now understand why Ray Dalio was going back into ancient history for new insights on today’s markets: History repeats itself. But sometimes it takes decades or even centuries to repeat itself. So people shouldn’t just use their own life experience to draw big conclusions. By going back further in history, Dalio found a more accurate way to predict the future that others overlook.

It explains why the #1 question that Peter Thiel asks new recruits and collaborators is:

“What do you believe is true that no one else agrees with you on?”

It’s a quick filter to know if someone is a consensus thinker or a contrarian thinker. If they can’t even think of one contrarian idea, they’re likely not a good fit.

It also explains why Elon Musk values engineering and design so highly and spends 80% of his time there rather than on “typical” CEO duties:

• It’s valuable. When he and his team design products, they judge quality based on how closely it matches their platonic ideal of what they’re designing rather than how closely it mimics competitors. In other words, they use a higher standard for value.

• It’s rare. He doesn’t follow the typical dogma of what business is. He redefines it. None of the other CEOs of car companies are designers and engineers. And most of them spend their days on business-related activities.

Bottom line…

While most people search for in-demand skills, top learners search for rare & valuable skills

Amateur learners focus on popularity as a proxy for value and ignore rarity. They look for in-demand skills. Primarily read bestselling books and popular articles. They use popularity-sorted newsfeeds to get information.

Professional learners add rarity and focus on true value. They are always looking for contrarian sources of information that are better than what most others are exposed to.

Becoming an amateur is not a stop on the way to becoming a learning pro. It is actually a fundamentally different path and way of thinking. In other words, we don’t become great at learning simply by doing what everyone else does, but just a little bit better.

We become great by charting our own path.

Now that we understand the power of the Outlier Algorithm, it’s critical to ask ourselves an important question:

How do we find rare and valuable skills?

Get started with four simple rules of thumb
The bad news is that it’s harder than it sounds to make rare and valuable bets, which is why most people don’t do it:

• First, it’s really hard to beat the market. As I said, in financial markets, 90% of professional investors do NOT beat the market. The same is true in many other markets.

• Second, it means being misunderstood for a long time. Most of the time that people break conventional wisdom, they’re wrong. So, if you break conventional wisdom, people will likely think that you’re wrong too. As a result, you may feel alone and under-estimated. Others might call you a quack behind your back or give you subtle signals that they think you’re crazy. At that point, you’ll probably seriously question yourself. If you end up being wrong, it can bring the feeling of shame. You can end up losing a lot of money and even lose your job/company. The difficulty only increases when you depend on support from family, a boss, a board, the press, investors, and other stakeholders.

• In addition, it’s extremely time consuming. It’s much easier to trust the authority (government, mainstream media, experts) on a topic (i.e. what to eat, what to learn, what to do when you’re sick, how to interpret world events) than to do your own nuanced research especially if you’re not an expert).

• Finally, it’s confusing. When one first starts with the Outlier Algorithm it can be hard to find rare and valuable skills. The consensus view is often so entrenched that we are even blind to the idea that there could be another credible perspective.

For example, you can read the biography of almost any successful artist, leader, activist or entrepreneur, and you’ll see that they endured years of darkness before they became an overnight star. Years before they became the Elon Musk or Gandhi or Mother Teresa or Vincent Van Gogh we know today. The same is true with ideas and technology. Many of the scientific ideas we take as obvious were at one point heretical (the earth revolves around the sun, time is not constant) and many of the biggest technology breakthroughs seemed like toys at first (Internet).

On the other hand, the good news is this…

The difficulty of applying the Outlier Algorithm is the exact reason to do it! More difficult means more rare.

To help you get started with these challenges, below are four rules of thumb I come back to over and over. Although there are just four, they pack a lot of punch. They are the simplification of hundreds of hours of thinking how to better find rare & valuable skills:

1. Be the first to learn a valuable skill. Track emerging science, technologies, apps, tools, industries, and fields. When ones are growing exponentially, spend a few hours exploring them to see if it’s worth putting in more time. I call this Jeff Bezos’ Hockey Stick Rule. It helps you try new things without wasting your time on things that turn into duds.

2. Learn valuable skills that are difficult. Be willing to invest in areas that are taboo, aren’t super sexy, time-consuming, strenuous, appear risky or are super technical or academic.

3. Learn valuable skills with hidden benefits. Humans have value blindspots. They under-estimate skills with abstract, long-term payoffs; micro-skills; skills from other disciplines; and classic ideas that have been forgotten.

4. Redefine value better than the consensus. In our careers, we use our skills to serve someone else. It could be a customer, a boss, our fans, a recruiter, or someone else. If you can better understand the unmet needs of the people you’re serving better than others, you will be able to meet those needs better.

Or, for short, remember to:

• Be first

• Face difficulty

• Look for hidden benefits

• Redefine value

And, if you are dedicated enough to have read this far in the article (3,000 words and counting), then, you’re awesome! You’re the kind of person that keeps me going with these heavily-researched longform articles when I question whether social media has destroyed all of our attention spans. 🙂

So, I have something extra special for you…

I created a month-long learning challenge called Month To Master. And, I’ve made the first week free.

In one week (October 3rd — 9th), you will learn how to:

1. Find a valuable micro-topic that you will become an expert in with ~100 hours (worksheet includes a checklist with 30 questions you can ask yourself to find rare and valuable skills).

2. Build your learning curriculum to build expertise in the topic fast.

3. Get momentum and support at getting started.

Find a rare & valuable topic in one week — join the free challenge >>

• • •

This article was written with love and care using the blockbuster mental model.

If there’s a link to an Amazon book, it’s an affiliate link, which means I get a small amount of compensation when you buy the book. This compensation does not influence the specific books I recommend, as I only recommend books that I read and love.

This is exactly how you should train yourself to be smarter [infographic]

by Category One
Accelerated Learning
This is exactly how you should train yourself to be smarter [infographic]
Picture of Michael Simmons

Michael Simmons

I teach people how to learn.

The thinking tool that self-made billionaires, accelerated learners, technology investors, successful entrepreneurs, highly-paid consultants, coaches, & cultural creatives are using to dramatically increase their success…

Design Inspired by the Cognitive Bias Codex

View the high resolution version of the infographic by clicking here.

Out of all the interventions we can do to make smarter decisions in our life and career, mastering the most useful and universal mental models is arguably the most important.

Over the last few months, I’ve written about how many of the most successful self-made billionaire entrepreneurs like Ray Dalio, Elon Musk, and Charlie Munger swear by mental models…

“Developing the habit of mastering the multiple models which underlie reality is the best thing you can do.” — Charlie Munger

“Those who understand more of them and understand them well [principles / mental models] know how to interact with the world more effectively than those who know fewer of them or know them less well.” — Ray Dalio

“It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang onto.” — Elon Musk

Each of these luminary entrepreneurs use different words to essentially say the same thing.

I’ve collected the 650+ most useful mental models from the best mental model curators in the world. It is now the most comprehensive list in the world. And I’ve launched a free mental model mini-course to help you understand what a mental model is and how to apply it to your life.

This infographic is the culmination of all these articles. It is my personal list of the 12 most useful & universal mental models that I believe everyone should master first. For each mental model, I share the sub mental models that make it up and one paragraph explaining its significance.

This infographic matters because it would take 6,500 hours to master each of the 650 mental models that others have recommended. That’s a lot of freaking time! You probably aren’t ready to commit that amount of time to mental models… yet. By creating this infographic, I hope to save you dozens of hours determining which models to learn first.

What is a mental model?

Mental models are descriptions of reality that apply across every area of our life, don’t get outdated, and provide immediate results by helping you make better decisions.

They are like little miniature mental maps of how a particular area of life works.

And when you learn them, it changes everything.

What is an example of a mental model?

One of the most famous and valuable mental models is called the Pareto Principle. You probably know it as the “80/20 rule.” This mental models says that most of your results are going to come from just a small percentage of your effort or work.

Vilfredo Pareto, the man who discovered this principle noticed that 80% of the land in his area was owned by 20% of the people. He looked in his garden, and saw that 80% of the peas were in 20% of the pea pods. Then he realized that this was something like an organizing principle of life.

This phenomena applies across many domains including productivity, happiness, business, health, etc. Here are a few examples:

• 20% of relationships lead to 80% of happiness.

• 20% of exercises lead to 80% of health benefit.

• 20% of items on your to do list lead to 80% of productivity.

For example, by taking 30–60 minutes per day for prioritization, you can double your productivity. By auditing the relationships in your life, you can identify people you want to spend more time with and people you want to remove from your life. By looking at what experiences give you the most delight, you can begin to engineer your life differently.

The rule can also be inverted:

• 20% of relationships cause 80% of drama.

• 20% of clients cause 80% of the problems.

• 20% of foods you eat cause 80% of sickness.

For example, by taking 30–60 minutes per day for prioritization, you can double your productivity. By auditing the relationships in your life, you can identify people you want to spend more time with and people you want to remove from your life. By looking at what experiences give you the most delight, you can begin to engineer your life differently.

This model is much more complex and it can be applied to infinitely more places, but this basic version allows you to quickly get value from it.

Take action

I’ve learned from personal experience that it literally takes years to develop true mastery of the mental models. Therefore, I created two resources for you:

Resource #1: Free mental model course (for newbies)

If you’re just learning about mental models for the first time, my free email course will help you get started. My team and I have spent dozens of hours creating it. Inside, you’ll learn the models that these billionaires use to make business and investing decisions — tools you can apply immediately to your life and business. You’ll also learn how to naturally use these models in your everyday life.

Sign up for the free mini-course here >>

Resource #2: Mental Model Of The Month Club (for those who want mastery)

If you’re already convinced of the power of mental models and want to deliberately set about mastering them, then this resource is for you. It’s the program I wish I’d had when I was just getting started with mental models.

Here’s how it works:

• Every month, you’ll master one new mental model.

• We’ll focus on the most powerful and universal models first.

• We’ll provide you with a condensed and simple Mastery Manual (think: Cliff’s Notes) to help you deeply understand the model and integrate it into your life.

Each master manual includes:

• A 101 Overview of the mental model (why it’s important, how it works, its vocabulary, etc.)

• An Advanced Overview that includes a more nuanced explanation.

• Hacks you can use immediately to apply that mental model to every area of your life and career. These hacks are based on my personal experience and are crowdsourced as well.

• Exercises and templates you can use on a daily basis to integrate the lessons in the manual and achieve maximum results in your life.

• A Facebook community where you can meet other mental model collectors and learn from one another.

To learn more about the program or to sign up, visit the Mental Model Of The Month Overview page.

• • •

This article was written with love and care using the blockbuster mental model.

If there’s a link to an Amazon book, it’s an affiliate link, which means I get a small amount of compensation when you buy the book. This compensation does not influence the specific books I recommend, as I only recommend books that I read and love.

Blockbuster: The #1 mental model for writers who want to create high-quality, viral content

by Category One
Accelerated Learning
Blockbuster: The #1 mental model for writers who want to create high-quality, viral content
Picture of Michael Simmons

Michael Simmons

I teach people how to learn.

Learn how I went from zero to tens of million views in 5 years… and how to make your best ideas go viral in an age of information overwhelm.

Will this article be read by anyone?

That was the #1 question going through my mind as I pressed ‘Publish’ on my first Forbes article in April of 2013.

As someone with no email list or journalism background, my insecurity felt overwhelming. I feared my words would die the silent death of obscurity.

So, I made a crucial decision… I would go all in. I would improve each article until I couldn’t anymore. This meant that I would spend more than 50 hours per article.

The results of doing this over and over for each article have surprised me.

My articles have been viewed tens of millions of times with the average article now being viewed 150,000+ times. One article even got well over 2 million views in just one publication it was syndicated on:

How did this happen?

How did I go from almost no experience, no email list — in a world of information overwhelm — to having articles consistently seen by stadiums full of people in just a few years?

It all comes down to one mental model, which I will dissect in this article.

In my experience and from my research, collecting and learning the most valuable mental models in the world is a key strategy of world-class entrepreneurs and leaders. Because, the better our mental model of any domain is, the more likely we are to be successful in that domain. Even one mental model, like the one in this article, can be a complete game-changer.

But, before I dive in, let me give some context on why I’m writing an article on thought leadership when everything else I write is about learning.

Here’s why…

1. When other writers I follow have shared their underlying mental models, it has really helped me understand all of their writing better. So, I hope this article helps you understand mine.

2. Second, over the years, many people have asked me how they can write articles that are read millions of times and shared in top publications. Now, I can send this article as my answer. A longform article is the culmination of thousands of little decisions, and almost all of the decisions I make can be traced back to this mental model.

3. Finally, for the first time, I’m going to coach a handful of people on how to write blockbuster articles that inform and inspire. I’ll show you how to get hundreds of thousands of views, thousands of subscribers, and thousands of dollars from each article you write. If you’re interested in learning more, you can click here to complete a short survey.

With that said, let’s dive in…
The story of the long tail and fat head

In 2008, Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, wrote the New York Times bestselling book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. The premise of the long tail theory is that content consumption is increasingly shifting away from a relatively small number of ‘hits’ at the head of the demand curve toward a huge amount of content in the tail.

In other words, there are more books, articles, movies, music, apps, and TV shows than ever. Therefore, rather than people watching a few things because that is their only choice, people will spread out their attention over all of the content. They’ll focus on the small, niche topics that are the most interesting to them.

The book was rated as one of the top business ideas of 2008.

Here’s the problem with it…

It was wrong — or at least half wrong.

The long tail theory is right because there are now more options in every category. There is more media of all types being produced than ever before.

The long tail theory is wrong because most of the overall attention is being concentrated in the blockbusters in every medium.

Research of the data by Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse shows that blockbuster content is receiving a larger percentage of the attention pie than ever in all entertainment categories including publishing, TV, music, sports, movies, comedy, and opera:

“Rather than bulking up, the tail is becoming much longer and flatter… Meanwhile, our research also showed that success is concentrated in ever fewer best-selling titles at the head of the distribution curve.”

Increasingly, the top media companies are focusing on fewer, high-quality titles and those titles are monopolizing attention and being enjoyed more.

The early pioneers of the Internet thought that it would be a great democratizer. 30 years later, the Internet appears to be the greatest centralizer in human history (read Attention Merchants for more on this).

What happened here?

Below are the 7 reasons why blockbusters are taking over, and why you as a thought leader should adopt the blockbuster mental model as the center of your strategy.

#1: The web operates on a get richer basis

This is the central reason that the blockbuster model is so powerful. In markets where there is a winner-take-all dynamic, it’s best to have a model that focuses on becoming a winner, because winners receive disproportionate rewards.

Below are charts that show the top 100 most shared articles for a variety of niches (Source: BuzzSumo). Do you notice any commonalities? These are not normal bell curves where most of the content has roughly the same number of views.

Rather, a small amount of content accounts for a large majority of the traffic. And 50% of articles get 8 shares or less.

The higher quality something is in terms of the underlying ideas and how it is packaged, the more likely it is to be shared over and over, which then makes it more likely that other publications will syndicate it, republish it, promote it through their social media and email channels, write about it, and feature it on their frontpage.

Furthermore, there is a growing body of curated newsletters, message boards, apps, and sites that look for the best content on the Internet to feature. Take Pocket for example (you can follow my article recommendations on Pocket here). Every day, they send a newsletter to their tens of millions of subscribers and recommend articles online.

Finally, we humans are fundamentally designed to consume things that are popular. In other words, we make decisions based on social proof. The more our friends read an article, the more likely it is that we will read it. In one particularly surprising study, researchers created a fake “music market” where study participants listened to songs from unknown bands. Simply by changing the initial leaderboard, researchers were able to change what songs became most popular.

In other words, the Internet is just one giant positive feedback loop…

By understanding this phenomenon, I made the decision to focus on quality over quantity. With each article, my aim is to write the best article that has ever been written on the subject. And, we’ve designed our process over the years from the ground up to make this happen.

Now, I spend over $1,000 per article on researchers, illustrators, editors, and proofreaders. I also spend dozens of hours of my time, which is split between reading several books, writing the actual article, and editing it 15–20 times.

Side note: Because of the impact mental models like the Blockbuster model have had on my own life, I co-founded the Mental Model Of The Month Club last year. Every month, we provide a 15,000 word mastery manual and masterclass on the most important mental models in the world. If you want to learn faster and make better decisions, you can try out the club for $1.

#2: There is much less competition from people creating blockbusters

At first glance, attracting attention online feels impossible.

There are millions of other people creating content daily. How can you possibly stand out?

Here are the two secrets I’ve learned that answer this question. First…

• There is a lot of competition for mediocre articles. Almost all article writers dash off their content in an hour or two. You know these articles… ones that give a list of life tips like “get sleep,” “eat well,” and “be nice” without really bringing anything new to the table.

• There is almost no competition for blockbuster articles. Almost no one spends dozens of hours on every article to make it the best article on that topic in the world.

Second, in the world of movies where the blockbuster approach is considered a best practice, it is almost impossible to create a blockbuster hit starting from scratch. You need $100M+ dollars, A-list celebrities, and the most talented people in the world.

In the world of online content creation, the blockbuster approach has not yet become a standard practice. Therefore, the barrier to creating blockbuster content is very low. You can create a blockbuster article in 50–100 hours, at zero financial cost, and be a mediocre writer. 50 hours is doable at the same time that it is enough to deter almost all competition.

This gap is your opportunity. And, this unique opportunity will not be open for a long time, as more and more people figure out how powerful the Blockbuster mental model is.

#3: Blockbuster articles build your reputation

A large part of the success of any given article is the name of the author. The same exact content will have a wildly different level of success based purely on who wrote it. In other words, the messenger is the message.

For example, I just saw that Kanye West tweeted the following recently:

Nearly 3,000 people saw this seeming gibberish and resonated with it so much that they decided to share it with everyone that follows them. On the one hand, this is funny. On the other hand, it says something deep about how the human psyche works.

This phenomenon has been widely studied in the academic world. Research shows that with any given academic article, the reputation of the authors have a big impact on the article’s initial success. The same holds true for content in general.

For example, every time I see a new Malcolm Gladwell or Nassim Taleb article in my newsfeed, I feel a rush of excitement. I immediately stop whatever else I’m doing to read it, because I’ve loved all of their past writing. In fact, I’ve even shared their article before I read it. Why would I do this? The answer is in the status update I made at the time:

Just saw that Malcolm Gladwell’s latest article came out, and I’m really excited to read it.

On the other hand, if I see an article from someone I’ve never heard of, I’m probably not going to click over, unless there is a really compelling headline or it was shared by multiple people in my network. Even worse, if the article is by someone who has written mediocre content consistently, it will take even more to get me to click over. In other words, if you write mediocre content, you are digging yourself a ditch.

Every time you share content online, you’re training your readers to either ignore you or stop what they’re doing and read you.

Malcolm Gladwell, one of the most successful nonfiction authors ever, has built his brand through the blockbuster model. Rather than focusing on writing an article a week, he’s focused on writing seminal articles and books, which means he only writes a few articles per year and two books per decade.

As a result, Gladwell releasing an article is an shareable event unto itself.

#4: Blockbuster articles create true fans

All shares are not created equal.

It’s one thing for people to share an article on Twitter, because it passes some minimum threshold of interestingness.

It’s a whole other thing when a blockbuster article completely flips someone’s reality on its head and changes the way they see and interact with the world. When an article does this, a few things happen:

• They share your article with much more passion.

• They keep referring back to it for years.

• They will tell everyone they can over and over.

• They even write you to tell you about the impact it had on their life.

• They will be likely to buy a book or course from you in the future.

Bottom line: One true fan is worth 1,000 social media followers.

#5: You will develop an amazing body of work

If every article you write is a blockbuster, then when someone discovers one of your articles, they’ll want to devour all of your others as well.

On the other hand, if you have hundreds of mediocre articles, people won’t spend their precious time going through each one. To show the power of a body of work, Shane Snow’s brilliant book, Smartcuts, contrasts two videos that went viral:

Paul Vasquez’s Double Rainbow (45M+ views)

Michelle Phan’s Bad Romance Makeup Video (55M+ views)

At the time that these videos went viral, Paul only had ‘made-at-home’ style videos while Michelle had a whole library of videos just as high quality as the one that went viral. After the videos, Paul continued to make videos, but none of them went viral. On the other hand, Michelle’s career took off as people discovered her body of work. Several years later, Michelle has a multimillion-dollar enterprise. Her Youtube channel has 9M subscribers while Paul’s has 44,000.
#6: The blockbuster model makes you a better writer and thinker
“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” — Flannery O’Connor
Which do you think is going to make you a better writer:

• Dashing out articles and pressing ‘Publish,’ or…

• Being very deliberate with each article, learning from the masters, breaking down the writing process into its core components, getting honest feedback from multiple people, and doing everything you can to make the article great.

By having a blockbuster strategy where you invest time in research and deliberate practice, each article makes you smarter. It also makes you a better writer. So, even if your initial article doesn’t take off, your future ones have a higher chance of blowing up.

Top thought leaders invest the time to build a solid and unique foundation of ideas, and they reap the rewards. Each article is a stepping stone for future articles.

#7: People spend more time reading blockbuster articles than other articles

The more time you put in, the better the article becomes. The better the article becomes, the more time people will spend reading it.

The data proves my point…

According to Medium’s Datalab division, doubling the time spent drafting articles corresponds to an 89% increase in Total Time Read.

It’s another feedback loop:

To create blockbuster articles, think like Warren Buffet

No matter how obvious or proven the blockbuster mental model is, following it is hard. Almost everyone I tell the approach to nods as if they get it. But very few people actually do the hard work.

And, I get it. Even as I write this article, I fear that all of the time and money I invested will not pan out. It’s scary to spend so much time on something that might be a complete dud.

Putting all of our eggs in a few baskets feels more risky than spreading them out. In other words, it feels less risky to write five mediocre articles than to write 1 blockbuster article.

But, the reality is that mediocrity is more risky.

So how do we train our minds to be OK swinging for the fences on each pitch?

I think we should think like investors, and more specifically like the best investor in history — Warren Buffett.

Early in his career, Buffett discovered the power of the blockbuster mental model and adopted the strategy of only making 1–2 investments per year. In other words, Buffett only swings at pitches when he thinks he can hit a homerun.

The following quote from Buffett captures the essence of how we can use the Blockbuster model:

“I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only twenty slots in it so that you had twenty punches — representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all. Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did, and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about. So you’d do so much better.”

Source: Capital Alligator

As a writer following the blockbuster mental model, I’m aware that I can only write 1–2 blockbuster articles per month. So, at the beginning, middle, and end of each article, I constantly ask myself and others, “Does this have the potential to be a blockbuster?” As a company, we’ve designed our whole process around that answer being yes!

We live in a media world with winner-take-all dynamics. In this world, a strategy that doesn’t maximize your chances for a home run is the most risky.

Now, if you see the power of the Blockbuster model, and you want to go viral consistently…

Over the last four years, my team and I have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours of time perfecting how we apply the blockbuster model to article writing.

To create this system, we studied the deeper patterns of blockbuster articles, hired some of the best writers and marketers in the world, and then tested everything with our own articles and our clients’ articles (we did over 4,000 tests in various niches).

The result? Apart from my own results (10M+ views), we’ve helped folks write articles that are viewed hundreds of thousands of times and published on top-tier websites like Fortune, Inc., Forbes, and Time. One article alone even generated $100,000.

If you want to “copy and paste” our entire system — so you don’t have to learn from years of painful trial & error — this is your chance:

From now till June 2023 each month, I’m going to lead a live group coaching program where I personally work with a group of coaches, consultants, entrepreneurs and other experts to help them break through the noise and build their audience online with blockbuster articles.

This is the last time I’m teaching a live cohort.

To learn more and apply, fill out this form.

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