from Nicolas Cole 🚢👻 | by Nicolas Cole 🚢👻

My 10-year Overnight Success Blueprint I started writing online when I was 17 years old. Today, I write 10,000 words per day (almost a book a week) and earn 100% of my income from writing or publishing-related ventures. Here are the skills I had to learn to do what I do✍️👇 t.co/p6jRtrxsej

1. Volume My first endeavor writing online was a gaming blog I had in high school. I wrote (and published) a blog per day, every day, for an entire year. By the time I graduated high school, I had 10,000 daily readers and was e-famous in the emerging eSports world.

2. Interviewing My first major in college was Journalism at the University of Missouri. I didn't go to class and hated school. But I did join the school newspaper. I would call up the police department and ask any question I wanted (mostly about drugs): "I'm writing a piece."

3. Fiction My sophomore year, I transferred to Columbia College Chicago to study fiction writing instead. I'd never written fiction before, but fell in love with it. I gravitated to Russian literature & Kafkaesque "magical realism." There, I learned the structure of story.

4. Personal Stories My junior year, I took a class (my only class) that was 100% nonfiction. We had to tell true stories. I wrote a short story about my teenage years as a pro gamer. This sparked my 1st book. t.co/VV6fbopfMx

5. Teaching My senior year, the only path I knew for earning a living as a writer was teaching. I started tutoring students in the department as a "Writer's Workshop" teacher—with plans of going to grad school. I learned a lot about my own writing by teaching other students.

6. Self-confidence A week before submitting all my materials to Iowa's Writer's Workshop (#1 creative writing school in the country), a teacher I respected told me not to go. "I went there. It killed my love for writing." She suggested I get some life experience instead.

7. Marketing Instead of grad school, I took a job as a copywriting intern at a small ad agency downtown Chicago. I made minimum wage writing social media copy for brands. My first "ghostwriting" experience was writing for a well-known female gynecologist. I was 23.

8. Proofreading My boss (the creative director & co-owner of the agency) became my mentor. He used to have me proofread his emails, proofread his texts to girls, proofread multimillion-dollar proposals to national brands. I racked up 2,000+ hours of proofreading.

9. Sales The agency was small, and eventually there was nowhere for me to go. When I asked how I could earn more money, my mentor said, "Bring in deals." I used to watch Wolf of Wall Street & teach myself "how to sell," and after a year, I finally landed my first client.

10. Online Writing While working at the agency, I didn't want to let go of my dream of becoming a writer. So I challenged myself to write 1 Quora answer per day, every day. In 2015, I became the #1 most-read writer on the platform. Slow & steady wins the race.

11. Columnist Writing On Quora, Inc Magazine started republishing dozens of my answers. Eventually, they offered me a column of my own. There, I wrote another 409 columns for them over the course of 2.5 years. I mastered the art of the 800-word article

12. Freelance Writing After working at the agency for 4 years, and seeing success writing on Quora & Inc, I decided to take the leap. I quit my job & went all-in on freelance writing. All that practice on Quora & Inc meant I could write an article in 30 minutes. My income 📈

13. Ghostwriting Then, I stumbled into ghostwriting. My first client was a guy in his 60s who had sold his company for $1B. He wanted help sharing his entrepreneurship advice. One client led to 2, 2 led to 4, etc. All of a sudden, I was ghostwriting for 12+ execs at a time.

14. Entrepreneurship When my bandwidth hit a ceiling, I convinced one of my best friends to quit his job and start a ghostwriting agency with me. We called it Digital Press. 2 years later, we had 20+ full-time employees, 80+ clients (at a time), and $2M in revenue.

15. Self-publishing In 2019, we decided to scale the business back. Ghostwriting is very subjective and hard to scale. The biz was a disaster. Once things settled down, I spent 4 months writing a book about everything I'd learned about Online Writing. t.co/w1xTv33WKW

16. Scalable Education I loved the writing workshop model I experienced in college. When I met @dickiebush, we built #Ship30for30 to be what I experienced in college, but 100% online & digital-focused. Full circle. t.co/b67flUjQ0W

17. Intellectual Property Around the same time, @lochhead & @EddieWouldGrow and I decided to start a paid newsletter together talking about Category Design. 10 years of writing online, ghostwriting for 300+ executives, all prepared me for this. t.co/uWfyCa3aJZ

Even writing this thread is wild to me. I had so many moments along the journey where I'd get upset and say to myself, "Why isn't it happening faster?" Until years went by and realized: I needed each of these chapters. Each one taught me a different skill.