Nicolas Cole Quotes

beating the game” isn’t what makes you feel fulfilled. Maintaining a healthy, positive relationship with your inner child is what makes you feel fulfilled.

1 + Subhead And finally, if you want to just get straight to the point, why waste any time? One sentence is all you need in order to frame the piece — before immediately hitting the reader with the first milestone and subhead. Here’s how it works: This first sentence is what the whole piece is about. And this first subhead is what we’re going to dig into right here, right now. I don’t recommend this technique for everything you write, but as a way to change things up, it can be a powerful mechanism for turning your Rate of Revelation knob to level 10. Here’s an example of the 1 + Subhead structure from my article, “I Used To Have Social Anxiety. These 4 Mental Shifts Made Me Confident.” Most people see confidence as something you’re born with — you either have it or you don’t. But the truth is, confidence is just like any other personality trait. If you want to be more patient, you have to practice patience. If you want to be more compassionate, you have to practice compassion. If you want to be more thoughtful, you have to practice doing things intentionally. And if you want to be confident, well then, you simply have to practice being confident.

*There is another strategy here, and that’s to not compete within an existing category but create an entirely new category of your own. However, before we get into breaking the rules, it’s important to learn the rules of the game, first.

What makes a great headline is getting someone to understand three things at the exact same time: What this piece of writing is about Who this piece of writing is for The PROMISE: the problem that will be solved, and/or the solution being offered This is what’s known as The Curiosity Gap. The Curiosity Gap is what tells the reader what this piece of writing is about, who it’s for, and what it’s promising — all without revealing the answer.

Write confidently and declaratively. A lot of people hesitate to “make a point” or “take a stance” when writing online because they don’t want to get criticized in the comments. As a result, their writing stands for nothing, and resonates with no one. It’s safe. It’s self-conscious. And worst of all, it’s vague. The more declarative you can be with your language, the more you will force readers to make a decision. Either they will say, “I strongly agree,” or they will say, “I strongly disagree.” Either of these responses is far better than, “Meh.

The reason I like tagging posts with both broad and niche hashtags is because it gives each post a chance to be exposed to the masses, and to be found by highly targeted readers. We’ll talk more about this in the next section, but the entire secret to getting exposure on your writing online is to find as many ways as possible to make your writing resonate both on a broad level and with a specific audience at the same time. This is one of those ways.

For articles that have three or less Main Points, you are going to want to use a structure that doesn’t cut your explanations too short. The 1/2/5/3/1 structure is a good framework to use when thinking about how to make a solid argument for whatever it is you’re writing about, without getting “lost in the sauce” and rambling on and on. Here’s how it works: This first sentence is your opener. This second sentence clarifies your opener. And this third sentence is why the reader should care. This fourth sentence starts to expand on the point. This fifth sentence is a story, or some sort of credible piece of insight. This sixth sentence builds on that story or insight and tells the reader something they maybe didn’t know. This seventh sentence is a small conclusion. And this eighth sentence is why that conclusion matters. This ninth sentence recaps what you just told the reader. This tenth sentence reinforces the argument you’re making with an additional tidbit or insight. And this eleventh sentence drives the point home. This twelfth sentence reminds the reader of the important takeaway.

Less worried about whether or not I was the most credible person to be answering each question, I focused all of my energy into making my answer the most relatable to whoever was experiencing (or wanted to experience) similar things in life.

If everyone in your category is writing restaurant reviews as if they’re formal essays, something “unexpected” would be to write comedic restaurant reviews from the perspective of a part-time food blogger named Cindy who works for a failing restaurant magazine, and shows up to every restaurant pretending to be this hot insta-famous food-review writer but actually doesn’t know anything about food and gets too drunk at every tasting (and it shows in her writing). In the professional-restaurant-review category, this would be “unexpected.” And as a result, it would stand out.

The 1/1/1+ structure is a mechanism you should use for very specific sections within your writing: beginnings and endings. Single sentences are great for calling out individual ideas, statements, or descriptions, and doing so several times in a row can elicit a powerful response in a reader. Here’s how it works: This first sentence is a strong statement. This second sentence builds on, reinforces, or repeats that strong statement. This third sentence builds on, reinforces, or repeats that strong statement. For example, I use this structure to emphasize a length of time in my article, “The 1 Thing I Did That Changed My Entire Life For The Better.” Step 2: Like I said, I did this for 2 years. Two. Years. Not 3 days. Not a few weeks. Two entire years. I started to see how the people I was surrounding myself with weren’t very conducive to who and what I wanted to become. I started to realize I was terrific at coming up with ideas but horrible at seeing them through to completion. I started to understand why I struggled to make friends, and how closed off I was from the world. If you notice, immediately following the 1/1/1/1 structure, I went into a lengthier paragraph. This was deliberate. When you use the 1/1/1+ structure, you are building momentum. You are moving a reader quickly from Point A to Point B. But after a few big steps, the reader is not going to want to run anymore. They’re going to want to take a quick break and settle into the thing you’re talking about. So, crescendo with the 1/1/1+ rhythm, and then decrescendo with a three, four, or even five-sentence paragraph. Then repeat.

Instead of taking the time to give all this backstory, or make the reader wait and wait for me to “get to the point,” I would just start with the main point instead. This became a defining characteristic of my writing style. I would give a few sentences of explanation or story, and immediately move on to the next point, and then to the next point, and so on and so forth.

The 1/5/1 structure is the same as the 1/3/1 structure, just with more room for description and clarification in the middle. Here’s how it works: This first sentence is your opener. This second sentence clarifies your opener. This third sentence reinforces the point you’re making with some sort of credibility or amplified description. This fourth sentence builds on that credibility or description, giving added context or new information. This fifth sentence explains to the reader why you’re telling them what you’re telling them. And this sixth sentence drives home the point. This seventh sentence is your strong conclusion. You want to use the 1/5/1 structure when your opener would benefit from additional context, or you want to tell a story that requires an extra sentence or two for clarification.

When people read online, they don’t actually “read.” What they do is skim. Browse. Scroll. They let their eyes gloss over the words, and if something compelling catches their eye in the first two, five, maybe ten seconds (a word, a subhead, a phrase), then they’ll stop skimming and start reading. But you better believe as soon as momentum in the writing starts to slow, they’re gone. They’ll swipe back to their social media feed and be neck deep in Memeville in a millisecond.

Here’s an example of the 1/3/1 + 1/3/1 structure from my article, “8 Soft Skills You Need To Work At A High-Growth Startup.” It takes a certain type of personality to want to work at a startup — and the crucial qualities of startup employees you decide to hire. When I was 26 years old, one of my closest friends and I decided we were going to start a company. He was still in the process of finishing his MBA. I had recently taken the leap from my job as a copywriter working in advertising. And every few weeks he would fly to Chicago (where I was based), or I would fly to Atlanta (where he was based), and we’d trade off sleeping on each other’s couches while brainstorming what our first step was going to be. We called it Digital Press. I’ll never forget the day we decided to make our first hire. He was a freelance writer recommended to me by a friend — and we were in the market to start hiring writers and editors (to replace the jobs my co-founder, Drew, and I were performing ourselves). We asked him to meet us at Soho House in Chicago, ordered a bottle of red wine to share, and “interviewed” him by the pool on the roof. He was a fiction writer with a passion for fantasy and sci-fi (not business writing, which was what we needed), and we were young and inexperienced just hoping someone would trust us enough to follow our vision. We hired him — and fired him two months later. The last thing I want to point out here is that you can actually make the 1/3/1 + 1/3/1 structure move even faster by combining the last sentence of the first section, and the first sentence of the second section, into one singular subhead. Here’s how it works: This first sentence is your opener. This second sentence clarifies your opener. This third sentence reinforces the point you’re making with some sort of credibility or amplified description. And this fourth sentence rounds out your argument. This fifth sentence is both your conclusion and the first sentence of your second section. And this s

The number of hours I spend consuming should never equal or exceed the number of hours I spend creating.