*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, befo… - Nicolas Cole

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.

What hooks us is their consistency, their improvement over time, and most importantly, their ability to create something that resonates with us in that particular category. By “following” them, what we’re really saying is we believe what they create tomorrow will be “As Great” or “Better” than what they created today — and we want to be there to experience it.

Here’s an example of the 1/3/1 + Bullets structure from my article, “5 Serious Things You Should Know About Money Before You Turn 30.” Money, and “financial freedom,” is a skill. No one ever tells you what you should know about money when you’re young. There isn’t a class in high school, or even college, where a professor sits you down and says, “Now listen up: mastering money is no different than learning how to shoot a basketball or paint a picture. It just takes practice.” Instead, money remains (for many people) this massive unknown in their daily lives. They don’t know how to make more of it. They don’t know how to spend less of it. They don’t know how (they’ll ever) save it. And they don’t know what to do with it once they have it. And that’s a big problem.