Browsing articles tagged with "Niklas Goeke Archives - Michael D. Simmons"

Creating a Sustainable Feedback Loop with Niklas Goeke

Jun 16, 2021 // by michaeld // Podcast // No Comments

Niklas Goeke is a writer reaching over 500,000 monthly readers with a personally-curated email list of 70,000 subscribers. His work has been published in Business Insider, CNBC, Fast Company, and many more. He is also the Founder and CEO of Four Minute Books, leading a small team that publishes free and daily book summaries from non-fiction bestsellers.

In the past five years, he has created several courses to help writers create better content and strive to control their craft development, including his flagship course Write Like A Pro, where he teaches writing to over 100 creatives. Niklas has been featured as a Top Writer in over 10 topics on Medium and was named Top Writer in 2017 and 2018 on Quora.
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Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Niklas Goeke shares what inspired him to become a writer.
What is a soul market fit and how does it help to become a writer?
Can early monetization be detrimental to your writing career?
The Four-Minute-Book Strategy.
The deliberate practice of writing.
Niklas shares his shift from focusing on grammar to creativity.
How do you create a daily feedback loop?
Niklas shares his approach to writing his book and the difference between an article and writing a book.
Is self-publishing the way to go?
Niklas recalls how case studies allowed him to expand his perspective.
Hiring characters from different stories to tell your story.

In this episode…

Storytelling is one of the oldest forms of communication known to humans. Stories are constantly being retold and enhanced with each generation—and this is nothing new! The only difference between these stories is two-fold: how we tell them and who experiences them.

Niklas Goeke, a writer and author, understands that our stories differ based on life experiences. So, he’s developed an interesting strategy for getting his point across in writing: using characters from movies and tv shows to demonstrate his point.

Join us for this week’s episode of The Michael Simmons Show as host Michael Simmons sits down with Niklas Goeke, a renowned writer. They discuss creating a soul-market fit for your writing, deliberate practice, and how early monetization can ruin your writing career. Niklas shares how he creates a daily feedback loop and limits distractions in his writing space. He also shares his writing routine and how it has changed over the years. Stay tuned.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by my company, Seminal.

We help you create blockbuster content that rises above the noise, changes the world, and builds your business.

To learn about creating blockbuster content, read my article: Blockbuster: The #1 Mental Model For Writers Who Want To Create High-Quality, Viral Content

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:02

Welcome to The Michael Simmons Show where we help you create blockbuster content that changes the world and builds your business. We dive deep into the habits and hacks of today’s top thought leaders. Now, here’s the show.

Michael Simmons 0:14

Today, we have Nik Goeke, I have been friends with Nik from for several years now. And so it’s really been awesome to watch him grow. I spoke with him when he was just getting started. And over the past few years, he’s just really blown up. He’s written many hundreds of articles that have been read 10s of millions of times, he’s also created a website fourminutebooks.com, you’ve probably seen it when you search a book name, it does really well in the search results. And it gets hundreds of 1000s of views per month. And he’s another person that’s just an example of being very consistent. We’re gonna talk about his writing routine and how he guards his writing time. And just doing that over the years. He’s also an example of someone where you can’t make excuses about being too busy, because he really built his writing while he was getting a Master’s, from the university in Germany. So without further ado, I give you Nik. All right. Welcome to the podcast, Nik.

Niklas Goeke 1:20

Glad to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Michael Simmons 1:22

I’ve been saying how excited I’ve been to to do this call and just really admire your journey from starting in your early 20s in writing to being where you are now at 29. And I was curious, when did you start writing? I became aware of you in 2015. But how far into it? Were you at that point?

Niklas Goeke 1:42

That was pretty early. I think I started at the end of 2014, September 2014. I think I published my first blog post on my blog. That was a that was a public kind of writing thing.

Michael Simmons 1:56

And did you have any intentions that Okay, I’m going to Well, I guess you’d be create a blog, you’re going to plan to write a lot. But did you have any structure to it? Were okay, I’m gonna post once a week about this topic and see what happens. And I want to accomplish this goal and be a writer or is it just testing.

Niklas Goeke 2:12

It was

Niklas Goeke 2:17

given how I think, subconsciously how determined I was to be a writer, I didn’t really know it. And I didn’t have a lot of structure when I first came to it as a activity kind of, because the idea to be a writer came to me in 2012, I think, and but it was all very, very subliminal kind of I couldn’t really express it or formulate it. And it wasn’t like I had a certain goal, a certain income goal or anything like that. So when I started in 2014, was super experimental. And the blog was also a result of some experiments I’ve done in the months leading up to it with building websites, learning some WordPress design, things like that. So I literally just decided to write about the few topics that were on my mind at the time. And I have some ideas, let me get these out. And then go from there and just keep learning and adjusting as I go. And then I think over the next few months became a little more structured. And then yeah, just the structure came as I went along kind of initially was very fun. And just let me try this. And this will be fun to put together kind of driven.

Michael Simmons 3:14

Yeah. And what made you in 2012 even be interested in writing or what was the thing there was the inspiration.

Niklas Goeke 3:23

I think the the the, one of the fastest ways I can trace it back or points I can trace it back to is interestingly, it was my statistics professor in the United States. So I was on exchange. I was on exchange at UMass Dartmouth, which is I think it’s a public. It’s a state school, I think, in Massachusetts. And I took a statistics class to try and not have to do my statistics class in Germany, because it was super hard. And the professors in Germany agreed you have to get agreements. And they agreed to it. If I take these two statistics classes in the United States, then I wouldn’t have to do it in Germany, and I could just transfer the credits. So I did that. And luckily one of the classes, the teacher, I think his name was Gary Davis. He was great. We talked about a lot of things, and he actually made us start to blog for the class. So we had to do a, yeah, we had to do a WordPress blog and do our statistics homework every week on the blog with outputs from software, graphs and stuff. And we have to do that. And in the course of that we like he taught us a lot or told us a lot about the people in this blogging space, which were at the time, like Tim Ferriss, James Alger. So basically he mentioned those names to us. And I think that was the first time I heard about them.

Michael Simmons 4:41

You got exposed to it. Then in 2012, you had a little bit of posts, then 2014 you jump in? How many posts have you now done? It’s been about six years now. And you had to guess,

Niklas Goeke 4:54

probably around 2000, maybe, definitely well over 1000. So I think it’s it’s got to be somewhere Between all the all the pieces I’ve done on all the different websites should be around

Michael Simmons 5:04

2000, I think. And so many people start writing online and 99% of the people, they’re kind of reaching a friends and family audience that they’re already followed that they know personally on LinkedIn, probably not really any strangers. And how do how do you account for you being such an outlier?

Niklas Goeke 5:25

You mean in terms of just sticking with it just consistency or?

Michael Simmons 5:29

Yeah, that you’ve really know that audience? And yeah, you know, right. If you try reaching over 40 million people, I mean, kind of crazy ride. Sometimes it’s just a number. But when you actually take a step back, I mean, that’s crazy. Yeah, that’s,

Niklas Goeke 5:40

yeah, that’s the that’s true. Yeah. And I guess it’s the consistency also, that drives the results At the end of the day, right. So it’s kind of like the same, same thing. Um, I would say that a big part was that I started it as a fun driven thing. That was the sort of it was I was passionate about it. I had fun writing. I always had fun writing, even at school doing essays and things like that. And then I sort of picked that back up. And I somewhat professionalized it right? I gave some more structure to it. And then having a blog and creating a newsletter and so on and creating some accountability to the audience. Even if the audience was super small in the beginning, I think it took me took me six months or more to get my first 1000 email subscribers. So it was like a long time, it will didn’t take off like a rocket ship or anything.

Michael Simmons 6:28

How often were you posting in those first six months?

Niklas Goeke 6:32

I think I started with the almost weekly schedule, doing these mini posts. And then I got more into case studies and more in depth content. And then I was posting probably two to three times a month for a while.

Michael Simmons 6:43

Okay, so not even a huge volume. You’re still kind of testing it out.

Niklas Goeke 6:47

Yeah, yeah. No, initially not. I went from short to longer. And then I just kept kept exploring. But I think Yeah, the fun part, the accountability part that sort of came with it. And then the other thing, I think there was a little bit, it’s probably a smallest factor. But it is a factor is I always get competitive about things. So I was playing video games in high school and trying to compete with friends for pro gamer points and things like that. And so there was a little bit of once once I started being also in the sphere and talking to other people, there was a little bit of sort of competitiveness to it, not in the sense that, oh, this guy’s in the same niche as me. Let me try to get more investors. It’s more just a general kind of, Okay, this person is posting a lot. What can I do? So this as a motivation kind of thing?

Michael Simmons 7:36

Yeah, it’s interesting. As a side thing, I interviewed Nicolas Cole. And he was talking, he grew, he was one of the best World of Warcraft players in the country and high school. And so he became interested in he did he did like, hundreds of videos, I think, for that. And so that when he switched to writing, right, in 2014, he started, he had that base of understanding storytelling and gaming. So gaming was an interesting, he knew what it takes to improve as a gamer and move up the scoreboard and things like that.

Niklas Goeke 8:06

Yeah, it’s quite similar. And it’s quite similar in in many ways, I think.

Michael Simmons 8:12

And so for you with, you know, you know, in our course, on seminar, we help people write blockbuster articles, and get into the habit. And these are people who are older, often, you know, let’s say 30s 40s, and so on. And there’s that balance between, okay, I want to do something that’s gonna make me money, there’s a market for it. There’s more of a product market fit. And then, you know, the other side is the soul market fit. And so it sounds like in the beginning, you’re optimizing for soul market fit, really focusing on fun? And how do you think about that balance? And how has that evolved for you over time?

Niklas Goeke 8:50

I think for me, it was extremely helpful that I didn’t see a way to make money with my writing at first. And it wasn’t as obvious in the options that we had, there was no sub stack, where it’s created a paid email newsletter in a couple clicks, there was no Patreon. Or they were just starting. And they were very small, there was no medium partner program. So none of these options for easy quote unquote, monetization existed. And so I think, for me, that really helped because it was driven by the fun part. And I realized even just sitting down writing that I enjoyed the activity in and of itself, would keep doing it. And if 10 people read it, and one person said, this is awesome, then there was a great reward for me. And I think that really helped not quit along the way. Because I think nowadays, what happens with these easy monetization options, just because easy to monetize, it makes it look like it’s easy to make a lot of money, but that’s never the case. And so people get frustrated if the money doesn’t come immediately. And so I think the fun part or focusing on that or not monetizing if you if you can afford to, if you’re not trying to force it to work initially, that really helps.

Michael Simmons 9:50

Interesting. So yeah, actually never thought about that actually, having early monetization could actually hurt you. Do you have those expectations? For how long did it take you to make your first dollar from writing in any form

Niklas Goeke 10:02

that didn’t take too long. So

Niklas Goeke 10:04

I started writing on the blog, I also started freelancing on the side and I started translating tried German English, because there was my, I’m German born and raised. And then I went to the US to study and I’ve always been fascinated by English, reading English books, and so on. So I started there. And then from there, I also quickly got some, some referrals, and also just reach out to people on Facebook and stuff. And I got some gigs to write articles for a company, blogs, travel sector, and so on. And so I think within a few months, I was already earning a little bit at least, like 50 euros an article 100 euros an article here and there. So you’re more doing

Michael Simmons 10:40

it like as a freelancer, for other people are translating, but how long until you actually made money, let’s say directly from like, Hey, I’m Nik, I create courses or I get paid directly for the articles I want to write.

Niklas Goeke 10:58

That part I think that was about a little over a year, probably 15 months, because in 2016, late 2015, I started Four Minute Books. And that was the first sort of structure project where I was like, I’m in control of the content and the monetization and everything like that. And it’s a simple affiliate model for the website. But that started working sort of immediately as I created it, and it

Michael Simmons 11:22

was awesome. So can you for people who don’t know, what Four Minute Books is, Can you kind of tell what it is, and just the background of the story on it a little bit?

Niklas Goeke 11:32

Sure, basically, Four Minute Books is a collection of now over 800 Book Summaries free online, and you can find a lot of them via Google, if you happen to search for Book Summaries for popular books. Each summary is about 1000 words, so should be readable in around four minutes. Depending on your reading speed. Each one has just like three lessons from the book. So it’s not a comprehensive summary by any means. But it’s a short excerpt, you can learn something from from some great books and authors for free. And yeah, that’s a that’s a that’s about it. And so, I did this initially, mostly to create a very much more consistent writing schedule, or much more frequent, I should say, I was trying to find something that I could write every single day publish every single day. And this was sort of this sort of, I just put this together as a structure. And then I realized I could put some monetization on it and potentially make it into a project that might

Michael Simmons 12:27

work. And this is going back to routines, I asked this, I find it really interesting of all the elements that go into it. If you’re doing two to three times per month. Why did you want to do one? Once every day? Why was that important to you? And particularly publishing every day?

Niklas Goeke 12:46

Yes, I think so after that first year, in the first year, I did a lot. I did mostly freelancing. And and I was writing on the blog for free with writing. And I realized I didn’t make a lot of money. Um, I don’t know, probably, I don’t know, we’re like supposed to share numbers or not. But

Michael Simmons 13:00

if it makes you feel comfortable that the more the better so people can just understand what it’s actually right.

Niklas Goeke 13:05

I think I made around 20,000 in the first year that I was doing all of it. And

Michael Simmons 13:11

it was enough to get by I’m why you’re going to school full time. Full time.

Niklas Goeke 13:16

Yes, no, actually, that was after school. So I graduated with my bachelor’s in 2014. Then I did started this completely from scratch, having no experience, I was like, let me try to do this for a year. And after the first year, I did a second and then I went to get the masters and continue part time, so to speak. And now after five years, I’m doing it full time after I graduated with the masters and I’m done with school. Okay, okay, as a background, but so in the first year, I was freelancing, I was I was doing the writing on the blog, I was learning how to build an email list, online marketing, and so on, doing a whole bunch of other things. But I realized, okay, there’s some potential, I think I can make this work, I obviously need more time to figure out how to do it well, and stuff. But I also realized that the writing part on the blog was the most fun, and I really wanted to figure that part of the equation out. So I decided to try to minimize the freelancing and focus more on building something on myself. And at the same time, I realized my writing wasn’t that good yet. So I just needed to practice a lot. And also, I wanted to make whatever I was building work fast. So I thought if I publish once a day, that can’t be too bad. So I’m just going to commit to this project for the year. And that was my goal to publish every single day on the website for a year.

Michael Simmons 14:21

So it’s not like a challenge, not only to get the result, but also to get better at the skill of writing. So, yeah. How do you What’s your theory of deliberate practice for writing? or How did you think about that? In other words, where is just the act of writing and doing a huge quantity that will create the learning or were you trying to get coaching, study great writers practice it with each post.

Niklas Goeke 14:50

I was definitely trying to make each post a little better than the last one. Yeah, and the back then it started with things like grammar and I’m going back now and I find so many spelling errors and grammar mistakes in the in the older articles. But that’s, that’s where it started just reviewing everything from a very technical grammatical standpoint. That’s where it started. And then I was always trying, how can I be a little more creative with the summary? What kind of examples Can I draw on that I didn’t draw on before how and over time, I started being less focused on the books and more focused on the lessons. So I shifted away from what’s in the book, and how can I repeat that in sort of my own word and my own words versus saying, Okay, this is what the book talks about in the book makes this example. But maybe there’s an example in my life that is interesting to the reader. And then so that’s where the creativity part started. So I think was important to have the consistency

Michael Simmons 15:47

What made you make that shift? Putting yourself into it?

Niklas Goeke 15:51

That’s a good question.

Niklas Goeke 15:54

I think I honestly think it was boredom, I think at some point, when you’re doing it, and I had a fixed framework for how each article was supposed to look like, because it was supposed to be easy it was it was supposed to be easy to keep the routine. And it was at some point, because you have an input, you have output, and then you know how to get from A to B. And then I started getting a little bored myself. So I was like, how can I add some some twist to this to make it more fun for me again, and goes back to the passion thing? I think that not let writing become boring for myself. I think that’s when I started experimenting.

Michael Simmons 16:28

Interesting. Now I consider that a hallmark of your writing. It’s hard to imagine a time before that where I feel like you’re always sharing personal stories. And indeed, you At what point did you start writing on Quora? I actually I always pictured you starting on Quora first in my mind. Quora, I

Niklas Goeke 16:46

didn’t start until 2017. So at that point, oh, really, I think two and a half years.

Michael Simmons 16:51

At that point, you had developed a little bit of your storytelling. And now it seems like all your core posts are based off of rather than just sharing an answer to the question, you’re sharing a personal story that goes along with it and really pointing your voice and your storytelling.

Niklas Goeke 17:06

Yeah, Quora really helped in that regard. That’s what I was trying to after I did the 2016 experiment. And I had the 365 Book Summaries and the income was building from the site and it was starting to work, I dialed down, and I wrote one summary a week in the next year. And I said, Let’s let me go to Quora and try to do the same thing. And I only did it for about nine months. But I wrote a Quora answer every single day. And I definitely had an I felt like I had an advantage at that point going into the platform, because I knew a lot of basic storytelling things from from the summaries and stuff. But there’s also so much to learn there because now it was it was new audience, the topics were much broader, the potential to do examples was much broader, and so on. And I think those nine months also really, really helped me with my storytelling and stuff, and especially then expanding their content later and other places.

Michael Simmons 17:57

Yeah, really interesting. Because Yeah, Nicolas Cole, also, he started on Quora doing a daily post. I think he was doing daily for at least a year while he was doing it full time. I feel like Quora is interesting platform because for practicing that storytelling, and just getting that that feedback loop. How, if you’re advising a beginning writer, you know, you’re, there’s this idea of these challenges that you had like a one year challenge to do one post per day on on the book, Four Minute Books, and then nine months for Quora? Would you recommend somebody if they’re just getting started, that it’s all about, get a daily feedback loop? And try to get better every post and keep, have fun?

Niklas Goeke 18:39

I think so. Yeah, I think the consistency in the beginning is the most important part. Because if you can’t find your way to that, then it’s very hard to to get to a point, if you want to be a full time writer at some point, or even, like make a part time income from it or something along those lines. If you want to do it in a professional capacity, I think the consistency is pretty much the most important part. And you need that as a sort of baseline

Niklas Goeke 19:03

To first of all, to get to build audience to get stuff out there to get better to practice. But also to show yourself that you can rely on yourself with the writing so that even if you just want to if you want to do freelance for example, and you know, okay, I have something to deliver by this deadline and so on, you want to be able to get that done whenever you need to. So you can be professional literally. So I think that really the whole consistency part is is very big,

Michael Simmons 19:29

really interesting. And you know, now you’re making a really big shift with wanting to do longer form. And, you know, books where you know, the the feedback loop would be a lot longer, what is going to percept precipitating this change and how are you thinking about it in the scheme of yourself as a writer while you’re passionate about your competitive advantages as a writer and trying to break above the noise and even just the online world right now where it is 2000 end of 2020 and there’s all these platforms and ways to monetize online.

Niklas Goeke 20:05

Think from day one from way back in 2012, I was reading James Altucher’s blog, things like that it was always appealing to me to sort of just sit in a room and write and have that be my job. And then I close the laptop, and I’m done. Kind of that was a, that was always a big appeal to me. And of course, I wasn’t sure if that’s even if I can even make that work, right, if that would work as a mode of working for me, and so on.

Niklas Goeke 20:28

But now, now, I think I do enough. But over the years, as I went back and forth on doing freelance doing other work, and so on, the writing was always consistent, it was always there. But it was, I think it was never, I was never to the point where I was literally just writing like writing basically creating more, whatever form it takes books or posts or medium blogs, whatever. I’ve never really gone there. And so I was thinking that now might be the time to try that. And if I have this full exposure to writing, if I’m literally writing in the morning, writing in the afternoon, how does that feel? Yeah, will that good? Good, be good for me or not? My gut feeling tells me it’s gonna be good. And I’m enjoying it so far. But yeah, so it was really, it was very driven by what do I want every day to look like this whole? I think it’s probably a question and both around online, right? You ask, don’t ask yourself, like, what you want, or how you want to feel like, as you said, what should everyday look like what would be like my ideal daily routine and work backwards from there.

Michael Simmons 21:25

And so for you, you really came across that you want your day to be focused as much as possible on writing, not as a managing people or administration part, which is essentially other share for myself, I can really see the consequences of the models you choose for innovation, or for for monetization, if you choose to create a course, then you’re going to be spending years understanding and conversion funnels, and you’re gonna create a course. And then you’re gonna need to learn how to create courses, which is no easy thing. It’s easy to put up a course, but to actually create a transformative course, because learning loop, yeah, and so, you know, all of a sudden, like you’re writing part time, again, like an hour to a day max or something like that. And so by is part of it by writing a book or choosing that sort of monetization, or even like, if somebody were to choose a sub stack, you’re getting paid directly for your writing, you don’t need to learn, the writing promotes itself in a way your body of work.

Niklas Goeke 22:22

Yes, and, and over the years, as you write letters, you have some some variables, some do better, some, some don’t. But I feel I’m at the point where if I create something really substantial, and it’s of substantial value to the people who read it, there’s going to be enough people spreading that around, so that I can kind of rely on it to if it’s monetized some somehow have a good like returned for me. And in terms of the creative part I and I’ve done like courses and stuff like that. And I agree, right, it’s quickly it quickly becomes another job. And I like doing these things occasionally. But I have to feel in control about the time that I spent there versus how much time I spent writing. And sometimes I got sucked into these other commitments, where I and it ended up being the opposite. And I was scrambling to find the time to be writing. And I always hated that. And

Michael Simmons 23:17

how do you think about it, I try to really guard my time, I have to really fight for my writing time, like on the weekends. And like in the mornings, I’m always trying to meetings are always trying to creep up in the morning, I’m always trying to push them back. And also, I’d have to fight my own tendencies that I see an opportunity to do something. And that’s like, you know, for you, I know you have lots of publications that you manage on medium. And on Quora for me, we have seven different Facebook groups. Just yesterday, I was just drafting the post to announce a new Facebook group, I’m like, let me just hold off here. Like, I want to create another Facebook group. But uh, how do you battle all those different forces and really stay true to that.

Niklas Goeke 23:59

One thing I’m doing. So I think I’m my own worst enemy. So in terms of in terms of distractions, very easy for me to give in to them in terms of opportunity, very easy for me to want to jump on everything. Of course, also. And that becomes more difficult as you get more opportunity. Because the further you go, the better the opportunities you have to let go of. So yeah, really cool and awesome things. And that gets even it gets harder. It’s easy in the beginning, when people are just trying to sort of take advantage of, I don’t know, whatever platform you have, for example, it’s like easy to turn that down. But once the opportunities become really good, it gets harder and harder. But one thing I do is my phone is basically dead. It’s it’s new, it’s always on mute, basically. No real notifications, nothing pops up. I always keep it facedown somewhere else where I can access it that really helps in the morning. And other than that, it’s once I get going and once I get into the flow writing is enough fun to sort of keep me there. But of course it’s always easy to get sucked into some rabbit hole. But I’m also trying to account for that. So for example, if I’m researching something, and I’m going way deeper with the research for the article about some character or some historical figure reading the whole Wikipedia article, I think that’s actually fine, because that’s the kind of research that also drives creativity. I don’t know what might fall onto the page as a result of me reading that article later. I think that’s okay. And that’s the kind of procrastination I want to make room for. Whereas other procrastination just being stuck in my inbox for two hours, doesn’t help anything, I have to be really careful about.

Michael Simmons 25:31

And one thing I’ve a lot of questions I want to ask here, you’ve jumped around on a lot of different topics as a writer. Yes. And you know that is your picture someone like Tim Ferriss or Joe Rogan? Don’t people jump around, jump around? every few years, let’s say like Malcolm Gladwell, every four years he might jump around the topic where some people jump around every article is a very different topic. How do you feel about the choices you made, there following your curiosity, which maximizes your fun that maybe you’re not known for the world top expert in it.

Niklas Goeke 26:14

I think it’s probably hard to know in advance when you when you start out. But if you know, you have the long term vision of being an author, writer, very focused on the creative part, then I think that’s not a big problem. If you don’t have this niche, if you don’t have this niche, this this expertise, and if it takes a few years, if you’re doing it sort of the slow way, I think I was writing about habits a lot for a while. And I got some reputation, I think relatively early on for that. But then I diverged, especially at Quora, I was answering questions all over the place. And but for me, because I wasn’t, I wasn’t in a in a rush, so to speak, to monetize, especially at first. And that definitely helps. So when you want to monetize, especially, that helps I think early on to have a niche and be known for something if you have something you’re very passionate about, and you feel like you have a lot of things to say about that might be also easier for you. So I think in terms of money is probably the more profitable route. But for me, for example, I was covering productivity a lot early on. And after five or six mega posts, I felt like I ran out. I had my system down, I had nothing to say at the time. And I could have kept coming up with things. But it felt kind of fake,

Michael Simmons 27:26

because I wasn’t right. And so for you, you mentioned something there that you had your system down. So for you, are you writing articles that can apply to your life as well as part of what makes it fun for you that it’s not purely teaching other people? It’s okay, I want to research this article on productivity because I’m struggling with this part of it.

Niklas Goeke 27:45

Yes, I think that that’s why productivity was one of the first topics I was drawn to as well, because I hadn’t really read a lot of books on that topic or anything of the sort. And from getting into knowing Tim Ferriss thought his whole 8020 thing approach that he had to everything, and learning about habits. And so I tried to just piece together my own little system for for what works. And I did and I ended up sharing that along the way. So there was definitely some let me go out and do something that I can actually write about that has some substance. Because especially in the beginning, and if you’re not practiced if you don’t have the discipline yet, you can just it’s much harder, at least to sit down and just come up with something on the blank page. That which now I have more confidence on, people always ask me how Where do you get all the ideas, and I say, usually I have a folder full of ideas, like I have more ideas than I can ever write about, right? So I can if I sit for like, if I sit down long enough and stare at the page, something’s gonna come up, and then I’ll just write about that. But in the beginning, especially, it really helps when you feel you have your first dry slump or whatever. And you feel like okay, I can just go out I can do something, and then I can come back and report on it.

Michael Simmons 28:48

Yeah, so I think one thing, you know, I’m taking away from you. And I think very similar is like there’s if you have a long term perspective, that that makes a really big difference. And most people don’t, who you’re going to give up really quickly, if you’re a long term perspective, even if you’re not going the absolute fastest way doesn’t really matter. Because long term, you end up in the same place, but on some level, and I ask this because I’m thinking about this for myself. I’ve written a lot of articles on learning how to learn. And now, you know, I’m thinking about how to do a book around that and how to combine the articles and things like that, in retrospect, knowing what you know. Now, of course, you had to do everything you did to get where you are now. So are you happy with yourself? You can’t regret it. But would you have created a book once you’ve done all these articles on productivity and habits? Would you have written a book on it and be like, okay, now I’m going to combine those into an article and then move on.

Niklas Goeke 29:41

Hmm, I don’t think so. The funny thing is one of the first things I did was write a book actually, it was about it was super tiny. It was about googling

Niklas Goeke 29:53

Because I started some an article series about how to Google because I was just trying it was around productivity. I was trying to share helpful things. And that was like, man, if only everyone knew how to Google because I find myself thinking so often you can google the answer to this in two seconds. And if you know how to Google, and especially how to go deep into Google and find very specific things, that you’re just going to accelerate your own learning so much. And

Michael Simmons 30:15

so it’s so true. I mean, people, it’s one of those categories of things that people are like, I know how to Google like, why should I read a book on googling? But then no, like, there’s actually, yeah, a huge difference in your life. Okay, so you’re, you’re working on this book? And

Niklas Goeke 30:32

yeah, so So I started as an article series, and then it got so long and expensive. I was like, Oh, this should actually be like a small self published book. And I did that I was writing like, crazy for a week had all these screenshots and stuff. And I did self publish, I think was in 2014. Still, so was one of the very earliest things that I’ve done, and of course, totally bombed. I had no audience, the call was terrible. I made it myself. So there was a lot of marketing lessons learned there. But how many books did you sell at that point? A handful of copies, five to 10, or something. Okay,

Michael Simmons 31:01

so not not a lot, interesting.

Niklas Goeke 31:03

Yeah. And so and then I dialed back really hard on the whole book thing, and I started thinking a lot more about it. And now, I mean, so many books published, like at least 1 million, I think of traditionally published ones, let alone the self published ones every year, right. And after that, I’ve never really felt this, I have this killer idea, whether it’s a concept like the five second rule, or a Miracle Morning, you know, these very grippy concepts, come up with where you’re like, this is something I can really make into a book. And the book helps drive the initial concept home, even if the concept can be explained in the blog post. But the book has a sense, a bigger message. Yeah, and I haven’t had that until this point. But um, so that’s why I was now going I want to start with self publishing books, I want to start with the more what you said. So I have a lot of content on certain topics. So let me try the bundle some up in a cool way is going to be a short book, that’d be cheap, mostly for my audience. And if it ends up taking off or leading to a bigger book, that’s fine. But not to this, this traditional book, big, big scale kind of effort, where I feel like I have to let that come to me. And I still haven’t had this like, oh, man, this has to be a nonfiction. Traditional bestseller, whatever,

Michael Simmons 32:08

huh, really interesting. So for you, you feel like a good time to go into books was number one, you have a much higher skill set a few years later, you have a larger audience. And then you really found a hook that you feel like can really work? And how, you know, there’s always a tension between, you know, people who follow you have already read a lot of your articles. How much are you starting from scratch? versus how are you? Are you taking articles and just glueing them together? or How are you thinking about going up to that next level.

Niklas Goeke 32:37

So with the first one, one of the topics, I ended up covering over time, a lot of self love, or self validation, confidence, whatever you want to call it, but looking in the mirror, and feeling good about yourself, not smug, but good. Yeah. And so I have a whole bunch of articles. And I just, I just tried to collect all the articles I had 20 30 40 was sort of related to the topic. And I’m just trying to put structure to it, and have the book sort of tell its own story, work the articles into this story in the ones that work, but then also do adapting, editing, maybe do bridges, seguess between the articles. So I’m thinking of it like essay or blog post Compendium, which I think most books are nowadays anyways. And that’s the format. Also, you want to keep the reader’s attention, you can do this, if you’re not doing novels, at least, it’s very hard to have, like, very dense, dense pages of pages of that material

Michael Simmons 33:29

I was gonna ask you about that is, you know, I’m thinking about the learning book and around the five hour rule. And it’s like, on the one hand, there’s like a Malcolm Gladwell style of storytelling, which I don’t do in articles, I’m more give a quick summary of like the big ideas, but he’s more like, and the researcher like, was born here. And then they grew up and then became really fascinated in this idea. And then they did this study. And here’s the design of the study. And here’s like one of the participants in the study. So there’s a huge storytelling around one study. And I feel like it’s a little bit easier to do that in an article or in a book format. Versus in a so what I’m asking is, are you going to change your writing at all, or I feel like what I heard you say is you actually know you’re going to keep it still an article style, because people appreciate those short get to the point, ways of doing it.

Niklas Goeke 34:16

I think for I think for this first effort that I’m trying where it’s basically stitching articles together, but also really thinking about how that translates in translates into a book as a different format. Because I know a book and articles, very different contexts, then some people just you can throw just articles in a book as a collection, but then there’s pieces missing, sort of bridges between the pieces and so on are missing that the reader can walk over kind of so I’m really trying to make a big effort with the editing and everything so that it actually becomes feels like a wholesome like a whole book, rather than feel bad. But in terms of style, I think I’m going to keep it I’m going to keep it where it is also have subheads between the articles so that’s shorter sections and

Michael Simmons 34:57

visual so people can pop in. If they’re Waiting in line on their Kindle and get something valuable, then it’s okay. Leave it. Yes. Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve been wrestling with that of there’s like the, the Four Hour Body book here somewhere. But I feel like that was a very interesting design book where it’s very modular. You know, each chapter could be a small book on its own right. And it’s very, you don’t need to assert you don’t need the previous chapter to understand that chapter. So that’s one way of writing out another way of writing is really building up on top of each other, the first book is making the case for this huge thing. And then second half is more about how to, how are you kind of drawing those lines? I think,

Niklas Goeke 35:40

I think mine is. Because we’re going to be about self love as a concept, I’m going to try to have some very brief definition, a story that kind of makes the definition and makes a case for it. What is this? Why is it important? How do you get it? Why is it more of a behaviour rather than a trait and just clear up some misconceptions and try to set like the concept itself, and then the rest is going to be connected stories that help you with certain aspects of implementing this concept into your life, but very story driven, like the articles, sort of leading with different examples, different stories, and then where it becomes a sort of passive thing where I feel like it’s, I feel like I want it to be a book where, first of all, you can read random pages, you can read subsections. And there’s a little story in there. And that makes you feel good about satisfying your curiosity that kind of, but then also, if you read the whole book in either one goal or in slow doses, kind of, then you start feeling better about yourself. So it’s not necessarily a super practice driven super, do this exercise, do that exercise, it’s more something you like a book that when you close it, close it and you put it down, you feel a little better about yourself, you feel good about your day.

Michael Simmons 36:51

Yeah, interesting. It’s interesting that, you know, going on, I feel like it’s the publishing industry is getting to a point now where somebody like you, you don’t, and Nicolas Cole, too, is, you know, you’re going more the self publishing route, you don’t need the credibility of a major publisher. And that also creates more room for creativity, you don’t have to do a book that’s 212 pages that’s on the shelf of Amazon, or Barnes and Noble or something like that. So how do you think about almost this new format of these shorter books? How long is it? How much are you gonna charge for it? Is your plan to how often you’re going to create these in your mind?

Niklas Goeke 37:30

So I haven’t thought or thought about everything, right. But I can tell you what I thought about so far, which is that I don’t know how long it’s going to be. But I think it might be around 30 essays, and I don’t know, total might be 150 pages, maybe 100, I guess also depends on which format you’re going to get it in. But I don’t think it’s going to be a super long book. And I’m also not trying to make it artificially long. And I’m thinking about charging, at least for the digital version, and making it super cheap, sort of this mass market paperback idea where cost two, three bucks, where you get it, and then if you think is really good, you’re like, I can’t believe this cost three bucks. Right? Really good value for for three bucks. And it’s easy to sort of share and pass on. Sort of maybe like you would find a very meaty or like long blog post where someone explains more technical concepts in great detail and just takes a lot of space, but in a more inspirational creative form. And I think I’m going to do that. And I have ideas for I think 567 of those books, looking at the topics and articles that I have. We’ll see. I don’t know how often I can I can put them together, but maybe try to do one every three months or?

Michael Simmons 38:43

Yeah, yeah. Oh, God, that’s awesome. And how are you thinking about, there’s always a balancing of what mediums one publishes on what formats and what platforms because there’s a trade off that the more time you spend on book writing grew to have less time to do medium. And you know, a lot of people, they might jump from one platform to another too soon. And there’s always a learning curve for each platform. How? How are you thinking about with that with yourself of Okay, I’m gonna stop writing somewhere else less? And then how would you advise other people think about how long to focus on a medium or platform before switching?

Niklas Goeke 39:23

I think that’s mostly that should mostly be a function of When did you start writing? how consistent Are you with your writing habit? And how much deliberate practice Have you done towards this whole I could be a professional writer, I could charge freelance, I could charge for freelance clients for my articles. So you can do all of that at the first year. It doesn’t matter if you spend it on one or three platforms. I think one might actually help you with the marketing aspects, understanding those because it takes time to understand even one platform and might also have you with the consistency and with getting better because you’re catering to that platform audience whether its core, a medium substack something But, and then after that first year or two, depending, if you can find a rhythm and find find consistency and find a regular habit, then you can maybe think more strategically about if you haven’t before, where do I want to be long term? And where do I want to sort of set up shop and and then also maybe just as an experimentation factor for your deliberate practice, go somewhere else. And, for example, antic bones, bunch of Quora questions on top of writing medium articles, I think you’ll naturally find that sort of once you get somewhat bored with the existing framework that you have, because you’re so consistent that you start to feel the routine literally becoming a bit boring. And then I think that’s gonna unfold on its own kind of,

Michael Simmons 40:42

yeah, yeah. And one thing that I think is interesting as a topic is voice and storytelling, I haven’t done as much personal storytelling, and I always struggle with it. And I think I realized recently that one of the reasons I struggle with personal storytelling is when I’m feeling like I’m researching or building an idea. I feel like I’m really understanding it better, and then I can apply it to my life selfishly, but sometimes I get bored with trying to think about my life, or what was the interesting stories around there? And yeah, I look at what am I getting out of it? I guess I could see I’m rewriting my own story. At some level, every time you think about it, it changes that but what makes personal storytelling fun for you? I’ll start off with

Niklas Goeke 41:30

Um, I think there’s, there’s one of the things is the lesson I think that was on Quora, because on Quora, I learned that most nonfiction writing or especially shorter pieces, answers, blog posts, should most often have a clear takeaway. And the way you if you can provide them with your own example, that just a powerful story that has the novelty factor that people haven’t heard. So I think it starts there, what adds to it is that it helps you process my own story, I’m thinking about it again, I’m reflecting on it, I’m trying to learn something from it. So it’s, it’s it has this meditative aspect to it. Um, then there’s also learning how to how to manage that because you don’t want to come across as gloating or bragging. Um, so it’s sort of practicing trying to stay humble in a way also in your in your writing. Because if you’re, if you’re writing about someone else, and it’s a great person, it’s very easy to you can say, good things about them. But then when you’re doing that with your own story, you don’t want to look like you’re holding your own.

Michael Simmons 42:36

And then when I was 16 years old, I made a momentous decision that Yeah. Okay, so. But I, for me, gravitate towards other examples or case studies of other people. Yep. Is it ever sometimes with our own story, it’s hard to see ourselves from a third person perspective and be like, Oh, this is an interesting story. Do you ever have that with yourself of how do you find those really interesting stories? Or is it not really about the most interesting story, it’s how you tell it.

Niklas Goeke 43:09

Sometimes it’s about how you tell it, but I’m also not trying to force it. So I’m also I’m using a lot of examples. Some of my articles are just drawing together different examples that none of which are me, to make a point. And I found that important, and also fun at some point to and I think that’s also where I started at the beginning was less personal than it became a little more personal. And then I have phases where I write more personal stories and less depending on how much happens in my life, and so on, because I’m not trying to force it and pull the example, for something from everywhere, because I can’t right now, I’m not ever like you don’t have experiences for everything and relevant and fun experiences also all the time. So I’m not trying to force it. And it’s more it’s more retroactive, I think. So if it fits the post, and if I make a headline, for example, or I want to write about this topic, and then something immediately comes to mind, or as I’m researching and thinking about it, something comes back to my mind at some memory, then I’ll see if I can include it in a meaningful way, but not trying super hard to force these in there.

Michael Simmons 44:11

Are there any questions you ask yourself? to, you know, beyond? Okay, what are stories that relate to this topic? It sounds like it’s got a gut level, you just did anything come to mind. But I was curious in the beginning, is there a process you used it? You know, James Altucher, everyone has a different voice do James Altucher is like, When was I about to like give up on like life basically. Or like, he looks for those stories. I personally, I did a year of experimenting with vulnerability. And I just didn’t work on multiple levels. For me, I actually felt like it. finding those stories over and over made me more aware of them and like, change my self identity in a negative way. Okay, I’m curious how you how you think about it. I think once in a while those stories are good. That’s what I took away from me personally, but every day, right,

Niklas Goeke 44:57

right. And did you did you do some Did you have a practice? Or did you do some journaling or something? And then try to write about them in an article like you would share publicly? Or what was that process for

Michael Simmons 45:08

you, I did a year challenge where I just want to, you know, I’d read Brené Brown on vulnerability and James Altucher. And I want to just get better at having my own voice and experimenting with that. And so I made a commitment to write once a day on Facebook. And to make you know, I spend like an hour and to do something I thought really deeply true to me, but also like, walking the line of maybe sharing more than one would normally share as well. Right. And interesting. I think I just focused on like, here, the things I’ve done wrong, or things like that, versus that. And I think I could have shared, I think sometimes it’s good to share on things you did right as well, you know, so it’s like, you can’t go too far on the humble side as well.

Niklas Goeke 45:51

That’s all Yeah. For sure. Yeah. So you don’t end up beating up yourself in public kind of all the time. And then that’s going to have negative like on your reflect negatively on like, your day to day frame of mind?

Michael Simmons 46:02

Yeah.

Niklas Goeke 46:05

Interesting, interesting. For me. Yeah, the the vulnerability part is, of course, there’s always this question of, should I share this? How much should I share who share here, I’m a little afraid to hit publish. And some writers like James Altucher are very hard on that spectrum. And they feel like they don’t publish if they don’t think there might be some write negative repercussions or something. For me, it’s never been like that. Just as writing as I went on, I felt also bigger, the bigger the audience grows, the bigger the responsibility to be honest, and to try to hold yourself accountable, and yet, not talk about things that you, for example, have no clue about lie to the audience, things like that. So I think that’s also the piece where the accountability of the audience is one part where the vulnerability came in where at some point, I was like, I have to share this story. And because otherwise, people might people might think, something of me that ends up not being true if I don’t say this now, right? If I don’t speak up about this now. Right, right. So there’s that to it. But then the process of sort of finding the stories and the examples. Now it’s very gut feeling driven. And same as with the productivity system that I had in the beginning, the further I went on, the less of these structural things I felt I needed it, I have now it’s very natural for me to want to write and wake up and want to write something and share something. So always try to leave, come up with some intro lead the story in a way, whatever comes to mind and feels like it gets a good angle like it could work. And then just naturally, as I tell the story, we’ve been what comes to mind. And sometimes there’s big gaps there, right? I put away the story for a day or two, I researched some other things, and it ends up flowing in there. Sometimes it’s all it’s all in one goal. But now it’s very gut driven. I used to have Evernote and I saved a lot of articles, saving YouTube videos, and so on. But now it’s much more a reflection of whatever currently comes up. But I also do have a big stack at this point of stories and examples that I can draw on. Because, you know, a lot like that.

Michael Simmons 48:09

Yeah, yeah. Are they almost like, there’s like, next for me, the reader, maybe it feels like you have a new story every day, but from maybe it’s for you. And maybe there’s like 30 stories that really illustrate a lot of the key things you believe in? And you keep going back to those stories. Is it like that?

Niklas Goeke 48:26

Yeah, definitely. And I can see I can, I can sort of see or trace the stories by which examples come up more often. So there’s certain people that I’ve used or talked about multiple times. So when it’s the 8020 example, it’s the it’s the origin story of Pareto, the founder that I’ve talked about the man who came up with the concept that I’ve shared on multiple times. And then a lot of the early riders I read that I keep coming back to also to sometimes to see their progression, how have they evolved over the years? And what’s now a new example about this person that I can share? What’s the new angle on old story?

Michael Simmons 49:01

I draw out from movies, I love movies, TV shows, books, stories from books. When you share a movie, I haven’t done actually I just did, maybe for the first or second time referenced a movie. Yeah. And I’m always thinking like, the nine people, if you’ve watched it, and people love that TV show, like you did, then it’s great. But then a lot of people didn’t. Is there? Is there a way you think about and how effective of those that people really resonate with movie examples and TV shows,

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