Adam Knorr | Ghostwriter

Pro tip: Every time you're wondering if quitting your 9-5 was worth it, go to a Marriott, order a burnt Pike Place from the Starbucks in the lobby, and watch the corporate guys choke down parfaits in constricting collars at 7:17 AM. Panacea.

Can someone equally up-to-date on the potential apocalypse that is Claude Mythos and personal finance tell me if I should be stockpiling cash or blindly buying SPY or buying a house? Thanks.

@BenElenbaas Petway! A legend.

@TakeActionCopy Our best March highlight back then was Air Congo winning the dunk contest!

Used to pretend to be Daniel Horton in the driveway back home.

@AndrewTalksHoop Buzzed the hair and rocked 11 at St Mark because of him

My idol growing up. I wanted to be just like him. I was borderline obsessed as a 9 or so year old kid. My closet from my parents still has a stack of stuff signed by him. He was a hometown kid. Also, a friend now and coached at his basketball camp for a handful of years. If you are impressed by this - you should have watched him in HS. It was like j will type of passing and the ball was on a string. @drewneitzel

@maxwellcopy @danmartell Hit me at the right time. Thanks for this.

“90% of the way there is 100% awesome.” I heard this on a podcast from @danmartell and it stuck because it explained something I was struggling with severely. There was a time when I was having a hard time with delegating. I was working all day, every day on client fulfillment, and I was getting frustrated with people not doing things exactly the way I wanted to. I remember delegating a client to a team member and I was thinking their work was good… but only 80-90% as good as I would’ve done it… and I was stressed that it wasn’t up to my standards. But then I got feedback from the client… and sure enough, they liked the other person’s work better than mine. That same time I heard ‘90% of the way there is 100% awesome’ and it made it click for me. It gave me permission to actually accept that delegated work is never going to turn out how you expect it… or how you think it should be done. However, that’s just my opinion. Nobody will ever do as good a job as you in your eyes because you have your own way of doing things and your own way of imagining how things should look. Nobody can see inside your brain, and everybody has a different opinion on how things should be executed. If you expect people to live up to 100% of your standards and your way of doing things, you are just going to be set up for frustration, wasted time, and lots of pain. But when you accept ‘90% of the way there is 100% awesome’... you will free yourself from stress and even potentially get a better work product. Once I gave myself that grace, it relieved a lot of stress and have me confidence to delegate at scale.

@antoineazar @brexHQ @tryramp Uncomfortably relevant is right. I was selling a portfolio that held SVB stock when they had their problems... Not a super fun time.

1/ @brexHQ just sold for $5B. If you're a @tryramp customer, that number should terrify you. Here's why 👇

People who post ChatGPT slop on LinkedIn: Don't you feel ashamed for outsourcing your thinking to AI? Like, don't you actually feel stupid? Doesn't it make you feel cognitively bankrupt to let literal Artificial Intelligence replace your brain? And then post it? Next to your face? As a way to promote your business? I get that AI makes writing easier, but so many of you are clearly just going to ChatGPT and saying: "Write a LinkedIn post about XYZ topic. And then publishing whatever zero-calorie amalgamation of milquetoast oatmeal The Machine ™️ spits out. Aren't you embarrassed by publishing that stuff? Don't you have pride in your ability to think? What mental gymnastics are you doing to justify it? At the very minimum, at least speak a stream of consciousness into an LLM and tell it to stick to your verbatim thoughts when creating a post from it. I am using AI more than 99.999% of the world in my day-to-day. Never am I letting it write from scratch or replace original thought. If you are doing so, remember that you are complicit in the degeneration of intelligent society. I know people are gonna say, "It's not that serious, bro." But honestly, it is.

The most important factor in your ability to successfully work for yourself is self-awareness. You need to know if you're actually talented, you need to know if you're actually a hard worker, you need to know if you actually love it — or if you just don't want to be doing the other thing you're currently doing. If you lie to yourself about any of these things, you're done.

Two writing tips: 1. Write "poorly" on purpose. My job in 2022: "I know how to write properly. I will help you." My job in 2026: "I know how AI writes. It's too proper. I will make it worse." I sort of hate all of you who just copy and paste stuff from ChatGPT. It's embarrassing. You're an adult. At least pretend like your brain works. 2. Nuance kills reach. "I hate all of you" >>>> "I sort of hate all of you"

Yo @AnthropicAI — I'm a paying Max subscriber, M1 Mac, Ventura 13.0, latest Desktop app... Can't get the Cowork tab to appear. Tried logging out and logging back in to no avail. Something I'm doing wrong? Can anyone help? @alexalbert__

@ramim_rifat_ @beehiiv Yes, I unsubscribe from them all. My question is: Why do I get signed up for newsletters I never subscribed to in the first place?

@TakeActionCopy @beehiiv you have full control over what newsletters you receive from beehiiv there’s a button to unsubscribe at the bottom of every email

Is there any business practice that turns you off to a company more than @beehiiv subscribing you to random newsletters you didn't sign up for?

@YDaftary Pro bettors hit 55% at best but yeah this kid is doing a "decent" 60%. Nothing crazy.

A kid in college DM'd me selling sports picks for $29/month. I thought it was dumb, but then I found out he was doing $6K/month. "We're hitting 70% win rate, want in?" My brain immediately went to: "If you're actually winning, why sell picks instead of just betting?" But I was curious enough to pay $29. Picks were decent. Maybe 50-60% accurate. Nothing crazy. One weekend he went 12-0. I told him: "I would've paid $1000/month without thinking if you asked. Why are you charging $29?" "I didn't think anyone would pay $1000." My guy… People willing to pay $30 will pay $1000 if the value justifies it. He tested $1000. Converted immediately. Then built an actual business around it. - High-ticket packages at $1-3K - Real sales team - Professional closers - Average order value jumped to $2,200 Within six months business went from $6K → $250K monthly. NBA playoffs 2023, we went all in. Hit $700K in one month. Now he does millions annually. All because he stopped assuming his audience was broke and started pricing for the value he was actually delivering.

It took me 3 years to make more money writing online than I made in 6 years of finance. I still know nothing, but here are 7 reasons I think I've had some success: 1. I have never missed a deadline or asked for an extension. I've written 5,000+ LinkedIn posts and delivered 250+ other projects in the last three years. Some of this has been due to luck as I haven't had anything catastrophic happen in my life over that time, but life has not always been easy. Far from it. I've still dragged myself over to my laptop, yanked it open, and sent everything in on time. If I ever hire a writer and they miss a deadline without a hospital or funeral note, they're done. Not acceptable. 2. I don't set boundaries with clients. I will text you back until I go to bed at 8 PM. I will pick up your calls on Sundays. Many of you will call me an idiot because of this. I do not care. It has been a competitive advantage. 3. I have sacrificed life for work. Earlier this year, I went to Austin City Limits Music Festival and missed Day 1 because I stayed back to work while all my friends went. This is not an isolated incident. I'm comfortable with the trade-off and I'm always aware of where the scales are tipping, but this is part of the bargain you make with self-employment. The more you say "no" to things, the more you can say "yes" to your business. 4. I don't overthink. This is true for posting content, rolling out new offers, taking risks. One morning, I decided to sit down and record a LinkedIn Masterclass. Five people joined it. Then, I offered to edit their posts on a monthly basis after the Masterclass concluded. Post editing has now become one of my main offers. 5. I care about my clients' businesses more than my own. I know this is literally saying "I care too much" to "What is your biggest weakness?" but it's the truth. I have lost count of how many times a client has told me, "The last time I hired a marketing agency, the communication fell off after I paid them." I ghostwrite for 6 clients. Their posts get researched, edited, and rewritten. Most posts get slapped together at the last minute. Who do you think grows faster? If you care about your clients' businesses more than your own, your clients' businesses will succeed. If your clients' businesses succeed, your business will succeed. 6. I built a writing habit. When I started in 2022, I made a promise to myself that I'd write 100 blogs in 100 weeks. I did it without missing a week. The blogs got very little traction and barely a whisper of monetization, but I did them anyway. In the end, multiple people hired me from them. 7. I don't raise prices on existing clients. What you pay me the first time is what you pay me the next time. I'd rather build a multi-year relationship than try to squeeze you for an extra 10%

Just watched my LinkedIn Wrapped and I imagine this is what being stricken with typhoid feels like.

@maxwellcopy I've lost count of how many clients have told me, "Once I gave XYZ agency my money, they stopped caring."

The only real secret to success is actually giving a shit. Genuinely nothing we’re doing at Well Copy is revolutionary. We don’t have some crazy Jeff Bezos / Elon Musk AI proprietary tech stack. We just give a shit about our clients an each other. It's not the sexy answer... people want to hear about some secret AI system or revolutionary framework that'll 10x their results overnight. But that's not what we do. What we excel at is building relationships with clients, maintaining high levels of communication, being completely transparent about what's working and what isn't, and delivering results. We stick to the basics. But the difference is we do those basics at such a high level and execute consistently. Every task is executed by team members who are experts at their craft. We do this month after month because we genuinely want our clients to succeed becasue we give a shit about them. Stop trying to find “the one thing” that will 10x your agency and realize that the solution you’re looking for lies in executing the fundamentals at a high level consistently. Just care more and be better than your competition.

Ironically, the worst way to prompt AI to write a LinkedIn post is to tell it to write a LinkedIn post. It will write your post like a LinkedIn post, which is the absolute last way you want to write your LinkedIn posts.

Why are you, as a LinkedIn creator, not choosing your power words based on what has the highest Scrabble score?

Last Wednesday, I knocked on 11 doors and invited 11 strangers to dinner. But the story doesn’t start there. In October, I was on a flight from Houston to Austin. When I’m on a flight, I like to honor the miracle of air travel by becoming the least approachable human I can be. Hood up, laptop out, headphones over the ears. I’m Simon Cowell with a toothache, Gordon Ramsay judging a toddler bake-off. I’m the Grinch — stuck in economy. But on this particular flight, I was sabotaged. Her name was Kay, and she was in her 70s. Kay caught me with my headphones down and started chatting me up. After a few minutes of small talk, Kay looked at me: “This is nice,” she said. “No one talks on airplanes anymore.” “Tell me about it,” I beamed. “A travesty.” Kay went on to tell me about how she puts on social events for her friends back home in New Mexico. She talked about how community is dying. How we’re all in our phones to stay in touch, forgetting that those phones just keep us out of touch. Six months before this flight, I had been invited to a dinner in Toronto by a business partner of mine named Tony. Tony got some people together and treated us all to a family-style dinner. I told Kay about this — and about how cool it was — and she asked me: “Do you have anyone you could do that with?” “Well,” I said. “I have 11 neighbors on my apartment floor, but I never see any of them. I guess I could put together a dinner and knock on their doors.” So Kay made me promise that I would. She even gave me her personal card — the one she started carrying after she retired and no longer needed a business card — so I could tell her when I did it. And that’s how, last night, I hosted a dinner with nine new friends. Turns out, knocking on doors gives you what tapping on screens promises you.