It’s amazing how one decision can transform everything. Last year, I started hitting the gym—classic New Years resolution, right?

But the real game-changer? It wasn’t the weights.

It was the words. Writing daily shaped my life in ways the gym never could.

I have been pretty good at writing since I was a kid.

I remember going each week to Mrs Tolley's Creative Writing after school class when I must have been around 9 or 10 years old. It was perfect for my wild imagination and although I can't remember a single lesson or activity we did apart from some puppet show that I put on with a blonde puppet I called "Uzo", it must have stuck.

I didn't really notice that I could writing until I started working in radio in 2001.

Within my first week volunteering there I was writing ads, announcer scripts, promotions proposals and replying to emails from listeners and other complaining members of the public.

This continued until I became "Creative Director" at Hot 100 FM in Darwin in late 2003. I put that in quotes because there was nothing creative about what I was doing. I was pumping out up to twenty new ad scrips a day for businesses I knew nothing about and who wanted their name, phone number, website address, physcial address and entire product inventory mentioned in 30 seconds.

But what I set out to do early last year was different to this.

I knew how to write.

But I didn't know how to be consistent with it.

And since I was now a year into taking LinkedIn seriously, I wanted to replicate the momentum I'd gained with my weekly newsletter. But I wanted to produce good content daily.

And that meant learning to write consistently.

So I looked at the people who were doing really well at it.

Justin Welsh. Dan Koe. Chris Do. Dakota Robertson. Yeah I know. All guys. Because you might have noticed that I'm also a guy. So I tend to relate more easily to the content produced by other guys. And I won't apologise for that.

What they all had in common was some system or method that they used.

It would usually involve setting aside time, activating some kind of focus mode and then using systems and processes to do the work.

And what they produced was outstanding. I took a particular liking to Dan Koe. He's stoic, doesn't smile, is not flashy or loud. I wanted to be a bit more like him.

Consistent. A deep thinker. A student of life. Reasonable. Disciplined. And unapologetically himself.

So as I learned more about what Dan and the others did, I started building my own routine.

5am wake up.

5.30 at the gym.

7 am was writing time.

8 am is when the official work day started.

You're probably expecting me to add an ice bath into all this, but I am not an ice bath guy and I really don't trust wellbeing trends because they never last more than a year before something else becomes the in-thing.

That's not the point though.

I had a routine. And that routine involved me writing content for every single weekday - and usually the weekends as well in a disciplined way.

How?

First, I had to work out what I was writing about. My topics, if you will.

In my case, it's three main topics around Social Media, Entrepreneurship and Confidence.

Each of those topics have tonnes of sub-topics under them that I can tap into. For example, in the world of Social Media, I can talk about making video, writing text-based posts, the platform updates, starting an online channel when you're over forty or any number of topics. This post right now is related to the topic of Social Media in fact.

How you choose which topic to talk about comes down to these three questions, really.

1. What do you know lots of stuff about?

2. What do people ask you advice about?

3. What is something that you now about that you see that others are making money from?

You don't have do Ikigai tests, although I did mine and really benefitted from it.

You don't have to see a career counsellor or get some mindset coach to guide you through aligning your chakras or whatever.

It's just about what's in demand that matches what you happen to be a bit of a wiz at.

That's the start.

Now you need to work out how to write. That's not what this is about today. But I will be doing some content on that soon that I think will be helpful if the writing itself is what you struggle with.

But honestly, most of the people I've worked with don't struggle with the writing once I get them on the right method.

They struggle with consistency and stamina.

The struggle to keep doing it on a regular basis and the struggle to keep doing it even they don't think it's doing anything for them.

Because it probably won't. At least for a while.

How I conquered the consistency piece is the trick here though.

I am not a particularly reliable or consistent person.

So what I did was tie the consistency of one thing to the consistency of another.

I had been going consistently to the gym from January 9 2023 to mid February. So I had developed a habit of waking up in the morning and moving my body. So what I did was tie my writing to going to the gym.

I was starting to really enjoy going to the gym.

So I decided to wake up an hour earlier than I had been. Instead of waking at 6am to head to gym and be at the office at 8 am, I woke at 5 am to be at the office by 7 am.

7 am was going to be my writing time.

Before anyone else was in the office.

Before I opened my emails for the day.

Before any meetings or Zoom calls or taps on the shoulder from colleagues.

And that let's me focus on what I want to write.

It's usually at this point that someone asks why I need to wake up so early. And it's simple really. I'm better in the mornings. I'm more creative and more alert.

My days are full of people and meetings and thinking fast on my feet. If I'm not hosting a workshop, I'm in a string of advisory meetings with clients or I'm brainstorming strategy with someone.

By the end of the day, I'm spent. Mentally and creatively. And because my people battery is dead, so too is my writing battery. I can't work after work. But I can work before it.

Plus there's something really cool about getting into the city when it's still dark and seeing the garbage truck drivers, street cleaners and joggers doing their thing while it's still relatively cool in Darwin.

So that's really it.

I don't have a particularly secret hack on how to be consistent.

It's just looking at what I am already disciplined and consistent at and linking the new thing I want to be consistent at to that thing.

And it's worked really well.

I've had a newsletter every week. I've posted something everyday. I've increased my following by a few thousand and made more money through consultations and training that I got from people on LinkedIn.

So yeah - not really a secret. Just an idea I tried that might work for you too.