How Dickie Bush Skyrocketed His Success: Lessons on Building a Business Without Quitting Your Job

Meet Dickie Bush. He wrote for nine months straight without seeing any results. However, when he tried writing on Twitter for 27 days, something happened on the 28th day: his tweet thread about Balaji went viral. This skyrocketed his following and led to a copywriting gig. Ali Abdal hosted him on the Deep Dive Podcast, and here are eight lessons he highlighted about building a business without quitting your job.

Lesson 1: Types of Compensation

There are three ways people get compensated:

• Jobs: Trading hours for $$
• Careers: Trading performance for $$. You are either in sales or highly productive work.
• Business: Trading other people’s time and performance for your own money.

When you quit your job, you operate from a scarcity mindset instead of an abundance mindset. You might think quitting your job and going all in would make you productive, but that’s not true. If Dickie Bush had done that, it would have been the wrong move.

Set a goal to make twice the income you currently get from your job.

• Time and money are similar. Having more of either will just expose your behaviours. No one is coming to save you.

Lesson 2: The Need for Intense Effort

Work-life balance: You can’t have a balanced life when building something from scratch. The effort required to take something from zero to hero is about ten times that of a regular job. This means sacrifices must be made now to avoid suffering tomorrow. Dickie achieves balance by being at both extremes rather than being in the middle path, which he believes leads to mediocrity.

Lesson 3:Finding a Niche and Unique Angle

If you are creating content and want to niche down, the easiest way is to use your personal credibility and apply it to whatever you are personalizing. For example, while many people can summarize “Atomic Habits,” only you can explain how you applied it in your unique way. Instead of summarizing, explain how you use or would use the concepts.

On the service side, niche down as specifically as possible so your ideal customer can say, “This is for me.” For example, if he were to go back to ghostwriting, he would say, “I write worldview summary threads for CEOs of copywriting agencies.”

Lesson 4:The Role of AI in Summarizing and Creating Original Content

Ali Abdaal asked Dickie, “Are the Twitter thread boys going to vanish now that there is AI?”

Dickie starts with the quote: “AI will not replace you, but someone using AI will replace you.” Someone using AI will be more effective and have more time to do more. You could summarize a podcast using AI and then expand more on the personal side of how you applied it. That way, you are not just posting what AI gives you.

Lesson 5:Summarizing vs. Creating Original Stuff

No one is actually creating new stuff; people are just putting it in a different context. Quotes from Buddha have been relevant for thousands of years. Study your favourite creators, like Dan Koe, and observe how they construct sentences and create frameworks. Dickie wrote summaries of these and built a following of a couple of hundred thousand on Twitter. You have to start with curation at first and then remix it in your way.

Lesson 6:The Journey from Curation to Creation

In Ship 30 for 30, Dickie pictures himself as a third grader. The coolest people in the world aren’t eighth graders; they’re fourth graders — people just one year ahead of you. Wherever you are, pick people marginally ahead and distil their knowledge. Then, educate those behind you.

Lesson 7:Brain-Breaking Moments and Leverage

Dickie mentions that some of his brain-breaking moments were when someone he didn’t know paid him online. These simple things unlock layers of leverage.

Lesson 8:The Four Layers of Specificity for Success

Some bottleneck in your business or life always stops you from achieving the next level. You can't move forward unless you work on what’s limiting you. You must have a goal to identify where the bottleneck is. Dickie calls this Identity, Inhale, and Iterate. First, identify the goal and the bottleneck to achieving it. Inhaling means taking in as many resources as possible to remove that bottleneck. Once you have learned enough to implement that system, you need to iterate and keep doing it. In summary, it’s about identifying the bottleneck, figuring out how to remove it, and working on it.

You should only apply bottleneck thinking to a system you know will get you where you want to go.

Dickie got this from Alex Hormozi: to reach a million dollars a year, you need four layers of specificity: a specific platform, a specific person, a specific problem, and a specific way. For Ship 30 for 30, he needed to market on one platform (Twitter). The specific person was a beginner who wanted to start writing online. The problem was that they didn’t know how to get started, and the way was writing daily for 30 days.

I’m ready to embrace these principles and commit to daily writing starting 1st June 2024 to build my online presence and business. Join me on this journey! 🚀✍️

About the Author

Hey, I am Eric Karani, a Tech enthusiast from Kenya. When not tinkering with things on the Cloud, I write my thoughts on productivity, minimalism and career navigation here. 👈 Click that link to sign up for free :)