College teacher turned ghostwriter | Scaling founders, coaches, and consultants to $100K+ /mo | Writing to build wealth and better self | 98,000 on Twitter (X)

Taylin John Simmonds

3 years ago, a friend lent me $40K to pay off my debt. So I could focus on business.

2 years ago, I offered to pay it back. He said no. Reinvest. Pay me later. 1 year ago, first payment. 

Yesterday, I paid him back!

Find the people who bet on you before it makes sense. Then spend your life proving them right.

College teacher turned Substack ghostwriter | Thoughts about craft, ideas, and AI as a creative partner (not a replacement) | 2B impressions | $4M+ revenue generated | All in on Substack

One pattern I’ve noticed in all the people that inspire me: They live a diverse life.

They layer unrelated skills. 
Read widely. 
And have friends you'd rarely see together. 

A rich life isn't only about money. It's about the range of experiences that made you who you are.

Stop calling yourself a content creator. Content creators chase algorithms. You're cultivating a body of work.

You're not in the content game. You're in the depth game.

And depth doesn't scale. It compounds.

I'm noticing a quiet rebellion against balance. 

People who disappear into their craft. 12, 15 hours a day for weeks. Then step back completely. No guilt. No routine. No splitting the difference. Full immersion, then full recovery. 

Seasons, not schedules.

You don't actually want to stop working. You just haven't found work worth your devotion.

The goal isn't to do less. It's to care so deeply about one thing that everything else becomes noise.

Find that thing. Then you'll never need convincing to start.

Everyone's trying to escape work. Fewer hours. Passive income. Early retirement. That's not freedom. That's avoidance.

You don't want to do less. You want something worth pouring everything into. Work that's worthy of your full attention, your full energy, your full devotion.

Find that first.

If AI is speeding up your writing process, you're using it wrong.

AI should slow you down. Stress-test your ideas. Pressure-test your arguments. Find the angle that actually matters before you write a word.

The bottleneck was never your writing speed. It was your thinking clarity.

You don't need 100 clients. You need a handful of the right ones and the devotion to serve them so well they never want to leave.

No empire. No team of 30. No "scaling to seven figures."

Just craft you're proud of and a livelihood that lets you live well.

A book you highlighted but never practiced is a book you never read.

Understanding doesn't live in the notes you took.

It lives in the choices you made differently afterward.

A life-changing habit I picked up recently: Fifteen minutes of breath work before work.

The breath brings me out of my head and into stillness. A stillness that makes creative work feel effortless.

Your best work is hiding behind the ritual you're skipping.

The real value in the AI age isn't what you know. It's who you can inspire.

Give them an aim, a compelling reason, and the next small step when everything feels overwhelming.

If you want to matter in the AI age, don't just share knowledge. 
Lend direction.

You're behind because you've never given 100% of yourself to the thing you care about.

Subtract everything that isn't it. Give it everything you have. Not 40%. Not most days. Everything.

You've never seen what happens when you actually commit. Find out.

Ed Latimore is a writer with over 10 years of experience in creating engaging and insightful content for various platforms and audiences. He has a B.A. in Physics from Duquesne University, a MOS certification as a Land Combat Electrical Missile Systems Repairer, and a Secret Clearance issued by the US Army.

As a self-employed writer, Ed shares his unique perspective and wisdom from his diverse background as a former heavyweight professional boxer, a veteran of the United States Army National Guard, and a physics graduate. He teaches the lessons he has learned through his blog, his newsletter, and his Twitter account, reaching millions of people who benefit from his advice and stories. Ed's mission is to help others overcome their challenges, improve their lives, and achieve their goals.

Ed Latimore

At 41 years old, I have lost quite a few friends over the years for different reasons.

My drinking or being an asshole or just being immature.

Many were my fault, 100%. Others, I could have salvaged, but only by betraying myself.

I'll never see most of them again, but if I do, they are strangers. I'll see them in a new light with no pretense.

No one did anything unforgivable.

Maybe they'll be different. Maybe not.

Either way, I'm not a slave to the past. You should not be either.

Professional boxer (14-1-1) | Stuck at 1800-ish chess rating | Keynote Speaker | Author of “Hard Lessons From The Hurt Business: Boxing And The Art of Life

You want it to happen quickly, so it probably won't happen at all.

And if it does happen, the result will be so different from what you intended that you'll have to start over anyway.

I'm starting to realize that the reason everyone and everything is so polarized is cognitive laziness.

No one wants to question anything if it feels good. People are not interested in facts. They're interested in feelings.

And the internet makes this worse in at least two ways:

1) Every idea that feels good is easily amplified, whether it's true or not. The worst ones, of course, get the most amplification.

2) It's completely eliminated cognitive friction. People just are not used to thinking hard. Now, thinking has always been taxing, but before the internet, you didn't really have a choice. But now, people don't care about sources, or, even worse, they twist they misinterpret the data to fit a narrative. Or hallucinate information that isn't there.

AI is ONLY going to make this worse.

Because imagine a machine giving your hallucinations weight because it's used 80% of its tokens... but you don't even know what a token is, because that takes energy to learn.

So eff it! If the all-knowing AI said it's true, it must be.

Stupid people don't know that they're stupid.

And they usually assume that *you're* the stupid one for not understanding or agreeing with them.

Remembering this can save you a lot of misery.

The average person has neither the courage nor the intelligence to choose truth over tribe.

They're too worried about fitting in.

Or more precisely, about not being outsted and being forced to confront the possibility they've been fed bullshit.

Because then they'd have to think for themselves.

You can't help someone committed to ruining their life.

You are *literally* the enemy for trying to help.

The best way to catch a falling knife is to let it hit the ground.

The reality is that any significant accomplishment is a confluence of both individual effort and interference from factors beyond your control.

You make your own luck, but paradoxically, only when you’re acting in a way that reduces the need for luck.

In this way, creating luck comes from strategic decisions that reduce uncertainty.

The old saying “The harder I work, the luckier I get” perfectly encapsulates this reality.

Hard Lessons From The Hurt Business: Boxing And The Art of Life https://amzn.to/4dt8n3m

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