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.

Storyteller, wordsmith, pleasant chap

I write about writing—specifically fiction, craft, and the inner life of writers who think differently.

I’m a lifelong storyteller, a technical writer by trade, a fiction writer by calling. 

For more than 25 years I’ve worked at the intersection of clarity and complexity, translating dense, technical systems into language normal humans can actually understand.

These days, I apply that same skill to fiction. I write about story structure, narrative craft, and the why beneath the work, often through the lens of ADHD. 

Not as a productivity hack. Not as a brand angle. But as a lived experience that shapes how writers perceive tension, pattern, meaning, and momentum.

I’m especially interested in helping writers:
– understand how stories actually work
– finish what they start
– trust structure without killing their voice
– and stop mistaking struggle for failure

I’ll tell you a mystery – I’m not here to sell you a system.

(Not yet, anyway, heh.)

I’m here to think out loud about craft, wrestle with the work, and share what I’m learning as I write fiction seriously and deliberately.

If you’re a writer—especially one with ADHD—who cares about story, not shortcuts, you’re in the right place. 

You are my tribe, and I’ll be grateful if you go on this journey with me!

John Cook

I don't write like AI. AI writes like me.
 
Here's what makes me angry...
 
There's a whole industry built on the anxiety around AI-generated writing, and it's a scam. AI detection tools flag your writing as machine-generated, then conveniently offer a paid "humanizer" to fix it. 

Create the problem. Sell the solution. 

That's not a service. That's a shakedown.

And for neurodivergent writers like me, it's even worse. Em-dashes, structured thinking, precise language — the patterns that come naturally to ADHD brains — are the same patterns these tools flag as "AI tells." 

So we get hit twice: 
once for how our brains work, 
and again when someone tries to charge us to 'fix' it.
 
Neurodivergent designer Elise Gomes sounds the alarm:
 
"Many of these AI detection tools don't just misidentify human writing — they do it intentionally to push a paid service... This is nothing short of a predatory business model, profiting off an artificial problem they themselves create. And for neurodivergent people like me, whose writing is naturally different from neurotypical norms, it becomes an additional tax on simply being ourselves."
 
Did you catch that last line?

Those tools are 𝙖𝙣 𝙖𝙙𝙙𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙩𝙖𝙭 𝙤𝙣 𝙨𝙞𝙢𝙥𝙡𝙮 𝙗𝙚𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙨𝙚𝙡𝙫𝙚𝙨.
 
I'm not going to apologize for finding a better way to write. And I'm definitely not going to pay someone to make my voice sound more 'human' when the only people who think it doesn't are the ones selling the fix.

I have one test for my writing:

𝘐𝘴 𝘪𝘵 𝘨𝘰𝘰𝘥?

Everything else is just someone trying to sell something.

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