What a master con man taught me about writing online...

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The other day I was scrolling Instagram and saw a clip of Catch Me If You Can, a movie based on the real-life story of Frank Abagnale Jr.

The movie follows Frank (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), a young man who successfully commits numerous frauds and cons, including check forgery, posing as a Pan Am pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer—all before his 19th birthday.

It’s insane.

Anyway, I did more digging and learned that Frank also briefly posed as a sociology professor at Brigham Young University (BYU).

When the FBI asked him how he taught a college-level sociology course, he responded, “I didn’t have to know everything about sociology. I only had to be one chapter ahead.”

Mic drop, am I right?

Frank’s story highlights an important truth about success:

You don’t need to be an expert to start. But you do need to start to be an expert.

Jeff Bezos knew nothing about the Internet when he started Amazon, and Mark Zuckerberg was only 19 when he started Facebook.

History is plastered with those who knew nothing about their field. The only thing they had was an intense curiosity about learning everything they could about it.

Imagine how different our world would look if they never started because “they weren’t an expert yet”.

And the same is true with writing online.

You don’t need to be the world’s leading expert in your field to share your ideas on the internet.

You only need to be 1-2 steps ahead of those you’re writing to.

And look. I get it.

Putting your ideas out into the world to be potentially judged and ridiculed is scary.

I spent my first year on Twitter lurking in the shadows, passively consuming other people’s writing.

But everything changed when I realized I didn’t have to be the guru, I could be the guide.

Just like the kid in the back of the class sharing their notes with the rest of the class, I could be the person climbing the mountain WITH my audience.

Today, I’m grateful to say over 100,000 people read my writing online. But it wouldn’t have been possible if I never put out my first piece of content.

If you follow your curiosity, share what you learn as you go, and have fun along the way… good things tend to happen.

See you next Sunday,

Jay Yang

Ps.

The second biggest obstacle many writers face is not knowing how to write for the internet.

School taught me a ton of bad writing habits.

The way I re-learned how to write high-impact content?

I reverse-engineered what captured my attention.

Over the past 3 years, I’ve created 100s of templates like the one above. They’ve helped me write content for myself and my clients that’s garnered over 100M impressions.

I’m releasing them soon.

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Top Tweets of The Week

A lesson I’m re-learning: Solitude is required for those who want to make extreme bursts of progress (especially as a creative).

Everything always looks saturated from the outside.

Guilty of this. Thinking I’m “better” than people just because they’re on chapter 1 and I’m on chapter 3. Everyone starts somewhere.

Been eating a lot of fruit recently, and candy just doesn’t have the same appeal. Anyone else notice this?

Went on a couple of podcasts this past week. Listening back, I’m disappointed in how many times I said “kinda”, “like”, and “right”. Something to work on.

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