How to make a living teaching what you learn for fun.
Become a Knowledge Synthesizer
Hamza believes the best opportunity to make $10,000 or more a month in 2023 is to become a knowledge synthesizer.
Simply put, this means that you read many books, listen to many podcasts, and take a bunch of courses that interest you, and then you break the knowledge you’ve gathered down, simplify it, make it your own, put it in your own language, combine it with other insights you’ve learned from the past (synthesizing) and share it with your audience via YouTube, Courses, and Social Media.
This is what Hamza himself has done. He’s a self-help YouTuber. He’ll read an interesting book on masculinity, for instance, and then he’ll share his insights from the book in his own way while combining insights from other sources as well as his own life story.
You want to simplify the knowledge you’ve learnt from other sources, making it more digestible for your audience while also combining it with your own life experience to make it more personal.
To succeed in becoming a Knowledge Synthesizer, there are 5-steps.
Step #1: Intentionally consume high-quality, knowledge-rich content ( Learn)
Consuming content isn’t a bad thing. Consuming content mindlessly is. Before you teach others, you must first know a lot yourself. You need to fill your brain with an abundance of practical, useful, valuable, and ideally life-changing knowledge. Acquiring that knowledge takes intentionality, consistency, and focus.
To properly learn, it is crucial that you take notes while consuming whatever form of content it is that you’re consuming. I’ve consumed A LOT of content over the last 5-years, and I honestly only remember the things I took notes about. It is best if you put the knowledge into your own language in your notes and that you write as many examples as to how you can apply this knowledge in your own life as well as to the lives of your viewers.
The more you learn, the more value you can provide to others, the more money you can demand.
Step #2: Apply, Apply, Apply ( Implement)
If you learn something and you teach it right away, it won’t be authentic. All you’ll be is a parrot. You need to, therefore, incorporate the knowledge within your life experience. You need to find out for yourself if it works. You need to have the mindset of an experimenter, of a mad scientist. You must be a guinea pig, testing out every bit of knowledge you acquire on yourself and seeing if it works or doesn’t work and sharing your results and conclusions with your audience.
Read the book, and the moment you get an idea to use something from the book, you toss the book away and instantly apply it right there this second. Practically, this means that if you’re reading a book on social media and they’re saying it’s important to include certain key hashtags for your niche, you get up and make a post with those hashtags this second to see for yourself if it works.
You need to get into the habit of applying what you’ve learnt. This way, you develop a personal relationship with the knowledge, and you can speak of it in a real and personal way.
Implementation increases the depth of the knowledge in your brain. It makes words real. It makes you remember what you learned.
Ideally, you help your audience attain the results they want, and they will only look to you for that knowledge if you yourself have achieved those results, and the only way to achieve those results is through implementation.
Learn. Stop. Implement. Repeat.
Step #3: Share Content ( Teach)
This step is all about sharing the results of your implementation. You may feel like you’re unqualified to teach anyone about anything. However, qualifications are a thing of the past. People will tune into what you have to say regardless of the qualifications you have as long as you know what you’re talking about. Take, for example, Graham Stephan. He’s no CPA or Financial Advisor, yet millions still take his advice on finance. You don’t need to know everything; you just need to know more than most.
Don’t think too much about what your niche is or limit yourself to only speaking about one topic. It’s far better to simply teach about whatever is interesting to you at the moment. Your passion and enthusiasm for the subject will, on their own, engage the viewer and make the topic interesting to them.
Think about your best teachers in high school. Regardless of the subject they taught, the best teachers were the ones who loved what they taught. And more than likely, they were so interested in the subject that you couldn’t help but become interested in it yourself.
Teach what you like to learn.
Start Now
Hamza says that there’s no reason why we can’t start now.
Hamza challenges the viewers to open up an account on whatever medium they plan on sharing their content on and posting there within 24 hours of now. So, if you’ve read these last words, I’m challenging you to do the same, like I’m doing right now by writing this article down.
The first 100 videos, articles, or podcasts you make will absolutely suck. That’s the reality of things. They just will. There’s no way around it. You simply haven’t developed the skill of producing good content yet, and that’s ok because it’s your first time doing so, and no one is good at their first time doing anything.
You telling yourself you can’t record a YouTube video because you’re not good on camera is the same as telling your 5-year-old child they shouldn’t start basketball practice because they’re not good at basketball.
Yes, your child isn’t good at basketball yet. But practice is how they get good. And you can’t get good at anything without practice. Not being good at something isn’t a reason not to do it; in fact, not being good at something means you should do it. How else are you going to get better at it?
Start. Fail. Learn. Succeed.
Step #4: Express your personality fully ( Brand)
People today prefer to consume content from those they relate to rather than those with formal qualifications.
This is why it is imperative that you display your full personality on each and every piece of content. You need to be 1000% yourself. You need to be real, raw, and blunt.
Yes, people come to watch for the content, but in many cases, they also come to watch you. I’ll watch Graham’s videos no matter what topic he’s speaking about because I like Graham and the way he speaks about things.
People come for the information but stay for the personality.
In a world of fakeness, we crave real authentic people.
We get emotionally invested when it feels like we know the person sharing content behind the screen. Make yourself extremely vulnerable to your audience; they’ll love you for it.
Be exactly who you are, whether you’re awkward, shy, quirky, extroverted, loud or quiet. We both like and relate to people who are like us, and if you have any one of the traits listed above, there are many millions who are just like you who’d love to learn from someone like them.
When speaking to your audience, refrain from looking down at them and instead view them as your friends. Talk to them like you would your friends.
Do your best to speak how you normally speak. There’s no need to act more charismatic than you are.
When you have valuable insights to share and you stay true to your personality, you will begin to have “ true fans.”
Your goal should not be to have millions of subscribers but to instead have 1,000 true fans.
These are the people who love your content, who watch all your videos, who relate to you greatly and are people who, if you’d met them, would be your best friend. These are the people you make the videos for. These are the people who’d buy your products at nearly any price point and who’d proudly wear your merch if you were ever to sell them.
Russel Brunson summarized it perfectly here:
Step #5: Making Dough ( Monetize)
There are many ways to monetize your teaching
Here are a few:
- Private coaching
- Books
- Posting articles on Medium ( wink, wink)
- Podcast sponsors
- Selling courses
- YouTube money (Adsense)
However, Hamza says that one overlooked way of making a lot of money from your 1,000 true fans or as I call them, “ Superfans,” is by creating and hosting a private exclusive community on a platform like Skool.
Make sure to have no more than 500 people in your community and charge anywhere between $100–500/month.
Here is where you will devote the majority of your time to sharing your premium content. Instead of making new courses, for example, you simply share the course material on Skool. You can also set up daily and weekly calls with community members, giving them direct access to you.
To keep your members on the platform, you will be motivated to provide them with a f**kton of value.
Everybody wins.
In Sum,
- Consume a lot of high-quality, knowledge-rich content
- Take detailed notes on that content.
- Implement what you’ve learnt.
- Share what you’ve implemented online while expressing your full personality.
- Direct your 1,000 true fans to your private community and charge them between $100–500 a month.
Note: Obviously, there are points Hamza made that I failed to include here.
However, I plan on watching the video again and adding some more details in the near future. I first needed to complete Hamza’s challenge of sharing a piece of content within 24 hours of watching the video, and I hope you do the same.
I hope you’ve found some value in this article.
Have a fantastic day! :D
