How to become a top 1% earner in the digital age

For as long as I can remember, I've wanted to be “great”. I used to read biographies of Kobe Bryant, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Napoleon and imagine myself in their shoes.

If I'm being honest, I've never understood people who don't want that. Why spend your one life settling for mediocrity? And I know that sounds pretentious, but that's just the truth. I've always had a visceral repulsion to people who thought small.

The problem was, for years, I had no clue where to start, so I did what any naive teenager does. I googled “how to make money online” and started trying everything. I started Instagram theme pages, I launched a few YouTube channels, I ran a weekly newsletter, I even started a clothing brand, convinced I'd be the next Gymshark.

All of them flopped.

And after a year of trying online businesses, I had a portfolio of failures and nothing to show for it. Only a few years later, looking back, I realize I was a master of nothing. I was trying to make money without understanding the skill of making money.

Now, at 20, I make a top 1% income in the world. I'm not telling you that to flex, and I'm not here to pose as a guru at all. But I've spent years ghostwriting for and working with objectively “rich” people, and I've seen up close how they think about money.

I wanted to crystallize my best understanding of how wealth gets created, and hopefully it's useful for you too. Let’s begin.

A business is a vehicle

When people want more money, their first instinct is to start a business. But a business is only a vehicle for making money from a skill (or a set of skills). If you haven't built a skill worth paying for, that vehicle has nothing to carry.

So instead of asking what business to start, the question I implore you to ask yourself is: what skills do I need to stack?

If you zoom out, money is a proxy for value created. So if you want to make more money, you need to create more value.

"Okay Jay, that sounds cool and all, but what does that even mean? How do you create value?"

Good question. Value gets created in two ways:

• Scale: how many people you help.
• Magnitude: how much you help each one.

And value itself comes down to three outcomes. You can:

• Save people time.
• Make people money.
• Reduce their risk.

Do more of those, for more people, and you get paid more.

This is also why a job and a business pay so differently.

In a job, you solve a set of problems, and your company pays you a fixed salary while keeping the gap between the value you create and what they charge customers. The downside: your salary is fixed. The upside: you don't carry the risk of finding customers. Someone hands you the work.

In a business, you solve a similar set of problems, but you set your own price and keep the value you create. The catch: you have to go find and win those customers yourself.

Decouple your time from your money

That's level 1. Level 2 is decoupling your time from your money.

If you are hourly, you'll never be rich. There are only so many hours in a day, and the moment you stop working, you stop earning. So you need work that keeps working after you've stopped. Aka, you need to build assets.

The 4 assets

An asset is anything that keeps producing value after you've stopped working on it.

There are 4 you can build:

1. Money. Your capital, or someone else's, working and compounding for you.

2. People. A team whose time and talent do what you can't do alone.

3. Software. Code and machines that run the work for you, at scale, around the clock.

4. Content. Media you create once that keeps reaching people long after you've published it.

Money and people have always been available to the already-rich. They're permissioned assets. Software and content are the two new ones anyone can start with today. They're permissionless.

How to get into the top 1%

Step 1: Pick one skill and commit to mastering it.

Because of the internet, the best person in the world at a given skill can now serve a global audience. So the rewards follow a power law. The top 1% earn way more than the next 10%, and the next 10% way more than the rest. Being pretty good isn't enough anymore. You have to go for great.

The skill I chose was copywriting. People hear that word and think of copyright lawyers, or that little © symbol. But copywriting is simply transferring an idea from one brain to another as effectively as possible. It's selling through the written word.

Step 2: Learn to sell.

If you can't sell, you'll always need a company or a boss to do it for you. But in reality, you're already selling something every day. Instead of selling your employer's product, learn to sell your own.

And this is the benefit of copywriting: it's not only a marketable skill, it's also selling through the written word (aka you get to double dip).

Step 3: Learn to learn.

If you can't teach yourself new skills, your income will always be capped by someone else's willingness to teach you. People learn in different ways:

• some by reading
• some by listening
• some by watching someone do it
• some by doing it themselves

For me, I knew early that I learn best by observation. So I did whatever I could to get in the room with the best people in the world so I could watch the decision-making frameworks they used.

Another benefit of copywriting: if you go the ghostwriting route, you literally get paid to ask rich, successful people questions, and then write what you learn.

Step 4: Stack permissionless assets.

Software: When ChatGPT first came out, I started using AI to write first drafts, edit, and speed up delivery, and it let me handle 3x the clients in half the time.

Content: Once I'd built an audience, clients started coming to me, and so did other opportunities (like investing).

That’s another benefit of copywriting: the same skill you use for clients, you can also use to build your own audience, write books, or create other assets (like blog posts and newsletters).

The summary:

• Pick a skill and get great at it.
• Learn to sell it.
• Use AI to cut your delivery time.
• Use content to multiply your reach.

This is how I've earned a top 1% income in the world. As long as I keep writing, keep helping people, and keep investing, time is my ally.

Where should you start?

One of the best assets you can start building today is your personal brand. It shifts the supply/demand curve in your favor: instead of hunting for clients, clients start coming to you.

Right now, the best place to build one is on LinkedIn.

So I teamed up with my friend Kevin Shim (who has 65,000+ followers and runs a ghostwriting agency writing LinkedIn content for founders), and we built Publish30.

It's a 30-day writing challenge where we walk you through our writing systems and write 30 posts right alongside you.

By the end, you'll have:

• 30 posts published.
• A lean writing system for turning ideas into posts.
• A small cohort of other writers you post alongside for 30 days.

The first cohort starts September 1.

Sign up here, and I hope to see you inside.

Until next time,

Jay "Never Settle" Yang