I talk about digital writing & personal progress

Here's a quick rundown of how I've spent my last 5 years:

1. Studied math and played football at Princeton. I graduated in 2018 with a degree in financial engineering and played center for the Tigers. In college, I was a 280-pound offensive lineman, so for the last 5 years, I've had to completely rewrite my personal operating system on the health & fitness front. I currently weigh 185 pounds and have learned a lot along the way!

2. Graduated and immediately started working for BlackRock in New York City. I worked as a junior hedge fund trader for 4 years, focusing on global macro markets. This was my dream job and the only corporate job I've ever had. In fact, it's the only job *interview* I've ever had (since I interned there as a junior in college).

3. Realized working for someone else was not going to be the long-term path for me. 12 months into working on Wall Street, I saw someone in their mid-40s ask their boss for permission to go to their son's Little League game. At that moment I realized I wasn't cut out to take directions or instructions from other people for very long.

4. Started to write on my old blog, then on Twitter. Rather than quit immediately, I started to passively explore other opportunities by writing online, starting out on my old blog (which no one knew existed), then transitioning to Twitter in July of 2020.

5. Changed my trajectory with a 30-day writing challenge, which led me to start Ship 30 for 30. In September 2020 I was ready to give up writing entirely. But I gave it one more shot, this time moving from a weekly blog post to a daily Twitter thread. The challenge was a huge success. It took me 9 months to reach 100 followers and 1 month to go from 100 to 2,000. And that personal writing challenge turned into the foundation of Ship 30 for 30, which started as nothing but a Slack accountability group to help people publish consistently.

6. Scaled Ship 30 while working remotely for all of 2021. I built and scaled Ship 30 with Nicolas Cole to over 2,000 students in 2021—all while continuing to work full-time (remotely) for BlackRock. But towards the end of 2021, Ship 30 hit an inflection point and it no longer made financial sense for me to continue working on Wall Street.

7. Left BlackRock in March of 2022 to write and build on my own. After weeks of weighing the pros and cons and trying to project my path forward, I made the decision to leave BlackRock and chart my own path. 15 months into making that decision and I'm confident it's the best one I've ever made.

Dickie Bush 🚢

I used to have one severe addiction:

Planning.

My brain loved the cheap dopamine of gathering:

• Books to read
• Tasks to complete
• And videos to watch

But when it came to taking action, the euphoric rush faded.

What ended my addiction?

This story of two men learning to fish:

The first fisherman heads straight to the marina to buy the best fishing boat money can buy.

He specs out a custom, carbon fiber rod.

And he spends time reading up on everything there is to know about fishing:

• Casting techniques
• Baiting techniques
• Reeling techniques

You name it, he's bought the book on it.

And of course, he's watching the fishing channel every night for hours, learning from the best of the best.

A few months later, he finally feels ready to fish.

The next day, he heads out on the lake in his new boat with his fancy rod and wealth of fishing "experience" built up over the last few months.

But six hours in, nothing. Not even a nibble.

What happened?

Turns out, the second fisherman had already sucked the lake dry.

On day one, the second fisherman grabbed a shitty rod, sliced up a hot dog, and went out to the lake.

• The first day, nothing
• Second day, nothing
• Third day, nothing
• One week, nothing

But on the eighth day? His first nibble.

And every day after, he honed his technique.

He found a baiting technique that worked a bit better. Or a new spot with a few more fish.

And after three weeks of iteration, he found the winning combination.

Before long, he was hauling in hundreds of fish every day. To keep up with his daily haul, he hired a small team to help him. And from there, he opened a restaurant with fat margins to sell his fresh fish.

And after that, he opened a fishing school to teach others his craft.

He did all of this while the first fisherman sat around gathering gear.

Sure, the first fisherman felt productive. He was "learning" after all, right?

But there was one difference: feedback.

Every day the second fisherman had an idea of something that might work better. And he went right to the market to validate his assumption. If it worked, his strategy improved. And if it failed, he learned something new.

The moral of this story?

Get to action as quickly as possible.

When you find yourself gathering gear, grab a shitty rod and start fishing.

Bad way to learn copywriting:

1. Bookmark dozens of posts
2. Read all the books
3. Apply none of them

Instead, just read The Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joseph Sugarman.

It taught me more about copywriting than dozens of books combined.

And you can steal Sugarman's 7-step process to write high-converting copy (that helped me generate $15,000,000):

—
📌 Copywriting helped me build a 7-figure writing business.

(While working 12-hour days at my Wall Street job)

But I made my first $10,000 on the internet as a ghostwriter.

And right now, becoming a LinkedIn Ghostwriter is the easiest way to land high-paying clients.

Want to know how to land LinkedIn writing clients in 2025?

Here's a free, 5-day email course on how to get started: https://lnkd.in/eCFfC5cX

7 Steps To Write High-Converting Copy (From Joe Sugarman)

At 24, a stranger on the internet paid me $5,000.

The crazy part?

I thought they'd sent it by mistake!

But I'd actually just stumbled across an insanely lucrative business anyone can start:

Ghostwriting.

Everyone should have writing clients who pay $5,000+ for a project.

(This is ultimately how I quit my job on Wall Street so I could travel and work from anywhere in the world.)

But most people are stuck figuring out:

• What service to sell
• Which clients to target
• How to charge premium rates

So, last month, Nicolas Cole 🚢👻 and I put together the Writer Positioning Playbook to help you:

• Escape the freelancer rat race
• Confidently charge high-ticket prices
• Land ideal clients who value your expertise

Inside, you'll find:

• The 1 simple shift to 10x your rates overnight
• A 3-step framework to upgrade your Positioning
• An AI prompt to find 5 high-paying clients for YOUR specific background

Plus, you'll see real examples from a $3M ghostwriting agency.

Want access?

Comment "playbook" and I'll send it across (for free).

And if we're not connected, send me a connection request with the word "playbook" and I'll DM it to you.

How To Land $5,000 Writing Clients

A daily habit I wish I'd started earlier in my 20s:

(It's not investing)

Writing & publishing online every single day.

In the beginning, I tried everything:

• Every app
• Every "simple hack"
• Every piece of writing advice

And I still struggled to build a daily writing habit.

But then I studied the routines of legendary writers.

And their secrets have helped me write every day for 5+ years.
 
These are the 10 tiny habits that make writing every day effortless:

—
📌 Writing online completely changed my life:

• Helped me quit my corporate job
• Made my first $10,000 online as a ghostwriter
• Built my $19,000,000 digital writing business

And it also taught me ONE thing for certain:

The easiest way to make money online is to become a ghostwriter.

Want to land high-paying ghostwriting clients?

I wrote a FREE 5-step blueprint with everything you need to make money ghostwriting on LinkedIn.

Click here to get (free!) instant access: https://lnkd.in/eQW3B7Y4

10 Tiny Habits To Make Writing Every Day Effortless 

This French teacher had one goal in mind:

To 4x her income.

Why?

Because Laura B. wanted to fund the work she's most passionate about—teaching her students how to become fluent in French.

So she took the plunge and joined our Premium Ghostwriting Academy.

And as a ghostwriter, she scaled quickly.

She sold:

• 5 Email Courses
• 8 Consulting Packages
• Dozens of Thought Leadership Packs

And now she's using this extra income to build her tutoring business.

Laura's example goes to show that anyone can become a ghostwriter and use this in-demand (and lucrative) service to either:

1. Create a new income stream
2. Or scale their existing income

Because executives, founders, and creators around the world are realizing how much they need a personal brand to scale their businesses.

And the salaries I've seen them pay are wild:

• Content Strategist at OpenAI ($319K - $393K/yr)

• Thought Leadership & Narrative Manager at Google ($211K - $297K/yr)

• Head of CEO Content at PayPal ($137.5K - $236K/yr)

And the best place to start right now is LinkedIn.

Want to start making money as a LinkedIn Ghostwriter?

I put together a free, 5-day email course to help you land high-paying writing clients.

Click "Visit my website" at the top of this post to get instant access.

Luke Shalom

CEO @ Grow Solo I help the C-suite turn industry expertise into predictable pipeline

Most founders are stuck in what I call "The Activity Trap".

They’re on LinkedIn every day:

DMing.
Posting.
Commenting.

Trying to be everywhere, still not getting consistent clients.

They’ve been told “show up and it’ll work.” But they’re doing everything and nothing’s compounding.

Instead of building leverage, they’re trapped in a cycle of rented results, ghostwritten content, and cold DMs that never convert.

Eventually they burn out:

- No time to sell
- No energy to market
- No leverage to scale unless they outsource again and hope it works

When you stop feeding the machine, the pipeline dies.

There’s a better way.

We install your Leverage Engine — a Trust-Led Outbound system powered by AI that turns LinkedIn into a client acquisition channel you own.

Everything runs in under 30 minutes a day.

With Atticus, we’ve helped 75+ B2B founders, consultants and experts:

→ Escape the Activity Trap
→ Scale without headcount
→ Drive 5–10 new deals per month from LinkedIn

Over $120M in pipeline booked without ghostwriters, appointment setters, or agency retainers.

Here’s how it works:

1. Attract

We install an AI content agent trained on your voice and expertise, built from 70+ top performers.
No ghostwriters. You own the engine.

2. Convert

A behind-the-scenes system moves prospects from cold to calendar.
By the time they book, they already trust you.

3. Activate

We build and install the full system in 60 days, fully trained, operational, and ready to scale inside your business.

Real wins from the system:

V, agency owner → 5–8 qualified opportunities/month + Forbes feature + six figures closed

B, M&A founder → $750K in sales-qualified pipeline

J, executive coach → 62 calls + $144K pipeline + price increase from $33K to $44K

J, startup consultant → 20 qualified calls in 20 days + $150K pipeline

B, career coach → 12 qualified leads in 8 days post-activation

This is for founders ready to shift from activity-trapped operators to leveraged dealmakers — where every post and DM builds trust, not just traffic.

Want your own AI Demand Engine installed?

Send me a message with “AI” and I’ll walk you through how it works and exactly what it would look like inside your business.

Founder

We help executives to build and monetize their brand on linkedin by scaling your content and turning it into leads, authority and thought leadership.

How?

Engagement + DM flows = Qualified meetings. 

Done with you. Done for you.

A few crazy things breaking past $50k profit months as a leveraged operator allowed me to do:

- Drive my entire client acquisition funnel on LinkedIn in less than 30 mins a day

- Take afternoons slow again. I finish most days at 3pm because our offers are mostly async delivery (we get paid for our minds and not our time).

- Worked from Colombia for 2 years without the business collapsing every time I travelled.

- Take 4 weeks of holidays this year fully offline (with only a little guilt).

- Be more present with my girl and pup instead of scrolling LinkedIn on the sofa.

- Generate a living income from just my investments > firmly on route to financial freedom.

- Reinvest heavily back into my own skills — I spent $30,000 in my training across mindset + sales this year.

- Perhaps my favorite of all… I finally flew my girl from Colombia to London last year. And this year we will go again to enjoy Christmas with my family (peep the picture of her smile man!).

I built this thing with just my laptop, LinkedIn and AI.

Now it’s put me in a position where I can support myself and the lives of those I love.

That’s what being a leveraged operator is all about.

Get leverage in the places that matter less.

And get more time with the people who matter most.

If you’re still deep in the grind of trying to hit above the $20k profit plateau…
Keep going.

A few simple changes could get you everything you’ve ever wanted.

PS: If you want to add $50k–$100k profit months with 90%+ margins using just LinkedIn, I’m hosting a LinkedIn client acquisition masterclass on the 12th. Smash this link to join biz owners gaining an unfair advantage in 2026 with AI: https://lnkd.in/gGNvBEfB

CEO @ Atticus | AI sales systems for founders | 5–10 deals/month from LinkedIn in <​30 mins/day I $125M+ pipeline generated for 100+ founders

March 2022: I hit 600,000 impressions in 60 days. Guess how much that added to my revenue?...

Exactly $0.

I posted daily.
DM’d like crazy.
My calendar stayed empty.

Back in March 2022, when I went all-in on my business, I had the metrics… not the money:

• 60 posts in 60 days
• 600,000 impressions
• 40 cold DMs per week

And still? Maybe 1 call a week.

That’s when I stopped chasing activity and started building leverage.

Here’s the truth most founders stuck at $20k per month profit don’t want to admit:

Consistency without leverage does not scale growth. It scales exhaustion.

I was doing everything LinkedIn “experts” said to do.

But nothing was translating into predictable deal flow.

So I audited a week of work and realized about 70 percent of my time was non-revenue.

Every morning felt like Day 1.
Staring at LinkedIn.
Anxiety bubbling up.

 “Why is everyone else winning but me?”

 “Another competitor posts a $50k month. Must be nice.”

I didn’t have a content problem.
I had a leverage problem.

Over the next 3 years, I rebuilt my entire client acquisition system around infrastructure, not effort:

- Identified the Rainmaker client persona (the one person I knew who was willing and able to afford me).

- Built an indoctrination strategy for my content—I identified the key ideas my audience needed to believe to buy from me.

- Created an AI content agent in my voice and trained on my brain. I was no longer spending an hour a day writing posts. I could create a week of content in 30 minutes. No AI slop because it’s trained on my library of content.

- Built a team of AI outbound agents that allowed us to scale our outreach to people in our sphere of influence from content and profile views.

Before → After:

- 4 to 8 calls per month → 35 to 50 a month
- $10k profit → $20k to $50k per month
- $270k closed in last 4 months

Try this for 7 days:

 Run an Activity Audit and highlight your activity traps.

- Log everything in 15‑minute blocks
- Tag each block R (revenue‑producing) or NR (non‑revenue)
- Circle your top 3 NR time sinks
- Kill / Automate / Batch anything NR
- Block 1 hour in your calendar for December 12 to join 100 founders building their own AI Demand Engine with LinkedIn on my webinar.

If you’re stuck in the trap, it might be time for a change.

Grab your FREE ticket to my LinkedIn masterclass here: leveragedoperators.com

I thought LinkedIn Thought Leadership Ads were “just brand.” I was wrong. They’re a sales-meeting machine if you structure them right. I spent $3,000 on ads, $1,000 on consulting, and 100 hours of study so you don’t have to. Here are 3 things we did to get our ads delivering leads in 60 days:

BACKGROUND

I sat in a café in Medellín with my father.

Me: “My LinkedIn reach is down 80%, feels like the end of the party.”

Him: “You always knew it wouldn’t last forever.”

Me: “I’m going to need an ad budget to fill the gap.”

Up to that point, I’d only dabbled with LinkedIn TLAs. Decent brand lift, but no leads. So over the last 60 days, I worked with Tom Casoo and learned a killer approach.

5 things that helped me drive meetings from TLAs

1) Having a founder-led brand helps.

Our content already hits the right eyes 300k–500k monthly reach so any spend pours gasoline on what’s circulating. Higher like counts also improve CTR and trust.

2) Tight targeting = better results.

I used to target every startup in the U.S. But our offer is specific: service business owners under $5M with a tech or service arm. Focusing on this ~2M TAM finally brought the right people in.

3) Having the right strategy.

 I stopped boosting random posts and split ads into:
 • Top + middle of funnel
 • Bottom of funnel

Every 2 weeks, I added top-performing posts to TOF/MOF and ran until we hit 1,000+ accounts reached. That became our retargeting pool. CPM was ~$30.

Then I fed that audience into BOF ads... our highest-converting client wins and framework posts. I track which posts cause Calendly bookings and spend more on those.

Pro tip: Add a direct CTA with your Calendly link or tell people to comment “GROW.” It meaningfully increased attribution.

Fitting engagements into our Atticus AI sales system.

We scrape likes, comments, and profile views, score them, and have our AI agent DM high-fit prospects with personalized context.

Adding ads multiplies your organic footprint. It’s just another way to show up in front of buyers... paid or not.

Stuck at $20K/month? I’m hosting a FREE LinkedIn Client Aquisition Masterclass on the 12th of December (usually $1,000 in consulting fees). 

I’ll show you how to build your own AI sales system to add another $50k a month using LinkedIn.

👉 Smash your revenue ceiling: https://lnkd.in/gkishZ_v

(40% gone. Don’t sleep on it.)

POV: thanksgiving after starting a business 😭 


P.S - Stay delusional, my entrepreneurial friends, and keep your cool as you eat turkey today. Happy thanksgiving!
-

Repost from @jimpapi

Every B2B founder wants to generate qualified sales calls on LinkedIn. 

But 95% have no idea where to start. Here are 5 outbound strategies that helped me generate over $125,000,000 in pipeline across 100+ companies (steal them):

1) Content-led outbound

This is where 99% of your hottest leads hide. If someone engages with your content, they already know who you are. Your cover photo acts as a sales billboard when done right.

Start conversations with this flow: 

Open-ended question > What they have tried > Curiosity gap > Pull to Zoom.

Spend 30 minutes a day on this and you will book an extra 5 to 10 calls a week.

2) Profile views and followers

Check profile views and net new followers (your followers list is arranged by who followed last) daily. When your ICP shows up, reach out and start a conversation using the same framework.

3) Messaging with intent

Cold outbound fails because it is unexpected and unwanted. Use an AI SDR to build lists based on intent events like funding rounds, job changes, new hires or key announcements.

Not all intent works for every industry. Ask what your ICP cares most about. For example, funded companies care more about ramp time than unfunded ones. Context matters.

4) The 800 open InMail hack

Every LinkedIn account has 800 extra free InMails on Sales Navigator. Tools with “open InMail campaigns” help you find these accounts fast. You can also check manually inside Sales Navigator.

5) Scaling outbound with multiple LinkedIn accounts

Get your team on Sales Navigator and use sales automation to multiply outbound across multiple open InMail licences. This loop doubles our monthly LinkedIn meetings.

Only do this once you have message market fit with at least a 20 percent response rate. Otherwise you will burn your total addressable market.
I learned all of this from running outbound for 100+ founders. 

If you want the exact AI outbound flow that books us 30 to 50 sales qualified calls a month in less than 30 minutes a day, join my free LinkedIn masterclass here: https://lnkd.in/gGNvBEfB

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The Battle

Dickie Bush 🚢

Luke Shalom

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Performance ScoreDickie Bush 🚢's LinkedIn Performance

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The Battle

Dickie Bush 🚢

Luke Shalom

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Dickie Bush 🚢's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreLuke Shalom's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreDickie Bush 🚢's LinkedIn Performance