My wife Lauren and I met at a co-working space in San Francisco in our mid-twenties. I was working an entry-level position at a creative consulting agency, at the bottom of the pyramid. Lauren was making $15/hour at an arts nonprofit, living rent-free with her aunt. 

We both saw no pathway to climb in our current jobs and chose two different paths to reaching for more.

I quit the creative agency to become an entrepreneur, designing my first online course. Lauren applied to grad school.

Neither path was easy, but both catapulted us from entry-level jobs to the careers of our dreams. What got us there wasn’t our qualifications, but our courage to go after something bigger than we were ready for.

Those leaps transformed us. We learned that you don’t wait until you’re qualified—you become qualified in the process of taking action. When you pursue something that stretches you, the journey itself develops the exact skills and confidence you need to succeed. 

Since then, Lauren and I have shared a mission of helping others take similar leaps. (If you hang out with us too much, you risk quitting your day job). We love helping people become active creators of their lives rather than passive participants in systems that don’t serve them.

What we’ve noticed is that both kinds of leaps—starting a business and applying to grad school—require the same underlying capacities. People without the ideal background, resources, or pedigree often overlook the soft skills that can propel them over perceived limitations. These leaps require courage and the ability to articulate a vision that moves you and others. 

But there is also a difference in our two approaches.

My work tends to resonate with people who have considerable autonomy—freelancers, creators, entrepreneurs, executives, and others who design their own career paths in the wild frontiers of professional independence. 

But the reality is that most people’s careers don’t unfold that way. They navigate through institutions—companies, universities, governments, and nonprofits. Their success depends on leveraging opportunities these organizations provide and successfully passing through gatekeepers who control access to advancement. This is where Lauren is the yin to my yang. 

While I’ve spent a decade helping people create freedom outside traditional structures, she’s mastered the art of navigating within them—and teaching others to do the same. Through her program Grad App Academy, she’s coached over 500 people from around the world into gaining admission to elite schools including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and pretty much any other top U.S. university you can name.

I’m incredibly proud and excited to share that she’s now distilled all that experience and knowledge into a new book, Beyond Acceptance: The Transformational Journey of Applying to Grad School.

The Hidden Curriculum No One Teaches

Her book reveals the “hidden curriculum” of applying to grad school – a series of rules, insights, and strategic levers that no one teaches you, and yet vastly increase your odds of getting into the school of your dreams. These tactics are crucial for standing out from the crowd of more than 1 million people who apply to U.S. graduate programs every single year.

As a co-founder of our company, Forte Labs, Lauren also weaves in many of the ideas and principles you may have seen in my content or books, but geared toward grad school applications.

Most people approach grad school applications by working harder: taking more classes to boost their GPA, studying endlessly for standardized tests, applying to dozens of schools hoping something sticks. They’re exhausted, scattered, and often end up with mediocre results because they’re spreading their energy too thin.

Lauren teaches the opposite approach: work smarter by being strategic and intentional.

Instead of applying to 15 schools, apply to 4-7 programs that truly resonate with your vision. Instead of trying to compensate for every perceived weakness, leverage your unique strengths. Instead of cramming more credentials onto your resume, craft a compelling narrative that helps admissions committees see the value you’ll bring.

The title captures what makes this book different from every other grad school application guide out there. Yes, it contains all the tactical advice you need—how to choose programs, craft compelling essays, secure strong recommendations, and navigate interviews. But more importantly, it teaches the transformational mindset shifts that will serve you for taking any big leap: 

Curiosity over Conditioning- Learning to follow what genuinely lights you up rather than what society tells you you should do.

Courage over Credentials – Taking action despite feeling unqualified, reaching out to strangers, and creating your own opportunities rather than waiting for permission.

Compassion over Criticism – Silencing your inner critic to see your unique gifts and tell your story powerfully.

Intuition over Information – Learning to trust your inner wisdom when facing uncertainty.

These aren’t just principles for grad school applications. They’re the capacities that allow you to navigate any inflection point in your life with confidence and clarity. They’re what allow you to stop letting gatekeepers determine your worth and start trusting yourself to create the future you envision.

Whether you’re applying to grad school this year or considering any other big leap, this book will help you develop the courage to go after what you deeply want—and become the kind of person who continues pursuing meaningful goals long after the acceptance letters arrive.

Lauren has seen her former students use the same skills she’s taught to win major scholarships, grant funding, and even get into start-up incubators like Y Combinator. 

Start With the Most Important Question

Most books on this topic focus narrowly on the “how,” taking for granted that getting a graduate degree is the right choice for you. Lauren’s process is much deeper, more personal, and more foundational. It begins with crafting a core vision you have for your life and then determining if grad school is the shortcut to that future, or a detour.

Starting with this foundation has so many powerful advantages. First, it may cause you to realize that grad school isn’t the right path for you at all, saving you years and many thousands of dollars. Depending on what you are trying to achieve in your life and in the world, she asks you to consider all kinds of alternative pathways that may be a much better fit, including:

• Learning the skills you seek through work experience (and getting paid for it!)
• Finding mentors in your field you could learn from directly
• Taking online courses, bootcamps, cohorts, fellowships, or other programs that more directly target your goal
• Starting an independent project or even an organization that teaches you through real-life experience

This is such a valuable, crucial step! Lauren often notices that many people go to grad school for the wrong reasons – because they don’t know what else to do, because it seems like the “next logical thing,” or to please their parents. Lacking a compelling vision for where they’re going, they casually walk into this multi-year, six-figure commitment without a plan for who they want to be on the other end.

If you decide that grad school is indeed the right choice for you, then starting with your vision will be just as important, since the lack of one is the single biggest mistake that Lauren has seen in the over 1,000 essays she’s reviewed.

As she writes in her book:

“Instead of “I want to work in renewable energy,” I want to hear “I want to accelerate the transition to clean energy in rural communities that have been economically dependent on fossil fuel industries.” Instead of “I want to get into tech,” I want to hear “I want to develop technologies that democratize access to high-quality film special effects.”

Once you’re clear on your vision, Lauren then takes you through a strategic, targeted, and proven process for developing the best possible application you can, including dozens of insights and tricks she’s gleaned from seeing who gets in and who doesn’t.

For example:

• How to reach out to current students to get insight into what it’s actually like to be in the program you’re applying to, and what unwritten rules determine who gets in
• Revealing essay prompts that help you uncover the stories, milestones, and paradigm-shifting moments that made you who you are today
• Guidelines on when and how to use AI to save time, and when to avoid it at all costs
• How to prep your stories and examples in advance, so you’re not scrambling during an interview
• How to draft your own letters of recommendation to make it far more likely you’ll get them submitted on time
• How to negotiate your funding with the university you got accepted to, instead of just settling for whatever they offer you

Lauren started her business because she was the first in her family to go to college. She witnessed the many built-in disadvantages for people like her trying to ascend through the halls of elite institutions. At UC Berkeley, she served on an admissions committee and taught as a Graduate Student Instructor, and saw firsthand how unfair and opaque the entire admissions process could be.

She has spent the last year pouring her love and wisdom into this book to make her knowledge more accessible to others, especially anyone who doesn’t have the perfect resume or the most pristine pedigree.

Her mission is to serve those who didn’t go to the most prestigious schools, are applying from outside the U.S., received a low GPA, or are switching into new fields they haven’t previously studied. 

For all these people, applying to schools and programs of various kinds is still one of the most reliable paths to upward mobility, financial stability, and impact. This book contains the best advice I’ve ever seen on how to take that path confidently and successfully.

The reason it’s called “Beyond Acceptance” is that the skills you gain, the story you tell, and ultimately the person you become as a result of applying to grad school, or applying to anything, will continue to serve you for the rest of your life, whether in business, parenting, advocacy, relationships, or in retirement.

Lauren writes that “Your purpose isn’t something you do; it is something you are, a state of being that can’t be taken away by getting rejected from grad school.”

Perhaps the most fundamental thing of all that you’ll take away from this book is how to believe in your vision, whether or not traditional systems of power recognize it or not. What that ultimately requires is learning to listen to your inner compass, no matter what society conditions you to believe.

I encourage you to pick up a copy on Amazon.

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It has now been 3 years and 3 months since my book Building a Second Brain came out in the U.S., and I’ve just received word that it has now earned out its advance!

That probably doesn’t mean anything to readers, but to me as an author, it means a ton. It means that the “loan” of $325,000 the publisher gave me to create this book has been “paid back,” which means the project as a whole has turned a profit, at least from the perspective of the publisher.

I wanted to take this occasion to determine if it’s also been profitable for me as the author, and to evaluate the holistic financial picture of my book-writing endeavors.

First, the numbers for my book Building a Second Brain:

• 144,018 total copies sold in the U.S. across all formats
• $352,246 in total earnings to date (or $10,674 per month on average)
• On average, I earn $2.45 per copy sold, but that varies by format: $3.69 per hardcover sold, $2.70 per ebook sold, $1.41 per audiobook sold, and only 58 cents per paperback sold. I make 6.3 times as much money for each hardcover sale compared to a paperback!
• The breakdown of sales by format has been 38.5% audiobook, 32% ebook, 27% hardcover, and 2.5% paperback. This is surprising to me, as I would have expected the ebook version to far outsell audio, since I put so much emphasis on saving digital highlights.
• My advance was actually earned out around October 2024, or 2 years and 4 months after the book’s release

My second book, The PARA Method, also earned out its (much smaller) advance in this period:

• 33,779 total copies sold in the U.S. across all formats

• $63,664 in total earnings to date (or $3,350 per month on average)
• That amounts to $1.88 per copy in royalties (about 23% less than the first book), and varies between $2.43 for hardcover, $2.25 for ebook, and 94 cents for audiobook
• The breakdown of formats has been 40% ebook, 32% audiobook, and 29% hardcover (so the ebook was more popular than the audiobook for this title)
• The advance was earned out around September 2024, only 13 months after the book’s release

Considering these books as complementary titles within the BASB ecosystem, they’ve sold 177,797 copies together in the U.S. and earned $415,910 in royalties for me as the author. If sales continue at the current pace, ongoing sales of these two books should continue to earn me about $5,300 and $1,900 per month, respectively, or $7,200 per month combined. The rest of this analysis only takes into account Building a Second Brain.

I was curious how much my U.S. publisher, Simon & Schuster, has earned from my book so far. Working with ChatGPT and some reasonable assumptions, I estimate they gross about $9.95 per copy sold on average, and after their costs, net about $8.61 per copy sold (which is 3.5x higher than what I make). At 144,000 copies sold to date, that means they’ve grossed $1.05 million, netted $850,000, and paid me $352k, or 41% of it. This doesn’t include their overhead costs, however, which probably dramatically lowers their overall profitability. 

One thing I take away from this analysis is that the common idea that publishers are raking in the dough while paying authors a mere pittance is mistaken. Under this model, my share seems to represent over 40% of the publisher’s earnings on a per-unit basis, and would probably be over 50% or even more if their overhead costs were taken into account.

Comparing to a self-publishing scenario

Working again with ChatGPT and conservative assumptions, I wanted to model what it would have looked like to self-publish my book on Amazon, knowing everything I know now.

Starting with the hardcover, I would have used Amazon’s KDP Print service. With a list price of $30, the printing cost would have come out to around $6.50. Amazon’s take would have been 60% of the list price, or $18, leaving me with $11.50 per copy sold as my royalty.

For the paperback, also via KDP Print, a book with a list price of $18 would have cost $3.50 to print, and after an Amazon take of $10.80, I’d be left with $7.30. Selling the ebook version for $15 would leave me with $10.35, and the audiobook $8 via ACX.

Assuming I sold the exact same number of copies via the self-published route, I would’ve netted:

• $447,959 in hardcovers (versus $143,469 I made via traditional publishing)
• $476,969 in ebooks (versus $124,498)
• $443,832 in audiobooks (versus $78,492)
• $26,200 in paperbacks (versus $2,069)

All of these together would have totaled a net of $1.39 million in self-publishing royalties, which is 3.95x as much as I made with a publisher. In other words, assuming the number of copies sold stayed the same, I missed out on about a million dollars. That includes, on a per-copy basis, a self-pub royalty that is ~3x for hardcover, ~13x for paperback, ~6x for audio, and ~3.8x for ebooks.

However, this is based on the following assumptions:

• The biggest one is that I would have somehow managed to sell just as many copies through my own efforts as I did partnering with a publisher which I think is extremely unlikely
• This calculation doesn’t take into account the considerable amount I would have likely spent on marketing and promoting the book on my own
• I’m also confident the mix of formats would be much different with self-publishing, including far fewer hardcovers and far more paperbacks, which would result in a less favorable comparison

Using a more realistic scenario of what I would have managed to sell on my own, such as 70% as many copies sold and a more typical mix of formats, results in a self-publishing grand total of $934,510. That’s still 2.6x what I actually made, meaning I missed out on $582,000 instead of a million. Another way of saying this is that I would have only needed to sell 37,926 self-published copies, or 25% as many as I did, to make the same earnings as I’ve done through traditional publishing. 

Including foreign translations

If I include foreign rights and translations, however, the picture changes considerably. To date, I’ve made $276,000 from 225,000 foreign copies sold via 24 foreign publishers. That means I make $1.23 per foreign sale, versus $2.45 on average for U.S. sales, or only half as much. 

But I doubt more than 2 or 3 of those would have happened if I had self-published, which means the differential would have only been around $306,000. In terms of raw numbers of copies sold, U.S. sales have accounted for only 39% of total global sales, and I expect that number to keep going down as new foreign translations continue to be released.

All of this boils down to a simple distinction: traditional publishing still wins when it comes to overall reach plus foreign rights; self-publishing wins when it comes to overall per-copy economics. 

Worldwide, across all formats, I make $1.70 per copy sold. Via self-publishing, I would have made $9.27 per copy sold, or 5.5 times as much (though limited only to the U.S.)

Projecting into the future

If I assume that my book is at the midpoint of its lifetime sales as of now, and will go on to sell another 369,000 copies worldwide, then I can expect to make another $627,540 in earnings through traditional publishing, in contrast to another $2.4 million via a hypothetical self-published route. 

If that comes to pass, that results in a grand total, lifetime earnings number for this book of $1,255,000, versus a hypothetical $4,789,000 via self-publishing.

Including the business upside

What really changes the whole picture, of course, is factoring in the additional revenue we’ve made in the business as a result of the book.

First, there is the difference in timing between receiving a large upfront cash advance, which was used to fund a variety of long-term efforts such as our YouTube channel, versus having to wait to receive that money over a period of several years. That YouTube channel is now the main marketing channel for the entire business, responsible for 36% of our overall sales, so it’s difficult to put a value on it.

Second, we can estimate more or less how much of our product sales happened because of the book by looking at our purchase surveys, which have been completed by over 7,000 customers since the start of 2023, about 6 months after BASB came out.

Based on that data, 34% of all our sales have come from people who first heard about me through my books. With total sales (after refunds) over this time period of $3,541,715, that implies $1.2 million in sales as a direct result of my books. That more than makes up for the lower economics of traditional publishing. However, a self-published book would have also produced a significant upside in product sales.

This also allows me to calculate that each book I sell needs to generate $7.57 in net referred product revenue on average to equal the economics of self-publishing. Or taking into account our approximately 50% margins, each book needs to produce $15.14 gross on average. 

Considering that our average customer lifetime value is $720, that means I need 1 out of every 95 book readers to convert to a paying customer of our courses/products in order to break even with self-pub. In other words, a 1% conversion rate more than makes up for the gap.

My best estimate is that at least 3,859 customers have come in through my books, which is a 1.05% conversion rate! Or approximately 1 in 96 readers so far. This means the traditional model is just barely surpassing the overall economics of self-publishing when downstream products are included.

This also means that my total earnings to date from the book and related sales are $1.85 million, 66% of which is from product sales. That sounds great, except if I had gone self-pub and made 70% as many sales, with the same conversion rate to products, I would have ended up with $6,743,072, or almost twice as much.

Projecting all this into the future, assuming my book is at the midway point of its sales potential, continues to convert 1 in 96 readers to customers, and our customer lifetime value stays the same, the full lifetime earnings outlook for my book should be $6.82 million, over about 7-8 years. That’s an astonishing figure by any measure, and shows that there is still a path to profitability for first-time authors under the traditional model.

Traditional publishing maximized reach and credibility, giving me $6.8 million projected lifetime earnings. Self-publishing might have doubled that number, but with much higher risk and effort. 

The right path depends on whether an author values distribution or economics more.

My overall takeaway is that the two pathways to publishing are different animals: they are optimizing for different things, display different strengths and weaknesses, and make sense for different authors depending on which capabilities they bring to the table, or are interested in developing.

In retrospect, I think it was a smart move to start with traditional publishing, since it gave me:

1. Authority and credibility I didn’t have before
2. Reach and exposure far beyond my small, niche online following
3. The upfront cash to hire a team and build new marketing channels like YouTube 

My first two books have been clear home runs under the traditional model, but I’m also interested in exploring self-publishing and hybrid models in the future to fully capitalize on the credibility, reach, and marketing footprint I’ve built through these endeavors over the last 5 years.

My next book, on the practice of annual life reviews, will be the true test of whether I’ve succeeded in building a sizable readership that will keep coming back to read my books. You can sign up here if you want to be the first to hear about it when it’s ready.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.