From one-bedroom apartment to $40m: How Jonathan Goodman initially broke through
One author's journey to success.
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Jonathan Goodman is the author of the newly released Unhinged Habits: A Counterintuitive Guide for Humans to Have More by Doing Less. It’s full of helpful frameworks to break bad habits and build your rich life by mastering the art of strategic subtraction.
If you liked Atomic Habits or Essentialism, you’ll love this book. Same lane, but a contrarian spin with more focus on the deeper values of relationships, health, and purpose.
I self-published my first book in 2011 and started a blog that same year.
From 2011 to 2025, I generated $40M from my writing. I began with no contacts and never took outside investment.
I’ve been fascinated by the question of why one person breaks through while another doesn’t. What gets you past that seemingly impossible ceiling everyone keeps hitting?
I can look back now at what I did differently than my colleagues. In many cases, their work was just as good as mine. They were better connected and worked just as hard—often harder.
The simple answer: I included others.
There’s a saying worth repeating: “The fastest way to earn a seat at the table is to host the meal.”
My first book provides a case study. This happened from 2011 to 2014, and it would work even better today. People are more self-absorbed, insular, and reactive in their businesses than ever, which leaves tremendous opportunity for anyone willing to be proactive.
Ignite the Fire was released in 2011. It sold ok initially.
To promote it, I started a website called the Personal Trainer Development Center. I was working with 10-12 one-on-one clients a day as a personal trainer. At 9:45pm I’d get home to my one-bedroom apartment and write until 2am. Then wake up around 6:30am and do it again.
I was single. It was fine. Getting started requires intensity to break through inertia. Small consistent habits maintain what you have. But transformative growth? That needs a period of intensity.
If you want what others don’t have, at one point in your life you must be willing to do what others won’t.
While I didn’t mind writing, I noticed how many good ideas other trainers were publishing online. I was also studying copywriting and internet marketing and was surprised at how poorly they handled titles, images, and distribution.
So I decided to name my website the Personal Trainer Development Center. This is stupid and embarassing, but it worked: the initial logo had a building in it because I wanted the site to appear official. I wanted people to brag that they were published on it.
Reality is much less important than the perception of reality.
Then I found the best articles others had written for personal trainers, emailed the blogger, and offered to pay them $50 to republish their article on my site. They got sole attribution as the author. I’d include code so Google knew which was the original source. I’d give them better titles, formatting, images, and distribution. Easy yes. The PTDC grew into my industry’s largest blog. From 2013 to 2020 we had 4 to 6 million visitors a year.
After some initial success, I needed an email opt-in. Again, I crowdsourced good ideas from others, asking the same authors for their top 4-6 career mistakes. I copied them all into a Word document, saved it as a PDF, paid $5 for a cover, and added every single one of their names as co-authors. These same people promoted the PDF because their name was on it.
I got my first 500 email sign-ups and was off to the races.
In 2013 I re-released a revised, updated, and expanded version of Ignite the Fire. The major change? Instead of writing my own ideas, I went through the entire text and tried to find somebody else who spoke about each topic. I replaced my initial idea with a quote or attribution to them, adding over 70 colleagues to the book. When I released the updated version, each one got a copy with a post-it note marking their section.
Many of them promoted it. Ignite the Fire has sold over 110,000 copies.
At this point, I had a reputation, an audience, and a website with readership. It gets easier after that. I’d broken through the invisible ceiling. The next seven years were simply a case of finding experts and building courses, producing information products, and hosting conferences.
From 2013 to 2020 I built and sold 32 different products and services for personal trainers. A few strikeouts. Mostly bloop singles. Two home runs. A fine batting average.
Not enough to make the hall of fame. But enough to retire and write books full-time right around my 40th birthday.
Breaking through is difficult. Hard work done well isn’t enough. You need leverage. And in a world where everyone is focused on themselves, perhaps the best thing you can do is be the one to lift others up. To host the meal.
None of this is new, of course. A rising tide lifts all boats.
As the legendary motivational speaker Zig Ziglar said: “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”
Unhinged Habits is a practical and philosophical examination of why modern success feels so exhausting, and how to step out of the middle. Rather than promoting discipline, optimization, or hustle, Jonathan Goodman argues that lasting change comes from designing habits, environments, and expectations that reflect how people actually live.
Written for those who are busy, capable, and quietly dissatisfied, the book offers a framework for doing less, choosing deliberately, and designing a life you don’t need to escape from.
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I must be clueless. My Substack had 4 million views the last 90 days and I am certainly not making THAT kind of money and I was a tech stock analyst for a billionaire!