We’re in the middle of a second renaissance.

But only a select few people can see what’s going on.

Even fewer people are actually taking advantage of it.

Can you see it?

• The creator economy is growing at an exponential rate.
• People don’t trust traditional jobs or schooling to secure their future.
• People are turning to creators to educate them on the skills necessary to thrive in a fast-changing digital environment.
• AI, automation, and software have made business more accessible to people who want to do what they enjoy for a living.
• People are working less, earning more, and leveraging technology to remove themselves from the old society.
• People are craving human connection online from people with personalities, not glorified search engines who talk about one specialized interest.

These are all connected to the fact that technology has changed the way we work, the opportunities we have for work, and what justifies valuable work.

If you want to do what you enjoy for a living, you’re living in the right time period.

The internet has decentralized wealth generation to individuals who value self-education, personal responsibility, and amounting to something in your life by doing good work.

A few problems have led to this.

1) Specialists compete with other specialists.

A specialist is someone who attempts to achieve a goal with a single interest or skill.

Like a bodybuilder with fitness.

Or only playing one role/class/character in a video game.

Or performing a mechanical string of tasks at a job.

Being a specialist made sense in the Industrial Age but not in the Information Age.

When a bodybuilder gets injured, they either get bored and stop making progress or start from scratch.

When you get countered in a video game, or someone is already playing your role, you are at a massive disadvantage.

When your work consists of the same thing over and over again, not only are you a prime candidate for replacement, but life loses its zest because there is no challenge or novel goal that brings meaning to life… your time shrivels up because all you can focus on is working all day, being tired all night, paying the bills, hoping your family doesn’t leave you, and the rest.

On the other hand, generalists are diverse and interesting.

Most people think that in order to become successful, they have to be really good at one thing.

Social media has distorted how we perceive value.

You don’t need chiseled six-pack abs and a spray tan to impress others and generate attention.

Most people find it impressive to have a tiny bit of muscle mass, be able to do a few pull-ups and have a life outside of fitness.

Pair that with a writing hobby and some psychology knowledge and you open up a world of opportunities from random people on the internet (that you wouldn’t have been able to get in front of in the past).

In the second renaissance, you don’t need to be exceptional at one thing, you need to be average at many.

2) The internet favors the generalist.

When I first started in business I was bombarded with the advice to “niche down.”

The riches are in the niches, so they say.

And don’t just niche down a bit, niche so far down that you only have a small pool of people you can help with the skill you’ve learned.

It makes sense, but in my eyes, it’s outdated advice.

Social media is at the forefront of attention.

Things like paid ads and cold emails – you know, the things absolutely nobody likes doing – require you to get specific on your messaging so you can find, target, and get your work in front of specific people. If you don’t understand this, take my free one-person business foundations course.

As marketing shifts more and more to organic content on social media, this just isn’t the case.

With content, your work is exposed to diverse audiences because that’s just how social media works.

• The algorithm
• Reposts and shares
• Comments from random people

They all launch you into unpredictable audiences.

And, people aren’t on social media to learn or buy (at least when they log on to social media until they come across something beneficial to their lives). They’re there to be entertained. So, you need to adapt your strategy accordingly.

If your message is too niche, people will scroll right past it.

Instead, you have to attract a diverse audience with a range of interests and then persuade them of the importance of the skill you aim to monetize.

If all you talk about is what you sell, people will catch on that fast.

I would rather have a diverse 100,000-follower audience than a niche 10,000-follower audience because I understand how to educate people.

I will teach you how to do this soon.

3) Labor work is more replaceable than ever.

Society has set you up to fail.

We are in the middle of a spiritual war of beliefs.

Older generations haven’t allowed their identity to be challenged with the changing landscape. Their mind still lives in a time when it was smart to go to school, get a job, and work until you die with the possibility of a good retirement.

It’s not their fault… that’s just human nature. It takes time for belief systems to evolve on a collective scale.

The problem is that people will claw and fight so that you don’t change. As much as they say they do it out of love for you, the reality is that their identity is threatened when you do better than them.

The path of the Second Renaissance Man requires mental strength and fortitude.

You must have conviction in your beliefs that you have more potential than getting a job that a robot can replace within 5-10 years.

I don’t need to tell you that most schooling and job options are outdated when you can go to any news or reporting site and see for yourself.

Why Generalists Thrive In The Creator Economy

Only slaves are expected to perform one task for their entire life.

That’s what our current education and employment system reflects.

Wage slavery is a very real thing.

On the other hand, a “free man” is defined as someone who acts on their interests and does many things throughout their life.

If you don’t create a goal, you will be assigned one, and society is great at handing out goals to those who can’t think for themselves.

A generalist is someone who learns all relevant knowledge and skills out of interest of achieving a goal in their life.

This came naturally for me, as I’m sure it has for many people reading this.

I’m grateful I have an audience that can relate to my failures.

So, for those who are in the trenches, I want to provide some clarity.

I failed at dropshipping, e-commerce, SEO, digital art, and more.

But in the pursuit of my business goals, I stacked an irreplaceable set of skills.

One or two skills didn’t bring me much in terms of results.

But five… six… seven skills allowed me to spot and act on profitable opportunities because I had more tools to solve more problems.

Dropshipping taught me branding so I could stand out from bigger brands with low shipping times.

E-commerce taught me advertising and product design so I could be more attention-grabbing.

Digital art taught me graphic design and the nuances of building an audience on social media.

Notice how I didn’t study endless tutorials to learn those skills. I set a goal of working for myself, started a project, and practiced those skills while educating myself along the way.

All of those “failures” were the reason I can do what I do today.

There are 2 reasons why this story matters.

1) Failure Stacking Makes You Irreplaceable

Most people know what “skill stacking” is.

It’s like a diversified stock portfolio.

Rather than investing all of your money in one stock – like a specialist – that sets you up for catastrophe, you invest in various stocks to increase your chances at success.

Even if one stock drops, a few others may go up and you will still be at a profit.

If you were going to be in the NBA or have a platinum album, you would know by now.

Being the best at one specific thing is statistically near impossible.

Now, being top 25% in the few areas you find interesting… that’s pretty easy.

To make this more digestible, let’s reframe “skill stacking” as “failure stacking.”

Acquiring a skill puts you in the mindset that you just need to study and learn all day.

Acquiring a failure assumes that you are actively working toward a goal and gaining actual experience.

• Identify a goal in your life – like quitting your job, finding a partner, or getting fit.
• Start with what you know – you can only know what to learn when you hit a roadblock, so hit one fast.
• Pursue your curiosity – let your experience guide you into new paths to experiment with.

All of these will overlap eventually.

Starting in fitness can introduce you to diet models to try, training programs to test, and lifestyle changes to implement.

Once you get to the top 25%, which isn’t much in fitness, you can explore new routes.

Maybe you want to start a career in fitness, so you start writing on the internet and building an audience.

Again, once you get to the top 25%, which again isn’t much, you can start adding to your results by branching out.

You can study philosophy to add depth to your writing, design to enhance your brand, or really anything as a creator – and that’s why generalists thrive.

2) The Most Profitable Niche Is You

The creator economy – not to be confused with the influencer economy – is characterized by individuals who pursue their interests and document their knowledge.

Nobody wants to follow a glorified search engine that talks about the same thing all the time.

Many creators tell me they are afraid to branch out into new interests because they have trouble understanding how that will work.

All you have to do is look at everyone you follow. Are they talking about one thing? Are they actually?

Or are they giving their opinions, beliefs, knowledge, and snippets of their life experience packaged up into impactful content?

“But Dan, what do I sell then?”

That’s where things get tricky.

How To Earn A Living As A Generalist

The first step to earning a living as a generalist is choosing a career path that doesn’t box you into one specific skill or interest.

In other words, you need to become an entrepreneur.

But that alone doesn’t cut it.

You can easily get trapped in a specific niche with work you no longer find meaningful.

As mentioned, you are in the second renaissance.

Social media is the new town square.

Creators are the new Renaissance men.

Creators are the decentralized education system.

Creators are the new economy.

Stop thinking of a “creator” as some new internet job. Think of it as a part of life. You already spend most of your day on your phone. To act like social media isn’t engrained in humanity at this point is foolish. Being a “creator” is just expressing your value in the digital world rather than being a slave to it on the sidelines.

You probably follow creators for education and entertainment because they present beliefs and opportunities different from what you’ve been told.

Ideas shape society, and it’s happening right before your eyes.

Creators are earning an independent income by teaching what they know by pursuing their interests.

They solve problems in their life and sell the solution.

Some sell stylish blue light glasses to help with sleep. Some sell business advice because college professors probably don’t own a business (unless they are teaching out of passion and sitting on wads of cash), so creators are some of the few qualified to teach it. Some sell productivity systems, psychology practices, and meditations.

If you don’t see this, it’s probably time to unfollow everyone and start searching for new pockets of the internet that create the society you want to see in the world. Your attention is going somewhere, might as well fuel what you believe in (and what you want to become).

Let’s start there. How do you begin earning a living?

Build A General Audience

I’m not a fan of building “niche” or specific audiences.

I am a fan of helping your audience reach a big goal with whatever skills, interests, and ideas help them get there.

When people tell you to build a niche audience in a specific topic, they usually don’t realize that’s not what they are doing.

They say that, and then they go on to give random mindset tips, discuss their beliefs, post about their lives, and discuss their other interests.

Before anything else, why build an audience?

Because you need attention and people if you want to make an independent income.

You can no longer rely on your boss to generate attention with a marketing department that sells their product. You have to do it all yourself.

Building an audience is the most accessible way for beginners to do this. All you need is an internet connection, a few ideas, and the ability to type on your keyboard. I teach this in 2-Hour Writer.

To make this simple:

• Choose a big goal – Is it financial freedom? Is it a fit body? Is it self-actualization? The purpose of a value creator – someone focused on value and education rather than entertainment and looks – is to help people improve their mind, body, business, and relationships.
• List out skills, interests, and beliefs – What do people need to know in order to reach that goal? The combination of these is what makes you unique.
• Frame everything you write through the lens of achieving that goal – If you want to talk about basket weaving for some reason, do it, but talk about how it benefits your life as a fun hobby that helps with creativity and mental clarity.

Let’s say the goal I’m helping people achieve is financial freedom.

I talk about creativity, psychology, writing, and human potential to help people get there.

Someone else can choose something completely different, like performance/health, budgeting, and spirituality.

Both have the same big goal that everyone wants – financial freedom – with completely different ways of getting there.

The problem most creators face is that they either don’t have a goal to frame their content, don’t choose a goal that people want, or choose a goal so small that they attract a small audience.

The bigger the goal, the bigger your potential audience and the more unique you can be.

Make Noise, Find Signal

Most creators struggle to start writing because they don’t know what to write about.

1. Just start writing. Nobody is watching when you have zero followers.
2. If your friends follow you, good. Maybe it’s finally time for them to learn who you really are and potentially join you. And if they don’t like it, maybe they don’t really care about you, and you should find that out now instead of later.
3. Write about all of your interests. Make a lot of noise and let your audience decide what they want to hear more of from you. A few poorly performing posts aren’t the end of the world; it’s data.

Of course, posting good content is only one aspect of social growth. You have to understand social media as a skill if you want to grow. I talk about that skill in How To Actually Build An Audience On Social Media.

Next question: how do I write?

First, make a list of content ideas based on your interests.

Second, focus on the “how” and “why.”

Third, write out the post.

Fourth, filter it through your big goal.

Let’s say I’m writing about psychology.

Some topics include:

• How do I manage my emotions? Create a list of steps.
• Why should I manage my emotions? Think of compelling reasons from experience.

Frame it through a big goal like financial freedom, and you have a post:

How to manage your emotions:

• Become aware of negative reactions
• Pause before you act on them
• Stay quiet or make a better decision

When you repeat this process, you reprogram your mind to be less negative.

Life, money, and relationships will flow with ease.

All it takes is a small mention of your big goal for it to be impactful.

Why are we focused on illustrating the “why” or importance of an idea?

Because people whine a lot and experiment little.

“Dan, how can I talk about my interests if nobody is interested in them?”

That’s not their fault. It’s yours. Your interests aren’t interesting because you don’t make them interesting.

If you became interested in them, that means there’s a series of thoughts and ideas that can make it important to someone else.

You weren’t born with that interest. You were programmed into it. You were persuaded of its importance and adopted it to help you achieve your goals in life.

This does require you to think. It probably won’t be that easy the first time around.

Establish Authority With A Digital Asset

At this point, you are writing quite a few posts.

You should review their performance every week to see which ideas did better than others. It should be obvious which ones they are.

You can look for better writing or more engagement.

From there, you want to make the most of those ideas:

• Turn them into longer-form content like a thread, carousel, newsletter, or video.
• Rewrite that post from multiple angles to consistently get more engagement.
• Bake that topic into your writing routine and make it a part of your brand.

If that topic continues to do well for you, establish a piece of your authority in that topic by creating a digital asset.

Create a free product. Pin a thread or carousel to your profile. Write it down as a potential starting point for a digital product. This is what we do in my new course Mental Monetization to monetize your creative work. It launches on June 3rd when the early bird price increases.

Why do we do this?

So you don’t feel like you have to keep repeating yourself and box yourself into a niche.

A free product will contain almost everything you know on the topic.

Instead of writing endless content on that, you can just send them to the free product or they can read your pinned thread.

This gives you room to continue experimenting with new ideas to diversify your brand and make it irreplaceable as a generalist.

As you make noise and find signal, you will solidify the signal as a part of your brand by consistently repurposing that idea and creating new free products to get people on your email list.

Build A Portfolio Of Income Sources

As a generalist, we can look to a few people for inspiration.

First, there’s Zuby.

He’s a rapper, fitness buff, and political commentator.

With a rather general audience, he promotes his music, fitness ebook, and public speaking gigs. He isn’t boxed into one specific topic and that’s what allows him to stand out.

I’d like to think of myself as another example.

Even though I started out in web design, that didn’t stop me from talking about emotional management and self-improvement.

It didn’t stop me from building more products like a physical planner and self-help ebook (The Path To Power that was complete sh*t but allowed me to get better and eventually write and publish a full book).

As my audience grew thanks to attracting people with big goals of achieving more in their life, I was able to pivot out of web design into writing, productivity, branding, and marketing.

I wouldn’t even say those are my interests. I honestly talk about whatever ideas are on my mind. Because if they are important to me with the goals I have, they can become important to someone else with those shared goals, which is quite a few people.

In brief, launch products around the ideas that do well for you.

Monetize with courses, cohorts, templates, systems, tutorials, or whatever else will help people achieve a smaller goal that helps them get a few steps closer to the big goal.

Every 3-6 months, launch at least one free product and one paid product until you have a brand and business you are satisfied with.

Once you have cash flow, then you can consider building a product that requires capital and a large audience of people to sell. I wasn’t raised in a wealth family. I never had capital to invest. I had to create my own substantial income source to be able to do thing like publish my own book and build a software startup.

That’s how you earn a living as a generalist in a world going digital.

Thank you for reading and enjoy the rest of your day.

– Dan

The post The Rise Of The Generalist (How To Thrive With Multiple Interests) appeared first on Dan Koe.

I procrastinate… a lot.

But I’ve learned that this is a good thing. Procrastination is my superpower for achieving what most people think is impossible.

I wait until the last minute, but in that last minute, I launch into the flow state and my mind is impossible to distract from the task at hand.

When I do this, the work is of higher quality than if I were to do scattered “planned” work for weeks before.

I have other things to worry about, and if my work isn’t the only thing on my mind, the quality will suffer.

I’ve discovered that this is a character trait.

It’s how some people are wired.

You only focus when focus is needed.

• You are bad at texting people back.
• You rarely did your homework on time in school.
• Client work is put off until the last minute.
• You struggle to make progress in business (because you don’t have someone managing you when it’s time to publish a project).

If this is you, procrastination is your key to getting ahead of 99% of people… if you learn to harness that power.

The work you procrastinate on isn’t real-time like a video game or sports where you get immediate feedback on your effort.

Society has made you feel bad for this character trait. You constantly feel like you are falling behind others because you can’t, and shouldn’t, play the same game as them.

You don’t need to change. You need to understand yourself, structure your life accordingly, and make calculated decisions.

Tactical Stress – Forcing Yourself To Survive

The best decisions I’ve made are the stupidest.

I maxed out my first credit card at 19 for inventory on a business that failed fast.

I signed multiple leases on apartments that I never thought I could afford.

I got rid of everything I owned to fly across the country because I saw an opportunity.

I purchased an expensive software that cleared my bank account as a bet on my business success.

I built a landing page and accepted orders for a product before it was built. I’ve done this with every launch because, one, if it doesn’t sell, I don’t waste more of my time. Second, if it does sell, I’m forced to build it out before the launch date.

Every time I took these risks, I only gave myself two options:

1. Figure it out
2. Be crushed

It was a quarterly powerlifting competition for my mind. I put myself under my mental bench press max and forced myself to lift it without a spotter.

An example I see often in the business space:

“Should I purchase this software or take the free option?”

“Should I buy a course or waste my time learning on my own?”

“Should I start or wait until the pain is too great in my current situation so I end up starting 2 years later?”

The answer is obvious.

When I spent $1,000 on software (when that was the last $1,000 in my bank account), I was forced to learn and build with that software to make that money back.

When I spent $3,500 on a course, I was forced to make the teachings work to make that money back.

When I moved into an $8,000/month apartment, I was forced to increase my income to make that feel comfortable, resulting in $100,000 extra per month in my bank account.

When I made $700K in 30 days from a product that had yet to be built, I was forced to do the best work of my life to build it.

For clarity and those who may benefit, the number was actually $687,886 in May 2023.

A few things happened:

• I created a 2-week-long cohort that was 4 calls long on one topic for $150
• Things like cohorts have scarcity baked in because there is an enrollment date
• I was increasing the price of another course at the time (more scarcity)
• I had the usual sales from my other products
• I used the strategy I will go over later to promote them
• I have a pretty large audience at this point in my journey, and it wouldn’t have been possible without putting 4 years of effort into that

This concoction led to the most money I’ve ever seen in one month.

(Side note: With digital products, you can build fast and do this often. It only took me 4-5 hours to build the cohort material above. With physical products, you have to build them as you sell or put a lot of time into product development, like when I launched my book. This is why I heavily test ideas with content and digital products first).

You’re okay with where you are because you won’t take the risk that forces you to a level you can’t fathom right now.

There’s a myth that floats around occasionally:

Goldfish grow to fit the tank you put them in. But if you keep them in a small bowl, they never grow.

In reality, smaller tanks lead to poor water quality and less room to move freely. So, it’s not that they never grow, it’s that they suffer and die. A slight but important difference.

This is similar to my concept of Tactical Stress:

The conscious decision to force yourself into a do or die situation – knowing that you have the skill to make it work – and have no choice but to overcome your fears. The result is a season of intensity that propels you into the next level of your life.

The purpose of tactical stress is to launch yourself into the unknown, the land of infinite potential. Because if you don’t, entropy takes hold and you slowly begin to drown and suffer until the pain is so great that you have to do it anyway.

When you launch into new situations that can change your life, you become overwhelmed with information.

It’s too much for your mind to digest.

So, you’re forced to be consumed by chaos or to create clarity.

You set a goal that is borderline impossible, make a single decision that forces you to step off the cliff, and turn the resulting stress into a potent fuel that allows you to outwork anybody else. This does a few things psychologically:

• Maintains Perspective – When you are in a do or die situation, you have no option but to focus on your goal. Distractions don’t register in your awareness, so you can’t fall to them.
• Creates A Deadline – Most deadlines don’t work because they aren’t real. If you spend money on something or accept money for something, you are forced to deliver. A real deadline is created.
• Narrows Focus – Survival mode puts you in a temporary state of stress. Stress narrows your focus on the task at hand, which allows you to survive. The only thing on your mind is achieving the goal you set out to achieve.
• Makes Life Enjoyable – Since your goal is top of mind, anything you experience is filtered to aid in that goal. The books you read, conversations you have, and content you consume all “magically” seem to help you. Dopamine floods your brain as pattern recognition gets pushed into overdrive.

If your life isn’t enjoyable or you aren’t making progress, maybe it’s time to take a leap.

This isn’t for everyone, but what’s really holding you back from starting a new life? Quitting your job? Not having a plan B?

Only give yourself 2 options: win or die. And if you understand that success is a result of skill and knowledge, not luck, I have trust that you’ll figure it out.

I don’t want to hear any excuses, because that’s just a prime example of a lack of skill. You can’t control your ego and use your brain to create your own path.

Fabricating Urgency – The Deep Work Routine Nobody Talks About

To start, this will not work unless you take full control of your life.

The reason you show up to a job every day is because your survival is at stake if you don’t. If you want to be free, you have to recreate this effect in your own work. Most people quit because they have nothing holding them accountable to continue writing, building, and selling toward their vision.

Everyone has a desire to be wealthy because they desire to do the work they want to do.

Yet, most people suppress this desire because they’ve been conditioned to believe they don’t stand a chance. Or they just feel guilty for making money because they grew up an environment – physical or digital – that had a terrible relationship with it.

The only reason I was able to do this was because I had full control over my time and income… because I had a business.

Some of these strategies can help you at work, but you need a business to fully leverage the asymmetric payoffs that come from taking risks.

A business gives you the creative boundaries to increase your income as much as you’d like. That isn’t possible at 99.99% of jobs, and I’m guessing you aren’t in the small minority that will make over $500K/year by working up the corporate ladder for 10-20 years when you can achieve that in 1-3 years of focused effort on building your own thing. I’ve had multiple friends and students make that amount in that timeframe by trusting the audience-building and digital product process I teach.

The question now is:

“What exactly do I do when I take a risk that forces me to survive?”

I’m going to walk you through the exact quarterly planning that led to me making the $700K in 30 days.

Repeat this as much as you’d like. You won’t make a ton of money in the first few rounds, but as your skill set and audience for your work grows, you will be surprised at what you are capable of.

0) How I Structure My Days

You’ve probably read about my routine before.

• I build new projects in the first block of each morning (right now it’s my next book).
• I write for the second block of each morning.
• I maintain different aspects of the business for the third block of each morning.
• I go on walks to clarify ideas and set intentions for my work in between blocks.
• I go to the gym as a hard cut-off time for my work.

I have a life to enjoy after work, so I know I have to get my work done in the time I’ve allotted myself in the morning.

It’s counterintuitive, but my health and life take priority over my work, and that makes my work more impactful.

I have to go to the gym at the same time so I can be free in the afternoons, so my work is naturally focused because of this.

1) Quarterly Projects

If you don’t sell your own product, you will be forced to sell someone elses.

There is a mind virus in the online space:

“It seems like everyone is selling something nowadays.”

“Look at this guy selling a product, he’s a sell out.” (I see this under many high level individuals posts).

“Ads ads ads ads.” (I saw this on Ali Abdaal’s promotion the other day).

Yes, silly, you need a product to earn an income. There literally is no other way. That’s how the economy works. Buying and selling. Sure, you can invest money, but where did you get that money? By playing a mechanical role in a company that sells a product and pays you a paycheck in return for your replaceable efforts. And if you don’t make a lot of money, good luck ever making anything substantial through investing.

Ignore the blind hypocrites and launch a product anyway.

Ever since I started my business, I’ve launched a new project every quarter. Why?

• It gave me plenty of ideas to write about relating to the product (because I was fleshing out the outline). I wrote most of the product as tweets and newsletters to test what ideas and marketing angles worked before I launched.
• Product launches are the most profitable part of your products timeline. Like a graph that shoots up fast, drops hard, and levels out at a certain number.
• I wanted to diversify my income streams. When you’re building an audience, one product can do well, but you wouldn’t bet on one stock to make you rich.
• I became more experienced and had something more valuable to launch each quarter. If you’re doing this whole business thing right, you should have something new and better than the competition that you should launch. This leads to a lot of people copying you to capitalize on your good ideas, but you still get most of the sales and reputation. Quarterly launches keep you on top.
• I don’t have to worry about being extremely successful with one launch because I know I’ll be iterating on it within 3 months.
• It gave me quarterly public deadlines to hit. I didn’t have to guess when my next project was going to launch (so I couldn’t get stagnant with my business). If I wanted my income to increase – rather than decrease – I had to launch a product to survive.

People often ask, “What is the one thing that helped you get so far ahead of other people in this space?”

I would confidently say it’s launching a project every quarter.

It built my authority, kept me focused, and prevented me from trying to fuel a dead product.

What kind of products can you launch in such a short time frame?

• Courses
• Cohorts
• Coaching
• eBooks
• Templates

You can build and test these fast. If one fails, that’s fine, build another. If it works, great, start building complimentary products and consider turning that idea into a business that demands more capital or resources. As an example, the success of 2 Hour Writer is what led to the idea of building Kortex. The idea is already validated with sales and engagement because the product and content that led to it were validated.

At the start, these should form the foundation of your brand and build cash flow. Don’t try to get complex with the products you create until you have the resources to do so.

Then, you can plan for bigger products like a software to launch in one of those quarterly spots, but still keep launching other things.

Now, you don’t need to launch an entirely new product. You can:

• Combine products into a bundle and launch that.
• Add a new module to a current product increase your prices – you would promote the price increase “launching” on a specific date.
• Run the same cohort over and over again each quarter. This is probably the simplest way to go about this. I would recommend having different topics for each cohort so you can attract customers with different needs.

By doing this every quarter, I could measure the impact and authority of my brand based on my revenue from the launch.

When I launched a freelancing product around 500 followers, I made around $3K. When I launched a branding product when I hit 10,000 Twitter followers, I made around $10K. 3 years later when I launched a writing cohort, I made $700K. People who only sell one product (and don’t improve it) end up marketing too hard and destroying their trust with their audience while making much much less in revenue.

There is a lot of nuance to product launches. We guide you through it all in the Builder tier of Kortex University.

The Lesson

Your deep work sessions are fueled by your quarterly product launches.

• Embrace procrastination at the start. You have time before the launch.
• Work on the product outline and plan for 1-2 months leading up to your launch.
• Set a public launch date. Set a first promotion date 3-4 weeks before that. Build the sales page to accept orders first. Execute the launch and get the product built.

If you read the last letter on The 12 Rules Of Creation, you understand that these projects are crucial for structuring your life and work. They are the single thing that move the needle toward your vision and goals. If you aren’t building, you’re dying.

2) Public Writing

In online business, you need three things:

1. An audience for your work.
2. A valuable product for that audience.
3. Good arguments to attract people to your audience and product.

Writing is the foundation of all three of those.

I want to harp on this again:

A valuable product for that audience.

If you own a business, this newsletter won’t bother you in the slightest because you are reading it through an enlightened lens.

If you don’t own a business, you may misinterpret or only read it from a one-sided viewpoint, especially if you have a bad relationship with money. You have to zoom out and realize that people buy products because they want them and benefit their lives. This isn’t only about making as much money as possible. It’s about solving a problem in someone’s life that is worth more than what you are asking.

And, I’d also ask you to zoom out and think about all of the useless products you buy that don’t benefit your life and ask yourself why you don’t apply that mindset to other areas. People will spend $100 on drinks without batting an eye (and destroy their health as an outcome), but won’t spend $100 on their skill development (that increases their earning capacity and therefore quality of life).

In 2 Hour Writer (gotcha), I teach the 3-point content ecosystem:

• Write tweets to test ideas.
• Write threads to expand on those ideas.
• Turn any of those into a newsletter to nurture your audience and promote your products.
• Use your newsletter to write new tweets and threads so you never run out of content ideas.

My friend Nick Verge asked about this process the other day. Here’s a screenshot if it helps see it from a big picture.

Writing is the necessary foundation of this strategy. I can’t tell you exactly what to do because I don’t understand your situation, but I can tell you what I do.

If you don’t have a lot of time on your hands right now, you won’t be able to do all of this, and that’s okay. You don’t need to for your first few product launches that replace your income.

• I write for 60-90 minutes every morning. I start with my newsletter and write social posts as the ideas come.
• I promote my newsletter once a day. I don’t post opt-in pages asking people to subscribe. I post the actual newsletter (as a blog post) so people can read it, get value, subscribe, and see the products I promote in the newsletter. This is how I get newsletter subscribers and sell my products whenever I am not launching a product.
• I focus my content during the product launch month. I will write about whatever I want for 2 months leading up to the launch, then write only about topics related to what I’m launching for the remaining month. (This is when I gain the most followers and authority… when I’m dishing out value and launching a product that shows my expertise.)
• I outline and build the product along the way, but am forced to actually finish it before the public deadline.

How do I stay consistent with writing?

Because I understand that if I don’t write, my audience won’t grow, and I won’t survive. I keep myself in a constant state of good pressure that wakes me up in the morning and gets me writing.

If my audience doesn’t grow, my product launch won’t do well, and I’m that much closer to getting a job. Plus, as you build projects, you have much more on the line. If I stop writing now, Kortex as a whole will die. I need money to build it. And I will not let it die.

Once it’s stable, I can take a break, but I’m going to start a new project so my life can remain meaningful and not become mechanical / boring.

Please note that writing isn’t the ONLY thing here. You have to understand how to grow on socials. You can’t just post content into the wind and pray it does well. I’ve talked about this before and will talk about it in next week’s letter.

3) Tactical Promotion

So far our deep work routine is structured as so:

• A public quarterly project that moves the needle toward our vision and goals. This creates a real deadline, but only if you charge for the value you are creating under a business.
• Daily writing to fuel the projects success by building a tiered audience. I write tweets and threads to attract the audience, funnel them to my newsletter, and promote my products after I’ve given enough value.

Now, I’m not a fan of heavy marketing and sales on social media.

I’m a fan of tactical promotions.

• I only promote my products on social media during the last week of launch. This keeps my profile clear of sales for all but 4 weeks out of the year. People like that and often compliment the fact that I’m not “pushy or salesy.”
• I have a soft promotion in each of my newsletters like you’ve seen above. That’s how I fuel previous products I’ve built outside of launches. I think people are tired of hard sales every day in their email and want a lot of value with the choice to buy something. They don’t want to feel forced.
• Leading up to the product launch, I promote more and more each week. Most of my income is made in the 1-2 days before launch because that’s when scarcity kicks in.

That’s my entire strategy.

That’s what holds me accountable to work and write every morning.

That’s how I’ve 80x’d (yes, that’s correct) my income since having a web design job 5 years ago.

If you quite literally plan for iteration and persistence and force yourself to do the work with proper strategies, failure is a myth.

Thank you for reading. Enjoy your weekend.

Dan

The post This Deep Work Strategy Made Me $700K In 30 Days (As A Procrastinator) appeared first on Dan Koe.

I don’t say this to sound arrogant.

But I’ve never had a problem with knowing what I want in the future.

When people say “I don’t know what I want,” what they’re really saying is “I don’t want to do the work it takes to get what I want.”

It’s not that you don’t know what you want. It’s that you know what you don’t want – meaning you know what you want – and are hiding from it it takes to get away from it.

I’ve always known what I wanted because it’s extremely simple to observe society and know what I don’t want:

• A job I hate
• Work I hate
• A body I hate
• A partner I hate
• A mind that hates me

From that alone, it’s easy to figure out what I had to do:

• Become an entrepreneur no matter how many times I fail (it took 7 failures)
• Gain the power to get rid of work I don’t want to do (writing on social media for leverage)
• Go to the gym and work on my nutrition
• Allow those 3 things to open up more opportunities in every domain of life
• Let that path create a peaceful mind from the progressive overload of responsibility. Weights feel lighter as you get stronger.

Everybody knows that some form of this path is what they are meant to do.

Your psyche craves actualization and transcendence. The depth of your being wants these things, but your ego is distracted by things it thinks it wants.

That’s the problem.

You don’t have a way to focus your mind.

You don’t have a plan for your future that has more gravity than the distractions in your life.

You struggle to maintain a long-term time horizon and get trapped in never-ending short-term stress-inducing tasks.

How would it feel to have one single framework that would determine the entirety of your success? One that you can refer to whenever you feel lost?

That’s what we are going to talk about.

The 12 Rules Of Creation

You need a plan. Because if you don’t have one, society does, and they’ve been planning your life for decades. – The Art of Focus

You’ve been assigned goals by society since the day you were born.

These goals went on to frame how you viewed the world.

You learned skills to achieve those goals. You registered opportunities in alignment with those goals. Everything you experience in life is through the lens of the conscious or unconscious goals guiding the systems being formed in your head.

If we want to build a life of meaning, money, and impact, we must pursue our ideal future, create a story worth telling, and pass down that path to those who are ready to receive it.

After a decade of dancing between creative success and failure, I’ve found a big-picture framework that will bring you success in anything you do.

These patterns can be found in marketing, sales, human behavior, peak performance, psychology, stories, games, the structure of billion-dollar companies, successful product development, and anything involved in the process of creating and distributing value.

You will be using this as a guiding light for your life, but I encourage you to meditate on how it can be applied to your business, relationships, and conversations.

Anti-Vision

We start our story with an anti-vision.

The bane of your existence.

The first polar end of the worldview you will cultivate.

A positive-fear mechanism that kicks you into action.

Your anti-vision is the future that you do not want to live.

Start a running note of experiences you do not want to repeat.

• The material you don’t care to learn.
• The work you don’t care to complete.
• The arguments you don’t wish to have.

You won’t get rid of them in an instant.

You are meant to identify them as problems to be solved.

Vision

If you don’t have a vision, you are lost.

You can’t create outcomes, so you are doomed to the mechanical living of determined outcomes.

Every decision you make in any domain of your life must be filtered through your vision.

That is how you bring meaning to your actions and minimize distractions.

Write down exactly what you want out of life.

Don’t miss a detail, but realize this is an iterative process.

You won’t get it right the first time around, and you probably never will. That’s not the point. Spend 30 minutes generating a minimum viable vision. Come back to it often to add, subtract, and improve as your desires inevitably change with your failures.

Mission

Your mission is the most important thing in your life.

It is the bridge between what you do and don’t want.

The path you are forging toward your vision.

Anything that does not align with your mission is to be treated as a distraction.

Your mission evolves with awareness of new beliefs, opportunities, and knowledge.

Your mission requires faith. You can’t see the next step unless you take the first. And once you do, the second may be completely different than anything you imagined.

Standards

You aren’t where you want to be because you are okay with where you are.

You don’t submit to your situation, you accept it so you can move forward.

Standards are absorbed from your environment.

• The friends you hang out with.
• The books you read.
• The media you consume.
• The parents who raise you.
• The teachers who knew it all.

It may be time to make a change and sit with the ramifications.

Goals

Big goals are for direction. Small goals are for clarity.

You don’t need motivation when the task in front of you is so stupidly simple that you can’t help but complete it.

Break down your vision into goals by decade, year, month, week, and day.

They are your guide, not your master.

Be stubborn with vision and loose with details.

Your goals will change as you do, be okay with that.

Projects

Learning comes from struggle, not memorization.

You need a series of tangible projects to build that will actualize your vision.

• Turn your goals into projects.
• Architect an outline.
• Determine milestones
• Set deadlines
• Map out areas of research.

Build, then learn. Start the project, expose your lack of knowledge and skill, and use that as a reference point for your education.

Education

You aren’t where you want to be because you aren’t as smart as you think you are.

With every project, there is a skill set and mindset required to complete the project.

Daily self-education must become a cornerstone habit in your life. If you stop learning, you stop evolving. Opportunities stop presenting themselves, and you get trapped in your current stage of development.

Education is the fuel for experimentation.

Limitations

A fool becomes rich at the expense of everything good in life.

A creative becomes rich at the expense of his choice.

Limitations on your goals force creativity.

The question is, what are you not willing to sacrifice to achieve your goals?

The creative challenge appears when you attempt to achieve a goal without betraying your vision.

You can become rich without sacrificing your family.

You can become healthy without sacrificing your work.

You can become valuable without sacrificing what makes life worth living.

Levers

Every day, you need priority tasks that move the lever toward your projects, goals, and vision from the ground up.

These are often perceived as boring fundamentals without the cultivation of a sense of mastery.

Do what needs to be done, but grip your vision as the anchor into the unknown. If you aren’t making progress, it’s because you aren’t moving levers, even if you think you are.

Writing is the main lever in my creator business (and almost any other modern business). This is what I teach in 2 Hour Writer, and what we help people that want personalized help and feedback with in Kortex University.

Challenge

When a novice plays against a master, neither has fun.

The novice becomes anxious while the master becomes bored.

When your skill is the perfect match for the challenge of a situation, the world goes quiet, and you move forward with grace.

Challenge is the source of enjoyment.

Enjoyment is found on the tightrope between boredom and anxiety. At the edge of your abilities.

The path to meaningful living is often found in a simple shift in perspective.

Curiosity

Be willing to steer off course and discover new potential.

It is too easy to lock ourselves in the mechanical routine we were trying to escape.

Be curious.

Dive deep into your interests.

Let few questions go unanswered.

Avoid getting locked into paradigms and beliefs that narrow your mind on one idolized path.

Your vision is like a battery. You must fuel it with experience, education, and misdirection.

Experimentation

If you only do the same thing as everyone else, you are bound to the results of everyone else.

• Research processes that others teach, the ones they have seen success with.
• Try multiple techniques to see which ones get you the best results.
• Create your own process that you can stay consistent with.

In fitness, try different training and nutrition programs. In relationships, try therapy or self-help books. In business, try cold outreach and organic content.

Avoid becoming dogmatic about the single right way. There is no right way, there is only your way, and that isn’t bound to stay the same as different levels of the game require different methods to complete them.

When you are lost, run through this process.

When your relationships are failing, run through this process. When your business won’t get off the ground, run through this process.

Every successful interaction with reality starts and ends with a clear image of the want, clarity on how to achieve it, and creative execution to acquire rare results.

Making Better Decisions

You aren’t where you want to be because:

• You didn’t make the choices that led to a purposeful career.
• You didn’t make the choices that led to fulfilling relationships.
• You didn’t make the choices that led to a healthy and aesthetic body.

You, right now, are the manifestation of your past choices.

So, if you want to take control of who you become, your choices are of utmost importance.

There are 2 things here:

1. Who you want to become – perspective and zooming out.
2. The choices that will take you there – perception and zooming in.

The good life is created by constant reminder of your vision and programming the identity that would actualize it through aligned action.

Better decisions come from perspective and perception.

Every day, zoom out and remind yourself of what you don’t want. You don’t need to focus on what you want, because that will make itself apparent through your choices.

Hold that frame at the top of your mind.

Do not allow distractions to penetrate it.

Any time a choice comes up, zoom out and align.

“Will this benefit the future I am trying to create?”

Then, be decisive. Make the decision.

Allow failure into your life so you can correct your behavior the next time around.

Awareness is a cure.

You don’t have to quit all of your bad habits. You just have to view them and their consequences through the lens of your vision for long enough.

Dan

The post Disappear And Come Back Unrecognizable (12 Rules To Change Your Life) appeared first on Dan Koe.

The fastest way to ruin your life:

Do what others want for you.

Never question what you’re told.

Take the route that seems safe on the surface, but is the least safe of them all.

Avoid the essence of life – trial and error – and close yourself off to the profound, the deep, and the meaningful.

The greatest mistake of all is not making any mistakes.

This is the life of the masses.

Bouncing around on the surface.

Only learning what they’re taught in school.

Only experiencing the same day over and over again.

Clock in, clock out, and fill the rest of your day numbing your mind from the thought of what will happen between tomorrow.

The path out of meaningless living is already available to you. Deep in your core.

We all have access to Nature’s Compass.

Nature’s Compass

If you don’t know what you want, you will be told what you want, and you will believe it. – The Art of Focus

How to do whatever you want:

Do what you want, but don’t ignore the consequences of your actions.

You have to do what you think you want to realize what you don’t want. You have to remove what you don’t want to do what you really want.

It is impossible to know with absolute certainty what is going to happen in the future.

This is why the masses flock to “secure” jobs and belief systems.

It’s an illusion of certainty to avoid struggle. You can’t skip making mistakes. Mistakes are your light in the dark. Mistakes reveal problems to be solved. Problems are the limits on your mind.

As Einstein said, “You can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created it.”

Most people skip that part.

They think they want a nice car, cushy job, and to travel the world – but once they do those things, the superficial shine fades fast.

They continue convincing themselves that’s the life they want, never evolve, never pursue anything deeper, and never get what they really want.

That is, they never get what their nature wants, not what their ego wants.

To get what you want out of life:

• Pursue what you think you want
• Realize what you don’t want
• Become aware of that problem
• Sit with it, study it, dissect it
• Expand your mind to see beyond it
• Solve the problem to evolve one level
• Repeat the process until you reach the essence of life itself

There is absolutely no set path that someone can give you to accomplish this.

People can give you direction with advice and tips, but they can’t act, think, or solve problems for you.

You don’t know what you want out of life because you haven’t tried anything.

You’re not getting results because you don’t have the skill required to get those results.

You don’t know what’s possible because you haven’t exposed yourself to the perspective that makes it possible.

What you want right now may be completely different tomorrow, or next month, or next year.

Nothing lasts forever. Meaning is found in endless problem-solving until you drill so deep you find what you are looking for.

This is normal. This is life.

The Macro Cycle Of Life – Why You Always Feel Lost

You feel lost because you don’t know what to do next.

You don’t know what to do next because you don’t have a goal.

You don’t have a goal (that you care about) because you aren’t aware of a problem that demands your focus.

Stop worrying about setting goals until you identify the next problem you want to solve in your life.

Life unfolds in chapters, phases, and cycles.

Your life is a story.

Your year is a story.

Your day is a story.

Each of them have a series of goals, problems, highs, and lows that may repeat themselves as time passes.

There is one macrocycle of life.

Once you understand it, you can identify which part of the story you are in, become aware of its components, and ease your mind until you enter the next phase.

The cycle is composed of 3 phases:

1. You feel lost. You don’t know what to pursue next. You’ve solved a problem, achieved a goal, and thought it was the end.
2. You become curious. You experiment with different topics, interests, and ideas until you become fully aware of the problem you want to solve.
3. You become obsessed. You dive deeper into the crevice of reality of your choice. You can’t stop learning and building toward your goal.

When you feel lost, you must force yourself to experiment in 2 directions:

1) Experiment Inward

Rest. Nap. Journal. Walk. Embrace silence.

Observe and deconstruct your thoughts.

Attempt to catch a signal of opportunity.

Follow your thoughts to a root problem.

2) Experiment Outward

Learn. Read. Scroll. Build. Try new things.

Refocus on the only things that matter in life.

Health, wealth, relationships, happiness.

Experiment with techniques that invest energy into a goal. Any goal.

During the experimentation phase, you are trying to accumulate new experience until your next quest becomes visible.

Like a video game, you are at a point where the quest isn’t unlocked, but you don’t have any other to pursue. You have to fumble around in the dark until you find a candle off in the distance.

Note: avoid labeling this as shiny object syndrome.

My business today is only possible because I tried and “failed” at 7 different business models. In reflection, those failures were periods of skill stacking, problem solving, and increasing my awareness surface area for the right opportunities.

Now, understand that there is no time limit for this phase.

It could last weeks, months, or years.

You must stick it out until you accumulate enough vision to stop going wide and start going deep.

When you find your obsession, experimentation doesn’t stop.

3) Experiment Downward

The secret is to try everything until you find that one thing that you can’t pull yourself away from. Then, once it becomes a normal part of your life, repeat the process.

When you find that one thing, go deep.

Learn everything you can about that domain.

Dissect all perspectives and avoid becoming dogmatic about one.

In nutrition, collect truth from veganism, keto, carnivore, Ray Peat, flexible dieting, and other ideologies until you are confident enough to create your own that is closer to truth. Truth is a process not a commandment.

In business, collect truth from e-commerce, freelancing, software, and other models until you note the principles that bring clarity to your own endeavors.

Self-experimentation is the only way to solve your problems for good.

People can diagnose and prescribe a solution to your problems, but that lacks regard for the difference in perspective, goals, and experience from those prescribing the solutions.

4) Experiment Upward

Persistence and iteration.

I’m assuming that once you’ve found your obsession you want to make it a consistent part of your life.

This means you must earn a creative income from that interest.

In today’s world, that means:

• Building a project to spread to help others solve their problems.
• Teaching in public to attract people with those problems.
• Selling your project so you can continue pursuing your obsession.
• Improving your project as you learn what can only be learned through feedback.
• Evolving to a new project when you’ve reached the level that can only be reached through business.

There are many ways to do this. Experiment.

But I can tell you with confidence, through my experimentation, that the creator economy is the “most true” model to follow considering human nature and the future of work.

The Digital Renaissance

We are living through a second Golden Age and it belongs to those who value:

• Self-education
• Self-experimentation
• Multidisciplinary study
• Digital leverage
• Skill acquisition
• Building your own thing

If you want to thrive, become a digital renaissance man.

Here’s what you do:

Join The New Society

Social media is not just an app on your phone.

It is a decentralized public school, marketplace, and podium but only for those who value personal responsibility. You aren’t forced to be a part of this society, and that’s why it’s important.

You no longer need startup capital to start a business.

You no longer need a job board to find a career.

You no longer need a publisher to launch a book.

You no longer need a record label to make music.

You no longer need formal education to become an expert.

You no longer need religious institutions to feed you meaning.

The centralized authority over learning, meaning, and earning is only a thing for those who are still asleep.

All you need is an internet connection, social media account, and the courage to teach, fail, improve, and persist.

I teach this in 2 Hour Writer & Digital Economics.

Become Valuable

Everyone tells you to become valuable but nobody tells you what value is.

Value is the relationship between what you do, why you do it, how you do it, and who benefits from that equation.

Value is composed of 4 parts.

• Problem – A limitation or challenge that creates pain when unsolved.
• Solution – An impactful end result that allows the recipient to evolve beyond the problem.
• Clarity – A creative system that breeds knowledge, skill, and awareness to bridge the gap between problem and solution.
• People – The amount of people that suffer from the problem, can benefit from the solution, and are ready to receive the clarity to act.

Value is experience exchange.

Value is the impact of your story.

So, to make a creative income, our job is to gain experience by solving the problems that prevent our evolution and pass down the condensed wisdom to those who are ready to receive it.

1) Unveil Problems With An Anti-Vision

It’s easier to know what you don’t want – from experience – than it is to know what you want – from imagination.

So, create an anti-vision for your future.

Keep a running note that you will add to as you observe life:

• What do you not want to look like?
• How do you not want to feel?
• What does your worst day look like?
• What qualities do you not want in your friends, customers, partner, and co-workers?
• How much money isn’t enough to survive?
• How does everything above spread into each area of your life and prevent you from doing what you want?

Hit on the things that matter. Health, wealth, relationships, and happiness. Those are the eternal markets in business. If you build a creative solution for a problem within those domains, you won’t have a problem making a living from your experience.

2) Identify Solutions With A Vision

You now have a plethora of problems to solve to gradually increase your value.

Pick one. Solve it. Move on to the next. Meaning is found not in the achievement of a goal, but in solving the endless string of problems that pull you deeper into the nature of reality.

Now, to increase your desire to solve it, create a vision for your ideal future.

Write out the opposite of everything you listed for your anti-vision.

Treat this as a Minimum Viable Vision. You will add to it with time. What you want will change as you do.

3) Learn & Build For Clarity

Don’t learn to build, build to learn.

You’ve chosen a problem you want to solve in your life. This could be related to fitness, finances, freedom, or anything else that is preventing you from living the life you want.

With that problem in mind, laser in on one big goal.

But remember, goals don’t start out magnetic. You probably don’t care about the goal.

You must invest energy into the goal until you feel as if you are wasting resources for not achieving it. Your goal must frame your perspective for enough time to register reasons to continue pursuing it.

You don’t develop an intrinsic philosophy in a day.

You develop it through conversations, reading, listening, and filtering reality until you stack enough “whys” to hold you accountable.

You will fail. That’s the only way to identify what you need to learn next.

When you do fail, reframe it immediately as a knowledge gap.

Use the failure as a new frame to filter your experiences for answers.

4) Attract People With Your Story

Be a failure.

Launch the project to a crowd of crickets. Publish your thoughts and get called a fool. Start the venture and watch people criticize your first moves.

Everyone else did it. You aren’t a special case.

Invest in your portfolio of failures until you can afford to succeed.

Your portfolio of failures is your story.

Like a movie, people are interested more in the lows than the highs.

You attract people and profit to you when you have the solution to a problem in your life.

Distribute Your Value

The greatest skill is writing because:

• It forces you to articulate your value
• It is the foundation of all media
• It can be repurposed into any other medium
• Any other skill you acquire enhances it
• It brings immense mental clarity

Learn to write.

It takes time to realize that writing is the highest leverage work.

You must synthesize your value into impactful ideas that live in the heads of others rent free and influence their thoughts and behaviors.

You do this by writing emails, content, guides, and products with persistent and iterative effort.

Writing is the foundation of communication.

Communication is how you distribute value.

Distributing value is how you attract people.

If you don’t attract people, you will never have someone else in the value exchange process.

This isn’t a job where someone hands you a paycheck for completing mechanical tasks that will be replaced.

This is a purpose that must be shared by another in order to earn a creative income.

I’ve discussed this in previous letters, please go search for them, or we walk you through it inside Kortex University to become a synthesizer in 16 weeks.

Thank you for reading this letter.

I hope it helped.

Dan

The post Most People Are Lost (How To Ruin Your Life, Fast) appeared first on Dan Koe.

Block out 1 hour a day.

Work on 1 meaningful project.

Aim for 1 vision for your future.

Take it 1 day at a time.

You don’t need more motivation, you need more clarity.

You don’t need more time, you need more focus.

This letter will teach you to unlock insane focus on command.

Most people think they need to work like a millionaire to achieve their goals.

But most people don’t understand how most millionaires work.

Two examples:

The first, Sam Altman from OpenAI

Second, Tej Dosa. A low-key copywriter who writes great X content:

Third, myself.

So no, you don’t need any more time than you already have.

Everyone starts somewhere. People don’t start with a fake millionaire routine. They start with what they have.

Aside from building new projects, I’ve rarely worked more than 4 hours a day.

Especially when I was starting out and had other responsibilities.

I had 1-2 hours a day and a bit more on my days off.

The entrepreneurs who work more make that choice, often at their own psychological expense.

Productivity is like fitness and you wouldn’t train 8 hours a day with no food or sleep and expect to make progress.

There are 2 types of work:

1. Building – when you are building the foundation of something new. Like a product, service, or brand. This requires a lot of upfront work.
2. Maintenance – when you are fueling the foundation you’ve built with a streamline productivity system. Like writing content, marketing yourself, building an audience, or fulfilling on your product or service. This requires 1-4 hours a day depending on your skill level or choice of work.

People trying to change their life or quit their job often get discouraged at the amount of work it takes to build.

They can’t zoom out and realize that once it’s built, your work decreases drastically.

Focus compounds.

You become better at what you do with time.

Like learning to walk, it’s difficult at first. It takes more time to walk from where you are to where you want to be.

But as you try, fail, and let your self-corrective mind rewire new neural pathways you can walk there as fast as you want… or just sprint.

If you want my complete philosophy for focused living, grab my book The Art Of Focus.

Focused work is only one part of changing your life.

Your Mind Is A Supercomputer Running The Game Of Life

Your mind is a supercomputer.

Your attention is the RAM.

Thoughts, regrets, and tasks are the programs slowing your performance.

Writing, mindfulness, and focus are the reboot you can access at any time.

RAM — or “random access memory” — is one of the most important parts of a computer, it determines performance.

The more RAM you use up with different programs running, open browser tabs, and the performance requirements of what you have running, the slower your performance will be.

This is no different from your focus, what you hold in your conscious attention.

Humans can process 50 bits of information per second. That adds up to 125 billion bits of information in your lifetime.

Most people live with multiple high-demand programs running that are draining the limited creative energy they have.

• Thoughts about regretful past mistakes
• Thoughts about stressful future happenings
• Desires of hunger and entertainment to escape those thoughts
• An internal cry to break out of their conditioned way of living
• A list of mixed-priority tasks that need to be finished
• Open loops of tasks they were supposed to complete but forgot about

The list goes on and on.

The modern mind has its attention split in infinite directions by default.

We go about our lives stressed and near sickness. Rather than living in the present with singular focus and a worry-free mind, we are the opposite. Living in a false reality created by split attention.

When we hold too much of the past or future in the contents of our consciousness, chaos ensues. The mind tends toward disorder. If not kept in check, we lose the sense of control over our lives that leads to enjoyment. This is accomplished through controlled consciousness.

Psychic Entropy: The Danger Of Distractions

Entropy is the supreme law of the Universe.

Without getting too complicated, if you don’t attempt to maintain order in a system by putting energy into solving problems, that system will decline into chaos.

If you don’t put effort into maintaining your bookshelf, books will end up all over your house, at your friend’s house, and small-scale chaos will ensue.

If you don’t put effort into the system of cleaning your room, it will slowly get dirtier and dirtier until you live in a disgusting nest of filth.

This is the state of most people’s minds.

A disgusting nest of filth.

Psychic entropy is the natural process of your psyche (or mind) tending toward chaos and disorder.

You aren’t productive because you don’t have clarity.

You aren’t productive because you focus on one distraction, don’t correct yourself, and slowly become overwhelmed by the chaos in your mind.

Distractions are the problems in your productivity system that must be solved if you want to unlock laser focus.

There are 2 ways to identify distractions and correct yourself:

Boredom and anxiety.

If the challenge of the task you are completing is too low for your skill level, you will get bored.

If the challenge of the task you are completing is too high for your skill level, you will get anxious.

The boredom stems from self-centeredness.

Your focus breaks, a new desire pops into your head, and related thoughts start to fill your attention.

If you are bored of the task, you will start thinking of better things you could be doing.

The anxiety stems from self-consciousness.

Your focus turns inward and negative thoughts flood your mind about how you aren’t good enough.

If you look in the mirror and spot a pimple, that is going to be on your mind for the rest of the day. It will impact every other area of your life.

The RAM of your mental supercomputer will be consumed by rogue programs until your performance suffers as a whole.

The chaos induced by boredom or anxiety can only be cured with clarity.

You must refocus your mind not only on the task in front of you, but on the ideal outcome of your life as a whole.

When you have the skill and knowledge that matches the challenge of a task, life becomes a video game of quests that you love to play.

The 4-Hour Workday – Creating Your Productivity System

Humans find meaning in stories.

Humans love playing games.

Why?

Because they present a clear hierarchy of goals that our mind can adopt as an indistractable frame.

They follow the curiosity > intensity > consistency cycle of the Universe.

First you’re lost. Then you’re curious. Then you’re obsessed. Then it’s a consistent part of your life with little extra effort.

Most people get lost, focus on distractions, and never put effort into a goal (even if they don’t see the meaning in it yet) to reverse the hole they’re digging themselves into.

Understand that nothing is perfect.

Like a story, you will experience lows, but those are what allow the highs to exist. Success doesn’t exist without failure.

Like a video game, you will have to progress from beginner to advanced by completing a series of quests to level up. It will take time.

If you want maximum enjoyment and focus in your work, these guidelines will help you create a hierarchy of goals for your productivity system.

The longer you stick with it, the more potent it becomes.

Identity – Solving Productive Problems

Ever since I can remember, I’ve always had the goal of working 4 hours a day.

A 9-5 job was the bane of my existence.

• I observed society and realized the life I didn’t want
• I observed the successful and realized the life I did want

Over time, this perspective shaped my identity.

I was attached to that desire.

Most people tell you desire is bad, but in my eyes, it’s only bad if the desire is bad.

Your goals are the axis of your suffering, and you get to choose what you suffer for.

Perspective is everything.

It allows you to identify problems and opportunities that (when solved) result in achieving the goal of that perspective.

It was an automatic decision to get to where I am today.

Anything that threatened my 4-hour workday was noted as a problem.

I was able to spot opportunities like social media, digital products, and audience building to solve those problems.

Most people have an identity and perspective shaped by society, with the goals of society, so they never identify and solve problems that lead to abnormal results.

Project – Building Out Your Potential

Your identity is shaped by your vision for the future.

Your vision is the all-encompassing goal you are pursuing in your life. It is at the top of your hierarchy. Everything falls under it.

Now, you need a project that will move the needle toward that future.

You need something to build that will expose you to problems you must solve.

You need clarity for your work so you have something to anchor your attention.

And if you read the last letter, you understand that building a project is the best way to learn new knowledge and skills.

1. Create an outline – braindump everything you know that should be built in the project. You will add to this outline as you build.
2. Create milestones – break the project down into manageable goals you can achieve in 1-4 hour work sessions depending on your current responsibilities.

What should your project be?

I can’t tell you that.

But it should probably be a business as that’s the vessel for your purpose. It is the catalyst for the good life that breaks you out of robotic living. Entrepreneurship is modern survival, and your psyche is wired to hunt. You aren’t meant to be a monkey in a cubicle.

Along with that, your health and relationships are important projects that enhance your business results.

Deadlines – The Procrastinators Edge

You aren’t productive because you aren’t public.

Another point for building an internet business on social media. The flow-state requirement of challenges and deadlines is baked in.

When I set a launch date for a product and accept pre-orders, once the first person pays, I have to build the product before the deadline.

It doesn’t matter how good or bad it is.

I can improve it after the fact that it’s actually out and I did something with my life.

Another thing:

Procrastination isn’t bad. It’s human nature.

Most successful entrepreneurs are lazy.

They wait until the last minute to get work done.

But during that last minute, they enter the most enjoyable season of their lives. Their mind becomes a magnet for ideas. Their best work happens in these periods of obsession and intensity.

They don’t have a choice, their survival is at stake.

Timeblocks & Breaks – Managing Your Focus

Focus is a muscle, and success is reserved for those who train it. – The Art Of Focus

Identity, projects, and deadlines narrow your attention.

Timeblocks take that one step further, making it easy to get into flow.

Set a timer for 45-90 minutes.

Focus with intensity.

Then, take a break.

Go on a walk. Eat. Watch some YouTube. Play a video game. I don’t care what you do.

Your focus is finite. You need to take rest between your sets.

Personally, I write for two 60 minute time blocks. That is what builds my entire business.

Leverage – Doing The Right Things

I’m going to save you a lot of pain:

Choose a career that allows for a 4-hour workday.

Start a one-person business. Become a value creator. Use the internet to do what you love.

Learn the skills that allow for this.

Evolution is the process of solving problems that reverse entropy.

Labor work and long work days are a massive problem. People hate it. So, social media, the internet, and artificial intelligence were born.

AI will solve the problem of overwork. Potentially in this lifetime (especially if we solve the problem of aging).

Now, your work sessions for the day should consist of 3-9 lever-moving tasks that build out your project.

Some people can handle more, some less. I help you structure this in the FOCI planner.

Routine – Becoming Efficient

You have a routine.

Even if your routine is “no routine.”

We discuss this in The Daily Routine That Changed My Life.

Routines are how you condition your mind to run on new systems.

If you want to solidify a new identity, you must start, refine, and stick to a routine.

For the first month, building your project will feel uncomfortable.

You’re supposed to feel overwhelmed. It means your mind is expanding into a new identity.

Slowly, then all at once, everything flows with ease.

You begin making exponential progress.

You move from intensity to consistency and let the results compound.

Rest – The Secret Of The Greats

“The clever man may work smarter, not harder, they say, but the creative man doesn’t work at all.” — Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

I’ve always had some form of aversion toward Western work culture.

• 80-hour work weeks.
• High-pressure environments.
• Little time for rest and recovery.

It never seemed “right” to me.

Why would I want to waste my entire day, knowing that 2-3 hours in my work quality would suffer?

This has been a talking point for a long time now. I believe it has started to shape the creator economy and remote work.

Ancient Romans, Ancient Greeks, Steve Jobs, Charles Darwin, and an infinite list of visionaries, strategists, and innovators attributed their success to surprisingly low “work” times.

Writers from multiple domains, like Hemingway and Tarantino, would spend the majority of their days lounging by the pool, spitting game with girls, and doing everything aside from what they deemed “work.”

Work for 1-4 hours.

Then, stop.

This is arguably the most difficult part of your day.

At the end of my work sessions I go to the gym as a “transition” into rest.

This allows the Default Mode Network to kick in. My subconscious begins to munch on problems related to the work.

When I get back to my morning focused work, I have the rest and creative resources needed to make those 4 hours more potent than those fatiguing their mental muscle beyond belief.

I hope you enjoyed this letter my friends.

Dan

The post How I Unlock Insane Focus On Demand (The 4 Hour Framework) appeared first on Dan Koe.

You need a routine.

And if you think you don’t, you may not realize that you already have a routine that was assigned to you by society.

Or your “routine” is not having a routine.

Without rules, there is no game.

Without a game, there is no winning.

A routine contains the rules for how you live your life.

The longer you play, the better you get, and you often forget the rules and win anyway.

Now is the time to stop playing the game society told you to play and start playing your own.

A powerful routine, no matter how long, prevents overwhelm as you progress toward your goals.

Most people are progressing toward the goals that were given to them.

They are progressing the dreams of someone else rather than their own.

Without a routine that you created, your life will slowly fall – faster and faster – down a chaotic hole into a life of responsibilities, work, people, and a personality that you despise.

Routines are comfortable.

The mind craves order, and routines allow you to focus your attention to make action seamless.

This is why working a job “sucks,” but not enough to make you quit and pursue something that sucks more until it sucks less.

Life is suffering, and we have the ability to choose our suffering every day.

Your goals are the axis of your suffering, and most people are pursuing goals that aren’t their own. Their suffering doesn’t bring fulfillment.

Reversing Local Entropy With Identity Change

The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else. – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

You don’t need motivation or discipline when you are the person who would take certain actions.

A bodybuilder doesn’t need motivation to eat healthy.

A gamer doesn’t need discipline to stare at a screen all day.

A writer doesn’t need motivation to synthesize ideas.

An employee doesn’t need discipline to show up to work.

They do it because their survival is at stake.

Not physical, but mental.

Animals survive the information in their genetic code.

Humans survive the information in their consciousness.

The information we are exposed to as children and throughout our lives programs our minds to run on certain systems.

A system, in brief, is the process of reaching a goal (this can get extremely complex).

So, our identity is a web of conscious and unconscious goals that determine the skills we acquire, the interests we learn, and the choices we make in alignment with those goals.

You are already acting toward layers of unconscious goals every second of the day. They’ve been conditioned to the point of not requiring conscious thought. You wake up, walk, brush your teeth (maybe), and put on your clothes so that you aren’t seen as an outcast. These are all skills that you have developed as a human with the goal of fitting in and surviving in society.

This goes deep. The social matrix of goals creates humans that all operate in a similar fashion. With a slightly different goal of society, we could all be walking around naked and communicating with each other by tapping people on the head with a stick. Biological goals clearly influence this.

When we do not have clarity on how to achieve a goal, our mind becomes disordered. We become overwhelmed, anxious, and narrow-minded.

Our mind declines into chaos.

This is known as entropy. Entropy is Universal. It doesn’t only apply to things like buildings that fall apart with time unless maintained. The structure of your mind, or identity, is an invisible building.

You reverse entropy by making a goal conscious, creating a path to achieve it, and focusing your attention on priority actions that bring results as feedback.

The priority actions include daily education and practice that expose you to the information that creates an identity.

We will talk about how to master new skills quickly in a future letter, but for now, understand this:

You need a plan.

There isn’t any other way.

Because if you don’t have one, society does, and they’ve been planning your life for decades.

If you don’t set your own goals, acquire the skill necessary to take on the challenge, and forge your own path – your destiny will be manhandled by society and you won’t even realize it.

Nobody wants to wake up 40 years later wondering where the time went.

The 4 Pillars Of The Good Life (How To Reverse Entropy)

Becoming multi-dimensionally jacked is the path to the good life.

All of these domains of life are interconnected systems that create who you are and reverse entropy in your mind. Tiny improvements are what create an ordered mind.

By adopting a daily habit for each pillar of your life, success becomes inevitable.

My question to you:

If you aren’t building your mind, body, business, and relationships every single day – what are you doing?

Genuine question.

Is there anything more important than that?

Or is everything you do now a distraction?

“But Dan, I want to enjoy myself and do what I want.”

Do you understand what enjoyment is when compared to pleasure?

Do you realize that human psychology has been mapped over the course of evolution to show that humans have an innate drive to grow, expand, transcend, and create?

Enjoyment is found in progress.

“Doing what you want” is often the ego ending the train of thought that would lead to you improving yourself – because that’s what your nature wants.

You can truly do what you want when you peel back the layers of what you think you want.

I’m not going to give you a super scientific approach to habit formation.

I’m going to give you the only real way to make behavior change seamless with time:

1) Align Your Future With A Holistic Goal

Goals can’t exist without the awareness of a problem.

Goals and problems create a frame for your perspective.

Your perspective determines what information you perceive as important.

A person who has money problems and the goals of society will see a new job opportunity as important.

A person who has money problems and self-generated goals will see a promising business opportunity as important.

Both people will read a book and interpret it in a different way.

One will store information in their mind that is conducive to their goals and solves their problems.

The first step to changing your life is to become brutally aware of the problems that make you want to change your life.

If you’re reading this, then you obviously have problems, everybody does.

The big problem is a lack of awareness of your problems.

Sit and become negative for a while.

Let your mind run wild to create an anti-vision for your future.

What is the worst-case scenario if you continue with the same mental, physical, financial, and relational actions you are taking?

Then use that as a place to toss an anchor into the future.

Create a big, vision-generating goal that encapsulates each domain of life.

Next, we will bridge the gap between where you are now with where you want to be with self-education and skill acquisition.

2) Treat Daily Self-Education As An Absolute Necessity

Schools are necessary in many cases, but they teach you a microscopic fraction of reality.

They train you into a compartment of reality – like chemistry, physiology, or literature – and lack regard for the holistic interconnectedness that breeds true intelligence.

Without self-education, you go through life with the same narrow identity and perspective as everyone else.

Education expands your mind.

It introduces you to novel perspectives.

It increases dopamine in the brain as a consistent source of energy.

It gives you the knowledge to act with clarity toward your goals.

Over time, education conditions your mind to run on new systems.

If you were to only immerse your mind in information that taught you how to build a profitable business, you would.

It took you 18+ years to shape your actions with education from your parents, friends, and schools – it’s going to take a few years to shape your actions with information that you curate.

3) Acquire The Skillset Necessary To Achieve Your Goals

The difference between where you are and where you want to be is skill.

This is a fact.

You don’t have the results you want because you aren’t the person with the skill that would get those results.

The only thing that can stop you is getting distracted to the point of falling off the path.

Skills can be trained.

Learning to walk and speak are arguably the most complex skills you’ve ever learned. They are more complex than building a billion-dollar company.

The thing is, you didn’t have a mind chained by limits that you were taught by people who didn’t break through their own.

With this, you need 2 things:

1. A 30-60 minute self-education habit – read, buy courses, listen to podcasts, and acquire ample knowledge that provides you the capability to act.
2. A 30-60 minute building habit– apply your knowledge in reality and experiment with what you learn. Get feedback and iterate until success.

Learning comes from struggle, not memorization.

When you build in the real world and hit a wall, a problem is created.

You may or may not become aware of the problem depending on your skill and experience (this is what prevents most people’s progress, they blame their lack of progress on anything but their own ability).

The problem sits in your subconscious mind to filter the information you get from your self-education.

As you repeat this process of education and building, for 1-5 years, you will be awestruck by how far you come.

The Daily Routine That Changed My Life

My current daily routine is as follows.

I will provide the reasons and whys behind each of these parts of my routine.

This is an important point:

Every aspect of your routine should be intentional.

Intention = what you are stretching towards.

The more reasons or whys you can stack behind your actions, the easier it becomes and the more beneficial it is to a great future.

You discover these reasons or whys by having a goal to apply your self-education to.

If I want to commit to a gym habit, self-education around habit formation and the gym will give me the reasoning necessary to do so – if and only if I am building in reality.

Please note that this routine may not be feasible for you now.

Please also note that this was the process of years of experimentation to find what I deemed enjoyable and conducive to my desired future.

I encourage you to take bits and pieces to experiment with in your own life until you can create a routine that fits you.

1) 30-minute morning walk.

First thing in the morning, around 6am, I get outside no matter the weather or how I feel.

I will either listen to educational material or plan out my day on my phone.

I aim for 15-20,000 steps a day because of the stacked benefits it brings to my life. Walking is one of those activities that requires minimal effort but brings maximum results.

Walking clears my mind, wakes me up, gets me away from distractions, acts as a creativity block in my day, keeps me lean, keeps me healthy, keeps me (slightly) tan, and reverses most of the damage done by sitting under life-sucking blue light.

Note: I am experimenting with slowing down my mornings even more contrary to most entrepreneur advice of “getting straight into work.”

For the past few days, I have been doing 30 minutes of meditation followed by 30 minutes of reading (Psycho Cybernetics right now).

I walk enough throughout the day.

2) 90 minutes of focused work.

I have a list of recurring tasks and levers that I execute every morning.

This is when I write (books, newsletters, content, and marketing material).

I stack all of my priority tasks in this work block so I can complete them before most people wake up.

This allows me to gradually introduce entropy into my day as work becomes less structured.

I teach how to become a digital writer in 2 Hour Writer.

3) 30-minute run or walk.

Three times a week I run for 30 minutes.

I do this to reap the benefits of the general 150 minutes of zone 2 cardio a week (I consider my excessive walking to fill in the rest).

I’ve personally noticed that running improves my focus, stress tolerance, body composition (less water, more vascularity), and allows me to sleep at night knowing I “did the hard thing.” I hate running.

On all other days I walk, listen to educational material, and collect ideas in my phone (using Kortex) to channel into my creations and products.

4) 90 minutes of focused work.

After my run, I shower, eat breakfast, and sit back down to work.

During this block, I do less creative tasks.

I’ll help with administrative work, client work, and introduce myself to people-oriented things.

This is when open loops and distractions start to take over, but not so much that they can’t be mitigated by another walk.

I break down my deep work morning routine here.

5) Take calls and/or another walk.

If you’ve been following me for a while, this is a new block.

I used to despise calls and removed them from my days.

With Kortex, this isn’t possible. I had to accept that.

I want Kortex to succeed more than I don’t want to take calls, therefore I want to take calls.

Most days, I work 4-5 hours. (Even with my excessive workload, I am still close to The 4 Hour Workday philosophy I have which I talk about in my book.).

These calls include client calls, internal company calls, design calls, and product calls spread out throughout the week.

If I don’t have to be at my desk, I will take these calls on yet another walk.

6) Go to the gym.

By now, it is around 1-2pm.

This is the turning point in my day from work to rest.

I know that I won’t be able to operate at my best after the gym, so I treat this as a work cutoff time.

I train every day, so not rest days unless my body needs it (please don’t reply with your latest and greatest training ideology).

Of course, with Kortex, the book launch, and everything else on my plate, I may have work spillover during this phase of my life.

7) A long conversational lunch.

I keep an extremely small social circle.

I’ve had many contacts in the past, but it has always subtracted from my life rather than adding to it.

After the gym, I get lunch with my good friend and decompress.

8) Take a nap, walk, read, or finish busy work.

By now it’s 3-4pm.

Things are getting boring now so I will spare you, but this part of my day is crucial for psychological recovery.

If you train your body in the gym, you need to recover.

If you train your mind with work, you need to recover.

Different domains, same Universal pattern.

9) Go to dinner or spend time with my girlfriend.

I love nice dinners.

It’s a bad habit (sort of, nice dinners are much healthier than fast food, and I don’t order the most calorie-dense things on the menu).

Most nights I’ll go out to dinner with a close friend or spend the night in watching shows and catching up with my girlfriend.

That’s my entire day.

It is comprised of intensity, consistency, curiosity, learning, building, mind, body, business, relationships, and the rest that create my future self and lifestyle in real-time.

Of course, this daily routine is subject to change if there is an event in my life.

I do other things throughout the week.

This is just the default that I fall back to.

I hope you enjoyed this letter.

Use the information as you will.

Dan

The post The Daily Routine That Changed My Life (4 Focus Habits) appeared first on Dan Koe.

I was observant as a child.

I knew there had to be a better way of living.

It seemed like every corner I looked… people were unhappy.

Unhappy with their careers, boss, spouse, children, colleagues, self, mornings, nights, everything.

This may just be the environment I was exposed to or what my mind gravitated towards, but something made me want to avoid this “default” lifestyle like the plague.

Complaining about the cards I was dealt wasn’t going to change my future.

Taking matters into my own hands was the only option.

Personal responsibility, self-education, and the pursuit of sovereignty is what I dedicated my sub-20-year-old life to.

If everyone was told to watch the news, go to college, get a job, retire at 65, and do as they’re told — would that not lead to everyone getting the same results?

Is that not the cause of this global unhappiness?

There was only one option: Do the exact opposite of everyone else.

While everyone glued their eyes to the TV, I drowned my mind in the information from people who were doing what I wanted to do, creators (who actually had results for it unlike most professors who teach something they’ve never done, they are taught to teach, not do).

While everyone sat on the couch after work, I went to the gym straight after school.

While everyone let toxic mainstream news flood their mind, I read books on spirituality and actualizing my full potential.

Before we begin:

The Art Of Focus Keepsake Edition price increases in 3 days. It comes with:

• The Keepsake Hardcover – we are only printing 2000 copies.
• The digital download of the book so you can be the first to read.
• The audiobook version when it is recorded and uploaded.
• The FOCI Planner to deconstruct your ideal future into priority tasks.
• The FOCI Coin to remember to act with intention.
• The Digital Transformation Center with 12 hours of modern entrepreneurship training.
• The Private Community for updates, discussion, and networking.
• A private invitation to an in-person event in Phoenix, AZ next year.

Preorder your copy here before October 24, 2023.

And a special shoutout to Jack Moses for seeing how the newsletters pieced together to create a cohesive book on The Universe, lifestyle design, creating your ideal self, and finding purpose in modern business (when it seems full of sleazy marketing on the surface).

The Bane Of My Existence: The Conventional Career Path

One thing that I was truly excited to do was go to college. I knew that it would give me a chance to let me try new things, meet new people, and ultimately:

Delay the amount of time I had to build a sustainable income source for myself.

The minute that I set foot on the ASU campus I knew that I had started a timer.

It was do or die.

I had to learn the skills necessary to make an income without a job, or end up the same as everyone else. If I had to get a job, I knew that 8-hour days and energy-draining work would leave little room for me to break free of that job.

I was hell-bent on trying different business models.

In freshman year, I started a fitness YouTube channel with my buddy who lived in the dorm room 3 doors down from mine.

We made workout videos, educational videos, and food challenges (my 10,000 calorie challenge video got around 20,000 views which excited me).

After a few months, we decided to call it quits. I didn’t do much else during freshman year aside from partying, playing video games, taking graphic design, marketing, film, and other classes to see what I was truly interested in.

Around that time, my group of friends and I were arrested for smoking weed in the parking structure across from our dorm building. I got to take a ride with the not-so-kind police officer, give him my fingerprints, and have him interrogate me about where I got the weed (funny story that we’ll dive into another time).

This is an important turning point in my life. I had forgotten about my goal of avoiding the conventional career path. When I went home for the summer, I got a letter from the court in the mail that gave me 2 options:

1. Go to court, defend my case, and possibly be a convicted felon
2. Pay $5-$10,0000 for a program that made me pee in a cup every week for 3-6 months.

This scared the crap out of me. I hid the letter from my parents and dealt with my emotional turmoil in silence.

This was the moment I purchased The Power Of Now by Eckhart Tolle. I glued my eyes to the page hoping it would ease some of my suffering — and it did. This was one of the times when I genuinely stopped caring. I let go. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen.

I regained that drive to blaze my own path, started making YouTube videos again (talking head videos, kind of like Elliot Hulse at the time), and continued learning about spirituality along the way.

As with every other business model I tried, it didn’t work out.

Failing, Failing, and Failing Again

In my sophomore year of college, I picked up photography. I watched YouTube videos like mad to educate myself, used my summer job money to buy a camera, and shot pics of whatever I could. Skyscrapers downtown, landscapes after a long hike, macro shots of nature.

I didn’t really care for taking pictures, what I really loved was editing. That realization shot me down a Photoshop learning rabbit hole and come junior year of college I committed to posting some of my edits on Instagram.

I spent 6-8 hours at a time glued to my computer working to actualize a surreal image I had in my head. These were some of the results:

Most of these were just mashups of stock images, some had my own photos (like the buildings and plane).

I never planned to make an income from this — but I ended up gaining around 2,500 followers on Instagram. I got bored of the whole digital art thing after a few months, but it taught me the importance of graphic design, visual storytelling, and opened my mind to the possibility of growing on social media with quality content.

If I had the awareness I do now, I could have easily created a course teaching people how to make these compositions.

That same year, I tried a few more business models.

1) A Facebook Ads Agency

I bought a course that taught me the fundamentals of landing clients, creating Facebook ads, and advertising local businesses.

I gave up after sending around 50 cold emails and never landing a client after 2-3 sales calls.

Looking back, this taught me about funnels and direct response marketing. A key component to making any business work. I just didn’t have the patience.

2) A Rave Clothing Dropshipping Store

I went to my first rave and was exposed to the whole EDM scene in my sophomore year (hence my obsession with dubstep for focused work and gym music). I knew the industry like the back of my hand and knew there was a demand for fancy (and skimpy) clothes. Especially during “festival season.”

I bought an eCom course that taught me branding, copywriting, Shopify, and how to find “good products.”

I used my previous Facebook ads knowledge, spent about $100 on ads, and made one sale of a shiny bra (lol).

The first online dollar felt amazing, but I felt like a piece of garbage having people wait 30 days for the product to be shipped from China.

My skills were starting to stack.

I had a solid understanding of design, marketing, copywriting, sales, and branding. Things started to make sense.

3) Freelance Web Design

This is where things get spicy. At this time — in senior year — I was living with 6 other guys in an old frat house. Yes… 6 guys in one house. There were 2 master bedrooms that people split.

Sometimes I miss those days. There was always something interesting going on. A truly unique group of people that all got along.

I took an introduction to web development course that launched me into an entirely new phase of life. I fell in love with coding. I skipped class, studied Udemy courses, took free coding classes, and ended up learning the entire college course curriculum in about a month. I didn’t show up to 95% of the classes and was still top of that class.

This taught me the absolute necessity of a self-education habit for those who want to do their own thing in life.

Deep study and deep work have to be a daily thing. You can’t skip it. The only other option is to be assigned distractions or the work of others to fill that time.

Part of the reason I loved coding so much is that I knew I could freelance with that skill and at minimum get a high-paying job whether I graduate or not. The tech industry was rather lenient when it came to needing a degree.

I tried my hand at freelancing, reached out to friends and family, built some portfolio sites, and landed a few cheap clients (I made around $500 total).

That was senior year — my time was running out.

I had to make something work or succumb to my fate of “getting a real job.”

4) Two Ecommerce Brands

I decided to combine my branding, web development, graphic design, and advertising skills into one and create a real brand.

I knew that developers were stuck at a screen all day — and this is around the time blue light glasses were gaining mainstream popularity — so I called my dad.

“Hey pops… question for ya… can I uhhhhhh borrow a few thousand dollars? I promise I’ll pay you back, here’s my entire plan for getting rich, makes sense right?”

My dad probably thought I was insane, but he believed in me, something I am truly grateful for — not many have this opportunity. I couldn’t waste it.

I looked for the perfect product, ordered them, waited 30 days for them to show up, took product pictures, and started paying for ads and influencer shoutouts.

Here’s one of my ad images:

Yes. That’s a hedgehog. His name was Momo. Very cuddly despite his spiky demeanor. He ended up getting sick — and after multiple efforts to syringe feed him to health — he passed away.

RIP Momo.

The glasses were great. I was proud of the product. But I was just shoveling money down the drain on ads at this point. I learned about influencer promotions, paid a meme page to post an ad and had everyone in the comments calling me a “clown.” That hurt, I quit once again.

This sparked another major low point in my life, similar to when I got arrested.

I had wasted my dad’s money, maxed out my first credit card, and could not see the light. I was doomed.

The only logical option was to accept my fate, use my previously learned coding skills, and opt for plan B of getting a job.

Luckily enough, I got a web design job fairly quickly. It was a cushy job that taught me about what it really takes to run a web design agency. I used my free time there to try to land clients and saw some success.

Now that I had money coming in, I decided to try out another e-commerce brand. This time with minimalist wallets (that my friends and I still use to this day, they were top quality.)

I even invested quite a bit in professional product pics:

Again… didn’t make a sale, wasted money, and got tired of it.

This is when I went all-in on freelancing.

There was a blurry moment throughout all of this where I also tried an SEO agency, content marketing agency, and was still kinda trying to find clients for anything I could get my hands on, mostly web design.

All of the skills I had developed up until this point could not fail me.

Nothing Happens, Then Everything Happens

Even though I had a decent-paying job, my inner child was still screaming at me to live up to my promise.

I may not have been able to avoid a job altogether, but I could sure as hell get out of it before other life responsibilities started to pile up. A car, wife, children, and the rest would be my nail in the coffin. I had to get out immediately.

I walked into local businesses, reached out to my network again, tried LinkedIn prospecting, and everything else.

I was able to land 2-3 clients a month at $1500-$2500 from this.

When I learned more about the businesses I was helping (mostly service businesses) I learned a bit about email marketing and copywriting.

I also realized that the web design agency I worked at was only profitable because they had a marketing, sales, and operations department. The web designers were only one piece of the puzzle (keep that in mind freelancers, you have to learn it all).

I pivoted my offer and started creating simple service funnels.

A landing page, opt-in, and email sequence that would get calls booked for people like contractors, lawyers, accountants, pest control, and anyone else who were already getting leads but wanted to convert more into calls and customers.

This is when I started increasing my prices (because it was a more specific offer that got better results than just “I’ll build you a pretty website”).

I was charging $2500-$5000 to set this funnel up. It took me less time to build than it did a full-blown website. I was able to systemize my process. It was less “custom” and more “results” based on what has worked.

A few months later, I decided to quit my job. I had the knowledge and skill. I had absolute confidence in my ability at this point.

Quitting my job wasn’t as exciting as I thought it would be… but the act of working toward that goal was deeply enjoyable.

A few months later I discovered the power of Twitter, started posting content, and planned out a freelancing digital product while trying to land web design/funnel clients there. This is when my niche shifted towards creators, coaches, and freelancers. I knew them well, liked working with them, and could get them some killer results.

Over the last 4 years, I built out products, pivoted my brand, tested different offers, and here we are now.

This is where the exponential growth started to kick in.

Here’s what happened:

1) I hit 6 figures freelancing.

4 years ago was the first time I hit 6 figures from my efforts.

Technically, it took 4-5 years of trial and error since my freshman year of college to reach that point. But I wasn’t all too serious. I took too much time off and like cardio, your progress dissipates fast. You have to do it every day for life.

2) I built out a freelancing course, grew my audience, and started making an extra $3,000 per month with my course (on top of client work).

“Solve your own problems and sell the solution” is my mantra.

I had so much freelancing knowledge by this point that it made sense to create a product around that. I could just have easily created a fitness product since I’ve spent 10 years in the gym and obsessing over my nutrition.

I only had 500 followers at this point.

I made $3,000 a month because I was smart with networking. I got shared and reposted by developer accounts (people who had skills to freelance with) and self-improvement accounts (people who wanted to get out of their job).

Even with 500 followers, I was leveraging accounts’ audiences that added up to over 100,000. That’s how I got traffic to my digital products and gained followers that would compound with time.

3) I created a second digital product that taught how I create websites.

The freelancing product was a hit for my size and authority (not much).

“Create your own customers” is my second mantra.

I had to create a bridge between my current product and the beginners I was attracting by talking about my other interests, like mindset and spirituality.

I had to teach them a skill that they could freelance with.

4) I hit 10,000 followers on Twitter and created a beginner social media digital product.

Now that I had results with social media, I created a social media product.

It was a logical puzzle piece to my other products.

You can freelance on social media and avoid the pains of cold email and manual outreach by building an audience.

I eventually bundled them all together into a product called Modern Money (lol).

5) I launched a physical planner.

I loved talking about productivity in my writing.

And I’ve always had an itch to create something physical.

So, I used my previous eCommerce failures to source and sell a physical planner.

It did well, but I hated shipping out of my own home. It was too time consuming.

So I turned it into a digital version and gave it away for free.

6) I hit 6 figures in digital product sales in just over a year.

With multiple product launches and “bullet spraying” the market to see what worked, I was able to double down fast.

My 3 digital products made $100,000 in a little over a year.

7) I pivoted my freelance offer into a marketing consulting offer.

At this point, I was kind of tired of web design and funnels.

I had creators and coaches nearly begging me to consult them rather than do it for them. Creators often like to learn and do things themselves, so I leaned into that.

I created a consulting program that taught marketing, sales, copywriting, offer creation and my simple service funnel to land more clients.

This freed up more time since I didn’t have to do the work for them. I showed up for calls and communicated through a chat app like Telegram.

8) I built Modern Mastery HQ.

Modern Mastery was the next stepping stone in my life’s work.

I spent two years of my life overloading it with all of the information I learned.

I put all of my old products inside there to get people up to speed.

This taught me that growing a membership-based community is a long and slow grind.

Everyone always asks me how to start a community because they think it’s more profitable than a plain old digital product. It’s hard… and it’s not.

9) I hit my first $50,000 month.

With Modern Mastery and my marketing/brand advising, I made my first $50,000 in one month.

This consisted of around 5 clients at $8,000 a piece and the rest was filled with Modern Mastery subscriptions.

10) I built Digital Economics and 2 Hour Writer to create a foundation for my vision.

Over the years I had some pretty insane results for myself and my clients.

The cool thing about this business is that my best clients became good friends.

With that, I was still annoyed by client work. I didn’t like how much time it took out of my day. I had the results to productize, so I did.

I built my Digital Economics masterclass with literally everything I’ve ever learned. Then, I splintered 2 Hour Writer off from that and sold it as a lower ticket product to create a value ladder.

Everything I’ve built until this point allowed for my current products to form.

Meaning, you can’t create the perfect product, or even know what product to create, if you don’t just create one at your current level.

All of my knowledge is going into my book.

The Power Planner failure will turn into a success with its relaunch with the book (you can preorder The FOCI Planner with the Keepsake Box).

The software I’m building would not be possible without 4 years of writing and teaching writing as a skill.

I had to evolve. Most people create a product and sell that for life. That’s a great way to get stuck.

11) I made $800,000 in 2022 writing 2 hours a day.

At the end of 2022, my brand started to reach exponential growth on all platforms.

Everything started to align.

My products were solid just by the nature of evolution.

My audience (traffic) increased fast, so my income grew with it.

Thank goodness I was out of client work now because I wouldn’t have been able to utilize that traffic.

Lesson: if you have a decent product that sells, focus the majority of your efforts on audience building and leverage. Diversify platforms, make sure you are growing, maybe even write a book for added depth and authority.

I made a video on my writing process that allowed me to do this in 2 hours a day.

12) I’ve made $3,300,000 in a year.

Once I realized that all I needed was a growing readership and a product that helped others (so it sold, brought value to their lives, and spread by word of mouth), I knew what my levers were.

I spent 2 hours every morning writing.

When done right, this leads to both new products, readership growth, and maintenance of your business.

By staying consistent – and being sure that I was in fact growing my readership – exponential growth hit and my income stayed consistent with my growth.

13) I’m investing every cent I can into the success of my new company, Kortex.

Kortex is many things.

At its heart, it is a revolutionary software for writers, marketers, and creatives.

Think of it as a note-taking app combined with a writing app to ensure that your writing is unique, impactful, and persuasive.

(Say bye-bye to Notion and Obsidian being the “second brain” apps of the creator economy when they don’t serve the purpose of good writing that builds a readership.)

Further than that, it will also replace newsletter software, personal websites, and content scheduling apps for the majority of creators in future versions.

That is the software base. It is not ready for the public.

We are building an education backbone.

All Kortex subscribers get access to a library of strategies that is better than most courses you will find in the creator economy.

It is the only place you can hire me (and Justin Scott + Joey Justice) for consulting, a group mastermind, or ghostwriting to build your name with writing as a creator.

If you’re interested in working with us, apply here.

The Overarching Lesson Of All Of My Teachings: Evolution Of Identity

Evolution demands struggle, tension, conflict, and challenge.

As above, so below.

When a star explodes, atomic nuclei fill the galaxy allow other forms to grow.

When war breaks out among nations, technological advancements are made that have saved more lives than were lost.

When you feel lost, you are nearing the end of a chapter in your life. You either find purpose or get consumed by the emotional turmoil you are trapped in.

You can’t allow yourself to get complacent.

There is always a next mountain to climb, project to build, product to launch, writing to post.

When you pursue and overcome challenges by solving problems, you are required to acquire the skillset and mindset to do so.

When you pursue and achieve goals, your complexity of self increases.

Life becomes meaningful because you have the experience to notice the things that the average individual can’t.

If you don’t know what to do, start a business.

It is one of the best vessels for personal and collective evolution.

That’s my story.

I hope you enjoyed it.

Dan Koe

The post My Story: The Untold Truth Of Dan Koe appeared first on Dan Koe.

I remember waking up at 3 a.m. so I could play games before I had to go to high school.

From Halo 3 and Call Of Duty to World Of Warcraft and League Of Legends.

I was addicted, to say the least.

Increasing my level in video games took priority over increasing my level in reality.

But I wouldn’t change a thing.

How else would I be able to write this newsletter?

Psychology, metaphysics, self-help, and modern business all point to life being a video game.

In a metaphorical sense, of course. I’m not saying that the underlying fabric of the Universe is a giant computer that aliens built before humans existed… but it’s quite similar as we will learn (and I’m not completely closed off to that idea. Who actually knows?).

I want to break down each perspective so you can:

• Make progress toward your goals (and fall in love with the process)
• Understand how to tap into optimal states of consciousness
• Stop taking life so seriously and create your ideal future
• Reinvent yourself or the character that plays the game of life
• Leverage your character to pursue your life’s work and earn a meaningful income

A game is a structured flow of information.

Life is in-formation, and our quality of life depends on our ability to process it.

When we push too far beyond our edge, too far into the unknown, there is too much stimulus. We can’t metabolize the experience. Information builds up and creates anxiety and overwhelm.

When we shy too far away from our edge, too far into the known, there is little novelty that makes life worth living. Our mind is not stimulated. Information is easy to digest and we become bored.

The conscious mind can process 50 bits of information per second.

The unconscious mind can manage 11 million bits of information per second.

As we become more efficient at processing information, or playing the game, our unconscious grows in power, and we free up conscious attention to invest in what we deem meaningful.

In video games, you have a map. The light of awareness reveals where you have been and what you have experienced. This knowledge allows you to make better decisions in the future.

The darkness of the map is the unknown, and you wouldn’t launch yourself too far from the known.

You must slowly puncture the unknown, let the experience normalize through skill acquisition and emotional management, and press forward.

The purpose of life is to raise your consciousness.

This is only possible by living at your edge. Embracing the story of life. The highs, lows, successes, and catastrophic failures. The most miserable place you can be is in the middle.

Psychology: How Video Games Make You Addicted To Progress

The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else. – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Flow.

You’ve heard about it before.

The optimal state of consciousness that all of the ancients, mystics, and psychologists point to with their teachings.

Where you are at one with doing or being.

You lose self-consciousness and move through life without a worry in the world.

It seems that the key to the good life is investing attention in what we deem meaningful. But what you deem meaningful is found by investing attention in what you eliminate as meaningless. This process of trial and error, high and low, focus and distraction is the natural balance that keeps life enjoyable.

But if you get stuck in a low, chaos ensues.

Psychic Entropy

Ordered consciousness is what creates degrees of the flow state.

To “order consciousness” is to focus your attention on something external or internal. A task, situation, or conversation in the external. Or a thought, emotion, or feeling in the internal.

Both have their benefits and change the way our brain operates.

When we lose focus to a distraction, we increase the chances of entropy – the decline into chaos. Psychic entropy is when the mind tends toward a disordered state of consciousness.

When we give life, or attention, to a negative thought it multiplies.

A social media post about how eggs will cause cancer brings thoughts about your grandma’s health, your diet choices, if you’ve fulfilled your potential, how food affects your skin quality, what you are going to eat next, and more.

We can reverse entropy when we use our human ability to zoom out, gain perspective, and refocus our attention on doing or being in a direction that brings growth.

Video Games Order Consciousness

There are a lot of practical lessons we can learn by deconstructing how video games order consciousness.

Those lessons can be used to enhance our learning, skill acquisition, and self-confidence.

When you first start playing a game:

1. You have no idea what you’re doing.
2. You go through a tutorial so you aren’t exposed to everything at once.
3. You practice at level one until that level becomes boring.
4. You are introduced to more skills, traits, and abilities to practice with.
5. You progressively overload the challenges you take on until you decide to stop playing the game.

There must be a skill challenge match if we want to maintain order in consciousness.

If the challenge is too high for your skill, you get anxious.

If the challenge is too low for your skill, you get bored.

So, you start by learning the rules of the game.

A “game” represents any situation in life. Especially the ones where you lack confidence and can’t see yourself winning.

Then, you practice the mechanics of the game.

There are a series of steps, or quests, that provide education and practice in unison.

Remember this when you approach anything new (or get bored with your current endeavor).

If you are faced with a large challenge, you need to learn and practice at your level.

If you are bored with your current level of challenge, you need to expose yourself to the education of the next level, practice the new skills, and enjoy the neurochemical cocktail with a double of dopamine as you transcend to the next phase of your life.

Self-Awareness As A Compass

Balancing skill with challenge is the metagame you must practice.

When you get bored, your mind will start to drift and think “I could be doing something better with my time.”

You tilt into self-centeredness. Refocus your attention on adding a challenge to the situation.

Even if you work a job with the same repetitive tasks, you can make it more enjoyable by creating a more challenging game.

You may see daily walks as boring, but what if you add some rules? Try making it without stepping on a crack in the sidewalk.

When you get anxious, your mind grasps at negative aspects of yourself.

“I’m not good enough.”

“What will people think of this blemish on my face.”

“I could never make that much money with my business.”

You tilt into self-consciousness and let negative thoughts multiply.

Again, pause and zoom out. Refocus.

This will take intentional practice to make a habit.

Metaphysics: We Live In A Survival Based Simulation

If you play a video game on your computer, such as “Doom” or “Uncharted”, you see compelling 3D worlds with 3D objects. Yet the information is entirely 2D, limited by the number of pixels on the screen. The same is true when you look away from your computer to the world around you. It too has pixels, and all the information is 2D. – Donald Hoffman

Donald Hoffman is a cognitive psychologist and author, notably of the book The Case Against Reality.

In the book (and various podcasts I’ve binge listened) he argues that human perception is a “user interface” that hides the true nature of reality, so that we can survive.

Natural selection doesn’t favor organisms that see reality as it is.

This aligns with psychedelic enthusiasts like Terrance McKenna who say that language is virtual reality. Perception is a closed system and psychedelics allow you to see beyond our fitness-based perceptions.

Spacetime As A Compression Algorithm

Hoffman argues that space and time are a visualization tool.

They are the operating system of our user interface.

Think of a desktop screen.

Subjective reality is like a screen that is programmed to help us see what we need to see in order to do what we need to do.

Every “material” object is like an icon on the screen.

It is pretty. It has properties and qualities. We should “take them seriously, but not literally.”

You can click around on the screen and perform specific tasks that result in a desired outcome.

These desired outcomes are “fitness payoffs.” These payoffs are like points in a video game. Through trial and error, we learn how to win, and how to evolve. By winning, your offspring go to the next level.

In real-world simulations, organisms that saw the truth went extinct. Like an ant trying to mate with a glass bottle, because its perception was distorted.

Removing The Interface

Everyone thinks they are seeing the truth but it’s more like everyone is in the same video game like Grand Theft Auto.

When we look at our computers and consoles that run these programs, they are packaged up nicely.

We don’t see the wires and diodes that transfer information to create what is on the screen. And even if we did see it, it wouldn’t serve our survival. We wouldn’t understand it and wouldn’t be able to do anything with the jumble of electronics.

Even further, we can’t see or comprehend the code that is running the game.

We can draw connections between this theory and non-duality, infinite consciousness, and mentalism / idealism.

If you were to remove your interface (with a tool like psychedelics or advanced meditation) you would eventually go insane. Your ego would dissolve and you would “live” and operate in a completely different fashion. Your physical body or avatar would stop playing the game – and you would probably die very soon.

There is a reason people aren’t on psychedelics 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

We aren’t at that phase of evolution just yet, but who knows what the future holds.

For now, it is wise to ground yourself in the metaphysical and act in the “physical” from a place of higher perspective.

The Mind As A Vessel

The human mind is a vessel where reality flows through it.

Think of it like a projector.

The light that the projector emits is consciousness.

The film is the mind.

The light shines on the film and displays a spectrum of experiences that humans have. It frames our perception.

Self-Help: How To Reinvent Yourself (Your Character)

Life is a game.

Stack gold.

Acquire skills.

Gain experience.

Unlock new levels.

And eventually, get to a point where you have the resources to do whatever you want.

When your operating frame is focused on the process that will actualize your future, your focus is impenetrable, and you live in a world of your own design.

The difference between a video game and real life is virtual risk and real risk.

The sameness between a video game and real life is learning, practice, and becoming a dopamine junkie.

Video games have tutorials, professions, quests, and an unknown to explore.

Real life has childhood, career paths, responsibilities, and potentials that you are unaware of – but once discovered – can drastically change how you think, act, and work.

Once you understand the significance of the patterns illustrated between games and life, you can begin to correct your behavior in a manner that is conducive to your ideal future.

Increasing The Complexity Of Self

No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it. – Albert Einstein

To raise your consciousness you must increase your level of mind.

To raise your level of mind you must open your perspective.

To open your perspective you must identify problems, take on the challenge, acquire the skill, and receive the knowledge necessary to transcend your previous identity.

With each level of mind, your identity must change.

The knowledge, skill, belief, and experience you order in your mind as “self” determines the opportunities available to you.

At level 1, you have access to opportunities slightly above your level. The opportunities you can register in your awareness exist on a spectrum.

As you level up, you have access to all opportunities beneath you, and those slightly above you still.

It is a massive disservice to your life to distract yourself and never see what you are capable of.

Creating The Games You Play

If games have a desired outcome (winning), a path to get there (progression), and habitual actions to take (priorities) then we can create games out of any situation in life.

This Universal principle of purpose, process, and priority is the underlying framework of human behavior.

If you don’t have a goal, you don’t have vision.

If you don’t have a path, you don’t have clarity.

If you don’t have a task, you don’t have focus.

Most of your problems in life can be solved by understanding and applying this principle.

To create a game, you need a hierarchy of goals that frames your attention.

As an example:

• A 10 year goal (that allows your vision to blossom)
• Yearly goals
• Monthly goals
• Weekly goals

All of which are to be loosely held in the back of your mind. They should not be your master, but your guide.

Only from there can you align your education and daily lever-moving actions with them.

The progress you make increases meaningful dopamine in the brain, it feels incredible.

And if you can anchor your attention to this hierarchy of goals, most of your worries disappear.

You’re overly focused on the negative parts of your life because you haven’t built positive responsibilities that demand your focus.

The more attention you invest in your goals, the stronger their gravity becomes.

All Change Is Behavior Change

To change your life you must change your actions.

To change your actions (in the right direction) you need a plan. There isn’t any other way. And if you don’t create your own, someone will create a plan for you.

To stick to the plan you need a system.

Systems are organized behavior changes.

To create a system you must attack your goals, embrace the nature of trial and error, double down on your successes, and persist until “success” becomes the default state in each area of your life. Health, wealth, relationships, and happiness.

Business: The New Digital Society

Eventually, everybody will be in the creator economy. – Naval Ravikant

The world is shifting from corporate dominance to individual power thanks to technology.

This is reflected in nature through the principle of division and unity.

Everything divides and reunites, like ocean to cloud to rain, and the creator economy is the perfect example of this phenomenon.

In the Renaissance Era, the economy favored the multi-dimensional. The polymaths. The artists who refused to limit their abilities. The thinkers, creators, designers, builders, and individuals who took responsibility for their mental, physical, and spiritual development.

In the Digital Renaissance we are going through, history is repeating itself.

We can learn anything, do anything, and become anything thanks to the vast and rapid information expanding at our fingertips.

The expansion of the mental plane of existence (through the internet) has created a field of infinite potential.

Communication is no longer local.

Commerce is no longer local.

Friendships are no longer local.

Society is no longer fragmented.

The creator economy is virtual reality.

Your personal brand is your character.

Online business is the game and progression.

Networking is how you build a powerful tribe.

Purposeful products are how you make a living.

The intrinsic philosophy you cultivate throughout your journey is the marketing firepower that attracts those like you.

You are a part of the creator economy right now.

The question is – which side are you on?

Are you engaging in the mutual benefit of value exchange? Product for money? Or are you draining your attention, overloading your mind, and wasting your creative ability by not producing anything in return for the value you are taking?

Brand – You Are The Most Profitable Niche

Your brand is your online avatar.

Strong brands have vision. A big irrational goal that they are leading their followers toward. The gravity of that goal – and the energy displayed along with it – is what attracts people to you.

Your brand is your highest version.

It is who you are becoming.

It is your guiding light toward a better future that allows you to align your actions with goals through a tangible vessel that others can benefit massively.

Your job is to display who you are in your profile picture, images, bio, and website.

Your style shapes your designs.

Your vision shapes your bio.

Your goals shape the content, product, and marketing you create under your brand as a hierarchy.

Content – Lessons Learned Completing Quests

Your content is the ideas, thoughts, beliefs, opinions, lessons, and advice you acquire as you pursue your challenging hierarchy of goals.

Do you see the power in this?

Writing has changed my life.

It has brought self-awareness, self-understanding, and the ability to organize my thoughts – or order consciousness – to make life more enjoyable. This is a driving factor why I created 2 Hour Writer – to teach you what is arguably the most valuable (and profitable) skill that will never go out of style – even with the emergence of AI.

You don’t need fancy content frameworks and templates.

They help, of course, but the best content results from energy transfer.

As you acquire knowledge and skills through education and practice – share the ideas that spark excitement and resonance in you.

Do not filter yourself.

This is what attracts a like-minded readership that sets you up for monetizing your life’s work.

Product – Systems For Behavior Change

The best products spark positive behavior change.

Behavior change is reflected in the eternal markets of business – health, wealth, and relationships.

Write to yourself.

Build for yourself.

Sell to yourself.

Create a product or service out of the knowledge and skills you’ve acquired on your journey.

Something that you would have wanted, or something that would truly benefit your life right now.

There are individuals in the creator economy that sell courses, clothing, supplements, blue light glasses, planners, coaching in multiple areas of life, kitchenware, and really anything that shapes the lifestyle of people like you.

People will object and tell you to “start a real business.”

What they mean is, “I am fabricating problems that don’t benefit humanity. Don’t start a business around real problems that will raise the collective consciousness.”

People who have a poor relationship with money think that sales and business are evil.

They don’t understand that the exchange of goods is a part of human nature.

Money is neutral until put in the hands of good or evil.

Consistent progression toward your conscious goals ensures that you lean toward good.

When you solve your own problems and sell the solution, you can guarantee that those problems exist on the cosmic scale, and rest well knowing that you are making a difference.

Marketing – Cultivating An Intrinsic Philosophy

It is wise to study marketing and sales.

They are evergreen skills backed with psychological and metaphysical principles of value exchange.

Of course, there are tainted aspects of those skills. People who lack moral development will use them for evil, but like money, these skills are neutral until wielded.

Invest in education around these, but do so to note patterns and identify principles that shape your articulation and persuasive ability.

From there, use the intrinsic philosophy you cultivate as you play the game.

Goals imply problems and problems imply struggle.

You will struggle on this journey, but the lessons learned are what increase your level of mind.

The reasons or “whys” behind your pursuit is how you promote the product you create to the people you’ve attracted.

Why did you start training in the gym or fixing your health?

Why did you improve your relationships and social life?

Why did you increase your wealth through business, skill, and professional pursuits?

The “why” is what creates emotion in your readers.

From there, you can learn tactics to test on your business to increase revenue, but don’t lose your soul in the process.

That’s it for this one my friends.

Life is a game.

– Dan Koe

The post Life Is A Video Game (You Can’t Escape The Matrix) appeared first on Dan Koe.

For some reason, I’ve always had the drive to “max out” every area of my life.

I saw life as a video game.

My mind, body, spirit, and finances were the abilities I had to gain experience in.

I wanted to become multidimensionally jacked.

Maybe because I started questioning the default path early.

Maybe because I noticed how unhappy, overweight, and miserable people seemed.

Maybe because I observed how people limited their opportunities by taking a specific path in life.

It didn’t make sense to follow what most people do, because that would create a life that most people have, and that isn’t pretty.

The problem with the default path in life is specialization, compartmentalization, and niching down.

We are trained to focus on one dot, instead of the lines that connect the dots.

In school, we learn biology, chemistry, math, literature, and more. We go to individual classes that don’t connect the dots between them all. It lacks holism, creativity, and the kind of practicality that gets abnormal results.

After school, we narrow our minds further on what we think we want to be for the rest of our lives.

We’re expected, as teenagers, to choose one of the infinite paths in life when we haven’t even started our real life. How can we know exactly what we want? There doesn’t seem to be a greater recipe for misery than to focus on one thing for the rest of your life.

This strips our curiosity and creativity from us.

It leads to a world where warriors lack brains and intellectuals lack balls.

A “philosopher” will ignore practical aspects of life because they are an intellectual. But the main question of philosophy is “How does one live a good life?” If a philosopher can’t build a business, ease their mind, or become a social savant, their philosophy means nothing.

Scientists will throw a frog in a blender to examine its parts. They will make a few discoveries, but not nearly as many if they studied holistically.

Rather than only looking at the pieces of a frog, you can study its environment, mating patterns, decision-making, and diet without ignoring one or the other.

The effects of compartmentalized learning destroy our individual potential.

The Modern Renaissance Man

At birth, we are prescribed a way of life.

Go to school, get a job, find a partner, try to squeeze in activities that make life good, retire at 65, and never work again when work is a necessary part of life that should involve investing our attention in what we deem enjoyable.

In school, we’re told to pick a major.

In business, we’re told to pick a niche.

So we neglect other areas of study and our results suffer.

Creativity is the path to wealth, mental and financial, and creativity requires a high level of understanding focused on solving specific problems.

We are smack in the middle of a second Golden Age.

There is so much information on the internet that it becomes overwhelming. There is no way that you can learn everything, but you can learn a lot.

People still live in a paradigm where they have to get very good at one thing, because in the past, that’s what the environment required for success.

Now, success is reserved for the value creator. The specialized generalist. The new Renaissance man. The Digital Renaissance Man. Somebody who can study diverse interests, create value from them, and sustain an enjoyable lifestyle like I teach in Digital Economics.

We live in interesting times.

There’s an abundance of information, but it’s only overwhelming to those without goals or intentions behind their learning.

The creator economy emerged and courses began condensing the information into actionable business models and life advice.

Content, courses, and books are like mental zip files for the modern world.

It no longer takes 4-12 years, $40,000, and a piece of paper to make a replaceable income.

But, this implies personal responsibility.

Nobody is there to hold your hand.

Here’s what you do:

1) I Am Nobody

Become labelless.

Become everything.

Be a designer, writer, marketer, socializer, runner, bodybuilder, philosopher, scientist, psychologist, and polymath that knows how to sustain their obsessive curiosity.

Subscribing to one skill, ideology, or identity limits your potential in every situation.

The Universe is a shapeshifter. It is in constant flow. The oceans evaporate, condense in the clouds, rain down into puddles, and the water inevitably finds its way back.

Nothing is permanent.

Your cells are completely different from a few years ago. Your interests are allowed to change. Your mind is allowed to change. You are allowed to change.

Become the Universe.

2) The Curiosity Compass

As a kid, people would discourage “going through a phase.”

I had my emo phase, my gym bro phase, and even my raver phase. All of which have shaped who I am.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with experimentation. There is absolutely something wrong with conforming to the whims of others.

Prescriptions, roadmaps, and long curriculums are not bad, but they narrow your mind on a specific outcome with specific advice to reach that goal.

This is useful, but should not be treated as a one-and-done type of deal. That’s how you get trapped in a miserable life.

There is one pattern I’ve noticed both in myself and those I aspire to be like:

They don’t limit what they learn to one thing.

Everything connects.

By pursuing what you are curious about, not only are you motivated to learn, but pattern recognition increases good dopamine and solidifies high-level knowledge.

“Focus on one thing” is great advice, but only if that one thing is a big, meaty, meaningful goal that requires you to focus on a plethora of interests, skills, and experiences to achieve.

My “shiny object syndrome” in business is what led to my online persona today. My branding, content, and products are all a unique culmination of my skills and interests.

It is wise to become obsessively curious about a topic, skill, or interest for 1-2 months to add it to your mental toolbox. This will only increase your awareness of opportunities as you experience life.

When you niche down (for too long, or too far) you become a glorified search engine that lacks depth and personality.

If you want to share your curiosities in public (in a way that brings career opportunities and fulfillment) check out 2 Hour Writer.

3) Invest In Your Education

In this life, you own one thing: your mind.

Everything else can be taken away from you.

There is one thing that the school system did get right which is consistent, daily education in hopes for a better future.

But, schools don’t prioritize curiosity, so most people hate learning by the time they graduate.

Learning is the foundation of the human experience.

Hammer it into your head that you must be learning something, anything, every single day. No matter if it’s for 10 minutes or 3 hours, your future depends on it.

How else are you going to discover new opportunities if you don’t first learn about them? How are you going to act on opportunities that don’t exist to you?

When you stop learning, your life stops progressing. You stop growing. The psychological benefits and feel-good chemicals stop flowing. Life gets mediocre and repetitive. You become mechanical and robotic.

We’ve talked about learning a lot, but learning means nothing without building.

Become A Builder

In my new book The Art Of Focus (coming soon) I have a section on the philosophy of the builder.

One pattern I’ve noticed in my life is that I’ve always carved out time to build something of my own.

School work, client work, and projects assigned to me at a job were necessary but didn’t get me the fulfillment I was looking for.

My life was the meta-project that was built through a series of personal and business projects.

Projects frame your attention for learning.

When your focus is centered on that which you are building, all information you are exposed to is filtered through that lens.

The source of learning is struggle not memorization. You must encounter a problem, discover the solution to that problem, and integrate it into your life.

To identify a problem, you need a goal.

To solve a problem, you need to create a solution.

To create a solution, you need a project to invest your attention in for the next 1-6 months.

When I say project, I mean something that is measurable and documented. It doesn’t have to be a physical product.

It can be as simple as having a weight training log, tracking your food, tracking your weight, and researching fitness information to boost your progress.

Let’s start there.

1) Big Irrational Goals, Small Rational Steps

Big goals are better than small goals because they give you the vision, motivation, and long-term focus necessary to see them through.

I get more excited about building a million-dollar business in 1 year than I do sending 10 networking DMs a day.

I get more excited over looking shredded at the beach this summer than I do meal prepping for the week.

To embark on your journey of becoming multidimensionally jacked, create a big goal for the main pillars of your life.

• Mind – How do you want to handle emotions and stress? Do you want to have the same mediocre mindset as everyone else?
• Body – How do you want to look and feel? How does that impact other areas of your life (like how others perceive you and throw opportunities at you)?
• Spirit – Do you feel like life lacks meaning, wonder, and fulfillment? Do you feel like life is happening to you, or that you are flowing with life?
• Business – How much money do you want to make? Why? Do you want that money to come from a purposeful endeavor, unlike 90% of jobs?

I would highly encourage that you spend 10-20 minutes writing about this in a journal. How do those impact your life?

The problem is that people stop here.

They mentally masturbate over their goals and never make any meaningful progress toward them.

2) Outline A Project For Each Domain Of Life

The goal is the what, the vision is the why, and the project is the how.

Now that we have vision and motivation for our big goals, we need to gain clarity.

Projects have a goal, process, and priority actions to knock out on a daily basis.

What can you do every single day that will move the needle toward your goals?

What aspects of your goals do you need to educate yourself on to make better decisions?

How can you document your progress in a way that keeps you motivated to come back tomorrow?

In the notebook you used to write down your goals, create a simple project for each goal:

• The milestones – Write down tangible milestones with realistic timelines.
• The variables – Write out each variable that will help you achieve the goal (for health: nutrition, training, sleep. for business: product, traffic generation, content)
• The principles – The priority actions that will move the needle forward.
• The skills – The skills you will have to acquire to actualize that goal.

This brings even more clarity to changing your life.

3) Start, Then Learn

If you want to learn faster, don’t start learning.

1. Outline a project
2. Start building it out
3. Learn along the way

Too many people get trapped in tutorial hell, stacking up useless knowledge as brain fog.

Start, encounter a problem, and experiment with different techniques to solve that problem.

When I was learning Photoshop, I would try to learn everything about the software before starting.

When I did start, I felt like I knew absolutely nothing.

I had to supplement with specific tutorials and “create with me” videos until I figured out how to create what I wanted.

What I realized is that there is more than 1 way to solve a problem.

If I wanted to remove the background behind something as complex as a tree, I could either do it with the pen tool, color channels, color range, or quick select.

Quick select would be what everyone does, and it often leads to the worst results.

Keep this in mind when you are researching anything.

If anyone can solve the problem with easily accessible information, there is probably a better way of doing it that will give you an edge over your competition.

Now, I don’t want to make it seem like you should never learn unless you have a problem.

Quite the opposite.

I would highly encourage a general education habit.

10-30 minutes every single day immersing yourself in information related to your goals.

Watch a YouTube video that interests you. Buy a best-selling book. Queue a podcast for your next walk (and start going on walks… I promise you won’t keep up with this education habit if you don’t get out of your house. Too many distractions).

4) Lifestyle Design Through Habit Formation

The difference between you and who you want to become is the habits that compose your lifestyle.

Think about it.

Do mentally, physically, or financially jacked people just wake up with the best mind, body, and business one day?

Or do they have tiny actions they take on a daily basis that maintains their progress and builds toward a better future?

Most people will tell you to stop playing video games, going out, and distracting yourself… I agree, but I don’t.

I still play video games here and there. Maybe 5 hours a week.

I still go out with friends and stay up late. Maybe 2-5 times a month.

The reason I still outpace 99% of people is that I frontload my mornings with needle-moving tasks.

Between 5am and 11am I:

• Go on a run 3-4 days a week
• Write my newsletter and content for 1 hour (this sustains 95% of my business… remember, principles).
• Build out a new project, right now it’s my book launch and software company
• Hit the gym 6-7 days a week
• Take walks in between all of those activities
• Cook nutrient-dense meals that take 10-15 minutes to prepare (and eat out for dinner quite a bit – I’m hovering around 4500 calories a day)

I know not everyone can do this due to time constraints, but neither could I in the past.

As you get results from your efforts, you become more efficient at what you do. Time will free up (since that should be a sub-goal for almost every goal you set… it’s a great way of measuring progress).

When in doubt:

Waking up an hour earlier unlocks the distraction-free time that will solve most of your problems.

That’s it for this one my friends.

To the multidimensionally jacked,

– Dan Koe

The post The Cure To A Mediocre Life (Become Multidimensionally Jacked) appeared first on Dan Koe.

This letter may get peoples’ panties in a bunch.

So, I ask that you keep an open mind.

Without an open mind, there is no chance to receive a kernel of truth (no matter how small) from someone else’s perspective in a way that can help your life.

Remember, that is my intention.

To help rather than hurt.

If you misinterpret what I say, no matter how harsh, it will be you that hurts yourself.

Even if my intention were to hurt you, some people may see that as a positive. If you choose to be hurt, you will be hurt.

If you feel your mind start to close, resist the urge to lash out. You know this feeling. It is hard to have any other thought than the negative garbage you’ve been programmed with by the external world.

With that, let’s get straight in.

You’re a slave.

I’m a slave.

Slaves don’t know they’re slaves if everyone else is too.

Just because the “slavery” that everyone knows and hates is no longer a thing, doesn’t mean that slavery doesn’t still exist.

No, I’m not talking about sex slavery, although many porn abusers could fall under that category.

I’m talking about mental and financial slavery.

Slave (noun) – a person who is forced to work for and obey another and is considered to be their property.

The key word in that definition is “force.”

Force can have multiple definitions and contexts.

For the sake of coherence, we are going to use this definition:

Force (noun) – strength or energy as an attribute of physical action or movement.

In other words, there is something pushing you to do one thing over the other. The stronger that “something” is, the more enslaved you are.

A slave of the past could run away, in some cases, but they would run out of food, water, and shelter to the point of death.

With this said, slavery is influenced by survival.

As we’ve discussed earlier, human survival is not physical, it is conceptual.

Humans survive form, self, ego, or identity. However you want to label a distinction within consciousness.

Some common examples:

Political Ideologies

If you identify as a Republican or Democrat, and your beliefs are challenged, you will feel a physical stress response that encourages you to defend those beliefs.

Your survival feels threatened because you consider an idea a part of who you are, which is also an idea.

Sports Teams

Have you ever noticed people get visibly angry when they argue about which sports team will win? Especially if they have money on the line.

Your “team spirit” makes you feel as if you are a part of something larger than yourself. It is your spirituality. But it doesn’t have to make your mental health worse.

Your Identity

Are you a coffee snob? Health expert? Productive person?

If someone tells you to stop drinking coffee, how do you feel? If someone tells you that the keto diet is best, how do you feel? Do you want to educate them on what you “know” is best or that you have experience with? The ideology that you have attached to your identity and feel the need to survive? Even when you know that blanket statements don’t apply to every single person on Earth across different cultures with different resources?

If you’re productive, and you move to a new location, how do you feel? Your routine just got destroyed out of nowhere. You were surviving the form that is your routine through effort, energy, and habit. You need a week or two to “acclimate,” right?

This is where I am often a slave. To my routines.

Religious Ideologies

Even if people say they don’t care to convert you to their belief system, they still do so unconsciously. Because they are conditioned to reproduce their identity.

Survival includes reproduction, and any ideas we transfer to another through communication influence the identity of another person.

Your “self” is a concept. It is a web of ideas and beliefs. Those ideas and beliefs can change with time. Any piece of information you consume has an impact on who you are.

Hence why mental phone slaves often end up unsuccessful. All they do is consume self-deprecating memes and numb their mind to avoid confronting the truth of their situation.

Slavery is powerful because if we are conditioned to survive an identity, like a job title, and if we think about quitting that job, the force of our survival being at stake keeps us tied to it.

Society Is A Pyramid Scheme Of Attention

If it is not given attention, it doesn’t exist.

If it doesn’t exist, attention must be invested for it to survive.

This brings two realizations:

1) You are contributing to unconscious destruction.

How do mega-corporations grow and thrive?

They start small and form a power hierarchy with time.

Fewer people with more power at the top, more people with less power at the bottom.

The top tier of the hierarchy (the company and executives) can only do what they do because a plethora of people are giving attention to the tasks, vision, and values from the bottom up.

The bottom is composed of low-skill grunt work, like a cashier at McDonalds, and moves up to marketing and business operations until you reach the top.

By nature, it is impossible for a large number of people to rise up this hierarchy.

The problem is that people at the bottom are unconscious of the impact they have with their work.

Like how McDonalds is poisoning the population with their food (do cashiers have extensive nutrition and health knowledge? No, or else they wouldn’t be working there, they would probably be in the nutrition field).

Or how military programmers write code for drones that execute orders to kill people on the other side of the country.

Or even a web designer for a course creator that scams people.

“Forgive them for they know not what they do.”

2) You can bring a conscious vision into reality.

The only way to escape is to build your own thing.

But this is increasingly difficult when you are a slave to that which sucks up your time and energy.

It’s taken you 20, 30, maybe even 40 years to drill yourself into this reality. It shouldn’t take that long to get out, but have some patience.

The way out is to become a value creator.

True value is creative.

Creativity allows for change and emergence.

It allows the form, ego, or identity it was trying to survive to evolve into something new.

If the only value you have to offer is physical, you will get stuck in manual labor jobs (while the people at the top earn with their minds).

As we always talk about, you must:

• Push the boundaries of the unknown
• Learn and discover new potentials along the way
• Acquire the skills necessary to build a purposeful product
• Solve your own problems so you create a solution of true value
• Start a business as a vessel to actualize your vision for the future

You must create your own conscious hierarchy that minimizes unconscious destruction.

The Wage Slave

I’m tired of both sides of the argument.

“9-5 workers are slaves!”

“It’s okay Johnny, if you work a 9-5 you aren’t a slave.”

Both are wrong. Both are right.

Both are trying to get maximum engagement and boost the status of their brand. They don’t zoom out and think if people are actually slaves. A published idea without depth and understanding is a disservice to humanity.

The fact of the matter is that 95%+ of 9-5 workers are slaves.

Your feelings don’t matter here. If you do feel threatened by words on a screen, then maybe there is some truth to what I’m saying. Look inward and see what you are hiding from.

Most workers are the literal definition of a slave.

If you cannot stop showing up to work for your survival and have no skills to open other options immediately, and you are the “property” or employee of a certain company… that’s a slave.

Now, this doesn’t mean you can’t be happy.

Everyone is a slave in one way or another, and we all have waves of happiness in our life.

If happiness is the feeling we get when our attention is distracted from the vast unhappiness in the world, then slavery may make some people happier than non-slaves.

You can be happy (at points in your life) while being unconscious of the problems in your life.

But once you are aware of them, truly aware of them, then you will feel the pull to evolve.

I am not here to demonize 9-5 jobs.

I see them as a necessary stepping stone.

I also see entry-level business models like agency work, freelancing, coaching, and even digital products as stepping stones in your life’s work. They can easily enslave you.

A personal brand, however, is not a business model. It is how you build an audience for any product or service you wish to distribute as you evolve.

A personal brand is your character in the digital society.

Many people will get trapped in a certain level of the hierarchy. Maybe that’s their destiny. And that’s fine.

Virtual realities, like video games, have a constructed society that is held together by NPCs (Non-Player Characters). On the internet, these are the unconscious trolls, consumers, and reply guys.

The truth is that most people will remain unconscious of the impact they have on the world.

I can’t change them, you can’t change them, but we can change what we do in our own lives.

Entrepreneurship Is Modern Survival

Entrepreneurship is the only logical option for long-term thinkers.

If you stay in a 9-5 job for too long, you become a monkey in a cubicle.

Your psyche is wired to hunt.

To hunt is to make novel discoveries that aid in your survival.

Imagine our ancestors walking by a bare bush every day. It doesn’t serve their future.

But one day, it grows new berries.

Somebody walks by it, they notice it, and that novelty causes excitement. They either gather the berries or remember them for later so they can survive longer.

When you get stuck in a 9-5 (or a new 9-5 like an agency or freelancing) you live in the eternal known. You can’t make new discoveries in the known.

You get bored, depressed, and see life as meaningless because the only dopamine you get is from superficial sources.

You never take risks, push into the unknown, and discover new knowledge, tools, and potentials that raise dopamine levels in the brain.

You must evolve.

Entrepreneurship is the path of uncertainty.

Like slashing your way through the jungle.

You are required to learn skills that aren’t taught in schools.

You are required to be okay with failure, rejection, and slow progress.

You are required to learn from your mistakes, show up again tomorrow, and push until your strike gold.

As an entrepreneur, you “hunt” for your survival by gathering knowledge, creating a valuable product, and putting it in front of people that could benefit from it.

As I’ve discussed, my path for doing this is to:

• Start a personal brand as the foundation
• Solve your own problems in the real world (health, wealth, relationships)
• Distribute your findings, opinions, and beliefs via writing
• Start with a freelance or coaching service and get results
• Sell a physical or digital product that requires less time invested (once your audience grows)
• Make a hefty income in 2-4 years with persistence and iteration
• Expand your vision for the future and build whatever you want to get there (software, spaceships, whatever you want)

This is the entire process I give, with templates and education, inside Digital Economics.

Skill & Opportunity

I am a slave to many things in life, but I would like to believe that I’ve escaped wage slavery.

If my business got wiped from the face of the earth, I can still:

• Create a product or service that someone else needs
• Call, email, advertise, and spread internet content to drive traffic to that offer
• Make $5-10K in the first month and improve that with the data I’ve gathered

Why can I do this but most can’t?

Because over the past 10 years, I’ve learned graphic design, video editing, copywriting, psychology, web development, marketing, sales, email marketing, speaking, audience building, advertising, product design, course creation, idea generation, lifestyle design, bodybuilding, nutrition, and more that people struggle with.

With $0 to my name, I could create a service that teaches people how to create a landing page that sells.

I would charge $1000-$2500 for a 4-call “boot camp” depending on how I want to structure the offer.

I would target new businesses that have a full website (because that isn’t even close to an optimal way to sell a product or service). Or I would target students who want to learn a profitable skill outside of employment. Or I would target creators that want the first step in monetizing their brand outside of platform revenue.

I would spend 3 hours in the morning DMing people and writing marketing content online.

People will read this and try to replicate it.

Yet, they will fail because they don’t understand how powerful experience is. There are so many subtle nuances and thought processes that a beginner has to reprogram with effort.

When you go to school, you are narrowed in on a few select skills that train you into an employable position.

With every skill I learn outside of school, I can spot multiple opportunities that allow me to earn an income outside of a job.

This effect compounds.

With the skills I’ve developed, I can write out 50 different products that I know will be profitable within the first 6 months of my efforts.

Skill is determined by experience here.

You can’t just learn about them and expect to see what I can in the market.

You haven’t failed to the point of understanding the nuance behind all of this business stuff.

If you want to escape, here’s how you discover opportunity and develop the skill to actualize it:

1) Drown In New Information To Program Your Mind

Most people are drowning in information that has nothing to do with their goals.

They don’t have a vision, goal, or problem to interpret information through.

Chances are you’ve already read life-changing information, but it didn’t register in your awareness.

With the goal of “escaping wage slavery” at the top of your mind, you can:

• Schedule a minimum of 20 minutes dedicated to consuming information that will help with that goal.
• Buy books, use your Audible credits, save podcasts, follow new social accounts, and add new videos to your “Watch Later” on YouTube
• Get out of your house, have a notes app open on your phone, and write down your discoveries as you immerse yourself in the information.

You will feel the dopamine in your brain on your hunt for a better life.

2) Study Purposeful Businesses You Aspire To Build

Now that you have a consumption habit, you need a more practical goal to apply what you are learning.

What business do you build to escape wage slavery?

• Take mental note of the apps and activities you incorporate on a daily basis.
• Look at who you follow and the businesses they’ve built.
• Buy a book or course on a specific business model that interests you.

You must discover a business model that you feel pulled to build.

One you can become obsessed with.

It doesn’t matter which one it is.

Emulation built my first successful businesses.

It helped me identify blindspots.

Those blindspots were usually the crucial piece that kept me from seeing success.

Get in the habit of studying people you want to be like, downloading and purchasing everything they have to offer, and making a mindmap of everything they have online (social media profiles, websites, landing pages, email sequences, products, services, lead magnets, books, everything).

Reverse engineer what allows them to be successful.

If you don’t know what to do after that, I don’t know what to tell you.

3) Become Your Own Dopamine Dealer

My friend and I were having a discussion the other day.

I’ll paraphrase what he said.

You know what’s wild… I remember asking you why none of your friends take action or follow in your footsteps. I get it now.

People are dopamine junkies, even businessmen.

The people that don’t take action don’t know how to replace the dopamine they are getting from their current habits with business.

So, they either don’t start or quit after a week because they couldn’t get their hit.

This made me think back and realize what made it work for me.

I was constantly chasing that good ol’ dopamine, but in the right direction.

So, my advice:

• Hold a loose idea of what you want in life (money, success, peace, fulfillment).
• Start building something, anything, that will make that a reality – I would, of course, recommend a one-person business because it is long-term.
• Learn what you want to learn the most to help build it (skills, courses, websites, logos, whatever) so you get your dopamine hit.
• Don’t be afraid to change what you are doing if you get bored.

I attribute my unique success to “shiny object syndrome.”

I tried and failed at 7 different business models.

What most don’t see is that I wouldn’t be here without those failures.

The skills I learned with each compounded into better opportunities.

My tweets wouldn’t be the same without copywriting.

My web pages wouldn’t be the same without web design.

My profile picture and branding wouldn’t be the same without Photoshop art.

The list goes on.

Replace the habits that keep you enslaved with habits that will break you free.

It won’t happen immediately.

Be okay with that.

If you can stay on the path, you win.

The post Entrepreneurship Is Modern Survival (How To Escape Wage Slavery) appeared first on Dan Koe.