Most people feel trapped.
Their mind feels narrow and small.
They can't escape the bubble of repetitive negative thoughts.
They lack clarity on what to do with their life.
They don't know that "one thing" they want to commit to because everyone in the self-help space yells at them to focus on "one thing," but that completely misses the point.
(You don't focus on one thing. You focus on one mission, which forces you to focus on many things. Focusing on one thing is a surefire way to become dependent on that thing and never adapt.)
They have these random ambitions like gaining some followers on social media, starting some random business they found out about online, trying to "get a girl" to end their loneliness, or any other thing they can latch onto for some sense of direction in their life. Those things in particular, like building a business, seem worthwhile because at least it's a different path from the dead-end one that our botched culture set them on.
It's no wonder why most people fail to start.
It's no wonder why they question everything they do.
It's no wonder why most people struggle to achieve anything worthwhile.
So they slowly start to accept that maybe they were meant to be average. Maybe you were meant to wake up, hit snooze 4 times, walk the dog, commute to work, act like you enjoy the people there, act as you care about your tasks, commute home, argue with your significant other, watch TV, pass out, repeat.
But there's something missing.
You're trying to achieve freedom with a mind that was conditioned to be a servant.
That's like trying to put a square block in a circular hole.
It will never work.
How To Figure Out What You Want In Life
Humans are natural generalists.
Humans build tools to adapt to different niches and environments.
Animals, on the other hand, like lions in the Sahara or polar bears in Alaska, wouldn't survive if they were thrown into a different niche.
This extends beyond physical tools.
Humans invented mental tools like language, culture, concepts, religion, and stories so they could adapt, build, and acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to thrive in any situation.
This is the ability that makes us unique.
This is the ability that most people have lost.
You see, as children, we love to adventure. We love to discover. We love to figure things out. We make mistakes and learn from them. We touch fire.
But then, our learning stops being about real mistakes.
It starts being about the traits our parents and teachers dislike in us. The traits they find annoying or uncivilized. The traits they don't think will lead to the version of success they were conditioned to believe is the only one true path, and they haven't opened their mind to the discovery that there is never only "one true path."
And what is that one true path? It's the reason you feel so lost, overwhelmed, anxious, confused, and the rest.
The path that was supposed to be safe and secure was the complete opposite.
You were plopped in front of a government-trained expert trained by government-trained experts who are clearly not doing what you want to do in life for 6 hours each day, being told what to learn, and how to act while constantly being prodded toward the status symbol of a job and degree. And if you understand how the mind works, you understand that the goals that compose your worldview – fancy degrees and high-paying jobs – determine your mind's potential development and freedom.
You were trained to be a specialist.
You were solely focused on becoming a doctor, lawyer, artist, designer, engineer, or any other self-limiting identity that shaped what you were able to perceive and learn.
You failed to develop agency.
You failed to explore, fail, discover, and build by your own desire, not someone else's. You failed to develop the singular trait of a free individual.
In the past, free men were expected to act on their own interests. To do that, it was implicit that they would do and learn many things throughout their life. The greatest designers are only great designers because of their experience in other domains of life, not because they went to a high-status school and somehow studied the same curriculum better than everyone else did.
A free individual is the opposite of a government-trained specialist, or someone who is viewed as a machine for labor. A useful worker. A slave.
The opposite of what I teach in 2 Hour Writer, because writing is a skill that allows you to turn any interest into creative work, not static work.
Nature's Compass
The thing is, you're different.
You're aware of this.
You're observant. Maybe a bit quiet. Afraid to speak your mind because they won't listen anyway. But that silence is killing you. You tried to fit in. You tried to trust others with your future. You tried to demonize money, success, and the rest because "you don't need it to live a good life," but you need to build. Because that's how you contribute to others, connect to something greater than yourself, and embark on a unique journey that brings an end to robotic living because you have the money to remove your dependency from that robotic living.
The thing is, you're still looking for the "one true path."
I'm here to tell you that there isn't one.
If there was, we would have found it by now, and everyone would be rich, happy, and healthy. But that's not how reality works. Things will never always be happy. Why? Because happy doesn't make sense without sad. A hand doesn't exist without an arm. The physical, biological, mental, and spiritual planes all contain this pattern. One thing cannot exist without the other.
When you go on a vacation, eventually, maybe after 2-3 weeks, it becomes normal to you. You get bored. It's not a "vacation" anymore. It's normal life. You want to get back to work. You want to do something, anything, that is just a bit more novel and interesting. Your mind craves balance, but not in the common sense of living a flat and miserable life. Your mind craves contrast.
All of this is leading up to say one thing:
You aren't where you want to be because you're afraid of making mistakes.
I cannot express that enough.
If there were one true sentence in which to orient your life, that would be it.
Mistakes are nature's compass.
If happiness can't exist without sadness, success can't exist without failure.
It is a universal law. A pattern of reality. A phenomenon that has been around since the first sign of life, because something can't exist without nothing.
You can make mistakes on the conventional path – schools and jobs – but you are still working toward a narrow goal. The mistakes don't lead toward a new, better path, they simply lead to you feeling sorry for yourself.
When you decide to be free – and reject the goals assigned to you at birth that made you think small and trapped you in this negative bubble of thoughts – your mistakes are your light in the dark.
But you don't know what you want.
That's the problem.
You don't realize that you will never know what you want. It's in the future. It doesn't exist. It's imaginary. Life changes. What you want now could, and will absolutely be, different tomorrow, the next day, or the next decade. But you'll never embark on this process of refinement and purification because you can't seem to allow yourself to fail.
What you want out of life becomes more clear when you realize what you don't want out of life and work in the other direction. Since you haven't made any mistakes on your own path, it's obvious why you don't know what you want out of life.
My advice:
Do what you want without permission from someone else.
Go to the party. Get drunk. Start the business. Scroll on your phone all night. Do whatever your little heart desires. Seriously, because denying those desires is only going to bind you to them.
But there's a catch.
You need to be able to realize when those things are a mistake.
Getting drunk every night isn't a mistake if you don't have meaningful responsibilities to wake up to every morning. It's not hurting your ability to achieve the goal. Managing parties and alcohol becomes a lot easier when it impacts something more important than parties and alcohol. Since your schooling and job aren't more important, you don't care and do it anyway. You need your own goals, and you can only generate those goals by getting absolutely fed up with where you are and rejecting everything you thought was true.
You need to start from scratch.
How To Make The Greatest Comeback Of Your Life
Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay. ― J. Krishnamurti
You cannot make discoveries in the known.
It just doesn't make sense.
Please realize that.
You absolutely cannot live a full, open, and non-robotic life if you operate by what your parents and teachers planted in your head. Sure, you can be happy at times, as all people are, but being deeply fulfilled is a different story. Most people haven't experienced that feeling because it's unknown to them, so they don't bother searching for it and instead project their insecurities by telling you how fulfilled they are working as a robot would. The lines of code are engraved on their brain. Again, you can't perceive what is a mistake if you don't have a goal that allows you to.
You must launch into the unknown, feel as if you are drowning, and learn how to swim. That is how you learn anything, and that is why most people learn nothing. They would rather jump off the deep end, complain about how hard it is (as if it were supposed to be any other way, or as if something that is hard is bad or negative rather than reality itself), and blame anyone but themselves for their inability to do anything without it being given to them.
But all of my rambling up until this point doesn't help with the fact that you are already drowning right here and now.
So what do you do? How do you learn? How do you make the greatest comeback of your life?
Get Mad At Where You Are
The best periods of my life came after getting absolutely fed up with the lack of progress I was making.
I didn't care what I did. I just had to do something. I would try anything to get out of that situation. Most people would call that desperation, but I would call it a mind that's hungry to learn, grow, and evolve to the next level.
The goal isn't to immediately find one thing that eases your pain.
The goal is to accept a radical shift in how you live.
You must realize that all of your actions compounded to where you are right now, and if you continue doing those things, you will remain where you are. The only real change is behavior change, so say goodbye to almost everything you hold onto so tightly right now that you think "aren't that bad." You clearly can't manage them well.
You must become disgusted with where you are.
You must fabricate a mental rock bottom.
Write down everything you don't want in life.
The stupid mind. The pudgy body. The sluggish energy. The dead-end relationships. Reject them.
You're allowed to be extremely negative, as negative energy is much more potent than positive, but you must channel it toward forging a new identity.
I'm not telling you to make simple habit changes.
I'm telling you to completely flip the switch.
Because if you do this correctly… if you gain absolute awareness of what you don't want in life, this isn't a difficult process. You won't want to do anything other than the opposite of what you've been doing your entire life.
Disappear For 3 Months
If you don't have a vision, you are lost.
The negative energy has nowhere to go, so it gets trapped and wreaks havoc in your mind. Psychic entropy. If you don't have a meaningful path, system, or goal to invest that energy into, you decay.
But a vision doesn't start out clear.
It starts as an educated guess.
You won't be confident in it.
"I think I want to try this business."
"I think I want to read this book."
And that's all it takes to begin reprogramming your mind in a positive direction by redirecting energy toward a better life.
If you want to map out your vision and break it down into actionable steps, use my Simple Life Reset planner that you can duplicate and fill out. It will help.
Now that you are brutally aware of what you don't want, laser in on what you think you want.
Fix your physical diet. Fix your mental diet. Go on more walks. Learn a new skill. Go to the gym. Go on a walk. Talk to someone new today. You're in the unknown for Christ's sake. Yes, it's going to be a bit uncomfortable. But that doesn't take away from the fact that a mediocre life is the most uncomfortable thing in the world. Once you realize that, truly realize it, everything else doesn't seem so bad.
Give yourself 3 months, not 2 weeks.
You need enough time to invest the right amount of energy to the point of seeing that thing as important. Like a song you don't like, but when you listen to it enough, it becomes your favorite song.
The gym isn't going to be fun the first time.
The skill is going to be difficult the first time.
But as your skill begins to match the challenge of the situation, you begin to find the game extremely addicting to the point where it's all you want to do.
If It's Wasn't A Mistake, You Didn't Learn A Thing
The best decisions I've made are ones that most people see as stupid.
I'm good at making massive mistakes because I've realized that's what leads to massive growth.
In 2018, I maxed out my first credit card to try to make a business work.
In 2019, I got rid of everything I owned (except for a bad of clothes and my laptop) and flew to a different country.
In 2020, I signed a lease for an apartment that was 2x what I could afford. This forced me to make my business work.
The catch:
These don't start as mistakes. They start as risks. The payoff of that risk is the mistake because if that risk only led to success, you wouldn't learn a thing, and you wouldn't be able to replicate it.
Why does this work?
Reason #1
Goldfish grow to fit the take you put them in.
But if you keep them in a small bowl, they never grow.
The same is true for your mind.
Reason #2
Parkinson's Law:
Work expands so as to fill the time allotted for completion.
When you launch yourself into the unknown, you threaten your survival, and you have less time to become a success.
Reason #3
The theme of going full circle.
Imagine a straight line with black on one end and white on another blended with a gradient.
Now, connect the two ends so it forms a circle.
There is an instant flip from black to white.
A joke that's so unfunny that it becomes funny.
Someone who is so dumb they become insightful.
Someone who is in so much pain they have no option but to find enjoyment.
This is a universal pattern.
Leverage it.
Here's the psychology behind it:
- You set a challenging goal that deep down you know you can achieve.
- You create a REAL deadline which eliminates distractions.
- It leverages your survival instincts to quickly learn what's necessary to stay alive.
So, what do you do?
1) Feel into your situation
Become brutally aware of the life you don't want to live. Let your mind simmer with negativity.
2) Launch into the unknown
Make a stupid decision. Force yourself to pursue the dream you've been putting off. Sink or swim.
3) Learn and build like a mad scientist
Perform emotional alchemy with the stress, pain, and overwhelm.
Channel everything into that one meaningful goal.
Study and learn while your mind is primed to store all relevant information.
You'll make it through.
– Dan