The fastest way to ruin your life is to follow someone else's plan.
But here's the problem:
The mind craves order.
Without thinking about it, we seek security, safety, and comfort.
When I was young and dumb and learning to survive in the world, my fate was in the hands of my parents. I was too young to trust my own thinking, so the path I was set on is the only one I knew.
That's where things start to go wrong.
We all know the path of least risk is the greatest risk of them all. We all know that a life of comfort is the most uncomfortable thing in the world. So we get stuck in this loop: seek comfort, become uncomfortable, seek more comfort, become more uncomfortable, and eventually, you end up so deep in a hole that it's incredibly hard to dig yourself out. If it's so comfortable, why do you have to numb the pain with quick pleasure?
But here's the thing.
It's not as simple as setting a new goal.
Especially if it's a New Year's resolution that you're only creating because everyone else is. You don't have an iceberg of "whys" stacked under your goals, so they're easy to quit pursuing.
You've done this before. The fancy new goal is motivating for a few hours, but then you find yourself in the same cloud of distractions you were trying to escape.
If you want to avoid living a robotic and predetermined life, the solution is to equip your mind with the right tools to think for yourself.
Here's how you start (the journey may be painful):
You Need A Plan, But Not Like Most Plans
What you aim at determines what you see. – Jordan Peterson
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.
A plan is not a list of things that won't happen. It is an evolving blueprint that structures your mind to notice ideas that lead to progress.
The problem is that people conform to the goals of their parents or society and stop there. They know that having a goal is a good thing, but they don't realize what a goal is. Most people try to achieve a goal for acceptance and status rather than the happiness that stems from resistance being overcome.
Why is this a problem? Because the goals that compose your mind, identity, and perspective—often in that order, like a set of concentric circles—filter what you perceive.
A person with the goal of going to school to get a job will not notice an opportunity to start a business and pursue their life's work. A person with the goal of starting a business won't notice ideas that will help them get good grades.
In both cases, each person could read the same book (or read this letter) and leave with completely different takeaways for how to implement the information.
The point is that we don't want conformity. We want creativity. We want to be different. We want to be unique. We want to create our own lives, not live someone else's. We want new discoveries, not the same results of past generations, because if you look around, most people don't have anything remotely close to the future you want.
A Plan Is Your Surface Area For Discovery
Let's get one thing straight:
There is an order of operations to achieve anything you want in life (within the boundaries of what reality allows).
Think of the simple equation 4 + 6 x (5 + 3 – 2) = ?
The answer to that equation is the goal you're trying to achieve.
The equation itself is the problem you're trying to solve.
In order to solve that problem and achieve the goal, you need to add, subtract, and multiply in a specific order. If executed in the wrong order, you won't get the right answer.
But this is life.
You don't have the equation.
You don't even know the answer.
All you have is a guess for what you want the answer to be and the ability to create an equation, or knowledge, through experimentation and error correction. That equation is valuable to both yourself and others. It is specific knowledge that can take many forms. Sometimes, the equation is a product or service, a book, or advice you give your children to contribute to the progress of humanity. If happiness comes from overcoming resistance and a connection to something greater than yourself, creativity is the vessel for both. This is why I write.
So that's where we start.
A goal or a problem.
One doesn't exist without the other.
But most people don't know what goal they want to pursue. Or their mind is programmed with assigned goals which makes it incredibly difficult to notice a problem. Partying, sleeping in, and all other bad habits aren't problems unless they prevent you from achieving a goal. Since the goals of the known path are to go to school, get a job, and retire at 65, those don't require much effort or creativity, so you can afford to be a degenerate.
The best place to start is pure honesty with where you are at.
Are you content with your life?
Trick question.
Nobody is.
Show me someone who is happy at every second of the day and I'll show you a liar. Life comes in waves. Cycles. Highs and lows. It's baked into reality. If there were no lows, there would be no creativity, and thus no life as we know it today.
In lies the infinite set of problems that become the source of your quality of life.
Pick one.
Start there.
Don't ask me which one.
You know which one.
But now things start to get scary. The unknown creeps nearer. You're knee-deep in the water and want to sprint back to shore. The thought of that problem starts to multiply because your mind has lost all constraints and boundaries.
This is known as psychic entropy, or disorder in the mind. One thought about the extra weight you gained this past week can easily splinter into a thousand more about what your friends will think, how you'll look without a shirt on, and if you'll end up alone for the rest of your life.
In between the problem and goal lies the opportunity for a plan. A strategy. A hierarchy of goals that frames your mind to keep chaos at bay as you trek into the unknown. A surface area for discovery.
But how do you create a plan?
How do you stop the walls from closing in?
How To Navigate The Unknown (& Create The Life You Want)
This will be a painful process.
You aren't just creating a new life. You're creating a new identity. You're expanding your mind to house more complexity that allows you to solve more valuable problems.
It's not as simple as setting a goal or creating a New Year's resolution because you aren't the person who would achieve those goals.
You don't have the identity that would achieve those goals.
Bodybuilders don't have a problem eating, training, and recovering. Their entire life revolves around their goals. Every decision is a vote toward their future. Writers don't have a problem generating ideas or publishing their work. On the other end, gamers don't have a problem staring at a screen for 8 hours at a time, for better or worse.
It's not that you aren't disciplined. You have no problem eating, partying, going to bed late, and eating brain-fogging Totino's pizza rolls as a midday snack (because it doesn't clash with the goals of your identity). A bodybuilder, on the other hand, would be in deep chaos if they didn't have access to the food that was a requirement for their vision. Discipline is a feature of identity. When you are trying to become a new person, who you are is fighting who you want to become, and that's painful. You will go through a period of growing pains until your new identity solidifies.
We need to take this process gradually.
1) Create Your Own Little World
The most successful people I know live in their own little world.
They've programmed their own video game.
It's addictive. It's enjoyable. It provides a logical sequence of steps that results in experience. It helps them understand what's worth paying attention to and what's worth learning. It is a frame for their mind that repels distractions and constrains entropy.
You start building your world by setting the foundations of your new identity.
We need to cover all bases. We need to create a full circle that will act as your frame of reference. We need a lens to view life from to notice new opportunities, make better decisions, and sense when we are off track so we can error correct in a better direction.
Don't expect this to happen all at once. It took decades for your mind to take its current shape. It will take some time for it to fit the expanding mold you provide for it.
Write these down:
- Anti-vision. Your picture for the life you despise.
- Vision. Your picture for your ideal future.
- Constraints. What you aren't willing to sacrifice to reach your vision.
- 10-year goal. Where you want to be in 10 years.
- 1-year goal. Where you want to be in 1 year.
If you want a worksheet for this, here it is.
Remember, a goal is an aim or desired outcome. That's it. Goals can, and should, evolve when exposed to better information. A goal is not a static point in the future that must be achieved at all costs. A goal is a tool for identifying a problem. A problem requires a solution. The solution must be arrived at creatively through making guesses and correcting errors. Goals are points of view that must be refined on a consistent basis.
With this, you are creating the outline for the story you plan to write.
When you write a story, you don't sit down and start writing. You create a structure by which your mind can begin to surface ideas and influence your perception of conversations, information, and internal dialogue.
From there, you add, subtract, reorder, and refine the ideas until you have the clarity to write the first draft.
The thing is, life isn't a book or game that ends. There is no final goal. The only real goal is to continue playing.
How do you start making progress toward these goals?
Projects.
2) Invest Energy Into A Series Of Projects
Don't learn skills.
Build projects.
Skills, like degrees, are practically useless in isolation.
A series of projects is how you move toward the life you want. If you want to receive, you must give, and keeping your knowledge in your head is a surefire way to become bitter about how smart you are and how little people care.
A project is a quest in your game. The more you build, the more experience you put into your traits, profession, character, and abilities. When you build a project, you learn relevant techniques that allow you to solve a problem and achieve a specific result.
But projects don't start out meaningful. They become meaningful as you invest energy into them. This acts as a filter for people who can't overcome the fear of what people will think.
A project that increases in meaning consists of a problem, ideal outcome, milestones, levers, tasks, and interest-based education.
Your projects must solve problems that stem from your anti-vision and breed solutions that build toward your vision.
If you struggle with money, that's a problem. From there, you fabricate a project to build in alignment with the example vision of having a successful business with the constraint of working 4 hours a day so you have time for your family or relationships. That drastically narrows what kind of project you will build.
If you aren't in the right environment, you won't notice this as an option. If you're up to speed with something like modern business models, then you'll see the one-person business as a viable option.
From there, you create a project, like starting a newsletter. You don't get trapped in tutorial hell learning about newsletters. You start. You search for techniques like how to choose a topic and write a headline. You continue stacking techniques like how to structure persuasive writing. Before you know it, you have "newsletter writing" as a skill, but not in a way that can be taught in a linear progression in a similar context. You are one step closer to becoming irreplaceable. Then you move to the next project after identifying a problem like your newsletter not growing or it not leading to any money.
Again, a project is like a goal. They evolve with time and are not static. Stop worrying about that.
3) Hunt For A Stack Of Reasons
There were a few big moments that changed my life for good.
It usually started with me realizing how I had become stagnant. I hated that. That realization alone made me want to search for reasons to dig myself out.
You see, your mind is wired to hunt for its survival. But humans survive on the conceptual level. We can notice the same mental responses from a physical threat as we can from a conceptual threat. A threat to your identity.
Since goals compose your identity, a bodybuilder with feel pain when they are thrown out of their routine. They aren't under any real threat, but it feels like they are because their identity is threatened by the lack of progress toward its goals.
Dopamine signals when something is important to our survival. We remember that information because it will come in handy in the future.
As you are recreating who you are in the pursuit of the life you want, your mind will start to change. You will feel the tension of continuing the habits that hold you back.
Use that as an opportunity to actively search for reasons to make the change.
Read new books. Consume new information. Search for a reason to commit to what you are doing, not the other way around.
It's all too common for people to quit 2 weeks after they start. Their mind searches for reasons to quit. You need to do the opposite. Search for reasons to continue. This can be as simple as typing, "Why should I build a business?" or "Why should I go to the gym?" into a Google and letting your curiosity take over from there.
Make it difficult not to change.
4) Document Your Life
The protégé effect – a concept in learning that suggests we learn more effectively by teaching information to others, even if those others aren't necessarily any less knowledgeable.
In the great ancient societies, those in the upper class, like Marcus Aurelius, had access to the best teachers of their time.
Today, we have something even better.
The internet.
You have access to most of the world's greatest minds at the click of a button. You can read their books, watch their videos, and follow their work. If you wanted to, you could email them, message them, or get them on a podcast.
But the benefits of this new digital world don't stop there.
What do you do with your projects once you build them?
Do you just toss them into a "portfolio" and share it with potential employers when the time is right?
Or did you set out on this path to do something unique?
On the internet, you don't need permission to publish your work.
Beyond that, you don't need permission to share what you know.
The best way, in my opinion, to drastically increase your chances of success is to document your journey where anyone can discover it.
To become a creator. Not a content creator. But a creator that utilizes resources, like content, to spread their work.
Share your thoughts, opinions, problems, vision, and learnings toward your goals.
Turn your projects into products and test their value.
When you put your creations in public in the form of posts and products, you don't need to question whether they are valuable or not. The market will tell you.
If they suck, which they will at first, good. You've identified a problem that you couldn't if you were to keep your progress quiet.
I could spend an entire letter on this topic, and I have multiple times before, or I teach you how to start in 2 Hour Writer, so I'll end here and leave this as an idea for you to think about as you go about your day.
Thank you for reading.
– Dan