If you want to understand why most people don't achieve anything great, you need to understand this:
Learned helplessness is a psychological condition where a person or animal learns to behave helplessly in a particular situation, even when the opportunity to avoid or escape it is available. It occurs after an individual has experienced repeated aversive stimuli (e.g., pain, failure) that they cannot control. As a result, they come to believe that their actions have no effect on the environment, and they give up trying to change their circumstances.
You know those people.
You probably have that friend who never believes they can't do anything. It's difficult to talk with them because it's just depressing. Like dude, how can you not see that it is possible?
You see this everywhere online.
People don't even try anymore, and there's a deep reason behind it.
They're presented with opportunities to start a business, meet new people, or change their life as a whole and their unconscious, automatic, and programmed response is:
- But what if it doesn't work?
This is a critical flaw in their self-development.
It's called selective skepticism.
Their mind can't see a potential future where they do well. Their beliefs trap where their thoughts can go in this small little bubble. Their attention can't transcend the problem. And if your decisions create your future, you can see that this only leads to a mediocre life.
The brutal truth is this:
You haven't failed enough.
You gave up too soon, and you didn't learn how to view failure as the only path to success.
Now, success is mostly about winning the internal battle between your lower and higher self. It's a mind game, and you lose that game when you accept that negative outcomes for your life are the only outcomes.
You win the game when you cultivate a mind that can thrive in any domain of life.
So that's what we need to do, and I have a few tricks for you in this letter:
- How to become a strategic thinker like the most successful people in history. We'll break down the 7 principles.
- How to simulate failure before you even start with the Pre-Mortem Technique (so you can prepare your mind to do hard things).
But first, we need to start from ground zero.
You need the belief before you can effectively act.
You need to learn how to reprogram your mind to love failure and uncertainty.
Winning The Mind Game
What is your aim in philosophy? — To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
You have a project you want to build.
You have a goal you want to achieve.
You have an idea for the life you want to live.
It could be making millions of dollars, marrying a person you couldn't see yourself without, losing weight, learning a skill, or anything else that leads to growth because humans have an intrinsic desire to break out of one shell, then the next, then the next.
Here's the thing:
Everything is a mind game within one big mind game.
In order to play the mind game, you must understand how the mind works.
We're going to go a bit deep before we talk about practical steps.
If you skip trying to understand the root cause of your failure, the practical steps won't help you in the slightest.
Stick with me and try to understand.
Let's dissect the mind so you can change your own:
1 – The Mind As An Interpretive Filter
The mind makes sense of the world in stories.
Stories are web of symbols that create a bigger picture.
Games are an interactive story composed of challenging goals to achieve, rules to obey, and actions you can choose to take that result in an increase in skill.
A story, or game, provides the mind with a "frame" to maintain order and clarity. It gives you fulfilling steps to take toward the end goal.
And if you don't understand the story your are living out, or the game you are playing, you can't make sense of your place in the world. You lose purpose. Entropy ensues and you get lost in chaos.
The thing is, everyone is living out a story, but most people aren't aware of what that story is or where it's leading.
In other words, they haven't created a strategy like we soon will.
They're pursuing the unconscious goals that their parents and society put into their head. They are playing the game of being a useful worker rather than a free and fulfilled individual.
People try to play the game of starting a business or losing weight with the programmed mind of an employee or overweight person and wonder why they fail. The don't understand that to achieve anything in life, you must become the person who both sees that as a possibility and has the skill to achieve it.
How your mind interprets the world is largely dependent on your identity or who you are.
Your identity is a web of ideas, beliefs, goals, and values that act as a mental "filter."
- You notice information that helps you achieve your goals (or win the game).
- You notice information that aligns with whats important to you, or your values (the rules of the game).
- You notice information that confirms your beliefs (how you think the game should be played).
Two different people, with different goals, playing different games, can read the same book and come away with entirely different conclusions.
Those conclusions are then used to make decisions. Those decisions compound into success or failure.
Do you see why this is important?
You fail at almost everything you do because you fail to interpret reality in a way that provides you with the information you actually need to succeed.
In any given situation, you can interpret it in 1000 different ways. Maybe 5 of those interpretations will help you succeed, but your mind can't comprehend those 5 ways.
You can't make progress because your mind rejects the information you need to make progress.
This goes far beyond getting information from a book.
What is your relationship with failure? Do you see that as the only source of reliable information to base your decisions on? Or do you see it as a reason to crawl back into your hole and give up?
Do you not realize that growth is like being a lobster?
That it is painful to grow too big for your shell. And if you don't remove it, the pain only intensifies until death. If you do decide to remove it, which most don't, you will be vulnerable. You will go through a period of building a new shell.
The shell is your identity, by the way.
Now, your identity is shaped in 2 main ways:
- Social conditioning: You adopt the goals or games of your parents, teachers, and friends. As a child, you are a learning sponge that doesn't know right from wrong.
- Conceptual survival: Humans notice and remember information that aids in their survival. It's how we're wired.
The thing is, we aren't animals, and most of us aren't under the constant threat of being attacked by a bear like our ancestors.
Humans don't only try to protect and reproduce their physical form like animals. They don't only try to pass on the information in their genes. They protect and reproduce their identity. Their mental or conceptual form. They try to pass on the information in their consciousness.
This is why we write books. This is why we feel offended and lash out—trying to impregnate their mind with their beliefs—when someone challenges our political ideology. This is why we feel stressed when we aren't making progress toward our goals.
Almost all of your pain, insecurity, and lack of progress boils down to you being trapped in the shell of your lower self that is doing everything it can to stay the same. You refuse to open your mind, or remove your shell, so you can actually see that a better life is possible.
Your identity isn't some set-in-stone thing that you were assigned at birth along with your name. It's a living, breathing, and evolving entity.
You aren't helpless.
You've just learned to be.
2 – Mistakes Are The Only Source Of Truth
Here's the thing:
Most people try and try and try just to fail and fail and fail because they try to match someone else's map to their territory.
Courses, books, podcasts.
They don't realize that these things are maps.
They are guides. Not truth. They are useful, but only if you understand that they are nothing but a candle off in the distance that guides you through a dark room. They do not determine the direction of your steps or if you stumble into a pit of snakes.
Further, you do not have access to someone else's state of mind. You do not have access to how they perceive the world. You do not have their same exact identity.
This leads to one crucial and counterintuitive realization:
Mistakes are the only source of truth.
Not the thoughts in your head. Not the advice of a billionaire.
Failure is the only teacher that is absolutely 100% tailored to your situation.
Failure has a signal to noise ratio or 100:1.
But you hate failure.
You let it rule your life.
You ignore it and dig your head into more courses, books, and podcasts.
Everything you learn that is not derived from mistakes is derived from theory. It is derived from a map. It is but a conjecture formed through the interpretation of mistakes made by another person.
That leads to the question:
How do you make better mistakes, in the right direction, and learn from those mistakes in a way that leads to success?
And lastly, for the end of this letter, how do you fail before you even start to start learning immediately?
How To Change Your Life With Strategic Thinking
Strategy is not a lengthy action plan. It is the evolution of a central idea through continually changing circumstances.
Lawrence Freedman
Most people's lives are mediocre due to a lack of strategic thinking.
Successful people, on the other hand, are highly strategic.
They don't just let life happen to them. They reject the default path they were assigned. They choose the game they want to play, both for their ideal life and the games that allow them to get there. They become the person that can win that game through skill acquisition and learning.
So, to win any game you choose to play, you need a strategy.
→ Here is a document to fill out accordingly as you read.
If you download the desktop app for Kortex, you can press Alt or Option+D to open a floating note as you read.
Onto the strategy:
1 – Strategic Intent
You need direction.
You need a new goal from which your mind perceives the world.
First, think of everything you hate about your current life.
The job? The body? Your routine? How you feel? Start somewhere.
Second, think of a few potential possibilities for your future life.
Starting a business. Being fit and energetic. Living out your ideal day.
Don't dwell on this. Write a few things down and continue.
Choose the macro game you want to play.
2 – Self Analysis
Your identity clearly isn't serving you.
So, you need to become aware of all of your sticking points by performing a SWOT analysis.
- Strengths – simple, what are your strengths and talents? What comes easy to you? If you respond with a cop out answer of "nothing," you are lying and already can't see past the reactions your lower self is feeding your mind to spit out like a robot. Think harder.
- Weaknesses – What are you notoriously bad at and how is it impacting your progress?
- Opportunities for Growth – What can help you overcome your weaknesses and leverage your strengths? This could be learning skills, taking courses, meeting new people, etc.
- Threats – What threatens your progress? This could be friends inviting you out to party, a lack of time, a fear of failure, etc.
By the way, I enhanced the Strategic Advisor prompt from the last letter.
I'd recommend duplicating this document, pasting it into Kortex AI, writing your entire strategy down in a document, and asking kAI to guide you through it.
Here's an example of what it spat out when I asked for guidance on building an audience:
I could then ask kAI to help me learn about any of the above and guide me along the way.
3 – Strategic Preparation
How do you change your identity so that you act on your strategy with ease?
You start by immersing yourself in a completely new environment.
You change the books you read, the information you consume, the people you follow, and everything else to reflect the goal you are trying to achieve.
You open your mind to new perspectives and allow them to challenge your beliefs of what's possible.
Delete most of the apps on your phone. Unfollow most of the people you follow. Buy 3 new books. Queue podcasts to listen to on a walk. Invest in resources to learn the skills you need to learn. Have a pre-written messages that declines your friend's invitations to go out.
Anything that does not align with your goals is by definition a distraction.
You need an environment that is solely conducive to you achieving your goal.
4 – Concentration of Force
As we discussed in the last letter, the only way to actualize a goal is to build a real-world project.
You learn through struggle, not memorization, and you need a project to apply your learning to, so:
- Write down 3-5 projects you could build to achieve the goal.
- Choose the highest leverage project that has the most advantageous outcomes.
- Map out the 3-5 priority tasks you can do on a daily basis to make progress on the project.
If you are trying to quit your job and do your own thing, an example project is starting a weekly newsletter or starting on social media. Social media would probably be the highest leverage due to it's ability to build an audience, and a newsletter would come after.
Of course, that may not be your interest, but if it is, 2 Hour Writer may help.
5 – Disciplined Execution
You need to replace your old routine with a new one.
Because you probably "fell in" to your current routine without knowing it.
And if your actions create your future, you are falling into a future without knowing it, and it's probably not one you'll care about.
- Execute your 3-5 priority, lever-moving tasks for 1-2 hours in the morning or 1-2 hours at night.
- Everything you do throughout the day should fuel your work. What you read. What you scroll. Your conversations. Going on walks instead of distracting yourself. Eating well.
- The only thing on your mind should be strategizing how to overcome obstacles of the game.
This will become seamless when we create a Pre-Mortem soon.
6 – Adaptability
A strategy is like everything else in life.
It is not static.
It evolves with feedback.
You need to be able to identify when things aren't working, go back to your strategy, and experiment with something new.
Remember, mistakes are the only source of truth.
Experimentation is how you make mistakes, thus, experimentation is the only way to achieve what you want in life.
7 – Study The General Principles Of Nature
If you understand the general principles that are found in everything you do, it becomes much easier to make sense of a negative situation.
The easiest way to make sense of this, in my opinion, is by understanding the structure of a story.
First, there's a problem that needs to be solved. There are highs and lows the hero must go through. There is struggle. There is bliss.
Like waves in the ocean, emotions in your mind, how your relationships develop, on all planes of reality, in every situation, you are in a sentence of a paragraph of a chapter of a never ending series of books.
If you can identify what part of the story you are in, and not fixate your mind on that as if it should stay the same forever, it becomes much easier to navigate out.
If you want to understand this deeper, a great short book to read is The Kybalion.
The Pre-Mortem: How To Fail Before You Even Start
The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.
Michael Porter
Most people don't fail because they can't complete their project.
They fail because of internal, psychological thought processes that take control of their focus and lead to the belief that success isn't possible.
A few examples:
- Paralysis by analysis (over-researching, not taking action)
- Losing sight of the big vision due to others' opinions
- Lack of complimentary skills, like writing and audience building, to be able to find customers for your work
- Financial insecurity to the point of accepting that you need to focus on the job you hate
- Burning out and not having a coping mechanism that refreshes you
- Getting bored with the mundane work that gets results
- The desire to do something fancy and high status instead of something that you enjoy, or gets you out of your situation
When you are in the middle of a project, it's extremely difficult to open your mind to see beyond your situation. You fall into a narrow-minded survival mode ruled by stress. You can't think of solutions, only problems.
The best way around this is to do a Pre-Mortem.
A Pre-Mortem is a strategic thinking tool that identifies failure points in any project before it even begins.
A "project" in this sense can be anything from quitting your job, changing your career, finding purpose, self-education, losing weight, improving your relationship, planning your year, or anything else really.
Here's what you do.
First, select your project or use your strategy above, all of this is in the template mentioned earlier to fill out. Then:
- Imagine spectacular failure – Visualize your strategy failing horribly. What does it look like? Where does your life end up?
- List the causes of failure – Brainstorm all possible reasons for the failure. Include psychological reasons like personal weaknesses, self-sabotage, lack of knowledge or skill, and external factors like not having enough money.
- Prioritize the list – Reorganize the list and place the most threatening at the top.
- Brainstorm solutions – For each cause of failure, brainstorm potential solutions. Ask kAI as your strategic advisor for help with these.
With both a strategy and pre-mortem completed, you should feel rather clear on what you need to do in order to prevent failing at your next project.
I hope all of that was helpful.
And I also hope you didn't just read this without implementing any of it.
Enjoy the rest of your week.
– Dan