“There is something intoxicating about a person who is deeply occupied with something you cannot see.” — Alexis McElroy

Whenever I imagine the chad-archetype of man I want to become, Steve McQueen always comes to mind.

McQueen was THAT guy. I’m talking babes biting their lips and whispering “is that him?” whenever he enters the premises — on some reality-altering aura with total ease type-shit.

McQueen raced cars competitively. He had real, cool taste and nearly half a century after his death he’s still referred to as the “King of Cool.”

In March 1970, for example, McQueen breaks his left foot in six different places in a motorcycle race in California days before the 12 Hours of Sebring — an annual 12-hour endurance race in Florida (this guy just couldn’t do anything half-heartedly lol).

What does the King of motherfucking Cool do?

This absolute mogger pulls up in a cut-down cast he cooked up himself and after twelve hours of racing, he and Peter Revson, his partner, finish second overall — a mere 23.8 seconds behind Mario Andretti.

He was racing at full speed for hours with a broken foot and did not give a fuck.

That’s the kind of standard I find to be wayy more attractive (by attractive I mean an ideal I want to emulate) than the “5-9 before my 9-5” hustle bro.

One smells of Jean-Paul Gaultier and swag and attacks life with vigor while the other, the Axe-smelling chud and his crusty forced nonchalant act merely idolizes men of action.

You can either talk about what you’re going to do or do it, the latter’s much harder but forges you into a man rich with lore and skills who easily attracts babes and bands.

This article isn’t going to be about manipulation or “seduction games” or “not responding quickly to texts” because that’s lame and shallow.

This is about the self. About feeding the soul and building a life so abundant that people unconsciously gravitate to you. Your very existence is a magnet for all the things you desire.

After all, the more interested you are in your own life, the less you feel compelled to search for love and approval elsewhere.

Nobody’s doing shit anymore

Most people never spend true time alone.

• Music in the shower.

• Netflix on while they eat.

• Podcasts on while walking.

• The boys going crazy in the group chat as they try to fall asleep.

They use the noise of others and the distractions of today to drown out themselves out because they grow anxious without a constant stream of sweet sweet dopamine. They aren’t nice to themselves and FOMO grows, not to mention that creeping icy feeling, like the high tide coming in, that they aren’t where they’re meant to be.

Noise has become anesthesia.

Take all of that away and most people would rather get the electric chair.

Literally.

In 2014, psychologists at the University of Virginia left people alone in a bare room for fifteen minutes with nothing but a button that shocked them. Every one of them had said they’d pay money never to feel that shock again. Yet 2/3 men pressed it. One chungus pressed it 190 times.

We’d rather shock ourselves than spend time alone — the habit that forges boys into McQueens.

Pascal wrote that “all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”

This kind of lifestyle — of constant distraction, I mean — is an Ouroboros-type loop of self-hatred and stimulation.

You stay distracted because you can’t stand being alone.
You can’t stand being alone because you’ve trained yourself to need stimulation to feel normal.

When a movie scene’s taking a lil’ too long, your phone is there. A shock. A tiny press that saves you from a zepto-second of boredom and the potential experience of being with your own thoughts.

On a day to day basis you avoid time alone because you feel bored when alone. This boredom must disappear at once — so you reach for the video games and scrolling and basically just falling into vices whenever you’re by yourself.

You thus start to equate time spent alone as time spent unproductively.

The Ouroboros grows.

Yet you need time alone to grow.

Study any of the greats as I’ve spent extensive time doing and you realize that every single one of them — from Miyamoto Musashi to Leonardo da Vinci, from Benjamin Franklin to Steve McQueen — was so great because their internal states were rich beyond belief.

Men like that, of substance and power, were forged by experiences and long hours alone to become someone worth following.

The 5 principles that follow are exactly how you replicate this:

Become really fucking good at something

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: excellence is aesthetic.

It’s beautiful. It’s attractive.

When I watch someone who’s really fucking good at what they do I find myself unconsciously drawn to them. I want to understand them. People like this are rich with layers and their soul’s flame is warm. They brighten up my days and life.

Being really damn good at something gives you that certainty and confidence that attracts people and can only come from stepping into an arena and elegantly coming out at the top.

As Paul Graham said:

While everyone else is scrolling, you must skate.

This is where the hours you spend alone go. Into getting good at something, so good that it shapes your identity, builds your confidence in your own skills, which naturally creates an easy-going kind of charisma.

If you want to build an abundant life, you need to fill it with excellence.

Be curious

Interesting people are interested people.

They study the world and build depth of soul. They know a little bit about everything and a lot about a few things.

Talking to someone like that is so enriching, it’s addicting, even.

I hate talking to one-dimensional people.

Don’t you have some opinion I’d disagree with? Have you ever just stared into space and confronted your own mortality?

Give me some substance. Show me some fire.

That’s the kind of friend I want. That’s the kind of person that’s instantly charismatic.

This demands you develop an insatiable curiosity for the world. Learning is such an important habit and, unfortunately, many of us abandon it after our years in school, where learning is out of necessity and not curiosity.

You must re-ignite this spark.

The world is filled to the brim with wonders and people and places and foods and music.

What a shame it would be to restrict your existence to a shallow slice of it, don’t you think?

Build taste

This is kinda piggy-backing off of the last idea.

I’ve noticed that the most confident people are those that know what they like and wear that shit on their sleeve, quite literally at times.

Think of Dennis Rodman. People loved him because he radiated this energetic confidence that came his peace with who he was. Some people hated him, dare I say because they saw something in him that they lacked — total assurance of the self — which is where most hatred comes from. We grow jealous because we see in others what we lack in ourselves, but I digress.

Taste is like a fingerprint of who you are. It’s a complex system of intertwining ideas and interests and pretty much nobody has the exact same taste as you.

Steve Jobs dropped out of college in 1972 but decided to stick around for classes that interested him. One of them was calligraphy.

Ten years later, however, it all came back to him as he was designing the first Mac. It became the first computer with beautiful typography.

That’s what taste is about: following what you’re drawn to, having no idea where it leads, and finding a way to imbue your work with it.

Mastery is intrinsically tied to taste.

It’s about knowing the difference between:

• what you actually like

• what you think you like

• what you think you should like

And ultimately alchemizing the path your curiosity takes you on, while avoiding mimetic thinking, into something tangible — like your music, your writing, your Macintosh.

Live life

McQueen raced cars because it was fun, not because it was productive.

As Haruki Murakami said: fI don’t think we should judge the value of our lives by how efficient they are”

Life is meant to be lived, not spent waiting around or measured by how many hours of deep work you do.

Eat good good.
Watch good movies.
Listen to good music.

Read.

Do things that scare you a little.

Experience as much of life as possible.

Being sad is a win, being greedy is a win, being angry, happy, and everything and anything in between is a win, because you get to taste more of life’s emotional palette.

Life is ultimately made up of small details. That’s it. Enjoy them.

Move your body

I learned the importance of movement and more specifically how much it matters to me in the 4 months in which I couldn’t exercise.

I had wrist surgery in December of ‘25. A bone graft that left me with a good ol’ scar and four months of nothing.

When I could finally move again, it felt fucking incredible.

The salty sweat, the pounding feeling of the blood pumping and its reverberation in the ears, the slight dizziness of pushing too hard after a long sedentary period.

There’s really no better feeling.

I’ve since gotten back into proper shape and I feel fucking great.

On top of the aesthetics and health benefits of exercise, physical effort, be it sports or cardio or calisthenics, builds confidence because you start trusting yourself. You know that you can push yourself through something hard and you won’t fall over easily.

Movement builds tolerance for discomfort.

McQueen racing the 12 hours is an extreme example of this, but you get my point.

You don’t need a race car, just your own body.

Jump rope. Row. Climb. Play.

Make movement a way of life and move how you love until you love to move.

The things you can’t see are the things that make you irreplaceable and desired by all.

The skill and the hours and the sweat.

Time alone is how you become someone worth knowing.

You’re never really alone anyways, you’re with you, building the single most important relationship you’ll ever have.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

Follow me on X for more posts on philosophy, personal development, and curating a meaningful existence.

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The birthing place of the atomic bomb.

Summer of ‘46. A Saturday.

The library’s closed. It always is on Saturday.

A thick armed guard paces back and forth at its door, guarding the most valuable papers on the planet: the secrets to the atomic bomb.

Richard Feynman desperately needs one of those papers. Something he wrote himself during the war and can’t remember.

Then he remembers his friend Frederic de Hoffman. Big De works in declassification and so got tired of running back and forth to the library that he made a copy of every single document, which he keeps in nine filing cabinets in his office.

Richard hustles over.
The lights are on.
De Hoffman’s gone.

So he waits, and while he waits he starts fiddling with a combination wheel. Richard’s read some safecracking books and always thought they were bullshit.

Try the secretary — she’s scared to forget the combination so she must’ve written it down somewhere.

Fine. We’ll see.

The secretary’s desk is littered with papers, one a sheet of Greek letters.

Across the top, carelessly scribbled: pi = 3.14159.

Why does a secretary need to know pi?

He tries 31-41-59.

Nothing.

59-41-31.

Nothing.

95-14-13?

Nope.

He gives up. Richard puts the papers back and he’s halfway out the door when he remembers the oldest trick in the book: the psychology method.

Who picked this shitty combination? Must’ve been Hoffman. Not his secretary. Yes.. and he’s a physicist. Exactly the kind of predictable specimen that’d use a constant.

27-18-28.

Click.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Richard from downtown!

27-18-28 is e.

One cabinet opens. He tries the next one.

Click.

One more… just to be sure.

Click.

Every single cabinet holding the secrets scrolls of the atom motherfucking bomb has the same damn combination, and that combination is the 2nd most famous number in all of math!

Richard takes what’s rightfully his and, since he’s Feynman, he grabs a pencil and some yellow paper, scribbles a couple of lines and leaves notes in the cabinets.

• I borrowed document no. LA4312 — Feynman the safecracker.

• This one was no harder to open than the other one — Wise Guy.

• When the combinations are all the same, one is no harder to open than another — Same Guy.

That evening during supper Richard runs into de Hoffman. The latter’s heading back to his office to work, so Richard tags along — just for fun.

De Hoffman opens a drawer. Funny. Why’s bright yellow paper there?

He turns Shrek-green. His hands are shaking. It happened.

“L-l-look at this!”

“What does it mean?” Richard asks.

“All the c-c-combinations of my safes are the s-s-same!”

“That ain’t such a good idea.”

Poor Hoffman’s convinced that whoever’s been trying to get into Building Omega, one of the most secret sites on the mesa, has finally gotten in. This can only mean one thing: the instructions to the single most destructive force ever conceived are out.

It’s Joever.

The blueprints weren’t out, of course. Richard, who’s standing right next to him and “broke in,” has them.

So how did Richard, a physicist with zero lockpicking training get into every cabinet on the mesa?

Richard was no genius lockpicker. No more competent than you or I, in fact. He said the locks were “no good” and that the steel rods and padlocks “didn’t mean a damn thing.”

What he did uncover was the underlying code.

He noticed that when a cabinet was open you could peek and read the last two numbers right off the dial.

He noticed that every dial let you be off by two numbers either way, which shrank a million possible combinations down to ~8,000.

He learned from a locksmith that the locks shipped at 25-0-25 or 50-25-50, then went office to office and found the default settings opened about one in five lol.

Finally, he noticed that the people who did bother to change the settings either picked birthdays or constants. Like e.

Some of the damn finest and smartest people alive worked on that mesa yet were completely clueless in front of a cabinet. Richard, however, saw a system with rules and predictable patterns — allowing him to easily glide through it.

Same cabinet. Same steel.

Different perception.

That’s what most prisons and problems are made of. As Richard said:

It’s quite hard to escape a prison when you can’t see the bars. And intelligence alone can’t burn through steel. De Hoffman was a physicist on arguably the most important scientific project ever and he chose a weak-ass code. As crackable as GOT Emilia Clarke (I just started GOT I just had to sneak ts in).

Most people fail, be it at solving their problems or achieving their goals, because they can’t even fucking see the problems they’re plagued by! They can’t even conceive of a goal! Be it their work or relationships or body or money all they see is that surface level and not it’s code. So they push and push and work, fall to pieces and have the audacity to scream at the universe that life is unfair and a good person like them shouldn’t suffer!

You’re using all your strength on the wrong lever you fat chungus.

Progress is never about more effort.

It’s always, always, always about applying leverage on the underlying system.

Learn the code under anything (a lock, a financial market, a person even) and every wall turns into a door.

Because you can only act on what you can see.

And you can only see what you understand.

When you can construct meaning from parts you stop pushing against the world and hack through it.

North-northeast and how language shapes your brain

Feynman’s code was mostly numbers.

Ours is, mostly, words.

Words shape almost everything you notice.

If you don’t have a word for something, it’s damn hard to notice it at all.

At the top of Australia, specifically on the west coast of Cape York, there’s a small community called Pormpuraaw (porm-pure-ow). The people there speak Kuuk Thaayorre and they have no words for right or left.

Everything is in damn cardinal directions.

Your cup is north-northwest of your plate.

Watch out bud there’s an ant on your southwest leg!

Even saying hello demands compass thinking. Run into someone up there and they ask:

“Which way are you going?”

“North-northeast in the far distance. You?”

Think about how that shapes the brain. You literally can’t even greet someone without knowing which way you’re facing, so you always fucking know. It’s like your brain’s become an unconscious compass because your language won’t let you speak without it.

Most of us can’t point southeast when asked on the spot but in Pormpuraaw, five-year olds can point southeast without thinking.

Five-year olds are mogging the fuck out of us direction-wise because of how their language shapes the way they play this game of life.

Languages are a form of code, an unconscious one that shapes your actions and perception imperceptibly. The Kuuk don’t consciously decide to track north. Their grammar, which is unconsciously absorbed during childhood, is their natural compass.

Words don’t specifically lock thoughts out of reach. What they do decide is what you notice unconsciously, and what you notice unconsciously is most of what you’ll ever see — unless you make a conscious effort to expand your perspective.

Another example: blue.

English has a single word for it.

Russian has two: goluboy for light blue and siniy for dark.

To a Russian speaker they’re two different colors, not merely different shades of the same thing, much like pink and red are two different colors to you.

In 2007, a team of researchers put Russian and English speakers in front of blue squares and timed how fast they could tell ‘em apart. When the blues fell on opposite sides of the goluboy/siniy line, the Russians were faster. The English speakers got no such Golden Mushroom.

The same thing happens to you too, on a slightly smaller scale, all the time.

I read DFW’s essay “Federer as Religious Experience” (it’s a masterpiece) and ran into the word kinesthesia: the ability to feel what can’t be seen. Like tennis players’ ability to feel where a ball is going or a writer’s ability to feel his sentence’s rhythm.

It was a concept I’d never heard of before — or rather defined properly by a single word — yet one that explains the mastery I chase. Anytime I was improving at something — be it soccer or writing — I was building kinesthesia. The concept was there but I had no real way of grabbing onto it.

Same thing with metaphysics.

The first time I came across Nero Knowledge on YouTube I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about.

“Manifestation” and “frequency” and “desired self” and “quantum timelines” and “parallel universes.”

But now I understand everything and can infer meaning from his videos — which I can then use to improve my life by acting from the position of the attainment of my desired reality — because I have vocab and frameworks I didn’t have before.

The ideas themselves didn’t change but my code (which affects my understanding) did.

Understand: Your potential for action is confined by the words you have to describe the world.

So what do you actually do about it?

You become a horny ass knowledge-hunting dagnabbit motherfucker.

When you hit a word you don’t know, stop. Look it up. And when something makes no sense — half of Nietzsche, for me — don’t skip it. I have to re-read and re-read sentences in order to understand what the fuck they mean. That’s when you know you’re on to something worth digging.

A concept that doesn’t yet make sense is a code you can’t see yet. Frustration is a sign you’re close to developing a new perspective.

By the way: Before Nietzsche was Nietzsche, he was a professor of philology — the study of where words come from. He who blew up Western morality started by blowing up words and finding their origins.

My first thought was doing vocabulary training or some shit with flashcards and word-of-the-day apps. But that’s the tortoise knowledge acquisition route — words drilled out of context don’t stick. The fast way is to learn what words are built from — i.e. to find their underlying code.

Hacker Mindset

Take a word we’ve known since we were four.

Insect.

It comes from the Latin insectum, which means “cut into.”

Because an ant with its head, abdomen, and thorax looks like some shit God created with his left hand and accidentally cut into segments. So the Romans named it after cuts.

They borrowed the idea from the Greeks, whose word was entomon, which also means cut into and it’s why the study of bugs is called entomology.

Sect, means to cut.

And thus we have:

• Dissect: cut apart.

• Bisect: cut in two.

• Intersection: two roads cut across each other.

• Section: a piece that’s been cut off.

• Insecticide: the thing that kills the cut-into thing lol.

That’s a single root and suddenly you’ve branched into a dozen words you don’t have to flashcard-memorize.

Carl Hendrick says this kind of systems-learning works “because it teaches the underlying code, not individual items.”

The underlying code.

That’s the key to mastery.

That’s what Feynman had. He operated beyond the mere guess-until-I-hit-it lockpicking philosophy and focused on human psychology.

Everything has this layer.

A language has roots.
A market has incentives.
A person has desires and fears.

Most people never get past the surface — words and prices and what people say — and take it all in one item at a time, never building deep knowledge.

The idea of building hacker mindset comes from Henrik Karlsson’s phenomenal essay on it. Once you see the system underneath, you can steer the parts on top in ways that look incomprehensible to the person who can only see the lower-system.

Hacker mindset by-passes lockpicking and finds e.

This mindset is just that… a mindset.

One built by taking systems apart. Henrik gives the speedrunner example. Speedrunners who beat Ocarina of Time, for example, don’t see Hyrule as houses and people and you know, the basic “this is the world of the video game” level. All that’s superficial when you care about beating the game. They see the code and can do things like Wrong Warp where they glitch the game while a boss’ death cutscene loads and it drops you somewhere it never meant to, straight toward the end of the game, for example.

There are deeper levels to most systems if you’re willing to take them apart.

This means picking one system you care about — your sport, your job, your teacher’s grading system — and go find the people who’ve cut it open. Learn from people who cut things up and see dimensions differently. Educate yourself by learning and continuously expand your perspective.

But merely thinking about the system underneath isn’t enough. The force of an idea doesn’t come from finding it or even understanding it. You have to test it.

You can never call an idea yours until you’ve acted on it.

This means just trying to break things apart.

This is how content creation works.

You study hooks and titles and formats of successful posts. You build a system for great content creation by dissecting the parts.

In school this could mean getting A-graded essays and finding out what they have in common before writing yours.

For soccer or basketball you could try watching your game with the sound off and only tracking the opponent or filming your training sessions and watching them back to find your ticks and weaknesses.

Stupid-level thinking

The catch here is that when you master one system you try to open every lock with it. And if you act in this way you’re no better than the man who can’t see a single system.

• Capitalists see incentives. Life’s a market and every problem is something about price.

• Religious men see community. Life’s about shared faith and the problem’s those who don’t believe.

• Scientists see mechanisms. Life’s about matter and behavior and problems are broken, individual parts.

• Stoics see the mind. Life’s about perception and a problem is something you can’t perceive correctly.

Every one of them is right, to some extent, and every one of them is blind in the 3 other directions.

American writer Ken Wilber mapped basically the entirety of human knowledge and identified 4 quadrants that most problems fall into.

The I — your thoughts and beliefs, your internal state and what it’s like in your head.
The It — your body and behavior, the external manifestation of the internal.
The We — the shared value of a group.
The Its — society’s systems like markets, schools, laws, what governs daily life.

Every problem you have can be mapped somewhere on this quadrant.

Most people only look at a single quadrant. They try to fit everything through that one code.

That’s bad thinking, stupid-level thinking — thinking that doesn’t allow you to solve problems or move towards your goals. Stupidity is shallow, categorical thinking.

The Challenger disaster was mostly due to this kind of thinking.

It was 36 degrees at launch (no shuttle had ever flown below 53). The engineers who built the rocket boosters knew the rubber seals between the booster sections go stiff in the cold, and stiff seals leak.

So the night before the launch they called NASA, telling them to wait. But then one of Thiokol’s senior execs tells his head of engineering to “take off his engineering hat and put on his management hat.”

He does.

73 seconds after liftoff, seven people are dead.

A few weeks later, at a televised hearing, Feynman (yes, our favorite safecracker) drops a piece of O-ring rubber into a glass of ice water, squeezes it in a little clamp, and shows the entire country that this shit doesn’t spring back!

That wasn’t too much of a mystery though. Engineers knew.

What killed people was listening to those reasoning on the wrong quadrant.

Feynman found that NASA’s working engineers put the odds of losing a shuttle at roughly 1 in 100. Management said 1 in 100,000.

Same problem but approached from a different quadrant (meaning different disaster-odds calculations). And listening to the wrong one got people killed.

Life works the exact same way.

You want a better body, so you buy a gym membership. That’s the It. But you live with people who eat like shit (the We), you sit for ten hours a day (the Its) and on an identity level you believe you’re “just not an athletic dude” (the I).

If you fixate solely on the corner you can see you’ll mistake it for the known world, and three months later you’re right back where you started.

As Dan Koe said:

Feynman, for one, practiced child-like humility in order to acquire new perspectives. When a hardware problem had him stuck, instead of trying to stare at the hardware even harder, he went and asked the people in the other quadrant— he went and interviewed the engineers at Marshall and Rocketdyne himself.

Next time you’re stuck on the same problem twice, stop pushing the quadrant you can see. Go ask someone, or read from an author, with a different perspective — ask your friend who’s never stepped foot in a gym about your diet or the guy in sales about your writing.

Different problems demand different perspectives and if you don’t have them, or won’t drop your ego long enough to build them, you’ll be stuck at stupid-level thinking and never realize it.

Which is terrifying.

Borrowed code

What’s even more terrifying is that most of the thinking most of us do have isn’t quite our own.

Sicily during the 4th Century BC belonged to diddyblud Dionysius II, a young tyrant with an empire and a reputation for wanting to seem smart.

Plato himself sails across the sea to teach him with the hopes of turning this tyrant into a philosopher.

They have one serious conversation.

Afterwards Dionysius writes a book about Plato’s philosophy and essentially passes the ideas off as his own.

Plato answers with a letter (whether he actually wrote it is debated). He says there’s no treatise of his on these matters and there never will be because this kind of understanding can’t be put into words. It must come from a struggle and extended period of work with the philosophy itself, and then:

Plato’s saying that understanding comes from deep struggle with ideas, not a simple conversation. Dionysius did the shallow work of merely interacting with the words and thus never found the spark.

It’s what all pseudo-intellectuals do: they borrow ideas and skip the gruelling process of trying to build understanding by writing and wrestling with the idea, yet they walk away convinced they own the ideas.

Holy intellectual masturbation.

It’s never been easier to know (or appear like you know) than to do. Grab a Nietzsche aphorism, screenshot a Stoic quote off Instagram, and you’ve got the look of wisdom without any of the work.

George Orwell wrote that ready-made phrases, and I’d argue all the quick attention-economy knowledge of today:

He also described a loop.

A man drinks because he feels like a failure, then fails harder because he drinks. Then continues drinking because he’s a failure.

Language works the same way.

It gets sloppy because our thoughts are foolish, and the sloppy language makes it easier to have foolish thoughts.

When you consume a fuck ton of information you borrow people’s understanding, their code. And when you borrow their code you see only what they see.

This gets fucked quickly considering the amount of AI slop on the Internet.

In 2024, researchers ran 14 million biomedical abstracts through a word counter, looking for vocabulary that spiked after the release of ChatGPT.

One word jumped out: delves.

In ‘24 it showed up ~28x more often than it should’ve.

By their most conservative estimates, at least 1/10 of that year’s abstracts had been run through an AI. Those are papers meant to be written by scientists, whose entire job is to think through problems.

So we’re reading more sentences written by a pattern-replicating slop-machine than ever before, and every single sentence, piece of content, motivational quote is a little line of code.

That’s scary. We’re just destroying our thinking.

And the death of thinking will rapidly be followed by the death of humanity.

AI prose gives you packaged thoughts and is slowly replacing your beliefs while convincing you that you’re accumulating worldly wisdom. Like Dionysius with a fucking WiFi connection.

And I’m aware that I quoted Orwell and Plato to make this point but borrowing is fine.

Borrowing instead of thinking is what’s destructive.

So write first. Think first. Consume second.

Take everything with a grain of salt.

Before you open the comments, before you ask Claude, before you watch a political reaction video — write down what you think. Try to find what you really think before it’s overwritten by the content you consume.

When a clip tells you what to think, ask yourself: what might’ve been clipped out? What’s the point of this — to inform, to entertain, to dramatize? What caused this reaction?

Use AI for business if you want. But do not delegate what makes you human.

Learn the code — of words, of people — and every cabinet in your life opens.

Approach life with the furious desire to learn and be humble enough to realize that your current perspective might not be the right one.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

Follow me on X for more posts on philosophy, personal development, and curating a meaningful existence.

All images used in thumbnail and article sourced from Pinterest. All credit goes to their respective owners and talented artists.

Weekly articles Tuesday, Thursday & Sunday 10:00am PST.

When you’re ready:

1. Subscribe to Alexander Romance — full archive, 3 articles a week, free

2. Paid subscriptions are frozen until Dec 31st. If you’re a paid subscriber you won’t be charged — unless you purchased it in the iOS App, Apple handles those — until I turn them back on then. Cheers!

3. Read the founding essays:

You can give it the best fertilizer and you can have a lil’ speaker next to it playing classical music.

But it doesn’t matter.

Without light, nothing else you add works.

It was in the 1800s that agricultural scientists figured out this is how all growth works — growth of a plant, an industry, a person, this principle is universal.

These scientists concluded that growth isn’t controlled by how much stuff you have, it’s controlled by how much you have of the scarcest resource.

Increasing a bunch of nonsense stuff — water, music, fertilizer — doesn’t do shit.

Increase the limiting nutrient — light — and the crop takes off.

This is called the law of the minimum.

Another way to picture it is a barrel made of wooden staves of different heights. Fill it with water and it’ll only ever hold as much as its shortest stave. Make every stave taller and you’ll still be limited by that short one.

Most of us are tall-stave builders. The wellness economy hit $6.8 trillion in 2024 and it’s all wonderful marketing for tall-stave solutions — supplements, apps, morning routines.

I’m guilty of this. ‘Cause, to be honest, it feels real good to optimize. Morning routines and whatever optimizers do nowadays are like biologically engineered McDonald’s greasy and salty fries. They bring us pleasure and comfort.

Yet when I look at my high-school cold shower + meditation + journaling morning-routine self I can’t help but picture Spongebob’s essay writing.

Feels real good. Feels beautiful. And it accomplishes fuck all.

I understand the optimization era is (mostly) dead. Most of us do. We realize that having a Whoop isn’t going to save our lives but still… it’s a great example of directing attention at the tall-staves.

If the chud optimizer focuses on the tall-staves, the chad achiever of today — think the Warren Buffetts and Elons and that general category of competence — abides by the principle of short-stave building. That means, as Charlie Munger, Buffett’s partner, is usually credited with saying: take a simple idea and take it seriously.

These high achievers win and keep on winning because they’ve found what works and they just keep going at it. Most of us try to find what works and if we find it, we spot greener grass and end up trying something else — and yet still have audacity to ask the universe why we aren’t manifesting anything lol.

Motherfucker you’re getting off a ship with a strong crew and a powerful tail wind!

Shiny object syndrome is the killer of ambition.

Its cure is finding what works and sticking to it. That’s it.

You stick to it consistently for decades. You don’t check for greener grass. You don’t look over your shoulder.

That’s the simple-idea serious-application principle in a nutshell.

The hard part is finding these powerful, fundamental ideas and then sticking to them.

That’s exactly what this is for.

I. Sleep

This simple idea is something we’ve heard ten thousand times: get enough sleep.

And it’s probably your shortest stave anyways.

In 2003, researchers at UPenn had people sleep six hours a night for two weeks — just below the national average of ~7 hours a night — and tested them on attention, reaction time, and working memory after said two weeks.

How’d they perform?

As bad as people who’d stayed awake for two nights straight.

The worst part was that they had no fucking idea.

The researchers wrote that the subjects were “largely unaware” of how terribly their lack of sleep had affected their performance.

I think that’s the most dangerous part of short-staves.

They never feel short.

We just get used to having six-hours-of-sleep energy and never realize how much better we’d feel at eight or nine.

The same can be said for most short staves.

We don’t realize how anxious social media makes us because we haven’t spent time away from it.

We don’t realize how high our ceiling is because we’re crushed by this invisible short-stave.

For sleep specifically, taking it seriously is quite simple. It’s not melatonin or mouth tape or a sleep tracker.

It’s earning your sleep.

Sleep is something to be earned.

You move, you work hard, and you get physically tired. You build and you learn and you train.

There’s nothing more gratifying than earned sleep. Snuggling under the covers with the satisfaction of having expanded your knowledge and run 3 miles is nothing short of bliss.

When Charles Dickens couldn’t sleep he didn’t close his eyes even harder and stay in the ring with insomnia. He’d instead get up and walk the streets of London all night and come home tired at sunrise. He wrote that his insomnia would’ve taken a long time to beat “if it had been faintly experimented on in bed.”

I’m telling you, I’ve been getting eight-nine hours of sleep for basically forever and I always, always sleep better when I’ve filled my day with activity.

I build up fatigue from good habits during the day — lift, run, walk, think, learn — and decompress under the covers. There’s this particular satisfaction that comes with finally laying down on your bed after a hard pickup game or day writing that’s almost indescribable. It’s like my brain knows that I’ve given it my all. I can relax now. It can relax.

This is the fundamental of good sleep.

Create real fatigue so that your rest has been earned.

And then add some cherries on top:

1. Get morning light — this improves your circadian rhythm and makes it easier to fall asleep because your body literally knows that once the sun is set it’s time for bed.

2. Keep your room cool — we sleep better in cooler temperatures.

3. Put your phone in another room — nobody sleeps well with TikTok in the vicinity.

There’s nothing more rewarding than good sleep. Take it seriously.

II. Movement

Piggy-backing off of the last idea: move your body.

Your life is at stake.

In a study of 122,007 patients being below average in fitness carried the same added risk of death as smoking.

And the benefit of getting fitter?

It had “no observed upper limit.”

No observed upper limit sounds like some anime breakthrough. Makes exercise seem like a drug guaranteed to unlock Ultra Instinct.

And it kinda is. If exercise was a pill it’d be the single most prescribed drug on Earth.

We need to move. We’re wired to move. Just like creatives grow anxious when all they do is consume, the body grows weak and frail when you’re sedentary.

Exercise is an absolute fundamental. I genuinely couldn’t imagine a life without movement or exercise. Not moving. Not skipping. Not being able to skip three-four steps while running up the stairs. Not being able to teach my future kids how to ride a bicycle and play their favorite sports with them. Not being able to play my favorite sports and compete with my friends.

No thanks.

Give me vitality and energy and lightness.
Give me strength and power and endurance.

Taking movement seriously just means seeing it as an absolute fundamental, not some grandiose effort.

Movement, for me, is a way of life. It’s just part of who I am.

For me this means calisthenics (push up variations and pullups and kettlebell leg exercises on leg day) 6x a week, soccer 1-2x a week, 20-25 minutes of jump rope (I’m progressively overloading and want to be doing 30 minutes per session soon) whenever I’m not playing pickup, and, above all, walking.

Walking is probably the most insane movement cheat code on this list.

Søren Kierkegaard wrote to his sister-in-law in 1847 that he’d walked himself into his best thoughts, and that “only in movement are health and salvation to be found.”

Walking is a super powerful health and creative habit. If you feel stuck, physically or creatively, take a walk. You’re just one walk away from a better day.

If you can, try to walk in nature too. It quiets the part of the brain linked to rumination better than a loud city street walk.

And remember: no headphones. No music.

Go over the same route, every day.

The last thing I’ll add is that exercise doesn’t (and shouldn’t) have to be restricted to a strict workout routine.

When Danish researchers followed 8,577 people for up to 25 years, here’s what they found.

• Tennis was linked to 9.7 years of extra life

• Soccer: 4.7

• The health club: 1.5

The gym is dead last probably because the healthiest activities are those that connect us to others, the ones that don’t feel like working out at all, the ones we love.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t workout — you absolutely should. But don’t underestimate the value of joining a sports team or learning a new sport. Sports are so incredibly wonderful. They’re something to be cherished. They’re an added area of your life in which you can find friends, develop passion for a skill, compete and improve, and become healthier.

The golden rule of movement is this: move how you love until you love to move.

III. Addition by subtraction

There’s an old way of thinking called via negativa.

It figures out what’s right by identifying what’s wrong, basically.

In other words: you get better by subtracting, not adding.

In A Study in Scarlet, Watson is baffled to find out that the great Sherlock Holmes doesn’t know the Earth goes around the sun.

Holmes, smirking, responds:

He’s not saying that science is unimportant. His reasoning is rather that a man’s brain “originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across.”

Most of us are hoarding lumber.

Kardashians? Lumber.
Social media? Lumber.
99% of politics? Lumber (except as of this writing ig since midterms are in 5 days… but even then).

The easiest way to create a wonderful life is to avoid storing lumber. Don’t try to add positives, just remove all the negatives. This philosophy is simple yet incredibly effective because no matter how many good habits you add, if your foundation is shit, you’ll never change.

You have to be careful as to what you direct attention and energy upon.

Back to you, Sherlock:

“The skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

It’s of the highest importance, therefore, not to have negative habits and thought patterns elbowing out the good ones.

So before you try to do more, learn more, exercise more, write down the one thing doing you the most damage — porn, social media, junk food, bad influences, video games— and cut it.

More specifically, replace it with the real deal.

If you cut the habit without chasing the real thing it was standing in for, you’ll keep relapsing.

Cut video games and start conquering in the world of business.

Cut junk food and find pleasure in delicious, high-protein home-cooked meals.

Cut porn and develop your charisma, relationship skills, and physique and hop into the dating market.

The best addition to your life is usually a subtraction.

IV. Don’t lose

The simple idea: don’t make big mistakes.

Warren Buffett’s two main principles to accumulate well over $100 billion were:

1. Never lose money

2. Never forget Rule 1.

That’s it.

Not some super fancy math quant analysis of stocks. Just don’t fucking lose money.

There’s a reason it works — and not just in the field of investing. In studying professional tennis, for example, physicist and serious tennis nerd Simon Ramon found that about 80% of points are won: like Alcaraz hitting a delicious drop shot his opponent just can’t return. In amateur tennis, however, 80% of points are lost: you double-fault or hit it into the net.

Pros win points and amateurs lose them.

The easiest way to win is to simply not lose.

As Charlie Munger wrote in a 1990 letter to his shareholders:

Be consistently not stupid.

Then he added a folk saying: “It’s the strong swimmers who drown.”

The guy who starts skipping the basics because he’s doing well, the guy who cuts on sleep before exam week, who hits heavy squats when he’s got a tweak in his knee, who turns on his day ones because things are going great.

Progress makes you careless.

And it’s incredibly easy to lose progress. A 40-year reputation can be destroyed in 4 seconds. Your 10-year gym physique can be lost to 3 months in the hospital because of a random virus.

So just invert like Charlie did.

Instead of asking yourself: “how do I live a great life?”

Ask yourself what would guarantee a miserable one — like building Dan Koe’s signature anti-vision and then doing everything to stay away from it.

Charlie liked to quote a rustic who said, “I wish I knew where I was going to die, and then I’d never go there.”

So write it down.

What would guarantee a terrible next year?
How could you make as little progress as possible?
How could you fuck up your relationships and your business and your grades?

Then just don’t go there.

You’re reading this because some part of you refuses to be average.

Yet your interests are piling up into a graveyard. The books you buy but don’t read and the half-started courses.

The FOMO you feel watching teens make bank while you keep on struggling. Your classmates who make school seem so damn easy.

Become a Polymath is the complete guide for molding this ambition into irreplaceable skill and genuine purpose — the exact method for turning your scattered ambitions into a specific, powerful advantage nobody can replicate.

First chapter’s free. Those on the waitlist get the entire guide first and at the lowest price it’ll ever be.

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V. Repeat what works

When something works, keep doing it.

Charlie Munger said he got this from Lee Kuan Yew — the man who renovated Singapore from a poor port into one of the richest countries in the world.

Charlie called it the fundamental algorithm of life: repeat what works.

The problem with this is that what works gets boring. And when it does, we leave it for something new and shiny and, in it, chase the growth we already had.

Again, self-sabotage manifesting as shiny object syndrome.

Charles Darwin walked the same path near his house almost every day for decades. He counted his laps by keeping a heap of flints at one point on the path and kicking one out each time he passed.

He did his thinking on this path.

And it worked so he just… kept on doing it.

For decades.

Taking a simple idea seriously might feel completely, ridiculously boring but its fruits are incredibly sweet.

So many people who attempt to make content fail because they don’t understand this principle.

The key to growth on Substack, for example, is stealing like an artist. You find what others are talking about that resonates with your audience and you put a spin on it. That’s it. You literally find what’s proven to work and you make it your own.

And that… works.

Yet some people try to be “original” and talk about shit nobody’s ever thought of and nobody reads their shit.

Just do what works bro. There’s no such thing as being original.

As the Bible says: “There is no new thing under the sun.”

But back to a broader perspective — the trick to sticking with what works is to change how closely you pay attention to it.

You find beauty in the seemingly mundane.

You improve your prose as you write.
You notice the patterns of leaves as you walk.

You learn to see more of what you do.

This is how you get progress. It might be slow but it compounds over time. There’s legit no secret sauce. And if there was, it’d just be sticking to what works over time.

There’s no reason to stop doing what works.

VI. Family

Love your people.

I want to retire my parents. Matter o’fact I’m going to (give me 5-10 years).

My mom always talks about wanting a big family house in the future and whenever my dad says some shit like — oh yeah I’d love that car — I always take note. I know that if he was filthy rich he wouldn’t buy supercars but instead rent a different one every week/month. Maintenance would be too much, he says. I know he’d want to travel across the world and watch every major sporting event.

The Champions League final. World Cup final. Wimbledon. F1. Any Serie A, Premier League, Bundesliga, game. Any major sporting event with France.

And we’ll get there.

But what matters most is right now.

When Confucius was asked by a student what it meant to honor your parents, he said:

Tim Urban did the math and realized that by the time he graduated high school, he’d already used up 93% of the in-person time he’d ever spend with his parents.

I’d guess that percentage is quite similar for most us. Most of the time we’ll ever get with our parents is already gone.

Both my parents turned 50 this year.

My mom asked me to take a picture of her the other day for some job thing and she said she didn’t like it because she thought she looked too wrinkly. I think she’s beautiful. But she didn’t. She doesn’t like aging.

Yet Father Time doesn’t care. He marches on. And I can only stand and watch.

So I wanna do as much as I can for my parents while they’re still here.

That means loving them — and all my loved ones, my friends, coaches and teachers too — seriously.

Be serious.

Eat dinner with them. Watch their dumb show. Whenever you have a question just ask — be it about spaceships or what they were like as teenagers. 99% of all the movies I’ve ever watched have been with my parents. They’re the ones who ingrained this love of learning and movies into me.

Ask yourself: what kind of man would I be, no matter how skilled or rich or proficient in a craft, if I cannot care for the people I love?

I want to be a serious man of love. I want to be present for those I love. Grateful for their existence. I want them to know how much I love them.

And again, that starts with the little things.

Watching Borat with my dad.
Cooking dinner with my mom.
Encouraging my brother as he studies for his tests.
Cheering my sister on as she tears across the lacrosse field.
Hitting my friends up to let them know how much they mean to me — or just to hit AMC for a new movie.

My mom left yesterday for a two-week trip to France. She was semi-crying as I gave her a last hug before leaving for school. That evening I saw a letter on my pillow.

That’s what I mean by serious love.

That’s what we should strive for.

A plant in the dark won’t grow no matter how much you water it.

Plato thought the highest good works like the sun: it’s what lets you see everything else. He also warned that it’s the hardest thing to see: “In the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort.”

The simple ideas work the same way.

You find them last, and only when you look hard.

Find your light. Then take it seriously.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

Follow me on X for more posts on philosophy, personal development, and curating a meaningful existence.

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When you’re ready:

1. Subscribe to Alexander Romance — full archive, 3 articles a week, free

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3. Read the founding essays:

These are the things I’ve learned, so far, about how to use that.

1. You can never call an idea yours until you’ve acted on it. Knowledge must be applied to become wisdom. Not everybody that grows old grows wise because not everybody pursues self-education and the application of learned knowledge.

2. Wait too long and you’ll end up dead. As Ernest Hemingway said: “Never delay kissing a pretty girl or opening a bottle of whiskey.”

   

3. A moving idiot is better than a genius at rest. The world rewards agency and audacity, not intelligence.

4. Confidence is a by-product of said agency. The more things you do, the more things you realize you can do.

5. The world is a malleable place. It’s like a giant sandbox and you’re allowed to add to it. Everything you see is frozen imagination.

6. You never want to suck, so you stay sucking. Your ability to be bad, to tolerate boredom, to tolerate uncertainty, will determine your ceiling. There’s no such thing as an overnight success. The fool must precede the sage.

7. Resistance (fortunately) never leaves. There is no day where everything becomes “easy” and waiting for such a day to change your life creates passivity. David Goggins (the most disciplined giga-chad harder-than-all embodiment of discipline) feels resistance when running but he’s made a habit of overcoming it. Challenges never go away, you just learn to deal with them. And I’m glad they don’t leave, because without challenges what would be have to work towards?

8. Slaying one dragon is proof you can slay the next one. Evidence cumulates. Overcoming a small challenge becomes the proof you take to the next fight.

   

9. To truly be disciplined, you have to be disciplined about your discipline. That means having discipline to rest, developing a feel for when your fatigue is sheer laziness (which can be overcome) or real, physical exhaustion (which demands rest).

10. At some point, on an ordinary day of chiseling, you will reach the other side and everything will shift. You’re one win away from changing everything in your life. Progress snowballs. It’s usually quite insignificant or invisible in the early years (teens-early twenties) but the gap between you and the rest will become significant with due time.

11. I wouldn’t wanna win the lottery. Effort feels good, and slow progress is insanely rewarding.

12. You are both the clay and the sculptor. You are who you see yourself to be. Identity is a concept, an ever-changing one at that. So every day, ask yourself: who am I molding today?

13. You don’t “get to know yourself” by journaling. You know yourself by creating yourself. Action beats thought.

14. Act from the position of your desired reality. Act rich until you are. Act confident until you are. Self-image creates a frequency the world tunes to.

    

15. A life filled with skill is a beautiful life. Excellence is aesthetic.

16. Perfection should remain an ideal, not a goal. In chasing an impossible ideal, you give way to impossible growth. The most fulfillment you’ll ever find in your craft comes from accepting that you’ll never be perfect yet chasing it anyways. You can’t be perfect, but you can try. And in trying you reach excellence.

17. Feeling your way through effort beats gritting your way through it. Think of the man under the cold shower who does his little breathing tactics compared to the stoic feeler who feels the cold, who tries to experience it on a deeper level than “this is super hard.” The second man will find that the cold has an almost lemonly feel, it’s prickly, it’s strange. The experience will be more enjoyable and rewarding than the taking-it-in-the-booty discipline.

    The best part of this essay is still ahead. So is the next one.

18. The better you are at something, the sharper your perception, the better your eyes. “Talent” is really about pattern recognition. Like in chess, where some see a checkered board, others see a complex set of moves. Polymathy trains you to see the world in a new light, which is why the more disciplines you practice, the better you become at that one major craft — you see different patterns and options than everyone else and so can create results they deem magical.

19. The best are the ones who have made the conscious unconscious. The road to mastery is simple: unconsciously bad, consciously bad, consciously good, unconsciously good. Practice is just about moving up the scale.

20. Real higher education is self-education. Follow your curiosity. Read old books. Read articles. Watch video essays. Watch the classics. Listen to new music. Continuously expand your perspective of what’s possible.

    

21. Perception and reality are one and the same. The man who thinks he can and the man who thinks he can’t are both right. Every experience is a blank page and you’re holding the pen.

22. Once an internal shift has taken place, it’s only a matter of time until the external follows. As within, so without.

23. If you allow a high to get you high, you’ll allow a low to get you low. As per the Hermetic Principle of Rhythm, everything in life follows a cycle. Your job is to focus on how you react to the cycle, not to control it.

24. Life and death are the only things in which you must play by the rules of polarity. In everything else, you are free to choose a side.

25. Winning and losing are psychological states. Losers feel like losers before they lose and their thoughts create energy, which create emotions, which lead to beliefs that snowball into actions that determine the result they get. There’s truly no such thing as chance — only cause and effect.

26. Detachment isn’t about “not caring,” but about not attaching self-worth to the outcome. Care deeply about what you do without letting the result (which is ultimately outside of your control) affect your self-image.

    

27. Attention is the single most important currency you have. Those who control your attention control your life because they control how you spend your time. Get rid of everything that’s deliberately sabotaging your attention (social media, Netflix, the entire attention-economy really — including Substack) and focus on cultivating deep singular focus.

28. If you don’t like being alone, it’s because you don’t know what to do when you’re alone. You need a goal and you need self-love. Then you’re untouchable.

29. If anyone spoke to you the way you sometimes speak to yourself, you’d square up on the spot. Lock in on steering your thoughts to match your desired reality. If you want to be confident, don’t entertain thoughts of fear and worry. This doesn’t mean trying to “control what you think” which is impossible, but instead making a deliberate effort to control your second thought, your third thought, your conscious thoughts, which create the energy that leads to the manifestation of certain results.

30. Philosophical masturbation is pussy. Stop thinking so much and get to work.

31. Don’t let yourself get comfortable. When you grow comfortable is when you get anxious, fearful, lustful, and slothful. The devil lives for idle times. If you’re comfortable, you aren’t growing, or worse, you’re quickly slipping.

    

32. Trying to subdue lust or kill it is the wrong objective. Steer it toward greater heights. Feel its energy and redirect it into hard work and discipline. The first law of thermodynamics teaches that energy can’t be created or destroyed, so trying to cold-turkey your way to Day 90 levitation no-fap will never work through sheer willpower. Guide your energy to a higher dimension instead.

33. It’s not what you know about the world, but who you can contact in it that matters. Relationships are levers. Give me enough of them and I will move the world. Many important games (politics, economics, academia, social media) are fundamentally relationship games. It doesn’t matter how good your writing is or how novel your ideas about changing the world are if you can’t articulate your value properly and connect with others. Connections are much more important than you think. I’m not telling you to become some freak of small talk and extroversion, just don’t hole yourself up in the basement expecting to change the world. Alone, you will always be limited to the knowledge of one. People are doors: into their world, their connections, their ideas.

34. There is no greater feat than attempting the impossible. Except maybe accomplishing the impossible. Failure in a glorious attempt is a victory.

    

35. Don’t sacrifice your family for work.

36. Being nice doesn’t mean shit. Nobody likes “nice guys.” Being loving means everything. Don’t be nice to yourself because video games and social media addiction and eating junk food are “nice” but they make you feel like shit and slowly destroy yourself. Instead, practice self-love via discipline. Meditate. Eat clean. Workout. Educate yourself. That’s self-love.

37. People worth listening to don’t tell you they’re worth listening to.

38. If you really want to understand something, write about it. Write as if you’re teaching a 12 year old. Writing is never as clear as thought, which is good because by writing badly you can understand the flaws in your logic, giving way to understanding and growth.

39. If you remove social media, you remove basically 99% of the desires that aren’t yours.

40. Feeling good should come before looking good, because how well you feel determines how much work you’ll do to look good.

41. Movement is the optimal state of man. Stagnation hates a moving target. When I’m stuck on an article I go walk, I workout, I move. As Nietzsche said: “A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.” I.e. never trust a thought that occurred to you indoors.

42. Growing old is a privilege. Challenge is a privilege.

43. Life is beautiful. Death is beautiful. There’s no true defeat until death, and even then… we don’t know what lies ahead.

Be loving. And push to greater heights. Always.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

Follow me on X for more posts on philosophy, personal development, and curating a meaningful existence.

All images used in thumbnail and article sourced from Pinterest. All credit goes to their respective owners and talented artists.

Weekly articles Tuesday, Thursday & Sunday 10:00am PST.

When you’re ready:

1. Subscribe to Alexander Romance — full archive, 3 articles a week, free

2. Paid subscriptions are frozen until Dec 31st. If you’re a paid subscriber you won’t be charged — unless you purchased it in the iOS App, Apple handles those — until I turn them back on then. Cheers!

3. Read the founding essays:

During the seventy-four years that followed he invented the lightning rod, giving man the power to tame Zeus, bifocals, which let man quickly change between close and long-range vision lenses, and a stove that heated rooms better than any fireplace. He blessed the English language with the words battery, charge, and conductor. He founded a lending library. He helped found the small academy that became Penn. He’s the only Founding Father whose signature is on all four documents that founded the United States — the Declaration of Independence, the alliance with France, the peace with Britain, and the Constitution.

How does a ten-year-old dropout manage to become such a mountain of a man?

The answer is clear: Franklin’s education extended far beyond traditional schooling. He managed so much because he cherished education after he dropped out — unlike the Iman Gadzhi copycat finance bros who convince teens to drop out because the matrix is trapping them and they need to join their Dubai program — Franklin managed so much in one lifetime because he was an autodidact.

As a teenage apprentice in his brother’s Boston print shop, he found an odd volume of The Spectator — a London paper of essays — and set his sights on being able to write that eloquently. He had no teacher and little free time, so he stole from Father Time during the nights and worked then, alone and hungry.

But he didn’t underline or reread paragraphs over and over like those of us who convince ourselves our reading is effective.

He rather wrote a short hint of the meaning of every sentence, put the hints away for a few days, then rewrote the whole essay from memory. Then he compared his version to the original and absorbed the slight differences in prose, rhythm, and vocabulary. Nobody asked young Ben to do this. He was just, in his own words, “extremely ambitious.”

This makes me wonder what Ben would do today, with every book ever written, every poem, essay, moving pictures that even he couldn’t have dreamt of and libraries upon libraries of information to soak into.

Even without every book ever written and all of humanity’s information at the tip of his fingertips Ben still cooked up a masterclass in the rapid accumulation of wisdom. His method of learning was extremely efficient and he quickly became a renowned writer. Luckily for us, his method is replicable and extremely simple. But before we get into that, let’s take a lil’ detour, a blast in the past, to another great master.

Two and a half centuries before Ben, a man who called himself omo sanza lettere — a man without letters — was looking over the day’s to-do list:

• Why is the sky blue?

• Why do fish swim faster in water than birds fly in air, when water is heavier?

• Describe the tongue of the woodpecker.

A strange to-do list, to be sure. One that perplexed even American journalist Walter Isaacson who spent years studying the list’s owner and his countless notebooks: “Who wakes up one morning and says, ‘I’ve got to know what the tongue of a woodpecker looks like?’”

Leonardo da Vinci, of course. Who else?

Painter of the Mona Lisa, designer of flying machines, dissector of corpses — Leo went crazy on the character customization ngl.

And his to-do list was just… questions.

So curious was the man that every day he’d identify what he didn’t know, not what he had to do, but what he had to know. In writing down these holes in his knowledge, he was a step closer to filling them up. Most people walk around covering their holes with tape and bravado (or something else still) but Leonardo cherished his lack of knowledge. They drove his curiosity and passion for learning, specifically polymathic learning which spanned the arts and sciences and technology.

Identifying what he didn’t know was a step closer to expanding what he did. “Flaws” are something to be cherished, because they show us how beautiful we could become.

Skip forward a hundred and forty years to Cambridge, a bit before the birth of our boy Benjamin Franklin. Isaac Newton keeps a notebook of his required reading — Aristotle’s logic and ethics — and fills it in from both ends with notes. Then, in the blank pages in the middle, he starts a section of his own: Quaestiones quaedam philosophicae.

Certain philosophical questions.

Later, he writes something above it: Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis amica veritas.

Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my best friend is truth.

Three masters and a clear pattern. One we can extract and apply to our own lives, which are rich with information and technology and opportunity beyond the imagination of these great men.

All of these men were insatiably curious and didn’t shy away from “not knowing.” In navigating the darkness of their own minds they were forced to create new light, new knowledge, that is. They embraced uncertainty and an egoless, humble “the more I know, the more I don’t know” approach to learning. Across the years, across the disciplines, this pattern is identifiable and, more importantly, replicable.

The study method of the greats

What sticks out to me from the life philosophy these three men share is that you need to actually know what you don’t know, then you need to know how to acquire more knowledge, then how to apply it to your circumstances.

Before these men tried to acquire more knowledge, they wrote down what they didn’t have.

Most of us never do this.

When’s the last time you wrote down your flaws? Everything you wished you knew?

W-w-well I think my j-journaling counts no?

💔

No. No it doesn’t. Realistically, most of us never take a critical look at our internal library of knowledge. We prefer to order new books and fill our shelves with “this is my next read for sure” than identify all the books we’ve bought but haven’t yet read — which are the exact gaps in our knowledge.

To be fair, when you hear the word “learn” or “study” you probably ptsd-shift into school mode, where learning isn’t out of curiosity but out of necessity. You NEED to learn and MEMORIZE certain things because you’ve been told you have to, not because you want to.

The school system killed spontaneous learning, and with it, the curious child-like mind behind mastery.

Yet we all still have that spark we had as kids. We just need to find it, we need to follow the threads our natural curiosity weaves. Curiosity is power, specifically curiosity in the form of questions.

The habit Leonardo, Benjamin, and Isaac all shared was quite simple: capture your questions. Give your thoughts a place to live.

Today that could be in a Notes page, an Obsidian vault, a receipt, whatever’s closest. The medium matters less than the habit of nurturing your curiosity, allowing the questions to bud into something insightful, into a new way of understanding the world.

You’ve probably heard of all these “second-brain” productivity tactics or whatever and all the cunts annoy me because they just muddy the water and overcomplicate having a personal library.

Let me just tell you exactly what I did: I personally started using Obsidian a couple years ago and I’ve loved it and don’t really customize like crazy and it’s great. I take my notes. I microscope in on certain mini-essays or ideas when I write these essays and then I get the fuck out.

Da Vinci and Isaac had their notebooks and Benjamin preached the same habit. “I would advise you to read with a pen in hand, and enter in a little book short hints of what you find that is curious, or that may be useful; for this will be the best method of imprinting such particulars in your memory," the latter of the three said.

This is a life philosophy, to attack life with a pen and let your curiosity guide your hunt for knowledge, I mean.

I’ve tried using analog but I just find that since my work is online writing it’s much easier to work with something digital — not to mention that I can connect my vault to Claude Code and have it do some pretty cool and helpful stuff.

It’s very much up to the individual so I recommend just trying a couple methods.

Maybe Notion is the move for you (but don’t get tempted just because of those Pinterest Notion aesthetic thingies you see). Maybe the full leather notebook analog is the way for you. I use analog when the situation calls for it. (I have a beautiful The Great Wave off Kanagawa leather bound journal I got from Barnes & Nobles that I use for journaling and another simple fall-brown leather coated journal with soft golden pages for handwritten copywork).

To each his own. But just have that library of knowledge you can dig into that serves as a command center for your knowledge, a sort of war room where you can discuss with philosophers, Substack writers, and video essayists.

Here’s a gift before we continue.

The first chapter of Become a Polymath: a dissection on why your curiosity is a superpower and a look at polymathy through the lens of Da Vinci, a rock star with a doctorate in astrophysics, and evolutionary science.

It’s free. And when you get on the waitlist you’ll be the first to get the full guide as its lowest ever price! Spots are capped at 250 though so move quickly!

Send me that first chapter baby!

Acquiring knowledge

I’ve realized that learning feels best exactly when it’s working least. The satisfying underlining and little margin note kinda learning or the re-reading your notebook the night before your test. This method of learning is tempting for the simple reason that it’s satisfying. It feels good to learn without much resistance, to feel like neuroplasticity’s taking place in the moment.

But this learning philosophy is really ineffective.

Real learning is like trenching through deep mud.

It’s a very specific kind of frustration. That clench-your-booty-and-jaw-and-contract-the-neck feeling while reading something and GENUINELY not understanding WHAT THE FUCK the author is saying. It’s closing your textbook and being asked what you just learned and you’re baffled by your inability to produce a coherent sentence on something you read a zepto-second ago.

This kind of friction and its consequence, realizing you don’t know as much as you thought, feels soooo incredibly frustrating yet it’s exactly what you need.

You don’t get stronger in the gym curling the 5lb dumbbell that feels nice. You need to sweat and push through resistance while progressively overloading. You get stronger on those reps that fucking suck, where the arms are shaking and the emotions flash to “I fucking hate this dogshit gym” and “this exercise is terrible”and every part of you wants to drop that weight.

The mind works the same way.

You need to struggle.

Maybe not genuinely-not-understanding-a-single-word kinda struggle but the I-really-need-to-lock-in-here kinda struggle.

Like the struggle to articulate an idea. The struggle of going through 50 calc exercises not understanding shit and then getting that click and suddenly derivatives feel like child’s play.

Psychologists call this desirable difficulties — learning that requires great effort and mental-focus that slows down immediate performance is the learning that sticks. The kind that feels butter-smooth doesn’t create any real change.

So if your studying always feels good, get suspicious.

If it feels like you’re in the mental ring with Mike Tyson getting your shit walloped, keep going.

I want to go a bit deeper because there’s two main different kinds of learning, and identifying which you need is crucial to mastery.

There’s skill learning and concept learning.

Learning is a tad different when it’s a skill (like a jump shot or yk some kind of mechanical action) and when it’s a concept (like understanding Jungian psychology or self-actualization).

If you’re building a skill, you want to rebuild the motions of masters until they become second nature. Franklin’s method to become a great writer is what my own daily writing routine is built on:

• 1-3k words of copywork (currently working on The Great Gatsby)

• 1 mini-essay

• 1 essay or article read

• Daily reading (currently on The Kybalion)

• 1-3k words of article writing

Copywork is where I build a feel for the rhythm and prose of great writers like Scott Fitzgerald, Paul Graham, and Joan Didion. Mini-essays are where the skill meets the concept — I take one idea I read or have been thinking about and write it out in my own words, and the cracks show up fast.

The most effective skill acquisition is stupidly simple:

watch the greats → replicate over and over until it becomes second nature

Watch Curry take threes and try to replicate his form and timing by making a hundred.
Learning Yann Tiersen’s I’ve Never Been There by listening to it hundreds of times and playing it over and over again.

Mastery is simple.

You get really fucking good by doing something so many times that it moves from the conscious part of your brain to the unconscious “second nature” “this is flow” part of your brain.

Now for concept learning.

Tbh I kinda lied, because it’s not that different from skill learning, the underlying principle is very much the same: consume from the best and then test your understanding by explaining the idea back to yourself.

Try it right now with Leonardo’s first question: why is the sky blue?

“The light…. umm…. the air… and the blue part is …. you know… does something.”

[Get out sfx]

Concepts get ingrained when you teach them back. The point of this is to force articulation. Your neat little thought, given any attempt at expansion, cracks. That’s the point. The cracks in your explanation are how light, understanding, gets in.

It’s so much easier to read about, say… skill vs concept learning and never try to explain it than it is to come across a new idea — like desirable difficulties — and explain it to yourself as if you were twelve. If you’ve ever tried this kind of forced articulation you’d know how frustrating writing can be. You feel so stupid. Like a genuine fraud. Because you might be. You might not know as much as you think you do. And becoming conscious of your unconsciously low level is how you get a step closer to becoming consciously good, and then eventually unconsciously good.

The answer, by the way, for the sky: sunlight is every color at once, and the tiny molecules in the air scatter short blue wavelengths far more than long red ones, so blue reaches your eyes from every direction.

Here’s where the learning gets fun and compounds: every crack becomes a new question on your list. Learning is this beautiful continuous rabbit hole — a never ending Socratic reasoning journey of constantly asking why? and constantly trying to answer it to the best of your abilities and digging into those answers you got wrong because that’s where the pot of gold is.

Every question becomes an idea to explore. Every idea gets rebuilt from memory until you can articulate it without fault. And when you can articulate without fault you move on, because learning is found in resistance, not ease.

It’s slow. It’s what Sinéad O’Sullivan in How to Become a Mathematical Genius calls super-slow thinking: “borderline lethargic work that demands concentration and the reconstruction of everything you think you know.” Not Lamborghini fast, not TikTok easy, but slow and boring — every time your bricks crumble you start from scratch. That’s exactly how you build a beautiful cathedral of deep wisdom instead of bullshit ass-crack quotable philosophy.

Applying knowledge

Through repeated action I’ve realized that the force of ideas comes not in finding or even understanding them, but in testing them. Trying to dismantle the reality around you with it. Trying to build something from it. You can never call an idea yours until you’ve acted on it.

Take soccer.

A beginner who idolizes Neymar and wants to learn scissors and body feints is better off practicing them alone for a bit. That’s the learning — copying the motions and putting in that Alex Hormozi volume. But at some point he’s gonna have to big-boy-up and try them in a real game, with pressure and a 6’4 230lbs center back who idolizes prime Pepe trying to take his soul.

That’s when his feints fail him. Which is great because failure under pressure is a much better teacher than an un-moving un-caring fluorescent orange cone. You learn sooo much more about yourself and the specific discipline you’re practicing when there’s real stakes — like online writing, for example. In writing this I’m testing my ability to articulate myself clearly and persuasively, I’m also building discipline and focus, I’m learning about my writing habits and when I work best and what the best focus routine is for me.

I kinda think of pressure as a hyperbolic time chamber of growth. Imagine those high-pressure practice scenarios to be like Goku training in high-G. Imagine how much you’d grow, how much charisma and confidence, not to mention real, genuine skill in your specific discipline, if you lived for pressure.

This is why Brazil is such a hotbed for soccer talent. Many of Brazil’s greats grew up in favelas and played in these tight street, almost futsal-like courts that demand super quick footwork and rapid adaptation. When you bathe in such an environment while the brain is hyper-plastic you’re bound to make leaps and bounds of progress.

The same can be said with every discipline ever. You need a high-pressure environment with rapid feedback.

If you only ever shoot threes alone with no pressure, you’ll never attain mastery. Ask the dude who went viral for a three-point world record in a gym (a comfortable, controlled environment with no real stakes) and then went on Inside the NBA to face retired champion Kenny Smith with millions watching.

He got 3pt-mogged by Kenny who was wearing a suit lol. Shaq and Charles Barkley didn’t take him seriously at all. Granted, he worked hard for that thirty-one 3-pointers in one minute world record, but they didn’t gaf because he couldn’t perform when it mattered.

Genuine humiliation ritual :(

Concepts work the same way. You can rebuild an idea perfectly on paper and still fold like a lawn chair the first time you see it on a test.

This is why training under real-pressure or recreated pressure is the most effective way of learning. You want to train under conditions as close to the real deal as possible. I’m studying for the 2nd of 3 Financial Accounting exams right now — thirty-five multiple choice questions — so I had Claude build me an HTML page that drills me with MCQs and Feynman Technique review passages.

Reviewing the material just to review it is useless.

This applies to your life philosophy too. You can read about confidence and agency for years, or you can do the things you’re scared of, the things highly-agentic, highly-confident people do, and become confident yourself.

Most people never make it this far. For the introverted normie, philosophical masturbation is a great tool for self-sabotage. A keen liar, it tricks the over-introspective into a false sense of progress.

You have to trudge through the mud. You have to find joy in it.

Now go articulate what you just learned about here.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

Follow me on X for more posts on philosophy, personal development, and curating a meaningful existence.

All images used in thumbnail and article sourced from Pinterest. All credit goes to their respective owners and talented artists.

Weekly articles Tuesday, Thursday & Sunday 10:00am PST.

When you’re ready:

1. Subscribe to Alexander Romance — full archive, 3 articles a week, free

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3. Read the founding essays:

Think about how often you take your phone with you when you shit.

Every single time. Every single day.

That’s discipline.

You’ve trained yourself over time — like one does to build muscle at the gym — to pick your phone up when you sit on the sacred throne and if somehow someway you’ve misplaced it you’re ready to dig through Hell and back to find your precious.

If that’s not discipline…. I’m at a loss for words for what is.

By the way brodie a 2025 study found that 66% of people use their phones on the big T and that those who did had 46% higher odds of getting hemorrhoids. That’s some dedication. You’re literally risking your life keeping that screen time high.

Most of us are actually more disciplined than we think, we’ve just been aiming this powerful bow onto the wrong target — and the blame isn’t solely yours because we’re the first generation ever who’re facing distractions biologically engineered by the world’s smartest engineers and scientists to be addicting. As Aza Raskin, the guy who regrettably designed the infinite scroll, said: “Behind every screen on your phone, there are generally like literally a thousand engineers that have worked on this thing to try to make it maximally addicting.”

Our discipline has been hijacked but we do have it in abundance. Our motivations are just a bit skewed — we’re motivated by pleasure and dopamine and shit but fuck man discipline is discipline.

Think of the discipline it takes to grind to Radiant in Valorant or Challenger in League or to somehow amass a snap score of 10,000,000 or to send hundreds of reels to your boy every day that he never watches.

You have more potential than you realize. You just have to redirect this powerful current toward the things that matter.

And redirecting it has nothing to do with clenching harder.

II. Realize discipline is play

The single most powerful reframe I could give regarding discipline isn’t about what to do or not do, but about how you see discipline. Perspective is a dimension above action, so changing it will always be more beneficial.

Most people approach discipline the David Goggins way — grit-your-teeth-and-take-it — while attaching their sense of worth to every rep. This kind of discipline will always lose to the playful master.

This reframe really clicked for me the other day when I was watching NBA highlights and thinking about those poor guys who get watched by millions of people and crumble under the pressure. I’d also been playing Rivals earlier and getting hyper-focused by some cunts (meaning that in a 6v6 game I felt that they were only shooting me, which was annoying) and I had an epiphany of sorts. (I promise this is going somewhere).

I guess I realized that I have no enemies and that the NBA players, and all athletes in general, who perform the best aren’t those who focus on beating the enemy. They focus on their internal state, their actions, and realize their opponents are teachers guiding them to that peak performance. The better their opponent, the better they perform — because flow arrives when high skill meets high challenge.

Essentially, the people hyper-focusing me and the people I play soccer against and the NBA players' opponents are just that… opponents. Teachers that help me improve. When they hyper-focus me and kill me if I make a mistake, they're teaching me what not to do.

That’s the power of perspective.

I now think about how I perform as a sort of tango between my current state and what I’m capable of doing — and my opponents just kindly present me with challenges that help me get to that peak performance.

It’s strange because now I approach everything I do with this mindset — nobody’s against me and I have everything to gain and nothing to lose since I can only win or learn (which is win because it gets me closer to winning).

Writing shit sentences is how I get closer to a good final article.
Making a bad play is how I improve my game sense.
Missing a three teaches me where not to set my feet.

I guess that’s what I mean by reframe. And I’d say the more you can have of these shifts in perspectives when it comes to meta-skills — if you can change the most important thing (perspective) for the most important skills, like discipline and self-image and the like — the closer you get to peak performance.

Which brings us to the reframe I had on discipline. I’ve come to see it as self-love.

I’m an ambitious guy and you are too.

And most goals depend on your abilities in the following three fields:

• Talent

• Work ethic

• Passion

Talent you can’t control and passion can only be found if you work, so work ethic is essentially the only lever we control. Discipline is a big part of that lever. Doing things you don’t want to do. Getting up a little earlier than the competition. Cutting out that junk food.

That’s discipline. That’s self-love.

Taking the necessary steps to achieve something you care about is self-love. It’s simple, really. My ambition drives me to pursue big goals and I’d feel like shit if all I did was dream without ever taking action.

What do you think happens to someone when all they do is talk and never take that first step toward their goals? Or even worse: what do you think happens if they have these big aspirations but drag themselves away from it via their lack of discipline?

They’d develop this deep self-hatred. They wouldn’t be able to live with themselves.

And I’d hate that for you. I’d hate that for me.

We must be disciplined because it shows we care about our soul, our mind, our bodies. I think this Dostoevsky passage suits this idea quite well:

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”

The un-disciplined man loses all respect for himself. And having no respect he ceases to love himself. He becomes an NPC, a shell of the man he could be, he lets his potential die without a fight.

Discipline is your way of telling yourself and showing the world that you’re serious, that you’re a man of your word. We love people like that. We love ourselves when we act in this way. The lazy man is unattractive because you can’t trust him with shit. Think of the bums who do jack shit on your school group projects. Nobody likes that fucking guy. Nobody wants to be that fucking guy.

Discipline builds self-trust and confidence.

You feel good when you know that you’re a guy who can get shit done, who can look at life, build a positive vision for the future, and manifest it by yourself.

Imagine the charisma that this version of you exudes. The courage. The calmness. The sheer power and dripping-hot sex appeal.

Discipline is the highest form of self-love. It’s a way of showing yourself that you care enough about who you are to make an effort toward the heights.

III. Stop resisting

That’s what she said.

Paradoxically, the most “disciplined” people don’t need to force it because they’ve consciously engineered their environment to promote discipline.

Every temptation you have to resist is energy that gets drained, leaving less room for discipline on high-ROI work (such as writing, studying, working out, and the like).

Think of it like a farmer whose highest yield crop are his pumpkins. His big, orange pumpkins that sell for an insane price each. Now think of this guy spending his time bending over and picking up the micro-baby carrots that sell for pennies. He’s breaking his back and spending energy on this insignificant task and thus has no energy for what matters.

Similarly, you need to make all the micro-decisions (such as what to wear, eat, your day-to-day schedule, etc) automatic and you need to remove all the micro-friction in your environment.

You need to make discipline easy. That’s it.

You need to arrange your environment (both physical and digital) to facilitate peak performance.

Remove all the baby carrots and focus on the pumpkins.

Most people have 2-3 big distractions they’ve made king of their environment and chopping down those bastards is the highest ROI thing they could do.

This could be the fact that you sleep next to your phone which makes waking up and scrolling on TikTok irresistible. It could be the fact that you have TikTok at all. It could be that you work in a noisy environment. It could be that you cope and “study with your friends” (which we know means you do everything but study).

In 2017, researchers at UT Austin had about 800 people take tests with their phones on silent, some face down on the desk, in their pocket, or in another room. The ones whose phone was in another room did significantly better. Just having it near you is a distraction in and of itself lol.

Our phones are the modern Goliath — something that never leaves our environment because it’s always in our pockets — so I’d say reducing your screen time is probably top 3 most important things to get done in order to facilitate discipline.

I’ll make this simple:

• One page rule — move all your apps to the app library and basically have one home screen with your most used apps (like Spotify or Notes or sum else).

• Remove all the social media apps (no you don’t need them as much as you think and the people who care about you will have your phone number you aren’t going to die).

• Spend atslittle time with your phone around you as possible. I, for example, leave my phone in my room for the entirety of the day and only pick it up/take it out when I need to.

Then it comes down to simple productivity rules like habit stacking (following one habit up with another, like meditating after breakfast or studying after you shower), you compound your habits by setting a new one after an established one. Minimalism is also great and pretty straightforward — the less stuff you have in your working environment, the less potential for distraction.

Consciously design your environment. Clean it. Take care of your space. Your environment is a reflection of your internal state. When you put effort in maintaining order externally, that reflects internally (and vice versa).

IV. There are no bad days

This kinda goes back to the idea of reframing how you perceive discipline and your performance. The Hermetic Principle of Rhythm states that “Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall."

All things rise and fall. Even your level of discipline.

You will have bad days. You’ll have days where you feel like shit.

I’m writing this right now with a mean stomachache fueled by a late night quiche snack right before bed last night (not to mention the coffee I’m sipping) and this could be one of those days where something outside of my control condemns me to rot on the couch and question my late-night-snack-life-choices (Editor Alexander here: not the case! Locked in today baby!)

There are days where I wake up just not feeling it, the spark of energy and wonder that’s so particular to young ambitious men chasing their goals has vanished. There are days where I legit cannot fucking write — my keyboard’s in front of me, I can see the blinking cursor on my Substack article draft page, my Good Kid or Japanese/Samba jazz or classical music playlist is playing, yet I can’t see anything. No potential openers. No potential quotable sentences. Just pure darkness.

Some days I can push through and I do what I can and some days I pussy out and cope.

The “value” of those days aren’t actually measured in what I did, but in how I perceived what I did. What matters above all is whether a “bad day” affects my self-image.

Being unproductive and spiraling into a negative thought cycle about how you’re nineteen and seemingly so far behind all these Internet gurus making bank teaching teens how to make bank is far more negative than just being unproductive. Matter of fact, you can be “unproductive” but still end the day feeling grateful because you’ve learned that a carb-heavy lunch gives you hibernating-bear energy for the rest of the day.

Fundamentally, there’s no such thing as a “bad day” — much like there’s no objective winning or losing, only your perspective of it. Winning and losing are psychological states. As Shakespeare wrote: "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

Banger line. Should get that guy writing plays or smth.

But for real though; bad days, unproductive days, days where you feel like shit, those are just days that you’ve labeled as “bad” and “unproductive.” Just that. In and of themselves those days are like every other day. The sun rose and set. The birds sang. The clocks ticked. And you spiraled because you didn’t do your Andrew Huberman sunlight-maxxing cold-shower morning routine.

Discipline changes when you don’t attach your self-worth to what you do. At the end of each day, ask yourself what you sowed, not what you reaped.

Much of our generation’s anxiety and depression comes from asking the wrong questions.

We ask: what did I do today? Did I study enough? Was I productive enough?

The fact of the matter is that you can’t (and shouldn’t) measure the quality of your life by how efficient you are.

You should instead ask yourself: who was I today? Did I complain? Did I feed negative thoughts? Did I try my best? Did I make an honest effort? Did I look for good signs or focus on the negative?

What you do is a by-product of who you are anyways, so focusing on identity is much more empowering.

If you’ve read this far it’s because some part of you refuses to be average.

Yet your interests are piling up into a graveyard. The books you buy but don’t read and the half-started courses.

The FOMO you feel watching teens make bank while you keep on struggling. Your classmates who make school seem so damn easy.

Become a Polymath is the complete guide for molding this ambition into irreplaceable skill and genuine purpose — the exact method for turning your scattered ambitions into a specific, powerful advantage nobody can replicate.

First chapter’s free. Those on the waitlist get the entire guide first and at the lowest price it’ll ever be.

Send me the first chapter!

V. Resistance never truly leaves

The biggest mistake I made with discipline is thinking that at some point I’d reach a demi-god day 90 no-fap floating level of discipline that would, from then on, allow me to coast through life. Like I’d finally find this wonderful “tomorrow” everybody always talks about and my shoulders would drop, my walk would steady, my breath would deepen.

This poisonous idea is very much like the “starting on Monday” and “this week is going to be different” cope that so many people like to pull out of their ass to feel they aren’t that mediocre.

Bill Russell, for example, who won 11 rings with the Celtics, threw up before big games a long way into his career and if he didn’t his coach, Red Auerbach, sent him back to the toilet.

Life isn’t some “get to x level and you’ll be free of everything bad” kinda game. It’s like a “level up and as you level up you get to face harder bosses.”

David Goggins still feels resistance when running. He’s talked multiple times about how he doesn’t always want to go running. But he gets up, gets hard, harder than the resistance, and starts running.

As you become more disciplined, you become more equipped to deal with the harder challenges. That’s it.

And I think that’s beautiful.

Because if you suddenly phased through something and never had to face anything hard again, what exactly would you do?

Like genuinely. What do you do if you’ve climbed every single peak?

I wouldn’t want to know. I just want to keep on climbing. I want to see how far I can go. I want to see how far you can go. How much value can you put out? How much of your soul can you imprint on this cold universe? How much of your potential can you actualize?

You'll only know if you keep on moving toward a higher standard of excellence.

VI. Burn the boats

In 1519, Hernán Cortés and his big boys landed in Mexico with eleven ships. Some of his own men, loyal to the governor of Cuba, plotted to steal one and sail home.

So Cortés ran their shit down. (Everyone says he burned the boats but he didn’t really — he sank them after taking all the valuable shit but “burn the boats” sounds so fucking tough that we’ll keep it that way.)

One of his soldiers, Bernal Díaz, wrote that “the die had been cast, and we, with Cæsar, when he had passed the Rubicon, had now no choice left.”

Hernán did this so that failure wasn’t an option.

Victor Hugo did the same thing but with his clothes. Behind on Notre-Dame de Paris, with a fine of 1,000 francs for every late week, he locked his clothes away so he couldn’t leave the house. He burned the exit. And finished the book in about four and a half months.

Burning the boats for conquest.
Sacrificing the undies for literary masterclass.

This just means putting yourself in a situation where you have to develop discipline. It’s setting a scary goal with a scary deadline that demands you be disciplined if you want any shot at achieving it.

Force deep focus through real pressure.
Force genuine growth by giving yourself real stakes.
Force yourself to come out of your comfortable cocoon.
Burn the fucking boats and stop optimizing for reversibility.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

Follow me on X for more posts on philosophy, personal development, and curating a meaningful existence.

All images used in thumbnail and article sourced from Pinterest. All credit goes to their respective owners and talented artists.

Weekly articles Tuesday, Thursday & Sunday 10:00am PST.

When you’re ready:

1. Subscribe to Alexander Romance — full archive, 3 articles a week, free

2. Paid subscriptions are frozen until Dec 31st. If you’re a paid subscriber you won’t be charged — unless you purchased it in the iOS App, Apple handles those — until I turn them back on then. Cheers!

3. Read the founding essays:

It draws people and dreams alike, without much effort from its source. It’s inexplicably powerful. We love confident people. Their smiles that have a quality of warmth and aliveness that you rarely encounter. That you cherish. The same can be said of their calm gestures, their way of making you feel heard and understood, as if you have earned a place in their universe.

We realize, consciously or not, that surrounding ourselves with such people is beneficial. We also realize, this time consciously, that spending time around anxious dweebs will reflect itself in our behaviors and gestures, so we avoid these types — those of us with a will to power and the ambition to succeed, that is.

There are some Gollum-like chuddy creatures who find joy in surrounding themselves with the weak because it gives them a false-sense of confidence.

I, however, doubt you’re one of those people.

You’re here because you want to be confident.

You’re here because you want big things.

That’s magnificient.

I, too, want big things.

And the first step to achieving big things, dare I say the first step to materializing anything, is confidence. Put more specifically: the first step to materializing anything is belief.

Everything in this world — from its cars, the wonderful Ferrari F40 and Toyota Prius alike, to its wonderful cities filled with culture, history, and art, Paris to Cairo to New York, and down to its people, the brilliant human extraordinaires sprinkled throughout — are frozen imagination. Someone daring had to imagine these, believe in their potential, and then create.

Belief builds worlds. Quite literally.

I’m going to make this simple. Confidence, real, powerful confidence — the world-creation-reality-distortion-field-type of confidence that attracts everything you want effortlessly, that brings not only material achievement and internal fulfillment respectively— has 3 steps.

1. Irrationality.

2. Evidence.

3. Rationality.

That’s it.

I. Irrationality or “delusional optimism”

When you first think of a goal or desired state, confidence in your ability to achieve said goal manifests itself as irrationality, that is; a belief for which you have no evidence.

In order to get to the Alex Hormozi confidence-comes-from-evidence grounded-confidence, you must first operate from a degree of delusion. You have to believe you can before the world proves it to you. You have to believe you can make something revolutionary or become confident or bag the Überbaddie before you have any evidence to support your claim.

Think of delusion as the necessary activation energy to get past initial resistance. Just as a rocket needs a massive burst of fuel in the beginning to escape the Earth’s gravitational pull so too do you need a massive burst of force to overcome mediocrity’s gravitational pull — fear, doubt, overthinking, anxiety, uncertainty, yada yada. You need to develop your own gravitational field that outweighs it.

Without some sort of irrationality, you literally have nothing.

How can you hope to fly if the idea of having wings scares you?

In the beginning of your journey you might not be equipped with sufficient proof to back up your claims or ideas of grandeur. That’s perfectly fine. It’s more than fine actually, it’s perfect. Because the essence of confidence in highly-agentic people is rooted in their belief that they will find a way.

I, for one, had to believe in my writing’s potential before I had any proof. During those months my work was fueled by the belief that I was headed in the right direction. Irrational belief allowed me to bulldoze past fear. Failure didn’t seem like an option. It wasn’t an option. I just knew I was gonna figure it out. I had to believe in myself.

You should be more afraid of wasting your own potential — and wasting it because YOU, the one person you should always have on your side, held yourself back — than of “failing.”

Ultimately this “delusional optimism” creates a launchpad for proof building.

That’s its sole purpose. To give you the means to get out there and back up your claims.

Delusional optimism is nothing if it doesn’t fuel action, the very action that will turn your delusion into foresight. That’s the second item on this list.

II. Build evidence, and a lot of it

Irrational belief must, it must, be followed by action. Action creates the proof you need to alchemize your delusion into real confidence. As much as you’d like to, you can’t operate on delusional confidence your entire life. Your work will inevitably need to be recognized and you’ll need proof to back your claims.

Even if you aren’t planning on entering the relationship-heavy games of politics and academia and economics, there will come a moment in your life where you’ll look back on the years spent talking about what you’ll done one day and realize this “one day” still hasn’t come. There is no “tomorrow” where you eventually figure it out.

I don’t want that.

I don’t want that for you.

And I don’t want that for me.

You need to take action. Because eventually your delusional optimism will fester into self-hatred and you’ll begin to feel like a jester, a clown who talked out of his ass his whole life without ever doing anything.

Taking action is how you prevent this and it’s how you gather proof.

Proof that you are someone who gets shit done.
Proof that you are reliable and understanding and thoughtful.

This isn’t deep or philosophical. Taking action means taking action.

Putting in the reps.

Writing some 150+ articles on Substack.
Taking 500 jump shots every day.
Speaking to investors.
Building your digital product.
Studying 2-3 hours daily in preparation for a test.

Gravity comes from mass.

Repetition rewires the brain. While delusional optimism works on a metaphysical level, taking action grounds your confidence on a neurological level. Neuroplasticity teaches that we essentially are what we do. Your neurons fire faster and easier the more you do something. That’s physical, chemical confidence.

You believe you can succeed on your test because you’ve studied more than anyone else. You believe you can take the game-winning three because you’ve shot thousands of threes.

Confidence when it matters most falls back on the small space between your neurons. And if you haven’t fired the pattern (the shot or the math problems) enough times the connection will be flimsy, leading to poor confidence.

The most universal principle I can give you is that you should find the highest-leverage kind of action and spam the fuck out of that lever.

For growing on Substack, this meant writing a fuck ton. Writing 3x articles a week for God knows how many weeks and writing thousands of words of copywork and learning from great writers.

Action is better than no action, but focused effort on the right action is better than mindlessly wabadoodling about spamming every lever.

III. Rationality, or earned confidence

Stack enough evidence and the delusion stops being a delusion.

It just becomes who you are.

And then this rational confidence — hey! I can actually write great articles that people enjoy and succeed on Substack — fuels greater endeavors and pushes your personal frontier of what you believe to be possible.

This, now real, confidence fuels the next climb, the bigger delusion. Your unwavering delusional faith is now backed by proof. So it’s not really delusion anymore.

Visionaries exist in retrospect.

The meta-skill underlying this is to build an identity.

If you build proof that you can overcome friction, that you can charm people, that you can think through problems effectively and creatively, that you can stay up during the late hours of the night working on an important project.

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If you build proof that you’re a certain kind of person — a disciplined, creative, hard-working, loving individual. When you operate on this level every single goal becomes attainable because you have all the requisite parts that most goals require, like the ability to tolerate discomfort (discipline), to find innovative solutions (creativity), to simply put in more reps than everyone else (hard work).

Slaying one dragon is proof that you can slay the next. Jumping over a hurdle is proof you can jump over the next.

I guess I’ve realized that the ultimate form of self-love is belief. How can I look at myself in the mirror if I’m not rooting for me? How can I move through the world with peace and confidence if I know, deep down, that I’m holding myself back? That me, the person I’ll spend the most time with throughout these seventy to ninety years I get, the human extraordinaire that I am, is somehow my biggest enemy?

Do you see the gigantic abyss that such a lack of self-belief would create in a person? Not to mention someone of ambition, someone like you?

Believe in you when no one else does.
Work to create proof you are who you say you are.
And look up one day, on top of your mountain, to find that you are who you say you are.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

Follow me on X for more posts on philosophy, personal development, and curating a meaningful existence.

All images used in thumbnail and article sourced from Pinterest. All credit goes to their respective owners and talented artists.

Weekly articles Tuesday, Thursday & Sunday 10:00am PST.

When you’re ready:

1. Subscribe to Alexander Romance — full archive, 3 articles a week, free

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1. Read the founding essays:

It’s a big ol’ beetle in Western Australia that’s trying to mate itself to death — and understanding its struggle will help us with our own fight against modern vices.

The male jewel beetle’s natural habitat, the scrublands — the dry, hot, earthy undergrowth — is littered with stubbies: dimpled brown Australian beer bottles.

The male jewel beetle, like all creatures, wants nothing but to mate and reproduce. He wants a female: a big, brown, glossy, dimpled, female jewel beetle.

The stubby, however, is bigger than any real female, shinier too, and makes no fuss when he attempts to charm it. So the poor, ignorant jewel beetle climbs onto the bottle and tries desperately to mate with it. It tries and tries, the Sisyphus of jewel beetle stubby-fucking, and just won’t stop. The clueless bastard even ignores real females walking right past him. Eventually, the sun or the ants or some other lucky predator stumbles across what can only be described as a punishment a bored god would smite a lowly insect with and eats him right up.

Once you understand this idea, which scientists call a supernormal stimulus leading to fatal attraction, you’ll see it everywhere.

Video games, for example, are a modern supernormal stimulus — an emulation of masculine achievement and progress. Video games are addicting because they bring, in abundance, that wonderful feeling of being good at something and beating others and climbing the hierarchy. It’s a way to externalize the drive to conquer, to rise, to win — which are healthy. “A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength,” wrote Nietzsche so the problem lies not in our hunger — without it humans wouldn’t be at the top of the food chain and we’d have no Pyramids of Giza, no Eiffel Tower, no ISS — the problem is that this hunger is directed at illusions of progress. All addictions are attempts to fill a void within with something external, like the beetle’s bottle: shinier and more approachable than anything the real world could offer.

Video games are the most obvious stubby. But if you look closer you’ll find one for every human desire — because, sadly, the world’s economy runs on selling quick money to the broke and love to the isolated.

The desire for love became porn. For most men the dopaminergic release that comes from watching porn is more readily available than a real woman. It’s so much easier to navigate to Chrome and straight to your favorite site than to improve your style, get a good haircut, work on your charisma, approach a girl you like, get rejected, try again, and again, until you develop a real relationship. The Hub also gives us access to more women who’re more willing, more perfect, more kinky, more more than any real woman could ever be. A supernormal mate, if you will.

The desire for status became social media. The ultimate social hierarchy of 2026 (while is also the shallowest form of status we’ve ever concocted) is one you can climb and dominate from your bed. A supernormal (superfake) tribe.

This principle can be extrapolated to every modern bread and circus.

Every one of these gives you the quick, easy feeling of the real deal without any effort and that’s the cruelty of our modern vices: the supernormal stimulus kills the drive for the real thing while raising your “this-is-what’s-normal” threshold.

What thrilled you yesterday is baseline today. Now you need bigger titties, more scrolling on 2x speed, more junk food. You need to start multi-tasking or up the dosage, quantity, intensity of your bad habits in order to feel… anything.

The more you get into this dopamine loop the harder it is to get out, you’re neurologically training need for stimulation — like making a habit out of picking up your phone the instant you’re bored.

These fake pleasures also make the real deal look less appealing — they ruin real women, real achievements, and real life in the process. You leave your fapping session needing more and find that your reality has become grayer while you were away.

Luckily, the cure is much easier than you think.

Become a god over your addictions

The first step is what we’ve just covered: education. You can’t fix what you can’t see — and understanding how the thing hurting you actually hurts you is the first step to escaping it.

You needed perspective — a simple reframe on what your addictions actually are.

The second step demands action — or rather, a lack of it. We’re going to starve the addiction.

Overcoming a bad habit isn’t some Rocky montage where you go cold turkey on everything at once. If you can, props to you — but most people don’t work that way. You have to let your system, mostly your dopamine system, slowly reset back to baseline. As Anna Lembke writes, “you’ve changed your joy set point to the side of pain, and therefore need more and more pleasure to simply feel normal.”

So we drop our egos and slowly reduce the dose. Still engage with the bad habit — but less intensely, mindfully — so the dopamine reservoir refills on its own. Like slowly lowering the volume on your uncle’s questionable aux choice.

This works, but it’s tricky, because it means sitting in the grey for a while. It’s tempting to go 100-to-0 overnight and chase all those I-can-levitate-after-60-days-of-not-touching-myself effects, but the real reset is slower. You have to endure that flat, bored, under-stimulated feeling you’ve been running from. Intentional boredom drops your baseline so low that ordinary things begin to feel wonderful again — imagine the beetle slowly backing away from the bottle, he’s finally gone hungry enough to realize that real females he can actually mate with have been walking right past him all this time.

My best days are a sort of constant flow state. No scrolling. No distrations. Just straight locked in.

You’re reading this because some part of you refuses to be average.

Yet your interests are piling up into a graveyard. The books you buy but don’t read and the half-started courses.

The FOMO you feel watching teens make bank while you keep on struggling. Your classmates who make school seem so damn easy.

Become a Polymath is the complete guide for molding this ambition into irreplaceable skill and genuine purpose — the exact method for turning your scattered ambitions into a specific, powerful advantage nobody can replicate.

First chapter’s free. Those on the waitlist get the entire guide first and at the lowest price it’ll ever be.

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Convert, don’t deny

Everything you try to suppress doesn’t go away — it festers, and comes out uncontrolled in your weakest moments. As Oscar Wilde wrote: “Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us.” To kill a passion at the root is to attack life at the root.

The hunger that drives you to choke your chicken is the same hunger that could build an empire. When you try to suppress it entirely you become a eunuch, powerless and weak, instead of the giga-chad saint-like-monk you were wishing to become.

There’s this Naval quote that encapsulates what I’m trying to get at: “It’s actually easier to achieve your material desires than to renounce them.”

Similarly, it’s easier to convert our desires than to deny them.

To conquer a desire you just steer it toward greater heights. Struggle converted into mastery. Lust into creativity and loyalty.

Self-mastery is about aiming your drives consciously; not suppressing them.

Self-study is so important for this reason — identifying your bad habits can to greater purpose. Your vices are something to read and interpret. Many of them are indications of a higher potential. A man addicted to video games is, yes, maybe a chud — but also a man with a powerful drive for conquest that’s simply being misaimed. The addiction is like signpost, pointing — look here you cunt! this is what you’re here for!

RememberL the beetle’s instinct is to mate. He simply acted on the wrong dimension, following the fake version of his natural desire.

Yours is doing the same. The drive is sound but the aim is off.

So ask yourself:

I. What is this selling me?

Are you watching porn because you want to be loved?
Are you addicted to video games because you love the feeling that comes with being good at something?
Are you addicted to social media because you’re scared of being alone?

You can’t tame an addiction unless you understand its underlying mechanism.

II. Don’t deny yourself

Cold turkey basically works for… nobody.

The trick is instead to progressively decrease — like the opposite of progressive overload for muscle building. You instead want to, gradually, decrease the quantity of time and intensity of the bad habit. If you’re gaming 5 hours every day, cut that down to 4.5. You still get to have your fun while slowing making your way to a better future.

The whole trick here, the whole trick in beating any addiction, is cutting down the ego.

Set a target so incredibly easy that success is inevitable. And then run that same loop over and over again until suddenly you find yourself at a healthy state with gaming — playing 1-2x times a week and genuinely having fun.

At the same time you do this, you start progressively increasing the habit that touches the same hunger as the bad habit.

Ex: as you start to decrease how much you play video games, you start expending energy on a conquest/progress oriented goal. Maybe you start hitting the gym, or start writing online, or start learning sales.

You slowly replace the bad habit with the good one.

III. Become who you are

The urges don’t truly die until you change who you are.

Identity and self-image are everything. Constantly thinking about how addicted you are only feeds the addiction, because where attention goes, energy flows. You must instead detach your self-worth from your bad habit.

Identity is the deepest lever you have, levels deeper than willpower.

Willpower asks “can I resist this?” which creates a daily struggle. But identity asks “is this even who am I?” which is a fight you only have to win once.

This is why I’ll always dislike streaks and the “Day 4 of No Fap!” bullshit. Every streak counter slop thing means you’re constantly thinking about how addicted you are which is itself a way of fueling the addiction.

A man who genuinely sees himself as a writer doesn’t have to white-knuckle pop-a-forehead vein to not scroll — scrolling is simply not what he does, like the way a vegetarian doesn’t have to “resist” eating a steak.

Your habits are by-product of your identity. Every time you give in is like a stone you’re dropping. You’re building mountains and becoming someone.

The beetle, poor beetle, can only ever remain that. Just a beetle who’ll die humping a bootle while sexy beetles straunt past him and he’ll never wake up because he can’t become something more than an animal following his instincts.

But we can.

We can choose what to aim for. What to chase. What to love. Your struggle is a sign that you’re made for more. You’re in a war with yourself precisely because you’re human and because you’re not average.

IV. Real-life maxxing

Ultimately, you beat your vices by having a life so fun that vices have no place in it.

Think about the discipline it takes to grind for hours to rank up and learn character interactions and constantly adapting to the meta — that’s a superpower. If you aim that exact energy at real life you’d be fucking unstoppable. You can maxx-out yourself IRL. Your money. Your charisma. Your taste and character and personal philosophy.

Shakespeare would probably say “maxx thy-self” if he were alive today.

An ideal life is just one where you do the things you actually want to do and where the things you want are the beneficial (that move you toward something). Naval said that “intelligence is getting what you want out of life” and it follows that what you want out of life is also a sign of intelligence.

Decide what you want and pursue it ruthlessly. Dedicate yourself to ruthlessly to the pursuit of greatness that any vice disappears in the rear-view mirror.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

Follow me on X for more posts on philosophy, personal development, and curating a meaningful existence.

All images used in thumbnail and article sourced from Pinterest. All credit goes to their respective owners and talented artists.

Weekly articles Tuesday, Thursday & Sunday 10:00am PST.

When you’re ready:

1. Subscribe to Alexander Romance — full archive, 3 articles a week, free

2. Paid subscriptions are frozen until Dec 31st. If you’re a paid subscriber you won’t be charged — unless you purchased it in the iOS App, Apple handles those — until I turn them back on then. Cheers!

1. Read the founding essays:

A dagger and a book.

The dagger, logical for a man of Alexander’s status, but why a book? And specifically, why a copy of the Iliad?

Granted, his mentor, Aristotle, had specially annotated it for Alexander, but why did the latter bother to haul it across the known world, to war and conquest and danger? What was so special about such a myth?

The answer is that to the young man it was more than a mere book; Alexander used it as a mirror — the Iliad’s hero, Achilles, was to serve as a standard, a myth that he, a young man of overflowing ambition, was to replicate.

And he did. It wouldn’t be surprising today to mention Achilles and Alexander in the same breath. But what fascinates me isn’t Alexander’s choice to idolize Achilles — we all worship something, someone, and to do so consciously is powerful — but simply his habit of mythologizing himself. And that began much earlier than with the Iliad. It began, like most things, with his mother.

Believe it or not, Alexander the Great was born “the Great.” Or so his mother told him over and over and over until he accepted it as fact … Before leaving off for an important military campaign, she pulled her son aside and told him of his secret, godly parentage. Zeus had visited her bed in the form of a lightning bolt and as a result Alexander was born a demigod.

You must show yourself worthy of your divine heritage, she told him.

And Alexander, whose ambition was lit aflame by this astonishing revelation, did.

He believed himself to be the chosen one. He believed himself destined for greatness. And the more he believed in his myth the more reality distorted around him to mirror his ideal, bending to his unshakable will.

His personal myth, the one seeded in his mother’s Dionysian mystery cult, materialized itself as Alexander the Great.

The power of personal myth

The personal myth is a natural aspect of human nature. Left to survive on a floating pebble in the universe’s vast and cold emptiness, it’s only rational that we make sense of the world by first making sense of ourselves. Story is man’s original fire.

You might not call your self-image or vision for the future a myth but that’s what it is, and it’s steering you, following time’s unstoppable and unforgiving march, toward the future, some future, whether you like it or not. The difference between you and Alexander is that he authored his future by authoring his myth; he believed in his mother’s words and looked up to the heroes of the past, emulating them, looking to them as standards of excellence.

Story has shaped man since the dawn of the soul. We find power in creating ourselves, in imprinting our souls onto the universe’s canvas. Money, nations, religion, and identity alike are stories we choose to believe in for the greater good. Story brings order. It fights entropy and decay.

Making this process conscious on a micro-level — directed at you — is everything. Because if you don’t know why you’re doing the things you do or have no vision for the future, you didn’t create yourself — the environment and the people around you did, and unlike Alexander’s delusional “Zeus as a thunderbolt somehow put it in” mother most of us aren’t surrounded by people pushing ideas of grandeur onto us — you have no control over your future, but scariest of all: you don’t know who you are.

The godfather of analytical psychology, Carl Jung, struggled with this idea of myth. He looked around, after years of mental calisthenics, and was still confused. “I was driven to ask myself in all seriousness,” Jung wrote, “what is the myth you are living?”

He didn’t know. Which meant someone else had control over his life.

For most of human history, the ghostwriters of your myth were at least human — Alexander’s mom, your parents, teachers, society, yada yada the usual society shitshow — but things have changed. Muse is here. Claude. ChatGPT. Technology the likes of which we’ve never seen, driving innovation and progress in every frontier. As Yuval Harari wrote: “AI has hacked the operating system of our civilization.” And by the operating system he means story.

AI is making its way into everything. Content creators are using AI to generate scripts, students to replace their thinking, software engineers to write code and you just have to wonder: what’s happening to us, as humans, when everything we consume, think, and learn is infused with the soul-less and repeated rhetoric engineered by multi-billionaires whose goal lies between increasing shareholder profit and creating an AI super-god that will grant them control over the world’s economy? 

We’re becoming more AI-like by the minute.

Nuh uh. I don’t want that. That’s scary, like really scary, actually.

So we’re left with the choice between surrendering ourselves — on a civilizational, societal level and on an individual, soul and personal myth level — to AI or… we can author our own futures, sneak our own Iliads under our pillows, look to proper idols of the past, and create our own myths.

The choice seems pretty clear…

Bodybuilding for the mind

Before we get into building a personal myth I’d like to touch upon a concept I learned about recently: bodybuilding for the mind and its importance in the coming years.

Believe it or not, for almost all of human history, nobody trained. As in physically trained. We didn’t need to. Our bodies were naturally built by the hauling ass and walking crates and the labor that simply living — we were an agricultural society until around 1760 — required. Then the IR (a tuff acronym I’ve made for the Industrial Revolution) came along and swept that back-breaking butt-clenching labor to the clankers, and a whole new class of men — the clerks, office workers, the white-collars of today — were born.

We no longer had to work as hard to survive, but the body no longer had a natural training ground. So within a generation physical fitness went from a by-product of living to something you had to consciously build. Thus, we got the modern gym.

The underlying idea is simple: when a technology replaces labor and its effects (farming and physical fitness), the work becomes a discipline of its own, and uses the technology that replaced it to improve itself (the IR helped build the machines that could make bodybuilding a thing).

The same thing is about to happen to the mind. More specifically, AI is making thinking optional in the exact same way the IR made labor optional.

Those of us that train and expand the mind will win because everyone else is too busy prompt engineering and prompt-slopping their way to shit software won’t realize that, in doing so, they’re sacrificing their brainpower, attention, and very mind.

We’re going to have to develop ourselves on purpose because those that don’t write — vibe coding doesn’t count — will be written. And bodybuilding for the mind is akin to building a personal myth. They’re intertwined. They feed off each other.

Let’s get into it.

Before we go further though we need to address your major limiting belief.

We always hear “jack of all trades, master of none” but not the full quote:

“but oftentimes better than a master of none.”

Both are wrong.

Become a Polymath shows you exactly why and hands you the method for making your ambitious curiosity a flame bring enough to burn the world, one that nobody can copy and everyone is unconsciously drawn to.

First chapter’s free and those on the waitlist will get the full thing at the lowest price it’ll ever be. It’s capped at 250 and won’t reopen.

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Building a personal myth

In writing this I found that there’s no clean a-b-c steps for such an undertaking, it’s more akin to a mindset shift and overall life philosophy than a concrete roadmap. What I can say with 75.5% confidence is that your myth depends on two things:

1. Your goal(s).

2. Your identity.

Every good story has a goal (plot) and a protagonist (identity).

Without a goal, there’s nothing to romanticize or mythologize — Sisyphus, for example, only found fulfillment because he had a rock to push daily.

Without an identity — you have no soul, nothing from which to build a plot. Your goals are mostly a by-product of your identity. If you’ve cucked yourself into anxiety and fear, the goals you’ll set (if any) will mirror that; they’ll be reasonable and timid and won’t actually be worth anything. If you’re too confident though, your goals will be unrealistic and you’ll come crashing back down to the uncomfortable reality that shit takes time and you aren’t as good as you thought you were very, very quickly.

The optimal plot-goal balance is what I’ll call reasonable unreasonability.

Your goal should scare you a bit, you have to be unsure that you can actually do it because without the possibility of failure your goals don’t demand anything from you. And the whole point of goals — beyond the superficial, and oftentimes materialistic, outcome — is growth. That’s it. In setting a goal, you’re demanding that you become someone with high standards.

To write a great novel, your standards of excellence must be that of a great novelist and your skills, used to reach that standard, develop in proportion to the standards you have. Without the stinging sting of this isn’t good enough, I know I can be better, you have… nothing. No growth.

My point is that you grow in proportion to the challenge of the goals you set. The more challenging the goal — while still being within reach — the more you’ll have to develop so as to reach it. They should be right on the threshold of what’s uncomfortable and what you know yourself to be capable of. Think of it as the same channel from which flow emerges.

Without this you can just casually stroll along and write a shit novel and find yourself worse off — because instead of practicing discipline, you’ve practiced false-detachment from ambition and are training yourself to move passively through life.

The last goal-setting tip I’ll leave you with is that you probably overestimate what you can do in 6 months and underestimate what you can do in 3 years.

Progress compounds. It’s not always quick. But it is worthwhile. Your goal’s time horizon should reflect this principle.

Your identity must then propel you to this goal. Your self-image is, and always will be, the ceiling for what you can accomplish. Perspective is reality. Reality will always mirror how I see myself. Without a strong sense of self, a positive self-image, a personal myth_, you’re confining yourself to stagnation. In consciously shaping the self, which is what creating a personal myth is about, you shape reality.

Remove limiting beliefs

Before you can write your myth, you must erase the one that’s been scratched up in the dirty ink of limiting beliefs, those conditioned in you from childhood, those that fester in the underbelly of the mind and, as Jung wrote, “when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.”

These are the “I’m so behind everyone else,” “I’m not worthy of [x],” “I’ll never accomplish [y],” and “they’re so lucky” beliefs that slow you down like massive tungsten blocks attached to your belt as you try to sprint.

Limiting beliefs aren’t erased via argument — when you argue with a belief or negative thought, you feed it more attention, which is what it wants. Where attention goes, energy flows. And the last thing we want is more energy toward mental entropy.

You must instead detach from these beliefs. Every time they rear their ugly heads, you notice them, curiously, as if a butterfly had flown into the room, and focus your attention not on the fact that you’ve thought something negative, but on what you can control: your next thought.

Do that enough times and the second thought becomes the first. Like editing yourself in real time. Notice a limiting thought, replace it with a self-serving one — I love myself, I can do anything I set my mind to, the world loves my energy — and repeat.

It’s quite simple, really.

Consciously direct attention

A myth is told by what the narrator chooses to notice. As narrators to our own myth, what we notice every day adds to this story.

Here’s what I mean:

The mind looks for what’s front of mind. Think of the confirmation bias: if you believe you’re going to fail, your mind will hunt for failure and you’ll inevitably slip toward that state. This can also be understood as the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon — thinking about something leads to you noticing it everywhere.

When you think of red cars or buy one, you suddenly notice them everywhere.

So ask yourself: what am I looking for everyday? Signs of luck? Signs that I’m loved? Or signs that I’m unconfident? Signs that others are ahead of me? Signs of anxiety?

I’ve been working on this skill – because the ability to notice good things is a skill and can be learned through conscious practice — and it’s been nothing but fun.

Every time I go rock climbing I pass by my lucky green light (a light that I’ve legit never gotten a red on) and throughout the day I consciously take things in and interpret them as signs of luck. Because reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else so what the fuck is stopping me from seeing as much awesomeness and whimsy and wonder as possible?

If I talk to someone about something — like a song — and then hear it a little later, I see it as a sign. Sometimes I’ll look at the bright blue Bay Area sky and call it a sign.

I drop something but manage to catch it? Sign.
I wake up and my hair’s looking pristine? Sign.
The day starts off foggy, as it always does in the Bay, but gives way to a 70 degree cloud-less afternoon? Sign.

The lesson is simple: there’s nothing stopping you from interpreting every little thing in your life as a sign of greatness, of luck, of prosperity. Perspective is everything my friend. Consciously directing the mind is the ultimate meta-skill and it’s how you add continuous fuel to your myth.

Affirmations

Every waking minute that I’m not actively doing something, I imbue my mind with positive thoughts. Affirmations just make sense to me — like yeah if I repeat something to myself over and over I’m eventually going to believe it no? — because your thoughts are like stones, drop enough of them and they become mountains, big enough to rule your life.

For context, we have some ~60,000 thoughts every day. That’s 60,000 opportunities to mold your mind and reality into whateverrrr you desire. So every day, like those tourists that drop coins into fountains, I drop as many positive, powerful stones as possible to build mountains that bring joy and peace and confidence as opposed to the mountains of gloom and despair that rule so many people’s lives.

Now remember: you can’t control your first thought, sometimes you’ll unconsciously drift back to negativity and anxiety, which is fine, you just have to control your second thought — your reaction. Conscious control of the mind isn’t about never thinking negatively but about softly steering the mind back to your desired path, like a ship lumbering across the waves, every time you notice it drift. Affirmations are like your myth’s literal lines and sentences.

Self-education

A mind full of affirmations without internal substance isn’t worth that much. In essence, a myth is built from material and the better the material, the better the myth. Self-education is how we find the world’s veins of gold and extract the most powerful substance, giving way to the most powerful myth.

Self-education gives you the tools to shape the world. By learning new skills, new ideas, new concepts — like you’re doing right now, props to you! — you’re expanding your mind, expanding your idea of what’s possible and, in doing so, improving the quality of your life.

Never learning about personal myths means you never build one.
Never learning about the importance of physical fitness means you never build strength, agility, and health.

Ultimately, the knowledge you accumulate creates your map of the world. The more knowledge you have, the clearer the map and the easier the navigation.

My self-education routine is pretty simple. I learn — from articles and books and the occasional Youtube video — and I write. I try to make sense of what I’ve just learned. I think writing is the best form of learning because it forces articulation, which forces me to concretely explain what I mean, which exposes the cracks in my understanding, which lets the light (opportunities for improvement) shine in.

Learn → digest through articulation → apply to life → repeat.

The discipline of today, the discipline of the mind, is about choosing to make yourself walk through nature a bit longer than you have to, to think for yourself instead of asking some AI for the answers, it means creating your own myth, setting your own goals, defining your own beliefs and stepping away from the increasingly AI slop-filled Internet and social media.

Alexander is arguably more remembered for his myth than for his death. Within a few centuries, Alexander Romance, his heavily fictionalized biography, a borderline myth, was translated into twenty-four languages, and is one of the most copied books in the world.

Alexander is far from the last man to do this.

Caesar, for example, modeled himself on Alexander. Napoleon modeled himself on Caesar — he studied his campaigns extensively and in Egypt consciously played an Alexander-type role.

At the very end of his life, on the measly little island of Saint Helena, Napoleon looked over his life’s impossible arc and said: “Quel roman que ma vie!”

What a novel my life has been!

In the end, Napoleon called his life a story.

I think that’s the true power of a personal myth: it outlives the facts. It outlives you. It gives you meaning. It’s fiery and beautiful and powerful. It makes you fiery and beautiful and powerful.

So ask yourself: what is the myth I’m living? And am I writing it?

Mine — well I think you know what mine’s called. I’m writing it right now.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

Follow me on X for more posts on philosophy, personal development, and curating a meaningful existence.

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Weekly articles Tuesday, Thursday & Sunday 10:00am PST.

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This poor, suffering man won’t let anyone forget about his desperate condition. So desperate is he, in fact, that he whines all night, keeping everyone up. His cries, however loud and obnoxious they may be, aren’t demands for help; he cries so as to be heard. He wants his almighty suffering to be recognized, and to transform him in the eyes of the weak, un-suffering men into something more than a mere mortal.

From his pain’s poison he extracts sweet, delicious pleasure.

“The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans; if he did not feel enjoyment in them, he would not moan,” Dostoevsky writes. “Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact,” he continues.

Man is sometimes in love with suffering.

We, like the toothache man, treat misery like the weather — something that happens to us, something outside of our control. And we, like the toothache man, try to find the pot of gold at the end of the shitstorm. Psychologists call it: secondary gain. The “hidden payoff” of pain, if you will.

The delicate attention you’ll receive because you, nothing but a poor damsel now, have been hurt. Or the wonderful, extravagant excuses you’ll be able to make — “Unfortunately I can’t come to your birthday party because I just had surgery.”

Ressentiment

Dostoevsky’s toothache man is a prime example of victim mentality, but I want to go deeper, so I’ll hand it over to my associate.

Nietzsche realized that sometimes this S&M victim-mentality self-masochism festers in the soul as something more terrifying than a mere habit of crying loudly: a virtue.

In the first essay of the Genealogy of Morals he takes us down the dark core of the self, where ideas are made and men are broken, and he makes us listen to what the weak, hidden in shadow, whisper to each other. They’ve taken their powerlessness and reclaimed it. They cannot strike back against the powerful, but have alchemized this into a matter of pride. As Nietzsche puts it: “Weakness is lied into something meritorious… and impotence which does not requite into ‘goodness of heart.’” Weakness gets alchemized into virtue.

Nietzsche calls this psychological-calisthenics-masturbation ressentiment: the revenge of the weak. Denied power, they build an imaginary version of it — “the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge.”

Their weakness becomes painted over, rebranded, if you will — “as if the weakness of the weak—that is to say, their essence, their effects, their sole ineluctable, irremovable reality—were a voluntary achievement, willed, chosen, a deed, a meritorious act.”

Large-scale ressentiment of this kind has plagued society. Everything’s going tits up because everyone’s rushing to be a victim — we live in a society where, somehow, being a victim, or being perceived as one (hence the endless virtue signaling), represents righteousness and moral superiority. This is exactly why victim mentality is so satisfying. If you believe yourself to be wronged, you never have to do the one thing that could end your suffering: take some fucking action.

Your failings aren’t your own.
You’ve been cheated, lied to, manipulated. It’s the system’s fault.

And thus mediocrity too, has spread like a plague.

As much as I’d like to, you can’t argue someone out of the victim’s cuck chair. It’s too comfortable, he’s grooved himself into its soft leather and has made it a throne.

What I can do however, is give you the facts: there’s nothing distinguished about suffering and weakness. What’s distinguished, dare I say noble, is agency. Agency is learned, which means it’s available to all — the weak and strong alike.

You must stop looking for someone to blame. There’s no one to blame. Refreshingly, people don’t actually care about you. People don’t care about your circumstances or misery. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. So people, rationally, care about themselves.

How am I being perceived?
How can I win?
How can I move myself forward?

You’re so caught up in how others perceive you that you forget everyone’s (also) self-absorbed.

Let’s break down how to break this shit down shall we?

I. It’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility

I believe I heard this some years ago when watching a guide on masculinity. “The key to becoming more masculine,” Hamza, I think it was Hamza, said, “is to take responsibility for everything that happens in your life.”

Over the years I’ve found this idea to remain as powerful as when I first heard it.

Your life changes when you stop trying to blame — which externalizes your internal power and renders you helpless to the world, which you’ve surrendered your arms to — and you start trying to take responsibility, which is practiced agency.

Granted, not everything that happens is your fault. I’d say most of what happens in your life is outside of our control, driven by the untouchable forces of the universe and the dynamic macro-forces of politics and economics, as well as the smaller, micro-forces of relationships and random chance. But nevertheless, everything that happens in your life is your responsibility.

As long as “fault” and “responsibility” stay interlinked every inconvenience, big or small, will remain a reason to stay un-agentic and irresponsible. Ignorance driven by helplessness is bliss until you live for years without gripping life by with horns and fight with it every day to get to a better future and end up in the same place, having made less progress and accumulated more regrets.

At the end of the day, the sun will set and the birds will continue singing, and the price of victim mentality will remain mediocrity. That bastard’s a delicate poison. Because, as discussed previously, it feels good to be a victim, and taking action and practicing responsibility can be scary. They demand the will to act, they demand courage, they demand a strong sense of self — all of which one doesn’t merely stroll upon, these ideals and characteristics have to be fought over, the way a prince must leave the comfortable home of high walls and pretty servants to enter the Hero’s Quest and conquer Dungeons & Dragons in order to save the pretty little Peach of a princess.

Beating victim mentality is very much a matter of practicing stoicism. Sometimes there is someone to blame, yes; maybe a waitress did spill water on you, or maybe someone knifed your car — someone to blame means it is someone else’s fault — but even in those moments, especially in those moments, it’s crucial you take responsibility.

Taking responsibility is one of the few things in this world that belongs to you, that you can control. It’s a subset of your internal state and a by-product of your self-image. That’s why the best thing to do when something doesn’t go your way is to focus on the internal, on what you can control.

I think Epictetus said something about this some two thousand years ago. The fool blames others for his condition. The man making his way to wisdom blames himself. And the sage blames neither — he’s stopped asking who’s at fault? and he’s started asking what’s mine to do?

Epictetus, by the way, was born a slave, He had all the reason in the world to blame all the evils in the world yet he chose the more self-empowering path; of philosophy, of internal control, of responsibility.

I think, ultimately, beyond philosophical talk, that’s the golden essence of responsibility: it’s self-empowering. A sort of coup d’etat against the almighty universe, if you will. Taking responsibility brings confidence and power.

Do you think it’s more beneficial for someone to be handed fifty reasons the world is against them or fifty that they have power over their circumstances? That they can shape their reality? That they aren’t some measly, insignificant ant destined to be crushed by time’s unforgiving march?

Victim mentality demands nothing, rewards helplessness, and brings nothing.
Responsibility demands you become better, rewards agency, and brings everything.

If you’re ever unsure of how to act, remember that every good thing you have has come out of taking responsibility.

II. Victim mentality is a choice

I might cringe a bit while writing the following, but it must be done… for the greater good.

My sophomore year of high school, and my first year in the school’s varsity soccer team, we played a rival school and won. A 2-0 win with a corner kick goal and a banger from downtown. It was great.

I, however, didn’t think it was great.

I’d only played five minutes and I spent the rest of the night sulking about it. The JV coach who I was quite close to — what a great coincidence that I’d have him as my freshman coach by the way, he’d been my first ever coach when I first joined a team as a young jit, he’d recognized me at tryouts by the way I run — even asked me why I looked so sad.

I had just poisoned a win with an emotion.

Nothing bad had objectively happened to me. I’d broken my pinkie that season, came back after missing a ton of games, and still got five minutes of playing time in this one. If you’d ask me now, that’s a win! But fifteen or sixteen year old Alexander crossed his arms and sulked and decided to cultivate negative emotions and thoughts, which led to a negative perception, which led to that equivalent reality.

A while later, some two years later to be precise, during my senior year’s 3rd block AP Computer Science class to be microscopic, I watched a Youtube video and learned about the Hermetic Principle of Rhythm: everything in the universe flows in and out.

Highs and lows are inevitable in life. Inevitable and uncontrollable. Some days you’ll reach productivity levels Ali Abdaal would ‘gasm at and some days you’ll lose despite doing everything right and some days will be mid-table mid like Man U and some days you’ll get five minutes of playing time.

What I didn’t understand my sophomore year, but thankfully do now, is that if you let these uncontrollable highs and lows of life decide your internal state — if something “bad” happening to you leads to you surrendering control over your internal state to the world, which, as you’ll recall, leaves you powerless — you’ll remain reality’s bitch and never know it.

But just like you can choose anger and jealousy at only playing five minutes, you can choose clarity and peace at having played five minutes.

Most people just choose to remain victims of their circumstances either because a) they don’t understand they have power over their internal state, and therefore over their reality or because b) they’re too scared to step away from the comfortable, “just right” feeling that victim mentality gives them.

The answer to a is self-education — which you’ve solved since you’re here — and the answer to b is a leap of faith. Stepping into the unknown can be quite scary — I’d know, I’ve gotten surgery, I’m a wonderful, brave little boy! — but I’d argue remaining mediocre should scare you more.

After all, the price of a comfortable life is the man you could’ve been.

Every thought is a choice. Every emotion you choose to feed grows to rule your life. Every choice is a stone. They stack up to become mountains and rule your life. Every day, these choices must reflect the reality you desire.

III. You can’t control the outcome

The victim’s great excuse is that you don’t control what happens to you — which is fair — but really what they mean is that “since I can’t control anything none of it matters.” Because if I don’t control what happens to me then everything is based on luck and religion and sex and age and zipcode and that means I’ll never be anything or anyone and the system’s right against me!!

We’ve kinda already dismantled this idea in the previous section but I’d like to attack it from another angle, one rooted less in the metaphysical-philosophical and more in the concrete-actions kinda vibe.

You aren’t able to entirely control everything you get in life, fair, but a large part of achieving your goals comes from realizing what you do have control over — your internal state, as mentioned, and the choices you make — and then action-maxxing on that one lever, which is the one lever that you control and thus the most powerful one.

Finding the highest leverage action is its own kind of leverage. Give me enough internal strength and a firm identity upon which to stand, and I’ll move the world.

Julian Rotter has this idea called the locus of control — where you locate the cause of what happens to you. If you pinpoint the cause outside yourself, like random luck or “the system” or other people, you have an external locus. If you pin it on your own choices, you have an internal one. This isn’t fixed in people, by the way. It’s more of a dial, not some set tone you operate at. The victim has turned his dial all the way outward. To the fool, everything arrives from somewhere else, which means he can’t be held accountable for anything.

For example: you fail an exam.

One version of you says I didn’t prepare hard enough and Kobe said that “confidence comes from preparation” so I should prepare more next time — the cause is internal, which means its fix is too. The other version of you says the exam was unfair and goes to file a complaint.

Same grade. But one of you gets closer to Epictetus and the other closer to a Karen.

And again, complaining is more comfortable. With an external locus, you’re off the hook forever. Moving it inward is uncomfortable. But it grants you power the victim will never have.

So whenever you can, ask yourself: where is my locus right now? Am I blaming someone or something? Am I blaming myself? Does this locus empower me? Where will I be in ten years if I perceive everything through this locus?

Just think about it: where will you be in ten years if you focused on turning the locus dial inward?

Well if I had a guess you’d be more confident and charismatic and smarter and maybe richer and more powerful than you are today and more powerful than anyone operating on a victim mindset. That’s the kind of man I want to be: self-confident, self-authored, who takes charge when others are trying to blame someone or something. That’s a special kind of leader, and as much as we idealize these kinds of people — the Churchills, the MLKs, the Napoleons of the world — taking action to become that kind of person is better than idealizing them forever.

IV. Nobody is coming to save you

For as much as I don’t like the red-pill alpha jerk-circle I can respect their all-too-repeated idea that “nobody is coming to save you.”

If we were to metaphysically dissect a man with a victim mentality what we’d find is a soul waiting. Waiting for big daddy teacher or some authority figure for permission, or waiting on the universe for “the perfect conditions to start” or waiting for someone to finally notice that he, that poor puppy of a victim, was owed better all along and then bam! Mr. Beast comes out and gives you a lifetime supply of Feastables because… yeah! Victim mentality for the win!

But no. Nuh uh. No way José.

So long as you wait and so long as you rely on an authority figure to guide your life, you will remain lost. Like an off-the-leash puppy who quickly realizes that nobody’s coming for him. You’re left to fend for yourself bud, and the reason you feel powerless and unable to act is because you’ve never been off the leash.

But that’s a good thing, being off the leash I mean.

If nobody is coming to save you, then you don’t have to wait for anybody. The idea that terrifies the puppy victim — [spoken in tiktok accent] OMG! like… nobOdy is ComInG to Save uS — is the idea that frees you.

There is no big pearly gate of destiny you have to wait in front of. Life is an open field. A big beautiful wide open field with tall beautiful Swedish blondes and massive beautiful mountains to climb.

Those who conquer life are those who practice agency and empower themselves. Agency, for example, isn’t a trait you’re born with or without. It’s the by-product of self-authored goals and taking action towards those goals is what builds an agentic identity. Agency, practiced through a project of one’s own, is the most important meta-skill you can have.

That word by the way — practiced — is of the utmost importance. Because that’s what agency is about: practice. It’s not about waiting until you feel capable and ready and then taking action and conquering the world. You act, without feeling particularly ready, you take a leap of faith, and that’s what makes you capable, feeling unsure yet still taking action is what makes you agentic.

The victim waits to become the Übermensch to act.
You become the Übermensch by acting.

Nobody’s coming to save you. Thank God.

V. Accept the rut and then take the smallest step

The last trap I’ll warn you about is a spiky, hidden under the leaves of good-intention lil’ bastard that catches the people trying desperately to do the right thing.

They hear “take responsibility” and start beating themselves up. They belittle themselves but call it accountability and feel some masochist productivity while doing it. But remember Epictetus’ middle man, the man trying to improve, the man who blames himself. That’s still a form of victimhood. Guilt is just victimhood performed on the self: you get to suffer and find a turd of pride in the fact that you’re super hard on yourself… but still not make any progress.

This goes back to the Principle of Rhythm: sometimes you’ll slip up, sometimes you’ll be in a rut. Ok, when those happen detach — stop seeing these things as events — and see them as facts. Just facts. Things that happened with no “good” or “bad” label attached. There’s no point beating yourself up if you don’t get back on track immediately. And there’s no point gaslighting yourself that tomorrow you’ll somehow be back 100%.

As I’ve learned from countless times where my standards for excellence had me bullying myself and I tried to go 0 to 100 cold turkey or sum bullshit, you have to drop the ego.

You have to accept that maybe, just maybe, you fucked up.
You have to accept that you need to set small targets that make failure impossible.
You have to accept that the process isn’t instantaneous.

Because really, all that matters in order to get out of a bad slump and climb a mountain is to keep on showing up.

You start taking responsibility by cleaning your room — not by trying to pay your entire family’s electricity bill. You start controlling your internal state by remembering you aren’t your immediate thoughts — you’ll inevitably have a negative first thought and that’s fine, you can’t control your first thought, but you can control your second.

That’s it.

After years of “grinding” I can confidently say that there’s no big breakthrough or Rocky montage, there’s no click where you look at your hands and realize you’re Spider-Man. It’s all just baby steps. Do a small thing today. Meditate a bit. Workout. Exercise the mind. Read. Don’t blame anyone, including yourself.

Then the same tomorrow. Maybe a bit more. And then a bit more. And gradually you move up the mountain, and when you get to the top, as grateful as you are for the wonderful view, you’re even more grateful for the climb and anxious to begin anew.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

Follow me on X for more posts on philosophy, personal development, and curating a meaningful existence.

All images used in thumbnail and article sourced from Pinterest. All credit goes to their respective owners and talented artists.

Weekly articles Tuesday, Thursday & Sunday 10:00am PST.

When you’re ready:

1. Subscribe to Alexander Romance — full archive, 3 articles a week, free

2. Paid subscriptions are frozen until Dec 31th. If you’re a paid subscriber you won’t be charged — unless you purchased it in the iOS App, Apple handles those — until I turn them back on then. Cheers!

3. Read the founding essays:

Exceptional people are uneven. To become extraordinary at one thing, you must be ordinary at everything else. You’ll never become exceptional by trying to be great everywhere.

This is the first sacrifice any form of skill demands; excellence will require, and force, pure, deep, singular focus. As Sherlock Holmes said: “a fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out… the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic."

To be more you don’t have to do more. You just have to choose what to do consciously, what you’re going to chase and where you’re willing to be bad.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t follow multiple interests and become polymathic. I’m saying that variety should be the overflow of a full life, not something you use to distract yourself from a shallow one. Breadth is its own kind of depth. In studying the world broadly, you learn about your master craft more deeply, gaining new angles that people who think categorically and confine themselves to one field can’t see.

Set the bar at “best,” never “good”

Like honor, value is something you have to risk losing. Chasing the best means risking failure. Chasing “good” risks nothing — and is thus worth nothing. Alexander Hamilton, for example, hated dueling. He’d lost his son to one but when Aaron Burr challenged him in 1804, he accepted anyway — because to refuse would be to lose the honor his life was built on. Hamilton died that day.

That’s what value actually is. Something you must risk. And your standards work the same way: “good” is vague and doesn’t cost you anything to maintain, so it’s worth nothing. “Best” can cost you everything, and is thus worth everything. Being the best is also a higher standard than “good” or “above average.” It’s more concrete, and spurs more action than the vague idea of “goodness.” Plus, I don’t find “above average” to be satisfying — realistically, anybody who puts in a little work can be considered above average.

Being good is also easier to fake than being the best. Think of all the AI-slop copycat Youtube channels. “Good enough” can be faked and mass-produced and shat out by anyone with Claude Code — so it is. The best, the masterpieces of this world, can’t be faked because the world is imbued with soul and detail. Slop is the average of everything that came before it. A masterpiece is the residue of thousands of specific choices no average chud would ever make.

Aiming lower than you can conceive just gives you a softer target to miss. If you’re going to fall, at least let it be from great heights. Paul Graham explores this idea in How To Do Great Work. “In some ways it’s easier to try to be the best than to try merely to be good,” he writes. When I’m asked how good am I at the things I care about, “above average” is the last thing I want to say.

Set your standards where they can hurt you because what can’t hurt you doesn’t move you.

Don’t psychoanalyze yourself into paralysis

“An unexamined life is not worth living” — Socrates.

But the over-examined life is not worth living either.

At the end of the day, introspection is a tool, not a lifestyle. Past a certain point— specifically past that threshold where you’ve identified your personality style and know your vices and understand your own potential — “getting to know yourself” becomes fucking cope and procrastination.

You get to know yourself for a bit by reflecting and journaling, sure, but those aren’t substitutes for action and they mustn’t become substitutes for action. The next step, the one that matters, is creating yourself.

Imagine living a life where you’re so stuck in the loop of “fixing yourself” that you never create yourself. You never look to your strengths. You never tap into your hidden talent. You never try to achieve anything because you’re so caught up in getting past step one. It’s easier to remain a victim of your own insecurities than to confront them and become someone new.

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Batman is nothing without Joker.
Same with Napoleon and the British Empire.
Obi-Wan and Anakin.
Harry Potter and

What does a man do when he hears there are no more worlds to conquer?1

Nietzsche spoke of such a man and the exact changes that occur within the soul when ambition dies; “all instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward — this is what I call the internalization of man,” he wrote.

The internalization of man is the acid-like, soul-eating process in which ambition, with no clear output, starts to eat at its maker.

And it’s a rampant disease spreading rapidly whose growth is fueled by modern comfort —the Internet, social media, video games, and whatever other circuses shall be left unnamed.

The internalization of man is also a sign, a sign of ambition, a sign that you were meant for something more than the mediocre life that your soul is rebelling against.

Your sins are a by-product of your undirected ambition.
You’re at war with yourself because the vision you have of the future and your current actions are worlds apart.

The last man’s world

Man is made for conquest, and the world used to be our outlet — as in, literally conquering other people. The modern world, luckily, doesn’t allow this. But it hasn’t replaced it with anything of substance, instead filling us up with Italian brainrot, pseudo-intellectualism, and drama between celebrities with hundreds of millions of followers I’ve somehow never heard of — like genuinely, why the fuck should I care about the Kardashians, who are these people? How on earth do they have hundreds of millions of followers? Who is actively choosing to spend time caring about these lame, shallow, one-dimensional, plastic (yet undeniably hot), millionaires? But I digress.

Nietzsche would probably spontaneously combust — like a Victorian child scrolling TikTok — if he were alive to see Kim K, and he’d swiftly call this the last man’s world.

The “last man” is Nietzsche’s idea of the final kind of human. The opposite of his Übermensch. A decrepit insect who’s traded all pursuit of greatness for comfort and proclaims himself wise.

“We have invented happiness,” say the last men, and they blink.

Nietzsche knew exactly where we were headed: “the time is coming when man will no longer shoot the arrow of his longing beyond man, and the string of his bow will have forgotten how to whir.”

You have no more mountains to climb. No more danger. You’ll own nothing and be happy. You’ll keep paying ever-increasing subscriptions with ever-increasing ads and restrictions, and find your little pleasure for the day in your little pixel rectangle.

The last man takes all this in beautifully — the ambitious man’s hell is his heaven.

The climb itself is the place worth looking

So while the last man inherits a paradise — a false Eden, to be sure, that will slowly destroy his mind, attention, and soul, but do so softly, slowly, and ensure his comfort — we inherit a fucking problem: we can’t do as they do.

We can’t just blink and arrogantly call our comfort wisdom.
We must aim our natural ambition.

What the modern world has made us forget is that conquest doesn’t mean literal go-out-there-and-kill-rape-pillage conquest. Conquest just means you have an enemy and you have stakes — something big, something challenging enough to demand every single fiber of your being, something that could genuinely beat you, something that forces you to grow, to think strategically, to learn new skills to overcome it.

The kind of conquest, the only one left in the last man’s world actually, is the conquest of the self. Your own ceiling.

You must wage total, scorched-earth war on your potential.

You wage war on a craft.

You pick something hard and real and become the best at it. Not above-average, not satisfyingly competent, but the best. If you don’t try to be the best, you’ll remain average. And you wage war on mediocrity — fear, discipline, that little chud chungus version of you that festers like a fungus, trying to get you to care about social media slop.

This kind of conquest is peak because the very act of setting out to conquer is itself a conquest. As Camus wrote: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” Overcoming resistance and slashing your way through Kim K slop, gremlin porn addiction, the dragons of hyper-processed junk foods, on your way to a better future is the war.

Everything in this world is exactly the same. Underlying every discipline and art is the art of changing the way you see the world. No matter what you do, you’ll have to overcome friction, you’ll have to learn to learn, you’ll have to become confident in your ability to figure shit out. Climbing a mountain, any mountain, will forge the soul.

You aren’t meant to settle for less. Why on Earth would you — a super-natural being who only had a 1 in 10²⁶⁸⁵⁰⁰⁰ chance of being alive, who will only be in this state and capable of feeling love, ambition, sadness, despair, anger, trust, kindness for a tiny dust speck of the universe’s lifespan — confine yourself to base camp?

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

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The discipline’s core was simple: control only the things you can — your thoughts, emotions, your internal state — and detach from everything else. As within, so without. Your internal state will reflect itself onto reality.

So I played detached. I restricted my thoughts and emotions to feelings of abundance, gratitude, and positivity. I tied no feelings to whether I won or lost — don’t ride in the highs and don’t sink in the lows!

When I finally stopped my session and scrolled through my game history, I was confused to find that I’d lost three games. That shouldn’t have been possible — not because I’m objectively a hightiergod player, but because I didn’t remember losing. Like at all. I hadn’t registered a single loss.

That’s what my manifestation free trial taught me: every game had felt like a win because I never bet my emotions on winning — something that I can’t control anyway. I was solely focused on my internal state, and as a natural consequence external reality aligned with my feelings of abundance, gratitude, and positivity.

Centuries before ranked and voice chat bans existed, a wispy-whiskered Chinese philosopher named Zhuangzi described the exact same feeling in archery: “When you're betting for tiles in an archery contest, you shoot with skill. When you're betting for fancy belt buckles, you worry about your aim. And when you're betting for real gold, you're a nervous wreck."

"He who looks too hard at the outside," Zhuangzi says, "gets clumsy on the inside."

Internal disorder becomes clumsiness on the outside. The tighter you grip the sword, the faster it slips from your hand.

This is the paradox of effort, and it teaches us something fascinating about top performers across all fields: they aren’t trying harder than you, they’ve just shifted internally to attract their desired reality.

The backwards law

Let’s be more precise because “stop trying so hard” is lazy advice and I’m not giving it. Effort isn’t bad, but its returns follow a dangerous curve.

At the start, more is more and more is better. You’re a beginner, you’re high-key shit and the only way to improve is through volume volume volume. Want that shit more, chase that bag, push that boulder up daily. The curve’s climbing. But it eventually peaks. And past that peak every extra unit of force makes the outcome worse — diminishing returns quickly spiral into outright negative results.

This idea explains why sprinters run faster at ninety percent than at a hundred. Bud Winter, the coach of San José State’s track team in the 60s that grew to be known as Speed City, noticed this while training his runners. He forbade them from going all out and they ran quicker at ninety because when they went the full hundred, that last ten percent — instead of generating more speed — caused more strain, firing the opposing muscles causing the runner to slow down, like hard slamming pedal to the metal with your other foot on the brakes.

This is the law of reversed effort, or as Alan Watts liked to call it: the backwards law. “When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float. When you hold your breath, you lose it," he wrote.

Basically: it’s by not needing, by not straining, that what you desire — more speed, more freedom, more of whatever lil’ desire you have — comes to you.

The ego and overthinking

A centipede was moving across the ground, swift and sure, when a toad asked it — with child-like innocence — which leg it moved after which. The centipede stopped to ponder, it had never been asked this before, movement had always felt so natural… and it could never walk the same way again. It “lay distracted in the ditch, considering how to run.”

As with most children’s rhymes, there’s more here than meets the eye. The centipede is a prime example that a skill you’ve drilled into automaticity lives below conscious thought — it works perfectly precisely because you aren’t paying attention to it. Like your breathing, and now that I’ve mentioned breathing, you’re breathing consciously — how’d you like that! — now your breath’s got your attention shined onto it, it’s been dragged back up into the slow, clumsy conscious part of your brain and now you’re wondering if you still know how to breathe (hopefully you do).

All that extra effort builds resistance in the form of ego. Not arrogance or Freud’s ego, but the ever-watching “I” standing over your shoulder, narrating, correcting, and belittling your every move. This little bastard is the single biggest killer of talent there is.

When you watch the greats you notice the opposite impression — of being completely unwatched. Total ego dissolution. The best athletes, like the best actors, perform like they’re in their own backyard; no eyes, no cameras, no pressure. Being able to handle pressure — both external (someone else demands results) and internal (you demand them) — is what separates the great from the rest. More specifically, the ability to deal with overthinking. Like when a pretty girl sits next to you at lunch and you’re suddenly consciously thinking about eating — something you’ve done tens of thousands of times yet you’re suddenly aware of your chewing, your posture, your hands.

In the words of Lao Tzu: “the reason I have an enemy is because I have a ‘self.’”

In other words: the more you battle your own mind, the more surely you lose.

Detachment

So how do we kill the ego?

Simple. We detach.

And to be clear, detachment isn’t “not caring” or some fake nonchalant act. Nah, that’s pathetic. Detachment isn’t about not caring, but about not needing. You can be ambitious and want to be the fucking best with every fiber of your being but be detached because you don’t neeeeed it — still refuse to let your emotions and beliefs depend on whether it happens.

As Epictetus said: “Some things are within our power… others are not.”

In your power: effort, attention, discipline, your own mind.
Not in your power: everything else.

Your disease — everyone’s disease — is pouring your emotions into the half you can’t control while ignoring the half you can.

You have power over your actions, but never over their results.

That’s detachment.

This is why I always perform my best when relaxed and detached. I feel a powerful confidence roar within me when I know that with or without “winning” I’ll be fine — so I’m free to take risks, free to just be and exist, free to push myself to my absolute limits and pour everything I have into what I can control. The fulfillment you chase from winning is actually found in the process.

Understand: winning and losing are merely psychological states. It’s just a matter of perspective. Everything is just a matter of perspective. Perspective is reality. This is why the man who thinks he can’t and the man who thinks he can are both right. Both will perceive reality in a way that confirms their beliefs. Think about how often you notice red cars when you think about red cars. That’s perception manifesting itself as reality.

So ask yourself: what if you looked for signs of luck? abundance? proof that things are going your way?

What if every single thought, belief, and emotion was aimed at a positive vision for the future or at reinforcing your self-image to reflect the identity of someone who has what you want?

The quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life because your internal state is the life you experience.

Let’s be honest, you’re reading this because some part of you refuses to be average.

Yet your interests are piling up into a graveyard. The books you buy but don’t read and the half-started courses.

The FOMO you feel watching teens make bank while you keep on struggling. Your classmates who make school seem so damn easy.

Become a Polymath is the complete guide for molding this ambition into irreplaceable skill and genuine purpose — the exact method for turning your scattered ambitions into a specific, powerful advantage nobody can replicate.

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Flow, play, and the price of both

The more you detach, the more you enter what athletes call the zone and what psychologists call flow. You’ve felt it before — the sun-in-your-fingertips feeling of lightness and warmth as the hours vanish, that performance where you stopped worrying and everything just clicked, that test you nailed without a hint of doubt.

That’s flow — basically it’s maxxed out ego dissolution aimed at something specific. For all its almost metaphysical feel, flow’s got a formula: it lives at the meeting point of challenge and skill. Too much challenge for your skill and you get anxious; too little and you get bored; and when both are low you become apathetic.

Flow is that slice where real skill is stretched by a challenge just big enough to demand all of you, your end and your beginning.

What’s fascinating about flow is that it creates the necessary conditions for playfulness. Flow feels like fun. And you can only play your way into it, if you veiny-neck-strain too hard the ego will appear and you’ll become self-conscious, flaccid, unable to perform.

Play is really just full engagement without a care in the world about anything else. It’s detachment, but with a smile on your face. So it’s like evolved detachment. Yeah.

Playfulness is detachment²

Take Alysa Liu, who lit up the 2025 World Championships — as well as this year’s winter Olympics in Italy — with her charm and elegance. She stopped chasing perfection and started enjoying herself more. “It is so much more fun this time,” she said. She came back for the joy of it. You can’t beat someone like that. No matter how hard you want to David Goggins, grit-your-teeth-and-bear-it your way to victory, your effort goes in vain against an opponent with a deliciously fat teeth-out grin. Play is the delivery system for mastery.

The only catch with this kind of performance is that it demands effort, and metric fuckloads of it.

Alysa gets to perform like that on the biggest stage in the world because she went through years of brutal training and intense self-doubt and caring wayyy more than was healthy and competing on the edge of what’s possible. As the writer Tomás Aguillar wrote: “One cannot fake insouciance without first having flirted with the abyss of caring too much.” Playfulness is the seen layer of a mountain of work.

First you obsess: you care more than anyone else, you climb the curve, you put in the reps and feel the sting of imperfection. Then, at the top, when you’ve got real skill, you release your grip on the outcome and unleash all your built-up care onto the process.

Care like its everything and play like it’s nothing.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

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Michelangelo’s David, arguably the most famed and mythic of all statues in the world, was sculpted from a seventeen-foot slab of marble that nobody wanted. It had sat in the courtyard of Florence’s cathedral for decades, collecting dust and contempt. Two sculptors had tried their hand at shaping the Carrara marble, which had been hacked from the Fantiscritti quarries in Tuscany, but they’d quickly given up on it, writing the marble off as ruined.

Michelangelo, however, sensed in the stone potential for a Goliath killer, a king, and seeing what others couldn’t he took the wretched stone and chiseled it into David. It took him three years. Three years of painstaking, arduous labor during which Michelangelo used small wax models to plan the anatomy meticulously — David displays musculature (defined by the pectoralis major, rectus abdominis (abs), deltoids, and a visible sternocleidomastoid) and vascularity (most notably, the jugular vein above the collarbone, which is distended, capturing a physiological sign of high adrenaline before battle) unlike any other statue. The block was too narrow for a traditional frontal pose, forcing David into a contrapposto stance with his head to the side; Michelangelo even thought to slightly enlarge the statue’s head and hands to ensure correct proportions for viewers looking from the ground.

How does Michelangelo account for his masterpiece?

“Per forza di levare,” he says.

By force of taking away; whatever is made by adding, he said, is closer to painting. His David was already in the stone, he simply had to remove everything that wasn’t it. This is less a technical distinction of the arts than it is a metaphysical one. A painter builds an image from nothing, stroke by stroke, like Michelangelo did for his monumental frescoes in the Sistine Chapel (he primarily considered himself a sculptor, but as most Florentine artists during the Italian Renaissance he dabbled in multiple disciplines). A sculptor does the reverse. He simply removes.

“Nothing the best of artists can conceive,” he wrote, “but lies, potential, in a block of stone, superfluous matter round it.”

Think about how backwards a method that is for making something great. By removing everything that isn’t brilliant, you get… brilliance. Brilliant.

Around 1.5-1.7 million people visit David each and every year. They understandably stare in awe at Michelangelo’s masterpiece and go home with the hint of pride that can only come from an intimate experience with mastery. Yet what they fail to understand, what most of us fail to understand in face of David, is that he, beyond the pristine nature Michelangelo’s created, is a reflection of human nature: humans are statues. Nothing but neurological and metaphysical marble, awaiting a master. We’re Michelangeloes capable of creating our own Davids.

Every man is the sculptor of himself.

Let me show you the chisel.

The neurological chisel

When we learn something, our brains accommodate by physically changing shapes. We have some eighty-six billion neurons — that’s eighty-six with nine zeroes — up here [taps temple] and along these neurons sit thousands of tiny nubs. These are the points where one brain cell reaches out to touch the next, and when you learn something new, new ones push out — real branches reaching for the signal, like a tree throwing its limbs toward light.

Repetition is what solidifies this process. Repeat the same action or thought enough times and the connection between neurons starts to thicken and strengthen — it fires with less effort, until what you had to consciously think about becomes natural, effortless, who you are.

Skills are built off of repetition.
Habits are built off of repetition.
Your personality is built off of it too.

This idea’s opposite also holds true: what you stop using or doing or thinking, the brain swiftly bins. It prunes the unused, shoving off whatever it’s decided you no longer need. Neuroplasticity itself is a meta-skill. Leave it untrained (as most people do), never learning anything new, and your ability to change erodes.

You’re not hard set marble, but rather something like soft clay. Every single day is an opportunity to chisel and life’s current always pulls you back to something shapeless, awaiting a master.

So the more you do a thing, the more you become it — neurologically and in who you are.

The old & installed self

I know exactly what’s holding you back — because it’s what slowed me down for years.

There’s something inside you that doesn’t want you to change. Change would mean death, darkness, which (rationally) must be avoided, no matter the cost. So this thing thrashes and roars inside you whenever you try to change. And the cruel part is that this entity whose only goal is your destruction is you.

You see, your brain prizes identity above almost everything else because a strong sense of self — even if it’s a miserable one — feels safe. Psychologists have found that people with poor self-image will actively cling to people and situations that reinforce it; they’ll pick the people who see them badly over those who see them well. The self would rather be recognized than happy. It chooses the familiar hell over the unfamiliar heaven.

This is why you feel like you’re self-sabotaging when things start to go your way. Resistance is the old self’s defense mechanism. Fear, worry, overthinking, procrastination, perfectionism, and the sudden drought of inspiration the moment you need it most — all of them are shadows the old self lights onto the walls of the cave, trying to steer you away from the light, the exact thing that’d let you outgrow it.

The most effective strategy for defeating this evil is to create space between you and it.

More precisely: to name it.

I named this shadow of mine Lucifer. In part because of the biblical villain and because mythologizing my journey, by naming my life’s main saboteur after perhaps the greatest (and most OG) villain of all time, gives me more energy to find the demons and dragons I will inevitably encounter as I pursue greatness.

Lucifer’s quite a talker. Always trying to slide in words of de-affirmation. Always humming in the background (usually Romeo and Juliet’s Dance of the Knights). He tries to make me forget who I am and want to be, tries to sell me on the newest AI slop and today’s distractions — always stirring fear that I’ll “miss out.” He keeps me company with vestigial habits — like the useless structures animals carry from some ancestors, these are the self-destructing habits of the past, the thoughts I used to think and the poorly-constructed beliefs I once clung onto a tad too dearly.

Lucifer is my opponent.

But not my enemy.

What took me years to understand is that this part of us lurking in the shadows isn’t evil. He’s scared and alone, like a cornered stray dog — scared of being left behind.

This is what most “shadow work” and self-improvement nerds get wrong. They try to kill the parts of themselves they deem weak and bury the shadow deep within. They mask their flaws under rented Lambos and escort girlfriends that they flash on social media to convince you of their superiority. And it never works, these guys stay fucking losers and anyone real can see right through them, because what you suppress doesn’t die, it rather ferments, like acid slowly building from within and slowly corrupting the soul.

Everything you shove into the dark roars back up uncontrolled and angry at your weakest moments: the post-10pm anxiety fap, the angry text you shouldn’t have sent and misspelled, you know the moments I’m referring to. Man.. those fucking suck; self-sabotage that lands precisely when I need it less, right when the grass is getting greener. Jung warned the shallow men who try to become new through force and insecure projecting alone: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”

It’s much easier — and it’s never been easier — to masquerade around looking wealthy, confident, and charismatic than doing the work it takes to actually become wealthy, confident, and charismatic.

The old self isn’t the enemy. It’s just like old code that needs to be rewritten, as opposed to deleted. There’s some gold in there for sure, you just need to look past your own arrogance to find it.

There’s a story about this, about a boy (fittingly) named Alexander.

A warhorse named Bucephalus (byoo-SEF-uh-luss) was so wild that no man could tame him; grown men, powerful warriors, tried to haul on the reins and pull with great strength, but to no avail. A twelve-year old boy watched quietly from afar and saw what these strong men missed — the horse was terrified of its own shadow. So, calmly walking up to the powerful beast, he turned its head toward the sun, where it couldn’t see the shadow anymore, and climbed on.

Perception is everything.

Although the story may seem contradictory — he’s telling me to look away from my shadow? — the lesson is that sight is more powerful than force.

The old self yields not to the baby-hands grip of insecure projection — it yields instead the second you can see it clearly, recognize it, name it, and turn it to the light.

When you name your shadow, as I did Lucifer, it stops being you and becomes something you can watch. You get a sliver of space and in it you realize you aren’t your first thoughts or your impulses. You can’t control either. But you can control how you respond to them. That’s the first chisel; the simple act of recognizing the old self.

True change always comes from looking inwardly, usually at the exact parts you most want to avoid.

Ignoring this brings a lot of pain, a sort of quiet suffering that hums quietly as you go about daily life. As a man, you’re never more miserable than when the vision you hold of yourself and the life you actually live fall out of alignment. It’s that quiet, undramatic suffering — which sucks because at least if you had some real, dramatic shit going down it’d be a proper excuse. But no, the pain manifests instead as a shallow kind of daily dread. Like a slight flinch followed by embarrassment when someone asks you what you’re working on. And, ultimately, the unforgiving knowledge that you’re not living up to your own expectations.

Become, then behave

Most people try to change their lives through cause and effect — if I can change X, then Y. Sound logic, but most make a mistake when it comes to what I’ll call reality causation — how the reality you experience comes to be.

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Although I wasn’t a particularly huge fan of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune — part of why may be explained by the fact that I watched it in a hotel on what is essentially a smart fridge, in contrast to the IMAX 70mm screens Dune was made for, which had neither the resolution nor the sound quality to make the experience enjoyable — what I remember most about it is the dialogue above from the Mother Mohiam pain box scene.

Paul Atreides (played by my goat Chalamet) gets mind-controlled mogged by a woman who surely has a signed copy of the Bible, and then puts his hand in the put-your-hand-here-for-excruciating-pain box. Inside the box, Paul is quickly introduced to Mother Mohiam’s friends: doom and despair, and he must persevere through the pure, unforgiving, manufactured, agonizing, nerve-by-nerve pain of flesh charring off his hand and bones blackening — all to test whether he can override his primal instincts of guttural fear and retreat with reason, proving he’s more than mere animal.

The pain box is an obvious rite of passage, which, as defined by French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep, follows the same structure across countries, tribes, and apparently intergalactic space empires:

1. Separation: the boy is torn from childhood, taken away from everything soft and known. Paul’s mother is ordered out of the room and he’s left alone with a terrifying old hag.

2. The threshold: the rite itself. Paul puts his hand in the box.

3. Incorporation: Paul comes back to the world changed.

Pain, isolation, and potential failure cocktail into a rite of passage one must overcome in order to be considered a man. Norman Mailer wrote it best: “Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.”

Manhood is a status you earn. Again: manhood is something you earn; not something you’re magically granted or walk into spontaneously.

But status has to be earned somewhere and for most of us, we never get a clear somewhere or somehow and are left stranded between boy and manhood.

For most of human history we had clear-cut rites of passage — in Sparta boys were turned loose in the countryside with nothing but a knife and little else; in the Brazilian Amazon the Sateré-Mawé weave hundreds of bullet ants into a woven glove, stingers turned inward, creating a sensation an entomologist described as “walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail embedded in your heel” — and now we don’t.

This seems to be a recurring theme when you examine the sorrows of modernity: humans did something for a long time and, however seemingly barbaric in retrospect, we feel like something is missing when we take it away, and thus have to build it anew.

Now bar mitzvahs are parties and the closest thing we have to a universal rite of passage is a graduation gown and walking the stage.

Psychologists call this “emerging adulthood,” where your twenties are spent neither boy nor man, just a strange thing floating about, directionless — Disney adults are a direct consequence of this phenomenon.

Without the ordeal you don’t get what it was meant to build. This is what Robert Bly meant when he wrote that: “Most American men today do not have enough awakened or living warriors inside to defend their soul houses.”

No one is coming to make you a man. No one is coming to save you. Only you have the power to build yourself, so you need to grab yourself by the bootstraps and get a grip.

Take yourself off the leash

So the question now becomes: how do we, in a society that seems to have everything but a clear transition into adulthood, create our own rites of passage?

The answer is quite simple: you have to take yourself off the leash.

The second a puppy is off the leash it bolts, excitement growing in the face of this new-found freedom, and then it freezes — because it’s never had to decide where or when to walk, and its owner isn’t coming back.

That’s how most of us live our lives; waiting for a teacher or parent or some authority figure to bring us salvation. So long as you live like this, in perpetual anxiety without a clear authority figure, you will remain lost. You must become an authority figure in your own life.

At some point in your life will come a pivotal moment; you must decide between more of the same and a leap of faith. A hunger for more has to override a fear of change.

Separation is the first leap of faith. Paul faced the box alone; the threshold between boyhood and manhood is always crossed by a party of one.

Time alone is required for any kind of success. Nietzsche wrote his best work during his years of solitude in the Alps. In spending time alone you develop a sense of self that imbues your work. Your soul becomes rich and warms whatever it touches. Without some isolation, your identity will always remain ghost-like — a flimsy, rudderless ship built from scraps taken from your parents and teachers and social media and whatever you consume on a daily. Isolation gives the soul space to expand. Not having someone to guide your days and tasks and goals creates urgency. You have to become someone, anyone, or you run the risk of losing your very self and letting your potential die with you.

Solitude paired with intense self-observation creates a form of hyperbolic growth chamber. Time alone is some of the best time you’ll spend because you finally get to know and understand the person you’ve been and will be with for the rest of your life.

Misogi

This is where misogi comes in. Originally a Shinto purification rite — standing under an icy waterfall in the dead of winter — it only has two rules: it has to be hard enough that you have a real chance of failing (if you’re 100% sure you can finish it, it isn’t a misogi), and you can’t die (so there has to be real challenge, but obviously non-fatal).

The traditional approach to this idea is that once a year you pick a misogi — an ironman, a marathon, climbing a mountain — and you do it. Elliott writes that “a misogi is an emotional and spiritual trial masquerading as a physical one.”

I, however, approach misogi less as a once-a-year David Goggins-style ball-and-cock-torture physical endurance feat, and more as a way of life. I continuously chase things that are ever so out of reach and consistently push myself to be uncomfortable. I strive to be comfortable with discomfort. Yes, you can absolutely apply misogi as the literal standing-under-an-icy-waterfall thing if that’s what you want but I find the more useful application of endurance feats is to morph them into life philosophies, which can be alchemized into habits and identity — as opposed to a one-time feat.

That’s all misogi really is — a way to expose yourself and forcing growth. David Goggins said that when he does his 200-300 mile runs he essentially ages 50 years, because of the extreme highs and lows his mind is forced to endure.

Misogis and periods of voluntary discomfort are microcosms of life. Shit will go left and you won’t feel right. You’ll overthink and doubt yourself but you mustn’t give up the fight — you’ll come out better prepared for whatever dainty life challenges are ahead of you because you’ve already gone through Hell N Back.

No one is coming to knight you

I’ve been “grinding” for a couple of years now, mostly alone, and I can tell you it’s not something people applaud. Nobody will appreciate or encourage you until you’ve already worked your way out of the dark. Alex Hormozi once said that “people only root for people who don’t need to be rooted for.”

The more you can work in this way without needing the approval of others, the closer you get to what Jung called individuation. In his words, “individuation means becoming an ‘in-dividual’... becoming one’s own self,” which he said we could translate as “coming to selfhood.”

“Become who you are” was Nietzsche’s order to the ambitious.

Become who you are. Knight yourself. Challenge yourself. Make something of yourself.

No one is coming to do it for you.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

Follow me on X for more posts on philosophy, personal development, and curating a meaningful existence.

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I love you because you probably overthink conversation openers and outfits and your day to day schedule — the life you imagine in your head muddies reality until your overthinking grows to throne itself as one of your life’s authority figures and mercilessly command your life.

And yet, overthinking is good.

Overthinking, no matter how much intellectuals like to demonize it, is potential energy. It’s proof that some part of you believes you’re destined for more than the mediocre life everyone around you has accepted.

The only slight hiccup with overthinking is that without an output it starts trashing and fighting, often manifesting itself as anxiety or procrastination. You want to do everything and do nothing — the most dangerous kind of ambition. The easy pacifier most people reach is consumption; if they aren’t going to find a creative output for their potential energy, they might as well find an input that soothes the ache of ambition.

Most mega-corporations and attention-economy companies — think Instagram and… well basically every company since the advent of the Internet — understand this simple fact of human nature all too well and thrive on society’s overconsumption. The billionaires of today love man’s original sin.

This brings me to the viral “create more than you consume” rhetoric I’ve been seeing much of lately. Like with Ferran Torres at PSG, on one play the greatest striker to ever grace a football pitch and on the next a complete burger ($50 million btw), I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with this kind of content. I love it because it’s true; you need to create more than you consume. And I hate it because it’s misunderstood; most people aren’t clear on what “create more” means.

That’s what I, in my youthful arrogance, will now attempt to break down and hopefully change your life for the better, even if just a smidge.

Creation is how you come alive

Recently I read James Foreman’s Slop Suggests the Existence of its Opposite. It was both a phenomenal read and a sharp reminder that writers like James exist and that I have a long way to go. In it, he argues that the existence of slop, like the endless burger AI-generated content of ‘26, proves the existence of its opposite. Slop is parasitic — it feeds off real knowledge and real creation that demanded real, deep attention to make.

The Internet has grown thick with larpers who feed off the real masterpieces created by deeply creative individuals. Believe it or not, this is a good thing for creatives. The ocean of mediocrity is the measure of how rare and valuable directing attention onto thoughtful creation is.

It’s taken me a while to properly define it, but here’s how I’ve come to understand creation: To create is to consciously direct attention into shaping the world. From sweet baby-making to writing to music to sports, interacting with the world in an attempt to materialize attention means you are creating.

James writes that when someone who actually knows something pays deep attention to their craft, “the object will become layered with his attention like a croissant.” Moby Dick and Frankenstein and other classics of literature endure because they hold attentional depth that keeps unfolding no matter how much time passes or how much you keep returning to them — they’re “imbued with an attentional depth that approaches infinity.”

Mastery is a sign of care.

Caring deeply about what you do has never been more important because a) depth and attention are rare nowadays and b) in devoting your full attention to something, the ever-watching and narrating “self” dissolves, leading to peak performance, flow, and as a natural consequence, fulfillment.

Devoting deep attention to creation also broadens your knowledge (of both your specific field and of the world). Real knowledge, as Plato knew, never comes from the words or the picture of success; it only crosses into you through real contact with real work.

In Robert Greene’s Mastery, he describes mastery as aliveness. “In moving toward mastery,” he writes, “you are bringing your mind closer to reality and to life itself.” creation is about bringing things to life, about imbuing a tiny part of the world with your soul, your life force. You understand the world more intimately when you help shape it.

Make a hundred worlds and live in them

I love books for the simple reason that they allow me to experience worlds ordinarily beyond my reach. I particularly enjoy listening to Russian aristocracy make small talk in War & Peace, or letting myself drift inside the smoky, jazzy current of 60s Tokyo in Norwegian Wood, or planning the downfall of Alexandre Dumas’ villains in The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers.

I’m not going to tell you to stop consuming, it’d be stupid to never consume in a world rich with Christopher Nolan and Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky. I’m going to tell you to consume wisely. Just about the best thing you can do is tie quality of information to life span — this is known as the Lindy Effect, and it’s why you should treasure Meditations or The Art of War more than whatever slop self-help books are being sausaged out every year. The longer something has been around, the more valuable it is and the more valuable it will continue to be.

Read good books, read the classics, find the few masters of today and find the balance between contemporary and classical consumption.

If I were you, I’d delete all social media. I’m tired of pretending that social media’s good if you “consume wisely.” Son, no matter how much you try to “craft your algorithm” with motivational and productivity content it won’t change the fact that all social media platforms are biologically engineered to be addicting and that doom scrolling productivity content doesn’t make you productive. Seeing people flex what you don’t have (most of it is fake and highly-curated to create a sense of fomo and urgency, which perpetuates the cycle of anxiety that social media thrives on) and destroying your attention span has never gotten anyone anywhere.

Remove all shit forms of consumption (you intuitively know what those are, don’t lie to yourself) and build a cathedral of thoughtful inputs.

And then create.

I write, and in deconstructing this act of creation I hope to bring you closer to finding yours and the feeling you should be looking for.

I’d like to think that in writing I can transport you, the reader, anywhere I wish. Good writing is ultimately reader-oriented. The prose and plot (if fictive) and ideas must intertwine delicately so as to let the reader paint the picture they wish — everybody’s version of Harry Potter is different — with the words you’ve written. To unconsciously transport you to Miyazaki-like realms with no effort on your part, that’s my goal.

To achieve this I must write, I must practice, I must create.

And for you to feel this aliveness and spread it throughout the world you must take the energy you’ve been pouring into your thinking and direct it to something real.

Take a pottery class. Write mini-essays. Learn how to freestyle. Find what ticks you and then master it. And remember that shit won’t be perfect, as Hemingway said: “the first draft of anything is shit.”

As I’ve come to realize the point of creation isn’t perfection but the act of creating itself, and the flow, fulfillment, and skills that come with it. Creation demands something and leaves something behind. If you’ve ever tried it you’d know that sitting down to write is a terribly arduous task. The excitement of the imagined Hemingway-writing-academic-studious-Pinterest-aesthetic gets crushed by the terrifying reality that the clear thinking in your head doesn’t translate to clear writing.

Writing, as most acts of creation do, makes you feel like a fraud.

Which I’ve learned is the point: when you create something you’re forced to accept there’s a Grand Canyon between imagining something and bringing it to life. Your skills paint or write themselves in front of you and guess what: you aren’t as good as you think you are. In realizing this, you give yourself needed space to improve. The cracks in my writing are how light shines in. It’s in doing things badly that we realize we’re doing them badly and can get one step closer to doing them less badly.

Perfection is unattainable yet worth chasing.

In an age where endless consumption is the default mode NPCs operate on and none process their own thoughts, the simple act of getting ideas out of your head and onto the world — be it through sport or art or music or writing — makes you much sharper than everyone else. You make something bad, then slightly bad, then you stay consistent, and then your efforts materialize into something slightly less bad, something others might call a masterpiece. Stop consuming the world, and go make it.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

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1. Read the founding essays:

It’s the new flex. Rollies with a dab of ranch don’t matter anymore. Our generation has evolved beyond such materialistic pursuits, and now we chase nonchalance.

Or the impression of it. Nonchalance is an epidemic. From Michael Olise’s hostage looking Man of the Match pics to detachment articles everywhere, calm is the new meta. Which is great. I think more people have yet to understand the value of a stoic approach to life.

But the more this message gets spread, the more misunderstood it becomes, the more people use “I’m just a chill guy” as a window between them and the world, making them feel good about their lack of social skills and emotional control.

Understanding “calmness”

I’ll let Epictetus roll out the intro: “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.”

Read it again.

We aren’t disturbed by things, but by our perception of them.

All events are neutral. Traffic isn’t objectively a bad thing. Neither is a breakup. All events are blank pages sitting on your desk, waiting to be written. Nothing outside of you has the power to disturb you unless you hand it that power. You can’t control anything out there. All the externalities of this world — what people do and what happens — are outside your sphere of influence so there’s genuinely no point in worrying about them.

I hate when people cringe at the idea of not caring about politics or war or all the shit going on in this world.

“Huh don’t you think it’s important to be educated and know what’s happening?” they ask while turning on Twitch political slop.

Yeah, duh, of course being educated is important you fucking nincompoop. But I choose not to watch the news or follow politics too closely — add to that basically any “Internet drama” or whatever the fuck X is filled with — because a) most everything we consume is engineered to be emotionally appealing instead of intellectually fulfilling and b) I have no control over politics and the wars that plague our world.

What good does following the rabbit-hole of our government and Epstein and conspiracy theories and whatever the fuck people spend their time researching do if your life is in shambles? What good is it even if your life is in order?

Realize that, unless you’re in a position of power and can change what’s happening, 99% of “breaking news” and terrible shit going on in the world shouldn’t have a governing place.

I don’t give a fuck. Everyone who pretends to care is virtue signaling morality while their life degrades and the things they “fight for” and “champion” don’t change a zeptogram.

You don’t have to care about everything. Focus on you until the focus is on you.

This is one of the great sources of peace available to the ‘26 man.

When you focus solely on what’s happening out there you begin to externalize your problems and their solutions to the outside world.

“X is happening because Samantha said this and if Y didn’t start Z in A country then the world would be so happy and it’s the systems fault for the position I’m in.”

Like fuck! get a grip dawg.

Victim mentality is so lame.

The Stoics had a simple rule: never impute it to others.

Never blame someone else for your own lost composure, or failure, or current position. It’s your job, and your only job, the only job that matters, to keep your internal state cool. Blaming the world is uninstructed — the mark of naivety.

Pema Chödrön wrote that: “You are the sky. Everything else — it’s just the weather.”

The storms come. With wind and hail and cats and dogs. But the weather never damages the sky. The sky is just a vessel for the inevitable storms and it never changes.

I love this analogy, but the trap with it is that the sky is big and blue and doesn’t want anything and last time I checked you aren’t an Avatar and you have some pretty big goals.

So where does that leave us?

Conqueror’s Calm™

The kind of calm that possesses ambitious men is different from the sky’s calm. While the sky is calm because nothing actually touches it, the great man is calm because he’s so incredibly locked in onto something that nothing can affect his internal state.

The common idea of calm is reflectiveness and passivity. Lots of meditation. Lots of umms and aahhs (or whatever it is monks chant). That kind of calm is cool, I guess. Being at a party and getting pushed around but controlling your emotions is… fine. But I, for one, don’t always want to be the “deep breath, let it go” kinda guy. Sometimes I think it’s good to get a lil’ angry, get some fire under you, and direct that emotion effectively.

The massive achievers of the past couple centuries all operated on this dimension. They were sharks. They smelled blood and hunted. Pure instinct, flow, and presence.

Napoleon operated on this level of effective ruthlessness. Asked how he managed entire wars in his head without breaking down, he responded: “Different subjects and different affairs are arranged in my head as in a cupboard. When I wish to interrupt one train of thought, I shut that drawer and open another. Do I wish to sleep? I simply close all the drawers, and there I am — asleep.”

That kind of calm stems from two things:

1. Supreme control over one’s own mind and internal state

2. Supreme focus on the mission

Alex Honnold free-soloed El Capitan (three thousand feet of sheer, raw, vertical granite) in 2017 with no rope, constantly one slip away from death. He explained that “feeling fearful while I’m up there is not helping me in any way. It’s only hindering my performance, so I just set it aside.”

He’s essentially so locked in on climbing that fear becomes a second thought.

Operating in this kind of way opens the floodgates to a life of flow. The self dissolves and there’s nothing left but the present moment and the mission. Napoleon, who basically lived a life of flow and operated on a tempo and rhythm that was never seen before and most likely never will be again, wasn’t the embodiment of stillness.

There’s no such thing as staying still anyways. You’re either doing better or you’re doing worse.

Conqueror’s calm may appear like stillness and detachment to the peanut gallery, but it’s driven by pure motion.

Waves

So how do you actually become calm?

Well, fortunately, it’s a skill.

Most of us are overwhelmed by our urges and flashes of emotions, which I’ve come to see as waves. They rise, peak, and collapse on their own. The power of emotion you think will last forever is actually impermanent. It screams that you have to act now and the feeling feels like it’ll last forever so you have to indulge or relapse to rid yourself of this ache. But every time you feel it and detach from it, you teach yourself you’re stronger than the wave.

You can practice calmness practically via meditation — which we’ll get to in a moment— or you can practice it in other contexts, like playing sports or video games or while in traffic.

Any low-stakes arena where you can feel yourself starting to tilt is a place to practice not surrendering your power to the moment. You become calm by doing reps. By repeatedly overcoming the urge to spiral into an emotional mess.

I’ve meditated for some 415 hours and this serves as both a humble-brag/self-glaze and to show you I’m not full of shit. I’ve done the work. I’m still doing the work. And from these hours have come incredible benefits:

• it’s been an incredibly long time since I’ve been genuinely anxious or started overthinking and let it spiral out of control

• I’ve become a chill guy

• I can work for hours on end without distraction

• My self-love and self-respect have grown as I’ve learned to disconnect from negative thought patterns and steer attention to affirmations

And I’m calm without being obsessed about being “calm.” I’m rather just focused on being in the moment and that presence gives way to peace. It’s deliciously impossible to think about the past or the future when your attention is devoted to the now. Peace and calm stem from a disillusion of the self and its worries.

Which brings us to flow and three more methods of developing/understanding a lethal level of calmness.

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More value than all your media subscriptions.}

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Flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined this term after spending his entire life researching the intersection between peak performance and happiness. As he describes it, flow is:

Read more

He doesn’t try to improve. Fuck, the idea that he can “improve” or change his life doesn’t even enter his hollow skull. Good ol’ average Joe is a literal NPC. The main story quest filled with princesses that need saving and dragons that need killing doesn’t even seem like a possibility.

Keep in mind that “average” by today’s standard is interchangeable with slop, mediocre, and below average, because being average in a shit society doesn’t make you less shit.

Joe’s left to wake up and repeat the same dialogue options using the same never-evolving skill tree (he’ll never upgrade beyond 15pts charisma and 10pts charm). This isn’t troubling to Joe because a) that’s all he knows, and when you can’t conceive of anything better than your current state changing it is nearly impossible, and b) comfort makes it easy to glide through life without ever needing to improve.

We already have the Big Bang and the Goldilocks Zone and millions of years of evolution — which holy fuck is already a lot to be thankful for! — add to that consciousness, the gift that proves our existence is meant for more than mere survival, and confining yourself to a small cage for the time you have (less than a billionth percent of the universe’s timeline btw) begins to look more than a waste: a sin.

Love, hope, history, purpose, fear, courage, philosophy, rocketships, Lily James — all possible only because of consciousness.

In this window of time between nothingness and death, as Jack London wrote: “I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.” I’d rather be a superb meteor for the simple fact that death is promised. For this simple reason, attempting nothing and letting oneself drift passively to mediocrity is a sin.

You’re dying, like every man that lives. In fact, you have already died. Seneca wrote that “we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years be behind us are in death’s hands.”

Time that has passed is time in death’s hands.
Time that is yet to be is in your hands.

It is your duty to become someone whose very existence is a rejection of stagnation.

But Joe’s got League to grind… And thus the modern man squanders our gift on a mediocre, dare I say meaningless, existence. Just like the average room temperature IQ political-tard unable to see beyond “us vs them” dynamics, it’d be easy to get mad at Joe and call him the “enemy.”

It’s not Joe’s fault though, NPCs aren’t born that way.
Mediocrity is learned. Helplessness is learned.

It’s for good reason that most Psych 101 classes begin with Martin Seligman’s 1967 experiment on dogs — it’s a warning: “this is what happens if you don’t consciously work on yourself” (at least that’s how I perceived it). For the unaware, Martin Seligman put two dogs in a box and gave them shocks they couldn’t escape. They initially fought against it but their prison and its electrifying regimen was inescapable, they thus accepted their fate and stopped struggling.

Then the dogs were moved to a new box, this one had an easy exit: a low barrier. An easy jump for most dogs. Most dogs. Dogs who hadn’t been in the first box figured it out right away. They felt the shock and exited the box. Easy.

The other dogs didn’t. They laid down and took the shocks, whimpering at the exit — like a starving man crying at a buffet, they’d been taught helplessness. That’s every NPC.

They’re taught helplessness.

Luckily we know that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. To every yin there’s a yang. To every piece of AI slop is a masterpiece. The existence of learned helplessness points to its opposite: agency.

Etymological understanding

As I’m sure you have, I’ve read many articles on agency and its importance in modern life. Surrounded by ever-increasing slop and information, action is presented as the antidote to this new kind of intellectualist-mediocrity epidemic. And it is the antidote.

But never once have I seen someone break down its etymology, which saddens me. Much of the world is hidden in its unappreciated foundations. Language is shaped by culture. It’s been through its own form of evolution. Through understanding words we can understand stories, entire concepts, and map the world in more intricate detail.

Want to understand something? Start with its etymology.

Agency comes from the Latin agere, which means to set in motion, to drive forward, to do. Agency means being the one who moves, rather than the one who’s moved. To dictate the current instead of drifting in it.

The barrier to an agentic life

Humanity has agentic individuals to thank for much of its treasures.

The French Revolution was a by-product of agency.
Space travel is a by-product of agency.
Artificial Intelligence.
Abundant clean food and water.
The Industrial Revolution.

All the good that was and the good that will be require agency.

Nothing changes if nothing changes. It’s a fundamental rule of the universe, as constant as The Cosmic Speed Limit of 299,792 kilometers per second, that motion is rewarded.

Motion is rational. Because in a world that gradually moves toward chaos — thank you entropy! — agency is an antidote.

So aren’t we all highly agentic?

The simplest answer, which Occam’s Razor teaches is usually the best, is because of fear.

Fear governs the lives of the many, leaving the few agentic to succeed.

I’ve come to think of fear as a siren. An Odysseus style baddie siren to be clear. Men of culture are slowed by their inability to look away from its sheer, dripping sex appeal.

Fear’s sex appeal masks its whispers of hopelessness. It’s seductive. It feels good to give in to fear, to push away what could be done today to “tomorrow.” Fear convinces you to draw your attention away from the wheel — OohH yOu COulD gaTHer MorE inforMAtion! It leads you to tasks that feel productive without ever creating anything of substance.

Procrastination and perfectionism, for example, are subsets of fear — manifestations of it. These clever sirens have most of us squeezed between their thighs. They’re clever because they don’t feel like acute, primal, fight-or-flight fear. They feel safe and comfortable.

I’ve come to develop an intuition for this kind of fear. It tries to pistol my ambitions against me. The most dangerous kind of fear is a trickster. You don’t realize you’re scared because fear has convinced you of some other reason for delay.

Overthinking hates action

The cure to a boring life is stupidly simple: you act.

It’s much harder to think your way into a new way of being than it is to act your way there. You can never truly know something — be it your ability to hit a new PR or a strange, metaphysical concept — until you can act on it.

Thinking about doing the thing, reading about the thing, planning when you’re going to do the thing — all feel like progress but aren’t. Because the only thing that’s doing the thing is doing the thing.

The anxious never realizes that understanding and growth come after action because they never act. I watched Miles Morales struggle with this idea in “Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse” recently. He knows exactly what needs to be done but doesn’t know if he can do it. People need saving, but he’s paralyzed by fear.

He asks Peter B. Parker (veteran Spider-Man) for advice:

“When will I know I’m ready?”

Growth demands a leap of faith. That’s all it is. A leap of faith.

You will never outgrow your self-image

Beyond agency as a nice philosophical Substack article subject, it’s a frequency, a mindset. With every action you take, you throw down one stone in favor of this action, neurologically speaking: your brain reinforces behavior by making the neural networks fire faster and faster. Neuroplasticity teaches us that the brain is malleable; the more you do something, the more you become that thing (literally, since your brain physically alters itself).

Agency has this neurological component and another one grounded in identity. Your brain rewires itself physically and phenomenologically — “I’m someone who does x.”

Every action you take is a vote in the running for who you could be. With every agentic act you take a step to a more agentic self. The more you act without confidence, the more confidence you build, and the more your future actions are rooted in evidence. Action follows identity. Identity follows action. They feed into each other, much like a flywheel. Focus on one side and the other follows.

What does this mean practically?

1. Believe before you have proof

If you aren’t already agentic, you have to operate with a certain degree of irrationality. You have no proof you’re agentic or that you can be. But believing in a future you have no proof for is the signature of greatness. Steve Jobs saw and believed in the iPhone before anyone else. His confidence was irrational, and he worked, distorting reality around him with this confidence, until his confidence for the success of his idea was rooted in the success of the iPhone.

That’s just one example. Every single success story starts with irrational belief.

2. Take action

The delusional optimism described above will do you no good without action. Without some brick-laying, all this fancy talk is good for nothing. Irrationality is meant to serve as a driving force for the action that will produce the evidence that’ll alchemize your irrationality into firmly rooted-in-evidence confidence.

3. Let the repetition become you

Once you realize that you can literally do anything — because irrationality backed by action is a superpower — keep on going. Root your identity in your ability to bulldoze through any adversity.

Set your mind to ever greater heights and get to climbing!

You must work in the dark to shine in the light

After years of chasing my goals I can confidently declare that Rocky is pure propaganda. Well… sorta. You can do anything you set your mind to, yes, but you won’t get a 3-minute motivational montage. You’ll have to work and struggle in the dark for months, maybe years, until any sort of proof that this’ll work arrives.

Take my Substack journey for example (which is far from over): I had to write and write and write and write and write for months until finally something clicked.

The Rocky journey that many imagine awaits them because they’ve decided to take action unfortunately doesn’t exist. It’s more akin to The Shawshank Redemption and Andy’s tunnel escape — you have to dig in the dark for years before reaching the light.

You pick a direction and a chisel and get to work. And it won’t feel like it’s working because the results don’t come at 20% or 50% of the journey. They all come pouring in — thank you compound effect! — at the 95% mark, right where most would quit.

The only way through is to make peace with friction and resistance. As I’ve come to learn, resistance is its own kind of work. When you push against it every day it becomes a habit, one as natural as breathing. Pushing past resistance is a sort of meta-skill. If you do it long enough you become like a rhino-chameleon: powerful enough to bulldoze past anything yet adaptable enough to absorb whatever skill you need by simply taking action.

My point is that practicing agency isn’t glamorous, far from it, but practicing agency and overcoming resistance are meta-skills in and of themselves. Just deciding to be more agentic will lead to growth.

The old self

Resistance — worry, fear, overthinking — is always loudest before acting. The hardest part of sky-diving is the plane ride up. That heavy knotted ball of dread and fear sits in your chest, accumulating more fear and dread, imbuing passing thoughts with its emotional field. And then you jump. And within minutes you realize you had nothing to fear. You fly through the air, master of the skies, and what felt impossible on the way up is just… happening. As Madeleine L’Engle writes, “Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.”

Similarly, fear usually comes before work, rather than during it.

Our average Joe doesn’t ever learn this because he feels resistance, lets it throne in his chest, gain ever-increasing power, and spends the rest of the day with the nagging thought that he could’ve just fucking jumped.

If resistance has taught me anything it’s that its presence is a sign of an incoming breakthrough. Your old self — which, like any entity, wants to survive — creates resistance because jumping would kill it. Every act of agency chisels off a little piece of who you used to be — and who you used to be doesn’t want that. So it fights you. It deploys its sirens and creates feelings of impending doom and despair. It doesn’t go quiet into that good night.

Novelty is taxing on the brain. It’s only 2% of your body weight but burns around 20% of your energy, so it’s evolved to conserve energy and keep you on the polyester beliefs it feels familiar with. Novelty is metabolically expensive. Our biology is built to keep us where we’re at.

So understand that resistance is simply the brain’s fear of the new.

It’s a sign of good things to come.

Your only job is to see it for what it is — a simple emotion, an indicator — and start anyway.

The breadcrumb method

Procrastination is a sneaky devil because the longer it stays around, the more power it gains. The longer you wait to do something, the scarier the task becomes.

Run 5 miles. Write an entire book. Build a business.

When you think of your goals like that, of course you freeze and panic. The mountain is too big.

So don’t state it like that. Break down your goals and your immediate tasks piece by piece. Mentally, it’s much harder to run five miles than to tie your shoes, but in tying your shoes you’re one step closer to running five miles.

The most effective strategy for overcoming resistance in-the-moment is to attack the small part of the problem. “I’ll just work for five minutes and keep going if I want to” is much more effective and faster at getting you into deep work than “I need to work for three hours with Adderall focus.”

Set targets so small failure is impossible.

This is how you build momentum.

Every small hurdle you jump over is proof you can clear the next: five minutes of meditation becomes proof you can do ten. Average Joe has transcended his chungus loops and is stacking evidence that he’s someone who does shit, and action compounds, really quickly too. Break two hundred reps into eight-twelve across a few exercises and boom! you’ve done all two hundred.

Turn your monster into a trail of breadcrumbs.

The best part about this is that there’s literally no resistance to overcome. There’s nothing for you to fight against when you just have to tie your shoes. The act slips under the old self’s radar and gets you moving.

The Übermensch’s Pen

There’s a type of agency that goes beyond action.

Every fact you believe about yourself — I’m not smart enough, not disciplined enough, the other guys are luckier — is a story. Not a fact. But a story, and one you can change. Your past doesn’t determine your future unless you keep telling yourself the same stories.

Change the internal stories → change the identity → change the outcome

The power of story stretches beyond beliefs and identity. Experiences themselves are neutral — blank sheets of paper of which you’re the writer. The stories you tell yourself about your experiences determine the experience. Two men can experience the same rain; one thinks “great! now I’m wet,” the other, looking up, says “great! a sign of incoming prosperity, rain’s always been good to me!” Perspective is reality.

This is why mindfulness is such a powerful skill. After hundreds of hours of meditation I can notice whenever I stray from my desired story and reframe it — from I’m useless, nothing’s going my way → I’m getting better every day, in every way.

I’ve started to see small experiences as signs. A green light, for example. There’s this particular light I pass by everytime I go rock climbing, that never seems to be red, like ever. Whenever I pass it, I say to myself, out loud, “that’s a sign baby!”

Objectively the green light and whatever other mundane things I attribute as signs don’t exist. But if I interpret them that way and they change how I act, then they’re real. Reality is what you make of it.

So every day, ask yourself: who am I becoming today? How are my thoughts, perceptions, beliefs carving the sculpture of who I am?

You’re never unhappier than when the man you could be and the man you actually are drift apart. That space is closed by agentic living. And remember: you’ll never be “ready.”

It’s a leap of faith.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

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O

When a man grows comfortable, his natural hunger turns inwards, beginning to eat at the soul — at least if this man is ambitious, which is the case for you.

Each man’s hunger manifests itself differently — perhaps he externalizes it into video games or is drawn to conquest. I, for one, am drawn to doing things excellently. My standards for action are unbearably high, which leads to self-analysis, scrutiny, and a degree of sharp stress, like a constant stabbing of the soul, an indication that I could’ve performed better or pushed myself a bit harder.

This regret, until I’ve improved or met my standards of action, eats away at me.

The idea that one should be harsh and demanding of oneself doesn’t quite fit into the self-love and “detachment” ideas that many, including me, love to write about. And yet, paradoxically, your ability to whip yourself and tiptoe on the side of self-hatred determines your ability to be great and love yourself.

Discipline is the highest form of self-love.

Having high standards of thought and action — I don’t entertain negative thoughts and I don’t skip a workout when I’m tired — and feeling a bit of shame when you don’t meet said standards is a powerful form of fuel. It’s a form of self-love. Self-love is demanding excellence from yourself because you know, deep down, that you have something in you that must be drawn out. You have a gift.

I’ve come to realize, from studying great men of the past and analyzing my own behavior (I’m not a great of the past, but I am ambitious), that for the ambitious man it’s normal to feel discontent — discontent about where you are and how the world is.

I believe it to be a powerful force. One of the most powerful forces in the universe in fact because in retrospect, everything great that we humans have built is a by-product of ambitious men looking at the world and declaring it’s not enough.

Fighting cancer because a world where millions die to it every year isn’t enough.
Building cathedrals because a world where we merely survive isn’t enough.
Chasing financial freedom because a world where you aren’t free isn’t enough.

Discontent is fuel for growth.

Look at Michelangelo. By the end of his life, with the Sistine and David behind him, he was the most celebrated artist in Europe. And yet, in his late eighties, he was still climbing the scaffolding of St. Peter’s, still discontent. He knew he had more to give.

“Ancora imparo,” he’s said to have written.

I am still learning.

This kind of greatness demands a delicate balance.

Because when I say “demand more from yourself” I don’t mean to constantly beat yourself up. I mean that you have to shake yourself from time to time, look yourself in the mirror, and man the fuck up! You still have more to learn.

You have to care deeply. You have to be obsessed.

And at the same time, you have to be detached.

In “Zen in the Art of Archery,” German philosopher Eugen Herrigel reflects on his experiences learning how to loose an arrow under a Japanese master. Not “how to shoot” an arrow, but to loose it. He spent six years working solely on release, and every time he focused on hitting the target his master would swiftly remind him:

That’s the delicate balance — years of obsession directed to release, and total detachment from where the arrow lands.

Care completely about what you control and let go of the rest.

Greatness isn’t a nice pursuit

The last idea I’ll leave you with is that greatness isn’t a “nice” pursuit. Discipline and routine and hard work aren’t “nice.” Having that little voice in the back of your head continuously pushing you to improve isn’t “nice.”

But it is loving.

And that’s so much better than “nice,” because “nice” isn’t a fucking compliment. Just like being a “nice” man doesn’t make you a good man, being “nice” to yourself doesn’t mean shit. But being loving — why that’s everything.

It defines everything.

Obsession is a form of self-love.
Detachment is a form of self-love.
Pursuing greatness is a form of self-love.

What was it Camus said?

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.

Love yourself. And push to greater peaks. Always.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

~ Alexander

Follow me on X for more posts on philosophy, personal development, and curating a meaningful existence.

Weekly articles Tuesday, Thursday & Sunday 10:00am PST.

When you’re ready:

1. Subscribe to Alexander Romance — full archive, 3 articles a week, free

2. Upgrade to paid — price will jump after the first 100 slots are filled up!

2. Read the founding essays:

His name is Chung Ling Soo — known as the Marvelous Chinese Conjurer. All of London adores him.

On this fateful day, March 23rd, 1918, at the Wood Green Empire, he shuffles onto the stage to perform his world-famous trick: the bullet catch.

Two rifles, each carrying marked bullets, that he’ll catch effortlessly between his teeth — at least, that’s how it’ll appear to the audience. Unbeknownst to them, the guns are modified with a secondary lower tube that merely fires a blank charge.

Chung merely has to pretend to catch a duplicate.

This time’s different though.

Unburned gunpowder had accumulated in a hidden channel over time, and when the blank was fired, the spark ignited the forgotten gunpowder in the main barrel, firing the real marked bullet into Ling’s chest.

As he goes down in front of a packed crowd, he screams out:

He speaks the first English words anyone had ever heard from him.

“Chung” had merely been pretending to be Chinese. His magic went beyond the stage. The magic of Chung Ling Soo lied in William Ellsworth Robinson’s ability to trick the audience into thinking he, an ordinary New Yorker, was a Chinese magician.

The real magic was the audience’s belief that the magician was a frail old Chinese man at all.

This is what I’ve come to understand as metadeception.

It is, far and away, one of the single most interesting topics I’ve ever learned about. I first came across it from a magician named Stevie Baskin, whose five hour breakdown of Oz Pearlman a) coins the term “metadeception” and b) is the single greatest video essay I’ve ever seen.

Metadeception is the purest form of magic. It’s about creating an illusion, a magic trick, that extends beyond the trick itself — like a veil laid over the whole thing so you don’t even know you’re being fooled. Author of “The Prestige” Christopher Priest writes that: “A magician’s secret is protected not because it’s large and important, but because it’s small and embarrassing — the wonderful effect is so often the result of a secret so absurd the magician would be embarrassed for you to learn how it was truly done.”

Every act of deception works by attacking what you’re able to see. As Baskin defines it, metadeception is “deception that operates beyond the deceptive act itself, obscuring its nature, boundaries or existence.”

It works by attacking your perception of deception itself. Hiding magic behind more magic.

In his Book of Water, Miyamoto Musashi writes the following: “the twofold gaze ‘Perception and Sight.’ Perception is strong and sight weak.”

He’s saying that you have two eyes.

The seeing eye — ken — catches real world movement.
The perceiving eye — kan — catches what’s underneath: intent and patterns.

The goal of any man should be to develop his kan. Because then malicious magic, such as greedy advertisement and the entire attention economy, becomes harmless and performance magic — such as Oz’s work — becomes all the more beautiful, and it goes beyond that, into the realm of mastery and flow, and don’t worry, you’re gonna get some.

Metadeception dissection

Oz’s “mentalism” is actually masterful sleight of hand, but that sleight of hand is masked by the metadeception layer of “I’m using body language and cold reading to read your mind.”

You don’t think to pay attention to the small details in front of you because you’re so focused on the impossibility of mind reading.

Oz does a trick where he “reads” a word a stranger picked from a random book. In this case, it’s with Bert Kreischer and his sister Kottie. All he’s doing to “read her mind” is using a simple sleight of hand move — swiftly turning his head toward Kottie for a zepto-second to peek at the word she’s going to choose, which isn’t hard, most of us with baseline intelligence could read and memorize a word in the same way, but Oz does it so imperceptibly that one would never guess his “mentalism” was actually remarkably smooth sleight of hand — to “guess” the word.

At this point, Oz already knows the word, the trick is effectively over, but he draws it out, tapping into the “cold reading” and body language analysis part to give the impression he’s a mentalist.

He’s fucking brilliant.

The trick starts at 15:00, Oz does the peaking sleight of hand at 15:36, and he escalates it until 17:42 — 2 minutes of metadeceptive foreplay! — and everyone loses their shit.

Metadeception works because it floods your seeing eye so that the perceiving eye never wakes up. The magician blatantly hands you all the surface level stuff — something like a bullet catch or reading your mind, which has to be impossible, right? All so that you never look to question the beyond (sleight of hand).

As Baskin puts it: “The stage exists within your assumptions”

And this is where it gets fun — because metadeception goes far beyond magic.

Your perception is your world-builder. The world isn’t some objective place with set rules and boundaries. It’s more akin to a giant sandbox, and the limits of this sandbox are what you see.

What you see is the world you can act in. What you see determines what you’re able to act upon. What you’re able to act upon determines the actions you take. The actions you take determine the results you get. What you see you create.

Perception is everything.

Two men can look at the same thing and see completely different worlds. Some see an 8x8 checkered grid; some see a complex game with more possible variations than atoms in the universe.

Shrink a man’s perspective and you make him mediocre, easy to fool. After all, what could be more controlling than influencing how you experience the world? Widen your perception, however, and you can operate on a dimension others can’t see, producing results they can only deem magic. “With each magic trick you uncover, you gain a little bit of knowledge about how you were previously fooled,” says Baskin, thereby expanding your perspective, making you harder to seduce and more incredible to those still being deceived.

Immunity

The moment you understand the following, you become immune to the metadeception practiced on you every single day.

Advertising, social media, and the entire attention economy is aimed at deceiving you without letting you see you’re being deceived. It’s dangerously beautiful in a way.

For example: in 1958, David Ogilvy, published the following ad for Rolls-Royce:

Sales jumped a staggering 50%.

Strange isn’t it? The ad doesn’t brag about the car’s supreme engineering, or uses buzzwords like “luxurious,” “quiet,” and “worth the money.” The ad is plain as toast — it just draws attention to the truth: the electric clock is the loudest noise in the car.

Given this simple fact the viewer creates their own assumptions about the car. David gets you to believe exactly what he wants you to believe without ever claiming anything. You’ve been sold to without realizing you’ve been sold to — because you sold yourself.

Social media fundamentally thrives on metadeception. You’re sold on beliefs, products, and ideas without realizing it… advertising that doesn’t feel like advertising.

The cost of remaining ignorant to this kind of deception isn’t merely that you lose yourself and destroy your attention span but that you get fooled into thinking this narrow beam of attention you’ve drawn onto social media is an accurate representation of the whole world. The narrower your beam of attention, the smaller your reality, and, as Alan Watts said, “a man who thinks he’s a lonely little island of consciousness is a man who can be sold things.”

But if you consciously work at widening your perception — like switching from a spotlight version of consciousness to an upgraded floodlight version — then you can see the world more accurately.

As soon as I started studying online business growth I started to notice funnels and sales pitches everywhere (that’s all making money on social media is anyways). And that’s just one tiny example. When you study more, you see more. You can see intent (why people really post what they post), edits (how they choose to present themselves), and signaling (how they hope others will perceive them).

The prize of this kind of expanded perception is freedom. To feel that you can deconstruct what you see before you gives you a strange sense of power. A free agent, unhindered by the puppeteers.

Sprezzatura

Everything so far has been about the external use of metadeception to fool you, but what if we flipped it around?

^{The sexual tension between you and this paywall.}

^{Few bucks a month.
More value than all your media subscriptions.}

^{Your move.}

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