I’ve been writing online for the past 15 months, more than a hundred articles published, and I’ve never really centralized all my ideas in a single place.

This is my attempt to do that, as briefly as I can.

My quest is to build a philosophy, a way of life, that will allow the individual to thrive and reach greatness, and through this, to raise the bar for humanity.

Brick by brick, I believe I’ve come close to something meaningful, especially for the young ambitious men of this weird era we live in.

Most of them live by a philosophy they never chose, convention, handed to them by their family, society, religion and friends.

Even in a herd trained for generations to be passive, there are always exceptional individuals that are born.

The cattle raiser isolates these problematic individuals, doesn’t let them reproduce, and they are the first to end up in the slaughterhouse.

Our modern society trains the exceptional out of children in schools, shames them for desiring more, and convention keeps them chained to the normal expected life they should live.

The exceptional individual is smothered by the group. Alone, they have little power to rise and change their condition.

My goal for this philosophy is to speak directly to this exceptional individual.

What follows is a summary of what the frame looks like.

Each point is connected to the others, and they feed into each other in order.

• Attention: You are the sum of where you put your attention on. You always hear you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with, but those people only matter because that’s where your attention goes when you’re with them. Your mind will optimize for what it’s fed consistently. This means you have the power to influence who you become by changing what you consciously and unconsciously focus on.
  This turns feeds, scrolling, TV or anything built to hook your attention for someone else’s benefit into abominations. Tools of manipulation that pull the strings of your brain in the shadows. If you want to become an exceptional individual, it is of the utmost importance to learn to recognize them for what they are: manipulation, whether through propaganda, marketing, or influence someone wants to have on you. Controlling attention will be the most important tool you have for changing your life positively.

• Pain Tolerance: Our default setting is to “feel” good, because evolution programmed us that way: what felt good meant better chances of survival. We humans still run on this wiring, in a world with an abundance of pleasure. A life aimed at feeling good will in effect turn you into a worm. A type of grazing cattle that only consumes by pushing dopamine buttons, made by big corporations to keep you as addicted as possible. Pain tolerance will save you from such a life. How? The more pain (read here: discomfort) you’re able to put yourself through for a meaningful reward, the less empty instant gratification will appeal to you.

  

  Pain is not a virtue in itself, but being a tough SOB is a necessity to achieve anything meaningful. It’s a chicken and egg situation of sorts. The aim is that it leads you to find a quest. More on this here:

• Quest: A quest is what wires your attention towards a meaningful direction, which makes the pain of the pursuit tolerable. Overthinking, depression, meaninglessness, anxiety, social anxiety, all dissolve when the mind is wrapped on achieving a meaningful goal bigger than the chaser’s life. Many make the mistake of chasing the wrong quest and wonder why nothing works for them. It is a subject that goes very deep, but the most important aspects of a quest are:
  1. it’s bigger than yourself and your own life
  2. it’s something you can become exceptional at, which by extension should make it mostly enjoyable to pursue
  3. it provides value to others (potentially profitable, otherwise you build something on the side that funds the quest)
  How do you find your quest? by trying things, failing, and pushing. All painful, hence why pain tolerance came before quest.

• Humanity: Which then, when you stretch it to its ultimate final point, means that your quest has to raise the bar for humanity in the long term. You do it by raising yourself, and by leaving behind something others can freely use. How? Maybe you want to clean the plastic out of the oceans, maybe you want to create clean energy, maybe you want to get humanity to Mars, maybe you raise children who will raise the bar after you, maybe you grow food, change the land to make it more prosperous for future generations, plant fruit trees, solve a mathematical equation, invent something, etc, etc. anything that is aimed at leaving something that makes the world a better place, that could be useful to others after your own death. What makes it exceptional is the level you pursue it at. Hence the point above of chasing something bigger that yourself.
  Why tho? what’s the point? If after you’ve died, nothing matters? If you’ll be forgotten soon after you’re gone? If the world will be wiped out when the sun dies? if it will be way sooner by human stupidity?
  Because I choose to believe in us, because I choose to believe that we can transcend the present wretched human condition into something higher, something healthier, something beautiful. Because I build a sturdy and beautiful house knowing it might very well be destroyed by an earthquake, or go up in flames.
  David Deutsch, in his book The Fabric of Reality, said it’s within the laws of physics to create a computer so powerful it could simulate a whole other reality, as real as the one we live in. This computer would have to be so immensely powerful that it would need an extremely powerful form of energy. A collapse of the universe, which physicists still debate as a possible end for our universe before it ceases to exist, could power such a computer forever, so consciousness would never die.
  This is my answer to any nihilistic defeatist and pessimistic remark that life is meaningless and we’ll all die. There is a chance that we won’t, and everything we do in the present moment builds towards it. Never doom.

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• Knowledge: What is permitted by the laws of physics is possible, as stated above. And the only thing missing is knowledge. That is the main thing separating us from a caveman. The caveman has oil in the ground, he has iron, he has all the resources beneath his feet, but he lacks the knowledge to create industry out of it. We today have immense potential ahead of us, most of it we probably can’t even fathom, just like that caveman couldn’t fathom our own present. The only thing separating us from this future is the knowledge to get there.

• Truth: The chase for truth is what separates useful knowledge from deceitful. Every theory is useful until it’s replaced by another which is closer to the truth, as seen with Newton’s theories which were replaced by Einstein’s. We live in an ocean of deceitful and complicated knowledge that is still waiting to be polished into its raw truth. We need to see this as endless opportunity to get better.

• Action: The best way to find truth is through action. Reality offers feedback that makes knowledge true or not. Experience. Reports from the field are more useful than any theory devised by the greatest minds while disconnected from reality and truth. This is why Man must get in the trenches, exert force and will into the fabrics of reality to change the course of history.

• Skills: Knowledge and action allow for the bettering of your skills. The more skills you stack on top of each other, the more effective you’ll become. This is the “building yourself” part. But you build yourself for a meaningful quest, not for the sake of building yourself. You build walls because they will hold the roof of your house, not because they might be of use in the future. Building without a goal beats doing nothing, but the person building for a specific reason will move much faster than the person building for the sake of building.
  Memory is essential for gathering skills: your capacity to retain useful information to use it at the right time. Learn, do, see what works, fail, get feedback, adjust, retain the lesson, win. Repeat. More on Memory here:

• Creation: Creation, just like productivity or work, is seen by the feel-gooders as a perverse activity that is antithetical to “enjoyment”, hence to feeling good. They are the things you must do before you can get to enjoy the thing that make you feel good.
  When you remove jam from your diet, you start enjoying fruits. When you remove the consumption aimed activities and replace them with creation aimed activities, you start to enjoy them as much as you did the consumption ones. Only now you get something in return, rather than the void left by a spike in pleasure, that you have to replace constantly with more pleasure. So create, and if you have to create something, might as well make it so others can benefit from it too.
  Money is an extension of creation/building. I’m a big believer in creating sufficient wealth for yourself so you never have to think about it. The goal is to buy your freedom.
  This is not to say all quests will necessarily lead to money, like the previous examples of raising children or planting trees. Sometimes you’ll need to work on something on the side. But if your quest can make money, you have to gun for it.
  Business (or entrepreneurship) is the natural extension, the tool you use that connects your creation and your quest to your freedom.

• Retrospective Redemption: The creation of an amazing present turns past traumas, mistakes, time-wasting into necessary stepping stones for your current life. The events are fixed, but their meaning is open. You choose their meaning based on your present. If you’re currently living a present that’s successful by your own standards, one you’re deeply grateful for, everything you’ve lived through up to that point was a necessary step that led you there.
  This is hard to see while you’re living inside the pain of trauma, this is why belief and optimism are essential.

• Belief: All this is irrelevant if you don’t believe in it. Belief shapes much of everything that is presented here. Cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias (and other cognitive biases in general) will bend reality in favor of your beliefs.
  This makes belief a powerful force on reality as we perceive it. It loops back to attention: belief decides what you notice. The question becomes: why not believe what best serves you, and by extension what best serves humanity?
  This doesn’t mean you live in a bubble. Where reality has spoken, where something is TRULY unchangeable, truth wins. Where it’s still open, like whether you can build a business or become someone else, believe what serves your quest.
  Truth Tolerance is an imperative here, that rare ability to see reality as it really is, more on it here:

  Most believe what was handed to them by convention, from their family, society, religion, friends. And many of these philosophies, ways of life, are parasitic in essence. They exist to keep existing and not for your well-being, and they use you for this goal. Choosing your own beliefs might be the first real choice you ever make.

That’s it.

I like to think of this philosophy as a castle. For now it’s defendable, you can live in it, you can thrive in it. It still needs a few towers, maybe higher walls, and most of all people living in it to prove it really works.

Ten years ago I had no future, no direction, my life was completely aimless and meaningless. Everything here is what got me from there to where I am now, brick by brick.

The exceptional individual alone gets smothered by the herd. A castle like this one is where they find like-minded people and can rise above.

If you recognized yourself in any of this, it was made for you.

Preference produces optionality and mediocrity. Necessity produces the men who change the world.

In other words: discipline comes from having no choice.

But it’s more than discipline.

The mediocre man has a thousand options open, and no vital pressure to select any of them.

Whatever he choses, he will be safe to live another day, just as comfortably as he as been for all his life.

When alternatives are readily available in his mind, the mediocre man’s mind resists, hesitate, and second guesses automatically. The brain allocates resources to find exits.

Willpower fights this allocation, but it eventually gives out, it’s an uphill battle.

Then he hates himself, blames his “lack of discipline”, his lack of atomic habits, he ends up hating himself.

Necessity ends the allocation.

The moment the mind treats a path as the only one that exists for you, it stops looking for exits and the energy goes to ruthless execution.

But you can’t just lie to yourself, the mind knows when there are real stakes, when there are still options open.

This is why you put yourself on death ground. You burn the boats.

Our modern environment maximizes options and minimizes consequences. It is the perfect breeding ground for this mediocre man that achieves nothing.

The peoples who had some value, attained some value, never attained it under liberal institutions: it was great danger that made something of them that merits respect. Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong. First principle: one must need to be strong — otherwise one will never become strong.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

To become an outlier, a man that can change the world, you have to stop waiting for circumstances to eliminate options for you. You have to take control of your those circumstances, consciously eliminate any option besides the one that means the most to you, then operate as if the remaining path is fate.

How?

Five steps:

1. Burn the boats

This is Sun Tzu’s death ground principle. Remove any options of escape, and an army will fight the opponent with ruthless desperation to survive.

Cortés sank his ships when he landed in what is now Mexico. He went on to conquer the Aztec Empire. There were various moving parts, but his men thinking of running back to the boats and leaving the expedition wasn’t one of them.

This is cheesy, you’ve heard all of it before, but modern research on decision reversibility also shows the same thing: keeping exits open occupies working memory, increases regret, and degrades performance.

I left my job almost a year and a half ago. A good 9 to 5, really comfortable, a good position. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do, but I was sure that I needed to leave this comfort in order to find it. I went to live in a mountain cabin without running water and electricity right after quitting. One month after, I started writing online, and here we are: writing this from distant lands, living off of it.

I put myself under pressure, would I have left my safe job for no reason? To go back to being employed in a worse one? Unthinkable. I increased the stakes, which allowed me to focus and ultimately find this.

Today I’m extremely grateful I took the risk, it was one of the scariest decisions I ever made, and surely one of the best.

2. Low stimulation

How do you think you’re going to achieve anything meaningful if you freely let yourself have easy access to a button you can push that will provide pleasure infinitely?

High stimulation such as doomscrolling, videogames, porn, binging TV shows, etc. are the great pacifiers of Man, the greatest circus among circuses.

If you spend hours every day on such activites, you are the medieval peasant being entertained while your life slips by and the lord milks you out of what you produced. Only a few steps away from being the fat man fed sugary garbage from a tube with a VR headset on.

This is the zenith of safety.

If you can justify to yourself the use of overstimulation in your life, you in reality justify your own transformation into a worm. The ambitious individual (which I assume you are) will never be able to truly justify it. It will rot you from the inside and you will resent yourself, filling you with regret slowly and unnoticeably until you realize it’s too late.

I have said this before but I believe the split will come mainly at this intersection, which is why I keep speaking about it.

The majority of people will push these easy buttons. Just like the man who’s shitty life is ruined by alcohol, and keeps drinking to forget his shitty life. Only unlike alcohol, overstimulation is widely accepted: no social stigma, no life ruined, normal and everyone does it.

I have seen it happen to close people around me. I’m sure you have too.

The minority that refuses to be pacified will rise to new heights. My hope is to make that minority as big as possible: this is one of the main reasons I write Conquer.

3. Increase energy

Low energy isn’t an excuse not to perform, but it’s a duty for the outlier to increase it as much as possible in order to increase said performance.

If your brain lacks nutrients, if you destroy it with alcohol or weed, if your gut is compromised and doesn’t absorb what you eat correctly, if you’re not sleeping sufficiently, etc etc. energy will be low, and that’s when the previously mentionned stimulations are made most easily accessible.

Naturally raising your Testosterone has the effect of increasing energy, because you fix health issues when you’re doing it, I wrote a whole guide on it already:

4. Go up that mountain

For so long, I believed you could learn from the mistakes of others easily, so as not to make them yourself.

For many of the things you want to do, there is a scratch that isn’t easily ignored. Sometimes it is very wise to do so, especially when it can cripple you or have consequences for the rest of your life.

The “party life” is the best example.

It’s such an empty life, the drinking, the “chasing” girls, popping bottles in the club. And yet it’s the thing you see young men desperately want to do. How can I convince them that it’s retarded, if I have lived that life myself for a while and seen how empty it is?

If you are wise enough to see from the outside that you won’t want it, you are lucky. If you are dumb enough (and aren’t we all at some point?) to need to do it, in order to realize it’s not worth your time, then you MIGHT be better off doing it so you can scratch it forever from your life.

So go up that mountain, whatever that mountain is that you can’t stop thinking about: living in Bali as a degenerate, becoming rich to buy that ferrari you’ve been manipulated to want by a rapper’s music video, starting a company, doing a marathon, etc etc. You’ll realize one of two things:

1. Most likely: it wasn’t what you wanted, but atleast you eliminated that path, learned some lessons and you can move on liberated from it for good

2. You realize it was everything you dreamed of and life is therefor amazing going forward (until it isn’t and you need to climb a new mountain, but each thing in its own time)

Doing this enough will make you realize at some point what seems to be a transformative experience: most paths aren’t for you, there is only a limited amount of things you can do in life, so focusing on the main thing that is worth something to you at the cost of everything else becomes a given. This is obviously hard if nothing is worth to you, because you’ve never tried anything seriously.

Important: what is a transformative experience? This is something I realize I need to write a whole long form article about, as it’s so important and yet nobody speaks of it. My article 11 Ideas That Will Change How You See Reality Forever was an attempt at provoking this.

A transformative experience is having an experience that will change how you view reality forever, with a clear before and after. Having a kid is the most obvious example: you can only imagine how it is beforehand, and you can’t ever go back to being how you were before having had the kid.

So go and conquer that mountain.

5. Self belief

You have to believe you can do it in order to do it.

Burning the boats was the external push towards no more options, but if you don’t remove the internal ones, you’ll go back to that same life again.

You have to ruthlessly believe in your own destiny. You have to believe you can be more, and have high expectations for yourself. You mind needs a kind of healthy arrogance here, being delusionally optimistic about what you can achieve.

I won’t delve deeper into that as I already have published a trilogy on limiting belief + a full article on how to become the main character of your own life, must reads:

The ultimate aim

Nietzsche’s paragraph above doesn’t end there: here is once again the important quote with what comes right after.

The peoples who had some value, attained some value, never attained it under liberal institutions: it was great danger that made something of them that merits respect. Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong. First principle: one must need to be strong — otherwise one will never become strong.

Those large hothouses for the strong — for the strongest kind of human being that has so far been known — the aristocratic commonwealths of the type of Rome or Venice, understood freedom exactly in the sense in which I understand it: as something one has or does not have, something one wants, something one conquers.
- Nietzsche

Freedom as something one CONQUERS.

Not something you’re given.

By thinking our freedom is a given, we do not strive to conquer it, hence we let ourselves become weak. We do not face dangers, we believe we have no necessity to become strong.

Historically, this type of short-term thinking has always been the “good times” before the fall. The safe times that reduces will to power, that level differences, make people small, cowardly, and pleasure seeking: producing the herd animal.

Great danger forces the individual to discover and forge their strengths. They must do it, otherwise they will be erased.

Let us be wiser and understand that freedom is not given…

But conquered.

And yet it seems to be a problem more important than it should be. Why?

Because it’s so easy to produce and it saturates every platforms.

But this can’t be the reason. Social media platforms are made to choke what doesn’t work into oblivion, and favoritize what does (supposedly human content that is quality).

And yet… this is not what’s happening.

We all see pure AI garbage go viral all the time. What the fuck is going on here?

Let me stop for a second. Let’s be clear about something:

This is not a rant against AI slop.

This is a rant against normalcy, which is what AI slop is.

See… AI is made to sift through the internet and find the most accepted/popular stuff. It isn’t programmed for truth, it’s programmed for convention. Meaning it’s programmed to look at what is conventional today and what is widely accepted as something that works. If you ask it a question about psychology, it will give you the regular pre-chewed answer it already read everywhere so much, and is accepted by general consensus.

In other words, AI will give you, and by extension create, normally accepted content, what is already popular.

It will not give you controversial or outside the box information.

Following conventional advice will provide conventional results, which is… average. And average is mediocre: the bar is very low.

Normal people will relate to normal content, they will not relate to outside the box, or exceptional content. They will keep gobbling up what is popular, and they will keep falling back into their old ways or get stuck in ruts. They will then most likely blame themselves for their failure, because nothing seems to work.

This was me when I started bettering my life, so I’m not speaking from a holier-than-thou position.

But let me ask you the main question: how is this new AI slop trend different from what existed before it?

Normal conventional content made to make you feel good and productive while you haven’t done shit was always the most popular stuff.

Productivity gurus selling you countless habit changing techniques or discipline slop. Which is exactly what AI is repeating now.

So the exact same thing is happening, only now it’s visible and out in the open: you can clearly spot what is written by AI. The only thing that changed is not the content itself, it’s that you think you know it’s slop.

The result has always been the same: a survival of the fittest, shown by what content you are absorbing. Those who keep absorbing popular feel-good content (whether from gurus or AI) will stay stuck and irrelevant, those who aren’t satisfied with slop will find the few exceptional people who create quality.

If quality always won, you would see the best thinkers absorb all the viewers like a black hole, leaving AI slop irrelevant forever. Yet we know this isn’t what is happening. It is engagement that wins, not quality. And the masses want to be told they will be fine and that they don’t need to stress so much.

But this is of course if you want to get into the race to success, most people just want to add a few healthy habits to their shitty life in order to feel better about themselves after watching healthy people sell them this lifestyle ideal on Instagram, hence why easy to read self-help books that make you feel good about yourself (but aren’t changing anything meaningful about your life) are the most popular.

If you are reading this I assume you aren’t chasing normalcy, and that you are trying to become exceptional in your particular field of choice.

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See… the reason I’m adamant about this, is because I’ve always known I wanted more out of life, but I’ve lost so much time trying to follow normal advice, which I guess is obvious when you start from the bottom, with nobody else in your life as example to make you strive for higher things.

Following Atomic Habits and corporate productivity advice, built to get people stuck in a 9-to-5 meaningless life they hate to develop a gym routine, while what I wanted was to become free and achieve something deeply meaningful.

Instead of doing it like me where you spend years hitting every pothole, falling back into ruts in between your normal life and the life you really want, please read this rant as from someone who was nothing and who became something. I was a literal zero in everything 10 years ago: depressed, socially anxious, no dream, no purpose, no direction, no work, no diploma, no girlfriend, extremely thin, unhealthy.

I was lucky to have been a gifted kid and told I had so much potential when I was a kid. I had tasted the highs, which is what created this sort of arrogance that I could be more and made me keep wanting to climb even though I was going nowhere for years.

I suspect many will give up on that hill, because it’s just nonsensical. Looking back, I have trouble believed how I pulled myself out of that hole alone, on pure arrogance of having high expectations for myself and the delusional self belief that I could be more.

I am now the opposite of what I was 10 years ago, and most important of all: chasing a deeply meaningful quest. I’m building a philosophy for exceptional people stuck in convention.

The ultimate goal is to raise the bar of averageness for humans that is currently so low.

If you want to be exceptional, you can’t do normal shit. You can’t keep doing the same shit everyone is doing and expect to have exceptional results. You have to become an eccentric, an outlier, and act like one: stop following the herd that goes where it’s known and where the grass is already eaten. Go towards the jungle where nobody goes, and eventually you will find the greatest rewards.

How do you do that?

Look at all information out there, and what you absorb (which is by extension who you are becoming) split into two:

1. convention (normalcy, AI slop, average shit = mediocre and mostly useless)

2. and exceptional (outlier stuff)

How do you tell them apart?

1. Do the people giving the advice to you have what you want in life? This is a tricky one because you first need to know what you want in life, and most people are already confused about that part. This is why the guru flaunting a supercar is popular. Did they get it by doing what they teach, or by teaching it?
   This article will help you find what you want out of life:

2. What are they trying to sell you? Because everyone is trying to sell you something. If they sell you feeling better, it’s convention.
   I’m trying to live off of the philosophy of conquering greatness I’m creating through my writing, so I can do this full time. This is what I’m selling you: turn your life around into something amazing and becoming exceptional.

For this, you also need to drastically reduce your input of information, but especially the amount of people you listen to. The more people you listen to, the more you will tend to go closer to average.

If you are ruthless with this, quickly enough you will find that few people deserve your attention, and you will realize you need to act and do, much more than listen and absorb.

When this happens, victory is assured. The only requisite is that you do not give up on yourself and keep iterating with the feedback you get from the real world.

All this is better if you learn from the masters at the same time, who have already been on the path you’re undertaking.

I’ve written this article through the lens of content consumption, because AI slop was on my mind.

But this is really an article about LIFE.

It’s about what you do and who you become in your life.

Will you be normal, follow convention, the herd, and disappear into oblivion?

Or will you try to reach excellence in your field of choice and become exceptional, dare I even say: Great?

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

There’s a cheat code in life: find someone who resembles you, your personality + your goals, and absorb everything they’ve ever put out into the world as fast as possible.

This will rarely happen. But when it does, you have to take full advantage of it, because it can provide you with months or years of progress in a very short time.

If you’re someone who loves learning, who’s curious by nature, you know this feeling.

You find someone you totally relate to, and you start binging everything they’ve put out: books, videos, podcasts, interviews, substack essays, you follow them on every platform, you can’t get enough.

Then you keep looking for that feeling again. You keep consuming, hoping to find it, and you don’t. Because this can’t be forced.

This is the kind of thing you stumble upon. Looking around for it is a waste of time.

To be clear, I’m not saying all consumption outside of this is bad.

For me at least, reading books is never a waste. It calms me down, it regulates my nervous system, it puts me in a boredom-like state where I’m still absorbing something slowly, and that state makes me creative.

How many times have I started reading a book and had a totally unrelated idea pop up. It happens because reading puts me in a state that provokes creativity. (Usually later in the day, once the work is done.)

But that’s not what this essay is about. I’m assuming here that you live your life normally: you build, you create, you produce. And on the side, because you’re the curious person that you are, you consume. That’s a given. Hopefully not short form, although truthfully, short form is how we find new stuff nowadays, so maybe it has a use there.

Charlie Munger read Barron’s for 50 years. After 50 years of reading it, he found exactly one investment idea in it, invested in it, and made hundreds of millions from that one deal. So was the prior 50 fruitless years of reading useless, if it allowed him to make hundreds of millions on one opportunity?

The thing is, he didn’t sit there reading all day, hunting for the opportunity. He acted in the real world, built his skills and his foundations, and that’s what allowed him to pounce when it showed up. Without all that real life knowledge and experience, you’ll miss the obvious opportunities you’re given, because you don’t know what a good one looks like.

Same thing here, except the opportunity I’m talking about is a person. Someone similar to you in personality and goals.

When you find them, you pounce. You get into their brain by absorbing everything they’ve ever shared. And in a few days or weeks, you absorb a lifetime of lessons.

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How I do it

I have a document in Obsidian for every person I’ve done this with. I consume like a maniac, then take notes on everything I learn from them, then I re-read those notes from time to time. At some point I turned this into an ebook and would read it at night on my Kindle.

When do you know you’re done absorbing and it’s time to bounce?

For me it’s when I keep seeing the same ideas repeated, when I catch myself thinking “you’ve said this 5 times already, I know that shit.” And when I start to feel (arrogantly) that I know more about certain things than they do, and that I could explain them in a better way.

By all means, at that point, writing about those things in a way that teaches them to someone is an excellent use of your time. Extremely high ROI. Not even for the goal of publishing it (although that’s always a possibility down the line), but because teaching a subject is how you integrate it and understand it deeply. That’s the Feynman technique.

The caveats

You do this rarely, for a few reasons:

1. You don’t look for it. Otherwise you’ll waste enormous amounts of time in consumption, chasing a feeling.

2. It’s irrelevant if you don’t have real world experience and feedback. Same as Munger: the foundation is what lets you recognize the opportunity at all.

3. The less information you take in, the more seriously you take it. The more you come across, the more the Paradox of choice kicks in and the less respect you have for any of it. Take a simple idea and take it seriously.

4. Consuming the story of others, and even more so their achievements, prevents you from creating your own story. This is why you barge in, take everything you need, rob, steal, take no prisoners, and bounce.

One last thing

I found that many of you have a personality similar to mine, and you’re just a few years behind me on the journey. The INTJ piece confirmed it more than I realized.

I have more than 100 articles published. Don’t just wait for the new ones to appear in your inbox. If reading me has ever given you that feeling I described at the start, take this opportunity and absorb everything I know. There are hours of absorption in the archive, and they took me hundreds of hours to write, and thousands of hours to learn.

So rob and steal from me, and if I’m not that person for you, that’s fine too. Find yours, and when you do, rob them blind.

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Talking about that INTJ piece, it’s the best way to see if you want to rob me:

Thankfully, otherwise things would be boring.

We are all the mix of our natural inclinations, our environment, and our experiences.

I am reminded of that when I see other creators that have arrived at similar conclusions as I have had in the pursuit of the best way to improve one’s life.

We would agree on something, but our own experiences getting there would vary, so their advice is different than mine.

And this makes a lot of sense, because we’re different people, with different life paths.

So the reader will then either relate to the other creator’s work, or mine, depending on who they are, and their life path (or to another creator altogether.)

It means we all build a set of lessons hanging around in the background of our mind that control how we see things and how we move about in the world.

If you had burned your hand on the stove, you will have a trauma, which will make you very wary of touching the stove again, at least when it’s hot.

One of my central lessons that I talk about often is the idea of attention and how where you allocate it defines your perception of reality.

The reason that one lodged so deep in me is that I once radically changed what I let into my attention for a long stretch of time, and I trace a real change in my actions back to that period. Basically I brainwashed myself unknowingly for my own benefit.

So what does that idea look like taken seriously?

If each thing that enters my attention builds my reality, then I have to filter everything through one question: what do I want my reality to look like? And then I feed my attention to those things and starve the rest.

My desired reality certainly doesn’t look like negativity, depression, pessimism, passivity. That naturally means that doomscrolling, politics, gossip, dumb negative people, all need to be erased, replaced with creation, smart inspirational people, learning, health.

Me defining this through attention is where it might differ to someone else, they might have lived the same thing, but would have tied the result to a change of identity, or some law of attraction/manifestation stuff.

Would they be wrong? If their path leads to the same change?

Probably not. If the story they told themselves got them to move, then it did its job.

These lessons we carry, our own private explanations for why our life went the way it did, they harden into the mental models we run everything through.

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Mental models

I had a period when I studied the most successful entrepreneurs on the planet. Bezos, Musk, Hormozi, etc. I watched a bunch of podcasts from each of them.

What shocked me about them, is how they repeated the same stories and the same ideas over and over again in every interview, years apart. What the hell was this? A PR stunt? Had they been trained to say the same things in interviews to not incriminate them or make people hate them?

If you read Bezos’ shareholder letters or listen to a few of his interviews, you notice he’s been circling the same few ideas for 20 years. It’s the same with Musk. It’s a small set of principles, repeated for two decades, in nearly the same words.

And yeah, if those few ideas are the exact things that got them where they are, why would they ever drop them? They found what works for them and they never let go.

Leaders are supposed to be the best teachers, and this Hormozi quote is central to all this: “We need to be reminded more than we need to be taught.”

This means you remind, remind, remind the basics of what is most important over and over again. Because people forget and get lost into distractions.

That’s true focus, staying with the same mental models for decades, and conquering your particular field with them.

When I look at Hormozi in recent podcasts, what strikes me are his new ideas. Hormozi is a learning machine, he is still on the path and adding new stuff. Bezos and Musk are at their apex and riding a wave that is locked in, because it works and it got them to the top of their field.

Hormozi lately talks more about pain (courage being the first trait he’d want to teach his future son), about the meaning of words, about utility as his central philosophy. He built himself his own logical dictionary to think and communicate more clearly, and it’s masterful to watch.

I relate to this a lot.

I see this in my writing, how it evolved over 100 articles published. I’ve started to veer off from consumption and passivity, towards action and doing.

My pillars are still attention/focus, learning, leaving herd thinking/consensus, uncovering your fire to reach your potential. But you would notice they have increasingly evolved towards pure action and doing as their primary function.

Remove any loyalty you have for your ideas

None of those pillars were handed to me finished. I found them by thinking about ideas, trying them in the real world and dropping the ones that didn’t hold up.

If you haven’t found a wave (idea) that you can surf, you need to keep trying new waves until you find it, ride it all the way, then look for another. If the wave never stops, like for Musk and Bezos, then there is no reason to hop off of it. And that’s the ultimate goal, finding those truest waves that will lead you to where you want to go.

This is taking a simple idea, and taking it seriously.

In the meantime, the way to notice better waves is to seek truth, and not be loyal to the waves you’re on.

Again because this is extremely important and you might not have taken this simple idea seriously: Don’t have any loyalty to ideas, only have loyalty towards truth.

This is what Karl Popper speaks of when he says that everything is a theory waiting to be replaced by a truer theory. Everyone thought physics were solved by Newton, until Einstein found a truer theory. That’s until someone else comes and finds a truer theory.

Your own ideas work the same way. Whatever you believe hardest right now is just the best theory you’ve got, standing until a truer one shows up.

Present you can’t fathom that because you’re on the wave having fun, and maybe you wouldn’t even realize that this wave is barely moving, or taking you to the wrong place.

Get it out of your head

So how do you find the good waves without burning years riding dead ones?

This is the whole game: your ability to find the few ideas that will sit in your head right now and let you move forward, and then take them seriously enough to build your whole life around them.

The trouble is these ideas are slippery while they’re stuck in your head. You can feel one is there without being able to say it clearly.

Writing is the best tool to uncover them. You put a thought down on something outside your head, and now you can look at it, turn it around, sharpen it.

Especially when you write it to teach it to someone else, you start understanding it more yourself, because you can’t hide behind a vague feeling anymore.

Writing lets us take our thoughts out of our heads and come back to them later, which is why it beats a conversation that’s gone the second it’s over. And now with AI you’ve got this on steroids, because you have something that can do the back and forth with you, push on the idea, hand it back sharper (when it’s not too busy ass kissing.)

You have to live it

But writing only uncovers these ideas, it doesn’t create them.

And reading is the same. It helps you make sense of something you’ve already experienced and just like writing allows you to uncover it. There is truly a cheatcode in absorbing what it took someone years to learn in an afternoon.

Additionally, reading can unlock ideas that you can seek to try out for yourself in the real world.

But it’s worthless if you stop there.

You make an idea truly yours by living it. You try it out in the real world, it either works or it burns you, and now it’s welded into you because there’s pain attached to it and a story you can point at. The lesson itself was never really the valuable part. What you keep is the pain around it, the experience, the story you walk away with.

The idea you only read and never act on stays on the surface, and you’ve forgotten it in a week. The one you lived goes down into the background of your mind and starts running your actions without you noticing, the same way burning yourself on the stove does.

And this is what almost everyone gets wrong. We’re drowning in information, everyone is reading and watching and taking notes, and almost nobody changes. The ideas aren’t the problem. They stay ideas, sitting there unlived, and an unlived idea has never changed anyone.

That’s what it means to take a simple idea and take it seriously.

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A fifteen year old with a visceral dread for what life would look like if he didn’t wake up and change things around.

See I have heard this type of story from a few successful people, and I stupidly made the connection only recently. Many won’t talk about it.

Truth is, if you don’t hate where you are, and as a result experience a high amount of pain from it, you won’t take on the painful path of changing your circumstances.

Any change in your life (=growth) is the result of hating where you are more than hating the pain to change.

That’s about it. We can keep looking for complicated stuff to explain why someone changes and others don’t, this frame makes it very straight forward.

Because a scary thing exists: if I hadn’t experienced that much hate for my condition right then, I could have very well ended up living that life forever.

Maybe I would have really disliked it, but thought “just a few years before I change things around”, thinking I would leave someday for a better thing.

Then I would have gotten used to the life, I would have my routine set up, it wouldn’t be that bad then? And at least I’m not one of these pencil pushers in corporate, I’m a real man doing real shit (that’s the moment you have to twist reality somehow and find justifications for your condition and to feel superior).

Then the wife and kids, and you’re “locked”, you can’t move anymore cause you have to provide.

Here are your 45+ years doing something you hate.

And that’s all there is: the pain of staying the same needs to be higher than the pain of change. Then change becomes inevitable.

So, what if I had found something that sedated the pain? What would have happened?

Because we optimized for this, in philosophy, in psychology, in our way of life. It’s everywhere now. A whole category of ideas whose job is to erase suffering, make life less painful, which is why they became popular in the first place, and this has nothing to do with them being TRUE.

That last part especially took me a while to understand, and it starts with something Richard Dawkins wrote fifty years ago.

Ideas copy themselves

You’ve got a song stuck in your head that you don’t even like. It entered without permission, it stays for two days, and maybe you hum it around someone else and put it in their head too. Nobody chose any of this, the song just moved in.

Dawkins wrote about this at the end of The Selfish Gene in 1976. His whole argument up to that point is that genes are not working for you, you’re the vehicle they use to get around, and the gene that wins is just the one that gets copied the most. Whether it makes your life any better is a completely separate question, sometimes it does, but it’s completely irrelevant to it, the gene just wants to survive.

Then in the last chapter, the one most important for us here, he says this same thing is happening with ideas.

He called them memes, way before the internet started using the word. Memes according to him are: a song, an expression, a way of building an arch, a religion, a philosophy, a business model, a way of raising your kids. They sit in your brain, they get copied into other brains through talking, writing, imitation, and they mutate a bit each time, so some versions get copied more than others and some die out. That’s evolution running on minds instead of bodies, and it runs very fast in comparison.

Most importantly: an idea doesn’t spread because it’s true, it spreads because it’s good at spreading. Those are two completely different things and we mix them up constantly.

Think about what you believe about money, or about work, or about what a good life is supposed to look like. You didn’t work any of that out from scratch, you caught it, from your parents, your friends, your country, or whatever you happened to be reading at 17. And the reason those specific ideas were sitting there for you to catch is that they were good at surviving in other brains before yours.

So popularity tells you an idea is contagious, but tells you nothing about whether it’s true.

This is the hardest part to swallow, because we’re so used to being attracted by popular things. We check the amount of views and likes before watching a video, we look at how many followers someone has to judge if they have sufficient authority/the quality of their work, etc, etc.

So what makes an idea good at spreading?

It has to get repeated, and people repeat what made them feel something, and most of the time that something is... relief.

An idea that makes you feel better about your situation gets said out loud all the time, to yourself in the shower and to your friend who’s going through it, and he says it to someone else the week after. An idea that tells you your situation is bad and you’re going to have to do something painful about it gets heard once and is quickly pushed under the rug.

“Flattery makes friends, truth makes enemies.” - Terence

So over enough copies the comforting versions win easily. Nobody consciously sat down and decided that, they’re just the ones that keep getting said, so they’re the ones still standing after a few thousand years of being passed around.

There is though selection pressure for ideas too, the same way it operates for natural selection as we know it. Reality might catch you in your fantasies. If an idea leads you to die (too quickly) then it will naturally be dropped and die off during hard times. True and useful ideas survive most during intense times of selection pressure.

When nothing is at stake, in good and peaceful times, like we have been living in the west since WW2, the feel good ideas spread very fast and take over. The useful ideas gradually get forgotten, this is when civilizations go from “hard work got us there” to “why are we working? let’s have a good time”.

Which means the ideas that reach you have already been filtered mostly for how good they make you feel, and not for whether they’re any good for you. That includes the stuff we call wisdom.

Especially the stuff we call wisdom.

Once you see ideas this way you stop asking “is this right”, which is hard to answer anyway, and you start asking why it’s in your head, what it did for whoever handed it to you, and what it’s doing for you right now.

That question is the whole rest of this piece.

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Suffering is information

Pain exists because it works.

You touch something hot and your take your hand out before you’ve decided anything about it, and you don’t do it twice. The animals that didn’t feel it walked into fires and got eaten and didn’t have descendants, so every single one of us is running on a curated system that spent millions of years getting good at one job, which is telling you something here is wrong, move.

Of course it doesn’t only fire for burns. It fires for being hungry, for being alone, for being at the bottom of the group, for your life going nowhere. Same signal doing the same job, telling you the situation you’re in is bad for you and you’d better change it.

Then we came up with ways to turn that signal off without touching the situation, which is the part evolution never saw coming. You can get the relief without doing any of the work now, and the thing that was wrong stays exactly where it was, still wrong, just in the background, far enough so you don’t hear it, close enough so you have to keep making noise to not hear it.

I know this one well because I lived in it for years. I started playing videogames at 11 and by the age of 14 I was doing it most of the day, and this basically through my whole adolescence.

When I finally pulled myself out of that at around 18, there was nothing underneath. Years of pure dopamine, nothing built, no skills, and now I could feel exactly how far behind I’d put myself.

That’s when I found self improvement, which really helped even though I kept falling back into binges, and then stoicism and meditation. These all worked in the way they were sold to me: I was calmer, less depression, less anxiety, less worrying and overthinking, I developed a way of looking at my situation that made it hurt a lot less.

But not much about my situation changed. I was reading good stuff and getting real relief out of it, the point is that the relief turned into comfort, and that was the problem. The more I turned the pain down and the less I had to do anything about it, so I stayed roughly where I was for a long time, although feeling much better in general.

What got me out wasn’t a better philosophy, getting deeper into understanding my shadow or enlightenment. I got hard into business two years ago, started my own thing a year ago, and that was it.

There’s more pain in my life now than there was in the stoicism and meditation years, deadlines, doubt, money, a future I can’t see the shape of, all of it, and I’ve never felt more alive than I do right now.

Which tells you the pain was never the thing that was wrong with my life. I spent years treating the symptom and calling it wisdom.

The rotten foundation

I want to put four things that have something in common next to each other. I’ve written about most of them separately before, and on its own each one just looks like me having beef with a particular thinker. Next to each other they look like something else entirely.

1. Buddhism says suffering comes from wanting things, and the way out is to stop wanting them. That’s the tradition describing itself, and the life it holds up as the highest one available to you is a man who has withdrawn from making anything and from having a family. So a philosophy built around not wanting produces people who don’t build, which isn’t a corruption of it or some watered down version, it’s the thing working exactly as designed.

2. Jung takes that same job and moves it inside you. The work becomes your dreams, your symbols, your shadow, and it never ends, because there’s no point where you can check whether it’s finished or whether it did anything at all. I’ve watched people do years of this, know themselves beautifully, oh it was beautiful, lots of explanations, and they were in the exact same place they started. (I go into my problem with Jung deeper here.)

3. Then there’s the therapy culture we’re all swimming in now, which is the biggest of the four by a long way. Self acceptance as the goal, your feelings are valid, healing as something you’re doing forever with no end date. Almost nobody in it ever says the thing that would durably help you, which is that your situation is bad and you should go change it.

4. Stoicism is the one I have the most respect for out of these. The actual doctrine puts your own action inside your control and tells you to go and do it, which I’m really on board with. In practice, the pile of stuff people file under “not in my control” keeps growing until it covers their job, their body, their city, their income, and turn them into a ghost in their own life, a spectator of it. (I’ve written about that at length here.)

Four traditions, thousands of years and half a planet apart, and they all land on the same foundation: eliminate suffering, and the solution is internal.

That’s what they share. Every one of them starts from a spot where changing your circumstances is off the table at some capacity, and once that’s off the table the only thing left to work on is your reaction. Which is a fine thing to do if you’re actually stuck. Most people aren’t stuck, they just haven’t tried very hard.

And go back to what we said about copying for a second. These are among the most repeated ideas in human history, they’ve survived thousands of years, they get quoted every day by millions of people who’ve never read a page of the source.

We said the ideas that spread best are the ones that make you feel better about where you are, and here it is, four times over, sitting in the ideas we respect the most.

Here, I’m obviously not telling you pain is always useful.

There’s pain you can do something about and pain you can’t. Someone dies, you get sick with something that has no cure, you lose years you’re not getting back. The literal laws of Physics (important!) won’t let you fix any of that and the pain from it isn’t pointing at anything, it’s just pain. That’s where these traditions are genuinely good TOOL, probably the best thing we’ve got for it, and I use them myself.

The problem is the man with a hammer sees every problem as a nail.

Once you’ve got a reliable way of making pain smaller you start using it on everything, including all the pain that was pointing straight at something you could have fixed that same week. A job you hate isn’t a death, being broke isn’t a death, being out of shape or in the wrong city or surrounded by people going nowhere isn’t a death, all of it is changeable and all of it hurts in a way that was supposed to move you somewhere.

You take the painkiller during the surgery, not instead of it.

Epictetus was born a slave, very little control over your own existence right there. Add on top of that the world they lived in, which was very limited not only in your ability to move around and do stuff, but mainly in your knowledge of said ability to move.

Switch to today, you’re not a slave, you aren’t chained and told to do set amount of work each day. But you keep acting like one, because you are still chained by what you think you can achieve.

You are not living in antiquity, or in the middle ages, you have your phone, access to a laptop and internet, to every book ever written and all the information at the few strokes of one fingertip, that would make the library of Alexandria a dump by comparison. You can focus for a year and create something that has the potential of making you rich and live a better lifestyle than literal kings of the past. Not saying this is easy but it’s a reality, people make it happen.

The conditions changed completely, the ideas didn’t. We’re still stuck with the same stuff circulating around in a world you have a ton of agency to change.

When it gets in and starts feeding on you

You are vulnerable to these ideas when you’re in pain, and this is when they latch on to you. Like a parasite settling into a host.

And it works, it provides relief to your pain. It pays you for its presence with calmness.

A state of weakness is prolific to these ideas, and that state starts using other means to spread.

Game Theory says we play games by using the optimal ways available to us to win.

Weak people that do not have a growth mindset but have a fixed one do not realize they can pick up new cards to play the game with, they think are stuck forever with their weak cards and this makes them want to start to switch the rules of the game.

Weak people with a growth mindset do not stay weak for too long.

And note what I said in the last section, because it’s the same thing seen from the inside. For Epictetus that fixed mindset wasn’t a mindset at all, it was an accurate reading of his situation, he really couldn’t change his cards. It only becomes a fixed mindset today, when the cards are there for the taking and you keep believing they aren’t.

This is when more vicious parasitic ideas/beliefs/memes find their place in that host.

Instead of rising out of its condition, the weak person then buries themselves deeper into it. They develop new ways to operate in: equality, justice, empathy, turning the other cheek. This is what Nietzsche called Slave Morality. You change the rules of the game because you cannot win in the game.

But the reason you cannot win in the game is because you have that fixed mindset to begin with.

I don’t blame weak people, I blame the ideas, the parasite that takes control of them, being the host, and uses them to spread and to survive.

And look at what the parasite is actually optimizing for here, because it’s not your death and it’s not your success. A host who fixes his life doesn’t need the idea anymore and drops it. A host who collapses completely stops spreading it. So the versions that make it through thousands of years are the ones that keep you alive and stationary, functional enough to keep going and comfortable enough to never move.

If you believe in an ideology strongly enough, confirmation bias starts operating: your views are constantly confirmed because you are looking for instances where they are, and you easily twist reality to get there.

It’s a downward spiral, vicious.

These ideas reproduce through the same operating principle, they are pain avoiding, because you being weak, and thinking you don’t have any ways of changing that, is freaking brutal. So you create whole philosophies, whole religions maybe, to counter this.

The relief is how it travels, the same way a cold makes you sneeze on someone. Nobody involved ever feels used.

And it spreads. Many never do, they die with their host at some point. Those who survive for millennia are especially great at surviving and providing answer to pain, whatever form it takes (lack of meaning, afraid of death, feeling powerless).

Gurus are amazing at getting their foot in the door, they may not create the state of things, but they are really good at farming it, many times with good intentions.

Whole businesses developed to take advantage of this, lots of incentives to keep the wheel turning. The forever subscription model is indeed better than being paid once and never hearing about the patient again. A customer who solves his problem stops paying.

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So what separates useful ideas from bad ones

Usefulness. I’ve mentioned it up there when talking about selection pressure. But this frame is different:

Does it produce or does it extract?

In my humble way, this is what I’m trying to do with this philosophical framework: put old philosophies that are parasitic in the trash in favor of a first principles approach to live a better life; the striving for greatness through the pursuit of a quest.

This is meant to create people who want to pursue great things, solve hard problems, and make the world into a better place.

Now, do anti-suffering philosophies, does slave morality produce or extract?

Here’s the test, and it’s brutal. Internal work does not accumulate. Every single person who wants the benefit has to build it himself from zero, and when he dies it dies with him, nothing carries over to the next guy. Two thousand five hundred years of men reaching enlightenment and the amount of permanent suffering removed from the world by all of it put together at the end is zero.

Now take Pasteur. One man, one lifetime, and it’s still running 150 years later for billions of people who have never heard his name and never did a minute of work to receive it. Your kid doesn’t die at 9 of something that used to kill kids at 9. That is what producing looks like when you stretch the timeline out.

So which one reduced suffering more, the man who eliminated it from the inside for himself, or the man who made the disease stop existing?

These are fixed pie ways of life. Fixed mindset. Stuck in a dimension that you can’t change anything about.

They are also, in the present day, selfish.

And nothing wrong with being selfish, we are all living for ourselves, we are all moving based on incentives. But think about it for a second. You work on your own happiness, your own peace, your own enlightenment all your life. And it produces nothing tangible in the real world.

You don’t have to become a martyr or to sacrifice your life for a greater good. But we have to call a cat a cat. This internal work is deeply selfish, aimed inward and backwards, with nothing moving in the real world.

Why now

Everything I mentionned about memes, the idea living a life of their own, spreading, and becoming parasites controlling the host.

Well, I discovered that all this shit has been written about before after I developed the idea by myself, brick by brick, which sucked because I thought I had invented a revolutionary framework. It’s possible I had heard of it before and then came up with it from first principles unconsciously.

Anyway, Daniel Dennett started speaking of this in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea in 1995 and other subsequent works (he has a TED talk called Dangerous memes). Haven’t read his books but I wish I did a long time ago so I would have came up with the rest of what I’m going to talk about here sooner.

Because as he speaks of this meme problem as a civilizational issue, covering religion and politics, I have turned this into a sort of self-improvement mechanism that is actionable in your own life. But more on that later.

So what makes today’s world especially vulnerable to this compared to even 30 years ago when Dennett spoke of it? The reason is that today algorithms spread new ideas extremely fast and this is unprecedented. The feed is optimized for engagement and virality, not for usefulness.

What keeps you watching wins, and what keeps you watching is the thing that makes you feel understood, so the distribution of these ideas is no longer a slow drift over centuries, it’s instant and it’s targeted. The comforting version of any idea now reaches ten million people in a day.

All of this to say: what your phone shows you at 1am when you’re miserable is not what would fix your life, it’s whatever will keep you scrolling. Those are two different things and the machine only knows how to find the second one.

Additionally, selection pressure was a way to protect you from parasitic ideas that don’t help you, well now is the softest environment ideas have ever bred in, so we should expect the sedatives to be winning harder than at any point in history.

They are.

The way out

The weakness that lets the door open for these parasitic ideas to take you over as a host is not innate, but one thing is certain: the ideas make you weaker, and keep you in that state.

The ideas got in, but they can also be eliminated.

That’s the whole point of this essay up until now: to offer you a framework to get these parasites out of your head, and to replace them with ideas that make your life better, that work for you instead of feeding on you.

This obviously isn’t easy. You have spent your entire life being taught that feeling better is the goal, by everyone around you and by every idea that ever reached you. It’s human, it’s natural to want to avoid pain and to seek pleasure. You have in some ways to become anti-human in order to fight your original programming.

But this is necessary to get out of that trance you might be in, and to make leaps of progress in your life.

More importantly, you’re not choosing between suffering and peace, that choice was never real. You’re choosing which suffering you get. The one that goes nowhere and repeats forever, or the one that costs you something and builds.

There’s more pain in my life today than there was during my stoic meditation years, and I’ve never felt more alive and “happy”.

If you’re content with where you are in life, this isn’t for you. You’ve got the theory, which in itself is tremendously valuable, what comes next is the HOW to snap out of it, the practical actionable parts.

Let’s eradicate these parasites from feeding off of you.

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You often hear people talk about the eyes as a window to the soul.

“The eyes chico, they never lie”, etc, etc. This always went over my head and I never gave it much thought. Until recently.

A few weeks ago, a cashier made small talk with me at a store, and made an assumption that was devoid of sense, nonsensical but in an innocent way.

I was slightly confused in the moment, but what is still drilled into my mind weeks later, is her eyes.

She had unfocused eyes.

As I left the store and got into my car, I scribbled something about it on my phone. As I write this I still haven’t re-read what I wrote that day, but if you’ve read my other articles, you’d know I have tied the ability to focus to what we externally see as intelligence several times in the past.

When people get drunk, look at the eyes. In many, that’s the first thing that changes.

Because when we get drunk or high, the brain becomes unfocused, the eyes take this fatigued look, like something has been switched off. That’s because we’re literally unfocused, everything is faster, we’re in the present and there are no focused thoughts behind our eyes.

When you look at some people, you notice they have the eyes of a drunk or high person naturally, when sober, on a random Thursday morning.

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This is what I’ve been thinking about these past weeks.

These people are unfocused, their attention is not activated. They are not using their brains at the fullest of its capacities, which makes them often clumsy or say the first thing that comes to their mind.

Now let me be clear with what I’m saying here, I’m not calling these people dumb. What I mean is that their attention is off (=unfocused) in that moment, that’s a different thing.

Related to this, I am reminded of Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Which in our case, would turn to the deeper rung: “Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by lack of focus.”

Unfocused and dumb produce the exact same results, in a conversation, at a job, on any test, and from the outside you can’t tell them apart. I’ve written about this at length: intelligence is both hardware and software, hardware is your raw capacity and focus is part of the software. I have no claim about their hardware, I choose to attribute their unfocused eyes to their software.

The difference is that dumb is permanent and unfocused is not. Turn the focus on and the same person stops being slow.

So when you look at someone that is clumsy, drops stuff all the time, bumps into people in the street, etc etc. What you’re looking at is someone that is either dumb (but we chose to discard this option for most people), tired, high, drunk, maybe socially anxious, on medication, or even mind-wandering about something else.

Yes, that’s the point: we don’t know, the external result is the same, they’re clumsy, they drop stuff, have no social awarness, ask questions where the answer is obvious if they had given it a second of thought, so on and so forth.

But there is only one reason for them all: being unfocused. All of the above cause the mind to drift into a state that is: unfocused, not sharp, attentionless.

And to be clear, this has happened to ALL of us, nobody can be focused all the damn time. An easy example is in the gym, when I’m doing heavy sets and getting tired, I start tripping over stuff on the floor: my focus is fatigued and I have less spacial awarness as a result.

I believe we humans know the difference even subconsciously, we look at the eyes and make an assumption on someone based on it. How people see us will define how they act with us, and in turn how we react to them and the world.

So, what can we do with this information?

To develop your eyes into those of a hunter.

The opposite of the unfocused eyes is what I call the eyes of a hunter. Those are focused eyes. I wouldn’t really know how to describe them besides comparing them to those of a predator. If you look at tigers, lions on the hunt, they have something, look at your cat and he has it too.

And for dogs? look at goofy little dogs, they always have these bulbous eyes and look around like they’ve just been recently dropped off here from an UFO. But look at intelligent breeds of dogs, and even more starkly wolves, completely different eyes.

Anyway… this led me to an experiment these past weeks: when I was waking up or felt especially tired, I would switch my eyes in this hunter mode.

Now I don’t know if it was the thought process behind making an effort, or the eyes really changing your brain state, but it didn’t really matter for my use case.

It worked.

Every time I do it something shifts very fast and cognitive function starts firing immediately. I become awake and focused.

So whether it’s one or the other, honestly it doesn’t really matter. Thinking about how your eyes look is a simple shift that will give you the habit of being more focused in general, which is something to use and abuse as much as possible.

Not that studies matter here, as an empiricist myself, but I looked if someone already talked about this. The “quiet-eye” research keeps finding the same pattern: people who lock a longer, more stable gaze on the target outperform those who don’t, and they’ve found that training the gaze improves the output.

Your reality happens when you are focused, so if thinking about how your eyes look, training them to be sharper in the mirror, and being self conscious about them will wake up your focus as a side effect, it means you’re going to be more present in your life and remember it more fully in the long term. The people you interract with will also see the change, even subconsciously.

This leaves you with a very practical easy tool to use every day: develop the eyes of a hunter, or… a Conqueror.

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More on how to Focus better:

He’s running a business, was living in Bali at the time, and he wanted to talk about why things were stuck.

The business has a lot of moving parts. He wants to grow, he wants to push harder, he knows he has to do more. He spends hours sitting at his desk stressing about it. But when he’s honest about it, his actual deep work output is minimal, and he hates himself for it.

Meanwhile he’s in Bali and he’s not even enjoying it. He hadn’t gone out in over two weeks. He wants to build his character, have experiences, live his twenties in a way he won’t regret. But he feels trapped by the work, even though the work isn’t really producing much.

He also felt flat, low energy, guessed his T was around 400 based on how he felt.

And then, he said this:

“All day locked up working but it just feels like I’m focusing for 4 hours... I want more experiences and to not spend my whole twenties getting rich and be the 30 year old without any character and lived life.”

I stopped him mid sentence: “bro… you just said everything right there” That’s the whole problem in that single sentence.

He already knew the answer. He just hadn’t given himself permission to act on it.

That call was in May. I’m posting this at the end of July and he’s fixed most of what we talked about that day, and he’s now doing multiple 5 figures a month.

I asked him recently what he’d say about the calls we’ve done. He sent me this:

Let me walk through what I told him.

Read more

You woke up springing from bed with a fire to discover the world. Nobody taught you discipline for this, you didn’t need any.

Now look at how you get yourself to do things. Systems, routines, habit trackers, a whole negotiation with yourself every morning just to start.

Funny thing is, it doesn’t even work: you keep falling back into ruts, and you feel like something’s wrong with you. It’s always swimming up river.

Somewhere between then and now the engine got swapped, everything that used to run on want now runs on forcing.

The usual answer to this is some version of “regain your childlike wonder”.

Sounds good, kind of doesn’t work.

You can’t walk backwards into childhood, but you can build back some of it.

The solution is to move forward instead of trying ot find something lost. Creation instead of regression.

We’ll not only try to find that childlike desire, but also the child’s first principles thinking, the ambition, the curiosity, and the innocence.

The camel, the lion, and the child

There’s a section near the beginning of Thus Spoke Zarathustra called the Three Metamorphoses, maybe two pages long, and I’ve thought about it since I read it years ago. Nietzsche says the spirit transforms three times: first it becomes a camel, then the camel becomes a lion, and the lion at the end becomes a child.

1. The camel is the loading phase, it kneels down and asks for the load, it wants the most difficult things it can find so it can feel its own strength carrying them.
   Nietzsche lists the difficult things: humbling yourself to wound your own pride, going hungry for the sake of truth, loving people who despise you, walking away from your cause at the exact moment it triumphs. Hard, noble stuff. The camel loves the “thou shalt” (=you shall) the world gives it, holds it sacred, and takes real pride in how much it can bear.
   Loaded with values, duties, and truths created by others, the camel walks into the loneliest desert. Admirable in endurance, but still defined by what it carries, not by what it creates.

2. In the desert the camel becomes a lion, and the lion has one job: kill the dragon. The dragon is called “Thou Shalt”, it’s covered in scales and on every scale shines a golden “thou shalt”, thousands of years of values and rules, and the dragon’s message is that everything has already been decided, there is nothing left for you to decide.
   The lion says “I will” and destroys it. This is the rebellion phase, the big No, allowing the freedom from imposed rules. And there’s a detail in the passage that makes this stage brutal: Nietzsche says the spirit once loved “thou shalt” as its most sacred thing, and now it has to find illusion in that same sacred thing. The dragon is built out of your own former beliefs, killing it feels like betraying yourself, and that’s a big part of why most people never do it.

3. Last comes the child, and Nietzsche writes:

   But say, my brothers, what can the child do that even the lion could not do? Why must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred “Yes.” For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred “Yes” is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world.

The child plays, and through its play it creates its own values, its own world, and it doesn’t need the old world as an enemy anymore.

Look at the order. The child is at the end. And this child is a different creature from the one you were at five, even if from the outside they look identical. At five you were innocent because you knew nothing. The child at the end of the sequence is innocent again after having carried everything and destroyed everything. It came back to the same place from the opposite direction.

This is why “regain your childlike wonder” never works as advice. It’s asking camels to imitate children, skipping two stages by acting out the third.

You already did the camel

I won’t spend long here because you lived it, probably twice.

The first loading you didn’t choose: school, grades, the career you were supposed to want, your family’s rules, maybe church on Sunday.

The second one you did choose, and this is the one that is tricky: the discipline era. The grind, the routines, doing hard things because hard things are virtuous, being quietly proud of how much you can endure. That’s still the camel, the camel wants the heaviest load it can find. Which means discipline itself, the thing this whole article is named after, sits at stage one of the sequence. The productivity world sells it as the destination.

And some of that loading is good, let’s be honest. You’re an idiot as a kid. Being told not to run on the road, or not to do the stuff that will literally kill you or leave you crippled, that’s rules doing their job. The problem is the process doesn’t stop there, it goes way beyond, and the rules that keep you in line get installed exactly the same way as the rules that keep you alive, by the same people, in the same tone. Somewhere in that process the fire and the excitement get lost too.

Most people never leave this stage, they carry until they die.

Where you probably are: the lion

If you’re reading Conquer my guess is you already killed a few dragons. You’ve seen through the career script, the life your parents had planned, most of mainstream self-help, most of what average people believe without ever checking it. You said your No, maybe loudly. I did the same, I said it hard enough that I left my country entirely.

But the lion is a trap, and Nietzsche saw it coming. If your identity becomes the No, you turn into a permanent rebel, the guy who can explain what’s wrong with everything and has built nothing with his freedom. I was that guy for a while. You see through the matrix, you feel superior about it, and years pass.

A quick test: can you say what you are FOR as easily as what you’re against? If the against list comes out instantly and the for list makes you think, you’re a lion, stuck at stage two of three.

The way out is not destroying more things. The way out is the child.

What the child has

“Wonder” is too vague to work with, so let’s be concrete. When I look at real kids, including the one I was, I count five things, and each of them got taken from you by a specific mechanism.

1. Desire louder than pain. The one from the intro, the engine you used to run on. The want was simply bigger than the cost, so the cost never registered, and no discipline was needed anywhere. Then society’s expectations kill it: the consensus, the family guidelines, religion, friends judging you. Almost everyone wants to belong, it’s one of the strongest human needs, and if you don’t listen and do what you want anyway, you get punished. So you comply, and the fire is the price. This is why everything in adult life suddenly requires “discipline”, the whole productivity industry exists because your wants became quieter than your pains.

2. Asking why until the adult runs out of answers. Kids haven’t had society’s rules installed into them yet, so they ask why, why, why, and get to the bottom of things without even trying. And the moment where the adult runs out of answers is the interesting one, because three whys deep most rules have nothing underneath, just “because that’s how it’s done”. You lost this one through punishment: asking why became rude, then naive, then a problem at work, and at some point you internalized the stopping point so deep you don’t feel yourself stopping anymore.

3. Saying the ambition out loud. A kid looks people dead in the eye and tells them he wants to be an astronaut, or the president. Who does that anymore? Everyone is ashamed of their grand ambition, or straight up refuses to have one. The kid doesn’t know yet that there’s a bill for saying it out loud. Then he learns it: the first laugh, the first “be realistic”, the first disappointed face from an adult he respects. By fifteen the ambition goes private, by twenty five it’s dead or hidden behind irony.

4. Curiosity. Ask questions, discover how things work, what’s beyond the corner, what’s on top of the mountain. I want to be precise on this one because I don’t think it died, it got captured. You still want novelty exactly like the kid, but now an algorithm feeds it to you in fifteen second pieces, made by people who are paid very well so you never have to go find anything yourself. The wanting is still there, the muscle that goes out and finds things rotted from never being used.

5. Innocence. A kid tells you what happened, including the embarrassing parts, keeping a second version of events hasn’t occurred to him yet. He’ll shout in a packed store that he shat his pants, zero remorse. I used to ask my great grandmother why she was still alive, because every year she told us she’d be dead by the next time we came to visit. There’s no gap between what the kid thinks and what comes out of his mouth. Then his first lie works, and from that day he’s keeping books: who was told what, which story goes with which person. And it’s simply a worse way to live, watching what you say so you don’t get caught in one of your lies, looking over your shoulder because you’ve done something wrong or you’re ashamed of something. Most adults have carried this so long they forgot it costs anything.

Here’s what the five have in common: the kid gets them all for free, and that’s exactly why they’re so fragile. His desire never chose anything, his honesty never survived a real price, his ambition never faced a room of skeptical adults. Life takes all five easily because none of them were ever defended.

The versions you can get back are built on purpose and paid for, and that’s what makes them stay. A desire you constructed yourself doesn’t die because a few people laugh at it. Honesty you chose knowing the full price doesn’t fold the first time it costs you something.

Below the paywall, how to rebuild each one:

1. How to construct a desire loud enough that the costs stop registering (and what keeps it from turning into stimulation chasing, because that road ends in drugs)

2. When tearing things down to first principles pays off and when it's wasted effort

3. What the research says about telling people your goals and who exactly you should tell them to

4. How to point your curiosity at one mountain instead of letting the feed graze on it

5. The handshake rule that makes trust an advantage instead of naivety

All five come down to the same swap: back to running on want, so you can stop swimming up river.

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Before the article begins…

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Now onto that article.

Learning might very well be the meaning of life.

If you think about it, it shows up at every level:

1. At the individual person’s level: you evolve through life by learning. You learn to walk, to speak, to read, to write, you watch how grown ups act and learn to be a decent person, to think critically, to make friends. Life is constant learning and expansion of the self. This is self-education.

2. At the level of life itself: the form of life that learns the fastest is the one that adapts the fastest to its environment and thrives. Natural selection is the same learning curve, just running over generations instead of years, with genes doing the remembering, and every update paid for in death.
   What made humans so broken is that we stopped waiting for it. We didn’t wait for our species to grow claws or a pointy thing through thousands of generations, we picked up the rock and threw it at the animal, we sharpened the stick and stabbed with it. We moved learning out of the genome and into the brain, and became the deadliest life force in the world.

So at both levels the pattern is the same: learning is what makes life thrive, and speed of learning is what separates the winners.

Self-education is how you put your foot in that process and try to maximize it. It’s a lifelong thing, a constant.

The sooner you turn your mind into a machine that extracts lessons out of everything, even the mundane, the faster you’ll get where you want to go.

Because some people get wiser every year, but most repeat the same year forty times and call it experience.

I’ve been trying to understand what separates the two, and as with most solutions, it’s simpler than we make it: the answer is feedback loops.

You do something in the world, the world responds, and you adjust next time according to it. That’s the entire thing.

It sounds so simple and obvious that it feels stupid to write it down. But when you look at the most effective people in history, this loop running at high speed is what you find underneath everything else.

Napoleon read the world like a book

When I look at someone like Napoleon, he is obviously a genius. But read his biography with this lens and you’ll see something more useful than genius: he accumulated lessons at a faster rate than almost anyone alive.

When he’s a young officer engaged in the campaign against Sardinia which fails, he leaves very frustrated from all of it because of the command and bad equipment. He extracts the lesson in one shot and keeps it for the rest of his life: on every campaign afterward, he obsesses over logistics.

He witnesses royal guards get massacred by a rebellious mob in Paris. He watches how it happens, what hesitation costs. Years later, when he’s the one responsible for defending the government against a mob, he doesn’t hesitate: he fires grapeshot on it and avoids a bloodshed with limited casualties. That single decision makes him a general and prevents any mob uprising in Paris for several decades.

One observation, one permanent update. Over and over, for decades.

You can see the same thing in Elon Musk’s early career. He learns about recruitment at his first companies, that a small team of highly capable people will beat big teams of average people every time, and he applies it everywhere after.

He learns what going public costs a founder in his early companies, and SpaceX stays private for 20+ years, making him a trillionaire. Lessons extracted early, followed for life.

This is what highly effective people are underneath: skills stacked on top of each other.

Install a skill by focusing on it violently, then put it on maintenance, then install the next one. But that raises a question: where do the right skills come from? How did Napoleon know logistics deserved a lifetime of obsession? Nobody handed him the list. The world told him, through feedback, and usually through pain. The loop is what fills the stack.

The mechanism: the world hit them, they paid attention to where it hurt, and they adjusted. Fail fast, adjust, win.

In my own online writing quest, it comes through putting some writing into the world, then seeing the reaction: what does well or doesn’t, what people contact me about, what I can see work for others. Increasing my volume of writing accelerates the feedback I receive.

In the beginning I used to write 3 articles a week, they were of poor quality, but they allowed me to get that feedback which was extremely valuable for improving myself. If I had perfected one article to publish it weekly I would have got where I am currently much slower.

Why everyone isn’t doing this

If the loop is that simple, everyone would already be running it. They’re not, and the reason is that it hurts.

Exposing yourself to feedback means risking a decision or an action that can fail. Your article flops, your pitch gets rejected, your business loses money, and everyone can see it. The loop only runs if you keep putting yourself in positions where the world can hit you. Most people organize their entire lives around never being in that position. No real attempts, no real feedback, no real learning. They stay safe and they stay the same, and forty years later they’re the guy repeating the same year.

So the first requirement is pain tolerance. You have to be able to take the hit and go again.

The second requirement is sneakier: truth tolerance. You need to see the world accurately and not lie to yourself about it, and this is harder than it sounds, because lying to yourself is the default. Something fails, you feel stupid, feeling stupid is painful, so your brain immediately starts cooking up a version where you weren’t stupid. The market wasn’t ready, they didn’t get it, bad luck this time.

I’ve done this myself more times than I want to admit, and the excuse always feels reasonable in the moment (that’s what makes it dangerous, a dumb excuse you would catch, a reasonable one slides right through). But every time you accept one, you pay for the failure and get nothing back. You took the hit, you might as well collect the lesson: I did this wrong, and here is exactly how. It’s the only version of the story that’s worth anything.

I’d say truth tolerance is rarer than pain tolerance. Plenty of people can take hits. Very few can take hits and report them accurately to themselves.

The underrated step: memory

Somehow it seems nobody speaks of this. A lesson you can’t retrieve at the right moment is a lesson you never learned.

Think about how many things you’ve “learned” that changed nothing. You read the book, you nodded, you even felt the insight land, and six months later you made the exact mistake the book warned you about. The information was in you somewhere. It just didn’t show up when the situation called for it.

There’s a reason for that. The brain doesn’t store everything you feed it, it stores what got flagged as important, and a few things do the flagging: emotion, pain, stakes, deep focus. A book read comfortably on your couch carries almost none of these. Nothing was on the line, so the lesson went in shallow and washed out. A lesson the world taught you is different: you acted, you failed, it stung, maybe in front of people. That one comes pre-burned. Nobody needs a system to remember the pitch that got rejected, you couldn’t forget it if you tried.

Which flips something from earlier: pain looked like the toll you pay to get the feedback. It’s also the mechanism that makes the feedback stick. The world’s lessons arrive with the encoding included.

This is what separated Napoleon from other officers who saw the same poor logistics and the same massacred guards. They all got the same feedback from the world. He’s the one who pulled the right lesson at the right moment, years later, under pressure. The extraction is only half the work. The retrieval is the other half.

I’ve got a whole article about memory and how to maximize it. But one simple example to increase it is to write about the lessons you learn. This is a way to add focus to memory instead of pain.

Whether it’s in a journal where you document what you’re doing, or you keep a list of lessons you need to remember and re-read often (I’ve seen a few high achievers do this), or by teaching a subject to someone through writing about it, the process will help tremendously for memory.

Practical example: when I have an idea I write it down on a special dedicated daily notes space on my Obsidian calendar. Then every week I come back to read what notes I have put down for the past week, so now it means I have imprinted it on my memory twice first by writing it down then by cataloguing it somewhere where I could use it later (at which point I read it a second time).

For notes I take from reading something, I actually create an ebook out of them and re-read them frequently.

The whole game

Action solves everything.

Thinking about it, planning it, reading about it, none of that makes the world respond. The world only answers to moves. And the output of completed loops has a name too, we just use it wrong: experience. Ten years in a job can be one loop, run once, then repeated ten times. One year of real attempts can beat it.

So that’s the loop, complete: expose yourself so the world can respond, tolerate the pain of the response, tell yourself the truth about what it means, and store the lesson so it’s there when you need it.

Run this for a decade and you become the person others call talented, or lucky, or a genius. From the inside it’s none of those things. It’s just a high number of loops completed, each one slightly adjusting your aim, compounding the entire time.

Most people run maybe two or three real loops a year. Some people run two or three a week. Napoleon had a head start on all of us, that’s true, you don’t pick your raw material. But the loop count is the part you control, and held over twenty years, it’s the difference between two people who started at the same level. One of them got wiser every year. The other one repeated the same year and calls it experience.

And this, right here, is self-education in its truest, most violent form.

Books are the safe version. The loop is the world teaching you by hitting you, and the hits are precisely what make the lessons stick. It’s the rock and the stick again, at the scale of a single life: you stop waiting for time to teach you at its own pace and take the learning into your own hands.

If learning is the meaning of life, this is how you play it at full speed.

Every week I talk about how to Conquer every mountain on the path to a fulfilling life.

Subscribe and these articles come straight to you.

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You’ve witnessed the free side of Conquer: the what and the why. This puts you at an advantage already.

The paid side is the HOW, the part where it stops being theory and becomes something you do and become.

The full Conquer Your Purpose course, complete guides on discipline, focus, becoming the main character of your life, testosterone, 15+ others and a new one every week.

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The full practical guides on Memory, Pain Tolerance, and Truth Tolerance:

The stoic ideal, the calm life, zen, want less, need less, don’t let anything get to you, sit still and be content whatever happens. I thought that was the top of the mountain.

After all, everyone knows Buddhism is an extremely wise practice, and “eastern philosophy” is highly regarded for this peaceful ideal. Stoicism is the western version, today everywhere on social media.

So… why WAS? Who doesn’t want peace?

I don’t.

I gave it up because once I saw what it really was, I realized it was never the destination, it was a step on the way, and I had spent a long time treating the step like it was the whole thing.

To explain why I arrived to that conclusion, I have to start with pain.

There’s a kind of pain that has no point.

The anxiety that shows up over nothing, the overthinking at 2am about things that don’t matter, the low background ache that comes along with consciousness.

There’s a reason most cultures independently invented ways to stop consciousness from circling downwards: meditation, drinking alcohol, drugs, creating problems/rituals (boredom is hard, being busy prevents that.)

That suffering is useless, it doesn’t build anything, it just sits on you. And eastern philosophy, stoicism, a lot of what I call therapy culture, they are genuinely good at cutting that pain down.

I leaned on this hard when I was in a bad spot and it got me out. That’s why these traditions survived thousands of years, they work, they surface every time people are drowning and need a way to stop the bleeding.

But there’s a second kind of pain, and this is the one they get wrong.

The pain that comes bolted onto anything worth doing. The stress of committing to something before you know it’ll work. The risk of it blowing up in your face. The discomfort of wanting a thing you don’t have yet and might not get.

You can’t build anything real without that pain, it’s the price on the thing, it’s welded to it and you can’t select it out.

Here’s where I part ways with all of them, and I mean all of them, eastern philosophy, stoicism, the therapy stuff, at the root and not just the watered down instagram versions.

They all start from the same move: suffering is the core problem of being alive, so the whole game is to reduce how much life can hurt you.

Buddhism does it by loosening your craving. Stoicism does it by pulling you back from everything you can’t control. Therapy does it by managing your inner state until the spikes flatten out. Different methods, same aim: get the pain down.

And it works, that’s the trap. It does get the pain down. But follow that logic all the way and look where it takes you. The biggest sources of suffering in life are all tied to the most meaningful things: love, pursuing a mission, caring deeply about an outcome…

So a philosophy built to minimize suffering, run honestly to its end, has to talk you out of wanting badly, because the wanting is where the pain lives.

Lower the wanting, lower the risk, lower the exposure, and yeah, you suffer less. You also do less, build less, become less. The flat life isn’t these philosophies failing. It’s them working exactly as designed, on a foundation that was rotten to begin with, because it treated the toll for a real life as a bug to be removed instead of the price of admission.

That’s the part nobody sees. You learn to back away from the pointless 2am suffering, good, but the same move teaches you to flinch from the pain that’s bolted to anything worth doing, and you can’t tell the two apart anymore because the point is to reduce suffering.

Watch a kid. He’s running around like an idiot, full speed, goes down and scrapes his knee. He could break an arm the way he’s going. He gets up and keeps running. He’s not tougher than an adult, he feels it, the knee hurts, but the hurt doesn’t matter against whatever he’s chasing. The pain is real, it’s just irrelevant because the want is stronger.

That’s the whole thing right there, wanting something so bad that the pain riding along with it stops mattering.

Now what would the anti-pain philosophies do with a kid like that? They would tell him to want less, to stop chasing so hard after something because pain will come as a result. The scrapes won’t get to you, because you won’t want anything badly enough to chase it into a fall. Kill the wanting and you kill the pain that comes with it.

They’re right that it works. You’ll hurt less. But you just switched off the exact thing that made the kid run, the wanting that was bigger than his fear of getting hurt. That’s the setting these philosophies turn off in you, and once it’s off you stop running at anything at all.

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Where peace stops working

So these traditions surge for a reason, and it’s always the same reason.

They show up when people have lost the thread, when there’s no meaning around and everyone’s anxious and stuck, and they hand you a way to stop the bleeding.

I wrote about this before with stoicism specifically, how it was born out of a world falling apart and it comes back strong every time the world feels that way again. Right now is one of those times, which is why the stoic accounts and the detach content and all of it is everywhere. It’s the same thing that’s always happened, people reaching for a painkiller in a meaning drought.

But a painkiller is a thing you take to get across the bad stretch, it was never meant to be the whole life.

Peace is where you build from, you need a stable base, you can’t build anything out of chaos and your mental health isn’t a joke, a calm steady life is something you pull from.

Desire was never the issue, uncontrolled desire was.

There’s a big gap between the two and the traditions blurred it. Desire for whatever scrolls past you, desire you picked up off other people, desire for ten things at once, yeah that scatters you and makes you miserable, the buddhists were right about that one.

But deep desire pointed at the right thing is the best thing a person can have, it’s the whole reason anything good got built, it’s the thing you feel when you can’t stop thinking about what you’re making.

When they told you to kill desire they threw the baby out with the bathwater. And the people who take it all the way don’t come out enlightened, they come out flat, you slowly become a ghost in your own life.

Deep desire for the right thing is amazing, you WANT it.

Is it going to put you in uncomfortable spots, is it going to risk failure, is it going to drag you through stress and not knowing how it ends? Yeah. But you don’t get to select those out, they come with the thing, that’s the deal, and it’s worth it. That’s the part the detach crowd never grasped.

You can’t turn down one side without turning down the other.

The same wiring that makes you feel pain makes you feel the good stuff. You train yourself to feel less of the bad and you feel less of everything, you wanted to stop hurting so you turned the whole thing down and now the highs went out with the lows. That’s why nothing lands anymore. You optimized for not feeling bad and you ended up not feeling much at all.

The worst version of this is the advice to not even get excited, because excitement might set you up for disappointment later. People actually tell you that. Keep it level, don’t get too high so you don’t get too low. That’s not wisdom, that’s just agreeing to be half dead so nothing can hurt you.

The one who did everything right

Recently I got a DM from a paid subscriber (which is what sparked to write about this!):

He has attained the life he wanted all this time, and he’s standing in the middle of it going something’s missing, it’s time to build the next thing.

That’s where the gurus jump in and tell him the missing thing means he hasn’t arrived yet. He’s still too attached, still has too much desire running him, if he’d just detach a little harder he’d finally find the peace.

It’s never ending. You did the thing, you wanted less, it left you empty, and the cure they’re selling for the empty is to want even less. It’s the disease sold back to you as the medicine. And when it doesn’t work you don’t blame the advice, you blame yourself, you figure you weren’t disciplined enough about your peace.

But he doesn’t need less. He’s already good at less, he mastered less, that’s how he got here. What he’s missing is the thing worth wanting, the thing to point all of it at, and nobody in the peace world has an answer for that because their whole toolkit is built for turning wanting down, not aiming it.

The reason I relate to it and decided to write about it is because I was that guy.

I’d gotten to the peace I told you about at the beginning, the calm I figured was the whole point, and there I was sitting in it feeling that same flat nothing, something missing I couldn’t put a name on, the same place he’s in now.

Fortunately, I got out, and I know what the thing was I’d been missing.

So if that’s you, if the life’s mostly handled and nothing gets you out of bed with that fire anymore, keep reading.

I solved this for myself, and the rest of this is how.

If you are not a paid subscriber, I think you had enough proof up until now to know whether or not what is coming will be good. If you want to push beyond the theory, the what and the why and get to the HOW (the practical side), you can become a paid subscriber and get access to the rest of this article, as well as 25 other exclusive ones (including multiple long-form guides about things like purpose, focus, productivity, etc.)

Let’s become that kid running again: ignoring exhaustion, ignoring thirst, ignoring scratches. Waking up springing out of the bed because we’re so excited to take on the day.

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On one side you have warmth and companionship and sweet understanding, and on the other—cold, lonely greatness. There you make your choice. I’m glad I chose mediocrity, but how am I to say what reward might have come with the other? None of my children will be great either, except perhaps Tom. He’s suffering over the choosing right now. It’s a painful thing to watch. And somewhere in me I want him to say yes. Isn’t that strange? A father to want his son condemned to greatness! What selfishness that must be.

Warmth and companionship on one side, cold lonely greatness on the other.

Two paths, and a father watching his son agonize over the choice, secretly hoping the kid chooses the cold one.

I think the reality is different, the choice is real but it’s more complicated than a fork in the road.

The warmth doesn’t necessarily stay warm, the cold doesn’t have to stay cold, and for some of us there was never a real choice to begin with.

The warmth

I know what this life feels like because I lived in it for years.

The regular normal life. A 9 to 5, a job you don’t really care about, but atleast the colleagues are funny and it pays you to do stuff. The same loop of going out every week-end, having to deal with problems stacking in the background, and some vacations/travel sparsed in a few times a year to have something to look forward to constantly.

You know what next month looks like because it looks exactly like this month.

There’s a real sweetness to that life. You’re known. People love you for who you are, not for what you’ve done. You can show up and be a mess and nobody’s evaluating you. Friday night is easy. Saturday is easy. The path is already laid out: school, job, marriage, house, kids, dog, retirement. You don’t have to figure anything out. You don’t have to wonder if you’re wasting your life because everyone around you is doing the same thing, so it feels normal. It IS normal.

That’s the hardest part about writing this honestly. The warmth feels good, it’s pleasurable, it’s certain, it’s safe, it’s comfortable. I felt it. I liked it. Leaving it was one of the harder things I’ve done.

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What happens to the warmth

But it doesn’t hold.

You feel it slipping before you can name it. That Sunday evening feeling where the weekend’s ending and you can’t point to anything you did wrong, but you know something’s missing. You tell yourself you’ll start the thing tomorrow, or next month, or after the holidays. You’ve been telling yourself that for three years.

Your friend group scatters. People get married, have kids, move away, get busy. The crew that hung out every weekend slowly becomes a group that meets up twice a year and sends memes in a group chat. Nobody planned it that way, it just happened because life pulled everyone in different directions.

The job you took because it was stable and paid well starts to hollow you out. You spend 8 hours a day doing something you don’t care about, you come home tired, you scroll, you watch something, you go to bed. Weekends become recovery time or pure hedonism, getting drunk because you need to feel something after a week of feeling nothing. You tell yourself this is balance.

I’m not judging anyone who lives this way, everyone is free to live however they like. But I think a lot of people end up here without choosing it. They ended up living the warmth, the safety, the certainty. But the warmth faded and all they kept was the certainty, the certainty that this is all there is. The happy stable friend group that does everything together past 30 is a fantasy for the overwhelming majority of people. It exists, but it’s rare, and banking your twenties on it is a gamble nobody realizes they’re taking.

The fire

If you’re reading this and you feel something, if you have that pull toward the cold path, if you’ve been wrestling with whether to leave the comfortable life and go chase something that scares you, I don’t think you’re making a choice. I think the choice is already made. You just haven’t acted on it yet.

The fire is that thing you can’t stop thinking about. The thing you know you could be doing. I throw around the “ambitious but lazy” thing freely becaus everyone calls it that, but it’s not ambition exactly, ambition is a plan, the fire is before the plan.

It’s really the awareness that you have something in you that your current life isn’t using, and the longer you ignore it the louder it gets. You know what it is for you. I don’t need to name it.

The reason you haven’t acted on it is rarely cowardice. The people around you hold a version of you in place without even meaning to. Your friends know the 22-year-old you, and every time you see them, every interaction reinforces that guy. You can’t become someone new while surrounded by people who only know who you were.

You go home for a weekend and within an hour you’re the same person you were at 19. Same jokes, same role in the group, same expectations. You’ve spent months building something new in yourself and it evaporates the second you walk through the door. That’s how strong the gravity is.

They love you, but their love is for a version of you that has to die if you’re going to grow into the next one. Your friends aren’t bad people. Staying close to them just makes it almost impossible to change, and that’s what makes the whole thing tragic.

The warm path is only available, like truly available, to people who never felt the pull in the first place. If you’ve felt it and you try to stay warm, the fire doesn’t go out. It just sits in you.

Ten years from now you’re the person at a dinner telling someone about the thing you almost did, the move you almost made, the business you almost started, the life you almost lived. That person will nod politely and you’ll both know what that story means.

There’s a quote from Marc Andreessen (I heard Elon Musk say it in an interview, attributing it to Andreessen): “Most people are willing to endure any amount of chronic pain to avoid acute pain.”

That’s the whole thing right there.

The cold path is acute pain. You leave and it hurts, you’re alone, you’re uncertain, you might fail, and the failure is visible and concrete. Everyone back home will see it. That’s terrifying, and I get why people avoid it.

The warm path, for someone who has the fire, is chronic pain. The regret that never peaks but never quite leaves. Manageable on any given day. You push it down, distract yourself, tell yourself you’ll get to it next year. But it’s always there, this low-grade awareness that you’re not doing what you know you should be doing. You traded a wound that would heal for one that won’t.

It’s two kinds of pain either way. One has a ceiling and the other one doesn’t.

The cold path

I’m on it right now, so I can tell you what it looks like in practice.

Nothing dramatic. There’s no movie scene where you slam a door and walk into the sunset. It’s a slow accumulation of distance. You stop being available on Saturdays. You move cities, countries.

Your old friends stop reaching out because they don’t understand what you’re doing and you can’t explain it without sounding either crazy or pretentious. Your family worries about you. You spend a lot of time alone. I’ve had stretches of weeks where the only people I talked to were cashiers and my girlfriend on a phone screen.

Nietzsche was all about this, he lived that life.

In Zarathustra there’s this figure he calls the last man. The last man is the person who has optimized everything for comfort. He blinks and says “we have invented happiness.” He has his little pleasure for the day and his little pleasure for the night, and he thinks he’s won at life.

Nietzsche despised this person because the last man gave up on becoming anything and built his whole identity around calling that decision wisdom. That’s the limbo. That’s the person three years deep into telling themselves they’re happy when they’re just comfortable, and the distance between those two things is enormous.

The whole warmth path, when it goes wrong, produces last men. People who stopped reaching for anything and got really good at justifying why.

But Zarathustra comes back down the mountain. He spends ten years up there alone, ten years, and then he descends. Why? Because he has something to give. He has something to share and he needs to find people who can receive it.

Nietzsche isn’t arguing for permanent isolation. The mountain is where you go to become someone. The descent is where you use what you became. The cold path has a direction to it, it’s supposed to go somewhere, and that somewhere involves other people eventually.

The motivational content on the internet takes all of this and strips the philosophy out. They show you the highlight reel, the guy who left everything, worked in silence, came back victorious.

They don’t show you the years of nothing, the doubt, the long stretches where you wonder if you made the biggest mistake of your life. They don’t tell you what Nietzsche understood, that neither path is safe, that the warm path can produce last men and the cold path can destroy you, and you have to choose anyway.

Finding your people

In Jack London’s Martin Eden, Martin is a working-class sailor, he choses the cold path to become a writer and win over an educated girl, becomes everything he wanted to become, and it destroys him. People say this book is autobiographical, and Jack London is said to have killed himself not long after it was published.

This tragedy was partly a tragedy of timing. Martin, or Jack for that matter couldn’t find the people going through the same thing. A writer alone in San Francisco in 1908 had no way to reach his equivalent in Paris or Moscow or Buenos Aires. He made it to the top of the mountain and there was nobody there.

Zarathustra had the same problem. He came down the mountain overflowing with ideas and tried to teach in marketplaces full of people who had no idea what he was talking about. A philosopher in backward villages and a writer alone in 1908, same issue. Their people existed somewhere in the world, they just had no way to find each other.

That’s the central issue in the two way forkroad that I mentionned at the start: warmth and companionship versus cold lonely greatness.

Because that’s different today. You write about your cold path on Substack or X and someone in Brazil or Germany or Japan reads it and thinks “this guy gets it.” You put your thinking out there and the people on the same mountain find you.

I’ve experienced this. Writing on the internet put me in contact with people who think the way I think, who are building the way I’m building, who are on their own cold paths and glad to know someone else is too. The internet lets you find the people Zarathustra was looking for without coming all the way back down.

The isolation is a passage. For Martin Eden it was a dead end because the world hadn’t built the tools yet. For us it doesn’t have to be. I can’t promise you’ll find your people up there, but the odds are better now than they’ve ever been.

Chronic pain or acute pain. That’s the real choice if you have that fire burning inside of you.

This is me extending my hand to you, from the cold mountains.

Every week I talk about how to Conquer every mountain on the path to a fulfilling life.

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If you are on the cold path already, reach out to me:

I believe that when you find a person that makes sense to you based on their experience, the goals they have, their life views and mindset…

It is EXTREMELY valuable to learn from them. They become a mentor of sorts.

But I noticed something particular about all this.

Let me explain.

I took a Myers-Briggs (MBTI) test years ago. I thought it was bullshit.

Same category as astrology, the kind of BS where they give you a vague enough description that anyone would recognize themselves in it.

It came back INTJ, I read the description, and yeah, I recognized myself. But I figured that’s the trick, right? Make it broad enough that it always fits.

(If you’ve never heard of MBTI: it’s a personality test that sorts people into 16 types based on how they think, process information, and make decisions. You can take it free at 16personalities.com, takes about 10 minutes.)

Then I kept reading about it. And it kept being right, too specific to be a coincidence.

Especially the way other INTJs described their internal experience, things I’d never reconsidered because I assumed they were just my own weirdness.

I started understanding parts of myself through the experience of strangers on the internet who apparently thought the same way I did.

Obviously there aren’t really 16 clean categories of people in the world, but it made sense broadly.

That was years ago. In between, I consumed content from a lot of people. Business stuff, philosophy, psychology, self-improvement, all over the place.

And consuming I did.

I’d find someone interesting, learn from them for a while, then lose interest and move on to the next thing. I made progress in my life during that period, but it was never stable. Nothing stuck long enough to compound.

Then I found Sam Ovens’ YouTube channel.

Something was different this time. I didn’t just watch a few videos and move on. I binged everything he’d ever posted. It turned into an obsession.

His way of thinking about business, systems, discipline, attention, I related to at a level that none of the other people I’d followed ever had.

Then I discovered David Senra’s Founders podcast and the same thing happened. Episode after episode, hundreds of hours.

Then Alex Hormozi. Same pattern.

One day I watched a video where Sam Ovens talked about MBTI. He said he was an INTJ.

I remember thinking: Huh! That might be a reason his stuff makes so much sense to me.

Later in some podcast David Senra said he was an INTJ too. Wait what?

So I started checking the other people I learned a lot from.

Hormozi: ENTJ. The E stands for Extroversion, the I for Introversion, the other letters don’t change. Very interesting.

But these might just be excellent teachers and it’s all a coincidence.

So in parallel I was reading biographies of Elon Musk, studying Napoleon’s campaigns, going through Charlie Munger’s speeches, reading Nietzsche.

I related to each of these people differently, in their specific ways of thinking and doing things.

Musk: INTJ. Napoleon: ENTJ. Munger: INTJ. Nietzsche: INTJ.

All INTJ or ENTJ.

I couldn’t unsee it.

Now every time I related with someone’s ideas and way of life, I checked their MBTI. Sometimes it didn’t fit, most of the time it did.

Arnold Schwarzenegger (ENTJ), Pavel Durov, the guy behind Telegram (INTJ), Christopher Nolan (INTJ), Alexander Hamilton (ENTJ), Isaac Asimov (INTJ).

Recently, I decided to understand all of this deeper. So I took these 12 people mentioned and started studying them.

I went deep on their lives to know what made them who they are and the outliers they became.

I figured if I related this much to them, there had to be something to be learned.

This is obviously not a scientific study, it’s a small sample, and MBTI itself is debated (+ the personality type of most of these guys is speculative).

Nevertheless, the patterns I found kept showing up in these men separated by centuries and completely different fields.

I write for a younger version of me, so if you read my stuff, it means you relate to my ways of doing things. There is a lot for you to learn here.

What is presented in this article will be of great use for introspective people who love to learn stuff (stuck in the consumption phase).

And specifically for INTJs.

Most advice never worked for me, and maybe for you too, because it’s written for a different kind of brain.

Different wirings need different operating processes.

What we’ll cover here might very well unlock your potential.

What I found

Here’s what showed up again and again across the 12, that I recognized in myself, and that you’ll probably recognize too:

1. Self-belief before anyone backed it. Real decisions made on pure internal conviction. Napoleon writing about empires at 23 with nothing to his name. Senra spending his last dollar on a podcast nobody listened to. The certainty came before the proof.

2. Obsessive self-directed learning, outside of school. And they did something with it. They didn’t just read, they extracted, argued, applied, built from what they took in.

3. Aggressive protection of their solitude. Nolan has no smartphone. Asimov barely traveled for decades. The real work happened alone, and they all organized their lives to defend that.

4. A catalyzing encounter that gave the capacity a direction. A book, a person, an event. One moment where something clicked and aimed them.

5. A decisive break that cut off retreat. They quit the job, left the country, dropped out, gave up the company. After that, all the energy went one way.

6. Conversion of intake into output. This is the one that separates them from millions of people who have everything above. They made something. The first version was usually bad. Didn’t matter, the act of making it started a loop that fed itself.

7. Cross-domain thinking. They pulled ideas from fields outside their own and used them where nobody else thought to.

8. Physical discipline as a baseline. Almost all of them treated the body as a non-negotiable foundation.

9. Extraordinary output volume. This is more a result of their finding their way than a cause.

This is exactly how my own path has gone, from obsessively learning about bettering my life to what you’re reading right now.

When you line these up, they’re not really separate. They happen in an order. One leads to the next:

outsider → consumption → encounter → break → activation

That’s the path. You start on the outside, you consume to make sense of things, something gives that consumption a direction, you make a break, and at some point it activates and starts producing on its own.

Keep that chain in your head, we’re coming back to it.

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How this brain works

Those were the patterns from the outside, what these people did. This is the inside, how the brain that produces them works, and where each strength turns on you.

Here are 6 things I’ve pieced together from the 12, from my own life, and from talking to other INTJs who described the exact same stuff:

1. The outsider. Higher intelligence plus natural introversion puts distance between you and the social world. You’re not broken, you read rooms fine, you get along with people. You’ve just never felt like you belong in most groups, and you’ve known it since you were a kid.
   The distance is an advantage: you see things people inside the group can’t, you don’t think by committee. The problem is when you burn energy trying to close that distance, fitting into circles that drain you, chasing approval from people whose lives you don’t even want.
   Every one of the 12 stopped doing that at some point and started using the distance instead. Some of us still haven’t made the switch.

2. The neurodivergent edge. Obviously not every INTJ is autistic or has ADHD. But the overlap is real, it’s documented (it’s not just me.)
   Pattern obsession, systems thinking, going deep on one narrow thing for weeks, hyperfocus when something grabs you, the total inability to sit with something boring, a high sensitivity to stimulation, processing social stuff differently than the people around you.
   The good side is the depth and the hyperfocus: locked onto something interesting, you can outwork anyone in the room. The bad side is that boring tasks become almost physically painful, and the same stimulation-hungry wiring makes you a perfect target for everything the modern world throws at you. This is also part of why this type shows up so much among entrepreneurs and outliers, the outsider default plus the obsessive depth is a strong combination.

3. The consumption drive. This brain loves learning. Pulling threads, going deep, connecting ideas across fields. I’ve been like this my whole life. Directed, it’s a huge strength: you build knowledge other people can’t match because they don’t have the patience or the interest to go that deep.
   The problem is that the modern world exploits this exact trait. The same wiring that made Napoleon read Plutarch for hours makes you scroll X for hours, because both feed the same pattern-hungry system. Your biggest strength is exactly what the slot machine in your pocket was built to target.
   I’ve had videogames in my life since I was a teenager, then scrolling, and it was never a phase, it was always running alongside the real learning. The difference is this brain pays a higher price for it, because deep focus needs clean input and overstimulation shreds it.

4. Arrogance. This brain develops an early conviction of its own capability. The intelligence plus the outsider view creates a sense that you see things others don’t, that you’re meant for something bigger. I’ve had it as far back as I can remember.
   You have to be a little arrogant to think you can build a rocket company, or start the first American car company in a century, or criticize every philosopher who came before you. That arrogance/delusion is the fuel. It’s what makes extraordinary things possible.
   The problem is when it stays in your head. As long as you don’t test it, the belief stays safe and intact. Test it and fail, and the one thing you have, that private sense of your own genius, could shatter. So you protect it by never putting it on the line, and you call that being patient, being strategic, waiting for the right moment, while the conviction slowly rots into a fantasy. All 12 of them tested it when it made no sense to.

5. The logical filter. This brain runs a cost-benefit calculation on everything you do, and flags anything that doesn’t produce. I consider eating a chore. I can’t wait to finish a meal, even a good one, so I can get back to something useful. Napoleon ate in minutes. Musk has said he wishes he didn’t need to eat at all.
   It goes past food: you can’t sit in the sun without feeling like you’re wasting time (I have to call it sunmaxing and be scientifically proven it’s good for me), you can’t rest without guilt, you can’t enjoy anything that doesn’t serve a purpose, because the voice in your head knows, correctly, that it produces nothing.
   The good side is ruthless prioritization, you don’t waste your life on garbage. The bad side is brutal, and I get into it later, because it’s the trait that’s caused me the most trouble of all.

6. Deep focus. When the environment is clean, the stimulation is controlled, and the solitude is protected, this brain produces at a level most other types can’t touch. That’s what all the patterns look like when they’re firing. Asimov wrote in a room with no distractions. Nolan writes on a computer with no internet. None of them had a phone buzzing every 90 seconds. They had the same wiring we do, they just operated in a world that wasn’t built to break it. We don’t get that for free. Protecting the focus from the environment is now a skill you build on purpose, because nothing around you is going to do it for you.

Every one of these is double-edged. The same wiring that can make you exceptional is the wiring that’s making you suffer.

You have a real advantage to do something big. But it gets hijacked, by the modern world or by pointing it the wrong way, and what comes out the other end is that specific “ambitious but lazy” pain.

You know you have potential. Not using it eats you alive.

That’s what we’re here to fix.

Where you sit

Go back to the chain:

outsider → consumption → encounter → break → activation

Activation is the goal. It’s the point where the work stops being something you force and starts pulling you instead. Rewards start appearing, each thing you make leading to the next, the whole thing starts snowballing. It’s when these people became who they really were and made their life’s work. Everything before leads there.

Now, find yourself on the chain. Be honest.

My guess is you’re stuck somewhere between consumption and the break. You’ve been the outsider your whole life. You’ve consumed obsessively for years. You might have had your encounter already, maybe more than one. But you haven’t made the break, or you made it and the output never really started.

You’re sitting on a mountain of input with nothing coming out.

It’s not a mystery why. The 6 traits are exactly what jam each step. The consumption drive keeps you consuming forever instead of building. The untested arrogance keeps you from the break, because the break risks the one thing you’re protecting. The overstimulation and the shredded focus keep you from producing even when you try. The logical filter keeps you from resting enough to keep going without hating yourself.

Each block has a cause, and each cause has a fix.

Every one of the 12 found their way through this. Different eras, different fields, same path. They all dealt with some version of these exact frictions, and they all found ways to keep the strengths and get past the blocks.

What comes next is the result of countless hours studying 12 of the highest-achieving people who share your wiring, plus my own years of clawing through this, plus everything I’ve learned from other INTJs I’ve worked with.

I’m not going to pretend I’m some guy who figured it all out and is selling you the miracle pill.

I don’t consider I’m on the mountain top, but I may be a few steps ahead of you on the same climb. I still struggle with some of this, yet I’ve gone far enough to map the path that nobody mapped for me when I needed it.

Nobody has ever put something like this together before, for us specifically.

You now understand your mind better now than when you started reading. But understanding isn’t enough.

This was the what and the why. What comes next is the HOW.

I know the arrogance we share might be telling you that you can take the pieces I’ve given you and figure out the rest yourself. I’ve been there. It cost me years of doing everything the hard way for no reason.

I’m not going to try to convince you. You’ve read this far, you already know if it’s for you.

Everything past this point is built toward one thing: getting you to activation, where the work finally starts producing on its own and you become who you were supposed to be.

This is the full operating manual.

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Plato writes in The Republic about prisoners who are chained in a cave, staring at shadows on the wall.

That’s all they’ve ever seen, so that’s what they think reality is.

One of them gets free, walks outside, sees the sun, the real world. When he comes back to tell the others, they think he’s lost his mind.

This is one of the oldest ideas in philosophy: the Allegory of the Cave.

It’s still so relevant to this day because it’s true: there are things you can learn that permanently change how you see the world. You can’t go back. You can’t unsee it.

The people who haven’t learned them will not understand what you’re talking about.

Let this be my disclaimer to you.

What follows will put distance between you and a lot of people around you.

Jack London wrote a novel called Martin Eden about a man who educates himself relentlessly, becomes successful, and then can’t connect with the people he used to know anymore.

The novel is said to be autobiographical, Jack London killed himself shortly after.

The world didn’t change, he did, and there was no going back.

If you’ve felt like you see something other people don’t and it isolates you, you know what I’m talking about.

These ideas function like transformative experiences: you go in as one person and come out as another.

Whether you want that is up to you.

Still here?

Let us begin.

1. We rewrite the past to fit our present narrative

You go through a breakup, it hurts. Suddenly, you can only remember the good stuff. How beautiful she was, how good it felt, the things you’ll miss.

But the reality might have been constant fights, manipulation, maybe even abuse. From your new viewpoint of loss and pain, your brain rewrites the whole story. You’re not mourning what the relationship was, you’re mourning a version of it that your brain just made up for you.

Depression does the exact same thing in reverse. Someone going through a depressive episode starts remembering everything that went wrong in their life, and all the good stuff just disappears. They’re not choosing to focus on the negative, their brain is reconstructing their past to match how they feel right now.

This is also what’s happening when successful people give advice. They tell you to eliminate stress, to cut out anger, to find peace and calm. What they’re describing is what they do now that they’ve already made it. They’ve rewritten their own rise.

What they did on the way up was care so deeply about winning that it kept them up at night, it made them angry, it made them obsessive. But from where they sit now, comfortable and arrived, the brain smooths all of that out and they believe what they’re telling you.

Don’t look at what someone says, look at what they did. Huge difference.

This happens at the societal level too and it’s arguably worse. Our morals have shifted constantly through history. Things that were completely normal a few centuries ago are horrifying to us now, and stuff we do today would revolt people from the past.

This is the Overton window: the range of ideas a society considers acceptable at any given time. It moves, constantly, and everyone alive at any point in history is convinced their morals are the right ones.

We also rewrite history itself from our own present lens. Who the villains and heroes of the past are changes depending on today’s politics. History can never be objective because we always weave our current beliefs into how we tell it. The consensus of the time drives the narrative, then the next generation rewrites it again.

Once you know this, you can never take your own memory at face value again. The story you tell yourself about your life, who you were, what happened to you, what it meant, it’s not a recording. It’s a reconstruction that changes depending on who you are today.

If that’s true for you, it’s true for everyone, which means every historical narrative, every moral certainty, every “we’ve always known this was wrong” is built on the same shifting ground.

But this works both ways, and this is where it gets interesting. This is the base logic behind my idea of retrospective redemption: if your present becomes amazing, your past will reconfigure itself and become the stepping stone to your current great life. It won’t be traumas to solve or something to heal anymore. Your brain will do the rewriting for you, this time in your favor.

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2. Mimetic desire

A lot of what you want in life, you want because you saw someone else wanting it.

René Girard figured this out and called it mimetic desire. We don’t generate our desires on our own. We copy them from people around us, people we admire, people we envy, people we feel competitive with.

You didn’t just wake up one day and decide you wanted that career, that lifestyle, that type of partner. You saw someone who had those things and something in you locked on. You might have built a whole story around why you want it, how it connects to who you are, how it’s your authentic path. But the seed came from someone else.

Think about how trends work. Nobody cares about some niche thing, then a few visible people start doing it, and suddenly thousands of people “discover” they’ve always been passionate about it. That’s not coincidence, that’s mimetic desire at scale.

And we’re swimming in it now more than any humans ever have. You get more mimetic desire triggers scrolling instagram for ten minutes than a caveman got in a month. Every post, every lifestyle flex, every “day in my life” video is planting desires in you that you’ll experience as your own. You won’t even notice it happened.

Once this clicks, you start watching people differently. Someone changes their entire life direction after spending time with a new social circle and you see exactly what happened. Waves of people flooding into the same career, the same city, the same aesthetic, and it stops looking like individual choice. It looks like contagion. This all connects beautifully with number 9 on this list.

The logical question you start asking yourself is: how many of the things I want are mine?

3. Any philosophy works if you believe sufficiently in it

The implications of this are enormous.

It means you can brainwash yourself into any life philosophy. Stoicism, nihilism, optimism, religion, whatever: if you commit hard enough, your brain will reorganize around it and produce evidence that it works.

The mechanism is pretty simple once you see it: cognitive dissonance. Once you’ve committed to a belief, your mind starts rejecting everything that contradicts it and seeking out everything that confirms it. Confirmation bias locks it in further.

So if any operating system will “work” once installed, why not choose the most advantageous one?

The vast majority of people never think in these terms. They fall into a philosophy by accident, through their parents, their culture, their peer group, their trauma, and they just sit there for the rest of their lives. Never questioning whether it’s serving them. They think they arrived at their worldview through reason. They didn’t. They absorbed it, and then their brain did the rest of the work to make it feel like a choice.

True outliers understand that you can choose what to believe. You can go against the crowd and your environment and install a belief system that serves your goals. This is extremely difficult, which is exactly why almost nobody does it.

4. Mass manipulation has been industrialized

If you’ve ever studied how advertising and marketing work at a deep level, you know what I’m talking about.

There’s a clear before and after. Before, you’re a normal consumer living your life. After, you can’t look at a billboard, a political campaign, or a news segment without seeing the machinery behind it.

There’s a documentary called The Century of the Self that tracks how Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud’s nephew) took his uncle’s ideas about the unconscious and used them to build the foundations of modern PR and advertising.

He figured out that you don’t sell to people’s rational mind, you sell to their fears, their desires, their sense of identity. He manufactured consent for corporate and political interests, and the system he built is still running today, just way more sophisticated.

Once you understand this, marketing stops being background noise and becomes something you can read like a language. Every ad, every headline, every political slogan is an attempt to get you to do something by going around your thinking. And it works on almost everyone, almost all the time. Learning about this stuff is like putting on glasses you can’t take off.

Then there’s the conspiracy angle. Once you learn that things like MKUltra (the CIA running mind control experiments on unwitting citizens) were real, that COINTELPRO (the FBI systematically infiltrating and disrupting political movements) was real, your calibration changes permanently.

This is obviously not to say every conspiracy theory is true, I’m saying the threshold for dismissing something as “crazy” moves once you realize how many “crazy” claims from the past turned out to be true (which are only those we know of, because they got leaked).

This amplifies almost everything else on this list. It makes number 1 more disturbing (history doesn’t just get rewritten by accident, it gets rewritten on purpose). It makes number 3 scarier (beliefs don’t just form on their own, they can be manufactured and installed at scale). And it makes number 10 downright ugly.

The next three are tightly related

Points 5, 6, and 7 all deal with the hidden engines behind what people do. They’re connected but different. Think of them as three angles on the same question: why do people do what they do?

5. Game theory: everyone plays the cards they were dealt

The idea is simple: all human interaction can be seen as a game where each player has an optimal strategy given the constraints of their situation. What’s the best way for you to win with the cards you have?

If you’re the big guy in a fight, you want it to be fair. Set a time, show up, fight. That’s your optimal strategy because you’re most likely to win. But if you’re the small guy, you don’t want a fair fight because you’ll lose. So you figure out when he’s asleep or eating and you attack then. You have to cheat. Both players are being perfectly rational for their position.

The Mongols are the best case study for this in all of history. They had three massive constraints: extremely low population (often outnumbered 100 to 1), huge distances to cover (meaning they could never afford a long war, they’d run out of supplies and soldiers), and zero ability to govern conquered people (they were nomads, no bureaucracy, no administrators).

Given those constraints, their brutality was the optimal strategy. It’s barbarism to us, for them it was logic.

Escalation dominance: a nation kills a Mongol trade delegation to send a message. In response, Genghis Khan sends his army to destroy the entire city and kill every single inhabitant. The message back is clear: I will always escalate beyond whatever you do to me. When you’re outnumbered 100 to 1, you cannot afford to let anyone think they can test you.

Aura of invincibility: people were literally telling each other these are demons from hell, not humans. The Mongols wanted that reputation. They promoted it at every opportunity because it meant cities surrendered without a fight, which solved their supply problem and their population problem in one move.

The Chinese or other empires they fought couldn’t comprehend any of this because they had completely different cards. Massive populations, organized bureaucracies, walled cities.

This is the reality break: when you zoom out and see that everyone, nations, companies, the people around you, is playing a different game with different constraints and different optimal strategies, behavior that looks crazy or evil or irrational starts looking like rational optimization. You stop moralizing and start seeing the game.

Combined with the next two points, incentives and status, you get something close to a complete map of why humans do what they do.

6. Incentives explain everything

“Never ever think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.” That’s Charlie Munger, and it might be the most useful single sentence about human behavior ever spoken.

There’s a famous story about the British colonial government in India trying to get rid of cobras in Delhi. They offered a bounty for every dead cobra brought in. Smart, right? Except people started breeding cobras to collect the bounty. When the government caught on and scrapped the program, the breeders released their now-worthless cobras into the streets. Delhi ended up with way more cobras than before.

Nobody in this story was evil or stupid. Everyone followed the incentives perfectly. The incentives were just wrong.

Once you start looking at the world this way, things start to make more sense. The doctor orders extra tests because that’s what the incentive structure rewards. The consultant keeps finding more problems because that’s how they justify the next contract. The social media platform keeps you scrolling past the point of enjoyment because their revenue comes from your attention, not your wellbeing.

You stop asking “why would they do that?” and start asking “what are they rewarded for?” and the answer is almost always sitting right there.

I wrote a whole piece on this called Never Ask a Barber If You Need a Haircut.

7. Will to power and the morality game

Nietzsche identified something underneath all human behavior: the will to power.

The drive to exert your strength, to grow, to impose yourself on the world. Not just in the obvious ways like conquest or competition, but in everything. In how people argue, how they help, how they build moral systems, how they define good and evil.

And this is where it gets really interesting, because Nietzsche noticed that different groups create entirely different moral systems depending on their position. This is master morality versus slave morality, and it connects directly to game theory.

The strong create moral systems that celebrate strength. Good means noble, capable, powerful. Bad means weak, cowardly, dependent. This is the morality of people who are winning and want to keep the game going as it is.

The weak, because they can’t win that game, do something brilliant: they create a completely different moral system where the values are flipped. Now good means humble, meek, suffering. Now strength itself becomes suspicious, even evil. Weakness becomes virtue. This is the optimal strategy for people who can’t compete on the original terms. If you can’t win the game, change what winning means.

Nietzsche pointed at Christianity as the ultimate slave morality. But look beyond that, do you see how this connects to our #5 (game theory), #3 (any philosophy works if you believe hard enough) or #1 (we rewrite the past) here?

This plays out everywhere today, not just in religion. Every political debate, every cultural fight, every argument about what’s fair has this dynamic running underneath it. One side is playing to preserve the rules that benefit their position. The other side is playing to change the rules entirely. Both will frame their position as moral. Both are playing optimally for their cards, exactly like in game theory.

Once you see this, you stop taking any moral argument at face value. You start asking: who benefits from this being the dominant moral framework? What position is the person making this argument playing from? And you realize that morality itself, something we treat as absolute and eternal, is often a strategy. A very sophisticated one, but a strategy.

8. Cognitive biases

Your brain has shortcuts. Patterns it evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to help your ancestors make fast decisions in dangerous environments.

The problem is these shortcuts are systematic errors. They don’t fire randomly, they distort your perception in consistent, predictable ways, and you have no idea it’s happening. These are cognitive biases. There are dozens of them, and they’re running in your head right now as you read this.

Confirmation bias is a big one, mentioned in number 3. Once you hold a belief, you notice everything that supports it and filter out everything that challenges it. This happens on autopilot. You’re not choosing to ignore contradicting evidence, your brain is doing it for you before you even see it.

Availability heuristic is another one that connects to like half this list. Your brain judges how likely something is based on how easily you can recall an example of it. If you can picture it vividly, if you saw it recently, your brain assumes it happens all the time. This is why people are terrified of plane crashes but not car accidents, even though the numbers say the opposite. It’s why a single viral crime video makes you feel like your city is falling apart even when crime stats are down. Your brain doesn’t do math, it does vibes.

These two alone are enough to change how you operate. But there are dozens more, and they interact with each other in ways that compound the distortion. My first real contact with this was through the books Poor Charlie’s Almanack, then From Darwin to Munger, both have great breakdowns of cognitive biases. I really recommend checking them out.

The gap between what you think is happening in your life and what is happening is filled with these biases. You can’t close that gap if you don’t even know they exist.

9. Where you put your attention determines your reality

This might be the most practical point on this entire list.

Your attention is the filter through which everything else on this list operates. Mass manipulation works because it captures your attention. Mimetic desire fires because social media puts other people’s lives in front of your attention all day. Availability heuristic warps your world because it hijacks what your attention defaults to.

Every single point we’ve covered enters through the same gate: what you’re paying attention to.

And here’s what changes everything: your attention is not passive. What you focus on becomes what you see, what you see becomes what you think about, what you think about becomes what you believe, and what you believe becomes how you act.

Two people can live in the same city, work similar jobs, have similar lives, and experience completely different realities based on what they’re paying attention to. One scrolls doom content for two hours a day and thinks the world is falling apart. The other reads and builds and thinks this is the best time to be alive. Same world, different attention, different reality.

The implication is wild once you sit with it: if you’ve been letting your attention go wherever it wants (which means wherever algorithms and other people’s agendas send it), then your reality has been constructed for you. By people who profit from your attention, not from your wellbeing.

The flip side is the most actionable thing on this list. Once you start deliberately choosing what gets your attention, your mental diet, your information sources, the people you spend time around, your experienced reality shifts.

I’m not exaggerating, it shifts fast and it shifts hard. I built an entire course around this because I think it’s the single highest leverage thing you can change in your life. Everything else gets easier once attention is handled.

10. People act on consensus, not truth

This ties the whole list together.

Humans are tribal. For hundreds of thousands of years, getting kicked out of the group meant death. So we evolved a deep drive to believe what the people around us believe. We didn’t examine the evidence and happen to arrive at the same conclusion, we absorbed the group’s position because disagreeing was dangerous.

This still runs. Think about how many of your opinions you can trace back to a conversation, a social circle, a feed you scroll. Think about how the medical establishment told everyone for decades that fat was the enemy while sugar was fine, and everyone just went along with it because that was the consensus. Exposed now, but how many current consensuses are just as wrong and we can’t see it yet because we’re inside them?

It’s also a lazy default. You can’t think through every idea from first principles, there’s too many of them. So you outsource: you adopt the positions your social environment has settled on and move on with your life. This is efficient. It also means that your “beliefs” are, to a large degree, just locally dominant narratives you absorbed without looking at them twice.

LLMs (AI Chatbots) work the same way. They’re trained on the aggregate of human text, which means they’re trained on consensus. Ask one a controversial question and watch it gravitate toward the safe, widely-held position. It’s this exact tendency made explicit in code.

Now combine this with number 4 (mass manipulation). If consensus drives belief, and consensus can be manufactured, then your beliefs can be manufactured too.

Combine it with number 3 (any philosophy works if you believe hard enough): if your manufactured belief reshapes your perception through cognitive dissonance to confirm itself, you’ll never notice it was installed.

Combine it with number 1 (we rewrite the past): given enough time, the manufactured consensus becomes “what happened,” and the original reality just disappears.

The crowd can be steered, and once it’s steered, everyone in it will believe they arrived at their position on their own.

11. Testosterone and independent thinking

I was gonna fold this one with the one above, but its implication are so big and it had such an impact on my thinking process that I had to keep it separate.

This is from the study that blew my mind the most last year.

What it found is that testosterone makes men more likely to act on what they think is right, regardless of what the group thinks. Higher testosterone, more independent decision-making. Lower testosterone, more conformity, more deference to the group, more tribal thinking.

Read that again in the context of everything we just covered.

Number 10 says people follow consensus instead of truth. Number 2 says your desires are copied from others. Number 4 says the consensus itself can be manufactured. Now add this: the biological substrate for resisting all of that, testosterone, is declining across the board. Men today have significantly lower testosterone than men a few decades ago.

So you have a world where consensus is getting louder, where manipulation is getting more sophisticated, where mimetic desire is being amplified by technology, and where the one hormone that makes you more likely to say “I don’t care what everyone thinks, this is what I believe” is dropping. That combination should concern you.

This also connects to the will to power. Nietzsche’s entire framework assumes a drive toward independence and self-assertion. If that drive has a biological component (and it does), then declining testosterone doesn’t just make individual men weaker, it makes entire populations more susceptible to herd morality, more compliant, easier to steer.

The practical side of this is obvious: raising your testosterone is one of the most concrete things you can do to break free from consensus thinking. Not the only thing, but a real, measurable lever. Your biology is either working for your independence or against it.

Where it gets interesting

I’m stopping here because this is already super long. I’m sure there might be others that I’m forgetting, and some that I don’t include because they’re less impactful than these right here.

What are some you would have put in this list?

One thing that strikes me, is how each of these is mind bending and worth understanding on its own, but the real clusterfuck happens when you start combining them.

Mimetic desire + mass manipulation: your wants can be engineered at scale, and you’ll experience them as completely organic, personal desires. You’ll fight people who try to tell you otherwise. A reason why I warn about rap music and the impact it might have on you. If you listen to stuff about violence, drugs, bitches, cars, money all day, you’ll rewire your desires and not even notice why.

Game theory + any-philosophy-works: people adopt whatever belief system optimizes for their position and then believe they chose it through independent thought. The person born into wealth believes in meritocracy. The person born into poverty believes in redistribution. Both think they reasoned their way there.

Game theory + will to power + incentives: everyone plays the optimal strategy for their position (game theory), the fundamental drive underneath is to gain and maintain power (will to power), and the systems around them reward specific behaviors that keep the game going (incentives). This is the complete engine: the game, the drive, and the reward structure. Together they explain almost all human behavior.

Each idea on this list makes the others more powerful. That’s what makes them dangerous.

Once you see enough of them, the world you thought you lived in starts to look very different from the world you’re in.

I mentioned Martin Eden at the beginning. He educated himself, saw things other people couldn’t see, and it isolated him to the point he killed himself.

Jack London wrote that story from his own life and killed himself shortly after. That’s one way it can go. You leave the cave, you see the sun, and you look back at the people still watching shadows and you feel completely alone.

But it doesn’t have to go that way. Send this to your friends, share it. Get the people you care about out of the cave with you.

The real problem was never seeing the truth, it was seeing it alone. Once enough people around you operate with this kind of awareness, you evolve on a completely different level.

The cave is comfortable. The sunlight is blinding at first. But once your eyes adjust, you don’t want to go back.

Now that you’re out the cave…

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I’d wake up, reach for my phone, and that was it, the day was gone before it started.

Video games, YouTube, scrolling, then more of the same. I was consuming all day and making nothing.

The whole time I knew I needed discipline and all that crap, but it didn’t matter.

I kept a journal back then. I went and reread those entries recently and they’re brutal.

Me writing about how I wasted another day, how frustrated I was, how tomorrow I’d finally do the work. Then the next day I’d write the same thing. Planning tomorrow’s work instead of doing today’s, over and over, for months.

I gave myself goals, didn’t do them, hated myself, in a constant loop.

There’s a technique in Naruto called Tsukuyomi where the victim gets trapped in one painful day that replays over and over again for a thousand years.

That’s the closest thing I have to describing what that period felt like. The same day, the same failure, on a loop, and I couldn’t find the way out.

If you’ve been there you know it isn’t a knowledge problem. I knew what to do. You probably know what to do too, you’ve watched enough videos or articles. The information was never the thing in the way.

You feel the pain of wasting your life. That pain is uncomfortable enough that you want it gone, so you reach for something that makes it go away: a game, a video, a scroll. The pain is sedated for the moment, but then it comes back, usually worse, and you need even more sedation.

The problem is that the pain was the one useful thing you had. The pain of being stuck is an alarm buzzing, the signal telling you something needs to change, and it’s the fuel that would push you to change it.

Every time you numb it with distraction you kill the one thing that could move you. It’s like destroying the alarm so it doesn’t bother you. You feel a little better and you’re still in a mess.

That’s the trap you can sit in for years.

If you mapped those years as a single line it’s almost flat. A few little bumps where motivation kicked in, the thing creeping up if you really squint, going basically nowhere.

Left alone, it will eat most of your life.

Why none of it sticks

Sometimes the pain does get you moving. You hit a low enough point that you can’t take it anymore and you finally try to fix it. I did, plenty of times.

I tried everything you’ve probably tried. 1% better every day, atomic habits, tiny steps that supposedly stack into something huge if you just keep at it for long enough.

It does nothing for one simple reason: we run on reward.

Everything you do, you do because some part of you is expecting a payoff. And 30 minutes of work a day never pays one you can feel. You don’t see a result, you don’t feel any different, so your brain files work under “costs a lot, gives nothing back” and goes right back to the games and the scrolling, because those pay out instantly.

That’s the real reason you can’t stop sedating. It isn’t weakness. Work has never handed you anything, so of course you keep reaching for the stuff that does.

There’s a study from the fifties that shows exactly what one real reward does to you.

Researchers dropped rats into water to see how long they’d swim before going under. A lot of them lasted a few minutes, gave up, and drowned.

Then they changed one thing. When the rat stopped swimming and started to sink, they scooped it out, let it rest, and dropped it back in the water.

The rats now swam for hours. Some of them way past sixty hours.

Nothing about the rat’s body changed in those few seconds out of the jar. The only thing that changed is it had felt rescue once. It now had proof the reward was real. And that one experience let it swim for hours instead of minutes.

You’re the rat that’s never been pulled out. You’ve been swimming on hope your whole life, hope that the work pays off someday, and hope runs dry very fucking fast. You need to feel the reward one time, really feel it, and then everything changes.

You can’t feel it through 30 minutes a day. The reward has to be big enough to register, which means the result has to be big enough to register, which means you have to produce something real in a window short enough that you can’t miss it. You have to make the progress in one go.

That’s where this protocol comes in.

The week that broke it

A couple of years into being stuck like this, I had a week of paid vacation from my job coming up. Normally I’d have spent it traveling somewhere. Instead I did something that will sound stupid to the average person: I stayed home and locked myself into the most extreme week I could put together.

Seven days, scheduled to the hour. Eight hours of deep work a day, timed. Reading. Training. No phone, no games, no people, nothing but the work. Monk mode, full send.

The whole point was to cut everything else off. You’re never going to do something like this surrounded by your normal life, phone buzzing, friends telling you to come relax. Yup, the people who always pick relax end up with relaxed little lives. For one week I wanted none of it, just me and the work, like a fighter going off to a cabin in the mountains before a fight.

It worked, but the way it worked surprised me.

By the end of the week I’d produced more than I had in the previous few months combined. Real, finished work I could sit and look at. But the output wasn’t even the main thing.

The main thing was who I’d become by day seven. I’d proven to myself I could push hard. I wasn’t the guy from those journal entries who couldn’t sit still for ten minutes, that guy was gone. In seven days I’d turned into someone who works, and you can’t un-know something like that about yourself.

That was the reward the rat got. I’d been pulled out of the water (or rather pulled myself). And once I had felt it, going back to the old life isn’t even tempting, it’s painful. I’d seen what I was capable of.

That week also flipped how I think about the word productivity.

Your ability to produce decides your whole life. Whether you build something of your own or spend your years building someone else’s thing. Whether you stay broke or pull yourself and the people you love out of poverty. Every bit of freedom and security you want sits on the other side of being able to make things.

And it feels incredible. There’s nothing like building something real and watching it matter to someone. I do work I love every single day now, and the door to all of it was that one brutal week.

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Why a week beats a year of dabbling

So why does a single week do what years of 30-minutes-a-day couldn’t? It comes down to what happens to effort when you concentrate it.

Think of a heavy flywheel, the big metal kind. Sitting still it’s a nightmare to move. You shove it with everything you’ve got and it barely turns. But you keep shoving, it inches forward, and at some point it catches its own momentum and starts spinning on its own. After that a light push keeps it going.

30 minutes a day is a single light push on a still wheel. You do it, it doesn’t move, you walk away, and tomorrow you do it again from a dead stop. It never catches. Seven days of real effort is you throwing your whole weight into it for a week straight until the thing finally spins.

One big reason is that when you only touch something 30 minutes a day, it never gets into your head. Your job, your problems, whatever’s eating you, that’s what your mind runs in the background. Your goal is just a thing you force yourself to sit with for half an hour before your brain drifts back to everything else.

When you spend most of your waking hours on one thing, it takes over. It becomes what your mind goes to in the shower, on a walk, lying in bed at night. You start solving problems when you’re not even working, the answer just shows up while you’re doing the dishes. You only get one thing living in your head like that at a time, and for those seven days it was the work. Nothing else got a seat.

Picture your progress toward what you want as a line over time.

For years mine was that flat crawl from the start:

The seven days did this:

One hard jump. The week grabbed the whole line and set it down on a higher level. The floor I landed on afterward was higher than the best day I’d ever had before. What used to be a great day turned into my normal bad day.

And once you know the jump is real, you don’t do it once.

You do it again, and again. Each push lifts you to a new level, you hold there a while, then you push off it to the next one. The crawl turns into a staircase, and after a few steps you’re somewhere you couldn’t have pictured from the bottom.

That first jump is one week of your life. It’s where this protocol aims to get you.

You don’t need a mission to start

Maybe you’re reading all this and thinking you don’t even have something to aim a week like this at. No mission, no big goal, nothing you’re burning to build. So what’s the point of learning to work this hard if you don’t know what you’d work on?

Obviously, the dream is to have a mission so big the path is impossible not to walk, something you want so badly you’d crawl over glass to get to it. You should be hunting for that your whole life. But you do not find it by sitting still and waiting for it to show up.

You find it by moving, by picking a mountain, any mountain, and climbing it. When it turns out to be the wrong one, the climb gave you something anyway. You got stronger, you built endurance you didn’t have, you picked up skills, and you found out whether you even want to be on that kind of mountain. Hating the climb is information, it points you at the next one. That’s how you close in on the thing you’re meant to do, way faster than the guy sitting in his room waiting for a sign.

Luck is the ability to exploit accidents, and you can’t exploit an accident you were never moving fast enough to meet. The work is what throws you into the path of them. You produce, you ship, you put things into the world, and one of them finally connects. The more you make, the more accidents you set off, and the more accidents you set off, the better your odds of catching the one that changes everything.

The overstimulation is the exact thing keeping you off every mountain. While you’re sedated, you climb nothing and you set off nothing, so you find nothing. You can sit in that fog for a decade and come out the far side with no more idea of what you want than the day you went in.

I didn’t start with a mission. My first week of this got me to start a YouTube channel, and it flopped hard. But the flop is what pushed me toward writing, and writing turned into the thing I’d do for free for the rest of my life. I didn’t think my way to that. I worked my way into an accident and caught it.

So you don’t need to know what you want before you start. You start, and the doing drags you toward it. This week builds you into someone who’s always in motion, always making things, always setting off the accidents that luck is made of. Run it enough and you don’t just get more done, you get pulled toward your purpose faster than waiting ever could.

What’s coming

That’s the case for the week, what it does to you, why it works, and why almost nobody ever runs one. Everything past this point is how you run it yourself, start to finish.

What follows for paid subscribers:

• The three things going on under the hood that make seven days enough to change your life

• How to set everything up before the week starts so you don’t fold on day two

• The full 7-Day Protocol

• The exact hour-by-hour daily schedule I ran

• What to do when day seven ends so you keep the new level instead of watching it slip away

You’ve got the whole case for the week now. What you don’t have yet is the week itself, the exact build, and it’s sitting right behind this line.

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Most people who tell me they “can’t find their mission/purpose/passion” are waiting for something to feel exciting before they commit to it.

Everyone wants to feel passionate first, then they think working on it will be easy.

It doesn’t work like that.

The way it usually goes is this: you have some initial interest in something. Maybe it catches your eye, maybe someone introduces you to it, maybe you stumble into it by accident.

Then there’s a phase where it sucks. You’re bad at it, it’s confusing, the progress is invisible, and every part of your brain wants to quit and go do something easier.

If you push through that phase long enough, you start getting competent. And once you’re competent, once you can do the thing at a decent level, that’s when it starts to feel like something you love.

Interest, then suffering, then competence, then passion. In that order.

Now... some people manage to skip the suffering part almost entirely.

Warren Buffett was obsessed with numbers from childhood, so obsessed that the hard parts barely registered as hard. The interest carried him through everything. If that’s you, if you’ve already got something that pulls you so hard the difficult parts don’t even register, what follows is obviously not for you.

This is for everyone else, the people who’ve never had that kind of obsession with anything and are wondering what’s wrong with them.

I’ve been through this many times.

When I started going to the gym, it was miserable. I was weak, I didn’t know what I was doing, I was sore constantly, and I felt stupid next to everyone else. Every session was something I had to drag myself through.

There was nothing enjoyable about it for months. But I kept going, and slowly I figured things out. I could see changes, I felt strong, I wanted to be there. Something that used to be punishment became something I need.

Same pattern happened with meditation, with reading, and ultimately with writing.

Most people who say they don’t have a passion have never made it past the suffering phase with anything. They’ve never felt what it’s like on the other side. They don’t even know what they’re working toward.

Why You Never Learned This

Think about kids who learn instruments.

The kid doesn’t usually wake up one day dying to play guitar. Their parents get them into it, they hype it up, they make it exciting, they congratulate the kid when they learn a new song. The parents are actively building the interest.

And the kid doesn’t have a phone in their pocket offering something better every five minutes, so the activity gets a fair shot. When it gets hard (and it always does), the parents keep them going. Before long, the kid can play. They’re good at something, and that competence becomes its own reward. Years later they’re the one with the guitar at parties, writing music on their own time. It became part of who they are.

The parents did two things: they created the conditions for interest to develop, and they held the line long enough for competence to take over. Once the kid could play, nobody needed to push them anymore.

Most of us didn’t get that.

Some had parents who let them quit the moment something got hard. Guitar lessons for three weeks, fingers hurt, “that’s okay honey, find something you enjoy.” I get why parents do this, it comes from a good place. But “find something you enjoy” really means “follow whatever feels good right now.” And if there’s a screen in the house, what feels good right now is always going to be the screen. So your interest never gets pointed at anything with a real learning curve.

A lot of people I know had it worse than that, though. Their parents never put them into anything to begin with. No instrument, no sport, no craft, just school and free time. And free time, for most of us, meant screen time. Your interest wasn’t missing. It was there the whole time. It just went undirected, which means it got captured by whatever was most stimulating and easiest to access.

School doesn’t work here because school has no mastery arc. You get grades, you pass or fail, you move on. But you never go through the process of being genuinely terrible at something for months and grinding your way into being good at it. School teaches you to complete assignments and follow instructions. That’s a completely different thing from building a real skill.

So a lot of people reach their twenties with zero reference experience of the full cycle. They haven’t just failed to finish it, they’ve never been inside it (don’t know which is worse to be fair). They don’t know what it feels like to push through months of being bad at something and come out the other side competent. That specific reward, the feeling of earned ability, is completely foreign to them.

You can’t want something you’ve never experienced. And your interest wasn’t absent, it just went somewhere else.

Cheap Pleasure and Simulated Mastery

Part of why the kid with the guitar succeeded is that there was nothing better competing for their attention. No phone in their pocket, no tablet on the couch, no algorithm serving them something more fun every thirty seconds. The activity got a fair shot at holding their interest long enough for competence to develop.

By now you’ve probably spent years soaking in activities designed to give you fast, effortless pleasure. Videogames, social media, doomscrolling, porn. The boring beginnings of an activity that you could develop competence for if you pushed is no match against these.

If you’re a guy, you know exactly what I mean. Think about the first MMO you played as a kid. Ten, eleven years old, completely consumed by it. That was probably the most obsessive, all-in experience of your life, and nothing has come close since.

The problem is it set the bar for what engagement is supposed to feel like. Nothing real can match it. Learning a real world skill can’t compete with something specifically engineered for being addictive. So you keep chasing that feeling without even realizing it, and everything real feels flat by comparison.

The damage goes deeper than just making you impatient, though. All of those activities gave you a simulated version of the mastery loop. You leveled up in games. You grew followers. You curated a feed that felt like you were learning things. You got the sensation of progress and competence over and over again without building any real skill. Your brain has felt “I’m getting good at this” dozens of times, but it was never true.

So when you sit down to learn something real, something that takes months of confusion and failure before you see any results, it not only feels slow, it feels totally broken. Your brain already has a reference for what “getting good at something” is supposed to feel like, and the real version doesn’t match. The real version has no progress bar, no level-ups, no likes. It’s just you being bad at something in a quiet room. Of course you quit.

But there’s something deeper and darker going on here.

You’ve experienced a lot of pleasure in your life from all of this overstimulating stuff, but almost no real enjoyment. Those are different.

Pleasure is passive, it’s what you get from scrolling, watching, consuming. It feels good in the moment and leaves nothing behind.

Enjoyment is active, it’s what you get from using a skill you built, from doing something you’re good at, from being fully engaged in something that challenges you. It feels different from pleasure, deeper and more lasting. But you only get it after competence. You have to earn it.

If all you’ve ever known is cheap pleasure, you have no frame of reference for what enjoyment even feels like. You don’t know what’s on the other side of the grind because you’ve never been there. So you keep cycling back to the easy pleasures and wondering why nothing feels meaningful, why nothing sticks.

Your tolerance for the hard phase has been destroyed by years of instant gratification, and you’ve never once experienced what exists beyond it. You’re not lazy. You just don’t know what you’re missing.

If you’re still drowning in easy dopamine all day, scrolling, gaming, consuming, then trying to commit to something hard is like trying to eat more vegetables after stuffing yourself with ice cream.

You have to cut the overstimulation first. Give your brain a chance to recalibrate so that real activities, the slow and boring kind, can actually register as interesting to you. Without that, you’ll quit at week two and feel worse about yourself than before.

Not gonna go deeper on this subject as I already have a ton of stuff written about it (and a full course).

The Right Question

Stop asking “what am I passionate about?” You don’t know what you’re passionate about because you’ve never been good enough at anything for the passion to develop.

Ask “what am I willing to suck at for six months?”

Pick something. Commit to being terrible at it. Your brain is going to scream at you to stop, it’s going to tell you this isn’t the right thing, it’s going to offer you easier pleasures at every turn.

That resistance doesn’t mean you picked wrong. It means you’re in the suffering phase, and the suffering phase is where everyone quits.

The passion comes after, it always has.

Knowing all of this is certainly helpful.

You’ve got one step closer to conquering your mission, towards the life you truly want.

But this is the surface, the what and why. Those will put you at a definitive advantage over people that don’t even know what they don’t know.

But it’s not the HOW. And the How is everything.

The HOW is $10. Less than a drink on a night out.

If by now you’ve seen value, I’ll let you imagine what the real action taking part provides.

Click on the Upgrade button below to CONQUER.

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To dive deeper into it, continue with these posts:

Your life depends entirely on systems you don’t control.

The grocery store being open, the water coming out of the tap, the pharmacy having your medication, gas stations being stocked, the power grid staying on.

If any one of these breaks for even a week, most people are completely screwed.

Yeah… completely. No backup, no plan, no supplies, nothing.

You might think I’m exaggerating.

In 2021, Texas got hit by a winter storm, just cold weather and a power grid that couldn’t handle it.

The electricity went out for days. Pipes froze and burst. People had no heat, no water, no way to cook food. Grocery stores ran out of everything within hours. Over 200 people died. In one of the richest states on earth… because it got cold.

During COVID, people fought over toilet paper. The supply chains got disrupted for a few weeks and suddenly adults were physically fighting and getting trampled in supermarket aisles over something they could have stocked a month’s supply of for 20 bucks.

Every single hurricane season in Florida, you see the same footage. People rushing to buy water and batteries 24 hours before the storm hits, everything sold out, gas stations empty, lines everywhere. And these are people who knew hurricane season was coming. It comes every year.

How I got into this

Years ago I had a period where I binged survival and prepper content.

I honestly like these guys, they live in their own different world. They’re waiting for imminent collapse at any second, overreacting to every piece of news, stacking supplies in their garages.

Some of them have been at it for decades and the collapse still hasn’t come. But they’re still going strong, hoarding stuff, making videos about it.

That’s obviously not the approach I’m recommending here. That level of obsession is its own kind of trap, you end up spending your entire life preparing for a life you never actually live.

But I learned a lot from them. The subject always made sense to me on a basic level: what food to buy and how to store it, what supplies to prioritize, how to filter water, tactical stuff like how to move distances efficiently, how to stay low-profile.

I’ve always liked mixing fun and usefulness I guess, and this stuff sits right at that intersection. It’s interesting, it’s practical, and it could save your life.

Since then I stay prepared as much as I can. And what shocks me regularly is how alone I am in this.

When I visit friends and family, I’m consistently surprised at how little anyone around me has prepared for anything. I don’t mean they haven’t built a bunker. I mean they don’t have a single week of food stored. No access to water beyond the tap. No spare fuel. Nothing. I literally know nobody in my personal life who does any of what I’m about to talk about.

Zero people.

And these are smart, capable, responsible adults. People with families, people with kids. They just haven’t thought about it, because things have always been fine.

Things have always been fine

That’s the core of the problem.

There’s a mental trap most people fall into without realizing it: because nothing catastrophic has happened to them personally, they assume nothing will. The Texas freeze couldn’t happen here. COVID was a one-time thing.

That’s exactly what Texans thought. That’s exactly what everyone in every disaster zone thought the day before it happened.

You hear about a crisis somewhere else and your brain automatically files it as “their problem, different circumstances, wouldn’t happen to me.” It always feels like it happens somewhere else, to someone else, until it doesn’t.

By the time you realize you should have prepared, it’s too late. The stores are empty, the roads are jammed, the power is out, and you’re standing there with nothing.

We’re the weird ones

For basically all of human history, every household stored food.

Your great-grandparents almost certainly had a cellar or a pantry full of preserved food, canned goods, dried meat, root vegetables. They stored water. They knew where to find it if the well went dry. They had tools, fuel, medicine, supplies for weeks or months.

This wasn’t “prepping.” This was just life. This was the baseline of being a functioning household.

We’re the first few generations in human history to fully outsource our survival to external systems and assume those systems will never break. We buy food three days at a time, we keep nothing in reserve, we depend on a supply chain that most of us don’t even think about.

That supply chain, by the way, is thinner than you think. Most grocery stores carry about 3 days of inventory on their shelves at any given time. The whole system runs on just-in-time delivery, trucks arriving daily to restock.

If those trucks stop rolling for 72 hours (a fuel shortage, a major storm, a strike, a road closure), the shelves are empty. There’s no massive warehouse somewhere keeping months of backup stock for your neighborhood. It doesn’t exist.

You’re currently about 3 days away from having nothing in your kitchen. Right now, today. And most people have no idea.

The guy with a stocked pantry and a water filter isn’t the weird one. He’s the normal one by any historical standard. We’re the weird ones for ever thinking we didn’t need that.

Why this matters for you

I’m passionate about this topic because I think there is an extremely high ROI activity that almost no one does, and it costs next to nothing.

Being ready.

Not in that doomsday prepper, tinfoil hat, building a bunker in your backyard kind of way. I’m talking about spending a few hours a year and a few hundred bucks to make sure that if something goes wrong, you and your family aren’t standing in line at a grocery store praying there’s still bottled water on the shelf.

The odds of a serious disruption in your area are small in any given year. But they’re never zero. And you only need to be caught unprepared once for it to really matter.

Think about what you’d do right now if the power went out and didn’t come back for two weeks. If the water stopped running. If you couldn’t get to a pharmacy. If gas stations shut down.

Most people’s honest answer is: I have no idea.

That’s a problem. And the thing is, fixing it is so cheap and so easy that it’s almost embarrassing how few people do it.

The point is not to live in fear. It’s the opposite. Once you know you have a month of food stored, clean water covered, medication stocked, fuel ready, you stop worrying about these things entirely.

You gain a kind of confidence that’s hard to explain until you have it. You know that whatever happens, you and your people are going to be fine for a while. You don’t depend on the state, on supply chains, on anything external to keep you alive for the next 30 days.

It’s our duty to be prepared in all circumstances.

That’s a form of freedom.

What follows is the full breakdown, organized from the absolute cheapest and easiest things you can do today (we’re talking 20$ and 20 minutes) all the way up to the heavier investments that are fun and useful in their own right.

From the lowest hanging fruits that could save your life, your whole family and extended family’s life and your favorite neighbors for next to nothing, to the highest hanging fruits that are still tasty year round anyway.

Most of these things can be integrated smoothly into your day to day lifestyle and actually increase quality of life regardless of some collapse ever happening.

Each level builds on the previous one. You don’t need to do everything at once, and you don’t need to go further than what makes sense for your life.

But the first few, there is genuinely no reason not to do them. The cost is so minimal and the potential upside is so massive that skipping them is just insanity.

I’ve hesitated to post this because it’s not “on brand” with what I usually talk about.

But I really think that this stuff is extremely underrated and too few people think of it.

If the following can potentially save the life (and family) of one single person, then this post was really worth writing and publishing.

In the case it’s never needed (which I obviously hope), atleast it will give you confidence, capabilities, and a fuller life anyway.

But enough rambling, let’s get to the meat: How to be prepared in any situation.

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Mid-30s, high ambitions like the rest of us.

He had been doing shadow work for years already and started talking about it. Reading Jung, doing the inner work, introspecting, all of that.

After a few weeks he told us he needed to go deeper. He announced he felt there was still more shadow to deal with, so he left the community to focus on that for the next forseeable future.

I’ve been thinking about this since then.

This guy spent years looking inward. Years of reading, reflecting, doing the whole Jungian process. And his conclusion after all of it wasn’t “I’ve learned enough, time to build something with what I know.” It was “I need to go deeper still.”

This right here, is part of the problem I have with Carl Jung.

I’m not saying everything Jung said was wrong, and I’m not saying he never helped anyone.

My problem is that his philosophy, the way it plays out in a lot of people’s lives, often turns into an infinite loop with no exit.

Shadow work is a Minecraft world

This exact same tweet goes viral all the time, people just love this idea it seems.

But what does “face your shadow” look like in practice? You start exploring. You find something, you process it, you “integrate” it. Then there’s something else behind it. And something behind that. You keep going because the philosophy tells you to keep going, the work is never done, individuation is a lifelong process. Jung’s words.

put this better than I could:

Shadow work operates like a Minecraft world. The terrain generates as you explore it.

It doesn’t exist until you go looking for it, and once you start looking, it will keep generating forever. There is no final room where you find the last piece and the process ends. The map expands the further you walk.

Jung himself framed individuation as lifelong. That’s supposed to be inspiring?

For me it’s a red flag. If the process never ends, and you’ve organized your life around the process, when do you go live?

The guy in the group chat had already done years of this. And the system he was following told him: keep going. There’s more. You haven’t gone deep enough yet. That’s not a path to completion, that’s a treadmill. And the treadmill is the product.

A bureaucrat’s philosophy

I’ll be honest, I haven’t read everything Jung ever wrote. I’m not going to pretend I did some exhaustive review of his work and I’m speaking from deep academic authority here. What I’m reacting to is what his philosophy looks like when it hits real people, what it asks of them in practice, and what it produces in their actual lives.

And in practice, this is what it asks.

You need to read his books (there are a lot of them, and they’re dense). You need to learn about archetypes, the shadow, the anima, the animus, the collective unconscious, synchronicity, individuation.

Each of these has sub-concepts and interpretive layers that branch into more sub-concepts. Then you need to apply all of this to yourself through years of introspection, ideally with a Jungian analyst who charges by the hour.

We’re talking hundreds of hours. Potentially thousands over a lifetime. All of it inward. All of it theoretical. All of it passive.

This is a bureaucrat’s philosophy. You’re doing paperwork on your own psyche, filing reports about your shadow, cross-referencing your anima with your childhood memories. And none of it requires you to do a single thing in the real world. You can spend a decade on this and not change anything about your external life. You just get better vocabulary for describing why nothing has changed.

I personally don’t know a single action-oriented person, a builder, someone who ships things and creates real things, who spends their time mapping their shadow and analyzing their anima.

The people I see deep in this stuff are almost always stuck. They read, they reflect, they journal, they discuss their inner work with each other online. And three years later their life looks exactly the same as it did before they started. They just have a more sophisticated explanation for why they’re still where they are.

The raft

There’s a thing I keep coming back to with philosophies like Jung’s. Not just Jung, but stoicism, Buddhism, a lot of modern therapy approaches too.

They’re rafts.

When you’re drowning, a raft saves your life. If someone is in real psychological crisis and they find Jung and it gives them a way to make sense of what’s happening, I’m not going to tell them they were wrong to grab it. The raft kept them from going under. That matters.

The problem is that people stay on the raft. They get comfortable. The raft becomes their identity. “I’m doing shadow work.” “I’m on a journey of individuation.” “I’m integrating my archetypes.” These become things people say about themselves, a whole identity built around being on a raft. They meet other people on rafts and they talk about raft life together. Years pass. They’re still floating in the middle of the ocean.

But, what if they had swum to shore instead?

Swimming to shore is obviously harder. We’re not debating that. You’re fighting the current, you’re exhausted, you can’t see the land.

But it’s shorter. You get there. You’re standing on solid ground and you can start building a life on something real, something you made with your hands, not on a set of concepts floating in the middle of nowhere.

Some people benefited from the raft. I did too, Stoicism helped me at some point in my life, but I used it to get to shore, I didn’t stay in the raft and made it my whole life.

Benefiting from something doesn’t make it the best option available. It’s great that you made it to a raft. But what if the help you followed had taken you all the way to shore?

Does this even fit you?

If you’re going to follow a philosophy (any philosophy, not just Jung’s), there are 3 points to consider:

1. Does it fit how your brain works? We are all different, a good reason you see many philosophies “work” is because they work for one specific personnality type. A simple example: If you have little in life, and no ways to make more, you will seek philosophies where equality is promoted. If you have a lot, or are confident about your abilities to make more, you will seek philosophies where freedom is promoted.

2. Does the ideal version of someone who follows this appeal to you? Not the theory of what a “fully individuated person” looks like in a book. The actual people you see in Jungian communities, online and in real life. Do they look like they’re building lives you’d want? Are they doing things you respect? Or are they perpetually processing, always one more insight away from being ready to act?

3. Is this an active philosophy or a passive one? Does it push you into the world or does it keep you in your head? Jung is passive. The entire system is built around inward examination with no clear exit point. And a philosophy that never tells you to stop looking inward and start building outward is, in my opinion, a dangerous one for anyone who wants to do something with their life.

Any philosophy can work if you believe in it hard enough.

Yeah, look around you. People live wildly different ways and make it work, but are they really happy? are they really living their potential? are they in a better condition for it? is the world in a better condition for it?

That’s impossible to answer objectively, but your gut instincts might have a clue.

Confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance will take care of the rest, we’ll always find evidence that it’s working and explain away the evidence that it isn’t.

That’s true for Jung, for stoicism, for anything. The question is whether it’s taking you somewhere real or whether it’s just a comfortable place to float.

Where this comes from

Jung didn’t appear out of nowhere. He came from Freud. They started as collaborators, and even though they split on a lot of things (Jung rejected Freud’s obsession with sex as the root of everything), they share the same fundamental assumption: the answers are inside you, buried in your past and your unconscious, and you need years of excavation to get them out.

This assumption is the thread that runs from Freud through Jung through modern therapy culture and into the water we all swim in now.

Adam Curtis covered this in Century of the Self (amazing documentary btw, you can find it on YT), how psychoanalytic ideas got picked up by advertising and politics and shaped an entire culture of inward-looking individualism.

Marc Andreessen talked about it on a podcast with David Senra, how the builder mindset is the opposite of all this, how the people who create things in the world don’t spend their time digging through their childhood looking for answers.

The whole tradition produces a society that thinks the answer to every problem is more introspection. More therapy. More processing. More “doing the work.” And the work never seems to involve building anything. It’s always inward. Always passive. Always one more layer to deal with before you’re supposedly ready to act.

You’re never ready. That’s the trap. The system keeps you preparing to live, indefinitely, which means you never start.

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The shore

So what’s the alternative?

I’ve been writing about this for a while, and it comes down to something I call retrospective redemption. The idea is simple: you don’t fix the past by excavating it. You fix it by building a present so good that the past changes meaning on its own.

When your life is going well, when you’ve built something you care about, when you’re in motion and creating, the hard things you went through stop being wounds you need to process and start being the steps that got you here. The past reconfigures around a strong present. You don’t need to analyze it and integrate it through years of shadow work. You need to make it irrelevant by making your present undeniable.

That’s the shore. Solid ground that you built yourself.

I go into how this works in depth in a separate piece (linked below). But the core of it is this: action, building, forward motion, these aren’t things you do after you’ve finished the inner work. They are the work. Your past gets resolved in the process of building your future, not in the process of staring at your past trying to find one more shadow to integrate.

The people I admire, the ones whose lives I look at and think “that’s what I want,” none of them got there through decades of Jungian analysis. They got there by building things. And the building itself did what all the introspection was supposed to do. It made them whole. Not through excavation, but through construction.

Stop analyzing your shadows. Go build something.

It might be hard for you to believe this because Jung, Stoicism, Buddhism have been hammered into the culture so much they have become like laws of physics almost. Reconsidering them feels like reconsidering reality.

But do consider the idea, don’t discard it immediately. Seek the truth always and not general consensus/crowd thinking.

I go over retrospective redemption in detail in this article:

In this article I talk further about introspection:

In this article I touch on the raft idea in more details:

In this article I talk about my problem with stoicism:

Check them out before discarding what is presented here.

Conquer.

I just turned 30 and I’ve lived like four different lives in the past decade.

I partied. I drifted through a job I didn’t care about. I solo traveled. I built something from scratch.

And looking at the full picture, the debate about how to spend your 20s is built on a false choice.

Everyone argues grind vs. enjoy. Should you sacrifice your 20s building something, or should you live them fully because you’ll never be this young again?

Both sides are loud about it, both think they’ve cracked the code.

They haven’t. And the reason they haven’t is that they’re having the wrong argument entirely.

You’re in a river

Tim Urban has this analogy in his essay “How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You)” (highly recommend checking it out).

He says that you’re born into a river. The current was set for you by your parents, your environment, society, whatever path was presented to you first as the “correct” one. And you just float down it. Passively.

The river is the path of least resistance. The external forces (social pressure, tradition, what’s easy, what’s normal) are so strong that your own internal force, what you want, who you are, what you’d choose if you were choosing freely, becomes basically negligible.

You float, and the floating feels like living, and you never stop to ask if this river is even going somewhere you want to go.

This is what’s happening with the entire “how to spend your 20s” debate.

The enjoy-your-20s guy is in the hedonism river, partying and traveling because instagram made it look like freedom. The grind bro talking about who’s going to carry the boats. The sedated guy is in the default river, gaming and scrolling because that’s what everyone in his life does.

They’re all floating. They’re all being carried by currents they didn’t choose. And they’re arguing about which river is best.

The question isn’t which river to be in. The question is why are you in a river at all. Why are you letting a current carry you? Why haven’t you climbed out onto the bank, looked around, and picked a direction for yourself?

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The worst river

There’s one river that’s worse than all the others and it’s the one flowing fastest right now.

The sedated life. Job you don’t care about, come home, scroll for two hours, game for three, sleep, repeat. You’re not doing anything destructive and you’re not doing anything meaningful. Just existing in this limbo where you’re not miserable enough to climb out but not alive enough to feel anything.

This gets romanticized now by youtube videos where some guy films his “cozy” routine of doing nothing. People in the comments calling it the dream.

I was in this river for a while and it was the darkest stretch of my 20s. The thing about it is that you don’t feel time passing. One week blurs into the next, same routine, same screens, same nothing. You look up and you’re 27 and you have no skills, no relationships that go deep, no body of work, no stories, nothing you built, nothing you’re proud of. You didn’t bite into anything, you just let time run out and soon enough your teeth will fall and you will have bitten nothing.

The other rivers are bad when they’re unchosen, but at least they involve movement. The party guy is doing things, getting experiences, collecting data on what’s empty and what isn’t. The travel guy is learning something even if he doesn’t know it yet.

The sedated guy is just being carried along by a current of dopamine buttons, his brain chasing the next scroll, the next video, the next small hit, every single day, accumulating nothing from any of it. That’s the worst river because there’s no information coming in. Nothing to learn from. Just years dissolving into screens.

Getting out of the water

If you’re happy in your river, whatever river that is, the rest of this article isn’t for you. Some people float their whole lives and are at peace with it. I’m not here to convert anyone.

But if you’re reading an article called “the best way to live your 20s,” I’m going to assume you’re not happy floating. Something brought you here. Maybe it’s that low hum of dread you can’t name, or the sense that there’s more to your 20s than what you’re getting out of them, or just a vague frustration with the fact that another year passed and nothing changed.

Getting out of the river is hard. Tim Urban is right about that. It requires active force against the current: self-examination, honesty about what you want, the willingness to stop doing what everyone around you is doing. It means swimming against everything that’s comfortable and familiar.

I got out. It took me most of my 20s to do it. And what I found on the other side changed everything about how I see this decade and what it’s for.

The rest of this piece is about what that looked like, what it cost, and what I’d tell a younger version of myself if I could go back.

If you haven’t figured out your 20s yet, you can give it a shot in what comes next for $10.

For less than a drink on a night out, you’ll not only have access to this guide, but to 15 other full complete guides ranging from confidence to focus to testosterone.

Is the river worth getting out of?

For those who will keep reading: let’s conquer your 20s.

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No ranking or order, just things that have made my life significantly better and that I think would do the same for yours.

It ranges from the silliest simplest things to the most life changing experience you will ever have.

All of them are worth it.

1. Have tools not possessions
   Strip any romance of the things you buy. What is the reason for buying it? Why do you desire it?
   Only buy tools, not stuff.
   How much time is to be gained? How healthier will I be? How much energy will be gained?
   The more you own, the more freedom is lost, not only by spending money, but by storing, thinking, and taking care of stuff. The things you own end up owning you.

2. Gratitudemaxxing
   Gratitude is a duty at this point. If you aren’t grateful about the things you have, you will never be happy because you’ll always want more. This might blunt your aggressivity towards change and making stuff happen, but it’s necessary to be appreciative for your long term happiness.

3. Wake up and work immediately
   The benefit of this for productivity is amazing. The night before I would plan the one thing I need to be working on. When I wake up, I already know what this thing is, I’ll clean up quickly, then get to it still groggy. This helps you get into flow much faster and easier because you’re still half asleep. By the time you realize what time is it you’ve already accomplished more than you thought.

4. Drink more coffee
   Between 2 and 4 cups of high quality coffee will make life more electric. Not some instant garbage stuff, or cheap moldy coffee. This is worth getting serious about and investing in. I recommend a moka pot or a simple pour over, quality beans that didn’t sit around warehouses for months or years. This process will quickly become a pleasure of yours, both the preparation and the consumption. It increases productivity and will make you healthier if you don’t abuse it. Consume 1h after waking and stop atleast 8h before sleeping.

5. Sunmax
   Almost every living being (except those who evolved in the deep sea, caves or some mushrooms) has evolved under the sun. It literally feeds the whole planet because it feeds plants which we eat and animals eat and we eat them. Sun on the skin is a non negotiable if you’re a human. Don’t burn but you need to have sun filtering through your naked skin.

6. AMRAP push up every morning
   I did this every morning for a long time, and it got my chest to grow significantly. It gets the blood flowing and signals your body to wake up.

7. Abuse fresh seasonal fruits
   One of the cheap blessings of this world are seasonal fruits. They’re abundant, they grow near you. Try to buy quality stuff, go in markets, clean them well, then spam them. This is less amazing in the northern hemispheres but when I lived in Mexico there were always a bunch of fruits cycling and it was an amazing experience to try them all.

   

8. Become a master at a few meals that you repeat over and over again because you love them and they’re good for you
   If you’re a man, you need to have at least one signature meal where people around you and your girl get excited that you’ll be making. Cooking in general is a great skill to have.

9. Write
   You might think you don’t need to learn to write with AI now, this would be a mistake. Writing is not only communicating your thoughts through time, it’s also thinking and organizing them, it’s also putting these thoughts somewhere, then coming back to them later and getting to see them outside your own brain. It’s like a friend that knows everything about you and your struggles and talks through you.
   It’s said to be the technology that propelled humans to a new level because of these reasons, and you won’t do it? Future you will thank you for having left him something.

10. Build something
    If you’re not actively building something, what the fuck are you even doing? Genuinely.
    You don’t need to be making rockets in your garage, but you have to have your energy aimed at something you care about and that gives you meaning.

11. Make the world a better place (meaning safeguard humanity)
    If you can pair the above with this one, you’ll be in a great place.
    Build something meaningful to you (so you enjoy it) + that helps people (value created) + makes money = basically the secret to life.
    Most of the time the first two unlock the third anyway.

12. Listen to the rain
    One subtle skill it would be worth to integrate in your life is the ability to enjoy weather whatever it is. I am a sun enjoyer, and I notice my mood going down when it’s grey for too long, but this is a mistake. The rain brings water and life to your lands, the sounds has something primal to it, it relaxes you. Take a moment to appreciate it.

13. Make fires
    You need to be firemaxing, another primal thing. The fireplace meant safety, that’s why we’re so entranced when we look at a fire, yet we do it so rarely.
    If you have a garden, make yourself a fireplace and light up a cigar even. Enjoy a winter night like this, stare at the fire in deep thoughts. Burn shit down at every opportunity.

14. Hike mountains
    Whenever I get inexplicably gloomy, I just pick up a bag and hike a mountain. Solves it right away. Humans are made to cover long distances and to be in nature.

    Fix your attention, find your mission, Conquer.

15. Ride horses
    Do you know how much your ancestors would have loved to own a horse? Do you know the power people on horseback had back in the day? You now can just LARP as a knight, a samurai, a cowboy, and you don’t do it?
    Every time you have the possibility to be on horseback you should do it. Whenever I travel I look for good horseback treks, they’re an amazing way to do that and discover natural places.

16. Shoot guns
    You think your ancestor that travels the future and comes visit you will be amazed by your iphone? No, he would ask you why you aren’t shooting guns and riding horses.
    I’m always amazed about how men simply do not care to have the ability to defend their life in all circumstances. Learn to shoot guns as the bare minimum, preferably own a firearm if you have the ability to do so.

17. Saunamax
    Enjoyable, and anything that is effective at cleaning you of microplastics should be considered very seriously. Get that shit out of your balls.

18. Fight the cold: cold showers, hike in winter, ski, cold plunges
    We’ve taken suffering so much out of our life, that finding something beneficial to you and that makes you suffer is always great. Exercise, sauna, cold, the options are limited, make use of all of them.

19. Lift heavy ass weights
    Do I even need to talk about this one? If that same ancestor came to visit you, he would be puzzled as to why you’re not looking like Hercules already.

    

20. Learn to fight, martial arts
    Connected to shooting guns. The BEST way to add competition to your life, the highest form of competition at that, the one where you try to kill each other without weapons. Not only this single addition is worth it, because this will raise your testosterone tremendously, but this also creates a brotherhood with other capable men, you learn to defend yourself, and your confidence will go through the roof. Nothing greater for confidence than knowing you can knock out everyone in the room if it came to it.

21. Pet a cat or dog
    Pet an animal whenever you can, high ROI activity. Dogs are almost always down for it, but there’s a special thing about petting a stray cat, or being liked by one.

22. Notice the color of the flowers
    I read something about how learning the names of flowers is great because it helps you to notice them more on walks. Flowers are beautiful. Beauty is always great. (yes I do realize we went from being able to kill people to smelling the roses, but this is the whole point, life has to be experienced fully)

23. Drive in silence
    Using any opportunity to blast music into your ears and preventing yourself from thinking is dumb. Your brain needs space to make sense of stuff for you, let it breathe from time to time.

24. Live in another country
    This is an experience far too few people will live. It changes you on a profound level, learning a new language also helps you see the world in a different way.

25. Travel deeply, meet locals and get to know the culture, not for instagram
    This instagram travel stuff is ridiculous. It has now become status, everything for a bunch of stories and people’s reaction. I was this guy at some point, until I stopped posting on instagram and actually had the best traveling experiences of my life.
    Also traveling “rough”, without any luxury will not only be cheaper but will make you appreciate your life when you get home.

26. Go camping
    A great opportunity to make a fire. Again living it rough whenever possible is a great humbler. Sleep on the floor, on the open, hike to get to the camping spot, etc.

27. Do a misogi
    A misogi is a challenge where you do something so difficult, you’re not sure you’ll make it through. Plan one of these a year atleast.

28. Appreciate the sunsets and sunrises
    Potential tremendous beauty twice a day, this is seriously underrated. I realized that when I left a mountain place where I was simply unable to see sunrises and sunsets and started living in a plain with full sight of both how amazing an experience it is.

    

29. More light in the morning than night
    While we’re talking about sunsets and sunrises, it’s a good time to correct something stupid many people do: leave on bright blue lights up until they go to sleep. I won’t go into the science and cortisol stuff, but it’s pretty obvious that our lives have been regulated by the sun for millions of years, and a sunset was the signal for going to sleep. Again the fireplace meant safety here, low light that are warm. So get sunshine in the morning if you can or equivalent through incandescent lights, and red lights/low lamps at night AT LEAST 1h before sleeping.

30. Read always
    If I’ve ever seen a cheatcode or a superpower in life, it would be reading; you can talk to the dead, travel into the past, enter someone’s thoughts, learn a lifetime’s experience in just a few hours. Not using this ability is ridiculous.

31. Absorb everything a human being can provide you in terms of knowledge: find someone that resembles you and your personality + your goals, then absorb their life’s knowledge as fast as you can. Do this at every opportunity
    This is related to reading. It’s not too often that you’ll find a person that fits the criteria, but every time you should definitely do it. Obviously don’t spend your life doing that (or reading), but you can absorb lifetimes of knowledge this way, why wouldn’t you?

    Fix your attention, find your mission, Conquer.

32. Embody speed and urgency
    Think “if i had to be 10x faster to achieve this goal, what would I do?” put yourself in tight deadlines. The ultimate deadline might be closer than you think. Live fully in the meanwhile.

33. Seek the truth always
    One thing that should be revolting to all of us is how much the world puts feelings over truth. You can change the world by changing yourself: be brutal about it, seek truth at every opportunity. It’s very easy to lie to oneself, this is not as easy as it sounds.

34. Energymax
    What drains your energy? what increases it? the ability to know yourself effectively will allow you to notice this. Learning to audit yourself from time to time in order to pull back and understand it from a bird’s eyeview instead of being in the trenches where you have no vision (but where shit happens!) will be a great advantage to you. Be ruthless about this, energy is everything.

35. Brainmax + Memorymax (the ability)
    Related to the above. The reason you want to be healthy is not only to live longer and avoid terrible disease. This is great, but you also want to increase your brain capacity, the energy you can use to live your life. It will directly correlate with your capacity to solve problems, to handle stress, to think, to memorize stuff (underrated).

36. Channel Conqueror’s Haki

    

    Imagine having a Will to conquer so strong that weak minds faint around you. Start spamming this when you feel tired and you’ll realized the power the mind can have for your overall energy and drive.

37. Avoid eating factory slop 90% of the time ATLEAST (anything that doesn’t come from a real ingredient/that passed through a factory floor)
    The fact this has to be said is crazy. To the question “What will future generations look back on and think was completely idiotic or insane about how we live today?”, this is my answer. Accepting to eat 20 impossible to pronounce chemicals just to feel good in the mouth for a little bit is probably the craziest thing we do that’s so widely accepted.

38. The exception to the above rule is eating mom’s and grandma’s foods + the occasional high quality dessert
    There are high odds your grandma and your mom are using seed oils. Is this a reason why you shouldn’t eat their delicious meal? No, this is the exception. High quality ice cream and tremendous homemade desserts from time to time will not kill you either.

39. Don’t be a pussy
    About the above, being a total nazi about all of this nutrition stuff is also counter productive. Eating some seed oil at a restaurant once a month won’t kill you. If you can avoid it, do avoid it, but if you don’t want to share a meal with family because you refuse to eat seed oils or whatever, that’s where the ROI of it stops.

40. Curate attention
    Mental diet is probably more important than food diet. What enters in your mind will define how you experience life. Fill it with negativity, and it will become negative. Be very careful about what enters your attention as it will literally create your experienced reality.

    

41. Eliminate plastic from your life as much as possible : clothes, bed, carpets, kitchen tools, etc etc
    A little while ago I realized a t-shirt I wore for years was made out of plastic trash. Literally they bragged about it too. What the hell have we come to that we’re wearing trash on our skin all day and think this is something normal? Microplastics have entered every part of our bodies, because everything around us is plastic. You can not reduce the plastic in nature, but you can reduce it by eliminating anything you can that is made of plastic from your vicinity.

42. Have someone you respect mentor you, give you another view of your operation
    You alone have blind spots, unknown unknowns you don’t even realize you have. Someone more experienced than you, who has been there before you can save you from disasters, pains, and years of tribulation if you listen closely. Do not think it’s a prerequisite to move forward, but if you have the opportunity, use it.

43. Find a woman that’ll become your pillar (redpillers are losers)
    A great woman will become the most important pillar of your life. This is obviously hard to find, but once you do, you’ll understand. Treasure it.

44. Make babies
    If you are able to give babies a safe space to grow optimally, you should spam them as much as you can. They are a joy and the survival of humanity. Stop talking about “the world is shit” it has never been better, you’ve never had as much knowledge to educate the best human possible than we have today.

45. Accomplish something huge in 5, 10, 20 years, and the best way to achieve this is to love every day until you get there: engineer your day so you can repeat it forever and it becomes better than any vacation

46. Laying bricks, cutting wood, digging dirt. There is something semi-primal about these activities. Exercise that makes the physical world move around you for a specific purpose. I believe this is embedded into us, our ancestors cut wood, built houses, farmed. You can too integrate these activities. Build walls, start some side project, modify the land, plant trees. You will do physical exercise, get your mind off of your routine, be in your thoughts often having the time to think, build real stuff in the world (very rewarding).

47. Treasure the low points in life because they have come as a result of high points, do not avoid suffering at any cost in life because the cost is usually meaning, you do not want to become a ghost that only lives a neutral life. Life is conquering the highs and the lows and the lows make the highs beautiful and achieving anything great will require you to pass through some lows. Good, they will make the highs better, and they will deter the weak

48. Attack the bottleneck in all realms: what is the thing that blocks the rest from flowing beautifully? Never let this be health or relationships.

49. Walk more
    In nature is best.

50. Desiremax, be competitive, care deeply, be engaged, commit, put stakes to it, take risks. If you fail, be crushed but move forward like a veteran, use the information as feedback to move forward more rapidly.

51. Optimize your problem solving abilities
    The most valuable people are the best problem solvers.

52. Put what is important to you in front of you in your environment
    What do you need to remember? Make it salient and visible to you. This is a simple tweak that can change your life significantly.

53. Shake the earth
    As someone of high capability, you have a serious shot at shaking the earth in your particular field. Why not go for it?

54. Focus relentlessly on something, lock it in and put it on maintenance, then move on to something else. Do this sufficiently and you’ll reach greatness, this is simply the thing that separates you from highly effective people.

55. Believe in your luck and in your destiny aggressively. swing for the fences. Luck is the ability to exploit accidents.

56. Get out of herd thinking
    Do not accept facts because they are presented to you on a silver platter. Question the consensus, lose respect for the general public and society’s conventional wisdom. Do you want to be average? Average means poor economic power, poisoned, fat, scattered attention, shit relationship. This is not the crowd I want to listen to.

57. The world is a very malleable place.
    You have this program installed into you early that the world is the way it is and that’s it. Don’t make waves, get your job, your family, save for retirement. But life can be more than that, once you realize that the world is a very malleable place, you realize that you have the power to change it. It was all built by people that were no smarter than you, and you too can make a dent in the story of humankind.
    Learning that will permanently change the way you see the world.
    Good.

Conquer