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Each of these ideas will short-circuit your mind.

You’ll read them, think “oh, sh*t,” and probably be stuck dwelling on at least a few of these ideas for the next week or two. This is a great outcome. Breakthroughs stem from dangerous ideas we accidentally discover.

I got each of these ideas from 12 years of daily social media reading, 100s of books, and people I met in life who challenged me. I offer them to you as a gift.

At least one of these ideas will completely change your life. Let’s go.

Raw talent makes you untouchable

I promised you dangerous ideas, and this one is borderline lethal.

There’s a rapper named Ye. I don’t like him. I find him repulsive. He’s not my cup of tea if you catch my drift. But in recent years I’ve still studied his earlier career. I chose to study him because I don’t like him and I wondered why.

Despite his craziness, there’s always something you can learn.

He says anything he wants, including deeply racist stuff. He’s made every mistake you could possibly make, including pissing away a billion-dollar Adidas deal and losing his wife and kids forever.

Yet the guy always bounces back.

People always forgive him. The crazy stuff he says is quickly forgotten. The reason is he has raw talent that is so rare people will do anything to be near it. So he can say and do the most evil stuff and it will never ruin him because talent transcends reputation.

He’s a master of obsession, self-belief, storytelling, and getting people to believe in themselves. And it turns out those traits transcend everything else.

It’s wild and dangerous to consciously understand that, but it’s true, despite whether you like him or not. This is why you, too, must embody those traits.

The most dangerous phase of your career happens right after you achieve basic financial comfort

(Raj Shamani)

On the surface, the desire for comfort seems smart.

Get what you want and live the easy life. It’s totally logical. But the paradox is when you have no pain and your basic needs are met, there’s no motivation to change. Change isn’t a must so you’ll chuck it on the back burner and light up a blunt.

The most powerful moment of my life was when I had $1.2M stolen from my digital wallet in about 30 minutes.

On the day, I wanted to jump in front of a train. I lost the money my wife and I had put aside to buy our first house so we could have kids.

It was a dangerous moment.

Thank god, I instantly saw the emergency and reached for a reframe instead of a death wish.

Fast-forward to now and I am so damn grateful for that theft. I almost want to pay the thief a fee for changing my life. When the theft removed my financial comfort, it made me get to work and change my mindset. I made $6M shortly after.

When comfort takes over you’re no longer hungry or desperate. What you’re left with is complacency which makes you lazy.

It’s why office workers get trapped for decades.

It’s too easy to earn 6-figures, get underpaid, go to the comfortable office with free coffee, and just settle for less than you can be.

When all the danger is removed it becomes easy enough to stop fighting. Now you’re trapped in average hell. It’s extremely hard to escape. Trust me, it took me 5 years to leave behind safety.

What holds us back isn’t what we lack, but what we have.

Comedian Adam Carolla said back in the day that, “if you want to destroy somebody’s life, just give them free rent in a sh*tty little house.”

If you return decades later, they’ll still be living there.

Nothing will have changed. They didn’t get a great deal, but it was too much of a good deal for them to let it go. So they didn’t. They won’t go and do things to change their life because there’s no reason to.

The good enough house, fancy car, and okay romantic partner are hard things to leave behind. They become part of our identity and we fight to keep them.

Instead of focusing on what you lack, think about how all the things you have may actually be the true barrier to getting what you want.

The old way of life is deeply spiritual and satisfying

Here’s another dangerous idea to say out loud: what if modern life is the problem?

Alcohol, drugs, junk food, prescription medications, vaping/nicotine, excessive tattoos, lip filler, booty implants, liposuction, calling everyone ADHD.

The old way of life is to do none of that. It’s to leave the body as is. It’s to not solve problems that don’t really exist. I live a deeply spiritual life because I do none of these things. I accidentally live closer to a monk than a modern human.

When I tell people I have less than 10 mins a day of phone screen time, people look at me like I’m crazy and just took a dump in front of them.

I think in the next few years living like a monk and going back to simpler times is going to become a trend. It’s the crux of my modern freedom philosophy.

Less is more.

Everything is risky when you’re a p*ssy

(Jeremy Haynes)

This is not the politically correct way to say it, but screw it. If you’re offended, then you probably need to be offended more often.

Modern life is full of cowards. People who take no risks. People who label stress as toxic instead of a normal part of living. People who can’t deal with the smallest setbacks – their dog dies and they disappear for a year to recover.

Alex Hormozi is violently allergic to people who are afraid of losing: “Losers becomes losers by being afraid of losing.” You win in life by understanding losing is part of the game. You have to lose a lot to win.

So if you’re hesitating because of a fear of losing, you’re guaranteed not to win. The only real wisdom and education comes from losing. Everything else is information overload, and based on theories instead of reality.

Pray to god you lose more.

The years of hardcore struggle will one day be your greatest memories

This might sound wild to say but I crave struggle more than I do s*x, ice-cream, or millions of dollars.

If your life is a story and you went to the cinema to watch it, you’d hope, just like watching any other movie, that some cool stuff happened and there were some huge blow ups and nukes that went off.

Struggles help you experience nostalgia.

One of my fondest memories was starting my first business with my brother. We’d work really late filling up our vending machines, then pass out on the floor of a vacant shop infested with mice. At the time it sucked. Looking back, I wish I could go back. I had blonde hair, no understanding of risk, and could sell steaks to vegans.

The come up is where the beauty hides. Being insanely naive is gorgeous too.

Whatever you tell yourself becomes your reality

I shouldn’t tell you this but I will. And it’s silly.

Whenever I see someone yawning, I instantly duck and look away. People get taken aback by it when they see me do it. I’ve done it since I was about 12. I learned to do this because I discovered that yawning is like a deadly virus.

When I see someone yawn it instantly makes me feel tired. So I don’t allow other people’s tiredness to infect me. Later that idea bled into my financial life as well.

I realized people who were perpetually broke influenced my worldview in a deeply negative way. The only way out was to apply the same technique of avoidance.

In recent weeks, soccer player Erling Haaland has become a cult figure for his dangerous ideas that challenge everything we’ve ever known about human psychology. In one viral video, he said this:

If you tell yourself you’re going to be tired, you’re going to be tired.

The thoughts in your head shape your reality. The cool thing is you get to mess with those thoughts in any way you choose, and the mind is unable to tell fact from fiction – or even total delusion.

“I need to think about it” is creating a dangerous neural pathway

We all say this. Don’t you dare lie. I say it too.

Every time you say “I need to think about it” neuroplasticity is working against you. You’re training your brain that when a decision is to be made you will hesitate. That becomes a habit. Then it becomes a neural pathway so deep it secretly makes you say maybe to every opportunity and never do anything worthwhile.

The learned skill of indecision is the kiss of death. It’s hard to become an adult decision maker again when you’ve said “maybe” 5000 times in a row and practiced this terrifying habit the way an Olympic swimmer practices winning a gold medal.

Every decision must be a yes or a no. Maybe is ruining your life.

Overthinking is incredible for your life

Overthinking is always labelled as a loser thing to do.

What if it wasn’t? Well, it doesn’t have to be. If you like to overthink everything, then keep doing it, but with one change:

Only overthink the positives of every situation.

Tony Robbins once said, train your mind to believe everything is happening in your favor. The car crash happened so you’d be late to the job interview you didn’t want. The guy or girl left you so you could go on that date that turned into the love of your life. You lost the house so you could make money to now own your dream house.

Life is working in your favor if you see it that way.

And when you see constant negatives as positives, you brainwash yourself into thinking anything is possible. That dangerous mindset will make you violently attack any goal and win.

We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.

(Anaïs Nin)

This idea has been at the center of my life for 12 years.

It made me realize my difficult childhood, past trauma and mental illness, and all my failures, rejections, and embarrassment color how I see the world. The person I am determines how I react to every piece of news or setback.

While these limitations are hard-coded into our brains by the time we’re mature adults, they can be brought back for great benefit.

Proactively writing down what happened to you in your life, then seeing on the page how these events are likely coloring your world is powerful.

Until you’re aware of what is controlling you, it’ll keep sabotaging opportunities and you’ll accidentally label it bad luck or “It wasn’t meant to be.”

The world isn’t messed up. Past trauma is just making it feel that way.

Soulless jobs create a dangerous habit

On the surface, a mediocre job isn’t that harmful.

It feels like you’re drinking the occasional can of Coca-Cola instead of feeling like you’re sniffing cocaine a few times a day. While that’s how it feels, the damage goes far deeper than that.

I found that when I worked soulless corporate jobs, I was bored out of my mind and craved work that had more creativity and imagination. After a while I noticed a pattern. I’d come home and also crave mindless entertainment.

So I’d watch a football game or binge some useless sitcom TV show like Seinfeld. Then I’d tell myself I’d be in bed by 10PM so I could wake up early for work the next day. But I’d end up watching TV until midnight and passing out on the couch from exhaustion. This pattern repeated daily for years. It slowly killed me.

I told no one because I was embarrassed.

No one talks about the link between boring jobs and the heroin-type addiction of mindless TV. I suspect this trend is why reality TV shows and day-in-the-life TikToks – that involve watching other people living their life – are so popular.

You’ll do anything to distract yourself from reality. Don’t let yourself.

You accidentally programmed your brain to live in fear

Harvard-trained psychologist Lorwen Harris Nagle says “A life with no hard things trains your brain to fear everything.”

It’s what she said next that took my breath away and almost caused me to pass out.

She says an easy life makes your brain’s memory center get weaker. It also makes emotions harder to regulate. Holy crap. Someone should be shouting this from the rooftops or putting it on billboards.

If all you ever do is easy stuff, you’ll fear everything. And in those fears hides all the opportunities that make you come alive and help you to unlock your full potential.

Fear isn’t temporary. It’s a daily habit you trained yourself to do. The same thinking that got you into this mess isn’t the same thinking that gets you out.

It’s not a skill issue, it’s a psychological issue

An abundance of free information and PhD-level AI is dangerous.

It’s now common behavior to drown in information. How-to content on TikTok and Youtube is now the new form of entertainment. You consume it because it gives you dopamine and makes you think you’re progressing instead of procrastinating.

I’ve run a multi-million dollar education company for the last 12 years. The uncomfortable truth I’ve discovered about learning is that more information slows people down. You likely don’t need more information.

The change you seek is secretly a psychological one, not an informational one.

You already know enough about what to do. That’s not the problem. The problem is action, and that’s psychological. Once you overcome that, the problem changes to a need for iteration. Only after that does a lack of information perhaps become a problem.

This isn’t common knowledge. But I’ve seen this pattern every day and can’t unsee it. The good news is it’s easy to solve. The bad news is 99% of people won’t solve it because they can’t see the problem and they won’t take this essay seriously.

Such is life.

Closing Thought

It’s dangerous to consume ideas like this.

They’re so polarizing and counter-culture they’re easy to dismiss. I know I dismissed them for years and just went back to the couch and ate my Vegemite sandwiches. But if you dare to look inside the system that runs the world you see patterns.

Hidden inside those patterns are the real wisdom that will help you get everything you want and more.

You must be daring enough to consume those ideas and think through them. If you do, you might discover the idea that leads to your next breakthrough. If not, you’ll live in an echo chamber of your own creation, and become best mates with your one true enemy: your ego.

Choice is yours. I recommend you be dangerous and violently seek wisdom.

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There is one TV show episode that changed millions of people’s lives.

Countless people have retold this scene and it’ll help you understand life and how to navigate it better than anything else can. The scene comes from the TV show Succession.

The main character Logan Roy is at a karaoke bar with his family. He takes them into a room to try and apologize for his past behavior in the hope his kids will stop blocking his massive multibillion-dollar GoJo business acquisition.

The kids don’t buy the apology for a second.

Logan realizes he has completely lost his emotional leverage and ability to manipulate his kids. As he stands up to leave, he pauses at the door, looks back at them, and delivers the ultimate, cold-blooded patriarchal verdict:

“You’re flaring up. You’re talking about things you don’t understand. I love you, but you are not serious people.”

This line hits his kids at the core because, despite all their expensive suits, corporate vocabulary, and high-stakes maneuvering, Logan sees right through them.

He views them as fragile, privileged children playing at a game they aren’t hardened enough to survive.

This isn’t a fictional idea. It’s the crux of modern life.

There are serious and unserious people. The problem is the unserious people are hard to detect because they look, talk, and dress like serious people. But they’re not.

The difference between serious and unserious people is obsession.

Obsession is a way of life

Amateurs will call obsession hustle culture because they imagine some Lambo bro with fake biceps telling them to work harder.

That’s not what obsession is.

Obsession has nothing to do with working hard because an obsessed person doesn’t see what they do as hard work. Their work doesn’t feel like work. Obsession is hard to describe, but I’d call it a way of life.

It’s an attitude. It’s a mantra. It’s a rebellion against normal. It’s a vaccine against ever becoming poor. It’s how you become a serious person.

Go all in

To become a serious person you must go all in.

People delude themselves into believing they went all in, but then in the same sentence say things like “I’m busy” or “I didn’t meet XYZ commitment because my cat got sick.” You’ll never achieve anything notable by being half-assed.

People have goals but they then have the safety net of a job or a Plan B in case anything goes wrong. So they hedge their bets and treat every opportunity like a purchase with a refund policy that they fully intend to redeem.

Passion says to make your goal a side hustle. Obsession says to have one goal and do nothing else. Serious people choose the latter.

Robert Caro is the greatest political biographer to ever live.

Most people know him as the guy who won two Pulitzer Prizes. What they don’t know is the borderline psychotic, agonizing level of obsession he put into his work.

In the 1970s, Caro decided to write a definitive biography of President Lyndon B. Johnson. A normal journalist would spend a year interviewing politicians, read a few diaries, and pump out a 300-page book.

Not Caro.

Caro realized that to understand Johnson, he had to understand the dirt-poor, brutal Texas Hill Country that shaped him. He went to Texas and interviewed the locals, but they gave him guarded, polite, “unserious” tourist answers. They didn’t trust a city-slicker reporter from New York.

So, Caro did the most unreasonable thing possible. He quit his job, sold his home, packed up his wife, and moved to the middle of nowhere in Texas.

He lived there for 3 years. He slept on the ground in the Texas wilderness. He did chores for the locals. He forced himself to experience the isolating, soul-crushing silence of the land. Only then did the locals open up to him.

He didn’t just want facts. He wanted the truth.

Caro is now 90 years old. He has spent the last 55+ years writing one biography series (The Years of Lyndon Johnson). The final volume still isn’t finished.

His obsession manifests in rules that normal people would find torturous:

• The Uniform: He goes to his small, barren office in New York every single day wearing a full suit and tie. There is no one there to see him. He does it purely to remind himself that he is doing “serious work.”

• The Technology Ban: He refuses to use a computer. He types every single word of his massive, 1,000-page volumes on a mechanical Smith-Corona Electra 210 typewriter. If he changes a paragraph, he doesn’t cut and paste… he re-types the entire page from scratch.

• The 7-Year Slog: A single chapter regarding how LBJ stole a Senate election in 1948 took Caro several years of daily, grueling research to write. He went through millions of documents page by page, long before digitization or AI.

Mainstream culture is obsessed with efficiency. We want AI summaries, 10-minute book breakdowns, and “fast content.” Robert Caro is the antidote to that entire worldview. He proves that scale requires sacrifice and obsession.

Caro refused to be normal. His books aren’t just biographies. They are the definitive texts on how political power actually functions in America. No one else could have written them because no one else was willing to ruin their life for it.

Caro spent his 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s obsessing over one man. He went completely broke writing his first masterpiece (The Power Broker), to the point where his wife had to sell their house while he was still writing it. He gave his entire existence to a typewriter and a dead president.

That is what going all in looks like. And it’s why Robert Caro will be remembered in history books and people will study his work for hundreds of years. The rewards of going all in and being serious are so great they’re almost unimaginable.

There is lived, and there is lived to the fullest beyond reasonable doubt. The latter category is one of the greatest feelings in the world.

Act like a psycho

This might sound insane but hear me out.

Being sane means you follow the traditional path, get told what to do, and earn a mediocre income that barely keeps up with inflation. The average person is fat, sick, drugged up on prescriptions, addicted to TV shows, watches too much sport, and drowns out uncomfortable feelings with alcohol and junk food.

Being “sane” in the modern world is actually the most insane thing you can do.

The opposite is to be a psycho. It’s to avoid being normal at all costs. It’s to ignore what people think of you. And it’s to realize that the answers you get from AI tools are based only on documented information, but the real wisdom and intelligence come from UNDOCUMENTED information.

If the information you’re consuming and relying on is publicly available, by nature, it’s average and will therefore make you average.

Avoid anything to do with being average.

Let people call you insane. Please, I beg you.

Creator Mason Hughes says, “The people who call you insane are describing the exact gap between you and them.”

Take it as a compliment. F*ck, take a bow and enjoy the praise. It’s the highest form of flattery in existence. What people think of you doesn’t matter. Their opinion of you is a reflection of their own insecurities. Them calling you insane says more about them than it does about you.

You have to be a little insane to achieve anything worthwhile.

As cliché as it sounds, Apple founder Steve Jobs saw the same pattern in society when he said this:

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

I still get chills when I watch the old Apple TV ad that says this quote.

The case for being normal and rejecting obsession

Not everyone agrees with me on this topic of obsession. Perhaps I’m wrong.

Critics responded to this essay idea on X with advice like:

• “Relax, for f*ck’s sake.

• “You only get one life. Don’t waste it chasing things that don’t matter.”

• “Slow down. Enjoy your coffee. Watch the sunset. Call your parents. Spend time with your friends.”

• “Be humble. Be kind. Be present. Let people call you unambitious. Let them think you’re missing out.”

• “Contentment is the path. There’s no right or wrong. Whatever you choose, enjoy your life’s journey.”

This is some of the worst advice I’ve ever read.

Relaxing means settling for second best in this context. It means wasting time and thinking we’ll live beyond today. Not chasing things that don't matter does make sense. But the critics are applying it to the one thing that does matter — your obsession.

When you find something you’re willing to die for – something so rich, so powerful, so meaningful – it’s an obligation to chase it to the end of its logical conclusion because to do anything less is a waste of your life.

The part about slowing down is also meaningless. It’s an excuse to just be mediocre, not have goals, and just rely on luck and hope. That’s not a plan. It’s guaranteed failure. You can chase your obsession, drink coffee, and watch the sunsets. Sure. No worries, mate. But your personal life has nothing to do with obsession.

Everyone, including me, has a family. I care about my two daughters. Being obsessed, going all in, and doing work that doesn’t feel like work doesn’t change any of that. Again, people will do anything to find an excuse to avoid doing hard things.

As far as having people call me unambitious, no thank you. Being a drifter and a romantic artist is a nightmare. We don’t pay attention to unserious people. They just drift into the underbellies of society and get forgotten about, assuming they don’t die of alcoholism or a drug overdose.

It’s never a good idea to be unambitious because that’s just another name for lazy.

Ambitions are awesome even if they don’t come true. It’s better to have dreamed and failed than to have never dreamed at all. When critics say there is no right or wrong they’re deeply deluded. There is right or wrong.

If you become average and piss your life away, that’s 100% the wrong choice. No intelligent person would think any other way. Contentment is just an excuse to drown in comfort and accept constraints that don’t actually exist.

Our primal nature as humans is to make sure our life is worth something.

We’re motivated by meaning and a sense of mission – and just drifting through life without any of that is a low-performance mindset that’ll steal your time, energy, and money away so you’re stuck working for “the man” or “a man” fulfilling the role of, well, there’s no nice way to put it, a modern slave.

That’s what the default path buys you. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.

Obsession is the path

Don’t screw it up by thinking being mediocre is some prize worth winning.

Have one clear focus. Go all in. Find work that doesn’t feel like work. Exert an insane amount of effort that looks illogical to a normie. Choose to be an outcast. Treat today as if you could be dead tomorrow. Have fun along the way. Let your way of being be the legacy you leave your family. Ignore the critics. Channel your inner Robert Caro.

The results from obsession are truly breathtaking, and if you discover them for yourself, you’ll feel like a born-again Christian spreading the gospel of obsession.

It’s the only sure path to getting everything you want in life and more. It’s the naughty secret everyone you look up to understands but no one speaks. Because if everyone was obsessed, there’d be actual competition. The fact most people aren’t obsessed is what eliminates 99.9% of competition, which is cool as hell.

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Not having enough money is a mental illness.

It’s time we call it what it is, because until we do, it’s a problem that won’t get solved for many people. And that’s a f*cking tragedy.

The title of this essay is a direct quote from Juliete Mirella. She suggests that when you have financial stability, it regulates your nervous system. It’s a bold claim that’ll probably piss a lot of people off.

Let’s dissect how money relates to your mental health, so you can finally break through and get closer to your version of wealth.

Money problems are a mental illness

What stops you from making more money is your psychology, not your skills and experience. This is an idea a lot of people haven’t figured out yet.

They get distracted with earning more credentials, consuming more information, begging for promotions, looking for passive income opportunities, or believing all they need is the right business idea.

These are all shiny objects.

If you’re not at your ideal income goal, then to get to that next level, it’s entirely psychological. This isn’t obvious. It’s probably the last solution people try (if at all).

My money problems almost ruined me. I didn’t have enough money and it led me to a minimum wage job I hated. When I paired depression with financial stress, I ended up with a type of mental illness that almost became inescapable.

Honestly, I didn’t want to live anymore at that point.

Fixing my financial psychology became a big goal. I eventually did it but it took longer than I expected. I wish I had known what I’m about to share with you.

How money bizarrely affects your nervous system

Therapist Dani Green says money itself doesn’t regulate the nervous system.

The antidote is to reduce chronic uncertainty. And when you have financial stability that’s one of the main ways to create that sense of safety.

Too many people obsess over getting rich. Instead, they should obsess over gaining financial stability first. The sad part is the modern job has very little safety because regular layoffs are now a core part of how corporations run.

This is why the new economy of creators and solopreneurs has gained so much traction. It’s not the money that made this trend explode, it’s the sense of safety.

Entrepreneurship makes you self-sufficient. You hunt and eat what you kill. You own the sales, marketing, and delivery. And you also own the upside, which is how you escape being chronically underpaid the way you are in the typical job.

When someone goes from sucking the corporate teat for milk money and moves over to creating their own income streams, the real change isn’t just financial. It’s psychological. I love to say that entrepreneurship is just extreme self-improvement in disguise. That process rewires your brain.

When your self-created income streams eventually are your only income streams, it regulates your nervous system and helps you have more certainty. Modern freedom is having a sense of safety which the traditional system can no longer deliver.

Unpopular opinion: working a 9-5 job is extremely bad for your mental health.

Yep, throw things at me. You’re probably mad I said this.

But deep down we all know it’s true. Being told what to do, having little agency, working as a cog in a giant machine, being underpaid, the threat of constant layoffs, extreme disruption from AI – these are leading to a 9-5 mental health crisis.

As the economy gets more desperate, the average job becomes a Hunger Games match to the death. Few get ahead so everyone just throws each other under the bus and behaves badly as a last-ditch attempt to make more money or get promoted – or worse, save their mediocre job from extinction.

This is what I see in my inbox every day. People just pissed off at the mental health issue that is their pain in the ass career.

The days of 40 years at the same job, and sucking up to some boss so you get one of the “jobs for the boys” are over.

Business has never been more transparent and efficient. AI can see the gaps, present better data, and often make better decisions than biased humans who will favor their mate.

As the global workforce continues to experience this modern-day mental health crisis, the world will self-correct. People will choose careers and businesses that stabilize their nervous system, instead of pinging their brain to death with a bunch of urgent emails that aren’t urgent at all.

Peace of mind is the new luxury.

More money equals more time

A lack of time is the real crisis right now.

Everyone is busy and doesn’t know why. The promise of technology was that we’d work less, yet everyone I talk to is working 3x more. A lack of time is a real problem. You only have so many hours in the day and when you don’t have enough free time, it becomes a mental illness too.

You have to make sacrifices like not attending your kid’s sports activities. It eats you up inside. Time passes faster than it normally would. Your nervous system feels unstable and you don’t know why.

A big part of the solution is money.

When you have more money you can buy back time. You can pay people to do things that save you time. You can make decisions without obsessing over how much money they cost. You can take weeks, months, or years off income-producing work.

Money gives you options.

Few people talk about that. People would rather show the material possessions they can buy with money instead of the positive psychology investments you can make that most people can’t see.

You can’t think straight when you haven’t figured out the money problem

A guy I worked with last year is a good example.

Right before we met his wife divorced him. Then he lost his home and had to sleep in his car in the middle of San Francisco. I was trying to help him figure out his product idea. Problem was the money issues had become so big he couldn’t think straight.

The conversations about product I had with him were nice to have. He had nowhere to shower and couldn’t afford food. Until he solved the money problem nothing else mattered. And he couldn’t focus or feel any level of calmness.

Most people aren’t sleeping in a car. But the psychological state isn’t as far away as they think. Society loves to say money is evil or to gaslight people into ignoring the money problem.

Instead of solving the money problem, we’re taught to eat the rich and fling poo at trillionaires and billionaires. That robs us of our personal power.

When you solve the basics of financial security, and later, financial freedom, you can suddenly think clearly. You have the bandwidth to zoom out, consume some stoic philosophy, and come up with new ideas in a more relaxed environment.

Your best thinking happens when you’ve solved the money equation, not before. This is when your creativity & imagination come alive and you do the best work of your life.

“Money doesn’t make you happy.”

No sh*t.

This is how some people will respond to this essay in the comments. They’ll think they’re Harvard-smart and expect a round of applause. So let me address it.

Money doesn’t make you happy, of course. At the same time, without money you can’t function in society and have your basic needs met.

So money doesn’t make you happy, but without money you are guaranteed to become unhappy because you’ll get stuck on a hamster wheel working a job you hate and having very little free time. Those downsides guarantee your life contains no pleasure.

Reframe: you’ll be unhappy if money is a problem.

So which comes first? Neither. It’s a loop. Financial stress hijacks the brain that would otherwise solve the financial problem.

That’s why willpower doesn’t work here — you can’t out-hustle a dysregulated nervous system. You have to break the loop at the psychological end, because that’s the only end you have leverage on today.

Here’s how to reprogram your money brain

This is controversial to say, but I believe generating any form of wealth is entirely a mental game. If you think like sh*t there’s no way you’ll ever generate any real money, unless you have access to a trust fund or daddy is rich.

Once you master your mind you can literally do anything in life, including making however much money you want to make.

It’s called limitless thinking.

You only see opportunities instead of problems. And you’re stupid enough to believe you’ll find a way to access those opportunities and profit off them.

These are the basic steps to reprogram your money mind:

1. If you tell yourself you’re going to always be poor, you’re going to always be poor.

What you speak in your head becomes your reality.

The financial blocker doesn’t start with ideas of how to make money. It starts with whether you’re telling yourself making more money is even possible. Most of us don’t want to admit it, but we have this quiet voice in our head that sabotages every opportunity to make money.

It tells us we’re not good enough, or people will laugh, or we’re being cringe or salesy… and it’s entirely full of sh*t. If you don’t recognize this beast and silence it, financial opportunities will be dead before you’ve even started.

Making real money is a series of experiments. Some will fail, some will cause you to be rejected, and some may even attract massive laughter (perhaps like this essay will for me). But never trying is a form of financial repression.

Ignore the voice in your head that says you’re not enough. Replace it with the voice of “I’m trying stuff out and whatever happens, happens, amigo.”

2. Let the evidence make your financial future undeniable

Your brain looks for evidence to help form stories.

Most people try to think their way to their ideal financial future through plans, supposed business strategies, income stream ideas, and drowning in information.

This approach gets you nowhere.

Through neuroplasticity and brain science there’s another way. S.M. brain coach explains:

So… in simple terms you must prove you can make more money. Evidence creates more confidence. It’s why focusing on landing one client or making your first $1000 online is way smarter than having grand plans that involve no action.

When I made $70K a month outside of my job, it became undeniable that I could be an entrepreneur, even though I didn’t believe it in my own mind.

3. Remove this hidden blocker

I remember working with this guy who had 2M Youtube subscribers for his music reactions channel and he couldn’t even make $1000 a month. I wanted to help him. He wanted me to help him.

But I couldn’t help him.

I damn well tried, but this guy had a massive ego and wouldn’t get out of his own way. He was entitled, didn’t listen to feedback, and refused to change his business model to sell something that actually solved a real problem.

He thought he was famous when the truth was his channel was dying and most of his Youtube views were the result of other people’s music. If you let your ego run your financial life, you won’t change.

You’ll hold onto the past, and you’ll think you’re too good to do hard things. You’ll expect people to pay you without doing anything helpful for them in return. And you’ll rely on stupid business models like ad revenue share that you have no control over and are designed to pay you pennies.

The wealthiest people are the most humble about their financial life. You must be too.

4. Dare to explore this dark part of your psyche

Limiting beliefs are the real financial poison in your mind.

Problem is it’s hard to see your limiting beliefs. You don’t want to admit them, or you will make up excuses. Worse, you’ll blame friends, family, your country, or your upbringing for these limitations.

A little exercise I’ve done many times helps you see your financial limiting beliefs. Ask yourself these 3 questions and write detailed answers down in a blank google doc:

• What do I believe about money? (Hold nothing back)

• What if I believed something different? (Dare to dream)

• Hardest question: What would I have to believe to be wealthy? (Imagine someone has a gun to your head and you must speak the truth)

In question one, assuming you don’t BS yourself, you’ll quickly see your money beliefs. The trick is to compare those beliefs to financially successful people you look up to. Notice the gap? It’s uncomfortable when you do but that’s the opportunity.

When I did this exercise I noticed I would drive 30 minutes to buy cheaper gasoline for my car when people I looked up to would never dare do that because their time was too valuable. I felt stupid at the time, but I also felt empowered.

What you believe about money determines your financial future.

What this all means for you

You can’t be happy or enjoy life without mastering money.

The spiritual gurus and the romantic artists will have you think otherwise, but they’re lying. Basic human psychology is not worth arguing with.

A stable nervous system needs a stable income that is large enough to give you free time, create some savings, and allow you to invest in assets and your own self-education. Anything less is an unnecessary tragedy.

You cannot escape financial problems with the scarcity mindset that created them, or by trying to cut expenses and save money

The answer to money problems is 1) Reprogram your brain 2) Then make more money.

P.S.

A big announcement today...

As promised, I’ve just opened enrollment for my new workshop — Rich With YouTube.

Showing how I’ve bumped revenue up $1M with less than 4,000 subscribers.

This is not for Influencer wannabes.

It’s for people with an offer who want to land more clients and customers using YouTube.

The smaller the channel, the better.

And yes, this workshop will fill up quickly.

Click here to book your spot for Rich With YouTube now.

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The traditional path means you create nothing.

The average job has zero creativity and imagination. It’s why the average worker lives a life of quiet desperation – too comfortable to change, not uncomfortable enough to do anything about it.

When I worked in consulting, I’d come up with new frameworks or ideas. I’d present them to my boss.

He’d take them to his leadership meeting. Then he’d present them to the broader teams. Then the Powerpoint guys would hack my ideas to death, like murdering a toddler, and present back to me some butchered, tomf*ckery carcass of a deck.

That’s how the traditional world works.

New ideas are risky. Creation is a system. New creations are fed into a big machine that spits them back out as the same old ideas you were trying to innovate on.

This is why workers are bored.

We’ve forgotten how to create. We’re so busy following the rules or optimizing for some promotion or stock payout that’ll probably never happen, while our souls are dying inside because we create nothing.

AI has made it worse. All the boring day-to-day work is being automated which is exposing the lack of creation even more.

You’re born to f*cking create. Life will feel boring until you start creating something.

Why modern life feels boring as hell

People spend the majority of their time looking at a screen.

Or on social media being rage-baited by professional sh*t posters who just use politics and the news to piss people off for attention and to sell their $49 going viral course.

Spare time is spent watching Netflix. People would rather stay home than go outside. The pandem*c taught us to fall in love with comfort. It’s why modern fashion looks like absolute garbage.

I went to the shopping center on the weekend and every second person was wearing pajama pants, Crocs, and some baggy top. Go to a pub or nightclub, and you’ll be even more disappointed at the attire.

The core problem isn’t obvious. What is it? Dopamine.

100s of years ago, the Romans would get the same amount of dopamine in a year that the average person gets in a single day. Modern life has become p*rn.

P*rn started as nude people banging on a screen for pleasure. Then getting attention became p*rn. Then LinkedIn created career p*rn (those 'day in the life at Slack' TikToks where someone does two-tenths of f*ck-all and calls it work).

Then politics became p*rn and reality TV stars had the most to gain (the least brains but the most likely to get elected).

Instagram then supercharged the life p*rn industry with billions of pieces of content that, summed up in one sentence, all said some version of F*ck you, my life is better than yours, you poor pathetic moron.

The final lethal injection was business p*rn which is basically just passive income. We went from timeshare and pyramid-scheme network marketing to “Here’s how I sit on the beach while AI does all my work and makes me $15K a month, you poor pleb.”

All of this life p*rn spikes your dopamine.

Too much dopamine from life p*rn makes everything feel boring, kind of like if you’re high on cocaine all the time, then when you’re sober everything feels boring in comparison (never done coke myself).

Too many dopamine spikes are making modern life feel terribly boring. Most people aren’t qualified in neuroscience to be able to see this pattern, so they live in ignorant bliss as a dopamine junkie without knowing.

Most people aren’t depressed, they’re uncreative

All the boredom leads to depression.

I shouldn’t admit this, but a big chunk of my banking career was nothing more than deep depression that I was too afraid to label as that. But now I’m unhinged and all, I should just admit it.

A lot of depression is secretly a lack of creation.

Therapists have a name for the treatment that works when antidepressants alone don't — behavioral activation. It's a clinical way of saying: go make something happen. Go create.

When you don’t create, it kills your spirit. Part of your humanity is quietly stolen from you. A creative deficit leads to feelings of “Is this all there is?” And that eventually leads to depression. Many depressed people addicted to prescription pills would be better off indulging in acts of creation than numbing their life with legal drugs.

But they don’t know any better. No one talks about the creative crisis caused by modern life. We all just live as if creating zero is normal as long as we get paid.

Getting paid isn’t enough though.

$200K a year feels like $100K a year after a few weeks.

If all you do is exist and never take the plunge back into creation, you will feel this sadness I’m describing and have a man in a white coat describe it as depression.

Don’t you dare ignore your creative calling any longer.

Your work is a form of radical
self-expression

Yet most people express nothing through their work.

This is why I’ve encouraged millions of people to write online. Not for fame, bikini babes, or head jobs – but as an act of expression. When we express we create. That act of creation fills a void in our lives that many of us have been starved of for decades.

Your expression transcends you too.

Your family and friends get to witness that creation. In extreme cases, it can even become your legacy. That’s worth fighting for, isn’t it?

Your creations express what you believe in too. They help people understand you. They allow you to create missions and share a worldview. That might seem small, but trust me, it’s absolutely addictive once you experience it.

Because too often in modern life we hide our true beliefs for fear of judgment. Or we let an employer limit our free speech out of fear we might get canceled or fired.

All of us have wild ideas we must let out into the world, or those same ideas destroy us from the inside.

A 14-year-old screwed the entire TV industry

In 1921, a 14-year-old named Philo Farnsworth is dragging a plow across a potato field in Idaho. Back and forth. Line by line.

The most mind-numbing chore on Earth.

Except this kid had been reading science magazines he found in an attic, and as he stared at the rows of dirt he’d carved into the field, his brain did something yours can do too: it made something out of the boredom.

The boy asked himself, what if you could paint a moving picture the same way you plow a field — one line at a time, but with electrons, too fast for the eye to catch?

He had no money. No degree. No lab. No permission. He was 14.

6 years later, in a bare San Francisco room, he transmitted the first electronic television image in history — beating the biggest corporations and the most credentialed engineers on the planet.

A farmhand with an idea f*cked the entire industry.

Every farmhand for a 1000 years had stared at those same rows in a field and felt nothing but tired. The difference wasn’t the field.

It was a mind that wanted to create instead of just endure.

And here’s the part that should haunt you. Farnsworth cured his own boredom by inventing the screen. Then he watched it turn everyone else into passive, glazed-over consumers. And he was so disgusted he banned his own kids from watching TV.

The creator built the thing. The consumers got addicted to it. Same object. Two completely different lives.

Creation is wealth generation

Society has taken a dark path.

Those who create are being torn down by those who create nothing. Everyone is equal, except mother nature proves nothing is equal. When you create things, you generate value. If you do that for long enough, you’ll build some form of wealth.

The opposite is true too.

If you create nothing, you will create very little value and your bank account will reflect that. When you don’t create anything you get stuck in a Hunger Games form of survival, where every day feels like you’re barely breathing.

You cannot consume your way out of this darkness, you can only create your way out.

Creation is value. Creation is money. So you must create to survive and later thrive. No one wants to hear this because deep down it’s obvious. But we forget how powerful the act of creation is because corporate culture and herd mentality of modern sheeple people in society conveniently allow us to forget.

Don’t you dare forget. Create… or drown in consumption.

There are no freaking rules

Creation used to be full of gatekeepers.

I should know. I started my career in music. Absolute suck-off-fest. Talent meant absolutely nothing. The best performers had PR, management, and a label behind them. The best music without these things went nowhere.

But no one told me that. I learned the hard way.

Thankfully, society has corrected itself. Technology has removed every single barrier. This is why traditional media and platforms like Medium have seen millions of users disappear for more open alternatives like Substack.

No one wants to ask an editor, publication, or platform for help reaching an audience. They just want the work to speak for itself. If it’s good, people will consume it. If it’s not, the only opportunity is to get better which is completely in your control.

When rules are applied to creation, you end up with AI slop.

So much AI-generated content is lifeless because AI is taught to follow rules. AI doesn’t want to piss you off or offend you so everything it creates is safe. That’s the real problem few people talk about.

Real art is dangerous. It’s unconventional, irrational, and pushes boundaries.

AI can’t do any of this. All it can do is ask me 1000 times why I didn’t reveal more details of the story I told about not wanting to live. It doesn’t understand that not every story is complete, not every essay ends on a succinct takeaway, not every opinion needs a Harvard research paper to back up the advice.

You can just create and the very act of creation is enough. Humans can interpret the creation however they want. They can take away some parts and leave others.

True art is deeply imperfect.

Rules cannot exist for art to do its job.

“Creative types” don’t exist

The label is an excuse for everyone who opted out.

We’re born to be creative. It’s not a personality type, but a decision you make if you want to live the good life and not be painfully bored every day.

Creativity and imagination create free energy inside your mind. They feed into everything you do and how you interact with others.

The people who operate at higher states of consciousness or are simply infectious to be around have secretly mastered creativity. They don't say it — either because they think it's obvious, or because they've never noticed they're doing it.

Act like you’re a creative type because you are. And if you’re not, not to sound drastic, but it’s easier for AI to replace you. Creativity is the new moat – it’s the only advantage in a new world where hard work accounts for nothing.

Become a weirdo again

The antidote to a lack of creation is to create again.

It’s how you heal from mainstream society and painful corporate culture that has made everything boring and allowed millions of humans to write “kind regards” and “let’s circle back” in emails like a pitiful corporate drone.

To create is to be weird. It’s not normal. Most people are called consumers. That’s ironically even what the government calls us. To create is to embrace your weird. It’s to be a little artsy. It’s to see opinions like a**holes – everyone has one, so what.

When you create, normies think you’ve lost the plot or they say, “Timbo, you’ve changed, man.” Damn straight. Change is the only way to heal. Unless you start to rapidly become creative again the consequences are dire. Again, because of AI.

Work that creates boredom or is mind-numbing to complete can be done by robots 24/7 for free without any complaints, sickness, or need for a holiday.

It’s obvious where the world is going.

This is your limited window of opportunity to re-enter the world of creativity before it’s too late.

This is what it all means for you

Let’s get down to action or this all becomes one big wankfest.

What you can do from here is…. drum roll… create. If you feel stuck, the easiest way I know how is to start writing publicly.

If you’ve got other creative goals, then do those. But make sure every day you are creating things and putting them out into the world to see what comes back.

Make creativity your #1 priority.

Stop f*cking putting it off. Stop saying “One day.” Stop waiting for the chaos to calm down (it won’t). Just create. Every damn day like your life depends on it (because it does, amigo, trust me).

The things you create make you come alive. They stop you from feeling bored. They cure any depression you might be experiencing. And they take you out of the quiet financial desperation millions of people suffer through.

Creation is transcendence. It’s one of the greatest feelings in the world, and I want you to experience it every day. Get addicted. Become obsessed. Go all in. Create.

P.S.

Fresh YouTube video just dropped about a strategy with a 4,000% ROI.

That is not a typo.

That’s a 40x return... as in, put $1 in, get $40 out.

And it’s a tactic so boring most people ignore it.

Click here to get a breakdown of the strategy

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Everyone talks about how the solution to money problems is to make more money.

The opposite of this idea is to stop being cheap. Being cheap unconsciously screws up your life in spectacular ways. And none of us is immune. Not even you.

To stop being cheap sounds easy. It’s not because it’s psychological. But if you can overcome this mental demon, you will go on to make ungodly amounts of money.

Here’s how I overcame being cheap (and have helped others do the same).

The simple philosophy of being cheap

Your mind tells you to be cheap because it’s a survival mechanism.

If you run out of money, your survival is at risk. Being homeless is difficult and so is begging for food. So it makes sense that our 100,000-year-old brains want to protect us from this tragedy out of love.

I wouldn’t wish being homeless on my worst enemy.

My family faced this reality several times when I was a kid. And one of my good friends has been homeless for ~5 years while raising two children. Anyone who underestimates this reality is deeply mistaken.

While your brain loves to jump to worst-case financial scenarios, most of them are fantasies that will never play out.

When you focus too much on your survival you assume everyone is out to rob you. You become overly skeptical. You say “That sounds like a pyramid scheme.” And you may become so toxic you start blaming rich people for your problems, which is a slippery slope into hell on Earth.

At its core, being cheap seems smart.

“If I pay less for this thing, then I will have more money to spend on other things.” What no one talks about, though, is the more something costs you, the more you value it—and the more likely you are to use it fully.

Take consulting as an example. I’ve been doing it for 12 years. Without a doubt, the most successful people I’ve worked with have coincidentally also spent the most money with me. Bar none. It sounds wild to say that, but the data doesn’t lie.

It’s not because I’m great. It’s because money focuses the mind.

It makes you do the work and get the help you need, so you can justify the investment. In that new frame of mind, you bizarrely want things to cost more, not less, because that’s how you get the most out of spending the money.

Being cheap secretly pisses people off

I used to be a hard-nosed negotiator.

I learned this tactic by watching the TV show American Pickers like a junkie. I applied their way of life to every purchase I made.

A lot of things went wrong.

People ghosted me. I got yelled at when I tried to negotiate. I got banned from groups, masterminds, and conferences. For a while, I couldn’t figure out why. Then I learned the hard way.

When you’re cheap, nobody likes you.

You become a giant pain in the ass that everyone just wants to get the hell away from. Being cheap fools you into thinking it helps your survival, but at the same time, it takes money away from someone else who is also trying to survive.

The best opportunities in life have a premium price tag and a screening process.

There is likely an application. You’ll likely be judged. And only the right people will get access. Acting cheap guarantees you’re excluded.

“A bad psychological relationship with money will absolutely ruin your f*cking life”

(Dan Koe)

The money game is psychological.

It’s why the best-selling money book of the last decade is called “The Psychology of Money.” You don’t make a lot of money by working hard or getting lucky. You get wealthy based on your relationship with money.

I had a bad relationship with money for a long time. My family has been bankrupt multiple times and my 104 year old grandma grew up in The Great Depression. She turned her wedding dress into clothes for my mother because times got so tough.

She accidentally taught me to have a bad relationship with money.

She saved every dollar. She saw everything as an expense to avoid. She never had any real fun. She never went on an airplane in 104 years. She never even left Melbourne, Australia. She died at 104 with regrets.

I miss her deeply.

On the opposite side, it wasn’t all bad. She knitted clothes for children in Africa for multiple decades. She won several awards for it.

This demonstrates that people’s psychological relationship with money is complicated.

On the one hand, she had an incredible scarcity mindset. On the other hand, she had no issue giving away time and money to make clothes for people in extreme poverty.

If you don’t sort out your relationship with money, it’ll ruin you. I found it hard. I went to therapy which helped. And I lost a lot of money multiple times which helped retrain my brain. I’m now a cheapskate in remission.

How you think about money determines how much money you’ll have.

Don’t you dare become obsessed with the price

When you sell something expensive the common sales advice is to avoid telling people how much it costs until you speak with them 1-1.

This seems deceptive on the surface. It can even seem illogical.

But when you look deeper it makes sense. If a person comes to you for help and jumps straight to “how much does this cost” without any context on how you could help them, there’s no way they will buy.

High prices without context scare us.

Before you’re presented with a high price, you need to be presented with the outcome and ROI of your investment. Otherwise, the price alone will automatically make your brain shut it down.

There’s never a day in your life, no matter how rich you are, when $100K will sound cheap to you. Expensive purchases always mess us up psychologically by design. I’m going through this right now. I want to buy a new home for my family because the current house is one bedroom short.

I’m looking to spend $2M. There’s never a time when this won’t feel like a face-ripping amount of money. But if that’s what I focus on, then my two daughters won’t have their own bedroom and will suffer because of my scarcity mindset.

The best way to avoid being cheap is to focus on the ROI and the outcome of an investment – and not the price tag.

Because the price is relative. $50K to get help from a doctor sounds expensive without any context. But $50K to have chemo when you’ve got stage 4 cancer that’ll save your life sounds like the deal of the century.

Believe that everything is going to work in your favor

Now, when I make a financial investment, I assume everything will work in my favor. There’s a key reason why this works.

I’ve reprogrammed my brain to understand that when I invest money, I am the one in control of whether that investment was a good one. I’ve stopped outsourcing blame to other people for my financial mistakes.

This approach gives you unlimited power to bend the world to your desires.

Trying to get the bargain of the century while looking like an idiot

Asking for discounts is offensive.

Without realizing it, you’re basically telling someone “I don’t value your work.” Or you’re saying “based on your price, I think you’re dishonest.”

This is a terrible way to live. It makes you look like an idiot. Through the filter of price, you’re basically punching people in the face who are trying to help you.

After decades of looking like an idiot, one idea changed everything for me:

Every time I’m tempted to be cheap, I remind myself of this powerful idea.

A different lens to see the world through that’ll make you a badass

A few years ago, a stranger said something to me that I’ll never forget:

“People are just trying to feed their families. Remember that every time you buy anything.”

Since then I’ve adopted this idea. It’s made me way more compassionate and helped me reconnect with my humanity.

When you stray too far from this idea, you can become a deeply transactional person devoid of all emotion. A robot. A corporate drone who says “kind regards” or “thoughts and prayers” but doesn’t mean it.

One solution I’ve found is to gently tell people about your family when you ask them for money or to take action.

For example, I tell people that when they are kind enough to leave me a testimonial, it really helps my family business which is how I feed my two daughters. Every time I say this it completely changes how someone responds.

Instead of them believing they don’t have time, they now see a testimonial as part of a higher purpose. And I like showing up like this because it ties nicely to my daddy-first approach to modern freedom and business. Try this yourself.

One area to invest insane amounts of money in

Having a budget in each area of life is probably a good idea.

There’s one area this can trip you up though, and that’s investing in new skills and self-learning. Your skills determine your income. If you’re cheap in this area, you’ll limit your income without even realizing it.

I’ve spent $500K+ on my skills over the last few years. I credit this one financial decision for most of my successes online.

Yet this is not the norm.

Most people will still see acquiring new skills as an expense, except, bizarrely, the average person doesn’t blink twice when it comes to investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into a university degree which they have to go into debt for with zero promises of results, a job, or a business after they graduate.

Being cheap with self-education guarantees you’ll be broke.

The weirdest money idea you’ll ever come across

Let’s finish here.

I did the opposite of being frugal with money the last few years. I spent money like it didn’t really matter. I didn’t obsess over every purchase. And I assumed things would work out when I paid people.

Bizarrely, when you live like this, money finds its way back to you. I can’t quite explain why. Maybe it’s woo-woo. My best guess is that when money leaves your bank account, you have the motivation to help it come back again.

I also think part of it has to do with how you show up in the world. If you show up as a helpful person who inspires others and is generous with their skills, the right people will find ways to pay you and the wrong ones won’t.

People who operate from abundance and are generous… have an aura. This helps you attract more money into your life.

Bottom line: Stop being cheap. Start living as if you’re already wealthy.

P.S.

Just dropped a new YouTube video to celebrate some breaking news.

The news is pretty wild.

It’s actually the opposite of what most people are claiming is “truth” these days about digital business owners.

Then, of course, I’ll tell you how to take advantage.

Watch: If I Wanted to Make $100K/Month in 2026, This Is What I’d Do (It’s Not a Flywheel or a Funnel)

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Modern society has quietly changed forever.

The changes are drastic and impact every one of us. And I don’t think most people have caught up with it yet. One man has nailed the narrative on where society is heading: Dan Koe.

A few years ago, he came out of nowhere. He’d been reading essays on platforms like Medium and decided to give writing a shot himself on X/Twitter.

Dan quickly grew a cult following.

I initially thought he was a gym bro until I saw something deeper. People dismissed him as another self-improvement guy but they missed something. Dan looks at the world more from a philosophical lens rather than a self-improvement one. His Substack is regularly at the top of the philosophy best-sellers list which is proof.

He believes hoarding information is dead. He believes intellectualism is dead.

He believes the modern 9-5 job is more of a one-person business than a safe job to bank on until retirement at 65. I believe he’s bang on. Dan has never published his rules for life.

I spent the last 3 years taking detailed notes of everything he’s ever written.

His rules for life appear repeatedly throughout his work. Once you see them, your life will never look the same again. And these rules will explain why most people follow the traditional path and end up in a world of pain without even realizing it.

Rule #1 – You only need 1 hour a day in a flow state

Most people think they need huge blocks of time to achieve a goal.

So they delay taking action until a future moment when it’s the right time. But it’s never the right time because new versions of chaos will always enter your life.

Dan presented another way to view time:

All you need is 1 hour a day of focused work. After a year that equals 365 hours. That small habit will get you more progress.

This best-selling book echoed the same idea

James Clear wrote the book Atomic Habits.

The premise is unless your goal is a daily habit, it’s bullsh*t. What James missed is he didn’t outline how small the daily commitment had to be. Dan filled the gap in by suggesting one hour.

One hour works because before and after work most people have an hour if they are serious and are willing to give up some Netflix time.

Insight:

Stop delaying your goals. Work on them for one hour a day and aim to create a year-long streak. Once the habit is automated, you can then focus your attention on making sure the action you take leads to daily iteration.

Rule #2 – Walk the world like an ancient philosopher

Some days I think Dan Koe is a reincarnation of Marcus Aurelius.

They got similar haircuts too. It feels like Dan Koe came to us in a time machine from the Roman Empire era. There aren’t many photos of Dan online either.

Even more weird: Dan Koe is not his real name. It’s a nickname.

Just like the Romans, Dan suggests that walking is one of the greatest activities you can do every day. It’s when he says he gets peak creativity.

Neuroscience backs up the power of walking

Neuroscientist Dr Dominic Ng says the real problem of modern life is there are no gaps in stimulation. People have background noise or headphones removing all the silence in their life. He suggests taking one silent walk a week to see the difference.

Too much input leads to sh*tty output.

Insight:

Walking is a form of meditation.

The constant movement gets the mind moving and it helps you to think. It also gets you out in nature which resets the mind and brings about new clarity.

If you’re lacking creativity, you desperately need to walk more in nature.

Rule #3 – Develop future-proof skills

The internet is obsessed with skills that directly make money – copywriting, AI, illustrating, UX, etc.

Dan has a different view. He says you must develop skills for the new economy, one where AI is more intelligent and memorization is extinct.

Develop these skills:

• Taste

• Iteration

• Charisma

• Persuasion

• Persistence

• Metacognition

• Critical thinking

• Sitting with discomfort

• Articulating what you believe and why

• Changing your beliefs when presented with new information

You can’t buy a course or watch a Youtube video from a guru to learn these. They are skills developed through ruthless execution and daily experiments.

Because nobody talks about these skills (they’re not s*xy), it gives you a massive advantage in the digital economy.

George Mack says skills aren’t enough without doing this

When people try to learn new skills, they fall for the 10,000-hour rule.

“If I just work hard, then I’ll get what I want.”

Writer George Mack points out this thinking is flawed. If all it took was 10,000 hours to learn a new skill, we’d all be world class speakers giving Les Brown motivational talks to stadiums.

The reason we’re not all world-class speakers is we never listen to ourselves speak. Here’s the formula George suggests:

Feedback helps you iterate. It helps you avoid letting your ego tell you that you’re better than you really are. And the feedback leads to faster iteration.

Insight:

Stop obsessing over degrees, certifications, people-pleasing, and asking gatekeepers for permission. Let your execution and work speak for itself.

Focus on learning through experimentation, not on seeking approval. And build intangible skills most people are avoiding.

Rule #4 – You must only have one priority

The default path is to have goals, to-do lists, and checkboxes.

Dan advocates for a radically different approach. When you have too many priorities, you water down your effort, energy, and focus – so the results you produce are watered down and you end up frustrated.

If you want to achieve anything worthwhile in life, it must become your top priority, and you must erase all other priorities.

Trying to do everything leads to doing nothing.

A hard truth

Having a priority isn’t enough.

The threshold to achieving your one big goal is higher than your brain believes it is, which means you will have to suffer more than you expect. It’ll feel like stress and exhaustion to you on the inside, and to the outside world it will look like luck or results. This is the way.

Your moat is no longer intelligence. It’s ruthless focus, pain, suffering, and effort.

Insight:

Remove all the things getting in the way of your one true priority. Lock in for the next year on a single goal and watch it change your life.

Rule #5 – You must be delusional (or you’ll be mediocre)

Fear and doubt stop most people from taking action.

Instead of making a decision, they make no decision at all and just lie to themselves by saying “I’ll relook at this in 6 months when the current chaos is gone.” They never do. They sh*t all over their life with this mindset.

Dan says that doubt sounds logical and reasonable when it enters our mind. It presents compelling evidence and rational roadblocks that appear to save your life.

But if you listen to this voice enough times, it’ll lead you to stagnation followed by regrets of what you could have, should have done.

Being realistic is a trap. It leads to the default path you’re trying to escape.

Your worst fears are that you’ll fail at your goal. But you’ll learn more from failure than you will from standing still trying to avoid the downsides and letting fear run your life like a drunk driver.

The antidote from a doctor

Dr Julie Garner thinks obsession and self-belief lead to you being called delusional.

None of us start out as the greatest though, so to become great, you must have extreme self-belief when nobody else believes. Eventually, the market will catch up to your level of self-belief.

An unhealthy level of delusion makes you persist, even after a string of rejections and failures. The biggest sin isn’t making a wrong move. It’s giving up too soon before your effort has produced meaningful results.

Insight:

Redefine your view of what’s realistic.

Follow people who force you to think bigger than your current life. Stay locked into a goal longer than you ever have before. Adopt the mindset “I will make this work” instead of hoping it’s going to work.

Rule #6 – Let self-improvement take over your life in an unhealthy way

Self-improvement is done to death.

The industry promised the world… but delivered mostly empty dreams. Self-improvement is now out of fashion. Self-help books are on the decline.

Frankly, good.

When an idea goes out of fashion that’s the best time to adopt it. Dan’s philosophy is that self-improvement is a gateway drug. Once you master the fundamentals, it bleeds into every area of your life.

Entrepreneurship is the most extreme version of self-improvement there is. Dan says if the modern business is just a system, it’s something you have control over to optimize. The foundation of a successful business is mindset.

If the person running the business thinks like sh*t, their revenue will reflect it. But if they adopt the cliché basics of self-improvement, it’s pretty straightforward to iterate your way to high profits and plenty of freedom.

Life is a video game with cheat codes

Writer Nicolas Cole said something that broke my brain.

He shared that he played the World of Warcraft video game professionally for 4 years and became a top-ranked player as a teenager. Then he spent 8 years training as a bodybuilder and went from the skinny kid to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Then he learned how to rap by recording 150+ rap songs and releasing some of them.

The whole time he played classical piano at an elite level for 18 years.

This is a pattern of high achievers. Many high performers, including me, played video games when we were younger. We took the skill and mindset to other pursuits, and it became a superpower.

Becoming great at one video game involves:

• Hanging out with the best players

• Playing the game on hard mode

• Testing your skills at an elite level against other players

• Spending too many hours playing (people tell you it’s unhealthy)

• Being completely obsessed with the game and letting it consume your life

• Always seeing there’s an even higher level of the game that you can reach

This philosophy, when applied to business, writing, YouTube, or AI, can produce world-class results that bring you freedom and money most people can’t comprehend.

Only gamers understand.

Insight:

The basics of self-improvement – risk-taking, habits, discipline, mindset, motivation – are the foundations of any goal worth achieving. Binge on Jim Rohn or Tony Robbins to learn from them if you haven’t already. Then apply self-improvement to your goal.

Rule #7 – Busyness isn’t a badge of honor

Being busy used to be high status. Now, being busy is stupidity.

No one respects busy people. Not being able to manage your time is a huge failure, and it costs you time with your family. The goal isn’t to do a lot of stuff. It’s to produce results. Results are data that you can make decisions from.

Your ego tells you that you’re busy and it’s good. But when you realize the people you look up to aren’t busy, it shifts your perspective. Stop telling people you’re busy. Start looking at why you’re busy and be determined to change.

Time isn’t found. It’s created.

Author Sahil Bloom points out that when someone says “I don’t have time” what they’re really saying is “this doesn’t matter” or “I don’t understand the ROI.”

Instead of trying to find the time, he suggests we figure out why we want the goal in the first place. Then we decide if the goal matters. Once a goal matters, you force yourself to create time.

Like, if you got diagnosed with cancer tomorrow, you wouldn’t tell the doctor “I don’t have time to get chemo.”

You’d drop everything and find a way to get chemo asap. Unless you’re Steve Jobs and you think you’re invincible, so you drink vegetable juices and work your butt off until it’s too late for chemo, then you die.

Insight:

Why you do what you do is crucial to understand. Unless you know why, you won’t create the time to do it.

Rule #8 – People aren’t ignoring you

Right now, your work may be getting ignored.

Dan made me realize people don’t ignore us because they’re too busy or don’t like us. Our work gets ignored when other people are doing work that is more valuable than our own.

The most valuable people get all the attention. Everybody else gets ignored.

When people ask how they can master social media, I tell them to focus on being the most helpful instead of trying to sell stuff like a used-car salesman.

The case for selling your skills

Selling is just helping.

When you help someone with your skills, it’s an act of service, or at an extreme level, it’s an act of love. When you reframe selling in this way it doesn’t feel salesy or cringe. It feels like doing your life’s work and getting paid for it. That’s a noble cause.

Insight:

Value is measured in helpfulness. Share what you know on social media. Help people for free. Reply to comments. Don’t paywall everything. Be a good human.

Rule #9 – Decrease the time between idea and execution

The average person struggles in life because they move at a snail’s pace.

They overthink everything and they live in permanent indecision. The antidote is speed. Dan says when you have an idea you should take the first action as fast as possible. Even if it’s only a small step, it doesn’t matter. What’s crucial is speed.

In a world where I can spin up an army of Claude bots and execute on an idea as soon as I think of it, you must be better. The bar for excellence has been raised. Speed is rewarded. Being a sloth bear is penalized harshly with poverty and layoffs.

If an idea pops into your head today, ask yourself, “What’s the smallest action I can take on this right now?”

A counter-intuitive truth

When you move fast you will fail and get rejected more often.

This creates a new problem. The cheat code is to shorten the time between the failure and the reset. This is called your recovery speed. For example, I had $1.2M stolen from my digital wallet. The time between losing the money and beginning to make it back again was about 48 hours. Shortly after, I made $6M off the back of that failure.

You’re guaranteed to fail when you move fast. But how quickly will you get back up when you do? That’s a skill you want to get good at it.

Once a failure has happened it’s in the past. You can’t change it. Therefore, the only thing in your control is to take a new, different action right now to change the future – or you’ll stay trapped in the past.

Insight:

Increase your recovery time. Decrease the time you dwell on the loss.

Rule #10 – Shamelessly self-promote your work

Self-promotion seems like a trap.

It feels like bragging which feels off to most people. If you break down what self-promotion is, it’s just sales and marketing. People avoid sales and marketing because they think it’s desperate or cringe and that hurts their fragile ego.

What Dan made me realize is when you avoid sales and marketing, you automatically (without realizing it), outsource sales and marketing to a 9-5 job.

Because when you can do sales and marketing, you don’t need a company logo or leads. You can do that on your own. That means you can take your skills and sell them to the open market for more money instead of being underpaid and sitting in an office cubicle.

Dan says no one will pay you if they have no idea who you are. It makes sense if you sit with that idea for a while. So unless you show up in google or one of the big AI platforms, you won’t be getting paid for your skills.

The only way to get around this problem is to use social media to build a small presence and be known for your skills. If you want to be a private person, you can by using a nickname like Dan Koe did.

But you can’t avoid sales and marketing if you want modern freedom.

Insight:

Self-promote like your life depends on it because it does. Document your journey, share your worldview, share your beliefs, and show people how to solve problems.

The Unpleasant Conclusion

A lot of what Dan shares isn’t what people want to hear.

He goes viral and has a cult following because he shares counterintuitive truths that, once they enter your mind, you can’t stop thinking about them. His work is like a virus which is why it works and is hard to replicate.

Dan forces us to confront the parts of ourselves that we’ve been avoiding.

Because the person we lie to the most is ourselves.

Until you break the cycle with a pattern interrupt, you won’t change, which means nothing will change. And you’ll keep doing the same thing repeatedly, hoping for a different result which is the definition of insanity.

You’re the main problem, which means the solution is simple and within your control, but only if you lower your ego and are willing to change.

The deepest transformation doesn’t happen from consuming more information. It happens from an uncomfortable level of execution that produces negative feelings along the way that you must get used to.

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Retiring by 35 seems totally unrealistic.

But no one ever told me that as a teenager. My brother and I started building businesses together when I was 16. We both wanted to retire early. That was our entire life goal, and we talked about it often.

We nearly retired when I was 26. But not quite.

My brother eventually retired at 32 doing his own thing. I retired at 34. That’s not a flex because I know you don’t give a sh*t. I share it because the nuance behind the headline will completely change your life.

Retiring early isn’t what you think it is

Retirement is one of the most confusing words in human history.

You were raised to believe by society that retirement equals working like a dog doing work you mostly hate (but pretended to like) until you’re 65. Then doing nothing after you turn 65 and driving around in a caravan and relaxing.

The first step to retiring early is to change your definition of what retirement is.

My brother and I chose an unusual definition of retirement. We were raised in an odd way. Our parents were unconventional in every sense. Our dad worked about 3 hours a day since I was born, and he raised us.

Other parents used to give us sh*t and say our dad was more like a mother. They used to make all sorts of gender-related jokes about him, saying he was a man dressing as a woman and doing housework like a little b*tch.

Our family wasn’t rich, though.

Our parents believed that extreme wealth was silly and having free time was the ultimate flex of true wealth. That turned into our dad working 3 hours a day. The rest of the time he’d hang out with us, smoke a pipe, and read philosophy books.

As my brother and I reached adulthood, we were accidentally molded by this lifestyle our dad lived and that allowed him to drive us wherever we wanted to go.

We decided our definition of retirement was to quit doing work we didn’t enjoy as soon as possible. The second part was that we wouldn’t get told what to do by a boss. And the third part was that we would still work for ourselves, but retirement meant making a certain amount of money would no longer be our goal. When those three criteria were met, we would have retired.

As it turns out, we achieved our definition of retirement quite early. We could have got there by 25 years old if we’d been a little less immature, but everything is f*cking easy in hindsight.

What it means to build wealth

Most people in the old economy think of wealth as investing some money and being patient for a few decades. Or being an entrepreneur and taking wildly absurd risks.

In the new digital economy, this is no longer the case. There isn’t one path anymore.

Create digital assets

If you don’t show up in AI search or in google, you’re invisible.

That means you’ll be applying (asking for permission) to get opportunities. This is the equivalent of slavery and you will be underpaid, used, and abused. Just ask anyone who’s tried to break into Hollywood.

The pushback I get on this one is some version of “I don’t want to be on social media blah, blah, blah.” When people can’t find you online, you look like a coward.

Cowards don’t get opportunities.

They just sit in silence for decades, hoping and praying someone will discover them. How do I know? I was a coward for 10+ years.

The reason people don’t become visible online is because they make it all about themselves and how they look. And they think people care about them when they don’t. If you die tomorrow, your family will think about you 99% less within 4 weeks.

Sooo… you must build digital assets – a portfolio of work, social media profiles, an email list, testimonials, and case studies, etc. “I’m a nice guy” or “I have this qualification” or “I worked as X for 10 years” don’t cut it anymore.

AI wipes out all of the “trust me” and replaces it with “prove it or f*ck off.”

Become a radical self-learner that pisses off Harvard types

People think they self-learn.

But they lie to themselves. Self-learning is no longer about consuming information – that’s not learning. Self-learning is valuing execution that creates wisdom.

Consuming information has been replaced with new skills.

Writer Dan Koe says the new high value skills are agency, taste, persuasion, persistence, and iteration.

He says the trouble is you can’t go watch a bunch of Youtube videos to learn them. You can only learn them through execution.

Being an experience-led self-learner is crucial. You don’t magically make a lot of money by finding the right opportunity. No. You iterate your way to wealth by starting basic and treating life like a video game, where the only goal is to level up.

Get around stupidly rich people who fart loudly

I recently paid $32,000 to join a mastermind.

Within 5 minutes I had buyer’s remorse. I couldn’t stomach it – the investment felt more like an expense. Then I jumped on one Zoom call with the other members. The first person I met on the call was making $1M+ a month by himself with no team.

It broke my brain.

I then met another gentleman. Seemed like a normal guy. After a few days of chatting in messenger with him, I find out he drives two Ferraris and owns a yacht worth more than most people make in their lifetime.

A week later I was looking for a new accountant. My current one felt out of touch, slow, and like he wasn’t adding value. I met a new accountant. Same age as me. He was worth tens of millions of dollars. We started hanging out. I met him at his office.

In one meeting, he shared with me how the richest families generate wealth through commercial property.

It once again broke my brain.

In a handful of weeks, my entire view of the world changed. All because I got around people far wealthier and more successful than I am. It sounds cliché as hell, but getting around the right people literally makes you money.

If your entire network is made up of people with a scarcity mindset, you won’t become wealthier no matter how hard you try.

The cheat code is just to pay to get around the right people through private groups and masterminds. Most people won’t, though, so that’s an advantage for you if you buck the trend.

Hoard financial assets like you’re King Charles

I didn’t want to go here. But I must.

There’s no way you can talk about building wealth without talking about owning assets and investing. Yes, it makes me sound like old man Warren Buffett, but there’s no other path to wealth without ownership.

Someone once explained to me that financial assets are delayed consumption. You store the value from your work in an asset, so that in the future you can sell that asset to redeem the money and spend it on food, shelter, and living.

If you don’t own assets, then you end up either 1) not storing any money at all 2) or storing money in bad ways, like a bank account.

The main skills to develop here are:

1. Understand how the financial system works

2. Understand what assets to own and how much money to put in each (asset allocation)

I forced myself to read 100s of finance books early in my career to ensure I had a basic understanding of the economy. Then I owned different financial assets to understand the pros and cons through actual experience instead of theory.

When you own, say, shares in Nvidia, it bizarrely forces you to pay attention more because your money is on the line. This is what I did.

Instead of investing money in buying a nice home, fancy car (I drove a Honda Civic for 10 years), designer clothes, or endless holidays to Europe – I focused on investing in financial assets.

At the start, I made peanuts.

But after 10 years of compounding, I’ve made more money from this practice than I could have ever imagined. My investment in Amazon alone did over 300% in gains since I bought it. Even with all the hard work in the world, I could never have made that sort of return for literally a few hours of research and clicking the buy button.

Not everyone is wired to be a sophisticated investor, though.

That’s why, for most people, index funds are the smarter choice. You still need to know what index fund to buy, but it’s ten times easier than trying to figure out what single investment to make from the millions of options available.

Hoard financial assets, instead of trying to impress others and getting into huge debt.

Take calculated risks that give you runny poos

By definition, wealth doesn’t exist without some small risks. True learning doesn’t happen without taking a risk either. Because what is learning? Being willing to change. When you learn, you become a different person.

But change isn’t safe, comfortable, or easy.

Most people fail in life because they refuse to change and just accept their excuses as facts. To access wealth the aim isn’t to be reckless and take stupid risks, which is what mainstream society believes.

The aim is to take calculated risks.

It’s to understand the downsides so you can limit the risk, but to focus on the upside which a lot of the time is exponentially higher. Fastest way to stay in poverty is to focus on all the risks and downsides and try to think through them.

You can’t.

Nothing good ever came out of comfort and a lack of risk-taking. That’s just a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory golden elevator to the pits of financial hell, where one overdue car payment can force you onto the street. No thanks, man.

I once read a quote that said, “Playing it safe isn’t actually safe. You’re just trading the chance of winning for the guarantee of nothing.” That changed how I thought about risk. Most people are guaranteed of nothing in life and they don’t even realize it.

I’m not too proud to say that was me for a long time. But there is a way out, and it’s through taking some calculated risks that make you feel like doing a poo. Yep. Poo.

As author James Altucher once said, walk around and poo your pants once in a while. That’s how you feel what it’s really like to live.

Work smarter with leverage instead of work harder

Working smarter sounds obvious. And it is.

You know you shouldn’t work harder to make more money. Yet here’s where I’ll be real with you for a second. I know this too. Yet I still try to work harder to make more money because it’s our default programming.

The factory worker age taught us to value hard work. It taught us to work harder if we wanted to get ahead. And while we should know better… we don’t. We naturally go back to working hard without even realizing it.

The path out of hard-work-hell is to build leverage.

This idea used to be woo-woo. Only millionaires truly got it. Now with the invention of AI basic leverage is available to all of us. You can outsource some of what you do for $20 a month. Once you have AI leverage you can then look to add leverage from code, outsourcing to humans, building a social media audience, etc.

The goal isn’t to do everything yourself. The goal is to get so good at what you do that you mostly get paid for ideas and thinking while a system takes care of the income-earning tasks.

That creates a whole new conversation.

To get paid for ideas and thinking, you need to become a master in your field.

You need to become so good at what you do your value becomes undeniable. I’ve obsessed over this idea.

When you meet someone who’s incredible at what they do their energy is infectious. When they can prove their mastery to you in a few minutes, it’s so incredibly rare, that you probably start telling people about it without even realizing it.

That’s the power of mastery.

Competition vanishes because it’s so rare. It’s simple to become a master but hard to do because it takes discipline and dedication to pass the threshold of effort needed.

But if you can become a master, you’ll never have to worry about building wealth again. People will be lining up to get your help and pay you. Read that again.

I’ve experienced this firsthand. I’ve obsessed over my field for 12 years. People who’ve experienced it describe me as totally insane.

Last week that resulted in 7000 new leads. It means I get to pick and choose what I do and who I work with because for that 7 days there were 7000 people lining up. Yes, I just sounded like a wanker, but I have no other way to describe it.

Could you not become wealthy if you had 7000 people in 7 days wanting your help? Of course you could.

Choose mastery.

Stay away from the hobby mindset, being passionate, following the conventional path, people pleasing, asking for permission, and anything else that doesn’t force you to apply an insane amount of effort to your goal.

Become debt-free sooner than your mommy and daddy did

People carry enormous debt for too long.

It’s cool for the X/Twitter finance bros to push the idea of getting into debt to buy property and stocks. What they leave out is what debt does to your brain.

It’s hard to feel good when you’ve got loads of debt. All it takes is for the economy to get the flu or an employer to hang some employees to increase profits and you’re suddenly vulnerable.

Being debt-free is modern freedom.

It’s not as fancy… and you may not be as rich – but you buy back peace of mind. And peace of mind feels incredible when you escape constant stress, burnout, and always having to ask permission to take a day off.

Being debt-free sounds easy but it’s not. When you can delay paying for things to some distant future the temptation to indulge is more addictive than heroin. The only solution I’ve found was to stop trying to impress people by buying stuff.

I went even more extreme.

I made it a game to see how much fun I could have without spending a single dollar. I tracked win streaks where I didn’t make any significant purchases.

And I did one more thing that forced me to cop a lot of insults…

I lived with my parents.

People ridiculed me for it. My family made fun of me. And I didn’t care because I did what I had to do. After a while people just stopped talking about it because they couldn’t get a reaction out of me. They saw a grown man living at home and assumed I was a failure.

But I believed a different story.

I believed I was doing something incredibly important with my life and I needed to give myself the financial runway to get there. That belief eventually paid off and the critics turned into fans (as they always do).

If you worry about what everyone thinks, you’ll take on debt to buy stuff that makes you look more successful.

If you forget about what everyone thinks, you’ll have the discipline to make smarter financial decisions and stay away from the crack cocaine that is debt. Choose wisely.

What determines whether you retire at 35 or 65

If I had to put it down to one thing, it’d be this: the amount of money you decide you need to fund your lifestyle.

If wealth feels like a $10M mansion and a Mercedes convertible with 3 kids at private school and a golden retriever named Snuffles, you’ll be working longer and harder than someone like me.

On the flip side, if you decide you don’t need to live some wild Instagram bikini babe life, then you can earn decent money without going overboard and retire earlier.

I got to retire at 34 because I had zero debt, no credit cards, and I rented a student apartment with my girlfriend (now wife). It didn’t take as much money as you might think to leave my old life behind.

But here’s the part I’m not supposed to tell you…

Many people who retire early end up having to come out of retirement because they screw it all up. So me retiring at 34 isn’t the important part. Staying retired is.

That’s why I drive a basic car, live in a modest 1971 single-story house, and why both my daughters will be going to public school which costs $0.

The less money you need, the less you need to earn. And the easier it is to reach retirement and stay there until death.

That’s how you build wealth and retire at 35. It’s not s*xy but it is simple and achievable for most people.

This article is for informational purposes only, it should not be considered financial, tax or legal advice. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.

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There’s a saying in self-help:

Winners are going to f*cking win. It’s the idea that the outcome is predefined. People who think they’re a winner will find a way to win.

On the other side is the famous line from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross with Alec Baldwin. “A loser is a loser is a loser.”

Whether you’re a winner or a loser is already decided based on how you think. If you think like a loser, you’re stuck as a loser and can’t escape.

Winning is different.

To win you must not only think you can win, but you must act like a psycho. Only f*cking psychos win in a world full of normies, sheeple people, and corporate drones that say “kind regards” and “synergy.”

Psychos are weird. They don’t comply with mainstream society because the masses are fat, sick, medicated, and addicted to Netflix p0rn.

Following what everyone else has done is the fastest path to loserville.

Act like a psycho instead.

Just shut up with all the excuses

Winners don’t look for reasons why they can’t.

They’re too stupid to do that. The part of the brain that generates excuses doesn’t exist in a psycho. A winner assumes they can, and then tries desperately like their life depends on it to prove it. That’s smart.

Whatever excuses you have in your head, they’re Bonnie Blue gang bang fantasies, and you’ll end up pregnant with HIV if you listen to them.

It’s never the right time to do anything. You will never NOT feel like an imposter. Fear is oxygen and we’re all feeling it.

You’re not special.

If you can just assume all your excuses are liars stabbing your dreams in the heart and screaming “you’re all gonna die” in a I-Know-What-You-Did-Last-Summer horror movie type of way, you won’t have your dreams murdered.

The outcome is never predefined. Psychos are too dumb for excuses.

Assume most pleasure leads to a dark place full of rag dolls

Some say coffee or nicotine are the modern addictions (grandpa preferred Playboy magazines while sitting on the dunny three times a day).

The real addiction is pleasure.

And people are drowning in it. But now we call pleasure self-care. We do 3 mins of work then scream “I’m stressed” or “this is burnout” or “I need a holiday, mayday.”

Modern culture is as weak as piss.

It’s disgusting. It looks and tastes like a meat pie you found on the dance floor at a strip club after a drunk guy took a dump next to the stripper pole because he couldn’t hold his bowels (I actually witnessed this when I was a DJ).

Acting like a psycho isn’t a weakness. And it’s not being Superman either. It’s realizing that if you don’t work hard at something you care about, nothing will happen, dude.

There’s no way to sugarcoat it.

Every person you respected was a psycho in the sheets and behind closed doors, and did a wild amount of hard work.

Weakness doesn’t just look like self-care. It’s also hidden in popular phrases like passive income, automation, and “an AI agent can do all of that while you go and jerk off to a Star Wars movie.”

Modern p0rn isn’t nude bodies rubbing each other off and having a big “O.” No. It’s the packaging of wealth, health, business, and relationships into clickbait headlines that make people think they can do 5 mins work and become more famous than Britney Spears in the 90s if you just do it baby one more time. Wrong.

One time ain’t enough, chief.

One time is for losers. Passive income is for losers. And easy is for the most stupid people on the planet.

Don’t disgrace your bloodline with this pleasure addiction. Be a psycho.

Do real work. Not the fake work of planning, overthinking, and designing logos on Canva for your fantasy digital product business that’s supposedly going to make $600K a month while you work out and take selfies of your flubber belly that should have been a 6-pack. Nah, bro. Don’t do it.

Psychos don’t crave pleasure.

They crave stress that leads to growth and makes you look like you won the lottery when all you did is avoid the easy life that kills most people’s potential a few years out of exiting their mommy’s vagina.

Hard makes you hard.

Act as if you’re 16 year old Justin Bieber and you gotta be famous by 18

Psychos have a sense of urgency.

They’re pissed off when things take time. When the coffee takes 15 minutes to prepare instead of 2 minutes, they ask “What the hell, man?”

Their impatience is a superpower.

They just won’t wait for anything.

Psychos don’t settle. They don’t give a damn if you’ve gotta drop grandma off at the psych ward at 12PM. They want you to do the thing right now.

They don’t just want you to do it like a Kardashian s*x tape. They want you to do it imperfect. Messed up. Without your make-up all done. In your ripped jeans with dirt on your ass because you sat on filthy grass to eat your dinner.

Perfect seems stupid to a psycho. It’s illogical.

Nothing starts as perfect, not even my newborn baby daughter (okay, perhaps she’s perfect mofos... give her a break. She’s a baby, player.)

Until you realize your funeral could be tomorrow, you never win. You just settle. You delay. You wait for the right time. You live in some fantasy future that doesn’t exist and hijacks every good opportunity you’ve ever had.

The only time is now. Psychos tattoo this on their forehead.

Set a bar so high average people think you’re a psychopath

I wanna be hated by average people. It’s my goal in life.

I want them to trash me in the comments section with their anonymous profile pictures and their “AI Guy” usernames.

Being average should be the #1 goal to avoid in life. It has the worst results imaginable. You fight for every opportunity. You’re forced to eat Happy Meals, you kiss the d*ck of every professor and MBA guy you meet, and you get into debt to impress people who don’t give a f*ck about you.

Psychos don’t care how they look.

They’d rather live in a 1970s apartment and live off beans & rice and ramen, so they can do something worthwhile. They understand that buying dumb stuff leads to debt which makes you a slave.

Instead of living you exist to be a debt slave.

Psychos are happy with very little. They’d rather have the freedom that the masses don’t have. They’d rather round up their herd of friends and fly to Vegas for a bender without asking a people-pleasing boss if they can have fun and get blind drunk on $10 cocktails by the pool.

Social media literally dumbed society down to two pathways. You’re either leading people and they’re following, or you’re being led and are a follower. The latter is what keeps you stuck in the land of average with a finger up your butt. Psychos want to lead.

They don’t care if they only lead 30 people. They just don’t ever want to be a sheep that follows the almighty guru off a cliff into an inevitable death.

Leaders will disappoint you. You’ll find out they ran cults in the 80s, harassed minors, or took steroids when they told you they’re all natural bro.

You’re better off being a psycho and leading.

The paths are endless. And it’s one of the best feelings in the world. Better than getting divorced or telling your boss to go jump in the lake when you quit.

Make life so simple Steve Jobs reincarnates to congratulate you

Steve Jobs was interesting.

He’s a great example of a psycho. He treated his employees worse than 19th-century sweatshop workers. But he was also a genius in launching the iPhone into the world that had only one button.

Nothing outside of Apple mattered to him. And he became a psycho about the most random things. For years, he refused to pay registration on his 500SL Mercedes. He thought it was insufferable.

That’s the thing about psychos. They become psychopathic about the most random things. It’s not the adult baby “passion” most people worship.

It’s pure obsession.

The obsession is illogical. It’s hard to understand from the outside. And even if you’re on the inside with an obsessed person, it still doesn’t make sense.

Obsession can’t be explained.

Only a psycho who is obsessed understands what it’s like and can make sense of it. And that’s something we should celebrate with balloons, confetti, and a Peppa The Pig birthday cake.

Obsession is simplicity in disguise. It’s an operating system so basic that it almost looks like a Lambo MLM scam for normies. The goal of obsession isn’t to do lots of things and get participation trophies like a loser.

It’s to go all in on one goal and do a number of sets and reps that look crazy to anyone on the outside. Doing the same thing over and over makes most people bored.

To the obsessed, repetition is exciting because it’s a chance at greatness.

You don’t get to the Olympics and win a gold medal with complex strategies. Nope. You get there by doing a simple sport like diving and repeating the same basic dives 100s of times until you end up with doing a backflip and entry into the pool that makes a panel of grandpa judges get hard and wet their pants.

Psychos love simple pursuits.

Goals that are so obvious and straightforward that it would seem dumb to pursue with the level of ferocity and intensity they attack them with.

The hidden advantage of acting like a madman

The psycho way of life looks immature at face value.

What’s interesting is it’s the great leveler. You don’t have to be brilliant, impress people, or get into 6-figures of college debt to use it to your advantage.

Few people think and act like a psycho. It means the mythical competition you think you have in your field is an illusion straight out of a UFO book.

AI is making being high IQ dumb. So if AI is going to outsmart us all, then what do we have left? The way we act. That’s the moat that’ll float your boat.

And there are two ways to act:

• Like a stupid normie

• Like a psycho

This essay is a vote for the second. AI can’t compete with a psycho. Replaceable humans working cubicle jobs can’t either.

A psycho can’t be shaken. Their mission is clear. They don’t care what the world thinks or whether it’s possible.

They’re hundreds of layers deep in their own delusion about what’s possible for their life.

You can’t get a psycho to take a chill pill or change course. They don’t know how. It’s illogical for them to slow down to the snail speed that most people operate at. They only know fast. They only know their bloody-minded mission. And they want to succeed in their field more than they want to breathe.

You can’t understand a psycho. Sending them to a psych ward and giving them electroshock treatment doesn’t work. They’re psycho and they know it. They know this is the only way to live.

Sometimes they don’t even know they’re a psycho. That’s how psycho they are.

Thank god normies call them a madman, psycho, or different versions of crazy. Being a psycho is an art form that produces art better than the Mona-Boner-Lisa.

The world needs more psychos. Be one.

PS.

If you’ve now harnessed the “psycho energy,” put it to good use.

Check my latest YouTube video.

All about how to land clients with $0 in ad spend. (Watch now)

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Uncertainty is at an all-time high.

And humans are terrible at dealing with uncertainty. Most people run from it as fast as they can and see it as a bat virus to get vaccinated against. So it makes sense that society is struggling.

Here’s why we’re all so confused right now – and what to do about it.

The way we consume information has changed.

Access to information used to be an advantage. Information was a scarce resource, then it became a commodity. Now, more information does more harm than good.

The more information people consume the more confused they become. Because what is the truth anymore? Does that foreign country really have nuclear weapons or is that propaganda? Is a new bird virus really going to send us into another 2020 pandem1c or is that just silly hysteria?

I don’t care how smart you are, it’s impossible to know the truth anymore about anything. Even with journalism skills, the deliberate spreading of misinformation makes it extremely hard to get the truth.

So when the truth is hard to find you feel a sense of confusion about how the world works. It’s easy to fall for conspiracy theories about a secret Illuminati or a Rockefeller grand plan to kill humans. Maybe it’s true? Who knows. Your googling or AI skills won’t be able to figure it out.

We used to learn the truth through books. But books for the first time in history are under attack. Author Tim Ferriss blew my mind recently when he shared this:

Tim’s book sales are down 57% in 12 months.

Many other non-fiction authors are seeing dramatic drops in book sales. This isn’t a short-term trend. It’s a permanent change that started in 2022 when AI went mainstream.

Tim Ferriss explains:

In 2019, the best interface for answers was a book.

In 2026, millions believe that the best interface is a free chatbot that has read my books.

For those of us who grew up on books and relied on them, we’re now in a new world where that format will play a tiny role in society.

Education has bizarrely changed, too.

Right now I am trying to decide which high school to send my daughters to. When I go for a tour of any school and ask questions, they all seem to be still doing the same old thing: locking kids in classrooms with uniforms to memorize information they mostly won’t use as adults. Then giving them an exam or test to see how much they recall.

As a father, this scares the cr*p out of me.

Kids are being prepared for a world that already doesn’t exist.

That’s extremely confusing to me. I’m unsure what to do. Where I live there are no other options. It’s hard to be a responsible parent in this situation. My kids have to go to school, but in doing so, I will be wasting years of their lives.

The only way I can wrap my brain around this is to hope that by the time they reach high school the world will have caught up and school will have changed. But that’s not a great strategy. Perhaps you can relate.

One thing is for sure: my daughters probably won’t take on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to go to university. That trend is already collapsing faster than people’s patience to read a 10-hour non-fiction book.

So that’s a big relief.

The art of building a business is even more confusing.

The main difference for internet businesses is that the value people are willing to pay for is changing. People used to pay for information or for code in the form of software. But now you can get all of that for free.

Many people have not figured this out yet.

I have because I do it every day and am obsessed with the topic to the point of insanity. The trend is so clear it makes my butt itch thinking about it.

Every business needs a clear AI strategy, like, yesterday. Most people are playing catch up. Thank god I implemented AI on day one or I’d be stuck too. Instead of hiring employees, I’ve hired Claude bots to do the same work.

Replacing humans with bots seems weird but it’s already happening.

Bots don’t complain, they don’t quit, and they can follow instructions. A lot of low-level jobs will have to go because of this and people who depend on them haven’t realized. Only when you own a full-time Claude bot on a Mac Mini do you know this.

At a 5th-grade level, a business solves a problem. Whoever solves the problem the best and the fastest makes all the money.

Tim Ferriss suggests the market for information is dying and the market for transformation will accelerate. So, businesses now need to think in terms of transformation, and not just access to information.

Implementation and execution now come with a premium price tag. Sell that and you’ll make millions in business.

Sell information, code, or some other intangible benefit and you’ll be scraping $5 newsletters subscriptions off the floor while trying to pay rent on an out of town shack with no windows.

Investing is hard too because economics no longer makes sense.

Before 2022, I could make insane amounts of money investing. It’s gotten harder because economics makes less and less sense.

The fundamentals of markets, business, and government are distorted. They’re wildly disconnected from reality. The stock market goes up because the currency it’s priced in is created out of thin air. The value of money has changed because inflation and money printing make every dollar you own buy less and less.

Economic superpowers are being left for dead because of a lack of innovation, too much regulation, and a government full of grandpas aged 80+.

In Australia, where I live, the government banned social media for teenagers. I asked a few teenagers at my gym if it affected them. They laughed.

“Nah, bro, we just use VPNs.”

The government is so dumb they literally don’t understand most of their laws are meaningless. The internet in many countries is replacing government.

Recently, SpaceX listed on the stock exchange. In a few days it went up by 50% when the fundamentals suggested the opposite should have happened. Launching rockets doesn’t make money (yet). But the story is more powerful than the strength of the business so people invest in it.

This is why all the recession predictors and doomers are wrong.

Economics isn’t statistical anymore. It’s science fiction.

And the main characters who can storytell will make all the money while the pessimists are left scratching their hairy ass cracks.

There has to be a solution.

And there is. The only way to face this level of confusion is to adopt an open mind. You must assume these problems will work out in your favor and humanity will be fine. You must learn to deal with extreme uncertainty.

You must practice self-education after hours and focus on implementation and execution, instead of information gathering and procrastination. You must stop fantasizing over the old world of books and adopt AI in every area of your life.

You must realize the confusion will make the world better than it is.

We've been here before. The mainstream adoption of the internet in the 1990s created a similar upheaval. This is that moment again — but with 10x the confusion and 10x the opportunity

You won’t survive this era if you lose your mind. The antidote is to stay calm, focus on what you can control, and iterate every day.

P.S.

When the world is confusing, you need clarity.

You can find some here in my new video

Warning: Don’t watch if you can’t handle blunt honesty.

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We’re living through a focus epidemic.

People are wasting the best hours of the day looking at their phone and not being present. Once you see it you can’t unsee it. Everywhere you look, there are people addicted to screens instead of being addicted to winning.

If you sneak up on them, you’ll see most of them are scrolling Instagram Reels or TikTok (or a similar platform). It's worth asking: do we really need to overload the brain with so much input? Is all the extra information making us geniuses, wealthier, or giving us 6-pack abs? Nope.

The modern brain is fried. Brain cells are being lit on fire by choice.

My brain was cooked too. Then I took a radical approach to reclaim my focus, which has completely changed my life.

It’s made me a dangerous human being. It’ll make you dangerous too.

The overlooked idea hiding in plain sight

When I broke down my focus problem, I learned an uncomfortable truth: I was a scatterbrain at the highest level.

When I went one layer deeper, I realized I had no priorities in life. Without priorities, I just drifted from one urgent task to the next. Whatever was loudest in my life dominated my calendar and thoughts. That’s no way to live, man.

This is how a lot of people live – DIRECTIONLESS.

Without direction, stuff just fills up their time. Technology made everything more convenient. With that innovation came the accidental convenience of being able to fill up your time with literal bullsh*t.

The way to win back your focus is to have a priority.

It’s harder than it sounds though. Most people can’t decide on a singular priority. Life has taught them to prioritize too many things. Everything seems more urgent than it is (by design).

So I had to develop the skill of prioritization. I had to decide:

• What do I want out of life?

• What’s the #1 goal that can get me there?

• What do I love doing that brings me energy?

Only when I did this 10,000-foot view exercise could I figure out my priority. But knowing wasn’t enough. The hard part was what came next.

If I visualize it for you, it looks like this. I had a big chunk of stone and every day I had to carve away pieces. By the end, what I was left with was the statue of David with a modest-sized penis.

The analogy might seem smart, but in practice it meant 1) saying no to almost every ask and 2) being disciplined in holding my boundaries.

This is what made me dangerous. People could tell from the way I handled tasks and emails that I wasn't f*cking around anymore. I had one priority, and nothing was going to throw me off the game.

The level of discipline almost wasn’t human.

I’d describe it as bland, cold, boring, and if I’m being real, lonely. Only with that level of ruthlessness and discipline can you prioritize anything in life.

Oh, and don’t give me the “I’m neurodivergent and I can’t focus” line.

I’m almost certainly ADD, ADHD, PTSD, autistic, and everything in between. Some of the most successful people in the world are neurodivergent – I’d argue it’s a superpower. Focus is only impossible if you tell yourself it is.

Focus must be tied to your survival

A goal is a fantasy. Visions are p0rn. Systems are idealistic.

None of these modern self-help tools actually work, because if they did, humans wouldn’t be at peak burnout, peak loneliness, and living through a meaning crisis.

The workaround I found is that you must tie what you focus on directly to your survival. When I sit down to write essays like this, I have a photo of my two daughters next to me. I look at their tiny faces and imagine they will starve if the essay doesn’t get done.

It’s a delusion.

My daughters probably won’t die if I don’t write this essay, but I’ve conditioned myself to believe there’s a probability they will. So for the last 3 years I’ve never missed writing an essay since my first daughter was born.

Your survival is deeply motivating. It helps your priorities transcend your own existence. And when a priority is about more than just you, it’s easier to focus.

Tell yourself you’ll ruin your life if this single priority doesn’t work out.

A guide to using a phone that’ll leave you screaming “F you, Tim Denning”

This essay isn’t a place for comfort. It’s a place for breakthroughs.

The way I use my phone is so radical, I guarantee you won’t like it. But we live in desperate times when everyone is a zombie looking at a phone and not living in the present. The current solutions to fix this problem aren’t working.

I currently have less than 10 mins of screen time a day on my iPhone. Read that again.

Here are my extreme phone rules:

• Phone must be permanently in do-not-disturb mode (only family can get through)

• No social media apps installed on the phone

• No looking at emails on a phone

• No phones around family

• No phones at meal time

• No phone notifications

• No phone scrolling

I feel like a total outcast sharing these rules with you. It’s almost as if I’m a 1980s guy who came to 2026 in a time machine. I don’t think you’ll find a single human who has less than 10 minutes of phone time a day.

I don’t share this to brag. I share it because I genuinely think it’s the antidote to the huge focus problem. What might surprise you is I do have a lot of screen and internet time. But I only allow myself to do it on my desktop computer.

This allows me to schedule and set boundaries around when I do or don’t scroll. When I’m in my office using my desktop, it’s work time. When I’m not in my office, it’s time to be present. That physical boundary makes it 10x easier to focus.

My iPhone is only for phone calls. If flip phones had great cameras, I’d switch overnight. Smartphones are what made us dumb.

Stop dabbling like an amateur

One reason it’s hard to set priorities is you don’t know the outcome of every goal or task you choose to take on.

This seems harmless but it’s not. If you become obsessed with knowing how things will turn out, given it’s impossible to predict, you’ll find yourself dabbling. You’ll hedge your bets, dabble, and not invest enough time to reach the outcome.

Dangerously focused people don’t dabble.

They assume things will work out. They go all in. They know the only way to find out is to dedicate themselves to the mission and be okay if it ends in failure.

When you go all in, that simultaneously means you’re committing to one project, putting all your energy into it, and choosing obsession instead of lukewarm passion.

You must go all in to become dangerously focused.

Break the concept of flow states until you wake Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi from the dead

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote the bible on flow states called “flow.”

It’s one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read. It explains how to enter a flow state. You remove distractions, focus on one task, make the work slightly beyond your capabilities, drink coffee, and ensure the work you do gives you energy. The result is that an hour in flow will feel like 5 minutes. You’ve 100% experienced this.

Flow states are helpful, but to become dangerously focused, you must go to the next level. Flow states typically last an hour or two for most people. I’ve been able to extend them to 4-8 hours. My longest-ever flow state lasted 16 hours straight.

Longer flow states are more potent.

They’re so powerful you can achieve extreme goals when you use them. And it’s those achievements that’ll make you dangerous in the modern world.

First, you need to know it’s possible. Second, you need to set up your day so it can be done. It requires a distraction-free environment and a free calendar.

Those two requirements aren’t easy for most people – but they are possible. Then you simply apply the normal flow state protocol, but with the intent of staying in flow for a much longer time period.

Weaponize the hours of the day

There’s this concept called “Make then manage.”

I hate concepts like this but I found this one helpful. I always start my day with creation, imagination, and making stuff.

I push all the reactive stuff to the end of the day when I’m tired. This simple shift allows you to have the right levels of energy appropriate for the right task.

Let some crazy bastards into your life

It’s easy to become unfocused because the bar is so low around you.

Most people can’t focus for 30 seconds. So when you focus for 30 minutes, they compliment you and call you dedicated or hardworking.

This does more harm than good.

I found it more helpful to get around other highly focused people who’d hold me to a much higher level. I learned this from Olympic swimmer Kieren Perkins. I asked him how he trained so hard to win more Olympic gold medals than most people in history.

Answer: “It’s hard to skip a 4 AM training session when you’ve got three other Olympic gold medalist teammates to drag you out of bed if you dare try to skip a session.”

Most people surround themselves with friends, advisors, and mentors who tell them what they want to hear. Then they wonder why they’re distracted and can’t get the results they know they’re capable of.

The solution is to get around bastards who swear at you, tell you to keep going, and hold you ruthlessly accountable for what you say you want in life.

You lie to yourself when you only hear your own voice. Outside voices wake you the hell up from being in love with yourself and thinking you’re focused.

Cultivate a psychopathic sense of urgency

A lack of focus needs consequences.

Most people don’t have this. If they’re a lazy ass, nothing bad happens. That’s why you must hardwire your brain to take your priorities in life and make them urgent.

“I’ll start in 3 months” is ruining your life. No, you won’t. Circumstances won’t be better. Waiting for the chaos to subside is mental ma$turbation. There will always be chaos. You work around the chaos. Or, if you’re a psycho like me, you learn to love the chaos and thrive in it.

But trying to avoid chaos is a loser move. Impossible.

There has to be a reason why now is the right time. You must craft the story in your head and make sure it’s evidence-based.

Whenever I try to delay priorities I tell myself “Timbo, you had a near-miss with cancer in 2015. What the hell makes you think you have the extreme privilege of being alive in three months to start this goal then?”

Without fail this thinking always makes me move faster. Believing you’ll be alive beyond today is sheer arrogance. It’s ego. And it’s bloody disgusting. How dare you. You could be dead tomorrow. So do it today or shut up and stop complaining.

A psychopathic sense of urgency is a pattern interrupt. Use it.

Bringing it all together

Being dangerously focused can change your life.

But it requires an extreme approach because the focus problem is more extreme than people are willing to admit. You’ll never achieve anything worthwhile in life unless you develop the simple skill of being able to focus. It’s simple but it’s not easy.

Unless there’s a reason for extreme focus, you’ll default to a distracted state which produces low states of consciousness and piss-poor results.

We’re at war. Guard your focus, or face the deep regrets that come with not getting what you want out of life when you know you could have made it happen.

Focused people are dangerous because they have no competition. It’s life on easy mode, and it’s the best cheat code I know.

Be honest — are you actually focused, or just busy?

PS: Only 8 hours to register for my new workshop — How to Win on LinkedIn in 2026.

If you want to land connections, leads, customers, or clients every single day from LinkedIn, don’t miss this.

No late entry.

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They laid her off 8 weeks before having the baby. She cried.

Nobody expected it. Least of all me, her husband. Having a kid is supposed to be joyous — not when you've just lost your job for no reason.

I’m not supposed to say the quiet part out loud… but I will. They fired her for being pregnant. This isn’t a sob story though.

When my wife got fired, she reflected on her career. She got a master’s in engineering at the start of her career. She needed a lot of approvals. Then she became a graduate at a big company. She then spent 8 years climbing the corporate ladder.

They promised her a senior product manager role. They kept her on the sidelines for years, waiting for her turn to step up. She had to do everything the bosses said. She had to go above and beyond. She had to kiss old man white guy ass.

She hated it.

After she got fired, she saw that the corporate emperor she once worshipped had no clothes and was wearing a g-string that didn’t cover their private parts.

She saw her deep need for approval lit up by a floodlight. Now she has become a rebel. She doesn’t give two f*cks about the corporate ladder anymore.

She’s decided to stop needing approval and just do things.

The sublime madness of quitting while you’re ahead

Agnes Martin wowed the New York art world in 1967.

Old dudes in top hats got intellectually aroused by her grid paintings. Elitist critics and gatekeepers crowned her Queen Bee of fine art. Every major museum wanted to display her work.

They begged her.

She was at the absolute peak. Everything she’d ever dreamt of and more. But she did something wild that still seems crazy today.

She quietly walked away from it all without telling anyone.

When no one was watching she gave away all her art supplies. She destroyed every painting she’d ever made. And she embraced her inner redneck and bought a pickup truck. What made her do these crazy things?

She didn’t want her future defined by what people already liked.

She then drove out into the New Mexico desert, built an isolated home, and didn’t paint again for years. Rebellions are often defined as noisy and public. We rarely talk about the quiet rebellions though, like the type Agnes pioneered.

What Agnes did is the most radical act of defiance you may ever come across. Hers was completely silent on purpose, which sent the loudest possible message. Her message was clear, even if she never said it out loud: “F*ck off, I don't need your approval.”

This happens when the people who admire or praise you no longer feel like your people. So rather than try to explain yourself, you just disappear in silence as a form of quiet rebellion.

The seductive addiction of
people-pleasing

You seek approval to please people. It feels good.

It starts in school. You want to please the teachers so they’ll give you good grades, give you lollipops, or let you go to lunch early. Makes sense.

But this childlike behavior follows most people into adulthood which makes sense because the average person commutes to an office daycare every day to be micromanaged by some dumbass boss.

There’s no real thinking required to be a people-pleaser.

You just do as you’re told. You do what you’ve always done. The default software in your head just runs as it’s supposed to.

But the longer you seek out approval the less you feel like yourself. It’s hard to put the feeling into words. To me, it felt like going to work as an improv actor in a costume and coming home to get changed into boxer shorts and be myself again until the next morning.

What makes it so seductive is everyone else is doing it and pretending to like it.

When you hear success stories in your career, you assume they came from following the rules and pleasing others. You become fixated on those stories because they reinforce the narrative that you’re doing the right thing.

All is well… until something blows up your worldview.

My worldview exploded when I got paired with a bunch of whacky clients in my banking job – each one more bizarre than the next. First guy I met was a bankrupt who started a fintech. He tried to hire me. Next guy ran a gym software business and secretly donated most of the money back to the homeless in Egypt.

The last guy was Brian Johnson, the “don’t die” guy. I worked with his team early on and saw randomness all around. These dudes had a psychopathic sense of urgency and an unreasonable expectation about, well, everything.

I could never really please Brian’s team. Soon as I did something good, it became the new norm. They pushed me to level up every day to the point where I didn’t recognize my former self.

The whole “don’t die” movement makes sense to me now after that experience.

What each of these people had in common was they succeeded because they ignored the rules and pretended they didn’t exist. Their defiance was a core part of why people followed them and they became wealthy.

They worshipped competence, independent thinking, and merit.

The dark side of needing approval

In my career, I’ve seen some dark stuff.

Drug dealers getting away with murder, rich people profiting off insider trading, charities doing evil disguised as good, and hospitality venues used for illegal s*x and the sale of drugs.

The people who give out the approvals don’t do so in a fair manner. The criteria is flaky and it can easily be used for personal gain. The people who get approved and who don’t can entirely be based on bias, s*xual favors, or flat out bribery. It’s a slippery slope. That’s why I’ve never vibed with it.

If certain people have the power to grant approval, it means they can abuse it too.

I witnessed this firsthand when a bunch of fake do gooders took over my neighborhood and told me “we can do whatever we want” when they were questioned. One of them had a medal issued by the government.

The more big egos are given the right to hand approval to others, the more they will get high off their own self-worth and abuse it.

Dr. Nicole LePera says “People pleasing is safety seeking.” Yet people-pleasing is the most dangerous thing you can do because the gatekeepers which grant approval to you can take it away too.

You don’t want to be part of that world. Join the rebellion.

Learn to say this without feeling bad

The way out of needing approval starts with one word: no.

It’s a word we all know. It’s a word we hear a lot but don’t speak often enough. No. No, thank you. No is the start of the rebellion. It’s a small act of defiance. You don’t stop seeking approval in a single moment.

Instead, it’s a small migration from one worldview to another. The bridge that gets you there is no. Each no gets you further away from needing approval.

When you don't clearly communicate your decision, it looks like cowardice. You’re choosing silence which doesn’t clearly communicate your desire for refusing to seek approval.

Saying no out loud makes you stronger. It voices who you are and who you’re not.

It’s an opportunity to grow.

The post-2000 revolution destroyed the need for approval

When the internet took off around 2000, it removed the need to ask for approval.

Suddenly, you could make your own website and express yourself. Then you could message anyone you want from anywhere in the world. Then, government secrets escaped to the dark web. Then, social media allowed everyone to voice their opinion. Now we have AI that can help you build a billion-dollar business without banks, lawyers, or accountants.

Every layer of the approval hierarchy has been dismantled.

Now you can live anywhere. You can give up your passport and move offshore when your local government tries to screw you with new laws or taxes. You can buy magic internet money that stays entirely in your custody.

I call this brave new world the permissionless economy.

The trouble is a lot of people haven’t woken up to it. They’re still living as if they need to seek approval at every crossroad. They're blind to opportunities that exist without credentials or daddy’s special friends in high places.

What used to take 4 years to learn at college and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars can be learned in months, weeks, or even days. Or not learned at all because it’s irrelevant.

This opportunity grows stronger each day. It’s created a level of freedom I can’t even comprehend or explain.

The true source of self-worth

By default, you seek approval through praise to increase your self-worth.

But I’ve learned you can increase your self-worth by giving yourself approval to be crazy, out there, unhinged, and unapologetic.

The self-worth you create internally through your own actions is way more powerful than the kind others rent to you through their approval.

When you’re in full control it feels so much better.

When your effort and hard work determine the outcome and not a flogger in a suit with a Harvard MBA, life starts to feel different. The greatest self-worth I have comes from publishing 7000+ long-form essays over 12 years without any writing credentials, editors, or publication owners.

True self-worth is permissionless.

It’s not all sunshine, champagne, roses, and orga$ms though

With every positive comes a negative.

Not needing approval is great, but it will make you the villain in someone else’s narrative. That someone will be living in the old world. They’ll see you living all permissionlessly with your quiet rebellion and decide to take aim at you.

Why? Because how you live sh*ts in the face of everything they’ve ever known. And that’ll make them mad. Real mad. Just look over at yours truly. I dared to say in an essay that having two daughters changed my life.

It resulted in 100s of proclaimed feminists coming after me and saying, “It’s because he’s a man. He knows nothing about raising kids.”

That’s right, a picture of me with my two daughters pisses them off for some unknown reason. So, while I’m here, let me share a picture once more for those haters in case they’re reading.

The irony is that I’m actually pro-women and anti-manosphere. I’ve loved seeing female leaders flood the corporate world. Having two daughters has only made me appreciate the gender rebalancing even more.

Being a villain in someone else’s narrative is a good thing. It reminds you that you stand for something. If you’re not at least pissing off a few people, you’re likely still living a people-pleasing life.

Being the villain to someone else is how you know you’ve transcended.

The quiet rebellion has started

You don’t need approval from anyone.

Give yourself permission to be whoever you want. Realize that over your lifetime you’ll be multiple different people. The person you were a year ago will be laughable to the person you are in two years. That’s the way it should be.

You defeat the need to gain approval from others when you make life a competition between you versus you. The only person you need to impress is yourself. If you do that then outside opinions will have little relevance to you anymore.

Even if you do everything right, 1/3 of the people you meet will think you’re an a**hole, another third won’t even take notice of you, and the final third will think you’re the greatest thing to be invented since electricity and won’t even be able to articulate why.

That’s life. Bloody amazing if you ask me.

You don’t need approval. You need to show yourself what you’re capable of through your own actions.

P.S. 2026 is the year I’m opening up my entire LinkedIn playbook for you.

The LinkedIn algorithm is NO LONGER what it was.

Which means:

You can’t just roll up and write the phrase “mental health” or “hiring practices suck” and go viral.

But in many ways, it’s been a change for the better.

Want leads?
Want clients?
Want subscribers?
Want business revenue?

You can get it on LinkedIn.

Click here to reserve your seat for How to Win on LinkedIn in 2026.

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Information overload is the new pandemic.

We’ve become information junkies. The internet has overloaded us with information. Then social media 10X’d it. And now AI slop has 100X’d it.

I don’t know about you, but I’m drowning.

If I get one more email from someone who wants me to read their god damn 20-hour book, my head is going to explode. Books from unknown authors are dead. Why?

No one can afford to risk 20 hours of their time on a book written by an unknown person. So they will read books, but only if they already trust the author.

This is what information overload has done to humanity. It’s sad.

The false god is that gathering more information will solve our biggest problems. That’s clearly a lie. We have more information than ever and simultaneously more problems than ever. The simple life has been replaced with the complex life for most people. Every channel to someone’s brain is noisy.

Brain rot is everywhere too.

So the goal for you must NOT be to endlessly collect information.

The hidden problem of information gathering

You’re addicted to collecting information and probably don’t know why.

Writer Sahil Bloom simplified the problem for me:

Dopamine from information gathering is a dangerous drug. It’s the dopamine from reading, planning, or learning, but never doing.

I wasn’t lying when I said we’re information junkies.

Just like junkies are addicted to heroin, we’re all addicted to gathering information because it gives us the drug of dopamine. Dopamine runs our brain's entire reward system. That’s why you’re addicted. It’s biological.

You can only defeat the addiction with an understanding of what’s going on, and a ruthless level of discipline to stop consuming so much info.

When you collect information, you feel like you’re making progress.

The information you collect gets added to a plan, strategy or set of actions you intend to take in the future. The problem is plans always get f*cked up by life.

Everything sounds like a good plan until you get punched in the face, sued by a stranger, or fired from a job you spent 10 years working at.

The entropy of the universe guarantees your fantasies of plans and future actions will never come true. Yet most people can’t see the information-gathering mirage. They genuinely trust themselves and the world that chaos won’t find them.

But chaos finds everyone. Even me.

That’s when people say, “Sorry, I didn’t take action because I got sick or my mother died.” The response is innocent. But quietly underneath their reply is the belief that “Now you’re surprised what just happened to me and will let me off the hook for not doing what I told you I was going to do.”

That translates to “I’m special.”

But whatever unique form of chaos you experience isn’t special at all. There’s a list of about ten problems that will find their way into your life – and they happen to all of us.

Collecting information and expecting to implement it later on is a fantasy that’ll destroy your life the same way cheating on your partner with a hooker will.

The danger of gurus

Gurus are everywhere.

Open any content platform and you’ll drown in opinions. All of them seem like they’re only trying to help. The challenge is everyone’s strategy to solve a problem is different.

If you listen to too many gurus, you end up confused.

I shouldn’t admit this but it was a big problem for me. Between 2014 and 2019 I made little progress on my goals. And my business went nowhere.

I just kept listening to too many people. One guru told me to build a Wordpress blog. Another one told me to write on Medium dot com. And another one told me to focus on writing a book.

None of this helped me. I only felt more and more confused. So I did nothing. Perhaps you can relate.

The best type of information most people are unaware of (caution)

My entire life changed when I stopped consuming more information.

In my corporate job, I learned “agile methodology.” I won’t bore you with that sh*t, but the main takeaway was to run experiments using minimum viable information.

I started publishing essays on different platforms. I wrote short-form content on LinkedIn. I launched a few test products. Instead of consuming information, I became a creator of information. I used the information I created from my experiments to learn what did and didn’t work for me.

In the case of Medium, I rose to the top 1% of the platform. I figured out things about writing essays that no one else knew. I had essays get tens of millions of views. And I made $70K a month.

Turns out I had enough information to start. And I could learn more from iteration than conflicting gurus.

There is one difference though. Instead of paying for more information like before, I started paying for personalised help contextual to my situation. This combination has become deadly. It’s enabled me to get 1B+ views on my content.

This part is controversial as hell

Up until this point it’s all cookie-cutter and kumbaya. You’re probably thinking, “That Tim guy is a standout guy.”

Hold your horses, cowboy.

I must let you down. I’m not here to blow your whistle or tell you what you want to hear. I’m hear to see you change. That means I gotta share the hard part.

Learning from experience and experiments is good. It’s level one stuff. But there’s level two. It’s where the learning goes from a 5/100 to 999/1000. Ready?

Real learning comes from taking risks, embarrassment, facing uncertainty, and dealing with failure.

The problem with information gatherers is they’re stuck in a comfort bubble. They think they’re learning. They’re taking a few small actions, but their progress is nonexistent. So they consume more information.

That’s not the answer.

As an anti-guru, I’ve learned real learning only comes from circumstances involving negative emotions. I learned nothing in business until I lost everything. I learned nothing about investing until my digital wallet got hacked for $1.2M – in the years preceding, I made more than $6M from that loss.

I didn’t learn about love until I went through multiple painful breakups and my wife-to-be exited the car in the middle of the highway and never returned.

I didn’t learn about the music industry until I worked as a DJ in a strip club and got played by nightclub owners.

I didn’t learn about banking risk until my client was caught at the ATM with $100K in cash attempting to launder drug money. And none of us learned about the power of governments until we were locked in our homes in 2020 because of a bat virus.

Here’s what you don’t want to hear:

True learning happens when something bad happens. Avoiding bad outcomes or not taking risks is the real barrier to wisdom.

I love to see people fail or get rejected because that’s how I know they’re learning.

Most information you consume presents the ideal circumstances. But when you act on information, you experience the opposite. Nothing is ideal. Everything is f*cked. Your balls are on fire every day.

One negative emotion is all it takes

I spoke to a lady from Japan the other day.

She told me how she didn’t want to get help with her business because she bought a blogging course in 2018 for $500 and it didn’t work out great. So she's been stuck for 8 years — paralyzed by a single bad experience.

This is how most people live.

They expect everything to work out. And when one tiny failure happens or they experience a teaspoon of negative emotions, they stop everything and usually never get back on the horse and ride again.

Real learning is a series of negative emotions that you must be willing to experience.

This is what it all boils down to for you

The solution Sahil Bloom suggests is this:

Stop looking for more information and start acting on the information you already have. Get your dopamine from action.

When your dopamine comes from the right place, your brain’s reward system is working for you, not against you.

You probably have enough information to take action already. Use a minimum viable level of information to take some actions. Learn from those and add personalized help along the way so you’re not trapped in a bubble of your own awesomeness.

Taking action decreases confusion because you see what works for yourself. And without evidence something works, you won’t invest the time to repeatedly do it. Because you can see me do it, but you’ll still think, “Yeah, but will it work for me?”

You gotta act to find out. And your own experience is always going to be the most trustworthy in a world of shonky gurus and bad AI answers.

Oh, and go out there and sh*t in your pants so you can experience the thrill of embarrassment and your whole day not going as planned.

Be honest — what's the one thing you already know you should be doing, but have been "researching" for way too long? Drop it in the comments. No judgment. Just accountability.

PS

Get this.

My YouTube channel has driven $1M in revenue.

The channel is tiny

But the profit is huge.

Will reveal more of the “how” soon.

For now, take a peek at my latest YouTube video.

(See if you can guess how I’m doing it)

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I’ve never shared this. I was offered a job working directly for Tony Robbins.

I spent weeks thinking it over. Then I said no. Yes, I’d be on the road hanging out with my biggest hero alongside people like Jay Shetty and Gary Vaynerchuk – but the hard truth I knew deep down is I’d be living in his shadow.

Instead of using my skills to become a leader in my own right and make money on the internet, I’d become one of Tony’s many minions and never have a family. That’s right, I’d be on the road all year, flying from country to country.

It would have been glamorous as hell, but good luck finding a wife or having kids with a career like that.

I now see that life as a nightmare.

Making money on the internet gives you a better life. This is nothing new. You’ve heard it thousands of times already. So the question is, if everyone is so smart and already knows this, why can’t they make money on the internet?

The ego trap that screws people

Making money on the internet has different rules from the real world.

And it’s not even close to being like the traditional path of get a degree, get a good job, get into huge debt for a house, climb the corporate ladder, brag about “years of experience,” and retire at 65.

Years of experience mean jack sh*t on the internet.

I paid to get consulting from a 17 year old girl who made $50K a month with a business coaching offer. She'd never had a job. She wasn't certified in anything. Her entire business was built on a Google Doc, a simple email sequence, and showing up consistently on one platform.

Her clients — doctors, consultants, people with 20 years of experience — paid her $5,000 to learn what she figured out in a bedroom after doing homework while listening to BTS K-pop songs.

Her clients were in their 30s and 40s. That’s how much the internet doesn’t give a f*ck about age or experience.

I’ve observed big egos a lot with people I’ve met who want to make money on the internet. They’ll often flaunt their many degrees or say things like “I’m good friends with Richard Branson,” when if you dig deeper, you realize it was a dinner with him 4 years ago and Sir Richard has completely forgotten it by now.

If you challenge their “Branson friendship,” they’ll say, “Well, he said my idea was brilliant and I had potential.” Okay.

He says that to everyone because he’s a gentleman. Nice words aren’t proof of work or results. They’re just words. If Sir Richard really believed in you, he would have stayed in touch or invested his money in you.

But he didn’t. He’s kite surfing in his underwear not giving two sh*ts about you.

Your ego tells you that you’re brilliant. But the internet tells you the truth. And the internet is now the real world.

If you attempt to build anything online, you’ll be humbled real fast. It’s hard to get attention. People are skeptical and don’t trust anyone easily. Experience doesn’t mean you can solve a person’s problem. And how many degrees you have doesn’t fix the “I don’t trust you” and “I’m not sure you can help me.”

Smart, experienced people don’t make money online because their ego blocks them.

The hardest idea you’ll ever ponder

This is one of the best ideas I’ve ever come across and it’s from Naval Ravikant: “The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.”

To succeed, you must change your definition of success.

Most intelligent people don’t get what they want out of life. They’re NOT living the good life. They’re stuck in their head, angry at the world, chasing goals so they can desperately tell the world they’re a somebody while quietly being a nobody.

For me, I don’t care about wealth or any of that nonsense. I consider myself successful because I’m getting exactly what I want from life.

No boring job. I wear Nike clothes 24/7. I don’t follow anyone else’s rules. I have fun online. I write whatever I want. I get to decide who I work with. And I’m surrounded by the top 1% in my field who I look up to.

Life could not get better if I tried. I don’t say that to brag. I say it to smash your view of the world into a thousand pieces.

I’m not that smart. Average IQ. Zero degrees. High school dropout (went back later and barely passed). No rich family. No special privileges.

Success is less about how much money you make online, and more about what you do with the money you make to live your ideal lifestyle.

Smart people on paper are dumb people in lifestyle terms.

The hidden downsides of being smart

People with high IQ are great at seeing downsides.

They’re often skeptical about everything because they think they know better. So when you present a simple idea to them like “Oh, you just take your skills, package them into a high ticket offer, and sell it via an email list” they look at you like you went to a billionaire’s naughty island to make out with seals.

Pessimism sounds smart and optimism looks like a sales pitch.. so they ignore the obvious opportunities. “That make-money-online stuff is all a pyramid scheme.” Tell that to the doctors, lawyers and accountants I’ve worked with who have built 6 and 7-figure online businesses. Are their businesses scams too?

Smart people spend all their time doing calculations and assessing risks because their intelligence forces their ego to believe they can tell the future, like some sort of drunken fortune-teller living in a gypsy van with her grandma.

Being intelligent means you likely overthink, overplan, and overanalyze, which leads to painful procrastination that guarantees you never make a dollar on the internet.

On the surface, they’re in motion, “doing stuff,” but in the eyes of the internet, they’re nobodies who’re helping no one.

An idiot in motion will always go further than a genius at rest – Kpaxs

If you break down what smart people are doing, you'll find a silent plea for permission hidden inside all that planning.

They needed permission to get a degree, and permission to climb the ladder in their job. And, deep down, they’re waiting for that kind of permission online as well.

Except it doesn’t exist.

Don’t worry, I failed here too.

I stayed stuck in a banking career for 10 years because I waited for the world to give me permission to quit. I wanted my boss to say, “Timbo, you’re making $70,000 a month outside of your job already. You’re too good. Quit, man.”

He never gave me permission. He needed me to sell stuff for him so he could take the credit for it. That’s because incentives drive behavior. So I never got the permission I was looking for. Thank god, I ended up signing my own permission slip.

Writer Sahil Bloom once said, “Permission isn’t granted. It’s taken.” Spot on.

The missing trait smart people don’t understand

What’s missing is courage.

You can think you know everything, but if you don’t have the courage to act on what you know and build something online, then you never will.

It’s not one-time courage that is needed either. It’s daily courage.

Like when a huge Twitter influencer took a swipe at me for using an AI-generated photo of a guy working on his laptop on the beach. Dude lost his mind. He put my face on a coffee cup and sold it in his merch store. He called me a course boi even though I don’t sell courses. He made fun of my nose and my ears.

I thought I was the bigger man, but honestly, it brought back high school trauma of people calling me dumbo ears or making fun of my witch nose. You think you’re past that until your face appears on a coffee mug for $19.95 plus shipping.

Turns out I wasn’t past it.

It took courage when an essay I wrote on Substack went viral and a group of angry women accused me of being a terrible man because I said having a family was one of the greatest things to ever happen to me.

“What would you know about having a family?! You’re a man. Women raise kids, not you!”

Yep, I saw some version of that comment 100s of times. It took courage to ignore it and not react. Or not feel stupid. Because without courage, you stop the moment things get tough or your perfect little plan goes up in flames.

The leaders you follow and admire had the courage to act.

Unconsciously, you probably don’t realize that’s why you follow them. It’s why people say they follow me. I had the courage to quit a successful banking career, knowing I could never go back because of the potty mouth stuff I said online.

That type of courage does more to help you make money than an over-bloated business plan ever will (that’ll get blown up by AI anyway).

“Complexity makes you seem smart. Simplicity makes you money.”

(Codie Sanchez)

Some of you are going to hate me for saying this. Making money on the internet is stupidly simple. It’s not easy though, but it is simple.

Smart people love to make it complicated because they think the barrier to entry must be high, just like it was when they applied to get into debt to buy a PhD. It’s not.

I’ve spent 100s of hours in masterminds surrounded by people doing more than $1M online with their business. Here's the pattern I can never unsee — and it's the same every time.

One social media platform. One funnel. One offer. Daily action.

The tech stack they use is almost non-existent. They use a few basic tools like Gmail and Zoom and that’s about it. Yet smart people want to use Claude bots, hire big teams, build their own customer app, etc.

They’re literally trying to boil the ocean when all they need to do is take a few simple steps that a 17 year old girl I met did after doing her high school assignments.

Internet businesses are actually dumb. But you have to be willing to be dumb enough to make a million dollars or more from one. Intelligence and complexity will only take you further away from your goal.

A reader of mine said, “The smarter you are… the easier it is to talk yourself out of doing the simple things that actually pay.” I think about that a lot.

The mindset that robbed me of millions of dollars

I’ve made millions of dollars on the internet. But I could have made millions more if I realized my one big flaw: I was afraid to be salesy.

I thought selling stuff was beneath me. I wanted to have companies sponsor my work and to speak on stages for $50K a pop.

It never happened. My mindset was off.

Everything changed when I figured out the people who make the most money online aren’t the best at sales or marketing. Nope. They’re the most useful.

Selling stuff is just helping people.

The more people you help, the more money you make. The help starts as free, then as they enter your world some percentage of people will pay to get your help.

So the question I ask myself daily is “How many people have I helped today?” If the answer is “none,” then I know it’s been a bad day financially without even logging into Stripe.

Smart people think the internet will pay them for their ideas, IP, or brilliance.

But they won’t.

That’s selfishness. People pay you when you help them. And if they actually know you give a sh*t about them, they’ll pay you a lot more and more frequently too.

The simple path that actually helps you make money on the internet

Some of you probably hate me now. Good.

I’m not here to please you. I’m here to tell you the truth, or else you won’t change and you’ll become one of those nasty haters on Youtube that nitpicks at everyone else’s videos except their own (because they have no videos).

All that’s left is to tell you what does work from what I’ve observed helping more than 6000 people start online businesses. I’m warning you… it’s uns*xy. It’s so simplistic it almost sounds like a cliche or a 10 ways to be badass blog post from 2011.

Here we go…

• The start is hard. Only brute force will allow you to cut through the noise. It won’t be easy. Momentum will take longer than you think.

• Relentlessness gets you through. Ruthless levels of posting. Follow up that is better than the FBI investigating a murder. Stupid, tedious, hard work and painfully boring execution. Work like a horse instead of a magnificent lion that struts around looking for its next meal while everything in the jungle trembles at the sight of it.

• Sell things tied to your existing skills. People don’t spend good money with unskilled amateurs. True professionals make the most money.

• Build systems above all else. Simple ones too. Use them to run your business. Document everything.

• Insist on daily KPIs for yourself. Otherwise, you won’t know what inputs created the outputs. And you’ll lie to yourself about what you actually did on the hard days when your ego is bruised from NOT making as much money as you thought.

• Be yourself at all costs. Don’t become some caricature of yourself, where you act like somebody you’re not. The internet is smart. They sniff that sh*t out and come at you with pitchforks.

• Don’t sell to people. Offer them help.

If you’re not making money on the internet, it’s entirely your fault.

That’s not an insult. It’s empowerment. Because if you created the problem that means you have the power to fix it. And that’s cool as hell, man.

Being smart won’t make you money online. Intelligence just leads to overthinking.

What you must do is to focus on daily execution, that 99% of people are unprepared to do because they don’t understand the enormous rewards they could access if they did.

What's stopping you?

P.S. (Almost) everyone who makes a lot of money online has an audience.

Haven’t built one yet?

Start here:

If I Wanted to Grow 50K+ Follwers Fast, Here’s What I’d Do

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The 6-pack Lambo bros make fun of employees.

They say having a job is for losers and you should be an entrepreneur. Most of them have never had jobs – and it shows. They just live off daddy’s money in secret while wearing Calvin Klein boxer shorts and shooting TikToks by their rented pool.

Quitting your job as an ambitious person with no money coming in is su!cide.

It’s literally the worst advice I’ve ever seen. While you build your business, you still need money to live. And your business probably needs a little startup capital.

Just quitting your job and YOLOing your savings into a business that may not even work is low IQ.

Harsh truth: you can’t help anyone if you’re broke.

It’ll make you desperate, needy, and do dumb things.

You might even break the law or avoid paying taxes because some Instagram bro said to put your money in the Cayman Islands.

Quitting cold turkey and going all-in isn't what I did — and it isn't what most of the successful people I know did either.

We did the responsible thing and earned a salary while building a business on the side. It’s not as s*xy but it’s the best path for 99% of people.

A better goal for financial freedom

Instead of quitting your job, change jobs.

Get a job that is 100% work from home and pays well. Get a job where you can do the work and clock off at 4:59PM every day. Choose a boss that isn’t a pain in the ass and won’t micromanage you into an early grave. Choose low stress.

Choosing the easy path in your 9-5 career gives you the freedom, energy, and bandwidth to choose the harder path of entrepreneurship in your after-hours career.

What I did was set strong boundaries in my 9-5 career. I told the truth. I made my intentions clear. I didn’t work weekends. I didn’t show up for the 10PM calls with the offshore team. As I got validation of my business, I went from 5 days down to 4 days.

Then eventually I quit with a smile and zero drama.

I quit right because I wanted to keep the door open in case I wanted to go back.

This is a much better approach than taking some giant risk because some bro said having a job is for losers.

A job is level one. For most of us, it isn’t the end game. But a job does serve a purpose. Milk the job and suck on the corporate teat for as long as you need to. Use the milk money to fund your side business until it can fund itself. Then quietly slaughter the corporate cow and put the meat into a steak sandwich.

Don’t get stuck for decades though

Building a side business is alluring.

But some people move too slowly. A sense of urgency is crucial. You don’t want to stay in a 9-5 life you hate for too long, or it’ll rot your soul and suck the joy out of your life.

So, get around other people building similar things. Pay to get help to move faster. Focus on action, not consuming endless information. And back yourself, knowing millions of people have gone down this same path.

Ambitious people love to be self-sufficient and succeed in their own right. But you’ve gotta earn it. You’ve gotta validate your ambition because you might be entirely full of sh*t and be a total rookie. And the sooner you work that out, the better.

I made $70K a month and thought I was a hero. But I earned it from a platform and didn’t build a real business. So when the platform went woke and then broke, I had the $70K a month taken away from me and learned a hard lesson.

The first time you try, you may fail. That’s okay.

You can always get another job. What you can’t get back are all the times you wish you had taken a chance and didn’t. That leaves you with huge regrets about what you could have been.

Treat 9-5 jobs like an investor for your side business. Build after hours during 6AM to 9AM and 5PM to 10PM. See what you’re capable of. Validate your business idea. Then quietly vanish from corporate life without a trace.

That’s the strategy gurus never talk about because it’s uns*xy.

PS: Only 8 hours to register for my new workshop — How to Win on Instagram.

I went from 5k to 300k in just 6 months.

No ads.

No cheating.

No hacks.

Instagram might be the ONLY platform that’s possible these days.

If you want to leverage Instagram for an audience, leads, and revenue, don’t miss this.

No late entry.

Click here to grab your seat for today’s workshop.

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I’m embarrassed to admit I waited in line at a nightclub for 9 hours.

And I never got in. When I was 18, there was a club everyone wanted to go to. I got there nice and early when they opened. It was a chilly night. I wore a massive puffer jacket. Honestly, it was cruel to make people wait outside in the Antarctic conditions.

But people like me were suckers.

We had to be seen at this nightclub to inflate our fragile egos. I went with two of my friends. At the start of the night, we thought it was a given we’d get in. The wait was long. After 2 hours, we got to the front of the line. We were pumped.

Then the doorman Jason said “Sorry, guys, without a guest list, there’s going to be a bit of a wait.” We didn’t mind. We would wait. Every hour after that, I’d check with Jason about the wait. He kept telling me “Not long now buddy.”

At 6AM the nightclub closed. We were still outside waiting to get in.

Jason said “Sorry, guys, maybe next time.” I crossed the road and just stood there. I saw Jason and the security guards laughing. I assumed they were laughing at us.

I was pissed. I felt betrayed.

The two friends I was with thought I overreacted. A few weeks later, we weren’t friends anymore. I never quite got over what Jason did to us. It was cruel. He had no intention of ever letting us into the club. It was a game.

The 9 hours we waited in line to get in taught me a lot. I saw one guy give a $50 note to the security guard and go from the back of the line straight in. I saw hot girls walk to the front of the line and be let straight in.

We were in the general admission line. On the other side was the guest list. Those people didn’t wait. And right at the front was a VIP entrance. They didn’t line up or talk to anyone at all. They went straight in.

The next day I realized this is how life works. There are three entrances to every opportunity and most people choose the general admission line.

The story doesn’t end there.

About a year later, I found out that my dad had met the nightclub’s owner. My dad introduced us. The owner said, “Timbo, if you ever want to come to my club for free, let me know.”

So I did. The next weekend I went with the owner to his nightclub. I saw Jason. His whole vibe changed. He looked surprised. It didn’t end there. I ended up working for the owner. That meant I could use the staff entrance.

I could walk into the club whenever I wanted and do whatever I wanted. Jason saw. He watched. Then it went even further. I became a DJ at that nightclub.

Jason now saw me walking in with bags of vinyl records and a small crew. He saw me get handed stacks of drink cards for free alcohol.

On my birthday the owner threw a party for me. All my friends and I drank for free. Jason saw that too. Then one night, someone handed Jason one of my demo CDs of a mix I’d done. He walked up to me later that night and said “Man, that mix you did is one of the best DJ sets I’ve ever heard.”

He was blown away.

I never forgot what happened at that nightclub. It taught me you can settle for the general admission line in life, or you can find a way to skip the line altogether.

Stay the hell away from the front door

The front door for any opportunity is where you ask for permission.

“Please, sir, can I come in tonight?” The crazy thing is most people choose the front door. They choose the traditional path. They get told what to do.

Right now what makes me emotional is seeing so many people being laid off, then applying for jobs on websites or LinkedIn. It’s sad because they use AI to write their resume, and then the employer uses AI to read their resume and screen them out.

Humans are removed from the process.

And so many job ads are fake. They’re posted for compliance reasons, to test the market, or to build a pipeline of people for a possible future opportunity.

If you apply for a job and ask for permission, you either get ghosted, put through endless interviews, or low-balled on the job offer because everyone is getting laid off.

The front door sucks.

Same with dating. If you go through the front door and end up on some dating app, you’ll be put in touch with predators, people looking for free or paid s*x, and blatantly rude people who treat you like a doormat they wipe their dog sh*t filled feet on.

Starting a business is another area where the front door sucks. You go it alone through trial and error. You ask the bank for a loan to buy a business. Or you buy a McDonald’s franchise where they dictate the rules and take a huge chunk of revenue.

Either way, you’re asking for permission and being treated badly.

If someone stands in between you and your freedom, it’s a trap. And that’s every front door in existence.

You’ve got to be bold as hell to skip the line

Skipping the line sounds simple. Like anyone can do it.

I disagree. To skip the line you have to reject everything you’ve ever been taught. You have to reject what 99% of society does. But most of all, skipping the line is deeply psychological.

When you decide to skip the line you’re becoming a rebel. You’re being bold, courageous, and dangerous. When Freddy McBasic finds out what you’re doing, you’ve got to be strong enough to ignore him when he tries to talk you out of it.

But most people don’t act boldly. In fact, they don’t act at all. They just sit there in fear for most of their life and fantasize about what they could do without doing anything.

That’s your opportunity.

The high-profile job that didn’t exist

Early in my finance career, I was stuck in a call center. I couldn’t break out.

One afternoon a manager asked our team if one of us could process the paperwork for a small startup. No one wanted extra unpaid work. I said yes.

I’d never heard of the company. They were called Braintree, founded by the “don’t die” guy Bryan Johnson.

I did their paperwork as fast as I could. And I emailed them every day to keep them up to date. I didn’t think much of it. But they thought I was a hero. They told everyone at the bank I worked at how much of an asset I was to the company.

Eventually, I got a secondment to work with this manager directly. He taught me everything he knew. At the end of the secondment, he promised me a job. But there wasn’t one. I waited a year. Then the manager came back to me with an open position. It was at least 3x more senior than my current role.

He told me I already had the gig but to pretend I didn’t. I did fake interviews and acted humble. Then I got the job.

It was a dream job. Everyone wanted it because it dealt with Silicon Valley tech companies. Guys with decades of experience applied. Guys with better tech backgrounds and who drove $400K cars applied. None of them got it.

Somehow, underqualified, overlooked, stupid old me got the job.

And the people who missed out were pissed.

They complained. But no one cared. Every day after that I had a target on my back. They did everything they could to make my career a living hell. It didn’t work.

I got a dream job I was stupidly underqualified for because I went through the back door. I did admin work with no reward to prove competence. I showed I was high agency. Around this time, Braintree sold to PayPal for ~$800M. I now had a giant client backing me. Speaking up for me. Telling my employer they must promote me. And big companies always listen to big customers.

The challenge with skipping the line is you must be delusional.

There’s no roadmap or guarantee. You must do what isn’t rational or scalable. You must do things with no clear reward. And you do those things because you understand the rules of the skipping-the-line game:

• Do hard work

• Act high agency

• Be humble as f*ck

• Build relationships instead of create transactions

People always told me I was talented or lucky, and that’s why I got the job. What they didn’t know was I learned how to skip lines because I waited 9 hours to get into a nightclub when I was 18.

The worst startup in history skipped the line and became a unicorn

In 2008, everyone laughed at Brian.

He’d pitched his startup to 20+ investors. They’d all said no. He was selling novelty Obama O’s cereal to pay his bills. If there was a line, Brian wasn’t at the back. No. He was banned from the line for being an incompetent fool.

Brian had the crazy idea of pitching his startup to John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins. John was seen as a mythical god of the tech world. People kissed his butt and licked his feet because of his early investments in Google and Amazon.

To get on his calendar, you had to be referred by a tier-one investor or founder and wait months. Even then, there was no guarantee. Brian had no chance. He was Kramer from Seinfeld dressed in a clown suit asking Buckingham Palace if he could stay with them for a year and share a toilet with the King.

Brian had a screw loose.

He didn’t bother with front doors. Wasn’t his style. He preferred a more backdoor approach. Giggity giggity.

Brian found out John Doerr was heading to a conference. He used the last of his savings to fly there. While everyone was networking and slamming business cards in each other’s faces, like desperate sheep looking for a root, Brian went on a stakeout.

He watched John’s every move.

After John spoke all the sheep descended on him. He was swamped with beggars, freebie-seekers, and “Can you sign my google t-shirt?” Poor guy. I’m sure he could cry tears into $100 bills from his multi-billion-dollar fortune, though.

After everyone tried the front door and failed, Brian descended into the dark and gloomy car park. He found the speaker’s VIP exit. He stood there like a creep. He watched. He waited. He smoked a cigarette.

Then John exited the building. He was all alone and headed for his ride home. Brian knew it was go time. He appeared out of the darkness. Instead of asking for permission by saying “Excuse me kind sir, can I pitch you my startup if you have a minute,” he just went straight to value.

He explained his startup’s core value in 30 seconds.

Brian said they were going to unlock the surplus capacity of millions of spare bedrooms around the world. He chose that instead of talking about challenging hotels or running a marketplace which sounded generic and obvious.

John was surprised by Brian. He didn’t expect the pitch in the car park. Brian’s appearance, financial position, KPIs, or pitch deck didn’t matter. What John saw was a high agency individual and he instantly got him a meeting for the following day.

Brian’s startup is now known as Airbnb.

Now, that was a nice story. Beautiful hero’s journey ending. Heck, you could turn that into an animated Disney movie and call it Cinderella. Glad you liked the show. Please leave your tips at the door. Now let’s go for drinks.

Wait… hang on a f*cking second. The story doesn’t end there.

Brian did have the meeting with John. But John was a prick and didn’t invest in Brian’s startup. He thought the idea was too weird and creepy.

The idea strangers were going to sleep in your spare bedroom tucked nicely into your bed with freshly washed sheets was wild. Creepy even. And god forbid those strangers did the dirty in your bed and left white stains on your Eight Sleep mattress. Yuck.

Too weird for John. So he passed.

But something odd happened. When all the other VCs and investors found out about Brian’s meeting with John, he went from being the homeless guy no one wanted to go near to an Instagram super model in a Victoria-Not-So-Secret g-string, baby. Jackpot.

The takeaway here is when you attempt to skip the line, it doesn’t guarantee you’ll get what you want the first time. But it does mean you’re now in the main game. People take you seriously. You can make things happen.

Brian eventually applied to well-known accelerator Y-Combinator. Silicon Valley royalty Paul Graham didn’t let them in right away. He, too, hated the idea of strangers sleeping in people’s beds. But when Brian told him how he sold $40 boxes of Obama O’s cereal to keep the company afloat, Paul nearly pissed his pants.

Brian stunk of high agency. And it’s so rare, Paul let him into Y-Combinator even though the idea was stupid. Because you never want to underestimate a high agency person who skips the line for a living.

High-agency moves don’t eliminate failure—they just eliminate the wasted time spent waiting in line to find out.

Alright, here’s how the heck to do this in reality without all the hype and Lambos

There are some general principles I’ve learned being a serial skipper of the line (mostly because I hate kissing ass and sucking off gatekeepers).

First, assume if you’re resourceful enough, you can always find a way to skip the line. If you don’t believe this and you’re not completely delusional, skipping the line won’t work, and you may end up in the homeless shelter line by accident.

You and I are not the first to skip the line. We won’t be the last. History is full of the greats who secretly skipped the line. If only we knew. You know the tech bro Tim Ferriss? He has that best-selling book “The 4-Hour Workweek.” The hero story is that it was a great book and he went from nobody to somebody.

Not quite.

Tim’s advisor the whole way through the book process was Jack Canfield. If you don’t know Jack, well, he wrote Chicken Soup for the Soul – one of the best-selling books in history. So with Jack by his side, it was unlikely Tim wasn’t going to smash it.

But that part of the story is left out. It ruins the mythical nature of it.

The point here is Tim found a way to skip the line. He somehow got one of the greatest authors in history to back his book project when he was a nobody.

We don’t know how, but we at least know it wasn’t privilege or a rich family because Tim had neither. So somehow Tim Ferriss was resourceful enough and got to skip the line. This shouldn’t be a surprise.

In other areas of his life, Tim is famous for being resourceful. In his first job, he famously figured out a way to reach CEOs after hours while everyone was calling them during business hours.

The second way to skip the line is to share your ideas online.

People don’t buy products or services. They buy ideas and the people behind those ideas. Social media is one of the best ways to make that happen. I recommend you write every day on one big social media platform. Share stories. Share ideas. Don’t freaking paywall anything. Focus on being helpful.

The third way to skip the line is with non-needy networking. This is where you make it a habit to proactively connect with people without asking them for anything or saying “Can I pick your brain?” like an absolute moron.

You do it by leaving thoughtful comments on people’s social media posts for a while. Then after a few months you reach out via the DMs and start a conversation. Because they’ve likely seen your comments by now, they’ll reply.

Now you have a new connection. Someone you can build a relationship with. Do this enough times and you end up with a powerful network. That network can help you meet hard-to-meet people, and see opportunities others don’t.

When someone is looking for a co-founder, they don’t put up a job ad. No. They go to their network. That’s how I found my co-founder. He was referred to me.

The best opportunities with the highest leverage, most status, and biggest paydays aren’t public. Read that again. So if you’re waiting around for opportunities or hoping one will find you, you’re wasting your time. Skip the line and start doing non-needy networking tonight.

The last way to skip the line is the hardest of them all – it can’t be faked. It’s to have proof of work. It’s to rack up hundreds of hours actually taking action, reaching goals, and gaining experience in a field. Along the way there will be stories that happen.

This is powerful for skipping the line because when you can show you’ve done things, and you can share interesting stories about it, people pay attention. They see you’re real. You’re secretly given the label of a practitioner. This is how you stay away from the front door and avoid asking for permission.

It’s what I did. I wrote every day online for 12 years so that my proof-of-work was undeniable. So that the outcome of my success would be inevitable. It’s simple to understand but hard to pull off.

Theorists say, “I think I can do it… give me a go.” Practitioners say, “I’ve done it before, and here’s what I did.” Nobody gives a f*ck about your potential. They only care what you’ve already done. That’s the fastest way to skip the line.

Go skip the line

You now know the principles.

Go try them for yourself. Watch opportunities flow in your direction. Be humble when they do. Show others how to skip the line too. The journey won’t be easy, but the failures and rejection will become the best kind of nostalgia later on.

The market right now is tough, no matter if you’re an entrepreneur or an employee. This is the cheat code. This isn’t hope, it’s a strategy you can implement.

Stop going through the front door. Use the back door, VIP entrance, or go really crazy and use the staff door. You’ll be amazed at what happens when you do.

P.S.

I went from 5k to 300k followers on Instagram in 6 months.

No cheating.

No pods.

No ads.

That speed of growth might not be possible on any other platform in 2026.

To celebrate, I’ve launched a new workshop showing exactly how I did it: How to Win on Instagram.

Seats will be limited.

Head here to get the details and reserve your seat now.

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A limitless mindset that I can do anything changed my life.

This idea can bizarrely change your life too. To get to the essence of the idea, I need to take you beyond the cookie-cutter mindset info that is all over social media. A happy-go-lucky view of the world won’t make you successful and wealthy.

That’s clickbait.

I never used to have a limitless mindset. I was overweight, depressed, hated my 9-5 job, and didn’t want to live anymore.

One evening I discovered these “Power Talks” from Tony Robbins. They were recorded in the 90s, long before podcasts existed. Tony sat down with individuals most people hadn’t heard of. The whole point of each talk was to reinforce the idea you can literally do anything you want in life.

He interviewed regular people who became astronauts. And spiritual gurus like Deepak Chopra. After the first talk I called bullsh*t on the idea, as you do. But I was bored and had to pass the time on the way to work because I parked an hour away from the office to save $5 in parking fees.

After about the 30th Power Talk, a switch flicked in my head.

It became obvious to me what Tony was trying to drill into my stubborn brain. I could literally do anything I put my mind to.

I didn’t get the inspiration then do nothing.

Nope.

I went to the staff directory of the 40,000-person bank where I worked. I looked up all the General Managers and Chief-level staff members.

I called them on their cell phones out of the blue. And I just assumed I would be working for them in the future. I even told them so. Then I asked for advice on how to skip the line and reach their position.

Some of them told me to f*ck off. No joke. But most helped because they admired the total bat sh*t craziness of my approach. I wasn’t just delusional. I risked my job to call them and talk the way I did.

One complaint would have ended my career.

I eventually got a gig working for one of these Chiefs much sooner than I thought. We’re still friends. And he still thinks I’m crazy.

The world wants to place limits on your imagination. It wants you to get on your knees and ask for permission, get more experience, wait your turn, be patient, get underpaid in the name of “that’s what you deserve,” and choose one path and stick to it until retirement.

The internet burned this worldview to the ground.

AI and social media finished the job.

You can now literally do anything you want in life with zero barriers. No one is watching. No one gives a f*ck if you fail. And there are infinite opportunities to replace the current ones you have access to.

Let me explain the power of the mindset that you can do anything you want in life.

The war hero with a naughty secret

Joseph Cyr is a son of a gun. You’re about to see why.

In 1951, he got on a ship and headed to the Korean War. He was the ship's sole medical officer, responsible for the health and lives of every man on board.

As the war raged, he completed dozens of complex surgeries and saved many people’s lives. Everything from reattaching limbs to cutting open chests to remove bullets. Not a single patient died.

Dude was a freaking hero.

There was only one problem: “Joseph Cyr” was actually Ferdinand Demara, a high school dropout with absolutely zero medical training. Ferdinand had stolen a real doctor’s credentials, forged some paperwork, and walked onto the ship with a smile.

When patients started piling up, he didn’t panic because he had zero medical training. No. At night he read books on how to perform surgeries. The next day he’d perform them. He felt successful because he saved lives.

When he returned home, he got busted for not being a real doctor. The public was outraged. “Why’d you do it, man?”

His answer was chillingly simple: he just didn’t see why he couldn’t.

Ferdinand couldn’t be stuffed waiting 4 years to get a medical degree. He just decided he was a surgeon, so he became one. Before you go and do the same, I must tell you that I don’t suggest you become a fake doctor. That’s not the point.

The point is people tell themselves stories about why they can’t do things when they can. The story you tell yourself becomes reality. You can change the story. You can rewrite it. Or, like Ferdinand, you can pretend the rules don’t exist.

The delusional 16 year old that defied a room full of PhDs

Boyan Slat decides at age 16 to clean up the ocean.

He gets in front of a room full of billionaires and PhDs and tells them he is going to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world. World governments had already declared the problem impossible.

The world’s brightest scientific minds unanimously agreed that cleaning the oceans was impossible. The area was too big, the currents too unpredictable, the cost too astronomical. It would take thousands of years and tens of billions of dollars.

So the fat cat scientists went back to work and kept reading National Geographic.

Boyan was a punk high school kid. He had a total disrespect for authority and experts. He decided to fix the problem himself. He dropped out of his aerospace engineering degree and founded The Ocean Cleanup.

The biggest problem to solve was the extreme current of the ocean. Instead of moving his cleanup machines through the ocean, he got the ocean’s current to move the rubbish into his cleanup machines.

10 years later, this punk kid is now an adult and his company has removed hundreds of thousands of pounds of rubbish from the ocean.

There is a solution. There is hope. Seals don’t need to swim in your beer packaging anymore and get drunk with frustration.

Boyan didn’t make enormous progress because he had a high IQ or a degree.

He did it because his brain wasn’t mature enough to understand what was impossible. He assumed the problem could be solved so he just got to work.

Most of society sees a problem and goes, “The government needs to solve this and change my adult diaper.” A small part of society sees a giant problem and says, “No one is going to solve this, so I must do it, instead of complaining like a toddler.”

The moment you stop seeing problems and start seeing opportunities, your entire life changes. You realize what Star Wars creator George Lucas said: “We are all living in cages with the door wide open.”

There’s a dumb fish called a Northern Pike.

If you put it in an aquarium and divide the space in two with a piece of glass, the Pike will try to get to the other side.

Each time it will bruise its nose when it hits the glass. After three days, the lazy Pike gives up on life and stops trying. It’s conditioned to stop trying after three days of failure. Conditioned by failure, it accepts the invisible wall as permanent reality.

If you remove the glass in the middle of the tank and chuck in lots of food on the previously blocked half of the aquarium, the Pike dies.

Inches from food it just ignores taking a bite. It won’t cross the now invisible barrier to save itself. The Pike’s mindset is fixed and nothing will change it. It’ll die because of its stubbornness and worshipping of the rules.

This story isn’t just about the Pike. It’s the story of mainstream society.

Most humans starve to death in an environment full of opportunities only inches from their grasp. Then they complain there’s no food when there’s a Costco warehouse full of food right in their backyard with the door wide open.

A limitless mindset is the solution to your biggest struggles

I know you’re not Ferdinand, and you’re not going to pretend to be a doctor. And you don’t need to.

But everyone suffers from limits we place on ourselves and don’t even realize. Unless you remind yourself every day that you can literally do anything in your life, you’ll forget. Hang this picture from Tim Urban on your wall as a reminder:

You may have followed one path to date, but that’s literally one of millions of paths you can take. And you get to choose your path in life. The most dangerous thing you can do is let other people choose your path.

Religion, parents, or the corporate ladder can make us put on blinders and limit our paths in life for no good reason.

A limitless mindset is different. It allows you to turn the impossible into possible. It gives you mental fluidity. It helps you see opportunities, not problems. It expands your mind to believe anything is possible and you get to decide.

It’s one of the greatest forms of modern freedom in existence. And most people do not take advantage of it.

Right now you either believe anything is possible for your life or you don’t.

There’s no in-between. Now don’t bullsh*t yourself. Be honest. Do you really believe anything is possible for your life? If not, that’s the opportunity of this essay. That’s the change you now get to make if you want to get what you want.

The challenge is not so much yourself, but everyone around you who wants to mold your mind for their benefit.

Slavery is the default in society and it starts with brainwashing people to close off huge parts of their mind and delete all of the limitless paths they could take.

Modern mindset theory lied to you

The woo-woo spiritual vibe guys go too far and tell you to believe you can do everything. So you end up doing too much and being overloaded and burned out.

One of my readers said this:

It’s about taking responsibility for building the conditions that make something possible. Mindset without a system is an illusion. Mindset with a system is power.

Theory sounds smart. It’s inspirational. But it doesn’t produce change or turn you into a millionaire. It’s just free dopamine that gives your brain an orga$m.

If you want to do anything you want, you must first work out what you want. Dan Koe calls this a quest. I call it a mission. Call it whatever the hell you want. But what do you want? If you don’t know, you must experiment or you’ll never know and die a bum.

Once you know what you want there has to be a system to get you from where you are to where you want to go. That’s a combination of cliche as hell daily habits and some sort of accountability like a KPI tracker.

No one wants to hear that because we’ve had James Clear’s Atomic Habits shoved up our asses for almost a decade. But it’s true.

Adopting the idea that deep-rooted belief manifests into reality has completely changed the way I move

(One of my readers)

What you believe shapes your reality.

If you have terrible beliefs, no amount of reading or advice will help you. What you believe determines whether you will act on what you learn.

Beliefs must shift before you can learn new things.

I used to believe I was a loser and would end up on welfare. I came within a month of that becoming a reality. Getting a $55K a year call center job saved me.

After learning Tony Robbins’ teachings, I began to change my beliefs. I believed I would find a way out of the corporate world and build a life I love. I didn’t know how, but I believed this idea with every bone in my body.

This belief opened up my mind and helped me see opportunities I couldn’t see before. For example, I used to go on Youtube and leave hate comments on people’s videos. I believed anyone with a Youtube channel was a grifter and trying to sell something.

When my beliefs changed, I suddenly became open to the idea of doing Youtube, using social media, putting up a website, and doing some blogging.

That opportunity eventually changed my life.

The simple path to get what you want in life

Whatever you’ve done to date is irrelevant.

You can go from being a lawyer to a Youtuber tomorrow if you want. You can quit a career in banking and go be a chef if you decide to.

You can light your current degree on fire and get another one. You can use self-education to get out of poverty if you’ve had enough of your current life.

The limitation is you.

If you can remove YOU from the equation, you can see a different reality. Your current thinking got you to the current place. New thinking is what is needed. And the idea you’ve been searching for your entire life is this:

Adopt the mindset that you can literally do anything you want in life and you will.

This idea made me a millionaire. Everyone I’ve shared it with, who has dared to embody it, has gone on to change the world in some tiny way.

Why not you?

“But this situation prevents me from…”

The limitless mindset tells us that humans are all the same.

People we love get sick. Some of us have kids which affects free time. All of us will struggle financially at some point. People will lose their jobs. We will get lied to at some point. You’re not special. Your situation isn’t unique.

I had a guy last week tell me life is hard because he’s a single father of two kids. Therefore, he can’t do anything until the kids are grown up. He acts as if he’s the only single father on Earth.

Meanwhile, a connection of mine lost his wife to cancer and raised two kids on his own with no help, while building a massive brand online that helps people overcome the grief of losing a partner.

Some people are victims. Some choose to be heroes.

I had another guy tell me he’s been stuck trying to start a business for 16 freaking years. Yet he still won’t change.

The harsh truth is nobody is coming to save you. You must save yourself. But the upshot of this reality, as Alexei on X said is, “No one is coming to stop you” either.

Every limitation you think you have is just a fake sob story and a bunch of excuses. If you’re living like that you need to wake up and stop being immature. You will either get what you want, or you will suffer and watch other people get what they want.

You get to decide. And your bullsh*t excuses determine which reality.

You will hate this part and may block me

When some people discover the secret they can literally do anything they want, they set up an Instagram account to brag about it. They take photos of the Ferrari and 6-pack to rub it in your face.

There’s not much you can do about it. It’s human nature that once you learn to defy the laws of nature and live in abundance, you may want to brag about it. A limitless mindset is incredible. But it can make you think you’re better than everyone.

I’m guilty of this.

I discovered in my 20s I could build a $50M a year eCommerce business without much skill and using other people’s money. I turned into a narcissistic a**hole and even asked employees to kiss my shoes. I asked a couple of them to suck my you know what, too. And I was serious. I wish I didn’t. But that version of me did it.

Every cheat code in life comes with downsides.

The solution here is to adopt this limitless mindset, but use it for good. Don’t let it blow up your ego. Instead, use the mindset to help others. That’s how you use it to create more abundance, and it oddly creates more for you too.

Here’s how to make a limitless mindset work for you

This part is simple. It’s uns*xy. But I’m not here to please you. Sorry.

1. Reverse-Engineer the “Experts”

The biggest illusion holding you back is the myth of the “Expert.” You look at CEOs, authors, and innovators and assume they possess a secret blueprint of the universe.

They don’t. Most of them are just making it up as they go, running on high confidence and iteration.

• The Action: Stop looking at people at the top as superior beings with superpowers. Look at them as prototypes. If a human being built a company, wrote a book, or sailed the world, it means the physics of reality allow for it.

• The Rule: If someone else has done it, it is mechanically possible for you to do it. Strip the romance away from success and look at it as a logical puzzle to be solved.

2. Operate with “Strategic Delusion”

If you only aim for goals that feel realistic based on your current resume, you will only ever achieve linear growth.

To do anything you want, you have to practice strategic delusion: setting a goal so absurdly high that your current brain doesn’t even know how to process it.

• The Action: Choose a goal that genuinely scares you, then actively ignore the voice that asks how you’re going to pull it off.

• The Rule: The how is none of your business at the start. Your only job in phase one is to lock onto the what. When Ferdinand Demara walked onto that ship, he didn’t know how to do surgery. He figured it out because the situation demanded it. Audacity forces capability.

3. Lower the Cost of Failure to Zero

The reason people don’t try to do “anything they want” is the fear of looking stupid.

They treat failure like a permanent tattoo when it’s actually just kids’ washable paint my daughter uses to draw monsters for my 5 month old baby.

• The Action: Build a lifestyle where a “no” doesn’t break you. Send the cold email. Pitch the crazy idea. Apply for the job you’re entirely unqualified for. Build the business that feels beyond your reach using your existing skills.

• The Rule: Treat life like a video game with infinite respawns. If you lose a level, you don’t die. You just hit restart with more data than you had before. The faster you collect rejections, the faster you stumble into the room where everything changes.

The brutal truth

I’m not that smart. I didn’t invent this limitless mindset.

Everyone who has succeeded throughout history has stumbled across this mindset. Unfortunately, the bastards didn’t share it and kept it for themselves to reduce competition and have an aura of superiority.

F*ck those sons of b*tches. It’s time to level the playing field with a bazooka.

Adopt the mindset starting today that you can literally do anything you want in life. Embody the idea. Tattoo it on your cheeks. Then when it brings you abundance, like it has for me, make sure to share it and not be greedy.

Those who believe they can do anything end up doing anything they want. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy as old as the Egyptian pyramids.

What's one limit you've accepted as permanent that, reading this, you're now not so sure about?

P.S.

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The world is full of AI slop.

Most writing has become unreadable. It’s full of oversmart how-to fluff, contrasting, EM dashes, and information placed into threes.

Most writing just feels lifeless.

It’s become nothing more than a performance done by a machine. Sure, it looks like words on a page, but it has no soul. It’s saying something without saying anything much at all. On some days, it makes me depressed. I miss the days before ChatGPT went mainstream in 2022.

Now everyone is looking for the shortcut with writing, which makes sense because writing is hard. It’s not putting words on a page. No. Writing is thinking.

And most people don’t think. They’ve forgotten how to think.

TikTok and their phone have turned their brain into mashed potatoes. Not the good type of mash either. The watery type that your 3-year-old throws in the bin while having a tantrum.

Good writing is deeply human at its core. So the idea that a machine could replicate that is kind of stupid if you think about it long enough while smoking a joint.

The last thing you should want your writing to sound like is a machine.

I’m determined to bring back great writing. Here’s how to write well.

Rule 1: Show up butt-naked in all of your glory

The best writing is risky.

The writer shows up and takes a risk by sharing a story or point of view that could harm them. There’s a touch of vulnerability. They’re sharing an idea that is contrarian or goes against what society deems prim and proper.

When you publish writing like this you feel naked.

Hitting the publish button feels dangerous. You imagine you might get canceled. I did this last week. I live in Australia, and recently we all got butt-f*cked with a massive tax increase. I quote-posted the government’s polite spin on the massive tax increase and shared my unfiltered opinion about why they must be voted out.

This is risky because in Australia we have draconian social media laws. You can go to jail for criticizing the government. But I did it anyway. I'm willing to take the risk because the cause is greater than the individual.

This is what naked writing looks like. It’s powerful. That’s why people pay attention and it cuts through all the AI slop.

Rule 2: Don’t perform like a circus monkey doing tricks for bananas

Modern writing has become a performance.

People write to look smart or build an audience that inflates their ego. It’s deeply f*cking selfish. And boring.

The best writing feels like a friend wrote you some advice on the back of a napkin because they actually care about you. It’s selfless. It’s a conversation instead of a performance. It’s egoless.

The best example in history of this is The 4-Hour Workweek book written by Tim Ferriss. He struggled to write the book, so instead, he opened a blank draft in Gmail and wrote it as an email to his friend.

It removed all the overthinking and pretentiousness from the book. This one technique helped the book become a bestseller for more than a decade.

You can apply this to your writing. Write like the reader’s friend. Have a conversation with them. Remove all the formal words and jargon and just say “Gday, mate, here’s what I wanna tell you about.”

Rule 3: Be totally unhinged to the point where your grandmother turns in her grave

Modern writing is too safe.

The best writing is unhinged. It goes where most people won’t go. It says the thing we all think but are too scared to voice. Like, who said we all need to use pronouns in our bios and email signatures? Or, does International Women’s Day really empower women? Or is it just a “thoughts and prayers” kind of vibe?

I don’t have an opinion on either of these topics, but if I did, I would share it without giving two hoots what anyone thinks. Good writing feels a little naughty. It makes us dream a little. It encourages us to be leaders or to dare to inspire others.

The world needs less how-to content and more writing that pushes conversations deeper and further than before. You can’t do that if you’re wearing safety pants and bringing a box of condoms to every conversation. Sometimes you’ve gotta let your ideas impregnate people’s minds.

Rule 4: Bleed on the page until you pass out

Great writing has emotion.

Emotion moves us. It helps us abandon all logic and keep reading for reasons we can’t explain. Not everything you write has to have emotion, but some of it should.

AI can’t do emotions. It only understands how-to content. So if you want to avoid writing AI slop, then adding emotion is an easy workaround.

That doesn’t mean YOU must bleed on the page. You can share conversations or stories from other people and convey their emotion instead. But without any emotion, writing lacks the human element we all secretly crave.

Rule 5: Read a boatload of good f*cking human writing

This one isn’t obvious.

After 12 years of writing every day, whenever someone asks me how to get better, they assume my answer will be about writing. Wrong.

Writing better starts with reading better writing. Because reading great writing helps inspire you to do the same. It gives you ideas. It helps you see how to package your ideas so people will actually want to read them.

Reading a combination of old writing and modern writing is usually best.

Rule 6: Write where good writing exists

Writing well comes down to the environment.

It’s hard to write well when you’re in poor company. Writing is deeply social. You publish and people read. Other writers publish and you read. If you publish your writing in the wrong place, it messes up your mind.

It’s why I stopped writing on Medium dot com. Everyone on there was trying to write to the point of insanity to maybe earn $20 for an essay while the platform overlords mocked them like King Joffrey did to the peasants in Game of Thrones.

Being in a toxic environment like that kills your inspiration.

Your perception of the writing world comes from which corner of it you inhabit. It’s why I write on Substack. It’s where the best writers in the world are.

As my grandma used to say, roll around in the mud with pigs, and eventually you become nothing but a filthy pig waiting to become ham in someone’s sandwich.

Rule 7: The best writing breaks every Harvard University writing rule

To avoid sounding like AI slop you now must break all the rules.

AI wants to make your writing logical. It’ll tell you to flesh out the conclusion more. Or if you dare tell a story in two sentences, it’ll slap you in the face and tell you to make it longer and go into more detail.

But AI doesn’t understand writing.

Great writing isn’t logical. It doesn’t read like a neat little essay you wrote for Mrs Winterbottom in Grade 3 to try to get an A+. Great writing is messy. It has incomplete thoughts. The flow is often illogical. It’s not chronological. The contention isn’t always revealed right at the start.

Great writing is kind of like that TV show Lost. It’s all over the place. You never know where it’s going to take you. One minute you’re on a plane, then it crashes, and now you’re stuck on an island. And before you realize it, weird sh*t is happening and you’re seeing ghosts from 100 years ago.

If it’s logical and flows nicely, it’s probably bullsh*t.

Non-AI slop is also imperfect. Grammarly didn't jam in a whole bunch of extra punctuation. There are spelling mistakes. Some of the facts might be slightly off. You might start a thought and forget to finish it.

This is the writing era we’re moving into.

We’re so damn tired of perfect writing performances that inspire no one and read like a listicle from a Wordpress blog 10 years ago. The world is going mad. We’re going back in time to an era when technology didn’t filter the words and shape our thinking.

Raw, unfiltered writing is the future. And the good news is we’re all overqualified to do it. Even you.

Closing Thought

I’m going to end in an unexpected way with a cookie-cutter conclusion that’ll make AI wet its pants in excitement.

The secret to writing well in an era of AI slop is to violently refuse to go down this dark path and reject every hack and copywriting technique there is.

Lean into your human side as much as possible in your writing, or expect your words to be lost in a never-ending pile of AI dog sh*t. Ask yourself, “Does this essay show proof I’m human?” If it doesn’t, light a match and let your essay burn. Then write it again like a human freaking being.

It’s now either unhinged human writing or AI slop. The messy middle has been removed – and I love it. You should too.

What's the one opinion you have that you're still too scared to publish?

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This one makes me cry every time.

All my daughter wanted was $2 to buy a toy. My wife said she had to do chores to earn it. Each chore she did earned her $1.

Within a day she’d done two chores and earned her $2. She really wanted these toy eggs. The look on her face melted my heart. Her sweet little voice begging for the toy was impossible for me to ignore.

But what made me emotional was the thought of being cruel.

I cannot stand to be cruel to my two daughters in any way. It’s because my childhood was extremely cruel to me. I spent my younger years surrounded by criminals.

I saw people get punched, stabbed, and robbed every day. I hated every minute of it.

The thought of me being cruel to my daughters with things they want to buy is too much. It gets me every time. It goes deeper. I grew up with no money. I now never want to NOT be able to provide for my daughters.

I want them to have all the things I couldn’t afford (without spoiling them). I want them to experience Disney World that I didn’t get to go to until I was 32.

The other night my daughter was misbehaving. My wife told her if she didn’t eat her dinner it would be taken away and she would starve (normal parental discipline). But I couldn’t handle it. It felt cruel. I once again felt emotional.

Nobody tells you that having kids turns you into a giant p*ssy with a heart full of love.

That is lesson one. Here are 39 other life lessons from my 40 years.

2. “Trust me, bro” doesn’t work.
   
   You must have proof of work. Proof of competence. Proof of skill. Social proof. If there’s nothing to evaluate, the risk of betting on you is too high.
   

3. Burnout isn’t real.
   
   You only experience burnout when you live a life you shouldn’t be living and do nothing about it. Stress is good for you.
   
   If you run from it and call it burnout, you’re missing the point. Eliminate the bullsh*t work, not the stress. Time off doesn’t fix it. Changing your life does.
   

4. The only way to be a loser is to be afraid of losing.
   
   Pessimism is low IQ. You won’t know anything unless you try. And the way you learn is by losing. So not losing equals zero learning. You gotta love losing if you want to win.
   

5. Your life isn’t unique.
   
   Everyone else is facing death, sickness, money problems, job loss, and uncertainty too. Once you understand your life is the same as millions of other people’s you can stop letting excuses hold you back. Yes, life is hard. But what are you going to do about it? Delay? Complain? Wait? Just f*cking get going.
   

6. Understand everyone’s secret incentive.
   
   It’ll help you make better decisions. And it’ll stop you from getting scammed. A person’s bias is your opportunity. See it. Verbalize it. Then make an informed decision.
   

7. Most problems make sense when you apply basic logic.
   
   Instead of looking for complex solutions, break down the problem and analyze it. What seems logical? That becomes your starting point.
   

8. Understand human psychology to become wealthy.
   
   And to get people to take the actions you want to take. People do things out of selfishness, not compassion or virtue.
   

9. Everyone needs someone to mind f*ck them.
   
   Tony Robbins did it for me. For others, it’s Dan Koe. Find your person and let them challenge your view of the world. Let them stress test it.
   

10. If your focus is to always save money or cap downside, you’ll never be wealthy.
    Good news is it’s easy to change.
    

11. No one who said “in 3 months will be the right time” achieves their dreams.
    
    Avoid these people like the plague. A dream is a daily habit that starts today. If you can’t even work on it for 10 mins a day today, you’re not serious.
    

12. Many opportunities are lottery tickets in disguise.
    
    Sell SaaS. Write a best-selling book. Sell $50 digital products. Run a $5/month Substack. People are tricked easily into these paths because they look easy. But they’re actually dumb. People win lottery tickets. Doesn’t mean you should try to too.
    

13. All the psychological labels give people permission to be mediocre.
    
    “It’s not me. It’s because I’m introverted.” Don’t outsource your potential and identity to a made-up human label. Your brain can literally rewire itself to believe anything and to heal from anything.
    

14. The most life-changing rabbit hole I went down is neuroplasticity.
    
    Nerd out on it. Understand it. Experiment with it. Your entire life can change because of neuroplasticity. It’s the antidote to boredom, procrastination, laziness, and feeling stuck.
    

15. Selling is just helping. Learn how to help people and you’ll make a lot of sales without having to try and sell.
    

16. When people call you cringy, they really just mean “I wish I could do that.”
    
    I love being cringe. It means I’m acting weird and refusing to fit in and that’s my zone of genius. What you want to avoid is being unremarkable.
    

17. Not taking risks is disrespecting yourself.
    
    You won’t know unless you take a risk. And 99% of decisions are reversible anyway. In the future you'll appreciate the chances you took — regardless of the outcome.
    

18. Relying on fantasies hurts you.
    
    Many people fall for this delusion. They think the result they crave is inevitable. Most results are insanely hard to achieve and require more effort that is hard to imagine. Focus on actions. The memories of doing — not dreaming — are what compound over time.
    

19. Most luck is hard work and networking compounding over so much time that you forget you were even building it.
    
    Luck is earned. It’s proof of work. It’s when what you do is undeniable and you appear serious due to the library of experiences and moments you’ve shared.
    

20. Aim to be a practitioner – not a leader, influencer, or guru.
    
    People trust practitioners more. The barrier to entry is work and effort. Anyone with a low IQ can do it. While it’s simple it’s hard. And most people won’t do it, so there’s little competition.
    

21. Your nightmares reveal your fears.
    
    Mine are about failing high school and something happening to my daughters. High school isn’t important to me, but being self-made is. You can’t stop nightmares. But you can use them to tell you what’s important.
    

22. “Get good grades. Get a good job. Stay for 40 years. Retire at 65.” Tech killed this dream. Most haven’t realized.
    

23. The country you live in and its government are actively working against you.
    
    Not in an evil way. It’s just incentives. Their incentive is to take more of your money. Unless you understand how and why they do that, they will get more of your money. And you’ll work harder without realizing it.
    

24. When you have kids you miss simple things.
    
    Much of your social life disappears for a while as you nurture small children. When they’re able to fend for themselves more, society has already written you off. You’ve been missing from the social scene for years.
    
    All you can do is jump back in. Let people know you’re back. And make going out a priority.
    

25. Family picnics with friends are way more fun than nightclubs/pubs.
    
    A picnic is where you go to enjoy the moment and look at what you’ve built. A nightclub is where you go to drink and escape the life you have. They’re not the same.
    

26. Avoiding alcohol and drugs solves a lot of problems. Addiction rots the brain.
    

27. Having a copy of “Ego is the enemy” next to you at all times keeps you humble. Your ego will ruin more opportunities than rejection ever will.
    

28. Life is more fun if you learn to enjoy the struggle and see hard mode as a way to get everything you ever wanted in life.
    

29. The courage to look stupid matters more than skill acquisition or competency ever will. If you can look dumb and not care, you’ll figure out what you don’t know.
    

30. Rock bottom is just a breakthrough that’s about to happen.
    
    Craving them is important. Knowing we all have them makes it easier to push through. Without extreme pain you don’t have the motivation to change.
    

31. There’s no need to explain yourself.
    
    As long as your world makes sense to you that’s all that matters. If people ask for explanations you can ignore them. Not every question asked of you demands an answer.
    

32. Fall in love with criticism.
    
    I get about 5-10 people every day criticizing me. It used to make me depressed. Now I crave it. Criticism means you’re making moves. You’re repelling people. And that means you’re actually trying to produce change. The haters just want what you have anyway.
    

33. The best skill to acquire is to constantly reinvent yourself
    
    My dad started as a minister. Then he became a soldier. Then late in life he bought a business. You’re not one thing. Your life is made up of many different paths. Don’t get stuck on one.
    

34. “Am I willing to change or am I happy to stay the same” reveals your true bottleneck. It’s rarely money, time, resources, or information. It’s you. You’re the roadblock.
    

35. Redundancies prove job security is bullsh*t. Stop protecting your job and start protecting your family.
    

36. When you truly witness insane levels of obsession it’s hard to forget. David Senra is my daily reminder of this.
    

37. A war always ruins your investments at the start.
    
    But after people get used to the war it becomes old news and the markets recover. Same with the pandem!c. Same with tech layoffs. Same with the AI debate. Same with the president being shot in the head or the Queen dying.
    

38. Labor leverage is still one of the greatest advantages.
    
    Hire smart people to replace you. Let them do the work. You measure the outcomes. Doing everything is dumb. And people can be more talented at a skill than you.
    

39. If you play the social media game, embrace authenticity above all.
    
    It’s what people now crave. It means mistakes, typos, and being vulnerable. It also means you don’t let AI do the writing for you.
    

40. Anyone (including me) can die tomorrow. Stop waiting for someday like a f*cking clown. Do it today.

P.S. I’ve just opened enrollment for next week’s workshop:

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Oh yeah.

And as a bonus to celebrate my 40th birthday, I’ve added a stack of bonuses:

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My 40 best sales emails of the last year.

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It’s weird that a video of a guy DJing made me teary-eyed.

Grown men aren’t supposed to cry over DJs. I might be the first. It happened because I accidentally stumbled across a DJ set filmed at the Boiler Room nightclub. People online were going bat sh*t crazy over it. At first, it seemed like nothing.

Then about halfway through there’s an odd moment.

Everyone is partying hard and loving the club tunes. Then one strange-looking guy bumps the DJ console and the music stops. I used to be a DJ. If you did this in a club, you’d be thrown out on your ass and likely beaten to a pulp by the security guards.

But that didn’t happen.

The normal-looking DJ restarted the music, smiled at the guy, then gave him a massive hug. As I analyzed the video, I realized there was an extreme version of love in that room. The DJ had somehow created this environment.

His random act of kindness to the guy who stopped his music was one of many moments that proved it. There was something real about this DJ. It transcended his music, personal brand, and Spotify music.

He cared. He was real. He gave a f*ck about people. He wanted to spread joy.

The video stayed with me longer than I expected, even after I stopped thinking about it consciously. Then, a few weeks later, Justin Bieber got on stage at the Coachella music festival and played random Youtube clips. Nothing fancy. No big lights or LED boards. Just Justin and his laptop, hanging out like friends.

Same happened again at the Grammys. Justin got up on stage in nothing but his boxer shorts with one light shining on him. He played some guitar, used a basic loop pedal, and made music live in front of the audience.

It felt like you were in his bedroom.

If that weren’t enough, I noticed my favorite Substack writers doing something similar. Not trying to be content creators. Not building some over-the-top personal brand. Just sharing real stories and educating.

It’s catching on. More well-known people are joining Substack (not an ad for Substack) – Mark Manson, John Cleese, Pamela Anderson, Tony Hawk, and even Gary f*cking Vee. (Unfortunately Andrew Hate joined and still acts like a d*ck. )

The Substack version of these famous people is different.

It’s downplayed. There’s no fancy website, slogans, amazing graphics, or ghostwriters. It’s just them. Real. Sharing basic writing that’s mostly unedited.

What the hell is going on?

The world is reversing.

We’re sick and tired of polished, loud, and overdone. We’re having a moment. And that moment is called the Authenticity Era.

The Authenticity Era is the cultural shift where audiences are actively rejecting polished, produced, and performative content — and gravitating toward creators who show up raw, imperfect, and genuinely themselves. It's not a trend. It's a correction.

In a world of AI, the way to win is to be authentic.

What’s cool is it’s easier to be authentic, real, and yourself than it is to be a puppet acting for other people. Hollywood is full of actors pretending to be other people because they hate themselves.

The corporate world is full of people doing soulless work they know is bad for humanity and feeling like they can’t escape because that’s all they’ve ever known.

When you spend your life pretending to be someone else, it feels exhausting.

It rots your soul. You feel like a zombie.

It’s not just exhausting for the characters. It’s exhausting for the audience too. As part of an audience, we want to feel intimacy. We want to feel like we really know the writers, musicians, athletes, and entrepreneurs we follow.

When everything is stripped back to its core and PR and marketing are removed, what you’re left with is the true artist. That’s what people connect with. And that’s what is creating all these viral moments of authenticity all over the internet.

Being raw and authentic is one level of the game.

There’s an even deeper level.

That level is being willing to make mistakes, publicly fail, and intentionally insert errors. In music, that looks like performing a song and stopping then starting if needed. In writing, it means publishing without an AI edit or spell check. In comedy, it’s going to a comedy club and trying out new jokes even if no one laughs.

We want to see people put themselves on the line. We want to see people take artistic risks that have consequences. This is when the people we follow and admire shine.

Not when we see the finished product. But when we see them struggling to actually make the product.

To go to this deeper place and be willing to be imperfect, you must go to a dark place. Something other than cookie-cutter fame, likes, or money must motivate you.

I am a good example of this. I’ve been to the dark place many times. Both with mental illness and not wanting to live anymore, and during my banking career that felt like a prison sentence. If I want to truly connect with people, I need to go to these dark places and talk about things I swore I’d never talk about.

I need to be willing to share stories I come across (names changed), knowing the main character of that story may realize I’m writing about them.

Without the artistic risk there’s no f*cking point in creating anything.

“Safe” doesn’t inspire people. Safe doesn’t help people change. Safe doesn’t blow up someone’s view of the world. Only taking artistic risks can do that.

The other cost is embarrassment.

Let me share an embarrassing moment to demonstrate. A while ago, my team was testing a new AI writing tool. They loaded up a piece of content they found from someone else and asked the AI to write it like me with my insights. The AI f*cked up. It posted the story as mostly a copy-and-paste job.

A few hours later, a reader saw it and emailed me in a rage.

I had posted a pure piece of plagiarism. No doubt about it. Total freaking accident… but still, no excuse. Within minutes of finding out, I deleted it. Still, the damage was done. A few people now hate me forever because of that.

When I want to inspire people, I go back to this dark place.

Because from here there is energy, emotion, and a sense of rock bottom that can help act as a reframe and connect with people on a deeper level. You can’t fake stuff like this. People know when you’re full of the brown stuff.

The secret to winning the internet is to lean hard into authenticity.

The DJ at the start of this essay is Fred Again. He’s built a cult following by leading the Authenticity Era.

There’s a problem though.

When you research Fred’s journey from the outside, you’ll quickly realize his dad advised the King of England. He comes from pure privilege. He’s a rich kid. His neighbor growing up was famous music producer Brian Eno.

Brian became his free mentor. It opened many doors for Fred. At a young age, his privilege helped him to produce albums for people like Ed Sheeran.

But then Fred walked away from producing famous people’s music. He stopped dropping his famous mentor’s name.

And he produced his own music which he put out on Spotify. The first album “Actual Life” blew people’s minds. It wasn’t just music. It was an experience. It defined the 2020 era of isolation, staying at home, and loneliness.

People craved Fred’s work. It was inescapable.

The critics would argue Fred’s privilege made him famous. But I did deep research on him and found something different.

Fred’s privilege bought him a life of making music for famous people – but that turned out to be a huge burden. Fred's pivot into authenticity won him the internet

It’s why famous artists from all around the world get on stage with Fred. A recent example is Thomas Bangalter. Thomas Bangalter spent decades as one half of Daft Punk — one of the most successful electronic acts in history — deliberately hiding his face behind a robot helmet. He almost never performs live anymore.

But Thomas decided to perform with Fred because it was different. So when he got on stage with Fred, people paid attention.

Fred dances on top of the DJ console. He talks to the crowd like a friend. He hugs the people he performs with constantly. And he invites the audience to dance on stage next to him with no security guards or barrier between him and the audience.

People like Thomas want to be part of that. It helps them be reintroduced to the world through a new lens of authenticity. It even relaunches their careers.

If you want to rise to the top of your field and win the internet, you need to start embracing the Authenticity Era.

The reason most people don't do this isn't laziness. It's fear of being judged, misunderstood, or ignored.

But here's what Fred, and every creator living in the Authenticity Era, has figured out: the people who judge you for being real were never your audience anyway.

The good news is to harness this new era you basically just have to be yourself. Make mistakes. Have fun. Connect with people. Talk with them, not down to them. Fail. Get rejected. Make more mistakes. Show people behind the scenes. None of it is hard.

There’s no need to perform anymore, thank god. Just be yourself.

Are you craving more authenticity just like I am?

P.S.

Quick question - If you took 30 days off tomorrow — no calls, no emails, no checking in — would your business still make money?

If the answer is “no,” you’ll like this.

Just dropped a new video: How to Build a Business That Doesn’t Need You

You can jump straight to that by clicking here - How to Build a Business That Doesn’t Need You.

(I’ve even left some homework hidden in the video for you as a treat)

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The last 2 weeks have been tragic.

I found out a coach I wanted to work with was found dead. He took his own life. The more tragic part is in his content, he talked about how taking one’s life was selfish and hurt others the most. He had an ex-wife and a young son.

His son will grow up without a dad.

Yet his son will see his dad’s social media videos and be blown away by the persona he had. From one perspective, his dad was a titan of the online world, inspiring millions of people. From another perspective, he obviously didn’t practice what he preached.

Seeing someone die so young for no good reason really hit me hard.

Only a few moments later after I made this discovery, I learned that a young woman I used to drive around as a chauffeur, who later became a famous DJ, fell off a balcony in Bali and died.

She was blind drunk.

I wish I could say it surprised me. Hardly. Her relationship with alcohol had always been terrible. She would drink until the ambulance rolled up. Right before she died, she told her sister that nobody taught her how to be happy.

She tried to use alcohol to fill the void. It didn’t work.

Both these individuals fell out of love with life. They let a series of seemingly normal events rob them of their love of life. A few dark days turned into weeks, months, and eventually a tragic end.

This is why if you’ve fallen out of love with your life, it’s critical you do something about it. Now.

Here are a few uncommon ideas you can use to fall in love with life again.

1. Quit accidentally acting like a coward

The gurus will call people cowards.

I rebel against that idea. No one knowingly acts like a coward. It almost always happens by accident.

When you act like a coward you rob yourself of potential. You become less than you can be. Each day you lose a tiny bit of your personal power. After long enough you become a hobbit hiding in your bedroom full of wall-to-wall pillows to protect you from harm while telling yourself you’ve earned your self-care.

Cowardliness starts with ghosting. Not replying to people. Ignoring simple follow-ups. Not RSVPing to invitations. Hiding. Watching. Waiting. Being flaky. And most of all…

Avoiding hard conversations.

Cowards go nowhere in life. They fall out of love with life because they see everyone else winning and they blame their situation on personality traits or being neurodivergent when it’s really just cowardliness.

If you know you’ve been acting like a coward… that’s okay. But it’s time to stop.

Admit where you’re at. Start doing the uncomfortable things you’ve been avoiding. And for the love of god stop ghosting people because it’s ruining your reputation and making you look like a giant p*ssy.

2. Start making real decisions

Life starts to feel terrible when you can’t decide.

When every decision turns into a 6-month research project and still nothing happens. If you spend enough days not making decisions, you shrink. Your confidence contracts. Your options quietly disappear. You feel terrible inside.

Every big opportunity that comes to you requires a decision. And the right decision will never feel comfortable. You either make decisions with a yes or a no (not a maybe), or life gets worse real fast. And you fall out of love with it and don’t know why.

Decide. Today. 99% of decisions are reversible anyway.

3. Add more total randomness and chaos

The assumption is that if you’ve fallen out of love with your life, you’ve transcended into total darkness and are about to walk off a bridge. That’s not true.

Falling out of love with life looks more like boredom.

Every day feels the same. There are no surprises. You just want to make it through the day. Life becomes a game of survival.

The cure is actually simpler than you think.

Try adding in more randomness. Walk to the shops a different way. Drive to different places. Start random conversations with people. Buy the person behind you in line a coffee.

Life starts to feel less predictable when you do. And that helps you fall in love with life again too. The cool thing is when life becomes less predictable, your experience of time slows down as well. Instead of months feeling like days, they now feel like months again. Randomness forces the mind to take more snapshots and to operate less on auto-pilot.

Here’s where I’ll push you to go further…

Add in more chaos to your life too. I did this by having two daughters under the age of three. Every day is a tantrum followed by dinner being thrown at my face. Running a business adds even more chaos into my life.

I never know what is going to happen. I constantly have to grow and evolve to deal with the latest crisis and this helps me fall in love with life. Why? Because when I look back each year I realize I’m far more capable than I was the year before.

I’m about to do that right now. I’m 39 today. In a week I will be 40. The difference between the two characters is ridiculous. A year ago, I had a tiny team and half the following. And I was making half the money.

Seeing your evolution like that is deeply addictive. It makes you think anything is possible for your life.

But it all starts with a little more chaos. That’s what creates the growth and builds the resilience – so you don’t experience a little bit of stress and get fooled into thinking, “I now need to take a year off work.” No, you don’t. You need to learn to deal with a little stress and chaos.

4. Lower your stupidly high expectations

High expectations rob you of joy.

They make you think every situation needs to be perfect when the reality is the world is messed up, imperfect, and chaotic.

Plans don’t go to plan. Your cookie doesn’t crumble the way it does in the TV commercial. And your kids don’t grow up to be perfect little angels who never smoke weed or get blind drunk.

If you lower your expectations, it makes you happier.

You feel better with failure and rejection as a result. You expect things to go wrong and even begin to crave it. And on the rare occasion things go right, you can do a victory dance to Katy Perry’s “ Baby, You’re a Firework” song.

5. Stop doing work you don’t give a f*ck about

People’s careers are the #1 form of misery.

The worst part is we don’t admit it. I didn’t. I told myself I loved my stupid banking career for years, even though it made my ears bleed. Not doing work you love is a fast way to fall out of love with life.

You spend so many hours at work, you better enjoy what you do, or you’re literally wasting precious hours of your life. This doesn’t mean quit your job tomorrow. That’d be financial su!cide. But start building something on the side.

Let the side project grow into the main project. Then turn your job into a side hustle and eventually into a resignation letter. Now you’ve transitioned without YOLOing your life away and giving into the quit-your-job bros.

This doesn’t just apply to employees. There are many business owners who hate what they do too. They might make a million dollars a month like they say on their Instagram, but behind the scenes their life is a train-wreck and they hate all the cr*p they’re selling.

Bizarrely, sometimes these people need to go back to jobs for a while. Or start a totally new business they don’t hate.

Either way, life is too short to do bullsh*t work and pretend you like it so you can get a paycheck and pay off debt. There’s a higher level of calling, purpose, and fulfillment. And it starts with you getting real with yourself and running some experiments.

6. Rebuild your energy levels

The last few days I’ve had intense food poisoning.

I couldn’t get out of bed. I felt like vomiting non-stop. I had no energy. I couldn’t eat. And my piss was yellower than the yellow submarine from that Beatles song. So, I missed writing an edition of this Substack.

When we have no energy life looks and feels terrible.

The last few days felt like the end of a 6-month chemo battle. When your energy comes back again you suddenly love life again. The bizarre part is many people live with low energy and the consequences and don’t even know it.

Until the brain fog lifts, most people don’t know that the reason they fell out of love with life was entirely due to a lack of energy.

It’s a bit like waking up every day looking through a dirty windshield full of bird poo, and expecting life to look good. It won’t.

When your energy levels are high, it feels more like you’re looking through a kaleidoscope each day and seeing the wonder in our planet and your potential.

The ways to fix your energy levels are cliché at this point. Drink more water. Sleep longer and better. Eat food that is grown not processed. Be careful of your content diet and don’t consume ragebait, politics, and clickbait. Remove losers from your inner circle who suck your energy away. Ignore critics and nitpickers.

7. Focus on one goal and go all in at an extreme level

Making progress in life is crucial to whether you love being alive.

The masses have goals, though, and never achieve them because they quit too soon. They give up at the sign of one roadblock. Or, they don’t give their all. They put in minimal effort. They dabble. They have a hobbyist approach. They’re a tourist in the environment that could take them to the next level instead of being a citizen.

To make progress you must go all in. You must be stupidly consistent and worship James Clear’s Atomic Habits like he’s your daddy. To sustain that level of effort, you must focus on one thing — not a hundred. And you must take action at an extreme level for more than a year.

If you follow this simple formula, you’ll end up more in love with life than you may realize. You’ll see a side of life most of society can only dream of by watching Instagram life p*rn.

Most won’t do this. They’ll dismiss it as hustle p*rn. And that’s the greatest opportunity that exists for you right now.

8. Treat every day like it’s the last day of your life

Life feels nowhere as good when you think you have time.

To fall in love with life, adopt the cancer survivor’s mindset. Assume every day is the last day of your life.

Assume, like my now deceased friend, that everything is going well in life, you’re about to start trying for a baby, then you get a strange lump on your chest and 4 weeks later your funeral is being filmed on Youtube because you die during the middle of a global pandem!c (true story).

Being truly connected with the fragility of life helps you appreciate every day so much more, without having to do a gratitude journal and shake hands with a hippie wearing rainbow-colored flower pants.

Life is short. You could die tomorrow. May as well fall in love with today because that’s all you’ve got.

You can use life to your advantage, or life can use and abuse you for society’s advantage. Choice is yours. Don’t be a victim. Be the main character. You know how to fall in love with life again, so go do it. Stop reading this. Hug a bear. Make out with a flower. Scream “I pissed my pants” in the middle of Times Square. Just do something interesting. Do it for the story. Do it for the love of it.

P.S.

Part of loving your life is succeeding financially.

So if you have an internet connection, fingers, and ambition, read this:

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