You’ve probably never heard of a weirdo named Blake Masters.
While most go to college to get a degree, he found a cheat code that’s so obvious and stupid it blows my mind.
Blake was a law student. He came across a course at Stanford University called “CS183 – Startup.” People took it to become business moguls.
Blake had a different idea.
The course was taught by billionaire PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel. Instead of trying to be great at the course, he focused on taking detailed notes for every class. These notes weren’t written for himself.
They were written as if he was explaining the class to a friend who had no context. The notes had actionable takeaways. They were the blueprint for building a startup.
To make the notes he took more powerful, he posted them on his website blog. A few nerds on the website Hacker News shared them.
Then Twitter and Reddit found his blog. It went viral.
Every professor, entrepreneur, or investor who had any sort of credibility was quoting his notes. The site exploded and had hundreds of thousands of monthly views. Normally a stunt like this would come with a penalty. The class notes aren’t supposed to be shared. But when Peter Thiel found out, he loved it.
Peter asked Blake to co-write a book with him on the topic. Together they wrote the book “Zero to One” that went on to become a cult classic in the business world and sell millions of copies in 40 languages.
Blake was supposed to finish university and become a corporate lawyer climbing the ladder to nowhere and working long hours until his wife divorced him and his kids no longer recognized him.
But he escaped the corporate matrix.
Peter hired Blake as his Chief of Staff. He got to skip the line. He got the job everyone wanted and got paid well for doing it. Later he built his own businesses and even went on to run for the U.S. senate.
Most people follow the rules. Blake broke them.
Most people follow the curriculum like sheep. Blake rewrote it in his own words and made it go viral on social media.
Most people cold email billionaires. Blake got a billionaire to come to him and ask to write a book with him
The best part is Blake started with no connections, $0 to his name, and no credentials.
Blake saw a cheat code in plain sight and took advantage of it while everyone else ignored it. Some people live in the normal economy. Others live in the Permissionless Economy.
Life isn’t fair. But it is hackable.
Blake saved 10-20 years in his career thanks to hacking the system with his cheat code. Here are the 17 cheat codes to life to help you do the same (and get ahead of 95% of people).
1. Be able to do work without seeing results
The need to see results too fast is ruining your life.
I teach people digital business. The absolute worst clients in the early days expected to make $20K in one week (now I screen them out). Their expectations are disconnected from reality.
Results come after you pass the threshold of participation. Doing the work because you love the work itself is highly underrated.
2. Memorize your calendar
As Naval says, “If you can’t hold your calendar in your head, you’re too busy.”
Too many meetings turns into brain rot. You become robotic. You have no time for deep thinking. Without space to think you become lifeless and can’t solve the real problems that create value, so you end up with financial problems.
Delete 90% of your meetings. Just stop attending. Stop saying yes. And watch almost no one notice.
3. Make bad art every day
Perfectionism says “it’s not good enough yet.”
What people forget is your life’s artwork gets good when you’ve done it for long enough. Better to do a poor job of, say, writing than it is to never do it at all and drown in overthinking and “one day, someday, mayday!”
Build things, break things.
4. Always be willing to walk away
Sunk cost fallacy screwed me up the butt. I wasted 10 years in banking as a result.
The mindset goes like this: “I’ve given up so much already, I can’t walk away. I need to see this out. Doing something new will just end up being the same as this.”
Wrong.
The smartest people walk away from bad deals. They walk away when the incentives go from good to bad. I did this with Medium dot com. In 2021, I could make 6-figures a year. Then they went woke (on their way to broke) and cut off everyone’s paychecks as form of socialism.
At some point one has to say “is this still worth it?”
The moment I asked myself this question about Medium, I knew it wasn’t. 40 cents an article is lower pay than driving Uber. So I quit. So did tens of thousands of others.
If you don’t quit good incentives that go bad, you end up becoming a slave.
5. Forget about trying to have balance like a snowflake
High performance and greatness come from imbalance. They come from chaos.
The best in the world thrive in chaos. They use it as motivation. They see overwhelm as the path to growth, not a sign to go drown in carbs and watch Netflix.
You want to push the boundaries to the point of excess because, as Edwin Land says, “Everything worth doing, is worth doing to excess.”
"They don't write biographies of people who have balance."
– David Senra (Founders Podcast)
6. Only do one or both of these jobs
There are only two types of jobs in the world: building or selling. Everybody else’s jobs are rounding errors which is why they’re an expense.
The goal is to master one or both of these art forms. It’s counter-intuitive to the current culture war that’s all about tearing things down.
When you can build and/or sell you can literally do anything in life. If you go bankrupt or lose your career, you can always start again because you have the foundation. That’s why I’m not afraid to take risks.
In 2021, I had $1.2M stolen from my digital wallet. It didn’t faze me because I knew I could make it all back again (and more). And I did.
Sell and build every damn day.
7. Never build average things
There’s zero demand for average.
The market is too crowded. If you create something like a mediocre podcast and put it out into the world saturated with podcasts, no one will care. You’ll get no results.
It’s a smarter aim to build something extraordinary. Even if you fail the quality of the result will still surpass all the mediocre crap in your niche.
The way I do this is to care. I care about what people get and I give a damn that they spent their time and/or money on it. So I make it the best that it can be out of respect and a moral obligation.
8. Master the hidden art of charisma
“Fake it until you make it” is the worst advice in history.
People can smell fake confidence faster than they can taste sh*t smeared over their steak by a smart ass waiter who hates a customer.
The secret to charisma hiding in plain sight is to be unapologetically yourself.
It’s to be so authentic that people think you’re oversharing. When you practice this cheat code in public it has surprising consequences.
True vulnerability that’s not done for empty likes pulls people in. It makes people pay attention. They can’t turn you off because it’s so rare. While everyone on social media is trying to look like they’re winning 24/7, just focus on being yourself.
Share the wins and the losses as if it’s normal.
9. Become addicted to always being in a great mood
It’s easy to be in a great mood when you just had s3x with a supermodel.
But try being in a great mood after your dog dies or you get laid off from your job. That’s where most people can’t do it.
The way I stay in a great mood is I expect things to go wrong.
I expect people to die or to disappoint me. So when it happens it doesn’t make me cry into a pillow and drink gallons of hot chocolate to soften the blow. Remember: the fact you’re alive today is already a massive gift.
You control your mood. Chose to be in a good one.
10. Build a business instead of a career as if your life depends on it
Being an entrepreneur now has more job security than a job – LevelsIOThis is sad but true.
Layoff culture now means that churning staff for the sake of churning staff to rid businesses of so-called low performance is the default.
You can’t work the same job for 40 years anymore. The average tenure is plummeting. Freelancing, contracting, consulting & one-person businesses are becoming the default. The last bank I worked at employed more than 50% of people as contractors.
Now is the time to treat yourself like a business – because you are. Think like an owner. Talk like an owner. Ask to be paid like an owner.
11. Develop a radical hate for mediocrity
Author Ryan Holiday said in 2020 that the world got worse when we started worshipping mediocrity as if it were good. I agree.
All human progress has come from those trying to do the extraordinary and move humanity forward. Being a c0ck blocker critic in some sort of approval committee-type role in society holds humanity back.
The antidote is to hate mediocrity.
It’s to treat junk food like poison. It’s to treat being overweight as a crime against your body. It’s to treat getting into lots of debt as a stupid decision. It’s to treat 9-5 jobs as a stepping stone instead of the end goal. It’s to treat watching other people play sport like a waste of time.
Mediocrity is truly a nightmare.
It’s how most people live and it leads to deathbed regrets. Do the opposite of society if you want to be happy and fulfilled and avoid taking pills to overcome imaginary mental disorders.
Hating mediocrity raises the stakes. It gives you motivation. Try it.
12. Become a synthesizer of information
Information collecting used to be cool.
Read a book a week. Listen to podcasts everywhere you go. Scroll social media to find good ideas. In a world of AI, we’re now drowning in information. Information collecting no longer has value.
Adam Grant says in the old world information was scarce. But now that information is infinitely abundant what’s now rewarded is pattern recognition.
I call this synthesizing. It’s where you join the dots between random ideas to create something new and be helpful to other humans. One of the best ways to do this is by having a public writing habit.
You take what you learn and:
Strip away the fat
Simplify ideas
Add in new ideas
Make predictions
Use different metaphors
Add further context and meaning
Add lived personal experience
Connect the dots for people instead of collecting useless facts.
13. Use walking to increase productivity
Sitting at a desk all day is how you become a slob.
It breaks your back and, more importantly, freezes up your mind. It’s why desk job workers have little to no creativity or imagination.
Walking changes your mood. It gives you energy. It makes your mind think and as your feet move, it acts as a form of meditation in conjunction with your thinking.
Burn the to-do lists. Walk to become productive.
14. Get used to being kicked in the nuts
Intelligence used to be worshipped like Pamela Anderson in the 90s.
Now it’s a dying trait. There are millions of intellectual over-thinkers, procrastinators, and wannabes who say they have “potential.”
Nobody gives a f*ck.
What matters now is can you get kicked in the nuts and keep going? Can you get rejected? Can you fail as a way to learn? Can you get smacked down 999 times and keep getting back up? Or do you try once then give up and blame the world?
Resilience matters the most. Those who keep going despite the setbacks usually figure it out. Why not you?
15. Deliberately choose hard things that make people say “you’re crazy”
Choosing hard goals is a cheat code.
The average person is looking for easy. They want an easy job. Or they want passive income. Or they want to “just write” and get paid because it’s easy. If you flip this idea on its head, you realize that choosing hard goals is easier.
Hard goals have little competition because people usually give up in the first 30 days or get stuck in tutorial hell like most beginners. By just trying hard things you get further ahead than most people.
It’s why I chose to write every day online for 11 years. I knew almost no one else would do it. It was my hidden advantage. The writers I started with 11 years ago have all given up. I wasn’t better than them, I just outlasted them.
Choose hard goals and let people call you crazy.
16. Be extremely careful how you use your free time
Most of us piss up our free time against the wall.
We drink alcohol and then piss it out a few hours later. Or we overindulge on Netflix and junk food. Then there’s those pain in the ass life events like weddings.
You can spend an entire year stuck at the weddings of people you barely know just to feel like you’re not being rude. The average person’s weekend is full of distractions and chasing cheap dopamine.
All I did during my 9-5 career was obsess over how I used my free time. I knew my freedom would be created during my free time. Doesn’t mean I didn’t have fun or relax. But I made it my #1 priority to escape the rat race.
I woke up at 4am some days. I went to the office early to work on my writing. I worked on my dream before starting work at 9am on someone else’s. I took fake sick days to work on my dream some more.
The only difference between a rich person and poor person is what they do in their free time – Alex Hormozi
17. Turn off this nasty voice inside your head
It’s the voice inside your head that says “do it later,” “you still got time,” “maybe in 6 months.” The problem in life is you think you have time.
The cheat code is to realize time is running out. You get 80 summers of life. Or 4000 weeks. Or 6000 days if you only live for the weekend. You could be dead tomorrow.
Stop waiting. Have a sense of urgency. It’s either today or never.
Closing Thought
These are your cheat codes.
Not theories. Not fluff. Real-world hacks to buy back your time & escape the mediocre maze most people call life. The only one that matters now is the one you use today.
Which cheat code will you apply this week? Let me know in the comments below.
PS: Only 8 hours to register for today’s workshop: Create a 6-Figure Business Model in 60 Minutes
If your digital business is stalled in 5-figure land…
or if you’re just getting started and want to avoid beginner hell…
you’re gonna want to join.
No late entry.
At 5:00 P.M. we go live.
At 5:01 P.M. we close the doors
Again Tim. You hit the nail square on the head with honesty and insight. Its a shame that "hacks" are not easy for most people. It takes dedication and belief. As Tom Hanks says in "A league of their own" Its supposed to be hard. The hard is what makes it great. If it weren't hard, everyone would do it." Don't be a mediocre everyone. Step out and take charge of your life.
These are great hacks. I would also add having a sense of urgency. If you don’t live like your life is on fire and you have to extinguish it, you won’t have the urge to take action towards your dreams