3-6 Months of "I'll F*ck Around and Figure It Out" Is the Barrier of Entry to Personal Freedom

How do I take what someone does in 10 years and do it in 6 months?

Image Credit-Midjourney

The need for certainty is a pandemic.

It ruins dreams before they’ve been thought of. It prevents us from taking risks that are essential for growth. And it forces us to miss easy shots and drown in regrets.

I famously tell my wife, “Honey, look, I don’t know sh*t but I’ll f*ck around and figure it out. Don’t worry.”

And I do.

Taking a bad neighbor to the Supreme Court? F*cked around and figured it out. Quitting my 9-5 job forever at 34? F*cked around and figured it out. Running a high-growth Substack? F*cked around and figured it out.

F*ck around and figure it out is a way of life. Below is the bible that’ll help you experience explosive personal growth and take smarter risks.

It’s the mindset that none of us know what we’re doing

If only you knew how bad most people are at life.

None of us have it figured out, especially not me. A few years back I met Gary Vaynerchuk. I expected him to be this huge figure. I thought he’d give me some amazing business strategies and change my life forever. He didn’t.

Gary is an ordinary guy.

He said a bunch of stuff I’ve heard before like “be patient” & “work hard.” When I shook his hand he was humble and began small talk like any other human. He was completely unremarkable despite his millions of dollars and massive social media following.

Writer George Mack says the problem is adults think there is this god-like class. This group of elite people who are smart and sexy and have all the answers.

We place these people on a pedestal. We allow them to lecture us. We make them our heroes in the movie we call life.

But they’re freaking false gods.

They don’t know much at all. It’s all an act. They’re pretending. George says Superman is Clark Kent with the glasses, cheap business suit, and all.

When we remember we’re just children living in adult bodies and we’re all scared as hell about everything, life gets easier.

We can f*ck around and figure it out because we no longer think we need to be some special character in a Disney fairytale to live the good life.

It’s the mindset permission slips are useless

People love to ask permission.

They want a mentor or a university to kiss them on the butt hole and bless their holy life. They want to be chosen. They want a record label or Hollywood to say “you’re ready” and “here’s your Oscar you sexy devil.”

People who f*ck around and figure out hate this stuff. They see permission slips as a way to slow-cook themselves to death. They want to remove unnecessary barriers. They give themselves permission. They choose themselves.

Most qualifications are useless in an age of AI, where information is outdated every second. Just-in-time is the only way, and sitting in a classroom with a dinosaur professor for 99% of skills is just too slow.

Minimum Viable Information followed by action gets you results faster.

You can’t theorize a goal into reality. If your goal is to learn a skill and act on it then you need to:

• Feel emotion

• Get dopamine from learning

• Fall flat on your ass and cry

• Experience rejection as you execute

When these things are missing from the learning process, jack sh*t happens. No transformation occurs. You acquire information but you forget 90% within a few days.

Behavior change beats information overload.

C students run the world while A students overthink it – Steve On Speed

It’s the mindset strategy ain’t gonna save your life

I worked as one of the corporate sheep for most of my career.

I spent years of my life in strategy meetings that led nowhere and were out of date before the action phase even occurred. When I tried to write online, and later start a business, the disease spread.

I found myself trying to analyze trends, obsess over brand names, and think about where I’d be in 5 years. All of it led to overthinking and overwhelm.

You can’t think your way out of your head when you haven’t taken action.

There’s real-world data … and there are fantasies that live inside your head like softcore p*rn. People become delusional when they spend too much time on their fantasies and hypothesizing like a fortune teller what might happen when they take action.

You don’t know what you don’t know.

Unless you rack up some life experiences, you’re simply just having an 0rgy in your brain with your own thoughts. Romanticizing about what could be instead of taking action and seeing what you can be.

9 times out of 10 you don’t need a strategy. You just need to start.

6 months versus 5 years

The average person’s time horizon is way too long.

They give themselves decades to achieve their goals which gives them years to procrastinate. Their youth has evaporated by the time they’re “ready.”

The f*ck around and figured it out mindset cuts timelines by 90%. A question I like to ask myself is, how do I take what someone does in 10 years and do it in 6 months?

This question forces you to go faster and break stuff. Most people move at a snail’s pace and never get enough momentum to stay in motion and keep taking action. So they get frustrated and give up.

You can probably move 30x faster if you remove all the imaginary barriers and just f*ck around and figure out your problems right now.

We make this mistake because we think we have time.

When you get smacked in the face by a cancer scare like I did, you snap out of this “I’ll do it one day” bullsh*t. There’s no guarantee you’ll be alive tomorrow. What the freaking hell are you waiting for amigo? You’re slowly dying.

Don’t make the highlight reel of your one life a snoozer.

The simple formula I accidentally figured out

So now you’re sold. (Good job Timbo!)

We must f*ck around and figure out our goals right now. The formula I’ve used for the last 10 years is to do daily experiments. It’s why I love social media because each little post is a mini-experiment that gives me data and tells me if I’m helping people.

This feedback gives me what I need to achieve my life mission of helping people write online to create new opportunities.

But experimentation isn’t enough.

Many people experiment but they’re too stubborn (or dumb) to change their ways and iterate on their experiments to learn real wisdom. So they stay stuck doing the same dumb thing for way too long and living the definition of insanity.

I spoke to a writer last month. After 10 years they have only ~1000 email subscribers. I suggested they might be doing something wrong – and they flipped out.

They told me all about their “experience,” marketing degree, brand name clients, famous employers they’ve worked for, and reminded me how they’d been doing it more years than me.

My inner dialogue: That’s all great lady but you’ve got crap results and can’t pay bills.

She refused to iterate. She refused to consider she was a giant f*ck up and probably needed to change. So I let her run back into the wild and moved on.

You can’t help people who refuse to iterate.

F*ck around and figure it out people like me love nothing more than to be the dumbest person in the room and to completely blow up their worldview roughly every 12 months.

When you cling too tightly to what you think you know, you suck the life out of your potential and squeeze your genitals until they explode.

Mantra: you don’t know sh*t. Good. Now you have infinite potential.

Conclusion

If you f*ck around and figure it out for 3-6 months, you’ll get results you could never have predicted. These results will compound and eventually you’ll have some success.

Success will lead to more money, and that cash can buy back your time and give you personal freedom.

But to earn that freedom like I have, you must…

Do what others aren’t prepared to do.

Everything you just read is hard. It takes time, determination, basic habits, and automated motivation.

Critics will tell you that you’re an idiot. You might lose a few friends. But if you’re bold enough to take action while most are drowning in Netflix and infinite loop TikTok videos, you’ll experience a level of freedom most can’t even imagine.

Choice is yours.

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