Eight Ways to F*ck up Your Life Without Trying

Toxic mindsets we all have that will unconsciously ruin your life

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F*cking up your life isn’t permanent.

I recently rang my bank to change my daily limit so I could pay for my Tesla. Because it was a large payment the fraud team asked me a few questions.

I told them I used to be a banker. As we went through the process she said, “I can tell you used to be good at banking.”

The conversation hit a weird point.

I told her I knew about fraud well. Not from working in a bank but from having $1.2M stolen from my digital wallet. It was weird to blurt that out without being prompted. Out of the blue I said, “This Tesla is the first nice thing I’ve bought since that fateful day in 2021.”

Until I said it out loud, I hadn’t realized that reality. I became emotional.

“Are you okay?” the banker said.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

The reason I was emotional is because I realized you can screw up your life and do a lot of stupid stuff and still recover. I’m one of the lucky ones. I didn’t do something stupid after losing so much money in a day, like walking in front of a train.

Here are 8 ways to f*ck up your life that I’ve learned the hard way.

1. Overstay your time working in a workplace daycare

Working in corporate has been a big part of my life.

I reflect on it a lot. The other day on a walk it hit me. A workplace is an adult daycare. If you get sick you can ring your boss and they’ll give you time off. If a family member dies, everyone will tell you to take a day off and your team may send flowers.

If someone pisses on the toilet seat at work, you can ask the cleaners to come & wipe it up. If they’re too slow, you can complain to HR. If you slip over in the workplace kitchen, you can demand compensation. If you want a sabbatical you can apply for one.

If you feel sick you can go home. When you show up for work your attendance is tracked. There’s a dress code you must follow to look professional.

A workplace looks like a daycare. It has all the same rituals.

But after I left the corporate world it hit me: no one is coming to save you. Now I don’t work a job, nobody is coming to save me.

If a family member dies my customers don’t care. If I don’t post online because I feel sick then my audience will find someone else to read and I’ll quickly become irrelevant. If I injure myself I must pay. No one tracks if I work or not. If I don’t work I don’t get paid and will starve.

The global economy is moving more in this direction.

A way I see people f*ck up their life is they get so used to working in an adult daycare that when they try to build online they expect:

• A cookie-cutter proven path with 12 steps

• People to give a damn about them and what they post

• The world to be forgiving when they’re inconsistent with their passion/obsession/business

They don’t understand they are on their own. The world doesn’t care. If you don’t show up then it’s on you. You’re only cheating yourself. And if you’re broke it’s because you’re not adding enough value to the world.

Solution:

We shouldn’t work too long in a 9-5 job or we’ll have a daycare mentality that we can’t be cured from.

2. Accidentally see genuine opportunities as scams

I used to be skeptical of everything.

To make it worse, I’d overdose on conspiracy theories. I thought 2pac faked his death, 911 attacks were an inside job, Area 51 had aliens, and the water supply was poisoned. As I’ve matured, I’ve stopped explaining hard-to-explain things using conspiracies.

For the first 5 years writing online, I wasted my life. I refused to get help, use editors, join masterminds, and learn about how a real business works.

I saw coaches as gurus, courses as get-rich-quick schemes, and communities as a noisy Discord channel with no value. In other words, I thought I was too cool and too smart for the internet.

So I didn’t grow.

I didn’t understand the depth and nuance of what I was doing.

Making-money-online seemed like a scam peddled by gurus. But as I’ve aged and had kids I now realize we’re all make-money-online gurus. Because we’re all plugged into the internet whether we’re working a job or self-employed.

Even selling a book is a make-money-online product lol. So unless every author in history is a scammer, then this idea needs to die.

Labeling everything as a scam holds us back in life.

There are scammers in every industry. Just ask my bank here in Australia that call me monthly to tell me buying crypto is dangerous, although they have no problem if I take my life savings to the casino and gamble it.

The best way to decipher scams from opportunities is to do some research. Speak to actual humans who have gone down a similar path. As long as you have average intelligence, you’ll be able to tell what a real opportunity is.

Then choose one opportunity and try it. Everything has some risk but the biggest risk is never taking a risk– that’s how you end up with no opportunities, money or network.

Solution:

Be open-minded. Take risks. Experiment. Expect bad outcomes (sometimes).

3. The way a consumer thinks will steal millions of dollars from you

I’m a good little consumer.

I learned how to save money in a savings account, negotiate bargains, search catalogs for specials, use coupon codes at checkout, and buy clothes during big sales days like Black Friday.

Every time I got something for a discount I felt like I’d won at life.

Later in life, I realized that if I didn’t have this consumer mindset, I’d be at least $5M richer.

Saving money in a savings account is legal theft. The bank will make money, and inflation and money printing will devalue your currency. Then you’ll be taxed through the butt hole on any interest you do make.

Negotiating bargains with service providers mostly just makes you look cheap, and it’s offensive when someone tries to get a price different to the one you advertise. If I wanted to, for example, pay writer Dan Koe for some help, the last thing in the world I’d do is email him asking for a discount. Or worse, ask for free advice.

He’d instantly block me, rightfully so.

And Dan is a friend. If I tried to buy his stuff for less than he sold it for, it’d tell him that I either don’t value our friendship or that I want some of his money because he’s richer than me.

Now that I run an online business I know most discounts we see online are fake. If we think we won because we got a low price, we’ve been played.

All that matters is, did what someone buy give them more value than they paid?

Solution:

Successful people use an investing mindset to manage money. They focus on ROI. They don’t think or invest short term. They focus on value, not price. They expect to invest money to make money, not get something for nothing.

Successful people hate cheap stuff because it comes with more problems.

4. Be an inconsistent monkey

Inconsistency is the silent kiss of death.

Everyone has a goal, dream, or vision… but 99% fail because they can’t deal with curveballs in life. If life gets hard then they use it as an excuse to stop… and start again later. But they never start again.

“Cat died. Can’t show up for 3 weeks. See you again then.”

That’s an email I got. I felt sorry for them, but at the same, the world doesn’t care if your cat dies. We don’t need 24 hours in a day to dedicate to the memory of Pumbaa the cat. We can still process the death of a prized animal friend & maintain our habits.

Recently, my business partner Todd lost a family member. He also broke his wrist because he tries too hard to be a sporting champion. While showing off at the ice rink, he landed on his wrist and broke it. 18 months ago he also got a neck disorder.

He hasn’t been able to move his neck properly since then.

Every day is agonizing pain. Yet Todd showed up for work each day with me. He went to a Taylor Swift concert in France. He taught classes. He helped me write a book.

The difference is he expected bad stuff to happen. And when it did, he slotted the bad stuff alongside normal life like an adult.

Always be the type of person who doesn’t use the first sign of trouble to get distracted and drown in unnecessary self-care.

Solution:

When trouble strikes in life, lower the output, but never quit the habits that determine your future. Momentum is a s*xy beast, and you don’t want to trade it in for a second hand fur coat from San Francisco full of stains called “excuses.”

5. Become a day trader

Investing money used to only be for the rich.

Then crypto, meme coins, and Robinhood apps came along. Now the financial markets operate more like a casino than a regulated financial system.

The devils to avoid are leverage and derivatives. Leverage means borrowing money to invest. Derivatives are complex financial products where you typically don’t own the underlying asset.

Day traders buy and sell assets most days. Investors buy and then rarely sell. Category two is where all the money is made. Category one is how you accidentally become a gambler and lose everything you’ve worked for.

In the last 10 years, I’ve bought some sort of investment at least once a month. I haven’t hit sell on a single investment in that period. Why? Because going in and out of the markets turns me into a day trader.

The belief day traders have is that they’re smarter than the market. That they can predict what will happen before it happens. You can’t. Wall Street is smarter. And random black swan events like a bat virus out of Ch!na will wipe you out.

Solution:

Do deep research. Buy assets that should go up over 5+ years. Remember you’re dumb, and mother nature will punch you in the face. Lower your ego. Use a long-term view.

6. Refuse to change your mind

This one personally hurts the most.

I learned this one the hard way. My wife and I ended up in marriage counseling. Not that unusual. But I came to a point where I realized every couple (team) will have differences in opinions and how to do things.

You can either make other people wrong for seeing things differently or you can acknowledge how they feel and accept them. I also learned that refusing to change my mind on certain ideas was a problem.

I told myself certain actions wouldn’t create the results my wife thought they would. But I never experimented so it was an assumption.

Then I decided to drop my ego and do the crazy thing she suggested. Within a few weeks, I saw life-changing results and it transformed our marriage.

Solution:

We don’t fail in life because we lack information. We fail because we’re too stubborn to change our freaking minds and consider that perhaps our assumptions are B.S. and we’re the problem.

7. Do what you’ve always done and expect different results

This one may sound wrong.

But you’d be surprised how many people take the same set of actions for years, but expect the results will change.

The reason they fall for this lie is because they’re secretly relying on:

• Luck

• Hope

• More time in the game to equal better results

• Magic mentors to enter their lives and save them

• More credentials to make them qualified for new results

Doing the wrong thing will always be the wrong thing.

You either change and iterate or the results don’t change. And if the results really suck, then only drastic change will transform the outcome, and most people can’t handle that level of uncertainty and change.

Now you know why failure can last a lifetime.

Solution:

Iterate like your life depends on it. Try many new experiments every month.

8. Hang around a bunch of crazies and expect to stay sane

I used to love reading on Medium dot com.

In the last few months it’s gone down a dark path. All the writers I respected have left. The people who are leftover are a special breed.

They’re either writing fortune cookies, wannabe Chicken-Soup-For-The-Soul posts… but mostly, doomer content full of conspiracies. Because all the incentives have been sucked out of the platform, what's leftover is trash and tumbleweeds (as much as I don't want to admit it).

Despite these challenges, I expected to stay on the platform and continue to read and write there. But I’ve found it’s impossible to stay sane when the bottom 1% of society is all that’s left and they’re content on burning everything to hell for a laugh.

Solution:

The people around you affect your mindset. Online spaces are important. Choose them wisely.

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