In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends, there’s this betting pool for the first year that there is a one-person billion-dollar company. Which would have been unimaginable without AI and now will happen.

– Sam Altman

A few years ago, I started to notice a few people who had built $1 to $10 million one-person businesses. Mostly education-based creators selling a mix of coaching and courses with social media as their way to attract an audience (because that’s what tech enabled one person to do - building an audience is free, creating information is free, both can be done with minimal time investment as one person compared to other business models like e-commerce or freelance/agency work).

But now things are different. Much different.

You can do much more as one person now than just last year, and the average person is completely oblivious to this opportunity, or they just think “AI bad” because their favorite celebrity said so.

The beautiful thing about it is you don’t need to get anywhere close to $1 billion, or even $1 million, to live a great life.

Most people just want to replace their salary and be able to afford minor luxuries without worrying about how low their bank account balance is.

For myself, when I started this whole online business thing, I just wanted to be able to afford Chipotle for lunch every day. I’m grateful to say we are well past that.

Ever since I was a kid, I never wanted to go down the default path.

I was very observant to those around me, and it seemed like going to school for an education that would be useless in 10 years, getting a job that you become dependent on, marrying someone you despise, and being promised retirement but never really being able to stop working was the norm. It disgusted me.

So I realized that some form of entrepreneurship was the only path out. The only path that would put me in control of more than just my financial situation.

And that’s what I did.

I failed over and over again. Fitness YouTube channel, dropshipping minimalist wallets, selling blue light glasses, freelance SEO, Facebook ads, and web design until I finally had to get a job because the student and credit card debt was piling up.

I saw that job as a deadline. If I didn’t make it work soon, I’d get complacent like everyone else does.

About 7 years ago, I was able to quit that job and do freelance web design.

About 6 years ago, I started on social media, and made around $10,000 with digital products.

The next year, $100,000. Then $800,000. Then around $4 million (my tax bill had officially quadrupled to what my old salary was). Then as I dove into software, my personal income stabilized around $1-2 million (pre-tax) while I started building something more long-term.

I have a lot to share about this one-person business thing, especially when it comes to doing more than I was able to do now that AI gives a massive advantage to those who are able to use it.

With that, let’s begin.

Real quick, the next Creator Bootcamp starts in 3 days.

If you want to create your niche of one, gain clarity on what to talk about, master short and long form content, and learn growth strategies that don’t make you dependent on the algorithm - join before then here.

Your interests (unique value) + Social media (free distribution) + AI (cheap force multiplication) = A profitable one-human business

As a one-person business, you’re going to post on social media.

Boooo, I know. It’s so hard to write a few words for 30 minutes in the morning and post it where everyone else in the world has the potential to see it. But social media is where the attention is right now, and you probably don’t have the capital to invest in paid ads or paying creators $2500 to post one reel about your product (yes, the prices are that absurd nowadays).

One piece of content can be spread to millions of people for free, if you understand how to make it good. For most people, you can probably get 100-500,000 impressions a month. All you need to do is get a tiny fraction of those people to buy your product or service.

I’m also assuming that you don’t care to start a service business and drown in client work. You want some form of freedom and a creative lifestyle. I personally prefer writing content and building products that can run while I sleep.

I’m going to give you a few “AI employees” you can just start using immediately below, but it helps to know what comprises this type of one-person business.

1) Brand - How you present yourself or your business to the world.

In your personal life, when people think of your name, what do they associate with you? Do they think you’re cool? Fun to be around? Helpful and trustworthy?

Brand is that, but for your business. Like a digital storefront.

It’s what makes people buy your app, course, product, or service over someone else’s, even if it’s a worse product. It’s what shapes how you market your product and who you market it to. This is how marketers made 10x more than indie programmers in the past, because they gave people what they wanted.

As a one-person business, in today’s world, your brand is probably going to be a personal brand. And even if you aren’t a one-person business, look at Elon Musk, Mr. Beast, and the rest. A personal brand is one of the most effective growth strategies, if you can pull it off.

It’s your values, worldview, and story externalized.

I’ll help you create a unique, irreplaceable brand that gives you all of your content pillars in just a bit. It’ll be worth it.

2) Offer - What people pay you for that helps them get a result.

You need a product or service.

That’s obvious... you can’t make money without one.

But an offer is the perceived value of that product or service. It’s how you package it. It’s the deal. This is one of the most profitable skills you can learn, because once you nail the offer, the landing page, copywriting, marketing, and the rest become that much easier.

That’s what you compete on. Not the product you’re selling, the deal you’re offering. The amount of value compared to price.

You can look at a tool like 1of10, which is great for YouTube research, but with Eden, you get research for all platforms, AI usage, social scheduling, an entire second brain and workspace, and more. The choice is obvious if you’ll allow me to brag a bit.

Offer creation is the art of pulling 4 levers.

1. The dream outcome - what the customer actually wants

2. The delivery mechanism - how you get them there (course, coaching, supplement, etc)

3. The speed of results - how fast you get them there

4. The guarantee - what happens if it fails

I’ll give you an AI you can chat with to learn about offer creation and create one people can’t refuse.

3) Distribution - How you spread your brand and offer.

Build distribution, then build whatever you want.

– Jack Butcher

We’re living in the internet age where attention = leverage.

You can have the best brand, you can have the best product, but none of that matters if nobody knows you exist.

Distribution, for what we’re concerned with, is everything from marketing to sales to content to ads to your landing page and website.

It’s how people find you, learn about you, and pay you (that’s what a “funnel” is).

As an example, you found me through social media content. You are reading this via email on Substack or X. And if I can display the value of my knowledge enough, you may grow to trust me to the point of using Eden (the greatest content research/creation tool) or enrolling in the Creator Bootcamp. Not because I swindled you into it, but because you see it as something useful for your own goals.

I could also run paid ads, sponsor other people’s newsletters, sponsor podcasts, or other things like that (and I have), but as a beginner who probably doesn’t have capital to invest in that, we aren’t going to focus on it now.

Right now, the way you generate attention as a small digital business is social media. You don’t need millions of views to get anywhere close to replacing your current income.

Social media is free to start, and content is permissionless leverage.

If you learn the skill of personal branding, offer creation, and content marketing, you will do quite well.

Pair it with AI and you’re ahead of almost everyone.

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The AI team that used to cost $500k per year

Okay.

Let’s simplify this.

To start this one-person business, this is your daily routine:

Post 1-3 times a day on a short-form platform of choice. Substack, X, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. Pick the one you vibe with the most. They all work. Start with one short-form platform. Get good at it. And once you have a backlog of ideas that have done well, take those and grow faster on other platforms.

Post 1 long-form piece a week. Substack or X. Probably Substack because your followers are email subscribers. If your main platform is X, then cross post the article there too.

Write content for 30 minutes and a section of your long-form piece for 30 minutes. 1 hour a day is really all you need.

Promote your offer once a day. Plug it inside your long-form piece. Link to it in a reply under your best post for that day. If you don’t ask people to buy your product, you obviously aren’t going to make any money.

Personally, I like to promote in my newsletter/article, then link to that article as a reply to one of my short-form posts - that way people subscribe to my newsletter, and if they read it, they’re more likely to buy my offer.

There’s a bit more to this of course, but this is the base.

You will have to go through quite a bit of trial and error until you start gaining traction on your posts, and it may be wise to research and experiment with various growth strategies depending on the platform (don’t just try one, fail, and cry because it didn’t work.)

Now, there are a few things we can have AI do here.

• Brand Strategist - Create a personal brand strategy so you don’t blend in with everyone else, and study how your content is doing to propose growth tactics.

• Content Strategist - Researches what’s performing across social media, understands all of your prior content, pairs them with your brand strategy, and delivers a week of ideas for you to post about (or have it draft content for you to edit if that’s your cup of tea).

• Long-Form Specialist - Understands long-form frameworks and retention strategies, helping you outline a newsletter, article, or video script with your ideas in a well-structured way.

• Short-Form Specialist - Takes your rough ideas and turns them into post drafts you can review, edit, and schedule to go out on all platforms.

• Offer Consultant - Helps take your experience, interests, and expertise and turn it into a compelling offer, and helps you decide between what product or service to start with.

• Marketing Strategist - Takes your offer, brand strategy, and customer avatar, then helps generate social promotions, email promotions, and landing page copy.

I’ve actually created all of these for you if you don’t want to go through the effort of creating them yourself.

Simply using these will put you ahead of almost every creator. Not kidding.

» You can find all of them here. One click and you can start chatting.

These work best in Eden, because it can research trending posts, see what works, and schedule content - but there are also skills you can quickly install into GPT-6 Astra (because it’s popular right now), Claude, or any other agent.

I’d recommend going in the order they are listed above. Start with brand strategy, then content, then once you have clarity on those, consider the offer consultant and marketing strategist.

Beyond those, and once you understand the process, then you can have AI start drafting content and potentially scheduling it for you, which is done in Eden. However, I don’t think it’s wise for beginners to do that.

You’ll notice that none of those involve having AI write for you, and that they do not automate the process that makes branding and content unique.

If you want to have AI do those things for you, I’m not opposed to it. It’s just not something I’ve chosen to do yet, even though I think it will be the future of how we write. My mind is starting to change on that front, which deserves another newsletter.

How to create your own AI team (the best way to use AI in general)

This section is going to lose quite a few people.

Because even though we’re talking about AI, it’s a difficult process in a world of cheap dopamine seekers. It takes a certain level of systems thinking to understand and implement.

The problem with AI is that people think of it as some kind of all powerful being.

And since it’s not an all powerful being, when it doesn’t do exactly what they want (because they don’t know what they want), they just assume it’s only capable of generating slop.

Yesterday, I saw some guy was begging businesses to not create their website with ChatGPT or AI because it “looks bad” and you can tell it’s slop.

If you actually use AI, you find this laughable.

It’s true... if you just have it one-shot the entire website and put no effort in beyond that. But if you give it examples and clear instructions, you’re off to at least a better start. After that, you have to start digging into the details. You have to tell it to tweak the border radius, the drop shadows, the padding, the column layout, and everything else you would already do in Figma, Photoshop, Webflow, or Framer. The process hasn’t changed, but the toolbar filled with knobs and numbers has turned into natural language.

Telling AI to “create a website” or “write a newsletter” or “write a viral tweet” today is like using a Wordpress template in the past. People can tell. There was just as much slop in the past as there was today, but AI is some special case that people really dislike.

You can stop there and have a pretty terrible website that does not make your brand stand out in the slightest, or you can use that as a starting point and iterate further, just like you can build an app and resolve the issues for weeks on end until it’s actually a good app.

The baseline for what is considered a modern Wordpress template will continue to rise, forcing people to either develop taste and experience or default to being perceived as average.

This is part of why my opinion around writing with AI is changing, because if you treated it like you did when you actually write, you’d realize you’d have more control, more creativity, and more opportunity to create something truly unique that nobody has even thought to do before. But people say “write this newsletter like me” and expect it to account for the hundreds, if not thousands of decisions they make when actually writing... obviously the AI isn’t just going to pull those out of your head and do exactly what you want, because you didn’t tell it to do that.

It only sounds like AI slop because the person chose to post it in that state, and doesn’t have the taste to notice it or the knowledge to iterate until it becomes something only they could create.

With that out of the way, how do you actually do this?

How can we create something like a weekly content strategist that’s actually good?

1) You need to know what good looks like, or have an example of what good looks like

When it comes to “good” content, there’s a lot at play.

There’s the structure of the post, article, or newsletter. There’s the creator’s vibe or energy signature. There’s the throughline of their brand and big ideas they incorporate consistently to get their worldview across. And there’s the unique ideas they stumble across that help them stand out from everyone else. All of this needs to be accounted for.

No AI is going to tell you that. You can only find it through experience or mentorship from someone who has that specific knowledge (that’s why reading this gives you a slight advantage).

But now that you know you need those things, you need the reference, example, or instructions to give to the AI because it doesn’t know how to do it on it’s own.

That means YouTube titles and transcripts of videos that represent the type of content you want to create. It means reels transcripts, Substack notes or articles, X posts or articles, or ample examples of the style of writing you like.

For web design, this usually just means giving the AI a ton of screenshots as you work through each section of the page you’re creating, or writing out in detail what you want.

That’s how I start almost every AI or agent chat that isn’t just a simple question.

If I know what I want, then I give detailed instructions. I’ve written 2000 word prompts teaching it to write tweets like I do, and it gets extremely close. You wouldn’t be able to do that just by asking it to look at my best tweets, because it will try to templatize those and doesn’t account for the thinking process that went into writing them.

If I don’t know what I want, then I start researching and asking questions until I have clarity and fill the context with the right information.

Meaning, I don’t just say “write me a newsletter.”

I ask questions that help me decide what a good newsletter looks like.

In your case, you could ask something like, “I want to write one of the greatest, most engaging newsletters in the world. Something that stands out and doesn’t sound robotic. Let’s treat this as a brainstorming session until we land on a style that I like. Start by asking clarifying questions on what you need from me to make this happen. We’ll go from there.”

At the end of that conversation, ask it to condense everything into one document.

Now you have a document you can reference in other chats at any time.

2) You need to understand the process that gets results, or start with someone else’s process until you develop your own

For a content strategist, this isn’t as simple as “research top performing posts and give me ideas.” That’s what the slightly above-average person would do. The average person would just ask the AI to write viral posts.

When I think of my own process, it’s something like this:

• Read books, save ideas, have conversations with friends, listen to long lectures for ideas that nobody is talking about online

• Pick an idea at the intersection of (1) what I am excited to write about (2) what people will massively benefit from and (3) what is already validated and performing well

• Brain dump title ideas for the article/script, and find the best ideas that would fit into that piece

• Consider which long-form structure would be the best to house those ideas and start outlining it

• From that outline, brainstorm 10-20 short-form content ideas that I can take and run with

This is also considering I have the branding side of things down, which is an entirely different story - that’s what would allow the content strategist to understand my worldview, influences, mission, brand enemy, and more that would further refine the ideas and make them unique to me.

The difficult part is turning that into a process that AI can help with.

It obviously can’t read books for me or discover ideas for me. That’s the edge that can’t be outsourced.

But I can capture all of this into my Eden library, which auto-tags and connects ideas, so the AI can pull from that bank of ideas each week to give me a few options that are likely to do well. Meaning, I can focus more on reading and learning rather than treating it as something to outsource, because I enjoy that process.

Then, the main thing I need to do is instruct the AI on how to perform good research, what ideas are worthwhile (celebrity posts that went viral aren’t a signal as to what’s performing on social media. Small to mid-size account’s outlier posts are), how to match the right topics to my own novel ideas, and examples of my own content structures that have worked in the past.

Then you have it spit that out into a table I can work from and you have something like the Weekly Strategist AI that runs on autopilot every week.

3) You need to continuously improve and iterate the system you build, as you’ve always needed to do.

We are building a system here.

And if you’ve ever used a Notion template or had any form of morning routine... you understand that sometimes a system isn’t always reliable, or you outgrow it, or something throws a wrench in it and it doesn’t work for that specific situation.

But that isn’t a reason to think that the system doesn’t work altogether. And it doesn’t mean that you abandon it entirely. It means you iterate and make it adaptable.

With AI, this means that whenever you notice something wrong, you tell it what’s wrong. You improve the system. You propose a solution or converse until you decide on a better way of doing it.

I think most people are too afraid of uncertainty.

This doesn’t click for them.

And that’s fine, those people need to step into the arena and stop trying to outsource everything to AI before they even know what to outsource.

But for those who do understand this, it is truly revolutionary what you can do in today’s world.

I hope this was helpful, and I hope the custom AIs serve you well. They are pretty darn powerful if you use what you learned in this letter.

Talk soon.

– Dan

Last call - Creators Bootcamp starts in 3 days.

And the divide between them is growing larger every day.

If you want to win in the next 10 years, it is critical that you avoid becoming number 1 or 2.

1) The Purists

“We’re the ones who stayed clean.”

The ones who rejected AI and retreated into nature, simplicity, and screen-free living.

It’s a peaceful existence, until they come across someone who uses any form of technology, then they have an uncontrollable violent reaction because it threatens their identification with this new religion.

When you look at a purist, you can’t tell if they’re being serious or if they’re just doing it because it’s the rebellious and cool thing to do.

2) The Automatons

The ones who outsource every decision.

They’re allergic to friction and addicted to optimization. If their eyes aren’t glued to a screen, they feel as if they are losing an imaginary race. Every thought they have runs through Claude.

They don’t know where AI ends and where life begins.

Most people think they have to pick a side.

But I like to be different from most people. Maybe it’s a character flaw. Maybe it sounds cringe. But I find joy in it. It’s a creative challenge to live a life that very few people live, but I’ve found that growth (and therefore meaning/fulfillment) does not come from following the herd.

I’m convinced both sides are wrong.

The Purists reject an entire portion of reality (external progress), demonize it, and assume that it can’t be healthily integrated with prioritization and effort.

There are 4 quadrants of reality.

Like a skill tree in a video game.

You put points in each as you gain experience and increase your level. They interconnect. You can try to max out your money, but if you haven’t improved your mind, body, or spirit at all... money can only go so far. The greatest fruits of life await those who accept the challenge of continuous development in all domains of life.

The Purists treat their internal world (mind and spirit) as the highest truth and reject the external world.

This is a recipe for disaster.

It does not matter how enlightened you are. If your body is frail, health is at stake, and you don’t have any money to your name - you will suffer unnecessarily, and the solution to your problems is something you consider evil, so you have no choice but to play victim.

The Automatons, on the other hand, do the complete opposite. They obsess over money and progress until their humanity is nowhere to be found.

There is a 3rd option, however.

It sounds crazy and impossible to those who can’t think for themselves, but the future belongs to those who become multi-dimensional.

Here is how you win in the next 10 years:

The Digital Renaissance Man: Why Polymaths Win In The AI Age

We’re in the middle of the second renaissance where proof of work replaces the resume, an audience replaces the employer, and taste replaces credentials.

The greatest tragedy of our times is that we were fooled into believing that the Mechanical Life is the only path to success.

You were told to pick a lane.

You were convinced that having multiple interests was a character flaw.

Become a designer. Become a writer. Become an engineer, a marketer, a salesman, or just get whatever high-paying job you can because that’s how you become respected and live a good life.

And that seemed reasonable, but now you feel replaceable.

Because that was never how humans were meant to live.

The modern version of a “job” is only about 250 years old.

Before it, the ideal was a free person who did many things throughout their life (compared to a slave who did one specialized task... sounds familiar). The artisan, farmer, and pirate are all examples of those who knew how to run an entire operation, not just one piece of it. They were both the thinker and the maker, the artist and the scientist, they understood that in order to live a good life, they could not be limited to one area of study.

Leonardo Da Vinci walked into Verrocchio’s workshop to learn painting and left knowing anatomy, engineering, optics, and bronze casting. Nobody told him these were separate things that were supposed to be learned as their own credential or degree.

In The Renaissance, nobody gave a shit about your niche. They gave a shit about what you were capable of.

During Industrialization, the factory model wasn’t meant to destroy education, critical thinking, individual agency, and taste, but that’s exactly what it did. It steered us away from the Renaissance ideal. Education became training instead of discovery. Employment and repetitive tasks kept us dumb to the entire entrepreneurial process, so we didn’t develop the experience or agency to do our own thing.

The unfortunate reality is that this is normal to us.

The linear career instead of the exponential.

The masses don’t question it.

And now that AI is on our doorstep, only those with an open mind (who do not identify with the “team” that fully rejects or embraces the next phase of evolution) will take advantage of this shift.

One person can now do what a 10-50 person team used to do, depending on the task. One person now has any and all known information at their fingertips. One person has access to social media (free distribution of their work).

If you are a true New Renaissance Man, this is the greatest time to be alive - and many people will try to convince you that the world is doomed.

AI can now handle the machine-like repetitive tasks that, for the past two centuries, used to be our entire way of life. People are so worried that AI will ruin our thinking and make us more like machines, when they’ve already been living like machines for the whole of their lives.

To those who join this Second Renaissance, your job is to choose your craft, leverage AI so that you can manage the entire operation, and focus on taste, direction, and judgment - because the output of AI does not have perspective. AI is simply that, artificial intelligence. Like a bag of water that you must mold.

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Become a multi-dimensional, irreplaceable, walking contradiction

The most interesting people are walking contradictions.

Jacked intellectuals. Casual billionaires. Spiritual warriors.

Life is better when you can’t be shoved into a box that others can easily make sense of.

In the future, the most interesting person will be the one who lives between two extremes. Pure creativity and pure productivity. They seamlessly balance the analog lifestyle (no screens, no urgency, pure life enjoyment) and the AI-native lifestyle (leveraging technology to do what used to be impossible).

Meaning and fulfillment are not found in a flat “balanced” lifestyle. They are found in contrast. If you were happy all the time, you wouldn’t consider it happiness. You would consider it normal. Honestly, a bit boring. You would need greater euphoria to feel what you think happiness is (hence why people can’t get off their phones today. A normal happy life is too boring for them). But when you fail, struggle, and suffer for something you care about, you learn what true happiness is on the other side.

Those who win will lean into that contrast. They work and rest deeply. Intense bursts of focus on their craft and life’s work followed by periods of complete rest - just like the world’s most successful creatives.

Charles Darwin wrote 19 books in his lifetime.

His morning routine would surprise people for that level of output:

7:00 AM - Short walk, then breakfast.

8:00 - 9:30 AM - First work session in his study. This was his most productive block.

9:30 - 10:30 AM - Break to read letters and spend time with family.

10:30 AM - Noon - Second work session. By this point, Darwin considered himself to have “done a good day’s work.”

After noon - Second walk of the day around the Sandwalk, a famous quarter-mile gravel path he built specifically for thinking and reflection.

After lunch - Read the newspaper, then rest while his wife read aloud to him.

4:00 PM - Third walk of the day, usually around the Sandwalk again, sometimes with company.

Darwin worked roughly 3 hours of focused, creative work per day across two sessions.

I believe those who will thrive in the future will have a similar routine, but with the output of 10-20 people, and be able to single-handedly build their life’s work.

They will have a One-Human Business (will break down in another letter).

There are almost 7B people on this planet. Someday, I hope, there will be almost 7B companies. – Naval Ravikant

Before factories and industrialization, you worked until the task was done, not until your 8 hour shift was over. You worked according to the rhythm of seasons, sunlight, and energy.

More importantly, you didn’t learn how to become valuable through a standardized curriculum and meaningless memorization tests.

You learned by doing.

You learned in the workshop from apprentice to journeyman to master, imitating someone who knew what they were doing until your own taste and judgment were formed.

The question now is just that.

How do you become a New Renaissance Man?

How to Become a Digital Renaissance Man

Do it all.

Become a writer, designer, marketer, filmmaker, bodybuilder, runner, or whatever your curiosity desires.

But channel your focus and attention into one vessel.

One craft. One thing that you choose to become known for, and your multi-faceted development will only contribute to your ability to get ahead of everyone else.

Here’s what you do.

Choose your craft, become irreplaceable

Most artists, writers, and creatives are revolting against AI right now because they identify with their skill, tool, or specific way of working.

I don’t care about the argument of whether or not AI art is real art or AI writing is real writing because that seems like a great distraction that prevents you from doing anything with your life (outside of complaining for views and likes, reinforcing the identity that isn’t going to serve you well in the coming years).

You need a craft, but you need to choose your craft wisely.

Your craft lives at the intersection of what you care about, what you can uniquely do, and what others are willing to pay you for.

There are 3 layers to building an irreplaceable skill stack.

Layer 1 is a foundation of human nature.

Marketing, sales, writing, speaking, psychology, etc. It’s understanding the mechanics of human attention and how what people perceive as valuable is highly subjective and changes as the world does.

Every single person who wants to succeed on their own, in any form, must master this domain.

This is the “what others are willing to pay you for” part.

Layer 2 is your domain obsession and unique interests.

Philosophy, fitness, design, coding, nutrition, or anything else. None of these are going away, they are simply evolving.

The combination of these interests is where your uniqueness lies. The jacked philosopher is far more valuable than the armchair philosopher who only grows their mind without direct experience to test their theories, and it is far more interesting. People will come to you over the next guy.

This is the “what you care about” and “what you can uniquely do” part, and it is the thing that other people come to you for. The human nature foundation is what helps you make it appealing to those people.

Layer 3 is technical skill.

Email marketing software. Photoshop. No-code website design. Social media management. Typing the physical code on a screen.

This used to be the most important, because it took time and effort to learn these tools, but now AI does it all with ease. You should not bank your future on mastery of a tool.

The pattern of every technological shift is the same. The mechanical part of the skill gets automated, and the human role moves up a layer. The scribe became the editor, and the hand-weaver became the machine operator.

We’ll discuss this more in a second.

How to become dangerously self-educated

Schools teach you how to operate within society.

Which is fine and necessary to some extent, but they do not teach you how to navigate your own path. Public schools are filtering and conditioning mechanisms more than anything.

True education is discovery.

It is the process of learning what’s necessary to achieve self-generated vision and goals, not the process of hoarding knowledge or memorizing facts to do well on a test that does not map to reality.

Even worse, most people stop learning after graduation.

They turn 20-25 and repeat the same day for the rest of their life. They do not pursue a creative challenge that demands unique knowledge.

So how do you actually learn?

You follow the apprenticeship model.

The beautiful thing about today is that you can find mentors and masters by simply picking up a book or opening YouTube on your phone.

I don’t care if you use AI to get information.

I don’t care if you get all your advice from one YouTube guru.

What I do care about is if you have a vision, have a goal, work toward that goal, and apply what you learn to problems that come up along the way. That is how you test what you learn to verify its validity for your specific situation.

Whether AI hallucinates or not, there are still plenty of profoundly stupid humans that you probably shouldn’t listen to. You need to question and test and experiment either way.

Don’t learn and then do, that’s how you get stuck in tutorial hell.

You do the thing first, or attempt to do the thing, and only then is your mind primed to receive the lesson that allows you to make forward progress.

The one-human business (and how to join the new economy)

Creators are replacing institutions.

I know that sounds silly, but can you not see it?

Creators are the new education system - do you not learn most of the things that are actually useful in your life on Substack, YouTube, podcasts, or niche accounts on X?

Creators shape culture, culture shapes behavior - do you not trust a creator whose thoughts you’ve spent time with over politicians who obviously have their own self-interest in mind?

The internet is permissionless leverage - you don’t need approval to build an audience, start a business, or sell a product. It is the high-agency path.

AI accelerates the generalist and polymath - you can become a one-human business. Content on social media to attract an audience around your life’s work, code to build the product, funnel, and digital real estate, and domain specific knowledge that makes what you do valuable over the next person.

Now when I say creator, you probably think of an influencer or “personal brand.”

That’s not exactly what I mean.

I mean someone who creates value. They solve problems, create solutions, and help others do the same. And since value exchange is the crux of human relationships, they return the favor, often in the form of money.

James Clear has a personal brand, yes, but he is really just using newsletters, books, content, and other media to get eyes on his life’s work and earn an independent income.

I believe most ambitious individuals will take this route in the future, even if what we know as social media today isn’t where you put your work in front of other people. In the past it was newspaper and radio, now it’s social media, who knows what it will be in the future, but starting on social media puts you ahead of everyone else. That’s where the attention is.

A personal brand is just the highest leverage vessel to be a creator right now. It’s unfortunate it’s turned into a marketable “content creator” identity, but that’s the world we live in. That doesn’t mean you have to conform to what you think a content creator should be.

We will break down the one-human business in a future letter, but the next Creator Bootcamp starts September 9th. If you want to learn irreplaceable branding, unique content, and non-gimmicky social growth strategies, consider joining here.

How to achieve the impossible with AI

Most people do not realize that AI is more than a slop generator and a new-age search engine.

They do not realize that they can quite literally ask it to build a software, landing page, funnel, app, tool, or whatever else they need to do anything on the internet.

“But Dan, that just leads to AI slop!”

Correct. And that’s where most people stop.

They don’t realize iteration exists. And that your first iteration would suck with or without AI.

The landing page starts as a rough draft, then it’s up to you to make micro adjustments until it’s actually effective.

The software is extremely buggy and looks horrible until you fix the bugs over and over again until it’s better than 99% of apps on the market.

In short, people don’t understand that they can just ask “How can I do this?” And continue asking questions until a clear plan is formed, then have the AI execute on your vision that you choose and control, not a random guess, and proceed to iterate until it is valuable.

It still takes quite a bit of time, and those who are only there for a quick dopamine hit will fizzle out.

Here is a quick start guide on how to do anything with AI:

1) Know what you want and what good looks like

For most of you, you are going to use AI to build a one-person business.

And if you don’t know how to build a business, then you’re going to expect the AI to do it perfectly for you without knowing what you need.

It still takes years of iteration to see any form of success, nothing has changed in that regard.

But if you know what you want, what you need, and what good looks like, then you can simply ask the AI how it can help you accomplish those goals and go from there.

The best place to start is by simply using AI as a learning tool.

Offer creation. Copywriting. Social media. You can’t have AI do something that you don’t even think to ask about.

2) Have absurdly high standards

The reason every response you get from AI is slop is that you treat the first draft as the final draft.

You don’t understand that you still have to tweak every little design, feature, word, sentence, or whatever else you are having AI do.

What you create with AI sucks because you see AI as this thing that should just be an absolute genius rather than seeing it as a tool that meets your level of intelligence and ambition.

3) Try to replace yourself with AI.

The best way to learn AI is to try to automate everything that you do.

You will quickly learn what can and can’t be automated.

Only then can you choose what parts of your business and craft you want AI to touch.

For me, AI is obviously great at scanning large swaths of information for patterns and trends. It would be silly to only manually research social media for top YouTube videos, tweets, and articles as that now puts you at a major disadvantage. That’s why you now use AI to do this.

But when it comes to writing the posts themselves... One, I like the creative process of writing, so I make it a part of my day. Two, the value of writing is in the eyes of the reader. With code, no end user cares about what the code looks like. They don’t see it. They care about if it’s beneficial to them. That’s why I write, for fine tuned control over the value provided.

If you don’t know where to start, just think of anything you do on a daily basis.

Then, ask AI how it could be turned into a repeatable process with a prompt, skill, tool, software, or skill.

And of course, understand that the automation (the prompt/tool/skill) is also a first draft. It will suck at first. Just tell it how to improve.

In future letters, we are going to dive deeper into everything mentioned in this letter. The Digital Renaissance. How to learn effectively. The best skills to learn. How to use AI without ruining your thinking. How to think with clarity. And more.

Thank you for reading.

– Dan

The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. — Naval Ravikant

A core sign of low intelligence is not being able to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at once.

Most people treat an idea as a team to join.

Once they join that team, the opposing view becomes a threat.

They stop thinking and start reacting, which is far more dangerous than it seems, because if the outcome of your life depends on the choices you make, and your level of thinking determines the opportunities you can see - the amount of time you spend reacting, being offended, or regurgitating the scripts society and culture trained into your brain

That is our goal.

Not to somehow become more intelligent, but to increase our cognitive flexibility. That is, to increase how long and deep we can think without our minds being hijacked by a reaction to an opposing idea. Today’s world has thinking traps laid out everywhere that keep you angry, dumb, and broke - which we will discuss how to avoid soon.

There are 3 levels of thinking.

Quick self promo: For those who’ve been asking for an Eden tutorial (social media research for validated ideas and workspace for creatives/creators - here’s a 1 hour full guide that just went out - save to your watch later and come back to read.

Level 1 - The NPC

The world is a circus. It is a place of neon lights and loud sirens and shiny objects. It is a place of institutions, dogmas, and propaganda that is created to control the masses. The world is a place of half-truths, and outright lies. It is a place that conditions and brainwashes the masses into believing various fantasies.

Politics, religion, schools, teams, spirituality, self-help, and all the institutions and dogmas it creates are to arrange individuals into competing groups so that they may be controlled.

– Kapil Gupta

In a video game, an “NPC” is a non-player character.

They run on a script. When you talk with them, they only have a few select things they can say.

This is the starting point for almost everyone. You are born into a specific culture with a specific set of values. For most people, that meant you were taught to go to school, get a good job, and praise your God. Unless your parents were high-agency and questioned their own beliefs, they probably did not teach you to do that.

In fact, they would feel threatened if you decided to do anything besides being a good student and becoming a cog in the machine.

This is the pre-rational stage of cognitive development.

People at this stage of cognition treat authority as ground truth. They obey their priest, parents, teachers, textbook, or favorite influencer or celebrity rather than evaluating ideas based on merit and critical thought.

To them, the world is binary. It sorts cleanly into right/wrong, us/them, sacred/profane. It is genuinely difficult for them to process nuance because they don’t have the cognitive architecture for holding paradox.

These are not permanent levels of mind. They are temporary states. You can regress into level 1 thinking at any time, especially during stressful or chaotic periods of your life.

The goal, as we will discuss and learn, is to compound the amount of time we spend in higher levels of thinking, because that’s what determines our success and quality of life.

Lastly, their identity is one with their tribe. Who they are is a direct representation of their job, their religion, their sports team, or their political party, and if any of those are questioned, they feel threatened and will lash out as if they are under physical attack.

Level 2 - The Main Character

At some point, you decide to stop living the life someone assigned to you and start pursuing your own.

Some would call this the rebellion stage.

This is the birth of critical thinking as a default, rather than something that occasionally shows its head.

You start questioning how you were raised, your faith, your path, your politics, and all the authorities and traditions you previously obeyed without a second thought.

The world becomes a puzzle, a series of quests. You start seeing your choices as something you control. You pursue a new career, seek personal development, start a side hustle, or indulge your curiosity and begin reprogramming your mind in the direction you want.

However, for level 2 thinkers, obedience to authority doesn’t go away. Instead, logic and evidence become the authority. And they often still aren’t able to see this. They look down on those who blindly listen to authority, yet they do the same thing. They simply swap blind faith for money, science, and hard numbers.

The core psychological shift that must be made to go from level 1 to level 2 is agency and self-authorship.

This is the rational stage of development.

The rationalist writes their own script. They set their own goals, define their own success, and choose their own values. This is a massive developmental leap.

Level 3 - The Programmer

At the highest levels of thinking, identity and perspective become tools.

Level 1 thinkers have one perspective (the group or tribe).

Level 2 thinkers also have one perspective (their own).

Level 3 thinkers can hold several at once, and understand that there are kernels of truth in each.

They can adopt specific perspectives when it best serves the situation. When it’s time to make a business decision, they put on their business lens. When it’s time for reconnecting with meaning, they put on their spirituality lens. When it’s time for logic, they put on their science lens. They are able to make decisions from the highest possible vantage point, because they aren’t trapped in one singular perspective.

In other words, they solve more problems in their life.

A bible thumper passes their problems to God. A scientist reduces everything to atoms. But a level 3 thinker has a mind that doesn’t shut off when exposed to threatening perspectives. They pull the useful parts of those perspectives and make far more progress than any other level. Those at lower levels will not understand them.

The biggest difference between level 2 and level 3 lies in gut feelings, somatic knowing, and aesthetic sense. Level 2 cannot utilize them because they are not logically useful, but a level 3 can comprehend the hidden form of intelligence and sees it as complementary.

The NPC reacts, The Main Character thinks, and The Programmer thinks about their thinking.

The NPC follows the script, The Main Character writes the script, and The Programmer examines the act of scripting itself - allowing them to change their lens or frame so that the script takes an entirely new shape. The mind is a story engine, and level 3 exposes how that story is shaped. They understand the operating system and can rewrite it.

If you want a good life, free from the emotional instability that clouds your decisions, becoming a level 3 thinker is foundational.

The problem, however, is that the modern information environment has set you up for catastrophic failure.

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II - The social media companies have you exactly where they want you: fat and addicted.

In an age of information overabundance, our curiosity, which once focused us, now distracts us. And it’s led to an epidemic of intellectual obesity that’s clogging our minds with malignant junk. — Gurwinder

We are in the middle of an intellectual obesity crisis.

We are as addicted to information as we are to food. It’s much harder to notice something you can’t see. Our minds are growing fatter and fatter, rotting from the inside.

Why?

Our brains evolved reward circuits for a hunter-gatherer environment.

When we sought scarce resources like fat, sugar, and salt, our brain released dopamine to signal their importance to our survival.

Homo genus emerged around 2 million years ago.

Homo sapiens emerged around 300,000 years ago.

The Industrial Age started around 300 years ago (1/1000 of human evolution).

That’s when fat, sugar, and salt started to become less scarce, because we could manufacture and distribute them rapidly.

In the 1950s, fast food chains started popping up, and the Golden Age of Television enabled the mass spread of information.

A bit later, the internet came along. It was incredible at the start, but then Google, Facebook, and other soon-to-be massive companies joined a race to the top, where profit was the way to win. This was a poor incentive from the start.

Fast food companies had already been testing infinite combinations of fat, sugar, and salt to maximize pleasure for their customers and keep them coming back for more.

Internet companies followed suit, adopting an advertising model and soon finding that polarizing, inflammatory content captured the most attention. They prioritized it because profit is their main incentive.

Social media algorithms don’t show you what you want, they show you what you’re most likely to react to - trapping you in a lower level of thinking.

Since media is the mass transfer of information, this leads to a society optimized for “one-marshmallow” thinking. You can either have one marshmallow now or two marshmallows later, and we can’t help but choose now. Instant gratification. This is inherently entropic and degrades systems.

Short-form attention hacking content has no through-line. No greater purpose. No sense making. Thousands of meaningless ideas flood our mind and we are unable to make sense of the chaos, trapping us in a low-consciousness state.

Long-form writing and reading is centropic. It heals your mind, allowing it to think longer, deeper, and toward more meaningful outcomes.

Now don’t get me wrong.

I’m not the type of person who is silly enough to believe that getting rid of social media is the solution. Same with AI. When innovation brings progress, it also brings problems, and problems must be solved with an entrepreneurial spirit, not that of a victim who cannot think creatively enough to solve a problem without tearing everything down.

In fact, I think social media is the solution.

It is the new education system. For self-educators, you don’t rely on formal education to actually educate you anymore. You take matters into your own hands, find the people who have achieved what you want to achieve, and seek specific knowledge to make progress toward your vision.

It is the permissionless career path. You no longer need a publisher to write a book, nor a record label to make music, nor an employer to make an income. You develop yourself, treat social media as a public journal, and build an audience around the most unique brand there is - you. You solve your own problems and sell the solution.

It is the natural way of life. Humans are creators. The process of identifying a problem, imagining a solution, and bringing it into existence is what brings fulfillment. It is the opposite of the mechanical life we were sold by the industrial paradigm. Factories and cubicles destroy the soul.

Being a “personal brand” or “content creator” is simply one modern, leveraged way to return to your nature. It is a vessel that turns experience into value through creativity, contributing to humanity in a positive way. That is the most meaningful way to live.

The world needs more value creators. Those who dedicate themselves to exploring a crevice of reality, pursuing their curiosity, and sharing what they learn in public in a way that benefits, not harms, the minds of others.

This is what we teach in the Creator Bootcamp. We talk about how to create your personal monopoly, find what to talk about, and other social growth tactics - but for those who don’t care to be an “influencer.”

Of course, social media still feels toxic, but only to those who are unaware of how much they love being intoxicated.

If you find yourself feeling the same way... tired of the ragebait and low-level thinking, here’s exactly what you do to avoid it, and how to change your cognitive architecture to increase your capacity for more developed thought.

III - How to change your cognitive capacity in 6-12 months (4 daily habits)

If you want to stay angry, dumb, and broke:

• Let every disagreement feel like a personal attack

• Consume information designed to provoke a reaction, then mistake that reaction for an original thought

• Fill every moment with short-form content so your mind never has enough space to turn on its creative ability

• Borrow your beliefs from your parents, political party, favorite influencer, or whatever the algorithm served you this morning

• Become intellectually obese, stuffed with ideas, incapable of turning them into anything useful

That’s where society wants you.

Governments, schools, and social media companies may not explicitly say they want to keep you there, but that’s the nature of systems and incentives. They benefit from profit and obedience. So public education, jobs, and media slowly take shape in a way that hacks your psychology and keeps you dependent.

The solution to most of your problems starts in the mind.

At low levels of mind, problems become death sentences.

But as you expand your capacity for thinking and nuance, problems become puzzles you enjoy solving. Problems turn from pain to curiosity.

Why does that matter?

Because the life you want lies at the end of a series of problems. If you can solve those problems (financial, mental, emotional, social, physical, spiritual), you can get whatever you want in life.

Like a skill tree in a video game. Every problem you solve puts a point in that skill. Solve enough of them, and you become one of the strongest players in the game.

Improving your thinking, or cognitive capacity, comes down to two things:

1. Breaking the habit of how you currently think

2. Retraining your mind to think in a new direction

In other words, it all comes down to habits.

It all comes down to what you do daily and whether it improves or ruins your ability to think.

There are 4 habits that, in my eyes, must be incorporated into every single day of your life.

If you can do these every day, your mind will transform.

Time block them.

Write them down.

Set reminders.

Make it a ritual.

You know it won’t become habit unless you nearly force yourself to do these things every single day.

10 minutes each. Every day. Not a lot. Not hard.

But there’s one prerequisite:

Drown yourself in information that forces you to become your ideal self

Rip yourself out of your current environment.

Because the information and experiences you expose yourself to quietly influence the ideas that live in your head. Your mind is like a house, and most people don’t care if people break in and call it their own. It’s a 24/7 frat party that nobody wants to clean up after.

Those ideas influence your behavior. Your behavior then creates a feedback loop which influences and reinforces your identity. And once it becomes your identity, good luck breaking out of it without a dirty fight.

We live in the 3rd millennium.

The information age.

Our ancestors used tools to hunt and survive, but survival doesn’t look the same now. Modern survival is mental, not physical. You are constantly fighting in a spiritual war of ideas.

If you want to survive, you need proper tools, practices, and routines to protect your mind from being infiltrated and destroyed.

You must align your environment with your ideal mind, body, spirit, and business.

Unfollow anyone who doesn't serve that.

Block everyone who tries to distract you from your path.

Pay close attention to who and what people and experiences you expose yourself to daily. The deadbeat coworkers. The peers with no future. All of it.

You must be ruthless about this. This is your fucking mind we’re talking about. It is your interface with reality. Do not let rogue ideas hijack it.

Question - Certainty is where thinking goes to die

The most powerful thinking tool is asking a question.

Then another.

Then another.

Then another.

And so on. But the second you stop questioning, you stop thinking. Which isn’t a problem, you can’t just think for the rest of your life, but this exposes the mark of stupidity.

Stupidity begins when you find an answer that feels to good to keep testing or exploring. The answer hardens into identity, and from then on any challenge feels like an attack.

There are a few obvious archetypes:

1. The expert who stopped learning - They went to college or were an expert 20 years ago, and feel like they know it all even when they are far behind even open minded beginners.

2. The victim of everything - They see the world in reverse. It is everyone elses responsibility to solve their problems and end their struggles. They do not believe in their ability to impact the direction of their own life. They never asked the question, “Why can’t I?”

3. The false dichotomy thinker - Rampant on social media. If you aren’t for us, you’re against us. If you subscribe to this religion or party, we can’t be acquaintances. If you don’t put a black square as your profile picture... you get the point.

The only way to escape this miserable way of living is by asking a question. Then another one.

It must become a natural process for you.

Once a day, set aside time to question the way you think.

Morning, night, afternoon, on a walk, I don’t care. You must do it.

Put it on your calendar and actually treat it as a priority.

If you don’t, you are not giving your mind the soil to grow.

Curate - The survival habit for the modern world

The uncurated feed is junk food for the mind.

If you default to the main feed, you’re eating whatever gets served at the world’s largest buffet, and the food is engineered for addiction and cheap dopamine.

Curating information is the equivalent of going on a mental diet, and if you want to be mentally agile and fit, you can understand the importance of that.

Plus, if information influences behavior and behavior influences identity, curating information is as close to the act of reinventing yourself as you can get.

Instead of scrolling the main timeline:

• Save links to your favorite social accounts in a note and manually go to each profile

• Create lists of those accounts inside of social tools and read from there

• Sign up for newsletters on a separate email and only scroll that inbox

Or, do something crazy by today’s standards and read an actual book.

Read - Actual books, long-form thought

You can only cook with what’s in the fridge.

By that, I mean you can only think thoughts and speak words that you have been exposed to. If you don’t read or learn new information, your intellectual capacity stays small and underdeveloped.

Most people are stuck with the stale knowledge and beliefs given to them by their parents and teachers. Meaning, the only opportunities they know in life are the ones they are aware of. They only have a set amount of outcomes for their future, and for most people, that life outcome is average and mediocre.

Short-form content scatters attention.

You bounce from one idea to another to another, 30 seconds apart from each other, and don’t give yourself time to digest the mental food you’re eating, and since it’s already junk food, it’s causing damage to your gut.

Long-form content orders attention.

A new piece of information will either create disorder in consciousness, by getting us all worked up to face the threat, or it will reinforce our goals, thereby freeing up psychic energy.

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Psychic entropy - or the mind tending toward disorder - happens when attention has nothing to organize around, or when incoming inputs fight the thing attention is pointed at.

This is what causes states of anxiety, racing thoughts, overwhelm, or a loss of self-control.

Excessive cheap dopamine was already an issue, but short-form entropic content on social media simply makes your life worse. You won’t even know where the anxiety and overwhelm came from.

Reading is the antidote.

Even if it starts as just 1 page a day. That’s enough to expose yourself to an idea that could change the direction of your life.

Over time, you train your mind to stop thinking in such a scattered, distracted way, and your enjoyment of life starts to increase drastically.

Create - Training for the mind

You can question, curate, and read every single day and still be intellectually obese because if you eat without moving, you get fat.

The flow state, or most enjoyable state of consciousness, simply represents flow of information and experience. Input comes in as fast as it's digested into output.

You can read level 3 ideas all day and stay a level 1 thinker. The NCP doesn’t stop being an NPC because he reads Nietzsche. He becomes an NPC who quotes Nietzsche.

You must write the thing.

You must build the thing.

And it must be your own thing.

If you can spend 8 hours building someone else’s dreams, you can spend 1 hour building your own.

It doesn’t matter what it is. A brand, a business, an essay, a design, a short film, software.

The world doesn’t need more consumers.

It needs more of what only you can create.

It needs curious people who question everything, avoid getting trapped in stupid thinking, develop their own unique mind, and share their perspective with the world.

— Dan

Read more on higher levels of thinking:

As you'd guess, 99.99% of them will not, in fact, become successful.

Because they're all obsessed with the wrong thing.

The latest Claude Code skill that went viral on Instagram.

The YouTube video that teaches them how to start a business in 5 actionable steps (I still don't get how people don't realize that their thirst for “actionable steps” isn't going to help them in the slightest).

Their obsessed with tactics.

You know... the same knowledge that everyone else has access to. Do you not realize that all the information you could ever need to make $100 million dollars is readily available to you online, in books, or inside of an AI conversation?

Have you ever stopped and wondered why everyone in the world isn't making millions of dollars right now? Have you ever considered that the “actionable advice” you crave so much won't get you anywhere unless you know how the pieces you're picking up fit into the entire puzzle?

It's obvious why most of these people won't actually achieve the success they're so desperately aiming for.

One, because they've just exchanged one form of cheap dopamine for another, more insidious form. The one that makes them feel like they're making actual progress when they aren't moving an inch. I'd argue that endless tactic collection is worse than doomscrolling ragebait videos.

Two, because they don't have a strategy that allows them to use the tactics they're collecting to their highest degree. They don't have a strategic bone in their body. Hell, they aren't even thinking half the time. They're just being thrown around like puppets by people who are good at internet marketing (it's not the marketers fault you can't control your own mind).

Now, if you fall into this camp, I don't mean to put you down.

6 years ago, I fell into the same trap. I still fall into it quite often. This article is to me as much as it is to you. I started business after business (Facebook ads, SEO, dropshipping, digital art, and a few more), but they were hobbies more than anything. I wanted to make money and quit my job, like everyone else, but my actions didn't reflect that. I did everything except for make money.

I learned the “high value skill.” That felt good.

I built the website. That felt good.

I registered my LLC. That felt good.

But when it came time to ask someone to pay for my service, I was nowhere to be found.

The missing piece was a strategy.

But not just a strategy... the ability to think strategically, which is an incredibly difficult skill to learn.

I may not teach you everything in this article, but I do want to share 4 of the most compelling ideas I could find or come up with.

We will discuss why a lack of strategy means a lack of control over the outcome of your life, the 9 traits of a master strategist, and finally how to create your own life strategy and develop the capacity for strategic thinking.

This will be long, as are most of my articles.

I'd recommend setting aside time to read this, and resisting the urge to indulge in infinite scrolling.

I - Strategy is getting yourself into a superior position, while at the same time making sure your opponent is in a worse one.

Tactics flow from a superior position.

– Bobby Fischer, Chess Grandmaster

Let's walk through a simple chess match.

I'll try not to bore you here so we can get to the point.

Player one spends the first part of the game doing things that look boring.

They aren't attacking or capturing any pieces.

From the outside it looks like they're not doing anything... they're just moving their pieces to certain squares on the board.

In a game like chess, you're playing on a grid, but not all squares on that grid are created equal. A piece in the center of a board can reach more places than a piece stuck behind a corner.

Player one slides a rook onto an open lane where nothing blocks it.

They place a bishop on a path that points straight at the enemy king.

They place a knight on a square near the middle of the board.

Meanwhile, player two has pieces getting in each other's way.

Their most powerful pieces are trapped behind their own pawns.

Their kind is stuck in the middle of the board because they never found a safe moment to tuck it away in the corner.

They were only reacting to player one's moves.

Player one moves their knight to a square where it can attack player two's king and queen at the same time.

In chess this is called a fork. Your opponent can only save one. And losing either is not good.

So, player two has to move his king, obviously, so it doesn't get captured, but that led to player one being able to take their queen, which is the most powerful piece on the board. Game over.

The crowd goes wild.

The thing is, any player who got to that exact arrangement of pieces could have played it.

The reason player one got there is because they spent the entire game building up to it.

If you were to remove any of those boring steps from the start, the fork, or the game winning tactic, wouldn't exist. The knight would have gotten blocked and the king would have escaped as a defending piece arrived.

The lesson: Strategy is getting yourself into a superior position, while at the same time making sure your opponent is in a worse one.

Strategy is the work of making your position better and your opponent's position worse, move by move, until the gap between the two is so large that tactics start appearing on their own.

But in the game of life, you are both the player and the opponent. Every decision you make changes your position, and most people are completely blind to where they are.

If the average person's life were a chess match, they would never reach the fork position, and if they did, they wouldn't even realize it. One of the strongest tactics in the game would be both unavailable and unconscious to them.

That's why strategy must come first.

If you want to actually succeed in the side business, building an aesthetic physique, or simply getting what you want out of life, you can't be like most people.

Most people spend zero time strategizing.

And if you observe society, you'll see that the outcome of tactic-level thinking is disastrous. If you do not spend time engaging in strategic thinking to overcome your own inadequacies, you will inevitably fall into the same mindless routine as everyone else.

II - The average person lives in a mindless cycle of struggles they can't escape.

Thank God you aren't actually on a battlefield.

Because if you were, you'd be dead already.

Most people commit highly predictable strategic mistakes that if they were in a truly violent setting, they would lose, and winners would be studying what they did so that they can do the exact opposite.

Getting married too early (or late), not developing mastery in anything, trusting that AI can do everything for you (I'm saying this as someone who is pro-AI), chasing money over meaning, irresponsibly going into debt, staying in a bad relationship, not investing in education, climbing a corporate ladder that leads to nowhere. The list goes on.

The average person does not try to solve their problems or struggles. They get stuck in a routine and live the same day over and over. It does not cross their minds to snap out of it, engage in strategic thinking, and change direction so they can eventually reach a more advantageous position in life.

If you want to get ahead of 99% of people, all you have to do is pause, think, and actually attempt to overcome the struggle you're faced with, while considering a path where you won't have to face that degree of struggle again.

Now, you may not be on an actual battlefield, but you are always on a metaphorical one. A battlefield where you are both the protagonist and antagonist. Before you turn 18, your parents are largely in control of your life strategy, which is largely influenced by their own parents and culture. For most people reading this, that means that your entire “strategy” is to go to school, get a job, and retire at some age, but you have a voice tucked somewhere inside you whispering about how that path will lead you to certain regret.

Once you enter adulthood, your mind is operating from a certain position, with a set of tactics that largely won't help you, and that's exactly when the enemies start attacking. You're slowly hit with a barrage of bills, responsibilities, thoughts, emotions, and what you want to do for the rest of your life.

It doesn't help that modern comfort allows people to coast through life and still survive, when in actual warfare, the general's own life was on the line. That forced strategic depth. You, on the other hand, just do “what you're supposed to do” and leave it at that, because if you tolerate most of a meaningless day, at least you get to go home and play video games or slam a few beers with your friends.

You need pressure.

Tactical stress.

Putting yourself in a position where you must craft a strategy, or you lose.

Move into an apartment you can't afford. Book the plane ticket to somewhere you've never been. Invest in the business software, course, or coaching even if you think it's a scam, because at least your finances will be put on the line and you can't live in a shroud of false comfort anymore.

Alright, you get it.

You need a strategy, and you need to develop the skill of strategic thinking, because without those, every decision you make becomes arbitrary.

And if the outcome of your life is the accumulation of results that stem from your decisions, paying attention to this may finally give you a more fine-tuned control over your life.

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III - How to build a superior life position by going so deep you see patterns in everything you do

In The Book of 5 Rings by Miyamoto Musashi, there are 9 precepts/principles every strategist should follow:

1. Don't think dishonestly

2. Training is the Way itself

3. Get acquainted with every art

4. Know the Ways of all professions

5. Understand gain and loss in worldly dealings

6. Develop intuitive judgment about everything

7. Perceive what can't be seen

8. Attend even to small things

9. Do nothing useless

A strategist, in Musashi's mind, is someone who has gone so deep into one discipline that they hit something universal at the bottom of it.

You notice patterns that aren't specific to business or relationships or swordsmanship or chess. They are a constant, and once you see those patterns and notice them across domains, you become far more effective within all domains, because you are never really starting from scratch - you have an understanding of reality as a whole on your side.

The 9 precepts define what this type of person looks like on the outside.

The modern idea of a generalist is usually someone who knows a little about a lot. A jack of all trades, but what Musashi is describing here is a bit different.

There's the generalist.

There's the specialist.

Then there's the master (the strategist).

This also maps quite well to the stages of ego development and spiral dynamics - the strategist stage is quite achievable and comes with the following qualities:

• Systems thinking - Strategists see competing systems and perspectives simultaneously, while Achievers (self-helpers, businessmen) operate within a single system of success and achievement.

• Comfortable with paradox - They hold contradictions (like being both pro and anti AI) rather than resolving them into clear (false) answers.

• Process over outcome - They care about how things happen and the principles at play, not just results.

• Awareness of constraints - They see how their own assumptions and frameworks shape what they perceive.

• Meta-awareness - Strategists can observe their own meaning-making and not just deploy expertise or navigate social dynamics.

• Principled flexibility - They have strong values but adapt methods fluidly, versus rigid rules or social conformity.

Most importantly, the strategist's core trait is the ability to hold multiple frameworks or perspectives. They are often non-dogmatic and do not choose a black or white side. Most people on social media argue themselves into oblivion because they do not yet have the mental capacity for this.

Strategists see their own constructions as choices.

Their identity, values, and worldview.

The master/strategist receives the benefits of both the generalist and the specialist. Both the ability to be good at many things (so they don't narrow their mind to one area of study, limiting their potential) and the ability to excel significantly at one thing (so they can get outsized results, preferably in a meaningful domain).

That is our goal, and you can easily see how many people do not adhere to these precepts.

Most people are so identified with ideology (see: religion, pro/anti-AI, flavor-of-the-day distractions) that they could not fathom the precept of “Don't think dishonestly,” because they are in a constant cycle of self-deception. Their mind is hijacked by extreme black and white takes (the lowest form of intelligence) and their thoughts are not in close proximity to truth. And the further from truth you are, the more of a liar you are, by definition. Most extreme takes are blind lies, and you see them everywhere on the internet. See through it.

I will give a different lens to view these precepts of principles when we learn how to think strategically, but “don't think dishonestly” ties in well with “do nothing useless,” because being in a constant state of lying and unconsciously scheming is useless.

The mindless way of life is a useless way of life.

If you were to simply audit your thoughts and behavior for usefulness, you would rapidly turn your life around.

The questions now are:

What do you master?

What is your form of “training?”

How do you begin to understand gain and loss?

How do you begin to embody the principles of a master strategist?

And most importantly, in my eyes, how do you do something useful?

IV - how to think so strategically you finally take back control of your life

Most people's lives suck, not because of bad luck, bad circumstances, or lack of opportunity, but because the average person does not even think to solve the problems in their life.

The problems are just something they live with.

They have not developed themselves to the point of seeing problems as puzzles, and that all problems are ultimately solvable on a long enough time scale, with access to the proper resources, and with the prior series of problems already being solved (i.e. You can't build a rocket without first building an engine. Rockets seemed impossible in the past, yet the problem of space travel was ultimately solved, thanks to strategic long term thinking.)

You may not care to build a rocket, but you can have a similar magnitude of impact on your own life. You can build a business that makes life changing money, completely turn your health around, or really achieve whatever you set your mind to, if you do not get distracted.

Thankfully, we can study what makes a good strategy.

The principles have been refined for centuries in military, business, and sports. You have a massive amount of historical wins and losses that you can reverse engineer and study.

And the beautiful thing about it is that they all apply to your personal life and success. Principles cross domains.

I've compiled 7 of them.

If you sit down and take the time to actually do this, your life will change.

This doesn't guarantee your strategy is a winning strategy, but it sure helps with not being trampled by your opponent, which is often yourself.

Principle 1 - Vision

No one ever suddenly gets lucky, if the stars suddenly align for you, you actually aligned them, consciously or not, by choosing where to live, who to learn from, who to marry, who to befriend, what lifestyle to maintain, what risks to take, and what vision to believe in.

— @orangebook_ on X

If you do not have a vision, you are lost.

You do not have intention behind your actions. You are holding 10 darts in your hand - 10 bold decisions that determine the outcome of your life - but you don't even have a dart board to aim at.

You don't even have a chance to hit the board... let alone get a bullseye, even though a bullseye isn't the highest scored shot in darts, which is silly in the game of darts, but in the game of life it as an apt rule, because a bullseye teaches you nothing.

Of course, there is benefit to being lost.

You either let entropy drag you into oblivion, or you make the decision to figure it out, collect vision, and begin on your path. The void is where success is born.

A vision is the ultimate outcome you're going for.

It is not a vague wish. It must be as specific as it can possibly be. It must be compelling enough to motivate and guide every action. Because until you're clear about what you want, you can't have a strategy at all. Once you are clear, you can reverse-engineer every step and iterate as you go.

If you want to become someone who is emotionally resilient, deeply self-aware, and financially independent by 35 - that's specific. That allows you to evaluate every daily decision against. Scrolling social media for two hours probably doesn't move you toward that, and without vision, you wouldn't even register that as a problem in your life.

If you want to build a 50k-audience newsletter in the personal development space that generates enough revenue to quit your job in 18 months - now every piece of content, every platform choice, every monetization decision can be evaluated against that intent. Plus, all the tactics people shove down your throat on social media can be filtered for what actually applies to you. It is simply your job to say no to distractions. Everyone's talking about personal brands these days, so I made a little bot that researches your niche and gives you a strategy + swipe file of posts that are performing. It's pretty cool and free here.

However, vision is very difficult to cultivate just by thinking “what do I want?”

Instead, it's easier to start with an anti-vision and post-mortem, so you understand what complete failure looks like and use that as an inversion mechanism to find what you really want.

That's step one.

That's what you stop reading and do right now.

• Anti-vision – Think of exactly what you don't want the outcome to be.

• Post-mortem – Reverse engineer why that anti-vision would have happened in the first place. What mistakes were made and how do you avoid them?

From there, you are in a much better position to create an MVV - a minimum viable vision that grows stronger and clearer with each step forward.

I created this life strategy prompt if you want to be brutally interviewed and figure out what your MVV is.

Principle 2 - Research

Worry less about which 'career skills' AI will take over, and more about whether you are training to be, and training your kids to be, high-agency, perceptive, self-motivated people who can navigate an unknowable future with an adaptable mind.

— Devon Eriksen

In war, a general sends out spies, studies the terrain, and learns the enemy's habits and tendencies, because you need intel before you act.

When was the last time you studied yourself? When was the last time you audited your habits and what kind of life they are compounding into? When was the last time you paid attention to how your mind reacts to silly little things that end up clogging your headspace for hours on end, removing you from your path?

Most people have zero intel on how to build a career, how healthy relationships work, what the mastery process looks like, etc. They get a spurt of motivation and decide they want to finally achieve the goal they've been putting off, but it's obvious why they fall flat.

Before you begin improving your life with something like a spirituality practice, study multiple traditions, read the research on different techniques, talk to people who've done it for years, follow a range of social accounts, and understand your own psychological patterns and what tends to trigger you.

Don't just grab the first meditation app that shows up as an Instagram ad.

Before you write a social media post or article, you research what is winning and losing and let that inform your strategy (I recommend using a research tool for this so you don't spend days filtering through nonsense). You curate lists of creators, watch and read competitor content, and begin thinking of how you can wedge yourself into a winning position.

If you “just want to write,” then feel free to do so, but again, don't expect anyone to give you their attention just because you have clever thoughts. Writing can be an incredible hobby, but if you're doing this as a form of meaningful work, these strategic principles apply, because at that point, it is a business.

Principle 3 - Preparation

You must identify your resources and gaps.

Because you wouldn't just drop into the battle with no food, no logistics, no weapons, and no support.

Once you know what your resources are, and what you are lacking, you start building reserves like money, time, knowledge, skills, location you live, connections and relationships.

Before attempting a major life change (quitting a job, ending a relationship, starting a new project or venture), build your financial runway, decrease expenses, develop the emotional regulation skills you'll need, and line up support systems. Don't just rush into battle.

In other words, you need to hedge against risk.

Every goal comes with risk, and the higher the risk tends to mean there is a higher reward, and you must adjust for it.

For someone looking to make more money, you can build software, sell an info product, start an agency, learn crypto trading, and a plethora of other options, each with their own level of risk.

The market is saturated with info products because (1) they work and (2) they are low risk. The profit margins are beautiful. But for a SaaS, even if they're easier to build, have a much higher risk profile, and the margins are becoming smaller because more accessibility only means more technology that you have to pay for in order to build it.

For more people, the best thing you can do is hedge against risk by whatever means you can.

If you're young, that means selling everything you own, living in a horrible apartment, and cutting all expenses so that you have maximum leverage in building your own thing.

Young people have the resource of time, but they don't have money, so they need to make up for that by controlling the variables they can.

A person who quite literally has nothing to lose is in a much better position, with far greater tactics available to them than the ones who are financially irresponsible.

Principle 4 - Focus

Is there a point at which doing more does not produce more? Is there a point at which doing less (but thinking more) will actually produce better outcomes?

— Greg McKeown, Essentialism

Concentration of force.

This is the military principle of focusing your resources at the decisive point rather than spreading thin.

The best example is France in 1940.

The French had more tanks and troops than the Germans. They had far more raw resources. But they distributed their armor evenly across the entire front, so every sector had a few tanks.

The Germans took every Panzer they had and drove them through a single point (the Ardennes forest), which the French thought was impassable, so they barely defended it.

Focus is about where you put what you have.

In life, you only have so much of it at any given time. Most people try to change their life and place 10% of their attention into diet, sleep, exercise, meditation, relationships, their side hustle, and more - when they would get better at all of them faster if they focused on the single bottleneck holding them back the most.

If you focus on solving a massive financial struggle first, that frees up more resources you can focus toward the next problem, like diet. Then, you can easily afford higher quality food, which gives you the resource of energy that can be put toward your relationships.

The same applies to business. On something like social media, there is more to growth than content. Cross-posting to all platforms takes away time you could spend building connections with people that will help you grow. You'd gain for more followers by focusing on one platform first, which can then be used as leverage to grow on other platforms - faster than you would have in the same amount of time spreading your force across all platforms. This is a major teaching point in the Creator Bootcamp, how relying on the algorithm is not a sufficient strategy.

Focusing on one thing allows you to do all things better, given time.

Principle 5 - Execute

Strategy is how you choose to allocate your limited resources against unlimited options.

– Alex Hormozi

Proper execution of strategy is the continuous act of jumping between macro (vision) and micro (daily action), ensuring that the decisions you make have aim and intention.

This is the core of what strategy is - doing the opposite of what 99% of people do, because most people do not think outside of their conditioning, assigned goals, or repetitive routines.

But how do you execute effectively?

This is where everything comes together.

1. Practice holding your vision in the back of your mind, write it down somewhere and look at it every morning. It must become a part of who you are through repeat exposure.

2. Take note of what you learned from studying your opponents or yourself. Meditate on it. Contemplate it. Let it marinate in your mind so that it can start to make connections.

3. Identify the primary resource you can leverage. For young people, it's time and freedom, most likely. For some, it's capital. For others, it's an internet audience. For more, it's a weird set of interests and knowledge. And yes, for many, it's AI - but not from the low level sense.

4. Choose your concentration of force play. Where is the single highest-leverage point? The one that would unlock progress in more than one domain? The thing that makes everything else easier?

From there, we have a soft plan, but it needs to be crystal clear.

We must reverse engineer our vision down into a hierarchy of goals that allows us to gain perspective on our daily actions.

Work backward to 1-year goals, 90-day objectives, weekly priorities, and daily habits. Every step should trace back to the intent or vision. If it doesn't, set it aside.

As mentioned, I've created a prompt that helps guide you through this, as I think it is useful.

Principle 6 - Adapt

It is not possible to experience a feeling of control unless one is willing to give up the safety of protective routines. Only when a doubtful outcome is at stake, and one is able to influence that outcome, can a person really know whether she is in control.

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow

A rigid strategy is a losing strategy.

Especially in today's world. The environment changes every 3-6 months, and the rate of change will only increase. In my eyes, the future belongs to the strategists, because masters can adapt on the fly. They don't need a vast amount of upskilling and reeducation. They can intuitively flow with what life throws at them.

Your job is to respond to what's actually happening, then and there, on the battlefield. Not your mental fabrications of worst case scenarios or your fantasies that are not yet real.

If you committed to a morning routine, but your job schedule changed, you don't abandon the routine. That's what most people do. Don't do what most people do. The vision and intent of your strategy doesn't change (becoming more disciplined and grounded), but the tactics do. If a particular meditation or business strategy stops working after six months, experiment.

Systems fall apart with time. You should expect that. The Notion template you downloaded won't matter in 3-6 months. Nor will your Claude skill. Nor will any AI strategy. You still have to be skilled enough to know when something isn't working.

I have people come to me all the time about how their posts don't do well on social media. The answer is to adapt. Find a new tactic. Experiment. Do something different. You obviously aren't going to continue getting results if you just do the same thing.

Review, reflection, and prediction.

Schedule them weekly.

Review your week. See if you are on track. Reflect on your progress. Predict where you are heading, and adjust if need be.

Principle 7 - Study of Principles

I encourage you to adopt the belief that anything is a skill.

Anything is a field of study that you can stack experience in.

Strategy itself is a field of study with principles that hold across domains. The more you study the principles, the better you become at applying them to your own life situation. It is a lifelong ongoing practice.

Read Sun Tzu.

Read about cognitive biases.

Study how habits form.

Learn the principles of negotiation.

Study why content goes viral.

Study how attention economics work.

Don't just copy what other creators do. Understand the principles so you can come up with your own moves (and actually understand why you're taking that action).

Beyond that, I believe the best way to study the true principles is by studying reality itself. Because strategy is just the application of reality's principles to human goals.

I want to leave you with a list of areas you can study and leave it up to you to go down a few rabbit holes and start making connections.

I'll leave a few links at the end so you can start reading immediately.

Formal systems:

• Cybernetics - The study of feedback loops, control, and self-regulation in any system (mechanical, biological, or social).

• Systems theory - The study of wholes, interconnections, stocks and flows, emergence, and leverage points.

• Thermodynamics - Especially the Second Law, entropy always increases. Every ordered system requires energy input to resist decay. Your habits and routines will fall apart otherwise. Clean your room.

Philosophical traditions:

• Taoism - The Tao as the ineffable underlying principle of reality. Wu wei (action in accordance with nature, not forced action), yin yang (complementary opposites), and cultivation of effortless mastery.

• Perennial Philosophy - The claim that all major wisdom traditions share a common metaphysical core. There's an ultimate reality, the human self can participate in it, and the purpose of life is to realize this.

Intagrative meta-frameworks:

• Integral Theory (Ken Wilber) - Maps reality across quadrants, levels of development, states of consciousness, and types.

• Spiral dynamics - A model of value-systems development through tiers. It models how humans construct meaning at different stages, which, for a strategist, is studying reality, because it's constructed by the observer.

The esoteric / symbolic:

• Hermetic Principles (The Kybalion) - Mentalism, correspondence, vibration, polarity, rhythm, cause and effect, and gender. A compact set of lenses that have influences a lot of new thought traditions. “As above, so below.”

• Jungian Alchemy - Psychological and spiritual process of transformation. A framework for how deep change actually works in a person or system.

The strategic / mathematical:

• Game Theory - The mathematical study of strategic interaction. Zero sum vs positive sum games, the prisoner's dilemma, nash equilibrium.

• Evolutionary Theory - Selection, adaptation, fitness landscapes, variation and retention.

All of these are lenses that point at how a different facet of reality actually works.

If you were to simply study these for the next year, your understanding of almost every other skill, domain, or area of learning would rise with it. You will naturally be better at everything you do in this life.

If you want to continue reading, I'd recommend Human 3.0. My own synthesis of many of these frameworks, including more from flow and performance psychology.

I hope all of that was helpful.

Talk soon.

– Dan

If you want a place to save, read, and highlight articles, links, PDFs, and ePubs, try out Eden here.

And if you're a creator, you can use Eden to research what's trending, study creators top posts, schedule content on all platforms (this was written and scheduled from Eden), and more.

It is the ultimate advantage so standing out online.

If you need to remember it, it’s not important. If it’s important, you will remember it.

For some reason, it’s become an obsession to remember everything you read. There are hundreds of videos about it with millions of views.

People feel like if they don’t retain the knowledge from what they read, they’re a failure, or they wasted your time, when that’s not the point of reading at all.

Why would you want to memorize every word of a book in the first place?

I know why.

You want to sound smart.

It’s an unconscious status symbol for you.

You want to impress others with your articulation and intelligence, but you don’t realize that sounding smart comes from understanding, not memorization, and understanding requires a much different approach to learning. It also doesn’t help that schools tested you on your ability to memorize. You studied for hours just so you could pencil in the right answer. That’s not how life works.

I get it.

You want to acquire knowledge so that you can make better decisions and work yourself into a more advantageous life situation with more money and power so you don’t have to worry about your day-to-day survival. Everyone wants that, but memorizing facts is the least effective way to get there.

That’s what we’ll talk about first - how to acquire knowledge in a way that actually sticks, so you can create a better future for yourself.

Then, we’ll talk about why your note-taking system, bookmarks, and even your precious “second brain” (the sex doll for mental masturbators) are largely useless.

Skip to the rest of the article if you’re allergic to self-promotion:

Speaking of second brain software, we just added Library, Reader, and Highlights to Eden. Now, not only can you research creator’s top content and find your next viral topic (and schedule posts to be published), but you can build an interconnected library of posts, links, and ideas that Eden organizes for you - and allows you to search based on meaning.

And, you can save any Substack article, X article, or YouTube video, read the transcript, and highlight so you never lose an idea.

Get 4 months and the Creator Bootcamp free (normally $499) here.

How to actually learn anything fast

Most people have no idea how to learn.

Because most people have no idea what the learning process is.

The reason most learning fails is that there is no negative feedback loop.

Think of it like this.

If you don’t have the goal of getting in shape (and I’m talking a deep intrinsically generated goal not a superficial goal you’re pursuing to fit in, like a new years resolution) then a night of heavy drinking and partying won’t register as a problem (negative feedback), because it doesn’t impact your non-existent goal of performing on your morning run or gym session the next day. You can go to work just fine with a hangover because you don’t give a shit about how well you do at your job.

Learning is a cybernetic process.

Cybernetics sounds like something relating to cyborgs, but it stems from the Greek word kybernētēs, meaning steersman or helmsman. The person who steers the ship.

The word “cybernetics” was chosen because the helmsman is the perfect image of a feedback system. The helmsman doesn’t just point the ship in a direction once, he constantly reads the current state (wind, waves, heading), compares it against the intended course, and adjusts. In other words, the process of trial and error, and so few people have the direction that allows them to notice errors in their life.

Cybernetics illustrates the properties of intelligent systems.

1. Reference signal (the goal) – The system holds a target state.

2. Sensor (perception) – The system reads its current state.

3. Comparator (the gap) – The system computes the difference between target and current state. The difference is the error signal.

4. Actuator (behavior) – The system acts to reduce the error.

Like how a thermostat turns on the heat when it gets too cold, or how your pancreas releases insulin when blood sugar rises.

That exposes the issue nicely.

When most people try to learn something new, they focus on content. They hoard material and try to absorb it with space repetition, flashcards, courses, and learning the fundamentals. They assume learning is an input process.

In reality, learning is an output process, because output demands input.

A goal creates the error signal.

The error signal creates the filter.

The filter creates relevance (most people fill their mind with noise and things they will never use).

The relevance creates retention.

A person who has been conditioned their entire life to have the nearly unconscious goal of going to school and getting a job will naturally learn and behave in that direction. The destiny they were assigned will inevitably come true.

The person who is deeply conditioned to go down the default path will not even notice money-making opportunities outside of a job, because their brain is filtering it out. The big life goals they were assigned at birth dictate their behavior and learning. They are a puppet of someone else’s ideals. They are not in control of their life.

But if you consciously create your own frame, by knowing exactly what you don’t want out of life and comparing it to an evolving vision of what you do want out of life, you are only then able to sense when you are off track, notice the error, correct the direction you are heading, and learn as a byproduct.

Makes sense, but what do you actually do?

Step 1) Become obsessed with a meaningful goal.

The way you become obsessed is to look at your current actions and realize where your life will end up if you don’t change.

For most people, that outcome is not pretty.

Sit with that image, let it fill you with potent emotion, and redirect that emotional energy toward a better direction for your life.

Only then can you actually align the goals you pursue with the aim of your future. Only then does a useful learning process start, the opposite of schooling, where your learning is determined by the direction and goals society sets for you.

Being extreme changes your brain and enhances neuroplasticity. In my eyes, you’re better off making an extreme change than making a lot of small changes.

Burn the boats. Change your life.

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2) Don’t start learning.

The life you want lies at the end of a series of meaningful projects.

Your mind is to be treated as a project. As is your body, relationships, and financial situation. A project is simply a structured set of goals and milestones. A project creates a frame for your learning (by filtering unimportant noise). Anything that does not directly move the project forward is not worth learning (right now), because you won’t retain it anyway.

In other words, when you want to learn something new, don’t start learning, take the first step toward the goal instead.

3) Seek specific knowledge.

I ultimately think that everyone should be figuring out what it is that they uniquely do best—that aligns with who they are fundamentally, and that gives them authenticity, that brings them specific knowledge, that gives them competitive advantage, that makes them irreplaceable. And they should just lean into that. And sometimes you don’t know what that is until you do it.

– Naval

Schools teach general knowledge, or knowledge required to do a job.

They do not teach how to navigate your own path. They narrow you into one area of study, which by nature does not prepare you to direct your own work through the path of entrepreneurship - or simply doing what you want to do.

Self-education is the process of learning what’s necessary to achieve self-generated goals. Again, no hoarding general knowledge to feel like you’re learning.

As an example, let’s say I want to learn After Effects - the animation software.

It would be stupid to go and watch a bunch of general After Effects tutorials and learn every little thing about the software.

Instead, you need a vision for the project you want to build.

You start the project with the knowledge you have, and if you don’t have knowledge, then you find a specific tutorial that is as similar to the project you want to create as it can be.

Now, since you have a filter (what you want to create), most of the tutorial will be useless, but you will find one little technique that allows you to at least start the project.

You apply that and then repeat until you’ve stacked so many techniques that when you go to create your next project, then the next, it becomes easier and easier.

Same with learning the guitar or an instrument.

You don’t go and study music theory.

You choose a song you want to play.

Then you learn the first chord of the song. Then the second. Then the third. And eventually you learn to tune it a specific way, and you pick up little hacks that allow you to play better.

After learning a few songs, you feel as if you could then create your own simple song.

That is how you learn.

The Second Subconscious (Delete Your Note-Taking System)

I’ve tried all the systems before, and I loved them. I started with Roam Research, and it completely changed how I write. I built a knowledge base of potent ideas, and pulled from those every time I sat down to put words on a screen.

A few years ago, I even built Kortex, which wasn’t meant to be second-brain software, but that’s what it ended up being before it inevitably failed. Well, it didn’t really fail, but it painfully evolved into Eden, which has become the best tool on the market to find what’s trending on social media (for creators), and capture ideas from anywhere (for creatives).

So, I’m not here to say that second brains are useless.

I simply think they’re misused.

You bookmark and take notes just for them to never be seen again. You quite literally wasted your time thinking you were learning when you could have been actually learning, as we discussed.

In the past, people didn’t have a popularized “second brain” that markets well. They had a commonplace book.

Marcus Aurelius’ book, Meditations, is essentially a private commonplace book with notes to himself and digested philosophy. It was never meant to be published.

Leonardo da Vinci filled thousands of notebook pages with sketches, observations, questions, and borrowed ideas.

Mark Twain, H.P. Lovecraft, Thomas Jefferson, Ronald Reagan, Montaigne, Rick Rubin, and many more each had some variation of this.

But there is one major difference between the every day second brain stan and them.

Their collection of ideas were fuel for their creations.

Their inventions, writing, and music would not be what they are today, and I would go as far as saying you wouldn’t even know who those famous people are if they didn’t have some variation of a commonplace book.

When you create something, your subconscious spits out relevant ideas that contribute to the quality of the creation, but it’s still limited in processing power, and sometimes it decides to not help you at all, leaving you in a creative rut.

A metaphor that Seneca used was to gather pollen from many flowers, then digest it into your own honey.

In modern terms, steal like an artist.

This is the antidote to writers block. You don’t have ideas for your writing, content, or videos because you don’t have a repository of ideas to pull from. Every single thing I’ve written in this letter is from articles, videos, social posts, random ideas, and highlights I’ve saved before.

I think you get it, but how do we actually build this?

How do we create a digital commonplace book, or second subconscious, that we can build throughout our lives that doesn’t turn into a cluttered note-taking app where your ideas go to die?

Step 1) Choose The Right Software, Or Create Your Own AI System

Don’t get breathless about how “smart” AI is. It’s dumber than a sack of wet hammers.

Leverage, instead, its ability to do rapid input and output for simple tasks on large datasets.

– Devon Eriksen

Most note-taking and “second brain” software still require manual upkeep.

Some of them have an AI chat tacked on, which is absolutely useful, but they’re missing the most useful application of them all: making it so your ideas don’t disappear into the void - because your creative work depends on your ability to resurface them.

You have 2 options here.

Our goal is to have somewhere to drop ideas and easily be able to resurface the right ones for our project.

• Option 1 - Use a combination like Claude Code + Obsidian to store your knowledge in one place and retrieve ideas with AI

• Option 2 - Use a software like MyMind or Eden, which auto-tags, categorizes, and embeds your knowledge in “meaning space” so it can connect seemingly unrelated ideas to birth novel insights

There are plenty of tutorials on the internet for option 1. It’s very popular right now because people swapped their precious collection of Notion templates for a collection of Claude skills (a fad that will fade as they all do), but here’s the 80/20 of how to do it yourself:

1. Download Obsidian and Claude

2. Open Claude Code or Claude Cowork and select your Obsidian vault folder on your computer as the folder you’re working in

3. Create a “save an idea” skill - ask claude to create a skill that creates a note in an inbox folder with a clear title

4. Create a “process my inbox” skill - ask claude to create a skill that goes through your inbox folder, add tags, move it to the right folder, and add backlinks to other related notes within the vault

5. Ask Claude to help you define your taxonomy so it knows what tags/categories to use

That allows you to capture ideas, notes, and knowledge into a time-tested note-taking tool.

Then, you can ask Claude at anytime to “Search my vault for everything related to [idea I’m writing about].”

That works for finding most ideas, but good writing and creative work come from novel connections, not keyword search or the AI brainstorming synonyms to find related matches.

If you don’t want to do all of that manually, then you can use a software like MyMind, which allows you to save any link or idea to one big and searchable library.

Eden does the same thing (you can capture anything fast into your library), but takes it a step further. When you save a link, like a Substack article or YouTube video, it transcribes it, and allows you to highlight it. Plus, you can integrate with Kindle to pull all previous highlights in - which are potent creative fuel.

The way MyMind and Eden differ from Obsidian and Claude is that everything you add to your library is automatically tagged, categorized, and embedded. So you can do the same search that Claude allows you to do, without wasting precious AI usage (Eden also has an MCP if you do want to build and access your knowledge base with Claude.) Plus, if you’re a writer or creator, Eden has an outlier search feed where you can find what social posts are performing in your niche and save them straight to your library.

I am not entirely sure if MyMind does this, but with Eden, it also differs in that it can search based on meaning.

Obsidian can show you “what’s related,” Eden can show you “what’s nearby” because each idea is embedded with ~1500 numbers that act as GPS coordinates for an idea. They can be found even if they share zero of the same words. This is what allows you to just drop an idea in and forget about it, because you know you will find it exactly when you need it.

It can pull up novel connections without re-searching through your entire knowledge base every time, costing hundreds of thousands of AI tokens.

You probably don’t want to maintain a vector database, an embedding API, indexing scripts, re-embedding when notes change, keeping the index in sync when files are renamed or deleted, and caching so you don’t re-pay for unchanged content.

All of the tools do this for free, but if you want a true “second subconscious” that you can research while writing, creating, or building projects - Eden may be worth trying out.

Step 2) Capture The Ideas That Best Represent Your Ideal Mind

Now that you have a place to drop ideas without worrying about organization (because you only organize things if you want to find them later, which we just solved), you don’t just dump everything in their.

When AI can create anything, curation matters more than ever.

You need a curated space for ideas that spark inspiration. The opposite of an endless fire hose of noise we call a social media feed.

As a writer, creator, or someone trying to do independent work (meaning you need to build an audience by attracting them to the ideas you put out), people don’t follow you for your content anymore.

There’s Google, AI, and plenty of information that can be found at the click of a button.

They follow you for your point of view. Your opinion. Your interpretation. Your personality. Your story. And all of those things are downstream of the ideas that compose your worldview. The ideas you use to make sense of the world.

As an example, when I get into a conversation about the nature of reality, my mind jumps to ideas about history, integral theory, spiral dynamics, and more - because I’ve deemed these the most useful lens from which I can view that conversation from. It makes the most sense out of the other ideas I’ve heard that tend to fall flat.

Those are the ideas you capture.

You curate a large set of knowledge that would best represent your ideal mind.

Because that’s what your fancy note-taking system was meant to be, right?

You just never got around to solidifying those ideas as a part of yourself, usually through the act of thinking, writing, and sharing in public so that you can receive feedback from the market and let the best ideas win.

How do you do this?

You read more books. You let your curiosity guide you. You reject doomscrolling and embrace curated lists of authors and thinkers who are dedicated to producing good ideas. You make time for “research,” because as a writer or creator, that’s 80% of your job.

The rest of your job is just synthesizing that “research” into something that’s beneficial to other people.

Step 3) Build Your Ideal Mind Through The Act Of Creation

Let’s close the loop.

We have the system for capturing and retrieving knowledge.

But now we need the project to apply it too so that it doesn’t go to waste.

And, we still aren’t capturing specific knowledge because we don’t have a reason to learn. We aren’t giving our mind the frame from which it can effectively signal that ideas are important enough to capture, as we discussed.

That’s the entire goal we’re after, right?

We want to be smarter. We want to retain and remember what we learn. We want to sound articulate. For superficial reasons, maybe, but also because the outcome of our lives depend on the decisions that we make, and our level of smartness and ability to articulate our own value absolutely contribute positively to that.

I can’t tell you what to create.

But if you’re interested in writing, I can give you a part of my process that recently helped someone else.

For something like writing a Substack article, YouTube script, or X article, here’s what I would do:

1) Choose a topic.

Obviously.

The best topics are the ones that lie at the intersection of performance and excitement.

Performance = topics that have already proven to do well.

You find these by saving social posts that have gone viral, or using a research tool that allows you to find outlier content and study creator’s top posts.

(This article I’m writing now is based on “How to remember everything you read,” a topic that has gone viral more times than I can count, but I applied my own contrarian perspective to it).

Excitement = topics and ideas that you want to explore more out of curiosity.

Your job is to pair the topic you want to write about (that probably wouldn’t do well on social media) with a topic that has already proven do well, so that you can write about what you want and increase it’s potential to actually gain traction.

That’s where most beginners fail.

2) Braindump → Outline → Draft

Don’t start writing yet.

Writer’s don’t just open one page and then expect all of the ideas to linearly fall into place.

Start with a braindump. Write down all potential ideas that could fit under the topic you’re writing. Look through your notes, ideas, and links and add them inside it too.

Then, start to add some structure with an outline. Take all the ideas in your braindump and try to fit them into a general storytelling framework: Problem → Insight → Solution.

Organize ideas under each of those sections in the outline.

Then, have your outline, ideas, and library of knowledge open and ready to pull from as you string together the ideas in the form of an actual draft.

3) Use AI to remove friction, not write for you.

I’ll write about my thoughts on AI writing in a future letter, but when I say “don’t use AI for writing,” I’m actually saying “don’t use AI to articulate your own beliefs and opinions.”

Now that Substack has their AI writing estimator, people are going to start pointing out how certain accounts use AI in their writing. I’ve had a few point out that some of my articles have AI writing in them.

Don’t be dense.

Yes, I copy paste straight from AI when providing pure information - like explanations of Greuter’s 9 stages of ego development, the same information you’d get from a Google search. I’m not going to waste my breath trying to rewrite it in my own words, because that doesn’t need to happen. It’s a disservice to myself and the reader.

I think there is value in struggling to articulate your own thoughts and beliefs, which is something the anti-AI people can’t seem to do very well as they are kept narrow minded by their new religion.

When I say “use AI to remove friction,” I am talking about using it like you would a course or mentor or editor while you are learning the skill.

If you don’t know how to structure your article, ask for a list of structures that your ideas could fit into.

If you don’t know what to write next, ask for a few directions the article can go.

If you don’t understand something, research it, like any writer would in the past with a less efficient method of scouring through the internet for the right information.

All in all, I trust that you have a brain.

You are ultimately the one who decides what gets published.

If it doesn’t represent the values, ideas, and beliefs you want it to, then refine it until it does.

I’ll leave it at that, because I have much more to say that I’ll save for another letter.

– Dan

If you want to write but don’t know where to start, what to write about, or anything about how to grow on social media, consider joining the bootcamp here.

Even if you don’t want to be a “writer.”

Writing teaches you how to think, how to learn any skill fast, and how to attract an audience that supports your work, which is absolutely needed if you want to build your own business, or just do any kind of independent creative/meaningful work.

In the age of AI, thinking, learning, and distribution (getting your value in front of other people so you actually have the chance of being paid) are timeless skills. Writing allows you to practice them all while building digital leverage as a byproduct.

I never thought I would be a writer.

I don’t even look the part. I’m a big dumb meathead who fell in love with deep ideas.

By all measures, writing, as a simple morning habit, has completely changed the course of my mind and life. It has helped me articulate my thoughts, calm my mind, find opportunities outside of the traditional job market, and is the single thing that fuels the success of my work and business.

In this letter, I want to show you my system for capturing ideas and writing content worth reading, but I also want to show you why this path is more viable than ever - and why it will transform how your brain interacts with reality.

Yes, it’s that deep.

Let’s begin.

Old leverage VS new leverage: The secret to modern success

The biggest leverage is no longer capital. The biggest leverage is enterprise — the ability to run a great business. And in particular, the biggest leverage is personal brand. Having a big audience. As soon as you’ve got people paying attention to you, you have this enormous form of leverage.

– Daniel Priestley

The rules of wealth creation have fundamentally changed.

The assets that drove income in the Industrial Age (property, factories, machinery, physical goods) are being replaced by digital assets (audience, personal brand, IP, content, data, software) that are incredibly cheap to build, more scalable, harder to tax, and compound while you sleep.

The only requirement to building leverage for yourself in today’s world is a good idea and the confidence to post it on the internet.

The problem, and opportunity, is that most people are still conditioned by Industrial values. They somehow still believe that school → job → retire is the most certain, safe, and secure when that couldn’t be any further from the truth.

The same holds true when it comes to building leverage, and thus creating wealth, for your future.

Old leverage comes from physical, tangible assets.

A house, factory, Rolex, fleet of trucks, warehouse of inventory, gold. You buy them, then let them appreciate or generate income.

Old leverage is linear and local.

A factory can only produce so many units per day, and a house can only be rented to one tenant at a time.

Don’t get me wrong, leverage is leverage, and old leverage is still a great thing.

However, physical assets are going to be the first thing that governments find, tax, and seize if wages collapse, which is more likely today than yesterday because AI can swiftly do that, leading to governments expanding social safety nets.

Governments are much less likely to seize an email list of people who know who you are, a library of content, or a best-selling book.

New leverage comes from intangible, digital assets.

An audience, personal brand, IP, data, systems, software. These are the leverage of the newly rich. Media, data, and code. Content can be written once and be seen by millions of people. Software can be created once and serve millions of users.

For most people, writing is the most accessible and practical form of leverage. You can learn to code, but if you cannot attract people to care about the product you built, then nobody will use or pay for it. Writing is the leverage that unlocks other forms of leverage.

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You will not see digital assets on a balance sheet, but they represent 90% of the S&P 500’s value.

Kim Kardashian, Taylor Swift, Ryan Reynolds, Mr. Beast, Elon Musk - all have massive audiences and personal brands.

But you probably don’t want anywhere near their level of fame, and that’s a great thing, because you don’t need millions of followers to make this work. With 6-12 months of focused effort, you can find yourself in a wildly different life than you are now.

Personally, I replaced my income around 5,000 followers (about 6 months in) because I actually took it seriously. My friend Randy, a fitness coach, was making $100k a month at around 10,000 followers, because he invested in education, studied marketing and sales, and implemented everything as if his life depended on it.

The point is that people drastically overestimate how much they need to win, because all they see is out-of-touch celebrities on their timeline.

That’s why we teach how to find what you want to talk about, create your ‘personal monopoly,’ and write high-impact content in our bootcamp. You still have time to join the next live call we’re doing.

But the benefits of writing stem far beyond that.

How writing completely shifts your brain & life

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

– E.M. Forster

It’s hard to explain... but the act of writing is much deeper than putting pen to paper.

It shifts your mind to see the world in a more meaningful way.

Conversations become a source of inspiration. Your thoughts become filled with ideas you’re wrestling to understand. You notice more detail in life rather than living on the stressful surface.

In my eyes, there are 4 key benefits to writing:

1) Writing rewires how you think

The core mechanism here is forced linearity.

Which is a fancy way of saying that you can feel like you understand something in your head, but writing forces you to collapse it into a single stream.

Thinking without writing is like walking through a forest where you can see every direction, while writing itself is like driving on a road through the disorienting mess. You have to decide where you’re going, which turns you’re going to take, whether or not you want to take the scenic route, and how to navigate back if you get lost.

In other words, writing is the apparatus for thinking. It’s the gym where your mind is built.

You may think you understand the feelings, counterarguments, memories, or half-formed analogies in your head, and even your values and beliefs, but unless you write them out, I can almost guarantee you don’t.

2) Writing increases pattern recognition

There are a few layers to this.

The first is that by writing regularly, you build an external record of your thinking. You are able to quickly reference what you’ve written in the past as a way or articulating your current thoughts better. It helps you think with clarity.

The second layer is similar to the “photographer’s eye.” After a few years of serious practice, you start to see frames and compositions in everyday life. The world doesn’t look the same, it has another layer of depth.

With writing, you start noticing structure in an argument, a metaphor in a mundane moment, or the narrative arc of your average day. Writing trains a specific kind of attention that bleeds into everything.

The third layer is that you notice ideas you normally wouldn’t have.

When I have a newsletter planned for the week, or just know that I need to write a tweet today, my mind will naturally help me notice ideas that help achieve those goals.

It’s the concept of psycho-cybernetics - that your mind is like a heat seeking missile towards it’s goals, and will help you notice the tools you need to achieve them (the problem is that people don’t actually have conscious goals they care about, they have unconscious goals assigned to them, and since their path is planned for them, they don’t have to do much aside from show up to school and work, so they are missing this layer of life).

3) Writing helps you articulate your thoughts

Most people walk around believing they understand things they don’t.

Not because they’re dumb, but because they’ve never been forced to externalize the thought and look at it. Writing is not only a tool to improve communication - thus improving most other areas of your life - but a tool to expose whether or not you actually know what you’re talking about.

That’s what most people are afraid of.

They don’t want to feel the struggle that comes from doing something meaningful. They want it to be easy. They want all the ideas to just come to their head immediately. They see writing as something that everyone knows how to do, so they don’t appreciate that it is a skill just like anything else, and takes effort to improve.

Which leads into the most important point.

4) Writing helps you learn faster

The future belongs to those who can learn the fastest.

And unfortunately, most people stop learning after they graduate high school, and it shows.

You must learn in order to achieve a goal, so if you want to achieve any goal outside of the three society planted in your head at birth, then you must self-educate, and if you want to enhance that process, you must write.

Writing is both a form of teaching and understanding.

In learning science, there’s the “protégé effect,” which shows that students who teach material retain it better than students who merely study it.

The cognitive load required to figure out how to explain something to someone else forces deeper processing, better organization, and identification of gaps in knowledge.

I learned more in my first 6 months of writing online than I ever did in school. I’m exaggerating, but what I mean is that I learned much more about the things I care about. I could feel my mind changing shape, and I was closer to being like the thinkers that I admired as I was growing up. My younger self thought my brain was just too dumb to speak intelligently. Turns out, I just didn’t practice.

Last, writing demands that you understand.

You read something.

You feel like you get it.

You try to write about it.

You realize you can’t.

Most people think it’s because they aren’t “qualified” to write about the topic, which is bullsh*t. You can write about an idea just like any other person on planet Earth can. You’re just creating invisible gatekeepers out of fear of putting your ideas in front of other people.

But now you know exactly where your understanding breaks.

That’s when you go back and learn. You research. Then you continue writing.

The Writing System I Use To Generate Ideas People Can’t Help But Read

I’ve never been the most organized person.

I’ve tried the second brain apps. I’ve tried doing everything inside of AI.

But I always found myself going back to jotting down ideas in a long-running note. Of course, ideas would get lost all the time, but I don’t see that as a problem. If you need to remember it, it’s not important, and if it’s important, you will remember it.

I’ve found that great writing (or content) that actually gains traction and doesn’t disappear into a black hole of nobody caring about your work boils down to a few things:

• You need ONE topic or theme for the week

• You need a place to quickly jot down ideas

• You need a way to capture inspiration (social posts, YouTube videos, Substack articles, etc)

• You need to understand how to package the hook or title so that people actually want to read it

• You need to effectively pull from your ideas, inspiration, and research while you are actually writing or creating

This is what that looks like in the form of a system.

It may seem complex, but we’ll recap at the end in a simple way.

1) How To Pick What To Write About

I don’t care about niching down.

You are not an animal that dies when they get put in a different niche or environment, like a lion in Alaska.

You are a human who learns, builds, and adapts so that they can thrive in any niche.

I operate by two principles when picking a topic:

• Is it something that I find important or worth sharing? Because by simply filtering an idea through my perspective and not overthinking myself to death, it becomes unique. I have a specific identity, and I’m probably not going to speak to soccer moms in their 40s no matter how hard I try. By just talking about what I find worth sharing, it will attract the people I can impact the most.

• Is it packaged or framed in a way that grabs attention? Because as a writer, that’s what you do. You grab attention, otherwise your writing doesn’t get read. The way you do that in today’s world is by studying what’s working on social media and applying the structure and principles to your hook, title, etc.

This is social media growth in a nutshell.

Many people want to feel like they’re a super creative writer, and they want to be super authentic bro, so they don’t package their ideas in a way that the market actually wants, so they never get traction on their work. In other words, they never get paid, because it feels icky to them, so they continue working on someone else’s dreams so their boss can get paid. They want to impact people so badly yet refuse to do the one thing that allows that. They see it as sacrificing a part of their identity rather than acquiring a skill that increases their usefulness.

The simplest way to do this is as follows:

Before you write, research what’s working on social media.

Because that shows you what the market is already paying attention to.

You can do this just by scrolling social media and saving posts that are doing well, or you can use a research tool for it that pulls all top-performing posts into one place.

As an example, this letter is titled “The writing system that saved my brain (and my future).”

I had previously seen this post in the Discover feed of Eden and saved it to one of my boards, it’s called “The Notebook System That Saved My Brain.”

In other words, I saw what people already signaled that they wanted, took the topic I wanted to write about, and merged the two together. This is when you use a research / inspiration library tool like Eden, or you can scroll social media manually and attempt to find high-performing posts.

2) Create One Project For The Entire Week

I post one newsletter a week on Substack.

That long-form piece gets posted to X articles, turns into a soft YouTube script, and the YouTube video gets uploaded to all podcast platforms.

I’ve tried twice a week, but my brain operates better when it has time to think and gather inspiration around one topic.

My entire week revolves around the topic. When I read a book, ideas stick out that fit the topic. When I listen to a video on YouTube, the same happens. Ideas come to mind for that topic.

Those idea become research for the topic I’m writing about, and the newsletter becomes the source of social posts for all platforms.

In other words, I write one piece a week, and it becomes content for all platforms. This has drastically improved my thinking, because it isn’t scattered all the time.

This is my entire idea capture and content system.

What do you actually do here?

Create one place a week to save ideas to.

I create one board in Eden (which I talk about a lot because it’s the only app that can do all of this in one place), and that’s where I jot down ideas, paste social links, add articles and videos, and even upload books as PDFs so I can ask AI to pull ideas out of them so I don’t have to go searching manually for them, or even worry about highlighting them.

I’m writing this, right now, in that board.

With all ideas and inspiration in one place, it makes it easy to have this open as I write, or just create a chat and connect a post, PDF, or link to it to pull the idea out of it.

If I post ideas when I’m away from my computer, I just save them to the board on mobile, like a YouTube video I watched, and then I can chat with it to get the idea I wanted out of it.

Note: I do have multiple boards called “Favorite Ideas,” “Validated Ideas,” and “Personal Ideas.”

I save posts I love to favorite ideas.

I save posts that have gone viral to validated ideas.

I save personal notes or thoughts to personal ideas.

A mix of all of these creates a great piece of writing (yes, your favorite writers research, save inspiration like their lives depend on it, and mash it together to write their pieces).

I can chat with any of those to give me headline variations, angles, or post ideas that I can then pop into the scheduler.

3) Outline, Write, and Repurpose

I am not going to go into the actual writing process. That would take an entire bootcamp to go over.

However, someone broke down my best newsletters and turned it into a prompt that helps you outline your own in an engaging way. It will ask about what you want to write, then help you gather ideas that can go into the outline.

As mentioned, here’s what I do:

• I create a board or place to save posts, ideas, and videos (this is the research portion of my writing)

• I create an outline document to start organizing the ideas

• I have all of that open next to me while I write

• I post that as a Substack and X article

• I block out an hour 1 day a week to record that as a YouTube video

• That YouTube video goes to all podcast platforms

• I use the article to generate post ideas throughout the week

• I promote my Substack a few times a week under my other content so it grows

That’s the entire system.

Walking, reading, and about 60 minutes a day of writing forms the foundation for some of the most future-proof skills: learning, thinking, and earning (independently).

I’ll leave it at that, and am happy to expand more on this in future articles.

– Dan

If you want to read more, I’d recommend these to get better at writing:

AI? Coding? Marketing? Am I wasting my time if I go to school while everyone else is vibe coding apps they’ll never get traction on? Do I start a YouTube channel? What about a Substack? Should I even try getting a job? Or should I build my own thing?

There is more opportunity than ever, yet that opportunity paralyzes more people than ever. There are so many options, but you feel like if you start learning one thing, it will be irrelevant in the next 1-2 years.

However, there is one skill that will never go out of style.

A meta-skill, if you will, that once you learn it, increases the power of any other skill you learn.

What is that skill?

Human nature.

Because if you understand how the human mind works - what makes it tick, what makes it pay attention, what makes it take action... then you can make any business successful. You can work your way into new opportunities. You can make friends and influence people. You can navigate through life with elegance and grace because you are no longer a slave to your mind, but a master of it.

How else are you going to succeed outside of a job? Humans are the ones with the money to pay for your independent work. Humans are the ones who have access to the resources and opportunities you want. And even if your goal is to get a job, how are you going to get your dream job if you do not understand this?

But how in the world do you “learn” something as intangible as human nature?

In this letter, that’s what I hope to provide: The steps and principles that you can apply today that will give you a competitive advantage against everyone else who is racing to succeed as fast as possible because they think AI will somehow save them from their lack of experience.

Subtle reminder: If you want to build an audience via writing on social media (to attract people who support your independent work), the bootcamp starts in 5 days. Enroll before then here.

The Anatomy Of Human Nature (And How To Exploit It)

The mind is a story engine.

That’s what humans can’t help but pay attention to.

Robots are useful for utility. Nobody would care (aside from the DMV workers) if the DMV was completely automated and made efficient. Who in their right mind looks forward to standing in a long line for hours just to get a new picture for your driver’s license?

Same with fast food, or riding in an Uber. Nobody likes when the cashier gets your order wrong. Nobody likes riding in a dirty back seat while someone you don’t know asks about your day simply because they want you to tip them.

Let the robots solve utility, that way, humans can abstract out to meaning, purpose, and narrative.

Humans love stakes. Our chest gets tight when their team is about to lose in the final inning. Humans love novelty. We travel across the world to dine in a 5-star restaurant.

Mastering human nature is about mastering story.

But I’m not going to teach you how to write a novel. No. Instead, I’m going to teach you the principles of value creation. If you understand these, you will write better, speak better, create better products, attract more customers, make more friends, and understand how to create value for others, thus increasing the value of yourself.

In essence, I am teaching you marketing, sales, and how to influence people all in one go.

The mind has three pressure points. Press any one of them, and attention is almost involuntary (if you’re speaking to a person who is prone to that specific tension). And if you press all three, you have a grip on someone that logic alone can’t break.

If you nail The Three Tensions into your head and remember them every time you write, speak, or interact with someone else - you will be surprised with how much opportunity comes your way.

1) Survival Tension

The mind is a story engine, but it is also a set of survival strategies.

We’re in constant, subconscious threat detection mode because we still have the same wiring as our hunter-gatherer ancestors. We don’t want to die, obviously, so we desire safety and solutions to problems (and if you can make someone aware of a problem, then provide a solution, that’s sales in a nutshell.)

But “safety” doesn’t only apply to physical life or death situations here. It lives on a spectrum. Even the smallest problems can seem like the end of the world if we let them take over our mind. Those problems can be financial, social, or even just about a missed opportunity that could put you ahead (or have better chances at survival).

A few examples:

• You wake up at 30 and realize you’ve been living on autopilot, and the gap between who you are and who you want to be is so large that change feels impossible.

• You spend a decade building someone else’s dreams just to find that they don’t care about you at all.

• There are people dumber than you making 10x more than you because they don’t think about the risk.

As you may already be able to tell, those sound like some of my social posts, and they did really well, because they hit the psychological lever that makes people stop, think, and desire a potential solution.

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2) Identity Tension

Survival goes much deeper than physical survival.

While animals only attempt to reproduce the information in their genes, humans attempt to reproduce the information in their consciousness.

This is why you feel threatened when your sports team is about to lose, and why you may get in a fight if someone makes fun of you for it. It’s why you choose to be “anti-AI” or “pro-AI” and argue into oblivion all day, regurgitating how “AI is rotting your brain” rather than not choosing either of those religions, testing your theory against reality, and seeking truth over hype.

Humans desire a tribe. They desire status. They desire belonging.

Because if they don’t have that, their chances at survival are much lower. You unconsciously adopt your culture’s and parents’ values and beliefs because if you didn’t, everyone would think you’re a loser who didn’t go to school, get a job, and retire at 65. That’s changing, of course, but it was considered the “safe and smart” route for decades.

We’ll learn how to target this tension in the next section.

3) Progress Tension

By now, some of you can see the pattern.

First, people need safety and comfort.

Second, they need belonging and status.

Third, they crave deeper meaning, purpose, and experience.

You can desire any of these at any time, but if you aren’t in a safe environment, or you are stressed all the time, your mind will be narrow, and you can’t think beyond the problem you have. Once that need is largely solved, or kept more at bay, you start craving the higher levels of status, belonging, and eventually progress: clarity, direction, purpose, and transformation.

For my creators out there who write about the deep ideas and insights, understand that 90% of people are not ready for them yet. You have to work them up the ladder and solve the lower-level problems first via your content or products.

This all sounds great, but what can you actually do with this information?

How does it make you a better writer, speaker, or businessman? How do you practice this as a skill?

How To Pull Psychological Levers To Get What You Want

The modern information environment is breaking our ability to think, and most people don’t even notice. Essays might be one of the last forms of content that actually develops your capacity to make sense of reality.

You can read all the books on persuasion.

You can study psychology and behavior textbooks.

You can think you know a lot about why humans think and act the way they do, but if you have not tested that knowledge against reality, then you do not know what you are talking about.

You need feedback. You need to put something out into the world and see how people respond. You need to write. You need to speak. You need to create a product and sell it. Entrepreneurship equals self-improvement, because the market and reality become your harsh mentor.

For now, understand that “pulling psychological levers” and “exploiting human nature” is just a fancy way of saying “learn how to persuade.”

It’s only as unethical as the person who wields the tool. Someone who resides at a lower level of mind who cannot see beyond their personal survival will inevitably use persuasion in unethical ways. Their sole priority is money, rather than meaning, because they do not feel comfortable financially, and will attempt to manipulate and scheme to acquire money in a way that does not stem from value exchange and mutual benefit.

With that said, know where you stand.

There are 5 psychological levers that pull one or more of the 3 tensions.

You create tension first (what gets people to pay attention when you write, speak, post, or sell), and then you offer a solution (that preferably changes behavior in a positive way).

Lever 1: Name the Threat (Survival Tension)

Before anyone cares about a solution (your video, product, etc) they need to be aware of the problem, and there are 5 levels of awareness (from Eugene Schwartz):

1. Unaware – They don’t know they have a problem. You make them aware of it by naming it.

2. Problem aware – They know there’s a problem, but don’t know a solution exists. You name the solution here.

3. Solution aware – They know a solution exists, but they’re comparing options and don’t know about your unique solution.

4. Product aware – They know about your solution. They need proof, objection handling, testimonials, etc.

5. Most aware – They simply haven’t implemented it and need a little nudge over the edge.

When I write these letters, I always start by naming a problem. Scroll back up and look at the first sentence, “Nobody knows what skill to learn.” This allows almost anyone to read my letters and get value, then I slowly introduce an argument for a solution. This is how most of my posts start as well.

Try to notice how people do this as you scroll social media and you won’t be able to unsee it.

The practical step here:

No matter what you’re doing, from writing to creating a presentation to talking to convincing your wife to let you have a night with the boys, start with the problem. Frame the situation.

Think of 5 problems you’ve experienced in your life → Now you have 5 content ideas that are better than just thinking from scratch.

Lever 2: Mirror the Identity (Identity Tension)

You identify with a group or tribe without realizing it.

Being a “morning person.”

Being a “coffee drinker.”

Being a Christian, atheist, republican, democrat, anti-AI, pro-AI or any of the other ideologies or religions we like to adopt as a part of ourselves.

As an example, here’s the title of a YouTube video that got 3.9 million views:

It quite literally packages everything we’ve discussed into 8 words. Problem, identity, solution.

There are so many ways to pull the identity lever, but my personal go-to is just starting with, “If you’re...”

That’s it.

If you’re lazy. If you’re broke. If you’re unhappy. If you’re a writer.

Boom, that’s the start of 4 attention-grabbing social posts, or the start of a public speaking gig, or the title of a YouTube video.

By the way, if you have interests, skills, or knowledge that people already talk about online, I’ll teach you my system for building an audience in the content bootcamp that starts in 5 days. Enroll before then here.

Lever 3: Exclude People (Identity Tension, deepened)

Explicitly name who it is not for.

Exclusion creates a sense of belonging, and it pushes people to pick a side.

This is best done after you mirror the identity from step 2. Drawing a line filters out the wrong people who weren’t going to support you anyway.

I.e. “This isn’t for people who want to ‘try’ to get in shape. This is for people tired of their own excuses and ready to completely change their life.”

“If you’re looking for a productivity hack or a morning routine, you’re in the wrong place.”

“This isn’t for people who want a dinky side hustle. We’re building a real business here.”

I think you get it.

Lever 4: Paint the Transformation (Progress Tension)

Essentially, mastering human nature is about changing people’s lives.

At least that’s the most ethical version of it. That’s how you build a life’s work. You become a massive value creator. You hone in on a purpose, and that purpose revolves around solving a problem for as many people as you can. Persuasion is simply how you get people on board with that.

So far, we’ve captured attention (name the threat) and filtered out those who don’t match (mirror identity), now we create desire by simulating the future.

Again, you can probably see in my introduction alone to this newsletter, I hit all of these in a short amount of time.

Why does this work? The same neural circuitry fires when you imagine an experience as when you actually have it. So when you paint a potential transformation (or the later chapters of someones personal story) you’re giving them a felt experience of a future they haven’t lived yet.

If this doesn’t sound too practical, again, you need to practice. You need to see it in action.

To help with that, I turned this entire letter into a prompt.

You can use that while writing posts, newsletters, scripts, or even a sales page or promotion. It’s pretty dang helpful. It can be used in teach mode, writing mode, or coach mode.

Lever 5: Give the First Step (Progress Tension, activated)

The reason most people don’t change is that they don’t believe they can do it.

They don’t have clarity.

The comfort of their current life is more desirable than the discomfort of doing what it takes to solve the problem you’re offering them a solution to.

In a tweet, this looks like, “Don’t overhaul your life overnight, just go to bed an hour earlier.”

In a product, this looks like making the first step so obvious yet so beneficial that they can’t see why they didn’t do it earlier.

Giving one small step allows the Zeigarnik effect to kick in, which is that the brain hates incomplete tasks. Once someone starts something, or even starts thinking about it, there is a tension that wants to be resolved.

That’s it.

The more you practice this, the more it impacts every other skill you could acquire. And when people learn the latest “high value skills,” they’re essentially just learning a more specific layer of human nature.

If you learn the meta skill itself, you can pick up almost any high-value skill that comes about in the coming years, because the people who have the money, opportunities, or resources you want are humans.

Make it your full-time job to study them.

– Dan

P.S. Again, the personal branding and writing bootcamp starts in 5 days. Here’s the link.

At least that’s what it feels like if you take loud people on social media a bit too seriously.

You may even adopt the Anti AI ideology as your new identity, screaming “f*ck AI” so you can feel like you’re making a difference without actually changing your behavior, broadening your skill set, or adapting to the new world, because who would do that when you could just stay the same and cry about how much of a victim you are?

AI isn’t the threat you think it is.

The real threat is what it’s always been:

You are dependent on everyone but yourself for your survival and well-being. Your employer and government have their own survival to look out for, and when something threatens that, they drop to a lower level of thinking and quickly attempt to reconcile the threat. It’s human nature. You can argue that they’re “supposed” to care about your well being, but if you blindly trust that they will follow through, you are bound to be very, very disappointed.

AI is too big to control by crying about it.

Posting how much you hate AI on social media isn’t going to stop jobs from being replaced, and it definitely isn’t going to stop the skills required to become successful from evolving.

My hope with this letter is to give you both perspective and a potential solution (that has been around since the dawn of time).

I have 4 ideas to share with you on wage slavery, becoming high agency, and why all of these ideas don’t mean a thing unless you fundamentally change who you are.

At the end, I have a short practice, with 6 questions, which may open you up to a new way of life - even if it seems simple.

Before we begin, self-sponsorship, 2 things (skip if you get mad at people promoting):

1. Eden now has social scheduling for all platforms (Substack too), and you can do it from Claude, along with researching outlier posts on any platform - it’s the complete content workflow. 50% off your first month here.

2. The next personal brand bootcamp starts July 8th. You learn the set of skills that people actually need in the AI age, and you learn how to position your own brand and business. Join here before the enrollment date.

Okay sales promo done, here’s the letter:

I – How to escape wage slavery

Wage slavery is doing meaningless grind work you didn’t choose, for someone else, just to survive.

I am not anti-job.

I think jobs are worthy stepping stones for practical experience and skill acquisition.

But whenever I talk “badly” about jobs, there are always the people who can’t help but say, “You’re an idiot! I actually enjoy my job!”

That’s great. I’m not speaking to you (and I partially think you’re lying just to avoid facing your potential, while being unconscious of it at the same time).

I’m speaking to those who understand the psychology of true enjoyment, and can’t stand the thought of: one third of life doing work you didn’t choose, one third of life mentally exhausted to do anything worthwhile, and one third of life asleep... for 40+ years.

You see, enjoyment, meaning, and fulfillment come from living at the edge of your abilities. This is pretty well studied. No I won’t cite sources. Enjoyment comes from pursuing a challenge just above your skill level. Not so challenging that you get anxious, and not so underwhelming that you get bored. Video games exploit this. You take on quests that are just challenging enough, because if you were a level 1 character doing a level 100 quest, you would die immediately and hate the game. This is the single greatest driving factor of getting into the flow state, and if you can create a life structure that increases the likelihood of this flow trigger, enjoyment is abundant.

The thing about jobs is that after a few months, you know everything you need to know. You just clock in, do the tasks, and clock out. You get bored. It’s against your nature. You feel it. Your attention is no longer immersed in the tasks and shifts toward, “What else could I be doing?” For most people, that “what else” doesn’t involve a meaningful goal. It involves opening your phone and rotting your brain. It is very rare that a job requires you to consistently improve your skill to match a greater challenge.

Climbing a career ladder can help, but again, you aren’t in control of the level of challenge. You aren’t working on your own projects. Curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery are bound to be in lack - and those are the 5 drivers of flow.

What does this have to do with wage slavery?

Well, civilization was quite literally built by tribes enslaving other tribes. That dynamic never disappeared. Instead, it abstracted into employment, law, and culture. Society has essentially become a pyramid scheme. There are more people at the bottom than at the top, and it’s mathematically impossible for everyone to be at the top. One boss, multiple employees, dependent on the boss for their survival.

Most of us were raised with industrial standards.

Become a specialist. Study one domain hard. Get a high paying job so my friends think that my son/daughter is successful. And since that’s what you did, you stayed blind to most of the process. You understood the one skill to do your job, but didn’t try to understand the system that paid you. You didn’t dedicate time to other domains, so you don’t know how to build your own thing. All you know is how to fill a role in someone else’s thing.

Before you know it, your ability to think is crushed, even if you were considered “smart” in the skill you chose. You make a decent wage, but you don’t feel financially stable, so you get caught in a chaotic stress loop. Stress narrows the mind. It becomes even more difficult to fathom a life where you do build your own thing.

You have no capital to do what you want. You have no time for personal development. And you’re probably too tired (spiritually, not physically) to re-educate yourself because most of your waking life feeds someone else’s vision.

That’s how you survive mass replacement, by the way, you commit to your own thing.

The problem is that slaves don’t know they’re slaves.

This goes far beyond wage slavery. We are all slaves, usually to ideology and belief systems, in some way or another.

Slavery is about force, and when we hear the word, we think about the physical form. But wage slavery is financial. If you cannot stop showing up to work without catastrophe, and you have no skills to create alternatives, you meet the definition of a slave, no matter if your “feelings” tell you otherwise.

Worse, if you’ve identified with your job, you may take this as an actual attack. You’ll feel the threat response. You’ll want to argue with me, and that’s fine, but it only proves the point further.

I think you get the point.

It sucks. I hate the thought of it.

Let’s talk about what’s possible now and what you can do about it.

II – The five ingredients of success

If you don’t create a routine, you will be assigned one.

Most people, for most of their lives, have been trained to learn things they don’t want to learn, to get a job they don’t care about, working for people they would never want to be associated with in their everyday life.

While I think AI, technology, and social media have accelerated us to the point of understanding that schools and jobs aren’t the only path, I also think people are just tired of the sheer meaninglessness in the world around them.

For those who are tired of the default path, there are five ingredients to becoming future-proof, allowing you to do meaningful work even when/if all jobs are replaced:

1. Agency - the ability to “just do things” without permission. To see an opportunity and act on it when nobody asked you to.

2. Taste - the experience to know what’s worth putting out into the world.

3. Persuasion - the skill to get people to care about what you do, not to be confused with manipulation.

4. Persistence - the understanding that mistakes do not equal death, and that they are necessary.

5. Iteration - the process of error correcting toward a goal based on feedback (if something doesn’t work, learn and pivot until success).

Everyone is obsessed with being “high-agency” right now.

I get it. It’s important. You need to be able to initiate action toward a goal. It’s one of the traits that most distinguishes entrepreneurs from employees. Entrepreneurs are people who put something into the world that nobody asked for.

But it’s only one piece of the entrepreneurial puzzle.

The 5 ingredients above actually boil down into two skills: the ability to figure it out and the experience to know what needs to be done.

AI so far is really great at asset creation, but hit creation is not asset creation. Asset creation is a necessary but insufficient condition for hit creation.

Anyone could make a video game last week like anyone could make a video game 5 years ago. The technology is readily available. It’s commoditized. You know how many mobile games get put out a year? Thousands. You know how many hits are made in a year? Zero to five.

– Strauss Zelnick

Anyone can build anything now, meaning that the barrier of entry for entrepreneurship (the antidote to wage slavery) continues to get lower, but that doesn’t really matter:

You, right now, can go and build an app.

Not the next Notion, but an app or tool with a maintainable scope, focused on a desired outcome people actually benefit from. Something that doesn’t need to be a hit to be valuable.

I’d actually recommend it. I think software will be the next info product. And by that I mean building software will be the default option for creators, solopreneurs, and other one-person businesses. Info products dominated for so long because anyone could create them, but that doesn’t mean all of them succeeded, of course.

The problem is the image above.

You can build anything, but that doesn’t mean (1) it’s worth building (2) people will care and (3) you have the ability to iterate and persist according to feedback so that it becomes something worth building that people care about.

If you truly understand that sentence, you will do just fine.

The second problem is that agency, taste, persuasion, persistence, and iteration aren’t your typical “high value skills” that you can go watch a few YouTube videos about.

Theory and tweets about becoming high agency will not make you any more high agency.

The only way to practice them is to start doing your own thing.

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III – The antidote to employment is becoming unemployable

I remember the day I landed my first web design client.

I believe they paid me $300 for a horrible hand-coded site. It was for a local mattress company, and they just wanted a place for people to see their mattresses.

That was it.

$300.

That’s when it clicked for me. I knew that if I could repeat, improve, and iterate on whatever I just did to make that money, I would somehow be able to gain more control over my lifestyle and future. It made me unemployable. It formed a deep conviction that I would never accept a job again, and I would fend for my own survival, as dramatic as that sounds.

But that number alone, $300, doesn’t account for everything that led up to that moment - the identity change and tricking myself into believing it was possible in the first place. And it doesn’t account for what I learned over the next 7 years.

I want to provide you with two things: the start of an identity shift so you become the person who is unemployable, not just the person who likes the idea of it, and an action plan that anyone can run with in their own unique way.

1) Hurl yourself into an environment that forces growth

The fastest way to change your life is to rip yourself out of your (physical and digital) environment. Change everything overnight. The places you go, the accounts you follow, the info you consume, etc. It’s difficult but it absolutely works.

Behavior change = identity change.

You can try to go on a diet and lose 30 pounds, but if you aren’t the person who values health, and you don’t enjoy living a healthy lifestyle, you will always feel like you’re running up hill. You will, like most other people, gain all the weight back unless you fundamentally change who you are.

How do you do it?

Well, it helps to know how you became who you are today.

• You were born into a family and culture with specific values

• You were indoctrinated with those values, even if your parents didn’t force them on you

• You went to a school with specific values and were taught by teachers with specific values

• You were exposed to an absurd amount of information that may have shifted your values toward rebellion, laziness, victimhood

• You got a phone, and that conditioning process increased exponentially thanks to social media and our monkey brains not being able to control ourselves

There’s a bit more to that process, of course, but you get the point.

Now, this isn’t bad, it’s somewhat necessary.

I’ve heard plenty of authenticity bros say they hate the thought of “imitation” or copying, and yet they still walk on two feet and speak english because well, that’s what you do. You imitate. It’s called learning.

It becomes bad when your behavior isn’t conducive to the life your core is calling for. That inner voice that is whispering “you are meant for more.”

To begin the reconditioning process, it starts with your environment.

You must become incredibly conscious of all stimuli, because it is all feeding into who you are.

What you do is this:

Flip the switch over night.

Wake up tomorrow and do nothing the same, for atleast the day.

Set your alarm for a different time. Plan exactly what you’re going to do when you wake up. Eat different foods. Talk to different people. Consume different content. Everything.

As we progress, you’ll start to understand the direction in which you should curate your environment.

2) Choose a vessel where feedback is as close to reality as possible

The most dangerous lifestyle is one removed from continuous trial and error.

To be removed from the process of error correction is to be removed from challenge, discovery, and hard earned wisdom that leads to growth that leads to fulfillment.

This does not only apply to jobs where the level of challenge you are exposed to normalizes after you become accustomed to the tasks. It applies to business and entrepreneurship, as well as to those who carry over the employee mindset: always needing to be told what to do, or always needing a handbook to feel confident in their steps.

My question to you:

How did people figure things out before the internet? Before “how-to” guides and step by step processes were abundant? How was the first rocket built?

They tried. They failed. They didn’t let failure convince them into believing it was impossible, or disorient them to the point of indulging in quick pleasure. They set a new direction according to the feedback reality had given them. And eventually, they found the needle in the haystack.

They were intelligent.

Because the mark of an intelligent system is that they course correct according to feedback. They have a lighthouse, and they don’t quit when they get blown off course.

When I talk about entrepreneurship, this is what I mean.

I mean engaging in your natural state. Engaging in creation. Pursuing unknown goals that demand failure to achieve.

This is the singular trait of most successful individuals.

Failure is not a negative concept to them, it is a constant that is necessary for a good life.

That all sounds great, but how do you actually apply this in today’s world?

3) Learn 1 of these 2 skills if you want to thrive in the future

Code and media are permissionless leverage. They’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.

– Naval

You, as a beginner, as one person, do not recognize how much leverage you have available to you, especially with AI.

And I’m not talking about the lower levels of AI use, the casual ChatGPT question-askers and the artists who get mad at AI for stealing their work.

I’m talking about the level where understand that you can build almost anything, because AI puts you in the stream of trial and error. Sure, most of the first outputs aren’t what you expected, but if you have agency, if you iterate, if you persist, if you accumulate taste, then you can build almost anything, and this is likely to only become more true. Then, if you are able to persuade, what you built can pay you while you sleep.

This was possible before AI of course. The core problem is that most people don’t understand that anything is possible with a long enough time horizon if you possess the 5 ingredients of success. AI has simply allowed you to do more, faster, and has given you access to things you didn’t have access to before - like the ability to create software and a supercharged version of learning and research.

With that said, I believe media is more important than code.

And by media, we’re talking about content.

Posts, videos, podcasts, or writing that you publish once and it can be seen by thousands if not millions of people. That, in my opinion, will be the skill worth having, especially as more people try to do it all with AI.

Because with content, you need to know what good looks like.

You still need education that AI can’t give you, because you haven’t started the process of trial and error. You don’t know what to ask.

The value of content is subjective. Every person reading every single sentence is going to interpret it in a different way. In other words, there is no one right way that gets results.

The value of code, on the other hand, is relatively objective. It doesn’t really matter how you write it, as long as it gets the result you were looking for. Like we saw above, there are more mobile apps than ever, but their downloads and usage have actually decreased.

Why?

Because they they don’t have distribution. They don’t understand media and content. They can’t get people to use it, and they especially can’t get people to care about it enough to pay for it.

By the way, I’m not talking about the type of content where people on Instagram say “I gave Claude access to my social media and it grew my account by 100k followers overnight.” That is practically worthless unless you are building trust and loyalty through narrative and authority. You can do this in Eden, but it helps if you know what you’re doing.

As JK Molina says, likes ain’t cash.

Intelligent content creation is much more than just posting rage-bait for likes and follows.

By the way, if you haven’t already guessed, the environment you expose yourself to for the sake of identity change should consist of the people, places, and habit triggers that are aligned with the life you want. This is a part of it.

IV – How to start - set aside 15 minutes to change your trajectory

You have changed your environment.

You have chosen your vessel.

You know that media beats code because the value of content is in the eye of the beholder, which commoditizes AI-generated content rapidly because it becomes normal, opening up space for true creatives - whether they use AI or not, because again, AI isn’t the problem.

Now you need to answer the only question that matters:

What is your life’s work?

That’s what we’re building. A life’s work, not a personal brand.

Peterson, Huberman, Watts - they all have “personal brands,” but they are deeply aligned with their purpose. They know what they want, and they use social media as the tool to actualize it, because that, plus AI, is the technology you use to do more as one person right now, because you probably won’t get much success on TV or on the radio or with a book publisher if you’re starting from zero.

(Alan Watts, of course, didn’t intend to have a “personal brand,” but he absolutely does, and the point stands.)

Their personal brand is who they are.

It’s their identity.

If you want to see your identity live, in front of your eyes, just go through the welcome flow of Eden. It builds it out for you as a graph you can explore.

Most people love the idea of this, but they get stuck fast. They seek the quick dopamine hit, searching “what’s the best niche to make 6 figures in with content creation” rather than digging into the value they already have from years of accumulated experience and story that they think is worthless because it’s normal to them.

The raw material for your life’s work is already inside you, buried under years of being told to specialize, to be practical, to stop asking so many questions. This process isn’t meant to give you some new and novel idea. Instead, it’s meant to show you what you already have.

Take this seriously.

Close your tabs. Open a blank document. Set a timer for 15 minutes. Answer every question below in writing. Do not skip the uncomfortable ones.

Step 1: Excavate your raw material

Most of what makes you interesting has been trained out of you. Your curiosity was treated as a distraction. Your varied interests were labeled as a lack of focus. The system wanted an obedient worker.

Your content will only work if it comes from material that is actually yours.

Answer these, and if you don’t have an answer, move on and let the question sit in your subconscious:

• What do you know too much about for it to be an accident? What topic have you researched across dozens of sources, for years, without anyone paying you to?

• What problem did you solve for yourself that you assumed everyone else already figured out? What comes naturally to you that seems to break everyone else?

• What did you get in trouble for as a kid that was actually just early taste? What did you obsess over before anyone told you it was impractical?

Now circle one answer. The one that made you feel something. That is raw material.

Don’t worry about your niche, content pillars, or any of that. Worry about the quality of your ideas, because that’s ultimately what wins.

Step 2: Name your contrarian spine

Nobody needs another person repackaging common sense. Your content needs a perspective that only you can see. That perspective comes from the one thing you believe that the mainstream gets wrong.

Taste is not about knowing what is good. It is about knowing what is broken and being unable to look away.

Answer these:

• What piece of mainstream advice actively made your life worse? What did you have to unlearn to become functional?

• What do you believe about your domain that experts would call naive, but you cannot shake?

• What is everyone in your industry pretending not to see?

Look at your answers from Step 1 and Step 2 together. Where they overlap is your direction.

Your answers to these questions are your first posts.

The best brands are that persons world, published in public for people to explore.

Step 3: Post your first idea tomorrow

This is a letter, not a course.

I wish I could have 20 modules here, but I can’t. That’s what the bootcamp is for.

The final ingredient, to mark the beginning of the end of dependence on someone else for financial stability, is actually doing the thing, and actually doing the thing starts with one post.

You literally have post ideas written down from the last step.

Take one.

Think of how to make the hook attention grabbing.

Think of how the word the body for impact.

Embrace that the first iteration will suck and that you can’t improve what doesn’t exist.

If you want a little help, here’s a prompt/skill for you to brainstorm angles and draft variations so you can get a feeling for what “good” looks like. These are all built on what works. We talked about this previously in the growing on social media is easy letter.

Your task is simple.

Take one answer from Step 1 and one answer from Step 2. Combine them into a single sentence that only you could write. Then publish it tomorrow as your first piece of content. A post. A video. A newsletter. The format does not matter (yet).

Now you actually have feedback against reality.

If it doesn’t work, good, you have to learn. You have to study, find a persuasion tactic you can try in your next post, and then the next, until you master the skill because skill acquisition is just stacking techniques as you encounter problems.

If you are one of those that is now saying “I wish this is more practical,” you are blind. I just gave you the formula to do anything.

And you just received feedback from your own mind that you did not register as an error to correct.

That’s it.

Talk in the next one.

– Dan

When I become interested (truly interested) in something, nothing else matters.

Focus becomes seamless. I could “work” 24 hours a day if I didn’t value sleep. It’s all I think about. It’s all I learn about. It’s all I want to do.

I’ve gone through these obsessive cycles many times in my life. First, it was fitness. Then spirituality. Then digital art, photography, and web development. Then psychology, various branches of philosophy, and various “high-value” skills like direct-response marketing and advertising.

But there’s a problem.

If you love learning, and if you have multiple interests, society may have convinced you that trait is a weakness. And you may believe them, because you can easily spend all your time learning and never getting results through doing.

It’s understandable why they think that, though. Most people still have a worldview influenced by the industrial paradigm. They fully believe that becoming a specialist, getting a job that requires you to perform a mechanical string of tasks for 40 years, and retiring at an age where your money can’t be put to great use outside of buying material objects because you were deprived for so long is still the best route to take in life.

I can confidently tell you that your love for learning is a superpower.

It signals that you are high-agency.

It signals that you have a unique point of view.

It signals that you have everything required to turn your interests into a modern source of income.

In this letter, I want to break it all down.

• Why people who learn quickly and have multiple interests are already ahead of most of the population

• How you already do 80% of the work required to make an income (that is, you already research, you just don’t think of it as that)

• Your options to start earning a side or full time income, preferably by discovering and pursuing your life’s work (yes, it’s that deep)

• I’ll provide prompts and templates that help you start making sense of what you want to do

Let’s begin.

Why learners and improvers have more leverage than ever before

Code and media are permissionless leverage. They're the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.

— Naval

You, as an individual, have more leverage than ever before.

Leverage, in this context, is the multiplier between input and output.

A small action can create a disproportionately large effect, and technology continues to increase the power an individual holds.

Think about it.

When social media became a thing, one person could post an article, a video, a tweet, and reach millions of people. The radio didn’t allow that. Television allowed that, but not for the everyday person who just had something interesting to say. Physical mail definitely didn’t allow that.

This is still possible, but the market has become more sophisticated. Now it requires a touch more skill and strategy.

Now AI is a thing, and the ability to code has been democratized to a large extent. Most average people can build a small-scale digital product, accompanied by a full marketing funnel that used to take teams of dozens of people to build and maintain. This was always possible with information products, coaching, freelancing, and other low-risk business models that one person could operate and make a living from, but now you can do so much more.

Paul Musso, for example, has built a modern philosophy school.

He quite literally teaches philosophy on Substack, and his paid tier includes weekly lectures people can attend.

I’ve talked about this in Purpose & Profit, but I see the good parts of the creator economy as a decentralized education system.

Passionate individuals dive deep into their interests, pull out the compelling parts, make them useful, and teach them. Most people these days get most of their education (related to their goals, not their parents) from places like YouTube and social media, from the creators they resonate with.

The entire business model is: Improve yourself, then improve others.

In other words, if you have interests to talk about, you have a way of building an audience. You have traffic. You have leverage. The difficulty lies in talking about your interests in a way that captures attention and makes them want to follow you.

This is why we built Eden, by the way. It makes it near impossible to not generate ideas worth writing about, and then actually write them. You can study creators, reverse engineer their content, find your unique voice / intellectual signature, and write content that only you could write. You can get 50% off your first month here.

If you understand how to package up those interests into a product or service people will pay you for, you have a way of monetizing that audience. You have a business.

How to turn your love for learning into a business

To the point: you teach your interests.

Or you turn what you would have taught into an implementation tool (as we’ll discuss).

Yesterday, I had someone ask me for advice on what to monetize.

They said that they were trying to do videography for personal brands in the real estate niche. He said, in an ideal world, he wanted to be doing more creative and artistic filmmaking.

I asked if he was making content for his own brand.

He said no.

To me, it was obvious. He should express his artistic side through his own videos and teach videography to personal brands, since he already has some experience in this area. Not only would he attract clients (because the top dogs don’t have time to do it themselves, but they now see this guy as an authority in videography), but he would build a broad enough audience to monetize with some form of education product around videography. Most creators don’t know how to edit, so I think it would work well.

That’s only one example, but the same probably applies to you.

You don’t have a lot of capital to invest, you don’t care to fundraise, and you probably just want to do something creative and meaningful.

For people who love to learn, here’s the gist of what a “business” would look like for you:

• You study your interests. They are inherently valuable because you value them, meaning someone else can value them, and many already value them. (No, people can’t just ask AI, because they often don’t know what to ask.)**

• You learn how to package them. You aren’t Marcus Aurelius. Writing fortune cookie tweets isn’t going to get you anywhere. You must understand attention mechanics and engagement psychology. (Now that you know what to ask AI, research that).

• You weave in your unique voice. Because your audience doesn’t care if you have new ideas. They want your opinion, your point of view, on an idea that works. If you don’t know what that voice is, build it in Eden.

• You turn yourself into the business. Your brand, content, and product all stem from your interests and the transformation they can provide.

Your sole job is to become a researcher and a vessel.

Seriously, you must consider it your full-time job to research. That’s what writers, creatives, and visionaries do. That’s what Peterson does. That’s what Huberman does. That’s what Marcus Aurelius and all your beloved figureheads of the past did. They probably don’t care about being a “personal brand,” but they do care about their interests, so creating content (which was once just considered “writing” before it took the specific form of media on the internet) is their chosen vessel for earning income.

They read weird books. They find themselves in esoteric rabbit holes on the internet. They curate idea sources they love and save them in a safe place. They question what most people think, gather multiple perspectives, and synthesize a unique one. They jot down thoughts like mad scientists. They are all idea workers. They hunt for ideas and share the best ones. 80% of writing comes from research. The other 20% is structuring and writing it the way only you would.

The question then is, how do you actually create a tangible brand, content, and product?

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Your brand is the transformation

When you think of a person you admire, why do you admire them?

Because they have changed your life in some fundamental way.

Their content or product led to a change in behavior.

They first changed your mind, then your actions, and you associated the results of those actions with that person.

James Clear convinced millions of people to adopt tiny habits that went on to make big changes.

Jordan Peterson (in his prime) convinced millions of young men to take responsibility for their lives and pursue meaning.

Alan Watts helped people stop taking life so seriously.

Naval Ravikant taught people the power of digital leverage.

If you heard an idea from Naval, and then noticed the outcome of that idea in your life, you would attribute that outcome to Naval.

So, your brand, as a person with multiple interests, is how you help people change their lives with those interests. The more people you help, the stronger your brand becomes.

Now, people get stuck on this all the time.

They think they need the perfect bio, tagline, or value proposition.

In reality, you don’t need to actually say any of those things. People may read your bio one or two times. Your brand is invisible. It’s an image in people’s minds that accumulates as they read your content, buy your products, change their behavior, and tell other people about you.

All you really need to do is answer 3 questions and have them guide most of your content:

1. Who can you help the most? (What does their life look like now?)

2. What has changed your life the most? (What interests do you see as important?)

3. How can you help other people do the same? (What about their mind and actions need to change, and how can you help them change?)

You don’t need to put the answers in your bio. You never even have to tell people your answers. You simply have to write the content and create the products that help others change. Your brand is created through your content and products.

However, if you struggle to answer even the first question, here’s what I would recommend.

The person you can help the most is your past self.

What situation were you in? How did you get into the interests that helped you change? How can you help people go through the same transformation, faster?**

Don’t think too hard about this, it will refine with time.

Your content is the map

I talk to a lot of people who want to start writing.

As you might guess and as you may have experienced, their problems revolve around the same issues.

They don’t know what to write. They don’t know how to write it. They don’t know what makes their writing different from everyone else’s. They don’t know why people would listen to them over someone else. They don’t see themselves as experts, but don’t understand that experts aren’t the only ones who have audiences. You can build a “student” style personal brand, too. You just learn, research, and share what you found without claiming any results until you actually have results.

I like to think of content like this:

You have your brand (who you help and how you help them change their life).

Now, you treat content like you’re the programmer of a video game.

You have point A - where your audience is now - level 1.

You have point B - where you can help them get to - level 100, or 50, or 10, or 2.

(And even if you aren’t at level 100, you’re allowed to grow. You should grow, actually. You’re the leader here. That’s why you attract “followers.” Entrepreneurship is self-improvement in disguise.)

To make this simple, any idea or content is free game if it lands between point A and point B.

It may help to quite literally draw this map on paper. Add point A to one side and point B to another, then start filling in the middle with topics and ideas:

• Write 2-3 broad topics, like health, psychology, or business (these are your content pillars, your main interests).

• For each of those topics, write 2-3 more sub-topics

• For each of those sub-topics, write 2-3 pain points, principles

Let’s say my brand is to help people become future-proof (it is).

That’s my niche, so to speak. I attract anyone who is interested in the way that I, personally, help people become future-proof.

Then my entire goal with content is to find great ideas and align them with that throughline.

If I’m studying my interests, like flow psychology, and I find an idea I love, like how psychic entropy causes the mind to slowly become disordered with time unless effort is put into maintaining a meaningful hierarchy of goals, then the first question I ask myself is this:

“How does this apply to becoming future-proof?”

And through that question alone, I now have a unique content piece. I am not copying the idea one-to-one. I am applying it to a new domain, from my own voice and perspective.

That’s content creation in a nutshell for people who don’t want to just follow trends and do the latest tiktok dance.

You study your interests, you hunt for great ideas, and then you ask “How does this apply to [my map/mission/brand]?”

However, there’s a bit more to the puzzle.

You still need to be able to package and structure your content.

By "package," I mean the right hook, title, or headline that gets people to click.

Then you need the right structure (intro, body, conclusion) to keep people engaged.

I’ll talk about those in a future letter, but for now, again, that’s why we built Eden. If you are or want to be a creator/writer, consider it the new staple in your workflow. You can discover proven ideas, reverse engineer them, and apply them to your own ideas quickly.

Because if you can’t get people to click and stay, who is going to see your product? Who is going to pay you for what you offer?

In other words, how are you actually going to do what you love (learning) in a sustainable way if you’re always in survival mode and selling a product for your boss rather than yourself?

Your product is the tool

When I first started on social media, I was a web designer.

I started writing on Twitter because I wanted to land clients without doing the exhausting cold outreach I was used to.

As I got clients, and as my service evolved (as my own knowledge did), I found people were coming to me not because they wanted a website, but because they just didn’t have clarity on their brand, content, and product.

So, I helped them, and there was a two-year period where I considered myself a brand advisor. That’s what my web design offer turned into.

The biggest question then was: “Okay, if I write about all these ideas and interests, what do I sell? It feels like I’m giving everything out. People won’t have a reason to buy my product if they already know it all.”

Typically, people just love getting into their own heads.

People just buy things. They probably don’t remember everything they read from you. And they are even more likely to never implement it. Just because you’ve talked about it doesn’t mean people aren’t going to buy something.

There is a better way to think about it, though.

I like to think of my products as tools or systems that help them get from point A to point B.

As an example, I can talk about writing all day. I can teach how I write newsletters, content, and generate ideas. But a tweet or newsletter is usually not the best medium for teaching an entire system through modules, worksheets, templates, and the like.

So if I create a product, like ‘2-Hour Writer,’ that can be the complete system for implementation. A daily set of actions, backed with education, that someone can use to get results.

And if you don’t care to sell an info product because everyone told you they were a scam and you were dumb enough not to question or think, then you can build a software. But again (I’ve learned this through 3 years of failure so far), it needs to be a system. Yes, you can probably vibe code small-scale software quite well if you have agency and understand the iterative process. You love learning, so you should be able to just start building it and ask the AI questions along the way. You can literally start with “How do I start building a software/app/tool with you,” and it will suggest steps. Then you keep doing that until you have a v1. You just ask the question that you’re wondering when you encounter it. The first version will suck, as all first versions do, but you can quickly iterate to the point where it is quite good.

The creator economy, when it comes to monetization, is a systems economy.

You don’t build the next note-taking tool (tried that).

You build the software that helps them do what your info product would have told them to do.

For Paul Musso, with his philosophy school, he could build a learning platform. Or he could keep doing what he’s currently doing, but build a philosophy AI app that helps people think more deeply as a daily practice. Or an app that’s similar to what daily devotions are for those who study the bible. Have daily philosophy lessons that people can make a part of their routine. Who knows if that would sell out of the gate, but that’s what the process of trial and error is for.

For myself, it could be packaging up a part of my workflow. Finding validated ideas, studying why they work, and filtering them through your mission to create your own perspective. That’s what Eden does at this point (yes, I’m promoting it a lot today because we just launched it and there’s a welcome offer, and the MCP is going out soon).

With all of that, this wasn’t a hyper-practical letter.

Because I don’t think that’s what you need.

You just need clarity that this path is viable.

Once you know that, you can figure out the rest, because you love learning.

This letter was just meant to be the spark to show that it is possible.

I’ll write more about this in the future, but until then, I’d encourage you to go down a rabbit hole on brand, content, and online business.

Thank you for reading.

– Dan

Growing on social media is easy.

There, I said it.

I never really had a problem gaining followers, but that could be unconscious competence.

Note: This is a more tactical post. If you get your panties in a bunch when people talk about growing on social media, nobody is holding you hostage and forcing you to read this. There is value in talking about it.

When I started on social media, I wasn’t starting from scratch. I was starting with nearly a dozen failures under my belt. I failed at digital art, drop shipping, multiple agency businesses (ads, SEO, web design), freelance photography, and more.

As a teenager, my entire goal was to make some kind of online business work so that I would never have to work a full time 9-5 in my life. I was going to college simply to have a “buffer period” to make one of these endeavors work. But after all those failures, 5 years in college, and about $20,000 in student loans that continued to stack up... I had to get a “real” job at a web design agency.

At that job, I continued learning and attempting to freelance. Eventually, things started to click, clients became consistent, and I was fortunately able to quit that job.

That’s why I started on social media. Twitter to be exact. I saw other web designers writing content that I had the knowledge to write, and they were using Twitter as a way to attract more clients.

My edge was that my failures taught me so much.

Digital art taught me brand aesthetics. Facebook ads taught me copywriting. Agency work in general taught me networking and communication. Web design led to funnel design. I didn’t even realize that I had picked up all the pieces to building a successful one-person business.

So when I started writing content on Twitter, things just... worked.

That’s my goal with this letter.

Social media is probably your first stab at business. You don’t have these other marketing and business skills. You may even be trapped in beginner hell - writing content into the void - and about to quit because you think social media is just a game of luck.

You couldn’t be any more wrong.

Social media has specific mechanics and levers, like a video game.

If you understand those, you can predictably control your growth.

You can’t just expect to send a post and watch it go viral. The problem with most beginners is that they are so accustomed to social media already that they don’t see it as an entire industry. They don’t see it as a skill that must be constantly studied and practiced.

With that, there are really only 2 things you need to know.

2 levers. That’s it. That’s all you need to focus on.

Treat everything else as a distraction.

If you nail these, growth isn’t that difficult.

I – Do what works, from your own perspective.

People aren’t on social media to find something new.

They’re on social media to hear an opinion on a topic they’re already interested in (that’s literally how the algorithm works).

In fact, when I think about the content I consume, I watch the same things over and over again on YouTube. I could literally see the same exact video title every day for a week, and I’d happily watch it, because I want to listen to the creator’s opinion on that topic.

I love training, and if I had an ounce of muscle for every time I’ve watched a nutrition 101 video, I’d be Ronnie Coleman. Yeah buddy.

This is the single most fundamental aspect of social media growth.

As an example, look at Craig Perry.

His first YouTube video got 144k views.

That’s absurd. That rarely happens.

His second YouTube video got 254k views.

Again... absurd.

How did he do it?

Well, the titles of those videos are:

1. How to remember everything you read

2. How to become dangerously self-educated (complete plan)

Now, if you watch videos in that niche on YouTube, you’ve seen those before.

“How to remember everything you read” is a topic that’s talked about over and over again by productivity and learning creators. Why? Because it works.

“How to become dangerously self educated,” as far as I can tell, is a spin on another title structure that did very well, “How to become dangerously [articulate, intelligent, confident].”

But isn’t that copying?

In some ways, sure, but how can anyone take credit for a title like “How to remember everything you read?” It’s such a general topic. It’s a process. There is no one right way to read that somebody can claim. Imagine trying to say someone stole “how to remember everything you read” when the entire video itself is different. They just decided to talk about the same topic that other people want to watch.

What Craig is doing here is taking an outlier that works and talking about it from his own perspective.

The packaging (title, hook, and thumbnail) are simply there to grab attention. The content inside is all original to Craig.

As another example:

In 2019, I wrote a tweet with the hook, “How to get ahead of 99% of people.”

In 2023, I knew that hook had already done well, so I used it as the title of a YouTube video. It is now my most viewed video on my channel with 1.7 million views.

A few months after that, Mark Manson (author of the subtle art of not giving a f*ck), put out a video with the title, “How to get ahead of 99% of people (Starting today).” He got 4.7 million views.

Then, Alex Hormozi put out a video with the same title. He got 1.7 million views.

Then, Tom Bilyeu retitled one of his older videos to the same thing. It became a 28x outlier with 1.5 million views.

Did it click yet?

These creators aren’t creating the same video. For something as broad as “How to get ahead of 99% of people,” you can fill the content of the video, newsletter, tweet, or reel with almost anything.

One persons video could be about acquiring skills faster while the next persons could be about planning and productivity.

Where do you find high-performing content?

The best creators don’t just post what’s on their mind.

I mean, sometimes they do, I do, and that’s great, they should, but you don’t build your life’s work on randomness and luck. You have a strategy, obviously.

If I’ve been talking about my own clever ideas for too long and growth has slowed, I know I need to throw in some content that has been validated to work - that way I get more eyes on my more esoteric ideas.

The best creators, most of the time, research what works first. Then, they plan out ideas. Then, they start writing.

What most people do is this:

• They search for a creator on YouTube and filter their videos by most popular

• They wait for good reels or tweets to show up on their feed, then save the link in a notes app

• They jot down potential ideas as they scroll or when they see a piece of content working

That’s fine, but it’s time-consuming and slow.

(This is where I transition to a sales pitch for a second).

That’s why we built the new version of Eden.

You can search through our growing database of outlier content, filterable by follower count, platform, and niche. (You will not find this in any other tool, by the way).

You can search for any creator on any platform and filter their content by top liked, top viewed, and top outlier.

You can save any post you find to a board, then chat with it to generate more potential ideas (I chat with my YouTube swipe file board for title variations a lot).

You can also write scripts, articles, and batch-written posts. I do all of my research and writing in here.

We’re launching the new version of Eden starting today (here’s the story of why we pivoted).

But you can get 50% off your first month throughout launch.

If you are a current or aspiring creator/writer - this will give you a massive edge.

Check it out here.

Okay, sales pitch over.

Onto the 2nd lever.

II – You’re going to hate this word, but... networking.

I don’t know what goes through people’s heads when they start on social media.

They think they can just post something good and hope it goes viral.

Sometimes that works, for a select few very lucky people, but social media growth like any other business comes down to manual work and effort put in on a daily basis.

If it were as easy as posting, everyone would do it, and that’s why almost everyone who starts fails... or gets trapped in beginner hell.

“Okay Dan, how else can you grow if it’s not by praying the algorithm makes you famous?”

Let’s break it down.

You want followers.

Followers come from other people seeing your post and liking it enough to click on your profile and follow you.

If the algorithm is like a lottery, how can we manually get more people to see your posts?

Where is the “source” of people on social media?

Other people’s audiences.

If someone has 10,000 followers, what would happen if your post got in front of those 10,000 people?

This is why brands pay so much to partner with creators. It gets them immediate access to a specific audience.

However, if you’re smart, you can get in front of other people’s audiences for free.

All it boils down to is making friends.

Yes, that means you will have to talk to people. In the replies and the DMs. It should take up at least 30 minutes a day. Time block it if that’s helpful.

The goal is to have friends that are willing to share your content to their audience (so you don’t rely on the algorithm anymore). You return the favor of course. You want to build a tribe of people that support each other to get beyond beginner hell.

I call this process non-needy networking.

If you do it right, this is how you:

• Get a 50,000+ follower account to retweet your thread that will result in massive growth (the same goes for any other social platform sharing your post)

• Have connections that will share new growth strategies with you (my friends send me new tips when they come across them)

• Join or create group chats and begin forming your tribe (that you will grow with for much of your social media journey)

• Put your name in more people’s mouths. The more people that know about you, the more work and potential connections will be sent your way. Get your name in front of as many eyes as possible.

Here are the 7 steps.

1) Find someone you WANT to DM

This is not exclusive to making connections. It is crucial for paid work as well.

The common theme between service businesses is that their life is a living hell if they do not resonate with the client they are working with.

Reach out to people that you are inspired by, you would want to work with, you would want to strategize with, or you see potential for mutual benefit.

When you are just starting out, you will have to work your way up the ladder. Start by DMing people who are within your follower range.

Once you have an audience and leverage, you can really reach out to anybody and get a warm response.

Where can you find people to DM?

• The “following” list of accounts that you like. Scroll through and see if anyone catches your eye.

• On the timeline in general. When you see a post you resonate with, make it a habit to DM them using the next steps.

That’s really it. Just scroll on social media and befriend those who pass by you, especially if you resonate with them.

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2) Send them simple praise

Find a piece of their content, work, or current projects that you are truly inspired by.

Then, you have one of two options.

The first is to simply seed a conversation. You just DM them their own post and say something simple.

If their post was something like this:

Most people quit because they forget that you have to be bad at something before you can be good at it. It’s so obvious. You suck. Of course you’re not going to win in 2 weeks. But if you can learn to enjoy extended periods of failure, you will make it very, very far in life.

Then you could respond with:

Damn that’s good. I’ve noticed the exact same thing.

Talk to them like you’re texting a friend. Most cool people are allergic to corporate-speak.

We aren’t even trying to get a response here.

If you do, cool, continue the conversation.

3) Show interest in them

If they don’t respond, you can try reaching out again in a similar manner.

Showing interest is communication 101. Showing interest makes you interesting.

Ask them about their goals or what they’re building. People love to talk about the things they’re passionate about.

This gives you the opportunity to give value (even if YOU don’t have value to give right now).

Let’s assume they respond with the generic “thank you so much.”

Now, you can either find what they are working on from their profile or just ask them.

If you find what they are working on:

What are your next plans with Eden? It’s been crazy seeing you pivot, I’m curious what you’ve got in store.

If you can’t find what they are working on:

What are you building right now? Are you hopping on the AI wave?

Again, just keep the conversation going.

Friendship is the process of gradually letting walls down and aligning on certain ideas.

4) Show you are useful

This is the part that trips most people up.

In order to show that you are a valuable connection, and once you know what their meaningful goals are, your first options are to see where you can help, send actionable tips, send resources, send systems, or send videos you remember that relate to what they’re doing.

Once you do that, the law of reciprocity kicks in. They feel obligated to return a favor, and you’re in a position to tell them you are trying to grow on socials. They may just start engaging with your content, but at the very least, you’re in a much better position to ask them to share something.

As an example, if you find out their goal is to build software, and you watch a YouTube video that has good insights on it, just send it to them and say, “This reminded me of our conversation.”

It’s that simple. Do more of that.

Send things to people when it reminds you of them.

5) Get on a call to make a deeper connection

This part is optional but recommended.

You can skip straight to step 7 after a few days, but I would practice all of these steps at some point.

Most creators get on a call to just say what’s up and talk about what each other are building. Usually, you find cooler people online than you do in real life, so it only makes sense to call them or text them off socials.

When I was starting out, I was getting on zoom calls left and right with people that I wanted to get to know better. It’s more normal than you think... and people are usually open to it when it is clear that you have similar goals as them.

You can also take the conversation to somewhere like Telegram and send voice messages to make yourself seem more human. Most social accounts use Telegram and Whatsapp groups to communicate and strategize.

I’m kind of just teaching you how to be a social person here.

This isn’t some secret strategy. It’s just how you connect with people.

Friends help friends achieve their goals.

6) Send more resources as they come up

Remember their goals and keep an eye out for any content, resources, or people you can send their way. When you find something or someone, send it to them.

I remember you telling me about your plans for [their project or goal]. I found this today and thought you’d find it helpful.

People appreciate this, and rarely anybody does it.

Whenever a friend sends me something like this, I always think, “Wow, they have their shit together. It’s cool that they thought of me and took the time to send this.”

7) If you haven’t already, ask

By this point, you’ve built a pretty damn solid connection.

You’ve given value to the point where they are ready to return the favor.

This can unfold at any time during the conversation, but by this point, you can easily:

• Ask them to join a group chat with others.

• Send them one of your posts that you put a lot of time into.

• Ask any specific questions you have for them without paying for consulting or mentorship.

If your plan is to leverage their audience for growth, be sure to write a post that they would want to share. If the post sucks, they probably won’t want to touch it (go back to step one on how to write good content in this letter, use Eden - 50% off first month for launch). Then, you can send it to them and mention that they inspired that post.

Yo, just wrote this up and thought you’d enjoy it. It was inspired by our previous conversation. I put a lot of time into this and want it to pop off. If you’re able to share it, I’d appreciate it. I’m happy to return the favor however I can.

Even if you don’t get a retweet or share, any engagement will help more people see it, which helps you grow.

You should be reaching out to people almost every day. That’s 50% of your job as a beginner creator. If you are immersing yourself in the environment of your interests, you should see inspirational people that you want to reach out to on a daily basis.

Last tip:

If you want to make this fool proof, start showing up in the replies of the creators you want to make friends with first. Show up more in their replies and they’ll start to see you as a regular. When you DM them, it won’t be cold. They’ll know who you are. That’s optional, but it works.

That’s it.

Those are the 2 levers to actually growing.

If you like this style of letter, hit the like button so I know and I’ll continue making them.

Thank you for reading.

– Dan

At some point, usually in your 20s, you’ll notice that the people around you stop believing in themselves. And no matter how hard you try, you can’t save them. By all means, do not let it infect your mind. Stay on your path.

I was mulling over that thought a few days ago.

And the more I think about it, the deeper the problem goes.

I can’t help but notice that too many people between the ages of 20 and 35 fall into the blatantly obvious vicious cycle.

You get motivated by some external source.

A video, a book, a conversation, whatever.

You feel like this is your moment. You go all in.

You start the business.

You start working out.

You start learning the skill.

But then like clockwork, 2 days, a week, 2 weeks later... you fall off.

You so easily go back to the life you swore you despised.

As if you were addicted to it. As if you preferred it over the life you just said you wanted. As if the desire to change your life was just another form of cheap dopamine that you couldn’t resist.

Life goes on.

You get another hit of motivation.

You start again, from zero.

The cycle repeats. You get frustrated, but not enough to solidify the change.

Then you wake up. One, two, ten years later.

What’s going on?

Why is this such a common thing?

Why is it so damn hard to change your life?

I’ll tell you why, and it’s not anything you’ve heard before. Another video about productivity, motivation, discipline, or dopamine doesn’t even solve half the equation. You’ve watched enough of those, and nothing’s changed.

We need to dig much, much deeper into the mind.

By the end of this letter, I hope you will have what you need to adopt the traits of a wildly successful person.

Specifically, a person with this admirable quality:

To work with tremendous intensity on things that matter to you, and more importantly, to be strangely unbothered when those things don’t work out.

If you actually attempt to understand this letter rather than just read it to horde knowledge, your life will look drastically different in 3-6 months.

Your mind is a collection of survival strategies, that’s why it’s so hard to change

Survival is the mechanical, often unconscious, engine behind every thought, emotion, and action.

Everything you think, feel, or do is rooted in survival.

I repeat, your entire human experience, right now, is directed by survival. This is one of the most important topics you can understand to change your life, because it’s the root of what’s keeping you the same.

There are two types of survival.

People tend to only think of the first one.

1. Physical survival – Like animals, we attempt to reproduce the information in our genes. This is largely solved in today’s world. Most reading this aren’t worried about getting eaten or dying from starvation.

2. Psychological/conceptual survival – We also attempt to reproduce the information in our consciousness. We feel the drive to preserve our non-physical identity. The ideas, beliefs, practices, and worldview that shape our mind.

To understand this, we need to understand the gist of evolution.

Billions of years ago, some self-replicating molecules existed. Some replicated more successfully than others. The ones that happened to build protective structures around themselves (cell walls, then cells, then multicellular bodies) replicated more than the ones that didn’t.

Over billions of iterations, you end up with a world full of genes that are really good at building physical bodies that are able to survive.

Then, human consciousness became a thing.

Don’t ask me how. I don’t know.

But the same process continued.

We have genes that selected and self-replicated.

Then we have memes. You can think of them as genes for the mind.

I’m not talking about memes that you find on Instagram and send to your friend. I’m talking about the original meaning, coined by Richard Dawkins, which is defined as “units of culture that spread from mind to mind.”

Memes are the fabric of the social world.

Memes are the ideas, words, language, concepts, beliefs, and worldviews that allow you to make sense of and survive in the world.

When you were a child, your parents spread their memes to you. Their beliefs, their ideas of what success means, their ideas of what failure means, and the language they speak that allowed you to communicate within your culture. Most of these were installed in your head before you even had the time to question them. You just think “this is how life is” when it’s really been a process of natural selection that has led to how we speak, relate, and communicate today.

Then you went to school. You were rewarded for good performance, solidifying certain memes that benefited the survival goals of society, and punished for bad performance so you didn’t pose a threat.

The most dangerous set of memes right now is the classic go to school, get a job, retire at 65 which represent the pinnacle of success. Anything less is considered failure by those who have not evolved beyond the industrial set of memes. In today’s world of rapid advancement and AI, those are no longer beneficial to success and survival. Culture is evolving.

One important survival mechanism of memes are institutions and ideologies. We create larger structures like religions, nations, political parties, and corporations that have the goal of protecting, perpetuating, and replicating the beliefs and values they were founded on. They try to spread their memes to you, and if they are successful, you’re more likely to attempt to spread them to others, because they are now a part of who you are. They are something you’ve identified with and hold as a part of your “self” (a composition of memes that create a psychological structure/body). Religions want more members, nations want more control, corporations want more customers.

A religion that tells its adherents to have many children and convert outsiders will spread faster than a religion that tells its adherents to remain celibate and keep quiet, obviously.

Same with political ideologies, brands, conspiracy theories, jokes, fashions, video games, coffee, alcohol, team Apple, team Android, team Claude, team ChatGPT, team anti-AI, keto, carnivore, vegan, your morning routine, and really anything else. Understanding this is largely a key to get what you want in life be it money, fame, or success.

Everything is a religion. Your morning routine is a religion. Your political opinions are a religion. Your identity as a gamer, a lifter, a minimalist, a stoic, a craft beer enthusiast... all religions. With social media and global access to information, we’re experiencing the religionization of everything. Very few people actually do things because they want to anymore. Almost everyone’s life is built around actions that allows them to fit into the digital tribe.

The point:

Genes have gotten really good at survival.

Memes have gotten really really good at survival.

They’re primary goal is to persist.

I think you get it. How does this relate to the vicious cycle of trying to achieve your goals and quickly going back to your old ways?

Because the mind is a self-deception machine.

When you try to pursue a goal that would fundamentally change who you are, it’s very difficult to notice, because your mind doesn’t want you to notice, but your ego starts throwing out defensive reactions left and right. Your mind is threatened. Your identity is threatened. Your memes want to survive, and their goal is to persist. Your mind floods with anxiety, fear of failure, irrational thinking, and the closest distraction that will give you a hit of quick comfort. Like an addict going through withdrawals.

When you are physically attacked, your body goes into fight or flight. You do anything and everything you can to survive.

When you are psychologically attacked, the same thing happens. Your mind reacts as if you were just shoved, punched, shot, or stabbed depending on the severity of the threat to your ego/identity.

If you were to deeply observe your reactions, you would realize that they are all dictated by survival. Every single thought you have or action you take centers around the survival of your self-image.

Now, imagine if you were able to reprogram this process so that the opposite happened.

What if you felt threatened when you stopped pursuing your meaningful goal? So much so that achieving the goal didn’t require much discipline, because it’s just a part of who you are?

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You can’t escape the mind game, but you can master it

Effortless self discipline happens when the desire to become the highest version of yourself outweighs the desires of the lowest version of yourself.

The core difference between “winners” and “losers” is that losers are afraid of success while winners are afraid of mediocrity.

The person who does not identify as a fit person will feel threatened when they make the commitment to be healthy. You may not consciously identify as an “unfit person,” but you identify with the preferences, habits, and abilities (the properties of the self) that an unfit person would have.

So your mind starts sending warning signals.

What happens to going out and partying with friends?

What happens to the late-night snacks while watching Netflix?

What happens to relaxing on the couch instead of going for a walk?

Even the little things... what happens to adding a slab of butter to your favorite meal? I really have to give up that extra flavor?

And when the opportunity does come to go out, indulge at night, or relax on the couch, are you going to be able to break that deeply ingrained pattern?

These are four out of thousands of thoughts that would enter the unfit person’s mind.

However, the fit person would feel threatened by the opposite.

This baffles the unfit person. They don’t understand it.

If the fit person travels to a place that doesn’t have readily available clean food and a gym, they feel like all of their gains are going to disappear. They feel like if they eat McDonalds once, they’ll spontaneously combust.

This is largely the secret of successful individuals.

The businessman would feel like a failure if their business started losing revenue, so much so that they would obsess over tactics, strategies, and plugging holes in their business until revenue started to increase. They wouldn’t be able to sleep at night until that problem is solved.

How did you get to this point?

We’ve discussed it briefly, but when you were young, people expected you to act, think, and behave a certain way.

Your parents were influenced by their parents and culture.

Your parents' worldview was passed on to you as a child.

You started growing up, maybe you rebelled, but you couldn’t escape the subtle programming from your teachers, peers, and, even worse in today’s world, social media. You could effectively search up any information on the internet and program yourself into being a part of a tribe whose general actions aren’t beneficial to a meaningful and useful future.

The good thing is, if we want to flip the script from being the person who is threatened by “success” goal to becoming the person who is threatened by a “failure” goal, we can consciously use this process to reprogram our own minds.

I want to teach you how to weaponize your survival mechanism. That way, you can intentionally identify with things that trigger threat responses that push you in a positive direction.

You’ll get results, but you’ll still suffer, just more impressively. The third section is about what to do about that. Don’t skip to it. You can’t transcend a game you haven’t learned to play.

With that said, this won’t happen overnight.

You will have withdrawals. You will have relapses.

But these are what I’ve found the most potent for recreating yourself.

All of these overlap in some way and synergize with each other.

1 – You need a reason with extremely high gravitational pull, and when that one fades, you must find another.

The most intense periods of my life came after I stumbled across a reason to change.

A reason with such an intense pull that I couldn’t focus on anything else but actualizing the positive trajectory of my life. The thing is, this reason doesn’t last forever. You can quickly find yourself back in a rut months later because you let autopilot take over.

It’s difficult to force this reason.

You have to find it in a book, conversation, or experience that happens at such a perfect moment that everything clicks for you. You have to discover it by breaking out of the familiar past and predictable future.

For most people, right when they wake up, they are met with a thought that triggers a behavior, and they start the day as their old self.

You think about the commute to work, which was stressful for you in the past, so you bring that feeling into the present, and now you are stressed and narrow-minded. Then the cascade continues. You experience the feelings and behaviors of your past, which create a predictable future that you don’t want.

Only in the unknown will you find a novel insight that will launch you into the next phase of your life.

How do you start to live in the unknown?

2 – You need to become brutally aware of who you don’t want to become.

The most powerful visualization exercise you can do is this:

For the next day, look at all of your current actions. Look at them all. What you do when you wake up, what you do throughout the day, what you do at night.

Now, sit with a pen and paper and write down exactly where your life is going to end up if you keep doing the same thing.

If you’re honest with yourself, the answer will probably disgust you. And that disgust can be used as an ultrapotent fuel to slingshot in a positive direction for quite a long time, until you need a new reason.

The problem here is that most people are dishonest. It doesn’t really hit them.

Why? Because the self doing the exercise is the self being evaluated.

You’re asking the current identity to honestly assess where the current identity is heading, but the current identity has a survival interest in not seeing this clearly, because seeing it clearly would mean death.

You soften the blow. You rationalize it. You imagine future variables that may rescue you, so changing right now doesn’t really matter.

For this exercise to work, you have to be able to receive the honest answer. You have to observe people in your real life so that you can actually see what your future looks like. And, you need something that has already created a crack. So when you do this exercise, it splits you right open.

What creates the crack?

For most people, something catastrophic and real has to happen before they change. Their car has to break down, or they have a health scare, or a parent dies, or a relationship ends that makes you want to get super jacked. That’s what creates the crack. You can’t be living mindlessly.

Let’s solve that.

3 – You need to change your environment faster than the identity can recalibrate.

Your old self is partly stored in your surroundings.

The people you follow online. Your bed. Your routine. The people you hang out with. That’s a big one and points to why so many people aren’t where they want to be in life. Your identity is often programmed socially. The same person in two different friend groups will behave like two different people. Moreso, when you log on to social media, you also become a different person.

The simplest move here is to wipe your phone or get a new one.

And once you do, only download what’s necessary. Don’t go back to the same social media platforms, accounts, and websites you used to.

The most difficult move that many successful individuals make is to spend a week somewhere new, even if it’s only a few hours away from you in an Airbnb. You just have to break the cycle of repeating the same day over and over again by removing the triggers that keep that cycle going.

Beyond that:

If you want to change your life fast, the most useful thing you can do is immerse your mind in the environment of your future self. Bathe your psyche in the opinions, beliefs, and education that person would have without judgement.

At first, I was curious about starting a business.

I searched for courses and took a few, but it wasn’t until everything I read, every video I watched on a walk, everyone I followed on social media, and all of the conversations I had were about business. I would pick up tips and tricks, but more importantly, I felt like if I wasn’t building a business, I didn’t fit into the environment I was in.

Identity is created through learning. You can’t learn if you react all the time or think you know everything.

You must willingly expose yourself to perspectives you disagree with, and try to understand them.

4 – You need to increase the gap between impulse and response.

Break the pattern today, or you will repeat the loop tomorrow.

The way you start detaching from your old patterns is to do nothing.

Correct, nothing.

This is the only way you can interrupt the survival mechanism in real time.

Everything else, from finding a reason to changing your environment, happens outside the moment of the urge to remain your past self. They create better conditions, but they don’t help you in the 3 seconds when your hand is reaching for your phone.

Your job is to starve the old self that is trying to survive of the normal feedback it receives. This is a difficult practice, but you must observe and examine yourself throughout the day. Are you just repeating yesterday on autopilot? When you read an opinion or belief, are you going to solidify your own stance further by arguing with them in your head and saying how wrong they are?

When you sit with this uncomfortable feeling without making a decision, you train your nervous system to tolerate the gap between impulse and action. From that neutral state, it’s much easier to make a conscious choice in the right direction.

Now, there are plenty of ways to “train” his gap. They’re very popular right now. Meditation, cold exposure, fasting, etc. Anything that helps you delay gratification is useful.

But in my opinion, the most impactful thing you can do is practice somewhat of a 24/7 meditation. You become the observer. You operate from a higher level. You attempt to get really good at expanding and contracting your mind like you would when you’re training a muscle. You zoom out to think clearly, and zoom in to act.

The problem is that people live in a perpetually zoomed-in state.

Survival mode.

Notice it.

Do nothing about it.

Neutralize the impulse and choose your own direction.

Winning the game is how you discover it’s the wrong game

The greatest trait you can acquire is to work with tremendous intensity on things that matter to you, and more importantly, be strangely unbothered when those things don’t work out.

If you’re smart, you’ve noticed something.

We replaced one survival game with another.

Meaning, we replaced one source of suffering with another.

Sure, learning how to stress yourself into building a hyper successful business or aesthetic physique is better (in my opinion) than stressing yourself into a hole of being overweight and broke, but the problem is this:

The business owner will be unhappy until they hit a certain level of money, like $100m dollars, but even once they hit that number, they still have the same identity. If they don’t increase the amount and continue working, they will remain unhappy.

The same happens for the bodybuilder. They won’t be happy until they win their pro card, but unless they have a shift in who they are, they will continue moving the goal post until they have an existential crisis and are forced to change.

This is the crucial piece that so many are missing. I’m sure you know of many business or fitness influencers who represent this archetype of drowning out their lack of fulfillment with more work.

The goal, then, is to play the survival game, because there is a great deal of fulfillment that comes from continuous growth (and life is a bitch if you stagnate), but you must also transcend the game. You remain largely unbothered when things don’t work out.

The question then is, how does one become unbothered?

Well, you can’t try to achieve that, because the bothered self attempting to become the unbothered self is just another survival strategy.

The person who says “I am going to detach from outcomes” has just made not being attached to outcomes the outcome they’re attached to. So it becomes the axis of their suffering. The snake eats its tail.

That’s a big trap here... premature transcendence. You read about detachment or spirituality and immediately identify with it because it sounds like a “higher” operating mode. It’s a status game of who’s more enlightened. In reality, this is avoidance. I was hesitant to put this section in the letter, because most people have to spend years deeply attached before their attachment becomes visible enough to see through.

I know content is supposed to provide something immediately actionable so you can get your cheap dopamine hit disguised as learning and success, but this is a decade-long project.

What you can do, however, is this:

First, continue increasing the gap between impulse and response. Work your psychic muscle. Expand and contract the mind, and be aware of it. Become very familiar with what those states of consciousness feel like.

Second, distinguish pain from suffering. Pain is a feature of life. Suffering is the identity’s refusal to accept the event. Becoming more conscious and open-minded doesn’t remove pain, but it removes the second layer.

The businessman whose revenue drops still feels the punch, but he doesn’t have to feel the subsequent spiral of “this shouldn’t be happening to me, I’m a failure, my life is ruined.”

The intense and unbothered personality is powerful.

It is near the pinnacle of human development across both material and spiritual planes.

They are a walking contradiction.

They fear mediocrity enough to work hard, and they’re unbothered enough to not collapse when things don’t work out.

It is the mark of a mature mind to be able to hold two opposing forces at once.

I hope that you are able to one day master that state.

Until then, thank you for reading.

– Dan

One of them is the version you perform.

The one with the LinkedIn headline, the job, the goals that sound respectable at dinner parties, the five-year plan you recite when relatives ask what you’re doing with your life.

This version is competent. This version is impressive on paper.

This version is, statistically, probably miserable.

The other version only shows up for about forty minutes on a Sunday afternoon. Usually when you’re alone. Usually right after you’ve finished something you actually care about.

For those forty minutes, you are not tired. You are not anxious. You do not need to check your phone.

You feel, for a brief and infuriating moment, like your life is actually yours.

Then Monday arrives and the first version takes back over.

The gap between those two versions is the most important problem in your life. Everything else (the discipline issues, the motivation problems, the vague sense that something is off) is downstream of it.

I call that gap a failure of Identity-Lifestyle Fit.

Product-market fit is when what a company builds matches what the market actually wants.

Before you have it, every day is a grind. Founders describe it as pushing a boulder uphill, convincing people to care, tweaking the pitch, and burning cash.

After you have it, the market pulls the product out of your hands.

It’s the day you’ve been waiting for.

Identity-Lifestyle Fit is the same phenomenon, but the product is you and the market is how you live.

When you have it, your calendar is inviting rather than daunting. The work you do feeds the person you’re becoming. Discipline stops feeling forced and starts feeling effortless. You wake up and rather than hiding from the day by pressing snooze, you can’t wait to get up. Very few people can say they have this type of life.

When you don’t have it, you are in a constant but quiet war with your own life.

You set goals and miss them.

You build habits and drop them.

You achieve the thing you said you wanted and feel nothing.

You spend your twenties optimizing a life you never consciously chose, and then wonder 40 years later why you did that at all.

Most productivity and self-help advice is a bandaid over this, so it’s important that we get to the root, which is deep in your head.

You don’t need a better morning routine.

You need to figure out whose life you’ve been living.

Why this letter may give you an existential crisis

In the next few minutes, I’m going to show you three things.

First, why the beliefs running your life were installed before you were old enough to consent to them (and the research that proves this isn’t just a feeling).

Second, how to surface the specific belief that’s currently keeping you stuck in whichever area of your life feels most off right now.

Third, a seven-day protocol for testing that belief against one you’d actually choose.

If you do this honestly, you will not finish the week the same person who started it.

That’s the point.

This will be incredibly comprehensive.

We are going to dig deep into your psyche.

All I ask is that you set aside time to actually read this.

Resist the urge to get distracted, even if every sentence doesn’t give you a little hit of dopamine. You have to earn it with this letter.

If anything, atleast read to Phase 2, The Inversion Test, of the belief interrogation... because that alone made me question much of my life as I wrote it.

I - How life-determining code got written in your head without your permission

Every person alive is running on a set of beliefs about what will make them happy.

These beliefs are mostly invisible to the person holding them.

They feel less like opinions and more like how reality “obviously” is.

The person grinding toward a million dollars genuinely believes the million will fix something. The person chasing the relationship genuinely believes the relationship will save them. The person building the business, the body, the audience, the farm, the family... all of them are right, in the sense that they’ll feel a real hit of meaning when they get there.

And all of them are wrong, in the sense that the hit wears off in weeks and they’re left standing in the same body with the same nervous system, wondering why the thing didn’t do what it was supposed to do.

This is how the mind works.

We move toward what we believe will make us whole.

The problem is almost nobody stops to ask where those beliefs came from.

A thousand years ago in ancient Japan, there was an old Zen monastery holding a sesshin (their enlightenment intensive). These were multi-day retreats where monks would meditate for their enlightenment.

During an intensive, an annoying cat wandered into the room and began meowing. At first, the monks ignored it, but the cat kept going to the point where the monks became agitated by the noise.

The Zen master instructed one of the young monks to go tie the cat outside in the front of the monastery by a post so it couldn’t sneak back and disturb them.

The sesshin continued, and it turned out to be a retreat where more monks than usual achieved their enlightenments during that intensive.

Centuries later, monasteries throughout Japan would adopt the practice of tying a cat outside the front door.

One young monk, new to the monastery, was tying up the cat when he asked the Zen master, “Why are you forcing me to tie this cat outside? What’s this going to do?”

The Zen master replied, “This is the cat of enlightenment. When we tie this cat outside, it causes more of the monks to have their enlightenments. So do as you’re told.”

And the young monk did just that.

Whether the story is literally true doesn’t matter.

What matters is that you are the young monk, and your entire life is full of cats you tie up every day without asking why.

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Your operating system was installed before you were old enough to object

Between the ages of roughly two and seven, your brain runs in a state called theta wave dominance. It’s the same brain state adults pay hypnotherapists to access.

You absorb everything.

You don’t even really have the ability to determine whether or not the information is good.

The tone your mother used when money was tight. The way your father talked about his boss. Whether ambition was celebrated or resented at the dinner table. Whether curiosity got you praised or told to sit down. Whether you were loved when you performed or loved when you existed.

By the time you’re a teenager, those patterns have hardened into what feels like your personality, or at least that’s what we call it.

By the time you’re twenty-five, they’re foundational pillars in your psyche. You can’t just remove them or else everything the pillars support will crumble.

This is why the twenty-nine-year-old who “suddenly” quits the corporate job to start a business isn’t what most people think. He’s not impulsive or taking a massive risk.

Instead, he’s been running a script his parents wrote in 1998, and somewhere around his late twenties he accumulated enough contradictory evidence to finally question it.

The script breaks.

He either writes a new one or finds a new script to follow.

Most people find a new script.

Your job (if you want your life to feel like yours) is to write one.

The data is unfortunately, uncomfortably specific

If you think I’m just speaking nonsense, the research is worse than you’d guess.

The World Values Survey has tracked the beliefs of over 100 countries since 1981. It’s the largest dataset on human values ever assembled.

The core finding, after four decades of research: your values are overwhelmingly predicted by the survival conditions of your childhood.

That is, the economic and cultural pressure you grew up inside.

People raised in scarcity prioritize security, tradition, obedience, and in-group loyalty. People raised in abundance prioritize autonomy, self-expression, creativity, and meaning.

This means the “values” you’re defending as your “deepest truth” are, statistically, a pretty accurate readout of your parents’ tax bracket and country they lived in 1998.

For understanding, you can argue that Christianity (or whatever belief system) is the one true religion, but if you were born on the other side of the world, you would not believe that. You would be a completely different person on a different life trajectory. You can talk about abundance and energy as a laptop lifestyle bro who moved to Bali, but you can’t deny the fact that the culture and ability to live like a king largely shaped those beliefs.

That should bother you.

It bothers me.

If you never interrogate the script, one of two things happens

Option one: you succeed at it.

You hit the milestones assigned to you. You get the job, the salary, the partner, the house, the kids, the retirement account on track.

And somewhere around thirty-five or forty, you realize you are exhausted in a way sleep doesn’t fix, and the life you built doesn’t feel like a life. It feels like a performance you can’t stop performing because too many people are watching.

This is the “midlife crisis.”

But you can have this crisis well before midlife if you want, because waking up inside someone else’s goals is the cause, rather than age.

Option two: you fail at it.

You can’t sustain the discipline to chase goals that aren’t yours, so you drift. You half-start things. You consume other people’s lives on your phone for three hours a night.

You tell yourself you’re lazy, or broken, or unmotivated, when the truth is simpler and more humiliating:

You can’t commit to the life because the life isn’t yours to commit to.

There is a third option, but very few people take it.

Because it requires doing the one thing the script was specifically designed to prevent:

Questioning the script while you’re still young enough to write a different one.

That’s what the rest of this letter is for.

II - How to recreate yourself by interrogating your beliefs (a 7-day protocol)

It is only those who are in constant revolt that discover what is true, not the man who conforms, who follows some tradition.

- Krishnamurti

There are two types of beliefs operating your life:

1. Inherited beliefs - the ones installed during childhood by your environment, parents, culture, and survival conditions. These are unconscious. You didn’t choose them.

2. Chosen beliefs - the ones you consciously decide to live by after examining your life. These are intentional and iterative. They change when experience demands.

Most people don’t even think about these.

Or worse, they think they have certain beliefs and their actions say otherwise.

This is why most people feel unfulfilled. Their stated values and their actual values are different values, and they don’t know it.

The next seven days are a protocol for finding out which is which.

Before you start, pick one domain of your life that feels most off right now. Health, career, creativity, finances, relationships.

Just one for now.

You can pick other ones if you want to repeat it for future weeks, and if you do, those 5-6 weeks will be the most transformative era for you.

III - Phase 1: The Excavation (Days 1-2)

Before you can test a belief, you have to find one.

This is harder than it sounds.

Your inherited beliefs are not labeled. They show themselves in your daily actions, but those actions are too normal for you to notice. They feel exactly like your own opinions.

In fact, they feel more like your own opinions than your actual opinions do, because you have never had to defend them.

They’re the water you’re swimming in.

The only reliable way to surface an inherited belief is to work backwards from your behavior.

What you actually do, every day, is a confession. Your calendar, your bank account, your screen time, and the things you say yes and no to... these are the honest signals of what you believe, regardless of what you tell yourself or anyone else.

This phase takes two days. The goal at the end of it is one written sentence (one belief) that you can test in Phase 2.

Day 1: The audit

Answer these four questions in writing.

Not in your head. In writing.

(You should be pulling out a paper or notes app right now).

The act of forming the words is where the belief shows itself. It will resist being named, and you’ll watch yourself soften the answers as you type.

Don’t let yourself.

The more the answer embarrasses you, the closer you are.

Remember the area of your life you chose above. The one that feels the most “off” like health, relationships, money, creativity, etc.

Question 1: In this area, what do I say I want?

The polished version. The one you’d give at dinner with trusted friends.

“I want to build a side-business.”

“I want to be in the best shape of my life.”

“I want to do meaningful creative work.”

Whatever your stated goal is, write it down exactly as you’d say it out loud.

Question 2: In this area, what does my actual behavior reveal I want?

Now look at last week.

What did you actually do? No masking the truth by focusing on the one productive block where you got something done. Think about the entire week.

Where did your time go? Where did your money go? What did you open your phone to do when nobody was watching?

Write the answer as if you were describing a stranger whose life you’ve been observing.

This is an important part.

The stranger’s wants are different from the wants you claimed in question 1.

Name them.

Question 3: What would I have to believe for the stranger’s behavior to make sense?

No man can think, feel, will, nor even dream, without everything being defined, conditioned, limited, directed by a goal which floats before him.

– Alfred Adler

This is the question where the work you’re hiding from reveals itself.

A person who says they want to build a business but spends their evenings watching other people build businesses on YouTube must believe something that makes consuming feel like progress.

A person who says they want to be in the best shape of their life but has skipped the gym for three weeks must believe something that makes skipping feel acceptable.

Behavior is never random. It is always the output of a belief and a goal. Usually one the person would deny holding if you asked them directly.

I beg of you to understand this.

It’s the difference between saying and displaying.

You may say you want to build a business, but you display that you just want to stack evidence that you tried and it didn’t work, so you stop trying without having to admit you were scared to actually succeed.

Back to question 3, write down what that belief would have to be for your behavior to make sense to a stranger. Phrase it as a sentence starting with “I believe...” and finish it in a way that would actually produce the behavior you described.

Examples of what might come out:

• I believe that preparing to start is the same as starting.

• I believe that if I commit fully and fail, I will not survive it.

• I believe that I am only lovable when I am producing.

• I believe that wanting something publicly is humiliating unless I already have it.

• I believe that rest is something I have to earn and I haven’t earned it yet.

None of these sound like beliefs a thoughtful adult would choose.

That’s the point.

You didn’t choose them. You inherited them.

Question 4: Who in my life, living or dead, would nod if they read that sentence?

Somebody taught you this.

Not with a lecture. With a thousand small moments.

A parent’s tone of voice when you came home with a C. A coach who only gave you praise after a win. A friend group that mocked anyone who tried and failed publicly (for some reason it’s cringe to be a try hard). A grandparent who survived something hard and passed the survival posture down as a family value long after the danger was gone.

Name the person, or the type of person.

We’re not blaming the person here. We’re just deepening the identification of the belief.

You are doing it because a belief whose source you can see is a belief you can question.

Day 2: The confirmation

Day 2 is for checking whether you actually found the belief, or whether you found a decoy.

Because the mind is tricky, and it will always try to deceive you.

They look like real beliefs but the ones that sound deep but wouldn’t actually change anything if you inverted them.

A real inherited belief, named correctly, should make you slightly nauseous to read back. It may even trigger full on disgust. So much disgust that you can’t imagine yourself believing it anymore.

If your Day 1 sentence feels noble or admirable or insightful, you haven’t found it yet. You’ve found something you’d post on Instagram.

Run the sentence through these three tests:

Test 1: The specificity test.

Does the sentence point at one specific area of your life, or is it a general platitude?

“I believe I’m afraid of failure” is a platitude.

“I believe that if I launch the business and it fails, my father will finally have proof that he was right about me” is a belief.

The first one is a theme. The second one is a pillar in your psyche that if removed will be painful, but will then allow the potential to recreate yourself. You can decorate an old house, but if the foundation is rotting, you’re solving the wrong problem.

If your sentence reads like a book title, go back and write the version you wouldn’t say out loud.

Test 2: The prediction test.

If your sentence is the actual belief, it should predict your behavior in situations you haven’t considered yet.

Try it. Given this belief, what would you expect yourself to do next time you had a chance to publish something? Ask someone out? Raise your rates? Spend a Saturday alone?

If the belief accurately predicts your behavior across three unrelated scenarios, there’s something there.

If it only explains the one behavior you started with, it’s probably a narrower belief masquerading as the root one. Keep digging.

Test 3: The resistance test.

Read the sentence out loud. Then read it again.

If a part of you wants to add qualifiers (well, it’s not exactly that, it’s more like...) that resistance is the signal.

You’re close. The belief is defending itself.

Let the resistance happen, then write the sentence one more time, more honestly than before.

The final version is the one you take into Phase 2.

What you should have at the end of Day 2

One sentence. Written down.

Specific enough that you could explain it to a stranger in thirty seconds. Uncomfortable enough that you don’t want to share it with anyone.

That sentence is the belief you will invert in Phase 2. Everything downstream of this moment depends on it being honest, so spend the time to get it right.

Most people will not.

Most people will write something vaguely self-critical, feel proud of themselves for the introspection, and move on without changing anything.

You are welcome to do that. It will feel productive for about a week and then your life will return to exactly the shape it had before you started reading this.

The alternative is to write the sentence you don’t want to write.

IV - Phase 2: The Inversion Test (Days 3-5)

This is where it gets uncomfortable.

Because testing requires you to act against the exact instinct that has kept you safe your entire life.

Your nervous system does not distinguish between “this belief is outdated” and “if I act against this belief, I will be cast out of the tribe and die.” It treats them the same.

That is why inversion feels like physical risk even when nothing is actually at stake.

The goal of this phase is to design one small action that contradicts the inherited belief you surfaced, take the action, and watch what your mind does in response.

The watching is the work. Not the action.

When you act against an inherited belief, your brain will flood you with reasons the action is a mistake.

You do not need to fight it. You need to see it clearly, name it, and keep going.

Here are seven inversions, each targeting a belief I see chewing up ambitious people in their twenties and thirties.

Pick the one that makes your stomach drop.

That’s the one you need.

1. “I need to finish learning before I start.”

You’ve bought the courses. You’ve read the books. You have a Notion database of strategies you’re going to implement “once you’re ready.”

You’re not going to implement them.

You use learning the way other people use Netflix. It’s a way to feel productive while not actually risking anything.

Inversion: This week, publish something unfinished.

A post, a product, a landing page, a first client offer. Doesn’t matter.

Ship it before you feel ready. You will not feel ready.

You will probably feel like your survival is at stake.

Watch for that feeling specifically. It is the one you’ve been organizing your whole adult life around.

2. “I just need to be more disciplined.”

Every time you fall off a habit, you conclude you need more discipline.

So you build a harder system. You buy a new planner. You try the 5am thing again. It works for a few days and falls apart.

You blame yourself.

Inversion: For three days, do not try to be disciplined. Do not force a single habit.

Instead, track what you naturally do. What you reach for when no one is telling you to do anything.

Most people discover that when they stop forcing themselves to do things, the life underneath isn’t one they actually want to live.

And that’s okay, that can be changed.

That’s what you’re trying to realize here... that you don’t lack discipline. Instead, you just don’t want to do it, and you should probably act toward the thing you want.

3. “I’ll pursue what I want after I have financial security.”

You have a number in your head.

Six figures saved.

Enough to quit.

Enough runway.

The number keeps going up.

Every time you get close, the goalposts move, because while you think the belief is about money, it’s not. You’re waiting for permission.

You are waiting to be told it’s okay.

Inversion: This week, spend 90 minutes on the thing you would do if money were handled.

Not “work on the side project.” The actual thing. The one you’re embarrassed to say out loud.

Write the novel. Sketch the building. Draft the album.

You live in the 21st century. You can do whatever you want.

Do it badly. Do it in secret if you need to.

The goal is to prove to your nervous system that pursuing the thing does not kill you. Which is what it currently believes.

4. “I need to build a personal brand.”

You post because you’re supposed to post.

You’re building an “audience” for a product you haven’t made, teaching a skill you haven’t mastered, performing a version of yourself that you curated by studying three creators you kind of resent.

You tell yourself this is self-actualization.

Even though this is something I preach and recommend, the last thing I want is for you to be assigned a belief by the person who tells you not to be assigned beliefs.

Inversion: This week, write one piece of content that would cost you followers.

Share the opinion you’ve been softening. Say the thing your niche doesn’t say.

If your output is so calibrated that it couldn’t possibly alienate anyone, you aren’t building a respectable brand. Everyone is unfortunately a clone nowadays. I’m personally taking weeks off at a time to prevent this.

Find out what happens when you aren’t trying to perform.

Usually, the people who were going to unfollow were never your audience anyway.

5. “I should have figured this out by now.”

You are 26, or 29, or 32, and you have a clock in your head telling you you’re behind.

It’s humorous when you gain perspective.

Your friends are getting married. Your college roommate got promoted. You look at LinkedIn and feel nauseous.

You work harder to catch up to people whose lives you do not actually want.

Inversion: For seven days, delete the apps that tell you what other people are doing. All of them. Instagram, LinkedIn, X, whatever you use to benchmark yourself.

Do not replace the time with more work.

Just let it be empty.

Most people discover within 2 days that the urgency they’ve been running on wasn’t theirs. It was manufactured by watching a highlight reel of strangers.

The belief running this pattern is “my life is a race against people I don’t know.”

Remove the input and see if the feeling survives.

It usually doesn’t.

6. “I’ll be happy once I hit the goal.”

No you won’t, and you know it.

You have hit goals before.

You hit them and felt a three-day high and then felt nothing and set a new goal.

This has happened enough times that a sane person would update their model.

You have not updated your model, because updating would require admitting that the thing you’ve organized your life around doesn’t produce what it promised.

Inversion: Write down every meaningful goal you’ve achieved in the last five years. Next to each one, write how long the satisfaction lasted.

Be honest.

For most, the satisfaction maybe lasts a week maximum.

Now look at your current goal (the one you’re grinding toward right now) and ask, without flinching, whether there is any evidence at all that this one will be different.

7. “I don’t want to be like them.”

There is a person, or a group, whose life disgusts you.

The corporate lifer. The Instagram wellness girl. The crypto bros. The non-tradwife. The 9-to-5 middle manager.

You organize a lot of your identity around not being them.

Your career choices are partly negative. Not because of what you want, but because of what you refuse to become.

Inversion: Sit down and write what you’d do with your life if the person you most define yourself against did not exist.

If there was no one to be unlike.

Most people discover that a surprising amount of what they call “their path” is just the inverse of someone else’s.

Finding out what you want in the absence of an enemy is one of the most clarifying exercises available to you.

How to actually do this

Pick one.

Not three. Not all seven. One.

The instinct to do all of them is itself a form of avoidance. If you’re busy running seven experiments you don’t have to fully commit to any.

Pick the one that made your stomach drop when you read it. For me, it’s number 7. That’s the belief doing the most damage.

Run the inversion for three days.

Keep a note on your phone (not a journal, a note) and write one sentence every night: what did the old belief say today, and what did I do anyway.

That’s it.

At the end of three days, you will have done something almost no one does. You will have generated firsthand data about whether the beliefs running your life are actual pillars or just loud.

Everything after this point is a matter of what you decide to do with that data.

V - Phase 3: The Verdict (Days 6-7)

By now, you have have a lot of power in your hands.

You surfaced a belief running your life without your permission. You designed an experiment to test it. You ran the experiment and watched what your mind did in response.

You have five or six days of data/evidence about what happens when you act against the script.

The last two days are for deciding what to do with that evidence.

Sit down with your notes and answer three questions.

These are not prompts. These are decisions.

Did acting from the chosen belief feel more alive, even when it was uncomfortable?

Alive is the key word.

Not happier. Not easier. Not more productive.

Alive. Meaning present, engaged, awake in your own life in a way you usually aren’t.

If the answer is yes, the chosen belief is closer to the truth of who you are than the inherited one.

And the discomfort you felt is a sign of growth. You have learned that the thing you feared has not, in fact, killed you.

Did the inherited belief hold up under examination?

Sometimes it does.

This is not a failure. Some of what you inherited is worth keeping.

But keeping it consciously, after examination, is different in kind from keeping it by default.

The inherited belief you chose to keep is now a chosen one.

That upgrade alone was worth the week.

What will you refuse to go back to?

This is the decision that matters.

Not what you’ll do. What you won’t.

Write one sentence, specific and non-negotiable, that names the version of your life you are no longer available for.

I will no longer live as if I need permission to pursue what I want.

I will no longer treat rest as something I have to earn.

I will no longer perform a version of myself to keep people who don’t know me comfortable.

Whatever it is. Write it, date it, and keep it somewhere you’ll see it.

That sentence is the only real output of this entire week.

Everything else was scaffolding to get you to the point where you could write it honestly.

VI - Please close the gap

Go back to the beginning of this letter.

There were two versions of you walking around. One was the version you performed. The other was the version that showed up for forty minutes on a Sunday when nobody was watching.

The entire point of this protocol was to start closing the gap between them.

Not by discovering some hidden true self buried beneath your conditioning (there is no such self, and the people selling you one are charging too much for it).

But by noticing, in real time, which version of you is making each decision. And slowly, deliberately, giving more of your life to the one that actually feels like yours.

That is what Identity-Lifestyle Fit is.

It is a practice of choosing, on repeat, over years, the beliefs that compose your mind and behavior.

The belief you questioned this week is one of probably fifty that are still running. You’ll surface the next one when you’re ready.

The work does not end. The work becoming conscious is the thing that changes.

Here is what I can promise you:

If you do this honestly (this week, and again next month, and again the month after) your life six months from now will not look like your life today. At all.

All without optimizing your routine more or working 12 hour days.

Because you stopped spending your one finite life performing a script written by people who did not know you, could not have known you, and in most cases meant well anyway.

The version of you that shows up on Sunday afternoon is a preview of what your life feels like when it’s actually yours.

Most people never get more than forty minutes of it.

You are not most people, or you would not have read this far.

– Dan

Or to start writing essays if you aren’t already.

No, not like the essays you were assigned in school.

I’m talking about one of the greatest tools to learn faster, think deeper, improve the articulation of your ideas and beliefs, and avoid being replaced by AI.

But those are the selfish personal benefits of writing.

There’s something deeper.

The modern information environment is breaking our ability to think, and most people don’t even notice. Essays might be one of the last forms of content that actually develops your capacity to make sense of reality.

We are living through the largest-scale production of fake thinking in human history.

The consequences are quite high, and only a select few people care.

In this letter, I want to show you exactly how this fake thinking epidemic (if it goes on as it is) will not only make your own life worse, but potentially lead to the collapse of society.

Then, I want to help you write your first essay so you can fix one of the most precious resources you have - your mind.

(Turning it into a career or side income doesn’t hurt either).

I – The internet isn’t dead, but it’s killing us

The written word as the primary type of media was probably required for democracy to work, because it required the capacity to pay attention to an idea for long enough to understand it. — Daniel Schmachtenberger

Social media and AI are quite literally a threat to civilization.

I know that sounds insane.

How could scrolling on Instagram actually lead to the collapse of society? Watching a little TikTok dance can’t hurt, right? Reading someone’s 5 second opinion about Trump on X is just a part of your lunch break, yeah?

Yes, but only when you are so focused on yourself.

When you zoom out and see what’s really at play, it’s hard to unsee.

There are 3 layers to this.

Stick with me here, because this goes deep.

The first layer is that the epistemic commons is becoming poisoned.

What is the epistemic commons?

Think of it as our water source, but for information, and that’s extremely important.

Most people watch the news to stay “informed,” or to educate themselves, but if you look closely, they’re just becoming complacent. Their lives aren’t changing for the better. In fact, most people are becoming more jaded, more polarized, and more violent.

Whenever you post on social media, whenever someone creates a TV show or movie, or whenever someone produces music on Spotify, the epistemic commons (or public information environment) grows.

This obviously gets complex and requires a level of systems thinking to fully determine, but if the content you publish in public hurts more than it helps, and it is not counterbalanced by content that does help, our intellectual water source becomes contaminated.

Why is that bad?

Because the information you or any individual consumes influences their identity. Their identity influences their life trajectory and behavior. The form of content you consume trains your attention span, tolerance for complexity, ability to hold contradictions, and the capacity for nuance.

That’s why you learn, right?

To equip yourself with the knowledge and cognitive ability to achieve the life you want?

But that’s just it...

Before you can solve any problem that is a civilizational threat in climate, governance, AI alignment, public health, or the rest, you need a population capable of understanding the problem coherently. 99% of people don’t even know what these problems entail, because they’re happy drooling over the cat video on their phone.

The takeaway here that we will touch on later is this - Does what you consume or create lead to a beneficial behavior change in yourself and others? Or are you unconsciously soaking in information that silently makes your life worse, and poisoning the information environment by what you contribute to it?

That’s layer one.

Reminder: Build a 2-Hour Content System in 14 Days starts April 7th (a few days from now).

If you are interested in turning thoughtful writing into a modern career, or simply want to realize that you do have ideas worth putting out in public, consider joining before the start date.

Check it out here.

II – The three forces breaking civilization’s ability to think

As technology is empowering our choices and we are getting something like the power of gods, you have to have something like the love and the wisdom of gods to wield that or you self-destruct.

I want to introduce you to one of the most important thinkers of our time.

His name is Daniel Schmachtenberger.

He doesn’t post much, but he occasionally makes an appearance on podcasts. When you listen to them, you can instantly tell that he is a calm, nuanced, and non-polarizing systems thinker.

He has dedicated his life to what he calls the Metacrisis, and while it’s much deeper than what type of content is posted on the internet, that’s what we’re going to focus on.

In a nutshell, Schmachtenberger believes that there are 3 massive threats that can result in 3 outcomes, two of those outcomes being catastrophic.

The 3 threats (he calls them generator functions) are:

• Rivalrous dynamics – Win-lose games where one party’s gain requires another’s loss. Think arms races, corporate competition, social media content, and academic publishing (hoarding data to publish first).

• Substrate consumption – “Substrate” is what something needs to exist, like soil for plants, attention for media, trust for markets. When systems consume their foundation faster than they can regenerate, that’s bad. Think depleting top soil that took millennia to form and the attention economy consuming human cognitive capacity faster than it recovers.

• Exponential technology – Tools and systems that improve themselves at accelerating rates, outpacing human wisdom. Think AI doubling in capacity, automated weapons, and social media algorithms evolving faster than we can study their psychological impacts.

When those 3 things converge, they can result in either civilizational collapse (nuclear war, unaligned AI, ecological destruction, engineered pandemics) or dystopian control (total surveillance, digital authoritarianism, elimination of individual agency).

He calls these “attractors,” or the basins that complex societies tend to fall into.

The “third attractor,” or the good outcome here, is a world where sense-making, shared understanding, and aligned incentives exist.

When we look at the internet, AI, and social media, it’s pretty easy to see how this is playing out.

When creators compete for attention, they optimize for engagement rather than transformation (rivalrous dynamics). The algorithm only measures how much you’ve clicked, watched, or liked, so creators are much more likely to abandon truth and impact for whatever will make people react. That’s an obvious problem.

When engagement is optimized, the content that individuals consume does not require thinking or understanding, so that muscle atrophies. The “substrate” being consumed is cognitive capacity, which is downstream of attention.

AI accelerates content production, yes, but it also accelerates imitation, and when there’s only destructive content to imitate, you can see where that goes. AI itself isn’t the issue. The issue is that it can mimic what looks like real thinking without requiring any cognitive effort from either the creator or consumer.

So, the default outcome here is the epistemic commons (or mental water supply) becomes poisoned incredibly fast because it’s optimized for content that looks like it should shift your thinking but structurally it cannot.

That leads to layer three - what you can do about it, and how you can profit from it in a meaningful way.

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III – Why essays may be the last bastion of real thinking

Wisdom is not algorithmic and cannot be made algorithmic.

For the past few decades, a certain type of content has dominated the internet.

Specifically, content that delivers conclusions without requiring thought.

It’s fast food for the mind.

So we’re going to call this category of media “fast content” - because social media companies use the same psychological triggers to get you addicted as fast food companies who realized fat, sugar, and salt were a scarce good that are brain’s aren’t wired to have an abundance. Finding those resources spiked dopamine because they aided in survival.

On the fast content end of the spectrum, you have BuzzFeed listicles, rage tweets, AI-generated summaries, hot takes, engagement-optimized threads, and TikTok explainers that give you the feeling of understanding in 30 seconds. Makes sense why everyone thinks they’re an expert these days.

The early adopters of the internet could post “Top 10 habits to get rich by age 30” and be swarmed by hundreds of thousands of readers, but the landscape has changed.

On the slow content end of the spectrum, or content that requires you to think, you have essays, long-form non-optimized conversations, certain books, certain lectures, and even tweets crafted in a way that make you think to receive the insight.

I personally want to focus on essays.

Why?

Because they are something that you can produce, alone, and leverage to take advantage of the meaning economy we are heading into. And, essays are the most scalable and durable form. A meaningful conversation can shift one person, but it lives and dies in the memory of the participants. An essay develops the reader’s and writer’s thinking capacity, and it can do that for thousands of people across decades. More on that in a bit.

On top of that, most people walk around with opinions they’ve never thought through. They feel like they believe something, but they’ve never tried to write it down in a way that would survive a smart reader’s scrutiny.

It also doesn’t hurt that some of the world’s most respected minds were forged through the act of writing essays: Paul Graham, Isaac Newton, Peterson in his prime, Nietzsche, Emerson, etc.

The defining factor of an essay is that AI cannot write one.

For understanding, it helps to distinguish an article from an essay:

1. Articles are answers, essays are arguments.

2. Articles package existing knowledge, essays change the author’s beliefs.

3. Articles start with the conclusion, essays figure it out.

4. Articles inform or educate, essays are an act of thinking.

5. Articles communicate what’s already there, essays discover what isn’t.

If you think about it, only a human can write an essay, because a robot doesn’t have a situated point of view. It does not have direct experience. It can simulate the perspective you tell it to adopt, but it lacks the beliefs, biases, and emotions that lead you to think and question in a particular direction. And honestly, it would be nearly impossible to pass all of that context off to AI, because every passing moment influences your point of view, and in order to have a meaningful point of view, you can’t be sitting at your desk conversing with Claude 24 hours a day. You have to engage in novel experiences.

More importantly, AI destroys the magic of surprise and discovery. This is a crucial point. You can tell AI to share something novel, but then you are anticipating it. It is no longer a surprise. You destroyed any chance of stumbling upon a discovery. It may give you good material to write about, but it was not from your own creative ability and thinking.

The more I use AI, the more I find it useful, but on the other edge of the sword, I find it exhaust creativity extremely fast. I can’t help but believe (even as someone who is pro-AI) that most relevant content on the internet will be in essay form. Slow content.

IV – The meaning economy and how to thrive in it

The meaning economy has been emerging for a few years now.

AI has only accelerated this.

Why?

Because meaning is the scarcest commodity in civilization right now.

Before industrialization, we praised Gods in the sky. During industrialization, we made productivity our God. Today, more is our God. More money, more information, more content. We have more stuff and less purpose than ever.

In my eyes, meaning will be sold at a premium.

People will crave it more than they already do.

And who better to provide meaning than those who shape the epistemic commons? The value creators who fight against the poisoning of the water supply.

But how is meaning created and experienced?

Meaning is the experience of ordered consciousness.

When attention is fragmented, scattered, and pulled in competing directions, that’s psychic entropy. It feels like anxiety, boredom, and restlessness. Chaos.

When attention is invested in a complex, challenging activity with clear feedback, that’s psychic negentropy. It feels like flow, purpose, and meaning. Order.

So, meaning isn’t something you find out there in the world, it’s a state of consciousness that emerges when your attention is ordered toward something complex enough to fully engage you. If you are level 10, a level 1 challenge is boring and a level 20 challenge is daunting. But a level 11 challenge is just enough to lock you in.

Meaning is created through the process of ordering consciousness.

The act of ordering consciousness (taking chaos and creating structure, wrestling with complexity until it coheres) results in meaning.

If you’ve ever been stuck in a rut, wrestled with where your life should go, and eventually received a burst of clarity that launches you into a blur of meaningful living, you’ve directly experienced this.

What does this have to do with content and essays?

1. Fast content (entropic, pre-digested, algorithmic, AI-generated) skips the ordering process and delivers pre-packaged conclusions. The reader’s consciousness stays and becomes more disordered. They received information but didn’t generate meaning. That’s why they feel informed but empty.

2. Slow content (essays, genuine thinking in public, insight that requires effort) requires both the writer and the reader to engage in the ordering process. The writer orders their own consciousness through the act of writing. The reader re-orders their thoughts by properly digesting the thinking.

What’s the opportunity here?

The world doesn’t need more people competing for the most rage-bait post. It also doesn’t need more people trying to become the most productive person in the world to build the next billion-dollar AI company.

Instead, it needs ordinary people who make sense of their own minds and document them in public.

Previously, I’ve called these people “value creators” (because it’s distinct from the typical influencer or personal brand).

It’s a person who chooses a positive trajectory for their life, cares deeply about the interests and skills that help move the needle toward that, and passes their journey down from their point of view to others who can relate and benefit from it.

By all measures, I believe this is a future-proof and deeply meaningful way to live. Sure, you aren’t creating a tangible physical product, but you are causing a greater cascade. That is, you are providing the root. The information that influences identity that influences behavior that influences the flourishing or destruction of civilization. Even building rockets doesn’t have that much power.

V – How to think in public (and why it’s the most valuable skill you can develop)

It’s funny.

You guys don’t see it, but this letter was incredibly difficult to write.

I scrapped three separate drafts about “why you should write an essay” but they all felt off. However, by sticking with the challenge and synthesizing a point of view that led to a deeper understanding of what I was trying to say.

And if this letter changes your mind and behavior in a positive way, that brings even more meaning into my life and yours.

I hope that you can experience that same feeling.

So, let’s get practical.

Here’s what I could put together to get you started on the right track, then we’ll talk about where you can public your essay.

• Write to discover, not to perform. Most social media engagement comes from packaging anyway, and you can learn about that later. Start with a concept, viewpoint, question, experience, thought, something that bothers you, or topic. An essay begins with uncertainty and an open mind.

• Write about what genuinely interests you. Focus on a single main idea. Use this as a time to research and learn. Go down rabbit holes. Challenge everyone’s point of view. Do not accept one source as law.

• Resist the template. You’ll find how you like to structure your writing as you get better at it. It’s a skill, remember that. For now, just write. Have a debate with yourself. Ask questions to keep the writing going. Then worry about structure and ask AI for help if you want. Do the thinking first.

• Ask, “Do I actually believe this?” It’s easy to write what you already believe, but the point of this is to change what you believe. This is the most difficult part. Resist the urge to act like you are absolutely right.

• Read essays, consume centropic content. Your sense-making capacity is shaped by your inputs. You can’t expect the For You page to feed you this content. You must actively search, curate, and nurture your digital feed.

• Build a body of work, not a content calendar. People don’t follow creators for one piece of content. They follow for their body of coherent work. Each essay compounds on the last. AI can’t replicate a coherent philosophy built through years of genuine thinking.

Makes sense, but where do you start?

X or Substack.

Those are the only two platforms that prioritize long-form writing and thinking.

I’ve written about this quite a few times before, so I’ll leave you at that.

If you want a guided challenge to do this, and to learn the ins and outs of impactful writing, consider joining the challenge before April 7th.

– Dan

These past few weeks, I’ve felt completely brain-fried.

You know, when you feel like you’re thinking about nothing and everything at the same time.

When you try to think, brainstorm, or have a great idea, and nothing comes to mind, no matter how hard you try.

It’s more of a cognitive burnout than an emotional one. I can keep working, sure, but I don’t feel very human.

It could be stress.

It could be too much AI (I’ve been using cursor quite a bit recently).

It could be falling out of my writing routine (which stems from shifting focus to other companies, which leads to more stress).

Great ideas and writing were a breeze for me just last month. I could sit down and write my heart out and feel like it was quality and close-to-original thinking.

The longer this went on, the more the feeling compounded.

Why can’t I write? Where did all my ideas go? How can I get back?

That’s my primary goal with this letter.

I want to provide both you and me with a guide that helps us return to our most creative state, and that’s very important, as you’ll find.

My secondary goal is to show you that, even if you don’t think you’re a “creative person,” you can enter an incredibly enjoyable state of consciousness. Similar to the flow state, but potentially more potent. You aren’t focused on breezing through a set of tasks. Instead, you’re seeing the world in a completely different way, like a dog who sees grass for the first time.

My tertiary goal is to give you a 7-day protocol. If you follow it to a T, you will go from feeling brain-fried to alive. It will be difficult but well worth it, and the quality of your work will improve drastically.

Because in today’s world, your creativity is the most scarce resource.

Anyone can build anything. Anyone can think anything. Anyone can write anything. The people who will win in business, writing, art, and general quality of life, as always, will be those who can take the most creative path. The path that nobody else considered to take.

I – You don’t have ideas because there’s too much interference.

“I’m not a creative person.”

That unfortunate and often unthought-through statement makes creativity seem like it’s some sort of talent or skill.

In some ways, it is, but at its core, creativity is a natural way of being. It’s a state of consciousness. It’s a capacity that everyone has, but that capacity gets buried as time goes on.

How does it get buried?

With anything that narrows your mind. Creativity is a very open, relaxed state where you see connections, patterns, and possibilities that aren’t immediately obvious. It’s the act of noticing the unnoticed, which is not the same as what most think creativity is: creating something from nothing.

In my eyes, there are Three Narrowers of the Mind:

1) Conditioning is the enemy of wonder.

When you think of creativity, you think of children.

They see the world through such fresh eyes. If a child asked ChatGPT to build a teleportation device so they can take their friends to another galaxy, nobody would bat an eye, but if you did that, people would think you’re just an idiot who doesn’t understand “how the world works.”

Kids haven’t yet received the compounding negative feedback from their parents, teachers, and peers. They haven’t internalized that they have to act a certain way to fit into a broken and boring society.

You must go to school.

You must do your best to get a high-paying job.

You must praise this God, and if you disobey, you’re going to hell.

By the time most people turn 20 years old, they are the same as everyone else. Same thoughts, actions, and types of beliefs. They are going down the life path assigned to them rather than the one they chose to create.

Creativity requires holding beliefs loosely and entertaining an idea without immediately rejecting or demonizing it (as everyone does on social media, where it drives engagement and facilitates groupthink).

2) Productivity as a priority is a losing game.

When the 9-5 job became a thing during industrialization, productivity became the highest value. Everyone became a specialist who only learned how to place one piece of the puzzle, because if they understood how to solve the entire thing, they would be the entrepeneur not the employee.

Today, everyone feels like they’re falling behind (and if you’re being real, you’re never going to catch up in a game you didn’t create. Creativity is the only way out).

You have this perpetual deadline that’s always looming.

A stressed mind only worries about survival, and you can’t see new connections when your nervous system is ruled by deadlines.

If your life isn’t structured around optimization and efficiency (in other words if you aren’t a robot) everyone thinks you’re useless. But that’s exactly what creativity demands. Useless wandering. True boredom. Creating space for the right idea to emerge that will take you much further than the productivity bros stuck in the same race as everyone else.

People who schedule every hour don’t stumble onto anything

The priorities themselves interfere with the conditions creative thought needs.

3) Infinite input and zero processing time.

Your metabolism can only go so fast.

It’s obvious that if you eat too much food, you start to feel slow and look slow.

Yes, you get fat.

But most people don’t realize this applies to the mind as well.

They feel as if they don’t consume 10 podcasts a week, they won’t be able to “keep up,” even though the opposite is true. Their mental metabolism doesn’t have time to digest the information.

There’s a time for curated information that helps spark more ideas, but if it isn’t kept under tight control, it gets dangerous very quickly.

Creativity is rarely an input problem, but then again, you can only cook with what’s in the fridge. The problem is that most people’s fridges are overflowing with ice cream and soda pop.

Oh, by the way, we’re doing another challenge starting in exactly 2 weeks.

It’s called: Build a 2-Hour Content System In 14 Days.

(It also comes with 14 prompts, one for each day, and no they don’t write content for you. We aren’t that desparate yet.)

It’s intensive challenge that gets your creative juices flowing. By the end you’ll have your unique voice, a batch of non-slop social posts, one polished newsletter you’re proud of, and a skill that AI won’t replace any time soon.

Join here to get in early.

Early bird pricing ends in 3 days.

II – You’re not bored, you’re overstimulated.

“Dan, I’m bored all the time and I’m not creative.”

Being chronically overstimulated and overcaffeinated is not boredom. You’re so fried that you’ve gone all the way off the other end and associate that with boredom because you’re so used to euphoria that it’s become boring. You quite literally can’t go any further, you must come back the other way.

True boredom (after your withdrawal period) does a few things.

1) Boredom provides a gateway to novelty.

Carl Jung, OG psychologist, harped on the importance of shadow work – confronting the uncomfortable aspects of ourselves we typically avoid.

Sitting with boredom does just this.

It activates breakthrough insights when the rational mind stops trying to solve everything.

It reveals our authentic desires beneath external conditioning.

It sets the scene for 3 flow triggers, making you more likely to enter a season of intense learning and building:

• Deep embodiment – being present with discomfort

• Novelty – boredom forces you to seek new, healthier stimulation

• Unpredictability – not knowing what will emerge from the void

If you don’t know what to do in your life, maybe you should do nothing.

Not the default nothing that everyone falls into, but truly nothing.

2) The brain will upregulate dopamine receptors when deprived.

Hedonic adaptation is your psychological thermostat.

No matter how high or low the temperature goes, it always tries to return to the set point.

This creates what psychologists call the “hedonic treadmill.” You’re always running toward the next source of pleasure, but the satisfaction never lasts. Each experience becomes your new normal, requiring more intense stimulation to achieve the same emotional high.

But when you deprive yourself of pleasure, the opposite happens. A hedonic treadmill reversal.

Slowly, then rapidly, simple pleasures become enjoyable again. You experience what Buddhists call the beginner’s mind.

You notice the detail in the sky when you’re on a walk outside. You notice the hint of rosemary in the well-cooked meal. Life becomes electric, as it should be.

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3) You don’t need motivation, you need clarity.

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

– Naval Ravikant

Boredom creates space for sensemaking. That is, processing and integrating experience. The digestion that most people don’t realize as important.

In the Information Age, modern technology creates a “context collapse.” Our brain is only capable of processing around 50 bits of information per second through our conscious attention.

When you deprive yourself to the point of boredom, you’re almost forced to confront all of the problems that you’ve suppressed over the years.

You need to sit and notice what happens in your mind.

It will be painful, but if you sit with it long enough, you’ll receive a burst of clarity that launches you into a new phase of life.

Through chaos, or a change in perspective of chaos, order emerges.

III – The 7-day protocol to slow the fuck down (how to feel alive again)

Alright you get it.

Creativity is an incredible thing, and you should probably prioritize it more.

But how?

Well, we look at the problem (being overstimulated, overcommited, mentally bloated) and design a system that results in the alleviation of those things. That’s what you do when something isn’t going well, but when you’re stuck in this narrow-minded state, it’s hard to first identify what your problem is, and even harder to change your behavior. That’s why a letter like this can be helpful. It shines a light of awareness (you can’t ask ChatGPT what you don’t think to ask).

Now, we don’t need a full “dopamine detox” here, but we do need to commit.

If it helps, get upset with how you feel, and use that negative energy to pursue these next 7 days full force:

Day 1-2: Reduce The Input Fast

This is the equivalent of doing intermittent fasting, but for the mind.

All of this is important, it’s okay if it doesn’t feel right.

• Impose strict timeblocks on your workday. If you can, limit work to 4 hours a day for this week. If you can’t, that’s fine. Set an alarm that marks the end. When it goes off, you’re done. No “one last task.” Your job is to not think about work or productivity when you’re not working. You’re practicing the skill of letting something feel unfinished without anxiety.

• Cut out your primary input source. Like the junk food in the cabinet at night, pick the one source you reach for the most mindlessly. This could be the podcast on the commute, the scroll before bed, or the news in the morning. Replace it with nothing. Sit in silence. Listen for an idea.

• Go on a walk. Not because it will do anything magical, but because ideas are caught in motion. No headphones. Hell, even leave your phone at home. This walk won’t do much for you since it may be your first time, but trust the process.

That’s it. Three simple changes.

Psychologically, removing constant input allows your brain’s default mode network (the brain’s “wandering” system) to fire. This is the network responsible for random insight, self-reflection, and imagining the future.

It cannot be active while you’re consuming.

For those who don’t know, I love experimenting with nootropics that help faciliate productivity, learning, or creativity in the brain.

My buddy is a genius level biochemist (seriously, he’s just fun to have a conversation with). He recently put together an assessment + custom formulations for this exact reason.

There’s beginner and advanced formulations for those who like that kind of stuff.

Day 3-4: Digest What’s Already There

Now that you’ve created space, things will start surfacing.

Unfinished thoughts, suppressed feelings, random connections, and ideas you forgot existed. Your mind finally has time to break down what it’s been collecting but doing nothing with.

During this phase (and while maintaining what you did in days 1 and 2), we’re going to practice noticing deeper layers of reality.

• Read one chapter of a book slowly. You aren’t trying to finish it or learn something, but simply trying to notice when a sentence makes you stop and think. When it does, put the book down. Sit with why that line hit you. In my eyes, this is the best way to read. Don’t try to quickly finish a book, just get what you need and put it down. That one idea will impact you more than the entire book.

• Sit with nothing for 10 minutes. You can call it meditation, sure, but I don’t want you to use a meditation app or any guided breathing technique. Just sit somewhere and let your mind do whatever it wants. It will be chaotic at first, but that’s the digestion happening. Don’t do anything with it. Just sit.

• Keep going on a walk. Same rules, no headphones or any stimulation. But this time, try to actually see things. You’ve passed by these things a hundred times, but have you noticed the detail in the sidewalk, the structure of the tree’s branches, or the vastness of the sky? I bet you didn’t even look up the last walk.

What we’re trying to do is release your grip on your subconscious (the thing responsible for working in the background and surfacing “aha” moments). Stepping away from task-oriented work is the best way to do this.

And if those moments of insight lead to an idea that allows you to do better, higher-leverage work, then are you not getting more done by not working?

Day 5-6: Become Interested In Life Again

Something I think about often:

When people say they “don’t find anything interesting,” I wonder if they’ve actually looked around. Everything is interesting.

Your mind is just so occupied with meaningless shit that you don’t notice it.

By now, your mental fog should be lifting. You feel a bit sharper, colors are more vivid, conversations are more interesting, and small things feel meaningful again. You walk outside and finally just enjoy a breath of fresh air again.

• Trust that ideas will come back. Resist the urge to take notes on everything. If it’s important, it will find its way to you. When you have an interesting thought, let it play out. Stay in that stream of consciousness. Don’t reach for your phone. In a world where people don’t trust their own minds, learn to trust yours.

• Have one real conversation. No “catching up” for 5 minutes before your next meeting. No “networking” to form a business connection. We’re trying not to perform here. Listen to other people’s perspectives and attempt to be as present as possible. Your brain may just light up.

• Extend the walk. You might find that you don’t want to stop.

During this phase, your dopamine receptors are resensitizing. You start doing something because it’s inherently interesting, which is a massive predictor for creative output, and leads perfectly into day 7.

Day 7: Create With What’s Emerged

Most people try to create from a state of depletion and then wonder why everything feels forced.

I know this feeling well. I’ve written a newsletter almost every week for the past 5 years. But this last month, I couldn’t find what to write about. It felt forced. I’d fallen out of the creative way of life.

Now that we’ve spent six days making space, processing, and letting connections form, you can create from abundance rather than obligation.

• Make something with no plan. Write, draw, record a 20-minute voice note, or cook without a recipe. The only rule is no rules. No strategic thinking or trying to find the perfect angle. Start a thread and follow it.

• Don’t share it. I know this is antithetical to what I preach, but we need to remember what it’s like to not have silent opinions influencing your direction. Notice how it feels to have made something that’s yours.

After at least 24 hours, if you want to return to it and post it somewhere, be my guest.

If you don’t know what to post or create, again, the writing / content system challenge starts soon.

What we are doing here is separating generative thinking (producing novel ideas) from evaluative thinking (judging and editing them). It’s typical for people to try to do both at the same time, but by doing so, you suppress the generative’s potential.

IV – To be creative, you need something to create.

Remember how we used to take spelling tests in grade school?

Whenever I learned a new word, I would start to hear that word everywhere.

The same happens when I see a car I’ve never seen before. I see it once, then I see it everywhere.

The same happened when exposed to certain business opportunities. I didn’t even know they existed, because I was made to believe that a 9-5 was the end-all be-all, and once I started exploring, I noticed them everywhere.

This is the reticular activating system in our brains.

It filters the millions of inputs we receive and surfaces the ones that match what you’ve told it matters.

This is exactly what we need to be more creative.

You need a meaningful project to work on. You need a problem to solve. You need a business to build. You need to create. An essay, a design, whatever.

You’re creating a lens by which you reprogram your mind.

Because if you are the culmination of the ideas you’ve accepted into your head, and the ideas you accept are based on what you deem important, and the only things that were important to you were the school, job, and retirement that industrial culture permeated into your parents, teachers, and peers, then the primary way to pursue a rare life is to simply question and choose what is important to you.

When you have something important - a project, design, product - even a conversation you overhear on the street becomes creative fuel. You read a book and a sentence pops out at you, but when another person reads it, they don’t get the same effect.

Without a project, your mind is a boat drifting in open water.

The 7 day protocol we went through calmed the storm, but even with a calm sea, if you don’t have a direction you’re just floating. It’s nice, but at some point you’ll want to do something.

So what makes a good frame?

What makes a project worth creating?

• It has to be something unsolved for you. It doesn’t have to be completely original or novel, but it must be a challenge. There must be something you don’t know the answer to yet, which allows your subconscious to become a magnet for relevant and useful ideas.

• It has to matter to you. Your pattern recognition is powered by emotional investment. A project you chose because it “looks good on paper” - like a high paying degree that you don’t actually care about - won’t activate the same radar as the one that genuinely keeps you up at night.

• It has to be shareable. In other words, it has to take some form. It has to exist in reality. It can be words, visuals, code, a conversation, a business, or a meal. You have to take the abstract thoughts in your head, ground them in reality, and test their worth. We aren’t just imagining things we can’t do here.

That begs the final question...

How do you find this meaningful project?

Well, it takes a bit of floundering, which is unpleasant, but it helps if you flip the problem on it’s head.

You think deeply about all of the meaningless projects, tasks, and activities you currently tolerate to fill your time, because if you aren’t engaged in something meaningful, where do you think your life will end up?

If you cultivate this deep awareness of what you don’t want in life, that starts to create your frame. You start to see it everywhere. And once you see it, it’s much easier to start moving in the opposite direction.

– Dan

If you want to continue reading here’s more letters:

Well, you do everything you would have done before, but you use AI to do it faster, with higher quality, and with less guesswork.

You still generate traffic.

You still write content.

You still write emails/newsletters.

You still create a product or service.

You still create a customer avatar.

You still formulate a compelling offer.

You still build a landing page.

You still write persuasive copy for that page.

You still put the offer in front of people and see if they buy.

But that’s a lot. Very few will do it.

Before AI was such a big thing, social media was the thing that allowed one-person to build what we call a “lifestyle business.”

But of course, now that the barrier of entry is lower, anyone can try to do this, meaning there is more “competition,” but most people barely try, and they especially don’t improve and iterate, and when things get rough they try to just have AI do it all for them. So, the barrier of entry is lower, but the skill cap is higher. If you take what you learn here, I feel like you’ll have a solid starting point.

For the sake of this letter, we’re going to set the goal of making $1 million as one person just so we can make this tangible.

I’m going to share exactly what you need to learn, how to use AI better than everyone else, and prompts that you can use today to start your business in about a week.

Note: We are not going to be using crazy agent workflows in this letter, but we may in the future if you want them. We are going over the fundamentals. The fact of the matter is that most people using things like OpenClaw and Claude Code are wasting their time and money. They just get a dopamine hit from watching an agent do stuff and thinking they’re “doing 10 peoples worth of work” yet they have nothing to show for it. I’m not saying agents aren’t useful, I’m saying people don’t understand what they’re doing. They think an agent absolved them from learning.

How To Make $1 Million As One Person, Without The Gimmicks

Before we start, let’s break down a few realistic paths to get to $1 million a year as one-person. 

You need to at least believe this is possible before you do it. 

$1,000,000 / 12 = $83,333 per month

$83,333 / 30 = $2,777 per day

Now, there are a few ways to do that.

• Sell 18 $150 products a day (i.e. a course)

• Sell 111 $25 subscriptions a day (i.e. Substack)

• Land one $5000 client every other day (i.e. freelancing)

• Land one $10,000 client every 4 days (i.e. coaching / consulting)

• A combination of both. 1-2 clients a week and a few product or subscription sales a day.

• Or whatever other combination and price point there is to hit $1 million.

If you go the client route, you will either need a team at some point or be good enough to orchestrate AI/agents to fulfill on the service. One person can only do so much client work, but it can be done. Either way, going the client route is a good option for beginners - because you don’t have an audience yet and can focus on reaching out to people individually. As a beginner, it’s much easier to sell a $1000-$5000 service to one person than it is to sell 100-200 Substack subscriptions or courses.

If you go the product or subscription route, like a book, course, niche vibe coded software, or membership community, you will need a lot of traffic. You probably aren’t going to go viral randomly when nobody knows about you.

How do you get enough traffic to make that many product or service sales?

At a 2.5% conversion rate on a landing page that allows people to purchase your product, you need 720 people to visit that page a day to make 18 sales on a $150 product. Or you need a post to go viral once or twice a month, resulting in huge spikes in traffic, but I wouldn’t bet on that, because virality usually doesn’t result in a lot of sales.

Where do those 720 people come from?

Social media, ads, SEO, or some other form of influencer marketing or word of mouth. As a beginner with little money to spend on testing ads until they work, social media is probably your best option. It’s free and building an audience is leverage.

So, if we assume you become skilled at social media (yes, social media is a skill, with a little bit of luck involved), you can:

• Get 10-50,000 views per YouTube video

• Get 500k to 1 million impressions on social media per month

Yes, it will take some time to do that, maybe a year of non-distracted execution, but it’s possible, and we’re taking on the big goal of $1 million a year. Many people would be happy with a tiny fraction of that.

That means out of that many people, you need only 720 people a day to click on your landing page in order to make $1 million a year.

That’s pretty doable.

For those who are used to time and labor as their source of generating money, it is a bit “out there” to think it can be that simple. That’s what your employer does to make multiples on top of what they pay you to execute one specific part of the process that makes them money.

But of course, it’s simple not easy yada yada I get it.

It can take 2-5 years to get really good at offer creation, social media marketing, and copywriting.

But if we “train” AI on the principles of them all, and feed them data from legendary marketers, you’d be shocked how well AI can do those things for you.

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How To Build A One-Person Business With AI, The Entire Workflow

The core difference between building a one-person business this year vs a few years ago is this:

You have AI. Not to do everything for you, but to help you learn, execute, and iterate faster. An entire course can be a prompt. You can chat with your favorite guru’s content to get “coaching” from them without paying them. You don’t have to scour the internet for niche information anymore. That’s incredible.

This is the template we are going to go over (read the ‘how to use’ document inside). I’d highly recommend using it and working through it on a desktop. Save the link as a reminder in your phone if you have to.

If you follow this exactly, and use the provided templates, you will have the 3 pillars of a modern, successful business. At minimum you will have a great starting point.

1. Brand – Who you are, what you help people achieve, and why people should care about both.

2. Content – Your ideas, opinions, and teachings that attract people to your brand.

3. Offer – Your product, service, and compelling landing page you can send people to from your content.

Of course, no matter how smart AI is, all of this stuff is variable. Running through this once isn’t going to instantly make you successful. You will need to notice what doesn’t work, try something else, and continue repeating until you see results. And even then, you’ll need to repeat the process because once something works, it eventually stops working. Thanks, human nature making novelty normalize.

That said, I’ll also provide a way to do that with AI, so you don’t get stuck.

1) Personal Brand Strategy

As one person, on social media, you are starting a personal brand.

Why?

Because if you want to make money, you need something to sell and a way to get people to see it. A personal brand is neither of those things, but you can think of it like a digital storefront (or resume) that adds a layer of trust - trust is a moat in the age of AI. Your offer is what you sell, your content is how you get people to it, your brand is the umbrella for both.

Oh, and I don’t care how cringe you think the word personal brand is. That’s what you’re doing if you are posting as a person on social media. If it helps, just think of it as a vessel for meaningful work.

We’ve discussed this plenty of times before in past letters and videos, so I’m going to be brief.

This is my recommended strategy, not the only strategy, for social media.

1. You are the niche. Your beliefs, experiences, and interests give you a unique point of view that reflects in your content and products.

2. You need a few content pillars: one skill or interest you plan to monetize, and two complementary interests that you can’t shut up about.

3. You need to ground those content pillars in pain points, foundational content topics, and high-performing ideas.

4. You need to turn all of that into a 1-2 sentence social media bio that gets across the most attractive parts.

From there, everything is easier to do. It’s easier to generate product and service ideas, create a content calendar or cadence, and more.

How do you use AI to make this process easier?

When it comes to personal brand strategy, there are a few ways you can use AI (in a better way than just asking questions to a chat app).

First is curating expert information and having a conversation with it. As an example, you could find YouTube videos or books from people who are certified experts and add those to a chat rather than asking for a general AI’s opinion. AI works best when you know what you want.

That’s the simplest one.

Second is turning those sources of information into a prompt that interviews you and generates a strategy that’s tailored to you.

Both of those are what I’ve included on the canvas above. You can duplicate it and start chatting with it here (use on desktop, save the link for later if you need to).

Third is doing more complex things that people may not need. Creating a personal brand coach agent that has context of your brand, researches competitor content, and suggests content ideas is one example. I can go into this in a future letter, just like this or let me know and I can.

2) How To Start Writing Better-Than-Most Content Immediately

I’ve been doing this a while.

I can read a tweet, newsletter, or YouTube title and know whether or not it’s going to do well.

The biggest problem beginner’s make is not illustrating the importance of the idea they are trying to convey. They have interesting ideas, but they can’t make it interesting to other people.

In order to make an idea interesting to someone else, you need to provide a compelling “why.” You need to give them a reason to change their behavior. Because if you’re the one who changes their behavior, they will remember you as the person who “changed their life,” and they will start to trust you over any human or AI.

In other words, the secret to writing content is to (1) have a good idea and (2) have a pain point it solves or a benefit it gives, and you need to illustrate that reason well. The best way to understand this is to read good ideas and look for the pain point they’re solving or benefit they are promising.**

The second mistake they make is not understanding how things fit together. They are good at writing content, but they feel like it’s pointless because they don’t know how to make an income from it, so they start catering to the algorithm by posting feel good nonsense hoping that the platform monetization system will pay them enough to eventually quit their job. As someone with a few million followers, I can tell you that platform monetization is not enough. I can make about 300-1000 a month on Instagram or X, but with my own product/offer, I can make 50k-200k+.

Now, since this isn’t an entire course on content, I’m going to give you the 80/20 of what to do:

• Write down ideas like crazy – Read more books, listen to podcasts, reflect on your life and try to “catch” ideas that are unique and beneficial

• Immediately think of a pain point or benefit – Train your mind to think of why this idea is important to more than just yourself

• Save ideas that you like the structure of – Have a folder in Eden (you can paste direct social links and reference the folder with AI if you want) where you save ideas. As a beginner, imitate the structure or framework of these with your own ideas as the topic.

Then, simply practice writing until it becomes second nature.

Now, when it comes to where you should post, I recommend having a content ecosystem or content waterfall system. It looks like this:

• I write one newsletter a week – This is on a topic that aligns with my content pillars from the brand strategy we went over earlier.

• That newsletter becomes a soft script for one YouTube video a week, that YouTube video get’s posted to podcast platforms.

• For posts, I can pull ideas from that week’s newsletter (using a prompt we go over below), or I can just write posts as normal by generating my own ideas.

• My best posts get used as a soft Reels/YT shorts script – I just read over the ideas and then start speaking to the camera. Since they are already validated they tend to do better than if I were going about it blindly.

• My other posts get turned into carousels for LinkedIn, Instagram, and the YouTube community page.

As one person, I believe it’s better to focus on a few quality pieces of content (one long form a week and a few short form a day) and then spread those to all platforms. Trying to create unique content simply decreases the quality of each idea.

Okay, now how do you use AI to make this process easier?

Since this isn’t an entire content guide, I can’t really teach you the ins and outs of post or newsletter writing (because that would be very long - I could write a book on it).

What I can do, however, is give you prompts that I’ve personally written that contain my way of thinking. If you simply run through the prompts, you will learn more about post and newsletter writing in 30 minutes than you would with months of trial and error.

Inside the canvas template that you can duplicate, you can read the sticky notes and follow the instructions.

One piece of advice: do not post what the AI generates.

Use the post and newsletter generations as first drafts or prototypes.

I would highly recommend reading through each one and refining them according to how you would say it.

3) What You Sell

So far you have a few pieces of the one-person business equation.

1. You have a brand that illustrates your values and attracts the right kind of people.

2. You have content that slowly builds trust over time and allows you to reach more people.

Simply put, you have people whose trust grows in you over time.

Most businesses could only wish for that. Too many people build a great business but they can’t attract customers for the life of them, and if they don’t have customers, they will not earn a penny.

Now, this section makes me kind of mad, because I spent 5 years of my life studying and practicing marketing, sales, offer creation, copywriting, and more.

In today’s world, you can have AI do most of this for you if you know how to “train” the AI to use frameworks and knowledge from great marketers, salesman, and copywriters.

That’s what I’ve done for you, but it helps to know what you should do here:

1. Create a detailed customer avatar – This is something you’ll keep safe and reference often whenever you are creating marketing materials.

2. Create your first offer – Using your customer avatar and offer creation principles, create a product or service that they can’t resist.

3. Turn both into a compelling landing page draft – Most people create a boring product and then just illustrate what the product does on their landing page and wonder why nobody wants it.

When you go through these prompts, they will first interview you. Answer all of the questions as throughly as you can. They will spit out a full customer avatar document, a full offer blueprint, and full landing page copy.

Simply follow the order that they are in and you should be good to go.

A final note:

I can’t guarantee that the generations will be 100% accurate or work perfectly well.

AI, frankly, isn’t good enough on its own. The person directing it is where the magic lies.

You have everyone spending thousands a month on agents that do everything for them, yet their lives haven’t changed that much and they aren’t instantly successful. Most people are quite literally just burning money to watch a computer produce something mediocre because they don’t know what good looks like.

You will still have to learn. You will still have to practice. And most importantly, you will still have to iterate when something doesn’t work until it does work.

I hope this was helpful for you, and I hope you learn some useful skills as you go through the prompts provided here.

I know it’s been a while since I last sent a letter out, but I should be back in the groove of things now. So i’ll see you in a week or so.

– Dan

That is not an exaggeration, and learning to think has never been more important.

Especially if you consider yourself a smart person, because you are the most likely to think like an idiot.

I mean, it’s all over social media. There isn’t a day that goes by where you see a person with a verifiably high IQ fall into obvious traps.

There are plenty of smart people who live in their moms basement who are one french fry away from a heart attack, and there are plenty of dumb people who are abnormally happy, healthy, and wealthy.

Rather than talking about first-principles thinking, systems thinking, meta cognition, or anything else that you can ask ChatGPT to teach you about, I want to give you something different.

We’re going to start with one-dimensional thinking and slowly work our way towards 5d thinking.

If you read carefully, you will experience what it’s like to think on a new level.

If you’re so smart, why are you broke?

Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.

– Buckminster Fuller

Thinking tip number one:

If you want to understand what something is, like genius level thinking, then it helps to understand what it is not.

That way, we can identify and avoid stupid thinking.

When we observe what stupid thinking looks like, we come to a few insights:

• Stupid thinking is one-dimensional. People try to jam everything into their own perspective and have difficulty seeing outside of it.

• Stupid thinking is reductionistic. Experts in one domain, like business, try to reduce everything to a “strategy” problem, as an example.

• Stupid thinking is tribal. You only trust your group, party, or tribe and consider everyone else wrong because they don’t conform.

• Stupid thinking does not question. Your justification is “that’s just how it’s done.”

As a whole, stupid thinking is about closing your mind off once you’ve reached the limits of what you know.

Stupid thinking is to stop thinking too early. To reach a point where you react with your pre-programmed thoughts and fail to reach any novel insight.

With that, we can start to guess at a worthy definition of genius thinking, which could be:

The ability to hold threatening ideas in the realm of possibility, paired with the intention to understand rather than just know. The mark of genius thinking is illustrated by the width, depth, and height at which you can think without being cut off from venturing further, often due to holding an idea as absolute. It’s your ability to traverse the full, universal web of ideas (reality, all potential knowledge) and pull them together into something coherent or useful, if not something entirely new.

The question then is, what’s the difference between knowing and understanding? And how do you develop width, depth, and height of thought? What if you can take it even further than that?

Knowing is horizontal. You learn a lot and memorize facts about a specific domain until you become competent. People who know a lot are “experts,” but we don’t need more experts in today’s world.

Understanding is vertical. It’s about how sophisticated your entire cognitive operating system is. One can understand a lot while knowing very little and use that insight to take an action that leads to a more worthwhile result.

The “smart but dumb” phenomenon stems from being horizontally advanced but vertically stuck. A businessman who has all the money in the world but finds himself unhappy. A creative with beautiful work that can’t make a living. A meathead that can’t hold a steady relationship. They know a lot in their respective domain, but can’t see outside of their bubble of knowledge, and that bubble of knowledge does not provide enough surface area to identify and solve problems that lead to suffering.

That’s why learning how to think is so important.

Because your mind is how you interact with reality.

You process information → make sense of it (thinking) → make a choice → receive information as feedback → respond to that feedback and repeat the cycle.

Thinking, then, determines the outcome of your life.

Every passing moment where you engage in stupid thinking contributes to a compounding effect, digging you into a rut so deep you can’t even access the idea that would lead you out.

Altitudes, levels, and lines of thinking

You can’t solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it.

– Albert Einstein

Let’s work from the ground up.

Lines of thinking are domains you can know a lot about.

Lines represent horizontal development (width).

These can be anything. Marketing, astrophysics, politics, social dynamics, religion, etc. When you attempt to learn domain specific knowledge, you are increasing the width of that line of thinking. It’s like gaining experience in a video game.

(By the way, if you’ve studied Ken Wilber at all, you can see what I’m getting at here, just applied to thinking).

Levels of thinking are how you think about each line.

Levels represent vertical development (depth).

When we observe how cognitive development evolves in collectives and individuals over time, we can notice 5 core patterns:

• Instinctual (Level 0) – You are born act out of the need for pure survival. You react to stimuli with little thinking in between.

• Conformist (Level 1) – Black and white thinking. You follow rules and obey authority without questioning. You adopt others perspective.

• Individualist (Level 2) – Critical thinking emerges and you construct your own model. You build your own perspective.

• Synthesist (Level 3) – You see your model as one among many. You hold contradictions and use perspectives as tools rather than law or some unquestionable truth.

• Generative (Level 4) – You create original perspectives that didn’t exist before, or you come to ideas without outside influence.

Levels 1 and 2 can be considered “first tier” thinking, which is overly dogmatic. I’m right you’re wrong.

Levels 3 and 4 can be considered “second tier” thinking, which reject dogma and seek the ultimate truth that lies in the middle.

In the domain of meaning, you are often indoctrinated into one belief system, then you question that belief system and come to your own conclusions (often rejecting the prior), then you start to see truths in all belief systems, and finally you have the ability to create a more expansive one.

In politics, much of the fighting and violence we see is do to the general population operating within levels 1 and 2. My group vs yours. Neither side can think beyond their bubble.

Again, and I want to make this exceedingly clear because it is such an easy trap to fall into:

Genius thinking is the ability to continue thinking.

At each level of thinking, your ability to navigate that space of both known and unknown ideas continues to expand. When you are born, you don’t really think. When you are a conformist, you think until you reach a point where you have “the” answer, then you start defending that answer. When you are an individualist, you do the same thing, but with your answer. When you reach synthesist, you can think far and wide, but your ability to create new lines of thought is not fully developed yet.

Reaching your highest ability to think, and thus providing the runway for your highest potential in this life, boils down to the simple practice of noticing when your mind feels threatened, being honest with yourself, and at minimum, staying open to new perspectives.

Altitude of thinking is the average of all your levels.

Altitude represents cross-dimensional development (height).

To best understand this, and to almost complete the thinking puzzle, it helps to visualize thinking as a skill tree.

In a video game, you can put “points” into certain traits that allow you to do more inside the game. You can take on higher challenges, have more fun, and continue playing. The same holds true with the mind.

The thing is, higher level traits can only be unlocked once you meet a specific requirement of lower level traits. You can’t access “level 3” of dexterity without reaching “level 4” of strength, as an example.

In the real world, imagine you started a business. You learned everything about marketing, sales, and product. You’re verifiably smart. You make a good amount of money. But then you try to take it further, and you hit an invisible road block. You can’t identify what’s wrong and then blame it on what you know: “the market just isn’t big enough,” or some permutation of that. Your mind is closed and there is no way forward.

Further, business isn’t all there is to life, obviously. If the rest of your life is falling apart, you, as a business person, will try to jam a circle into a square hole. You may relieve the issue temporarily, but you never understand the root cause.

This is mostly why the domains of politics, religion, and others like nutrition are so hostile and polarizing. It’s a bunch of smart but dumb people calling each other idiots because they’ve stopped thinking and only defend what they believe is the one right way.

Back to business, the problem is that you can’t see the actual problem. It could be that you don’t know how to lead a team. It could be a time management issue. It could even be a spiritual issue, but you’re too business minded to even entertain that possibility. At a minimum, that perspective could birth the insight that leads to further progress. This is why generalists and polymaths win.

In other words, you can’t reach Level 3 of business because you haven’t “put points” into the other required domains that would unlock that level.

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How to unlock 4-dimensional thinking

There is a fourth dimension to thinking.

Well, it’s not really a fourth dimension like time, but it does increase your ability to think by the power of four.

You see, there are 4 “dimensions” of reality.

These dimensions are perspectives. You can change how you look at a belief, idea, situation, or problem in 4 major ways.

There’s the inner world and the outer world, and there’s collective and individual segments of both.

The inner world is mental. By that I mean psychological and cultural. Your individual inner psychology contains your thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and consciousness. The collective inner world, or culture, contains group beliefs, value systems, and ideologies.

The outer world is physical, which sounds less woo-woo, but you can’t deny that you can think about the mental, which is what we’re here to talk about. Your individual outer world is your visible appearance, behaviors, and physical brain states or measurements. The collective outer world is composed of systems, structures, and social institutions.

To illustrate the power of understanding this, let’s walk through a thinking progression.

• I learn a lot about marketing and use that knowledge (line of thinking)

• I practice, fail, and experience enough to understand that there isn’t “one proven framework,” but I have such an understanding that I can create outperforming marketing campaigns of my own (levels of thinking)

• I pursue interests like psychology, fitness, and personal development which gives me deeper pattern recognition that further removes me from dogmatic frameworks (altitude of thinking)

From there, things start to get interesting, and it can go in so many different ways.

One thing we forgot to mention is that thinking is usually done for the sake of solving a problem. That’s what humans do. That’s how we grow. That’s what we find fulfillment in. And the minute you stop growing (and thus thinking), problems multiply and life becomes ever more chaotic.

So, if we identify a problem like “the world is becoming corrupt and meaningless,” we can continue our thinking in that direction.

How does society control attention and market their ideas to the masses? (collective inner world)

How can your behavior change, more than it already has during this process, to have a positive impact on society? What would be the steps to reaching such a point of influence that you can leave your mark? (individual outer world)

What does the current job market look like? Is a job an actual path to achieving such a thing? What about AI? Can I utilize the technology available to me to have that impact? (collective outer world)

Am I thinking about this the right way? Or is there more? What am I missing, and how does this make me feel? Motivated? Inspired? Hateful? (individual inner world)

We could go on and on, but I think you get the point.

Genius thinking is the ability to direct attention in a useful direction. You gradually encourage your mind to zoom further and further out, and from there you have a more enlightened vantage point to zoom in on the original problem you sought to solve.

How to tap into the 5th dimension

It is no measure of health to be well‑adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

– Krishnamurti

Yes, I know, this isn’t actually the 5th dimension.

It’s the fourth dimension (time), but I’m trying to practice my thinking here by making things up, and when you apply time to all four dimensions of reality we just talked about, your ability to think continues to rocket upward.

In all previous examples, we never tapped into the power of history. And if you understand history, specifically the evolutionary patterns rather than memorizing the events, you can aim your thinking in a more accurate direction.

This illustrates the difference between knowing and understanding. You can know a lot of facts about specific moments in history, and that’s a great thing, but if you can’t zoom out to see the essence of what that moment represents, you may fail to spot that pattern across different domains.

There are 5 things you need to know to begin thinking effectively about history. These aren’t exhaustive, and there is far more to it, but this is a good enough starting point.

1) The master pattern is Transcend and Include

A materialist would say that reality is composed of atoms, and they’d be correct.

A mentalist would say that reality is composed of qualia, and they’d be correct.

But if we zoom out for the sake of understanding, the pattern is clear that reality is composed of whole parts (wholes that are also parts of a greater whole).

Matter → Life → Mind

Word → Sentence → Paragraph

Machine → Computer → Artificial Intelligence

Human → House → City → State → Country → Continent → Planet → Solar system → Galaxy

Each is a whole that transcends and includes the one before it. Meaning, if you remove the thing that allows another thing to exist, the entire chain self-destructs (which is why environmentalists are so worried about climate change. If the biosphere collapses, humans go down with it).

This will make sense with examples.

2) How individuals evolve physically

This one is simple since most people can see it, touch it, smell it, etc.

Atoms → Cells → Molecules → Organs → Organism

You can think about the physical world by how individual things develop, not just humans.

3) How individuals evolve mentally

Humans develop through an increasing circle of care.

First, we care about ourselves and our survival (egocentric).

Then, we care about our tribe, group, or culture (ethnocentric).

Next, we care about all groups regardless of differences (worldcentric), but since the master pattern is transcend and include, we still care about ourselves and our tribe, and that must be accounted for in our thinking. We do not sacrifice ourselves or our values simply because caring about others sounds virtuous. This is usually where the arguments between most groups happen, because some use “caring about the equality of everyone” as a moral high ground that can often be self-destructive, which is counterproductive to caring about everyone.

At the most developed levels, we care about reality as a the ultimate whole. This clearly requires one to be able to think through vast amounts of complexity to come away with anything practical.

4) How societies evolve physically

Social structures follow technology.

We went from tribes to villages with the invention of the hoe that enabled small scale farming.

We went from villages to empires with the invention of the horse-drawn plow (because a surplus of food allowed people to focus less on farming and more on exploring, discovering and conquering.)

We went from empires to nation-states with the invention of machine agriculture.

Now, with computers in our pockets and AI at our doorstep, I’ll let you think about where things could go.

5) How societies evolve mentally

Since individuals compose the collective, societies evolve through a similar pattern of egocentric, ethnocentric, and worldcentric.

Collectives have an identity too.

The tribe can only care about itself and it’s survival. Then, it can expand into a larger empire or nation-state, holding multiple sub-groups within it.

In this case, we call these worldviews pre-rational, rational, and post-rational. First we conformed to authority, then we sought progress through science (the enlightenment), then we began to realize the blind spots of both while integrating the good parts.

But how would you actually use this knowledge to “think?”

Here’s a few ways out of many:

1. Identify where individuals are when you encounter an idea, movement, or conflict. Who do you want as a politician when entering the age of AI?

2. When engaging in debate (political, business, personal) notice the level people are operating from. Individuals at higher levels of development often need to meet people where they are.

3. Look at the technology of societies and organizations. A business still operating on industrial era methods (and are too dogmatic to adapt) will probably fail.

The most useful application is to locate where your own center of gravity is. I would encourage you to reread this letter at another time while thinking about your own development.

We missed something important

Stupid thinking is when you stop thinking.

We know that.

But what makes a person stop thinking? What makes them turn from open to defensive, closing themselves off to further learning and growth?

The answer is identity.

Specifically, latching onto ideas, beliefs, or constructs and making them a part of who you are.

Because if you are a diehard republican or democrat, you will never be able to think outside of that bubble. Therefore, you will never be able to find the truth of the situation. That doesn’t mean that you can’t adopt certain values from either side, it simply means that you don’t need to feel threatened when someone else disagrees with you.

The same applies to identifying with a specific religion, group, vocation, or anything else we’ve discussed prior.

You must also consider how you came to those beliefs.

Most people, in today’s world, have never thought for themselves a single day in their life.

They were born into a specific part of the world.

That part of the world was at a specific level of development.

They were told what to believe by parents who probably hadn’t questioned their own beliefs.

Those beliefs shaped how far you could think, which probably wasn’t very far.

And remember, your mind is how you interact with reality.

You process information → make sense of it (thinking) → make a choice → receive information as feedback → respond to that feedback and repeat the cycle.

The space in which you can think determines the outcome of your life.

If you only think within the confines set by your parents, teachers, employer, and peers on social media, the outcome of your life may not be that pretty. Just observe where the average person ends up and it’s not hard to see.

So, the next time you feel threatened, do not collapse in on yourself.

Sit with it. Question it. Realize that your mind wants to feel safe, because that’s how it’s wired.

Our brain is still wired like our hunter-gatherer ancestors, but we do not live in that world anymore, and the world will only change faster.

Those who practice thinking will win.

– Dan

So I want this one to be good. Potentially life changing. I think it has the potential to do that even though everything can “change your life” nowadays.

What is it?

It helps you find your unique point of view. Your edge, that is.

Because I’m sure you’ve noticed that any time you log onto social media, everything just sounds the same. It’s not even worth scrolling anymore. People just write based on what’s trending so that they can get a bit of growth.

But there’s that one type of person you see online. They have an energy signature that you can’t pull yourself away from. Every time you see their profile picture you get a dopamine hit because you know whatever they are going to say will be good. They’re the type of people whose ideas you can’t stop bookmarking. They stick with you.

I wanted to reverse engineer where that came from and turn it into an exercise.

In my own writing, I feel as if I’ve done well at connecting ideas that wouldn’t normally be connected, like philosophy and business, so I included that as well.

So, when you finish this prompt, you’ll come away with what your intellectual signature is, the core ideas that you or your brand will be known for (that you should treat as your core ideas), and a developmental sequence for what type of content you should write to get your worldview across.

In essence, it’s a brand blueprint, but incredibly unique and diverse.

I’m quite proud of this prompt. It’s long and extensive. It will take a bit of time, but I recommend sitting with it.

I can’t promise that this prompt will do that for you, but it will do it for some.

You can copy and paste the prompt below into your favorite AI tool.

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But I can’t help but think that there is something about the human experience that can’t be replaced.

I can’t help but think that humans will still want to work. That is, they will still want to create something, share it with another, and be recognized for their contribution by receiving some form of currency in return. This is a fundamental aspect of human nature, but it’s unfortunate that “work” has become dirty word stripped of meaning as productivity has become our God.

I am less concerned with industrial factory-style work being automated. We all know what that soulless pit does to a person.

I am much more concerned with creative work.

What will that future look like?

Will money become obsolete?

Will AGI write all prose and create all art?

If struggle, status, and curiosity are the generators of meaning, and AGI promises to rid us of such, what do we do?

What is the one thing that AGI can’t replace, if anything?

In a world without scarcity, how do you become the scarce good?

I want to share 6 ideas on the future of work, the skills and traits you must optimize for as a creative, and ultimately how to live a meaningful life in a future that feels daunting. I’ll share both my own thoughts and theories that I believe hold relevant weight.

And if you are a creative who wants to know if AI will ever replace your work, this is for you.

Let’s begin.

I – The meaning crisis makes meaning worth paying for

Meaning has become a scarce good.

It’s not hard to see that.

But to understand how we got into this mess, a little history lesson helps.

You see, reality develops toward greater complexity over time. When things become too complex or chaotic, a new ordered structure (or a new whole to envelop the parts) must emerge.

A few simple examples:

Letter → Word → Sentence → Paragraph

Atom → Cell → Molecule → Organism

Matter → Life → Mind → Spirit

This is how reality is structured.

When it comes to meaning, I want to focus on how societies have evolved, which can be seen in two ways:

1) The techno-economic base (or dominant mode of production) of past societies and specific technology used.

Foraging → Horticultural → Agrarian → Industrial → Informational → Whatever comes next (Intelligence?)

2) The dominant worldview and value structure of people within those societies (their meaning-making system).

Premodern → Modern → Postmodern → Whatever comes next (Metamodern?)

For brevity, we can speedrun the first few.

Foraging societies were hunter-gatherers. Easy. In horticultural societies, men were the hunters and women tended small plots. In agrarian societies, food came from large scale farming, enabling massive surpluses, allowing men to work less so they could use their new time to explore, discover, and conquer.

The technologies of these societies developed from:

Axes, spears, and fire → Hoe and digging sticks → Animal drawn plow (from human labor to animal labor).

All of these societies fell largely within the premodern worldview.

In other words, meaning is given by a higher power (elders, scriptures, kings, priests). You were told what to believe. You conformed. Agency was a trait that could get you killed or cast out.

Then came the Industrial Age, where food production came from mechanized agriculture. Fewer farmers fed more people, food became a commodity. The primary technologies were steam, coal, and oil. Human and animal labor were needed far less.

One key insight here is that the techno-economic base of a society creates the conditions for a new level of worldview and value system to be possible at scale.

An industrial society allowed for the modern worldview to take hold that valued rationality. Meaning was discovered through reason, science, and evidence rather than inherited by tradition. Nature became disenchanted, progress replaced the divine, and merit replaced birthright.

That’s where things started to go wrong.

• First, productivity became overemphasized at a young age. The second you were born, you were already expected to go to school, get a job, and become a cog in the machine. You were programmed like a robot since the start.

• Second, we disconnected from the tribe, village, and community. We are alone in a big digital world of artificial connection.

• Third, religious and spiritual frameworks were replaced with the mechanical model of the universe. Meaning was no longer given by the divine.

• Fourth, we began outsourcing our agency to institutions and forgot the value of self-directed work. 9-5 jobs replaced the work of artisans and farmers.

These have all led to a corruption in what we do and how we work. Work was broken into simple, repetitive tasks that kept workers dumb to the entire process so they couldn’t replicate it on their own (why generalists always beat specialists, as we’ve discussed).

In other words, meaningless work became our sole focus and means of survival. So much so that we can’t see it any other way, and many people are in for a rude awakening when AI removes this cancer from us.

That leads to the Information Age, where the invention of the computer led to a further abstraction from labor. We now sit at desks to work rather than tending fields - for the most part - and allow machines to do the heavy lifting.

The dominant worldview now is Postmodern, where we have begun to deconstruct everything prior.

The key insight of postmodernism is aperspectivalism, or that no perspective is privileged. All views are situated, partial, and contextual. This is a great achievement, because we now know that one view is not the one true and absolute view (religiously, politically, etc) that everyone must conform to.

This achievement, however, has only accelerated the meaning crisis even further. So much so that we are waking up to the fact that something has to change.

It also leads to a contradiction that must be solved in the next stage of development (the age of intelligence) we are entering:

If no perspective is better, truer, or more developed than another, then the claim that all perspectives are equally valid is a perspective you are claiming is better. It is a value ranking. You deconstruct all hierarchies by creating your own.

Postmodernism correctly saw that no perspective is absolute, but then incorrectly concluded that no perspective is better.

Some perspectives are, in fact, better.

Why does this matter?

First, meaning effectively evolved as so:

Meaning from “Up There” (the Gods) → Meaning from “Out There” (productivity and progress) → Meaning From “Nowhere” (supposed equality) → What comes next (Meaning From “In Here?”)

Second, taste is a core skill that will matter going into the future, demanding that you say one thing is better than another. It demands exclusion.

Third, agency is also becoming a core survival skill. Very few people of the past consciously embodied it.

Fourth, your individual perspective may just be the one thing that AGI can’t replace. It may just be your competitive edge in your creative work.

Fifth, creatives are the meaning-architects of a society, and if the baby is thrown out with the bathwater (jobs), the result could be catastrophic.

And last, we’re smack in the middle of chaos, demanding a new structure to emerge. We get to play a role in how the future is formed. This is one massive reason why I write so much.

Further, productivity is no longer a reliable identity.

Nobody knows what path to take or what skill to learn.

Meaning is at an all time low, but so is certainty and security.

So what’s the next stage?

What can we learn to ensure that we don’t enter this new world at a massive disadvantage?

To understand that, we must understand the emerging techno-economic base (artificial intelligence), because that creates the conditions for the next worldview, and thus what we value, and even further what we do.

Important stuff.

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II – The acceleration of AI (and meaninglessness)

AI promises to remove us of all labor.

At least that’s what the hype is all about and what everyone is focused on.

It promises to provide the necessities so that we no longer live in scarcity.

But by all measures, the way in which it does so only increases the scarcity of meaning. Many people, including myself, derive meaning from a certain type of labor. I am not anti-AI in slightest, but I do not see a world where AI removes the craft from the creative.

But why?

Why will work disappear?

And what replaces the economic function of jobs?

To get a full picture, David Shapiro’s Post Labor Economics is a useful theory for what the future could look like.

The problem that’s on everyone’s mind is this:

Since jobs have been a thing (working for a wage), companies pay the workers, workers spend the money, companies make the money, and the cycle continues.

But then AI comes along and threatens it all.

As a company, the thought of having a machine do all your work is enticing. Humans are expensive, complicated, emotional, and legally risky. Up until now, the only option was to hire humans.

Once AI and robots cross the “better, faster, cheaper, safer” threshold for given job (let’s assume they actually do reach that point, we can only guess for now), it becomes economically irrational to keep humans doing the work. Irrational does not mean immoral or optional. I’m not here to take a stab at the morality of doing this.

It’s irrational because the hoe replaced the digging stick. The animal drawn plow replaced the hoe (and allowed a new class of explorers and conquerers to emerge). Industrial machines replaced the plow. With each evolution, the power and potential of an individual who utilized the tools increased. In today’s world, an individual can run a more lean and profitable business than many corporations could in the past. You can learn anything and build anything, but even with that power, most people will do nothing, and those who do will be in endless competition with each other, making us all ask where one’s competitive advantage lies.

But of course, there’s a huge problem with AI replacing all jobs.

If everyone gets fired, no one has money. If no one has money, no one buys anything. If no one buys anything, the economy collapses.

As we’ll find, the above sentence applies to people with jobs, not people with companies, and I can’t help but think about this quote from Naval:

There are almost 7B people on this planet. Someday, I hope, there will be almost 7B companies.

Right now, most people are worried about how they’ll get paid if they don’t have a job. The only three ways households get money is as so:

1. Wages – Someone pays you for your labor (employer, customer, self-employment)

2. Transfers – Government pays you (UBI, Social Security, SNAP, Medicare)

3. Capital Income – Your assets pay you (dividends, rent, interest, appreciation)

If the first collapses, the second and third have to carry the weight. But transfers alone create political instability and lose price signals. It just won’t work as an overall solution.

Meaning, one potential solution would be broadening capital participation. Regular people would own income-generating assets.

To keep this brief, I will not list all of the proposed mechanisms for this. Because the truth is that some people, especially creatives, will still want to work and be acknowledged for their work. That’s what we’re here to talk about.

Personally, I do not want to sit around and collect a baseline level of cash. Much of the meaning in my life comes from growing personally and professionally across various domains of life, and growth requires agency, and if money shifts from a productivity metric to a way to express agency, that is the path I would want to pursue.

I would recommend digging further into Shapiro’s ideas and folllowing him for when his comprehensive book on this topic, Labor Zero, comes out.

Fortunately, there are jobs that may persist even when automation is superior. These jobs are based on humans specifically demanding other humans:

• High-liability roles (where there’s someone to blame)

• Statutory positions (legally required humans)

• Experience economy (bartenders, boutiques, art)

• Meaning makers (helping people navigate the human experience)

• Relationship/trust jobs (sales, diplomacy, negotiation)

As an everyday creative, I want to focus on the third and fourth option.

That is what humans will pay a premium for.

But before we talk about how to join the new meaning economy or what high-level skills are required, we’ve missed something critical, which is how meaning is generated in the first place.

III – The evolution and anatomy of meaning (robots vs humans)

The elegance of the future is not in man versus machine but in their division of labor: silicon sanding the rough edges of necessity so carbon can ascend to meaning. We will abolish baristas and canonize chefs, silence agents and encore actors. It is the same selfish instinct in both arenas—purge friction, preserve narrative—driving a world where the driest chores are done by circuits and the juiciest stories are told by people who bleed.

– Chris Paik

For most of history, humans found meaning - or a reason to live - by looking up to the sky.

“Up there.”

Meaning was given.

Then, we got smarter, supposedly. We made productivity our God. We looked to science and reason for meaning.

“Out there.”

Meaning was earned.

Now, we’ve become too smart for our own good. We looked for meaning in relativity and couldn’t find it.

“Nowhere.”

Meaning was deconstructed.

Going into the future, it is your job to pick up the pieces. You must accept your role as the creator you are. The tool builder. The explorer. The problem solver. If you outsource too much of your agency to the machines, they will be just fine having you hooked up to a collective dopamine IV.

Now, meaning must be generated.

How do you generate meaning?

Well, it helps to look at what creates meaninglessness.

First, meaninglessness stems from stagnation. If you do nothing with your life - like many will once jobs are gone and they have just enough to stay afloat - you do not stay the same. You slowly fall into chaos. Entropy can be observed in the mind, too.

Second, meaninglessness is amplified by isolation. Without tribes and villages, we are the loneliest we’ve ever been. Screen in face waiting for the next paycheck so you can buy buy buy.

We could then say that the two pillars of meaning are the feeling of forward movement and a connection to something greater than yourself.

Progress and contribution.

For the longest time, we outsourced both. Progress was given by an employer and connection was given by a divine authority. Now, both are in your hands, and that will not sit well with a lot of people.

Progress and contribution are activated through creative problem solving. You have an aim for the future, you identify a problem preventing you from moving forward, you create a solution through experimentation, and you pass that on to someone else in a similar position, and if that person deems it valuable enough, they will exchange another form of value back with you.

Of course, that doesn’t help with understanding how creatives will survive if all jobs are gone, we’re getting to that.

What I am arguing is that you must become a creator. You must build your own thing. You must take your own path. You must express your agency. Do not, by any means, sit around waiting for the day when the world promises to solve all your problems, because I promise that it won’t.

Beyond the two pillars of meaning, there are three generators:

1. Struggle – The engine of progress. What you choose to struggle for (or care about) is your purpose.

2. Curiosity – The direction of progress. The non-linear choice of attention to solve problems.

3. Status – The proof of contribution. The recognition that completes the loop.

When you put those all together, you get a story.

Stories, authentic stories, are what will demand a premium price tag.

Because the human brain is a story engine.

That’s how we make sense of the world.

We hate when something is slow when it should be fast.

We hate long lines at the DMV. We hate the small-talking Uber Driver that’s late. We hate sitting for 30 minutes on hold to ask what should be a simple support question. We hate when our fast food order is wrong.

But we will pay top dollar to fly across the world to dine at a five star restaurant.

We sit at the edge of our seat while watching a tear-jerking play at the theatre.

When the task is about speed, accuracy, or utility, leave it to the machines. But when our mind leave the state of needing to do something just to get it done (when we engage in leisure, which there will be plenty of in the future) we crave something entirely different.

We crave the potential for failure.

We crave the lesson of the man who bleeds.

We crave the story, drama, novelty, myth and meaning, and we pay good money for it.

An entire economy will be built around this, and the construction has already started.

The question then is, what is so unique about you? And how can we be sure this won’t be replaced by machines?

IV – The creator economy = the meaning economy

If you are not paid from a job, and you do not find meaning in collecting just enough passive income to cover your necessities, what’s left?

To get paid from people who believe in what you are doing and want to see more of it in the world.

You pursue what you care about and inspire people to care about it too.

Attention, then, is the scarce resource that creatives will be competing for.

We’ve already been seeing this play out in the creator economy.

Elon Musk, as an obvious example, understands the raw power of attention. He can quite literally shape the future with it. He can marshal capital, talent, and networks. He resource of all resources to ensure that his life’s work of becoming interplanetary is carried out.

Mr. Beast is another. He is a master of attention capture, reinvests that back into production, which leads to more attention.

Think about how you get your education, news, and knowledge today. Most of it is on social media from creators who have taken it on as their job to provide their point of view. Centralized education and information is still at large, but not for long.

However, I don’t want to be the next Mr. Beast. You probably don’t want the risk and criticism of Musk. You simply want to pursue your interests and share it with a tribe of people who care about your vision just as much as you do, just like your brain is wired for. You want to generate and share meaning.

The biggest misconception of the creator economy is that it’s a winner takes all battleground. That couldn’t be any further from the truth.

Justin Welsh, a friend in the space, is known for wanting a quiet life. He wants meaningful work, ample family time, and the ability to do what he wants without financial stress. He does quite well for himself and has full control over how long he “works.”

But you don’t even have to go that big. There are plenty of people with small followings who make more than enough to live well. They don’t grind 16 hours a day. They don’t care about becoming billionaires. They just have something they deem meaningful and share it (while pairing it with the specific skills that allow them to garner attention, as we will discuss). You see these people every day. And by the way, if you want to become a billionaire or work extreme hours, be my guest, some people love that way of life and I’m not here to tell you how to live.

“But Dan, what about the dead internet? Isn’t AI just going to flood the space with brain rot and slop?”

Yes, actually.

How is that not a good thing?

You’re telling me that everyone is flooding the space with mediocre content so it’s never been easier to stand out? I think most of the worry about AI slop stems from a lack of understanding how attention works.

Once everyone can do it instantly, it becomes instantly worthless.

Sure, anyone can have AI write 1000 posts or 10 articles to play the algorithm lottery, but how often do you see “slop” actually go viral? And if it did, doesn’t that mean it’s not slop?

Slop lives on a spectrum. When I went mega viral last week, I had people reducing my article to “just a bunch of self-help cliches” when, if you actually read the article, you know that is a bit of a stretch - considering the sections on psychology, epistemology, and human behavior. There is no AI prompt that could produce that exact same article, or even this same article. Not to say that it was the deepest writing on Earth, but it makes me question why a bit of self-help sends certain people into a blind rage - could self-help not help you there? Smart people are often biased to the domains they are smart in, which is quite an unproductive way of thinking. And frankly, once a piece of content becomes “popular,” people who identify as anti-mainstream immediately find a reason to hate it. One mans slop is another mans treasure and vice versa.

Slop aside, you have access to ChatGPT, right? Then why are you reading this? Is it because you didn’t know what to type into the chatbot? Is it because there’s more to life than answering the questions you know to ask? Do you think ChatGPT is just going to deliver this exact article to you on a silver platter one day? Seriously, think about those questions before you start going on about how everything is doomed.

The truth is that skills are being abstracted up a layer.

The manual task of typing words on a page or adding brush strokes to a painting still matter, because compiling everything into a chat input removes agency for work that demands a personal touch, but they don’t matter as much as the mind of the artist doing that thing.

Skills like marketing, persuasion, writing, digital art, programming, and more still matter, but the people who are able to get the most results are operating from a higher level.

They’re operating at the human level.

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V – The last defensible moat is you

As a writer, I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past few years.

Will AI ever be able to fully replace creatives and artists? That seems kind of bleak no matter which way you spin it.

Can AI ever write what I write?

Can AI ever create the music of a famous musician?

Can AI ever produce a Spielberg level film?

Can AI ever build a company like Steve Jobs could with Apple?

The answer I came to was... yes, but no.

Many will argue that AI can generate a beautiful essay or film, especially as the models get better, but they’re missing something crucial.

Let’s call this The Swap Test:

If you could swap the creator and the creation would be just as valuable, then AI can replace it.

If the creation only works because you made it, then that’s your edge. It carries your perspective, your situation, and your taste.

You see, certain types of work have an objective floor.

When it comes to writing, it’s perfectly fine if AI writes documentation, summarizes multiple sources of information, or makes instructions clearer. Hell, I would even argue that AI can take a brain dump of your original thoughts and structure them into something publishable, but some people may have a style they want to get across as well.

In other words, if speed and efficiency matter over voice, you can hand off control to AI.

But when it comes to writing a personal essay about grief after losing a parent, or writing an article arguing why minimalism is a trap for creatives, there’s something different at play.

Your point of view is at play.

You know, the most unique thing on this planet that nobody else has access to.

The culmination of beliefs, ideas, and experiences that can’t be reversed or resimulated that has been forming since the day you were born.

So that begs the question, if anyone can copy your writing, product, music, or art with a single prompt, when should you not hand over control to AI?

It lies in what AI cannot access.

• AI cannot think from your perspective. It can only think about your perspective or in the style of your perspective.

• AI cannot replicate your energy signature. It cannot select what to focus on and why it matters to you right now.

• AI cannot perform genuine sensemaking. It cannot decide what information means, what’s important, or how to frame it.

• AI does not have a trajectory. It does not have the stakes of death. And even if mortality becomes a solved problem, once a moment passes for humans, it’s over. AI can simulate stories, but time does not serve as a natural compression algorithm like it does for us.

• AI does not have evolving taste. It does not look back on it’s writing from a year ago and disagree with it. It does not grow.

In other words, AI can copy anything, but it cannot copy what happens next until it has already happened.

You, as a creative, have a perspective that is always evolving. AI is always chasing where you were but not where you are now.

By the time AI copies you, which could be instantly, you have already moved on.

What is considered “great work” is a moving target that evolves with society and culture. For creatives, the act of discovering what they think is the process.

If AI could perfectly write like me, right now, then I, being a stubborn human being, would not want to write about that anymore. What I care about would instantly change.

When I try to get AI to write like me, I immediately dislike it. Therefore, I would not write that thing.

So what’s changed going into the future of work?

Nothing, really. We’re finally just uncovering what mattered in the first place. People are so worried about the onslaught of AI slop without realizing that goods in high supply become commodities. The human perspective cannot be commoditized, therefore it will always demand a premium.

All of that makes sense and sounds nice, but it’s not very practical.

So what can you start doing, right now, to ensure that you create a perspective worth paying for?

VI – The post-labor skill stack

The skill stack of the future cannot be pinned down to career specific skills.

We all know that AI can write content, code, and music.

What’s much more important is developing the skills that make those things human.

Since this letter is getting long, I’m going to keep this brief. I already have and will continue to expand on these skills in my future writing. For now, this list is just for awareness so you can begin noticing opportunities to refine acquire and refine them.

The skill stack, which is more of a skill hierarchy, looks like so:

1) Agency – The meta skill that creates a story worth telling

Agency is the ability to act without permission or outside prompting.

In other words, it’s your ability to create a unique story. It’s your ability to set a trajectory for your life and make the billions of small and large decisions that move you forward, backward, and side to side. Within each of those decisions lies an opportunity to acquire pieces of knowledge that are then deposited in what you choose to create.

Agency is practiced through the 3 generators of meaning we discussed prior: struggle, status, and curiosity.

Struggle requires you to make deliberate choices, reject conformity, step into the arena, create the potential for failure, and develop a character arc. Staying on the default path society wants you on is a surefire way to get replaced.

Status, in the future, will still revolve around money, but money will shift from a productivity metric to a tool to express agency. The more money you acquire (not that you need to get uber rich) the more options you have, and the more unique your decision making can be. The complexity of your story increases with money.

Curiosity is how you, specifically, filter signal from noise. The more distracted and numb you become, the less you can notice your core pulling you toward a novel path in life.

2) Taste – The skill of discernment

AI right now is creating the infinite library problem.

If a library contained every possible book with every permutation of characters, it would contain all truths, all falsehoods, and all gibberish.

The library is effectively useless because finding meaningful text is statistically impossible.

Information without curation or structure is noise.

The curation and structure come from your taste.

Further, AI also creates the infinite monkey problem.

Given infinite time, a bunch of monkeys typing randomly could produce Shakespeare, but the output is meaningless because there’s no intention or selection behind it.

To develop taste you must build something of your own.

Because if taste is the ability to discern what’s worth keeping vs what’s not, and you do not have full control over that process, you are being molded by the taste of another.

As a creative, curation is a far more important skill than creation.

3) Perspective – Increasing your human capacity

Developmental psychology illustrates that human values and worldviews evolve through predictable stages over time.

We learned this back up at the top of this letter.

Typically, these stages follow a simple pattern: your mind becomes less conformist, ideological, and dogmatic - as long as you do not get stuck.

In other words, your mind expands. You’re able to make sense of higher level systems and constructs. You’re able to house greater complexity of thought without labeling it as “wrong” as a defense mechanism for a lack of understanding.

In other other words, you collect more perspective. You do not see the world from a narrow lens, which hinders your ability to curate, which limits the value of your taste.

The problem, as we see very clearly on social media, is that most of the population (documented at around 50%) lives in a highly conformist stage of development.

Meaning, most people don’t have the cognitive capacity for genuine agency. They simply here that they should become high agency and conform to that idea, which is a low agency behavior.

We’ve talked about ego development theory plenty of times before, and I will continue talking about it, but here’s the 80/20 of what actually increases your capacity for greater perspective:

• You do not try to “level up.” You simply allow yourself to become disoriented or knocked out of equilibrium and let that become your new normal with time (and without rejecting it).

• Example: When you get a new job and feel like you can’t do it, because your current mind can’t metabolize it, you learn. Same goes for new relationships or exposing yourself to new cultures.

• The worst thing you can do is double down on your current perspective, because that’s how you close yourself off to growth.

People try to resolve pain or dissonance to quickly because in today’s world, everything is quick.

They take the political opinion as law and now everyone else is wrong.

Or, they experience a false transformation and act like the higher stage without actually embodying it. We see this all the time in hippies. They use spirituality as a status symbol to mask their massive ego.

4) Persuasion – The ability to get people to care

You have something you’ve created.

Something you care about.

But most creatives stop there. They simply think they can post, write, produce and somehow people will magically find it. Or, they think that sounding intelligent or clever in their writing is enough to signal that their ideas are worth following. In reality, nobody cares unless you can persuade them as to how it’s beneficial to their lives.

When we lived in villages in tribes, you were assigned a role. You produced what was necessary and others benefited from it.

In today’s world, you’re seemingly all alone. You must put in effort to get your work spread.

Because you can have the best book, product, painting, or music in the world, but if you don’t understand the attention mechanisms (marketing, sales, social media, advertising) nobody is going to see it, and nobody is going to care enough to pay you. Art must merge with business.

We don’t need to go into “how” to learn these skills, because they are lower in this skill hierarchy for a reason.

You learn them automatically by building your own thing, making mistakes, and correcting those mistakes, and only a person of higher development can do that effectively.

In a nutshell: if you aren’t getting the results you want, you need to experiment, learn, and iterate until you do. That’s how you become effective at anything.

5) Technical Know-How – Utilizing AI and tools

This letter may seem like it’s against AI, but I can assure you that is not the case.

You don’t need to pick a team.

And c’mon, we just talked about that with developing perspective.

The truth is, everyone is going to be working with AI in some capacity, even the creatives who swear against it (while posting on X about how much they hate AI, feeding straight into Grok’s algorithm, well done.)

The best advice I can give, as always, is to experiment.

Try to use AI for the next project you build.

Ask the AI how you can pass off tasks that don’t demand a personal touch.

Feed it this letter if you want, give a description about what you are trying to create, and start playing around. See if it can provide some cognitive offload so your mind is more free to focus on what matters.

I will leave it there, because I’m as tired of writing as I’m sure you are reading this.

Thank you for your attention.

– Dan

At least for now. My articles are doing mindblowingly well on X.

People are saying it’s “just a trend,” but a friend of a friend is in charge of this stuff at X, and articles seem to be keeping people on the platform longer, which is what the social media companies want.

And, long-form content in general is just… better. Very few people can abuse it. It builds trust more. You can’t just tell ChatGPT to generate 1000 articles and expect there to be enough attention to go around like there is with short-form. If you want to stand out, it requires you to think. I will continue to stay bullish on Substack, X articles, YouTube, and podcasts - because the value in them lies in perspective. It lies in the craft of writing and articulating ideas in a way nobody else could. I’m tempted to just drop short form entirely, but I’m unsure if I’ll do that. I want to, though.

With that said, I think it’s timely to just give out my entire process.

I can’t promise anything with this, but if you’re looking to start talking about your interests on the internet, this is a great place to start.

I don’t want this to be a “how to go viral” guide. I want this to simply act as a foundation anyone can start with to begin writing long-form content in an impactful way.

To start, we are not going to focus on the actual nuances of writing and wordcrafting. I think that is best left for your own experimentation and allowing your taste to develop over time.

With that, it sucks to stare at a blank screen and not know what to say. If that’s the case for you, I want you to think of writing as thinking.

How do you “think?”

You question.

We’ll start with this short writing process, then we’ll go deeper and deeper:

Read more

Go to school.

Get a degree.

Get a job.

Retire at some point.

But there is so much wrong with that sequence of events.

We don’t live in the Industrial Age anymore. Specializing in one skill is almost certain death. I feel like we all know by this point how dangerous mechanical living and siloed learning is for your psyche and soul. And people can feel that we’re going through a second renaissance. Your curiosity and love for learning are your advantage in today’s world, but there is something missing.

For the longest time, I learned and learned and learned. I was stuck in tutorial hell. Some may call it shiny object syndrome to point out your lack of focus. I got my dopamine from feeling smart, but my life didn’t change all that much. Honestly, I felt like I was just falling behind. I tried so many different things in college. I had dreams of doing my own thing... earning an income from something creative... but after spending 5 years “learning,” I was met with the reality that I had to get the best job I could find just so I could survive.

The missing piece was a vessel.

A vessel that would allow me to channel all of my interests into meaningful work that I could earn a decent income from.

If you’ve ever felt guilty for not being able to pick one thing, if you’ve been told to niche down when your mind wants to expand, if you’ve wondered whether there’s a path you can take that doesn’t lead to the misery you see in everyone else’s eyes – this is the greatest time to be alive.

Here are 7 of the most compelling ideas I could come up with. We’ll start by understanding why having multiple interests is a superpower in today's world, then I’ll give you practical steps to turn that into your life’s work. We have a lot to talk about, so I hope you’re here for the ride.

I – The 3 ingredients of individual success & the death of the expert

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations... generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. — Adam Smith

Funny you say that Mr. Smith, because you created those people, and we’re still dealing with the backlash.

Specialization took over during industrialization because, in a pin factory, for example, one worker doing every step could make 20 pins a day. Then workers, each doing one step, could make 48,000.

So we built an entire world around this model.

Humans became assembly lines working 9 to 5 because frankly, governments don’t serve the national interest, they serve their own interest. Corporations don’t serve the employees interest, they serve their own.

Schools were designed to serve that interest. Their sole purpose was to create factory workers who were punctual and obedient.

But this is no way to live.

If you want to have specialized knowledge so that you could never run an operation, especially your own operation, then be dependent on schools for your education and jobs for your wage. Be duped into believing the promise that specialization is what makes a human valuable when it is clear that the system does not need you, specifically, to perform that task.

In lies the distinction.

If pure specialization makes people stupid and dependent, what makes an individual smart and sovereign?

Three ingredients: Self-education, self-interest, self-sufficiency.

Self-education is clear, because if you want to achieve a result different from that of traditional education, you must direct your own learning.

Self-interest raises some flags. It sounds selfish and short-sighted, which many people view as bad without thinking through it, but it simply means “concern with one’s own interest,” because the only other option is to serve the interest of the organizations that compose society as it is, which we’ve discussed. In other words, follow your interest, because your interest can very well benefit others in a selfless way - depending on your level of cognitive and moral development. Oh, and by the way, indulging in short-lived pleasures (cheap dopamine) is usually not your interest, but the interest of corporations that benefit from your mindlessness.

The truly selfish person, in Ayn Rand’s view, is a self-respecting, self-supporting human being who neither sacrifices others to himself nor sacrifices himself to others. This rejects both the predator and the doormat.

Self-sufficiency is the refusal to outsource your judgment, learning, and agency. If self-education is the engine and self-interest is the compass, self-sufficiency is the foundation that prevents your life direction from being hijacked by another force. They collaborate, but are not fully dependent.

The generalist emerges naturally from this triad.

Self-interest motivates self-education.

You learn because it genuinely serves your flourishing, not because someone assigned it.

Self-education enables self-sufficiency.

You can only be sovereign over domains you understand.

Self-sufficiency clarifies self-interest.

When you’re not dependent on others’ interpretations, you can actually perceive what serves you. Most people pursue multiple interests as an escape from their work. When your interests become your work, or your life’s work, most of them start to filter out.

When we look at every CEO, founder, or creative that we actually admire, they are generalists.

They understand enough about marketing to direct it, enough about product to build it, and enough about people to lead them. But they also need to direct the ship. They need to learn and adapt when circumstances change.

More importantly, they understand that ideas across domains complement each other and create a unique way of viewing the world, which allows them to catch novel ideas from the aether and translate them into market value.

When we look at where the world is today, and if you understand the opportunities available to singular individuals, not just leaders, you will find that the options you have as a natural polymath are extensive. It should spark an immense amount of excitement in you.

II – You are living through the second renaissance, take advantage of it

Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses—especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else. — Leonardo da Vinci

The ultimate moat, or the final competitive edge worth paying for, in my opinion, is an opinion.

A perspective that only you can see, because the uniqueness of your life experience created it. That may just be the last thing anyone else can replicate.

And since that’s always been the case, why not prioritize that now? Especially when automation is at our doorstep?

But how do you prioritize it? How do you develop it?

By pursuing multiple interests and building something with them.

You see, every interest you’ve ever pursued leaves behind a residue. Every interest increases the number of connections that can be made. Every interest expands and increases the complexity of how you model and interpret reality. The more complex your model of reality, the more problems you can solve, opportunities you can see, and value you can create. Specialism completely halts this process, and your shiny object syndrome has been trying to tell you this whole time.

From birth until now, you are cultivating a way of seeing things that others can’t. A way of seeing things that AI can only think if you tell it what to think.

A person who studied psychology and design sees user behavior differently from the pure designer. A person who learned sales and philosophy closes deals differently than the pure salesman. A person who understands fitness and business builds health companies that MBAs can’t comprehend.

Your edge lies more in intersection than it does in expertise.

This is the exact pattern we see in the Renaissance that is coming back with a much stronger force now.

Consider what made it possible...

Before the printing press, knowledge was scarce.

Books were copied by hand. A single text could take a scribe months to reproduce. Libraries were rare. Literacy was rarer. If you wanted to learn something outside your trade, you either had access to a monastery or you didn’t learn it.

Then Gutenberg changed everything.

Within 50 years, 20 million books flooded Europe. Ideas that once took generations to spread now moved in months. Literacy exploded. The cost of knowledge collapsed.

For the first time in history, a person could realistically pursue multiple domains of mastery in a single lifetime.

The Renaissance was the result.

Da Vinci didn’t pick one thing. He painted, sculpted, engineered, studied anatomy, designed war machines, and mapped the human body. Michelangelo was a painter, sculptor, architect, and poet.

Unique minds are finally free to operate the way they are supposed to.

They were supposed to cross disciplines, synthesize connections, and follow curiosity wherever it led, but most of us never realized that.

The printing press was the catalyst for a new type of person to emerge. A person who could learn anything, combine everything, and create what no specialist ever could.

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III – How to turn multiple interests into a lucrative way of life

There are a few things we know so far:

• You have multiple interests but feel like you can’t keep learning forever

• You have a love for interest-based self-education but have to carve out time outside of your career to do it

• You understand the need to become self-sufficient but you feel like you don’t have value worth paying for, yet

• You need to be able to adapt fast because we don’t know what the future of work looks like

The question then is, how do we combine all of these things into one way of life?

How do we combine learning and earning into something you can do for work?

I’ll try to make this as logical as I can.

To make money from your interests, you need other people to become interested in them too. That part is trivial. If you became interested in something, other people can too, you simply must learn to persuade.

Further, you need a way for them to pay you. In this context, that usually means you need to sell a product, because you probably aren’t going to find a job that allows you to express your interests, and investing in stocks or real estate (to any effective degree) requires a good amount of capital.

In other words, you need attention.

Attention is one of the last moats.

Because when anyone can write anything or build any software, which ones are going to win? The ones that people know about. You can have the greatest product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, the person who can capture and hold attention will run laps around you.

As an aside, and if you’ve been keeping up with the tech space, no, I don’t think everyone will just “build their own software.” Most people don’t even spend 20 minutes cooking their own food. They would rather pay a few bucks for Uber Eats. And people have their own things they want to spend their time on.

Back to the point:

You need to become a creator.

Now, before you cringe and leave, I don’t exactly mean becoming a content creator (well… it’s complicated).

I mean that the solution to stop creating for someone else because you need them to give you a paycheck is to create for yourself.

Humans, by nature, are creators who were convinced that being a machine would lead to the American Dream. We are tool builders at our core. We thrive in any niche because we create solutions to problems. If a lion were put in Alaska, it would not build shelter and clothing. It would die. A lion belongs in its own niche.

The thing is, every business is a media business now. And remember, you need attention. Where is the attention? Mostly on social media until the next attention preference platform comes around - you’ll need to adapt at that point. So yes, if you have multiple interests, it would be wise to become a “content creator,” but it may be easier to think of social media as a mechanism to get your interests in front of other people. It is one piece of the puzzle to do independent work.

Plus, that covers all of our bases.

You love learning? Great, reframe it as “research” and now that’s literally your main job. Most of the things I write about simply come from me learning about my interests and treating social media like I’m “taking notes in public.”

(You’re already spending time learning, now just spend that time learning in public and boom you have the foundation of a business).

You need to become self-sufficient? Well, you’d need a business to do that, and every business needs to attract customers, and you probably don’t give two f*cks about paid ads, SEO, or any other form of marketing. This is what trips many people up because they are only used to doing one specialized task within a business as an employee.

You need to be able to adapt? Amazing, you can build and launch new products to your audience as fast as you can build them. I have a solid audience, and if my next product were to fail, I have people who would be willing to invest, be a part of the team, or support the next product. You can build your little SaaS company, but if you don’t have distribution, you are putting in marathons of extra leg work into getting capital, finding talent, and getting things off the ground.

No other job or business model allows you to do just that with so much freedom.

But how do you actually start building it?

How do you tie all of this together?

IV – How to turn yourself into a business

It’s unfortunate that “entrepreneurship” and “business” have become dirty words that make people think they aren’t qualified to take that path, so much so that when an opportunity comes up, they don’t even notice it.

If you’ve ever helped someone with your interests, you’re qualified to start a business.

They no longer require upfront capital. They are not reserved for unethical elites. They are not only for people who want to make a lot of money. And they are not only for talented or special people.

The reality is that entrepreneurship is in our nature. It is modern survival. We are wired to create and distribute value to a tribe of like-minded people. We are wired to hunt, explore the unknown, seek novelty, and never stagnate. Psychologically, this is the most enjoyable way of life, even if there are low periods, because those are what allow the (non-artificial) highs to exist.

Further, the barrier of entry has collapsed.

All you really need is a laptop and internet connection.

Distribution is now free thanks to social media (well, not free, but skill-based, which can be expensive in time). Anyone can post an idea that reaches millions, and if they have a product, those millions of eyes can result in millions of dollars if you know what you’re doing, and that’s a big if. Most people just love becoming really good at an interest or skill that doesn’t directly impact their success, potentially because they’re afraid of it.

Tools and technology now handle what used to require teams of people. You have access to AI and a plethora of useful software.

Now, there are 2 paths you can take to start.

Path 1) Skill-Based

This is what dominated the internet for the longest time. You “learn a marketable skill.” You teach that skill through content. Then you sell a product or service related to that skill.

The limitation here is the limitation of being a specialist. It is one-dimensional. You put yourself in a box. You “niche down” because you were told it is more profitable, and since you’re chasing profit over interest, you tend to build yourself into a second 9-5 where you do work you don’t care about for people you don’t care about.

Path 2) Development-Based

The creators that win right now are those without a niche they can be pinned down to. Typically, they are focused on one of the 4 eternal markets: health, wealth, relationships, happiness. Or even all of them. Technically, everyone’s niche is self-actualization, they are just all taking infinitely unique paths to get there.

• They pursue their own goals (brand).

• They teach what they learn (content).

• They help others achieve the goal faster (product).

For those with multiple interests, I obviously recommend this path, because it goes a bit deeper.

First, when you take this path, you are also taking the first path. Because building your brand, content, and product requires you to become good at all of the relevant marketable skills, so even if you fail, you have something worth paying for. You are building your business, and you can help others with a specific part of theirs if you are good at it.

Second, it flips the traditional model on its head.

You don’t create a customer avatar so that you can niche down and only focus on that. You turn yourself into the customer avatar.

That makes things much more palatable.

You pursue your goals in life and develop yourself → you have already validated the usefulness of what you will offer → you help the past version of yourself reach that same goal.

Don’t be a YouTube creator.

Don’t be a personal brand.

Don’t be an influencer.

Be you. But in a place where your work can be discovered, followed, and supported. Right now and for the foreseeable future, that’s on the internet.

Jordan Peterson (or others like him) isn’t a “content creator,” even though that’s how it seems on the surface.

He goes on tours, writes books, leverages social media as a base, and uses all of the tools at his disposal to spread his life’s work. He isn’t worried about the latest content idea trend. His mind outperforms any of those myopic growth strategies. The quality of his ideas is what sets him apart and changes people’s lives (regardless of your opinion on Peterson).

With that, I want to provide a different perspective on brand, content, and product. That way you can use this as a vessel for your life’s work.

V – Brand is an environment

Stop thinking of your brand as a profile picture and social media bio.

Brand is an environment where people come to transform.

Brand is the little world you are inviting others into.

Brand isn’t illustrated when a reader first visits your profile.

Brand is the accumulation of ideas in your reader’s mind after 3-6 months of following you.

You illustrate your worldview, story, and philosophy for life across every single touchpoint. Your banner, profile picture, bio, link in bio, landing page design, pinned content, posts, threads, newsletters, videos, and the rest.

In other words, your brand is this:

Your brand is your story.

It would help to spend a day writing out where you came from, the “low” points of your life, the experiences you’ve had and skills you’ve acquired, and how those things have helped you the most.

When you’re thinking of ideas, content, or products, you should filter them through your story. This doesn’t mean you have to talk about yourself all the time. It means you have to align what you’re saying so that your brand is cohesive.

The difficult part is realizing that your story is worth telling, even if you think it’s boring or haven’t reflected on your growth.

The point:

Your bio and profile picture do not matter. There are literal people with one word in their bio and a singular color for their profile picture.

My recommendation:

• Make a list of 5-10 people you respect online

• Look at their profile picture, bio, and content

• Take mental note of patterns between them

• Start formulating what you should do for your own brand, with your own little spin

In all honesty, I wouldn’t overcomplicate this or even worry about it. Your brand will take shape as you start writing content. We could even say that brand is content, so we need to get that right.

This article on the content ecosystem to build your own world may help.

VI – Content is novel perspectives

The internet is a fire hose of information.

AI is only adding more noise.

That means trust and signal are more important than ever.

In my opinion, the guiding light for your content should be to curate the best possible ideas in one place. Your brand is a collection of all the ideas you care about, in your own words, under one account on the internet.

If you have any plans to do podcasts or public speaking, notice how the best speakers always have 5-10 of their best arguments or ideas top of mind. They repeat these over and over and that’s how they build influence. If you don’t have a set of those 5-10 ideas, then you won’t be as impactful as you could be. Writing a truckload of content is how you discover those ideas.

Once the “idea density” of your content increases with time and effort, that’s what creates a brand worth following and paying for.

The goal of curating ideas to include under your brand should fall at the intersection of:

• Performance – the ideas have the potential to “do well.” This is the measure of how much other people will care.

• Excitement – the ideas give you a sense of excitement to write about them. This is the measure of how much you care.

Art and business.

Metrics and performance shouldn’t determine everything, but they do mean something.

Step 1) Build an idea museum

The secret of most creatives you love is that they keep a ruthless curation of notes, ideas, and sources of inspiration.

In other words, they have a “swipe file,” as marketers call it.

You can use Eden (if you have access), Apple Notes, Notion, or whatever else you want, but I want to make this very clear:

You need somewhere to jot down ideas as soon as they come to mind.

This is a critical habit.

Whenever you find an idea that is useful, either now or in the near future, write it down. You don’t need content pillars or 2-3 topics to talk about. The ideas you curate should simply be important to you. That alone means they are relevant to a specific niche of a person: you. However, you can create a content map if you’d like.

I don’t care how you structure this. It can be a neat and organized set of documents, or it can be a messy running note without structure. The habit matters more than the format.

You gauge performance by glancing at the likes, views, or general engagement of a post to see if it has the potential to resonate. If the idea falls flat or does worse than their other content, it probably won’t do well for you.

You gauge excitement by noticing when you feel as if you are wasting something valuable if you don’t write it down.

Step 2) Curate based on idea density

How do you start filling your idea museum?

You need 3-5 sources of information that have high idea density.

When I say “idea density,” I mean an idea that is high signal.

It’s difficult to explain how to find something that is high signal, because that is subjective. It’s dependent on your level of development (what’s useful for you), your audience’s level of development (what’s useful for them), and your translation from one to another.

The most basic piece of advice could be the most valuable thing in the world for someone else, but it may seem like common knowledge to you.

With time, you will tune your own signal-to-noise ratio by seeing what ideas resonate with your audience and which don’t.

The most idea-dense sources of information:

• Old or little-known books – I have 5 books that I reread over and over again because the ideas are so good. These are where the timeless principles live, untouched by trends.

• Curated blogs, accounts, or books – Blogs like Farnam Street curate the best ideas from modern intellectuals. Accounts like Navalism curate Naval’s best ideas. Books like The Maxwell Daily Reader have one of Maxwell’s best ideas one day at a time for a year. These do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, allowing you to pick and choose the best of the best.

• Heavy-hitting social accounts – I have a list of maybe 5 social accounts that always post great ideas. If I don’t have something to write about, I’ll scroll through their page and find something I have an opinion on and write about that.

Finding these sources takes a few months of discovery. But the result of maintaining an idea museum of dense ideas leads to you creating idea-dense content.

Your idea museum becomes a representation of the mind you are attempting to create.

That’s the ultimate goal.

To have a library of content so good that people can’t help but open your emails, turn on post notifications, share your ideas with friends, and think about your ideas often.

You become a curator of ideas that people wouldn’t even think to ask AI for, and that people would never come across organically.

That’s how you become less dependent on the algorithm for your success.

Step 3) Write 1 idea 1000 different ways

Becoming a good writer or speaker isn’t only about the idea, but how the idea is articulated.

The idea does a lot of the heavy lifting, but the structure is what makes it engaging, unique, and impactful.

Let me show you what I mean.

Take this post structure:

One pattern I’ve noticed in happy people: They’re obsessive about maintaining their mental clarity.

The idea here is that happy people maintain their mental clarity.

The structure is formatted in 2 parts: a hook in the form of an observation, and the delivery of what the observation is.

It seems simple, but the difference in the structure of an idea can make all the difference.

Now, if I take the same idea but use a “list” structure:

Happy people are clear-minded people:

– They take time for rest
– They focus on one singular goal
– They ruthlessly eliminate distractions

In other words, happy people are obsessive about maintaining their mental clarity.

Same idea. Different structure. Different impact.

If you wanted to, you could practice writing the same idea with every single post structure you come across.

Here’s how to practice this:

First, break down 3 ideas into their structure.

Choose 3 posts from your idea museum that resonated with you. Then, try to break down each part of the idea and write why it works.

If you don’t have experience with content psychology, that’s okay. You learn it as you practice.

This is the perfect time to employ AI for help. Try this prompt for each post:

Do a comprehensive analysis on this social post. The overall idea, how the sentences are structured, and choice of words. Analyze why people engage with it, why it works so well, what psychological tactics are being used, and how I can replicate this style step-by-step with my own ideas.

Then paste the post below the prompt.

I’d recommend Claude as the model to use for this over ChatGPT or Gemini.

Continue doing this for any idea you find along your journey that you want to incorporate as part of your writing style. You can use this for videos as well, not just posts.

Second, rewrite 3 ideas with different structures.

Go back to your idea museum and choose one idea you didn’t use in step one.

Then, try rewriting that idea with the 3 post structures you just broke down.

This is how you develop range.

This is how you stop staring at blank screens.

This is how you turn one idea into a week’s worth of content.

Why are we doing this?

Well, you now have all of the secrets to creating content that stands out and coming up with good ideas.

Seriously, those are the secrets. Any results that come from them are a matter of practice.

VII – Systems are the new product

Okay, this is getting long so I’m going to speed things up.

And I have an entire guide on creating your first product here... so don’t want to be redundant.

At this point in time, we are in a systems economy.

People don’t want a solution to their problems.

They want your solution to their problems.

There are tons of writing products out there, so what’s different about my 2 Hour Writer product, as an example? Or even Eden, the software that I’m building that could “easily be replaced by Google Drive or Dropbox,” according to super smart people who have definitely built successful products in the YouTube comments?

They’re systems that I created by getting results for myself.

2HW doesn’t teach a bunch of academic writing nonsense that doesn’t help you achieve our shared vision of living a creative and meaningful life.

I had a few problems:

• I had trouble having an endless source of content ideas.

• I didn’t want to waste a ton of time creating content for all different platforms.

So, I started experimenting with my own system.

My goal for the system was clear: write all of the content I need to in under 2 hours a day. That way my audience growth is handled and I can focus on building better products and enjoying life.

I started testing solutions to have more content ideas.

I created swipe files, steps to generate ideas, and templates if I still couldn’t think of anything.

I mapped out exactly what I was going to attempt to write each week: 3 posts a day, 1 thread a week, and 1 newsletter a week.

During that process, I realized I could cross-post my writing to all social platforms (this is public, you can see it). I also realized that threads could be turned into carousels, and newsletters could be turned into YouTube videos.

If the system didn’t flow, I would try new things the next week.

From there, I realized I could copy paste my newsletter to my blog, embed the YT video in that blog, promote my products in that blog, and turn that blog into more content ideas.

Then, I could link that blog under my content each day.

This led to more newsletter subscribers, YouTube subscribers, and product sales.

I realized that if everything I did was newsletter centric, that’s all I had to worry about for both growing my audience and promoting my products.

That’s how you stand out in a world of copy paste products.

Yes, it takes time and experience.

But the end result is so worth it.

That’s it for this letter.

Thank you for reading.

– Dan

First, if you made it this far, I like you. You read long things.

If you want to support this letter, consider joining the paid tier. I have everything from a full course on how to start a one-person business to prompts to reset your life to writing strategies I use when I can’t generate ideas.

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