Life is so much better when you have a code to operate by.
Because most people have been tricked into thinking they want "freedom." Absolute freedom is synonymous with absolute chaos. The only reason you think you want freedom is because you're living by a set of rules you didn't create.
So when you feel like you need to escape your life, you take time off from work and go on vacation. But after a week or so, the simulated honeymoon phase ends and the tourist novelty wears off, and you find yourself unfulfilled wanting to go back to structure.
Long term, and for the majority of people who hate their jobs, you can't wait to retire - a promise marketed to you since you were a child like a Clickfunnels landing page with a 40 year countdown timer. Little do you realize that's just another vacation you'll get bored of, because that's how the mind works.
The core mechanism of our brains is that they are "pattern-making machines" evolved to solve specific problems with limited resources, not to handle unlimited possibilities.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the godfather of flow psychology, argued that happiness comes from "taking control over the contents of our consciousness," creating what we know as the flow state: periods of complete absorption where people experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life.
Again, you don't want freedom.
You want the freedom to create your own rules of the game.
You don't want to be assigned goals from parents, teachers, or employers, but you mistake that for not wanting structure as a whole, so you crave the one thing - freedom - that will make your life substantially worse. Double edged sword.
If you want to increase the enjoyment, creativity, and lack of distractions in your life, the solution is to do what all successful people do: discover and create a set of personal principles to operate by.
You need to create your own little world and become immersed in it.
Most people will give you the destination.
Some will give you the steps in the journey.
But nobody gives you the navigation system to set your own destination and create the steps.
Below you will not find another guru's "proven system," but a meta framework to discover what your unique rules can be.
These are 12 rules to change your life.
Give yourself 12 months.
I - Reject the average life
Life is a series of decisions.
The single decision that determines all other decisions is to vehemently reject the trajectory you are set on at birth.
I want you to think of your mental frame as the way you see the world and make decisions that determine the outcome of your life. But this frame doesn't remain static. It grows and evolves to house more complexity as you acquire knowledge and skill. The desire for freedom is a sign that you did not create your own frame, thus you are not in control of your life, so you want to remove the frame, but you are not at a level of development where that is a wise decision.
When you truly despise the outcome of being like everyone else, you begin to form an anti-vision.
If you want to make this a potent source of negative yet powerful energy in your life:
Every time you experience something you dislike, write it down. Go on a walk and think about where your life is heading if you keep doing the same things. Reflect on your past and note what you never want to experience again. Gather all of the data points you skipped over while you were under the spell of someone else's structure.
When you do this, the first outer half of your frame starts to take shape.
You are now able to stop, think, and consider whether or not you should make a certain decision. You now have something to work away from and make the choice that leads in the other direction.
Now we need something to aim towards.
II - Commit to excellence
I don't say this to sound arrogant.
But I've never had a problem with knowing what I want in the future.
I never saw my ideal life as some unmoving target. I knew that my vision for the future would change as I matured.
The thing is, as a teenager, I observed society and quickly realized the life I don't want: a job I hate, a body I hate, a partner I hate, and a mind that hates me.
From that alone, it was easy to figure out what I had to do. I had an aim for my future, not an outcome, and that gave me a few options:
Become an entrepreneur no matter how many times I fail (it took 7 failures) so I can control how long I work and what I work on.
Build a strong, aesthetic, and energetic body by making training and nutrition a non-negotiable.
Nurture a strong mind through the progressive overload of uncertainty and emotional labor.
The commitment to excellence created a sense of vision. The second outer half of my mental frame. If I trained my mind to stay within that frame, my life would turn out great no matter the steps I took.
Those may not resonate with you, but I have a feeling that most people want some form of these things.
Everyone has the inner voice begging them to reach their potential. Developmental psychology is littered with this fact. You know deep down that the answer to "what do I do with my life" is to progress in the only areas that matter: mind, body, spirit, and work. Work is how you contribute to others and the world. Something greater than yourself. It is arguably the most important piece of the puzzle that spills into other areas.
But for most people, the fear of the unknown is greater than the fear of ending up like everyone else, so we need to decrease that perceived fear.
That's what the next rules are for.
III - Standards create identity
You aren’t where you want to be because you are okay with where you are.
If you are okay with having $0.50 cents in your bank account, you won't have the desire to change that, and many opportunities to improve your health, relationships, or finances will be closed off to you.
If you're okay with having $100,000 in your bank account, you will see anything less than that as a problem that needs to be fixed. Problems, when treated as projects, are what make life enjoyable.
When you have high standards, your mind's survival mechanism notices opportunities that helps you maintain those standards. In this case, you notice more opportunities to get back to having more money in your bank.
Your Google searches start to change to acquire better skills.
You start having conversations about money with your friends.
All of these tiny choices begin to compound into results.
You rewire your thinking patterns based on your intentional search for specific information relating to the problem you are facing.
If you surround yourself with people – physical or digital – that make it seem like it’s “okay” to be 100 pounds overweight, have zero money, work a job you hate, stay with a partner you despise, get drunk every night, and the rest… how do you think your life will end up?
If your standards require you to eat clean, you will look at McDonald’s meals in disgust. You only think this sounds stupid because your standards are abysmal. Someone who values fitness find it painful when they don't have the option to eat clean. It's not hard for them, it's actually enjoyable. You find it painful not to eat clean. This is backwards.
Even more powerful are anti-standards. Write down what you are not willing to do to achieve your goals.
For myself, I don't want to sacrifice my health, social life, or time to build a business like most entrepreneurs do. Most people think those things are a natural part of starting a business, but they don't have to be.
In fact, setting those constraints is how you get creative results, because creativity is born within constraints.
You can brute force starting a business with 12+ hour workdays, or you can commit to 4 hours a day. When you do, your mind will notice higher leverage business opportunities. You will register anything more than 4 hours a day as a problem, and only then can you think of a solution that few people have thought of before, allowing you to blow past the masses competing against each other.
This isn't set in stone. Of course some days you'll have to work longer or skip hanging out with friends.
Standards are simply a portion of your mental frame that helps you identify opportunities and bring clarity to your actions.
IV - Project based learning
You know what you don't want out of life.
You have an idea of what you want out of life.
You need to acquire the skills and knowledge that bridge the gap between both.
How do you slowly start moving into the unknown by having a way to order any potential chaos along the way?
Personal projects.
The best way to learn is to build a real-world project and only search for information when you need it. How much you learn is directly correlated with how much progress you make on the project.
When you watch endless tutorials, you fill your mind with noise and chaos. Most of that information goes to waste. It leads to overwhelm, anxiety, and slows down how fast you learn. When it comes time to build the project, you feel as if you learned nothing. Endless consumption creates endless options. We don't want that.
A "project" can be anything. Your health can be a project. Your business can be a project. An image in Photoshop can be a project. A project is simply a structured way of achieving a goal, or making progress toward a goal.
The bridge between where you are and where you want to be is a series of projects that reflect the value you've developed in yourself. If you'd like, you can turn that project into a product, because you've solved a problem in your own life and can now help others do the same. A project is the only qualification you need to start earning an independent income.
Here's how you start:
Choose something to build that moves the needle toward what you want in life. Think of it as a traditional goal, but a project turns that goal into a system. Create a note and brain dump everything that comes to mind. Save 3-5 sources of inspiration you want to emulate. Study those sources and break down their structure. Outline the project into sections, milestones, and what you need to learn.
Now that you're ready to start, don't start learning. Start with what you know.
Learning comes from struggle, not memorization. Start the project. Let it expose the gaps in your knowledge. Try to figure it out. Search for the answer when your mind is most likely to remember it.
If your anti-vision, vision, and plan is difficult to think through, use this Life Reset AI prompt to guide you through it.
V - Daily levers
Every single day, complete at least 1-3 priority tasks that move the needle toward completing the project.
That is the only piece of productivity advice you need.
A good rule of thumb is this:
After 2 weeks, if you haven't made any noticeable progress toward your goals, you are not moving the right levers. You are doing something wrong. Most people won't admit that, or they will intentionally do busy work to avoid making progress because secretly they want to fail.
That's an even bigger problem.
Your mind notices opportunities to achieve your goals, and many people have an unconscious or deeply programmed goal of staying the same. They want to fail.
Be honest with yourself. Put progress check-ins every 2 weeks on your calendar. If you haven't gotten closer to your goal, you need to change the goal, start moving toward it, and acquire the knowledge you didn't have before that will unlock the next step.
So far, our frame is composed of:
Anti-vision → vision → standards → projects → levers that lead to progress away from mediocrity and toward excellence, creating a tight feedback loop that makes life an enjoyable game… for the most part.
That's the foundation. That's what pushes you deeper into the unknown.
But how do you actually navigate the highs, lows, emotions, and uncertainty along the way?
VI - Become a deep generalist
Traditional education and hyperspecialization is a way to make people subservient to the dominant paradigm/system. Study the generalized principles of nature and be a deep generalist. – Daniel Schmachtenberger
Humans are natural generalists.
Humans build tools to adapt to different niches and environments.
Animals, on the other hand, like lions in the Sahara or polar bears in Alaska, wouldn't survive if they were thrown into a different niche.
This extends beyond physical tools.
Humans invented mental tools like language, culture, concepts, religion, and stories so they could adapt, build, and acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to thrive in any situation.
This is the ability that makes us unique.
This is the ability that most people have lost.
You see, as children, we love to adventure. We love to discover. We love to figure things out. We make mistakes and learn from them. We touch fire.
But then, our learning stops being about real mistakes.
It starts being about the traits our parents and teachers dislike in us. The traits they find annoying or uncivilized. The traits they don't think will lead to the version of success they were conditioned to believe is the only one true path, and they haven't opened their mind to the discovery that there is never only "one true path."
And what is that one true path? It's the reason you feel so lost, overwhelmed, anxious, confused, and the rest.
The path that was supposed to be safe and secure was the complete opposite.
You were plopped in front of a government-trained expert trained by government-trained experts who are clearly not doing what you want to do in life for 6 hours each day, being told what to learn, and how to act while constantly being prodded toward the status symbol of a job and degree. And if you understand how the mind works, you understand that the goals that compose your worldview (fancy degrees and high-paying jobs) determine your mind's potential development and freedom. Your aim determines what you see.
Give yourself permission to study multiple interests.
VII - Entrepreneurship is spiritual
Here's my prediction:
The future of work will consist mostly of entrepreneurs, and if not entrepreneurs, elite employees who have entrepreneurial traits in increasingly rare positions.
The "entry-level" will go extinct.
This leaves two options:
Rely on government support with a marginal chance at a good life
Take full responsibility and become an entrepreneur.
Unfortunately, "entrepreneurship" and "business" have become dirty words. People believe entrepreneurship is only for talented people or requires massive upfront money. Let me redefine it.
The difference between employee and entrepreneur is the difference between low-agency and high-agency. High-agency individuals create their own goals and pursue them without permission. Low-agency individuals are assigned goals and pursue them because their programming doesn't allow them to see other options.
Industrial schooling and employment breed complacency and are dangerous for your psyche. It goes against your nature of needing uncertainty, challenge, and constant improvement to thrive.
People climb ladders because their minds crave challenge, but you can only climb so high. Once they reach limits, they justify comfort with "I just like job stability." They eliminate the possibility of discovering their calling and further novel challenge. That's dangerous.
Without challenging, self-generated goals that expand your mind, you drastically slow self-development and throttle your impact. Work consumes one-third of your life. If that massive chunk is spent in stagnation, your decline into chaos is inevitable.
Entrepreneurship is the only logical option for long-term thinkers. It's the path of uncertainty, requiring skills not taught in schools. You must be okay with failure, rejection, and slow progress.
Stop thinking of "employee" and "entrepreneur" as titles.
Think of them as states of mind.
Employees are passive individuals told what to learn. Entrepreneurs are assertive individuals who set their own vision, learn by curiosity, and create solutions that push humanity forward.
The secret is cultivating a skillset so impactful you can't help but share it.
You solve your own problems, sell the solution, and improve humanity.
That's entrepreneurship.
Employment isn't our natural state. Your psyche is wired to hunt, but today's threats are psychological and spiritual, not physical. Nobody wants to be a monkey in a cubicle, and everyone feels that pull to achieve something greater.
VIII - Become a "creator"
For millions of years, creativity was reserved for the gods.
Then humans slowly began to understand how things work.
We built tools that allowed us to survive in any environment, harnessed energy, and transformed the earth. Humans took over the role of creator, but so many have lost their path.
We don't know what the future holds or how AI will displace jobs.
But we know two things.
One, problems are infinite.
Two, problems are soluble.
No matter how developed we become, there will always be a next problem to solve. That's all you need to know to live a life of meaning, money, and mastery.
If happiness—or enjoyment—is the combination of progress being made and contribution to something greater than yourself, and both are accomplished by solving problems, for yourself and others, and problems are solved through creativity, then the only logical and fundamental aim for your future is to embody creativity by becoming a creator. In other words, you find the intersection of purpose and profit by creating solutions to problems you deem interesting, passing on those solutions to contribute to the progress of humanity, and repeating the process when the next set of more complex problems arise. Although problems become more complex, you become more equipped with knowledge, skill, and experience to solve them. Life gets better as problems get harder, if you learn to keep chaos at bay, which is a problem within itself. With every problem comes the opportunity to reach a new level of purpose.
Becoming a creator has always been possible, but never so accessible. We're in the Second Renaissance, and it's happening on the internet, everywhere, faster than before. A digital society where anyone can be an Einstein or Shakespeare.
In this society, there are consumers, creators, and companies. When I say "creator," I mean the essence of your being. Someone who self-reflects, identifies problems, explores the unknown, tests solutions, and creates something worth passing down. A creator lives at the intersection of purpose and profit.
Creators are the sense-making pillars of this new society. With rapid information spread and growing chaos, people can no longer trust static belief systems. They find creators who share their vision. Someone a few steps ahead providing relevant ideas that breed specific knowledge.
The path to becoming future-proof is this:
Shift from consumer to creator. Solve your own problems, distribute your solutions in the global town square, attract people who share your vision. Even with just 1000 true fans, you'll find the power to create a good life.
Do it all. Write. Design. Market. Sell. Film. Code. Be the generalist you were born to be.
If you want more on my entrepreneurship philosophy, read Purpose & Profit, my second book.
IX - Uncertainty is signal, not noise
You're supposed to feel lost.
You're supposed to feel overwhelmed.
You're supposed to feel like you have no idea what you're doing.
What in the world did you expect to happen when you decided to change your life? Did you just think that all possible knowledge and skill would be deposited into your head the moment you tried to do something?
When you commit to excellence, you commit to a life of uncertainty, because you commit to a life of learning.
Your potential is determined by the amount of uncertainty you're willing to embrace.
The thing is, the most successful people don't flinch at this. They don't perceive uncertainty as something dangerous, so their fight or flight response doesn't go off. They can trek into the unknown with a clear head, allowing them to make proper decisions.
How?
Because they realized that all outsized gains lie in their ability to embrace, manage, and extend uncertainty. They realized that the "certain" life is the least rewarding.
A job is certain. Your paycheck reflects that. A business is uncertain, depending on what level you are operating at. Starting out with a local business, agency work, freelancing, or even information products is level one. It's uncertain, but it's simple, and you have a cap of about $1 to $5 million a year before you need to increase the stakes even further by hiring a team or expanding the business model into something like software or physical products.
The same goes for investing. You can invest your savings in a "certain" 401k. That's level 1. You can invest in the stock market. That's level 2. You can invest in businesses, crypto, or even more uncertain assets. Naturally, those have the highest returns on investment, but also the highest risk.
You need to hedge against risk as much as you can. Punch just above your weight. Don't take on a challenge you can't handle. Change your environment to reduce the impact of losses. Move into a cheap apartment. Live well under your means. The more responsibilities you adopt before you've had the chance to take risks during your youth, the more difficult it is to justify changing your life.
X - Engineer enthusiasm
"You need to be obsessed."
This is how people describe successful people with an intense spirit. If you are intense, you need to learn to redirect that energy away from people and toward a skill, interest, or business. You can't, and shouldn't, control people.
The real word for this is enthusiasm, but that doesn't feel as cool and edgy as "obsession."
The word enthusiasm comes from the Greek word enthusiasmos, with the literal translation of "having god within" or "god-inspired." It referred to being possessed or inspired by a divine spirit, suggesting that true creative or spiritual power came from beyond the individual self.
The master key to the good life is to fill your average day with that which makes you enthusiastic.
So, one of the most important things you can do is reverse engineer where enthusiasm comes from and begin to eliminate, outsource, or accept that which does not align. Acceptance is the decision to see reality as it is and not attempt to control the uncontrollable, not allowing those situations to cloud and poison your mind.
Notice which activities make you feel energized, which distort time, and which make focus effortless. Notice what makes you excited, curious, and open-minded. Especially notice when you can't sleep because you are having too many ideas. Do everything in your power to fill your day with more of these and remove things that prevent you from doing so.
Literally block off 1-2 hours a day to pursue your enthusiasm.
The next rules will help structure these time blocks.
XI - Self experimentation
Self-experimentation is the only way to solve your problems for good.
People can diagnose and prescribe solutions to your problems, but they often lack regard for the difference in perspective, goals, and experience from the person with the problem.
Here are two approaches to solving the problem of making money:
Person A: Follows exactly what a guru says. They play it safe, follow the rules, and downgrade their lifestyle based on someone else's blueprint.
Person B: Pulls advice from multiple sources to make decisions based on the patterns they notice between all. They use how-to advice, but only to discover principles that can be integrated into the pursuit of their goals. Eventually, with education and effort, it clicks and they know how to make it work in their own unique way.
On the topic of weight loss, Person A is in a much more dangerous position. You find a guru preaching veganism, you clean up your diet, follow their advice as law, see results, then attach to that ideology and become a prophet.
This is dangerous and the definition of low consciousness.
You lost weight and felt more energetic, but from a lack of understanding decided that only the vegan diet can do that (I have nothing against the vegan diet btw, it's just an easy example).
If you’re going through problems in your relationship: hire a therapist, binge-watch YouTube advice, go on a retreat, and experiment with options until you find the right solution. The first one you try probably isn't the best way.
If your business isn’t growing, buy a course, hire a coach, test a new software, zoom out, and create a new strategy…
There’s always a way to solve your problems, and you strip yourself of that power when you latch onto one solution (that probably won’t solve the problem for good).
XII - How to live a unique life
The greatest mistake is not making mistakes.
The thing is, you're different.
You're aware of this.
You're observant. Maybe a bit quiet. Afraid to speak your mind because they won't listen anyway. But that silence is killing you. You tried to fit in. You tried to trust others with your future. You tried to demonize money, success, and the rest because "you don't need it to live a good life," but you need to build. Because that's how you contribute to others, connect to something greater than yourself, and embark on a unique journey that brings an end to robotic living because you have the money to remove your dependency from that robotic living.
The thing is, you're still looking for the "one true path."
I'm here to tell you that there isn't one.
You aren't where you want to be because you're afraid of making mistakes.
I cannot express that enough.
If there were one true sentence in which to orient your life, that would be it.
Mistakes are nature's compass.
If happiness can't exist without sadness, success can't exist without failure.
It is a universal law. A pattern of reality. A phenomenon that has been around since the first sign of life, because something can't exist without nothing.
You can make mistakes on the conventional path – schools and jobs – but you are still working toward a narrow goal. The mistakes don't lead toward a new, better path, they simply lead to you feeling sorry for yourself.
When you decide to be free – and reject the goals assigned to you at birth that made you think small and trapped you in this negative bubble of thoughts – your mistakes are your light in the dark.
But you don't know what you want.
That's the problem.
You don't realize that you will never know what you want. It's in the future. It doesn't exist. It's imaginary. Life changes. What you want now could, and will absolutely be, different tomorrow, the next day, or the next decade. But you'll never embark on this process of refinement and purification because you can't seem to allow yourself to fail.
What you want out of life becomes clearer when you realize what you don't want out of life and work in the other direction. Since you haven't made any mistakes on your own path, it's obvious why you don't know what you want out of life.
My advice:
Do what you want without permission from someone else.
Go to the party. Get drunk. Start the business. Scroll on your phone all night. Do whatever your little heart desires. Seriously, because denying those desires is only going to bind you to them.
But there's a catch.
You need to be able to realize when those things are a mistake.
Getting drunk every night isn't a mistake if you don't have meaningful responsibilities to wake up to every morning. It's not hurting your ability to achieve the goal. Managing parties and alcohol becomes a lot easier when it impacts something more important than parties and alcohol. Since your schooling and job aren't more important, you don't care and do it anyway. You need your own goals, and you can only generate those goals by getting absolutely fed up with where you are and rejecting everything you thought was true.
You need to start from scratch.
– Dan
Absolutely, fantastic.
Mistakes are nature's compass.
If happiness can't exist without sadness, success can't exist without failure.
It is a universal law. A pattern of reality. A phenomenon that has been around since the first sign of life, because something can't exist without nothing.
I'm living this quest in my journey. These 12 rules resonate.
Thanks,
Daniel
I can't express how much I needed this letter at this point in my life. Thank you!