Give me 20 minutes and i’ll make you impossible to manipulate

The world is a circus

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.

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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.

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: