Learn these skills for 6-12 months and you're set for life

you will make multiples more than a "high-paying" career

Before we begin, the second Future-Proof challenge is scheduled.

It just went live and is $75 off until August 19th (1 week from now).

3 days. 6 hours of trainings. Become unemployable and learn how to productize yourself. Speakers include me, JK Molina, and Justin Welsh. All people who've built $1 million dollar one-person businesses, some with large followings some with small.

If you want the "laziest" way to start earning, how to turn AI into your marketer or copywriter, and the best monetization paths as a beginner, check it out here.

Okay, shilling done, onto the letter, I think you'll enjoy it.

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The biggest money mistake I see people make is optimizing for high paying careers they have no passion for. You need to be optimizing for something you can become top 1% in the world at. The top 1% of Halo YouTubers or WWII historians or acroyoga teachers make multiples more than the median programmer.

– Max on X

As a society, we expect kids to have everything figured out by the time they're 16-18 years old. That's obviously stupid, because the only thing they've figured out during that time is how to mimic their parents, teachers, and peers. They haven't learned how to learn, how to think, or how to generate their own goals.

Then we push them off to college so they can drown in textbooks and never learn a thing because true education is the result of doing, not studying.

They aim to become a doctor, lawyer, or pursue the next "highest paying" career path they found online before applying to a few colleges.

So, you go off into the workforce. You compete with the masses who did the same thing. And soon enough, you turn 40 years old, have a midlife crisis, and try to make up for all the experience you missed.

A pattern I've noticed in successful people is that they had an early-life crisis.

They gained awareness of the fact that the education system is a structure that relies on conforming thought energy, as do political parties and corporate mission statements.

They became disgusted with the idea of ending up like everyone else.

They decided to direct their own life, leave the structure, set their own goals and rules, and discover a path that was unique to them, because true education is discovery, not memorization.

They became the top 1% in the world with their intersection of interests.

They acquired the skills necessary to become self-reliant.

They earned 2x, 5x, and even 10x what society markets as the highest-paying careers.

And in the age of AI, creating your path is becoming less optional by the day.

If you want to find out what you are good at, learn what skills you need for self-reliance, and how to make an outsized income from both, this is for you.

How to find out what you're good at

The greatest mistake is not making mistakes.

Because most people think about their future for 30 seconds until the next opportunity for dopamine pops up. They come to the conclusion that they "don't know what they want to do with their life" and it becomes their identity. That becomes their default answer, and they stop thinking about the most important thing they should be thinking about every day for the rest of their lives.

Everything meaningful in life is downstream of self-direction.

You choose a goal that you think would benefit your life or is slightly interesting to you, discover more of what you're interested in by investing energy in that goal (you live it, contemplate it, and act on it), and only then do you have data points (experience) to generate refined goals that lead to discovering what truly interests you. This sounds simple as a single sentence, or maybe it doesn’t, but you never actually reach a final destination. It takes about 5-10 cycles over 3-5 years to even feel like you're on the right path, but even then you never stop experimenting.

All intelligent systems have this property of trying, acting, seeing the difference, changing, trying, acting, seeing sensing. A system cannot be intelligent unless it has those properties. Cybernetics is the most powerful language for describing systems that have goals.

– Paul Pangaro

Cybernetics is a way to model the world.

And by world, we don't just mean the mechanical physical world, but also the biological, social, and even mental world. All of them overlap.

When you're steering a ship toward a lighthouse and get blown off course, that's an error, so you correct course over and over again so that you reach the lighthouse rather than ending up lost in the middle of the ocean.

When you're having a conversation, you may not realize there is a goal for it, so when it starts to get stale and awkward, you don't know how to correct course and you kick yourself for sounding like an idiot.

When your body gets hot, it sweats. When you invest in the stock market, it goes up or down due to various goal-striving systems that you may or may not understand. When you're trying to find what you're good at so you can make an income from it, that's a goal, and just like everything else, you're success in doing that boils down to error correction. Trying → comparing to the goal → changing → and repeating without getting discouraged to the point of going back to a predetermined life.

As Naval said, "The real test of intelligence is getting what you want out of life."

So, if intelligence is to not only error-correct toward a goal, but to generate new goals, that exposes why many people today fail: You are conditioned as a child to pursue narrow goals (school, job, retirement) that have little room for failure. You're a bowling ball thrown down the lane with the bumpers up when you don't even want to play bowling.

In my own life, I didn't figure out what I was good at in an instant. Never in my life did I think I would enjoy writing so much, and I'm sure what I enjoy doing will change as the future of work does (you may have to change what you do - don’t limit yourself by identifying with a tool to do meaningful work). I went to college because that's what I was supposed to do. I switched degree paths every semester until I became obsessed with web development and skipped going to class so I could study it in my free time (still aced the class). Along the way, I tried every online business model under the sun. I failed at all of them, but was able to get a cushy job as a web designer.

But that wasn't my end like it is for many. Instead, it was my chance to experiment faster while having a safety net that reduced the risk and uncertainty that could cloud my mind and hurt my progress.

I got on social media to land freelance web design clients, I started talking about my other interests like emotional management and spirituality, and over the course of releasing at least 20 total guides and products, I realized what I'm very good at - changing how people think about their life.

Who in the world would have thought that I could build a strong income source off of that?

You can't reach that point with a specialized degree.

You can only reach it through making the uncertain certain through trial and error.

And you can't make an income with what you're good at without a specific skill stack you build along the way (that also can't be learned in schools, because they are a direct threat to the goal of that system, which is profit).

The skill stack of the top 1%

The only people who are genuinely worried about AI are those whose work resembles that of a machine.

A machine is assigned a task, and its sole purpose is to complete that task. Again, bowling ball with bumpers up on the lane. And while this always seems to piss some people off, there is a shred of truth here, which is that the definition of a machine is very close to the definition of a slave.

That's the problem. The current education system reflects the education of slaves. Read my book, Purpose & Profit (free), if you want the history behind Prussian-style education being brought to the West.

Slaves were taught career-specific skills like growing wheat, herding sheep, and riding a horse. Today, we're taught to be useful workers, because that's what most benefits the social system. If you don't obey, you are punished. If you do, you are rewarded. You are not correcting your own errors, you are being whipped into shape. Reward and punishment. No matter which way you look at educational institutions, if you actually look at it through clear eyes, the bad drastically outweighs the good, but there are few options – aside from creator economy courses and homeschooling - that allow for an interest-based education.

The difference between man and machine is that someone who is free is expected to act on their interests and do many things throughout their life. They are educated by the pursuit of their interests, and that occurs through trial and error toward a self-generated goal. This demands that you learn how to learn, how to think, how to live, and how to earn.

To become the top 1% at what only you can do, career-specific skills are only a complement to what Devon Eriksen calls the "liberating arts." Similar to the liberal arts that were supposed to liberate you, but since they are a department in an ideological structure, they do the opposite of that.

The liberating arts are:

• Logic: how to derive truth from known facts

• Statistics: how to understand the implications of data

• Rhetoric: how to persuade, and spot persuasion tactics

• Research: how to gather information on an unknown subject

• (Practical) Psychology: how to discern and understand the true motives of others

• Investment: how to manage and grow existing assets

• Agency: how to make decisions about what course to pursue, and proactively take action to pursue it

I'll also add one of my own, risk tolerance, because wealth creation always lies in your ability to embrace uncertainty. A 9-5 is not uncertain, but business, investments, and doing what is abnormal to the masses are.

But how do you learn these skills?

You choose a vehicle for them.

In most cases, that vehicle falls under entrepreneurship, but we'll talk about other options in the last part of this letter.

To those who say, "Not everyone should be or wants to be an entrepreneur," I think you lack perspective. If you were offered an opportunity that made complete sense and had to educate yourself to achieve it (like you already have with your current situation), you would do it, especially if it meant higher financial compensation. The problem is, you don't want to go through the trouble and insecurity of discovering that opportunity yourself. You think it will be painful, which it will be, but the best things in life are on the other end of suffering that you choose to take on. Most people are not even remotely aware of how entrepreneurship benefits and expands the psyche.

Beyond that, the modern notion of a "job" (wage labor instead of family or trade work) is a very recent development that came about during the Industrial Revolution. Before that, people were mostly farmers, artisans, and apprentices. They directed their own career, because that's how humans are wired. Most people think they never want to work again when work is a necessary counterbalance to rest, like how happiness wouldn't make sense without a reference point of sadness. You need both. You simply lack the meaningful work that pushes you to evolve and lights up your brain in all the right places.

Your ancestors were entrepreneurial. Your brain is wired to hunt. “Business” is the modern hunting ground. You don’t have to hunt for food anymore, but neglecting that aspect of your brain is not wise.

And with AI promising to rid us of the work we hate, many people will push against it thanks to the part of human nature that makes us latch onto the things that are killing us, but intelligent people will see it as an opportunity to do what they were meant to do.

A final objection before we get into how to do it:

Being an entrepreneur doesn't mean building a billion-dollar company.

For all I'm concerned, it simply means creating and directing your own work, even if that’s a $2000/month side income that allows you to choose what project you work on, because that is the crux of an enjoyable life.

How to make a living at what you're good at

"Dan, there are many people who are top 1% at what they do but still make very little income."

Correct, because they're missing one critical piece of the puzzle: the pursuit of excellence.

If those people were (1) aware of the opportunity to make more and (2) acted on it without permission, they would learn more than just what they are good at. They would intentionally stack the skills that led to money and leverage. They would choose the right vehicle for what they're good at.

In today's crazy world of technology, there are a few paths for the type of individual who wants to see what they are capable of.

First, you can join a startup. A startup is fast-paced and high-agency. Even though you may be considered an employee if you aren't a founder or executive, you are forced to acquire an entrepreneurial mindset. You are expected to do what you are best at, and are usually rewarded for doing so without needing constant direction. And, you can negotiate equity. That's always a plus.

Second, you can apprentice under someone successful. Take a fitness coach who is making hundreds of thousands to millions per month. If you are a true outlier in fitness and know what you're talking about, that is a massive benefit to them. It's difficult for coaches to find someone who can get their clients the same results that they would with the same level of quality and attention to detail. This applies to almost any niche of creator or company you can find online. Do it for cheap, study their business, earn more once you’ve proven your worth, then break off and do your own thing with what you learned, if you want to.

Last, you can build your own thing. The internet allows the top 1% to rise to the top, even in the weirdest topics, but only if they understand how the internet has changed everything.

Before the internet, there were traditional assets. Think fine art, rare wines, luxury watches, real estate, stocks, and commodities like gold or oil. For most of those, you needed capital to acquire them, and in order to acquire capital you probably needed the right connections and to live in the right geographic location.

Now there are digital assets, and anyone with an internet connection can build them. Please don't take that for granted.

Digital assets fall under media, data, or code.

Anyone can create content and build an audience.

Anyone can write software if they have the skill to do so.

An audience or customer base leads to data, which one can use to iterate and make progress faster than those without it.

Now, in my opinion (and many others'), even if you are the top 1% at coding, the most logical progression seems to be this:

• Prioritize media – If you are a one-man operation, start creating content. If you prefer writing, choose a writing platform. If you prefer audio or video, choose a platform for that. If you have the capital, you can hire someone else to do this for you.

• Start a service business – Freelancing, coaching, or consulting in your area of interest. You can charge higher prices so you only need a few customers to make a decent income. You don't need a large audience to do this, but you do need basic 1 to 1 sales skills.

• Productize your service – Either build a team and systemize your process or build an information product that teaches your process. As your audience grows these become more sustainable options.

• Continue pursuing uncertainty – Build software, design and launch a physical product, or even start making large investments. You can do almost anything at this point while being mostly self-funded.

If you're reading this, you're probably at steps 1 and 2, so forget about anything else for the time being.

People still drastically underestimate brand and distribution on social media. That is arguably the greatest skill you can learn (building an audience) because you can attach any business model to it and that business will grow if you know what you're doing.

Or, you can leverage that audience to join and startup, work under someone as an apprentice, or partner with someone who has resources you don’t - like how a creator can partner with a coder and vice versa. You can let your resume sit in a stack with thousands of others, or you can post content to display your character and expertise. Your account is your public resume.

Building an audience around your interests and turning it into a business is the practical vehicle for acquiring the Liberating Arts as skills and traits.

I know it sounds overplayed at this point, and you’re probably tired of everyone talking about it, but those people are in fact on the leading edge. Becoming jaded will hurt you.

So, how do you actually start?

• Well, you start. You learn by doing, not absorbing information. If you need to memorize it, you are learning the wrong thing.

• Set initial goals and be meticulous about your progress. Aim for $1,000 and 1,000 followers. If you aren't moving the needle every day, here's what you do:

• Research a process that someone has found success with. You can find these with a simple google or YouTube search (I wouldn't use ChatGPT to find processes that are unique to individuals who've gotten results. ChatGPT gives you generalized garbage for this use case.)

• Experiment with various techniques. Apply tips and tactics you learn immediately. Building an audience or business allows you to instantly apply what you learn. This is the most crucial part.

• Identify patterns and principles. Note what works, what overlaps from various teachings, and double down on those. Congrats, you've learned without endless studying.

• Create your own process. Tailor the patterns and principles to your unique lifestyle and situation.

You don't need to learn social media, content, email marketing, lead generation, copywriting, sales, or any of that. You need to start pursuing a goal, research ways to achieve it, and double down on what works. If you can't make your first few dollars within 30 days, you are absolutely doing the wrong things, and at that point, your problems are emotional regulation and focus. Solve those.

Thank you for reading.

– Dan

P.S. We go over all of this in the How To Productize Yourself 3 day intensive with JK Molina and Justin Welsh.

If you want to start your service business and productize down the road, check it out here for early bird pricing that ends August 19th.

If you simply want to read more, here are some complimentary letters that talk about topics mentioned in the letter above: