Life is a mind game, here's how you win

Why most people won't make it

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Onto the letter:

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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?

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