You won't be the same person in 6 months (how to master anything, fast)

Why it's so damn hard to change your life

Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence. – Anthony De Mello

People are living on autopilot.

Everyone was assigned goals by society as a child.

Goals require a system to be achieved.

A system takes trial and error to become efficient.

You had the biological goals of walking, talking, and speaking to survive.

As simple as they are for you now, that wasn’t always the case.

Your mind received negative feedback from your environment, which led to those systems becoming efficient to achieve your goal of surviving.

Your parents either scolded you or pointed you in the right direction when you made a mistake.

You started crawling, then stumbling around, then walking like a toddler with little balance, and now you can (hopefully) walk like an Olympic gold medalist can flip through the air and stick the landing – because they practiced achieving that goal long enough.

Learning to walk is just the start.

What about the goals of going to school, getting a high-paying job, and retiring at an age where you have little time left to enjoy your life?

Society as we know it is a system with the goal of creating useful workers and obedient citizens, because without them, the authorities and rulers would lose power.

Those are the 3 big goals – school, job, retire – that they injected into your mind right when you learned to comprehend the language you speak.

99% of people only see the 1% of reality that reinforces their beliefs and helps them achieve those goals. Much of their zest for life is extinguished by 25 years old.

99% of people are learning the skills and conditioning their minds to live a mediocre life, and they don't even know it.

The masses are being shepherded to an unfulfilling life because the systems that compose their mind, identity, perspective, and perception are becoming more efficient as they age.

A realization people often make too late:

Success is not planned, it is automatic.

Successful people – whether they were conscious of it or not – had a mind that was programmed to achieve the goals that led to their success.

Here's how you dissect your mind and reprogram it to become the highest version of yourself.

The root of all human behavior (and why you can't seem to change)

Your identity is not who you are, it's a collection of survival strategies.

In last week's letter, I promised that I would write about the core psychological mechanisms that keep people trapped in a low-consciousness state.

That letter was about ideology, and we broke down:

• Mass regression during stress: When people face stressful events (via a one of catastrophe or cyclical events like elections or tax season), they regress to lower levels of consciousness, becoming reactive and resorting to black-and-white thinking and ideological attachment.

• Three levels of human development: Level 1 thinking (Conformists who value authority/tradition), Level 2 thinking (Individualists who reject norms but believe their way is right), and Level 3 thinking (Synthesists who can adopt multiple perspectives and use ideology as a tool).

• Ideology as the primary trap: Ideology provides simple answers to complex problems and becomes harmful when it becomes a non-negotiable part of identity, leading to closed-mindedness, emotional volatility, and stunted psychological growth.

• Attachment vs. content problem: The issue isn't what ideology you believe in, but how rigidly you attach to it - treating beliefs as absolute law rather than tools for understanding. Humans need direction and purpose, but they need to outgrow psychological infrastructure that no longer serves them.

• The Solution = Firm beliefs held loosely: Hold ideas in the "realm of possibility" rather than as absolute truth, be willing to be wrong, and synthesize truths from multiple perspectives.

• Level 3 thinking indicators: You've reached higher consciousness when you can argue opponents' positions better than they can, create more than you consume, see former enemies as teachers, and view problems as fascinating puzzles rather than threats.

• Path to advancement: Question all beliefs deeply, expose yourself to radically different perspectives, practice non-reaction, deconstruct ideologies into parts, synthesize paradoxes, and create new frameworks that make old debates obsolete.

In HUMAN 3.0, I mapped human development across four fundamental dimensions (mind, body, spirit, vocation).

My goal with HUMAN 3.0 was to provide a model for becoming the most developed version of yourself. Multidimensionally jacked, let's say, rather than becoming overexposed to one domain, leading to unconscious problems in others (like a businessman who lacks meaning or a mystic with a frail body).

To create this model, I pulled from flow and performance science, various philosophical schools of thought, and developmental psychology research from Clare Graves which turned into Spiral Dynamics, Susanne Cooke Greuter's 9 stages of ego development, Maslow's hierarchy which shows that higher needs emerge once lower needs are satisfied, and Ken Wilber's AQAL model that orients generalizations, creating a useful, non-dogmatic theory of everything.

Here's the key problem that we're here to talk about:

If you don't expand your consciousness (in other words, develop your mind, body, spirit, and vocation) your life will be unnecessarily difficult and painful.

You'll wake up being 50 years old with the psychology of a 14 year old going through an emotional puberty, always reacting to problems and never being able to solve them. And thanks to the digital and physical modern environment, you end up addicted, overweight, broke, purposeless, and bitter.

Since ~80-90% of the world are at lower levels of development, this creates a low consciousness collective where nobody wants to actually solve problems, they simply want to fight until the other side loses.

Ideology, as discussed in the last letter, is one mechanism keeping most people trapped in this destructive state.

Survival, on the other hand, is the root of it all.

Every level of development is, in essence, changing how you survive.

If you can master your survival and leverage it in a way that is advantageous to a high quality of life, you unlock the core "cheat code" to achieving what other people think is impossible.

Your ego is a collection of survival strategies

Please do not downplay how important this is.

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 this is what got you into the current situation you're in.

You cannot win the survival game, you can only transcend and include it. Trying to win the game is the ultimate source of suffering.

Here's where it gets tricky:

Animals survive on the physical level. They attempt to reproduce the information in their genes.

Humans do this as well, but our survival extends beyond the physical world into the psychological world. We survive with our body, but also our identity. We try to reproduce the information in our genes, but also the information in our consciousness (memes).

So, what we're concerned with here is conceptual survival – the drive to preserve one's non-physical identity.

Animals use claws, teeth, and camouflage to survive, but humans are more deeply invested in the survival of their concepts: their self-image, beliefs, values, and worldview. As illustrated in the Ideology letter, this is why we attach to belief systems and defend them like our life depends on it, because to our mind, our life does depend on it. The ego perceives threats to our concepts as a life-or-death threat, triggering the same fight-or-flight mechanisms as a physical attack.

Our bodies are composed of genes. Our psyche is composed of memes. A meme is a unit of culture or an idea that spreads from mind to mind. This is an extended phenotype (a gene's expression is not limited to it's body but reflects in it's environment, like a beaver's damn aiding in survival).

We create larger structures like religions, nations, political parties, and corporations. These institutions are "nests" built to protect, perpetuate, and replicate the memes they are founded on.

If you are a gamer and somebody says video games are bad, you lash out in defense.

If you are a democrat and a republican calls you an idiot, you do the same.

If you identify with a sports team, religion, fad diet, or really anything else, you can't help but want to attack those who come into conflict with those things.

The core problem here is that you are unaware of this. It happens mechanically. Automatically. Your life is a series of unconscious reactions rather than conscious choices. You are more animal or robot than you are human.

Why it's so damn hard to change your life

Think of your identity or self-image like a house or building.

If you wanted to remodel it inside out, would you start ripping down walls or pulling out the foundation?

Of course not, the entire house would crumble, especially if you don't have the relevant skills.

Instead, you start with the floors, maybe the plumbing, then tear down one small wall, redecorate the inside, give the outside a fresh coat of paint, and slowly you don't even recognize the house.

So, every time you try to:

• Wake up earlier (threatening your "night owl" identity)

• Start a business (threatening your "employee" identity)

• Eat healthier (threatening your "comfort food" identity)

• Be more social (threatening your "introvert" identity)

You're essentially trying to replace a wall in your psychological house.

It's painful. It exposes vulnerable parts of you. And if you don't have an understanding of survival like we just discussed, you'll quickly retreat back to comfort until your house starts rotting from the inside and your life gets worse and worse thanks to entropy.

We'll save the concept of psychic entropy for a different letter, but understand that a system naturally declines into chaos unless effort or energy is put into maintaining order (remember, your mind is a series of nested systems). If you don't pursue growth and improvement, naturally, your life only gets worse until it's incredibly difficult to dig yourself out.

In other words, if you don't remodel your house, it eventually rots. At first, some chipped paint and maybe a roach don't bother you, but if you let that small problem slide by, it gets much bigger. Either way, as time goes on, you'll eventually need to build a new house or move altogether, no matter how much effort you put into maintenance.

If you truly want to change, it's going to be a painful journey.

But if you have the right strategy, you can expect and mitigate that pain, making it easier to reach a higher level of consciousness faster.

The Mastery Method (How To Learn Anything, Fast)

The Mastery Method is a framework for acquiring knowledge, skill, and experience fast.

What most people don't understand is that in order to master anything, you must master and transcend your survival, because in the process of mastery, you become an entirely different person.

You need to let go of your past life to open up room for a new one.

So, it's safe to say that you are going to have to learn… a lot.

Learning is the foundation, because right now, your self-image that is so desperately trying to preserve itself is preventing you from doing so.

Education expands your mind.

It introduces you to novel perspectives.

It increases dopamine in the brain as a consistent source of energy.

It gives you the knowledge to act with clarity toward your goals.

It exposes you to the potentials that you hadn't yet become aware of.

A consistent flow of education increases your chances of encountering meaningful events.

Meaningful events occur at the edge of the known, when your nervous system signals that you should pay attention and act on the opportunity.

When you have one foot in the unknown, you can just barely metabolize new aspects of reality and put that information to use.

Every skill you learn, every piece of knowledge you acquire, is either reinforcing your current survival strategies or helping you transcend them. You are extremely skilled at staying the same. We need to change that.

Becoming the person you were meant to be is the most painful yet rewarding process you can dedicate your life to.

You begin this path when you realize that the pain and pleasure of where you are now are of lesser magnitude than the pain of not receiving the rewards that come from seeing what you are capable of.

With that, let's discuss how to master almost anything as you trek toward becoming a new you:

1) Expand Your Mind

All real change is identity change.

Your level of mind dictates what values, beliefs, and standards are available to your identity.

You don't care about global problems because you haven't solved the personal problems that restrict your mind from seeing them as important.

Most people's minds are trapped in level 1, low-consciousness thinking. They can only see threats and opportunities that impact their physical or psychological survival. You're focused on your own personal gain.

If we pull from the great belief systems and philosophies, one common pattern is that the purpose of life is to continually expand your consciousness beyond yourself.

So, that's step one.

To break out of level 1 thinking, you need to peek into level 2 thinking, then level 3.

You must allow yourself the room to discover new goals by tossing an anchor into the unknown.

How do you do that? You set a massive goal in one of the 4 dimensions (mind, body, spirit, vocation). For most people whose biggest problems are their weight, energy, confidence, or finances, starting in the body or vocation quadrant is usually the smart way to go. I started with fitness, and the benefits of that spilled over into every other domain.

The thing is, you don't set this goal for practicality or achievement.

That's not what goals are for. A goal is a point of view. Achieving goals = solving problems = acquiring perspective = expanding consciousness (by the way, goals are not only materialistic pursuits). You don't appreciate the journey without first reaching the destination.

You set this massive goal for vision, direction, and filtration of opportunities.

Focus on making it as desirable as possible.

If you don't know where to start, answer these questions, or fill out this Life Reset prompt and it will spit out a first version of your plan to reach your next level.

• If you had all the money in the world, what would your average day look like?

• What kind of environment do you want to live in? Is there a specific location? Do you want to travel?

• Do you want a family? What do you want that life to look like? Visualize an average day of family time.

• How long of a workday do you want to have? If you could do anything, what would you do for work?

• How do you want to look and feel? Describe your body, energy levels, and how you want to present yourself to the world.

• What does your ideal day look like? Map out every hour.

• List out anything else that comes to mind in terms of a specific future that you want to build for yourself.

To make this even more potent, turn this vision into an anti-vision to round out the perspective of your ideal self:

1. What is the bane of your existence?

2. Write out the opposite of every question about your vision.

For even more firepower, create a vision board. Add images to a scrapbook, software, or wall that makes that future more tangible.

Remember that nothing is permanent.

You will discover inklings for your vision as you trek along this path. Be open to changing what you want as you discover what you don't want.

The pain of not reaching your vision should outweigh the pleasure of mediocrity.

Filter every single opportunity you receive through your vision.

Say "no" to everything except for that which aligns with who you want to become.

2) A Hierarchy Of Goals

When a person invests all her psychic energy into an interaction—whether it is with another person, a boat, a mountain, or a piece of music—she in effect becomes part of a system of action greater than what the individual self had been before. This system takes its form from the rules of the activity; its energy comes from the person’s attention. But it is a real system—subjectively as real as being part of a family, a corporation, or a team—and the self that is part of it expands its boundaries and becomes more complex than what it had been. – Mihaly Csikszentmihaly

Most people don't need motivation, they need clarity.

An ordered mind is a happy one, and a hierarchy of self-generated goals makes it hard for depressing distractions to penetrate your awareness.

While big goals are for vision and filtration, small goals are for practicality and progress.

Now, break your massive goal down into tangible sub-goals.

• 10-year goals

• 1-year goals

• Monthly goals

• Weekly goals

Then, every day, you are going to write down 3-5 priority tasks that move the needle toward these goals from the ground up.

Knock these tasks out first thing in the morning before responsibilities and distractions have time to wake up.

This daily practice literally rewires your survival patterns. Instead of waking up in reactive mode, you wake up in creative mode.

3) How To Learn

Learning comes from struggle, not memorization.

You don't learn by studying tutorials all day.

You learn by building a project and facing reality.

True learning threatens your current identity while false learning (found in schools and institutions) reinforce it. That's why it feels uncomfortable. Your survival systems resist new information that doesn't fit your current worldview. But when you're building something real, you can't hide behind theory.

Projects are goals that you can measure and iterate.

So, turn a few of your 1-year or monthly goals into a project.

• Ideate a way to build something tangible (you must do work)

• Write down milestones you can reach

• Create an outline in a notes app or notebook

• Brain-dump any ideas that come to mind

This primes your mind for pattern recognition-induced meaningful dopamine.

Your projects add additional "rules" to your perception of situations.

You now have a place to write down high-signal information that you receive as you educate yourself and interpret feedback while building.

Start, then learn. You must learn and build in unison to truly learn.

When you build something, you encounter real problems that require a new level of mind to solve.

Only then can you search for information to expand your mind and solve those problems. This is impossible when watching tutorials all day.

Each problem you solve is a small evolution. You literally couldn't have solved it from your previous level of consciousness.

4) Skills Are Groups Of Techniques

Building a project isn't the end of learning.

To build a project, you must acquire skills along the way.

But you don't "learn a skill."

You learn a technique, experiment with it, and continue adding techniques until you can combine them in a way that leads to your desired outcome.

Each technique you master is a tool that makes you less dependent on your current survival strategies. The more techniques you have, the more options you have beyond fight, flight, or freeze. You move from having one hammer to having an entire workshop.

You don't learn Photoshop as a skill.

You create a project, search for a technique to complete one aspect of it, and continue learning techniques until you finish the project.

Trying to learn the software itself is almost useless and takes much longer.

There are 10+ different techniques to remove the background of an image.

Knowing multiple techniques will allow you to remove the background seamlessly from almost any scene.

You don't learn copywriting as a skill.

You learn techniques for:

• Capturing attention

• Holding attention

• Enhancing the perceived value of your product or idea

• Moving beyond survival-based triggers to creation-based inspiration

There are dozens of techniques for each, and the more you learn, the better you get at copywriting as a skill.

Everything is a skill.

Life is a skill that encapsulates health, wealth, and relationships as skills until broken down into techniques you can practice over the course of your life to master life itself.

5) Reinvent Yourself

Think of your mind as the digestive system of reality.

If you eat too much or don't move enough, you won't metabolize that experience.

If you eat too little or move too much, you get hungry and agitated.

When you eat just enough, you create an environment that is conducive to mental muscle growth. You slice through reality toward your goals. You enter a season of pure progress, and the feeling is incredible.

Intentionally reinventing yourself is controlled identity death and rebirth. Your old survival strategies will fight this process because they perceive change as a threat. But this resistance is signal. It's a sign to lean into the discomfort (when most people would shy away).

You've already created the boundaries, limits, or clarity necessary to launch fairly far into the unknown. Risk has side effects, but risk can be mitigated with knowledge and skill.

With a vision, goals, and projects you are primed for an entirely new life.

All you have to do is take the leap.

Launch yourself into a new physical or digital environment.

• Move across the country

• Unfollow everyone online

• Follow people aligned with your future

• Change what you wear, where you shop, and who you see

• Drown your mind in the books you've been putting off reading

Align all information, or reality, with who you want to become.

Your old identity will die because it is starved of the information that reinforces it.

Hold strong during this extremely difficult yet extremely meaningful turning point in your life.

6) Nature's Compass

People are so afraid of making mistakes that they make the biggest mistake of them all: not making mistakes.

You can't avoid making mistakes.

They are Nature's Compass.

People who don't make mistakes don't give themselves a chance to achieve successes.

Imagine a self-driving car.

For years, it has received negative feedback that refines the system that shapes the mind of the car.

It can navigate roads with ease and may be arguably safer than a human driving the car.

Even though we often don't think of it like this, the self-driving car made millions if not billions of mistakes before it could actually reach a meaningful destination.

You must act in alignment with your big goal to form new systems that your mind operates on through the negative feedback of mistakes.

• Make a habit of forcing yourself to adopt the perspective of the highest version of yourself

• Allow this lens to unveil new opportunities that you can act on

• When you make a mistake, because you will, use it as direction for your next choice

• Notice which mistakes come from operating at lower survival levels

You will be able to achieve what most people think are difficult goals like you are able to walk (while most are still crawling).

7) Self-Experimentation Solves Problems

Your life and the projects that compose it should be treated as science projects.

To solve the problems that achieve your goal:

• Hypothesize an outcome (from your goals)

• Experiment with techniques (for skill acquisition)

• Document the process (as a project)

• Double down on results (as a solution)

Now, you have experience, skills, a project you can turn into a product, and a solution that you can charge money for to create an independent income source.

Self-experimentation is the only way to solve your problems for good.

Let's say you have the goal of achieving a six-pack.

You are in search of a solution, they tell you that veganism will solve all of your problems, and from an unenlightened state you:

• Clean up your diet

• Follow their advice as if it were law

• See the results they mentioned

Then, you attach to that diet ideology and become a prophet. You attribute results, that others have gotten via different modalities, to veganism and demonize anyone that questions you.

This is dangerous, obviously, and is the definition of low consciousness – operating from tribal survival rather than conscious choice.

In reality, what happened is independent of veganism:

• You ate more nutrient-dense foods

• Your actions worked to survive your vegan identity

• You had clarity (not chaos) by following a disciplined nutrition regimen

Veganism, in this case, was simply a modality for ordering your mind and allowing you to follow the principles of health – but you attributed it to a method.

Now, if you were to try veganism for a month, carnivore for a month, keto for a month, and flexible dieting for a month, you would:

• Make connections between the diets to reveal the fundamentals of health

• Pick and choose certain methodologies that you enjoy, meaning they will bring sustainable results

• Refine a system that fits your individual nature to perfection

• Transcend dietary tribalism into conscious nutrition

Then, once healthy living becomes effortless, you can do the same for your finances, social life, romantic relationships, spiritual endeavors, or any other domain of life.

Think of each domain of your life as both a project and a skill in which you collect techniques to master that domain.

The Mastery Method: Summarized

This is how you achieve goals so fast people ask for your cheat code in the game of life:

1. This is how you achieve goals so fast people ask for your cheat code in the game of life:

2. Expand your mind with a vision generation session. This perspective will allow you to create new goals and discover new potentials for your life (so you can break out of your narrow mind and achieve more).

3. Create a hierarchy of goals to bring clarity to your life. You need to bridge the gap between where you are now and where you want to be with practical goals.

4. Turn your goals into projects so you can build and learn in unison. Projects are goals that are measured, tracked, and improved.

5. Don’t learn skills, acquire techniques. Your skill level depends on the amount of techniques in your toolbox that can solve challenging problems.

6. Reinvent yourself with information overload Change your physical and digital environments to force an open mind and discovery of new potentials.

7. Treat mistakes as negative feedback in your system. You have no other way to test something that gets better results.

8. Treat your life as a science project. Become obsessed with experimentation in fitness, business, knowledge, and relationships.

Thank you for reading.

Until next week,

Dan