Humanity is conditioned to follow a default path leading to a dull, mechanical, and mindless life. The 3 pillars to the good life are focus, energy, and experience. Your life feels meaningless because you are not grounded in the present moment. Creativity is the key to becoming irreplaceable and your creativity depends on the openness of your mind. Understanding the Universe as a natural law will put you ahead of 99% of people. You must solve the burning problems that are preventing your mind from expanding beyond surface-level living. You do not have one purpose, you move from lesser to greater purposes with time, effort, and evolution of who you are. Life is like a video game: every situation has a series of goals, problems, and paths in between that every individual perceives according to their identity or perspective. When the challenge is just above your skill level, but you have absolute confidence in your ability to execute, you tap into what is arguably the most enjoyable point in the human experience accessible without drugs. When you zoom in and focus on one thing, the background blurs and creates focus in your practical life and eliminates distractions. But staying in this narrow focus limits your creativity. At times, you must zoom out to gather truths, patterns, and creative resources. Then, you can zoom back in to apply them to your practical life. It is in your best interest to fail hard and often with a smile on your face. Most people close their minds at the first hint of difficulty and stop learning after graduation. If you aren’t interested in anything, it’s because you aren’t in the unknown. You don’t have a chance at finding your interests. You need a vision and an anti-vision, what you want and what you don't want, to frame your perspective. You need a purpose to perceive situations and identify problems, a path to clarify your skill acquisition and building, a priority to focus on daily and ground your attention. Curiosity is the path to doing the things you want to do. If you learn the same thing as everyone else to be trained into the select few jobs that are left, you can be replaced by almost anyone. The solution is deep knowledge because the future demands that we earn with our mind, not our time. People don’t realize that work is a necessary part of life that brings contrast to rest. Everyone wants to spend the majority of their life sipping coconuts on the beach, but when they have free time on their hands, they are arguably the most miserable. They don’t realize that work brings order to the mind. The concept of a “life’s work” doesn’t cross the minds of the mindless masses. You must create space for your life’s work through intentional lifestyle design. If you don’t take the time, it will be taken from you. Focus is finite. Fill your mind with education, empty it with writing, use it with ideas. 4 hours of focused work is better than 8 hours of distracted work. 3 to 5 hours is a sweet spot for mental energy expenditure. Specialists are out, but so are generalists. We live in a time of specialized generalism. You must pursue your curiosity, become obsessed with one crevice of reality, stack skills to solve burning problems within that domain, and let the base of your skill tree spread its roots into other connected domains. If you become a specialist, you can work for someone else for a pretty paycheck, but you don’t realize that they are the reason you can get paid. You can’t create an independent income because you haven’t learned those skills that allow you to get paid. Value is determined by perception and perception is influenced by an individual’s worldview. Mimic the universe by telling stories, leading people through highs and lows, sparking emotions, opening a curiosity loop, agitating problems, relating to others with personal experiences, implying a goal with desirable end results, providing a path for them to follow to achieve that. Then comes the medium: writing, speaking, marketing, and sales are the foundational skills that will determine the results of any other skill you learn. You are your life’s work. You are a project that houses projects each with a purpose, path, and priority that when actualized, allows you to evolve. A project is how you throw an anchor in the unknown and pull yourself through a difficult current of learning experiences to complete the project. The source of learning is struggle, not memorization. Learning is the process of turning knowledge into understanding, and the lowest points of your life are those where a stackable lesson presents itself, but only if you apply it in reality. To learn with efficiency, create a project for the goal you want to achieve, build it with what you know, teach others what you're building, study knowledge gaps, repeat forever. Your job is to research a plethora of solutions to your problem, test them all without latching onto one, note principles and patterns and truths between them, note what gets you results but may not get others' results, begin to create your own solution with what you’ve learned. This is where true value is cultivated. This value can be used for profit or just to make your life better. Don’t be discouraged if the important problems in your life aren’t solved in an instant. Everyone is an entrepreneur, some just choose to get paid for the problems they solve in their personal life. All profitable products start as a project whether the intention to sell is there or not. Self-improvement is about solving problems in your life. Business is about solving problems in other people’s lives. Stop overcomplicating how to make money. Stop trying to solve creative problems that don’t exist. Acquire the skills to solve the problems in your life, which is an automatic filter for value, then turn the solution into a product for others. There are 4 eternal markets in business: health, wealth, relationships, and happiness. Solve your own problems and sell the solution. The most profitable niche is you. Your purpose is your brand. Your path is your product. Your priorities are your content. Your content contains the valuable message that attracts people to your brand. When you occasionally put your product in front of them, that’s how you start to generate an independent income. Everyone has the same big goals of making more money, having more sex, having more energy, and ending their existential angst. While the goals are the same, the path you will take is different. If you are the niche, saturation ceases to exist. Become a fountainhead of value in a world that is desperate for depth.
Dan Koe