A plan is your surface area for discovery and the best place to start is pure honesty with where you are at: are you content with your life? Navigate the unknown by gradually building discipline through pain until your new identity solidifies. Create your own little world, program your own video game, one that is addictive and enjoyable. It took decades for your mind to take its current shape, change will take time. What do you despise in life? What is your ideal future? What aren't you willing to sacrifice? Where do you want to be in 1 and 10 years? Invest energy into a series of projects rather than skills, as skills are useless in isolation. A project becomes meaningful as you invest energy into it. Hunt for a stack of reasons to commit to what your are doing, not the other way around. Search for reasons to continue, make it difficult not to change. Document your life, you don't need permission to share on the internet where anyone can discover your journey. Don't be a content creator but a creator. If you don't create a purpose, you will be assigned one. Contemplate what you don't want often. Focus on the Why and watch the How magically emerge. If you aren't building, you're dying. Money is a tool for personal development. Clear, turn negative thoughts and experiences into 5-10 ideas that can be used for your work and gaining awareness. Consume, learn, and hunt for ideas to capture. Create, synthesize information into something that helps and impacts others. Connect, adopt a new shape of mind. Beginner hell can last anywhere from 3 months to 30 years. What advanced people do now is not what they did to grow in the first place. Build authority on social media before people care about your cute philosophical quotes. Solve more problems, it captures attention. Cover important ideas in extreme depth, stop trying to avoid writing about the things that people want to learn about. People need to be reminded more than they need something new. If you aren't growing, your content isn't that good. Use numbers, break patterns, callout problems, show proofs, throw punches. Nobody knows who you are, network with big accounts and get your content seen beyond audience. You need a product to build authority and framing. Your life is determined by how you choose to cure your boredom. You don't deserve outcomes based on hard work and time put in only, review your plans and expectations. Explore different things until you find the ones you can't pull away from. You can't fit each new passion into your lifestyle, respect your priorities. Productivity is highly dependent on creativity, take time off from working to generate ideas. Make indiscipline difficult, remove bad things from your environment. Focusing on something over time gets you exponential results, but you can only scale hard on a few things. Writing takes many form (texts, emails, journaling) and is about thinking, you can write a book but you can't think a book. Like writing, recording your own podcast to talk in a therapeutic way is helping to explore ideas. Writing is hunting for ideas that will stick with you in the long term. Most of the internet is made up of bots and AI content, and that's ok. People become so accustomed to pain that it feels like home, and leaving it seems like the real suffering. There’s processed food and there’s processed content: digital fat, cheap dopamine, instant gratification. You already know you can’t trust social media companies to change the incentives they operate on. Reputation beats reach, posting results from doing. AI content isn’t good unless you are good at content. Do you care if AI wrote something you got value from? AI lacks a coherent vision and philosophy. People don’t follow creators for one piece of content but for their body of coherent work. Artificial intelligence has only created the potential for one person to create more, faster. Anyone can learn, anyone can create, anyone can be discovered. Don't try to be a content creator or to build a brand, create the things you want to see in the world and be yourself. You are the niche, write to yourself, build for yourself, solve your problems and sell the solution.
Dan Koe