This letter may get peoples’ panties in a bunch.
So, I ask that you keep an open mind.
Without an open mind, there is no chance to receive a kernel of truth (no matter how small) from someone else’s perspective in a way that can help your life.
Remember, that is my intention.
To help rather than hurt.
If you misinterpret what I say, no matter how harsh, it will be you that hurts yourself.
Even if my intention were to hurt you, some people may see that as a positive. If you choose to be hurt, you will be hurt.
If you feel your mind start to close, resist the urge to lash out. You know this feeling. It is hard to have any other thought than the negative garbage you’ve been programmed with by the external world.
With that, let’s get straight in.
You’re a slave.
I’m a slave.
Slaves don’t know they’re slaves if everyone else is too.
Just because the “slavery” that everyone knows and hates is no longer a thing, doesn’t mean that slavery doesn’t still exist.
No, I’m not talking about sex slavery, although many porn abusers could fall under that category.
I’m talking about mental and financial slavery.
Slave (noun) – a person who is forced to work for and obey another and is considered to be their property.
The key word in that definition is “force.”
Force can have multiple definitions and contexts.
For the sake of coherence, we are going to use this definition:
Force (noun) – strength or energy as an attribute of physical action or movement.
In other words, there is something pushing you to do one thing over the other. The stronger that “something” is, the more enslaved you are.
A slave of the past could run away, in some cases, but they would run out of food, water, and shelter to the point of death.
With this said, slavery is influenced by survival.
As we’ve discussed earlier, human survival is not physical, it is conceptual.
Humans survive form, self, ego, or identity. However you want to label a distinction within consciousness.
Some common examples:
Political Ideologies
If you identify as a Republican or Democrat, and your beliefs are challenged, you will feel a physical stress response that encourages you to defend those beliefs.
Your survival feels threatened because you consider an idea a part of who you are, which is also an idea.
Sports Teams
Have you ever noticed people get visibly angry when they argue about which sports team will win? Especially if they have money on the line.
Your “team spirit” makes you feel as if you are a part of something larger than yourself. It is your spirituality. But it doesn’t have to make your mental health worse.
Your Identity
Are you a coffee snob? Health expert? Productive person?
If someone tells you to stop drinking coffee, how do you feel? If someone tells you that the keto diet is best, how do you feel? Do you want to educate them on what you “know” is best or that you have experience with? The ideology that you have attached to your identity and feel the need to survive? Even when you know that blanket statements don’t apply to every single person on Earth across different cultures with different resources?
If you’re productive, and you move to a new location, how do you feel? Your routine just got destroyed out of nowhere. You were surviving the form that is your routine through effort, energy, and habit. You need a week or two to “acclimate,” right?
This is where I am often a slave. To my routines.
Religious Ideologies
Even if people say they don’t care to convert you to their belief system, they still do so unconsciously. Because they are conditioned to reproduce their identity.
Survival includes reproduction, and any ideas we transfer to another through communication influence the identity of another person.
Your “self” is a concept. It is a web of ideas and beliefs. Those ideas and beliefs can change with time. Any piece of information you consume has an impact on who you are.
Hence why mental phone slaves often end up unsuccessful. All they do is consume self-deprecating memes and numb their mind to avoid confronting the truth of their situation.
Slavery is powerful because if we are conditioned to survive an identity, like a job title, and if we think about quitting that job, the force of our survival being at stake keeps us tied to it.
Society Is A Pyramid Scheme Of Attention
If it is not given attention, it doesn’t exist.
If it doesn’t exist, attention must be invested for it to survive.
This brings two realizations:
1) You are contributing to unconscious destruction.
How do mega-corporations grow and thrive?
They start small and form a power hierarchy with time.
Fewer people with more power at the top, more people with less power at the bottom.
The top tier of the hierarchy (the company and executives) can only do what they do because a plethora of people are giving attention to the tasks, vision, and values from the bottom up.
The bottom is composed of low-skill grunt work, like a cashier at McDonalds, and moves up to marketing and business operations until you reach the top.
By nature, it is impossible for a large number of people to rise up this hierarchy.
The problem is that people at the bottom are unconscious of the impact they have with their work.
Like how McDonalds is poisoning the population with their food (do cashiers have extensive nutrition and health knowledge? No, or else they wouldn’t be working there, they would probably be in the nutrition field).
Or how military programmers write code for drones that execute orders to kill people on the other side of the country.
Or even a web designer for a course creator that scams people.
“Forgive them for they know not what they do.”
2) You can bring a conscious vision into reality.
The only way to escape is to build your own thing.
But this is increasingly difficult when you are a slave to that which sucks up your time and energy.
It’s taken you 20, 30, maybe even 40 years to drill yourself into this reality. It shouldn’t take that long to get out, but have some patience.
The way out is to become a value creator.
True value is creative.
Creativity allows for change and emergence.
It allows the form, ego, or identity it was trying to survive to evolve into something new.
If the only value you have to offer is physical, you will get stuck in manual labor jobs (while the people at the top earn with their minds).
As we always talk about, you must:
- Push the boundaries of the unknown
- Learn and discover new potentials along the way
- Acquire the skills necessary to build a purposeful product
- Solve your own problems so you create a solution of true value
- Start a business as a vessel to actualize your vision for the future
You must create your own conscious hierarchy that minimizes unconscious destruction.
The Wage Slave
I’m tired of both sides of the argument.
“9-5 workers are slaves!”
“It’s okay Johnny, if you work a 9-5 you aren’t a slave.”
Both are wrong. Both are right.
Both are trying to get maximum engagement and boost the status of their brand. They don’t zoom out and think if people are actually slaves. A published idea without depth and understanding is a disservice to humanity.
The fact of the matter is that 95%+ of 9-5 workers are slaves.
Your feelings don’t matter here. If you do feel threatened by words on a screen, then maybe there is some truth to what I’m saying. Look inward and see what you are hiding from.
Most workers are the literal definition of a slave.
If you cannot stop showing up to work for your survival and have no skills to open other options immediately, and you are the “property” or employee of a certain company… that’s a slave.
Now, this doesn’t mean you can’t be happy.
Everyone is a slave in one way or another, and we all have waves of happiness in our life.
If happiness is the feeling we get when our attention is distracted from the vast unhappiness in the world, then slavery may make some people happier than non-slaves.
You can be happy (at points in your life) while being unconscious of the problems in your life.
But once you are aware of them, truly aware of them, then you will feel the pull to evolve.
I am not here to demonize 9-5 jobs.
I see them as a necessary stepping stone.
I also see entry-level business models like agency work, freelancing, coaching, and even digital products as stepping stones in your life’s work. They can easily enslave you.
A personal brand, however, is not a business model. It is how you build an audience for any product or service you wish to distribute as you evolve.
A personal brand is your character in the digital society.
Many people will get trapped in a certain level of the hierarchy. Maybe that’s their destiny. And that’s fine.
Virtual realities, like video games, have a constructed society that is held together by NPCs (Non-Player Characters). On the internet, these are the unconscious trolls, consumers, and reply guys.
The truth is that most people will remain unconscious of the impact they have on the world.
I can’t change them, you can’t change them, but we can change what we do in our own lives.
Entrepreneurship Is Modern Survival
Entrepreneurship is the only logical option for long-term thinkers.
If you stay in a 9-5 job for too long, you become a monkey in a cubicle.
Your psyche is wired to hunt.
To hunt is to make novel discoveries that aid in your survival.
Imagine our ancestors walking by a bare bush every day. It doesn’t serve their future.
But one day, it grows new berries.
Somebody walks by it, they notice it, and that novelty causes excitement. They either gather the berries or remember them for later so they can survive longer.
When you get stuck in a 9-5 (or a new 9-5 like an agency or freelancing) you live in the eternal known. You can’t make new discoveries in the known.
You get bored, depressed, and see life as meaningless because the only dopamine you get is from superficial sources.
You never take risks, push into the unknown, and discover new knowledge, tools, and potentials that raise dopamine levels in the brain.
You must evolve.
Entrepreneurship is the path of uncertainty.
Like slashing your way through the jungle.
You are required to learn skills that aren’t taught in schools.
You are required to be okay with failure, rejection, and slow progress.
You are required to learn from your mistakes, show up again tomorrow, and push until your strike gold.
As an entrepreneur, you “hunt” for your survival by gathering knowledge, creating a valuable product, and putting it in front of people that could benefit from it.
As I’ve discussed, my path for doing this is to:
- Start a personal brand as the foundation
- Solve your own problems in the real world (health, wealth, relationships)
- Distribute your findings, opinions, and beliefs via writing
- Start with a freelance or coaching service and get results
- Sell a physical or digital product that requires less time invested (once your audience grows)
- Make a hefty income in 2-4 years with persistence and iteration
- Expand your vision for the future and build whatever you want to get there (software, spaceships, whatever you want)
This is the entire process I give, with templates and education, inside Digital Economics.
Skill & Opportunity
I am a slave to many things in life, but I would like to believe that I’ve escaped wage slavery.
If my business got wiped from the face of the earth, I can still:
- Create a product or service that someone else needs
- Call, email, advertise, and spread internet content to drive traffic to that offer
- Make $5-10K in the first month and improve that with the data I’ve gathered
Why can I do this but most can’t?
Because over the past 10 years, I’ve learned graphic design, video editing, copywriting, psychology, web development, marketing, sales, email marketing, speaking, audience building, advertising, product design, course creation, idea generation, lifestyle design, bodybuilding, nutrition, and more that people struggle with.
With $0 to my name, I could create a service that teaches people how to create a landing page that sells.
I would charge $1000-$2500 for a 4-call “boot camp” depending on how I want to structure the offer.
I would target new businesses that have a full website (because that isn’t even close to an optimal way to sell a product or service). Or I would target students who want to learn a profitable skill outside of employment. Or I would target creators that want the first step in monetizing their brand outside of platform revenue.
I would spend 3 hours in the morning DMing people and writing marketing content online.
People will read this and try to replicate it.
Yet, they will fail because they don’t understand how powerful experience is. There are so many subtle nuances and thought processes that a beginner has to reprogram with effort.
When you go to school, you are narrowed in on a few select skills that train you into an employable position.
With every skill I learn outside of school, I can spot multiple opportunities that allow me to earn an income outside of a job.
This effect compounds.
With the skills I’ve developed, I can write out 50 different products that I know will be profitable within the first 6 months of my efforts.
Skill is determined by experience here.
You can’t just learn about them and expect to see what I can in the market.
You haven’t failed to the point of understanding the nuance behind all of this business stuff.
If you want to escape, here’s how you discover opportunity and develop the skill to actualize it:
1) Drown In New Information To Program Your Mind
Most people are drowning in information that has nothing to do with their goals.
They don’t have a vision, goal, or problem to interpret information through.
Chances are you’ve already read life-changing information, but it didn’t register in your awareness.
With the goal of “escaping wage slavery” at the top of your mind, you can:
- Schedule a minimum of 20 minutes dedicated to consuming information that will help with that goal.
- Buy books, use your Audible credits, save podcasts, follow new social accounts, and add new videos to your “Watch Later” on YouTube
- Get out of your house, have a notes app open on your phone, and write down your discoveries as you immerse yourself in the information.
You will feel the dopamine in your brain on your hunt for a better life.
2) Study Purposeful Businesses You Aspire To Build
Now that you have a consumption habit, you need a more practical goal to apply what you are learning.
What business do you build to escape wage slavery?
- Take mental note of the apps and activities you incorporate on a daily basis.
- Look at who you follow and the businesses they’ve built.
- Buy a book or course on a specific business model that interests you.
You must discover a business model that you feel pulled to build.
One you can become obsessed with.
It doesn’t matter which one it is.
Emulation built my first successful businesses.
It helped me identify blindspots.
Those blindspots were usually the crucial piece that kept me from seeing success.
Get in the habit of studying people you want to be like, downloading and purchasing everything they have to offer, and making a mindmap of everything they have online (social media profiles, websites, landing pages, email sequences, products, services, lead magnets, books, everything).
Reverse engineer what allows them to be successful.
If you don’t know what to do after that, I don’t know what to tell you.
3) Become Your Own Dopamine Dealer
My friend and I were having a discussion the other day.
I’ll paraphrase what he said.
You know what’s wild… I remember asking you why none of your friends take action or follow in your footsteps. I get it now.
People are dopamine junkies, even businessmen.
The people that don’t take action don’t know how to replace the dopamine they are getting from their current habits with business.
So, they either don’t start or quit after a week because they couldn’t get their hit.
This made me think back and realize what made it work for me.
I was constantly chasing that good ol’ dopamine, but in the right direction.
So, my advice:
- Hold a loose idea of what you want in life (money, success, peace, fulfillment).
- Start building something, anything, that will make that a reality – I would, of course, recommend a one-person business because it is long-term.
- Learn what you want to learn the most to help build it (skills, courses, websites, logos, whatever) so you get your dopamine hit.
- Don’t be afraid to change what you are doing if you get bored.
I attribute my unique success to “shiny object syndrome.”
I tried and failed at 7 different business models.
What most don’t see is that I wouldn’t be here without those failures.
The skills I learned with each compounded into better opportunities.
My tweets wouldn’t be the same without copywriting.
My web pages wouldn’t be the same without web design.
My profile picture and branding wouldn’t be the same without Photoshop art.
The list goes on.
Replace the habits that keep you enslaved with habits that will break you free.
It won’t happen immediately.
Be okay with that.
If you can stay on the path, you win.
