Let me ask you a question:
Have you ever had a taste of the optimal human experience?
The state of consciousness that professional athletes, spiritual masters, and culture-shifting artists swear by as the key to their success.
You’ve felt it before.
- That sense of unbreakable confidence.
- Feeling light on your feet and secure with your future.
- The moment where skill becomes art and you no longer care what people think.
- You feel as if you don’t exist and can’t think of anything you’d rather be doing.
It’s called the flow state.
A state of peak experience, maximum enjoyment, and effortless productivity.
It’s quite similar to “being present.” You know, the thing that spiritual gurus won’t stop preaching about.
Presence comes from an open state of focus. You release your mind from attaching to any given thought and become one with life itself.
Flow, on the other hand, comes in handy when in the pursuit of a lofty goal. You become one with the task in front of you, which leads to the actualization of a meaningful goal.
A self-generated goal, that is.
Not a goal that is assigned to you, dictating your destiny and molding your identity into an unconscious monstrosity.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of the best-selling book Flow and the godfather of Flow Psychology, describes flow as an “autotelic activity:”
“Autotelic” derives from two Greek words, auto meaning self, and telos meaning goal. It refers to a self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward.
We will be referencing much of Csikszentmihalyi’s – along with a leading expert on human performance, Steven Kotler’s – work throughout this letter.
The big problem with today’s society seems to be that we can’t just get our work done.
We lack meaning in our careers.
The tasks are repetitive and endless.
Distractions are everywhere.
We don’t have clarity on what we want out of life.
Dopamine is quite a popular topic these days for that reason. Dopamine plays a crucial role in reaching the flow state, but it goes far beyond that.
Too many people get stuck in a state of narrow-minded surface-level living. All they know is to go to school, get a job, scroll on their phones, chase material objects, and never experience the depth that life has to offer.
That isn’t a way to live.
But what if I told you that you can find enjoyment in the boring, mundane, or terrible aspects of your life?
Even further, what if I told you that you could use the flow state to achieve the meaningful goals you’ve been putting off in 6 months rather than 6 years?
The result of understanding flow is discovering your life’s work, having a sense of passion for that work, and having tools to navigate the dreaded anxiety and overwhelm that cause most people to spiral into chaos.
Life enjoyment isn’t dictated by randomness or luck. It’s created by deconstructing life as the game it is and learning how to play.
The Anatomy Of A Video Game – Why We Become Obsessed
I used to play a game that consumed far too much of my life.
It was called World Of Warcraft.
If you’re familiar with it, you’re welcome for the nostalgia.
For those who aren’t, WoW is an MMORPG. A massive multiplayer online role-playing game. I often found it more interesting than the real world.
At night, after coming home from my part-time job as a lifeguard over the summer, I’d put on my headphones and get immersed in the online world. Nothing else mattered but my mind and the lines of code that kept it sane.
When you log in as a beginner, you’re met with a series of tasks.
First, you choose a faction, then race, then class, and customize how your character looks. There were two factions, Alliance and Horde. Many players were passionate and rather ideological about the faction they chose. I played Alliance but always thought the digital religion was a bit too much, so I didn’t necessarily “hate” the other side… I just thought the characters looked a bit funny.
Most of my characters were either humans or night elves, but you could choose anything from gnomes to orcs to Pandaren (panda people) to the undead. The “class” you choose determines much of what you do throughout the game. A class is your role and play style.
You can play the role of tank, healer, or damage. When you and others complete quests, dungeons, or raids together, the tank keeps the enemy attacking them, the healer keeps the group alive, and the damage role – whether close-combat with blades or long-range with magic – well… they damage the enemies.
The cool thing about a video game is that you can experiment with the character you play and start over if you don’t enjoy it.
Are you noticing patterns in the real world? How your identity influences your opportunity and potential? How getting attached to one political, religious, or social ideology will make it difficult to reach a state of maximum enjoyment? We will break down the psychology of this soon.
After you create your character, you are thrown into a starting zone specific to that race – like the culture you were raised in. All you know is one little spot on the map. The rest of it is dark and unknown. In reality, you are raised in a culture that determines your beliefs, which you accept as truth. What you fail to realize is that you only understand less than 1% of reality (if I could actually put a number on it, it would be closer to .000001%, but we like to act like we know more than we do to our own detriment).
The game will not let you progress to new areas of the map until you acquire the skill and ability to level up to the point of being able to survive in those areas.
As you level up, you unlock new quests, dungeons, special abilities, career choices, and the ability to ride or fly to new parts of the world.
You don’t need to understand many more details, but this will help us answer a few questions:
- Why do we find video games so enjoyable to the point of addiction?
- Is it possible to replicate that enjoyment to make progress toward our own goals in life?
- Can we structure our lives like video games so that we become so immersed that we forget we are playing a game in the first place?
Let’s deconstruct the parts of this fantastical game to understand the principles that addict our minds.
A Hierarchy Of Goals – The Key To Mental Clarity
The mind craves order.
Video games have quests, leveling, and skill development to narrow your mind on the big goal at hand and eliminate distractions.
Video games are designed to make optimal experience easier to achieve:
They have rules that require the learning of skills, they set up goals, they provide feedback, they make control possible. They facilitate concentration and involvement by making the activity as distinct as possible from the so-called “paramount reality” of everyday existence. – Flow
The keyword there is “designed.”
A question I want you to hold in the back of your head while reading this letter is, “How can I design a life, month, week, and day that gives me a sense of control over my life?”
Like the tutorial phase leading into quests of a video game, society is designed in a similar way:
- You go to school to make sense of the game society wants you to play.
- A hierarchy of goals is placed in front of you. Go to school, get a job, praise your God.
- At first, there is ample challenge to keep the mind narrow, but soon, life becomes repetitive and mundane.
It is human nature to gravitate toward the things that bring us comfort and security, but that can turn on us fast.
The massive problem with the default path in life is that one size doesn’t fit all.
It’s not difficult to see that most people don’t enjoy their lives. They are stuck in jobs they hate. They have lost trust in the God they praise. They were assigned goals to achieve – like reading a specific book in school – that put a bad taste in their mouth for learning, so they stopped.
We all find enjoyment in different things.
And, what we find enjoyment in evolves as our identity does.
A level 100 player won’t enjoy a level 1 challenge.
A level 1 player won’t understand a level 100 challenge.
The key to life enjoyment is maintaining a sense that one’s skills are enough to take on the challenge of any situation that one understands. One must create an environment with a rule-bound system so one knows how well they are doing. By doing so, concentration becomes so intense that there is no attention left to think about anything irrelevant or worry about problems.
The lesson so far is that video games immerse you so far into the fabricated reality that it becomes your reality. Nothing but the rules and structure of that game fill your attention. You reach absolute clarity. Zero distractions live in your awareness.
This stresses the importance of the goals that you choose.
- A big life goal to frame the information you see as important.
- A series of reverse-engineered goals to bring clarity to your actions.
- A small goal in the present to rivet your attention and kick you into flow.
This is why weird deep-work hacks like playing instrumental music, planning your day the night before, and wearing a hat while you work are so potent. They focus your mental energy away from distractions.
The mind is a machine that aids in reaching known goals and discovering unknown goals.
Your mind will notice, accept or reject, and use information to achieve the goals you feed it. If you’re always focused on negative outcomes, your life will become negative. If you only focus on the goals society assigns you, you lose a sense of control over your life.
In psychology, this is called pattern recognition. You feel the dopamine when you notice information that helps you achieve your conscious or subconscious goals. You can’t help but use that information to make progress.
The question is, how do we use this knowledge about goals to live a more meaningful life?
If you want to change your life, you must start by removing yourself from the repetitive string of tasks that make life unenjoyable. You must dive into the unknown.
By the way, I help you create your own life plan in my book, The Art Of Focus.
The Unknown – The Land Of Infinite Potential
Let’s imagine that you don’t know how to swim.
How would you feel if I offered you a scenic helicopter ride over the ocean?
You may be a bit fearful, but you’d be silly not to accept.
Now, how would you feel if, on that ride, I took the chopper low to the water, pushed you out, and brought it up just enough so you were forced to swim?
A few things could happen:
- You would succumb to your fear, overthink it, and drown.
- You would flail like a madman doing whatever it takes to stay afloat but soon lose energy and, again… drown.
- You would remain calm, attempt to float, and potentially stay above water long enough to devise a plan.
None of those are optimal.
When you play a video game, you have a map of the digital world.
On that map, there are unknown areas. Places you haven’t, or can’t, explore.
There’s a reason you can’t just teleport into the middle of those areas. Chances are, you’d be swarmed by monsters 50 levels higher than you, and you’d get killed in one single hit.
Is that fun?
Would you want to play the game anymore?
Now, what if you completed quests until you unlocked the ability to fly? What about reaching the level to do your first dungeon?
You would be ecstatic! You wouldn’t waste any time. You would get there as fast as possible to test your abilities. In the real world, you may even pull an all-nighter because you are obsessed with seeing the new opportunities available to you.
The lesson is this:
Meaning is found at the edge of your abilities.
The edge of the unknown.
Not so deep that you are met by chaos, but not so shallow that you close yourself off to depth.
The sweet spot where your skills are enough to navigate the challenge of any given situation.
You’ve been there before…
When you feel incredible for no apparent reason. When you know exactly what to do to make progress in your life. When you can’t stop having ideas. When your vision for the future is so clear that you can’t help but act on it.
The “flow” state of consciousness is where the “flow” of information is maximized. All thoughts, ideas, and mental energy are useful for the meaningful hierarchy of goals you are attempting to achieve.
Maximum signal, minimum noise.
Maximum focus, minimum distraction.
This is true education. Learning, doing, and discovering in unison. Not being told what to learn for a task you don’t care to do on a path that hordes of people have gone down before.
This gives us a hint about how we can maximize our time in the flow state.
I like to think of the mind as the metabolism for experience.
When you eat too much, you feel sluggish.
When you eat too little, you feel on edge.
When you are overwhelmed with information, you feel anxious.
When you are underwhelmed with information, you feel bored.
It isn’t uncommon for us as humans to bite off more than we can chew. To accept more work when you’re already neck deep in water. To learn too much and expect it not to overwhelm you. To know that you should say “no,” but say “yes” so you don’t disappoint the other person.
The optimal state of mind is when you can metabolize life as it comes. You learn and do without thinking and emerge a new person.
You have the skill to match the challenge of a situation. There is no friction. You flow with the information that life throws at you.
People often report that they don’t remember the times they were in flow, but once they came out, they feel as if they unlocked a new level of self-development.
One common misconception about the flow state:
It is not the product of trying.
It is effortless.
I have always been fascinated by the law of reversed effort. Sometimes I call it the “backwards law.” When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float. When you hold your breath, you lose it—which immediately calls to mind an ancient and much neglected saying, “Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it.” – Alan Watts
Now, this is pretty obvious, but you can’t go from working a 9 to 5 you hate to making millions from your life’s work.
But there is a quest you can create and follow in your life to reach any goal you want be it weight loss, good looks, charisma, more money, or work you enjoy.
The only thing standing in the way is you.
Character Creation – Reaching Your Potential
At this point in our history it should be possible for an individual to build a self that is not simply the outcome of biological drives and cultural habits, but a conscious, personal creation. – The Evolving Self
You aren’t where you want to be because:
- You didn’t make the choices that led to a purposeful career.
- You didn’t make the choices that led to fulfilling relationships.
- You didn’t make the choices that led to a healthy and aesthetic body.
You, right now, are the manifestation of your past choices.
So, if you want to take control of who you become, your choices are of utmost importance.
There are 2 things here:
- Who you want to become – perspective and zooming out.
- The choices that will take you there – perception and zooming in.
The good life is created through constant reminders of your vision and programming the identity that would actualize it through aligned action.
Do you know who you are?
Your identity. Your concept of self. Your personality.
That little character you’ve been playing in the game of life. A web of ideas that shape your perspective. A perspective that shapes your perception of situations. A perception of situations that determines the choices you make. The choices you make that result in who you are and the quality of life you live.
You are a perspective vessel in a relative reality.
Your perspective can be expanded or contracted.
Absorbed in a task or at one with life.
Manhandled by an emotion or drowning in a sea of familiar future events.
In a video game, you create your character.
A mage can only wear cloth clothing and perform a certain set of spells. They can’t fight big monsters alone because they aren’t strong enough.
A warrior wears armor and fights in close-quarters combat. They can take more damage and fight more monsters on their own, but that comes with disadvantages, too. They aren’t specialized to have certain professions, so they can’t make as much gold on the market as someone like a mage.
The class, profession, quests, and path you choose in the game determine what you can do in your future.
In other words, if you don’t like your life, it’s because your identity doesn’t allow you to notice and pursue the challenges you find enjoyable.
The day you were born, you became a learning sponge. Your biological goal was to survive, so you pulled information from your environment to fulfill that goal.
- You learned the language you speak.
- You learned to crawl, walk, and run.
- You were told “eyes, ears, mouth, and nose” because you can’t directly see your own face.
- Your parents, teachers, friends, books, and media told you what was good and bad, so your mind shifted to only retaining information that allowed you to survive by those standards.
From a structural standpoint, a worldview or perspective is composed of goals and problems that the goals allow you to become aware of.
Only then can you choose to solve those problems, achieve the goal, and open up room for the next one.
Every day, zoom out and remind yourself of what you don’t want. You don’t need to focus on what you want, because that will make itself apparent through your choices.
Hold that frame at the top of your mind.
Do not allow distractions to penetrate it.
Any time a choice comes up, zoom out and align.
“Will this benefit the future I am trying to create?”
Then, be decisive. Make the decision.
Allow failure into your life so you can correct your behavior the next time around.
Awareness is a cure.
But if you don’t have vision, you may accept a quest society assigns to you, which almost always results in you not being in control of the level of goals you pursue or problems you solve. In other words, you – as a perspective – stop growing. Around the ages 25-35 you are met with an inescapable bubble of responsibilities that trap you in a cloud of chaos and meaninglessness.
If you identify as a “smart” student, you have the goal of applying to college, and the only problems you notice are those like the state tests that you have to study for.
So, you invest mental energy into that goal.
When you achieve it, your psyche is rewarded, and you continue pursuing that narrow path.
The problem is that this path is known. It was assigned to you. People have done it many times before. You know well that you are limited to the results of others when you go down this path, but you don’t care because it’s what you’ve been programmed to do.
Later on, we will discuss a different vessel into the unknown. One that allows you to choose and find clarity on a path you create.
One that exposes you to your unique potential.
A path that nobody has gone down before.
Your life’s work.
Your perspective – goals and problems – frames any and all information and opportunities available to you. By information, I don’t mean books or podcasts or words. I mean anything that you perceive. Sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and touches. The combination of which composes the content of our consciousness. Our experience. The only thing that is real.
The conscious mind can process 50 bits of information per second.
The unconscious mind can manage 11 million bits of information per second.
So, if we want enrich our everyday experience, notice more novel opportunities, achieve the impossible, and create more flow in our lives, we must expand who we are by fundamentally changing the goals our mind operates on to navigate reality. We must influence what information composes the 50 bits of processing power we have in any given second.
Now, what is self-development?
It is increasing the complexity of your self (or identity).
When you pursue a challenging goal, your mind must expand to a new level to acquire the knowledge and skill to solve problems in the way of achieving that goal.
When you achieve one goal, only then do you have the awareness and skill to achieve another.
As you achieve less superficial goals, you reach a level where you can take on more meaningful opportunities – ones that you didn’t know existed before.
To stress this point:
You don’t know what you want because you haven’t done anything with your life outside of what you’ve been told to do.
You stayed in the “known” areas of life’s video game map. You didn’t take a rare questline into the depths of the unknown, challenging who you are and your abilities.
But it isn’t entirely your fault.
There’s an enemy we are all battling against that leads to us being stressed, anxious, and overwhelmed more than we’d like to admit.
That enemy is called entropy.
Chaos In Consciousness – Why Your Life Feels Out Of Control
If you understand entropy, you understand that by doing nothing with your life, you choose to slowly drown in chaos. You don’t stay the same. You dig yourself deeper into a hole without trying. The good life demands consistent effort toward your own goals.
Let’s summarize what we’ve learned so far in one sentence:
The flow state occurs when the content of your consciousness is composed of one challenging yet meaningful task.
But there’s a problem.
Most people feel like they are drowning in a cloud of chaos.
Rather than one meaningful task occupying their attention, there are 10 negative thoughts that have the potential to splinter off into 100 more. Like how you feel a pain in your chest, then thoughts of grandpa’s heart attack come to mind, the 10 different heart-healthy foods you neglected eating, and how an early death may impact your family.
I want you to think of your mind as a supercomputer.
Your ability to process information is dependent on a few things, but the RAM – or random access memory – is the most important part of a computer that influences its performance.
The more RAM you use up with different programs running, open browser tabs, and the performance requirements of what you have running, the slower your performance will be.
This is no different from your mind.
What you hold in your conscious attention is critical.
Most people live with multiple high-demand programs running that are draining the limited creative energy they have.
- Thoughts about regretful past mistakes
- Thoughts about stressful future happenings
- Desires of hunger and entertainment to escape those thoughts
- An internal cry to break out of their conditioned way of living
- A list of mixed-priority tasks that need to be finished
- Open loops of tasks they were supposed to complete but forgot about
The list goes on and on.
The modern mind has its attention split in infinite directions by default. We go about our lives stressed and near sickness. Rather than living in the present with singular focus and a worry-free mind, we are the opposite – living in a false reality created by split attention.
When we think too much of the scattered past or future, chaos ensues. The mind tends toward disorder. If not kept in check, we lose the sense of control over our lives that leads to enjoyment.
This leads to the question:
What is a state of consciousness?
That’s an incredibly deep question, but when it comes to the flow state, it’s crucial that we understand it. Since we are tackling a metaphysical problem, be open-minded, ask questions, and be okay with the fact that those questions may take time to answer and make sense of.
A lesson there:
Ask more questions. You won’t receive the answer immediately, but you seed your mind to receive an answer that you normally wouldn’t have. It can take a day, a week, or a month… and for the questions that matter, a decade.
Reality is consciousness that takes different states. There is nothing but states of consciousness. All that is real is state. The denial of states of consciousness is done from a state of consciousness.
If it helps, you can think of “states of consciousness” as just “states of mind.” They are synonymous for the most part.
There are higher and lower states of consciousness, neither of which are “better” than the other… they just “are,” but higher states of consciousness may be preferable at times, like getting into flow for deep work.
Being sleepy, drunk, high, anxious, dreaming, stressed, bored, or overwhelmed are all on a spectrum of conscious or unconscious, open or narrow states of mind.
David R. Hawkins developed a map for levels of consciousness, or stages of consciousness.
Ken Wilber often speaks of the difference between “states” and “stages.”
States are fluid and temporary modes of mind. You oscillate between various states every day. You can think of this as your “everyday experience” from being tired at night to focused in the morning.
Stages, or levels, represent your baseline of development. You can still reach lower states, but you come back to baseline rather quick, and tend to hangout around your stage of development.
So, what causes chaotic states of mind that make it seem like our life is falling apart?
Are we doomed to continue suffering from it?
And most importantly, how do we increase our baseline level of consciousness to achieve more flow and live a better life?
Psychic Entropy – A Mass Mental Health Crisis
We are going through a mental health crisis.
We lack the curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery that create a flow-sustaining life’s work.
Most people have mental disorder.
Not a mental disorder, just mental disorder.
By that, I don’t mean one that can be diagnosed and prescribed a solution (even though that’s been on the rise… mainly to profit off of this epidemic).
When I say mental disorder, I mean disorder in the mind.
Psychic entropy.
Psychic = of the mind.
Entropy = systems tending toward disorder.
Systems need consistent energy to thrive.
A system is a group of parts that are connected or work together to form a goal-achieving complex whole. Each part affects the system in some way and depends on the other parts to function properly. For example, your digestive system is made up of organs like your stomach and intestines that work together to help you digest food.
Just like how your business is made up of brand, content, product, and marketing. If you don’t have a good product, which is a system in itself, you won’t make an income. If you neglect energy in other parts of the system, again, you won’t make an income.
Systems become more efficient with time unless you neglect them.
To describe entropy in a system, if your mind is a room, and you don’t put energy toward cleaning that room (maintaining order), then the room will get dirty.
One day without cleaning won’t be bad. But after a week? A month? A year?
Then your mom starts telling you that you live in a pig sty.
It’s no wonder that anxiety is rampant in our society. Nobody has cleaned their room for a year, and who wants to put in that much more energy? It’s much easier to clean your room after a day than it is after a year. The anxiety cycle continues because we know we need to clean our room, but we don’t. There is a gap between thought and action.
With that, if you are a writer, it takes some time and experimentation to form the habits and systems that lead to an audience and income. But once you have it down, you don’t need as much energy to keep it going. But if you stop for a day, week, or month, it becomes increasingly harder to regain your ground.
That is exactly where problems occur.
When there is a blockage of energy in the system that is our mind.
Mental health is about making sense, understanding, and clarity.
If you let a compulsive and negative thought hijack a situation, you can’t see that situation for what it is.
You get stuck in your head, thinking about the bad things that could happen. You pull that negative experience into the now and it influences your thoughts and actions.
Attention breathes life into everything it touches.
When you give your attention to a false reality that your mind creates, you act in a way that makes it real.
Do you think this will lead to beneficial outcomes in any situation?
The solution to chaos is finally taking control of your life.
Reversing Entropy – Putting Energy Into The Right Goals
In a video game, your mind is framed by the game itself.
In reality, this is your perspective. We’ve discussed that.
To narrow your mind further, there is a hierarchy of challenging goals.
Finally, to immerse you in the world and focus your attention on the now, there are rules and mechanics.
Rules prevent you from cheating. They make the game worth playing.
Mechanics are skill-based. Your aim will suck at first. You’ll feel clumsy with your keyboard. You won’t be able to move around or land shots well. But… you get better. You practice and improve as the challenges increase.
In life, the rules are what you deem important and meaningful. Your priorities. Your values. What you value.
The mechanics are the skills and habits you use to achieve the prioritized goals in your life.
To create a life of enjoyment and flow, you need to:
- Invest mental energy into self-generated goals
- Stick it out long enough to create passion (you don’t just “find” passion)
- Create new systems (or routines) for your mind to operate on
That’s how you reverse psychic entropy and chaos in your mind.
You invest energy with your thoughts, emotions, attention, and actions every single day in goals that create your ideal life through work, study, and practice.
Thankfully, there are only a few goals that can truly be meaningful.
They correspond to the eternal problems that can’t be solved by AI, prescriptions, or technology:
- Business – meaningful work that allows you to choose the problems you solve.
- Health – you live in your body, it is your obligation to understand and improve it.
- Mind – pursuing your curiosity, acquiring knowledge, and expanding your sense of self.
- Connection – creating shared experiences and expanding your circle of concern to transcend the self (like when you party up in a video game, multiple minds achieve goals faster than one).
Like a skill tree in a video game.
As you improve the relevant skills in these domains, you unlock new levels.
But there’s a catch:
You can only improve one trait as much as you improve another.
You can only reach a certain level of mind by reaching a certain level in your creative work.
You can only reach a certain level of health by reaching a certain level of mind (because mental and physical health are deeply intertwined).
My question to you:
If you aren’t building your mind, body, business, and spirit every single day – what are you doing?
Genuine question.
Is there anything more important than that?
Or is everything you do now a distraction?
“But Dan, I want to enjoy myself and do what I want.”
Do you understand what enjoyment is when compared to pleasure?
Do you realize that human psychology has been mapped over the course of evolution to show that humans have an innate drive to grow, expand, transcend, and create?
Enjoyment is found in progress.
The flow state points to much more than some neurochemicals in your brain.
It points toward the divine.
“Doing what you want” is often the ego’s way of ending the train of thought that would lead to improving yourself because that’s what your nature wants:
Do what you want in alignment with your goals.
Pursue curiosity. Self-educate. Build meaningful projects that actualize your ideal lifestyle.
Don’t know where to start?
You’re in luck. That’s next on our agenda.
Create Your Own Infinite Game – The Neuroscience Of Flow
Okay, we understand the goal.
We want to create a life of more flow.
We want work that’s meaningful to us.
We want to create a life where we have an overwhelming sense of control over its outcome.
We don’t want to be assigned goals and, therefore, assigned an identity and destiny to become a cog in the machine.
Steven Kotler, author of The Art Of Impossible, believes that there is a formula for achieving the flow state and thus achieving the impossible (when used correctly).
Aligning motivations is the first step to doing this well. He describes 5 intrinsic drivers that fuel and energize our actions:
- Curiosity – Our compass into the unknown.
- Passion – Finding that one thing you can’t pull yourself away from.
- Purpose – How your passion will impact the world – something greater than yourself.
- Autonomy – The desire for freedom required to pursue your passion and purpose.
- Mastery – Honing your skill set so you can monetize your passion.
Per Kotler, each of these contributes to certain neurotransmitters like dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins, serotonin, and norepinephrine. This neurochemical cocktail helps create the flow state.
I would encourage you to read his book to discover his process for reaching flow, but I have my own methods.
In my eyes, this is best tackled from the top down.
Mastery stems from your life’s work. Your vision for the future.
Autonomy stems from entrepreneurship. The ability to create your own work.
Purpose stems from projects that turn into products. A way to help people solve their problems and expand your circle of concern.
Passion stems from connecting the dots. Finding the pieces of the puzzle you are creating.
Curiosity is the fuel. The desire to acquire the knowledge to reach the next level.
Here’s what you do:
Creating Your World – The Seed Of Obsession
As we learned earlier, goals and problems compose your worldview.
So, we need to make those goals and problems conscious.
1) Create An Anti Vision
We start our story with an anti-vision.
The bane of your existence.
The first polar end of the worldview you will cultivate.
A positive-fear mechanism that kicks you into action.
Your anti-vision is the future that you do not want to live.
Start a running note of experiences you do not want to repeat.
- The material you don’t care to learn.
- The work you don’t care to complete.
- The arguments you don’t wish to have.
You won’t get rid of them in an instant.
You are meant to identify them as problems to be solved.
As your list grows, ensure that you are doing everything in your power to work in the opposite direction.
2) Cultivate A Vision
If you don’t have a vision, you are lost.
You can’t create outcomes, so you are doomed to the mechanical living of determined outcomes.
Every decision you make in any domain of your life must be filtered through your vision.
That is how you bring meaning to your actions and minimize distractions.
Write down exactly what you want out of life.
Don’t miss a detail, but realize this is an iterative process.
You won’t get it right the first time around, and you probably never will. That’s not the point. Spend 30 minutes generating a minimum viable vision. Come back to it often to add, subtract, and improve as your desires inevitably change with your failures.
3) Set Big & Small Goals
Big goals are for direction. Small goals are for clarity. Neither are for action.
You don’t need motivation when the task in front of you is so stupidly simple that you can’t help but complete it.
Break down your vision into goals by decade, year, month, week, and day.
They are your guide, not your master.
Be stubborn with vision and loose with details.
Your goals will change as you do, be okay with that.
Remind yourself of your anti-vision, vision, and goals daily.
These are your own little world.
When your world is all you think about, your mind conspires in your favor. You notice small details that others don’t. That gives you an edge. It spurts dopamine into your brain as a motivator. It sets the scene for more flow. You stop worrying about problems you don’t have control over.
Leave the drama of society.
“What about the starving kids in Africa?”
“What about the next election?”
“What about that celebrity beef?” (That’s fabricated to make them money and keep you dumb).
What’s going to actually solve that problem?
You crying about it and changing your profile picture?
Or you becoming the most developed human being you can.
Building a passionate business that has the ability to help more people.
Becoming a massive value creator that gives others knowledge and tools to do something about it.
Passing along your obsession to others, spreading your energy like wildfire, causing dozens to thousands of more developed individuals who can truly make a change in society together.
When people ask what your thoughts are on [insert the flavor of the week drama here], you’re only response should be “I don’t care.”
Else you are an NPC.
Become An Entrepreneur – Your Path Into The Unknown
If your vision is big, audacious, and truly impactful, you will not reach it working for someone else.
Steven Kotler harps on how an MTP, or Massively Transformative Purpose, is key to achieving the impossible in life.
Robert Greene preaches about discovering your life’s task.
In my eyes, entrepreneurship is the only logical option for long-term thinkers.
Entrepreneurship is a mindset, not a title.
A mindset dedicated to solving an infinite set of creative problems. A way to hedge against getting trapped in a repetitive routine someone assigned to you – because that’s a problem that creates 10 more in other areas of your life, and an entrepreneur would identify and solve it.
It is an infinite game, not a finite one.
Your work evolves, it doesn’t stagnate (unless you allow it, but even then, at least it’s your choice).
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 job you hate, you live in the eternal known. You can’t make new discoveries in the known. That’s a bigger problem than most people living on the surface would think. It’s normal to them, so it doesn’t register as a problem.
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 you strike gold.
As an entrepreneur, you “hunt” for your survival by gathering knowledge, creating a valuable product, and putting it in front of people who 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 one-person business model.
You don’t need to build a billion-dollar company.
You need to attract an audience by passing down the lessons you’ve learned.
You need to monetize that audience by building a product
Both of these cost zero dollars thanks to the internet.
If you don’t know where to start, download my one-person business mini-course for free.
Turn Your Goals Into Science Projects – Learning & Building
When you learn how to learn, you can achieve 6 years of results in 6 months.
Let’s take everything we’ve learned above and ground it with practical steps.
1) Create A Clarity Catalyst
There were a few moments in my life when I made giant leaps in understanding and progress:
- Writing my book
- Building my products
- Writing these newsletters
What do they all have in common?
I treat them as a project.
A project has:
- A scope for how large it is – the bigger the better for creativity.
- An outline so you can note ideas to fill in that outline from everyday life.
- Milestones so you have direction and clarity on your next steps.
- A real-world deadline that forces you to act, or else your survival takes a hit.
- Experimentation, trial, and error so you can turn failures into lessons.
This newsletter is 8600 words. It was all I thought about for weeks, and it will stay the thing I think about until the video essay is done and on YouTube.
This presents a perfect environment for the flow state.
There is pattern recognition for novelty and dopamine, clarity from milestones, challenge from deadlines, and experimentation for learning.
Determine what you want to learn.
Create a real-world project that you will publish for others to see.
If you don’t know what project to create, see what others have done.
If you want to learn Photoshop, your project will be anything from a graphic to a digital art scene.
If you want to learn how to bodybuild, your project is your body, nutrition regimen, and training program.
Your project outline doesn’t have to be perfect. It can start as a jumbled list of ideas on what you think you have to do and learn.
A project is an experience anchor.
You now have somewhere to write ideas, knowledge, and techniques down to try.
When I wrote my book, my book outline made life meaningful. Almost every idea I came across could be added to the outline.
I felt like a child again. I became obsessed.
Everything was seen from a new lens. The lens of my project.
2) Learn As You Build
If you aren’t building, you aren’t learning.
If you don’t actively apply what you learn to a problem that is sitting in your mind, you are simply stacking useless knowledge as soon-to-be-forgotten brain fog.
When you start building something, there are only a few things you need to know: the fundamentals.
You have no business researching advanced tactics yet.
The fundamentals will take you 95% of the way there (and for most people, that’s millions of dollars, a jacked physique, or a stress-free life). Most people just get distracted.
New tactics may help with a marginal 5% improvement, but this mental bandwidth should be reserved for obsession, mastery, and your life’s work pertaining to a few specific skills and interests.
When you have a project to build, do the following:
- Purchase a beginner-level course on the topic
- Watch overview videos on YouTube that teach the fundamentals
Study them until you have clarity on what to do next. Then, do it, and when you encounter a problem:
- Refer back to sections of the course or video
- Research how to directly solve that problem
- Watch tutorials where people build projects similar to yours and see how they overcome those problems
Learning is problem-solving, not hoarding as much knowledge as you can.
3) Teach What You Learn
The protégé effect:
A psychological phenomenon where teaching, pretending to teach, or preparing to teach information to others helps a person learn that information.
When you teach, you pay closer attention when you learn and identify knowledge gaps that help you learn faster.
I, of course, recommend teaching in public by writing as a personal brand (or your public resume) so you can also attract high-paying opportunities as you learn. (This is what I teach in 2 Hour Writer).
- Write in public and let people criticize you.
- Teach your friends to make for interesting conversations.
Teaching almost forces you to make sense of the information.
You have to structure it, explain it, and ensure that you aren’t giving false knowledge.
When I write these newsletters, I don’t know everything. But I can guarantee that writing for 4 years has accelerated my learning in the topics I love well beyond what I would’ve learned trapped in tutorial hell.
When you build a brand (not in the business sense, in the sense of your external display to the world), building and teaching collapse into your work.
Your life becomes a meaningful series of solving problems, learning how to solve them, teaching others, and making an income doing so. I believe this is what evolution has allowed: people doing what they love without barriers thanks to the internet.
4) Expand Into A New Level Of Mind
Read to expand your mind.
Write to organize your mind.
Build to focus your mind.
By this point, you may still feel overwhelmed or like you aren’t learning much.
This is a good thing.
Your mind is primed for pattern recognition.
So:
- Launch yourself into the unknown – immerse yourself in the culture, environment, and information related to what you are trying to learn.
- Condition your mind through repetition and exposure – slowly understand the lingo, vocabulary, and skillset of those who have seen success in that topic.
- Let your mind expand through the discomfort – the worst thing you can do is quit when you are feeling growing pains.
You aren’t seeing results because you aren’t the person who would see results.
This process allows you to become a new person by letting your old version die.
Like when you are adopting new habits, you have to get out of the old environment that fueled your bad habits.
To make this more practical:
- Read books – books give you 10 years of effort from 6 hours of reading.
- Consume lectures – long articles and videos give you 3 days of effort in 20 minutes.
- Follow new people – this is less about consuming short form content and more about training your mind to be in that tribe of people.
Buy 3 books.
One best-seller, one technical, and one historical.
Burn through them and don’t let your obsession die.
This may seem like a long process, but we aren’t trying to learn something on a surface level, we are trying to become masters as fast as possible.
5) Make Connections To Solidify Understanding
When you master one thing, it becomes easier to master others.
Principles are Universal. They overlap.
When you master fitness, you can master business in half the time, then relationships in another half.
Most people never master one domain of their lives, so they never experience exponential personal growth.
When you feel like you have a solid understanding of the topic you are trying to learn:
- Zoom out one layer – move from “Photoshop” to “graphic design” to “creative work.”
- Take note of signal – when your mind signals important information, write it down.
- Build better projects – from a new level of mind, build a new project that will take you to the success you want to see.
In my own experience, my knowledge compounded when I peeled back a layer from web design to marketing to content creation to metaphysics.
This is also a great way to start your one-person business.
Start by learning, teaching, and building in one domain then branch out as your audience expands.
The End
This was an abnormally long letter.
I didn’t want to miss any bases.
But to be quite honest, I could write an entire book on this topic.
In fact, I did, and it’s called The Art Of Focus.
I hope you realize by now that a state of consciousness, like flow, connects to all of life. It’s not just neuroscience. It’s metaphysics, psychology, self-improvement, and productivity all in one.
It gives us incredible hints about living a good life.
If you’ve read this far, consider sharing this post with a friend.
It might be what they needed right now.
If you want to learn how I write these pieces, run my business, or monetize my life’s work – check out the free and paid tools on my website.
Thank you for reading.
Until next time:
– Dan
