The clever man may work smarter, not harder, they say, but the creative man doesn’t work at all. – Alex Pang
It’s a shame that the average American has equated overwork as a status symbol.
Or worse, they use it as a way to escape other responsibilities.
Because if you were serious about your work, you would optimize for creativity, not productivity. You would eat well. Train daily. Go on walks. Get enough sleep. Socialize. Push your limits in a calculated way. And design a life that prioritizes your mental inputs and outputs. You would understand that 4 hours of focused work yields much higher results than 12 hours of scattered work.
If you understand the mind, you understand that humans are a bit different than animals. Animals try to reproduce their physical body, the information in their genetic code. Humans do the same, but we also try to reproduce our mental body, the information in our consciousness. Our identity. We write books, argue with others, and acquire knowledge to impregnate the minds of others with little ideas that take root and blossom (or decay).
When overwork becomes your identity, often through unconscious repetition toward a goal you were assigned by society, you constantly feel anxious when you “aren’t being productive.”
But most people get productivity wrong. They may not explicitly say this, but their actions show it. They think productivity is about quantity, not quality. They think that all hours of the day are equal, that they are the same person in the last 4 hours of the day as they are in the first 4. They think productivity is about working on all things, not the one thing that brings all of the results.
They fail to separate “tasks” from “levers.” They fail to realize that person A can work 12 hours a day and make $50K a year, while person B can work 1 hour a day and make $5 million. The difference is skill, leverage, and understanding. Not how hard, long, or organized you work.
The secret is to design a creative lifestyle. Here’s what we’ll talk about in this letter:
- Why the quality of your ideas matter more than ever as AI fear increases.
- The 4 modules of a creative life and a template to plan your week.
- The routines of famous creatives, and how Charles Darwin changed the world with minimal work.
- My personal routine, why I do it, and how to create your own.
With that said, this newsletter is for those who want that leverage. This is not for those who are set on a more traditional style of work. I’m not here to convince you, I am simply stating that you may not benefit from this letter.
The quality of your work depends on the quality of your ideas. Therefore, the future of productivity is creativity. And as the economy continues to bias creators and founders who leverage AI and technology, the way we work is changing.
The future of productivity is creativity.
Idea Flow Matters More Than Ever
Anyone can type ChatGPT into their browser and have it spit out a book, newsletter, marketing asset, piece of art, code for a to-do app, or legal document.
And yet, there aren’t a million best-seller quality books or production-level software. Work has become easier, but the fact that most people lack agency remains. If people weren’t already motivated to build their own thing in the past 10 years, they’re still not going to be, and they may be taken advantage of by those who are.
I could be terribly wrong. But I don’t think AI could ever replace writers. When I say “writers,” I don’t mean the title. I don’t mean the tool by which someone creates. I mean the essence behind what writing is.
- Sifting through 100 ideas to find 1
- Constructing a creative narrative toward a goal
- Capturing the attention of a group of people
- Deeply relating with them through conscious experience
- Documenting high-signal information for future generations
Now, I’m not against AI in the slightest.
In fact, we’re implementing it in Kortex over the next month (it’s pretty cool).
The thing is, if you aren’t a writer or don’t learn from a writer, your AI outputs are probably going to disappoint you. Good luck building “anything” if (1) you don’t know what you want to build and (2) you’re still too lazy to learn even if AI makes it easier (even though its been easy for the last 10 years). If it takes 10 years to see incredible success in any domain of life, and AI cuts it down to 5 (or even 1), that doesn’t change the fact that most people quit after 2 weeks. The world will move fast, and that scares the underconditioned.
AI lacks executive function.
It is a tool that needs a master. A specialist that needs a generalist. And when so many people have been turned into tools by their parents, schooling, and repetitive task-oriented jobs, it’s no wonder why people are so afraid of being replaced. It’s because they are going to be replaced unless they start acting like a human. Agency. Conscious experience. Risk. Mistakes. Discovery. Perception.
As an example, James Patterson uses a ghostwriter for his novels.
The author, James, still creates the plot, tone, writing style, and final output and has a big-picture awareness of everything involved with distribution, sales, and community.
A ghostwriter, or AI, removes the amount of time and labor it requires to produce said writing and the auxiliary tasks to get that in front of someone else. The master still has to be a generalist. They still have to be an entrepreneur. They still need the vision, story, and value.
But how do you make those things impactful?
Can’t you just ask ChatGPT to spit out a vision, story, and value?
You can, but unless you want to be at the whim of how AI writes by default (the baked-in bias), you will still be doing what most other people are doing. You will still lack agency. You will get lumped in with the homogenous output of the biased model and as markets go, you will be a commodity. You won’t be able to sustain any kind of meaningful result.
The answer lies in idea flow.
Robert Greene reads 100 books before he writes one.
Founders have 1000 ideas before 1 changes everything.
Creators post 1000 times before 1 makes them an overnight success.
More ideas lead to more exponential events. Nothing happens, then everything happens.
You don’t find these ideas by asking ChatGPT to give you a list of 100 ideas. Because guess what, you’re still missing the overarching vision and story.
You’re missing experience. You’re missing meaning. You’re missing purpose.
You’re missing a forward-moving lifestyle designed to achieve your vision from which you can extract and connect ideas to create value. You’re missing the context.
People don’t follow you because you have information. They follow you because you have lore. If my social feed was all filled with those default AI generated voices my phone would be at the bottom of a lake. Just like people don’t trust the system, they won’t trust AI, and a like-minded tribe will be where you find meaning. An audience is still one of the most important things you can build. You are still the niche. Especially if crypto allows you to verify and own your work, whether you use AI or not.
Ascending up the spiral of development, the pendulum is swinging back to the tribal nature of our ancestors.
The 4Cs Of Creative Lifestyle Design
People give me a weird face when I say I work 4 hours a day.
On the surface, I look like I get a lot done. Posts on all platforms every day. A newsletter and YouTube video every week. Managing and building Kortex. A book. Products. Lots of stuff.
My question is: What’s so crazy about what I do?
I mean hell, when I started building an audience I would write posts and talk to people in between video game matches. If I accounted for how much actual work I did, it would probably be an hour a day. I was incredible at procrastinating, forcing me to focus on the things that matter.
Even now, I lump writing a book, writing a weekly newsletter, and writing social posts into the first 2 hours of my morning. If I’m not writing a book, then I’m building another product or project. These are my baseline levers. If I get these done, my “work” is done for the day.
Sometimes, my desire to build something becomes very strong. I can’t help but work 8-12 hour days. The thing is, I can’t force these seasons of intensity. It’s a natural build-up of clarity—by investing energy in a vision—until I have no choice but to sprint.
We’ll go over the rest of my routine later.
But yes, I will admit, there is a lie somewhere in there.
I’ve never really considered reading, walking, napping, or training as a part of my work. I read to hunt for ideas. I walk to make sense of those ideas. I nap because I like to. I train because I enjoy energy and health.
The quality and quantity of my work would not be possible if I did not do those things. I’m not optimizing for more, I’m optimizing for the right amount that brings the results I need to actualize my goals. I can do less “work” with more impact than most working 12 hour days with those simple habits. Again, creativity is the fuel for productivity.
So, if those are taken into account for how long I work, then I work all day every day, because my work is my mission. It is the most important thing in my life.
With that said, you are drastically overestimating how much work you need to do to start. Be rational for a second. You know that people also have responsibilities like you. You know that people don’t start with 12 hours, they start with 1 hour in the morning. You just love to make excuses about how your situation is special.
The question now is: how do I make the most of that 1 hour of focused work?
By designing a creative lifestyle and titrating the time spent on those activities up as you’re able to transition to doing it full-time.
You need 4 habits.
Think of these like modules in your day. You don’t have to do them in order, you just have to do them.
If you’d like, here’s a new weekly planner you can use that walks you through each of these every day (+ a place to write out daily tasks).
Habit 1: Clear
My favorite way to clear my mind is by turning negative thoughts and experiences into 5-10 ideas that can be used for my work.
I tend to do this first thing in the morning before I start writing (technically, it is writing), but I know many people who do this before they go to bed so they have something to write about in the morning.
Sit with a blank page and probe your mind.
Ideas may not come for a bit, but they will.
Another way to clear your mind is a simple brain dump journal.
- Write down literally everything you can squeeze out of your mind
- Organize them into different categories (like work, worries, and unimportant)
The goal isn’t to do anything with those ideas. The goal is awareness because awareness is self-corrective.
Habit 2: Consume
Plain and simple:
You can’t create if you don’t consume.
I’m not talking about consuming endless content on social media like a mindless zombie. I’m talking about learning. Hunting for ideas for your work. Like your ancestors did in the physical, you do in the mental and digital.
- Read a long book
- Read a long article
- Scroll a curated social timeline for 5 minutes
- Study that course you bought but forgot about
- Listen to a podcast or lecture
But don’t forget an absolutely crucial step: have somewhere to capture those ideas to a relevant project you are creating.
In Kortex, you can do this in the Capture feature. Write down the idea and type “@Document name” to save it to a specific project. There aren’t other capture features on the market that do this. I walk through this and give you a weekly content template here.
The point: if you aren’t learning… well, you aren’t learning. Therefore, you aren’t moving forward in life or opening up new opportunities.
Habit 3: Create
The core human desires are to create, expand, and transcend.
Anything else is either a distraction or a lesser purpose that pulls you toward those desires.
To “create” is to account for a crucial function of the mind that most people miss out on.
Everyone consumes information (they gain mental fat). Some people write down information (they cut down mental weight). Few people synthesize that information into something that helps and impacts others (they have the strength to save someone in a mental car crash).
In other words, most people are missing how they contribute to the world. They are missing purpose. Deep purpose, not shallow.
You need a project to build.
A structure for your mind from which you can connect ideas.
Habit 4: Connect
When you have a meaningful project to build, not one assigned to you by parents, teachers, or society at large, you see life in a completely different way.
When I write a book, it’s completely different from a social post, obviously.
My mind expands to match the frame of that book.
I notice more in my everyday experience, the information I consume, and the conversations I have because I have an anchor for those ideas.
My mind can zip through complex reasoning and make sense of ideas I couldn’t before. I can articulate novel lines of thought that AI can’t, because I would have to train it on that same frame to come anywhere close.
Unfortunately, most people don’t optimize for pattern recognition (what this 4C framework helps with). By doing so, they rarely become curious or obsessed. They haven’t invested energy into a project that encourages their mind to take a new shape.
How & Why I Structure & Balance My Deep Work Blocks A Certain Way
The ultimate goal is to have a life so beautifully designed that work, rest, and play cease to exist. The entirety of your life is channeled into one singular yet evolving vision.
There is no right way to work.
Clearly, Hormozi does well working 12 hours a day while many of the worlds most famous creatives barely work at all.
The point is to experiment. To collect various perspectives, experience them, and discard the pieces that don’t work for your unique set of goals, interests, and values. It’s called lifestyle design for a reason. You don’t simply copy someone else’s design and expect it to make you rich. How can you call yourself a creative if you can’t apply the creative process to the main thing that influences everything else?
I want to focus on Charles Darwin’s daily routine as it reflects many of the reasons behind my own. Darwin’s daily routine was highly structured and included multiple walks and work sessions in his study.
In the morning, he starts his day with a short walk at 7:00 AM followed by breakfast. He would start his first—most productive—work session from 8:00 AM to 9:30 AM. Following that work, Darwin would take a break to read letters and spend time with family, then returning for another work session from 10:30 AM until noon. By this point, he considered himself to have “done a good day’s work.”
Now, Darwin would take his second walk of the day around his famous “Sandwalk,” a quarter-mile gravel path that Darwin created specifically for thinking and reflection. After lunch and reading the newspaper, Darwin would rest and listen to his wife read aloud. At 4:00 PM, he took his third walk of the day, usually around the Sandwalk again, sometimes with company.
My point in sharing this with you is that Charles Darwin, of all people, worked surprisingly little, yet accomplished more in his life than most productivity-obsessed people today.
This realization is crucial because it allows you to disconnect hours worked from results generated, and you can start to think and experiment with your day rather than adopting a model that worked for goals that aren’t your own.
As you could have guessed, what I love about Darwin’s routine is the importance of walking. Those times of deep thinking were an integral part of his work. Focused work sessions paired with regular walks allowed him to achieve a balance of intense intellectual work with periods of rest and contemplation. Imagine if he had access to AI.
Darwin wrote 19(!) books and developed his theory of evolution by doing this.
My Routine – Releasing & Constraining Entropy
I like to slice my days into 3 parts:
- Low entropy – little room for uncertainty or chaos. Clear mind, deep focus, high intention.
- Mid entropy – allowing myself to interact with people and my phone.
- High entropy – controlled chaos that results in a plethora of ideas I can utilize the next morning.
I wake up naturally around 5:00 AM, sometimes earlier. In the warmer months, I go on a 10-20 minute walk first thing. In the colder months, I find that getting straight into work is better for me. Winter resembles a season of building. When I do walk, I am simply focused on what I am going to write when I’m back.
My first 90-minute work block is dedicated to my highest-leverage task. Usually, this is a book, product, or business. Something that only needs to be built once rather than systemized and maintained forever. Right now, I’m writing my second book. This is also when I bake in the “clear” module of my day by brainstorming 5-10 relevant ideas if I need to.
After a small and convenient breakfast, usually just fruit (to not bog my mind down), my second work block lasts anywhere from 45-90 minutes. This is when I do high-priority tasks that grow and maintain my work. For me, this involves writing one section of a newsletter (20-45 minutes), writing as many content ideas as possible (10-30 minutes), and cross-posting to various platforms (15-ish minutes). This is highly dependent on how well my mind is churning out ideas. On Tuesdays, I replace this block with recording a video. I also teach this process in 2 Hour Writer.
Note: this is also my main role in Kortex. I drive traffic and execute on growth strategies.
For those who have questions about this, yes, I write my newsletter and content every day. I am not a fan of “themed” days. I train daily. Write daily. And do anything else I consider an important part of my life daily. Even on vacation. Even during the holidays. That’s what brings me joy and keeps me sane.
After that workblock and more fruit, like Darwin, I also feel as if I’ve accomplished a good day of work. At this time, I’ll go on a second walk, usually shirtless, to get midday sun (which helps with a plethora of health-related subjects) and consume some form of an audiobook, video, lecture, or even sometimes read straight off of my phone. This is when my best ideas come for what I am currently writing. I capture all ideas and connect them to relevant projects (so they don’t get lost) inside Kortex Capture.
After this walk, and sometimes during it, I’ll do administrative tasks like answering emails, messaging partners, and checking the premium Discord.
Then, I go to the gym. Since I train daily, my volume is split across 7 days, so the sessions are pretty short. 30-40 minutes max. High intensity. Torso, arms, legs, repeat. 4 sets per muscle group. Mostly supersets of the alternating body parts. After the gym, I have a more protein-heavy lunch.
The gym marks a crucial distinction in my day. This is where I transition from work to light rest for the next few hours. I’m not really tracking time at this point. When I get back, I’ll do what my mind feels like doing. I’ll walk, read, nap, write a bit when ideas strike me, and message people. This is when I schedule most meetings or calls. When I’m in a season of intensity, these hours are usually dedicated to building that one project that demands my attention.
At around 5:00, I go to dinner with my editor and/or girlfriend. Date nights on Saturdays. Unless I have something extremely pressing that I need to do, I don’t work after this. I may go on another walk if I’m bored, but most of the time I’ll be very lazy. It was initially difficult to allow myself to do this and stop focusing on work.
Bed by 9:00-10:00 PM.
That’s it. That’s my life.
I hope it gave you some inspiration in some way.
At the very least, I’m grateful if I can provide at least one thing to experiment with.
– Dan
