This past month, I have realized a common theme in my life (and the lives of many others).
Obsession.
As a kid, I was obsessed with finding a better way of living. I don’t know what sparked this. All I know is that I was a silent observer. Everywhere we went, I paid close attention to people’s actions. Not in a judgemental way, but in a discerning way.
How did that person get to that point in life? Why did they look that way? Was it because they were going through the McDonald’s drive-thru every morning? 2 sausage and egg McMuffins with a large iced coffee (and don’t forget the 3 extra pumps!)? Many things didn’t sit well with me.
One of them was the conventional career path. Go to school. Think you know what you want to do at 18 years old (when in reality it’s what culture conditioned you to do). Possibly get a good job the first time around. Possibly enjoy life while having no control over 70% of your day. Possibly have the freedom to do whatever you want with your time… at 65 years old. Sign me up!
Nope. Didn’t like that. A “secure” future didn’t sound so secure. So I spent my time in the gym, learning from people I aspired to be like on social media, learning whatever skill could help me, and failing at 7+ business models.
Side note: I found this was a missing piece in my brand. So I am launching Digital Economics on June 7th. It will be a modern business degree (taught by someone who actually understands modern online business). Skill acquisition, brand building, rapid content creation, and creating your own niche that nobody can compete with (in 30 days). Here is the waitlist for early-bird updates.
When it all clicked, I started seeing success. Throughout the last 4 years, I’ve pieced together the puzzle. Here is what I wish I knew at 18 years old:
The Future Career Path
The future of work will not be work. It will be play.
The human psyche is wired for survival. Entrepreneurship is modern-day survival.
We cannot control human evolution. The path is already laid out and it is unfolding rapidly before our eyes. Those that hop on the train will survive and others will experience neurobiological decay.
Good dopamine VS bad. Pursuing your curiosity, making discoveries, and being able to maintain that lifestyle in a world that is shifting from corporation to individual. Tapping into your creative genius, creating solutions to problems, condensing information, and raising the well-being of the collective.
Pursuing Your Curiosity
We’ve talked about curiosity a lot in these letters, specifically in the last one.
For the first 18+ years of our lives, culture is designed to strip our child-like curiosity away from us. This is a blessing and a curse. A blessing for those that realize it, a curse for those that don’t.
Curiosity is the path to doing the things you want to do — not the things that others want you to do. The school system assigns us learning material that we may or may not be interested in. It may spark curiosity to explore something in your own time, but kids rarely do that. Especially when their parents are yelling at them to do their homework.
You pursue your curiosity by questioning instead of coping.
“What if I learned that skill?”
“What if I improved my health?”
“What if I started that business?”
“What if I failed? What if I didn’t? What if I stuck it out? Would the world end? Of course not.”
After a series of questions, what follows is exploration of the unknown. Action. Finding resources to self-educate online. Letting new discoveries lead you down another unknown path. Repeating the process until you’ve connected all of the dots.
Luckily, we live in a world where anything is monetizable. If you know how to learn fast, build an offer, and sell — you can build distribution just by talking, learning, and teaching about your curiosities online.
The Medium & The Message
I have a theory. A theory that we as humans are mapping out the collective consciousness online.
Creators, personal brands, “thought leaders,” and online educators are increasing the rate of evolution at an exponential rate. We are condensing information through courses, systems, step-by-step guides, and mentorship that distills years of experience in a digestible way. What would have taken 60 million bits of information to process now takes 10 million.
We can learn more, act faster, make new discoveries, and pass down our own lessons in the same manner. Some argue this is the meaning of life and some people are sitting on the sidelines as others are building massive leverage for their future. All while pursuing their unique curiosities that would allow everyone to go in a unique, unsaturated direction in business.
That is exactly what humans do. They imitate for survival. We imitated our parents, teachers, and friends in order to learn how to function in the world. Many stop there. Intelligent imitation comes after the fact. You learn from those that are condensing information you are curious about, dissect it, understand it, and experience it. How? By documenting what you learn, build, and experience online. To do this correctly, you need an understanding of what captures attention. That is, how to distill your learnings in a way that attracts others pursuing their curiosity.
If you want my Intelligent Imitation process for faster learning, download my free 7-day challenge. It will 10x your creative output and make content creation ideas seamless. (It’s how I write these newsletters).
Now, back on track. There are 2 paths you can take to pursue your intrinsic curiosity.
1) Media (The Message)
Media is how we communicate with other human beings without being right in front of them. The front end of the internet is media. That is how you capture attention to educate, entertain, and inspire others. That is how you attract an audience, learn in public, and distribute your condensed zip-file-like knowledge that you can sell (while simultaneously accelerating evolution and raising the collective well-being).
To master media, study marketing, persuasion, sales, psychology, epistemology, philosophy, and everything else that allows you to understand the mind. The best way to do this is to learn in public. That is, learn by building out a real-world project. Start a social media account based on your curiosities. Create videos, podcasts, articles, posts, and the rest. Treat it like a hobby, a game where you are learning what makes other human beings tick.
At a minimum, you have created a public portfolio and developed modern skills that can get you a high-paying job without a degree. Media jobs are hot. You can work for marketing and media agencies, creatives, other personal brands, and many other options. You can then use your increase in income to fuel your entrepreneurial journey (and have already mastered the media game).
At a maximum, you build leverage for your future, create a system-based project, and make more than enough money than you need to live a happy life.
Either way, you win. Start creating.
Modern Mastery HQ — the private community — has 1000+ members doing just that. Koe Letter readers can join for $5.
2) Code (The Medium)
The tech world has exploded in the last decade. Tech, specifically code, is the vessel for media. It allows us to package up information in a structured way. It allows us to house the information, products, services, and everything else in the digital economy. It is the back-end of the internet.
Again, you can learn to code and get a job in ~6 months without a degree, make a good amount of money, and then transition into whatever you would like. When I was in my last year of college before dropping out, code was my curiosity. I took a basic HTML and CSS class, got hooked, and started self-educating via YouTube videos and courses. I ended up getting a job at a web design agency after failing on the media side of things. I used that income to fuel my business and ended up seeing success freelancing. I took what I learned, talked about it online, packaged up a system, and sold it under my personal brand.
There is more to the coding side of things, like blockchain and web3, but I can’t let my focus split from what I’m building just yet. So I’ll leave that to your curiosity 🙂
3) The Brutal Combo
The beautiful thing about all of this:
The coders of the world have gotten so good that no-code tools are popping up out of nowhere. Anyone can build a website, email list, blog, product, membership, community, and other things that allow them to harness their media skills online.
With these no-code tools, the average individual will learn both media and code by just starting a personal brand. You educate yourself on communication by learning and posting, you educate yourself on code by housing that information on your website, landing page, and email list.
Build Distribution, Then Build Whatever You Want
As we’ve learned, anyone can build distribution. Distribution is just a fancy way of saying potential traffic. An audience is traffic. An email list is traffic. Communities are traffic. Your network is traffic. All can be sent to your digital product or service.
The world is craving human connection as we learn to navigate the internet. Decentralization is a hot topic. Corporations can’t be trusted. Formal education can’t be trusted. Individual distribution centers (personal brands) are popping up to give that human connection and educate. Everyone can pursue their curiosity and do what they love — if they realize this opportunity.
“There are almost 7B people on this planet. Someday, I hope, there will be almost 7B companies.” — Naval
Media is the information (content). Code is the real estate (where content is housed). Brand is distribution (how you attract people to your content). By building these digital assets, you can create a system-based digital product or service (that condenses information, which is valuable) and talk about your expertise from the lens of your curiosities (so there is no “competition”).
Making A Fortune
So far, we’ve gone through the curiosity, media, code, and distribution steps. But what do you distribute? Digital products or services. The things that impact human’s direct experience through accelerated education or solving a problem.
There are 3 ways to do this:
1) Done For You
Done for you services are things like freelancing or agency work. Someone has a problem, you have a unique system for solving that, they hire you, and you solve the problem for them.
2) Done With You
Done with you services are things like consulting, coaching, or mentoring. Rather than doing something for someone, you are walking them through your system. You are teaching them, educating them, on how to improve a certain aspect of their life. You help them navigate the roadblocks that you’ve experienced previously.
3) Do It Yourself
Do it yourself is for digital products. You package up your system in a digestible way via no-code tools and distribute it infinitely via the internet. You can go straight into the digital product game, but you will need distribution to monetize well. When you don’t have distribution, freelancing or consulting can help you develop your system, get results, and make an income without a large audience.
This is how you make a fortune. By working your way up the ladder, developing your system, packaging it up, and distributing it with “no marginal cost of replication.”
Start Building Leverage
I could go on and on about this, and I will in future letters, but for now — just start. That is how you learn. Use my Power Planner to develop the mission and vision for your brand (what you are leading people towards, what you are going to study, and what you are going to learn in public). Then, use my intelligent imitation process to aid in the process of documenting your mind.
That is what we are all doing. Mapping out a giant mind (like the universe is) online. Join the party and reap the neurobiological benefits, or wait until you have no other option. I’m not a fan of “fear-mongering,” but there truly seems to be no other path. You either live in accordance with nature or be a product of man. That is, create or be created.
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