These 7 habits are psychological.
(I’d actually argue that all habits are psychological.)
They aren’t physical actions that you try to stop doing.
They are subconscious thought processes that lead to staying the same rather than acting on the future you want.
And it will take some work to get you to rewire your mind.
So stick with me.
Habit 1) Not Being Selfish Enough
Because the oxygen mask principle applies to real life:
You must secure your well-being first if you want to help others.
A suffocated savior helps no one.
We’ve been trained to think that we need to care about everyone else before ourselves, and the people who trained us to think that way are unconsciously selfish. Most people don’t want the best for you. They want what’s best for them, and they will convince you to serve them in a way that makes you seem selfish if you don’t. Avoid that trap. It positions you as an exploitable resource.
The most important people and work in your life deserve the best version of you.
And when you neglect yourself to cater to the needs of others, they receive all of the benefit while your potential slowly goes down the drain.
Stop seeing selfishness as a negative thing.
Instead, become strategically selfish.
Think of yourself as a cell phone battery or a muscle. When you are fully charged or recovered, you perform your best. When you’re exhausted, you shut down. Most people are operating on zero percent battery in everything they do.
- Identify non-negotiables – a short list of what you absolutely need to function well. Exercise, alone time, sleep. Be specific. These are necessary not luxury.
- Be unapologetic when saying “no” – this is difficult, but practice saying no without saying sorry. State that you aren’t available and let reactions expose their lack of care for your well being.
- Filter requests against resources – if you don’t have the energy, if it’s not important, if you have to give up something important, or if you will hate it, decline. Full stop.
- Give when you are overflowing – know what you need to function, know what you need to perform your best, and know what you can give away freely after those are prioritized.
Selfishness and selflessness are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have one without the other, just like you cannot have happy without contrasting it to sad.
This may sound like basic advice, but do you actually do it?
If not, you needed this reminder, and probably shouldn’t write it off because you’ve heard it before.
If you practice becoming more selfish, your quality of life will improve drastically within a week.
Habit 2) Asking “How Do I Start?”
Excuse my rant here.
Why are people so obsessed with the wrong things?
It feels like a day doesn’t go by without people asking:
“How long will it take?”
“How do I start?”
Both of which stem from a deeper question, “What if I fail?”
I get it.
You want to start the side business to make more money. You want to get in the gym to fix your self-confidence. You want to do the hard thing so that life can be easier.
To that I say:
It doesn’t matter if it takes years.
What the fuck else are you going to do?
You aren’t going to learn, build, experiment, and everything else that makes life meaningful because you have something better to do?
Make it make sense.
You want life to be easier because it’s hard. But the minute that pursuing your dreams becomes hard, you quit and accept how hard your life is?
Really?
The problem is that your priorities are a lie.
You say you want to be successful, but you clearly don’t, because your desire for success doesn’t outweigh your desire to lie in bed eating doritos.
You must realize that it doesn’t matter if it takes your entire life, because at least you’ll be growing, not dying, along the way. Your life’s work isn’t an outcome. It’s a process.
Onto the next question:
“How do I start?”
You start by starting.
Plain and simple.
Imagine you were the first person in the history of the world to do what you were about to do. Starting the business, getting in shape, learning a new skill, whatever it may be.
Do you think that person had a tutorial they could watch? A book to read?
Or did they make a mistake? Then another. Then another. Without labeling it as failure because they understood that they were building a collection of what doesn’t work, and at some point, it would be impossible for them not to succeed, considering all of the experience they gained.
Here’s the real secret to starting:
Act as if nobody will tell you exactly what to do.
Assume that you will have to figure it out all on your own.
I’m not going to give you the best way to learn or do anything.
Instead, stop focusing on that.
Obsess over it. Learn everything. Try everything. Let it fail. Let it be cringe and embarrassing. That is the only way to achieve anything worthwhile in your life.
Habit 3) Never Hitting Publish
When I realized that a conventional pencil-pushing job was the bane of my existence, I started to experiment with any “make money online” method that I could.
I ended up trying, and failing, at almost every business model out there until I was forced to get a job to survive.
The singular reason why all of those online businesses failed was that I never hit publish. I would spend an excessive amount of time on the logo, the website, and building a portfolio of free work so I had some kind of authority.
As I learned, you don’t need any of that to succeed.
Instead, you need a body of public work that potential clients, employers, and followers can sink their teeth into to know what you do and how well you do it. That’s how you increase your percentage of luck.
Never hitting publish leads to something dangerous.
It’s called progress invisibility.
In other words, you don’t have real world feedback and don’t give yourself a chance to have some form of responsibility to stick with it.
In other other words, you aren’t actually learning anything. It’s like you’re going to college, applying for a job, and going to college again. You never actually start the job… which is where you actually learn how to do the job. Most of your degree knowledge is thrown out the window.
I don’t have an option to not write newsletters every week. I don’t have an option to build products and promote them. I have people waiting on them, and my entire survival is dependent on that. I have to do it (and want to do it) because I said no to every other thing, the job included. It’s optional for you because you have a plan B – AKA the current way of life that you’re trying to escape because you don’t like it, which doesn’t make sense.
Last, never making your work public is a form of reality distortion through isolation.
You work entirely alone without community, customers, feedback, or accountability. It’s easy to maintain your self-deception in this environment.
It’s easy to justify your lies about how “hard” you are working and your lack of results because you don’t have reality checks.
Hit publish.
If you don’t know what to publish, this article is probably my least popular premium post, because the least sensational things are usually the most effective but get the least attention. In it, I teach 3 ways to practice writing your ideas for short posts on Substack notes, LinkedIn, X, or any other platform. Check it out.
Habit 4) Creating Artificial Complexity
In a nutshell:
People dumber than you are making 10x more progress and money than you because they don’t over think and under act.
I’m talking to the people who read my business content and think “oh that’s basic.”
As if I’m lying to you as to what it takes.
The problem is that you are subconsciously maintaining artificial complexity around business fundamentals to justify inaction. You believe that business success requires some mysterious secret that others are hiding from you, so you stack up more and more useless knowledge that only slows you down.
I’ll keep this one short to avoid complexity.
You need consistent execution of the basic principles.
If you need to take more than a beginner level course to act or see results, you are doing something wrong.
Learn the fundamentals.
Start. Make a mistake. Learn from the mistake.
That’s the blueprint: no blueprint at all.
A surfer doesn’t need a blueprint to respond to the feedback of the waves. They’ve failed and practiced enough to the point of it being second nature.
A common theme between all of these habits is that you never actually do the fucking thing with persistence and iteration.
Habit 5) Being Too Frugal
Most people struggle with money.
That’s a fact.
Money is deeply intertwined with modern survival.
It impacts every single area of your life. Even if you aren’t thinking about money, you’re thinking about money. Your health depends on your money. The sanity of your relationships depends on a baseline amount of money.
You can say that’s unfair and complain about how it should be different, but I heavily disagree.
I’m not here to tell you the truth of money was somehow “hidden” from you.
It’s both your fault and not your fault for being in this situation.
You didn’t question how you were raised, developed a terrible psychological relationship with money, and because of that you failed to understand that making money is a skill. You can make as much as you want, you just didn’t take the time to study, practice, and master that skill.
Money problems don’t exist. Psychological problems do.
Most people’s inability to make, keep, or smartly use money comes down to their beliefs, because your beliefs determine the opportunities you can notice to do those things.
Here’s a list of the average persons beliefs around money:
- You believe money is hard to make.
- You don’t believe money is a domain of mastery like health, relationships, or your creative work.
- You may believe money is evil (because you were programmed by prior negative experiences).
- You aren’t interested in starting a business because you only see the vocal minority of sleazy salesmen and 80 hour work weeks.
- You think everyone is trying to scam you, or that any non-mega corporation is a grifter (when they’re usually the independent businesses you say you support).
- You are stuck in survival mode, so you don’t see the importance of self-development or business and feel the urge to write them off to feel better about your own actions.
- You don’t think you can make a lot of money in your field, which is just plain false if you can simply observe the top earners in your field (hint: they have a business).
Every single one of these limits how much you make.
If you believe money isn’t a skill, you won’t learn that skill.
If you believe money is evil, you will be repulsed by the thought of making more (even if it’s your only way out of your self-induced chaos).
Your perception of money is determined by your level of development.
The solution to your money problems (psychological problems) is to advance through each level.
The purpose of money changes as you develop yourself. It starts as a way to survive, becomes a method to acquire status, which leads to a desire for autonomy, then becomes a fuel for creativity and expression, then finally transforms into a way to help others advance through similar stages – related to money or not.
Here are the levels:
- Survival – you are in the survival level of development right now in the financial domain of your life (you may be higher in something like health or intellect).
- Status – you reach the status stage when (1) you have a sense of security around money and (2) you realize the need for others to perceive you as valuable to survive better.
- Creativity – you realize the faults with status games, begin to crave autonomy, and develop a philosophical sense of mastery around your craft. You create your own way of doing things after following the methods of others for so long.
- Contribution – you develop yourself to the point of becoming unemployable. Work, rest, and play become difficult to distinguish.
You transcend to each level once the previous level becomes too painful to stay in. You will know when that is.
For now, having awareness of this path is all you need to cure the habit of being frugal. Keep it in mind.
You can also go through the 25+ prebuilt AI workflows inside of Kortex to discover what you want out of life, how to turn it into a modern business, and other things that may change the direction of your life. (And, having notes, PDFs, and all AI models in one place doesn’t hurt).
Habit 6) Minimizing Anticipated Regret
The magic you’re looking for is in the work you’re avoiding.
While I believe the magic you’re actually looking for is in the experimentation you’re avoiding but can’t see because all that’s on your mind is avoiding the work, this holds a hint of truth.
There are few days that go by where people don’t ask:
- “What platform should I start on?”
- “What kind of digital product should I create?”
- “Should I start a service business? E-commerce? Something else?”
Then, when they finally decide and go through a phase of premature optimization.
Like I did with my previous business attempts, I focused on the website, the logo, and doing portfolio work in private until I felt “ready,” which was never going to come.
You make decisions primarily to avoid future negative emotions rather than to maximize positive outcomes. You are unconsciously playing to lose rather than playing to win because in the back of your mind, you really don’t want to win.
The solution is perspective.
What are you going to regret more?
Taking the wrong path – which is the only way to find the right path – and gaining more experience than you ever have in your life…
Or staying the same.
It’s not a difficult decision.
Do the work that leads to results and forget the rest.
If you think you need a website and logo and LLC before you can start getting customers, or that you need the perfect digital product or business model in order to start making an income, you are lying to yourself.
I’ll talk about this in a future letter.
Habit 7) Holding Onto An Identity That Doesn’t Serve Your Goals
You aren’t where you want to be because you aren’t the person who would be there.
When people want to change their life, they try to do it without changing much.
- They want to lose weight without giving up their favorite foods.
- They want to make more money while still going out every weekend.
- They want to get into a relationship while being a slob.
I’m not saying you can’t do those things and see results.
I’m saying that the reason you don’t have the results is that your current lifestyle doesn’t get those results.
The thing is, all of those things are optional.
The only reason you love the sweets or fried foods is because they are habitual. You’ve done them to the point of feeling like your life would be terrible without them.
If you really want to change, you need to rip the band-aid off.
You need to jump into a new identity overnight.
You need to become disgustingly aware of the fact that the reason you are where you are is because the things you do, right now, are the reason you are there.
You won’t die if you give up your current habits.
You may go through a short period of pain, but that’s what happens when you attempt to remodel a house. It won’t feel the same, but if you continue the renovations, you’ll create an identity that makes it all worth it.
Thank you for reading.
– Dan
How I can help you when you’re ready:
- Last week I posted a mega guide to creating your first digital product. This week I will post a full guide to writing a persuasive landing page for the product.
- If you need a new place for your notes and knowledge, try out Kortex. There are 25+ AI workflows for learning, marketing, and creating plus you can reference any of your notes, highlights, PDFs, or even YouTube links in the AI chat with any model.
- I posted a YouTube video yesterday on the deep work routine that changed my life. Watch it here if you want some good ideas while you’re on a walk or just have some free time.
