If you want to stop caring what others think…
If you want to move through the world with confidence and grace…
If you want to build the business, approach the girl, master your craft, or get what you want out of life…
Here are 8 steps to just stop giving a f*ck.
We’re going to go over:
- The 3 pillars of self-confidence so you can stop caring… fast.
- Why you care so much in the first place (so you have the awareness to stop).
- How to reprogram your mind to become who you were meant to be.
- Why you are probably on a life path that has a 100% failure rate, and how to escape.
- How to develop your own internal compass and find what you want in life.
- The passion process for discovering your interests and turning improvement into obsession.
- A tool to accelerate changing your life.
- The nature of reality, and how it can help you become more intelligent (so you stop worrying about minor inconveniences).
I don’t want this to be yet another superficial band-aid of step-by-step advice you can find anywhere online. I want you to solve this problem for good. And that will require us to go deep.
A subtle reminder:
We will begin rolling out access to Kortex on September 20th (6 days from now).
You must be on the Kortex waitlist to gain access.
Taylin Simmonds said, “It’s like Notion, Obsidian, and Google Docs had a baby.”
So, if you want a place to:
- Capture all of your ideas (without having one messy note where you lose them all)
- Store your highlights from Kindle, web pages, PDFs, Tweets, and anything that integrates with Readwise.
- Haven an interconnected second brain that breeds articulate and unique writing.
- Write landing pages, social posts, video scripts, or any of your creative projects.
And, get access to a free second brain course and community forum…
Join the Kortex waitlist here. You’ll be receiving an email over the coming weeks to sign up (and yes, there’s a free tier).
1) The 3 Pillars Of Self-Confidence
The first step to not giving a f*ck is understanding the big picture of self-confidence, not just some shallow advice.
If self-confidence were as simple as watching a YouTube video on confidence, we would live in a Utopia.
There is something much deeper going on, and I hope I can make you aware of it throughout this letter.
Lack of confidence is the one thing that plagues the potential of the majority of the population. They care too much about what others think.
Let’s say you want to start a business, and the thoughts start to flood in:
What will my parents think?
What will my friends think?
What will my spouse think?
Will it be enough to replace my income?
How long will it take?
Don’t even get me started on the thoughts that come when you actually start building the business.
The reason people fail is they can’t lift the emotional weights required to achieve the goals they set.
For every thought of a better life, there are 100 thoughts beating you back down.
And that’s just thoughts about business.
What about the other 60-80,000 thoughts we have in a day?
We have a lot on our plate.
Will I come off as weird when I try to make new friends?
Where will I end up in life if I don’t get my debt under control?
Did I feed the dog this morning? Imagine how terrible of a pet owner people would think I am if they found out.
Developing self-confidence is no easy task.
More information, more responsibilities, and more options for our future turns confidence into success and anxiety into failure.
This is the modern environment we live in.
How do we begin to cultivate the trust in ourselves that leads to self-confidence?
When most people wonder how they can become more confident, they are reminded of the simplistic advice:
“Confidence = competence.”
This is true, but most people will see competence as getting better at a specific skill.
So they’ll learn and learn and learn, never act, never self-reflect, and never actually develop confidence as a skill in any situation. This is the most common outcome.
There is depth behind that simple statement that few can see.
We must seek to understand that statement, because clearly “confidence = competence” as general advice has not fixed one of the biggest problems in the world, but has made it worse.
Pillar 1) Perspective
When you enter a situation where you don’t feel confident, anxiety shoots through the roof.
This closes your mind to everything but your thoughts.
They multiply.
You completely retract from the situation and become a slave to your past. The experiences you’ve had before. You remain the same person.
You must snap out of this and make a conscious effort to reprogram your habitual way of reacting to situations.
To do this:
- When you enter a situation and anxiety sparks, pause
- Zoom out to see the situation for what it is, just a normal situation
- Transfer consciousness to those in the situation with you
“Transferring consciousness” is adopting another person’s perspective.
Most people are just people living the same experience as us.
Billionaires are people with the same problems.
Fitness models are people with the same problems.
Any person you mentally place above you has the same problems.
The ONE thing that will make them react in a negative way to you is treating them like they aren’t human.
Don’t put them above you.
Remember, this is a habit you are forming.
It will take repetition and practice.
You cannot advance to the other pillars if you do not gain perspective on a situation.
Pillar 2) Perception
How you perceive situations determines how you act.
This requires you to shift into an open-minded state before and maintain it during the situation.
If you are scrolling social media and don’t perceive a business owner’s tweet as an opportunity to reach out, you won’t reach out.
If you see it as an opportunity, you may still botch the message or not send one at all because you misperceive that individual.
The same goes for making new friends or engaging in difficult discussions.
Perception goes two ways.
You perceive others in a certain way based on how they present themselves.
They perceive you based on how you present yourself.
If you don’t “look the part” or hold yourself in a way that would lead to a positive interpretation by the other party, it won’t go well. And you will know this subconsciously. You won’t engage in situations because you set yourself up for failure in the way you look and act.
I’m as introverted as they come, but people often tell me I look confident in the way I dress, walk, and talk.
Practice.
Pillar 3) Practice
How good you are at something allows you to perceive situations better.
Think of skill acquisition as a way to increase your level in the game of life.
In a video game, there are “skill trees.”
As you play the game, you choose skills to help you play how you want.
As you practice those skills, you increase your experience, and new skills become available to you.
The key point here:
You are not able to access other skills until you practice the ones available to you.
You don’t have the awareness of profitable opportunities because you don’t have the skill to recognize, choose, and act on them.
As you move toward your goals, you will be required to educate and practice skills to reach those goals.
If you aim too high, you get overwhelmed and don’t know what to learn.
You must play at your level and acquire the skills necessary to reach the next level.
As your level increases, you fill your toolbelt with skills that allow you to view the plane you are on, which is more vast than the lower level you were at.
My first successful endeavor was freelance web design.
A single skill that is available for anyone to learn. Lots of competition and battling for higher prices.
I knew that if I wanted to do something more profitable, like funnels for service businesses, I would have to learn skills like marketing, copywriting, and buyer’s journey to do that well.
Then, when I pursued the level of a creator, I needed to combine what I knew and add new skills like content writing (I teach all skills you need in 2 Hour Writer).
The higher my level grew, the more people I met, and the more my confidence throughout multiple domains increased.
The worst thing you can do is stop learning new skills and settle for the level you are at.
Perspective, perception, and practice are the foundations of self-confidence. Now, let’s dive a bit deeper.
2) Understand Why You Care In The First Place
Today, so many hundreds of thousands of years later, we have the same brain designed for the same purpose. But because we have increasingly gained control of our environment and the physical pressures have loosened dramatically, the dangers have become much more subtle—they come in the form of people (not leopards) and their tricky psychology, and the delicate political and social games we have to play. And because of these less obvious dangers, our greatest problem is that our minds tend to become less sensitive to the environment; we turn inward, absorbed in our dreams and fantasies. We become naive. – Robert Greene
You care too much because it threatens your self-image.
You have an image of who you are in your head, and when a thought, idea, or opinion conflicts with that, your emotions start to flare up. You retract. You get trapped in survival mode. The only thing you can focus on is the opinion of another person. From there, and because you failed to pause and open your mind, it amplifies and dominates your mind.
Humans and animals have one major difference.
Animals attempt to survive on the physical level. They feel threatened when their physical body is threatened. They attempt to reproduce the information in their genes.
Thanks to the emergence of self-reflective consciousness, humans attempt to survive on the physical and mental level. We feel threatened when our physical body is threatened, but also when our mental body, or our self-image, is threatened. We attempt to reproduce the information in our genes, but also the information in our consciousness.
We write books, communicate, text each other, and choose political sides so that the web of ideas that we identify with survives beyond our death. Ideas are mental sperm. By reading a book, the author is mentally impregnating you. Your self-image is the child of all of the ideas you’ve been exposed to your entire life. Artists attain immortality when their ideas become immortal, like how we reference Plato and Aristotle long after their physical bodies are gone.
This may sound weird, and it is, but I’ll let you reflect on it for a bit to determine its validity. If it helps, don’t think of it as mental sex, think of it as planting and watering seeds to become flowers in your mind. Same thing when you think about it. As above, so below.
So, why do we care what others think?
Because we want to survive.
We are wired to be accepted by the tribe. If we aren’t accepted, we will become outcasts. We will lose our resources for survival. Your parents will kick you out if you don’t agree with the ideologies they’ve so heavily identified with, like being a Republican, Democrat, Christian, Muslim, or if they’ve identified hard enough… they will despise you if your favorite sports team is not the same as theirs (this is an extreme, but possible case). Your beliefs go to battle with your parent’s beliefs, and they will do whatever it takes to survive. The psychological feeling is on par with being stabbed in battle. If they aren’t developed, they will stab back by kicking you out of the house, and you will feel that pain.
In some cases, it makes a lot of sense to care what others think. It is wise and strategic not to want to be kicked out (or stabbed back) at a young age when you don’t have the ability to survive and thrive on your own.
But in 95% of modern cases, when we can learn anything, do anything, and achieve anything, it’s completely useless. You are not actually being threatened. Your survival is not actually at stake when someone makes fun of your hairline in the comment section. But, you haven’t learned to navigate and master your mind, so you think the threat is real and become a slave to it. You don’t have the knowledge, skill, and self-development to be able to do whatever you want with confidence.
3) Program Your Mind To Stop Caring
You care what people think because your mind is programmed to.
It’s second nature to you.
You were programmed as a child to follow orders. Your mind programmed itself to survive. You registered threats to your survival – like touching a candle flame when you were young – as a bad thing. It makes sense. You didn’t want to be scolded or scorched. That’s negative feedback, and your mind interprets it as such.
Your parents probably didn’t teach you how to master your mind because they didn’t master theirs.
Here’s how you start reprogramming your mind.
First, you need to break the unconscious habit.
You need to stop the program from executing.
Any time you feel an emotional reaction, pause.
A pause is an opportunity to change your mind.
Second, practice metacognition. Question your thoughts and allow your mind to open up from its narrow state.
Ask the question, “Do I actually care about this?”
From there, let thoughts trigger thoughts until the tension is released.
When you do this enough, it becomes a habit, and your mind transforms. You realize that you don’t actually care; your mind just loves to distract you from being fulfilled and at peace.
This may not be possible in the heat of the moment, but it’s possible in reflection or when you are alone and feel threatened after reading something on your phone.
Through self-reflection, you can reprogram your mind at any time.
4) Society’s Path Has A 100% Failure Rate
The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. – Naval Ravikant
You care what other people think because you aren’t confident in your ability to survive on your own. You are dependent on someone giving you a role, rather than creating your own.
I’m going to state a few things that may offend you.
In other words, you may care what I think, so it may be time to practice what came above.
1) The default modern path in life is an automatic failure because you didn’t set the destination in the first place.
Go to school, get a job, buy the house, let 40 years happen, retire (maybe).
You achieved what someone else wanted, not what you wanted. That’s not intelligence, that’s blind stupidity. You failed to question your programming.
That’s not success, that’s complete and utter failure. Even if everyone around you perceives your material possessions as success, they are blind to the fact that you aren’t a unique human being. Your personality and self-image is a clone along with the masses of society.
Success, in my definition, is creating who you are. The quality, enjoyment, and satisfaction in your life is the byproduct of that.
2) The school system is a construct made to keep people dumb, even if that wasn’t the intention.
Schools were created to educate people into specific roles within the kingdom or society they were in.
The keywords there are “specific roles.”
For the entirety of their education, they pursued one goal. The goal they were assigned so that they could achieve a certain level of status so others would think of them as important. That way they could survive and acquire resources from others. That one goal framed any and all of the knowledge they had the potential of acquiring (that’s what goals do, frame your mind to learn new information to reach that goal). They studied one domain, like history, finance, biology. They studied a part, not the whole. They studied the material, not the relationship. They studied the dot, not the web of connections.
The result is a lot of knowledge in one field that makes them useful to someone else, not themselves. They only have the option to be a slave of someone who needs their expertise. Not physical slavery, but mental. They don’t have the generalist understanding that allows them to create their own path toward the goal they set for themselves.
What does this have to do with caring what other people think?
5) Embracing Nature’s Compass
Do you know how the mind works?
The mind is a system that aids in achieving known goals and discovering unknown goals.
Your mind is always operating, scheming, and making sense of reality based on the goals that occupy your mind.
These goals, most of the time, are the result of the values you accept from your culture, the information fed to you by parents and teachers, biological needs to survive, and more. Your goals are often the product of the environment you are in.
Why is this important?
Because understanding it will determine the outcome of your life.
The goals which occupy your mind determine what you perceive and learn.
Your mind automatically accepts or rejects information to aid in achieving the goal you are pursuing. As an example, if you only have the goal to go to school and get a job, you will only notice the aspects of life that help you achieve that. But if you had the goal to live the best life, something a tad more holistic and almost neverending (an infinite game), you would notice much, much more. The goals and skills available for your discovery and acquisition would be endless. Life would maintain its zest as long as you maintain that goal – because it can easily be overtaken by society.
The point:
You care what others think because you aren’t in your own little world. You aren’t consumed by your vision, mission, and the goals that comprise them to the point where distraction is impossible.
The flow state is representative of optimal experience. Your attention is immersed in the goal at hand and you forget about your worries.
To stay in a constant degree of flow, that can only happen if you are in control of the goals that shape every single one of your actions, from waking up in the morning to walking down the street.
If you want to take back control of your life, you must start from scratch.
Since goals frame how you perceive the world, and therefore determine the opportunities available to you, the default path society set you on – and any shred of it’s existence in your head – is detrimental to your quality of life.
Question everything you know. Revolt against society and find out what’s true for yourself. Pay close attention to every single one of your thoughts and actions. Ask, “Did I set the goal that led to this outcome?”
The question now is, how do you navigate life with certainty?
You don’t. And you weren’t in a secure or certain place to begin with.
For all I’m concerned, today is your birthday. You are no longer the identity that was assigned to you. You are born anew because you chose to be, and you can now begin the reprogramming process. So, happy birthday.
Forget about your constant craving for certainty and security. That will just trap you in another narrow-minded domain.
Instead, embrace nature’s compass.
- Create a vision for your future. Make it big and almost delusional.
- Reverse engineer that into 10-year, 1-year, monthly, and weekly goals.
- Break that down further into priority tasks you need to do every day.
- Those priority tasks will involve self-education and problem-solving.
You’ve effectively created a new frame for your mind to make the most of life.
You are giving yourself the opportunity to tap into flow at will. You have an endless string of challenging goals and must acquire the skill to match them.
Now, this is not a static and narrow minded frame. This will evolve as you do. Be okay with revisiting your plan and changing it.
After that, everything you do comes down to identifying and solving problems. Problems are your light in a dark room.
- Start with the tangible problems in your life right now.
- Fix your health. Fix your money. Fix your relationships. Fix your mental health.
- Don’t get distracted by problems that aren’t within your direct experience.
As you solve problems, new ones will reveal themselves. You can go to the gym to fix your confidence issues, but that will reveal a deeper problem. Self-confidence isn’t solved with external looks. It’s an internal problem. So solve that one. Start shallow, because that’s the only way to dig into the depths.
How do you solve problems?
Through self-experimentation. Not accepting someone else’s solution, ideology, or advice as law. You experiment with techniques and processes from others and find the intersection of them that leads to the problem being solved for good.
Soon you will realize that all problems lead to self-actualization and development. The deeper you go, the more successful you can be, and the more skill you acquire along the way.
6) The Passion Process
It’s unfortunate that “passion” has become a bastardized version of its former self.
The internet is flooded with headlines and marketing angles screaming that passion is useless, that you don’t need to find it, or that you should do something else instead.
Passion is a great, descriptive, and worthy word.
You can feel passion in your bones.
And if you don’t live a passionate life, what’s the only other option?
When you are passionate about something, you don’t care what people think.
You’ll study it all on your own. It will be your escape.
You’ll have friends on a social level, but you’ll be perfectly happy with your loneliness on an intellectual level.
At the same time, when you find the select few who share your passions, an unbreakable bond is formed. There is no greater feeling.
How do you discover your passion?
There’s a few things you need to know:
- Passion is when improvement turns into obsession.
- Passion is the process of trying everything and discovering the one thing you can’t pull yourself away from.
- Passion is not found from where you are now. It’s discovered on the path of where you’re going.
Those are your guidelines.
As you are solving problems toward your vision, experimenting with potential techniques and solutions you find through self-education, keep a steady eye out for signs of passion.
Learning new information will become a hobby instead of a chore.
Building a business will feel like playing with Legos as a child.
If you want to stop giving a f*ck, discover your passion.
7) Write More
Your mind is the operating system for reality.
When you learn how to think, you learn how to effectively navigate situations for the most advantageous outcome to your life and others. In other words, when you learn how to think, you get what you want out of life.
How do you get better at thinking? By treating your thoughts and ideas as legos. You aren’t an intelligent thinker because the thoughts and ideas that compose your thinking are a jumbled mess. You aren’t able to see them in their individual states and reorganize them.
This is where writing comes into play.
Writing is a tool to accelerate the conditioning of your mind.
Write yourself into a worldview that leads to a better life.
I feel my best when I write in accordance with the person I want to become.
I never thought of myself as a writer (and still don’t in most cases) until I realized that every other skill I learned required me to write.
Video outlines, landing pages, text messages, emails, advertisements, social media content, etc. Even if I learned another skill like graphic design or programming, I still had to write using the other skills to get clients or customers for that thing.
Everyone is a writer. Once you internalize this and begin to polish the skill that is involved with making your creative work a success, you start seeing benefits you didn’t even know you were after.
- Writing forces you to organize and articulate your thoughts. You become a better decision-maker. You slowly begin to navigate the chaos in your mind.
- Writing is the perfect feedback mechanism. If your readers aren’t growing or you aren’t getting paid for your work, that’s a sign that you need to improve at writing with persuasion.
- The better you write, the better you think, and if your thoughts influence most of your habits, actions, priorities, and ability to make sense of complex situations – writing drastically increases your chance at success.
You don’t need an English degree to write. You already text your friends with more impact than most school papers out there. If you can convince a friend to grab dinner with you over text, you are a better writer than most academics in the real-world applications that it matters in.
Thanks to social media and the internet, and given you have the ability to learn about how they work, a simple text-message-like social media post can reach hundreds of thousands of people, many of them willing to pay you for the value you have to offer.
The most impactful habit you can adopt is a 30-60 minute writing habit first thing in the morning. Make it conscious. Making yourself and your work a success hinges on your ability to get your writing – free or paid – in front of people who resonate with it.
We will discuss how I do this inside Kortex in a future letter.
For now, join the waitlist and we will start rolling out access to the app on September 20th.
8) Kosmic Thinking
If you want to stop caring what others think, learn to zoom out.
And when I say zoom out, I mean all the way out. As far as you can go. Beyond the cosmos, toward the Kosmos.
For the ancient Greek philosophers, the world was a “kosmos,” used to describe the universe as an ordered and harmonious system. This is the opposite perspective of the reductionist scientific paradigm of today that sees the universe as a machine (trying to understand reality by studying it’s parts, rather than relationship between the parts that create a whole).
The “Kosmos,” in this sense, is close to synonymous with all interpretations of an ultimate reality: God, Brahman, The Infinite, Source, Teotl, and the rest implied by religious leaders and mystic masters.
For the Greeks, when thinking in parts and wholes, the parts each served a purpose toward the harmony of the Universe.
Other philosophers, like Alan Watts, speak of the world as an organism—a functioning ecosystem bound by relationships.
Aristotle believed that the final cause of a thing is its function, and that a full explanation of anything must consider its final cause. This presents the field of teleology and cybernetics.
Teleology (telos meaning goal, logos meaning reason) is the idea of explaining something by referring to its purpose, end, or goal.
Cybernetics studies how systems self-regulate and self-organize toward the end goal of the system.
When combined and applied to the mind, we can begin to understand our actions and behaviors, and through that understanding, we can change them.
The mind is a system that accepts and rejects information to aid in the achievement of its goals. I’ve discussed this previously, but for now you must understand that your behavior can be explained by your purpose.
Humans are goal-oriented creatures. You always have a goal. But when that goal is assigned to you, and you remain unconscious of it, you care what others think, and it slowly destroys your life.
By aligning with the purpose of your highest self, and the purpose of the Kosmos itself – as discussed in my book – life makes a lot more sense and you can begin to navigate it with grace.
We can go extremely deep into the nature of reality, but in my opinion, that is best done by observing your mind and noting pattern that reflect in the world around you.
When it comes to “not giving a f*ck” about a situation, you care what people think because you can’t see the big picture. You can’t see the ecosystem you are operating in. You don’t understand your purpose, the purpose of those in the situation, and how both of those goals aren’t in alignment, so of course, there will be mental conflict.
You can’t adopt the other person’s perspective to see how they are interacting with the situation. You can’t broaden your own perspective to navigate your way out. You can’t see the cause and effect of every variable in that situation, which would allow you to gain clarity and move forward with confidence.
You get offended by someone’s political comment because you don’t understand their worldview and what is causing that comment to occur. You can’t zoom out and see that your taking offense will have close to zero impact on the other person’s opinion and, if anything, will make their own reaction worse, leading to a time-wasting argument.
By Kosmic Thinking, I mean systems thinking with a bit of magic and spirituality thrown in. I love this subject, and haven’t written enough about it, so we will save much of this for a future letter.
Kosmic thinking is about letting go, expanding your mind to observe the situation from a higher, paradigm-agnostic lens, understanding the purpose of the whole and its parts (yourself included), and navigating yourself toward a decision that is conducive to clarity in your mind and progress in your life toward that higher purpose.
So, again, when you feel yourself becoming tense and reactive, pause.
Zoom out. See the situation for what it is. If you can’t control it, let it go. Find the connections that lead to order.
