By popular request, the next Writer’s Bootcamp is scheduled to start October 28th.
If you want to master digital writing in 5 weeks, know how to control audience growth to get eyes on your creative work, or just want a skill that allows you to earn a living with almost any interest…
Enroll here and check out last cohort’s testimonials.
Yes, everyone on the waitlist will have access to Kortex well before then (almost everyone already does – check your email and spam if you joined it.)
Onto the letter:
You won’t find rare results in an average lifestyle.
If you feel lost, tired, and can’t focus on making progress toward the life you promised yourself you would live, sometimes the only thing you can do is to flip the switch.
Create a glitch in the matrix.
Become a completely different person.
Change your habits all at once. Remove every distraction from your life. Start the business. Build the project. Work 12 hours a day and forget to eat. Look back and realize you’ve done more in 3 months than you have in the past 3 years.
You need seasons of intensity that launch you to a new baseline.
Waking up at 4am gives you 3-4 hours of experience that others just don’t get to have. It’s a completely different reality. A quiet one. People aren’t awake. Distractions lack gravity.
I’m not saying you need to wake up at 4am. That’s just one example of embracing an unconventional life.
But if your mind is already pushing back on the idea of breaking out of your painful bubble of comfort, you probably won’t benefit from the rest of this letter.
Open your mind or leave.
You Already Have Motivation
Here’s the thing.
You can already focus for 12 hours a day.
When you’re playing a video game or scrolling on your phone, it’s automatic. You don’t need to discipline yourself to do it.
But you know deep down that you’re ruining your life.
So, we need to learn how to create a mental, physical, and spiritual environment that makes it seamless to work on your dreams.
First, we need to understand that 12-hour workdays aren’t always possible. You need to be in the right phase of life (and you can’t get trapped in any of the phases).
Second, we need to remove the blockers that prevent you from seeing life as a video game. One that’s addictive and fun. One where you grind out hours of work and see actual progress in your life.
If you want to completely change the direction of your life, read on.
The Cycles Of Progress
Many people know my 4-hour workday philosophy.
Many people – albeit less, because people don’t understand the philosophy, they just see the idea and latch onto it – know that I’m not a fan of sticking to something for life as that limits growth and discovery.
Progress is non-linear.
You don’t go to the gym for 10 years and build the same amount of muscle every single year. You build a lot at the start because you’re new. Then you build muscle in cycles of consistency and intensity. You bulk and cut. Life happens and you get thrown off for a year. The next year you regain motivation and are hyper-disciplined, gaining more in year 10 than you did in year 3.
The same holds true for productivity.
I do not believe that 12 hour workdays are something you sustain forever. That’s just stupid. The downsides are obvious. Burnout. Neglecting other domains of life. And simply not having something to work on.
12-hour workdays shouldn’t be forced.
No amount of work should be forced.
If it is, change your work (or change your mind.)
Like a lion hunts and rests, we’re going to replicate that in our work.
1) Perplexity
There are 4 cycles of progress.
You can think of these like chapters of a book.
The first cycle is perplexity, or feeling lost and confused.
You’re at the start of the story. You haven’t set the scene or found your mission.
You can’t work for 12 hours because you don’t have something to work on. You don’t know what to do next.
Most people are in this cycle. They get trapped. They don’t allow themselves to be bored, so they flood their minds with instant gratification and cheap dopamine. This is bad, because it tricks your mind to think you’re making progress. It’s obvious why you don’t have the natural desire to pursue something more.
You escape the perplexity cycle by becoming curious.
If you have difficulty doing that, we will talk about progress blockers in the next section.
2) Curiosity
The next chapter in your book of building your dream life is curiosity.
You identify a problem in your life.
You dig deeper into how it’s dragging you into chaos.
The job. The bills. The sluggishness. The unfitness. The lack of social skills. Whatever it may be. You have plenty of problems you can solve. You’re just distracted.
You become curious and desire a solution.
At this point, your mind sees a pivotal transformation of perspective.
You start noticing information that reinforces a new goal attempting to shape your identity.
You start exposing yourself to new environments.
As an example, if you become disgusted with how your job is holding back every other area of your life with long work hours and low pay, you start noticing business opportunities on social media, or you start searching for side hustles to pursue, or you decide to finally pick up investing or budgeting.
In the curiosity phase, your job is to try everything and see what sticks.
Shiny object syndrome is a good thing.
But only if it’s toward a positive aim for your future.
Read more books. Join new digital social circles. Watch new content. Buy courses. Build projects. Try everything. Allow ideas to accumulate in your brain until you gain just the right amount of clarity to go all in on that one thing you can’t pull yourself away from.
Then, launch into a season of intensity.
3) Intensity
The climax of the story.
The main battle.
The most interesting and fulfilling part of your life.
The 3-6 months go by in a blur. Pure flow state. Completely focused on actualizing one meaningful goal.
In fitness, this is when you are disciplined with your diet and training. It’s all you think about.
In relationships, it’s the honeymoon phase. All you want to do is build your connection with one person.
In business, it’s building and launching a new product or going on a writing spree. Both lead to new heights in growth and revenue.
This is when you pull 12-hour days.
It’s stupid to try to force them in any other phase. You’ll end up doing low quality work while letting other areas of your life slip.
Of course, this phase can become dangerous, fast.
You have to know when to pull out of it. You also have to know how to transition out of those new habits you built.
Don’t try to push the bulk to the point of getting fat.
Don’t push the cut until you’re scrawny and losing muscle.
Don’t get so obsessed with the relationship that you become needy and desperate.
Don’t try to push revenue higher and destroy your brand reputation.
Know when to drop down to a new baseline and maintain the progress you’ve made.
4) Consistency
No, consistency is not everything.
Consistency is a tool to maintain progress, not make progress.
Stagnation isn’t maintaining progress. Stagnation is death.
Being consistent with content creation doesn’t get you anywhere. You must become curious and experiment with new angles and strategies. When you find the right one you double down and see the most growth you’ve seen (this is how I grew by 200K on YouTube in a few months and 1.2M on Instagram in the same). You find a strategy and milk it. But realize those strategies won’t work forever. Impermanence.
The consistency phase in your work is when you drop down to the 4 hours of high-priority work. Enough time to experiment for the next intensity phase, enough time to maintain a higher baseline than the last macro cycle.
When I shot up to $700K in a month after a launch, there was no way I was sustaining all of that. Not that it’s impossible for me to, I just didn’t have the right infrastructure to maintain that level. Instead, it brought me to a new higher baseline, and I made sure to execute the priority tasks I needed to maintain that.
For my work, those tasks were writing for 2 hours a day, managing the business for another hour or two, and building new projects like a book or product until the next season of intensity came.
This consistency cycle is important.
It’s how you drop down and maintain your gains in the gym when life gets busy. It’s how you nurture a relationship after the neurochemical cocktail fades.
The big thing is – you have nothing to be consistent on if you haven’t gone through the other cycles.
If you’re stuck in the cycle of feeling lost, it’s because your mind is blocked.
Why You Can’t Focus For 12 Hours A Day With Ease
Let’s not waste any time.
You can’t focus because your mind, life, and priorities are a mess.
And you haven’t done anything about it.
1) Remove Focus Blockers
Focus is about removing anything that prevents focus.
You feel lost, distracted, and low energy for that exact reason.
The moment you sense boredom, you fill it with the closest relief.
The moment you sense anxiety, you do the same thing.
Your mind is guiding you toward a better life, but instead of listening to the signals, you attempt to numb the pain of not being everything you could be, making it worse in the long run.
There are a few blockers that keep you feeling lost:
Purpose
You feel lost because you lack purpose.
You don’t know what problem you’re solving. You don’t know what goal you’re pursuing. You don’t know your part in a whole that’s greater than yourself.
Your mind is conditioned to focus on the goals society assigned to you. Your path is already known. Go to school, get a job, retire. You end up dragging your feet through life and getting bored because you don’t care about those things. You fill your boredom with laziness and pleasure instead of building toward your own goal.
You need to allow yourself to be bored.
You need to expose yourself to higher potentials.
You need to drop everything and see what sticks.
You need to sit with your thoughts so you can catch an inkling of vision.
Environment
Your environment creates who you are.
But most people forget that they’re in full control of their environment.
If you’re surrounded by people, opinions, and distractions in both the physical and digital world, it’s no wonder why you can’t focus.
Rip the bandaid off.
Take a day and quite literally throw away anything that (1) isn’t important and (2) distracts you from what is. Don’t hesitate.
Metabolism
You lack motivation because you eat too much in one sitting.
If I eat anything over 300-600 calories as a meal during the day, as a 225 pound guy, my focus suffers immensely.
Try intermittent fasting.
Try smaller meals and bigger dinners.
If you eat too much, your body takes from the energy you could use for focus and puts it toward digestion.
Reward yourself with a big meal once you are finished with work.
Knowledge
You’re lost because you don’t know what to do right now.
You project into the future you want, get stuck there, and begin to stress over how long and difficult the journey will be.
If you’re lost, learn.
When you have direction, act.
Stop trying to act when you need to learn and learn when you need to act. That alone will solve 99% of your clarity problems.
2) Throw Your Mind Off The Deep End
Everything starts with identity.
The web of ideas that shape how you view the world.
The perspective that’s been shaped by decades of social conditioning that makes you desire what you desire.
If you want to love working toward your dreams, your mind must reflect that.
It can’t be some idea you like the sound of. It has to be who you are.
How do you change who you are?
Reprogram your mind.
Rip yourself from your current lifestyle and immerse yourself in the information that will slowly shape how you see the world.
Follow people on social media who have the goals you want to pursue.
Listen to podcasts, read books, and put your money where your mouth is by purchasing courses that slowly give you ideas that compound into clarity.
Wake up tomorrow and do nothing the same.
Plan a new week. Set new priority tasks. Have new conversations. Overload yourself with new information.
3) Think Bigger, Act Smaller
You are now in a state of chaos.
It’s up to you to create order.
You’re surrounded by new ideas that you can collect as building blocks for your vision. Then, you can lay those blocks, day after day, to create the life you want.
You need a vision. Without one, and by definition, you are lost.
Take out a piece of paper and write down:
- Everything you hate and don’t want in your life again (anti-vision).
- Everything you want in your future. The body. The lifestyle. The location. The mind. The money. Anything. Don’t worry about being shallow. You can create meaning from it later.
Inside the Writer’s Bootcamp, this exact process becomes your brand. All of your writing topics stem from that.
You will be coming back to this every week.
Your vision will become clearer and clearer with time.
As you go about this process, you are waiting for “the click” to happen.
The moment when everything clicks, and you launch into a season of intensity.
But vision isn’t the only piece of the puzzle.
Big goals are for motivation, perspective, and potential.
Small goals are for clarity, action, and sanity.
4) Reverse Engineer Your Priorities
Once you have a Minimum Viable Vision, do this.
Break it down into:
- 10-year goals
- 1-year goals
- Monthly goals
- Weekly goals
- Daily priority tasks
Then, only focus on the priority tasks.
Everything else is for clarity.
You will need to test how many priority tasks you do, when you do them, and how you structure your work.
I personally enjoy 2-hour work blocks.
I can usually complete 1-3 tasks within that time.
In between the blocks, I go on walks, go to the gym, get lunch, and occasionally read. This makes my days more digestible.
5) Refine Your Productivity System Each Week
At the start of each week, I do a weekly review.
- What went well last week?
- What didn’t go well?
- What am I grateful for?
- What are my focus projects?
I use this Kortex template if you’d like to duplicate it to your workspace.
If you don’t have access, join the waitlist and you’ll receive it soon.
Simple and to the point, you can do that in 5 minutes.
This step is important. It shines a light on (1) what you should add to your vision and anti-vision and (2) what minor changes can be made this week for better results.
If you stick with this process, you’ll be awestruck with how far you go in 6-12 months.
– Dan
