When I was 18, I felt lost.
I was always searching for a neat little set of answers to the biggest questions of life. Why are we here? What do I do with myself? How do I avoid ending up like those around me, or is everyone destined to be reactive, unhappy, and low energy? How do I make the most of this chance I’ve been given?
But no matter how many books I burned through, I couldn’t seem to find them. All I found were debates without clear conclusions, arguments from people who didn’t seem happy, and beliefs of high conviction that didn’t seem to make sense when taken out of context.
After thousands of years on this planet, we really haven’t come up with a set of principles, values, or lessons that everyone can agree on? Is this some kind of sick cosmic joke? I mean come on… this even stems beyond life’s big questions. Seed oils. Business models. Relationship dogma. Religious teachings. Everyone is engaging in this war of concepts, and neither side is the clear winner.
It seems like evolution and entropy go hand in hand, but far beyond the physical world. We latch onto beliefs that give us a shred of clarity, preach them as the one true answer, and often refuse to change our mind when that belief inevitably falls apart.
So if there is one thing that I’ve realized, it’s that.
The only right way to live is like nobody else.
The good life starts when you reject any other way.
The best practice is to start from scratch and figure it out.
Beliefs, concepts, and advice are like tools. They are useful to achieve a goal, but once that goal is achieved, the tool can no longer fit the screw. So instead of searching for one true tool to fit a non-existent one true screw or plank of wood or house, it is wise to train a mind that can create its own tools, plan its own house, and be willing to start all over again from a place of experience that allows them to adapt as the micro and macro context inevitably takes a new shape.
If I could go back in time and hand my 18-year-old self a letter, this is what I would say.
1) If You Don’t Create A Purpose, You Will Be Assigned One
Most people, by the time they turn 18, have their entire life decided for them, even if they think they don’t.
The only way to reverse this process is by gaining a deep understanding of how the mind works.
Your conscious or unconscious goals shape how you perceive the world.
Dopamine spurts into your brain to signal that information is important and will help you achieve your goals.
Your mind stores that information, you act on that information, and if you make progress toward your goals, your mind interprets that feedback as a “success,” and a system starts to solidify. It takes much less effort to repeat that action. It becomes habit. This is what we call conditioning or programming.
The entirety of your life depends on the string of goals that are conditioned into your head because those goals shape how you perceive, interpret, and act on any and all information you are exposed to at any given millisecond of the day.
The massive problem here is that when we are young, we have little to no control over what goals are assigned to us. And if we don’t have high-agency parents who also understand this process, we become subservient to the dominant system. In this case, that’s going to school, getting a job, and retiring at some age with far less than what you were promised. Those are the goals injected into your mind at birth.
Most children are plopped in front of a government-trained expert for hours each day, soaking in information with the sole purpose of becoming a useful worker. This is not up for debate. The school system serves that which created it: the government. The way you serve the government is by becoming a useful worker, paying your taxes, and the rest.
Now, this is not all bad. It’s necessary in many cases. And many useful workers can live great lives. But I’m not speaking to them. I’m speaking to my past self. The kid who knew he was meant for more and couldn’t stand the thought of an average life.
To that kid, I would tell him that the difference between average and rare is the difference between low-agency and high-agency. In this context, high-agency individuals are those who create their own goals and actively pursue them without permission from another. Low-agency individuals are those who are assigned goals and pursue them because they don’t have a mind that allows them to see any other option.
This is the difference between free individuals and servants, entrepreneurs and employees, generalists and specialists, and it sets the scene for the rest of this letter. Every other lesson is focused on how to think, how to learn, and how to live in a way that cultivates and leverages your agency.
If you do not create a purpose – or a big, meaningful goal from which to align your decision-making – then you are not in control of your potential.
2) Contemplate What You Don’t Want Often
It is not death that a man should fear, but rather he should fear never beginning to live. – Marcus Aurelius
You do not learn anything from praise of positivity.
This is a feature, not a bug in the human experience, that you can learn to integrate and leverage. Our minds are wired for survival. When we are comfortable, which is quite often in today’s world, we become more susceptible to traps and pleasures that slowly drag us down into chaos.
You only learn from mistakes. You only learn from struggle. You only learn when your mind is in a state that is hungry to learn, adapt, and evolve so that it can experience that pain less. When your mind is wrestling with a problem until it births a solution.
So, the trick to moving toward our ideal lifestyle isn’t constant positivity and visualizing ideal outcomes. Those help, of course, but it’s missing the other half of the equation.
You must contemplate what you don’t want often. You must form an anti-vision that you can tap into for a source of potent fuel to rocket toward a unique future.
You do not create a vision or anti-vision all at once. You add brush strokes through experience. You give yourself permission to suck. You give yourself permission to be afraid. You give yourself permission to step into the unknown to make mistakes, struggle, wrestle with your demons, and figure it out.
Make a practice of reflecting on your experience when most people let problems in their life go unnoticed. What do you never want to experience again? Where are your current actions leading you? What pain did you ignore because your mind was in such a closed state in the moment that you couldn’t imagine a solution?
When you’re in the heat of the moment, you aren’t in an open state of mind. You won’t be bothered to fix it. If you don’t self-reflect when you are in a state that allows you to do so, you will not change. And you will let mistakes compound until it is too late.
3) Focus On The Why & Watch The How Magically Emerge
Humans are generalists.
We do not thrive in a singular niche like a lion or polar bear who wouldn’t survive if plopped into a different environment. We build tools like clothes, computers, and concepts to help us adapt to new physical, mental, and digital environments.
The problem is when a human is duped into thinking it is a tool.
That’s where the unconscious path leads. You go to school for status and security. You focus on becoming a doctor or lawyer or artist or programmer. Your mind is framed by that goal and you fail to learn anything outside of it.
It’s no wonder why you are afraid of artificial intelligence and automation. It’s because you are already a machine. You are a tool that is worried about being replaced by a tool. You aren’t a human with an executive function to create narratives rather than being a part of the narrative. You’ve relinquished your ability to nurture a vision, assign goals to the tools, and learn anything required to do both.
When you dig deeper into your desires, you realize that you don’t actually care to become a doctor or lawyer or artist. You realize that those are neat and tidy titles you can adopt to bring instant yet faulty order to your mind.
At the end of the day, humans have the desire to create, expand, and transcend. You want to be a doctor to help others. You want to be an artist to fulfill your creative needs. You want to be a writer to pursue mastery. But accepting this is incredibly difficult because when you do so, you are left with only the option to take complete responsibility for your life.
There are infinite and one paths to fulfilling those desires.
The only way to figure out what you were meant to do is maintain focus on the why: creation, expansion, and transcendence. Creating something valuable to help others. Expanding your complexity of self to take on greater challenges. Transcending and including previous levels of development toward a more holistic worldview.
How you do things changes with the times. It always has and always will. Why you do things has never changed unless you become distracted from your deeper purpose.
If you create a purpose that evolves as you do, contemplate what you don’t want often, and avoid latching onto the best or highest-status tools to get a job done, you no longer feel threatened by new technology and change.
Don’t learn skills just to do a specific job. Learn any skill that is necessary to create your ideal lifestyle. Try everything until you find that one thing you can’t pull yourself away from, and when that one thing inevitably decays, do it all over again.
As an aside, AI, in particular, is useless without the application. OpenAI only became useful when it became a chat app. Cursor made AI useful by putting it into an editor. Kortex will do the same thing as our AI features start to drop this month.
4) If You Aren’t Building, You’re Dying
The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary. – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Entrepreneurship is the only logical option for long-term thinkers.
You can be a high-agency individual at a job and be rewarded handsomely for it – by taking initiative and solving problems – but the fact still remains that you are not in control of the vision. You are not in control of the goal. You are not in control of what you learn, how you think, or where your life will end up. You have some control, of course, but it is still limited by he who is allowing you to survive.
If you want to move toward your purpose, leverage the energy from contemplating what you don’t want, and develop yourself as a deep generalist, you must become a builder.
If you can build someone else’s dream for 8 hours each day, you can spend 1 hour building your own. Everyone has one hour they can carve out in their routine. And to those who think that is small, where do you think 99% of people start?
Does every entrepreneur just magically start working 12 hours a day on their own thing? Or do you lack perspective and like the comfort of thinking that they don’t have responsibilities just like you? One hour can turn into 365 hours very quickly, and 365 hours is more than enough to build something incredible.
Block out 1 hour each day.
Outline a project as a puzzle piece to your ideal life.
Give yourself permission to start, suck, and make mistakes.
Learn the multitude of skills required to build something of your own.
For the record, I do not think jobs are useless or bad. But I am brutally aware that they make you complacent and are dangerous for your psyche. You see, at a job, you are not in control of the skill:challenge ratio.
A challenging goal is what makes life enjoyable. But if your skill isn’t high enough to match the challenge, you will get anxious. And if your skill is to high for the challenge, you will get bored. The key is to aim just above what you are capable of. That way, your abilities are tested and you feel the enjoyment of progress.
Jobs are useful for skill acquisition, experience, and connections, but you can only go so high up the ladder before it becomes unfeasible for most people. After the initial 6 months, the repetition will start to kick in. You won’t be challenged anymore. You will be more likely to stay at that job not because it’s fulfilling but because it gives you a steady paycheck each month.
If you are not a generalist, you will not get to the top. And at that point, you’d still be better off building your own thing.
But here’s the kicker. Boredom and anxiety lead to psychic entropy. Boredom leads to self-centeredness, you begin thinking of what better things you could be doing. Anxiety leads to self-consciousness, you focus on your faults and feel as if you aren’t good enough. Both allow negative thoughts to multiply, tearing down the order and focus in your mind resulting in chaos. Naturally, you seek out pleasure to numb the pain because you don’t see any other option. You don’t need to be your best at work, so you allow bad habits to compound in your life.
If you aren’t building, aligned with your ideal future, you are dying.
5) Money Is A Tool For Personal Development
People who are privileged but have no power are a waste, while those who are educated but uninfluenced are a pile of worthless rubbish. – J.D. Rockefeller
I know it’s difficult to believe, but money isn’t the evil monstrosity that narrow-minded people believe it is.
In fact, becoming an entrepreneur was the most powerful catalyst for my personal growth. It forced me to increase my agency. It forced me to get other aspects of my life together, like health and habits, otherwise my work would suffer. It forced me to expand my complexity of self by acquiring new skills and taking on more interesting challenges. And last, it forced me to be less selfish. My creations weren’t only to fulfill my creative outlet, but to help others.
I understand that you may have a frugal mind conditioned with limiting beliefs that prevent you from seeing a better half of reality. I understand if you identify with a purely ascending philosophy – and fail to integrate “lower perspectives” – that views the entire manifest world as dirty and unethical. I also understand if you don’t base your interpretations of money on experimentation and experience but instead on the common narrative about how rich and successful people are always unethical cheaters.
But life-changing creations aren’t built off of donations and charity. The well-being of humanity isn’t raised by disconnecting from it to contemplate in the woods. Unethical companies aren’t dismantled through protest, and by not starting a business that contributes to humanity in a better way, you are directly contributing to said evil through work and ignorance that allows these unethical companies to rise to the top.
Beyond that, is your life not already ruled by money? Must you not conquer it to remove its grasps? Do you not work for a company that sells a product to mostly happy customers to survive? Are you not a hypocrite for your hatred of the one thing you can’t seem to escape? Is the only way – in our modern world that people think they can escape by hoping to regress into a past, underdeveloped state of humanity when things were “better” – to remove your money problems not to solve them?
The underlying reason why people despise money is because it is a measure of value. Value is a measure of how many people support and care about your creations.
Getting paid for the amount of work you do doesn’t make sense. Getting paid for the amount of value you provide does, and that’s how reality works. You may not like it, and it may not be completely pure or holy (because nothing is, creation is counterbalanced with destruction), but those who are richer than you are, by definition, more valuable than you, and that pisses you off.
But rather than doing something about it, you whine and complain about how you work so hard and get paid so little. You don’t yet realize that in order to make the change you want to see in the world, you need attention, power, status, and all of the other things you hate. Imagine if Jesus Christ or Gautama Buddha or Alan Watts or any of the people you look to for direction and clarity didn’t have attention, power, or status. The point is that those things are not completely and absolutely evil. They are as evil as the level of development of the person who possesses them and the level of development of those who interpret them.
The reality is you can make money. How much is up to you. In fact, it’s probably the singular thing that is holding you back from achieving a more meaningful and fulfilling life.
If that last sentence shortcircuits your brain, you have some perspective to work on.
That’s it for now.
I have a few more lessons, but I’ll save those for future letters.
– Dan
