In today’s world, one of the worst things you can do is get trapped in the mind of the “noble brokie.”
Many intelligent people I know hate online business, marketing, and sales because they think it is “below” them.
They get locked into what they think is a “higher” perspective that demonizes the sleazy salesman. In reality, this is an illusion. This “higher” perspective is filled with misunderstanding, a lack of empathy, and hate.
It is on par with if not a lower level of consciousness than the “sleazy salesman” himself.
This is similar to how democrats and republicans argue to defend the ideology they identify with. Similar to atheists and theists. When they engage in these narrow-minded arguments, there is no chance of discovering the holistic truth of the situation.
Let’s start to deconstruct what this holistic truth is:
If you don’t start a business to provide information, education, and goods that make a better humanity – then unethical businesses rise to the top without competition making a worse humanity.
The reason that unethical businesses flood the marketplace is that you aren’t as conscious or intelligent as you think.
You are directly contributing to evil by not starting a business to raise the collective consciousness.
By doing nothing but demonizing money and businesses that are the lifeblood of society, you are assigned a job where the employer is more than likely unethical by your standards.
You won’t start a business because of your delusional assumptions and conditioning that it is unethical to make money – but you are working for a business that makes the population sick, contributes to bombing people across the world, and locks employees into robotic routines so they wouldn’t dare achieve their potential.
People criticize new creator education businesses as “grifts” and “scams” for solving the only true problems that will raise the baseline consciousness of humanity.
People who sell education, courses, and coaching in the health, wealth, relationships, and happiness domains of life are attacking the root of positive behavior change. I discuss the importance of education in You Have $100,000 Trapped In Your Head.
If humanity is only as strong as its weakest link, and 99% of people suffer from the same survival problems, and education is what allows the individual to solve their own problems (rather than prescribing temporary relief), and problems are what prevent personal to collective evolution, and if the education system is focused on training people into jobs for its own benefit, then the new digital society of value creators is one realistic path out of this mess.
Back to the main argument…
By doing nothing, you allow people less conscious and intelligent than you to have more attention, impact, and money than you.
Money creates a ripple effect and allows them to spread their message further, hire employees (that contribute to said unethical practices), and compound the attention they hold in society.
The only way you can stop people from paying attention to one thing is to give them something more persuasive to pay attention to.
This issue is not as simple as “just starting a business to make money.”
Everything is connected and you are unconsciously allowing the entire Universe to tilt in the hands of evil by not becoming a conscious business owner that impacts its customers, employees, readers, economy, and the rest to infinity.
Spirituality is understanding your part in the whole of the Universe.
Spirituality is not disconnecting from that whole to live in the woods and letting the Universe decline into chaos.
Spirituality then can be considered, and felt, when you attempt to reverse entropy by putting effort and energy into the progress and evolution of humanity.
Happiness is the feeling that power increases — that resistance is being overcome. — Nietzsche
If you hate money, do you not hate your life?
Everything around you right now from the phone in your hands to the roads you drive on to the desk you sit at to the food that keeps you alive are all products from a business that makes money for their contribution to the advancement of civilization.
You are drowning in a world that was built by the drive of money stemming from survival.
I discuss the importance of money, marketing, and sales from a spiritual lens in my new book, The Art of Focus. If you want a practical philosophy for meaning, money, and mastery pick it up here.
The Importance And Unignorability Of Money
“The best way to make money is teaching others how to make money.”
I see people say this quite often.
Some people say it as wisdom.
Others act like it is a sentence that dismantles any business advice so they don’t have to face reality.
Some people see this saying as a bad thing when money rules people’s lives. It is the one thing holding them back from reaching the next level of their personal development. It dictates almost every single action a person takes, even the most “spiritual” people, because money is deeply intertwined with modern survival.
Why do you work 8 hours a day for 45 years? Because you need to pay the bills and support your family.
Why do you go off and live in the woods like a monk? Because you want to eliminate the need for money to pursue personal development. (To think this is what everyone should do is more foolish than leaving society to rot. “All is one” until you actually have to take responsibility for the health of the world, so you choose to check out instead).
Why do you go to the gym and eat healthy foods? To be healthy, yes, but there’s more. You want to increase your perceived status so you can attract better opportunities, advance your career, and make more money.
Why am I typing on my keyboard right now? To help you out, yes, but there is not only one reason behind anyone’s actions. Writing is my business. I write on a weekly business because I get paid to do so, among a plethora of other benefits it brings to my life.
Why are you reading this? To get a new perspective, yes, but it will open your mind to reduce the limiting beliefs around making money.
Almost every action you take has money as an attached reason.
Money is deeply rooted in modern survival.
If you look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, each stage requires money in the modern world.
The financial domain of your life is just like any other domain.
Like a skill tree in a video game.
All domains of your life require seeds to be planted over time for a garden to flourish.
To achieve health, you need money.
To achieve fulfilling relationships, you need to solve the problem that destroys 99% of them… money.
To be happy (moreso to enjoy life since happiness is a fickle metric) you need to make progress toward a meaningful goal. You need to build. Building requires resources. Resources require money.
When you ignore the need for money, you limit how far you can go in your mental, physical, and even spiritual practices.
Spiritual practices? Yes. If you have a poor relationship with the lifeblood of the material world then your spirituality is stunted. You can’t acquire the resource that allows you to contribute to the spiritual evolution of humanity.
Everything is “teaching people how to make money” and advance their career no matter if its advice positioned from the perspective of relationships, health and fitness, or learning a new skill like digital art.
Hell, why do you go to school for 12 to 24 years of your life? To increase your earning capacity of course. Yes, you learn how to operate within society, but what is the lifeblood of society?
What do they teach in school? Is it only “how to make money?” Or is it an interest you can adopt to eventually help you make money?
Back on the topic of the creator economy…
Do you not see that the only way to make money in the new economy is from people who created the jobs and opportunities to make money in that economy?
Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it isn’t useful.
Do you not see that the only way to make money in the old economy is from the institutions and constructs that created those jobs?
Everything evolves. Let go of what you thought worked 10 years ago.
Schools teach outdated and less profitable ways to make money, because more profitable ones emerged with the creation of the internet. Just like how more profitable jobs emerged after the creation of the tractor and everything else.
By viewing everything as a scam you are delaying your development by years if not your entire life.
This is the phase of evolution we are in and you are missing out on what will be the new normal.
You Can’t Avoid Learning “Unethical” Skills
The most successful people are those who study unethical tactics and use them in an ethical way.
- Sales
- Marketing
- Persuasion
- Hypnosis
- Influence
- Game
Their work, business, and pursuit of lofty goals are the modalities for integrating their shadow. (I teach all of these, except hypnosis, inside Digital Economics from a philosophical business lens)
They’re all the same thing when you zoom out to see the principles.
All of these “unethical” skills are just understanding human nature, psychology, and patterns of the Universe like storytelling (even architecture and music):
Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music. – Goethe
Everyone has a dark side.
Like the ugly underside of a floor rug or the bass note of a song.
The Universe is a balance of creation and destruction, unity and division, birth and death. Buildings are destroyed so new ones can be built. Your past self dies so your ideal self and birth.
You are not pure good.
It is impossible to be pure good when “good” is relative and would not exist without evil.
People that try to suppress it, rather than integrate it, have that dark side manifest in unconscious ways. Often, the people who say they aren’t manipulative are the most manipulative, they just aren’t aware of it.
Getting a sales job or starting a marketing business is a great way to integrate your shadow. You are given a choice to use skills for good or evil. You get to see the outcome and how it impacts you and your customers.
Spiritual masters are not “all good,” they’ve just learned to integrate the bad and not let their song of a life be written as a depressing one. There will be lows in your story, but when you zoom out, how will it turn out?
A good way to think about your skill stack is like a mutual fund.
If one stock goes down, the mutual fund can still be up.
If one skill is “unethical,” that may be the unlock to your business being profitable, ethical, and impactful.
To Be Human Is To Transcend, Expand, and Create
The world is going mental.
As a species, we are transcending the physical thanks to technology, science, and computational power.
We are unifying as a species – the unity of consciousness – through technology. Would that have been possible without money?
While most see social media as a net negative to humanity, I couldn’t disagree more.
Social media is where we are documenting the collective mind.
We share thoughts, opinions, ideas, creations, and our identity. We are uploading our minds to the internet. Not just creators. Content is the collective mind.
Social media dissolves the boundary of how we are communicating.
It’s like people are waiting in line to go inside their screens. They stare at it all day. Like there is a primordial pull to become one with every other mind.
Your entire identity is already on the screen anyway, but there’s still a barrier that is the screen.
Imagine a world where you can send a signal that is a thought to another person. Imagine a world where you are reading my newsletters are fed into your mind without reading them. Imagine a world where you are watching my videos and I’m right there with you.
If you haven’t seen the Lex Fridman podcast with Mark Zuckerberg (The First Interview In The Metaverse), that future isn’t too far off. They have a podcast in virtual reality where their avatars are hyper-realistic. It’s mind-blowing.
I recently switched The Art Of Focus event from in-person to virtual – and one objection to this change is that in-person would be more valuable, a different kind of energy.
While I’m sure this is true now, what about in the future? What if virtual events were as real as physical, but the flow of information was instant and the experience was nothing like we can conceptualize right now?
Another question:
You have the entire world’s knowledge at your fingertips. How does that make you feel?
You have the capacity to learn, expand your sense of self, and start a business that provides value to the world.
When polled for what kids wanted to be when they grew up, the highest-voted option was a “YouTuber.”
While most see this as delusional and impossible, I see it as natural and really the only option in the future. Maybe not specifically as a “YouTuber,” but as a creator like the Universe. You are a being that creates with your mind.
Most people label wanting influence and attention as “vanity” but few people realize reasoning can’t be reduced to a singular “why.” There is always something deeper and unconscious pushing us to act and make decisions.
There are multiple “whys” behind our cares, wants, and desires.
Your reasoning behind your actions becomes more holistic as you expand and transcend to new levels of mind.
Your level of mind determines your values.
You didn’t choose to sit around and think about money, social media, and skill acquisition.
You make an automatic decision based on the structure of your psyche.
For many, they were assigned ideology, beliefs, systems, and business models that sounded “good” and began defending their beliefs as the best and only.
When you zoom out, push into the unknown, and make progress by solving problems that increase your level of mind – you can see money for what it truly is: a piece of paper that can benefit yourself and others massively.
A Brief Summary Of Why You Aren’t Successful
You aren’t successful because you say you want to help others, but you won’t learn the skills that allow you to help others.
You aren’t successful because you focus too much on art, and then blame the market when they don’t see the value in what you have to offer (because you couldn’t articulate it with marketing and sales).
You aren’t successful because you “focus on your craft” rather than getting your craft in front of potential customers. Your websites, designs, writing, and other projects do not count until other people see them. You are delaying the time to feedback. Without feedback, you can’t make it valuable. Your first iteration will not be valuable.
You aren’t successful because you have an incomplete perspective on what business is. It is how you participate in the advancement of humanity by creating a product that raises the collective consciousness.
You aren’t successful because you took these points as personal attacks, closed your mind to your potential, and allowed your conditioning to rule you.
You aren’t successful because you don’t create something valuable that the market wants to pay for. People don’t want what your ego wants, they want what Mother Nature wants, and who are you to act like you know what that should be?
You aren’t successful because you find comfort in the beliefs that you believe are high and mighty. You lock yourself into a paradigm that prevents you from growing as an individual. You begin coping rather than creating.
Self-development is a gateway drug into entrepreneurship because you realize that improving others is the next level of improving yourself.
To become successful, there is one golden rule:
Provide value to others.
This means two things:
- You must cultivate your value. You must expand your mind, identify problems, acquire skills to solve them, and make tangible progress in reality. (You can’t just sit around and learn theory all day, you must practice.
- You must distribute your value. You need a vessel – AKA a business – to distribute a product or service that the market wants to buy. If they don’t want it, it isn’t as valuable as you think.
In other words, you need self-development and other-development.
Personal growth and business growth.
Business is how you provide value to others at scale.
How do you cultivate and distribute value in the modern world?
Social media. Virtual reality.
Social media is your public school, public resume, and public portfolio.
It holds the holy trifecta of the good life: Learning, building, and selling.
You cultivate your value by learning new knowledge.
You solidify your value by building new projects.
You distribute your value by selling those projects.
All 3 result in a more valuable skillset and mindset.
Now, this letter was about mindset. It was to help you bust through limiting beliefs and provide you with a worldview conducive to a better future for yourself.
If you want previous letters on skillset, I’d recommend starting with my entrepreneurship letters. Scroll to the bottom and start there.
Talk soon,
Dan Koe
P.S. The price for The Art Of Focus Keepsake Box increases in under a week (you won’t receive another Koe Letter before then).
It has new pricing options and a better virtual event.
