Your mind is a complex set of systems that becomes more efficient in achieving the goals it adopts with time.
Your mind is the vessel that interprets reality.
When you were born, your mind was almost a blank slate.
You had biological goals of survival, so your mind would fire the synapses to cry when you were hungry, when you wanted attention, and when you felt discomfort after letting one loose in your diaper. Most babies come out of the womb crying because they just entered a massively stimulating and unknown game called life.
As you aged, you started developing a kinesthetic version of yourself.
Even when you couldn’t see your own face, your parents would sing nursery rhymes and point to their body parts to help you understand yourself.
“Eyes, ears, mouth, and nose.”
Soon after, you began to crawl, play with toys from your culture, walk, and try to make sense of this foreign language your parents were speaking.
You wanted to survive. You wanted to fit in. Your mind was a pattern recognition machine. And the systems of behavior and language were programmed into your mind as you subconsciously tested, failed, and succeeded with society’s code.
A system is a process to achieve a goal, and the societal system was injected in your mind so you didn’t lose your mind since you were a child.
I discuss all of this in my newly released book, The Art of Focus.
From Asleep To Awake
By the time we reach 30, the average person is in a prison of their own creation.
Not society’s creation, their own.
It was you who failed to question the limits that society projected on you.
You accepted them without struggle.
Most people grow to live the same monotonous life, over and over again, reinforcing their narrow minds with excuses, justifications, and identifications.
Get offended. Blame everyone but yourself. Tie your self-worth to radical ideologies. Accept everything at face value and question nothing. Expect free handouts for simply existing, no effort. Do what the authorities tell you. Go to school, get a job, retire at the ripe age of whatever it may be, no guarantees, with just the right amount of currency to survive until death. – The Art Of Focus
There is a turning point in every young adult’s life.
You can either remain a slave to the code written in your head, or you can go through the painful experience of learning it, deconstructing it, and reprogramming it.
3 broad stages of moral development are generally agreed upon:
- Pre-conventional – a young human that has not yet socialized, they avoid punishment through obedience and act out of self-interest.
- Conventional – the human learns from itself and others forming beliefs, values, and standards by conforming to society. They attempt to maintain social order.
- Post-conventional – the human questions and reflects on society, observes it from a higher level, and can then criticize or reform it with critical thought. Universal principles come into play, resulting in the “Ah! Buddhists were right!” insight.
The danger is getting trapped in prior stages.
People attach to ideologies in these stages and preach that worldview as “right” while others are “wrong.”
You can see this in bible thumpers cowering to their fantastical God to avoid punishment.
You can also see this in businesspeople who believe one model or way of doing things is absolute.
And to break philosophical character a bit – those who reach the post-conventional stage of creator development make the realization that You are the niche and operate their business from Universal principles.
This letter will serve as a catalyst to wake a few curious people up.
The Matrix Is A Web Of Ideas
Culture is a mass hallucination, and when you step outside the mass hallucination you see it for what it’s worth. – Terrence McKenna
How do you know anything about reality?
How do you know what’s true or what’s false?
How do you know what you should or shouldn’t do?
You were told by another person in society who learned in society.
99% of what you know was not discovered by your own testing or experimentation.
Where did other people get their information? Other people.
Every piece of information you get is from other people who knew nothing when they were born.
After you learn to walk and talk, the next step you take as a child is to go to school, so let’s use that as an example.
School boards determine what should be taught in school. But parents heavily influence the school board. Where do parents get the notion of what should or shouldn’t be taught in school? From their schooling and parents.
As you progress through public school, you pick up habits, refine your behavior, and develop your language from other students and teachers. Where do students and teachers learn their habits, behavior, and language?
By now, you’re nearly a clone going into the formal education system.
Let’s run through this a bit quicker…
The students and educators in the universities are coming from the schools. The people who teach children in the schools come from the universities. The people who taught the people who teach in universities also come from universities. Can you see how this is groundless and circular?
Society determines information as true from scientific journals and publications. To be published, you must conform to the bias of the publication. Who created the publications? People whose bias was shaped through their PhD education, taught by someone with a PhD education.
While you are at school, how do you complete your assignments? You research sites like Wikipedia when the articles are coming from the universities. You find the Wikipedia page through a search engine like Google.
Google determines what is displayed based on what’s most profitable or popular to serve up. Google gives authority to pages based on linking and link authority. Google places more authority on links coming from universities.
The school system is only one example of this.
Pharma companies fund huge wings of universities.
The banking system is the lubrication between each anchor in society.
You have to take out student loans to finance your education.
Money is the lifeblood of the matrix, and if money stops flowing to any given area, it dies off like if you were to lose blood to your hand.
The structure of society relies on itself to exist.
Some could call this a pyramid scheme.
Attention Anchors – Negative Feedback Conditions Your Mind
You can live and die inside these intellectual structures if you choose to. But people of curiosity… usually find themselves unsatisfied with the conventional answers. – Terrence McKenna
Society is a web of ideas that allows your mind to make sense of the world and not go insane.
Ideas, in this sense, are anything that the mind can make sense of and label. Ideas are everything. And if we want to get a bit crazy, everything is an idea in the mind of reality. Reality is mental.
Ideas are whole parts. They layer on top of each other. They allow each other to exist. They are hierarchical.
Like a word to a sentence to a paragraph to a chapter to a book, and that book is also a whole part of a bookcase, and that bookcase is broken down into parts like wood, which came from a tree, and a tree connects deep into the ecosystem allowing for much else to exist.
This societal web contains anchors like schooling, the media, the economy, the government, and culture that were all made up by those residing in it.
Society is a feedback system that punishes people for not fitting in as the negative feedback mechanism to correct behavior for the goals of society.
Parents scold their children when they don’t follow the rules of the matrix.
Teachers give bad grades to encourage memorization and obedience.
Peers make fun of you when you do something out of the norm.
Society is a system.
Your mind is a system.
Your identity is a system.
From macro to micro, reality is a complex nest – or hierarchy – of systems. Reality is a giant mind.
From the bottom up, your identity is programmed and shaped by society unless you make the conscious choice to reprogram it.
Programming is similar to conditioning or training.
With time and repetition, you pick up habits, learn your language, and form a worldview that may or may not align with your ideal lifestyle. Systems are layered in your mind as a deeply interconnected mesh with society.
It all starts with attention.
Your mind craves order, security, and certainty. Society provides that. So your attention is nearly forced to focus on the system society has laid out for you.
Your identity houses the conscious or unconscious goals you are trying to achieve.
If you are a program running in society, an NPC, and you have the goal to get a high-paying job, your mind won’t register starting a business as important.
This seems harmless on the surface, because “not everyone needs to start a business,” but it goes much deeper than that.
Deconstructing The Game
Games are fun to play, but only for a bit.
If you do not continue pursuing the challenge it takes to level up, it becomes boring.
If you try to play a new game but don’t start at level one, you get anxious and quit.
A game is a system. A game is a story. A mimics the ebbs and flows of reality.
The mind loves games because the mind loves order. It loves when things make sense, and hates when they don’t.
A game contains a hierarchy of goals that orders the mind and results in focus, flow, and fulfillment – but only as long as you are progressing through the game.
Society is a game with the goals from the bottom up of:
- Go to school so you can get on the same invisible page as everyone else
- Get a job so you can contribute to the operations of society
- Marry someone according to a made-up cultural moral code
- Become chained down with responsibilities you don’t care about (because society told you to)
- Be forced to focus on menial problems so you waste your time and never threaten society by pursuing your own thing and thinking freely
- Retire at whatever age you can with a bit of money just like it was planned all along
- Hope to never work again and be on eternal vacation (we all know how that turns out)
Life is somewhat engaging in school, but when you reach the job quest of the societal game, boredom slowly grasps at your sanity and makes you a pleasure-seeking robot.
This is the outcome for 99% of people.
If you don’t create your own game, you get trapped playing someone else’s, and that gets boring… sending you into an eternal cycle of stress and narrow-mindedness.
How To Escape The Matrix
I am not writing this intending to paint society as evil.
It was mostly an unconscious process of survival.
It is a necessary game we have to play until more people wake up to create a more conscious game for children to play, which may take decades if not centuries.
However, for those reading this, there are general steps you can take to escape this matrix.
This is not a quick fix.
This is a lifestyle.
This is your life’s work:
To see what you are capable of.
1) Master Your Survival & Find Purpose
Your problems are a tight-knit web that bind you to your current situation. Problems don’t exist on their own. – The Art of Focus
There is a reason you are in a life situation you don’t like.
You have failed to gain awareness of the problems keeping you there.
You haven’t expanded your mind to see beyond your problems, acquire what is necessary to solve them (knowledge and skill), and solved them to solidify that new level of mind.
You feel lost because you don’t have a purpose.
For simplicity, your purpose is the problem you are solving to achieve a goal. Most people are assigned a purpose that doesn’t evolve, and they are forever stuck in a narrow-minded state of stress pushing toward the goals of society.
When you master your survival, you no longer have to worry constantly.
You open up room for creativity, spirituality, and meaningful work.
You don’t care about these things because you can’t care about them.
You haven’t solved the problems staring you in the face.
Are you overweight? Is your diet terrible? Do you hate your job? Are you ignoring your relationships?
These are interconnected problems, not singular.
Your job may be consuming so much time in your day that you don’t have the energy to put effort into other areas of your life. Your nutrition may be contributing to that lack of energy and spilling over into your relationships.
Mastering your survival is mastering the eternal markets: health, wealth, and relationships.
There’s no coincidence these are the most profitable verticals in business. Everyone has these problems, and by solving them, you gain the experience to monetize your experience and do what you love.
I discuss this in Solve Your Own Problems & Sell The Solution.
When you fulfill minor purposes of self-improvement, only then can you discover deeper, more meaningful purposes.
Stop trying to solve the problems of the world when you haven’t even solved your own.
2) Learn From The Decentralized School System
You aren’t aware of your potential because you haven’t been exposed to it.
You haven’t been exposed to it because your environment is completely known.
The unknown is the land of possibility.
You must expose yourself to new career paths, health paradigms, and social circles.
Realize the knowledge and skills you must acquire to change your life. Writing, marketing, sales, fitness, nutrition, communication, and the rest.
A good starting point is 2 Hour Writer, as writing is the foundation of any other skill you learn.
When you do, you will feel uncomfortable. Your identity will be threatened. It will take time to accumulate.
The creator economy is the decentralized school system.
Creators are solving their own problems, forging new paths, creating new jobs, and teaching what they learn through content.
- Break out of your bubble of comfort
- Follow new people distributing life-changing information
- Invest in non-traditional education for non-traditional results
- Discover new potentials for your life and act on them
Life becomes meaningful at the edge of the known.
When you discover novel information, your brain will signal that you’ve encountered a meaningful event.
Don’t ignore this.
Pursue it fully.
Obsess over the rabbit whole of education.
This is how you open your mind, order your mind, and train your mind to become a new mind – one that isn’t subject to the limits of society.
Create Your Own Infinite Game
Entrepreneurship is the only logical option for long-term thinkers. – The Art of Focus
If you want to stop playing society’s game, you must create your own.
One with infinite progression and evolution.
Not one that traps you at a certain level and makes life boring.
This is done through cultivating a vision for your future, iterating on a plan to create that reality, and choosing a vessel that allows you to do that.
Note that I said “cultivate” a vision and “iterate” on a plan.
This is an ongoing process. It doesn’t end. Your vision will not remain static. Nor will your plan. As is the same with all things in life, they change.
- Illustrate everything you want in your future
- Illustrate everything you don’t want in your future
- Create a hierarchy of goals to get there
- Acquire the knowledge and skills necessary
- Make changes to your plan with experience as a feedback mechanism
You can do this in a blank notebook, or use the FOCI Planner I created for this exact process.
When you get bored, don’t quit, pivot. Pursue a higher challenge that utilizes the skills you’ve acquired.
For example: if you get bored with freelancing, try e-commerce. This is not shiny object syndrome, this is intelligence.
When you get anxious, set a more clear goal between you and the overwhelming goal you are trying to achieve.
Leverage The Digital Society
I see jobs as a stepping stone, not a death sentence (although for many it is).
For most people, it isn’t feasible to go straight into entrepreneurship.
By nature of the matrix, people take on responsibilities that tie them down early in life.
Bills, a family, a house, and a job that can drain your energy to do anything about it.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not anti-job.
Jobs are extremely useful for cultivating a valuable skill set, but the fulfilling challenge they provide can fade fast, and if work consumes 1/3 of your life, but drains your energy for the other 1/3, and you are asleep for the other 1/3… that is the first thing that needs to change.
The internet and social media have created a digital society.
Creators and brands are the new education system, media, government (of the online space… people calling each other out and whatnot to keep the space clean), religion (everyone is pushing an ideology), and economy (everyone is selling something… and no, this isn’t a bad thing, it’s survival).
This society is decentralized. You aren’t forced into any one path. You have the option to pursue what you want, and you are responsible for your lack of critical thought if you get trapped in place.
My advice:
- Use your skill set to get a job under a creator or brand on the internet
- Choose one that allows you free time to pursue your own thing
- Use the new skills you learn to build your own thing
Your profile is your public resume.
We teach all of this to help you start your digital career in 90 days in Kortex University.
You write content to display your value. You network to join a community. You leverage that community for opportunities. And you eventually use the resources you gain, like an audience, to build your own business and live free.
You won’t be able to do this in an instant, just like it took 18+ years for you to become a line of code in society.
Deconstruct the game you are playing.
Understand the code running in your mind.
Create your own game.
And enjoy the rest of your week.
Dan
