The problem. People are programmed at a young age to rely on everyone but themselves to secure their future.
The parents who are living in the past and out of touch with new opportunities, the schools that are funded by the system they train you into, the employers who benefit from you not seeking better options and will probably lay you off in the next 10 years, the society that distracts you with news, memes, and other noise that controls your emotional well-being.
This is the perfect formula for an insecure future.
Learn this, do that, take your exams, believe in this God, get this job.
By the time you start navigating your 20s, your mind is a computer program that runs the same functions over and over again.
Wake up, go to work, put in minimal effort, pay the bills, scroll social media, wish for the past, worry about tomorrow, and have brief glimpses of a future where your delusional sense of security will be threatened by AI, automation, or just the randomness of life.
There's no such thing as doing nothing with your life.
There's only doing what you want to do or doing what others want you to do.
And if you choose the latter, your life becomes more and more mechanical until it's near impossible to escape.
The solution, become independent.
Think for yourself, earn for yourself, dive into the unknown, create your own security, revolt against all conventional pasts in life, as that is the only way to allow room for truth.
The Lord, 40, wrote, Life is really very beautiful.
It is not this ugly thing that we have made of it.
And you can appreciate its richness, its depth, its extraordinary loveliness only when you revolt against everything, against organized religion, against tradition, against the present rotten society, so that you as a human being find out for yourself what is true, not to imitate but to discover.
That is education, is it not?
This leaves us with one task.
Open our minds, take our own path, and discover our way into a life of meaning.
That's what we're here to talk about today because there is just too much on everyone's minds.
Everyone gets on social media, everyone gets notifications on their phone.
A.I. is taking over. You 20 year olds don't know what to learn.
Children don't know what to study in school.
All of these things start to add up in your mind and they just lead to paralysis by analysis.
You end up quote unquote doing nothing with your life, but in reality, you do what other people want for you and that becomes more efficient with time and as technology advances.
So by doing nothing, you're just making yourself more of a replacement for A.I.
A.I. and technology and other things are going to replace the people that do nothing with their lives.
The people that don't have direction, the people that don't have vision, the people who can't make a decision for themselves, create their own goals and achieve them.
Those are the people that are going to get replaced that alone.
That alone is this entire video.
It's learning how to think for yourself, learning how to make decisions for yourself and understanding that problems will always exist.
The reason people get replaced is because the problems that are being solved by that replacement are easy to solve with the thing, but then that's going to birth more problems.
So the question for the entirety of this video is how do we choose and pursue the things that are going to secure our future when those things continuously change as technology does and with technology changing this landscape of society faster and faster.
How do we keep up and how do we stay on top?
The skill that you need to learn is hunting.
You need to learn to hunt for your survival.
You can't find enjoyment in life because you don't know how to hunt.
You're assigned material to read to pass your exams, you're assigned a routine to complete your tasks at a job, you're assigned beliefs and values to survive in your culture.
The problem with assigned goals is that the path to achieve them is known.
You are doing something that's been done before or you are repeating tasks that a visionary assigned to you to build their dream instead of your own.
Your psyche or mind is wired to hunt for its survival.
If you were to put a chimpanzee in a fluorescent lit cubicle for 8 hours a day, do you think it would thrive?
Of course not. It lacks the natural environment that contributes to its psychological well-being.
You don't need a scientific paper to assume this.
The point that I'm trying to make here is that most people are monkeys in a cubicle.
They have the mental wiring that our ancestors did, but they're in a new environment and nobody understands how to act within that environment and the psychological effects that come with boredom and a repetitive string of tasks slowly builds and builds.
And because it slowly builds and builds, you don't even notice it.
So you're operating at this lower state of consciousness for so long that you just think it's normal.
You don't think there's anything higher than that.
You don't think you can feel better and you don't think any opportunities are worth pursuing because you're used to just feeling like shit.
When you perform the same tasks day in, day out at a job, there is no more learning.
There is no challenge. There is no growth.
Of course, this is for some jobs, but I would argue that 90% of people are in jobs that they hate and I would argue that statistics back that a select 9% of people are in jobs that they think they enjoy and they're okay with it and they're not trying to get out, but they would be better off if they got out.
The last 1% are in the select few jobs where all of the psychological markers match perfectly and they thoroughly enjoy their job.
If you are in that 1%, this doesn't apply to you.
If you are absolutely happy and have the autonomy to do what you want in your life, keep the job, but that's 1% of people.
So just think that through before you continue with this video.
So when you're in the 99% of jobs or just careers or life directions that lead to this psychological insecurity that you think is security, the only options you have are focus on the predictable future and get anxious.
So you numb your mind with distractions, focus on the familiar past and get bored.
So again, you numb your mind with distractions or set a new goal so you can finally take control of your life and start navigating the unknown, the only place you can learn, grow and expand.
If you don't have a goal, the only option is to get distracted.
To hunt is to discover knowledge, skills, ideas and opportunities that help you achieve the goals you set for yourself.
And once those goals become known, you must have another one ready so you don't get lost.
This leads into step one, which is having a vision for direction.
And I'm sure you guys are absolutely tired of me in telling you guys that you need a vision.
But when I say to create a vision, I remind you that you need to remind yourself that you need a vision and you need to cultivate that.
So if that's not top of mind, that's why I remind you every video because I'm assuming you're watching this video because you feel like you need help and that you resonate with the problems that I stated earlier.
So if if you are like, oh, he always talks about a vision and that allows it to just go through your head and not stick, maybe it's time to rethink that and actually see the importance in the section that we're about to go over right now.
The world's greatest artists, founders and creatives are all visionaries.
They have an evolving image of what they want the future to look like.
Your vision is your life's work.
Your vision is the massively transformative purpose that Steven Kotler illustrates as a step to achieving the impossible.
Your vision is your life's task, as Robert Greene would point to as a key to the good life.
Your vision is an evolving image.
You discover what you want by realizing what you don't want and revolting against it.
Your vision will come and go.
You felt its power before.
When your vision is clear, use that energy.
When your vision is foggy, keep an open mind for the lessons that life is trying to teach you.
A lesson there is that your vision isn't always clear.
My vision isn't always clear.
It's just not going to happen.
It's the cycles of life.
You go through curiosity, intensity, consistency, and feeling lost.
Cycle, cycle, cycles. You feel lost and then you get curious about something because you're open-minded while you feel lost and you weren't drowning in the emotions that come with feeling lost.
You notice an opportunity.
You get curious. You dive in.
Then you go into this season of intensity where you build, build, build a business, your body, whatever it is.
You have that intense motivation.
But then if you don't systemize along the way, so when that crash inevitably comes, you aren't going to be consistent.
So, if you systemize what works and you create something sustainable from the intensity and all of that energy, then the consistency kind of just becomes easy and it becomes a part of your life.
So, you increase your baseline, both state of consciousness and just well-being and enjoyment in general.
The second thing after a vision is goals for clarity.
This is important. Set a 10-year goal, set a one-year goal, set monthly goals, set weekly goals, set daily goals, then forget about them all.
You need goals to reorient your mind toward the habits you must form that create the future you choose.
You need goals to form the system that would achieve those goals.
You need goals so your pattern recognition machine of a mind can notice and store information that aids in the achievement of those goals.
You probably won't hit all of those goals.
They probably won't keep you motivated.
Use them to reverse engineer what you need to do to reach your vision, then forget about them.
You may be wondering, okay, well, how does a vision and goals help me not live the life that someone else assigns to me or not be replaced by AI?
It's because the people being replaced by AI are achieving the goals that the AI helps them achieve.
Rather than getting replaced, you're becoming the visionary who can use AI as a tool to further your own goals.
You're becoming a free thinker.
You're becoming a master simply by having a vision and a goal for your future, but understanding that those things are fickle, those things are guides, those things are so far out, so we need to bring it closer to us so we can act every day with confidence that leads into step three, which is systems for progress.
A quote from James Clear is that winners and losers have the same goals.
Now a system can't exist without a goal.
A goal won't be achieved without a system.
What is a system? In terms that are relevant to your life, it's a series of actions or processes that lead to a specific result.
We see these in the forms of habits, routines, rituals, practice, and repetition in the areas of your life that are important.
We are talking about conscious systems in alignment with a self-generated goal, not unconscious, known systems toward assigned goals.
There's a big difference there.
Self-generated goals evolve when achieved.
Assigned goals stay the same and the modes of achieving them become efficient with time and get replaced by technology.
If you want to make money, you need a system for writing content every day to generate traffic.
I talk about this in to our writer.
If you want to get fit, you need a system for training and eating, preferably one that you find enjoyable and sustainable.
If you want a better relationship, you need a system for communication and connection, but understand that one system doesn't fit all.
The path to full control over your future is to solve your own problem with a unique system and sell the solution over and over again, evolving as society's personal and collective problems do.
That's how you adapt. And you can see this happening on social media right now.
If you've been following me for a bit, you understand that I don't think the creator economy can be reduced to just people who create content for the sake of a job.
I see it as a way of life being a creator, right?
The word creator. What does that bring up for you?
That could bring up quite a bit if you are open-minded and a big picture thinker.
If you are rather close-minded and you think of it as some myopic job title of like a creator, really you're going to reduce creator to just being that job title.
No, that's not how it is.
So what are creators doing?
They're identifying problems in their life because they have agency and they don't need permission from a boss to go and solve a problem.
So they go, they research how to solve it through the internet with the information there.
They synthesize that information.
They create their own system for getting results and then they pass that down to someone behind them.
So that person can get results faster and humanity can evolve just by that process alone by solving human problems, meaningful problems, not the problems that AI can't solve, right?
AI can't go into your head yet and fix your mental health issues or your growth needs, your self-actualization needs.
That's just not going to happen.
And this is why I say you are the niche because you are simply passing down what worked for you to someone else who has a very similar personality as you by attracting them to your vision and goals.
Everything I'm talking about right now is a business model.
This isn't just a way of, oh, I need to create a vision and a goal so I can pursue a better future.
This is everything. Your vision is your vision, but it's also what you're attracting people towards.
And then that's what turns it into a business, but a business is just a legal structure to allow you to achieve your vision in public and make money by doing so.
How do you create a system?
Self-experimentation.
Nobody can teach you how to do something.
They can only teach you how they do something.
So you research processes that others have found success with.
You can find these on social media, in courses, or with a simple Google search.
Then you experiment with various techniques.
You implement the processes you learn and attempt to get results.
Then you discover patterns and principles so you note the similarities between each and double down on them.
Then you create your own process.
So tailor what you learn to your unique lifestyle and situation.
Then contribute to true education by passing it down.
Give people education that can't be taught in schools with a fundamental grounding in critical thinking.
Now, if you want to understand how I create and monetize systems in the form of a digital product or it could be a software or even a physical product, check out mental monetization.
That's pretty much my course on product development, on how to monetize your creative work.
The next step after creating a system is open-mindedness for awareness.
Here's a quote from Daniel Schmacktenberger.
Traditional education and hyper-specialization is a way to make people subservient to the dominant paradigm or system.
Study the generalized principles of nature and be a deep generalist.
Now, before we get into this section, I do want to plug the book, The Kabbalion.
This is a book about hermetic philosophy and I know a lot of people that have read this.
Like if you just look up The Kabbalion online, you're going to find a bunch of people trashing it and being like, oh no, read this instead.
I found it actually pretty helpful.
And as someone who is spiritually, metaphysically, and ancient, knowledge-ly inclined, I really enjoyed the esoteric side of that book and it goes over the universal principles or laws.
And I want you to read that and I want you to try to notice those things in reality so you can start to understand what I mean by saying big picture thinking or what Daniel Schmockenberger here says as studying deep generalized principles of reality or nature.
Many people don't want to hear this, but schools were created to keep you narrow-minded and dumb.
You are given a hierarchy of goals to pursue and this orders your mind.
It makes you feel secure, but often those goals don't evolve, right?
So you get locked into this ideological structure and then you lose all challenge or growth.
You learn within one niche to reach the fabricated prestige that niche offers.
You want that degree, even when you know deep down you could succeed massively without it so the only things you learn are in alignment with that degree.
By the time you get it, you aren't educated at all.
You just spent four years learning your way into limited opportunities and potential replacement.
Education is not programming.
Slaves were expected to perform one task for the entirety of their lives.
Free men were expected to do many things throughout their lives because that brings power, flexibility, principles-based decision making and the ability to change direction with a well-rounded skill set to nearly guarantee success.
If you are just getting started on your own path, this will be a difficult transition.
Your mind will close off and react to everything that threatens your worldview.
Social media? That's toxic.
It's all memes and negativity.
Starting a business? That's for people who already have money, not people who want to start making more.
Writing? That's only for English majors, academics and authors.
I definitely don't text and persuade my friends every day.
I definitely couldn't provide some form of value and find more like-minded people on the internet.
You must practice opening your mind when you notice a negative reaction.
You must call yourself out on your own bullshit.
You must see beyond the ideas and beliefs that older generations programmed into your head because they're blinding you from your potential and you don't even know it.
Rather than reacting and distracting yourself from problems, open your mind and think through all perspectives, not just the one that discourages action and keeps you a slave.
Step number five is arguably the most important in this process because we had big picture vision, we had clarity for goals, systems for progress.
Now we're open-minded.
We need to use that open-mindedness in the here and now to identify problems.
You identify problems with step five, which is being a high agency individual.
The difference between an employee and an entrepreneur is agency.
An employee is given a problem to solve to achieve the goals of the company they work for.
An entrepreneur identifies and solves problems without the need to ask permission from someone or else they will never achieve their goals.
At Cortex, which is our software, a second brain for writers, I'm incredibly grateful that our team is high agency, incredibly high agency.
I don't see them as employees, well one because they aren't, they're contractors, but I don't see them as employees.
I see them as entrepreneurs collaborating with entrepreneurs or one person businesses collaborating with one person businesses.
They hold the same vision for our product when they spot a problem, they solve it, ensure the solution with us, even if we have to make small changes to that solution.
But even then we can't improve on a solution that doesn't exist.
So as an example, one of our developers Ian, one day he just, or he was working on something in the background because he spotted a problem and he just came to us with a complete app redesign, right?
The redesign of the app.
Yes, it set us back a bit, but the app is in such a so much better spot now and I don't know where we would be without that singular person exercising his agency to take the company further and in an environment like this, he's going to be compensated for that in more ways than money, but money too, of course.
In your own life, if you want to stay relevant in the coming years, you can't depend on anybody for your security.
This will always exist.
If you can't spot them, you lose.
If you can't give yourself permission to solve them, you lose.
Step number six to round out this skill set for learning to hunt.
The thing that will secure your future is creativity for unique solutions.
Unfortunately, most of us are becoming mere technicians.
We pass examinations, acquire this or that technique in order to earn a livelihood, but to acquire technique or develop capacity without paying attention to the interstate brings about ugliness and chaos in the world.
If we awaken creative beauty inwardly, it expresses itself outwardly and then there is order.
It's another quote from Krishnamurti.
What is creativity? That is an extremely difficult question to answer when you peel beyond the surface of skills and identities labeled as creative like designers and filmmakers, but those creatives can still follow mechanical stupefying processes in their work.
Creativity in my eyes is the process of bringing order to consciousness.
To embrace chaos, collect the dots, connect the dots, and create with the dots.
To create certainty from uncertainty.
Sense from nonsense. Clarity from chaos.
Focus from distraction.
Signal from noise. Something from nothing.
Success from failure. Meaning from struggle.
Life from death. Positive from negative.
As Krishnamurti said before, most of us are becoming technicians.
Robots. It's no wonder why people are so afraid of losing their jobs and being replaced.
They lack creativity. They are not creators.
Machines can solve a problem in 30 seconds that used to take a human hundreds of hours to solve.
That means if you follow a string of assignments at a massive corporation, it isn't a question of if you will be replaced.
It's a question of when.
What most worried people don't understand is that problems will never go away.
AI may help solve for our basic needs.
But what about our growth needs?
What about the new problems that people can't predict that emerge from advancements and technological efficiency?
This isn't anything new, it's just happening faster than it has before.
Meaning the chances for replacement are happening more than before unless you adapt.
Can AI solve the need for challenge, health, connection, meaning spirituality and every other aspect of self-actualization that can't be reduced to an external solution?
My answer to that is potentially it can help them.
It can't solve them because that's dependent on your choice.
So the lesson here is decision making and choice.
That is what you need to optimize for and work on because your livelihood depends on it.
This shines a light on the emerging meaning economy to solve your own problems and sell the unique solution.
To dive into the unknown, set your mind on the vision for the future, collect the knowledge and skill that allows you to make it reality and distribute your findings to others to unify consciousness.
To create or be created.
In a research paper titled ChatGPT is Bullshit, which is a sort of sequel to the declaration that ChatGPT is a bullshit generator from computer scientists Arvind Naree Yannan and Syash Kapoor.
Because these programs cannot themselves be concerned with truth and because they are designed to produce text that looks truth apt without any actual concern for truth, it seems appropriate to call their outputs bullshit.
In my interpretation, the major downfall of machines is they lack conscious experience.
If you can harness the singular, yet infinitely complex trait of self-reflective consciousness you have a chance to survive.
That is to say, if you learn to earn or survive with the creative ability of your mind, not time, labor, looks, status, prestige, handouts or any other fickle and replaceable materialistic resource, you unlock a level of power reserved for those of true wealth.
So now, we understand how to make good decisions for our future from a very big picture.
That's all you need is vision, goals, systems, open-mindedness, agency and creativity from the top down.
That's exactly what you do.
You're creatively solving problems on a day-to-day basis, high-leverage problems.
Now there is one last skill that is a meta-skill for learning other tangible skills in a sense that you can actually learn and go and learn today.
You can actually use them and that skill is making money.
Learning how to make money is learning how to hunt for your survival because of everything that comes into play with making money.
If you cannot make money, if you cannot make $10,000 by tomorrow, if I were to give you that goal, make $10,000 by tomorrow, if you aren't able to do that, you have a lot of work to do.
And before you say, oh, that's impossible, no, it's not, your program to think, oh, this amount of work equals this amount of money when that's just not the case.
You just don't own a business.
You're not an entrepreneur.
You haven't seen any success with that and you don't understand that everything good that comes in entrepreneurship, it isn't luck, it's behavior.
Behavior equals results.
It doesn't matter how long it takes to get them.
You get what you get my point.
What you don't understand in that equation is that you being paid, let's say $2,000 every paycheck for the certain amount of work you do in a day, how much is the boss getting paid?
And for that same $2,000, let's say I actually learn a skill and go and get a client for $2,000 and that takes a series of actions to reach.
If I replicate that and I systemize that so manually I can get like four clients a month.
That's $8,000. But let's say I systemize it, get better at it and make my process more efficient because I have something called technology.
I can land 10, 20, 30, if I hire employees, 40, 50, however much if I create it an actual business, I can make as much money as I want by doing what I talked about earlier, having a vision goals, creating systems, and then being able to identify a problem.
If you have the goal of making a million dollars a month and you aren't there yet, that shines a light on the potential problems in your business that you can then see and fix and move forward and get closer to that goal.
And as you move forward, new problems emerge that you start to think, oh, that's why I'm not hitting that number.
And then you eventually achieve it.
So the reason you don't make as much money as you want to make is because you are that your standard is how much you make.
If you raise your standards higher and actually mean it, then that is what identifies problems.
And then once you solve those problems, then you reach the standard.
Entrepreneurship is how you hunt for your survival in the modern world.
Why? Because true entrepreneurship requires you to become future proof.
So how do you make money?
How do you become an entrepreneur?
How do you become future proof?
It's simple on the surface, but complex in depth as all meaningful things are.
First, you create value through creativity, experimentation and experience.
You improve yourself. Second is you distribute value through attention, media and persuasion.
So you improve humanity.
Improve yourself, improve humanity.
When you are in control of the vision, AI and technology become the tool, not the master.
The beautiful thing about that simple process is that it never ends.
Value evolves with time.
Value is perception, meaning you have to give the right thing to the right person for them to see it as valuable or for them to pay you money.
A boomer will see gold as more valuable than Bitcoin and less persuaded otherwise by getting in front of them with persuasive media where they hang out.
We've already learned how to create value in the previous section, which is solve your own problems and sell the solution and have a vision and goals so you can actually identify those problems.
And preferably those problems are found in the eternal markets, so health, wealth, relationship and happiness.
You're treating your life like a video game, you're increasing those domains of your life, health, wealth, relationships and happiness, you're improving in those areas by setting goals for each of them under an overarching vision to identify problems and then solve those problems so that you are valuable.
And by doing so across those domains with different interests, because everyone's going to solve those problems with different interests, like one person can solve their wealth problems with financing, the other can solve it with business.
By doing so, everyone creates these unique solutions that they can then pass down and make more efficient so people can self actualize faster.
That's the entire philosophy I'm putting across.
So now we need to connect the dots.
How do we make money? The first thing is we need to understand distribution, specifically modern distribution.
So how to get your value in front of other people.
The distribution of value has been around since the beginning of time, but it has taken many shapes.
The most accessible form of distribution at this point in time is writing on the internet.
This is how I say accessible.
Yes, video is very prevalent.
So is just public speaking or other things on the internet.
Writing is the most accessible because you don't need a camera.
You don't need a mic. You don't need lighting.
You don't need $4,000 computers in the background.
You don't need that. You don't need a keyboard.
You just type and you post it on Twitter or medium or whatever it is.
It's low friction accessible.
And then those turn into video.
So this is social media and email.
That's where you're writing.
Email because it can't be taken away from you and social media because that's where the attention is.
So you write on social media, transfer it to email, keep that flow going and then you have an audience.
Writing allows you to become a one person media company.
You can write one post on X and cross post it to Instagram and LinkedIn.
You can turn that post into a script and post it as a real short or tick tock.
You can choose your best post and expand them into threads or newsletters, which then get repurposed into carousels, video scripts and podcast episodes.
Even better, you don't have to show your face as a writer or edit videos if you don't want to.
You just sit down in the morning and become one with the words on the page.
It's a very meaningful lifestyle and a means to improvement.
You learn more by teaching, organizing your thoughts and getting feedback on your ideas.
It is a catalyst for growth and value.
As you can tell, I'm a fan of basing your success on persistent principles applied to the modern landscape, which will continue to change.
Writing, speaking, persuasion, entrepreneurship, creativity, these are things that have been around since the first two humans came into contact with each other.
That means you should bank on them for your success, but apply them to the technology that continues to change.
That's how you stay on top is you apply the deep generalized principles of reality and move forward with things like graphic design or email.
You learn the skills that come up and then eventually AI or just technology in general help you do those things faster.
You may be wondering like, oh, you can create images with AI and potentially you'll be able to create videos and animation and you can write with AI, but it doesn't fucking matter if you don't have a vision.
You can tell the AI to write an article, but how does that article play a role in five years of newsletters connecting together?
How does that lead to a book that illustrates your life philosophy that you came to from experience?
It can't. I can go and tell an AI to do something for me, but unless it was me telling them to do it with the vision, then that's going to suck because again, you don't understand persuasion, marketing sales, the future proof skill stack that I've talked about in a previous video called the future proof skill stack.
The AI doesn't have my vision.
The AI isn't attracting people that are similar to me.
And if I wasn't the one using the AI with the audience that I have or the products that I have, it would be completely and utterly useless.
So if we could summarize that AI in the hands of the visionless is nothing to worry about.
If you don't get it yet, you make money whenever you want by creating a product or service based on a problem you solve for yourself, building an audience where the attention is right now the internet monetizing the audience by offering your product or service in a persuasive way.
Business and entrepreneurship have always been the same.
Build an audience, monetize the audience.
A business is just a legal structure that allows you to build a solution to a problem and get paid for it.
Your ancestors didn't need the legal structure to make a living.
They could simply trade goods and services directly.
Now let's recap. Achieve a self generated goal by creating a system.
Focus on health, wealth, relationships and happiness.
Turn that system into a product or service that can help someone with your same problem.
I recommend starting with mental monetization if you want to do this.
If you want a product to actually start selling so you can just call yourself a business pretty easy.
If you don't have a product, you don't have a business.
Then build an audience by writing to yourself so you can track people who share your same vision and the same problems so they see your system as valuable and purchase it.
Write about your opinions, beliefs and mindset, teach your interests and skills, share your favorite ideas, show people how you solve your problems, share your vision so others can resonate.
Then iterate, iterate, iterate.
Don't get trapped in client work.
Don't get trapped with one product.
Keep solving problems as they arise in your life and business.
Never stop growing and evolving.
You'll figure out what to do next.
Thank you for watching.
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That's pretty much it. Thank you for watching.
Have a nice day. Bye.