The clever man may work smarter, not harder, they say, but the creative man doesn't work at all.
I've been rereading the book Rest by Alex Soo Jung Kim Pong recently and I have a deep desire to share what I've been learning because I feel like the world is in desperate need of its teachings.
Most people struggle to do good work because they work too much.
Their mind is always on, out of gas, pushing down the road because you need to get to whatever destination you're heading to.
Stuck in doing mode, a narrow-minded state that when left unchecked leads to that hot ball of stress in your chest that you have difficulty identifying the source of, that feeling of a closed mind, the one that hurts your quality time with others, the one that makes you unappreciative of life's innate richness, the one where you forget how it feels to have a clear line
of thought. These people wear overwork as a badge of honor.
They feel like they need to keep working on something, they don't know what, because they're stuck in an imaginary rat race and trying to get to a destination that they aren't very clear on themselves or just to reach a destination that someone told them to reach.
Now, I'm not saying that working long hours is bad.
Let's just smash that bug right here because I often talk about working less and working four hours a day, but people that read the titles of my videos or the headlines of my newsletters often don't actually read or listen or watch the entire thing and I include the nuance.
So, smashing that right here is that I'm not saying don't work long hours.
We'll get into it. However, I do want to propose a different way of working itself and thinking about work.
We no longer live in a world that benefits the individual who works 40 to 80 hours a week as a repetitive and eternal lifestyle, not as an occasional thing.
The world is shifting from technicians to creators with the entry level turning into a senior level thanks to AI and automation, which we discussed in the future of work, which was two weeks ago.
Technicians will be replaced or they will be forced to become creators.
Technicians work toward the goals they are assigned.
Creators cultivate a lifestyle that naturally results in the goals they choose.
The ancient Greeks saw rest as a gift, as the pinnacle of civilized life.
The Roman Stoics argued that you cannot have a good life without good work.
Indeed, virtually every ancient society recognized that both work and rest were necessary for a good life.
One provided the means to live, the other gave meaning to life.
This is absolutely huge.
People don't realize this, that work and rest are necessary parts of life.
They're a necessary counterbalance.
If you go on vacation for too long, you're going to want to get back home and you're going to want to get back to your normal life.
You get tired of the vacation after one week, two weeks, three weeks, however long it may be.
Same with work, especially on work that you don't care about.
If you go to work every day, 40 to 80 hours a week, you come home at the end of the day and you are not looking forward to work the next day.
You just crave rest. So you're in this constant cycle of dang, I need a vacation, dang, I need to get back to work, dang, I need a vacation.
That's not the point of life.
The life is to understand both work and rest and create work and rest that no longer feel like work and rest.
My point and a major part of just my life philosophy is that you need to create these things.
You are never ever, ever, ever going to fucking find them in a job or something else that someone assigned to you.
That doesn't mean all jobs as a whole are bad.
None of this, just use your brain.
I'm sorry for getting very passionate and heated about this subject and yelling at you.
It's not directly at you.
I'm yelling at a camera right now.
Just don't take it personally, but think it through.
If you want to get things done, work.
If you want to get the right things done, rest.
Rest is not wine and bubbledash nor margaritas on a beach.
Rest is a necessity for creative work, the type of work that actually leads to a good life.
It's counterintuitive, but rest is how you get six years of work done in six months.
Proceed with an open mind because the path to get there may threaten everything you believe is true.
It may destroy the sense of security you had in your future because it was an illusion to begin with.
Let's do a thought experiment.
You have a six year goal of making $1 million.
The low leverage way to achieve that would be to create a budget and avoid buying $5 Starbucks coffees.
Try to get a promotion or raise so your income increases by plus or minus 10%.
Calculate how much you need to invest each month in the stock market or live below your means and fear for your life that nothing catastrophic happens to you.
Now, this is going to sound a bit insane for people that aren't very successful in business or haven't started a business and can really see the opportunity.
They haven't broken out of the labor theory of value frame where my time is worth this much and I want to break you out of that.
So the question is how in the world can you achieve that six year goal in six months?
And if our goal here is making a million dollars and the ways that we just listed are not the way to do that, how do you do that?
What you have to realize is that it is possible.
That's step one. Like if you can't believe that or realize that you can't go any further.
You can't get to step two.
So that's the first thing is you just need to understand that that is possible.
People make a million dollars in six months all the time.
Many businesses make a million in a month, sometimes a million in a day, especially on Black Friday.
They pull in multiple million dollars a day.
Now, of course, the argument of, oh, that's revenue, not profit.
I understand. Get the point.
Step two is realizing you just don't have the knowledge and skill that makes it possible.
You haven't sought new knowledge from education that can't be found in schools relevant to a financial goal you don't have in the first place.
Step three is truly understand what it takes to learn something of this magnitude.
It's a metric fuck ton of failures until you can afford to succeed.
I'm not saying that this will make you a million dollars in six months.
For the right person, it definitely could.
I am simply illustrating a point for this video.
But even if you do this or just use some of its lessons to move forward and you make 50k, 100k, even your first dollar, then that's a win.
So first thing, set a big six month goal so your mind biases education toward that goal.
If you don't actually have the goal, then your mind doesn't have the perspective that can receive the information that would help you achieve that goal.
Two is start a business.
Yes, a business. So you have full control over the product, audience, and revenue.
When you work for someone else, other people do this for you.
There's a marketing department, sales department, operations department, etc, etc.
You have to do all of these things yourself.
That is, if you don't want to just like perform one specific role and allow the company to have the audience, the income and everything else, and you only get a small fraction of that income.
Three is that because of those two things, you're forced to think creatively about how to achieve the goal.
Four is choose a business model that allows you to achieve that goal without sacrificing your interests.
And five is one x 2x or three x your income year after year rather than getting to 10% raise on your six figure salary.
If you're new to these videos, or my channel as a whole, you may or may not be aware that you don't need a super fancy business model to do this.
Technology is a thing. Social media is a thing we live in a great time.
You have all the information at your fingertips.
None of this stuff is new.
Go watch my other videos if you want to learn about that.
But it's more than possible for one person with the power of the internet and being able to spread their content and products to anyone with an internet connection on social media and newsletters, etc.
This is more than possible.
Stop thinking about starting an agency or ecom store.
Start thinking about business principles.
You need an audience and a way to monetize that audience.
That's it. You can start an agency, you can start an ecom store, but you need to understand that you get an audience, you have a product, you give the product to the audience.
That's what an ecom store is.
That's what an agency is.
That's what a personal brand is.
That's what literally any freaking business on this earth is.
Technology has created this beautiful new type of media.
Media is how you build, attract, or target an audience.
It's called social media, which is where most of the attention is.
You need attention if you want money, or you need attention if you want to attract an audience so that you have someone to actually buy your product.
You can build a startup all day long, but if you can't get users for it, you don't make money.
Starting a personal brand or being a myopically labeled content creator is how you attract an audience to you and sell whatever you want.
A freelance service, digital product, physical product, or anything that you see people selling online.
The reason I call it a myopically labeled content creator is because by calling yourself a content creator, that's just like some narrow business model and you're trapped by the ideology that people preach within that.
Social media is not a Bible.
Social media is a traffic mechanism.
It's a way to attract distribution to just who you are with a profile on the internet.
It's putting yourself online so people are attracted to you, and that's your massive distribution channel that you build over time and then you sell whatever product or service you want under it.
You are already a business.
You have value to give. You just don't know how to put yourself in front of the billions of people online and get them to pay you for your work.
The internet is a necessary part of modern survival.
So to use this meta business model, the personal brand or just having a social media profile and writing content and having a product to reach that six month goal, study social media, but don't fall into thinking it's a business model.
Yes, you have to study it and practice it if you want to grow.
Shocker. Write content on platforms like X or LinkedIn to build a quality audience.
You don't have to start on those platforms.
Those are just examples.
And for those that don't think LinkedIn is a good audience, that's where people with money hang out.
So they're more likely to pay you and it's blue ocean right now.
You can just grow. And another benefit of LinkedIn is that there aren't any trolls.
So you can really have a lot more fun on the platform because everyone is worried that they're going to lose their job if they troll in someone's comments, which is another reason that you should start a business.
So you don't have to worry about that.
Third is start a newsletter to keep and nurture that audience with longer trust building writing similar to the newsletters I write.
And if you want repurpose that writing to all other platforms like I teach into our writer, this video started as a newsletter.
So if you want to start on YouTube, writing is how you start.
And if you feel like you show up to the camera and you're like, Oh, I don't know what to say.
It's because you didn't write it out first.
Next, as your audience grows, launch digital products and services, courses, templates, freelance coaching, et cetera, that allow you to build cash flow without spending your life savings to actually start the business because they're free to create.
I didn't just start building cortex and we haven't taken investment or VC for building cortex.
It's because I built an audience because I built a cash flow business.
And you can honestly be happy with that.
I was making more money myself before I started cortex.
I know plenty of people that are quitting their big business or whatever they're doing, just to have a one person business where they make more, even though they're making less revenue, they're making a lot more profit.
And as we're talking about in this video, you get to control how much you work because all you have to focus on is writing content 30 minutes to an hour a day to actually build the audience.
Then you focus on a newsletter, then you build a product once and don't have to spend any more time on that.
So if you wanted to decrease the amount of time you spend working to one and two hours of just writing in the morning, you perfectly well cook.
But a lot of people aren't happy with that.
They don't really find meaning in the repetitive nature of that every single day.
That's why I wanted to build cortex and just take on more challenge, improve more as an individual evolve.
But the point there is that one person business is probably the best idea for you to start for the majority of people out there who do not have a lot of money to start another business.
But even then, you're probably going to make more money than one person business way anyways.
So just start that way. And then you have the audience and then the startup does well.
Last thing is promote your valuable product or service to your audience in a systemized fashion.
So let's say that you've studied social media, and you have zero followers, and you write a post, and you get that post shared by someone who has 100,000 followers.
Now your audience on that post is close to 100,000 followers or how many people view it in that audience.
And this is a skill, yes, a skill to be able to do.
This isn't relying on the algorithm.
I'm not a fan of that. I don't teach that.
I'm a fan of building a network, learning to persuade and learning how to provide value that you already have to someone else.
So they exchange it for their audience to get you in front of them.
And that's how you grow.
So now at this point, you get the content shared.
And now that has hundreds of thousands of people looking at it potentially because it gets retweeted or reposted or story shared to more people, not just that 100,000 follower audience.
This is the power of social media.
If I retweeted or reposted one of you to one million people, you would have however many impressions that not only I share, but everyone in my audience that decides to share that because they resonate with it.
Now you have traffic. Then from there, you promote your newsletter because you have traffic.
So you build your newsletter that way day in, day out every month, or you promote your product to that traffic.
And that's how you make money.
You have people looking at your content and then looking at your product and then buying it if it's good.
And then from there, you write emails and nurture that audience beyond basic social media content or top of funnel content.
And you get very specific and you help people and then they trust you more and then they actually want your product.
That's how that's why you buy anything not always through email, but because you trust it and you want it and it benefits your life.
You're only calling it a scam because it doesn't benefit your life or you can't see the benefit for your life.
So since you have an audience flow in the hundreds of thousands now, and if you stick that out for six to 12 months, and if you iterate and improve on your process, when you notice things aren't working, I find it difficult to believe that you won't be able to convert a fraction of that audience into buyers.
I'll let you do the math on if that would equal a million dollars.
So making a million dollars in six months, if that was our goal in however much time we wanted to work a day in order to reach that, if I could get shares or traffic on my content to a product and I just iterated and improved and tweak that and dialed it in, then yeah, you can make a million dollars in six months.
But of course, people with skill and practice are going to do that better.
So it might be worth having the mindset of I'm going to try to do this for three to four years, and then I can make a million dollars in six months.
Now some may say, well, not everyone can do this.
And I think you forgot where I said, you can sell whatever you want.
Most, if not all, local businesses are online doing the same thing already.
You don't market a business with direct physical mail and billboards anymore, maybe sometimes, but we're aiming for high leverage.
So yes, everyone can do this if they are the niche, if they don't conform to agency models and templated e-com stores, if they lean into their interests, personality, solve their own problems and sell the solution.
My entire point with illustrating that in that section of the video, before we even get into the minimalist workday stuff, is that you need a line of work that allows you to control the workday, right?
So if you're trying to go the minimalist workday, but you have an eight hour workday for someone else, then you can't do it.
One of his contemporaries said that Watson had time for girls and tennis because he was a genius.
But Wolf and Kay made me think maybe he was a genius because he made time for girls and tennis.
Maybe creative achievement needs to be approached obliquely.
These quotes that I'm giving, by the way, are from the book Rest that I talked about or introduced at the beginning.
Many of you know my four hour workday philosophy, which many people misinterpret as to like, oh, you should just work four hours a day the rest of your life.
No, four hours of four hour workday is a mindset.
It's a philosophy. It's an identity.
It's something that allows you to identify problems so that they can be solved so that you can work less.
What I mean by that is that if I identify as someone who works four hours a day, like I actually believe that, like that is my operating mindset, because I've self educated and acquired the skill that allows me to believe that, then four hours of work a day, if I go over four hours of work a day, then my mind identifies that as a problem.
So when I had this mindset, and when I read the title of four hour work week, and I'm like, Oh, that's possible.
And then I had a job. I constantly saw that job as a problem to be solved, because my mind wanted to have the four hour work week, or now the four hour work day.
And because of that, well, many people first, they don't actually see their current lifestyle as a problem, or they can't identify the problems in their current lifestyle.
So they don't notice opportunities like a specific business model that allows them to change that or to pursue something new said that they can actually achieve the lifestyle.
So do I always work four hours a day?
No, do I work four hours a day majority of the time?
Yes, I would say over 50% right now, it used to be higher.
But now that I'm building a startup and things pick up randomly.
And soon when we go into launch in next month, it's going to be picking up a lot.
And I'm going to be working a lot more than four hours a day.
But I'm not going to I'm not going to unnecessarily fill my plate with things that don't need to be done just to say that I've worked more.
And now it's like, okay, I'm sorry for ranting.
Some of you like the rents, but that's like, people will say, Oh, well, isn't there other things you could be working on that could get you ahead?
Yes, but I have other areas of my life that I want to get in ahead of is in well, holy crap, I can't speak.
I have fitness goals. I go to the gym every day.
I do cardio four to five times a week.
I want to pay attention to my nutrition.
I want to pay attention to my mental health.
I like to meditate. I like to take naps.
I like to go on walks. I like to do other things that I need time to do.
I like to read. I like to do etc.
And that only benefits my work.
So what is making me make more progress?
Is it working more on things that I don't really care to do?
Or is it resting more and taking care of the other areas of my life that will benefit my work?
Minimalism is not about having less.
It's about making room for more of what matters.
It's about leverage. It's about releasing the things that you think are bringing you progress, but are actually slowing you down like watching tutorials without actively building a project, because I don't just watch tutorials.
I find a tutorial I want to implement directly and learn the skill through building along with it.
It's about focusing on the few tasks that bring outsized results and systemizing, outsourcing, or delegating the rest.
That's a point there is with the four hour workday philosophy.
If you work over four hours, then your options are to systemize, automate, or delegate, right?
So if tasks are spelling over, delegate the ones you don't want to do.
If tasks are spelling over again, then systemize them or think about a new way of doing them in a way that gets better results and test that.
The point there is that you're probably taking longer than you need to actually get the result that you're trying to achieve.
And you just can't see a better way of doing it because you don't test an experiment enough.
You're okay with how you're doing it right now.
The key to growth in any area of life is to not be okay with how it's going.
But how do you find the select few tasks that allow you to achieve your goals in record time?
Well, you definitely aren't going to find it by following a path that your parents or teachers told you to follow, because you can directly observe what kind of high pressure lifestyle that leads to.
That's step one, choosing the right vessel that allows you to control all of the variables in work.
That means a business in modern day.
That means an internet business.
Step two is to study all perspectives and identify patterns and principles.
If you study online business, you notice that all of them build an audience and monetize that audience.
Step three is understanding co's law, which states that leverage work evolves to earn more in the time allotted for its completion.
So if I wanted to make one million as one person while working four hours or less, first, the allotted time for completion is four hours.
Don't work more than that.
So you can identify problems that make you extend beyond that timeframe and solve them with systemization, automation, or delegation.
Then begin building an audience on the internet.
However, you deem fit ads, content, etc.
I would obviously recommend content as the highest leverage because you build an audience or a personal brand along the way.
Ads put you in front of an audience.
SEO generates an audience based on like Google search, but personal brand like actually having an audience and an email list, I think is the highest leverage.
Then create a minimum viable product or service and start selling fast.
As soon as you notice a problem, like the first person not buying, begin to test new strategies and iterate until you see results.
That's the thing. That's why people don't see a lot of progress.
They write a piece of content and they're like, okay, this didn't do very well.
That's expected. I'm a newbie.
And it's like, sure, there's some truth to that.
But that's also a problem.
Why aren't you getting engagement?
Why aren't you doing it?
You have to learn more. You have to solve that problem.
Okay, I launched my product to my audience.
It didn't sell anything.
What's the problem? You need to educate yourself on copyrighting, landing page funnels, etc.
And you need to be have the knowledge to actually be able to identify the problem.
So it's a constant learning and experimentation process.
If when you write content and it doesn't go off, are you just blaming the algorithm or are you taking it into your own hands and working to meet new people that have an audience that can share your work so that you're in control of your growth and you have a network, then study new techniques and acquire new skills to enhance how effective you are in those four hours.
If you were to simply adhere to step one, persist with steps two and three and not forget about step four, you would have a growing audience and product that sells boom a million dollars and increasing income.
That's the power of minimalism backed by trial and error, the essence of any form of improvement.
Now on the topic of working long or short hours, we need to talk about this very quick, because I've seen quite a few well known people say that young people should just spend their days working, working, working, working.
And I agree, but I don't.
Life unfolds in chapters and phases.
Everything and I mean everything goes through cycles.
There are macro cycles and micro cycles cycles of the universe like seasons cycles of culture like holidays cycles of your day like going to the bathroom and satisfying your sexual desire and more.
This is a generalized principle of reality the principle of impermanence and entropy the four cycles of progress are one perplexity you feel lost and don't know what to do next in your life to curiosity you discover an inkling of opportunity and dive down the rabbit hole three intensity you can absolute clarity and can't pull yourself away from your work.
That's what leads to 12 hour work days.
That's when it's encouraged for his consistency.
You systemize what works lean back develop a sustainable routine and make rest an essential part of your creative life.
This is where the four hour work day comes into play.
Then you can repeat the process if you so please doing intense work day in day out often on mindless low leverage tasks is only going to add bloat to your mind and business.
You'll try pushing through a perplexity phase of life with intensity when it is solved with curiosity.
Keep in mind these are meta states of consciousness trying to force your way into a new one will not work you will not go from feeling lost in the perplexity phase into feeling consistent because you haven't built anything in the curiosity and intensity phase.
Sure go ahead and work 12 hours a day on a task that you chose to work on just because you felt like you had to.
I'll see you in my DMs with the hundreds of others who feel cheated by the labor theory of value.
But it's clear that the brain's creative work is never done that even in its resting state the brain is plugging away at problems examining and tossing out possible answers looking for novelty.
This is a process we can't really control but by learning to rest better we can support it let it work and take notice when it's found something that deserves our attention.
I am a massive fan of optimizing your life for pattern recognition being able to spot and identify problems that aid in your goals right that means you need projects to build you need a business you need potentially a newsletter every week that's what the pattern recognition system is for me I have a newsletter every week I have books that I'm writing occasionally
I have new projects that I'm building and these frame my mind to help me notice ideas and reality to notice patterns that then I can take note of and that's where good dopamine comes from that's where meaning comes from that's where progress comes from so let's condense what we've learned into practical steps but first if you want rest you have to take it because nobody
in this world is going to give it to you rest is what allows your mind to filter signal from noise intentional rest is how you break out of the narrow minded stress of doing mode that most of us are addicted to rest like walking lifting reading leisure or what we can define as anything aside from giving attention to work is what activates the default mode network in short
that means your brain is as active or more active when you are at rest your brain works for you when you rest do you understand how crucial and powerful that is is that by working two to four hours a day and resting the rest of it your brain is still working for you you're still working 12 hours a day you're just not actually doing the work you're enjoying life now of course
this is just another thing that is kind of only possible with knowledge work or mental work or creative work if it helps you can think of it like shower thoughts or the times right before you fall asleep where you can't stop having potentially life-changing ideas that's what we're optimizing for in our life and rest if you are always in doing mode good luck having
the idea that allows for more results in your work because if you just get trapped doing the same thing all the time and you don't rest it's going to be difficult to have the idea that allows you to transcend a layer of your work and do it better and get more results there's uh i don't know exactly what the book is i'm writing a book walk and someone that i'm working with talked
about how he's reading a book and the discovery of the atomic bomb happened as a person was walking across the street the when heisenberg was walking across the street like on a walk the idea came to him the secret to the creative workers ability to make massive progress in such short periods of time is that they have the ideas that spring up in the awareness to work
on the right tasks with quality and grace here's how you begin to leverage this power first is to build your own thing there's something special about working on a project of your own i wouldn't say exactly that you're happier a better word would be excited or engaged you're happy when things are going well but often they aren't so why do it at all because to the kind
of people who like working this way nothing else feels as right you feel as if you're an animal in its natural habitat doing what you were meant to do not always happy maybe but awake and alive it's a quote from paul graham if you want to get more lever moving work done i had to break it to you but that's going to be very difficult if all you do is work on projects that are assigned
to you so if you've made it this far i'm sorry for the tease maybe it's time to take a brutal look at your situation and stop trying to force finding meaning in the meaningless maybe it's time to finally take the leap the leap you've been wanting to make because you know it's the only logical long-term option but shy away because you may have to sacrifice a few comforts
you have now that can ultimately be replaced with something more fulfilling when you build your own thing you actually want to work it only feels like work when you are going through a lull but it's work you can still tolerate when you're in control of the project you can control the variables for creating the flow state of consciousness the key to achieving the impossible
curiosity passion purpose autonomy mastery i would argue that 90% of people publicly hate their jobs 9% of people lie to themselves that they love their jobs or they just don't have the awareness of something better because they've never explored the unknown and 1% of people who have the jobs that allow them to create the conditions we talked about before not everyone
can have those jobs not everyone can have the 1% of jobs that actually allow you to live a fulfilling life now i need to say this every time i talk about jobs is that i'm not against jobs i had a job i like people that are in job shocker crazy i know i feel like when people like especially people that are attached to their job when they hear someone say that like hey you don't
really have to do that you can do something else they immediately think that that person just hates people that hates jobs i think jobs are an absolutely incredible stepping stone you go in you learn skills you meet people and then when you're ready and hopefully to the point where you don't get trapped by responsibility there when you know you're meant for more
personally when you determine that then you leave and you go do your own thing because now you have the skill to do so so the question there is what if i don't know what to build refer to what i said previously choose a meta business model one that prioritizes the two principles of business build an audience monetize the audience if they don't mention those two things
as the first thing you're building when you're learning in a course or something else they probably aren't going to help you in the long term they may help you short term with quick cash but if you don't supplement that knowledge with the principles of business and big picture understanding then it's going to be difficult to survive because you're in the same specialized
mind frame that you are in a job that's what primes you for replacement the other thing with that choose a business model that allows you to leverage the skills and unique advantages that you already have or the things that you like love and can't pull yourself away from or the things you're just genuinely interested in and find yourself studying in your free time
that way you can explore your interests stack second order future proof skills like writing and persuasion which you can learn in my two hour writer course and use modern marketable skills like email graphic design and video to monetize those interests which i talk about in my mental monetization course or both in digital economics being a quote unquote creator is a way
of being that is currently channeled through the internet until the best way to harness your human capabilities evolves not the myopic internet job people make it seem like it is the second thing after building your own thing is to think bigger we all operate on a 24 hour clock you can choose to open a coffee shop and be limited to the foot traffic of that shop or you
can choose to start a coffee brand limited to the billions of people on the internet even further you can create a productivity course template tracker or other digital product that doesn't require inventory or physical fulfillment increasing your profitability and reach beyond people who want physical coffee in this situation the productivity digital
product whether it be a digital planner or coffee homebrew masterclass is the highest leverage option this is why i recommend everyone creates a digital product even the biggest businesses this is what we're doing at cortex we're going to have education products for the niche set of people that download cortex that want to learn more about writing and other things
like that but the note takers and other people they're not really going to fall into that and that's okay now to illustrate this difference i want you to imagine a line of locals at the local coffee shop the line is out the door and let's say every 30 to 60 seconds if not longer that's how fast you can take an order that's how fast the cards are swiping so by definition just
the rate of how fast you can sell something is limited at something local and the amount of people you can serve there especially is limited by physical location now let's say you build an audience online to the size of a football stadium of amount of people in that audience and you launch product and people just can't swipe their cards fast enough it's going through
you're getting all the notifications you get a notification every two seconds of sale for this product sale for this product sale for this product and you're just sitting at your home the point there is by choosing leverage and thinking big in business you can do the same amount of work if not less work and make more money just because of the situation you put yourself
into and even if you don't make more at the start you have the potential to make more so you can actually grow and improve your mental capacity is limited by the potential of the business you are building if your mind is limited to a small local shop you hinder your ability to raise dopamine levels in the brain through novelty discovery and pattern recognition the fuel
that keeps drawing you back to the project you are building eventually skill acquisition and growth slowed down and you reach the same point you did when you started hating your nine to five so to tie this together think big and reverse engineer how to get there vision 10 year goal one year goals monthly goals weekly goals daily levers then forget about the goals
like I talked about in a previous video which is learn this skill if you want to stay relevant in 10 years now after building your own thing and thinking bigger we need to install a creative daily routine you need three habits one to fill your mind one to empty your mind one to use your mind when you consume too much and create too little you get anxious when you create
too much and consume too little you get bored because you've run out of fuel to create with so you repeat old patterns and lose the challenge of the craft you enjoy this is what I call the fill empty use framework a big picture sustainable routine that allows you to experiment with the details experiment with filling your mind in the afternoon with books podcasts
and courses experiment with emptying your mind in the evening with journaling planning or meditation experiment with using your mind in the morning with writing deep work and building or front load all of those habits first thing in the morning or pull out a piece of paper to start the creation of a system plan out those three habits over a week and start doing them
if something doesn't flow change it and try until it does you can't get six years of work done in six months because you aren't aware of a way to do that you aren't aware of a way to do that because you don't have great ideas flowing through your mind your mind has three functions consume connect create idea flow if you don't connect ideas or create with ideas they sit
in your head and weigh you down you have to actualize an idea to discover the one that can only be discovered once it's actualized the tractor couldn't be conceived without the plow what you may or may not understand is that you can't generate a life-changing idea if you haven't already acted on the boring or shallow ideas that lead to that life-changing idea this is something
I'm going to talk about in I believe two videos from now where I talk about my life philosophy which I coined as co-ism so we're going to break that down about how you need to solve the shallow and selfish problems in your life and you need to probably be shallow and selfish when you're just starting out in order to reach the deeper metaphysical and meaningful because those
problems are weighing you down right now and they're going to continue weighing you down until you solve them so you should probably focus on solving the problems staring you in the face your health money and competency before you focus on solving more profound more complex issues that require a more developed mind to benefit from so after having a creative daily
routine you need tasks prioritized by leverage what is the one thing you can do that both increases in effectiveness with consistent failure and brings you closer to your goal now focus only on that do it first thing in the morning every morning if you only have one hour to build your own thing in the morning then do only that and be okay with it you don't need to and can't
work 12 hours a day if you only have one and no successful entrepreneurs don't start by working 12 hours a day on their projects there anything like you and I which they are they have a current life they need to exchange with gradual effort is something that people just don't understand like working a lot of hours is a choice and it's often a stupid choice depending
on the context of your life like we talked about before if you have a job like most entrepreneurs do before they go into entrepreneurship are they just not showing up to their job and working 12 hours a day how are they working 12 hours a day they aren't they're working one and maybe four or five or eight hours a day on the weekends if they have that time and even then if you
were creative you could find a way to do it another way if you have more time or are already deep into building your own thing tear out the rest of your work from highest to lowest leverage or lowest to highest entropy my work day is as follows writing first thing because that's the entire fuel of my business writing content newsletters landing pages promotions etc
is the business model typing at a computer then I go on a walk and attempt to learn something new for the day I fill my mind and then I do admin work for cortex and start opening myself up to conversations and responding to people unless I have a new project I'm building that's really it and then the new project will demand more time until it's systemized back down to four
hours or more or less the last tasks in your workday when ordered by priority are probably optional or easily automated or outsourced so consider doing that that's one thing you don't understand is naturally you're going to gravitate towards doing the things that are highest leverage in the morning or highest priority in the morning meaning just by nature's
filter the things you do later in the day that you don't really have much energy to do and you're kind of just doing them because you have to those are the things that can be automated and outsourced so you should probably do that this style of deep work on a macro level gains its impact from your ability to release and constrain entropy the first one to two hours should be
absolutely distraction free no calls no phone no conversations nothing just you and the task then once you've completed the tasks that actually make progress in your life you can allow more chaos in because your next tasks are for maintaining what you've built they require less focus if you don't have a successful business yet the maintenance work doesn't really
apply to you because you have nothing to maintain you only need one hour we already talked about how you can do that on social media in one hour if you can write content and get it shared in one hour you build an audience if you have a product built that you spent time building that's how you make an income boom and that can scale to infinity because your audience can continue
growing until you have everyone that's on the internet following you so that's it for this video check out to our writer mental monetization digital economics check out cortex and join the waitlist for when it's ready aside from that like subscribe comment if you want to thanks for watching bye
