Let me ask you a question.
Have you ever had a taste of the optimal human experience?
The state of consciousness that professional athletes, spiritual masters, and culture-shifting artists swear by as the key to their success.
You felt it before. That sense of unbreakable confidence, feeling light on your feet and secure with your future.
The moment where skill becomes art and you no longer care what people think.
You feel as if you don't exist and can't think of anything you'd rather be doing.
It's called the flow state, which is a state of peak experience, maximum enjoyment, and effortless productivity.
It's quite similar to being present, you know, the thing that spiritual gurus won't stop preaching about.
Consciousness comes from an open state of focus.
You release your mind from attaching to any given thought and become one with life itself.
Flow on the other hand comes in handy when in the pursuit of a lofty goal.
You become one with the task in front of you, which leads to the actualization of a meaningful goal.
Mihai Csikszentmihi, author of the best-selling book Flow and the godfather Flow Psychology, describes flow as an autotelic activity.
Autotelic derives from two Greek words, auto meaning self and telos meaning goal.
It refers to a self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward.
The big problem with today's society seems to be that we just can't get the work done.
On top of that, we're in the middle of a purpose crisis.
We lack meaning in our careers, but don't know what to do about it.
The tasks are repetitive and endless because that's all we're skilled to do.
Distractions are everywhere, which pull us away from what's important.
And worst of all, we lack clarity on what we want out of life.
Dopamine is quite a popular topic these days for that reason.
Dopamine plays a crucial role in reaching the flow state, but it goes far beyond that.
Too many people get stuck in a state of narrow-minded living.
All they know is go to school, get a job, scroll on their phones, chase material objects and never truly experiencing the depth that life has to offer.
That isn't a way to live.
But what if I told you that you can find enjoyment in the boring, mundane, or terrible aspects of your life?
Even further, what if I told you that you could use the flow state to achieve the meaningful goals you've been putting off in six months rather than six years?
The result of understanding flow is discovering your life's work, having a sense of passion for that work, and having tools to navigate the dreaded anxiety and overwhelm that cause most people to spiral into chaos.
Life enjoyment isn't dictated by randomness or luck.
It's created by deconstructing life as the game it is and learning how to play.
I used to play a game that consumed far too much of my life.
It was called World of Warcraft, and if you've played it before, I'm sure you're familiar with the late nights and dungeons and raids and grinding out quests and farming and all of that fun stuff, so you're welcome for the nostalgia.
But for those who aren't familiar, World of Warcraft is an MMORPG, or massive multiplayer online role-playing game.
I often found this game more exciting than the actual real world that we live in.
At night, after coming home from my part-time job as a lifeguard over the summer, I put on my headphones and get immersed in the online world.
Nothing else mattered but my mind and the lines of code that kept it same.
When you first log in as a beginner, you're met with a series of tasks.
First you choose a faction, then race, then class, and customize how your character looks.
There were two factions, Alliance and Horde.
Many players were passionate and rather ideological about the faction they chose.
I played Alliance, but always thought the digital religion was a bit too much so I didn't necessarily hate the other side.
I just thought the characters looked a bit funny.
Most of my characters were either humans or night elves, but you could choose anything from gnomes to orcs to pandaren, which is like, panda people, I guess, to the undead.
The class you choose determines much of what you do throughout the game.
A class is your role and playstyle.
You can play the role of tank, healer, or damage.
When you and others complete quests, dungeons, or raids together, the tank keeps the enemy attacking them.
The healer keeps the group alive and the damage role, whether close combat, with blades or long range with magic, well, they damage the enemies.
The cool thing about a video game is that you can experiment with the character you play and start over if you don't enjoy it.
Now let's stop and reflect for a bit.
Are you noticing patterns in the real world?
How your identity influences your opportunity and potential?
How getting attached to one specific political, religious, or social ideology can make it difficult to get into that state of maximum enjoyment?
We will break down the psychology of this soon.
After you create your character, you are thrown into a specific starting zone for that race or that character.
This is very similar to the culture that you were raised in.
All you know is one little spot on the map.
The rest is dark and unknown.
In reality, the culture that you're raised in determines your values and beliefs because that's necessary for your survival.
If you were born in a different spot on the map, geographically, literally, if you were born on the other side of the world, your beliefs would probably get you either outcast or killed, especially Western countries going to the other side of the world.
There are many such cases of this.
So just lesson number one is be conscious of other people's beliefs and understand that your beliefs are not absolute truth and they are only serving you for the culture that you live in.
So they're worth questioning.
What you fail to realize is that you understand less than 0.1% of reality if you haven't branched into the unknown.
And it's very difficult.
I don't think people can ever reach 100% understanding of reality, maybe the masters, the select few people, but most people, the average person that stays in a repetitive routine of tasks and doesn't break out and pursue their own goals, they understand and know less than 0.1% of reality.
And I would argue that number is closer to 0.0000001% of reality.
It's not all money girls, Lambos and whatever people are chasing to solve their survival needs.
They can't even access their growth needs yet of challenge skill acquisition and understanding.
The game will not let you progress to new areas of the map until you acquire the skill and ability to level up to the point of being able to survive in those areas.
As you level up, you unlock new quests, dungeons, special abilities, career choices and the ability to ride or fly to new parts of the world.
You don't need to understand many more details but this will help us answer a few questions.
Why do we find video games so enjoyable to the point of addiction?
Is it possible to replicate that enjoyment to make progress toward our own goals in life?
Can we structure our lives like video games so that we become so immersed that we forget we are playing a game in the first place?
Let's deconstruct the parts of this fantastical game to understand the principles that addict our minds.
The mind craves order and an ordered mind is a happy mind.
Video games have quests, leveling and skill development to narrow your mind on the big goal at hand and eliminate distractions.
Video games are designed to make optimal experience easier to achieve.
Quote, they have rules that require the learning of skills, they set up goals, they provide feedback, they make control possible.
They facilitate concentration and involvement by making the activity as distinct as possible from the so-called paramount reality of everyday existence.
The keyword there is designed.
A question I want you to hold in the back of your mind for the rest of this video is how can I design a life, month, week and day that gives me a sense of control over my life?
Like the tutorial phase leading into quests of a video game, society is designed in a similar way.
You go to school to make sense of the game society wants you to play.
A hierarchy of goals is placed in front of you.
Go to school, get a job, praise your god.
At first, there is ample challenge to keep the mind narrow, but soon, life becomes repetitive and mundane.
As an aside, we'll dive into this topic in another episode.
But for now, feel free to go through my other videos like, Society is a Pyramid Scheme.
It is human nature to gravitate toward the things that bring us comfort and security, but that can turn on us fast.
The massive problem with the default path in life is that one size doesn't fit all.
We all find enjoyment in different things.
And what we find enjoyment in evolves as our identity does.
A level 100 player won't enjoy a level 1 challenge.
A level 1 player won't understand a level 100 challenge.
The lesson so far is that video games immerse you so far into the fabricated reality that it becomes your reality.
It's the only thing that consumes your attention, that fills your focus.
At this point, you reach absolute clarity and there are zero distractions.
This is the key to maximum enjoyment.
It's maintaining the sense that one's skills are enough to match the challenge of the situation.
And you make it easier on yourself to do this when you create an environment or a system that allows your mind to solely focus on that.
There aren't any problems or distractions that pull you away from putting energy into what it is that you're doing.
Now this stresses the importance of having goals that you choose, not ones that were assigned to you.
A big life goal to frame the information that you see as important.
So you can actually notice that information.
A series of reversed engineer goals from that to bring clarity to your actions and a small goal in the present to rivet your attention in this very moment and kick you into flow.
And this is why weird, deep work hacks like listening to instrumental music or even putting on a hat or setting a timer or other things, those aren't, those don't inherently put you into flow, but they help you focus your attention so you can get into it easier.
It's an environment that allows you to focus your attention, creating deadlines, having a hat to literally narrow your eyesight and things like that.
The mind is a machine that aids in reaching known goals and discovering unknown goals.
Your mind will notice, accept or reject and use information to achieve the goals you've needed.
If you're always focused on negative outcomes, your life will become negative.
If you only focus on the goals society assigns to you, you lose a sense of control over your life.
There's a psychology that is called pattern recognition.
You feel the dopamine when you notice information that helps you achieve your conscious or subconscious goals.
You can't help but use that information to make progress.
The question is, how do we use this knowledge about goals to live a more meaningful life?
If you want to change your life, you must start by removing yourself from the repetitive string of tasks that make life unenjoyable.
You must dive into the unknown.
Let's imagine that you don't know how to swim.
How would you feel if I offered you a scenic helicopter ride over the ocean?
You may be a bit fearful, you may actually reject it, but honestly you'd be silly not to accept.
Now how would you feel if on that ride I took the chopper low to the water, pushed you out and brought it up just enough so you were forced to swim?
A few things could happen here.
You'd succumb to the fear, overthink it, and drown.
You would flail like a madman doing whatever it takes to stay afloat but soon lose energy and again drown.
You remain calm, attempt to float, and potentially stay above water long enough to devise a plan.
None of those are optimal.
When you play a video game, you have a map of the digital world.
On that map, there are unknown areas, places you haven't or can't explore.
There's a reason you can't just teleport into the middle of those areas.
Chances are you'd be swarmed by monsters 50 levels higher than you and you'd get killed in one single hit.
Is that fun? Would you want to play the game anymore?
Now what if you completed quests or just leveled up to the point of being able to fly or just being able to do your first dungeon?
That thing would be new to you and you'd be extremely excited to go and do it right then in that very moment.
You wouldn't procrastinate on that quote unquote work because you know exactly what you need to do, that's the only thing on your mind and you're going to do it because it's new and it's a fun challenge.
And in the real world, if you find this one thing, you may even pull in all nighter or let other important things in your life that you thought were important go and you realize that this one thing is more important and that's a great hint at where you should be going in life.
Meaning is found at the edge of your abilities, the edge of the unknown.
Not so deep that you are met by chaos but not so shallow that you close yourself off to the depth.
The sweet spot where your skills are enough to navigate the challenge of any given situation.
You've been there before, when you feel incredible for no apparent reason, when you know exactly what to do to make progress in your life, when you can't stop having ideas, when your vision for the future is so clear that you can't help but act on it.
The flow state of consciousness is where the flow of information is maximized.
All thoughts, ideas, and mental energy are useful for the meaningful hierarchy of goals you are attempting to achieve.
Maximum signal, minimum noise, maximum focus, minimum distraction.
This is true education, learning, doing, and discovering in unison.
Not being told what to learn for a task you don't care about to do on a path that hordes of people have gone down before.
This gives us a hint about how we can maximize our time in the flow state.
I like to think of the mind as the metabolism for experience.
When you eat too much, you feel sluggish.
When you eat too little, you feel on edge.
When you're overwhelmed with information, you feel anxious.
When you're underwhelmed with information, you feel bored.
It isn't uncommon for us humans to bite off more than we can chew, to accept more work when you're already neck deep in the water, to learn too much and expect it not to overwhelm you, to know that you should say no, but you say yes so that the other person doesn't feel bad.
The optimal state of mind is when you metabolize life as it comes.
You learn and do without thinking and emerge as a new person.
People often report that they don't remember the times that they were in flow, but once they come out and their sense of self comes back, it feels as if they've came back, a new person.
There's one common misconception about the flow state.
It is not the product of trying.
It is effortless. Quote, I have always been fascinated by the law of reversed effort.
Sometimes I call it the backwards law.
When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink, but when you try to sink, you float.
When you hold your breath, you lose it, which immediately calls to mind an ancient and much neglected saying, whoever would save his soul shall lose it.
Rest in peace, Alan Watts.
Now this is pretty obvious, but you can't go from working a nine to five you hate to making millions from your life's work.
But there is a quest you can create and follow in your life to reach any goal you want, be it weight loss, good looks, charisma, more money, or work you enjoy.
The only thing standing in the way is you.
At this point in history, it should be possible for an individual to build a self that is not simply the outcome of biological drives and cultural habits, but a conscious, personal creation.
You aren't where you want to be because you didn't make the choices that led to a purposeful career, you didn't make the choices that led to fulfilling relationships, and you didn't make the choices that led to a healthy and aesthetic body.
You right now are the manifestation of your past choices.
So if you want to take control of who you become, your choices are of utmost importance.
There are two things here.
One, who you want to become comes from perspective and zooming out, and two, the choices that will take you there, which comes from perception and zooming in.
The good life is created through constant reminders of your vision and programming the identity that would actualize it through aligned action.
Now a question. Do you know who you are?
Your identity, your concept of self, your personality, that little character you've been playing in the game of life, a web of ideas that shape your perspective, a perspective that shapes your perception of situations, a perception of situations that determines the choices you make, the choices you make that result in who you are and the quality of life you live.
You are a perspective vessel in a relative reality.
Your perspective can be expanded or contracted, absorbed in a task or at one with life, manhandled by an emotion or drowning in a sea of familiar future events.
In a video game, you create your character.
The class, profession, quests, and path you choose in the game determines what you can do in your future.
In other words, if you don't like your life, it's because your identity doesn't allow you to notice and pursue the challenges you find enjoyable.
The day you were born, you became a learning sponge.
Your biological goal was to survive, so you pulled information from your environment to allow you to survive.
That's the information you noticed.
You learned the language you speak.
You learned to crawl, walk, and run.
You were told eyes, ears, mouth, and nose, that nursery rhyme, because you couldn't see your own face.
Your parents, teachers, friends, and books, and every other environmental stimuli told you what was good or bad.
So your mind shifted to only retaining the information that allowed you to survive in that environment.
You understood touching fire is bad.
You understood praising your God is good.
You adopted all of these program beliefs that may not be serving you now in the goals that you're trying to achieve, and you feel that tension in your heart and in your mind to do the thing that you want to do, but you can't or you feel like you can't because you're still a, with choice of the bad words, slave to your mind that wasn't created by you.
From a structural standpoint, a worldview or perspective is composed of goals and problems that the goals allow you to become aware of.
Only then can you choose to solve those problems, achieve the goal, and open up room for the next one.
Every day, zoom out and remind yourself of what you don't want.
You don't need to focus on what you want, because that will make itself apparent through your choices.
Hold that frame at the top of your mind.
Do not allow distractions to penetrate it.
Anytime a choice comes up, zoom out and align.
Will this benefit the future I am trying to create?
Then be decisive. Make the decision.
Allow failure into your life so you can correct your behavior the next time around.
Awareness is a cure. But if you don't have vision, you may accept a quest society assigns to you, which almost always results in you not being in control of the level of goals you pursue or problems you solve.
In other words, you, as a perspective, stop growing.
Around the age of 25 to 35, you are met with an inescapable bubble of responsibilities that trap you in a cloud of chaos and meaninglessness.
If you identify as a smart student, you have the goal of applying to college, and the only problems you notice are those like the state tests that you have to study for.
So, you invest mental energy into that goal.
When you achieve it, your psyche is rewarded and you continue pursuing that narrow path.
The problem is that this path is known.
It was assigned to you. People have done it many times before.
You know well that you were limited to the results of the people who have gone down this path before, but you don't care because it's what you've been programmed to do.
Later on, we will discuss a different vessel into the unknown in part 3.
One that allows you to find clarity on the path that you create.
Or to create clarity because you created your own path.
One that exposes you to your unique potential.
A path that nobody has gone down before.
Your life's work. Your perspective, goals and problems frames any and all information and opportunities available to you.
By information, I don't mean books or podcasts or words.
I mean anything that you perceive, sounds, sights, smells, tastes and touches.
The combination of which composes the content of our consciousness.
Our experience. The only thing that is real.
The conscious mind can process 50 bits of information per second.
The unconscious mind can manage 11 million bits of information per second.
So if we want to enrich our everyday experience, notice more novel opportunities, achieve the impossible and create more flow in our lives, we must expand who we are by fundamentally changing the goals our mind operates on to navigate reality.
We must influence what information composes the 50 bits of processing power we have in any given second.
There's an enemy we are all battling against that leads to us being stressed, anxious and overwhelmed more than we'd like to admit.
That enemy is called entropy.
If you understand entropy, you understand that by doing nothing with your life, you choose to slowly drown in chaos.
You don't stay the same.
You dig yourself deeper into a hole without trying.
The good life demands consistent effort toward your own goals.
Let's summarize what we've learned so far in one sentence.
The flow state occurs when the content of your consciousness is composed of one challenging yet meaningful task.
But there's a problem. Most people feel like they are drowning in a cloud of chaos.
Rather than one meaningful task occupying their attention, there are 10 negative thoughts that have the potential to splinter off into 100 more, like how you feel a pain in your chest than thoughts of grandpa's heart attack come to mind, the 10 different heart-healthy foods you neglected eating, and how an early death may impact your family.
I want you to think of your mind as a supercomputer.
Your ability to process information is dependent on a few things, but the RAM, or random access memory, is the most important part of a computer that influences its performance.
The more RAM you use up with different programs running, open browser tabs, and the performance requirements of what you have running, the slower your performance will be.
Most people live with multiple high-demand programs running that are draining the limited creative energy they have.
Thoughts about regretful past mistakes, thoughts about stressful future happenings, desires of hunger and entertainment to escape those thoughts, an internal cry to break out of their conditioned way of living, a list of mixed priority tasks that need to be finished, open loops of tasks they were supposed to complete but forgot about, the list goes on and on.
The modern mind has its attention split in infinite directions by default.
We go about our lives stressed in near-sickness rather than living in the present with singular focus and a worry-free mind.
We are the opposite, living in a false reality created by split attention.
When we think too much of the scattered past or future, chaos ensues, the mind tends toward disorder.
If not kept in check, we lose the sense of control over our lives that leads to enjoyment.
This leads to the question, what is a state of consciousness?
That's an incredibly deep question, but when it comes to the flow state, it's crucial that we understand it.
Once we are tackling a metaphysical problem, be open-minded, ask questions, and be okay with the fact that those questions may take time to answer and make sense of.
A lesson there. Ask more questions.
You won't receive the answer immediately, but you can cede your mind to receive an answer that you normally wouldn't have.
It can take a day, a week, or a month, and for the questions that matter, a decade.
Reality is consciousness that takes different states.
There is nothing but states of consciousness.
All that is real is state.
The denial of states of consciousness is done from a state of consciousness.
If it helps, you can think of states of consciousness as just states of mind.
They're synonymous for the most part.
There are higher and lower states of consciousness, neither of which are better than the other.
They just are. But higher states of consciousness may be preferable at times, like getting into flow for deep work.
Being sleepy, drunk, high, anxious, dreaming, stressed, bored, or overwhelmed are all on a spectrum of conscious or unconscious, open or narrow states of mind.
David R. Hawkins developed a map for levels of consciousness, or stages of consciousness.
Ken Wilbur often speaks of the difference between states and stages.
States are fluid and temporary modes of mind.
You oscillate between various states every day.
You can think of this as your everyday experience from being tired at night to focused in the morning.
Stages or levels represent your baseline of development.
You can still reach lower states, but you come back to baseline rather quick and tend to hang out around your stage of development.
So what causes chaotic states of mind that make it seem like our life is falling apart?
Are we doomed to continue suffering from it?
And most importantly, how do we increase our baseline level of consciousness to achieve more flow and live a better life?
We are going through a mental health crisis.
We lack the curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery that create a flow sustaining life's work.
Most people have mental disorder.
Not a mental disorder, just mental disorder.
By that, I don't mean one that can be diagnosed and prescribed a solution, even though that's been on the rise, mainly to profit off of this epidemic.
When I say a mental disorder, I mean disorder in the mind.
Psychic entropy. Psychic equals of the mind.
Entropy equals systems tending toward disorder.
Systems need consistent energy to thrive.
A system is a group of parts that are connected or work together to form a goal-achieving complex whole.
Each part affects the system in some way and depends on the other parts to function properly.
For example, your digestive system is made up of organs like your stomach and intestines that work together to help you digest food.
Just like how your business is made up of brand, content, product, and marketing.
If you don't have a good product, which is a system in itself, you won't make an income.
If you neglect energy in the other parts of the system, like writing your content so you can actually grow, so you have the traffic to sell the product, but then if the product landing page isn't good, that's a system and you need to identify the problems in it and fix it so you can put more energy into it more efficiently so that it sells.
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Systems become more efficient with time unless you neglect them.
To describe entropy in a system, if your mind is a room and you don't put energy toward cleaning that room, maintaining order, then the room will get dirty.
Some day without cleaning won't be bad, but after a week, a month, a year, that's when your mom starts telling you that you live in a pigsty.
With that, if you are a writer, it takes time and experimentation to form the habits and systems that lead to an audience and income.
But once you have it down, you don't need as much energy to keep it going.
This is the same thing with learning any skill at all.
I've recently been learning animation for these videos and yeah, it's really freaking hard at first and I'm spending a lot of time on it and I'm overwhelmed and I don't know what I'm doing, but I keep going and I get better at the skill and I was able to learn it very quickly just by focusing on this one project.
We'll learn how to learn in part three, but eventually I'll be able to create animations like it's the back of my hand and what used to take eight hours will take one.
And if you're working a job or tasks are assigned to you and you're not learning, automating, outsourcing, delegating skills, you're not giving yourself the potential to be able to control what you work on, therefore, how much you work.
I talk about that a lot in my four hour workday videos, just type in four hour workday.
But once you do this, once you've learned something, if you stop for a day, month, week, year, it becomes that much harder to get back into it, but muscle memory is a thing.
Where I stopped using Photoshop after doing digital art for a long time, it took a bit of time to get back into it, but I got into it so much faster.
This is why skill stacking and consistently learning new skills is so crucial for your development because you can adapt so easily even if you don't use one skill for a long time.
But when you do stop, that is where problems occur because that's where entropy takes hold.
You have to understand that problems are not personal, they're systemic and everybody faces them.
It's when there is a blockage of the energy in the system that is our mind.
Mental health or fixing this mental disorder from psychic entropy is about making sense, understanding and clarity.
So if you're just learning a new skill, entropy is very high and you need to constrain it.
But when you stop learning a new skill or you let time go on, then entropy starts to creep back in, it gets released and then you have to constrain it again through effort and energy.
This goes for any domain of your life.
This is a universal principle.
It applies to everything.
If you understand entropy and you keep that at the top of your mind, it will change your life.
And with this, when entropy is high, this is when one single negative thought can hijack your attention.
It makes it so you can't see a situation for what it is and then the mind game commences.
You have to learn how to play it and the more you do it, the more you play, the better you get.
Attention breathes life into everything it touches.
When you give your attention to a false reality that your mind creates, you act in a way that makes it real.
Do you think this will lead to beneficial outcomes in any situation?
The solution to chaos is finally taking control of your life.
You need four habits. One that builds your mind, one that builds your body, one that builds your business, one that builds your connection.
The good life is the process of becoming everything you could be.
In a video game, your mind is framed by the game itself.
In reality, this is your perspective.
We've discussed that. To narrow your mind further, there is a hierarchy of challenging goals.
Finally, to immerse you in the world and focus your attention on the now, there are rules and mechanics.
Rules prevent you from cheating.
They make the game worth playing.
Mechanics are skill based.
Your aim will suck at first, you'll feel clumsy with your keyboard, you won't be able to move around or land shots well, but you get better.
You practice and improve as the challenges increase.
In life, the rules are what you deem important and meaningful.
Your priorities, your values, what you value.
The mechanics are the skills and habits you use to achieve the prioritized goals in your life.
To create a life of enjoyment and flow, you need to invest mental energy into self generated goals, stick it out long enough to create passion.
You don't just find passion.
Create new systems or routines for your mind to operate on.
That's how you reverse psychic entropy and chaos in your mind.
You invest energy with your thoughts, emotions, attention and actions every single day in goals that create your ideal life through work, study and practice.
Thankfully, there are only a few goals that can truly be meaningful.
They correspond to the eternal problems that can't be solved by AI, prescriptions or technology.
One is business, meaningful work that allows you to choose the problems you solve.
Who is health, you live in your body, it is your obligation to understand and improve it.
Three is mind, pursuing your curiosity, acquiring knowledge and expanding your sense of self.
Four is connection, creating shared experiences and expanding your circle of concern to transcend the self.
Like when you party up in a video game, multiple minds achieve goals faster than one.
These are like a skill tree in a video game.
As you improve the relevant skills in these domains, you unlock new levels.
But there's a catch. You can only improve one trait as much as you improve another.
You can only reach a certain level of mind by reaching a certain level in your creative work.
You can only reach a certain level of health by reaching a certain level of mind because mental and physical health are deeply intertwined.
My question to you, if you aren't building your mind, body, spirit and business every single day, what are you doing?
That's a genuine question because is there anything more important than that?
Or is everything you do now a distraction?
And you may be saying, but Dan, I want to enjoy myself and do what I want.
I would say to that, we just learned what actual maximum enjoyment is.
And by being distracted all the time and engaging in what you think is leisure, entropy is just high all the time.
And you're anxious and overwhelmed all the time.
You don't need to lie to yourself about this because there is a solution.
The other thing is, do you understand what the difference is between enjoyment and pleasure?
Do you realize that human psychology has been mapped over the course of human evolution to show that humans have an innate drive to grow, expand and create?
Enjoyment is found in progress.
The flow state points to much more than some neurochemicals in your brain.
It points toward the divine.
Doing what you want is often the ego's way of ending the train of thought that would lead to improving yourself because that's what your nature wants.
To do what you want in alignment with your goals.
Do curiosity, self-educate, build meaningful projects that actualize your ideal lifestyle.
If you don't know where to start, you're in luck.
That's next on our agenda.
Okay, we understand the goal.
We want to create a life of more flow.
We want work that's meaningful to us.
We want to create a life where we have an overwhelming sense of control over its outcome.
We don't want to be assigned goals and therefore assigned an identity and destiny to become a cog in the machine.
Steven Kotler, author of The Art of Impossible, believes that there is a formula for achieving the flow state and thus achieving the impossible when used correctly.
Aligning motivations is the first step to doing this well.
He describes five intrinsic drivers that fuel and energize our actions.
Curiosity, which is our compass into the unknown.
Passion, which is finding that one thing you can't pull yourself away from.
This is how your passion will impact the world, something greater than yourself.
Autonomy, which is the desire for freedom required to pursue your passion and purpose.
And mastery, which is honing your skillset so you can monetize your passion.
Per Kotler, each of these contributes to certain neurotransmitters like dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins, serotonin, and norepinephrine.
This neurochemical cocktail helps create the flow state.
I would encourage you to read his book to discover his process for reaching flow, but I have my own methods.
In my eyes, this is best tackled from the top down.
Mastery stems from your life's work, your vision for the future.
Autonomy stems from entrepreneurship, the ability to create your own work.
Purpose stems from projects turned into products, because a product is how you help more people than just yourself.
That's how you transcend yourself.
You give and you create for other people in exchange for another form of value.
It doesn't have to be money, but it can be status, or it can be peace, or it can just be the feeling of enjoyment.
It can be any of those things.
And all of those things are neutral, like money and status, until assigned to a specific person who is good or evil.
Passion stems from connecting the dots, which is finding the pieces of the puzzle you're creating.
And then curiosity is the fuel, the desire to acquire the knowledge to reach the next level.
There is one pattern I've noticed in all successful individuals.
They live in their own little world.
They disappear from society for months at a time to force pure focus on themselves and their vision.
They laser in on one meaningful goal and make it a reality.
As we learned earlier, goals and problems compose your worldview.
So we need to make those goals and problems conscious.
First, we need to create an anti-vision.
We start our story with an anti-vision.
Your anti-vision is the bane of your existence, the place that you don't want your life to end up.
It's a positive fear mechanism to kick you in the right direction.
It is the first polar end of the worldview that you're creating, because your worldview is anti-vision, what you don't want, vision, what you want.
Inside of that, another layer is goals and problems, problems you need to solve to in order to reach the goals.
Those things are what frame your perception and allow you to notice information in the world.
So if your vision is off and your anti-vision is off, or you just don't have them and they're assigned to you, then what you notice that programs who you are that leads to the actions you take are not your own and they're not going in a beneficial direction.
So how do you create this?
First, you start a running note of the experiences you do not want to relive or to happen.
So the things you don't care to learn or the places you don't care to live, you have to actually go and experience life in order to figure these things out.
You need to experience something in order to think, I don't want that.
That means you have to fail more.
You have to get uncomfortable more because you can notice that thing.
And once you understand what it is, you can work in the opposite direction.
Now you won't get rid of these things in an instant, but you can write them down and hold that awareness in your mind so that your actions start to self-correct in a new direction.
And just by nature, you reach your vision.
So that's step two is what is your vision?
Because if you don't have a vision, you're lost kind of by definition.
You can't create outcomes.
So you're doomed to the mechanical living of determined outcomes.
Every decision you make in any domain of your life must be filtered through your vision.
That is how you bring meaning to your actions and minimize distractions.
So write down every single thing you want in life and don't miss a detail and get very specific but understand that again, this doesn't happen overnight.
Think of it as a minimum viable vision, right?
One thing down in a note or on a piece of paper or just in a to-do list or something like that and add to it over time.
And as you write these things down, those little inklings or figments of consciousness will culminate in your mind and again, self-correct your behavior in that direction and allow you to notice and spot problems and goals or opportunities that you can take on, solve or achieve.
After that, step number three is setting big and small goals.
Big goals are for direction, small goals are for clarity, neither are for action.
You don't need motivation when the task in front of you is so stupidly simple that you can't help but complete it.
So break down your vision into goals by decade, year, month, week and day.
These are your guide, not your master.
They're there for direction.
Your goals will change as you do.
Be okay with that. Remind yourself of your anti-vision, vision and goals daily.
These are your own little world.
In your world is all you think about.
Your mind conspires in your favor.
You notice small details that others don't.
That gives you an edge. It spurts dopamine into your brain as a motivator.
It sets the scene for more flow.
You stop worrying about problems you don't have control over.
Leave the drama of society.
What about the starving kids in Africa?
What about the next election?
What about that celebrity beef that's fabricated to make the money and keep you dumb?
What's going to actually solve the problem?
Please, zoom out and think about this because these election cycles or just any cycle that raises your emotions unconsciously and controls you that narrows your mind and makes you dumb.
It narrows your mind and it has you adopt the goals and problems that other people have for you.
And that's the only thing that frames your attention and your perception.
So you can't notice information in the pursuit of your goals because you forgot your goals.
So is crying about it and changing your profile picture going to actually solve the problem or is upskilling yourself pursuing your own goals impacting people on the way by doing your life's work and transcending yourself and helping other people in a conscious and purposeful manner and creating change on the individual level that ripples out.
What's going to actually make the change?
Is it the little like if you're so narrowed in on I need to do this that someone else told me and you do that.
What's next? You lost vision.
You don't know what to do next.
You didn't make any form of a change.
You make a change by changing yourself because beyond that what you do when you pursue your life's work and you stay focused on that one thing is you pass along your obsession to others.
You start a beer company of all things and you are the one working it and you hand out your beer with passion, joy and you put so much frickin effort into that beer.
You pass that along to your customer.
They're happy. They love that place.
They go there. That's a part of their routine.
That brings them joy. They pass that joy on, etc.
etc. That's how it works.
What people don't understand is when you project your beliefs and force them on another person that they're not going to take that.
They're not going to accept that belief.
You're only creating more destruction.
So when people ask what your thoughts are on insert the flavor of the weak drama here, your only response should be, I don't care.
Otherwise, you're an NPC.
If your vision is big, audacious and truly impactful, you won't reach it working for someone else.
Stephen Kotler harps on how an MTP or massively transformative purpose is key to achieving the impossible in life.
Robert Greene preaches about discovering your life's task.
In my eyes, entrepreneurship is the only logical option for long-term thinkers.
Entrepreneurship is a mindset, not a title.
A mindset dedicated to solving an infinite set of creative problems.
A way to hedge against getting trapped in a repetitive routine that someone else assigned to you.
It is an infinite game, not a finite one.
Your work evolves. It doesn't stagnate unless you allow it, but even then, at least it's your choice.
If you stay in a 9-to-5 for too long, you become a monkey and a cubicle.
Your psyche is wired to hunt.
To hunt is to make novel discoveries that aid in your survival.
Imagine our ancestors walking by a bear bush every day.
It doesn't serve their future, but one day, it grows berries.
Somebody walks by it, they notice it, and that novelty causes excitement.
They either gather the berries or remember them for later so they can survive longer.
When you get stuck in a job that you hate, you live in the eternal no.
Now I want to make this clear.
I don't hate jobs. I just see them for what they are, which is a stepping stone that allows you to eventually evolve beyond it because you start and you only evolve and grow so much until you reach some form of a cap and then progression slows down.
And if enjoyment is found in progress and you no longer progress, you have to understand that a job is a stepping stone.
And that is, that's really the case for 99% of things where 90% of people, I would say, just actively hate their jobs.
99% of people think they enjoy their jobs, but they just don't understand their potential.
So they don't realize that in reality, they do hate it.
One percent of people have the jobs that actually allow for all of the flow drivers like curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, mastery.
That's 1%. And the amount of jobs that allow that aren't going to change.
So unless you bank on joining the 1% and still limiting your income to a salary, the wisest thing you can do is just bet on yourself because that's just simply by becoming an entrepreneur.
You unlock the ability to control your enjoyment in life and you dive into the unknown, which which is what we've talked about is the path to enjoyment.
Entrepreneurship is the path of uncertainty like slashing your way through the jungle.
You're required to learn skills that aren't taught in schools.
You're required to be okay with failure, rejection and slow progress.
You're required to learn from your mistakes, show up again tomorrow and push until you strike gold.
You're required, in other words, to be human.
As an entrepreneur, you hunt for your survival by gathering knowledge, creating a valuable product and giving it to people who would benefit from it.
And you have to understand if you have a bad relationship with money or business, you have to understand that people actually want to buy products, right?
It benefits their lives.
So by selling a product, if you sell a product that hurts someone's lives, then yeah, obviously don't do that.
But that's not all that business is.
As I've discussed before in previous videos, my path for doing this is to start a personal brand as the foundation, solve your own problems in the real world, health, wealth and relationships, distribute your findings, opinions and beliefs via writing, start with a freelancer coaching service and get results, sell a physical or digital product that requires
less time invested once your audience grows, make a hefty income in two to four years with persistence and iteration, and then expand your vision for the future to build whatever you want to get there, which could be software, spaceships or just whatever you want.
This is the one person business model that I talk about a lot.
You can go and watch my one person business model playlist.
I'll eventually be making another one of these types of videos very deep dive into the one person business.
So just stay tuned for that.
But you don't need to build a $1 billion company.
And I mean, you shouldn't even think about doing that until you have the cash flow to actually afford building the team and starting up the business to do that.
But for this one person business model, you need to attract an audience by passing down the lessons that you've learned by gaining experience and making progress in your own life with self generated goals.
That's how you become unique.
That's how you become the niche.
And then you need to monetize that audience by building a product by solving a problem in your life and selling the solution.
So if you're making progress and you're improving yourself, you're qualified to start a business.
You have experience that you can pass down because most people are not improving themselves and they need that better option from a person that they resonate with.
That's the best form of education is when you actually relate to the person that's teaching you.
And this option is $0 to start.
The one person business is $0.
Thanks to technology. Thanks to social media.
It's a great way to build cash flow and then use that cash flow to build whatever you want.
So if you want to get started, I have a mini course on it.
Then yes, I do promote my other courses in there.
This is all eventually leading up to the other products that I sell you, but the mini course is actually quite valuable and that's free.
So if you want that one person business foundations course in the description.
If you want to learn faster, don't start learning.
Outline a project, start building it out and learn along the way.
Too many people get trapped in tutorial hell, stacking up useless knowledge as brain fog.
Start encounter a problem, seek specific knowledge to overcome it.
When you learn how to learn, you can achieve six years of results in six months.
So let's take everything we've learned before and ground it with practical steps.
First you need to create a clarity catalyst.
There were a few moments in my life where I made giant leaps in understanding and progress.
The first was writing my book.
The second was building my products.
The third was writing my newsletters.
And now the fourth is creating these videos, which is like a next step up.
If you've taken to our writer, you understand how I write my newsletters and turn them into the videos I used to do.
Now it's sort of evolved, hopefully we'll see, into these types of videos and that's required, that's demanded an entirely new skill stack from me and my editor.
So what do these all have in common?
It's that they're a project, a big project.
A project has a scope for how large it is.
The bigger, the better for creativity.
It has an outline so you can note ideas to fill in that outline from everyday life.
In other words, you notice more in life.
It has milestones so you have direction and clarity on your next steps.
It has a real world deadline that forces you to act or else your survival takes a hit.
It has experimentation, trial and error so you can turn failures into lessons.
This video is long and creating this video is all I've thought about for the past like eight to twelve weeks, however long it takes to get this video out.
And this presents the perfect environment for a flow state.
There's pattern recognition from novelty and dopamine, clarity from milestones, challenge from deadlines and experimentation from learning.
So determine what you want to learn.
Create a real world project that you will publish for other people to see.
And if you don't know what project to create, just see what other people have done.
If you want to learn Photoshop, your project is going to be from anything from digital art to just a social media post to whatever you create in Photoshop.
It could be art, it could be a graphic, it could be something.
Figure out what you want to do.
If you want to learn how to bodybuild or you just want a nicer body, you want to solve that problem in your life, then your project is your body, nutrition regimen and training program and you use those systems to get better at what it is you're doing.
Learn the thing, focus your mind and actually stick to that goal.
If those don't work, then you need, you need to experiment with a new nutrition protocol and new training program and knew whatever it is until you piece together the patterns that fit you to perfection until entropy takes hold and you have to do it again because this game never ends.
If you're just looking to find that one thing that will get you results over and over and over again, stop.
And now your project outline doesn't have to be perfect at first.
Like I start these projects by just brain dumping all of my ideas on the paper and once that's there, then it becomes an experience anchor.
So when I go out into the world or I read social media posts or I read a book, the ideas that fit that project stick out in my mind and I'm able to go into it and add it to the outline and slowly piece it together until my outline deadline is there and then I can start working on the project.
Because when I wrote my book, that made my life meaningful.
So if you lack meaning, it's because you probably lack your own project, one that you assigned to yourself because almost every single idea that I had that came to mind was applicable to the book.
And so it was just this constant good dopamine of, wow, I need to put this idea in my book, write it down in the outline, research it more, find more ideas, etc, etc, this constant back and forth of serendipity that made me feel like a child again.
It made me feel like it gave me that wonder for life again.
Step two is to learn as you build.
If you aren't building, you aren't learning.
If you aren't actively applying what you learn in that moment by either writing it down or putting it in that outline or putting it in the project and actually doing it, you're just stacking that knowledge as useless soon to be forgotten brain fog.
You aren't going to remember it and it's useless to learn that thing.
It's useless to learn if you don't have a project.
If you're reading or other things in that scenario, then you aren't learning.
You're acquiring, you're starting to understand things that you already know.
It's leisure. It's not necessarily learning something new because unless it's applicable to your life, right?
Reading a business book without having a business is kind of dumb.
Reading a philosophy book works in all situations because it's your life that you're applying it to.
That is the project in big picture domains like philosophy.
Now, when you start building something, there's only a few things that you need to know and those are the fundamentals.
You have no business researching advanced tactics yet.
The fundamentals will take you 95% of the way there and for most people, that's millions of dollars, a jacked physique or a stress-free life.
You don't understand how far the fundamentals can take you if you actually stuck to them.
New tactics or advanced tactics may help with a marginal 5% improvement, but I feel like that mental bandwidth should just be reserved for rest and obsession towards your work pertaining to new specific skills and interests.
When you have a project to build, do the following.
Purchase a beginner level course on the topic, watch overview videos on YouTube that teach the fundamentals, study them until you have clarity on what to do next, then do it and when you encounter a problem, refer back to sections of the course or video, research how to directly solve that problem and watch tutorials where people build projects similar to yours
and see how they overcome those problems.
Learning is problem solving, not hoarding as much knowledge as you can.
Step 3 is to teach what you learn.
The protege effect. A psychological phenomenon where teaching, pretending to teach or preparing to teach information to others helps a person learn that information.
When you teach, you pay closer attention when you learn and identify knowledge gaps that help you learn faster.
Now I of course recommend teaching in public as a personal brand or as some would call your public resume or the modern resume.
That's what your social media profile is.
So you can attract high paying opportunities as you learn.
So you don't need to really know this stuff before you start writing.
You write so you teach and you understand it further.
I learned things 10 times faster because I teach them to other people and this doesn't have to be online, but doing it online makes it so it's a part of your life and you grow and evolve much faster and it's just a good career to get into because it's not really a career, it's the collapse of work and life into one and it becomes meaningful.
But to illustrate that point, it's like when I learned something like animation or art or just some difficult concept in a book and I explain it at night to my girlfriend, then I understand that thing so much better just from that simple conversation of me trying to illustrate what it is because it identifies what I don't know.
So then that's a new problem in my mind that frames my perception.
So I pick up the information that fills that knowledge gap so much faster.
So write in public and let people criticize you because without the criticism, you're not going to learn how to fix what you had wrong and then teach your friends by making just interesting conversation.
If you're naturally a quiet person, start learning something and then teach, just say, hey, I was learning about this new thing.
It's pretty cool. This, this, this.
Now you're a conversational person because with this, you have to structure what you're saying, explain it and ensure that you aren't giving false knowledge and that way you know what to learn next.
When I write my newsletters and create these videos, I don't know everything, but I can guarantee that writing for four years on topics that I'm interested in has accelerated my knowledge and wisdom in those areas so much faster than if I weren't to actually create and right now the modern way to create is content and products.
Your life becomes a meaningful series of solving problems, learning how to solve them, teaching others and making an income as you go.
I believe this is what evolution has allowed people doing what they love without barriers thanks to the internet.
Step four is to expand into a new level of mind.
Read to expand your mind, write to organize your mind, build to focus your mind.
By this point, you may still feel overwhelmed or like you're not learning anything.
You have to understand that this is good.
Your mind is primed for pattern recognition at this point.
If you're overwhelmed, if you're in the unknown, if you just feel this sense of chaos, but you're going in the right direction, then that's good because you're going to pick up information that allows you to survive on that path.
So launch yourself into the unknown, immerse yourself in the culture, environment and information related to what you're trying to learn.
Condition your mind through repetition and exposure.
Slowly understand the lingo vocabulary and skill set of those who have seen success in that topic.
Let your mind expand through the discomfort.
The worst thing you can do is quit when you're feeling growing pains.
You aren't seeing results because you aren't the person who would see results.
This process allows you to become a new person by letting your old version die.
Like when adopting new habits, you have to get out of the old environment that fueled your bad habits.
To make this more practical, read books.
Books give you 10 years of effort from 6 hours of reading.
Consume lectures, long articles and videos give you 3 days of effort in 20 minutes.
Follow new people. This is less about consuming short form content and more about training your mind to be in that tribe of people.
Buy 3 books, one bestseller, one technical and one historical.
Burn through them and don't let your obsession die.
This may seem like a long process, but we aren't trying to learn something on a surface level.
We are trying to become masters as fast as possible.
Step 5 is to make connections to solidify understanding.
When you master one thing, it becomes easier to master others.
Principles are universal.
They overlap. When you master fitness, you can master business in half the time, and then you can master relationships in half of that.
Most people never master one domain of their lives, so they never experience exponential personal growth.
Zoom out one layer, move from Photoshop to graphic design to creative work, take note of signal when your mind signals important information, write it down, and build better projects from a new level mind, build a new project that will take you to the success you want to see.
In my own experience, my knowledge compounded when I peeled back the layers from web design to business to just philosophy in general.
I had these big picture overlapping domains like business, philosophy, health, etc.
When you learn from a big picture, you are able to notice patterns and truth much faster and actually see progress in those things.
Now, that was an abnormally long video because I didn't want to miss any bases, and to be quite honest, I could write an entire book on this.
Whenever I start writing something, I understand that everything connects, so I can connect everything, so I could write a book, and I kind of did write a book on this.
It's called The Art of Focus, so if you want that, get it with the link in the description.
But by now, I hope that you realize that a state of consciousness, like flow, connects to all of life.
It's not just neuroscience, it's metaphysics, psychology, self-improvement, and productivity all in one, and more than that, because it's a state of consciousness, right?
It comes into play with anything that you do in life.
And this alone, just the flow state, gives us incredible hints at how to live the good life.
Now, if you've watched this far, consider sharing this with a friend.
I honestly don't share videos that much, unless they're just funny or something else like that.
But with this, if you enjoyed this, and you made it this far, there's something here for you, right?
And there may be something here for your friends, and that benefits me as well.
It's mutual benefit, value exchange.
You share a video to a friend and just be like, hey, I thought this was cool.
What do you think? And then I get a view, and you guys get knowledge, it just works out both ways.
And you never know, because it might be what they need right now.
Like I wish I had those friends when I was younger, that would send me a video like this to expose me to something new in my life, rather than just like an old meme that I've seen over and over again.
Now, if you want to learn how I write these scripts for these videos, or just how I create products or how I monetize creative work, you can go to my website, thedanco.com, and check out free products, paid products, Cortex is coming in the future, which is my writing app.
And that if you want to listen to this in podcast form, you can look up the co-cast on Spotify, if you want to subscribe to the newsletter to get these early and get other emails every week or so, just on good ideas that I've been thinking about that may expand your mind and help you unlock new opportunities in life.
Subscribe to the email list.
Again, that's thedanco.com.
Aside from that, thank you for watching.
Don't forget to like, subscribe, and do what every other YouTuber tells you to do.
But until then, seriously, thank you for watching this far.
If you did, have a good one.
Bye.
