[0:00]You need to be extreme if you want your life to change and the best way I can illustrate this is by talking about the story of my birthday in 2021 because I remember it vividly. This was the time when my business was actually starting to do well. I was also in the middle of losing weight because it happened after COVID, so I was 20 to 30 pounds overweight. I'd been in the gym my entire life. I didn't like how I looked. This was also a time when I was in the middle of the first draft of my first book, the Art of Focus. And the weird thing about this is I, so many things were going well. And it felt like at that time, every single weekend, there was a reason to go out and do something that would ruin my progress. Things like concerts or hanging out with friends or going out to drink, that kind of stuff, just normal life for normal people. And since I was making such good progress, I figured I could take a break. So I did. I went out, I partied, I drank, I stayed up late, I went off my diet and as you could guess. My progress didn't only slow down, it just started going downhill rapidly. Every weekend it would take me maybe four to five days for my energy and my mental capacity to recover. And by that time there was another way to slow down my progress. There was another thing to do that would slow down my progress. I couldn't think straight for writing the draft of a book and obviously my fitness habits fell off and my business started to slow down because of those two things. That was painful, but the pain wasn't excruciating enough just yet. I didn't have a reason to change. Now, for months prior to this, my friend group and I had been planning to go to Seattle for my birthday. And I was already tired of not making progress, but it was my birthday, right? So I could justify going out and having a little fun one last time. So, after a weekend of going out and doing the same thing and making very little progress, I was done. At that point, I was just so fucking mad at myself. Because when you have goals that are the most important thing in your world, they shine a light on everything you're doing wrong. The most painful thing in the world is watching those goals fade into the background as they're being replaced by goals of shallow pleasure. So, the second I got back home, I just disappeared. I didn't respond to anyone. I become unavailable. Every invitation or event in any form was just an automatic "no." I didn't even have to think twice about it. And because of that, every single action I took felt seamless. I wanted to be disciplined. It gave me joy and slowly my mind returned, my body returned, my business returned. My entire world changed in an instant. Now, why is that? The first reason is because being extreme changes your brain. There's a famous saying that summarizes a neuropsychological theory related to neuroplasticity called Hebb's Law and in a nutshell, it just says neurons that fire together, wire together. So neuroplasticity, as you may know, is your brain's ability to rewire itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. Your brain isn't fixed and rigid, it's a dynamic network that can adapt, learn and change based on your experiences, thoughts and actions. So, being extreme about changing your life helps quicken the process of neuroplasticity or changing your brain. People scream about how consistency is key, which is true due to repetition reinforcing neural pathways, but we can take it a step further than that. Novelty and challenge stimulate neuroplasticity even more. So, when you flip the switch and pursue a goal with all your might, you put your brain in an environment that quickly adapts and helps that become your new standard. The second thing is that intensity and obsession create this neurochemical cocktail in your brain. Most people fall into a rut because they seek extrinsic motivators, but when you are obsessed in the context of this discussion with a goal, you are fueled by intrinsic motivators, each of which stack and strengthen each other in a way that sustains some degree of flow, which is the state of optimal experience or one of the most enjoyable states of mind. Now, there are five of these intrinsic motivators. The first is curiosity, which is the desire to explore the unknown, learn how to change, and fill knowledge gaps. This results in good dopamine from novelty and norepinephrine, which heightens attention, preparing you to learn. The second intrinsic motivator is passion, where an intense enthusiasm is built for the path that allows you to change your life. This results in more good dopamine and norepinephrine. The third intrinsic motivator is purpose, which is the feeling that your actions contribute to something larger than yourself. Achieving goals here results in more dopamine, which reinforces behavior, and serotonin stems from significance and belonging. Oxytocin stems from connection. The fourth intrinsic motivator is autonomy, which is the desire to direct your own life and work, to control your choices, actions and environment. And this results in yet again, more dopamine and a reduction in cortisol, which is the stress from feeling put in a box, allowing for creative decision-making. And the fifth intrinsic motivator is mastery, which is the process of learning and growing, being its own reward. And this results in sustainable good dopamine that keeps you in the game. Those are the intrinsic motivators that create obsession and you will understand these more as they come into play when we talk about how to spend the next six months of your life. Now, the third point here is that your mind filters reality based on what you're obsessed with. Let's illustrate this with a quote from Maxwell Maltz.
[7:44]The man who conceives himself to be a "failure-type person" will find some way to fail, in spite of all his good intentions, or his willpower, even if opportunity is literally dumped in his lap. The person who conceives himself to be a victim of injustice, one "who was meant to suffer," will invariably find circumstances to verify his opinions.
[8:11]Our mind is wired for survival. But the interesting thing about being human is that we don't only try to protect and reproduce the information in our genes or in our DNA like animals. We do that, but we also attempt to protect and reproduce the information in our consciousness or our worldview or our concept of self. So what that means is that we feel threatened when our body is threatened, obviously, like animals, but also when our identity is threatened. So on the negative end, we notice information that reinforces our beliefs and worldview, often leading to us lashing out at those who question our religious or political beliefs. Our identity feels threatened and the brain's response sends that signal, so we feel the need to survive. Now, on the positive end, when you are identified with a goal that you are obsessed with, your mind will automatically notice opportunities in your environment to reinforce that higher version of yourself that you were becoming. An example of this is if you've ever set out to achieve a goal, like a New Year's resolution, and then you start reading a book and now you're learning things that you didn't even know existed before. You're noticing diets to try and exercises to try, and when losing weight or going to the gym wasn't a priority to you before, you didn't care about those things. They didn't even register for you. It's the same phenomenon when you hear a word for the first time and then you hear it everywhere or when you see a new car for the first time and then you see it everywhere. The point is that if you aren't obsessed with a goal, you are missing out on so much in life and so many opportunities where you're wondering, "Oh, how do I do this? How do I do that?" All I, it's it's all luck. No, you're just not obsessed with a goal. The goal that allows you to notice those things. The people who are obsessed with their goals are living in a completely different mind space than you and they don't have trouble succeeding because it's automatic. We're wired this way because our ancestors were wired this way. When our ancestors were hunting for something or they needed food, their attention was heightened and they would notice things in the environment that allowed them to survive. Now, if we look to something like cybernetics and apply that to our mind or the psyche, we can see that our mind has some form of a homing mechanism toward our goals. Our mind accepts information that helps it and rejects information that doesn't. You are steered toward your goals without much effort. So, in summary, if you are obsessed with a goal, the universe will conspire by giving you the resources to achieve it. So, we understand that being extreme or being obsessed is the best way to change your life. But how do you get to that point? Right? You're you're hearing me say, "Oh, you need to be obsessed with a goal," but what if you weren't obsessed with any goal? What if you don't care about anything? What if you don't know what to do? What if you're stuck in this rut or you just feel lost? What if you're like me, leading up to my birthday, where I was just starting to fall off track, but I didn't really notice how it was impacting my life until I finally hit that point where everything turned around? How do you hit that point and what is the reason behind it working? To understand this, we need to understand that evolution creates order from disorder. Now, this isn't interesting one because the second law of thermodynamics states that all natural processes move toward a state of greater disorder over time. In other words, this is what entropy is. It's the measure of disorder, randomness or chaos. Now here's the thing, the universe or your life just moving towards greater disorder or randomness or chaos is only half of the story. In his book, The End of Uncertainty, Ilya Prigogine makes the argument that this "arrow of time" is not just an illusion, but a fundamental feature of reality itself. When a system is pushed far enough away from equilibrium, it can become unstable. Now here's the key point: this instability can lead to a spontaneous emergence of new, complex, ordered patterns called "dissipative structures." The easiest example to wrap your head around this concept is think of a faucet and the faucet is just pouring out water and it's very chaotic. But at some point, it gets so chaotic that as it's going down the drain, it creates this whirlpool, this beautiful ordered structure of a whirlpool. That's not more chaotic, that's not more messy or more disordered, that's order that has emerged from disorder. Now, I know we're getting all scientific or abstract here, but bear with me for a second. Because there's one more thing that you need to understand and that's the fact that reality is composed of whole parts, not just parts, not just holes, but whole parts. An atom is a whole and a part of a molecule, a molecule is a whole and a part of a cell, a cell is a part of an organism, an organism a part of an environment. Or you can think of letter to word, to sentence, to paragraph, or matter to life, to mind, to soul, to spirit, or even things like the techno-economic base of a society, like foraging, to horticultural, to agrarian, to industrial, to informational societies. Now, the point that I'm trying to get at with illustrating this is that evolution creates order from chaos. As matter progressed and became more complex, life emerged, as life progressed, mind emerged, as anything becomes more developed or complex, or disordered, or messy, a new whole emerges as the ordered structure for that thing. Now, let's try to tie this all together. So when you take the concept of entropy and apply it to the mind, you get psychic entropy. In other words, the mind tends toward disorder, randomness, and chaos. So when your personal life, when you reach a point of feeling lost, or you feel like your life is falling into chaos, you are presented with an opportunity for a higher version of yourself to emerge. This isn't just some random abstract philosophy, this is directly observable in everyday life. This is exactly what happened in my story. Things became so complex, so disordered, I felt so chaotic, like I was falling into this rut, and eventually, I just hit that point. I hit the point of becoming so fed up with the progress that I was making that I had no choice but to flip the script and do the complete opposite. The reason that many people don't reach this point is because they aren't brutally aware of how their current trajectory in life is impacting their thoughts, emotions, and progress toward non-existent goals. So you need to reach the crossroads of dissonance and insight. What I mean by that is once you get a taste of where you are in life. You've gotten, you've been there for long enough, you will start to feel like you are being ripped in half, and that's exactly what you need to pay attention to. One lower part of you wants to stay the same, while one higher part of you wants to change. And as you intentionally choose to lean toward the higher, you are met by insight. You are given the answer to everything, and that leads to this insane burst of clarity that leads to obsession for a meaningful goal. That is the tipping point that pushes you into being extreme. Now, once you hit this point, this is when you disappear for six months and focus on four habits. New knowledge comes when you simply bear in mind what you need to know. Keep holding the problem in mind, and it will yield. The history of human beings is certainly a testament to that fact. An individual runs into a problem, and simply obsesses about that problem until he or she solves it. It might take a week, a month, a year, a decade, a century, or a millennium, but the cosmos appears to be such that solutions are always forthcoming. That's a quote from Ken Wilber that helps summarize this nicely, is that all problems are solvable. And that's exactly what you're doing when you go into this period of monk mode or disappearing for six months. You're obsessing over a problem. Now, on the topic of monk mode, I'm sure you're familiar with it. It's a concept that's often talked about in the self-improvement space and recently it's just become a bastardized version of its former self. Everyone has talked about it, and now since everyone knows about it, it's often reduced to this shallow definition of just cut everyone off and make money. So we're not going to do that, and in fact, we're not even going to follow the original definition of what monk mode was. What the original monk mode means is a purely ascending lifestyle, or an ascetic lifestyle. So, in the past agrarian societies, when the horse-drawn plow was invented, there was an abundance of food, and so men had the free time to pursue their own interests. So this is when things like writing and mathematics were invented, but it also gave people the time for deep contemplation, and what they found is that the divine wasn't out there or up there, but in here. And that realization led to the Axial Period. And the Axial Period refers to a pivotal era in human history—roughly between 800 BCE and 200 BCE—during which major civilizations across Eurasia independently experienced profound intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual transformations. So Socrates in ancient Greece, Gautama Buddha in India, and Lao Tzu in China. So this ascending spirituality that was created or asceticism is a view that pins the manifest world as evil. Since the kingdom of heaven couldn't be found up there or out there, money, sex, food, and pleasure were demonized. So true monk mode, the original definition of monk mode is just this. It's a period dedicated to the ascending path and self-realization. But the thing is here, we're in 2025. We have access to a lot of information, a lot of different world views, we have access to history. Any non-dogmatic person realizes that spirituality is only one piece of the puzzle. It's a very important piece, but reducing the solution to all of your problems to contemplation is just as bad as reducing the same to atoms, money, or just parts or physical things. The spiritual people who demonize the scientific materialists for reducing the world to atoms are doing the same thing. They're just reducing the world to spirit. So, instead of doing that, we're going to disappear for a period of intensity toward a better life. A period where you obsess over a problem until it's solved, and our problem here is that we want to change the entirety of our life. We need a holistic monk mode, if you will. Now, that comes in two parts: defense and offense. So we'll start with defense, which is short and to the point, which is eliminating distractions. Because focus does not only apply to work. Distractions are not only notifications that pull you away from work. The entire point of "disappearing" is to create a glitch in the matrix, to change your identity overnight. To rid yourself of the crabs and parasites that pull you down and drain you of the energy that must be dedicated to the choices that create a better future. Now, for the sake of being extreme, it's easier to change everything at once than it is to change one thing at a time. So rip the band-aid off. Stop responding to people who only take and never give. Any invitation that pulls you away from your goals should be an automatic and firm "no." Every bad habit that does not serve you stops tomorrow, no exceptions. It is an incredible feeling to choose your own limitations, to be free of that which splits your attention from the highest good you can do. Now that's defense. Now for offense, we need to form four focus habits. Because a good life stems from the pursuit of the good, the true and the beautiful. The pursuit of truth as a whole. The good is intersubjective truth, what is good for humanity or community, it's doing what's right. The true is objective truth, which is found in scientific study. And science derives data, data is experience and experience is physical, mental, and spiritual. The true is about learning and understanding how things really are. Now, the beautiful is subjective truth, the realm of aesthetics, noticing and creating beauty around you. Now there are many variations of habits that can check all of these boxes, but we're going to focus on four. The four that I think are the most impactful and easiest to focus on. So, what you're going to disappear and do for the next six months is this. One project, one book, one meditation, one workout. That checks the boxes of the good, the true, and the beautiful and each dimension of your life. So, let's start with one project. The thing that you're going to build. Your project is the thing you're going to work on. It's your work, because work is a necessary part of life that brings contrast to rest. But most people work jobs they hate, so they throw the baby out with the bath water, hoping that they will never have to work again. This is a delusion, because you will not be happy in the state of perpetual vacation, because meaning is found in contrast. If you don't work to balance out rest, then the rest becomes meaningless. You go on vacation after a month, you want to go back home, you want to get back to work. The problem is you're working on the wrong thing. And on top of that, the average person's view of what rest is, where rest is recovery, most people view it as this form of self-destruction. You lay in bed, you get fat, you eat Cheetos, you drink wine, you become a degenerate. That's not rest, that's just a recipe for burnout because you're not recovering for any form of meaningful work. So, the start of the solution is to choose one project that acts as a building block for the life you want to live. Now, this can be anything. A creative project that leads to independent work, a portfolio project that leads to a change in career. And most of the time, considering the state of AI, I at least recommend that everyone try entrepreneurship, because I know many people don't want to do that, but the way you hedge yourself against replacement is that. And because you are attempting to control the good, the true, and the beautiful in your work, you can't control that when someone else assigns you the work. Your work and the project that moves you toward creating the work you want is a representation of the good. Because entrepreneurship is the art of solving problems in other people's lives. It is how you contribute to a community or an audience of people by fulfilling a role that improves their lives. Now, obviously there is the bad side of work, which is doing work for someone else and being completely unconscious of the impact that that work is having on society or culture or the community or people as a whole. Some people are working some random desk job and don't even care or don't even notice that their company is in coordination with another one that drops bombs in another country. Your work also integrates the true, because you have to learn and actually try to get objective results for other people, and it integrates the beautiful by expressing the depths of your personality. Because the best type of business or brand is one with personality, either as one person, as a personal brand, or as a business with personality. So, spend one hour of deep work a day on a project that can change your professional life. Put it on your calendar. Work that doesn't feel like work is the intersection of what the world needs, the good, what you have experience with, the true, and what you deeply care about, the beautiful. Work, when done right, is synonymous with life. It is the central pillar of everything else you do. And that leads into number two, which is one book. Now you're bound to finish one book in six to 12 months. You can read more, but it just didn't make sense for me to say two books or three books when we're saying one project, one book, one meditation, one workout. It just didn't make sense. But if you want to change your life, you need the knowledge to do so, plain and simple. And school probably isn't going to give you that knowledge, so you need to self-educate. You need to immerse your mind in the thoughts of those who have lived the life you want to live. Now, this is simple enough. Read one book, 30 minutes a day, because learning something just because you're curious is a prime representation of the true. And as you'll find, the simple act of exploration brings novel ideas that lead to progress. Now, the third habit is one meditation. While work can be beautiful and spiritual, it is not a full replacement for a habit that maintains your connection with reality. Now, by meditation, I do not mean sitting in a dark room and closing your eyes and focusing on your breath and letting your thoughts pass. Even though that's very viable, you can do that. Meditation, for all I'm concerned, is a way of life. A way of perceiving the world through a lens of wonder and gratitude, noticing the amazing things all around you that tend to be glanced over when you are stressed and narrow-minded. The purpose of meditation in this sense is to notice depth, to escape the trap of shallow living. So, for at least 10 minutes a day, attempt to notice reality in greater detail and depth. Go on a walk and focus on the feeling of your feet on the ground. Stare at a tree and notice the detail.
[32:27]Listen deeply while having conversations. Don't just notice words, notice tone, expression, everything.
[32:38]Stare at your hand for 10 minutes straight. Yes, I'm serious, and let your mind wander deeper into the detail. Feel the water on your hands while doing dishes. Feel everything you touch for once in your life. Listen to the sound of silence or cars in the distance. Pick apart the intricate smell of even the most boring food. Don't overcomplicate this, and this leads into the last and final habit, which is one workout. And I'll let Socrates tee this one off. No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.
[33:36]Now, back to the topic of reality being composed of whole parts. One major tenant of these whole parts is that the destruction of the lower leads to the destruction of the higher. So, if we destroy Earth, then obviously humans, the level of mind is destroyed with it. Destroying the Earth is literal suicide. Another example is if a cancer cell or a virus invades the organism and eventually takes over, because we don't fix it, then it becomes sick and eventually dies. And if you remove something like a sentence from a paragraph, a lot of the times the paragraph won't make sense. Now, the point with this is that you live in your body. It should be considered your full-time job to learn about it, train it, and treat it with respect, because anything else is literal suicide. Not only that, but a lack of health shoots its impact upward into the creative ability of your mind, the quality of your work, and the depth of connections in your relationships. It's all connected. So, commit to one workout, whatever you feel the most pulled to do. Find a running program, a weightlifting program, a Pilates routine, a yoga thing, whatever. The point is to pay mind to the body that allows you to be here every single day. Those four habits can radically change your life. Those four habits can align you with the good, the true, and the beautiful. Those four habits can lead to a higher state of enjoyment through curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery. Get sick of being sick. Give yourself permission to be extreme. Disappear and come back unrecognizable. Thank you for watching this video. If you want to read my latest letter on the Death of Thoughtful Creation, how to get ahead of everyone else going into the future, you can read that on my Substack for free. And on the paid version of the Substack, I actually release the full course of the one person business launch pad. So you can go to my Substack, check out what's all there. Sign up for free or paid. That's it for this video. Thank you for watching. Bye.
