you won't be the same in 6 months

1 message

Dan Koe <dan@thedankoe.com> Sat, Dec 9, 2023 at 20:38

Reply-to: dan@thedankoe.com
To: Anonymous <subhratoddi@gmail.com>

The Koe Letter

December 9, 2023
>> Read the full letter here

Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep,
they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep,
they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the
loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence. –
Anthony De Mello

People are living on autopilot.

Everyone was assigned goals by society as a child.

Goals require a system to be achieved.

A system takes trial and error to become efficient.

You had the biological goals of walking, talking, and speaking to survive.

As simple as they are for you now, that wasn’t always the case.

Your mind received negative feedback from your environment that led to those
systems becoming efficient to achieve your goal of surviving.

Your parents either scolded you or pointed you in the right direction when you made
a mistake.

You started crawling, then stumbling around, then walking like a toddler with little
balance, and now you can (hopefully) walk like an Olympic gold medalist can flip
through the air and stick the landing – because they practiced achieving that goal
long enough.

Learning to walk is just the start.

What about the goals of going to school, getting a high-paying job, and retiring at an
age where you have little time left to enjoy your life?

Society is a behavior system.

And those are 3 big goals that they injected into your mind right when you learned to
comprehend the language you speak.

99% of people are only interpreting everyday situations in a way that leads to those
goals.

99% of people are practicing the skills and programming their minds to live a
mediocre life without even knowing it.

The masses are being shepherded to an unfulfilling life because the systems that
compose their mind, identity, perspective, and perception are becoming more
efficient as they age.

A realization people often make too late:

Success is not planned, it is automatic.

Successful people – whether they were conscious of it or not – had a mind that was
programmed to achieve the goals that led to their success.

Think of your mind as a structure of nested systems.

Your identity, perspective, and perception of situations are all systems that feed into
and reinforce each other in that order.

I am here to make you conscious of the systems that lead to automatic success in
any endeavor.

Goals > Systems

80% of living the life you want boils down to creating your own goals while most
people are mindless slaves to society's goals.

Goals change how you interpret situations, which influences your actions, which
programs your identity, which compounds over years into the good life.

You can't solve a problem unless you're aware of it.

You can't become aware of a problem unless it impacts a goal.

Most people don't have goals. Most people are afraid to make mistakes. Most
people don't give themselves a chance to improve any aspect of their life.

If you aren't clear on what you want, you can't communicate what you want to others.

This sets you up for a life of assumptions, expectations, and never getting what you
want out of life. Nobody can help you and you can't help yourself.

If you don’t invest energy into a goal, you won’t feel the pain of not reaching that
goal.

Occasional, non-alcoholic-level drinking wasn’t a problem until it took away from

achieving my goal of a fulfilling relationship.

I never saw it as a problem until I was made aware that I was acting “off” for a few
days after. I thought I was acting normal. If I had never invested energy in the goal of
a relationship, or deemed it more important than the pleasure of having a few drinks
with dinner, I never would have noticed its impact. That’s my point.

Most don’t have a clear vision of what they want from that goal, so the negative
impact of their actions goes unnoticed.

Your bad habits don’t seem worth quitting because you don’t have responsibilities
(or prioritize those responsibilities) that deserve you at 100% capacity.

If the importance of those responsibilities outweighed the pleasure of your bad

habits, you’d stop without question.

Goals are intertwined with identity.

Humans survive on the conceptual level.

We feel threatened when that which makes us, us is threatened.

A bodybuilder will feel stress and pain when they are in an environment that provides
less control over their training and diet.

A routine is a set of practical goals that order the mind. A writer who moves to a new
location or travels for an extended period of time will have a stressful acclimation
period until their mind runs on new systems. If they can’t write well in their normal
routine, they feel threatened, because “who they are” may die.

I discuss the importance of routines – even if you think you don’t need or have one –
in The Daily Routine That Changed My Life (4 Focus Habits).

The general misunderstanding here is that you either have a goal or you don't.

Your mind is a web of conscious and unconscious goals with accompanying

systems to achieve them.

You had biological goals as a child to walk, eat, and survive. It's seamless for most
people because they've practiced.

The system is efficient.

You may have cultural goals, depending on how you were raised, of fitting in and
following the safe path according to that culture.

If you were to condition yourself with new stimuli (constant self-education) to the
point of having an identity that couldn't "survive" without achieving new goals – you
would inevitably achieve whatever they are with ease. If you want a successful
business, relationship, or anything that is out of the norm, you must fundamentally
change the goals your mind operates on by changing who you are.
To change who you are you must educate, practice, and experience new information
to reprogram your mind’s faulty wiring that was installed by society.

The Mind Is A System That Helps You Achieve Your Goals

Man is by nature a goal-striving being. And because man is “built that way,”
he is not happy unless he is functioning as he was made to function – as a
goal striver. Thus true success and true happiness not only go together but
each enhances the other. – Maxwell Waltz

This quote from Psycho Cybernetics can be connected to another from Flow.

The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in

consciousness. This happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested
in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The
pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must
concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything
else. – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Humans are goal-oriented creatures.

And goals create systems.

Systems don’t exist without goals (take that, James Clear).

The mind has two key purposes for survival:

 1. Achieving known goals

2. Discovering unknown goals

The mind is an information processing and pattern recognition machine that we

have a certain amount of control over based on our level of consciousness.

The mind is a system – containing a complex set of systems – that accepts, rejects,
and uses information to aid in the goals you feed it.

If you’re always focused on negative outcomes, they will become reality, and you’ll
blame everyone but yourself for the misfortune in your life.

The man who conceives himself to be a “failure-type person” will find some
way to fail, in spite of all his good intentions, even if opportunity is 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. – Maxwell Waltz

In other words, if you think you can, you can, and if you think you can’t, you can’t.
At the root of your mind, like a puppet master, is your identity.

Identity is synonymous with self-image or personality for the sake of this letter.

Your identity is a system of ideas, beliefs, values, and standards that shape your
perspective.

Your perspective is like the lens of a camera.

You can zoom in and out.

You can focus on one part of the scene – while the background is blurred – or focus
on the detail of the entirety of the scene.

Your perspective influences your perception of situations.

Meaning, your identity will limit the information it can perceive, and if it receives
information that does not match its beliefs, values, or standards it will reject it.

Your mind automatically accepts and rejects information that aids in the
achievement of the goals that are programmed into your head.

If you want to get a job, dopamine will signal the importance of information and
opportunities that help you get that job.
Your book highlights will reflect that goal. How you approach conversations (with
anyone) will reflect that goal. What you engage with on social media will reflect that
goal (and the algorithm will help deepen the roots of that identity by showing you
more of that information, for better or worse).

If you want to quit your job, dopamine will do the same thing, but for information that
provides the opposite effect.

Your Google searches will change from “best careers to go into in 2024” to “best
businesses to start in 2024.”

Or, you'll be more compelled to check out Digital Economics where I help you
deconstruct your identity and turn it into a profitable one-person business.

Your book highlights in even something like a novel will be vastly different from
someone else with a different goal.

With or without knowing it, we are all reinforcing our potentially mediocre identity
that determines the outcome of our lives. For most people, this will be negative.

If you want to change the outcome of your life, change who you are.

If you want to change who you are, change the direction of your life.

Expose yourself to new experiences, environments, and information to allow your

mind a chance to discover new goals you can adopt that will carry you toward a
better future.

The Mastery Method – How To Learn Anything, Fast

It’s safe to say that you are going to have to learn… a lot.

Education expands your mind.

It introduces you to novel perspectives.

It increases dopamine in the brain as a consistent source of energy.

It gives you the knowledge to act with clarity toward your goals.

It exposes you to the potentials that you hadn’t yet become aware of.

A consistent flow of education increases your chances of encountering meaningful

events.

Meaningful events occur at the edge of the known, when your nervous system
signals that you should pay attention.
When you have one foot in the unknown, you can just barely metabolize new aspects
of reality and put that information to use.

Becoming the person you want to be is the most painful and rewarding process you
can dedicate your life to.

You begin this path when you realize that the pain and pleasure of where you are
now are of lesser magnitude than the pain of not receiving the rewards that come
from seeing what you are capable of.

With that, let’s discuss how to master almost anything as you trek toward becoming
a new you:

1) Expand Your Mind

All real change is identity change.

Your level of mind dictates what values, beliefs, and standards are available to your
identity.

You don’t care about global problems because you haven’t solved the personal
problems that restrict your mind from seeing them as important.

The purpose of humanity is to expand your level of mind to that of The Universe.

You must allow yourself the room to discover new goals by tossing an anchor into
the unknown.

Create a massive goal that acts as the spotlight in the unknown.

You don’t set this massive goal for practicality or achievement.

You set it for vision, direction, and filtration of opportunities.

Focus on making it as desirable as possible.

If you had all the money in the world, what would your average day look like?
What kind of environment do you want to live in? Is there a specific location?
Do you want to travel?

Do you want a family? What do you want that life to look like? Visualize an
average day of family time.

How long of a workday do you want to have? If you could do anything, what
would you do for work?
How do you want to look and feel? Describe your body, energy levels, and how
you want to present yourself to the world.
 What does your ideal day look like? Map out every hour.

List out anything else that comes to mind in terms of a specific future that you
want to build for yourself.

To make this even more potent, turn this vision into an anti-vision to round out the
perspective of your ideal self:

1. What is the bane of your existence?

2. Write out the opposite of every question about your vision.

For even more firepower, create a vision board. Add images to a scrapbook,
software, or wall that makes that future more tangible.

Remember that nothing is permanent.

You will discover inklings for your vision as you trek along this path. Be open to
changing what you want as you discover what you don’t want.

The pain of not reaching your vision should outweigh the pleasure of mediocrity.

Not only does a massive goal provide vision, it allows you a perspective to adopt
when it’s time to make a decision.

Filter every single opportunity you receive through your vision.

Say “no” to everything except for that which aligns with who you want to become.

Start short-circuiting the faulty programming your mind runs on through conscious
choice.

---

My letters are long to the point of cutting off in most email readers.

If you want to finish the letter and learn:

How to stop feeling overwhelmed to the point of procrastination at your big

goals.

The only true way to learn and acquire skills in a way that stick.
How to reinvent yourself by consuming more

How to overcome roadblocks with ease on your path

>> Finish reading the letter here (this link will skip everything you've already read).

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