Have you ever tried to make yourself confident by repeating positive affirmations, only to realize that, after a while, you still feel just as insecure?

The way confidence works is totally different from what the self-help industry explains; they have been selling a lie for too many years now.

I realized this while listening to a podcast by Mark Manson, the author of “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck”. He exposed years of wrong approaches and made me start experiments, research, and a whole new approach to life.

This new approach made my life way simpler.

Jessica Found Something Out

Jessica asked to leave work earlier than usual. Then she got in her car, trembling. She drove slowly, as if she didn’t want to finish her journey. She didn’t play any music that day. When she finally parked on the street in front of the building, she took a deep breath and told her friend to please answer her phone in case she needed her.

She stopped outside her door, took out her keys, and froze. She couldn’t bring herself to open the door. Then she heard her. It was Martha, her husband’s ex. Martha was inside her house. She couldn’t go in. Instead, she turned around, left in tears, and went back to her car.

The following year was very hard for Jessica. She was mortified, thinking that her friends and family saw her as a failure. Five years of marriage shattered in an instant, taking her trust with it. She couldn't shake the idea that it was her fault, that she had simply never been enough.

One day she started following a meditation influencer on Instagram, and a few months later she signed up for one of her workshops. During that weekend, she was taught the power of positive thinking. In the mornings, she practiced power poses, and in the afternoons, she listened to affirmations to boost her confidence.

One day, she was at a bar and saw a guy she liked and started making eye contact. But while he was gathering his courage to talk to her, she decided to leave; she felt ugly.

The next day, she was in a work meeting and had an idea, but she didn’t dare share it. She thought she wasn’t ready.

All the motivational quotes and workshops ended up being useless. She remained trapped in the memory of how worthless she felt to her ex.

The Power Of Positive Thinking

Norman Vincent Peale was born into a humble Ohio family. He spent his early years plagued by an intense inferiority complex, depression, and self-doubt. His later philosophy was not a theory born of ease, but a personal survival mechanism he developed to conquer his own negative thoughts.

His journey took a pivotal turn after becoming an ordained minister and taking over a church in New York City during the Great Depression. Recognizing that his parishioners needed more than traditional theology to cope with economic despair, he partnered with a psychiatrist to co-found a religio-psychiatric clinic. This unique collaboration allowed Peale to combine Christian faith with modern psychological practices, forming the pragmatic framework for his book.

In The Power of Positive Thinking, Norman Vincent Peale outlines a practical, faith-based philosophy designed to help readers overcome defeat and create a life of deep satisfaction.

When the book was published in 1952, the American public was grappling with the trauma of World War II and the emerging anxieties of the Cold War. Peale’s optimism offered a tangible, methodical antidote to a culture eager for hope and mental resilience. Ultimately, Peale concluded that our circumstances matter far less than the thoughts we have about those circumstances. By testing his combination of prayer, faith, and targeted mind-renewal techniques on thousands of counseling patients, he realized that changing the mental script was the ultimate key to human flourishing.

He developed affirmations, positive visualization, and prayer as a personal way of getting himself onto the stage and delivering sermons.

That actually worked for him.

The problem came when he generalized his personal coping mechanism into a universal theory of confidence and turned it into a hugely successful self-help system.

The Problem With Positive Visualization

Gabriele Oettingen is a German psychologist whose research focuses on how people think about the future and how this impacts cognition, emotion, and behavior.

Her research shows that fantasizing about successfully achieving a goal can reduce the motivation required to achieve it.

For example, people who intensely fantasize about losing weight, getting a job, recovering from surgery, or succeeding in an exam can sometimes perform worse than people who don’t indulge in those positive fantasies.

The proposed mechanism is that mentally experiencing the reward gives you some of the psychological satisfaction before you’ve done the work.

Your brain gets a little taste of “I’ve already got it.” And therefore, some of the urgency to pursue it disappears.

The Power Poses

In 2010, a groundbreaking study captivated the world with the thrilling promise that standing in expansive "power poses" could chemically alter body biology, spiking testosterone, plunging cortisol, and triggering an immediate surge of confidence that soon became a global phenomenon through an immensely popular TED Talk. I swear my ex-girlfriend was obsessed with this; she would do all kinds of power poses first thing in the morning.

However, the scientific triumph evaporated when larger, more rigorous replication studies completely failed to reproduce these physiological effects, prompting the original researcher, Dana Carney, to disavow her own study's grandest claims. While striking a powerful pose might offer a fleeting psychological boost, it is merely a temporary shift in your emotional state rather than a foundation for true, durable confidence.

So… What Actually Creates Confidence?

A few years ago, I signed up for climbing classes. I was really excited because it was a new activity for my free time and a chance to meet new people. After the first class, where I was the only student, I was feeling very positive; I had managed to climb my first route.

The next class, four more people joined. They had more experience than me, so the instructor assigned them more difficult routes. Soon after, I started feeling bad because everything was much harder for me than for them, and I was slowing them down. I got frustrated very quickly and ended up quitting climbing altogether.

I was already very familiar with this process; I knew exactly what happened. In 2014, I was obsessed with gamification. To keep someone motivated for a long time, the key is to keep the challenge just slightly above their ability. If it’s too easy, the player gets bored; if it’s too difficult, they get frustrated.

Competing against people who were far above me killed my confidence, and no motivational phrase could have fixed that.

If we go step by step and we conquer little tasks every day, that creates self-efficacy. You accumulate more evidence, and eventually, your brain develops a generalized expectation: “When I encounter difficult things, I can probably figure them out.”

People generally imagine:

Confidence → Action → Success → More confidence

But reality is:

Action → Performance → Evidence → Self-efficacy → Confidence → More ambitious action

An important caveat: sadly, confidence is domain-specific. You have confidence in particular domains.

You can be extremely confident professionally, insecure romantically, confident socially, and terrible at sports.

So when you hear “just believe in yourself”, you can ask: Which self? In what domain? Based on what evidence?

What to do when you aren't confident?

This is the apparent paradox. If you need confidence to act, but need action to build confidence, you’re stuck.

The clearest example is Albert Bandura’s famous work with people who had severe snake phobias. Some of these people had changed their daily routines because they were so afraid of encountering one.

One participant might begin completely unable to approach a snake. The therapist would first demonstrate that they could safely interact with one while the participant watched. Then the participant might move closer to the enclosure, then stand near it, then touch the snake using some intermediary object, and eventually touch it directly.

The important thing was that the therapist didn’t simply reassure them; they guided them through progressively more difficult actions until the person performed the feared behavior themselves.

You don’t need confidence. You need a small enough action.

Is It Visualization Helpful At All?

Your brain is not stupid; it knows when you are not good at something, and it will definitely feel bad about your latest rejections.

But positive thinking techniques aren’t completely useless.

These techniques can produce a small, immediate emotional boost, a “state change” or an “emotional pump.” For example, Mark says that changing his posture or body language can noticeably make him feel a little more confident in the moment.

The clearest example is Mark’s own use of music before speaking. When he had to walk onto a stage in front of 2,000 people, he would play Oasis’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Star backstage. It made him feel more energized and helped him “get over the hump” of actually walking onto the stage. Once he was on stage, he was fine. He explicitly says that this kind of intervention does change how you feel in the moment.

Interpreting Life Is A Fine Art

Florence Foster Jenkins, an American socialite born in 1868, had a dream of becoming a great opera singer. There was only one problem. She could not sing. She had essentially no ability to carry a tune.

Yet somehow, she developed an extraordinary belief in herself. She surrounded herself with people who encouraged her, convinced herself that she was talented, and eventually began performing publicly.

In 1944, at the age of 76, Florence Foster Jenkins performed at Carnegie Hall. The concert sold out, and the audience was enormous. She walked onto one of the most prestigious stages in the world with complete confidence, apparently unaware (or unwilling to accept) just how badly she was singing. The audience laughed, some people came specifically because they knew how terrible the performance would be, and yet Florence continued. She had achieved something remarkable: she had enough confidence to do something that an ordinary amount of self-doubt would probably have stopped her from attempting.

On the other, opposite side, we have Jessica, a beautiful and warm woman who had a cheater as a husband and blamed herself for his actions. A woman who put her life on pause because she thought she was not good enough to rebuild and connect.

Who has a better approach? Neither, but Florence was closer.

Florence Foster Jenkins was detached from reality; she wasn’t competent; she was just delusionally confident to the point of lying to herself, but…

Research suggests psychologically healthy people often have slightly unrealistically positive views of themselves.

Meanwhile, people experiencing depression or anxiety can sometimes have more accurate perceptions of themselves and reality. So some degree of positive bias may actually be psychologically useful.

There’s another subtle piece: attribution. Suppose you approach someone socially and the interaction goes well. Florence thinks, “I did that. I handled myself well,” while Jessica thinks, “They were just being nice to me.” The external event is exactly the same, but the psychological result is completely different.

Florence has just generated evidence that “I can do this,” while Jessica has found a way to dismiss the experience and conclude that “That doesn’t count.” So confidence isn’t simply about accumulating positive experiences; it’s also about correctly attributing those experiences to your own abilities and actions.

You can also achieve that by using some perspective techniques, which I explained here: Emotional Management: the only skill you need to learn in 2026

As a beautiful summary of this article, here’s a video I found a few days ago:

@elitexvisionEileen Gu. Our tools & resources in bio. #elitex #motivation #mindset #inspiration #success

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Every time you suppress a negative emotion instead of processing it, you add it to an internal ‘bag’ you’ve been carrying since childhood.

Over time, that bag has become so heavy that even the smallest trigger can make you snap. This is exactly why your motivation keeps falling apart.

You likely know the cycle: over the weekend, you feel a burst of motivation and plan the ‘perfect’ week. You tell yourself, ‘Monday changes everything.’ But by Tuesday, a single stressful message triggers the anxiety again.

Suddenly, you aren’t just dealing with one text; you’re drowning in years of resurfaced trauma. Because you haven’t processed the backlog, your brain abandons your goals and retreats into ‘survival mode’, leaving you scrolling for hours just to feel safe again.

Our brains were designed to survive and thrive in nature, and we didn’t have time to adapt to the new world.

This article is going to talk about emotions in a way you’ve never heard. I will decode years of neuroscience research, so you can finally understand how to manage your emotions.

Tremors

04:30 pm - North America

A cougar is chasing a deer at full speed.

Despite being slower than the cougar, the deer is not hopeless: she could survive by using superior agility, jumping, and better stamina to evade the cougar’s short-lived bursts.

When the deer finally avoids the cougar, her nervous system is full of adrenaline and cortisol. Her brain is in emergency mode, the amygdala is active and looking for threats. If that deer doesn’t release those chemicals, she could end up being traumatized, keeping the amygdala activated, thinking that the cougar could appear anytime, even when she’s sleeping.

Only after the real threat disappears, nature gives us a wonderful lesson:

That tremor is key to avoiding trauma; it signals to the brain that the danger has passed and that stress chemicals can finally be released. Afterward, the animal returns to its natural state of awareness without the lingering paranoia that a predator might appear at any moment.

Historically, humans functioned much the same way. Threats would trigger the fight-flight-or-freeze response, we would take the necessary action, and then we would discharge the accumulated stress through physical movement.

In the modern world, however, this cycle is broken. When a work meeting triggers an old trauma, you are often forced to remain still. You stay in a ‘freeze’ state, and those trapped emotions are never given the chance to be released.

That fact opens so many questions: how can I process my emotions? Why does that tremor work? What other methods have the same effect? What is the complete picture in that process?

We will answer all of them in this article.

Learned helplessness

In 1967, at the University of Pennsylvania, psychologist Martin Seligman initiated an infamous experiment that became the basis of how we understand trauma and anxiety today.

Ivan Pavlov demonstrated that dogs salivate at the sound of a bell once they associate it with food, even if the food never appears.

While studying Pavlovian conditioning, Martin Seligman conducted an experiment where dogs were placed in a box with a divided floor: one side delivered an electric shock, while the other did not. Under normal circumstances, a dog would simply leap over the low partition to the safe side.

However, Seligman noticed that dogs who had previously been in a cage where they couldn’t escape the shock didn’t even try to jump. They just lay down and whined, even when the “exit” was wide open and clearly visible. That’s called learned helplessness.

Subsequent experiments have confirmed that humans experience a similar depressive effect when they feel a lack of control over an aversive stimulus. In one study, participants who held a "kill switch" for a distracting noise outperformed those without one, even if they never actually pressed the button. Interestingly, simply being aware that the option existed was enough to substantially counteract the negative impact of the noise.

The brain is a prediction machine; it is always learning patterns to know how to act in the future. The problem is that in the modern world, our brains are continuously learning how to identify threats that do not exist.

Trauma is usually created from a lived threat where escape was impossible. In the case of the dogs, they were traumatized because they were physically confined to the box while being attacked. In such a high-stress environment, even a 'reset' tremor cannot be effective because the threat remains active. The real tragedy of this condition is that once the cycle of helplessness is established, the subjects become psychologically blind to future solutions, even when a clear alternative is presented.

But how can we overcome the trauma when the threat is no longer there?

Perspective

Perspective is the active ingredient that transitions someone from a state of suffering to a state of processing.

It is not perspective in the sense of comparing yourself with others or “looking at the bright side”, but a mechanical shift in vantage point.

In the year 2000, neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux participated in a groundbreaking study that changed how we think about memory:

For a long time, scientists believed that once a memory was “consolidated” (stored in long-term memory), it was like a dried concrete block, permanent and unchangeable.

The study proved that memories are much more like a digital document that can be edited every time you open it.

Reconsolidation

After you think about a memory, it becomes “open to change” (labile); the brain eventually has to “re-save” it to keep it in long-term storage. This is called reconsolidation.

• The Twist: Because the memory was “unlocked,” the brain doesn’t just save an exact copy. It saves the memory along with whatever you are currently feeling or experiencing.

• The Opportunity: If you change something while the memory is “unlocked,” the brain will save the new, modified version of the memory.

Blocking Reconsolidation (Weakening Trauma)

This study sparked a lot of interest in treating PTSD. Scientists found that when you remember something traumatic, the memory becomes 'unlocked' for a short time. During that window, they can use certain medications to block the brain from saving the memory with the same level of fear.

The memory doesn’t necessarily disappear entirely, but the emotional “sting” or the fear attached to it is significantly weakened. The next time the person encounters a trauma cue, the brain retrieves the “weakened” version that was saved during the blockade.

Perspective

One day, you are talking to your best friend, and she tells you that during her youth, she had to survive a fire and almost lost her leg. You didn’t know any of this, and you are absolutely surprised. After showing some empathy, you discuss this for a few minutes, and then you move on to the next subject.

That’s perspective.

Compared to trauma, when you talk about that situation, you don’t put yourself in it. If your friend has already processed that trauma, she also won’t relive the experience.

Gaining perspective is what would have allowed the dogs to see that they were no longer trapped. There are two primary ways to achieve this shift: pharmacological intervention for extreme cases, and somatic work for long-term healing.

Extinction

So it’s clear by now that what gives us anxiety today is the result of an unprocessed emotion and an exaggerated response of your brain that’s activating the amygdala when it’s not necessary.

“Trauma” occurs when we experience events that overwhelm our system’s capacity to cope.

Now we need to discuss further how to achieve extinction, which is the gradual decrease and possible elimination of that learned behavior.

Peter Levine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing, tells a story of his “eureka” moment that happened during a clinical session in the 1970s. He was working with a patient named Nancy who suffered from debilitating panic attacks.

During a session, Nancy began to experience a massive panic attack. Levine, acting on a sudden intuition, shouted, “Nancy, there’s a tiger chasing you! Run! Run for your life!” To his surprise, Nancy began to physically kick her legs and “run” while lying down. When she finished, she began to shake uncontrollably, followed by a deep, profound sense of peace. Her panic attacks vanished after that.

Levine creates somatic work through experiences with the simultaneous activation of sensation, image, behavior, affect, and meaning. Trauma creates a fragmentation of the coherence of an experience: you can hear a ring and feel the impulse to flee unnecessarily. The here and now becomes there and then.

We know we have overcome the trauma when we say something out loud and hear it from outside of ourselves for the first time. If we are anxious about money but take the time to process that fear, our reaction will eventually change. A few months later, when a friend mentions being deep in debt, our immediate response will be empathy rather than the terrifying sensation of being trapped in that situation ourselves.

Perspective Shift

To be able to get perspective and finally get extinction, we need to follow this 5-step process:

Step One

Notice the emotions

• If you react disproportionately to something, that’s an emotion trapped

• If you avoid feelings by using specific avoidance behaviors, that’s an emotion trapped. This includes: porn, social media, drugs, etc…

The good thing is that we only need to realize that the emotion is there. We don’t necessarily need to understand what is causing it.

Step Two

Name your behavior

What you are doing to avoid the emotion, or to cope with it, is a bad behavior that you need to label:

• Overthinking (rumination)

• Analysis paralysis

• Drug addiction

• Doom scrolling

• Performing (a survival strategy where a person uses their personality, achievements, or social utility to keep their internal emotional debt from collapsing into a breakdown)

• Controlling

• Serving others excessively

• Procrastination

• Infinite Investigation (part of the analysis paralysis)

Step Three

Let your body be

We need to finish the movements physically, that means letting the body shake, tremble, cry, running, etc…

After labeling an emotion, we need to fully feel it, and only after that is finished, we can use the neurogenic tremors (what the deer did).

The umbrella term to categorize these kinds of movements is “somatic work”, and there are all kinds of them that we can use to process and get perspective:

• Structured breathwork

• TRE (Tension, Stress, and Trauma Release)

• Vagal toning

• Extended Exhale Protocols

• Cold Exposure

I find it extremely useful to do high-intensity exercise after feeling strong negative emotions; it helps your system reset. But also starting your day with it will prepare your system to endure.

Step Four

Stop adding new emotions to the bag

You need to feel things, don’t say you are fine when you are not.

Every time you feel a negative emotion, take 10 seconds to feel it.

You don’t need to intellectualize or even understand the emotion; you just need to feel it and name it. Once your nervous system learns that emotions can be processed, it will stop storing them as trauma.

After doing this, do some somatic work.

Step Five

Get a witness

Talk to someone about your emotions. That person should just listen as a witness and not try to solve any of your problems.

A New You

When I first learned about this process, I was frustrated that we weren't taught this in school. Understanding how our minds work is essential to managing our daily lives and performing at our best.

I will highly recommend re-reading, saving this article, and summarizing it on paper; just reading alone is not enough to remember something, you need to get active.

Here’s my own summary of what you can do every day to resolve emotions:

• Notice negative emotions when they show up; they can appear as thoughts, but also as pressure on the stomach or chest.

• Name the emotion.

• Feel the emotion completely, give yourself a few seconds to process it.

• Name the distractions or habits that you use to try to forget those emotions.

• Move your body.

• Do somatic work to signal your brain that you’re safe and to gain perspective.

• Talk to someone about what you felt.

References

From Pavlov to PTSD: The extinction of conditioned fear in rodents, humans, and in anxiety disorders

Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights from Neuroscience

Learned Helplessness on Wikipedia

Why You Can’t Relax - Emotional DEBT

I once knew a guy named Daniel who was incredibly intellectually impressive. He could break down complex political systems, reference history with precision, and explain human behavior better than almost anyone I had met. In every discussion, he seemed like the smartest person in the room. But as the years passed, I noticed that Daniel never really acted on any of his ideas. While he kept analyzing and explaining the world, others around him were starting projects, building companies, and changing their environments.

After seeing this pattern again and again, it started to change how I think about knowledge. The people who understand the world the best are not always the ones who change it. That realization forced me to ask a more fundamental question: what actually separates those who merely understand from those who act and move things forward?

IQ predicts income, as you could imagine, but only up to a point. Around $60,000 a year, the correlation flatlines. Above that threshold, intelligence no longer explains why some people pull away from everyone else. Something else takes over.

But the things we are optimizing for (more knowledge, more understanding, more intellectual depth) are also not the final variable that separates extreme performers from everyone else.

So what is?

That’s the question this article is actually about. Not how to become smarter. Not how to read better or think more clearly. But how to take everything you already know and turn it into something that moves the world, not just your mind.

That’s what a dangerous intellectual actually is. And it has very little to do with how much you’ve read.

Cognitive Tunneling and The Einstellung Effect

Imagine you were born in Pakistan in 1995. As a child, the world you observe around you defines what you believe is possible. You see relatives becoming government employees, shop owners, taxi drivers, teachers, or engineers. Maybe someone opens a small textile business, joins the army, or emigrates to the Gulf for work. These paths become the mental map of “what life looks like.” Your ambitions naturally align with the examples available in your environment.

This is how cognitive tunneling forms. Your mind unconsciously filters reality, assuming that the opportunities you see are the only realistic ones. You might never consider becoming a startup founder, a global content creator, a remote software engineer working for companies abroad, or someone building an online business that reaches millions. The world feels small not due to a lack of intelligence or ambition, but because the range of visible models shapes the limits of what you believe you can become.

In contrast, now imagine a brilliant student growing up in France who excels at school from an early age. Teachers constantly reward him for giving the correct answer, following the method taught in class, and performing well on standardized tests. Over the years, he has become extremely skilled at solving problems the approved way. By the time he reaches university, he can analyze complex systems, quote academic papers, and apply sophisticated frameworks better than most people around him.

But something subtle has happened along the way. Because he has spent years mastering the “correct” methods, his mind instinctively returns to the same patterns whenever he faces a problem. Even when a simpler or more creative solution exists, he keeps applying the familiar frameworks he already knows. Psychologists call this the Einstellung Effect: when previous knowledge and experience make it harder to see new possibilities. Ironically, the very expertise that made him intellectually impressive also narrows the range of solutions he is able to consider.

The environment writes the first draft. Education writes the second. Both drafts say the same thing: stay within what’s been done before.

The dangerous intellectual is the one who learns to read both drafts critically and then writes their own.

Leaving Daniel Behind

I spent a long time being Daniel.

During my twenties and early thirties, I read obsessively. I spent months planning. I could hold a conversation on almost any subject: psychology, philosophy, politics, business, technology, etc. I understood, at a theoretical level, why certain people succeeded, and others didn’t. I had frameworks for everything.

And for years, that felt like progress (but in reality, it was just overthinking).

The moment I realised it wasn’t, I was in a conversation with someone very young and misinformed. He hadn’t read half of what I had. His frameworks were simpler, his references fewer. But he had built an app that people used, something that existed in the world outside his head.

The reading was real. The thinking was real. But somewhere between understanding and acting, something was convincing me that I wasn’t ready yet. That one more book about entrepreneurship, one more framework, one more degree of clarity would finally make the moment right.

Spoiler alert: It never did. The moment doesn’t arrive. You have to make it.

Fresh Ideas From Uncommon Places

In the 1840s, a Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that women giving birth in wards run by medical students were dying at dramatically higher rates than those assisted by midwives. He identified the cause: doctors were performing autopsies and then delivering babies without washing their hands. He had the data. He had the pattern. He published his findings.

The medical establishment ignored him completely. The dominant framework said disease came from an imbalance of bodily humors, not invisible particles on unwashed hands. Their expertise made the correct answer invisible. Semmelweis died in a psychiatric institution, largely unrecognised. Germ theory was confirmed decades later.

When hip hop emerged in the South Bronx in the late 1970s, the music industry didn’t take it seriously. Executives who had spent decades understanding what music was couldn’t process what DJs were doing with turntables in community centres. It didn’t fit the framework. It wasn’t even considered music by many insiders.

The people who built hip hop into the dominant cultural force of the last forty years weren’t constrained by what music was supposed to sound like. They were constrained only by what they could make work in a room full of people on a Friday night. Reality was their feedback loop, not industry consensus.

This dynamic affects intellectual individuals on a personal level, too. Many people who read extensively, analyze systems, and understand the world deeply can become trapped in analysis loops. They continuously refine their understanding of reality, but the frameworks they rely on become so dominant that action feels risky or premature. In other words, they become excellent interpreters of the world but hesitant experimenters.

Escaping The Trap

The most effective thing you can do is shrink the distance between thinking and testing to almost nothing. Not planning to test, actually testing.

A researcher named Peter Skillman once ran an experiment where he gave different groups the same challenge: build the tallest possible structure using spaghetti, tape, string, and a single marshmallow. MBA students almost always lost. Kindergarteners almost always won. The children didn’t plan. They built, failed, adjusted, and built again. The MBA students spent most of their time planning the perfect structure and ran out of time before testing whether it worked.

The marshmallow always goes on top. And it always reveals whether the structure holds.

Most intellectuals spend their entire careers planning the perfect structure. The dangerous ones put the marshmallow on early, watch what collapses, and rebuild faster than anyone else in the room.

Here are some ideas to escape this cognitive trap:

Build a small audience around one specific idea. The intellectual who owns a concept in people’s minds has more leverage than the one who knows everything about everything. Narrow is powerful. Wide is forgettable. The pure practice of building an audience will help you practice agency.

Look for continuous feedback. Feedback kills creativity only when you choose the wrong audience. One sharp person asking the right question can collapse six months of circular thinking in ten minutes. Today, you can use AI to pressure-test your ideas, poke holes in your reasoning, and force you to articulate what you actually mean before it matters.

Put your thinking where decisions get made. Most intellectuals write for other intellectuals. Write one piece aimed at people who control budgets, run organisations, or set policy. One person in the right position, reading the right argument, changes more than a thousand nodding subscribers.

Attach yourself to a problem, not a discipline. Disciplines are academic territories. Problems are where things actually move. The intellectual who says “I study philosophy” has no agency. The one who says “I work on why organisations fail to change” gets invited to rooms.

Get close to people who execute. Not to become them, but to understand what actually stops things from happening in the real world. Surrounding yourself with wonderful people who execute will immediately put your brain into execution mode.

Write the memo nobody else will write. Every organisation, every industry, every community has a conversation everyone is having privately, and nobody is having publicly. The intellectual who names it first owns the narrative. This is how thought leaders actually get made, not by being the smartest, but by being the first to say the unsayable clearly.

Build one relationship outside your field every year. Influence travels across disciplines. The ideas that change industries almost always come from someone who understands two worlds well enough to connect them.

Let’s Run An Experiment Together

If you reached the end of the article, I would like you to join me in the comments, saying out loud what you have been overthinking and what of the previous ideas can help you bypass that block.

This strategy is a double psychological weapon: on one side, you will be writing about the technique you want to practice, which will make your brain remember it better; on the other side, this can give you immediate feedback, I will reply to you, and others can too.

What are you going to do this week? Not when the moment feels right, not when the idea is fully formed, not when you're finally ready.

References

https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/442975-do-you-make-much-more-money-than-others-because-you-re-smarter

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691825003853

My initial thoughts were that this “millionaire” guy was going to be destroyed, especially because he is 21 years old and selling courses on the Internet, a classic scam pattern.

But I was immediately humbled by the guy. Especially because the people invited to discuss with him were obnoxious and suffered from an extremely obvious victim mentality, which I found really sad.

Over the next few days, YouTube kept suggesting these kinds of videos, and I noticed the same pattern in all of them: people who hate their lives usually have a past full of poor decisions and a negative mindset.

But beyond that, after watching several videos, I identified four mindset patterns that clearly set these successful people apart from most others.

Positivity To The Point of Disrespect

Whenever you hear a wealthy person giving advice on how to succeed, certain clichés tend to come across as a bit disrespectful.

Millionaires sound too positive, especially with phrases like “You need to work very hard” or “Just declare it, and it will happen to you”.

But the hard truth that I came to understand after meeting some really successful people in person is that they really believe in this.

When other people are looking for excuses, and they are sad about their lack of opportunities, crazy positive people are just looking for opportunities all around.

A big part of success in life could be attributed to, of course, being born rich, and at the same time, effort by itself is not a guarantee of anything. However, having the right mindset for success is the foundation upon which everything is built.

They Firmly Believe In God

According to Harvard Business Review, many entrepreneurs believe in God, with studies suggesting they are more likely to pray frequently and feel closer to God than the general population, often using faith to navigate high-risk uncertainty.

If you think about it, building a business is probably amongst the most difficult things for a human being. They need to deal with a lot of uncertainty, stress, and risk, so it feels only natural that they look for superior guidance in their day-to-day.

I’ve been a Christian my entire life, and a big reason I create this kind of content while working as a software engineer is that I feel a sense of calling.

They Withstand Criticism and Stress

When you put yourself out there, you receive a lot of criticism. I remember being accused of all sorts of things in some of my articles.

There was a guy who opened my newsletter page at least once a month, even when I was not publishing, to put a comment telling me I was a loser, I was fake, or whatever insult he could come up with. That happened until I blocked him.

Not only that, but being an entrepreneur can be very stressful, especially because you don’t have a manual of instructions and are solely responsible for all of the business decisions.

People with high resistance to change and stress are usually the most successful in any area of life.

They Know How To Sell, Working Closely With People

Understanding that companies are full of politics took me more time than I’m willing to admit.

Even if you are working in a physics lab as a scientist, your everyday life will be full of politics and people who might want you down.

Learning how to navigate this early in your career can be highly beneficial, but for someone building a company, it is key from the very beginning.

One of the most difficult things to do, even if you are extroverted, is reaching out to potential clients when you’re not used to it, but it is the only way of building relationships.

When you look closely at how businesses operate, whether B2B or B2C, everything is built on trust, and earning that trust requires genuine two-way communication with your potential customers.

As a final message after watching all of these videos, I would tell you something that can be helpful in whatever situation you are in right now.

When I look back 10 years ago and think about everything that was making me anxious back then, I feel a little bit ashamed. Those problems look stupid now, but they didn’t look stupid back then; in fact, many of them felt life-threatening.

Viewing every situation in your life as a test of your endurance that will help you grow can be a helpful mental exercise.

Humans have been through all sorts of difficult times, but somehow, with our free will, we can thrive and become people we are not even able to recognize.

Don’t let a victim mentality take space in your mind; keep working hard and following your heart.

I had a family emergency that triggered a lot of anxiety at the very moment that we were passing through one of the worst waves of online toxic speech: the cryptobros of AI basically predicting the end of humanity as we know it.

Now that the waters are calmed, I look back, thankful for all the knowledge I accumulated through years of writing about peak performance. The protocols literally saved me and kept me productive during this stressful situation.

In this article, I wanted to talk to you about an idea that really resonated with me during these days: rejecting averageness.

Most guys will live and die without ever doing anything truly remarkable. They'll work jobs they tolerate, take vacations to places everyone's been, and fill their free time with Netflix and social media.

From How to Be a Modern Renaissance Man

Life can sometimes feel like an endless race where, no matter how much effort we put in, we only move forward a little. We work hard, try to improve, and still feel like our careers are falling behind.

But if there’s one lesson from this newsletter, it’s that the biggest limitation isn’t time, intelligence, money, or luck; it’s the mental models we operate with. Again and again, we see that highly successful people have the same 24 hours we do. What sets them apart is how they think, how they decide, and the standards they choose to live by.

To the people who joined the challenge: I will contact you this week. I have great news.

The Moment You Lose

Let’s be honest: most people don’t like to think. They move through life on autopilot, following the next thing they’re supposed to do, the next expectation, the next convention. And that’s exactly where they lose, because they never stop to question the script they’re living in.

I know this well because I used to live that way too. In my early twenties, I was operating completely on automatic. I tried to please people I didn’t even like, followed social rules I didn’t believe in, and felt this constant frustration of putting in effort while getting nowhere close to the life I actually wanted.

I remember one moment very clearly. When I was at university, I joined student politics mostly to socialize, to have something to do, to feel like I belonged somewhere. I ended up in a political group where I never quite fit. Most of them came from a different background, a different social circle (their families were wealthy), and I always felt like an outsider. Eventually, things got so bad that I didn’t even choose to leave; they pushed me out.

But that turned out to be one of the best things that could have happened. Instead of quitting, I joined a small group of friends and we started our own movement from scratch. No resources, no status, no advantage. And somehow, against all expectations, we won the university elections with a record number of votes.

That experience stayed with me because I realized something deeper: I had no idea what forces were shaping my life. I didn’t understand why I was rejected in one place and successful in another. I didn’t understand why relationships didn’t work, why money felt so hard to make, or why I constantly felt lost about where I was going.

That confusion turned into an obsession.

I needed to understand the patterns behind everything: status, success, rejection, opportunity, timing.

I needed clarity because without clarity, life just feels like random wins and random losses.

Clarity

Things have changed a lot in the last few years, but the underlying principles haven’t. The kinds of personalities that thrived 100 years ago are the same ones that will thrive in this new era of humanity. Discipline, clarity, courage, independence of thought, those traits don’t go out of style, even if the world around them changes completely.

What has changed is the amount of noise.

Today, people living on autopilot are more lost than ever, because understanding yourself (and the world) has become incredibly difficult under the constant pressure of social media, trends, opinions, and endless comparison. When your mind is always reacting, scrolling, consuming, and adjusting to what everyone else is doing, you never get the distance you need to see your own life clearly.

Social media can be incredibly toxic, from TikTok to Reddit to Instagram. Not because the platforms themselves are evil, but because so much of what you see there isn’t real. You’re constantly exposed to filtered lives, exaggerated success, half-informed opinions, and people with questionable ideas gaining influence simply because they know how to capture attention. At the same time, politicians, companies, and algorithms are all competing for your focus, each trying to manipulate what you think, what you want, and what you should care about.

The result is that you end up feeling like you have to keep up with everything, every trend, every opinion, every war, and that pressure makes it harder than ever to think clearly about your own life.

High-Risk Adventures

Most advice will tell you that you should calm down, meditate, and journal. But at this point, I will tell you the opposite: forget everything else. Delete your social media, live life to the fullest, and try the things you have always wanted to try.

Do the things you’ve been postponing for years. Try what you always thought was “not for you.” Learn with the curiosity of a child, not with the pressure of an adult who feels late to everything. If you use AI, use it because you want to create something new, not because you’re afraid of being left behind.

Ride a horse, join a martial art, learn to dance, go on Route 66, or just create a TikTok account to show your personal project. Build something, show your work, embarrass yourself. That’s how you find your direction again.

In this new era, information is everywhere, but taste and originality are rare. The people who stand out won’t be the ones who followed every rule; they’ll be the ones who actually lived, experimented, and paid attention to what felt real to them.

Join us here if you want to do this challenge with the community. And thank you for being here.

Every day that you daydream of starting a new diet, learning a new skill, or entering a new club is a wasted day.

Writing 70,000 words into your second brain, only to let them sit there untouched, quietly collecting digital dust, is not useful at all.

That’s mental masturbation.

I have been exactly like you; I’ve been daydreaming my whole life. Some days ago, I opened a drawer in my house and discovered a notebook with notes from six years ago. Everything was the same as I wanted to do a year ago, just with different words.

Organizing your Notion is not the answer.

Opening a new chat with GPT is not the answer.

Taking more notes is not the answer.

Here’s a profound idea:

Modern life was designed to keep you lazy; the real great people are actually trying, failing, and trying again.

Human Motivation

Don’t try to overcomplicate things; human motivation is very basic. We still have our ancient brains working 24/7.

Your brain is always optimizing to meet your physiological and safety needs first.

But because we live in a modern society with those needs covered most of the time, you’re consciously trying to optimize for the rest of the pyramid: love, esteem, and self-actualization.

The thing is, those are very easy to cover artificially:

You have Tinder and porn for love, Instagram for esteem, and Notion for self-actualization.

Killer combination.

The result is that you’re doing nothing in reality but artificially filling your brain with the illusion of it.

Some years ago, I read an article about the best motivation technique of all, and the author told a story that I’ll never forget:

My parents died when I was young, so I had to look out for my little sister from a very young age. Do you think I had time to watch motivational videos? I had to survive for her, and that was the motor that brought me here.

Procrastination

You procrastinate because you overthink.

When you overthink, you need time to rest.

When you need to rest, you have social media and cheap distractions.

And the cycle continues forever.

There’s something about personality, too, of course, not everything is social media. I’ve met crazy people who have a strong internal locus of control. They really believe that they can control their destiny, so they act.

But the good news is that that’s trainable.

You’re ambitious, right? That’s why you’re reading this article. Trust me, with the right motivation and training, you can change the person you are entirely.

But to do that, you first need to be convinced that you need to change. I can’t do that for you, but that’s necessary.

I’ve met hundreds of people in real life who want a goal that’s already super easy to get for me, and when I try to teach them the way, they just nod and return to their mediocre lives. Most people in the world are like that.

To stop procrastinating, you need to become an entirely different person, one who identifies with building, not with planning.

Disconnect

I absolutely loved this comment in my last post from :

I’ve said it hundreds of times, even when I myself do not comply with this rule as I should: you need to go off the grid.

The Internet is not real.

Every time my mind goes into a fatalistic rabbit hole, the ones that convince me that the world has no future, I go for a walk in the city, and everybody is living their lives normally. Then I realize that it is a fake rhetoric.

Stop overconsuming information.

Most people who write about negative things on the Internet are either losers or have ulterior motives. You are not like that.

Have in mind that it’s not only Instagram or TikTok, you even need to be careful here! Any social media algorithm can mess with your mind.

Challenge

Do it for a single week, just that.

Write the rules of your week on paper, leave it in a visible place, comply like crazy.

Don’t give your mind an excuse to be distracted; delete apps.

Reserve at least 2 hours a day for your personal projects.

Keep doing it.

You will demonstrate to yourself that you can do it, and you will end up becoming the person that people look up to.

As I mentioned in my previous article, “Day 1 of 100: Engineering Myself To Thrive In the AI Revolution”, the Life Protocols will play a central role in this journey.

Today, I finally want to share that with you.

These are the Life Protocols.

Read more

On a winter night in 1811, in Nottinghamshire, England, a group of men gathered with a plan that required precision worthy of a modern heist.

By morning, some of them would be fugitives. In the months that followed, some would face public trials, others would be hanged, and some would escape back to their miserable lives.

England was strained by years of costly warfare against the French Empire during the Napoleonic Wars. The economy faltered, and working families sank deeper into hardship. Protests spread across industrial towns, but the government responded with military force.

Amid this tension, a new fear took shape: automation. Textile machines (wide, mechanical looms) could now do the work of many skilled laborers. Groups of workers began to organize in secret, slipping into factories at night to smash the frames that threatened their livelihoods. They came to be known as the Luddites.

The repression was swift and severe. Frame-breaking became a capital offense. Troops guarded factories. Trials were held publicly as warnings.

On 27 February 1812, in the House of Lords, Lord Byron spoke in defense of the suffering workers, condemning what he saw as cruel policy and indifference:

“I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey; but never, under the most despotic of infidel governments, did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return, in the very heart of a Christian country.”

Yet history carries its ironies. Byron’s own daughter, Ada Lovelace, would later take a different view of mechanization, especially of the potential of those very kinds of machinery the Luddites feared, the punched card loom.

In this video, you can see how it works:

Video by darksideoftheloom

Ada inherited her father’s creative temperament, but she directed it toward a different frontier. While many around her viewed the new machinery with suspicion, she saw possibilities.

After attending a scientific exhibition as a young woman, she struck up a friendship with the polymath Charles Babbage, who was consumed by the ambition to build calculating machines that could operate automatically. Drawing inspiration from the punched-card mechanism used in industrial looms, Babbage designed what would become the blueprint for the first general-purpose computer.

Ada was captivated by the concept. She understood that such a machine could do more than calculate numbers; it could eventually create music and videos. In her notes on Babbage’s Analytical Engine, she outlined a sequence of instructions for the machine to follow, effectively writing what is now considered the first computer algorithm.

In doing so, Ada Lovelace became the first programmer in history, not by resisting technology, but by imagining what it could become.

This pattern happened other times in history:

When ATMs arrived in the 1970s, everyone predicted mass unemployment for bank tellers. The headlines wrote themselves. But what actually happened is that banks opened more branches because transactions became cheaper. Teller numbers actually increased for two decades. The profession, however, was transformed. Tellers stopped counting cash and started helping with mortgages, investments, and complex financial products.

Which brings us to this moment in history, in which, following in Ada’s footsteps, instead of stressing about the advance of technology, we are going to explore the frontiers of humanity in symbiosis with AI.

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A New Adventure

Today, we are at the mercy of Big Tech, outdated governments, and unethical people.

We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.

Edward O. Wilson

Being a stoic myself, I know that the only thing I can do is work on myself, which is why I want to create the best version of myself to be ready for these changes and increase my chances of success.

To create the best version of myself with AI, I will run a 100-day challenge in which I will try many techniques, while also using my own Life Protocols to become the best person I can be.

If you also want to transform yourself and do this challenge, join me here.

To do that, I will start with the most basic problem modern humans have:

In today’s digital world, we are seeing a collapse of attention; in a few seconds, we forget the last reel we watched. We experience hundreds of different emotions in minutes in our brains that did not evolve for this load.

Recent research supports that taking breaks from social media can improve sleep and physical health.

A study published in Behavioral Sciences reports that participants slept longer and experienced better sleep quality after a social media detox.

Here are the problems I will address with the help of AI and several apps:

• Excessive use of social media

• Lack of motivation

• Loss of focus

• Lack of purpose

• Cognitive load

• Identity erosion due to AI

• Increased career competition

To do that, I’ll explore a range of apps and AI tools to create structure, accountability, and direction, but at the same time, I’ll draw on timeless wisdom to navigate this ocean of uncertainty and carve out my own path.

Designing a New Me

In 2013, author Chris Bailey began a series of experiments on himself, pushing his limits in unusual ways, like meditating for 35 hours in a single week or watching 70 hours of TED Talks over the same period. After years of studying productivity and documenting his findings on his blog, he uncovered countless insights. But if I had to distill them down, they come down to a few key ideas:

• Real productivity comes from autonomy, mastery, purpose, happiness, rest, reflection, and meaningful work (which coincides with the teachings of Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning)

• Your Mind Is Limited, Irrational, and Hackable. Attention is scarce. Memory is unreliable. We avoid conflict. We fear judgment more than failure.

• Growth Comes From Discomfort, Failure, and Pushing Limits. Fail faster. Seek moderate conflict.

• Meaning, Relationships, and Tribe Matter More Than Status.

• Stay Curious about Technology, Humanity, and the Universe. Innovation comes from curiosity.

In my pursuit of becoming a better, more capable version of myself, I’ve created a set of Life Protocols, practical guidelines I follow in moments of friction or crisis. For example, I have a specific protocol for when I start feeling sleepy while working from home, another for when inspiration runs dry, and others for different recurring challenges.

Now, bringing all this knowledge together, I’m going to define a clear set of rules to guide me on this journey to become a superhuman and avoid obsolescence.

The list is a bit more complex, but I could simplify it like this:

• I will disconnect from noisy technology as much as possible

• I will update my career skills to be ready for the future

• I will try all sorts of mindfulness techniques and apps

• I will be open to the AI symbiosis

• I will connect more with people

• I will work on a project that can change many lives

Supernatural Tools

Keeping up with the pace of AI model development is already a full-time job. But in the first quarter of 2026, the new “cool kid on the block” is OpenClaw, a tool that feels almost magical, capable of running AI agents 24/7 to handle tasks on your behalf.

Peter Steinberger, an Austrian developer, sold his company for over $100 million, only to spend the next three years navigating an existential crisis in Madrid. During that period, he rebuilt himself personally and eventually returned from retirement to experiment relentlessly, launching 43 failed projects before his 44th attempt, OpenClaw, which gained viral traction.

People are using OpenClaw for all sorts of things, like running 24/7 marketing, creating endless content, or even buying a car by negotiating with multiple dealers:

But, to be honest, as several users on X have pointed out, much of the excitement seems driven by novelty and FOMO. OpenClaw is genuinely useful in scenarios that require automating complex or repetitive operations, but it’s far from a magical solution to life’s problems, at least not yet.

But I’m still going to be open-minded and test a lot of AI tools in the search for the perfect human augmentation. At the same time, I’ll also try some paid programs that can help me with this.

• Overlord - An AI app that controls your entire phone to keep you accountable

• Endel - an AI-powered sound app that generates personalized ambient audio in real time to enhance focus, relaxation, and sleep.

• Tiago Forte (Building a Second Brain)

• ChatGPT, Cursor, and Claude (no OpenClaw for now until I find a use case that’s useful for me)

• My own Life Protocols and the Alter Ego guide

• Anki (with AI-generated cards)

• Claude's official certifications

• Maven courses about agentic workflow

• Reflect App (AI journaling)

  • Daily logs

  • Pattern detection

  • Emotional analysis

If you also want to transform yourself and do this challenge, join me here.

The Final Test

Many psychologists warn that if you spend too much time thinking about thinking, you can spiral into a loop of sadness. The antidote is movement: building something. So I will be using this experiment as an opportunity to finally create a program that consolidates all of my Life Protocols for motivation into a single app.

Five years ago, I wrote an article titled “I Hate Being a Software Engineer,” and it went viral. At the time, I was going through a work crisis. I felt stuck on a plateau, dissatisfied with both my work and my life. That discomfort pushed me into deep research: I became obsessed with understanding the human mind, the nature of purpose, and what it means to become the best version of yourself.

As an engineer, I approached the problem systematically. I began writing about how to find purpose and do great things, which gradually evolved into the themes behind this newsletter.

I discovered that people are happiest when they work toward goals bigger than themselves. And they become their strongest selves while struggling toward those goals, whether that goal is curing cancer or raising a child.

There are countless unwritten “life rules” that no one formally teaches, yet they shape everything. That’s why I’m running these experiments with you, to uncover them, test them, and build something real from them.

If you’ve made it this far, I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments.

A couple of years ago, I was at an improvised networking event after a marketing talk, where everyone was pretending to be important.

There was this guy who was wearing a sack jacket that was clearly not his size, thick glasses that only worsened his disheveled aura, and, of course, a weird hairstyle. Let’s call him Mark.

Mark approached a group and positioned himself next to an attractive blonde woman who attended the talk, let’s call her Hanna. Hanna had the presence of a natural predator, a she-wolf who could devour anyone in her path; you could see it in her confidence.

Mark positioned himself to face her and ignored the rest of the group. It was an awkward situation, especially because she didn’t know him, and she wanted to talk with the rest of the people.

He started talking to her about something that looked absolutely boring.

A few minutes later, Hanna was visibly annoyed by Mark when another guy (another wolf) approached the group.

He said to everyone:

Did you see what just happened in the corridor?

Hanna knew he was lying, but she wanted to watch his act.

Everybody turned to him to hear what happened. Everybody but Mark, who was still trying to talk to Hanna.

A few minutes later, due to this mysterious man, the group ended up discussing philosophy and religion. As everyone laughed and grew interested in him, the mysterious man said, “Excuse me, but I need to leave.” The group was disappointed…

Then, in front of everyone, Hanna said: Wait, what’s your number?

Mark was speechless.

I know very well the type of people like Hanna and that mysterious man. I know what they had for breakfast and their biggest fears, because I’ve surrounded myself with wolves.

Since I was a child, I’ve admired the kind of people whose presence is felt the moment they enter a room, and I’ve spent my life living alongside them. Eventually, I gradually became one of them.

Let’s uncover the minds of the wolves and bury that Mark you have inside.

Break Limits

Becoming an interesting person will earn you enemies; if you want to be one, you need to live with that. I’m pretty aware of this when I write my articles; all the time I lose subscribers because I say things they don’t like, but that’s ok, the right people will stay, more people will come, and I will keep telling the truth.

A friend of mine, a writer on Medium, was always concerned about losing subscribers (Medium notifies you when you lose a subscriber). She would spend days thinking about what could have offended them until I told her to turn off that feature, because it was blocking her. Now she’s a strong writer and seller, and she doesn’t care a dime anymore (although she knows I don’t like her purple hair).

How is that making you more interesting? Firstly, because nobody likes an insecure person who is trying to please everybody, and secondly, because an interesting person will live with uncomfortable truths.

An interesting person will swim comfortably in an ocean of contradictions, conundrums, and deep knowledge. You cannot be politically correct all the time.

If you think about it, the funniest people in the room are often the ones who dare to say what everyone else is quietly thinking but hesitates to express. Humor lives at the edge of comfort. It requires sensing where the boundary is, and then stepping just close enough to it without falling over. The joke works because it carries a small risk; it exposes tension, contradiction, or truth that others were too cautious to touch.

Engineer Your Life

If you want to become a connoisseur or a polymath, you cannot live the life following the latest celebrity gossip or political conundrum. No, Marta, you’re not a better person because you know the last detail of the latest Billie Eilish scandal (Yeah, I know what happened against my will).

To be able to hold a conversation about almost anything, you have to try many things and read across a wide range of subjects. I’ve intentionally engineered my life around that idea: I’ve been interviewed on television several times, led student movements, given speeches, learned to dance several styles, managed software development teams, raced sports cars, done the fool in public several times, etc.

Do you want a nice way to start?

Over the past few years, I’ve created a ritual of watching the Nobel Minds every January 1st. That’s a conversation between the Nobel Prize winners, where they discuss humanity’s current problems and often disagree or debate with one another.

Do you want to go deeper?

Read some random Wikipedia articles with this website and learn about things you would never search on your own.

Ready to do it daily?

Leverage the power of habits and set an hour of your day to just read, no scrolling, use it as your personal meditation hour.

Expose Yourself

Every winter, thousands of students step into hotel conference rooms dressed in suits slightly too big for them, carrying folders full of research and nerves. They are attending Harvard Model United Nations, one of the largest and most prestigious Model UN conferences in the world, organized by students from Harvard University.

For four intense days, they become ambassadors, negotiators, and crisis responders. They debate wars they didn’t start, draft resolutions for problems they didn’t create, and defend countries that aren’t their own. The room feels theatrical at first, but quickly it becomes real. Alliances form. Tensions rise. Compromises are made at 2 a.m. over cold pizza and unfinished clauses.

What HMUN really teaches isn’t foreign policy; it’s composure under pressure. Students learn how to speak when their voice shakes, how to disagree without collapsing into conflict, and how to think strategically in a room full of competing incentives. They discover that intelligence alone isn’t enough; you need persuasion, empathy, preparation, and resilience.

By deliberately placing yourself in unfamiliar or demanding social environments, you become more interesting almost automatically. Whether it’s attending a Timeleft dinner with strangers, joining a book club, a debate club, training in jiu-jitsu, or committing to a dance class, each setting stretches a different part of you, intellectually, physically, and socially.

The more rooms you enter that challenge you, the more perspectives, stories, and confidence you accumulate, until depth becomes a byproduct of participation.

I think I’m not so good working with other people. Not like I’m crazy, but I don’t trust other people.

I don’t want to have this consensus meeting where we all… You have a meeting with three people and then you get these compromise results, which is very European.

I don’t know if they call it Polder model where you put people in the room and you only let them out when they agree on the compromise in politics. And I think it breeds averageness.

You get an average idea, average company, average culture, you need to have a leader or you need to be solo and just do it.

Pieter Levels (Interview With Lex Fridman)

Pieter Levels is a Dutch entrepreneur who makes over $3 million in revenue every year with no employees.

In recent years, he has become a rockstar in an underworld where people identify as indie hackers and solopreneurs.

Indie hackers began to emerge on the internet in the late 2000s and early 2010s. As cloud infrastructure became cheaper and distribution moved online, small teams, and often single individuals, gained access to tools that once required companies.

Communities like Hacker News became early meeting points, where developers shared experiments, failures, and revenue numbers with unusual transparency. Later, platforms such as Indie Hackers formalized this ethos: build something small, profitable, and sustainable without external funding.

Pieter Levels became a reference point after launching projects like Nomad List and Remote OK as solo businesses that generated meaningful revenue with minimal teams.

By the late 2010s and early 2020s, this approach converged on social platforms, particularly X, where builders began sharing progress in public: screenshots of dashboards, honest revenue updates, and lessons learned in real time. This visibility created a feedback loop: audience, distribution, and product evolving together. This is how the #BuildInPublic movement started to grow.

The Indie Underworld

When Reddit was founded back in 2005, its creators started with a bunch of fake accounts to set the tone for the social media platform. That’s how every indie hacker starts: they bend the rules and leverage psychology to build and grow their products.

The first time I entered this rabbit hole, it felt like entering a secret subworld where geniuses create and share.

Video game creators and developers of all kinds use social media in creative ways to increase awareness of their products. In this example, this video game creator built his game in public for years, publishing his advances on the meme platform 9gag. By the time of the launch, he had so much awareness that he sold over $500,000 in copies of the game.

The Recipe

What these hackers are doing is essentially applying a traditional marketing playbook with minimal human and financial resources.

Every sale follows a funnel in which a stranger gradually moves toward buying a product. First comes awareness, when someone discovers the product. Then interest develops as they follow the brand or think about the purchase without committing. Consideration appears when new information increases the product’s appeal, such as learning it’s a limited edition. Finally, the conversion happens when they go to the shop and decide to buy it.

Every sales and marketing department of every company is working on parts of this funnel. Indie Hackers not only need to develop, but because they don’t have a marketing department, they also need to run through this entire funnel by themselves.

Often, the only goal with awareness is to build an email list, so they can start moving users through the funnel.

A common practice for generating awareness is building in public. A well-known format, used by Pieter Levels and Jon Yongfook, is the challenge of creating 12 Startups in 12 Months. Through this challenge, they attracted significant attention and built a large following.

In 2018, Yongfook stopped his challenge at number 7 when he realized he wanted to work on Bannerbear, a SaaS tool that generates social media images via API, which he grew to over $600K ARR (ARR means Annual Recurring Revenue; solopreneurs use this jargon to document their progress).

AI Changed Everything

In 2023, Pieter Levels stated that “Indie Hacking” was dead, meaning it was no longer a niche world and that many people around the world were now trying to do the same thing.

In an interview, he explained how a lot of companies with venture capital money were following him on X and trying to replicate his ideas, but with more resources.

It was I think the first big AI avatar startup. And then these big companies were following me. So they quickly within a month, they did the same and they got way bigger, say VC funded and they made I think $40 million. I think I made like, maybe half a million dollars, lots within a month or so I'm getting two months is insane.

Pieter Levels in an interview with Arvid Kahl

After years, the market became so collapsed that the only way indie hackers have to grow their products is with a lot of creativity and reputation.

Defying The System

Schedule I became the game of the year in 2025, and it was developed by a single guy.

Schedule I ridiculed the AAA companies, creating the most addictive game of the year with the work of only one guy, known as Tyler. The game was developed by TVGS (Tyler's Video Game Studio), without a major publisher, large marketing budget, or cinematic trailers. Instead of secrecy and long hype cycles, development happened largely in public, with early builds circulating online and mechanics evolving based on visible player feedback.

If you don’t know about it, Schedule was a game about creating a drug-selling empire. But it was funny to play and looked almost childish.

What ultimately separated the game from AAA competitors was not production scale but distribution dynamics. Clips of emergent gameplay began spreading organically across platforms like YouTube and short-form video sites, driven by creators reacting to unscripted moments rather than sponsored campaigns. The game’s mechanics were easy to understand but hard to master, which made them highly watchable. This created a feedback loop where audience curiosity led to more creators covering the game, which in turn surfaced more edge cases and improvements during development.

What’s different now is speed. Where previous indie successes took years to compound, Schedule I scaled attention in months by shipping early, iterating quickly, and allowing players to act as both testers and distributors. AAA studios still optimize for polish and predictability; this project optimized for responsiveness and momentum.

In every generation, kids want to defy the system, but only a few are smart enough to do it right. That’s why you must understand the world that surrounds you in terms of systems and patterns, not in terms of news.

His heart is pumping like crazy, and he feels a weird sensation in his stomach.

To calm down, he plays his favorite song on Spotify: Friendship is Magic by My Little Pony.

Little Jonny is thinking of cancelling the date, but he goes anyway, because he really likes that girl.

During the date, what he most feared happened:

He overtalked, acted weird, and his insecurity was evident.

To avoid more embarrassment, after the date, he sends a text:

Hey sorry if I was weird, I was really nervous today :)

No answer…

That embarrassment pushes you to make choices that gradually trap you.

The range of human experience is so wide that while some people feel intense fear at the thought of sending an email, others give talks before breakfast, face TV cameras daily, and are likely no smarter than you.

As we discussed in I Tried Extreme Confidence For A Week and This Happened, “Confidence is the best predictor of achievement in both mathematics and English,” and delusional confidence can fundamentally change your experience in life.

Let me emphasize, you only have one life; if you don’t make the change now, when will you?

Breathing Embarrassment

About fifteen years ago, I secretly fell for a close friend after spending nearly a year inseparable, and eventually worked up the courage to tell her how I felt.

I invited her to the movies, spent the day nervously, and an hour before, awkwardly tried to confess through a rambling, half-joking conversation.

When she finally understood, she exploded, screaming at me in public and accusing me of being a “fake friend” like every other man in her life.

Looking back, I realize how naïve I was to expect a relationship to emerge after a full year of nothing happening. Don’t be like that!

To become a better, more confident man over the years, I learned to embrace being weird in every social interaction until I wasn’t.

But you can’t work your way to success blindly; progress requires both hard work and deliberate thinking.

Let’s see the three curves in life according to Seth Godin:

Imagine Little Jimmy continues being shy his entire life, and he continues to date girls who are not comfortable with that; in that case, he will be trapped in a Cul-de-Sac. Many people spend their entire lives without either becoming better or choosing a path of less resistance.

Instead, imagine he becomes so confident that he forgets for a moment that he is still living in a society. In this case, he will reach The Cliff, becoming a kind of Johnny Bravo (or a very sexist man) that only inspires cringe.

The ideal path is always The Dip, but as you can see in the graph, you’ll always face a mini cliff before becoming actually good at anything.

Delusional self-confidence is what you need to endure The Dip.

Running Experiments

A couple of years ago, I developed a quiet obsession with confidence. Or more precisely, with the idea that confidence could be engineered.

If there was a confidence hack, I tried it. Affirmations. Bullet journaling. Morning sunlight to “set the tone.” Cold showers to prove I could override discomfort. Meditation apps to calm the noise. Being stupid in public… anything that could activate confidence on command.

On paper, it looked like self-mastery. In reality, it was armor. I wasn’t building confidence; I was doing random things and hoping they would change my inner self.

The irony is that none of those hacks actually created confidence. They just delayed the moment when I had to act without guarantees. Real confidence didn’t come from optimization or acting like a clown in public. It came later, when I stopped trying to feel ready and started moving while uncertain. The hacks didn’t fail because they were useless; they failed because confidence isn’t installed. It’s practiced.

Let’s talk first about the experiments that worked moderately.

Affirmations

There are some good YouTube videos on affirmations that you can watch anytime, like this one.

My very personal experience with affirmations is that they sometimes work, and sometimes don’t. It depends heavily on my emotional state. I still would add them to a weekly routine; sometimes they can lift you very quickly, like energetic music.

Doing Stupid Sh*t in Public

I’m not a fan of this, but I have experimented with some weird things, incrementally:

• Using a shirt color that I’m not used to, like brilliant pink

• Using different shoes

• Speaking English unnecessarily, while it’s obvious I’m a native Spanish speaker

• Using offensive t-shirts

• Doing talks while unprepared

• Screaming in public

Like with everything, after a while, you feel less ashamed of doing these things, which will help your confidence. But the effect doesn’t last forever: if you spend some days without much social interaction, it can take some courage to even talk to the cashier.

Go to places to meet new people

This is by far the best of the three.

Timeleft is a company that organizes dinners with 5 to 6 strangers, a very cool concept for this new era of solitude and social disconnection.

I remember the first time I went to one of the Timeleft dinners, two years ago, I was absolutely scared… but I forced myself to do it. People often cancel, even after paying for the experience in advance, so I understand it is a very scary experience for most people.

But for many of the friends I made there, Timeleft became an almost addictive experience. They made a routine out of it.

The continuous exposure to new people can help a lot with confidence.

What really worked

I’ll go into detail in a paid post, but here I wanted to comment a little bit about what really worked in the long run.

The most useful idea from the book Atomic Habits is to focus on building a new identity to change your behavior.

Little Jimmy needs to become James to change his life. Even something as small as dropping a cute nickname can reshape your behavior.

James, with his new identity, will face resistance from some friends who won’t accept this new personality. His only option in this case would be to leave those friends in the past; they can no longer be a part of his life.

Exposure

If you add continuous exposure to your routine, you’ll have countless opportunities to practice your confidence.

Medical doctors and professionals undergo significant cognitive and physiological changes in their brains as a result of repeated exposure to blood, injury, and high-stress situations.

This process is largely driven by neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to rewire itself based on experience, leading to desensitization, improved focus, and specialized emotional regulation.

The same thing will happen to you if you practice doing things outside your comfort zone.

Alter Ego

Creating an alter ego lowers the psychological cost of action.

When confidence is low, every move feels personal, and every failure feels like a verdict on who you are (that identity we discussed earlier).

An alter ego changes that dynamic. It gives you a temporary identity to operate from, one that isn’t burdened by your past, your doubts, or your reputation. You’re no longer acting as “yourself,” but as a role you’ve consciously chosen. That distance is powerful: it turns fear into a manageable variable and allows you to take the first steps without over-identifying with the outcome.

In the early stages of any confidence journey, momentum matters more than authenticity. The alter ego provides a way to behave before you fully believe.

By asking “What would this version of me do right now?” you bypass hesitation and access behaviors that confidence normally unlocks later. Over time, those borrowed behaviors stop feeling borrowed. The line between the alter ego and the real you blurs, and confidence stops being something you wait for and becomes something you rehearse into existence.

Download my ultimate guide for activating your Alter Ego on command here.

Continuous Inspirational Content

When you find the people who inspire you, binge-watch them without any regrets.

A friend of mine told me that when he moved to Lithuania, he was all alone, sad, and socially anxious. He found a random guy on YouTube who posts motivational content every single day, and he was listening to him every day to remember the kind of person he wanted to be.

You can do this even several times a day, when you’re tired and frustrated, anxious, sad… Find people who inspire you to stop using social media and work on your projects again.

This subject is so interesting that I’m about to finish an article on just this principle. Subscribe to receive it during the next few days:

You feel that you shouldn’t need to put a lot of effort into something because you’re smarter than the average person, so you get frustrated.

Now you sit there with 37 tabs open, 4 note-taking apps, and a life plan rewritten every quarter.

Believing that ability is a fixed trait rather than something built through effort is a trap.

In high-IQ individuals, that means:

• “Struggling” feels like identity death

• Difficulty = “Maybe I’m not actually smart.”

• Quitting preserves the illusion of unlimited potential

The more you know, the harder it becomes to act simply.

• You see edge cases that others don’t

• You anticipate failure modes early

• Simple actions feel naïve or reckless

The Patterns

I was listening to a podcast some days ago where they talked about an experiment where they organized children to solve problems, and they were separated into two groups:

• The first group was congratulated for their intelligence in solving the problem

• The second group was congratulated for their persistence in seeking solutions

When exposing them to new problems, children who were praised for their persistence tended to choose more difficult problems to solve, and children who were said to be smart ended up performing worse on the problems they solved.

Angela Duckworth's research shows that grit, defined as passion and perseverance for long-term goals, predicts success in challenging environments, often more than talent, IQ, or social intelligence.

Drop the ego, it’s not useful anymore.

Effort Embarrasses Genius

Josh Waitzkin was a national chess prodigy in the 1990s, winning U.S. national titles as a child and becoming the inspiration for the film Searching for Bobby Fischer. By his early teens, he was already competing at elite international levels, widely expected to become a world champion. But the pressure of being labeled “the genius” began to distort his relationship with performance.

The most heartbreaking devastating moments ultimately were the ones that catalyzed the most growth. But, they can also be brutal for young minds and destroy people

Josh Waitzkin

From age 7 to 23, he was the top-rated U.S. chess player in his age group almost every year, which made him a constant target.

Opponents and their coaches relentlessly studied his weaknesses, forcing him to confront and correct flaws early or suffer immediate losses. When Searching for Bobby Fischer was published and later adapted into a film, the sudden public attention shifted his relationship with chess.

The moment we believe that success is determined by an ingrained level of ability as opposed to resilience and hard work, we will be brittle in the face of adversity.

Josh Waitzkin

Here’s the equation you hate when you have a high IQ:

Performance = Talent × Effort²

The average person who shows up daily will bury the genius who waits for inspiration.

Every time.

The Cure Is Counterintuitive and Unexpected

According to studies, contrary to what you might think, you don’t need:

• Another framework

• Another app

• Another productivity philosophy

Read more

A homeless woman was about to change his life forever.

That Sunday in February, everything looked normal in Michael’s life; he was at home with nothing to do, scrolling through Instagram.

For the last five years, he had been a consultant, working ten hours a day either from home or in the office. He checked spreadsheets all day and had no friends.

But, to be honest, his lack of friends had an easy explanation: once, he reported a coworker to his manager for checking her phone for a moment. He trusted no one, and he helped no one.

That Sunday, while checking Instagram, he discovered that his city, Oklahoma City, was listed among the ten most boring cities in America.

He decided to go out for a coffee, only to discover most businesses were closed and the streets were deserted. Even if you’re introverted, this absence of people can still feel depressing.

He found an open café and decided to go inside to continue scrolling through Instagram.

After a few minutes, a homeless woman entered the café, and Michael immediately felt uncomfortable.

She asked for breakfast and stayed there for some minutes. Michael put on his earphones and tried to focus on social media, pretending she was not there, but still feeling uneasy.

When she finished, she called the waiter and told him she didn’t have money to pay for her food.

A few seconds passed in silence. No one knew what to do.

In that moment, Michael decided to do his first good gesture in years: he offered to pay for her food.

After a few minutes, she stood up, approached Michael’s table, and gave him a small handwritten notebook. Then she left.

The book’s first page said:

From God, to Michael.

His heart stopped.

When he regained his composure, he left a twenty-dollar bill on the table and ran outside, but the woman was no longer there.

Michael’s Date

Michael’s cynicism started when he was studying at university.

He really liked Olivia; she was soft and beautiful, and her voice felt like a hug.

One day, he decided to approach her and invite her out; she said yes, which was a little unexpected to Michael.

She was smart, had a beautiful smile, and they had a nice conversation about pets during the date.

After a couple of hours talking, Michael decided to tell her about his real feelings:

You know, when I first saw you, I couldn’t concentrate during the entire class.

In the last few months, I have been having some family problems, and just the fact of seeing you every day makes my day wonderful. I really appreciate your existence.

She stared at him, emotionless.

Then she got up and went to the bathroom, without saying a word.

She came back with red eyes, the ones you have after you have been crying, then showed him an Instagram story from her friend.

“Supporting my girl while she does charity work 🫶”

He immediately understood that it was all a setup. He was devastated.

A Letter For You

Michael went home with his notebook. He was nervous; maybe it was another cruel joke, but from whom?

When he was alone, he sat on his kitchen table, put on his reading glasses, and opened the notebook again.

It’s been a long journey. You have some scars, you have made some mistakes, but I know you’re still a good person.

Now you love nothing, you have nothing to suffer for, and you go to bed exhausted from disgust, not from passion.

I feel your pain, I feel your boredom, but that’s only happening because you have no purpose.

You need to believe again. Start by believing in yourself.

Michael was absolutely scared.

He got up and started looking for cameras in his apartment. A hidden camera and a larger plot by some malicious coworker were the only things that could explain what was happening.

He felt trapped and went outside again to breathe and have a short walk.

After a few minutes, he decided to continue reading the notebook and continue looking for clues.

I know you probably feel this is a dark joke, but that only happens because you think so little of yourself that you can’t imagine I want something bigger for you.

Michael was confused.

It was like whoever wrote that text knew him to the bone.

He decided to put the notebook away and watch some Netflix until it was time to sleep.

A New Life

The next day, Michael was absolutely distracted; he couldn’t work properly, all he could think of was that letter.

When he went home at 5, he decided to continue reading.

That afternoon, Michael decided to stop thinking it was a setup and start believing, even when he was opening to the possibility of being hurt again.

According to science, self-confidence is a better predictor of academic achievement than self-efficacy, self-concept, and anxiety. Source here.

He was being very careful with the notebook; he wanted to read it slowly, to make sure he understood every word.

He went back, read everything again, tried to process it as if it were true, and continued.

Son, stop being afraid, because I’m with you.

I want you to do great things for me. I need you.

Michael was overwhelmed. How could someone as bad as him be receiving words from God?

What should he do?

Michael, you know what you need to do. You know your addictions, your vices, you know that person who needs your help.

Start with that. Start by changing yourself, then your family, then your neighborhood.

I want to be here with you, and I want you to return to this letter whenever you need my words.

For now, do what you need to do.

Michael started crying.

After a few moments, he cleaned his face.

Then he cleaned his desk while he was thinking about what to do.

At the end of that day, Michael called his mom, something he hadn’t done in months.

Millennials are reaching what may be their last chance to repair a broken world, and many are trying. But progress requires letting go of outdated assumptions and rethinking what we once believed was good. It demands a fundamental shift in mindset.

In this article, I will uncover the patterns behind our current crisis and the solutions you can apply in your life to correct course.

The Patterns

Nothing explains the tragedy of our generation like this image:

We were raised in a world that has something called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and we assumed those were divine rights and not just a bunch of words on a paper sheet.

We assumed we were more civilized, and we wouldn’t fight in stupid conflicts.

Our lives were significantly better, too; our grandparents only moved as far as their cars allowed, and in very rare cases, they moved by boat to other countries. Instead, we can go to the other side of the world in less than a day.

Just forty years ago, meeting your lover meant picking a time and a place, showing up, and praying you didn’t misunderstand each other.

But then, social media appeared.

We were so eager and positive about social media that we didn’t realize it was damaging the brains of our kids, and it is now, years later, that countries are starting to ban them.

We were so unprepared for this change that we allowed these things to happen:

In 2016, the scientists behind Cambridge Analytica found a way to have the personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users. They offered money for answering a survey on an app. When the users logged in with their Facebook accounts, the app crawled Facebook to get information about them and their friends.

The brilliant (and evil) part of this plan was to use this information to make psychological profiles of the users to target them with ads in favor of Brexit. The Cambridge Analytica experts knew that the easiest way to win votes is to target people who 1. are not educated and 2. don’t have a strong political opinion.

When they started the campaign by targeting those profiles, they used a lot of fake information (e.g., immigrants are dangerous because they come here to rob) to win the votes of millions of UK citizens.

Politicians across the whole spectrum of ideas started using media to manipulate people, and then, in the absence of a real war, they started…

The men vs women war…

Things Changed

There is a huge realization that most haven’t processed yet:

What comes to your mind when someone says, “You don’t need to follow society’s rules”?

Rejecting traditional families? Avoiding the boomer lifestyle?

Gen X and Millennials broke those norms so violently that for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, being rebellious meant returning to Christianity.

In a world that’s in crisis, returning to conservative values is a regular response. It is a way for humans to say, “ok let’s try to do things carefully this time”.

The problem is that we still have social media to brain-rot people, and politicians group causes together to exacerbate the Us vs. Them speech.

So if you’re right-wing, you need to support anti-immigration laws and somehow become anti-vaccination, all in the same package.

If you’re left-wing, you need to do some mental gymnastics to be a feminist and support Islamism at the same time.

That’s why interesting phenomena like this end up happening:

But also this:

Ultimately, both groups acknowledge similar issues, but they differ significantly in their approaches to solving them.

Something Went Wrong

The gender dynamics changed extremely fast. Women entered the workforce and higher education in recent years, and people are still trying to understand what their roles should be, but that’s a topic for another article.

The big problem we are facing is this:

But wait, wasn’t the world superpopulated? That’s what Millennials were told when they were growing up…

Well, that was another lie from politicians. We need babies urgently if we want to keep civilization existing.

Millennials are struggling with this as they approach their last fertile years amid rising housing costs and growing tension between the sexes.

Is There Hope?

In 1958, Mao Zedong launched The Great Leap Forward, a campaign led by the Chinese Communist Party to transform the country into an industrialized society.

The Four Evils Campaign was one of the first actions taken in the Great Leap Forward. With the motto “Man Must Conquer Nature” authorities targeted four pests for elimination: rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows.

Pest control was widely used worldwide, and these methods were considered scientifically sound. But contrary to expectations, most of these “scientific elements” had a detrimental impact on food production.

The extermination of sparrows resulted in severe ecological imbalance. The absence of natural predators resulted in a proliferation of insects in the fields and crop damage, this became one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine of 1959–1961.

The Great Chinese Famine is widely regarded as the deadliest famine and one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history, with an estimated death toll due to starvation that ranges in the tens of millions (15 to 55 million).

That’s what happens when you try to fight against nature.

China recovered from the Great Famine first by quietly reversing the worst Great Leap Forward policies. The government reduced grain procurement quotas, relaxed strict commune controls, allowed families to manage more of their work and food, and brought back small private plots in practice. These pragmatic changes helped stabilize agriculture and end mass starvation, even though China remained very poor afterward.

The deeper, long-term recovery came after Mao’s death in 1976. Starting in 1978, the government launched reforms that restored incentives in farming through the Household Responsibility System and gradually opened the economy. This model transformed China’s productivity and growth over the next decades, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty.

So yeah, there is hope, even under the worst circumstances.

What can you do to fix your own life during uncertain times?

First of all, obviously, subscribe to my newsletter to understand the historical patterns of modern life:

Secondly, I have found it extremely important to have friends from a wide spectrum of political ideas, which will help you avoid radicalization.

A couple of months ago, a friend told me that even when she was afraid of my answer, she needed to know about my political beliefs. When I told her, she discovered that we greatly differed in several things, but her openness surprised me. After some minutes of talking, she said: This is the freest I’ve felt to speak in a long time; my entire circle of friends thinks in a very similar way.

VUCA

In the military, VUCA—Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity—is the philosophy that officers use to operate. Modern armed forces assume that plans will break the moment contact is made with reality.

Instead of detailed instructions, they rely on mission command: commanders communicate intent (the objective and why it matters), set clear constraints, and then decentralize execution. Training deliberately injects chaos, conflicting orders, incomplete intelligence, and equipment failure.

Here’s an example of this chaos.

Content warning: The following video contains sensitive images that may be disturbing to some viewers. Viewer discretion is advised.

In a recent article from , he was talking about life in prison when he mentioned this:

Chaos was everywhere in the cage. Fights. Lockdowns. Transfers. Violence.

The men who survived built routines like fortresses.

Wake up at the same time. Work out at the same time. Eat at the same time. Read at the same time. Every day. No exceptions.

Not because routine is fun. Because routine is control. When everything outside you is chaos, the only order is the order you build inside.

WHAT THE MONSTERS TAUGHT ME: 8 RULES FROM THE CAGE

Applied to real life, VUCA is a reminder to stop waiting for perfect information. As we saw in this article, what we think is a good political or social decision may prove to be very damaging in the future.

First, define intent rather than rigid plans: know what truly matters and why.

Second, shorten your decision cycles, treat many choices as reversible experiments instead of one-way commitments.

Third, build personal resilience before optimization: energy, emotional control, and simple routines matter more than clever strategies when things are unstable.

In a VUCA world, progress comes from acting with incomplete information, learning fast, and adjusting, exactly how the military trains people to operate when the map no longer matches the terrain.

The final piece of advice is that you should definitely read about history, because it repeats.

From the meditation techniques of the Mongols to the cleverness of modern digital entrepreneurs, you can live many lives from the comfort of your house. Keep reading.

Do you know what the greatest disgrace of our generation is?

We live in a world of unrealistic and amazing technologies; we can cross the entire globe in a matter of hours and communicate with anyone immediately, yet most people struggle to achieve self-realization.

We’re continuously chasing it, but it seems impossible to achieve.

Extraordinary people seem to have a key to life that most don’t have, or, as psychologist Abraham Maslow said in a 1967 conference, they have transcended human needs and limitations.

Abraham Maslow - Further Reaches of Human Nature.

The quote about ghosts from the beginning of the article was from Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist who founded the school of analytical psychology. Although it seems like a scene taken from a patient with schizophrenic traits, Jung used a technique called active imagination.

Jung began his career working alongside Sigmund Freud, but the two eventually split over major theoretical disagreements. Freud and his circle were Jewish intellectuals facing rising antisemitism in Europe, while Jung, raised in a Christian environment, followed a different spiritual trajectory. Though he didn’t strictly follow Christian doctrine, he viewed religion, Christianity included, as a profound reflection of the human psyche and its deep longing for meaning.

Abraham Maslow, inspired by Jung, dedicated his life to studying the human condition in a way that blows my mind: he was obsessed with Peak Experiences, one of the most interesting and forgotten subjects in this madness of life we have now.

A peak experience is a moment of intense joy, awe, and fulfillment, often accompanied by a feeling of transcendence where the sense of self is diminished or absorbed into the activity or surroundings.

Peak performers chase these kinds of experiences all the time. Content creator James Dumoulin has gained fame for his interviews, where he asks people, “How did you get rich?” His interviewing skills are impressive, but what stands out even more is a recurring pattern among his guests: almost all of them either believe in God or possess a strong sense of spirituality in their lives.

Mainstream psychology shifted toward behaviorism → cognitive psychology → neuroscience, and Maslow’s language sounded too subjective or spiritual for hard science. The same peak experiences are now known as Flow States or Self-Transcendent Experiences.

In a world that’s starting to feel more like 1984 or Cyberpunk 2077, the path of the peak experience and a form of scientific spirituality can help us reconnect with our consciousness and enter the sought-after world of self-realization.

Changing The Environment

In 2017, Pat Walls had the dream job as a developer in New York, but he ended up exhausted and “feeling empty” every day. He knew something was missing.

He was often daydreaming of quitting his job and starting his own business, so he started reading business books in his free time, but he kept running into the same problem: he didn’t know where to start and didn’t come up with good ideas to work on.

On his walk home, he passed every day in front of a Starbucks. One day, to force himself to focus, he decided to enter that Starbucks, order a coffee, and set a timer for two hours. He continued doing that for months, until his business, Starter Story, started making $1 million.

Pat describes his two-hour daily time at that Starbucks as the “flow state” he needed to unstuck himself.

Working from that Starbucks gave him something his apartment and office couldn’t: structure, stimulation, and separation from his usual mental loops. Solo founders and remote workers often struggle with an invisible cocktail of isolation, lack of feedback, and blurred boundaries between work and rest. In that environment, it’s easy to drift into analysis paralysis (reading, planning, overthinking) without ever entering flow.

The café fixed that. The background noise, the ritual of ordering coffee, and the clear two-hour window created a small but reliable container for focus. The mild social pressure of being seen by others replaced the accountability missing in solo work. This mix of novelty, constraint, and social energy quieted his inner critic and turned distraction into momentum.

I always do the same; Starbucks has become my place to write and be focused. You still need some daydreaming, especially during the night, to come up with creative ideas, but having a place and time to focus on your projects can help you enter focus.

A change in environment is always helpful. Native Americans and Mongolians (and probably most ancient cultures) practiced vision quests, journeys into the forest, mountains, or desert, where a young warrior or seeker would live alone for days without food, speaking to no one. These quests were a rite of passage, a way to confront fear, listen to the land, and receive visions that would guide their future.

Feeling The Air

During the autumn of 2021, actor William Shatner became the oldest person to go to space, at age 90. Several viral memes showed his interaction with Jeff Bezos, but I’ll never forget a quote I read from him:

It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness.

This is known as the Overview Effect, a phenomenon reported by many astronauts, from Yuri Gagarin to Michael Collins and Sally Ride. When they gaze upon Earth from orbit, an overwhelming awareness of the planet’s unity and fragility takes hold, beyond words or reasoning.

Author Frank White, who coined the term in 1987, described it this way: “There are no borders or boundaries on our planet except those that we create in our minds or through human behavior. All the ideas and concepts that divide us when we are on the surface begin to fade from orbit and the Moon. The result is a shift in worldview—and in identity.”

Shatner also described being in space as something that we can easily assume was the most intense peak experience of his life:

I’m so filled with emotion about what just happened. It’s extraordinary, extraordinary. It’s so much larger than me and life.

During these moments, we’re so focused on the present that we can live life at its fullest.

Dr. Wayne Dyer's pathway to reach Peak Experiences goes like this:

• Meditation and silence — to connect with the “field of intention.”

• Service and compassion — losing yourself in helping others opens transcendence.

• Gratitude and presence — appreciation pulls awareness into the now, where awe becomes available.

• Creative expression — he viewed writing, teaching, or art as channels through which the higher self moves.

He often said the ego blocks transcendence by making you believe you’re separate, special, or incomplete. Letting go of egoic drives—comparison, approval, power—creates the inner stillness that allows what Maslow called self-transcendence.

Dyer also asked himself: Is it possible to have peak experiences all the time?

He was convinced that it was possible, so he designed his life for peak experiences. One of his most relatable examples was in his love for Tennis, he said that every time he was playing Tennis, he tried to be completely focused in the experience: feeling the air, becoming conscious of the feelings in his body and mind… and, even more interesting, he didn’t rush for the next level.

Dyer said that he would plateau at a specific level for two years and wouldn’t run for the next one; it would happen automatically, according to him. This allowed him to reach his best possible version, avoid injuries, and enjoy the experience.

The Framework to Trigger Peak Experiences

Peak experiences don’t appear by accident; they emerge when certain psychological, emotional, and environmental conditions align. Over the past century, psychologists, astronauts, artists, and entrepreneurs have all stumbled upon the same pattern.

Below is a framework that anyone can follow to invite those extraordinary moments of clarity, purpose, and connection.

Read more

Throughout my life, I’ve noticed two distinct types of people: those who thrive in the face of challenges, maintaining their composure and even a good sense of humor, and those who seem to attract misfortune and melancholy, the unhappy and unlucky.

But I would say there’s a third type of person: the magical ones, those who show you that there are more possibilities, that the world is more exciting and beautiful than you imagine.

Some people simply have main character energy, and I want to discover your potential if you’re one of them.

That’s why today I want to extend a special invitation to a private (but free) program I’ll be hosting in January.

Everything is in this short video:

Join now here:
themaincharacter.io

As the legend says, Mexican singer Chalino Sánchez reads a death threat and immediately continues singing. He was executed by a cartel the next day.

Chalino’s tremendous willpower to continue the show is admirable. But being strong isn’t just about going to war or singing after your life was threatened.

Being strong is also about making your children laugh when you don’t know if you’ll have enough money to feed them, dealing with personal problems without telling your parents so as not to worry them, or even battling the fear of leaving your house to go to work.

The human condition can be extremely difficult, but we are also extremely strong and resilient creatures.

In this post, we’ll travel through history to teach you techniques that peak performers use to accomplish fearless things.

Hi! My name is David. Several years ago, I became obsessed with studying human behavior as a way to push myself beyond ordinary limits. Along the way, I uncovered the hidden patterns that shape modern life and influence the way we act. Today, I use those insights to help people break free from The Matrix and operate at their highest potential.

The Genetics of Fear

Let’s talk about the obvious before continuing, because I can smell the comments: you are right, nobody can be completely fearless unless they are neurodivergent.

Fear is a natural state of mind that activates our fight-flight-or-freeze response when physical or emotional danger is near.

Ever since humans developed language, we’ve used it to gossip. Some scholars even suggest that language itself evolved so we could talk about other people1.

Gossip can provide us with reputational information about other persons. This was key to surviving in ancient times, but it was also dangerous; if a story about you started to run in the tribe, you could be expelled, which almost certainly meant death. Our brains remember that, and that’s why we care so much about our reputation, even if today is not that important.

But fear can be a completely different experience for each person: modern research shows that several genes influence how intensely we react to danger: COMT affects how quickly we clear dopamine (and therefore how stressed we feel), and BDNF shapes how strongly we store frightening memories2.

These tiny genomic variations explain why one person might find haunted houses thrilling while another can’t even sit through a jump scare.

But our genes are only half the script. Fear is also sculpted by culture, upbringing, and the emotional imprints of our experiences. A child knocked over by a big dog may grow into an adult who crosses the street when a Labrador walks by, while someone who never had that moment will run straight toward it.

A person who was exposed to trauma will have an entirely different behavior than the baseline, which means that what are regular things for most people can be new triggers for them, even if they are not dangerous3.

Evidence For Your Brain

If you want your brain to adopt a new idea, the fastest path is to feed it evidence that the idea is true, because you cannot fool your mind.

Your brain is always trying to optimize your life to achieve both basic goals and big dreams. Your wildest dreams could be anything from becoming a professional dancer to meeting the love of your life, but whenever you take a step toward achieving those dreams and fail, your mind slowly loses enthusiasm and is scared to try again; this is why most people become cynical with age. When you try to do things with the wrong approach, like trying to achieve too much in too little time, your mind is saving evidence that will prevent you from trying again in the future.

In the book “The Progress Principle”, the authors explain how some managers use a system of small wins to build momentum in meaningful work progress:

Peak performers consistently display an internal locus of control; they believe their actions determine outcomes, and they reinforce this belief by accumulating small, consistent wins that generate sustained motivational momentum.

One effective practice is to spend a few moments walking or daydreaming about your true long-term objectives, and then outline a set of small, actionable wins that can guide you in their direction.

Two quick examples:

• You want to be a published author

  • Ask for feedback online (like with a Reddit post)

  • Create a short story and publish it or send it to a friend

  • Contact someone you admire and ask them for advice

• You want to learn how to dance

  • Take that free class; it takes courage, but you can do it

  • Ask someone for recommendations

  • Just Google for some videos about dancing in your city

Just like static friction vs kinetic friction, something in movement is easier to move than something static, but remember never to try to fool your brain, no matter how little progress you make, and no matter if you have rejections (you will), fill your life with tens of little actions toward your goals.

Burn The Boats

In 1519, when Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico with a small force to confront the vast Aztec Empire, he made a dramatic decision: he ordered his ships destroyed (often retold as “burning the boats”). By removing any possibility of retreat, Cortés forced his men to commit fully to the mission ahead, win or die trying. This act was psychological warfare on his own army, transforming fear into resolve. With no way back to Cuba, his soldiers had only one direction left: forward. The moment became a powerful symbol of total commitment, eliminating the safety net so that success becomes the only option.

Sometimes we choose to burn the boats, and other times life forces our hand, like Chalino, already standing onstage with no way out but forward. Yet that moment of no return is one of the most powerful motivators we have. It’s the engine that pushes us to act, to work, to conquer new territory. When retreat isn’t an option, survival and progress become our only path.

Another example of burning the boats is one I did myself.

Have you noticed how Argentinians do these gestures while talking?

Between roughly the 1850s and the mid-1900s (peaking around 1880–1914), Argentina received millions of immigrants from Italy4.

As poverty deepened and land disappeared in southern Italy, entire families were forced to make an impossible choice: stay and wither, or cross an ocean with no guarantee of return. Argentina, with its booming economy and vast stretches of land, became the escape route, and for many, the place where they rebuilt their lives from zero.

When Italians emigrated to Argentina:

• They left homes, villages, and often most of their possessions behind.

• The journey and settlement were expensive; returning home wasn’t realistic for many.

• The decision removed the fallback of staying in Italy under familiar but limited conditions; they had to commit to making the new land work.

When I came to Spain, I left everything behind, and returning was never on the table. That changed the way I approached life. I still find it interesting seeing that some people don’t share my urgency to grow professionally, as they can always fall back on the comfort of their parents’ home.

Burning your boats will push you in a desired direction even when your fear is holding you back.

Self-Delusional Belief vs Victim Mindset

Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.

Henry Ford

A couple of months ago, YouTuber Mr. Beast (James Stephen Donaldson) published a video that was scheduled 10 years ago. In the video, a much younger version of himself said he was hoping to reach 1M subscribers in 10 years, while showing his 8k subs at the time. When the video was published, he had almost 500 million subscribers.

In another video, he explained that it took him years to reach 1000 subscribers. This kind of confidence is delusional.

I’ve also found a direct correlation between success and our tolerance for rejection and failure. The more you train your mind to normalize failure, the more unstoppable you become.

The only way to build that level of confidence is through deliberate exposure.

Some years ago, when I was a junior developer, job interviews would drain me. I couldn’t sleep the night before, I couldn’t concentrate during the day, and my mind was constantly looping what-ifs. But after dozens of interviews, on both sides of the table, I have completely normalized them. The fear dissolved. Each interview became a chance to experiment, learn, and enjoy the conversation.

Fear is primal and useful, but it lies more often than it protects us. Our brains exaggerate threats and underestimate our capabilities. The way out is to stop approaching challenges from a victim mindset. When you visualize your best outcome instead of your worst, your brain starts working toward it automatically. You activate your prefrontal cortex and rewire your Reticular Activating System, the mechanism that controls what you pay attention to. Research5 shows that structured visualization can improve problem-solving performance by up to 44%, far outperforming traditional brainstorming.

Fear reveals where growth is possible and where skills or confidence still need to be built. When we stop treating fear as an obstacle and start treating it as feedback about our mind processes, it loses its control over us. The goal isn’t to eliminate fear, but to understand it, train for it, and move forward despite it. Progress comes from stepping toward the discomfort instead of away from it, and over time, what once felt threatening becomes manageable.

References

After three exhausting days on the Orinoco River, David Good was overcome with sickness. He was far from a natural adventurer.

Mosquitoes had feasted on his skin without mercy. He was drained, parched, and sticky with sweat in the heavy, suffocating air.

This story starts when his dad, Kenneth Good, came to the forest years earlier as an anthropologist to study the Yanomami.

Days became years, he became totally immersed in the Yanomamis’ world, and he eventually married a girl from the tribe, Yarima, who became his fiancée from a young age, according to the tribe's customs. They had three children together and later moved to the U.S.

Yarima had never left the jungle, and the outer world was totally strange to her; she thought the police were an especially fierce tribe that all lived in the same village. She warily observed the policemen and policewomen with their guns. Whenever she saw them, her eyes searched for their police children and police babies.

When he took Yarima to the U.S., the world turned cold. The walls hummed with silence instead of cicadas. Asphalt streets replaced rivers. Neighbors never looked into her eyes.

Yarima struggled to adapt to modern life, feeling isolated, disconnected, and overwhelmed.

One morning, she was gone. She decided to return to the jungle and leave everything behind.

David, her son, finally found Yarima in 2011 after a long journey. Their emotional reunion was marked by tears and silence, a meeting that bridged two worlds separated by culture, time, and geography.

But Yarima’s escape from the modern world (even if it meant leaving her children behind) reveals something deeper than culture shock. It exposes the vast divide between how we live now and how we were meant to live. We may have forgotten our origins, but our bodies haven’t.

For over 95% of human history, we lived as hunter-gatherers, wired for connection, movement, and nature. Those ancient neural pathways still fire within us, restless and confused in a world of walls, screens, and isolation.

A Need For Adventure

One in four Americans feels bored with their life.

The average respondent said they fantasize about going on some sort of adventure four times every day, but only 10% said they felt they could be adventurous on any given day, the survey commissioned by Storyteller Overland for American Adventures Month in August found.

Life as hunter-gatherers was brutally hard. Around 27% of infants didn’t survive their first year, and nearly half never made it to puberty. Even centuries later, in 14th-century England, people needed passports just to travel within their own country, a rule imposed after the Black Death to keep workers from leaving their villages.

Life has never been easy. Yet, despite all our progress, our brains still crave something ancient, something we once had and somehow lost.

Look at the countries where happiness decreased; among them, you see, ironically, the richest countries in the world.

In my most viral article to date, Become The Main Character Of Your Life Before It’s Too Late, we discussed these issues, and some of the comments highlighted the fundamental problem:

… The next few years were rough. I lived in residence hotels and a rented room… After 5 or 6 years, things were better; I met some great friends, and I met my wife, who sadly is no longer part of my life. Looking back, I realize that despite the difficulties, it was the adventure of my life.

Comment from Jimmie Oakland

We’ve always been explorers; it’s in our DNA. Around 60,000 years ago, when Neanderthals and Homo floresiensis still roamed the Earth, our ancestors, speaking only the earliest forms of language, made the bold decision to cross open oceans to settle in what we now call Australia, they used simple rafts or canoes to cross the Wallace Line, a deep-water gap between the Indonesian islands and Sahul (the ancient continent that included Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea).

What was the need for that? Or what was the need of going to the moon in a pressurized can?

The Fundamental Problem

Imagine the life of a 25-year-old woman living in New York, let’s call her Sarah. She was born in Rhode Island and moved to the big city for better job opportunities. Her parents earned a comfortable living running a local business that served ship owners; their lives are simple, they are mostly happy, and they gave Sarah all of their love while she was growing up. She had everything she needed.

Sarah has used social media since she was very young. Her heart beat faster and faster every time she saw the lifestyle of the New Yorkers. She dreamed about living there, finding her prince charming, and becoming famous.

She moved a year ago and is now working as a marketing junior at a consultancy company. New York is super expensive, so she’s trying not to go out that much to save money.

Today is Friday night, she’s working from home, and she has made no plans for the weekend. She closes her laptop and opens Instagram. Her friend Evelyn posted some stories on her trip to Miami, Emma is having dinner with her boyfriend, and Mia is going to a party with her friends.

She feels a little void in her chest.

Around 2012, when teens swapped flip phones for smartphones and people flocked to Instagram, teen girls began showing higher rates of depression than other groups. Jean Twenge’s research on Generations suggests one key reason: they were the heaviest social media users, with 31% spending five or more hours daily online, compared to much lower rates among other groups 1.

She opens the reels and guess what’s there… the same reels that she watched back home, the lavish lifestyle, the romantic dinners, the boats, the fame.

She continues scrolling like she’s waiting for something to fill her void. Nothing is enough… Sarah ends up thinking about how she hates marketing, and she’s now trapped in her new life.

Arthur Brooks, a professor at Harvard Business School, argues that boredom is essential for mental health and meaning in life.

When our minds aren’t occupied, we activate the default mode network, a part of the brain that turns on when we’re not focused on external tasks. This state encourages reflection and deep thinking, often leading to uncomfortable but important questions about purpose and meaning.

Modern society, however, has nearly eliminated boredom through constant digital stimulation. Every time we feel even slightly bored, we reach for our phones, preventing the mind from wandering and reflecting. This avoidance creates what Brooks calls a “doom loop of meaning,” contributing to the rise of depression, anxiety, and a sense of emptiness.

How To Make Your Life Exciting

Sarah decided to stop using Instagram and instead opened X to watch the global news, a serious mistake…

She reads all kinds of political debates and ends up consuming a lot of content about women's rights. It looks like the world is against her; she feels like a victim; she’s horrified.

She ends up frustrated, sad, eating ice cream, and disconnecting with her favorite series, one about a girl who gets cheated by her boyfriend.

The next morning, Sarah’s friend Eva invites her to spend the next weekend in her country house in Rhode Island. Sarah immediately accepted and was excited about it for the entire week.

Not having a plan for the weekend was Sarah’s first mistake. Avoiding life is very easy thanks to social media and TV. Back when we didn’t have those amenities, we had to plan everything; even a small trip without maps would be an entirely different experience, and staying at home wasn’t that exciting. Even the fallbacks, like going to the local bar, were healthier experiences than using social media or watching Netflix.

She’s a very smart young woman, and she realizes something key: what if she’s the one planning something fun for her and her friends for next weekend? It doesn’t have to be expensive…

That’s enough for a first level of making your life exciting:

• Stop using social media that much, delete the apps from your phone

• Stop watching that much negative content; you’re going to enter a loop of negativity

• Plan your free time so you don’t fall back into social media, porn, or any other addictions

• Be always the one proposing plans for your friends, they are probably bored too

But is there something else?

Trascend

You already know where you’re meant to go. Some worlds call to you, worlds you’ve glimpsed but haven’t yet entered. Maybe it’s the world of the professional dancer, the fluent Spanish speaker (es una aventura que te recomiendo), the plane pilot, or the thoughtful writer who creates great books.

Yet our instincts and our culture pull us in the opposite direction. Between our fear of discomfort and the endless novelty of our devices, we spread ourselves thin. We go wider instead of deeper, choosing easy pleasures over slow transformation. It’s simpler to scroll, to replay the same song, or to listen to another podcast than to wrestle with Aristotle or practice those clumsy guitar chords again.

What would you do if you couldn’t use any digital distraction for an entire week?

Live a life of making bold decisions, and you’ll never feel empty again.

They spend their days in meetings with stakeholders to optimize workstreams of projects that nobody will use. They create presentations that no one reads, which generate tasks that are not needed.

“Life is becoming miserable for these engineers; most of them are working on their own projects because they want to leave”. But they don’t want to just leave the company, they want to go out of The Matrix: the corporate jobs.

It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

Epictetus

When you are training a neural network with Reinforcement Learning, there’s a parameter called Epsilon (ε) that you can set. In artificial intelligence, Epsilon controls the balance between exploration and exploitation. This means you can set your bot's “personality” to be more exploratory or to try to exploit actions that already have higher rewards.

If you think about it, animals have their own version of this parameter: some cats can be siblings, but one of them will be much more social than the other, or much more adventurous; it’s like we have those epsilons coded in our personality.

When a person with an adventurous personality faces a difficult situation, they play a little game in their minds: they imagine their problems are challenges that they must overcome to become better, and they keep in mind they’re the heroes of their story.

Software Engineers Saw Their Lives Changed

When the layoffs started in the software engineering industry some years ago, a lot of software engineers, who thought they were going to have stable careers their entire lives, saw their plans changed.

The epsilon pattern emerged among the engineers, and we saw contrasting stories.

Some negative:

Some positive:

But the pattern is way more evident when we look at the entrepreneurs:

In August 2022, Bart Szaniewski was laid off on the same day he closed on a new home. With a baby on the way, the situation seemed dire, but instead of giving in, Bart entered what he called “demon mode.”

He threw himself into networking, taking interviews, and applying for jobs, all while leaning into his side project, DadGang. Within a week, he received three job offers and accepted one.

In the meantime, DadGang experienced significant growth, eventually becoming his main focus. A year later, DadGang supports his family, allowing his wife to stop working, and it’s one of the fastest-growing companies on Shopify. Bart uses the challenges as motivation and embraces the mindset that “there are no losses, just lessons.”

Getting Fired Made Him $11.4 Million

During his sophomore year in college, Jonah Berger ran a small business on campus. It was called the Concert Network and brought live music to campus throughout the year.

He spent every free minute booking shows, coordinating events, and devising new initiatives.

We started with only four employees, but in just over a year, I grew it to over 10 people and a $200k budget.

Some months later, Jonah decided to spend some months abroad and planned his absence by letting the CFO run the company.

A few weeks later, he got an email. After he left, the group met and decided that running the organization in his absence wouldn’t work. He underestimated how critical it was to be on the ground with his team.

They fired him.

He was, of course, devastated. Human brains are wired to trigger a strong response when survival feels at risk. In today’s world, losing a job can feel like a threat to our survival, even though, in reality, we live in a modern society that often gives us the chance to rebuild and thrive again.

Inspired by the book The Tipping Point, Jonah started learning about trends and why things catch on with people.

He decided to join a research project at the business school related to this subject. The project was so interesting that he focused his thesis on it and did a Ph.D. on it later.

Twelve years later, he’s a Marketing Professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, has published a bestseller, appeared on documentaries, and has a net worth of $11.4 million.

Normalizing Rejection

Accepting and normalizing rejection is a crucial skill for success, even if those epsilons in your personality are already set, there are several things you can do to train that ability as a muscle:

1. Reframe Rejection as a Learning Opportunity
“The Obstacle is the Way” is one of the books that made author Ryan Holiday famous. In it, he explains the importance of adopting a growth mindset, where you believe that skills and abilities can be developed through effort. This helps to view rejection as part of the growth process rather than a personal shortcoming.

2. Desensitize Yourself through Exposure
Deliberate Practice: Actively seek out situations where rejection is possible. This can be as simple as making requests that you think might get a “no.” The more you expose yourself to rejection, the less power it holds over you.

Rejection Therapy: Engage in “rejection challenges” where you purposely ask for things you expect to be denied (e.g., asking for discounts, favors, or unusual requests). This helps build resilience by normalizing the experience of hearing “no.”

3. Separate Your Identity from Rejection
Detach from Outcomes: Understand that rejection is not a reflection of your worth. It’s often about circumstances, timing, or external factors. Learning to separate your sense of self from the outcomes of individual events helps minimize emotional impact.

4. Practice Gratitude and Mindfulness
Shift Focus: After facing rejection, practice gratitude for what is going well in your life.

Meditation is a great way of cleaning your mind and continuing to work towards your new identity.

Some months ago, I was able to finally quit Instagram, and I unlocked a power I didn’t know I had.

The trigger for me was reading about the routines of high-achieving people; they all start their mornings without any distractions, some even meditate for up to two hours. So I decided that I was going to uninstall the app during the night and install it at some point during the morning.

The first time I tried that, I had the proof that I needed: I spent my morning being productive and not hating any specific demographic (lol).

But the change took some weeks. After relapsing again, I had to be more strict with it, signing out forever from the Instagram web and installing the app later during the day. The final mindset change came on a week I was studying for an interview, I started forgetting that Instagram existed almost the entire day, and I have continued like that since then.

I used to think that this was a problem of modern humans, until I read the stories of how it was common for the Mongols to ride away from the encampment and spend days alone in the mountains, letting the wind and the stars strip away distraction. In solitude, they sought answers to personal dilemmas, guidance before battles, or simply a reconnection with their own instincts.

Similarly, many Native American tribes practiced vision quests, journeys into the forest, mountains, or desert, where a young warrior or seeker would live alone for days without food, speaking to no one. These quests were a rite of passage, a way to confront fear, listen to the land, and receive visions that would guide their future.

Both traditions understood something we often forget today: when you step away from the safety of the campfire and into the unknown, the mind sharpens, the soul speaks, and life’s tangled threads often straighten into something simple and true.

Sorry for the commercial break, but what I’m cooking up at The Pill will blow your mind, I promise.

In The Pill, we’ll dive deep into the human condition, exploring what truly drives peak performance and meaning. Join the waitlist here before Nov 5th.

We were not designed for this

Human brains are not designed to live in an overstimulated environment; that’s why we are tired the whole time. Every few minutes, we switch from one thing to another: messages, notifications, headlines, videos. Each shift forces the brain to refocus, burning mental energy like a car stopping and starting in traffic.

In 2009, psychologist Sophie Leroy discovered something called attention residue. In her study, people who switched between tasks performed worse because part of their attention stayed stuck on the previous one. Our brains don’t truly multitask; they leave a mental echo each time we switch focus. After hundreds of small shifts in a day, those echoes pile up into exhaustion.

Modern life keeps our minds running hot, always processing, never cooling down. The brain uses up energy as if it were sprinting all day, even when we’re just scrolling. That’s why rest doesn’t feel like rest anymore: our bodies stop moving, but our minds never stop spinning.

Turn Your Life Into A Game

The best way to try out a new habit is to try it for a couple of weeks and commit to it like it’s a mission in a video game. Then go in demon mode.

When I started my extreme confidence challenge, I committed to the rituals for a week, then two, and now it’s part of my regular routine.

Your brain will love the novelty of it, which will help you stick to your rules during the first days. Then, if you notice the changes, you need to make a plan to become disciplined and make these rules part of the mantra of your life.

The moment you have the most energy is during the morning, people use it in very creative ways to go through their most demanding tasks.

Cal Newport — Deep Work Block, No Meetings

The computer science professor and author of Deep Work spends the first 4 hours of his day (typically 8 a.m.–12 p.m.) on one cognitively demanding task — research, writing, or problem-solving — with zero interruptions.
No social media, no emails.

“By noon, I’ve done the work that defines my career. The rest is logistics.”
This allows him to handle admin work or relax guilt-free in the afternoon, knowing his high-value output is already done.

Maya Angelou — Isolated Writing Mornings

Angelou famously rented a small hotel room (bare walls, no distractions) where she wrote from 6:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. every day. She brought only her notes, a Bible, and a bottle of sherry.
After that, she went home, had lunch, and was “done” — the rest of the day was for life.

“I keep a hotel room in which I do my work — a tiny, mean room with just a bed, and I go there at about six in the morning. I work until about two, then I’m done.”

But these routines are not realistic if you have an 8-to-5 job. In this case, you have two options:

1- You can compress the same psychological ingredients (stillness, focus, mastery, and control) into a pre-work ritual that changes how the whole day feels.

• 10-Minute Mindfulness Reset

• 5-Minute Visualization

• I also watch comedy videos to set the tone for the day

2- You can block a time after your 8-to-5 to focus on your own projects. How much depends on your energy and responsibilities. I usually do two hours.

Dead Hour

Some years ago, when I was a student, I developed a technique called The Dead Hour. It’ll be useful for you to avoid the constant buzz of notifications, chats, and timelines.

I’m super lazy. I’m the kind of person who will do anything to compress a 3-hour job into 1 hour. So Dead Hours are super useful and productive for me.

A Dead Hour is basically an hour where you turn off your phone’s signal and close every distracting tab in your browser. To be effective, you can’t be sleepy, so take some rest before if you need it.

If your brain is still noisy, put on some headphones and music for studying (no lyrics). Just the fact of starting will create the inertia that will put your brain in a focused state that will easily continue after the one-hour mark.

You Need to Resist

Life today is undeniably complex. We live surrounded by endless distractions that offer constant, effortless relief from discomfort. When we feel anxious, lost, or uninspired, our first instinct is to reach for a screen, to scroll, to consume, to escape. That’s ok, it’s human nature. And worse, it’s precisely what modern algorithms are designed to exploit.

But the truth is, the more you give in to the noise, the more fragmented your mind becomes. What separates Peak Performers above from those who drift is the discipline to quiet the noise and zoom out. To resist the pull of the easy escape and face the difficult, meaningful work instead. Focus is no longer something that happens naturally; it’s an art you must learn to master deliberately.

Push yourself out of your comfort zone. Train your attention as if your future depends on it, because it does. Once you dominate the art of focus, the world slows down, your vision sharpens, and you begin to see life not as chaos, but as a canvas you can finally control.