Inside, I unlocked a new “reality code.”

I was browsing and admiring the work, when one of the paintings caught my eye.

“That one is called “Angels Playing With The Wind’” ~ the shop owner said to me.

When I heard the name of the painting, years of personal experience and historical study clicked together.

First, in my personal life, there have been a handful of occasions where I have literally been “blown” down a different street by a gust of wind that I followed, only to meet someone incredibly important or have an experience that shifted me into a higher timeline.

I’ve also had experiences this past year playing American football where I was guided to make the right play because of subtle signs from nature, animals, birds, or weather patterns.

I told none of my teammates or coaches this, but this is really how I really approached practices and games. I somehow managed to complete over 70% of my passes and throw for 11 TD’s and only 2 INT’s in 6 games after not playing QB for 6 years. I think my (somewhat) successful season was in large part due to my connection to my intuition and communication with the higher realms.

My close friends know that I move and act via nature constantly.

Tweet ideas are confirmed by birds. Every animal contains a code that confirms or denies my intuition. How nature is expressing itself (the wind blowing, rain falling, the sun coming through a cloud) gives me information about the present moment, as long as I am present and open enough to notice it.

I am currently making a business move for Transcendence to live in a startup society for at least a month beginning in August based on a particular bird flying through the sky at a particular moment. I’ll be sharing more about this startup society and why I am deciding to go soon.

Most people reading this will think I’m insane and unsubscribe.

That’s fine. Those who are open enough to see beyond their ego and who have had similar experiences will understand what I’m saying.

Everything is interconnected.

Everything is energy, frequency, and vibration.

Higher beings, spirits, and even angels and archangels (certain geometric codes or frequencies present in the universe that we humanize into archetypes) can channel through animals, nature, and even humans in this third dimensional realm to move the collective towards more order and harmony on a cosmic scale.

A historical example of this “angels playing with the wind” phenomenon is from American history:

The “Miracle of the East River.”

In August 1776, George Washington, at the time Commander of the Continental Army, was trapped in Brooklyn with his troops after suffering a major defeat at the hands of the British.

The Americans were in a bad place and were probably about to be defeated.

They had one shot to escape, but they had to somehow cross the East River without the British noticing as they were surrounded and trapped.

In the morning, a thick fog descended over the area. The fog completely concealed the Americans from the British and allowed Washington and thousands of his troops to escape without detection.

In addition to the fog, alleged unexpected favorable wind conditions aided their crossing, propelling them towards their destination faster.

If the fog had not descended when it did, and if the wind had been blowing in the exact direction it was, the United States as an independent country may have never been born.

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How can you explain this?

Is it mere coincidence?

Or maybe, are there higher forces at play, subtly altering events, weather, and timing to ensure the highest outcome?

Could there in fact be “angels playing with the wind,” or beings one layer or dimension above our typical perception?

If we open our awareness to higher realms, can we notice their impact in our lives, and begin listening to their guidance?

I believe so.

Reply to this email and tell me: what do you think?

~ Jack

Things going on in the Transcendence Universe:

🌴✈️ The Thailand Expedition (Northern Thailand)

🐬🛸 The Creator Ascension Portal (Koh Phangan)

🏫💎 Transcendence University

But instead of just hanging near the shore, we decided to swim out to a rock formation a few hundred meters from the shore.

A few days before, a kid told me that if you were a strong swimmer, you could swim all the way out there and hang out on the rocks. I hadn’t considered swimming out there until he told me other people were doing it, but once he told me it was possible, I knew I was going to try.

I had never swum that far before. Maybe in a pool, but in a pool, I could always touch the ground or grab onto the side every 50 meters. This was different. When you’re swimming in the middle of the sea, there is nothing to grab onto.

I’m an adventurous guy, but I’m also a cautious guy. I like to push my edge, but I don’t like to test death. As we started paddling out and were about 100 meters from shore, I began to unexpectedly confront my mortality. Nothing was going wrong, but I realized the only thing standing between me living or drowning was whether I had enough stamina to make it to the rock.

There was a certain sense of aliveness and awe in this realization. I was confident I was going to make it, but I also had to be sharp and aware of every movement. I had no choice but to become incredibly present. There is something about being at the edge of something (a cliff, a life transition, your bank account, life or death) that snaps you into aliveness and presence like nothing else. The edge is where we feel most uncomfortable, but it is also where we feel most alive.

Finally, after maybe 10-15 minutes of swimming, we made it to the rock. Once we made it, I realized, for one, it wasn’t so bad, and two, I could have gone much further.

The way back was much more euphoric. I took my time. I took in the views of the mountains around me. I knew I could make it now. And because I’d pushed my edge, now I could do the same thing that was incredibly uncomfortable just 20 minutes ago with lightness, ease, and enjoyment.

The next day, I was finished with work and wanted to move my body and let some energy out. My instinct was to go swim back out to the rock. There was no fear anymore. It was no longer a new edge. I was choosing to do it for fun.

I was not scared anymore because I had already done it. My capacity, confidence, and abilities all increased. And now, my mind went to the possibility of swimming to the next rock formation, about another 200 meters beyond the initial rock.

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Tony Robbins said the number one skill that determines whether you live your dream life or settle for what’s comfortable is “your ability to do uncomfortable things consistently.”

If I look back at the past few years, anything I’ve done that has resulted in some form of success, be it hosting retreats, writing online, solo-traveling, or doing coaching work, was at first scary and out of my comfort zone. But that is the exact reason the experience increased my capacity, my confidence, and my abilities, and allowed me to see the next possible step beyond what I thought was my previous limit.

I was incredibly nervous the first time I sent a newsletter, posted a tweet, gave a coaching call, ran a group cohort, solo traveled, and hosted a retreat, almost to the point where I did none of them. It’s not like these things were just natural to me or there was no fear. There was pretty substantial fear for every single one of them. But every time I confronted that edge, felt the fear, and moved forward anyway, I became a more embodied and capable version of myself, to the point where the thing that I once feared normalized, and become my baseline reality.

So, what is the thing you can do to push your edge and increase your capacity?

What is the thing you fear that you know will push you closer to your goals?

Is it getting out of bed 60 minutes earlier to work on the project you know will change your life? Is it going directly to the gym after work instead of going home, debating with yourself, and pushing it off until tomorrow again? Is it posting on social media, even though it’s cringe and uncomfortable, because you know doing so is the path to the connections, lifestyle, and business you want to create?

Think about this question for a moment. Once you have a clear answer, and begin moving towards your fear, realize this:

Once you do it once, the fear will go away.

Once you do it twice, the experience will normalize.

Once you do it three times, the experience will become your new baseline.

Once you do it four times, you will unlock the ability to think much, much bigger.

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Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next article

~ Jack

🕊️ Join 20+ adventurers at the Thailand Expedition

🐬 Apply for the Creator Portal in Koh Phangan

In Barcelona, I went to a restaurant called “My Way,” a hidden gem in a little cobblestone alley in one of those mysterious corridors you find in Barcelona, twice — and had the best dining and waiter experience of my life.

You know the waiters that you enjoy getting at a restaurant. They’re energetic, kind, funny, and put in the extra ounce of effort to really make you feel at home. They’ve also usually got some charisma and swag that’s magnetic that puts you at ease to also be a bit more confident and playful yourself.

This guy was all that, but to a different level.

Imagine a Zen master combined with a world-class dancer, playing the role of a waiter. That was my waiter, Pablo.

He floated gracefully around the restaurant like a ballerina. Every movement between tables, dropping or cleaning of a plate, and pouring of a glass of wine was perfectly synced with the rhythm of the 1920’s Sinatra playing in the background. He was unafraid to sing at the right moment, to poke fun at a customer, but also to hug them on the way out. He danced between the 8 tables he was serving, bussing, and entertaining all by himself, without for a moment being stressed or in a rush — and mind you, he was also the owner of the entire place.

Pablo was truly one with his work, and one with the restaurant.

The best word to describe Pablo, the one my mom used, was suave. The only parallel I can draw is an athlete in a supreme flow state, a tai chi master going through his practice, or a musician completely lost in the rhythm of a piece. It was transcendent, psychedelic, almost otherworldly. This guy was in flow, 100% of the time, waiting and cleaning tables on a Sunday night, in his 21st year at the same restaurant, immersed in the moment, having the time of his life.

Watching him reminded me of an analogy I heard from Alan Watts a few years back.

Work as Play

In this great talk by the philosopher Alan Watts, he gives an example of two bus drivers in the same city with the same job, but who have completely different experiences.

The first bus driver sees his job as a job.

The traffic is a hassle. The passengers are annoying. Every red light is the universe working against him. His perception of the job being a job makes his life a living hell. By the time the day is over, his energy is drained.

The second driver, however, sees the job as a subtle game.

He weaves through traffic smoothly. He welcomes each passenger on with a smile. He plays music he enjoys. He sees the task of driving the bus around the city as a game he gets to play rather than an obligation he has to fulfill. By the end of the day, he goes home energized and alive. And we can only assume how that translates to his relationships and personal life.

Two men. Same job. Completely different experience.

This story, when I originally heard it, impacted me deeply. It’s why I have “It’s all play” tattooed on my wrist.

Pablo, my incredible waiter, reminded me of why I got this tattoo in the first place.

He was not working a shift. He was playing a shift. And because he was playing, his customers love him, his restaurant gets better reviews, his employees are in better spirits (and thus do better work as they’re also playing), and he leaves for the day grateful for his restaurant, fulfilled in his work, and energized for the next scene in the movie that is his life.

There is much you and I can learn from Pablo.

How can we be more playful in our work? Can we dance through it? Can we see it more as a subtle game and less as a demanding job or chore? Can we allow ourselves to love the intricate details of the craft? How may a more playful approach translate to different creations, ideas, or impact?

Sometimes we just need a little reminder and permission that it can be play.

When we love what we do and see it as a play, it won’t feel like a job. It will feel like a blessing. And when it feels like a blessing, we will love doing it, do it more often, tell more people about it, and get better results.

Promoting from Play

When we love what we do, and believe in it with full conviction, we won’t ever hesitate or hold back when promoting ourselves or our work.

Pablo had no problem promoting his restaurant.

When we were standing outside, looking at the menu and debating whether or not to enter, he came outside and said:

“You won’t find better in town, I promise you that.”

There was no persuasion. No crazy pitch. No special deal.

He just told us the truth of what he felt. We could feel his conviction and passion, and so we went in.

And damn, did he overdeliver.

And in the same spirit, I want to make the same offer to you.

Come to the Thailand Expedition this November.

You will not find a better experience on the market.

3 stops.

10 days.

25 creators, founders, artists, and travelers.

Yoga. Masterminds. Hikes. Pad Thai. Creative work sessions. Breathwork. Meditations. Motorbikes. Ecstatic dance. Lifelong connections.

It just might be the best 10 days of your life.

You can check out the itinerary, see the places we’ll be staying, and apply here:

transcendenceuniverse.org/thailandexpedition

18/25 spots remain.

And if you’re ever in Barcelona, go check out My Way and tell Pablo I say hi.

As always, I appreciate your time reading.

Much love,

Jack

Example:

From ages 19-23, I was a pretty consistent weed smoker.

I probably smoked over 50% of the days in those 4 years — often writing, working out, or hopping on calls high.

Flash forward to today, and I have zero compulsion or desire to smoke.

I’ve been offered weed a few dozen times in the last few months, and I say no with zero internal debate or hesitation.

I’m not using willpower or discipline. I just genuinely don’t want to.

How did it change, and why?

My values changed, and my identity changed.

I began to value the feelings of sobriety, mental clarity, and groundedness more than I previously valued the feeling of heightened imagination.

I like being on top of things, sleeping well, thinking sharp, making sound long-term decisions, and having my memory functioning at peak capacity way more than I like being high.

On the identity level, I began to see myself as a CEO, a leader, a man, and a businessman more than a kid, a hippie, a spiritual seeker, and a creative (the old identity).

I still value those aspects of the old identity in my new self (evolution always transcends and includes previous stages), but I now hold a higher self-image than before, where weed no longer fits in my internal value system.

That is the state we want to get to when it comes to transcending vices and addictions:

Valuing a new state MORE than the state the drug, habit, or behavior gives us.

When you experience an upgrade in values and identity, engaging in misaligned behaviors becomes MORE PAINFUL than the temporary withdrawal of abstaining from the behavior.

Willpower and discipline will eventually run out, but a genuine internal identity shift in values can make the new behavior permanent and effortless.

When you actually enjoy NOT engaging in the destructive behavior more than you enjoy doing it, you are then free of the addiction.

So ask yourself these questions if you want to let go of an addiction or destructive behavior:

1) What self-image is leading me to engage in this behavior?

2) What new self-image do I want to step into, where this addiction would no longer be congruent with how I see myself?

3) What feeling state could I learn to value MORE than the feeling of engaging in this habit?

4) What role models, archetypes, or inspirational figures are aligned with my new self-image that I could draw on for inspiration as I make this change?

5) What mental or physical cue can I make to remind myself of my new self-image? A feeling in the body? A mudra? A vision board? A quote?

Take some time to answer these questions, and you will begin to move towards transcending this behavior as your awareness increases and your identity shifts.

“First realize you are sick, then you can move towards health.” ~ Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, Verse 71

Thanks for reading, and I hope this was helpful,

Jack

The themes of family, mission, humanity, loss, betrayal, love, exploration, fatherhood, courage, quantum physics, signs, synchronicities, and Higher Guidance, woven together by a beautiful soundtrack, make me cry every time I watch it.

The first time I saw the movie, I liked it, but I didn’t have a deeper understanding or connection to what was really going on in the film.

What I’ve come to learn over the last few years is that Interstellar is not just science fiction or fantasy.

It is the story of all of our individual destinies, and our communication with Higher Beings, should we choose the courage and humility to listen to what’s calling us.

The same Higher-Dimensional guidance that’s depicted in the movie is, in my experience, real.

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When I was 23, I went into the Amazon Jungle to sit with ayahuasca 5 times and spend 10 days with no salt, no sugar, no technology, and no phone connection.

The first few days were quite normal.

I slept a lot, journaled, did push-ups, went for walks, swam in the river, and browsed the few books I had downloaded on my phone.

But towards the second half of the retreat, things began to change.

Around the 6th or 7th day, I had a feeling I was supposed to look at a book I had read before, but that at the time seemed a bit too abstract to really wrap my head around.

The book was called “The Golden Future: What to Expect and How to Reach the 5th Dimension” by Diana Cooper.

Here is what I came across on the first page:

The two highlighted sections are most important:

Maybe it was because I was bored out of my mind.

Maybe it was because I was incredibly open to other planes of reality thanks to the ayahuasca journeys.

Or maybe it was because my old perception of reality had shattered to the point where I was open to the idea that Higher Guidance was a thing.

But for the first time, I decided, with a completely open mind and open heart, to ask:

“Guardian angel, guides, spirits, are you there?”

And I received an answer.

A subtle, but unmistakable tap on the roof.

“Could have been a coincidence,” I thought.

Two taps this time.

“Oh, so you’re really there?”

One tap.

“Does one mean yes, and two mean no?”

Another single tap.

And so, the conversation went on like this for another 30 minutes.

In Interstellar, Murph tells her dad (Coop) she is communicating with a “ghost.”

This “ghost” makes sounds through her bookshelf, sends messages through binary “1” or “0” code, and sometimes, even pushes books off the shelf.

At first, Coop doesn’t believe it.

He tells her, “ghosts aren’t real.”

But after a dust storm envelops the town and destroys Murph’s room, clear lines of binary code appear on the ground that depict the “ghost’s” message.

It’s here that Coop has his big insight:

“It’s not a ghost. It’s gravity.”

The code revealed coordinates that lead to a “random” location, barricaded by a gate.

On the other side is an underground hideout run by NASA, where they are carrying out a secret mission to save humanity and find another home for humans beyond Earth.

It’s here that the leading NASA scientists tell Murph and Coop about a mysterious “they” that have been communicating with NASA through magnetism and gravity.

“They” have been giving clues to NASA, and “they” led Coop to NASA.

Dr. Brand asks Coop to pilot a mission to find humanity a home.

He says he is the only one who can pilot this ship.

After some debate, Coop agrees.

But he still can’t get an answer to his question:

My communication with these “guides” occurred in the same fashion.

Binary code.

Yes or no.

One tap means yes.

Two means no.

At one point during my first communication in the jungle, I asked if “they” could be in two places at once.

I was answered by two taps on either side of the roof at the same time.

“So you exist outside the confines of space and time?”

One tap.

I realized this was a higher-dimensional being.

We know from quantum physics that beyond the 3rd dimension, reality is no longer limited by space and time.

Meaning, beings who exist beyond the 3rd dimensions can be two places at once, in both the future and the past, and operate from a plane of existence where all moments are accessible simultaneously.

This is how, I believe, Higher Guidance works.

These Higher Beings, be it our guardian angel, our spirit guides, or our Higher Self, exist on the higher-dimensional planes, outside the confines of space and time.

They can give us guidance from “the future” because to them, all moments happen simultaneously.

We can listen and choose our actions in the world because we have free will.

The guidance shows us higher timelines and parallel realities.

And later on in Interstellar (spoiler alert), this Higher Guidance is what Coop experiences.

Fast forward in the movie, and Coop is about to be the first human to ever enter a black hole.

As he enters the black hole, he goes into the 5th dimension, into an information library (which I see as the Akashic field) where all possible parallel universes exist simultaneously.

As he sifts through this information library, he arrives at a moment in time, decades ago, where he sees Murph sitting in the original room in his home where she first started communicating with the “ghosts.”

From inside the bookshelf, he pushes books off the shelf to communicate first with Murph, and later, himself.

It is him, from the future, communicating to Murph from the past, from the 5th dimension, to help her unlock the coordinates first to NASA, and then to solve the equation that had plagued Dr. Brand for decades.

And it is himself, from the 5th dimension, who tries to get himself to “STAY.”

Did myself 4 years ago feel so deeply connected to this movie because my Higher Self knew I was going to discover that this higher-dimensional guidance was real?

Are the “guides” who I communicated with my guardian angel, my spirit guides, my Higher Self, or myself from the future?

Truthfully, I don’t know.

All I know is my experience up to this point.

Since that day in the jungle, I have had constant communication with “them.”

I have had books appear out of thin air in my room.

Cards flip over, turn around, or multiply by themselves.

More interventions and synchronicities than I will ever be able to share.

And anytime I ask “them” a question, I hear a tap.

I don’t know if this will manifest the same for you.

Higher Guidance happens in different ways for each person.

For me, it is through taps, just like Murph and Coop.

And as long as I am clear and ask, I receive an answer.

So maybe, just maybe, your Higher Self is trying to communicate with you in the present too.

Maybe that’s why “they” guided Christopher Nolan to make the movie.

And maybe “they” are leading you on a path to your destiny, just like Coop.

I didn’t want to be tied to Zoom for 20 hours a week, have to spam outreach to find clients, or box myself into a narrow niche.

I always wanted to build something with leverage.

Containers that could scale my impact and income without limiting my freedom or ability to explore my broad curiosity.

Most of my revenue today comes from leveraged containers.

• Communities

• Retreats

• Cohorts

• Revenue share partnerships

I still do 1:1 work.

But most of my 1:1 clients come from my leveraged offers first, then want to work with me more personally later.

I can make much more money and serve more people at scale by building leveraged containers rather than only relying on 1:1 work.

I can make $10,000-$20,000 in a month with a cohort or retreat, whereas if I tried to make that much in 1:1 coaching, I would have to spend 10-20 more hours a week on calls, spend a ton of time in the DMs trying to find clients, and repeat the cycle every month or two after a 1:1 client’s program was over.

I know I’m talking a lot about money, but money is just a symbol and tool for what’s actually important:

Freedom.

In life, the key to freedom is awareness.

In business, the key to freedom is leverage.

“You are never going to get rich renting out your time” ~ Naval Ravikant

Leverage is a disconnect between your inputs and outputs.

It means 1 hour of your work is not connected to a fixed, linear income.

Most coaches are unleveraged, meaning their income is still 100% tied to their time.

These coaches run into a few common problems:

• They can’t find clients

• If they do crack the code of signing people 1:1, they can’t scale their income without spending more time on calls

• They don’t know how to build leveraged containers to serve 1:many - or grow their audience to actually have enough people to serve 1:many

Throughout the rest of this article, I am going to share a few unconventional strategies to not only sign more clients to your 1:1 offer, but also to scale beyond 1:1 so you can detach your time from your income and be serving customers and see money flow into your bank account while you’re sleeping, vacationing in Europe, or on the plane ride to Bali.

By the end, you will have a clear picture of how to build out a full-stack, leveraged, cash-flowing Digital Universe.

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See the Bigger Picture

When you begin building out your creator business, you want to “build with the end in mind.”

Meaning, if you were visualizing the end goal for your business ecosystem, what would it look like? Would you be on 1:1 calls for 20+ hours a week? Or would you be 5 hours of calls a week MAX and spend most of your time reading, exercising, and creating?

When you build without the end in mind, you accidentally trap yourself into doing work you don’t want to be doing, being on Zoom calls for more hours than you’d like, and find yourself in positions without leverage.

When you build with the end in mind, you can begin chipping away on leveraged containers that will eventually grant you the income and freedom to scale without your time being attached to your income or your service, and make decisions today that lead you towards leverage tomorrow.

To build with the end in mind, it can help to outline the endgame for your offer ecosystem.

I call this your “Digital Universe.”

The Digital Universe Outline:

• Top-of-Funnel Content: Instagram, X, SS Notes, LinkedIn, TikTok

• Middle-of-Funnel Content: Newsletter, YouTube, Podcasts, Telegram Channel

• Bottom-of-Funnel Content: Free guides, ebooks, lead magnets, email courses

• Low-Ticket ($20-$150): Narrow courses, books, guides, communities, apps

• Mid-Ticket ($150-$999): Cohorts, courses, group coaching, community

• High-Ticket ($999+): 1:1 work, retreats, masterminds, rev-share partnerships

You can take this outline, copy and paste it into a document, and plug in your vision for how your ecosystem will build out over the next 3-5 years.

Then, once you see the bigger picture, you want to come back down to today and identify your highest priority project.

What is the highest priority project?

It is the project that moves you towards your next clear goal.

• If you want to jump your income to $3-5k/month, work on your high-ticket 1:1 offer and prioritize content and conversations that lead to clients

• If you have 1:1 clients but want to start detaching your time from your income and service, begin building an evergreen community that can run 365 days a year and brings in cash every month without taking more 1:1 calls.

• If you aren’t seeing success in your 1:1 and need a cash injection, launch a leveraged mid-ticket cohort to add $10-20k in a month, and downsell members into an evergreen community or upsell them into 1:1 after.

Outline your Universe. Focus on your highest priority project. Then build from there.

Separate Yourself With Leverage

Now, I want to present a few models that will help you instantly access leverage.

An *asterisk* here is that launching something leveraged usually requires a fairly big audience (1,000+ followers on X or 5,000+ followers on IG).

Without an audience (unless you have a big off-platform network you can reach out to directly), it’s going to be difficult to sell enough spots in a leveraged offer to make it worth your time. If you’re below the follower counts I just mentioned, I’d recommend focusing on growing your audience and signing 1:1 clients to start. Once you have an audience and testimonials from your 1:1 work, you can begin moving into positions of leverage.

The models below are also great ways to indirectly get people into your coaching program (without having to spam outreach and spend 4 hours a day begging people to get on a sales call in the DMs).

Most of my 1:1 clients come from my leveraged containers, not outreach in the DMs.

What I’ve realized is that it’s easier emotionally and psychologically for someone to join a $33/month community or a $500 cohort and then ascend to a 1:1 tier than it is to make the jump straight into a $3,000+ 1:1 container without knowing you, speaking to you, and feeling your energy first.

I don’t run my community for the sole purpose of upselling people into a 1:1. It just happens naturally as a byproduct of delivering immense value in the group, and people wanting more proximity and personalized guidance once they’ve already gotten a taste of what I have to offer and resonate with my teaching style.

Okay, now let’s move into the leveraged containers:

1) Cohort = Cash Injection

I would estimate that at least 50% of my revenue over the last three years has come from cohorts, aka group coaching programs.

I’ve probably launched 12 to 15 cohorts in the last three years. The least profitable cohorts probably did about $5000. The most profitable cohort did $23,000 and $40,000. Those numbers were in a month. It’s very hard to access those numbers in a coaching business alone because you don’t have leverage, meaning you can’t serve and sell 1:many.

A cohort is also an indirect way to filter for people who can eventually join your 1:1.

A few 1:1 clients I am advising right now in Digital Universe are having difficulty signing their own 1:1 high-ticket clients.

Instead of beating their head against the wall and contuining with the exact same strategy they’ve been applying for the last three months without seeing results (Einstein’s definition of insanity), I recommend they launch a 6-10 week cohort for $500-$1000, get 10 to 20 students in the program (because they already have fairly big audiences), and have the potential to upsell those same people into 1:1 after they’ve already begun to see results.

Not only is a cohort a great model to facilitate a transformation at scale and lower the barrier of entry for someone in your audience to work with you, but it is also a great way to get a cash injection of $5000-$25,000 into your business with the potential to upsell student students into a high ticket offer or downsell them into an evergreen container like a community on the backend, which brings us to our next model.

2) Community = Evergreen MRR & Best Client Pool

A community is a great way to build evergreen MRR, meaning the community cash flows every month.

My personal philosophy is that if you can get a community to $4,000 MRR, you are free.

Of course, you will have to run and facilitate the community, but ideally the community is built in a way that is fun, meaning you’d want to talk to these people and teach what you know anyways, even if you weren’t getting paid, you have members of the community who want to step up and teach/lead themselves (less work for you), and the network within the community is so valuable and the container is set up in a way that the community is valuable and runs on it’s own (even without you there).

In Transcendence, it lights me up to see the group chat active, people hopping on calls with one another, and even business collaborations forming between members without me being there.

With a community at $4,000+ a month, you are free in the sense that beyond $4,000 a month, you don’t need any more money to cover your living expenses (if you aren’t living extremely lavishly or buying bottle service at the club). You no longer have to do work you don’t want to do, take on a 1:1 client just because you need the money, or find freelancing work or a job to cover your baseline. You can now think bigger and move with more leverage.

The Matthew Principles states, “For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away.”

The Leverage Principles states, “For to everyone who has leverage, more leverage will be given, and he will have more and more abundance; but from him who does not have leverage, his income will always be tied to another.”

Getting a community to $4,000/month will not happen overnight (unless you already have a big audience and execute a solid launch). You have to do the things that don’t scale in the beginning to get to this number. But selling someone into a $20-$300/month community is a much easier sell than selling someone into a $3,000 coaching program. And once somebody gets over the hump and resistance of joining your community, they are much more likely to buy from you again in various different ways.

If you already have an audience, beginning to build out a community is a very smart long-term play, as it can become your freedom vehicle after 6-12 months of focus, and becomes your warm lead pool of people who trust you and will buy a cohort, coaching program, retreat, software, or digital product from you when you choose to launch something else.

3) Cross-Multiplication = Using 1 Portion of Your Program Multiple Ways

Once you have programs built out for your coaching offer, cohorts, or community, you now have a TON of content you can cross-multiply in multiple ways.

Cross-multiplication means taking pre-existing course content and program materials and using them in new, creative ways to increase cash flow.

For example, you can take an intro section to your broader 3-month program and launch the same content as a free lead magnet. Or, you can take one narrow section of your broader curriculum and launch it as its own asynchronous digital product for $97-$500 that can sell indefinitely as your audience grows and you promote it within your content.

This is a 140IQ play to build out your entire Digital Universe (value ladder) in less time, because you don’t have to reinvent the wheel and make something new for every tier.

Start with your broad curriculum, and then ask yourself:

Is there a section of my broader program that can stand on its own as a course, ebook, lead magnet, or guide?

If you start cross-multiplying, you can grow 5 trees from one seed or have 5 individual products stemming from one larger curriculum.

4) Long Form Content = Ultimate Trust Builder

The last leverage-building element I want to mention here is not directly tied to your income, but will be your greatest source of income as you compound over the next few years.

This is long-form content, aka articles, videos, podcasts, or free guides & ebooks.

I would estimate that 50-70% of my sales in the past few years have come from my long-form content, primarily my newsletter.

But also, it has surprised me that many cohort students, retreat members, or coaching clients found me from a video with fewer than 1,000 views or a podcast with fewer than 50 downloads.

How is this possible?

It simply comes down to mental real estate and time under attention.

Buyer’s psychology says someone has to spend ~ 7 hours with you in your content before they feel internally ready to buy from you. It’s very hard (if not impossible) to hit that number only doing short-form content.

If you want to stick in people’s heads, have them thinking about you when they’re making a decision, and move into a tier beyond short-form content creator (which you can call a thought leader), you have to start creating long-form content.

A simple way to do this is to start writing articles on Substack, then record yourself reading the script for a YouTube video and a podcast.

These pieces of content may not get as many views as your short-form content, but it does not matter. 100 newsletter readers are more valuable than 10,000 short-form content viewers.

Begin with Leverage in Mind

Even if you’re building a coaching business, you want to do so with the end in mind so you don’t get trapped in 1:1 work on Zoom for 20-40 hours a week.

You want to be able to scale without your time being attached to your money.

To do so, you need leverage.

And to build leverage, you have to build containers to hold large groups of people as your audience grows, to facilitate a transformation for them at scale.

The models I outlined above are great starting places. If you can chip away at them one by one, in a few years’ time, you will have a full-stack Digital Universe of coaching programs, cohorts, digital products, communities, retreats, and masterminds all filling up with your growing audience.

It will not happen overnight, so start with your highest-priority project, attack it with full focus, and scale when the moment is right.

And if you want guidance on launching a cohort, building a community, growing your audience, or signing more clients to your 1:1 program, I’m working with 5 creators in the first round of my Digital Universe program until June 1.

3 creators are in, and 2 spots are open until I close the doors on June 1 and reopen in July.

If this speaks to you and you want to build out your full-stack Digital Universe and 3-5x your revenue (without spending more time on 1:1 calls), check out the document below:

🛸 Digital Universe Program

Thanks for reading, I hope you found this valuable.

Happy building,

Jack

“The generals have a saying:

‘Rather than make the first move,

it is better to wait and see.

Rather than advance an inch,

it is better to retreat a yard.’” ¹

How often do we grind away at our careers or in our lives, pushing and forcing, just to advance an inch?

We work for 2 years for a promotion from associate to manager. We grind for 9 months to raise our salary by $5 an hour. We post every day on social media for a year just to get 10 likes versus 5. This is small thinking. This is advancing an inch.

When we only chase incremental improvement, we never quantum leap into a higher timeline. We stay stuck on the same track. We never 10x. Our nose is too close to the paper. We can’t see the whole picture. We can’t zoom out, reorient ourselves, and choose a new path, devise a new strategy, or approach our situation from a higher perspective that would leapfrog us 10 steps forward in ½ the time.

Oftentimes, what precedes a quantum leap or a 100- to 1,000x increase is an intentional step back. It is retreating a yard, rather than advancing an inch. It’s rare for someone to consciously retreat because doing so means taking a hit in status, security, and identity.

But those who can summon the wisdom and courage to take the status hit, the salary cut, the job loss, the time offline, and can bear a period of stagnancy, uncertainty, and confusion, go on to create far better results than those who spend their entire lives advancing only an inch.

Great leaps forward often start with steps back.

When Jeff Bezos left his high-status, high-salary finance job in New York City to create Amazon from his kitchen table, he retreated a yard, but eventually moved thousands of yards ahead of everyone else who stayed on the finance track.

When Matthew McConaughey left law school and then paused his new career in acting to spend six months motorbiking through Europe, he retreated a yard, only to return to the US fully ready to step into his purpose and move thousands of yards ahead in his acting career.

When Michael Jordan retired from the NBA in 1993 after 3 straight championships to play baseball, he retreated a yard, allowing his passion for basketball to reignite, and returned hungrier and more focused than ever to win 3 more straight championships from 1996 to 1998.

These three figures achieved results that were quantum leaps above others in their industry. How? They had the courage to step back, climb back down the mountain, and start again with more clarity, determination, and conviction than ever before. The greatest leaps in history were made from a conscious step back.

The most transformational periods in my life have always come when I consciously chose to retreat.

When I was 20, I chose to step away from football, change my major from economics to psychology, and travel Europe (after being inspired by McConaughey) instead of doing another finance internship.

I could have kept inching forward with football, maybe squeezing out a little playing time by my fourth year, and inching forward on the finance path, getting another internship that would have set me up for a well-paying job after college.

Instead, I took a status hit in both areas, wandered Europe for 6 weeks with no plan, and realized I wanted to write online as a career rather than work in a corporate office. That step back led to a quantum leap forward, where I left school 6 months later to become a full-time creator and ghostwriter and never stepped foot into a 9-5 job for a single day.

Almost a year later, in 2023, after my first digital nomad sprint in Argentina and Costa Rica, I decided to move back home with my parents to lock in and build for 3 months.

In those 3 months, I built and launched my first cohort and made $23,000, which propelled me to move to Austin, Texas, where I met friends who changed my life forever. I also iterated the previous cohort into another launch that did $40,000, which allowed me to take 3 months off to backpack Thailand. The origin of those leaps forward was a conscious retreat back home.

Over the past few years, I have taken multiple steps back to eventually make quantum leaps forward.

I cut my ghostwriting income down to zero to build my own thing from scratch. I left my high-status, well-paying jobs with Aubrey Marcus and Dan Koe because I felt like I was living one standard deviation away from my purpose. I even left the creator economy to wander around Thailand for 3 months because I was burnt out and misaligned, seeking presence and a deeper connection with my spiritual self.

Each time, the moves didn’t make sense to those around me. They killed my ego and shattered my sense of identity.

Imagine dropping out of a top 10 university, cutting $7,000/month of income, leaving secure jobs with high-profile people in the space, and pausing a business that just did $40,000 in a month to wander around Thailand with a backpack.

On the surface, these moves are pretty ridiculous. My parents didn’t understand or necessarily approve (although they have always supported me).

But a small voice inside me, a subtle feeling in my spirit, told me something was off — and I am not the type of person who can continue inching forward in roles or trajectories that are not 100% aligned for more than a few weeks or months.

I have always prioritized my spirit, my intuition, and alignment with my purpose over external benchmarks of status, security, or success — which is why I have continued to backtrack my progress to come into deeper alignment with myself.

More recently, I have once again retreated.

I significantly cut my responsibilities and income in my friend Nick Sweeney’s Coherent Creators program to put full energy into my own thing (I am still leading a class a week because I love the people inside and being a teacher). I moved back home from Bali to be with family for a month before a summer of heavy travel to lock in and build the foundation of my next few projects. I also just cut $1,000/month in income from a mid-ticket program to build a high-ticket, more personalized offer (the origin of this article idea).

Why? To iterate closer to absolute alignment with my purpose and set myself up for more ownership, more leveraged containers, and quantum leaps in business in the future.

Yesterday, with one of my 1:1 clients, Jack, we spent about 45 minutes restructuring his business model.

Jack’s doing about $10-$15k a month in his health coaching business, but he’s on calls for 20+ hours a week and works over 50 hours a week just to stay on top of everything.

We realized that by reducing his 4 pricing tiers to 2, taking bi-weekly calls only, and building better systems for his community and hiring as assistant, he could grow his revenue from $10-15k to $35-40k/month and be on calls for 10 hours a week instead of 20.

This way, he’s serving more people, has more time back to create content, serve his clients asynchronously, and live his life, and makes 2.5x the revenue in ½ the time.

The meta-principle here?

By stepping back, getting his head out of the day-to-day operations, and thinking strategically about how to move forward, we set up a game plan to quantum-leap his business and his quality of life.

He could have kept inching away in his current model by taking on more work and signing more clients, but instead, just by stepping back for an hour to think strategically, his entire business model became significantly more efficient and profitable.

The process of consciously retreating.

We are not talking about retreating out of fear, scarcity, and playing small.

We are talking about choosing to step back with calculation and wisdom to chart a better path forward to our ideal destination.

This is the process of choosing a higher timeline:

1) Step back

Get away from the world. Turn off tech. Destimulate from consumption and go inwards. It’s very hard to get clear on where we want to go when we are drowning in work, messages, and responsibilities. If you can, carving out time to go off-grid, offline, and retreat into yourself is a great way to do this. I am attending a friend’s retreat in Colombia, June 10-15, if you are interested in doing the same.

2) Zoom out

Once you have stepped back from the world, now is the time to zoom out. See your life as a story that is unfolding. Look at where you’ve come from. Sober up to where you are now. See your life from a broader perspective of years or decades rather than only the day-to-day. A good exercise to do this is to ask your older self for advice and perspective. This could be your 5-year older self or 50-year older self. You will always receive wisdom and guidance when you shift into this perspective. This is how you develop your inner coach.

3) Reconnect to your vision

Now that you’ve stepped back and zoomed out, you can visualize the future reality you want to create. What’s important to you? What’s your mission? What’s your ideal lifestyle? What’s your ideal work, career, and income? Most importantly, is the current path you’re on moving you towards this ideal future? If any aspect of it is a no, that is a sign to step back and move forward on an upgraded path with a different strategy. I have a free guided meditation to connect to your 1-year future vision on YouTube here.

4) Take the one step you can see

Is there one message you know you have to send? Is there a new job to apply for? Is there a project to build? You don’t have to have all the answers right away. Clarity will come once you start moving towards the layer of your vision that you can see. Start moving towards it, no matter how small, and the next steps will reveal themselves as you walk.

5) Make realignment a daily ritual

How do you not lose sight of your vision? How do you avoid accidentally going onto side paths that distract you from your main quest? You have to make zooming out and gaining perspective a daily practice. Journaling. Meditation. Pondering walks. Deep conversations with intelligent friends. These are crucial to staying oriented towards what you want most.

Don’t be afraid to take a step back.

Hopefully, the examples I used in this article of famous figures and myself have given you the permission and the inspiration to take a step back and reorient towards a higher future, if that is the season of life you are in.

If you already feel 100% aligned and on your mission, don't change anything. All you have to do now is stay connected to it.

But if this did speak to you, and there is a certain area of your life you feel called to retreat from, do so with wisdom and calculation. Don’t make a decision haphazardly, but also don’t delay your decision out of fear. Move with courage and faith towards your vision and continue stepping back and iterating when things feel out of alignment.

No one has to understand your decision but you. You can see your future more clearly than anyone else.

Trust yourself, and move forward from your inner knowing. And remember, the path forward often begins with an intentional step back.

Thanks for reading,

~ Jack

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¹ Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), verse 69.

² Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), verse 69.

³ Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), verse 41.

I’m running a 6-week writing cohort beginning this Monday (May 4).

The One of One Writer is a 6-week group writing sprint — with personal feedback, strategic implementation, and edge-of-knowledge information — so you can become a one-of-one writer in your niche, magnetize an aligned audience, and monetize doing what you love.

12 writers are enrolled. That means 8 spots are still open. In this brief letter, I will explain what the program is all about, what makes it different, and why you should think about joining.

If you’re not interested, feel free to click off this article. I’ll be back with regular articles in the next few days.

The Group

Unlike most writing programs that give you information and expect you to form a disciplined writing habit on your own, the One of One Writer has built-in daily writing hours so you can build the habit with a group of 15-20 other writers.

Every single weekday for these 6 weeks, we will be on Google Meet from 9-10 am EST, writing together as a group. If your time zone or life circumstances do not permit joining these daily writing hours, you can still be a part of the group, but it is expected if you do join the cohort, you will be at the writing hours each day.

If you get nothing else from these 6 weeks, you will have practiced the skill of focused writing for at least 30 hours — which will elevate every area of your life, from your thinking, to your focus, to your business abilities, and to your willpower and self-discipline.

Obviously, the cohort’s contents and value are everything we will be doing outside of our group writing sessions, but these hours are a nice added bonus if you want to commit yourself to taking this digital writing thing seriously over the next 6 weeks. I’m personally stoked to build my morning routine around this daily practice and let my own brand and business grow downstream of this consistent habit.

The Edge of Knowledge

As Naval Ravikant said, “Specific knowledge cannot be taught in school or learned in a textbook. It must be acquired by doing or through direct mentorship.

Here’s the part where I tell you about my social proof or whatever:

I’ve been deep in this space for 4 years. Between my own account and other accounts I’ve ghostwritten for, I’ve generated hundreds of millions of views, grown over 100k followers across platforms, and added over 10,000 followers to email lists. I’ve also brought in about $300,000 of my own from various products and services, all off the back end of my writing.

In this program, I do my best to extract and synthesize everything I’ve learned in our live classes + content, but the specific knowledge really comes into play when I can look at your brand, your writing, and your strategy and intuitively tell you how you can improve it — simply because I’ve been doing it daily for years.

Essentially, you are shortcutting your way to specific knowledge that took me 4 years of direct experience, $25,000+ in mentorships, and apprenticeships/jobs working directly with dudes like Dan Koe, Aubrey Marcus, and Nick Sweeney in a 6-week concentrated container.

Personalized Feedback & Strategic Implementation

Every Sunday, we will hold 60-120 minute office hours for feedback, workshopping your content, and improving your writing, brand, and aesthetic.

This will also be a time to ask specific questions and get personal feedback tied to the deeper layers of your writing business - like your marketing strategy, funnels, launches, dm flow, and ecosystem structure.

Bonus - Exclusive Community Access

Upon signing up for the cohort, and for the next 12 months beyond the finish of this program, you will also have access to the Transcendence Skool Community and social network.

Inside the Skool, there are 11+ additional courses on the creator, economy, psychology, performance, health, mindset, identity work, and metaphysics/spirituality.

Inside the community, there are 84+ creators across platforms and niches, building coaching businesses, apps, retreats, and software at the edge of the creator economy. We have a Telegram group chat and an Instagram group chat inside the community that are popping.

Each week, we have a group call focused on content and networking, and we will host frequent one-off workshops on niche topics such as setting up your first retreat, launching your first cohort, or amplifying your creativity, in addition to various guest masterclasses from creators within the community or at the edge of their respective fields within the broader space.

If you watch the video on the website for the One of One Writer, you will get a glimpse into what this community looks like from the inside.

Becoming a “One of One” Writer in Your Niche

“In your niche” is a statement that requires a bit of explanation, as I am not of the belief that you have to pigeonhole yourself in a niche to stand out. Quite the opposite, in fact.

The niche is you, and you “own” that niche by learning to combine, synthesize, and convey cross-disciplinary interests and knowledge into a cohesive brand to the point where no one can compete with you at that intersection. The key is understanding how to make your brand broad (but not diluted) and convey complex ideas in an interesting way that attracts attention on X, Substack, and Instagram.

Every big creator you follow has done this, and we aim to arm you with the skills, knowledge, and vision to set you on a trajectory to do the same.

Magnetize an Aligned Audience

When you nail your positioning, branding, and voice, you will naturally attract an aligned audience that eventually becomes your customer base.

To really leverage the principle of magnetism, we have to unlock higher degrees of authenticity, storytelling, and creativity. Much of the curriculum will be based on the subtle energetics of magnetic social media writing (writing from the body, the emotional world, and the spirit), as well as every tactic and trick in the book for social media growth.

The aim is to play the game of social media growth by leveraging tactics, but not to get lost in the tactics, so that you attract an audience that only followed you for your viral tricks, or worse, lose yourself along the way playing a character that was never really you. Much of my thinking on why I don't think you should write with AI is directly related to this principle.

Monetize Something You Love

When you attract an aligned audience that loves the real you, you can build offers and products they want to buy and that you love creating.

The highest aim in this space is to get paid to do what you love. Whether that's running a retreat, coaching with your specific knowledge, or building a community around your interest, writing is the vehicle to attract the audience that will fill out these programs and support you financially so you can do this thing full-time.

When you build an audience, the right way, and you don't sacrifice any of your interests while still understanding how to provide specific value to that audience, you can really monetize in any way you want. The only limits are the limits of your creativity and the limits of what the market wants. When you sit at that intersection, you can make money in a way that truly feels like play.

We Start in ~ 72 Hours

The price point for this cohort is a filter for those who aren’t serious or those who want shortcuts and quick AI systems to make content creation easier instead of doing the real work of developing an intrinsic writing skill and mastering the craft in the only way one can master anything - through deep study and real, focused action that doesn’t always feel easy.

This is the only writing program on the market that combines internal development with external tactics. We will go deep into systems, structure, hooks, psychology, cross-posting, long-form writing, and everything else you need to form the foundation of your digital writing career. But we will also go deep into your creative nature, elevating your energy, transcending subconscious limitations, and learning to write from your emotional/spiritual world so your writing has an emotional impact on the human being on the other side of the screen.

If you want an AI system or a tool to write AI for you, go check out Justin Welsh or Nicholas Cole. I’m sure their stuff is fantastic. xD

If this philosophy, this container, in this community resonates with you, I invite you to take a leap of faith into this program that can very well alter the trajectory of your life and career. On the other side, you will be equipped with the internal and external skill set to make a full-time living, and potentially a lot more, by writing on the Internet.

From here, you can go build an app, a software, you can go become a YouTuber, or you can go build your own community. But the fundamental building block we will put into place over the next six weeks will be your writing knowledge and skill set, which you will take with you for the rest of your life.

Our first call is Monday at 1 PM EST. We start our daily writing hours on Tuesday.

If you are ready, I'll see you inside.

~ Jack

This June, I will be speaking at the “Future Proof Creator Summit” alongside 15 other speakers. It will be a great learning experience for anyone who comes, and also a fun time hanging out and masterminding with other creators around the world. A good number of my friends from the creator space are going, so if you want to hang out with us in Vancouver from June 5-7, you can find tickets and details here.

The deadline to book a discounted hotel with your ticket purchase is 7 days from now, so this is the time to decide whether you’re attending. If you are interested or have questions, you can join this Telegram group to chat with me, the event organizers, and speakers.

Now, let’s dive into the article:

If you’re anything like me, you have big visions for your life.

A stable job, a nice paycheck, and a defined career trajectory never spoke to you. Living at your edge did. Chasing your potential has always mattered more to you than being comfortable.

Most people in your life probably don’t understand you. Why embark on some heroic quest to discover your potential when you could make $100k a year working a good job like everyone else in your town? What they don’t understand is that normalcy means failure to the ambitious spirit. It’s almost as if you have no other option but to think big. It’s simply how you’re wired.

We’ve been blessed with the ability to dream. But we are also cursed. Our dreams inspire us, but also haunt us. We can’t forget the visions we’ve seen, but we also constantly feel we’re not living up to that image. Who we could become is beautiful and inspiring, but when we compare it to our current circumstances, we can’t help but feel we are far, far behind. We repeatedly have to come face-to-face with ourselves and the world when we realize we aren’t living up to our potential, and doing so is a deeply sobering, emotionally challenging experience.

We spend our years waiting. Waiting to step into that next version of ourselves. Waiting for the visions we’ve had in deep meditations or psychedelic journeys to materialize. Waiting for the day we finally transcend our limiting beliefs, our behavioral flaws, and our destructive habits and fully embody our “higher selves.”

Why does it seem this day never comes? Why do we tap into this higher self for a day, only to come crashing down just a few weeks later and end up right where we started? How can we reside permanently in our next evolution and break this looping cycle of progress and regress?

This is what I intend to explore in this article. I will start with a personal story about a vision I had around what I was destined to build a few years ago, in 2024. I’ll also explain why I fell off the path, the sidequests that pulled my attention away from the mission, and the tipping point that finally, after years of circling the vision, has allowed me to fully step into the mission with zero apprehension or second-guessing. We’ll finish with some practical advice on how to break out of self-defeating loops and fully step into your next evolution.

Are you ready? Let’s dive in:

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The Original Vision

2 and a half years ago, in 2024, I had an incredibly profound experience during a kundalini activation session in Thailand to build a creator community to unite the conscious creator space into a positive-sum, decentralized networking platform and information hub.

If you don’t know what a kundalini activation session is, it’s essentially a consciousness-expanding experience that unlocks higher energy levels in your system, similar to a very deep meditation or psychedelic experience.

The vision that downloaded into my mind was immense. My body activated in a way I’d never experienced before. It was like 1,000 volts had just been injected into my mind and body. From this elevated state, clarity around the community and movement clicked in my imagination at levels I’d never seen before.

I rode the high from the session into a 2-week burst of action as I’d never experienced before. I worked 12-16 hours a day, stayed up until 8 am creating and building, and didn’t need more than a few hours of sleep to feel well-rested and supercharged. I’d found my “moonshot vision” Tony Robbins so often talks about, and it was pulling me at a rapid speed and intensity to bring it into reality.

However, I was not embodied enough or ready to hold the vision in my nervous system long enough for it to materialize. This is the potential issue with these mystical or psychedelic experiences. You see the “Kingdom of Heaven” or your “higher self” for a few hours, but then you come back to earth, in the same body, with the same nervous system, and the same skillset, and have to walk the path of integration every day to actually embody what you realized.

A lot of people think just because they’ve seen a big vision for their life means they’re destined to have it, but they bypass the fact that they have to integrate the vision into every fiber of their being through daily practice and holding the frequency as a devoted practice. Just because you have the potential for something does not mean it’s destined. It is called a “potential” for a reason. I have sobered up to this lesson the hard way over the past few years.

Once I left Thailand, I fell out of the voltage and frequency that matched the clarity and action with the community vision. I came back to Chicago, was no longer riding moterbikes around, going to psytrance raves every night (as my break from working / creative ideation session), and feeling infinitely free and expansive. Other projects moved to the forefront (because I needed cash), I fell into scarcity and practicality, I fell back into some old habits and patterns, and I slowly stopped working on the community.

A month later, I went to the Amazon to sit with ayahuasca for 10 days. I haven’t had a plant medicine experience since then (about 18 months later) because I am still integrating the lessons from that journey (to continue my thread of bringing “heavenly insights down to earth.”)

During that retreat, I contemplated the vision, the community, my path, and my life’s purpose for hours upon hours in the jungle with no phone, no wifi, and nothing to do except think and be. What I arrived at was that my destiny was waiting for me. I didn’t have to rush into it. I was going to be writing and building community for the rest of my life, and I didn’t have to try to take it all on now. I came to the fact that I was 23, I should allow myself to be 23, and it was okay to give myself some time to be a kid before taking on what felt like a Herculean task in my mind. And so I did.

A 1-Year Sidequest

I left the jungle with the decision to go back to college for all of 2025 and play football one last time. It was a complete 180 compared to what I imagined I’d come to before I went into the retreat. I realized everything I wanted to do with my life was still going to be there when I left, but spending the year close to family, being with my grandma near the end of her life, and having my dad and grandpa be able to see me play quarterback one last time were more important to me than building a business and traveling the world — for that season of life.

I enrolled in school at the beginning of 2025 and began training for football. It was, in all honesty, a very challenging year. I was constantly trying to dance between two words. I often felt I was wasting my time. I felt out of place and like I had no one who understood me or could see the world like I did. I wanted to write, create, and build, but I was stuck in class, listening to lectures with a bunch of 18-to-20-year-olds, or getting yelled at by a coach for my feet being shit or going through my reads incorrectly lol.

It was a lotttt to juggle. I would literally be launching a cohort, planning a retreat, or doing content strategy for Aubrey Marcus, and then going to a psychology lecture or practice right after. It was a strange season, a liminal period between worlds. But looking back, I realized how much the year increased my capacity and the weight and responsibilities of what I could hold.

Even though it was challenging, the year was extremely formative and fruitful for me. I reactivated my inner warrior by battling through multiple injuries in the arena. We had a few incredibly magical games that I’ll never forget for the rest of my life. I remembered how important sports and play were to my overall health and well-being (physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual). I met some amazing human beings on my team, in school, and in my community.

But by the time the final game came to an end and I turned in my final paper, I was itching to get on a flight back to Thailand and go full-time creator again. So in January, I booked a one-way ticket to Bangkok, and the adventure started again, and the remembrance of the original vision I had back in 2026 came with it.

Elevating My Frequency in Thailand

Within the first two weeks of leaving the frigid Chicago weather and arriving at a beach town in Koh Phangan, Thailand, I was back in the feeling of 2024.

Freedom. Electricity. Infinite potential. Purpose. Alignment. Psytrance music. Moterbikes. James Bond. Jack Sparrow.

It is no coincidence that my content began to pop off the moment I arrived back in Thailand.

The elevated frequency I dropped back into preceded the ideas that were coming through, and I began to go mega viral on X for the first time since before I went to play football in 2025.

The virality had nothing to do with my content system or workflow (I basically had none) and everything to do with the frequency I entered. Frequency precedes ideas, and ideas are the golden egg of content creation.

From that frequency, clarity around my ecosystem slowly started to reemerge. A writing retreat in Europe. A 6-week writing cohort in May. And coming full circle, beginning to restart momentum in the Transcendence Community.

However, just as I began to find my flow and things began to click into place, I once again was hit with more delays.

More Delays

After a month of ripping around the island solo, things changed.

Friends visiting Koh Phangan in February. Helping with other projects while, once again, putting my own on hold. Convincing myself I should wait to fully step into my own vision because “I’m young” or “I don’t have to rush.”

But inside me, a subtle burning rage began to stir - the feeling that I was once again delaying my own destiny. And so after weeks of this anger brewing, I went through a week of intense anger transmutation.

I’d sprint on the beach. Thrash around in the ocean. Work out hard as f*ck. Scream as I was driving my moterbike. Start barking and yelling out of nowhere (my friends can attest to this). My solar plexus was activating, and I was moving the stuck energy.

It sounds quite manic or insane if you have not done shadow work yourself. But if you want to alchemize anger specifically, you are going to have to move it in ways that look crazy to the average person (which is why I recommend doing so in private).

I was pissed at the lack of clarity in my mind, the lack of sovereignty over my direction, and the fact that I had once again delayed what I knew was destined for me.

But as I would allow the anger to come through, move the energy, and transmute it into action, new levels of clarity and direction would emerge.

Anger is unexpressed desire. When you do not express your fullest self to the world and suppress your desires for a long enough time, it will brew inside you to the point where it bursts out in a fit of passionate rage. You get so angry at yourself, your circumstances, and the world that the energy fuels you into a massive transformation, as long as you allow it to come through and don’t suppress it.

Anger is not a sign something is wrong. It is actually a sign you are moving in the right direction (transcending the map of consciousness and rising above shame, fear, and apathy). You are accessing a higher energy level, and channeling anger into intense action propels you towards greater courage and deeper embodiment of your destiny.

The depth at which you step into your destiny is equally proportional to the amount of courage you can summon within your own spirit. Courage is the doorway to your mission, and moving out of apathy (non-action) by transmuting anger into action is the key to unlocking it.

Fully Stepping In

After a month or so of this intense shadow work, I’m fully stepping into the vision after years of circling it.

The Transcendence Community is the north star — for this season of life. That’s it. Nothing is pulling me off the path. The constant feeling of waiting and delaying has gotten to a point where there is no other option if I want to feel fully alive.

If you’re still reading this, I’m sure you’ve experienced a similar arc in your own way. A vision that came through clearly once, that keeps finding you no matter how many times you walk away from it, but that you continue to delay in favor of fear, doubt, rationality, or stepping on toes.

The truth is that you will never feel fully alive until you fully step into your mission with zero hedging, negotiation, and outside influence.

Stepping into the mission is an inside-out game. You have to embody the energy and identity of the person who would live out the mission before you have the capacity to hold it.

How?

It all comes down to shadow work and identity work.

Take some time to actually think/feel through these questions, as they are the catalyst to fully stepping into your calling:

• What are you scared of?

• Who would you have to be to fully step into your vision?

• What would you have to give up?

• What emotions are you avoiding feeling if you were to fully step into this path?

• Whose voice (or voices) are keeping you small and living in fear?

• What old habits, emotions, and traits do you have to let go of?

• What behavior cycle or pattern do you have to break out of?

• What area of transformation have you been avoiding?

These questions, if you sit deeply with them and act on the insights you arrive at, are the doorway to break the cycle of self-limitation and step into a new cycle of self-transcendence.

Breaking the Cycle

To step into your destiny fully, you have to break your old timeline and step into an entirely new tone.

How do you break out of the cycle, end the karmic loop, and shed the old self and step into the new?

Here are some ideas:

• Shake things up drastically. It’s extremely difficult to change when your enviroment is reinforcing every part of the old identity you want to shed. Take a weekend and go on your own solo retreat. Book a one-way ticket to a new place where no one knows you. Quit the job that’s draining your spirit and trust in your ability to figure things out. To step into the next level of your destiny, you need to enter a new timeline, and taking a leap to completely reinvent yourself is the fastest way to do so.

• Look the fear directly in the eye and walk straight towards it. Don’t know how you’re going to make enough money to support yourself? Need to have a difficult conversation that you’re scared will let someone down? Scared of looking at yourself in the mirror and taking an objective analysis of your life? Good. Bring on the challenge. You can almost maniacally psyop yourself into loving fear and moving towards it. When you don’t back down, the fear naturally fades. It only grows when you continuously avoid it. Walk straight into the fear knowing you are protected by God, and you can never be hurt.

• Prioritize capacity expansion and internal alignment above all else. Your mission can only scale to the level of your internal capacity to hold it and your ability to stay devoted to it. How do you increase your capacity? Letting go / shadow work. Going outside your comfort zone as a ritual. Throwing yourself into situations where you feel over your head. Every time you sit down and release something, or put yourself into a situation beyond your current capacity, you expand. How do you stay aligned? Daily check-in points. Meditation. Yoga. Prayer. Reflective journaling. Real conversations with real friends who want to see your highest potential as much as you do. If you don’t intentionally recalibrate often, you slowly drift off course, where you then need more willpower and conscious reorientation to get yourself back on track.

Holding the Frequency

When you decide to step into your mission, it may feel like sunshine and rainbows for a day or two as you’re riding the high of new energy and clarity.

But this will not last. You will be tested by the mirror of reality on your level of devotion to the new frequency. Trials and tests will come up. Fears and patterns you thought you had left behind will reemerge. Old parts of your identity will try to cling on. Situations will arise that test whether you will stay coherent to your new level or fall back into your old ways.

This is not a sign that anything is off. It is a sign you are on the path of your own hero’s journey - and every hero is destined to face challenges on the path to his or her destiny.

The Hero’s Journey is a pattern of soul development and the course of your personal adventure.

Notice how the graphic matches the shape of the ourobouros (the snake eating its tail, the loop of karma).

As you ascend towards higher levels of your destiny, you loop around the map of the hero’s journey. You are the hero of your own story. You are here to live out your own myth. The sooner you internalize that your life is supposed to be an adventure, the more exciting (and also challenging) it will become.

As you go through the arc of full identity transformation as depicted in this graphic, you will reach a new point of internal stability at your new level, where you are then again called to adventure and start the cycle again.

Chances are, if you’re resonating with this, you are experiencing your own call to adventure right now.

If your life were a movie, what move would you make?

If you were the main character, what is the most courageous action to take?

And most importantly, who do you have to let go of being to step into this next version of yourself?

Sit with that, and I’ll see you in the next article.

Thanks for reading,

~ Jack

• Btw, the One of One Writer Cohort begins Monday, May 4. Our first call is at 1pm EST. You can join us for a 6-week writing, brand-building, and audience-growth sprint here.

• If that is out of your price range, you can also join 82+ creators in Transcendence University (the community I talked about in this article) as an intro step and access to our knowledge hub, group calls, and extensive network.

• There are also 3 spots open for the Lake Como Writing Retreat this July. You can check out the details and apply here.

1) The thinking self

2) The feeling self

3) The willing self

This philosophy draws from Rudolf Steiner’s work, a 20th-century philosopher and esotericist.

In this short article, we will explore what each aspect of yourself means, how to develop it, and how to avoid atrophy.

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The Thinking Self

We develop the thinking self by training the mind.

We do not want to be ruled by the mind, but instead use the mind as a sword to cut through reality. The mind is the tool of business, negotiation, mathematics, literature, and strategy. We sharpen the sword through mental training:

Concentration meditation. Focused work. Deep study. Strategy. Judgement. Discernment. Critical thinking. This is how you develop the mind and keep the intellect sharp.

Conversely, the thinking self can atrophy without intentional study, dedicated focus, or excessive use of AI. Today, the majority of people’s thinking selves are becoming weaker because, at the snap of a finger, they can outsource their thinking to AI. This is a dangerous habit to build, as thinking ability will quietly and subtly degrade to the point of being unable to think through a complex problem, write an article, or make strategic, high-level decisions. Deep reading, deep work, and deep critical thinking strengthen the mind and should be staples of each day.

The Feeling Self

We develop the feeling self by developing the emotional and intuitive world.

The feeling self is how we connect with our emotional world and live, create, and express from the heart. Without the feeling self, we become internally mechanical, cold, and dry. With the feeling self, we can share our deepest emotional and spiritual essence with the world and infuse our creations with love and beauty.

Music. Art. Poetry. Song. Dance. Love. Laughter. Joy. Tears. These are the mechanisms of developing the feeling self.

The feeling self can atrophy through excessive work, thought, action, and masculine energy. Feeling is inherently feminine. Much of the western world has weak feeling worlds because we have been programmed from a young age to believe work, jobs, and money are more important than playing, singing, or dancing. This is why so many Western women who have been psyoped into highly masculine corporate jobs are internally broken, and so many men are completely out of touch with their emotional worlds.

The development of the feeling self is as vital to your psychological and spiritual health as exercise and sleep are to the physical body. No matter what the Western world, hustle culture, or academia has programmed you to believe, carving time to express, feel, and create is not a waste of time, but crucial for psychospiritual development.

The Willing Self

We develop the willing self through disciplined action.

The willing self is how we assert ourselves in the world. It is how we take massive action, go to our edge, and discover who we could be if we left nothing on the table.

Finishing a work block. Going to the edge in a workout. Waking up and going to sleep on time. Competing. Training. Asserting boundaries. Standing up for yourself. These will all develop the willing self.

The willing self atrophies through excessive consumption and convenience. Highly sedentary lifestyles also atrophy the willing self. You have to consciously choose to fast, to work out hard, to detox from social media, and to push yourself to your edge to keep your willing self strong.

Integrating all 3

Businessmen have developed thinking and willing selves, but tend to be underdeveloped in feeling.

Artists tend to be highly developed in the feeling self, but weaker in thinking and willing.

Athletes are masters of the willful self, but lacking thinking and feeling.

We all have natural proclivities and expressions, but everyone can also strengthen the aspects of themselves that are underdeveloped.

If you want to reflect on these three areas, rate yourself (as objectively as possible) in each area, and ask yourself the associated question.

• Thinking self: 0-10

  • How can I uplevel my thinking self by 1-2 points?

• Feeling self: 0-10

  • How can I uplevel my feeling self by 1-2 points?

• Willing self: 0-10

  • How can I uplevel my willing self by 1-2 points?

Your highest expression is developed across all three areas.

Mind, body, spirit.

Thinking, feeling, willing.

This is the holy trinity of personal development.

Thanks for reading.

Let me know if you like the shorter, more focused articles, as I enjoyed writing it.

See you in the next article,

Jack

🪶 One of One Writer begins 5/4

🛸 Join 80+ creators in Transcendence University

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📖 Browse all my articles here

Continue reading…

Where do ideas come from? What is creativity? Why do you feel inspired sometimes, and lethargic at others? How can you optimize your environment and energy for maximum creativity?

We will explore these questions and more throughout this article. By the end, the aim is that you will have a better understanding of the creative process, be able to become a clearer and more consistent channel for creative inspiration, and optimize your inputs and lifestyle to become a creative weapon.

Let’s dive in:

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Ideas are not yours

The first thing to understand about creativity is that “we” do not have ideas.

Ideas exist as potentialities, or certain frequencies, in the “superconscious” before they enter our awareness as pictures, ideas, or symbols.

This is why a life-changing idea or creative breakthrough feels like you’re being hit by lightning. Your mind, like an antenna, receives insight from this higher source.

This is why someone else started the business you had once thought of, wrote the book you had the idea to write. The ideas were not yours, and they were not theirs.

They existed in the collective unconscious, and we’re looking for willing, able, and open vessels to take them and bring them into fruition.

I experienced this recently.

I had the idea a few years ago to bring creators from around the world together for an event. I thought to gather the top creators in the space to have them promote the event and bring their audiences offline and together in person. I never acted on the idea, but a year or so later, someone else did.

That someone else is my good friend Jesse James Carver. He received the idea for the event in a divinely orchestrated moment of synchronicity and spontaneity, and he decided to act on it with every fiber in his being. Now, the event is happening in Canada this June. The idea already existed as a potentiality in the collective unconscious. But Jesse, being the Leo he is, decided to step up to the challenge and make it happen, which has been no small feat. I’ll be speaking at the event along with some other incredible creators. You can join us in Vancouver here.

It should be liberating to know that you personally do not have to do anything in the idea-generation process other than open your awareness and make space for insight to reach you. Your work comes later, when you physically bring the idea out of the ether into reality.

Now that we have a baseline understanding of where ideas come from, we will explore how to maximize your creative process and creative expression.

Solitude

The creative mind needs solitude.

Long, continuous stretches of it.

Breakthrough insights or life-changing downloads may not reveal themselves until hour 5 or 6 into a solitude session. You have to allow the mind to wander for 5-6 hour consistent hours to reach a revelation. When you break a string of insight every 30 minutes, the mind cannot follow new strings of thoughts that it has never explored before.

When you break the continuity of insight through calls, texts, conversations, and obligations, you can never allow the mind to follow a thread of an idea deep into its crevices to reach a place of insight that can only be accessed 5-6 hours into a pondering session.

Days of solitude are as vital to the health of any artist or creative as the sun is to any living organism. At least once a week, spend an entire day in solitude. And every day, spend a few hours completely by yourself.

Even better, a multi-week period of solitude is so valuable for the creative process. When you live alone, eat alone, and create alone, the channel between you and God grows stronger. You begin communicating with God all throughout the day. You pull ideas out of the collective consciousness all throughout the day.

If I take an objective look at my writing metrics, my engagement and growth significantly increase in the seasons when I’m alone. Now, there’s more to life than seasons of solitude and growing on Twitter. There is a time to be with people, work together, live together, and celebrate life — but for the creative spirit, long stretches of solitude are absolutely vital. But, the point is, I have seen a high correlation myself between solutide and idea quality.

Waves

The creative process comes in waves.

Rain does not fall all day. The wind does not blow, and the sun does not shine all the time. The lion does not hunt every waking hour of the day, and the cow does not graze 24/7.

We don’t expect nature to express itself consistently without cycling. So why do we expect ourselves to be firing on all cylinders every moment of our lives?

It’s impossible. The human being, in his natural state (without excessive stimulation, supplementation, or willpower), goes through cycles of work and rest, creativity and consumption, and activity and passivity all throughout his days.

Some days he works like a dog for 8 hours. Other days, he lies around like a cat for 8 hours and does nothing.

We’ve been programmed to think one is better than another. We have been taught to think we are supposed to work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, consistently and mechanically, like a robot or machine. We believe it’s “wrong” to have a few days where we accomplish nothing. But these days of non-action are actually necessary for the complete arc of the creative process.

On days you do nothing, your subconscious mind is cooking and marinating on ideas. These ideas develop and build to the point of natural expression, where you then hit an 8-hour straight creative session without effort. You get an entire week’s worth of work done in one day — and you didn’t have to force it or even try. You simply allowed the creative process to unfold naturally. Creativity pours out of you when it’s ready to express itself, just like the clouds dump rain when nature deems it time.

Nature expresses itself in cycles, as does your creative nature.

Don’t beat yourself up for periods of non-action or even laziness. You are simply following the cycles of nature. And often, a period of laziness is necessary to get to a point where you can no longer stand sitting around — where creative energy bursts out of you like a volcano erupting after years of tension and compression.

Frequencies

You can imbue certain creative states by shifting yourself into different frequencies before you sit down to do your creative work.

If ideas exist as frequencies before they crystallize into images or thought forms, then we can open ourselves to receiving new ideas by intentionally entering new frequencies (energetic states).

Imagine for a second the difference in ideas that will come through you if you are listening to the Interstellar soundtrack versus if you are listening to a hard techno set.

The frequency of the ideas that come through will match the frequency of the music:

• The Interstellar track will likely produce ideas that are profound, deep, or even cosmic

• The techno set will produce ideas that will likely be fast, linear, and repetitive.

The frequency of the music imbues the frequency of the creative process.

This is where the intentional use of music and movement becomes so valuable.

If you want to get super non-linear, wide, and unconventional with your ideas, listen to music that matches this energy (psytrance, synthwave, movie soundtracks).

Or if you want to hammer out a project, bang through emails, or finish editing an article, put on music that matches the frequency of the intended work block (techno or D&B).

When I’m writing tweets, answering messages, or getting an article to completion, I listen to techno. When I’m ideating a new article or module, I’ll listen to psytrance. Or when I’m aiming to connect to truth and clarity, I’ll put on slow, soft spiritual music. I have a bunch of different playlists you can find on my YouTube channel here.

Music is not the only way to access new frequencies.

A deep conversation, a yoga class, a meditation, a breathwork session, or watching a movie that connects with your soul will do the same.

So next time you feel stuck creatively, don’t force yourself through the work. Instead, shift your state to match your intended frequency via music, movement, or expression, and allow ideas to flow through you as you reset your energetic state.

Enviroments

Yes, you can intentionally place yourself in environments that lead to higher degrees or different types of creativity.

Just imagine trying to write a book in the sweltering heat of the desert versus writing it in a cozy cafe in a rainy town in Europe. Obviously, it’s going to be easier to feel inspired to write the book when the enviroment carries an energetic vibration that supports it.

If your intention is to be ultra-focused, choose a city whose architecture matches the linear, masculine energy of your intended state. If your intention is to be very non-linear, flowy, and inspired, go to a beach town or artistic hub. If you can’t travel freely, go to new places in your town or city to help you shift into different creative states

Personally, I love finding new cafes to explore every day of the week. I usually never go to the same cafe twice, and if I do, I never sit in the same seat twice. Novelty breeds new downloads, neural connections, and creative states. Bonus tip is to sit in the corner of the cafe (especially if the windows are open). You receive the most prana and chi flow there.

Become Physically and Mentally Lean

I have a theory that a lean body is best for creativity.

Look at a radio tower, an antenna, or anything that harnesses and channels energy. It is thin, sleek, and minimal.

The human being functions the same way.

Remember, we do not come up with ideas ourselves. We pull ideas out of the ether, the superconscious, and act as channels for them to flow through us.

How well we can receive and channel insight depends on the openness of our awareness and the lightness of the energetic structure we embody.

When the body is dense, it takes more will and energy to move it. When the mind is dense, there is more mental fat to sift through to cut through reality and bring ideas to fruition. My theory is that being mentally and physically lean allows for maximum creative channeling.

You can also take a look at many of the greatest creative as examples of this.

Tesla. Jobs. Einstein. Da Vinci.

These guys were all wiry and lean.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they could channel divine insight and bring it into manifestation at a higher rate than most people. Their lean, wiry nature — combined with their expanded minds allowed them to receive ideas from the ether most could not access and bring them into reality at a rate faster than most because they had the least energetic weight or friction.

Again, this is just a personal theory that came to me when looking at a radio tower one day, and there are many examples of genius creatives who were bigger and bulkier.

But personally, it helps me not to eat during my creative work. I’ll wake up and work for 4-6 hours with minimal food, coffee, and water. Sometimes I’ll eat, but I function best when I don’t, or at least stick to fruit or fruit juice. This way I’m least dense and most clear.

Everyone’s biology works differently, so this may not work for everyone (especially women, from what I’ve heard). But I recommend trying it to observe how your mind responds to being free of food.

Open the Channel

You are a Rick Rubin talks about this at length in his book The Creative Act.

There is an invisible, energetic channel between you and the superconscious (the divine) through which downloads hit your mind, which you can bring into reality. The clearer your channel, the more insights you receive, and the more fluidly you can bring ideas through you into reality.

This is gonna sound strange, but you want to “lubricate” the channel between you and the superconscious so the divine can penetrate you with insight with minimal friction. Major pause, but hopefully you get what I’m saying.

Anyways, how do you lubricate your channel?

You train yourself to capture and act on ideas as soon as they arise.

When you build this habit, the connection to you and the superconscious grows stronger, and ideas hit you more frequently because your channel is open, circulating, and able to receive them. When you don’t write ideas down as they come, your channel becomes clogged. You unclog your channel by letting ideas flow through you as soon as they arise, either into your notes app or straight onto social media.

Keep your channel clear by building the habit of writing and capturing ideas all throughout the day, and the quality and quantity of your creative ideas will go through the roof. Sorry for the graphic image.

The 80/20 Rule

We like to romanticize the creative process as an effortless, majestic, spiritual state.

But the truth is, we have to balance inspiration with discipline to bring ideas into reality.

I like to follow the 80/20 rule:

• 80% of the time, create through downloads, inspiration, and passion

• 20% of the time, discipline yourself to bring an article or a project to completion

I went through a period in which I only moved through spontaneity, inspiration, and intuition. While the quality of my ideas was high, my execution of those ideas was low.

I could access high-level insights because I was so open, but I wasn’t finishing articles or projects because I stopped displining myself, using a calendar, or having a task list.

What I’m coming to realize is that you need both an intuitive flow and disciplined work. Open yourself to insights. Move via intuition and inspiration. But also sit your ass in the chair, put on some techno music, and finish the damn project. This is the only way to stay consistent and create things of substance and depth.

How to become a creative weapon

I’ll finish this article with a few things that will amp up your creative firepower to new levels.

• Meditate often: Your best downloads will often come when your mind is still and your body is relaxed.

• 8+ hours of sleep: There is a significant drop off in my creative spark and stamina when I’m underslept. The occasional 4 am night out or creative rabbit hole is great and healthy, but consistent sleep is the boring building block of all creative work.

• Stare at the rising sun and move your body: First thing you should do when you wake up (before you check your phone) is get in the sun and shake the sleep off your body. Jump. Stretch. Run. Dance. Your mind will be 10x more “on” when you do this versus slogging to your computer without first awakening the body.

• 0 calls on your calendar: It’s nearly impossible to be creative when you have a call every hour all throughout your day. As a creative, you want to optimize for long stretches of uninterrupted focus to maximize your downloads and output. Either stack them all into 1-2 days a week or build business structures that eliminate them entirely.

• Move your body every day: A stiff body creates a stiff mind. Movement and flexibility in the body allow the mind to be more active and flexible. Every day, play sports, lift weights, walk, do yoga, or dance. These activities are not a waste of time. They are vital for the creative process.

• Throw your phone across the room: Your Instagram Dms and text messages are probably destroying your creative ability. When it’s time to receive downloads (on a walk, at a party, during meditation), leave your phone behind. When it’s time to sit down and bring creative projects to fruition, put your phone in your bag or in another room. If you can resist the temptation of checking it and sit in the tension of creative work, your creative abilities will massively improve.

• Have a wild sidequest adventure 1x a week: It’s very hard to be creative (generate novel ideas) without having new experiences. The robotic life leads to robotic states of mind. Do something out of your comfort zone and out of the ordinary once a week. A wild night out or a 4 am work session might be just what you need to reconnect to your creative spark.

• Hang out with other artists & creatives often: When you hang out with other creatives, you naturally become more creative. Their frequency rubs off on you. They have books, podcasts, or music that will unlock your next creative evolution, The conversations lead you to places in your mind you haven’t explored before. All of this can be used as inspiration for your creative work. If you want to experience this for a week this summer in Italy, consider joining the Lake Como Writing Retreat. There are currently 3 spots left.

Hopefully, this article prompted some insights for you as you read or gave you some inspiration on how you can design your life to allow for more creativity.

Last, I’ll share this song I like that brilliantly explains the creative process. It’s called “The Creative Process,” and it was actually the inspiration for this article.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next article.

~ Jack

PS

The doors for the 1/1 Writer close May 4.

There are currently 12 spots available.

Join us for a 6-week sprint of writing, creativity, and audience growth here:

🪶 The One of One Writer

I didn’t know why. I had no concept of online business or marketing. I had no idea what the creator economy was. I had no goal or plan other than sharing ideas with friends. I simply felt called to do so. I had ideas brewing inside of me that, for some reason, I felt called to share with the world.

I remember feeling scared as shit to ask my friends and family people if they wanted to read it. It was even scarier to click send. I felt so open and vulnerable. A few of the friends I asked to send it to even said no. But 8 people said yes (including my grandma, aunt, cousin, dad, football teammate, and mom), and so at 3 am upon arriving in Paris, I hit send, closed my computer, and cringed my ass off.

A few weeks after sending that first email, I fell down a rabbit hole. Creator economy. Dan Koe. Dickie Bush. Justin Welsh. Alex Hormozi. Personal branding. The creator economy. A path began to emerge to write my way to freedom online via email newsletters and social media, so I worked up the courage to hit tweet to 900 followers who formerly knew me as a college football player.

This scared me even more. It took me 15 minutes pacing around my dorm room to hit send, and when I did, I had a full-body cringe/convulsion, threw my phone across the room, and hid under the covers of my bed for a few hours (for real lol).

Those two actions, which sparked so much fear in me and required a ton of courage to go through, put me on a path of online writing that completely transformed my life a few years later.

Within 3 months, I grew to 8k Twitter followers, began making $7,000 a month as a fitness ghostwriter, quit my economics degree, and dropped out of a top 10 school to become a full-time creator and move to Argentina (much to my parents’ and grandparents’ dismay).

4 years later, that same newsletter has grown to over 4,400 readers, my Twitter account to 35,000+ followers, and recently my Instagram to over 25,000.

Those numbers aren’t just vanity (although truthfully, I can catch myself getting caught up in them). This audience has become the backbone of my creator career, allowing me to travel the world, run multiple retreats, launch a wide array of programs and offers, work with my idols (including Dan and Aubrey Marcus), and generate somewhere over $350,000-$400,000 in revenue.

My personal brand has truly become a “freedom business” because I can write whatever I want, live wherever I want, work whenever I want, and launch whatever I want and make money.

At any time, I can launch an offer, and people will sign up for it, because I have the audience built, the skillset to whip up a website in a day, write copy for the site, build the offer and product, and market it. I also have the trust of my audience because I’ve written so much long-form content over the years.

I didn’t start with these skills (I knew none of this when I started). But my skill set and specific knowledge have compounded over 4 years to the point where I have maximized my autonomy and become pretty good at value creation. As long as I keep a pulse on the market and understand what people want and need from me, I will always be able to create an offer people want to buy. In this way, I am free.

The foundation of this “freedom business” is the audience and network I have built by writing on social media. More specifically, it is the trust and reputation with that audience that is directly related to my income.

There are hundreds of retreats people could go to. There are a million astrologers on social media. There are another million creator coaches in every niche imaginable.

Why would people choose to buy from me? Because they know me from the depths of what I’ve shared in my writing. I also never boxed myself into a niche, so when I pivot and launch a new retreat or program, it’s expected and not incongruent with my brand.

This same depth, trust, and non-conformity is also why they will buy from you.

If you play your cards right, grow an audience the right way (authentically), never burn bridges or trust with your audience, and display expertise in an area of desired transformation for your audience, you also will be able to make money in a creative way that’s aligned with your soul and ideal lifestyle that evolves as you evolve.

In the rest of this article, I aim to convey an argument as to why writing is more powerful than ever (even in the age of short-form video content and AI), what to avoid when building a writing-based personal brand, and how to actually grow an aligned audience that you can sell aligned offers to and make a full-time living via your creativity and unique expertise.

Let’s dive deep:

Why Writing?

Why would you choose to write in 2026?

Isn’t everything going to short-form content and AI?

I personally don’t think so. Yes, the masses will flock to what’s easy, dopaminergic, and sexy. But the intelligent people will persist with what’s lindy.

Few things are more lindy than good writing. Just look at ancient spiritual texts to see how powerful writing can still have an impact thousands of years after initial publication.

You may not write a book that holds space in the collective consciousness for thousands of years. But if you want to take up space in the collective consciousness today, being a prolific writer with depth carries much more weight than you may originally think.

A) Smart People Read

Imagine the average person who scrolls TikTok vs. the average person who reads articles.

I would be willing to bet very different images pop into your mind for these two archetypes of people.

The truth is that the people who read are the most sophisticated, successful, and intelligent people on the internet. I don’t imagine this would offend you as you are in the 1% of people who could even make it this far in this article lol.

People who spend their free time reading are high-level people. These are intelligent thinkers, open-minded, and improvement-oriented people. Out of your friends, which of them read? Do they just so happen to be the smartest ones in the friend group? It’s likely the answer is yes.

The most intelligent people I know read constantly and have read a lot. Yes, especially today in the age of AI and short-form content. They read books, articles, and courses when everyone else scrolls IG reels. This is what makes them high-level thinkers. And these are the types of people we want to attract to our offers. Intelligent people. People who actively choose to expand their minds through the act of reading. These people are also usually the ones who have money to invest in themselves via your offers or services.

It’s been my experience that the people who read are also the ones who will invest in a program, a course, or an in-person experience to expand their minds and income. 50-70% of my sales have come from my newsletter in the past few years, even though 50,000 people follow me on social media and only 4,000 subscribe to my newsletter. I estimate that 1 newsletter subscriber is 10x as valuable as 1 social media follower because these people go 10x as deep with you in your emails.

It’s easy to underestimate the power of long-form writing because Instagram, X, and YouTube are flashy. Likes, comments, shares are very sexy and dopaminergic (as I mentioned, I can trap myself in this if I’m not careful).

But these metrics don’t carry much substance or depth. Someone sitting down and reading your article for 20 minutes a week carries so much more weight than someone watching your Instagram reel and forgetting about it 20 seconds later. Sure, more people may see your IG reel than read your article, but the types of people who read your article are more valuable and much more likely to sign up for something you offer because they spend exponentially more time with you, and buyers psychology says someone has to spend ~ 7 hours with you to know and trust you enough to invest in you.

Last year, I hosted a retreat in Thailand. Every guy who signed up did so because of my newsletter. Yes, my newsletter. Not YouTube or Instagram. But instead, the stories I shared were about my adventures in Thailand the year before. And all 10 people who attended this year’s Thailand Expedition knew me through my long-form writing. Let that data reassure you that doubling down on long-form writing is not a waste of your time.

B) Writing Makes You Smarter

Writing is the foundation of clear thinking and communication.

All the smartest and most successful people I know are prolific writers. The two most successful guys I’ve ever worked with (Dan Koe and Aubrey Marcus) are also by far the best texters I have ever interacted with. I found this a very interesting pattern to observe.

They are precise in their messages. They don’t waste words. They get to the point and are incredibly clear with everything they say. It’s not a coincidence that they are both multi-millionaires because so much of business is built on written, text-based communication.

It really doesn’t matter what industry you’re in or what platform you create on; if you practice and hone the skill of writing, it’s going to massively help you.

• If you do sales, the practice of writing will sharpen your mind and improve your speaking ability.

• If you are a video creator on Instagram or YouTube, writing will help you shape your ideas, convey them in a digestible way, message leads with more precision, network with other creators, and write better captions, stories, or free guides.

• If you are an entrepreneur or founder, writing strengthens how you pitch to investors, think through problems, and communicate a vision to a team or the market.

And if we look at the market, people actually read more than they listen or watch content. Why? Because reading is more accessible.

C) Written content is more context accessible than video content

I want you to imagine yourself checking social media in a busy cafe, on public transportation, or as you need an escape from socializing at a party.

It’s loud and busy. You don’t have headphones. You don’t actually want to listen to someone yap for 60 seconds. You just want to see an idea that stimulates you for a moment.

It is very likely that what you will easily and naturally gravitate towards consuming will be written content, not video content.

You can read a post anywhere. You can only listen to or watch a post when you are in a quiet area, have headphones, and can put your full focus on the video. If we want to reverse engineer consumer psychology, we want to make our content accessible for people in as many contexts as possible. Writing is the best way to do so.

You are reading without consciously realizing you are reading all the time.

You are reading menus, advertisements, text messages, captions, stories, tweets, and articles all throughout the day. You only listen to something when you intentionally decide to listen to it, whereas writing is just there in your awareness all day.

If you can get really good at writing, you are maximizing the surface area and frequency with which you can get into people’s awareness.

Also, if you want to be a video creator (say, on Instagram or YouTube), you have a significant advantage over every other video creator who doesn’t practice writing if you know how to write. I grew 7,000 followers in a few weeks on Instagram by taking the ideas I had fleshed out and validated on X and bringing them over. Because they already did well on X, I knew they would do well on IG.

D) Authentic, prolific writing is a widening moat

Most people’s minds are subtly degrading because of AI.

Imagine telling a college student today to write a 2,000-word essay without AI. Very few would be able to do it, whereas just a few years ago, this was a basic skill.

It’s not just college students whose writing abilities are degrading. It is everyone. No one writes emails themselves anymore. AI writes it for them. Even most writing-based creators are looking for the next flashy AI tool to simplify and shortcut the writing process for them. What they don’t realize is that in their pursuit of efficiency, they are losing their ability to think deeply.

If you can resist the temptation to outsource your long-form writing and thinking to AI, your mind will strengthen, your writing will improve, and your ideas will become more unique, especially as the masses increasingly will not be able to do this.

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Why Most Digital Writers Never Gain Traction

I would love to see real statistics on this, but I can draw estimations from my time in the online writing space over the past few years

• ~ 65% of online writers quit within 3 months

• ~ 20% come in and out of the space for years

• ~ 10% become successful (make a full-time career writing online)

• ~ 1-3% actually get paid to be themselves (through ego development, a compounding reputation, and a multidimensional skillset and perspective_

For this section, I am going to focus on the ~ 85% of writers who quit, are inconsistent, and never break through to success (monetary or audience growth).

This is based on my experience observing the space for years and seeing thousands of beginners stay stuck below 100 followers, make progress for 3 months, and quit for the next 3, or stay on the sidelines because they can’t get out of their own way (ego).

A) They don’t understand that social media is social

Writing online, growing an audience, and building a business is not just about writing.

There are numerous supplemental factors that impact your success as a writer in the online space. One of the largest is that this is a networking game as much as it is a content game.

It does not matter how good your writing is or how profound your ideas are if no one knows you.

How do you get people to know you? You make friends. You send DMs. You join communities or make your own groups. You hop on calls. You do podcasts with people you find interesting. You want about 100 people who know you personally to form the foundation of your audience. This is your soul-tribe. Once you have those initial connections, you begin to tap into the network effect - or the fact that each of those 100 people knows 1,000+ more. You can grow exponentially once you have a base of 100 friends and allies.

Realize you are probably not that special. I don’t care if you are the modern-day Shakespeare or Ralph Waldo Emerson. If they were writing on social media today, they would have to form friendships and alliances with other players to become well-known and respected. Put your ego aside, connect with people from the heart, and allow your writing to grow as a result of the connections you’ve built.

B) They rely on extrinsic motivation

If you’re not writing from within because you feel pulled by spirit and gripped by an idea, you will burn out and quit. I have seen it over and over again. People who have no love for the art of writing but want to grow a personal brand because some guru said they should. They enter the arena for the sole reasons of making money and growing an audience, but they have no passion for the craft of writing, and so they quit after a month when their posts still get 2 likes because they’re coming at the game from the wrong energy.

Almost every successful writer I know on X started writing online because they felt pulled to write. Making money and growing an audience weren’t even in their awareness. They just wanted to share ideas because it felt fun. They end up growing and monetizing later, but it wasn’t even their original intention.

You have to love the game and act of writing for yourself first if you want to do it for the long run. The money and followers shouldn’t matter because you’re driven by something deeper. If you aren’t already writing and you only want to write online for externals, you’re probably playing the wrong game.

C) They try to be someone else

It is rare to find someone being themselves online. Most of imitating someone else. But the ones who stand out are always the ones being imitated, never the ones imitating.

Fuck everyone else’s personal brand. DON’T make a black and white minimal aesthetic and say you are writing about the future of work and creativity. You are not Dan Koe. No one wants to follow another Dan Koe clone. They want to follow Dan because he innovated and did it first. He was following his innate curiosity and what he thought was cool. They will want to follow you once you discover who you are and express that to the world. You will get lost trying to be someone you are not. I have been here, and it’s a shortcut to burnout and an existential identity crisis.

Make a profile, bio, and profile picture without looking at anyone else. Make it look cool to you. Write about what you find interesting and don’t use someone else’s content templates or hooks. A real artist will trust his taste over everyone else’s perception. You have to train this muscle within yourself and transcend the opinions of others. This is the only way you become someone other people want to read and follow.

D) Some other key things people mess up on:

• They write and comment with AI. The lowest IQ thing you can do is write tweets and comments with AI. You’ll lose your ability to think. Wreck your creative ability. Atrophy your mind and spirit. Create 0 emotional connection with your audience. Instantly be dismissed as a clown by anyone real. Probably get banned from the platform. < 80 IQ behavior. My writing has been doing better than ever. And I’ve been using AI the least. I see no coincidence between this correlation.

• Not getting a blue checkmark. Seems superficial, but such is human nature and snap judgments. People will instinctively respect you more if you put a blue check next to your name. And buying the blue check subconsciously signals to yourself that you’re taking the game seriously. It’s an easy way to quantum leap into a new timeline.

• Not having uniform handles, names, and profile pictures across platforms. You want to leverage the mere exposure effect (the psychological principle that states the more often people see a familiar face, the more they tend to like that face) and appear the same across all social media and messaging platforms (including Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc).

• Going too meta. A lot of writers, specifically the philosophical/academic types, don’t realize that 95% of people on social media are beginners in the field they are writing about. They write at such a high level that their content goes over most people's heads. They continue to post into the void because they fail to make their content approachable for the average man. The ultimate test of your superior intellect and esoteric knowledge is to bring high-level ideas down to the awareness/consciousness level of the masses. The best social media writers can bridge high-level insights with surface-level areas of interest, meeting their readers where they’re at and bringing them up to speed with their level of advanced knowledge. Make most of your writing approachable and simple, and allow people to dive deeper into your higher-level ideas over time when they go deeper into your articles and ecosystem.

• Not understanding writing aesthetics. How writing looks is as important as the content of the writing. This tweet got 75k views. If I wrote it in paragraph format, it would’ve only gotten 500. Why? Because lists are easy to read. When you are writing, you have to imagine you are the reader on the other end of the screen scrolling. You have to stop their scroll with a nice visual presentation of text as much as you have to stop them with a good hook and lead. Pay close attention to the posts that do well on your timeline. Don’t only look at what they’re writing about, but look at how the post visually looks. Imitate the structures that are working with your own content. This is why social media writing is art as much as it is a craft. Everything matters. Especially the visual presentation.

How to Grow (The Smart Way)

My general recommendation to anyone who wants to grow a personal brand around their writing is this:

1) Start writing on a platform like X or Substack

Create a unique character, vibe, or aesthetic. Post the unique thoughts that pop into your head. Take the unique information you’re studying and post about it through your own lens. Write on social media like you’re texting your friends or journaling to yourself. Don’t overthink or strategize it. Just post what’s coming to mind in the lowest friction way possible, and learn the more nuanced stylistic and psychological mechanics as you go.

2) Stop overthinking and just hit post

In the beginning, most people are too worried about creating the perfect post or having the perfect writing. This is going to do nothing but slow you down. You’ve got to learn to say “fuck it” a bit and rip ideas onto the timeline as they arise in your consciousness. Smashing 20 ideas off the hip onto the timeline a day will do more for you than perfecting 1 post a day. In the beginning, you are just trying to become known and maybe hit one lucky post that goes viral (power law). You maximize these things by showing up on the timeline a ton. And your writing will actually become better by just shooting ideas out into the ether at scale than spending weeks perfecting one article. Note the photography study. There will come a time for more calculation and precision, but you have to get going before you get good.

3) Network a ton

You want to become a known and trusted node in a broader social network. You want to be well-known in your niche. If you’re a spiritual creator, you should work your way up to being known by all the spiritual accounts in the space. The same goes for fitness creators, performance coaches, or psychology accounts. Send DMs to people to get to know them (without needing anything from them), become friends, and allow your name and account to spread like a virus within this network. I also recommend becoming known outside of your little pocket of the internet as well. Expand

4) Focus on audience growth and networking first - think about your offer later

A lot of writers who enter the space worry about their offer from day 1. I think this is a big mistake because you narrow your mind from the beginning. The smarter approach (imo) is to create broad and sell narrow.

Say you’re someone who’s interested in self-development, psychology, and spirituality. You can grow a large audience by writing about broad topics under these already broad buckets and later build offers that are more narrow and specific by understanding what your audience wants and needs. You can build a meditation program, a fitness protocol, a subconscious rewiring course, or near infinite niche offers under the bucket of your personal brand. But if you started with “I want to build a meditation offer,” you’d pigeonhole yourself into only writing about meditation, people would become bored of you fast, and you don’t have the surface area to actually grow across niches.

An offer is inherently niche. If you build an audience around your genuine interests, that audience will likely be broad, as your intrinsic curiosity is also broad. You won’t only be interested in one thing if you’re pursuing your genuine interests.

When you do build an audience that’s broad, you can then build niche offers (solutions) under your broad net of ideas (content) that solve specific problems for specific people. Offers (solutions) will emerge naturally when you build an audience around your authentic interests. When you grow enough, your audience will actually tell you exactly what they want from you as you talk to them and ask them what they need.

Offer creation as a creator is a game of creativity. There are actually too many possible offers in my head and not enough time in the day to execute on them. Why? Because there are so many things people need help with.

I could create a men’s group, a fitness offer, an astrology offer, a low ticket creator community, a positioning retreat in Paris, a mastermind in Thailand, a peak performance group, a meditation group, an accountability group, a dating offer, a matchmaking network, etc, etc. (Feel free to steal these, I don’t care)

The reason I could sell all of these things off the back end of my writing / personal brand is that the audience I’ve built matches the breadth of my curiosity. I didn’t have to limit myself to only writing about performance to create a performance offer. I write about anything and everything I’m interested in, and can create a narrow program of performance to solve a specific problem for a specific portion of my audience.

So, don’t worry about your offer from the beginning. Just focus on writing, networking, growing your audience, and speaking to them about what they’re struggling with, and allow the offer to emerge naturally as you go. Of course, this means you may have to find an alternative source of income in the beginning that allows you to write freely, grow organically, and play the long game of creator business, but this patient approach keeps the ceiling of your potential the highest.

You never want to put yourself in a box. Doing so stifles your human spirit and makes you inwardly dry. Keep yourself broad and find alternative ways to make income that allow you to continue to write about anything and everything you want. Yes, it may take longer, and yes, the hyper-rationalist business types won’t agree with this, but if you resonate with this, you don’t want to be like them. You want to get paid to become yourself, not get paid to box yourself into a niche. This long-term approach is how you will eventually get paid to be yourself.

5) Write your articles on Substack.

It's not easy to grow an email list. How many emails do you read a week from creators? A few, maybe. So how do you become one of those writers people choose to tune into? Well, Substack is one way. What makes Substack so special is that it combines an algorithmic feature and social media built into the newsletter. If you write your newsletters on Beehiiv or ConvertKit, there is no way to grow those email lists other than through external social media traffic. Substack is different because it is both a social media platform and an email list. If you’re writing articles or newsletters, I recommend writing them on Substack because you can go viral with an article because of the built-in social media feed. Yes, you can hit the virality button on X, but nobody is signing up for your email directly from an X article. I recommend publishing the same article to both Substack and X.

6) Find unconventional ways to grow your email list.

I have about 4,000 people on this email list. But the truth is, probably around 30 to 40% of those subscribers came from indirect sources. By indirect sources, I mean free courses, free guides, and free giveaways. Basically, if you are creating on Instagram, X, LinkedIn, or any other social media platform, you can create free PDFs, courses, audio, recordings, or any other asset that people would find valuable and give it away to your audience in exchange for their email. The key is you have to make something that's actually really valuable. This is usually going to be your specific knowledge, or some cutting-edge information you know that most people don't know. If you can synthesize key information from your area of expertise into a free giveaway, people will “pay” for that information with their email address. If you grow on social media and become very good at creating these free assets, you can add a few thousand subscribers to your email list without writing a single email.

How to monetize off the backend of your writing

Now, growing an audience just for the sake of growing will not grant you the freedom you desire.

You have to turn followers and connections into buyers and clients to create the cash flow that will allow you to travel, work whenever you want, operate on your own schedule, and make money in a way that feels aligned with your soul.

There are 3 primary paths you can take when you grow an audience:

A) The Freelancer Path

When you grow your brand via writing on social media, you can generate cash flow quickly with minimal time required by doing project-based freelancing work (not hourly) with the skills you’ve built for yourself.

This will help you pivot out of the 9-5 / college world quickly, create a baseline of $4,000+/month, maximize your time and location freedom, and continue prioritizing your own brand so you can eventually do your own thing.

Examples of freelancing work you can do off the backend of your personal brand are:

• Ghostwriting

• Email marketing

• Sales funnels

• Web design

• DM setting

• Community management

• Design & branding work

The more of these skills you can combine (by practicing them on your own brand first), the more valuable and irreplaceable you become as a freelancer.

You can separate yourself from 99% of freelancers by growing a brand around your interests, not labeling yourself as a freelancer, and signing clients based on your network and perceived authority on the back channels.

It’s way smarter (and effective) to build a reputation as a creator and leverage your connections to find freelancing work than it is to call yourself an “email marketer” and spam 1,000 cold DM’s a day (sorry Hormozi lovers).

Here’s a personal example of this:

I grew my account to 8k followers, writing about fitness, psychology, and self-improvement. I signed 3 full-time fitness ghostwriting clients at 7k/month from my network without ever labeling myself as a ghostwriter. These clients came from my podcast, Twitter DMs, and Telegram / Discord conversations via communities I was in. They signed me over others because I had undeniable proof I could grow an audience on X (via my own brand) and because they knew me and trusted me as a genuine dude (not another freelancer sending them cold emails).

Because I never labeled myself as a ghostwriter, I could pivot out of freelance work without destroying my brand as I continued to grow my audience around the areas I was interested in. I always wanted to be a sovereign creator, so even when I was freelancing, I kept this vision and my own brand as the highest priority north star.

You probably don’t want to ultimately end up as a freelancer either. But it can be a great pivot point into higher levels of freedom and direct experience inside a business that allows you to live a relatively free, autonomous lifestyle, keep developing yourself and your brand, and ultimately do your own thing.

I was a ghostwriter and marketing consultant for years before I had the audience, offer creation abilities, and most importantly, the courage to fully do my own thing. There is no shame in freelancing in the interim while you become the type of person who is sovereign and capable enough to do your own thing, and you’re going to have a massive advantage over almost any other freelancer by freelancing behind your own personal brand rather than being another AI-DM bro.

B) The Coaching Path

You don’t have to become a freelancer to create a life of freedom via your personal brand.

You can jump straight to coaching or consulting if you have expertise in a specific domain or a transformation you can facilitate for others.

If you have transformed your health, gotten yourself out of a mental health crisis, done shamanic work, learned astrology, or studied psychology, you can coach people in your area of specific expertise based on your personal experience.

Here’s how it works in essence:

• Post content

• Grow an aligned audience

• Build a coaching program for a specific area of transformation

• Talk to people in the DMs to see if they need your help (River of Money)

• Grow an email list and market your offers or coaching to these people

• Get on sales calls with people and close them

You can make a full-time living taking 5 Zoom calls a week with 5 people paying you $1,000.

But you probably don’t want to keep doing 1:1 coaching forever…

Which brings us to the wizard path:

C) The Wizard Path

The wizard path is when you start operating with leverage, create your own unique path, and create offers, products, services, and experiences no one else has ever created.

Examples of businesses that I would put under the bucket of the wizard path include:

• Digital products

• Communities

• Books

• Audio recordings, hypnosis, guided meditations

• Retreats

• Events

• Masterminds

• Software

• Applications

To play in the domain of the wizard at a high level, you’re going to need a pretty large audience. It’s hard to run a profitable retreat business, community, or course business with a small audience, which is often why these possibilities don’t open up until later in your writing journey, when you have a large enough audience to make a good amount of money off of leveraged offerings.

The wizard path is the highest expression for a creator:

Getting paid to be your unique self and creating containers straight from your imagination.

You may start as a freelancer or coach, but as you master the game of content and business, you pivot into higher levels of wizardry where you and your business operation become truly one-of-a-kind.

This was a long one, so if you made it to the bottom, thanks for reading.

Again, the Creator Accelerator program begins August 1 if you want to work with my to take your brand and business to the next level.

If you want a smaller introduction into this world, some intro content, and a community of other creators, you can join Transcendence University for free here.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next article.

Jack

PS

You can also read my 44-page ebook “The One of One Writer’s Guide” for free here.

I said to my therapist in college.

At 21 years old, I didn’t know who I was.

More accurately, I didn’t know how I was different than other people.

I looked at my college football teammates and peers and saw many of them had unique personalities, clothing styles, tattoos, speaking styles, and interests.

I admired their individuality, but was out of touch with my own.

Up to this point, I’d pretty much blindly followed the interests everyone around me had.

• Studying economics (because it seemed like the sensible thing to do).

• Applying for finance internships (because everyone else was).

• Going to parties, drinking busch lattes, getting hammered, and trying to pick up girls (because all my teammates were doing it).

But these were not authentic interests to me.

They were the interests of the crowd, and because I was out of touch with who I uniquely was, I followed them unconsciously.

I remember multiple times in college feeling like I felt like I didn’t have a unique personality.

I drank the same beer everyone else did, listened to the same rap music, played the same video games, and wore the same blue jeans and flannel everyone else wore to the party.

I believe it was this lack of internal authenticity that drove me to pretty intense depression, anxiety, neurosis, binge eating, sexual performance issues, and eventually therapy.

From this low place, I went on what you could call a healing journey, a self-discovery arc, or a spiritual awakening over the next 5 years.

You could also call this arc my “individuation journey."

What is individuation?

The famous Swiss psychologist / mystic Carl Jung described individuation like this:

"Individuation is the process by which a person becomes a psychological individual."

Or, a little more elaborately:

“Becoming a single, homogeneous being, and, insofar as ‘individuality’ embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one’s own self. We could therefore translate individuation as ‘coming to selfhood’ or ‘self-realization.’”

Essentially, individuation is separating from group psychology, going on your own quest, developing your own unique psyche, and reintegrating into the tribe to serve them at your highest potential as a fully unique being.

Individuation is how you actualize your unique potential. The other alternative is blending in with the masses forever and failing to recognize your unique gifts, interests, and destiny.

You can better understand the opposite of individuation by looking at an existential vision I had when I was smoking weed in my dorm room at 19:

I saw myself at 50 years old in my hometown bar. I was drinking beers, fat, depressed, dissociated, numb to reality, reflecting on the glory days of high school football back in 2019.

It was a grim, terrifying image.

It was my first true wake-up call to change my life.

That vision of normacly (which for some reason has always terrified me) is the polar opposite of what it means to become individuated.

If you want to understand what a failure to individuate looks like, go to a professional sports game or a political rally, and observe the sea of human clones. These things are not inherently bad, but the unconscious masses you’re seeing are unindividuated psyches.

On the other hand, if you look at a creative genius like Leonardo Da Vinci or Nikola Tesla, an entrepreneur like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, or an artist or musician you admire (big or small) and you will intuitively understand what it means to individuate, or actualize your unique potential.

I always felt inspired by people living out their potential, and so that terrifying vision I had at 19 drove me to figure out who I was and what I would do with my life over the next few years.

I went on a wild quest of foreign travel, plant medicine work, hundreds of books, deep esoteric study, meditation, journaling, spiritual coaching, and online business that I’m still in the midst of today 5 years later.

This 5-year arc of my individuation process led me to ultimately today becoming a “creator.”

What is a creator?

There are multiple types of creators.

There are influencers, vloggers, and OnlyFans models.

The type of creator I am talking about here is a “value creator” (credit Dan Koe for the term).

A value creator is someone who gets paid to create value for society via their unique knowledge or gifts. It is the modern career path for the psychologically individuated. It is the best way I have found to actualize your unique potential as a career path.

If you are still reading this article, you are likely a creator yourself, or someone who has heard about the creator space but maybe hasn’t fully jumped in.

The rest of this article will continue on the thread of individuation, but specifically from the vantage point of the value creator. It will teach you how to individuate yourself, stand out from the pack, and eventually get paid to be yourself.

If you are not a creator, you still will learn something from this article to acccelerate your individuation journey (specifically if you skip to the “How to Accelerate the Individuation Process” section).

So now, let’s continue:

Becoming a Creator = Individuating in Public

All of the most popular creators are the most individuated.

I am going to list out a handful of creators. You may not like some of them, but you cannot deny they have found a way to get paid for their minds, personalities, and interests.

Sam Sulek. Dan Koe. Jordan Peterson. Andrew Tate. Zherka. Sneako. Hamza. Clavicular. Myron Gaines. Nick Fuentes. Theo Von. Sol Brah. Noah Ryan.

Some may say they are not wholly integrated on a soul level and are instead expressing false characters rooted in trauma, and I would agree. I am using individuated here in the sense of becoming unique. These figures embody the meaning of “individuated” I am using in this article for the simple fact that they stand out as anomalies amidst the collective consciousness.

I don’t necessarily like these figures, but I have listened to all of them at length (even the polarizing, controversial ones) because I’m curious about what they have to say. It’s like seeing an elephant riding on a tricycle down the street. I simply have to look because what they are saying and thinking is so different from everyone else.

Also, I know I’m using primarily male creators here. But it’s simply because my curiosity leads me to research and listen to men as a man myself. There are plenty of women who also fit this category of individuated creators.

The point is, these creators have gotten paid in proportion to the amount they’ve become uniquue.

Dan Koe and Noah Ryan are examples of individuals who are so well studied and at the forefront of knowledge in their respective fields that they are considered the de facto thought leaders in their industries. Their college degrees or formal certifications have nothing to do with this. They are self-studied, share their learnings online, and back it up with lived experience. They have audiences and reputations that allow them to make $100,000 at the drop of a hat (if they want to), and this ability is directly correlated to how much they’ve individuated from conventional streams of thought.

More polarizing figures like Tate, Zherka, Myron, and Fuentes are willing to say things 99% of men are either not willing to say or capable of saying, and so massive amounts of attention flock to them. Sure, they may not be wholly integrated in the Jungian sense, but they have (very successfully) separated from the collective consciousness via their personas (constructed or real, for better or for worse) and made a ton of money by doing so.

You don’t have to be a radical or extremist to gain attention (although if you are willing to go this path and bear the consequences, it most definitely will work to attract attention).

But, you do have to think thoughts others don’t think, have experiences others haven’t had, or have knowledge others don’t to amass attention. The human psyche is naturally drawn to the novel and unconventional, and social media reflects the collective psyche.

You don’t have to become the next Tate or Sneako to get paid to be unique.

You just have to become yourself in public.

Lack of Growth as a Creator = A Lack of Individuality

Why do most creators never grow?

Why are most creators copycats of other creators?

Why do most creators pick a niche and stay stuck in it for far too long?

It can all be summed up by a lack of individuation or a lack of skill.

These creators either:

1) Haven’t individuated enough to share a unique message that attracts attention.

2) Haven’t mastered the game of sharing their message to the world through the skills of writing, positioning, marketing, branding, or psychology.

If you can embody the first and leverage the second at a high level, it will not be hard to get paid to be yourself.

For the purpose of this article, we are going to be mainly talking about the first: your own individuation process.

If you want to master the second half of that equation, consider joining One of One Writer.

The highest expression for a creator is to get paid to be oneself.

Your highest expression is not to sit in a niche.

It is not to be the master of one specific skill.

It is not to be the next (insert big creator).

Instead it is simply to be yourseld in public, create valuable offers around your unique interests, and get paid as you serve your audience.

A creator can only get paid to be themselves to the degree that they individuate from the masses.

Again, I use these guys as examples, not because I resonate with their message, but because I see them as anomalies to be studied:

Streamers like Sneako, Zherka, and Clavicular literally get paid to sit on camera and talk with their audience for hours. They don’t have to work a job. They don’t have to choose a niche. They are just being themselves in public (real or authentic) and getting paid for it.

Maybe these guys aren’t wholly integrated in the Jungian sense. That’s fine. I agree. The point is their character is so unique that they get paid to play it. Whether or not it’s truly “them” is irrelevant. You can study patterns without getting trapped in psychological dogma on what “individuated” truly means or who’s “moral” or not.

A more grounded example of a creator getting paid to be himself at scale is Elisha Long.

This guy sits in front of a camera, smokes a cigar, and talks about whatever he wants for 30 minutes on YouTube a few times a week. He makes money from a men’s group that he’s attracted based on his unique perspective and personality.

Why is Elisha able to do this, whereas 99% of people who tried the same strategy would fail?

1) He has an extremely unique character, aesthetic, and knowledge. He is unfiltered (aka he is free). His energy field is calm. He is clearly grounded and embodied. If you listen to his videos, he blends humor and deep wisdom like very few can. But he is also a relateable bro that other guys resonate with because he smokes cigars and tells stories of his time in college.

2) He’s been posting videos for 10 years. His audience has compounded since 2015. He’s honed the skills of speaking, tone, cadence, and rhythm over the years to the point of mastery. He has individuated in public since those years as he’s collected new knowledge and experience.

3) He is really good at marketing and positioning (without ever saying). He pioneered the “retardmaxxing’ trend and rode the wave to huge levels of virality. It appears as lucky, but the truth is he knows exactly what he’s doing.

Elisha, Zherka, Sneako, and Clavicular are guys that have huge audiences.

But you don’t need a massive audience to get paid to individuate.

One of my good friends who I’m living with here in Bali, Nornal Guy, has done this on a smaller scale, quite successfully and rapidly.

By following his own curiosity, dedicating himself to shadow work, psychology, and mysticism, and writing on X, he has amassed a following of around 20k followers, left his tech job in LA, and built a full-time business around his interests in just a few months.

He gets multiple messages a day from people wanting to pay him $1,000s to help them integrate their anima (the unconscious feminine aspect of the male psyche).

How? He has gone deeper into this field of study and deeper into his own psyche than anyone I know. He is devoted to his practices, his inner work, and his study. He shares what he’s learned online, speaks from direct experience, never filters himself, and attracts attention (while repelling others) because of his unique perspective and personality.

Throughout the rest of this article, I aim to lay the groundwork for your own individuation, and then explain how to leverage social media to get paid for your unique expression.

I am not going to tell you to become like Tate or Sneako. Instead, I aim to lay out some principles and guidelines that have helped me figure out who I uniquely am and express that to the world:

How to Accelerate the Individuation Process

First, we start with the opposite: how to never individuate:

• Avoid solitude

• Stay in your hometown

• Never create anything yourself

• Always work for someone else

• Never contemplate or meditate

• Always agree with everyone else

• Never pursue your intrinsic curiosity

• Trust your parents’ and friends’ perspectives over your own

• Drown out your inner dialogue with media or entertainment whenever you’re alone

You can basically do the exact opposite of everything on this list, and your individuation process will accelerate.

Your own process of individuation will also be completely unique to you. But you can pick up on patterns from others as you walk your own path.

The following are areas that have helped me detach from group consciousness into my own individuated self (while knowing I still have plenty of work to do on this path):

1) Go traveling

There are few things that break you out of your conditioned beliefs and interests like traveling somewhere completely new. Magically, every time I go traveling, I forget professional sports even exist. You are literally rewiring and accessing new parts of your brain when you place yourself in a new enviroment where you know nothing and nobody. You will also discover what lights you up with curiosity and what interests you naturally gravitate towards when you travel with no set plans, especially when you travel alone. I didn’t even know I liked writing until I discovered it while traveling. Now it is my career. You don’t know what’s waiting for you until you go travel, but chances are you’ll find a part of yourself that has always been there but was just repressed under social programming and other people’s expectations.

2) Spend lots of time alone

The individuation process happens mostly in solitude. If individuation means “becoming one’s own self,” then obviously we have to spend plenty of time alone to find out who that “self” is. Whenever you are in a group, the conversation naturally becomes a combination of the group’s shared interests. But when you are alone, the only interests to explore are your own. These unique interests are leading you on a journey to your own individuation (which you can eventually get paid for as a creator).

3) Practice meditation or self-reflection

The unindivuated masses never separate from group-think because their attention is always extraverted. What’s happening in the news, the NFL, or the group chat dominates their consciousness, but what’s happening in their inner world is never explored. Your inner world is the key to the individuation process. The more you sit with yourself and self-reflect, the more you get in touch with who you really are, where then you can express that uniqueness to the world. Sit with yourself for 30 minutes a day and your development process will exponentially accelerate.

4) Follow the strange curiosity that makes no rational sense

Your inner self will pull you in directions that illuminate your potential via what makes you curious. It may be strange genres of music, unique works of art, uncovered parts of history, or esoteric branches of study. Whatever you intrinsically feel pulled to (not what someone else tells you to explore) is pulling you towards your potential. Pay close attention to that feeling, and explore it fully without worrying about how it’s rational or not. Nornal Guy followed his curiosity to the depths of psychology, Carl Jung, and mysticism. Now he gets paid for it, even though at the time, he probably couldn’t ever have imagined studying these topics would lead to a new career path. Trust it will click together down the line in ways your limited mind can’t yet understand.

5) Hang out with other unique individuals

A great way to discover who you uniquely are is to compare yourself with other unique individuals. Not in a “better or worse” way, but through detached, objective observation. Through the mirror of their unique personality, they will help you uncover your uniqueness. Go hang out with a group of creators for a week, and you will delve into your knowing of what makes you unique.

6) Transcend everyone else’s advice and develop your inner knowing

A good sign of integrated individuated consciousness is to be able to listen to other people’s advice and perspectives with an open mind, but ultimately make your own decision. No one will ever have as much context as you do on your own life, nor will they be able to understand your intuition and emotional world. When you start making decisions that other people don’t understand, don’t doubt yourself, but realize you are individuating.

8) Create online consistently

Few things are as vulnerable and expansive as putting yourself out there in public every single day for years. Sharing your ideas on social media is a forcing function for development of yourself and your ideas. And if you want to grow, you have to continue to individuate. After a few years, you’ll look back and not be able to recognize the version of you who started creating and the person you’ve become today.

Get Paid For Your Own Individuation

The more you collect unique experiences, discover niche information, and uncover what makes you different than everyone else, the more you individuate.

The more you individuate, the more interesting and valuable you become to everyone else. The paradox of individuation is that by going your own way, you can serve others at the highest level.

But it does not matter how much you individuate, how unique you are, or what special information you know if no one knows about you. As a creator, you have to understand the mechanics of social media, human psychology, and value creation to attract attention and convert that attention in clients or customers.

Going into detail on the nuances of how to grow an audience, how to write & speak online, how to brand and position yourself best, how to create offers, how to run a marketing campaign, how to talk to leads, how to sell on sales calls, and how to fulfill for a client in your program would take an entire course to explain.

If you want to go deeper into the art and science of social media writing, I just published a free 44-page book called “The One of One Writer’s Guide.”

For now, I will outline bullets for you to research and explore deeper on your own:

How to get paid to be yourself on social media:

Step 1) Individuate from the collective consciousness via self-development, inner work, solitude, curiosity-led study, and unique experiences

Step 2) Project your individuated self into the collective consciousness via social media

Step 3) Learn the mechanics and psychology of social media, attention, and growth

Step 4) Attract your aligned sector of the collective by being authentic and polarizing (your authentic self will naturally repel some people; you don’t have to try to do this)

Step 5) Build an offer, a service, or an experience to serve your aligned sector to capture/create value and make money

Step 6) Learn marketing and sales to convert attention into customers to serve on a deeper level

Step 7) Get your clients incredible results, stack testimonials, keep creating content, and raise your prices / create leveraged containers to level up in business

Hit all 7, iterate for years, and your friends and family will ask you, “So what do you actually do for work?”

You will be able to reply:

“I get paid to be myself.”

Again, if you want to go deeper into the mechanics of aligned social media growth and value creation, consider joining my upcoming writing cohort (pre-sale closes 4/22 at midnight US EST).

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next article,

Jack

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I wrote a 44-page book.

It's called the "One of One Writer's Guide."

Inside, I teach the systems, structure, and principles to master the art and science of social media writing.

It is everything I’ve learned over the last 4 years in the online space about growing an audience, writing consistently (even with a busy schedule), and attracting an aligned readership through aura and energy.

Here’s the outline of the book:

00) Brand Clarity
01) Writing Principles
02) Lifestyle Design
03) Systems Creation
04) Bonus Resources

You can download and read it for free here:

transcendenceuniverse.org/writersguide

If you have any trouble accessing the book, let me know.

I’ve been busy with my Thailand Expedition, moving to Bali, and some other projects — but I’ll be back to my regular articles shortly (have a few cooking in the chamber).

Until then, enjoy the ebook, and chat soon

🛸 Jack

∞ The Transcendence Universe

Living anywhere in the world. Serving humanity. Getting paid to do what you love. It’s too exciting to overlook, especially when you compare it to the alternative. Now, the masses are beginning to hop on board.

But with thousands of people coming into the space every day, how are you supposed to stand out?

That is what I intend to explore in this article.

By the end, you will have a clear picture and nuanced ideas on what it takes to stand out in the increasingly saturated creator space — and actually get paid to do what you love by expressing your authentic self.

Let’s waste no time and dive right in.

Lean Into Your Eccentricities

“Always stick to what makes you weird, odd, strange, different. That’s your source of power.”

Robert Greene

There are many aspects of my lifestyle and personality I once wished to keep in the shadows and off social media out of fear of being too strange or weird.

I wanted to show myself as polished, serious, and mature to my audience. Inevitably, this led to burnout and misalignment. I wasn’t being fully authentic, so I wasn’t attracting clients or building business from a fully aligned place.

The truth is, I like going out. I go dance at raves, smoke a joint, drink Coca-Cola, and write Substack articles in the corner. I go days without creating anything and then hit a 10-hour EDM-fueled, inspired flow, and then lie around like a cat for the next 36 hours. I listen to ridiculous music while I work that most people would think is insane. I often stay up until 4 AM writing and making videos. People think I’m disciplined and consistent because I seem to create a lot, but if you actually saw my life on a day-to-day basis, you would see I’m far from it.

Some people are repelled by these aspects of me. Others love it because they see themselves in me, or they enjoy observing my strange authenticity.

Funny enough, these strange things are now elements I incorporate in my retreats to help people unlock new levels of freedom and creativity because that’s exactly what they’ve done for me.

By leaning into my eccentricities, soul-aligned projects, friends, readers, and customers emerged.

No one feels magnetically drawn to a robot. Magnetism arises from polarity, and polarity arises from authenticity. By being who you truly are, you repel some while attracting others. This is how energy and polarity work at a fundamental level.

Now, there is a balance here. You don’t want to lean into your eccentricities so much that you lose touch with providing value and connecting with a broader audience. This is a dance. If I only wrote this article about how I like to go to raves with no additional context or value, you probably wouldn’t read this. The eccentric hobby is subtly and intentionally infused with value. (Don’t worry — there is more value coming).

You have to provide value while being authentic, or else no one is going to care. We all consume content selfishly. If a piece of content doesn’t help you or entertain you in some way, you’ll click off of it, even if it’s your best friend. You want to create things that positively impact people’s lives — while throwing in a little sauce and flavor with an unexpected paragraph about your crazy travel adventure in South America drunk at a bar at 3 AM trying to rizz up latinas.

This balance keeps you entertaining, but also educational. Interesting, but not annoying. Valuable, but not a robot.

The value is the meat. But meat alone is quite boring, bland, and dry. You need some seasoning. That is your eccentricity and unique flavor. And if you don’t know what makes you eccentric or unique, discovering that part of yourself is your highest priority task.

Combine Mechanics with Authenticity

Most creators are either too focused on the mechanical aspects of hooks, psychology, systems, AI, aesthetics, and content creation—or too focused on expressing their authentic selves and expecting thousands of followers and dollars to roll into their bank accounts.

The truth is that you need both. There is both a science and an art to this game.

You need the mechanical, scientific side. The systems. The funnel. An understanding of marketing, sales, and offers. You need to know the psychological buttons to press to attract attention. You need to create a brand design and aesthetic that portrays you as an authority and conveys the right energy. You have to pull certain levers every day, promote yourself, and network if you want to play the game at a high-level.

But you also need the authentic, artist side. The element that makes you unique. The stories that make you, you. The style and flavor that only you can convey.

AI can operate the mechanical side quite well. But people don’t want to follow and buy from an AI. They want to follow and buy from a real human they feel emotionally connected to.

Authenticity without mechanics leads to the starving-artist, wandering-philosopher archetype. They may have some profound wisdom and insight, but can’t make money because they lack the structure and mechanics to run a business.

Mechanics without authenticity lead to a soulless content machine that’s consistent and has the right structure in place, but can’t attract followers and customers because there is nothing unique about it that creates an emotional resonance with a human on the other side of the screen.

You need both.

The mechanics to implement are:

• Hooks

• On-screen text hooks

• Content systems

• Editing

• Formatting

• Authoritative branding

• Networking tribes or systems

• Funnel architecture

• Sales processes

• Marketing strategy

• Offer tiers

• Fulfillment systems

The authenticity to implement is:

• Your unique perspective

• Your unique energy

• Your life stories

• Your lived experience

• Your eccentricities

• Your weird hobbies

• A unique style, tone, and rhythm

• Sauce, flavor, pizzazz, aura, mystique

You cannot have only one and expect to see success as a creator

Just because you’re being authentic does not mean everything will work out magically. We have to be somewhat realistic and rational here. We are playing a game on social media built on algorithms designed by mechanical systems and AI. You cannot transcend them purely through authenticity — unless you’re calibrating at an energy level and radiating such profound spiritual energy like that of Buddha or Jesus Christ. Chances are, you are not on their level (yet). So for now, we have to play the mechanical business game a bit to create the lives we want and have the impact on the world we wish to have.

We also cannot think that the perfect system or AI tool will give us the success we’re looking for. We have to find out who we really are and figure out how to convey that to the world. We have to do the soul work and shadow work to become embodied enough in our nervous systems and detach from our egos so we can put ourselves out to the world authentically, without excessive importance or attachment.

This is not only an inner game. This is also not only an outer game. This is a dance between the internal and external. If you can master both, you maximize your creative and earning potential and stand out amidst the sea of copycat creators flooding the space.

So take an objective look at your operation. Where are you falling short?

Do you know that you’re being authentic, but not seeing tangible results? Your mechanics probably need work.

Or do you know your systems are dialed, but no one is really resonating with your content? You’ve got to lean into the inner work and discover how to convey your authentic self (and probably stop using AI for a bit).

The middle path between the scientist and the artist is the path you’re looking for.

Subscribe now

Insert Yourself Into a Tribe

Social media is kind of like a high school. You become popular by association and uniqueness. It’s very hard to become well-known and well-respected by isolating yourself from the world and being a hermit.

What you need is a close group of people on a similar mission to you that you can grow and build with every single day.

Back when I started in this space in 2021, I was part of a small group chat of seven guys we called the “Momentum Club.” We were 7 guys, all aged 18 to 25, trying to escape college or the corporate world, solidify ourselves in the creator economy, and the online business space.

Four years later, each of us has achieved some level of success in different areas within this space. Two of those guys went on to start a $100,000 a month content agency. Another guy wrote a book and worked directly with Alex Hormozi. Every other guy in the group created a life of freedom through the Internet in a unique way.

And if I think back to some of the people I knew from those early days who were not in the group, most of them fell off, gave up, and went back to their old lives. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that those of us who were in this tight-knit tribe not only stayed in the game — but also saw unconventional success.

Human beings are meant to live in tribes. We become depressed, neurotic, and apathetic when we isolate ourselves from the world. We become motivated and inspired, and reach levels we couldn’t on our own when we are around those on a similar mission to ours.

The most valuable thing you can do is to form a tribe and take on the role of the leader of that tribe. Find 5-7 people you resonate with. Start a group chat. Connect on calls. Do co-working sessions. Share your intentions and wins every single day. You will make exponential progress when you build with other people on a mission. You will go further together than you will alone.

And if you’re looking to insert yourself into a tribe of committed creators and high performers, I am building a private tribe of 33 creators building personal brands and businesses in the health, wellness, and spiritual space with my co-founder, Nick Sweeney. We will be capping the group at 50 members.

If you want to join this tribe and receive hands-on guidance from me and Nick on how to scale your brand and business on IG, X, and Substack by elevating your soul and systems, message me “Create” on Instagram or X for more information.

Build the Thing You Wish Existed

It’s very easy to overcomplicate business, offers, products, and marketing.

ICP’s. ICA’s. Offer tiers. Offer shells. Marketing sequences. Giveaways.

These elements have their time and place, but if you want to cut through the noise and get to the signal, the simplest but best advice is to build the thing you want now or the thing you would have wanted 2-3 years ago.

So if you’re struggling with your offering or positioning, ask yourself these questions:

• What community do you wish existed?

• What event do you wish were a thing that you could create?

• What course or book doesn’t exist that you wish were a thing?

• What challenge do you want to put yourself through that you can gather people around to do with you?

• What movement do you think will impact humanity in a positive way that you can get other people on board with?

A great test of your value-creation muscle in business is to imagine an offer or product that your friends would want.

Think of a few friends in your life.

• What experience do they want?

• What product do they need?

• What community do they wish existed?

Then, if you created it, how would you feel about telling them about it?

If you are excited to tell your friends about your product, service, or event, you have found something that is incredibly aligned with both your soul and the market.

There is no longer shame in selling or promoting because you believe in it so much that you want to share it with your friends and family.

If you can arrive at this solution, you won’t have to worry about making money ever again — because you have found a way to engineer people’s gratitude towards you.

From my perspective, what I see now in the internet/creator space is that people want to do dope shit and be around dope people — both online and in person. Use this as your north star, and everything else will fall into place.

Transcend the Digital World

I put out a tweet a few weeks back about being fed up with the digital world / AI space and wanting to return to real in-person connection. It went pretty viral, which signals to me that this idea is building in the collective unconscious.

There is no doubt that the pendulum has swung pretty far in the direction of technology, media, and the digital world — and the AI obsession is pushing us even further in that direction. But I believe the pendulum will swing hard back in the opposite direction.

Co-living centers. In-person masterminds and retreats. Families living off-grid in communities and growing their own food. I believe these will all take off in the next few decades.

Are people still going to do things online? Yes.

Will they still buy online programs, coaching, and courses? Yes.

But information is becoming increasingly commodified. Emotional connection is becoming scarce. This makes it increasingly more valuable.

Much of my current business ecosystem is built on this premise of in-person connection.

I’ve been setting up retreats, and have been pleasantly surprised at the reception to the experiences. The most recent one I’m promoting, the Italy writing retreat, just about sold out within a few weeks of talking about it. There are currently 2 spots open.

Why is this retreat doing well? I believe a combination of factors:

1. I created an experience that I wanted.

2. Because I’m being authentic in my desires, other people with a similar desire to write a book in a castle in a beautiful Italian town also gravitate towards that.

3. People want to go beyond the digital world and meet the people they've become friends with online in real life (huge).

4. I have people reading my stuff and watching my videos online.

Almost everyone wants to gather together in person. But very few people are willing to take the step to be the one to organize it. My belief is that those who organize these events will be greatly rewarded in the coming decade.

You don’t have to run a big retreat with a fancy chef in a foreign country. Start in your city. Gather people together. Share an experience or work towards a shared intention. Chances are, a handful of people you know online live somewhere near you, especially if you’re creating online.

By stepping into a leadership role, even for a free event, you level up internally. Your energetic capacity increases, as does your confidence. You become a central node in a network and are recognized as a leader by others. Luck begins to find you when your network recognizes you as a leader.

Here’s a quick recap of the key elements we just went over:

• Lean into your eccentricities

• Combine mechanics with authenticity

• Insert yourself into a tribe

• Build the thing you wish existed

• Transcend the digital world

There are many other elements and nuances I could speak on for standing out in the creator space, but this article will be far too long if I did so.

Instead, I will list out everything else I can see when it comes to separating yourself from the masses in the space:

• Don’t use AI to create for you.

• Say what is true for you — but in the grey area societally.

• Speak to your audience the same way you speak to your friends.

• Follow the strange rabbit holes of your curiosity — even if they seem like distractions.

• Become a known face in the space. Master networking. Start a podcast. Join communities. Build your own. The more people who know who you are, the luckier you become.

• Lean into your unique edge, and when you think you’re becoming too weird or different, lean in further.

The truth is, the creator game is a game of self-discovery.

With each post, you transcend your shadow and become more free. With each day you try to convey some part of yourself to the world, you find out more about who you are. And with each offer, product, or service you create, you expand your energetic capacity and beliefs for what’s possible.

I can’t think of a more powerful space to be in for lifestyle creation, self-discovery, and spiritual growth than the creator space, because this game is the ultimate mirror.

If you aren’t where you want to be or experiencing the success you think you’re worthy of, the bottleneck is always you.

This journey is not for the faint of heart. But it is for those persistent in mind and spirit.

For those who want to individuate and actualize their highest potential, I can’t think of a better path in the modern world.

Hope this was helpful, and I’ll talk to you soon,

Jack

🛸 Enter the Transcendence Universe

☯️ My personal site

If you want to keep reading, here’s why I think you should stop using AI to create content:

For systems and linear tasks, I think it’s fine.

Actually, quite revolutionary.

But for creative purposes, I think 99% of this advice is absolutely retarded.

Why?

AI could never write what I just wrote.

It would NEVER say “I think that is absolutely retarded.”

It’s too PC. It’s too cookie-cutter. It’s too dry. It’s too Silicon Valley-coded. It’s too programmed by Sam Altman. It’s too mechanical, and it’s too gay.

Now, I know I may sound somewhat “unintelligent” and “unprofessional” here.

But that’s the point. In real life with my friends, I use these words and speak this way — and you probably do too. I may also say something profound and philosophical in the same sentence that I use the word gay and retarded. That’s just the truth.

Some will resonate with that, and some won’t. That’s fine. I don’t need to be liked by everyone. I actually don’t want to. If you’re living authentically, you will inevitably be polarizing. The best marketing is supposed to turn people away anyway.

And I’m noticing, my writing on X and even IG content are standing out amidst this AI-slop fest because I’m willing to write and speak in a real way that isn’t always polished, information-heavy, or politically/grammatically correct.

You read this and KNOW I’m a real dude. It hasn’t even crossed your mind that this might be AI. Why? Because the ENERGY behind the writing. I’m writing from my heart. I’m speaking from my chest. I’m filled with passion, rage, joy, and ecstasy — and it’s pouring through me onto the page.

There is rage and passion present because it DISGUSTS me to see someone I once deeply respected as a writer and unique creator sell their soul and willingly let their creative spirit DIE in favor of cold, mechanical, optimization with AI-slop. It goes way deeper than optimization. It’s our spiritual vitality and human beauty we are sacrificing at the altar of AI.

The worst thing is that those who are sacrificing their creative spark for the sake of hyper-optimization aren’t even aware of what they’re doing. They will optimize until one day, months or years from now, they’ll have a major wake-up call and realize in the process of optimizing for the intellect, they lost their heart and spirit.

“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
Jesus — Mark 8:36

I have a theory that people who succumb to only using AI for their creative work will become extremely empty and depressed over the next few years. Where is the meaning in work if the work is only done for the sake of optimization and a result? What about the creative process? What about the spiritual and emotional aspect of creativity? Is it only a matter of the intellect now? What about the heart and spirit? What happened to wrestling with an idea within your own body and consciousness to find what it is you’re trying to convey?

Going through the emotional roller coaster of the creative process is what makes the real writer, artist, and human feel alive. It also makes someone resonate with you on the other side of the screen. No one actually resonates with reading 50 AI-generated pieces of content in their heart and spirit. And no one actually feels fulfilled pumping out AI posts for the sake of hacking the creative process and the algorithm. It will always feel empty to the reader and to yourself when you create this way.

No one wants to read AI slop.

Everything is going to human-to-human connection.

People will increasingly be disgusted by AI-generated content. It personally ignites anger and rage in my spirit — and I know many others feel the same. Something about it is gross, inhumane, and very dystopian.

I see any of these thought-leading “writers,” ones who I greatly respected, reverting to AI slop. It’s a tragedy. I want to scream WAKE UP at them from across the screen.

You can sense it when you read their content. The cadence. The rhythm. The lack of heart and spirit. This is the writer’s equivalent of selling your soul.

You outsource your creative expression to a machine and then wonder why no one actually fucks with your stuff. (Btw, other AI reply guys commenting on your posts with other AI-slop is not people fucking with your stuff - lol).

People fuck with your stuff when you’re you. When you’re really you. When you say what YOU think without the AI thinking for you. When you tell me how YOU really feel, from the heart, not how the AI tells you to feel. When you give me some sauce, pizazz, flavor, rawness, and realness (which is often unpolished and not politically correct). This is creating from the emotional world, not only the mental world.

When you create from the emotional world, it creates a vibrational resonance with the human on the other side of the screen that goes beyond words or concepts.

I’m not only writing this to your mind. I’m writing to your heart and soul. That’s why you might be feeling something on the other side — vs. that dry feeling you have when you read someone’s AI slop bullshit.

If you want people to resonate with you on an emotional and spiritual level, the worst thing you can do is use AI to create content.

When you create content, you are not just transmitting words across a screen to the person on the other side. You are transmitting energy, frequency, emotions, and vibration.

These levels aren’t said, but they are felt. It’s why a beautiful piece of writing can make you cry. The words are a vehicle to convey the deeper emotional state. But it is the emotional world that hits you on the other side.

So, no matter how enticing the latest AI system is or how optimized you can be, be extremely careful to outsource your creative process to AI.

Sitting through the tension and discomfort of the creative process is what will create an emotional and energetic resonance with the human on the other side of the screen.

And at a deeper level, because the creative process is a spiritual process, and outsourcing it to AI is an easy way to accidentally fall asleep.

Thanks for reading

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I have two things to make you aware of:

1. I am the new head coach of my friend Nick Sweeney’s creator school - Coherent Creators. We are helping health, wellness, and spiritually-oriented creators scale their audiences and income so they can make a living serving humanity through social media. If you want to learn more, message me on telegram the word “Create.”

2. 4 of 9 spots are filled for the Italy Writing Retreat, July 24-31. If you are interested in joining us, please check out the website here and fill out the google form 🌞

If you want to keep reading, continue here:

The Source of Abundance

The source of your abundance is not a job, a client, or a product.

It is the universe itself, the infinite field of consciousness that is constantly growing and expanding.

When you recognize this source and live from it, you no longer need anything from anyone. There is always someone else to receive abundance from or another possibility for abundance to be created.

From this open state, you are most creative. From this unattached state, you can truly receive.

Infinite consciousness and scarcity consciousness cannot coexist simultaneously. Reside in infinity, and trust in the infinitely creative intelligence of the universe to channel through you to serve the rest of humanity.

The universe will always give you exactly what you need in each moment, so long as you're listening and doing your best to live in accordance with it.

Scarce Thinking vs. Abundant Thinking

Scarcity mindset is needing one person to pay you X amount for Y reason.

Abundance mindset is recognizing there are 8 billion people in the world that can give you money at any time — and that there’s an infinitely intelligent force that created the entire universe that you can tune into for ideas, inspiration, and even miracles at any time.

You never need one person, one job, or one idea to make money. This is dependency and narrow consciousness. Abundance is knowing there are infinite ways to make money and billions of people to serve. This is agency and expanded consciousness.

When you take full responsibility for your money and you rely on no one outside yourself, you step into your fullest creative power. And when you open yourself to the infinite source of reality, you become a channel for divine creativity, where there are always new ideas for how to make the world and others more abundant.

Take personal responsibility and open yourself to God, and you will always have what you need, and much more.

The Parable of the 3 Talents

Jesus spoke about abundance metaphysically in many of his stories.

The “Parable of the 3 Talents” (Matthew 25:14–30) is one worth sharing.

Jesus tells us of a master and his three servants to portray a deeper truth of how God wants us to steward the talents He has given us.

In the story, the master gives his 3 servants different amounts of coins.

To the first servant, he gives 5. That servant goes out, invests the coins, and makes 5 additional coins, coming back to the master with 10. The master is very pleased, and thus rewards him further.

To the second servant, he gives 2 coins. This servant also invests what he has been given and doubles his coins. The master is again very pleased, and rewards him further

Now, to the third servant, the master gives 1 coin. Rather than investing what he’d been given — and putting his money to work for him, he instead buries the coin in the ground out of fear. When he returned to his master, he only brings the 1 coin back. This is what the master said:

“‘You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents.”

And from this ending line, Jesus then spoke the famous “Matthew Principle.”

“For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’”

So what does this story mean for us?

The master is God, and we are the servants.

Do not cling to money out of fear. Invest your money in people, quality food, expansive experiences, and businesses that will help it grow. Be calculated with your money, but also give freely. Tip well, send birthday money, and buy gifts with love. Don’t do so at the detriment of yourself, but practice the feeling of giving love as you give money. When you give from this place, you will be rewarded from this place too.

When you cling to money, you signal to the universe you are scared. When you are happy and grateful to spend money, you signal to the universe you are abundant. Practice feeling abundant and grateful before you see it in your bank balance, and surely in time it will be yours.

Never Rush

The scarce mind thinks time is limited, and so he spends all day racing against it. His thinking is anxious, his body is tense, so he cannot open his awareness to new creative ideas because his mind and energy field are contracted.

The abundant mind knows time is an illusion, so he spends all day residing in infinity. He knows there is nowhere to go and nothing to do. He instead responds to each moment as inspiration pulls him. By following his creative joy and not allowing the illusions of the world to speed him up, he aligns his energy field with the nature of infinity: infinitely creative, ever-expansive, and overwhelmingly abundant.

Do not allow the world to speed you up. You can never be behind. You can only be exactly where you are. There is no one to compete with except the illusions and projections of your mind. Slow down. Tune into the expression of your heart. A state of inner calm and infinite presence is where truly unique creations will come from. They will never come from a state of rushing.

“Rushing into action, you fail.
Trying to grasp things, you lose them.
Forcing a project to completion,
you ruin what was almost ripe.

Therefore the Master takes action
by letting things take their course.
He remains as calm
at the end as at the beginning.
He has nothing,
thus has nothing to lose.”

Lao Tzu - The Tao te Ching - Verse 64

Make More Money By Spreading More Love

The best way to make more money is to spread more love.

Show up to the call with love. Respond to messages with love. Give more for free. Treat people with care. Be grateful for their time and energy. Overdeliver out of love vs obligation.

Live from a frequency of giving and give so much to others that the universe has no choice but to send abundance right back to you.

You will always have what you need - and much more - when you choose to live this way.

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Thanks for reading.

If you want to keep reading, here are a few of my recent articles:

🛸 Transcendence Universe

☯️ Personal Website

Because “human creativity” is not human.

It is Divine.

Something greater than us is the source of true Creativity.

The source of creativity is something beyond us impregnating the mind with a spark of inspiration.

We perceive this spark as a new idea.

What is this “something beyond?”

This is the realm of the Spirit.

The realm of the Spirit is the realm AI cannot touch.

AI, or technology in general, only exists on the physical and mental planes.

They do not exist on the spiritual plane of reality — the true Source of our existence.

Robots can move and complete tasks on the physical plane.

AI can perform tasks and move information on the digital/mental plane.

But neither can exist on the spiritual plane because the spiritual plane is acausal & non-linear.

Nothing can be programmed on the spiritual plane.

The spiritual plane transcends the linear, input-output, cause-and-effect-based mind.

On this level - a creative intelligence beyond our limited minds exists.

The mind cannot grasp this intelligence.

But a deeper part of you can.

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AI cannot create new ideas.

AI can pull information from a database and send you something back that appears as a “new idea.”

But these ideas aren’t new.

They are synthesized and extracted from a database of previous knowledge - or LLM (Large Language Model).

New ideas, new creations, new knowledge, and evolutionary leaps (new things manifesting out of no apparent cause) are from the realm of the Spirit.

Aka, the non-linear, acausal realm.

The ability to create new ideas, unlike any other form of life on the planet, is why it is said, “We are made in the image of God.”

Within each of us lies the Creative Power of God.

As it is written, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.”

The fundamental fear of AI is a fundamental misconception about who we really are.

We are more than the body and the intellect.

Our true nature is the Spirit.

And our creativity, which appears in the form of downloads, timeless flow states, mystical experiences, or altered states of consciousness, is from the realm of the Spirit.

“Human creativity,” or your creative nature, is not human.

It is the Divine Spark of God within you.

The Divine Spark is the same Creative Force that created the cosmos.

That Divine Spark is within you.

As long as you stay connected to that Spark, you have nothing to worry about.

Your Divine Spark.

What is the Spark?

It is the flicker of light in a child’s eye.

It is the enveloping warmth of love emanating from your chest when you’re surrounded by people you love.

It is the awe of wonder and possibility you feel that there is more to this realm than appears on the surface.

Stay connected to that part of you.

Move via your intuition.

Tap into your creative nature every day.

Stay connected to your Spiritual Self.

Remember your true nature as Spirit.

And you do not have to worry about AI.

Have faith and stay aware.

God will hold you - even as the world changes.

You have nothing to fear.

This is all a part of the plan.

To Remember who We truly Are.

thejackmoses.com

transcendenceuniverse.org

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I know that’s the case for me.

I’ve always been an avid video game player.

Clash of Clans. GTA. Madden. NBA2K. Tiny Tower.

Even up until I recently moved to Thailand, I’d play NBA2K from time to time.

I love building teams. Spotting talent. Watching players evolve towards their potential. My strategy was always to find the young players with high potential, put together a team full of them (that might suck for a few years), and simulate 3-5 years until we’d win 10 straight championships.

I’ve done this so many times I can do it now without much effort (even on Hall of Fame difficulty). I know the patterns. The nuances. I have the specific knowledge. I’ve probably put in 10,000 hours and reached some level of mastery. It’s likely I’m better at franchise building in NBA2K than anything I do in business. Why? Because I’ve spent over a decade doing it.

So many people are just like me. They’re better at video games than they are at the game of business. Why? Because video games are fun. They’ve been playing them since they were 10 years old. They’re also dopaminergic. They’re stimulating and have short reward circuits. You can play them for 8 hours a day without getting bored. The rewards come slower in business. You have to act for weeks or months without seeing real fruits. Especially if you’re building something of depth.

It’s also easier to become world-class at a video game than it is in business because it’s easier to be emotionally detached and play freely.

You can spend all their coins to upgrade your Town Hall and go back to zero without worrying or talking to a life coach because you know your earning potential will be higher on the other side of the move. You aren’t emotionally attached to the coins. You see them for what they are. Coins in a game. And to make more coins, you take the logical step and spend them even if it means going to zero for a day or two. Your emotions aren’t attached to the coins, so you can act freely and objectively.

The business world feels different. Our livelihood is at stake. We’re interacting with real humans. Our identity and emotional worlds are wrapped up in our success. We have people depending on us. It feels much heavier to play the business game than it does to play a video game because we think it’s real. The purpose of this article is to help you see business as a game so you can play it at a higher level and serve more people.

By the end, the goal is for doing business to be as easy, natural, and effortless as playing your favorite video game. We’re going to drop importance and see the game more clearly. Grab a coffee and pull out a notebook because if you act on the principles in this article, you will take your business game to the next level.

But before we dive in, I have something to share that will take an aspect of your business to the next level:

The One-of-One Writer

I’m launching a writing program called “The One-of-One Writer.”

It’s a 6-week program to help you build an aligned audience and business through your writing - without selling your soul to AI, the algorithm, or templates.

How?

First, by cultivating an aura. What’s your creative genius? What’s your unique magnetic flair? How can you get into flow states at will? What’s the balance between inspiration and discipline? You could say this is the “internal game” of writing.

Second, by understanding mechanics and psychology. What makes someone stop and scroll? How do you create an eyebrow-raising aesthetic? How can you create an alluring mystique around your writing? How do you turn readers into excited buyers (without selling out and becoming a snake oil salesman)? How do energetics and levels of consciousness play into this?

We begin on April 14. Pre-sale is open through March 15. You can learn more about the program and sign up here.

Now, back to the article.

Be the Player, not the Character

The first thing we have to do to see business as a game is to shift our entire perception of ourselves and reality.

Most people are too identified with themselves as the character in the game of life, without realizing they are the one holding the controller, looking at the screen.

Speaking more metaphysically, people are too identified with their ego/name/personality, and unidentified with their consciousness/awareness/spirit.

When you shift your perspective to that which is deeper and infinite, you can play the game of life and business more intelligently.

Making money is a spiritual pursuit. Increased abundance follows increased awareness. The actions that lead to abundance are spiritual actions. Acting despite your ego’s doubts. Having the courage to move forward despite fear. Having the faith to serve a client despite your own insecurities and inadequacies. These are all acts of spiritual development.

The first step to seeing the game of business more clearly is to shift your consciousness from the character to the observer.

Watch yourself send the message. Watch yourself write the tweet. Watch yourself craft the offer. Watch yourself sit down at your desk to work. This will help you consciously choose the action, courage, and faith that we just talked about.

Watch yourself find your positioning in the marketplace from a neutral, detached perspective, rather than from a first-person perspective within the market. Shifting your awareness is the best way to get a real gauge on your value and understand your ideal positioning.

As you shift into observer consciousness, you can also consciously change how the character acts, dresses, and speaks.

Imagine yourself at higher levels of abundance. How would your clothes, accessories, walk, gaze, and speech change? How would your schedule change? How would your morning and evening routines change? You can easily imagine all of these aspects of yourself at a higher level. Once you imagine it, you can then put it into practice.

An increased state of abundance is first created in your Higher Mind. By accessing new parts of your imagination, you change how the character moves through the marketplace and reality. As the character changes, the character then brings new creations, expressions, and value into the world.

This shift starts out as playing an act and is then integrated into embodiment through repetition. Literally, as you act something out, your body and nervous system respond to match it. This is what “em-body-ment” means. You integrate what was once in your imagination into your body through lived experience. The physical plane follows the mental. Your embodiment follows your imagination. “On earth, as it is in heaven.”

Shift into your Higher Mind as you’re reading this. Zoom out into observer consciousness. Detach from your ego. Then decide who you want your character to be. Don’t act blindly all day, every day, and wonder why your results aren’t changing. Play the game from a higher perspective. Play 4D chess with reality. Choose to move as the king instead of the pawn. And don’t identify with either. The true self is the one moving the pieces.

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How to Play the Game

Now that you see yourself as the player of the game and not the character himself, you can see the game of money and business more clearly.

Let’s zoom in on the game of business. It would help to see money and business more like a video game or board game like Monopoly. We could then see it for what it is: A made-up social construct that helps society function.

At a base level, what’s happening? Players send coins to other players. Some players use the coins to buy things. Others take the coins and create entirely new things with them. If the creation is good, it will generate more coins for others and increase society's collective wealth. But at the root, we are moving coins around to create new value and have experiences we desire.

Seeing the game as a game allows you to play the game more freely.

If you were playing a video game, you would shoot Stripe links and proposals to people like it was nothing. You would pivot when it became obvious to pivot. You would try out different offers and see what sticks. You would play with your positioning freely without attachment. You wouldn’t hesitate to do this, because you’re not overidentified with the video game. You know you are the player, or consciousness behind it.

When you know you are the player and not the character, you bring a healthy detachment to the video game that allows you to see the situation more objectively. You can take action toward your goal without the emotional baggage. You want to see the game of business in the “real world” the same way. The strategies and mindsets to follow will help you do so.

A) Realize price is mostly arbitrary

I can buy a white t-shirt here in Thailand for 50 cents. If you used the same fabric, put a Polo logo on it, and dropped me into a designer store in New York City, the shirt would suddenly cost $250.

I wear yellow light glasses from a company called Ra Optics. They cost $270. I could probably get the same quality of glasses on Amazon for $19. So why do I buy the Ra Optics? For the vibe. For the aesthetic. For the sweet case. For the esoteric logo. For the feeling of being a high-status, tapped-in, “based” health person when I wear them.

People don’t buy quality or even value. They buy status, feeling, and frequency. Obviously, creating high-quality things is best practice for customer satisfaction, reviews, and word-of-mouth marketing. But realize you could probably charge much more for the same service if you could create a vibe of luxury, status, and exclusivity around your product or service.

“But I don’t feel ready or worthy of that amount yet.”

You do the thing anyway. And then, once you prove to yourself you can do it, it becomes easier and easier to sell at that price, and you continue raising your prices just a bit beyond what feels safe.

So position yourself as an authority. Create an aura of luxury in your products and services. Prioritize creating a vibe over creating something perfect. See business as a game you’re choosing to play instead of an obligation to grind your way through.

“Naturally, if you are a hunter of butterflies, you would want to be where there are butterflies. Instead of chasing them around with your net and exhausting yourself, you would instead want to hold the scent they are attracted to.” ~ Frederick Dodson

B) Understand the ambiguous nature of money

What the f*ck even is money?

Money is a commonly agreed-upon store of value and a third-party medium for transactions. If I have milk, and someone wants milk but doesn’t have anything I directly want in return, they give me money instead of a physical item. It becomes the intermediary.

But today, money is a lot more complicated and a lot more ambiguous. We have digital currency. Governments print money out of thin air. The entire world carries over $300 trillion in debt.

What does it mean? Why does it matter? If you can see that money is inherently not real, and is instead a social construct, you can play the game from a more objective and neutral perspective.

There is no objectively agreed-upon value of money in a psychological sense.

Sure, $100 is $100, but $100 means different things to different people. To a millionaire, $100 is an afterthought. It’s .01% of their net worth. But to someone on the edge of being broke, with, say, $1,000 in liquid assets, $100 is a big deal. It’s 10% of their net worth. That’s a 1,000X increase in relative impact for the same objective value.

The millionaire can spend $5,000 on a service without much thought. The broke person has to be smart with how he spends $5. This should make you think about who you’re selling to.

The millionaire will spend $500 on a shirt made of the same fabric as the broke person spent $3 on, because the $500 shirt has a Polo logo. The price of these items and their perceived value have little to do with the fabric or material and everything to do with the aura, mystique, and status symbol associated with them.

The difference in charging $250 or $2,500 is your own perception of that money’s value, the person you are selling to’s perception, and the commonly recognized market value, brand narrative, and brand trust behind it.

How do you jump from a $250 price tag to a $2500 one while selling the same product or service? You have to create an aura around it, a mystique, a status symbol, a cult, or a rarity. You also have to construct these energies around your public image and perception.

On multiple levels, we can see that money is an ambiguous, relative concept. On a global level, governments print money out of thin air. Somehow, the entire earth has negative $300 trillion to its name. That is just insane to me. On a more local level, one person can perceive $100,000 as an afterthought, and another couldn’t imagine touching that type of money.

Yes, charging $10,000 may seem insane to you right now. But to the guy with $50,000,000 net worth or the company doing $1,000,000/month, it is nothing.

Know who you’re selling to. Remember, money is largely a matter of relative perception.

Create an aura of luxury and class around your brand and offers. Don’t overly attach to money, as it’s constantly being printed, devalued, and transformed.

Also, don’t feel bad about charging high prices if you have a product or service that you know can genuinely change someone’s life. A life-transformation is worth more than $5,000, $10,000, or even $100,000. You should never feel guilty about charging a lot of money if you know what you’re offering can change someone’s life.

C) Lower importance and take the bloody shot

Money does not flow to those who hesitate.

It flows to those who let it flyyyyy.

You want to get to the point internally where you no longer give a f*ck about shooting someone a $2,500 stripe invoice - especially if you’re just getting in the game of online business, when speed and iteration are most crucial. Close the deal first. Figure out how to fulfill it later. Your future self has your back, and the universe rewards speed and courage.

You’ll shoot the link anywhere and everywhere. While you’re out to dinner with friends and taking a piss. Between grabbing a drink at the bar and dancing with some hot foreign girl at a beach party. Lying in bed at 1 am watching a James Bond movie when you know you should be sleeping.

I mean all of these literally. You want business to be a natural extension of your life. It should be natural. It should be intuitive. It should be in the flow of life. No overthinking. No hesitation.

You have the confidence to take the shot from anywhere, just like Steph Curry pulls up from anywhere across half-court. And even if you miss once, you’re shooting again without hesitation because your self-worth and peace of mind are detached from getting accepted or rejected, just like the great philosopher Dion Waiters once said:

Obviously, we don’t want to always be shooting shots from across the galaxy and going 0/30 on our outreach. This is where strategy, positioning, messaging, authority, and sales skills are important. But if we can be okay with missing and shooting from distance, we are emotionally free to do business at our highest capacity.

To get into this mindset, you’ve got to be a little rogue. You’ve gotta be a little mercenary. You’ve gotta be a little Jack Sparrow. You’ve got to get out of the corporate mindset that work must only happen when sitting at a desk and see it as a game you can play from your phone anywhere, anytime.

There’s a time to be highly calculated, but in the beginning, action is more valuable than precision. Realize you can make money anywhere, anytime, and never be afraid to take the shot, because you don’t actually lose anything by missing, besides a little pride and ego.

D) Choose an archetype

When you decide to go make money for the day, say by pulling up to a coffee shop with the intention to sign a deal, get into character to do so. Remember again, you get to choose the character. (;

Is there a business person, a creator, an archetype, or a movie star you resonate with?

It can be 007, Patrick Bateman in the Dark Knight, Hercules, Archangel Michael, Jordan Belfort, Steve Jobs, Rihanna, Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump, or a rich dude who lives on the coast of Southern Italy. Doesn’t matter who you choose specifically. Just choose someone you admire.

It doesn’t matter who it is, and it doesn’t matter if you can rationalize it. This person or character represents a projection of an ideal in your psyche. Look less at their actions and more at the energy they move with.

Money follows those with confidence and swagger. Who moves with this energy, and how can you find a similar aura within yourself?

You then synthesize the character’s energy with your authentic flavor. You bring this new energy into your writing, marketing, messaging, offers, and sales. It then becomes fun to get into character to play the game of business, and you get excited to play every day.

For example, I’ve been in the James Bond energy recently. When it’s time to go make money, I hop on my moterbike, put on my shades, throw on a James Bond soundtrack, and think about what I can do to make some money today. Ideas for texts, tweets, articles, and videos start popping into my mind. Once I arrive at my coffee shop, I stay in the Bond energy (hyper-masculine, focused, alert, grounded, and attentive) while I work. Each text I send, or paragraph I write, is from this energy. And thus, an aura is created around my content and my brand.

Imagine pulling up to the coffee shop as James Bond vs. your programmed self. You’d wear different clothes. You’d greet the barista with new energy. You’d write different. You’d think different. You’d sell different. You’d also have way more fun doing it too.

This is why I do this. It is both fun and beneficial. So choose an archetype that resonates with you, and do the same.

E) Curate your enviroment

Our environment influences our energy and thoughts more than we realize.

Just imagine working from the lobby of a 5-star hotel in Greece vs. working from a run-down McDonald’s in the hood of Detroit. Obviously, it will be more natural for your thinking, writing, and beliefs to match the frequency of abundance in the 5-star hotel. Your enviroment programs you on a metaphysical level.

My friend Tyler and I would often go to super boujee restaurants in Chicago over the past year. There was a noticeable change in the vibration of our thinking in these environments. Surrounded by luxury and high-class people, our minds naturally broadened. It was at one of these dinners (in which we spent $300+) that I made $4,500 by sending a few text messages from this elevated frequency of abundance.

So go work in nice places. Choose places with light ceilings, warm lighting, beige furniture, high ceilings, and high-class people. Warm lighting calms the nervous system. Beige and symbolize abundance. High ceilings expand your mind. High-class people program your subconscious mind. These things seem trivial, but they work.

Have business conversations in places that match the frequency vibration of the abundance you want to call into your life. You don’t have to grind away in the trenches to unlock the ability to be in nice places. You can simply open the door and go in now. Drink water and eat the cheapest thing on the menu if you have to, but put yourself in the energy of abundance and allow your thoughts, beliefs, and actions to recalibrate to match.

Novelty is also a trigger for flow state. If you can change up your work environment, change the music you listen to, and even change the order in which you do tasks, you will have a higher likelihood of getting into flow - and thus have more fun.

So choose places to play the game of business that inspire and energize you. When you’re in a place that inspires you, you work from inspiration rather than obligation. When you work from inspiration, you create new value out of thin air, and create offers that make you more inspired to fulfill than obligated.

You don’t have to suffer and grind forever. You can allow yourself to feel abundant now. Feeling abundant before you see it in your reality is actually the key to creating it. Intentionally designing your enviroment to match can help.

F) Imitate money’s properties

Money flows to those who imitate its nature:

• Fast - Money can move between parties quickly. In the physical world, it changes hands. In the digital economy, it changes accounts instantaneously. The person who is light, quick, and can move with speed (when he chooses) is in harmony with the speed of money.

• Neutral - Money is unattached. It is a neutral tool. It circulates best when it is exchanged between neutral people or parties - aka acting without emotional excess or baggage.

• Transferable - Money can be exchanged between parties and countries easily. It can even be exchanged for different currencies. The transferrable person can apply his skillset in various ways, and can fit into any business, niche, or operation he chooses.

• Durable - Money does not decay quickly. Coins are incredibly hard to physically break. Paper bills are easier, but often last decades. Digital currency cannot be destroyed, only deflated in value. Bitcoin cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed (note the similarity to the Law of Conservation of Energy). Bitcoin may be the currency of the future because it more accurately mirrors the laws of physics. But this is not the article for that discussion. On durability, the person who is resilient to negative emotions and perceived setbacks is more attractive to money.

• Circulating - Money is always in motion. It circulates between countries, states, cities, towns, shops, diners, gas stations, bars, and people constantly. The person who also stays in motion imitates this property.

• Becoming increasingly digitized and decentralized - Over 90% of money today exists in digital form. Only 1% of that 90% is in decentralized currency (crypto), but the crypto market cap percentage grows by 90-95% each year. How does one imitate this trend? Become increasingly non-reliant on traditional institutions as much as possible. Build an online skillset. Build a personal brand (a digital resume). Learn to make money for yourself from anywhere in the world without relying on a physical location or hierarchical organization.

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Conclusion - Allow yourself to be EXCITED to make money

You should wake up in the morning excited to make money. It should be fun and energizing to create offers, message prospects, serve clients, and create new value.

Your offers should excite you. They should not drain you or make you scared to talk about. If it doesn’t light a genuine spark in you, it’s misaligned. When your offers excite you, you want to tell everyone about them. You can gauge your alignment with an offer by how excited you feel promoting it.

This is how I feel about the writing retreat I’m hosting and the paid tier of this newsletter. Both light me up. They feel sweet. As does the writing cohort. I’m so excited to facilitate that retreat, write these articles, and teach others how to become category-of-one writers online. And all of these offers started from what I wanted. I want to write in Northern Italy with a group of 10 people. I want to write and read esoteric niche articles. I also want to hone my craft as a one-of-one writer and teach others to do the same. All the offers started with me. What I wanted to experience. What I felt energized by. What I wanted to create. Because they started from this intrinsic place, it’s easy to promote them and fun to wake up in the morning and see who is a good fit to join.

Always remember this. You always get to choose to see business and life as play versus something incredibly heavy and serious. Wake up in the morning and see money as a game. Go make some deals. Cook up an offer you genuinely feel excited about in your body as much as your head. Choose to see this entire game of business as play vs. duty, and watch your relationship with it become much more positive. And remember the quote from the great Alan Watts, “Man takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”

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Thank you for reading.

This was a long one. I’m going to try to shorten these going forward. I hope a few nuggets in here stood out and you can go apply them today.

Talk soon,

Jack

🪶 One-of-One Writing Cohort

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