You see it.

You feel it.

You believe it.

You talk to other people about it as if it’s already true. But ultimately, nothing happens.

Psychologists say it’s not laziness. There is literally a neurological cycle happening in your brain that’s preventing you from pursuing your dreams.

And if you want to discover the real explanation as to why you’re acting “lazy”, stick around. This article will help explain how your brain works and how to fix it.

The Avoidance Loop (No Escape)

Procrastination researcher, Tim Pychyl spent decades studying why people don’t stick to their words. What they found is that procrastination is not a time management problem, it’s an emotional regulation problem.

Think about something important you’ve always wanted to do. Maybe a project that could improve your finances or an exercise habit that would build your ideal body. If you’re an introvert (like myself), that might mean signing up to dating apps to find love.

PS. I did this.

I had more failed dates than you can imagine.

But now one year into my relationship and all I can say is, I’m a very lucky man.

The greatest gift in life is finding someone who motivates you to become better and richer together.

That’s a success story because I took the initiative to fail 10+ times.

But let’s focus on why you’re brain fails to follow through.

And that’s because when you think about doing a difficult task, your brain generates a negative emotion. Self doubt. Overwhelm. Anxiety. The fear of not being good enough. Your brain obviously doesn’t like those emotions, so it looks for escapism. Cleaning. Scrolling. Playing video games. Alochol.

When you escape, the negative feelings go away temporarily and you feel relieved. Relief is the reward. And behaviours that get rewarded get repeated. So, the cycle continues.

Further research found that people who procrastinate the most have a weaker connection to their future self. What I call this is present you dumping sh!t on future you. But there is no escape. You will have to go through it either now or in the future.

You either learn how money works and self-educate yourself on a high-income skill in your 20’s or you end up suffering in a job that you want to escape in your 30’s, or even worse, until you retire. Same with health. You can either be healthy and exercise now or you will deal with a weak body later.

However, one thing is guranteed.

The future you will deal with the stress and panic that you right now is pushing away.

Always think about what the future version of you would want. Not what you want right now. If you don’t, the loop will continue to destroy your life.

You often feel like you have no control because you have no control.

You face a difficult task (trigger). You feel a sense of discomfort. You avoid the task. You feel relieved (temporary escape). And back to the start. Pretty common sense.

My YouTube channel (and Subsatck) are a great example. I didn’t start posting consistently until two years later. The trigger (and discomfort) was writing a newsletter or filming a YouTube video. I avoided it with multiple distractions. And that escapism gave me a lot of relief. But it was temporary.

Before we move on to solutions, let’s talk a bit about how your brain works with all this.

Two Systems Competing For Control

Every time you’re challenged with a difficult task, there are two parts of your brain competing for control.

1. Amygdala—this is the part of your brain that’s responsible for detecting threats. If the task is overwhelming, your brain literally treats it as a threat. Your brain doesn’t know the difference between a lion chasing you and a simple deadline. It treats both the same. It doesn’t care about your 5-year plan. It only cares about feeling good right now. This is why you resist things that are good for you.

2. Anterior cingulate cortex—this is your action system. It takes all the signals from the amygdala. If the threat is big, it obeys it. But if the task is more important than the threat, it shuts down the signals and pushes you to action.

Procrastination means the amygdala wins.

Your emoitonal brain overrides your rational brain.

One simple fix is to change how the task is framed in your brain. Instead of going to the gym (which is too big of a threat for your brain), change the goal to just move your body instead.

Work with your amygdala, don’t fight it. Because you won’t win.

The other thing is, the longer the dream has been a desire, the more unttainable it seems. The more you drag out doing the task, the more you make the dream bigger than you.

You become seperate from it.

Your mind and body goes into shock mode because what you want is so much bigger than you. Some of you might have been in this freeze mode for a while.

The reason you dream big but do nothing is essentially because your dream is nothing. It’s outside of you.

Instead, think about how the person you want to be would think, act, and feel. Don’t look at your reality, focus on the person who has your desired reality.

Quick story time. I’m designing my website at the moment. A lot of is basically going back and forth with the web developer. When I want to change something, I tell him what I want to change and he changes the coding. As a result, the website looks different (something more of my liking).

It’s the same thing for you.

Not a fan of your life? Install a new program. Pick what you want to change, then actually change it.

Do this through:

• Gratitude: programme yourself to see more of what you want.

• Identity work: stick around people that have your result—put yourself in environments where your ideal identity installs effortlessly.

• Act as if: see your wishes already fulfilled, “If I had it, I would do this”.

Your brain trains itself to avoid difficult tasks and procrastinate by default. The question is, can you train it to do the complete opposite?

Research has an answer.

And it’s very simple.

You can.

By just starting.

You don’t need to finish anything. Do it for 5 or 10 minutes. Train your brain to see an alternative. In other words, what we want to do is interupt the loop.

Interupt The Avoidance Loop

There are two ways to do this:

1. Catch and name it—do you notice yourself procrastinating? If so, think about the emotion you’re experiencing in that moment. Then name it. Just by doing that, you’re switching from your emotional mind to your rational mind.

2. Make the task stupidly small—don’t write an essay, open a Word doc and just write for 10 minutes. The actual process of completing a task is almost always much easier than the thoughts you have prior to it. You’re not avoding the task. You’re avoding the way you think that task is going to make you feel. Which your brain is almost always wrong.

If you’re an entrepreneur, creator, influencer, or simply an ambitious person, the next part will resonate with you SO MUCH.

The 2 Types Of Disguises

At this point, you might be saying, “I don’t sit on the couch doing nothing, I’m busy all the time! I just don’t see any results.”

That’s because your brain doesn’t just let you sit there and do nothing.

Doing nothing triggers guilt and guilt is another negative emoiton the amygdala is trying to avoid.

So your brain disguises avoidance as producvity through:

• Perfectionism—research shows that people who score higher on perfectionism are bigger procrastinators. And that’s because they don’t start. They do the oppostie of what research has proven to work.

• Productive procrastinsation—this is a sneeky one. You’re not actually sitting on the couch doing nothing. You’re researching. Reorganising notes. Watching videos on YouTube. Tom Pitchel calls this short-term mood repair. When a difficult task triggers negative emotion, your brain swaps it for a less risky task. You get a sense of accomplishment after you finish it, but the task is less high stake so you’re basically not moving towards your goal much, if at all.

From this, I want you to understand why you do what you do and for that reason, what you shouldn’t do.

Solutions

Firstly, don’t confuse thinking with progress. Most of the time, I tell people to expand their imagination of what’s possible. But a lot of people forget the most important part, which is to act. Thinking about success gives your brain a sense of achievement. It releases small amounts of dopamine. It reduces the urgency to take action.

Secondly, don’t have an identity that isn’t aligned with your goals. The brain resists actions that don’t match how a person sees themselves.

And thirdly, don’t be addicted to potential. Be addiced to effort. Real progress is repetitive, slow, and uncomfortable. Instead of doing the hard boring work, most people stay attached to the idea of who they can be because it feels beter than facing who they are now.

Final note. Stop pushing through. Forcing things don’t work. Work with your brain in the ways we’ve spoken about in this letter. Be mindful of your current thoughts, feeling and actions. Change them if you don’t like it. And when it comes to your work or side hustles, start with the tiniest action possible.

Dopamine is released most strongly in anticipation of the reward, not the reward itself.

Avoid getting chemical hits from thinking about success. Get it from actually achieving things.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this reading.

Talk to you next week.

-Serkan

But time is an illusion. Months don’t exist. These “productivity slumps" can happen at any time of the year. New Year’s resolutions are also BS. Why not make a change now? What’s more exciting than that? The present is the only time we can ever make a change.

The truth is, most people don’t fail because of a “mid-year slump.” They fail because they lack urgency from the very begining.

In this article, I’m going to share four shifts that you can make right now to become unrecognisable. Not in the next six months, but in in the next six weeks.

Be honest

Firstly, I want you to exercise being honest with yourself. We’ve been trained to think that every single endeavour needs a huge amount of time. We hear stories about athletes, authors, content creators, musicians, filmmaners, craftspeople, engineers—how all of them took years, and sometimes even decades, to get to where they are.

But do things really have to take that long?

Or are we just accustomed to a certain system?

You know what I’m talking about. To get one grade, it would take us a year. To get one degree, it would take us four years. Our brains have literally accepted this as truth. And this continues in our work lives. A performance review happens annually. Promotions and bonuses also happen annualy.

If there was one thing they should’ve taught us in school, it should’ve been time management. Not just how to manage our time, but how to design and manage our own projects. I say this because people, including myself, are terrible at estimating how long somethings actually needs to take.

It sounds impressive when someone says, “I put blood, sweat and tears into this for FIVE solid years.” We respect it more beacause of the repetiion and consistency. But does something really need to take that long? I tend to believe that the time in between doesn’t matter. What occurs in between matters.

Ask yourself: Where are you getting your timeline expectations from? Is it the people around you? Is it from deeply rooted beliefs you formed in childhood and adulthood through school and work? Are you even aware that you have a timeline expectation? Not setting one is worse because then whatever you need to do can be done wheneever. And whenever usually means never.

Your life moves at the speed of your decisions.

Work life balance is utter BS. Learn from nature instead. Everything comes in seasons. Every sucessful person is viewed as borederline insane becuase, at some point, they had a SEASON of going borederline insane about their goals and vision.

If you’re in your season of work, forget about balance for a while and do the thing until it gets done. Most of the time, it’s all just emoitonal safety. Not doing the thing makes you feel better in the short term, but quitely kills you in the long term.

If you want to move faster, learn faster. If you want to learn faster, then move faster. The quicker you learn the lessons, the quicker you’ll progress. Treat everything as a feedback loop. Not just your failures, but your successes too.

Don’t forget the basics

Get good sleep. Move your body. Don’t doomscroll the moment you wake up. Be well dressed and look presentable.

The basics are your sacrifices. They’re a NO to other people and the outside world. You must say no to things that don’t align with your goals and vision. That’s a non-negotiable in and of itself. A lot of people crave confience, but confidence usually comes from saying no and sticking to the plan.

Have 3-5 non-negotiables.

Here are mine:

• Workout for 30 minutes (even if it’s a long walk)

• Meditate for 20 minutes

• No alcohol

They’re not exciting. But they’re simple. And that’s the point.

Work on your money mindset

Over the next 6 weeks, pick one skill and ruthlessly eliminate everything else. If you’re not satisfied with where you are, skill is how you move from point A to point B through the bridge of self-eduation.

No dabbling.

Just pick one thing.

I would recommend writing, marketing, storytelling, or sales. That’s basically content creation, but it all falls under one umbrella.

Do a deep dive. Absolutely saturate your brain. Read, watch, listen and write about your interests and curioustiies for 4+ hours a day.

Then launch a project.

One project.

Build something.

A landing page. An e-book. A one-on-one coaching service. Anything.

Get feedback on it fast. Fix it. And Repeat.

It’s enevitable that something will happen. I promsie. Even if it’s just a $50 offer you put out there, it will teach you lessons and grow you much more than the two decades you spent at school.

Who is the person you envision yourself becoming? Is he someone who doesn’t work a traditional job? Does he have a side income? Is he self-employed to some capacity?

I’m 26. Entrepreneurship and selling your own thing has become the most integral part of my self development journey because it’s the only path, that I’m aware of, that forces you to work on so many of your limiting beliefs.

By trying to make money, you quickly see how many limiting beliefs you actually have. It’s a matter of practising abundance. You need to believe that anything that is meant for you will be yours. Very corny, right? But if you don’t believe something is yours, regardless of what it is, how can it truly be yours?

One of the biggest blockers for a lot of people are themselves. They spend weeks, months, and even years working on something that should have took a few hours or days. But that happens because they don’t believe they should get paid that amount just to do a few hours of work. Behind all of it is a limiting belief.

I have very strong beliefs about the creator economy and the opportunity to make money online because I genuinely believe this is peak humanity. This has never been done before. My parents had to leave their parents to come to the UK as immigrants and raise their kids, me. To give me this life.

Now, I could work through the corporate world and become a “something”, but I know that something is usually just a cog in a machine who no one knows their name.

What I’m talking about is different.

The internet is an opportunity.

For all of us.

If you also hold similar strong beliefs but aren’t sure where to start, or feel lost and overwhelmed by all the noise, I’ve created a free guide for you. It’s directly tied to what we’re talking about here, covering branding, persuasion, content and marketing.

Visibility

The more visible you are, the more opportunities you attract. Being brutally honest, I’ve never truly been in a good environment. I was born in Turkey, then moved to the UK at the age of two, to Newcastle which is a pretty rough area to grow up in. Before you think it can’t get any worse, I then moved to North London around the age of 13. These are all places where not many people make it through.

That’s why the internet means a lot to me. It’s given us the opportuntiy to put ourselves in front of people we would have never had the chance to meet before.

I’ve posted on TikTok since 2020. During that time, people have started reaching out to me. No, sorry. Not people. Some of the biggest brands in the world.

Netflix. Paramount Plus. Universal Studios.

I even almost had the chance to interview Christopher Nolan when Oppenheimer was being released. When the agency I was with at the time, “Digital Fox Talent”, told me about it, I was Unfortunately away on holiday in Japan, so I couldn’t do it. But the opportuntiy was there. And it came from being visible.

Don’t understimate visibility. Visibility is leverage. And leverage creates endless opportunities.

You also don’t need to be on camera. You can write Substack articles like these. Visibility is visibility at the end of the day.

That’s all from me for this week.

I’ll see you inside the free guide.

→ Get Creator Business Essentials for free

If not, I’ll see you in the next letter!

I hope this was helpful.

-Serkan

Before we move on, I just want to make it clear that there is nothing wrong with you. Your brain is literally designed to resist effort.

In this article, I will explain how your brain actually works and three ways to fix it.

Why do we struggle with hard tasks?

It’s very simple. It’s because we don’t want to do it. Why would you want to do something that is hard? The secret is to design tasks (your work) in a way that your brain actually wants to do it.

In order to do this we need to understand how your brain handles hard tasks. There are two systems for this:

1. Basal Ganglia

This is the part of your brain that handles all of the automatic behaviours. For example, brushing your teeth.

2. Prefrontal Cortex

This part of your brain is responsible for all the actions that require conscious deicison making and effort. For example, learning a new skill, writing an essay, working on a project etc.

Your brain doesn’t want to use the prefrontal cortex too much because if it stays on for too long it causes mental exhaustion. It’s interesting how this all works. It makes total sense. Everytime you want to do something, your brain does a benefit calculation. It analyses the reward for doing the task and whether it’s worth the effort.

Let’s look into the model that explains what we’re talking about here.

The Fogg Behaviour Model

On the left side, you have motivation. This is driven by perceived reward. At the bottom, you have ability, which is driven by perceived effort.

If the reward exceeds the effort for a specific type of task your brain says yes and you do it easily. But if effort exceeds the reward, your brain says no and you feel resistance.

Do you now understand why scrolling on TikTok is easy? Because there is zero effort and immediate reward. Your brain isn’t going to say no to an offer like that. But if you were to read a book, that would require a lot of effort and distant reward because you’re not going to feel the benefits of reading immeditely.

Here’s the takeaway:

You can’t control how much immediate reward a task is going to give you, but you can easily control how much effort it requires by intelligently designing your tasks.

There are three factors you can control when designing tasks: the size, feeling, and committment/duration of the task.

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1. Design the size of the task

Make every step of the task small so that it feels achieveable.

Writing online and the process of creating long-form video content on YouTube (through storytelling) is completely new to me. It’s a big task. I started off on social media making memes (yes, it’s not a lie). Just search me up on TikTok.

So, this goal of mastering writing and storytelling isn’t an easy job for me. And what I ultimately did to make it easy was break it into smaller steps.

Step one, open the computer. Step two, open a Word doc. Step three, write titles that have potential (ones that people are actually interested in). Step four, find resources on the topic as research via articles, podcasts and long-form media. Step five, write. Etc.

If you’re interested in this transition and how I grow on social media through writing and storytelling I’ve got a free in-depth guide that goes into my decade worth of experience of creating online.

Totally free. Grab it here: https://stan.store/SerkanKozkiran/p/cbf

Back to topic. Think about how addictive video games are. It’s because video game designers understand human psychology more than anyone else.

You will never fight a final boss at level one. Designers will cut the game to small achieveable chunks. Everytime you complete a small part of the game, you move to the next part of the game. This gives the player a sense of accomplishment and the drive to keep going. Believe it or not, it’s how certain people accomplish extreme things.

Stop thinking about the finish line. Focus on one simple step at a time. That will give you the sense of accomplishment (reward/dopamine) to do the next one.

2. Design The Feeling To The task

Everyone hates school. And everyone who comes after us will hate school if the education system stays the way it is. This collective hatred isn’t random by the way. We hate it because we have very little control over choosing what we want to learn.

So, think about the feeling the task gives you. Do you see the task as an obligation or a choice? One is mandatory, the other is personal. It’s not “I have to do it”, but more “I choose to do it”. Same task, different feelings.

This can go for everything. When you feel like you’re choosing, you engage more deeply with it, persist longer, and actually enjoy doing the task more. But as soon as you force something you will immediately come across resistance.

A great example is my Substack. I don’t need to write on Substack. I choose to. This is a conscious decision I’ve made.

Your brain doesn’t resist hard work. It resists work that feels imposed.

3. Design The Commitment & Duration Of The Task

When you’re learning a new skill, you feel a sense of excitment at the beginning but as time goes on the excitment wears off and so does your level of committment to the task. Your to-do list builds more and more and it all just becomes a heavy load.

But the goal isn’t to succeed. The goal is to experiment. But more importantly committing to and conpleting the task. In other words, commit to the experience.

We might only live once. Or we might have multiples lives. Who knows. What I do know is that you don’t take anything from this life on to the next. At least nothing material. Actually one of my weird beliefs is that if we do carry anyting forwatd, it’s experience, to whatever comes after life.

My point is that experience and committment work together. To actually experience one desire to its fullest, you need some level of committment. Whatever endeavour it is you’re working on, make it short and achievable. Don’t exercise everday until the end of the year, do it three times a week.

The one true goal is to teach your own brain that you’re actually the person that follows through.

My committment is to write one newsletter a week until 2027. To essentially become a better writer and storyteller.

Remember. Hard things do not become easy because you force yourself to do them, they become easy because you designed the right conditons for your brain to operate.

That’s all for this week.

Thank you for tuning in!

Here’s a free resource you can check out next: https://stan.store/SerkanKozkiran/p/cbf

-Serkan

The people who “don’t have time” and the people who “always find time” have the same amount of time.

That was one of my most viral Substack posts that seemed to have resonated with a lot of people. One of the main reason is because of this idea that while your day job may pay your bills, your 5-9 determines who you become. Those few hours after work are where books get written, life-changing content gets uploaded, businesses get built, bodies get healthier, relationships deepen and ultimately lives begin to change.

But for most people, that is not the case. Those hours disappear into distraction before we even realise it. The harsh reality is this: most people spend their energy trying to maintain their current life rather than work towards their ideal future.They deep down want something, but their daily routine is misaligned with their goals.

I want to ask you a few questions before we move forward. Where do you want to be in one year? And does your current lifestyle back it? It’s as simple as that. The bigger the gap between those two, the less likely you are to accomplish it.

You’re not naturally lazy, but you might be stuck in decision fatigue, cognitive overload, and a nervous system that is over stimulated. I know we all have that genuine feeling of wanting to change, but somehow keep falling into the same patterns every night.

How many times have you told yourself that after work (or school) you’re finally going to exercise, work on a passion project, cook a healthy meal, read a book, or try a new hobby? You keep telling yourself that tomorrow you’ll do what you said, but tomorrow never arrives.

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99% of people approach their 5-9 wrong. They rely on motivation instead of systems. Research shows that the quality of our decisions tend to decline throughout the day as mental energy gets depleted. I spoke about this in my previous video. Most “systems” around us are designed to make passive behaviour incredibly easy. We’re always on the go. Even in our free time, we don’t rest. That’s a big self-help problem. People treat rest as failure. We also feel guilty for resting. But rest and recovery is important. Of course, there is also a massive difference between intentional rest that restores your energy vs numbing your energy out and feeling frustrated with ourselves, which a lot of the times is when we give too much of ourselves into distraction.

Your goals start feeling like they belong to a future version of yourself who will have more time, clarity, and motivation. But in this video, we are going to talk about how your current evenings are the only thing that matter. I’m going to help you utilise them so you can be productive, energised, and more fulfilled.

You don’t need more hours in a day, you need to reset the way you use up the crucial time you do have. Everything you can ever dream of: Health, wealth, happiness, and love is accessible to you if you do the 5-9 right. So, here’s 7 strategies I’ve used to stop wasting my evenings and completely transform that time into something that is both productive and fulfilling.

Change Your First Action Move After Work To Avoid Energy Dead Spots

Behavioural Scientist Wendy Wood who studies habits and automatic behaviour said: “Much of human behaviour is driven less by conscious decision making and more by environmental cues and repeated behaviours”. That means your brain recognises the pattern before your conscious mind fully catches up. That’s an important piece of information as you don’t want to be fighting the wrong battle.

If going straight home from the office destroys momentum (which it does for for me), then you can’t rely on discipline when you’re already at home. Change the first action move instead. Go directly to the gym after work. Stop at a coffee shop to work on your passion project. I don’t know, go for a walk around your neighbourhood before stepping a foot into your home.

The purpose is to interrupt the auto pilot loop before decision fatigue fully takes over. Scientists call it implementation intention theory: create specific “if” “then” plans ahead of time. Research shows that people are far more likely to follow through on behaviours when they create a specific situational plan ahead of time. Don’t try making big decisions at once. Most lives are shaped less by huge dramatic choices and more by repeated small decisions that slowly become your identity.

I work two days a week in the office at the moment. So, what I do is go football straight after work. Me and my brothers book a slot for football every Monday for 8 pm. And then on the Thursday, which is my second day in the office, I’ll meet up with my girl for a meal. Most of the evening would include no phone time as I’d just talk with her.

The ”if” and “then” theory also aligns with the “Or-not-and” strategy. If you want to say yes to the things that really matter to you, then you have to say no to something else. Sounds like common sense, but people literally say yes to everything, then try making everything work, which never works out. There is no such thing as not having enough time. There is a such thing as something not being a priority.

Expectations of the ideal is the problem. You shouldn’t try making every evening perfect either, that’s not what I’m trying to say. If you place expectations, every evening will feel like a waste of time, and you will feel bad about it. You will see everything that you wanted to do but couldn’t do and diminish the achievement of what you did do.

This strategy doesn’t mean “I’m going to do this and this and this”. It means “I’m going to do this OR this”. So, actively think about which parts of the day or after what activities do you feel less energetic and bypass them or do something to spike energy at the same time. This is a strategy I continue to do every single day. It makes the biggest difference.

For me, a lot of the time it is the commute home from work. I honestly don’t know how people do 5 days in the office. But spot out energy dead spots and do whatever you can to avoid them or turn them into an energising activity. Could you stay at work an extra hour to do some of your other work? Could you fit in a workout? It might be inconvenient. But is it as inconvenient as feeling tired every single evening for the rest of your life?

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Batch Small Tasks, Cut The Tiredness Cycle, & Calibrate Your Natural Energy Levels

Chores and mundane daily tasks don’t seem overwhelming on their own, but together they eat hours of your evening before you ever get to the thing you actually care about. So, do everything in one block instead of scattering it all throughout the week. Pick a time for everything and stick to it. You don’t have to be perfect with this. I write and record in the mornings. I can rarely ever do it after 12pm. I work out when everything settles down around 4pm. I read or meditate at nighttime to wind down.

I hate the idea of “there’s no free time”. In 2024, I quit my job and moved to Malaysia. I thought I had no free time with my day job which was absolute BS. I actually worked less when I quit my job and moved away. Making something your entire focus gives you disappointing results. Stop spending all of your time working expecting the more work you do the better the results you get. You’re basically robbing yourself of the metal freedom to think about things at a big picture level without the pressure to complete tasks and do stuff.

Constantly feeling tired is not normal. Neither is constantly wanting to take naps. Aim to get maximum sleep and recovery because trying to be productive and skip sleep wastes more of your time. I recently went on a holiday to Rome (Italy) for 5 days and came back even more tired. You can’t pour out of any empty cup. If you want to be more productive in the evenings, do you even have the energy to be productive in the evenings? Try experimenting. Look at your current daily schedule. If you think you don’t have a schedule, you do. Look at how much sleep you’re getting and increase it gradually. You may need to change a few things but it’s totally worth it. For me, I usually need 9 hours in bed, even if all of it doesn’t include actual sleep.

Stop Waiting For Motivation Before Taking Action

The belief that you need to feel good before every action is a damaging belief. The belief that you are inspired before creating, energised before exercising, calm before mediating, and confident before starting a new task is an illusion. Consistency comes before motivation, not after it.

If you feel tired, then just do things tired. Go to a dinner with your friends or partner even if you’re in a bad mood. Do a workout even if you’re yawning. Write and record even if you’re creatively slumped. Prove to yourself that you can rely on yourself to do the things that you said you would even if you’re not in a perfect mood. If I’m being brutally honest, you’re not always going to be in a good mood. You’re not going to want to do anything other than to sit on the couch and scroll.

I want you to focus on what it would feel like if you didn’t do it in a week, month, or a year from now. The things that are good for you feel bad at the beginning and amazing afterwards. The things that are bad for you feel great in the beginning and not so good afterwards. Small actions matter so much. They seem insignificant in isolation but overtime it is evidence of who you are. Your future is shaped by what you repeatedly do when no one is watching.

Treat Your Energy Like A Generator, Not A Battery

Just think about how a battery works. It starts 100% charged and as the day goes on it reduces. The more you’re on it, the more it gets drained. This is how people see themselves. The more you do, the more you think, the more you get drained. Make the switch. You’re not a device. Your energy is more like a generator. Certain activities generate energy much faster than just resting and doing nothing.

It doesn’t have to be work based. You can practise an instrument, play a sport, create content on social media. Just have a hobby. Believe it or not, doing this is the solution to your energy problem. Here are a few rules for it.

1. Physical activity – I have a workout around 4pm

2. Cognitively effortful – E.g. solving a puzzle (I normally work on my own projects, like products I’m building for social media etc)

Dedicate some time exploring which activity brings you fulfilment and energy. Spending 30 minutes in the evening learning something new and interesting can really stack up meaningful skills. If you’re interested in business and mindset, content and marketing, spiritualty and consciousness and would like to gain information much faster from me, I would recommend my weekly newsletter. They are emails of the most important stuff I wish I knew when I was first starting out not only on social media, but life itself. It includes interesting perspectives with actionable takeaways.

Totally free to join here: https://stan.store/SerkanKozkiran/p/cbf

Subscribe now

Surprisingly, I did secure one. At a Japanese bank in London, which is where I’m based. I worked from home for one year with a full-time salary. Believe it or not, I was on top of the world. But like most ambitious people, it wasn’t enough. I was aware of other important things going on in the world.

Social media was booming. The creator economy was growing faster than ever. And a new platform had just emerged in the space. Which you can probably guess.

TikTok. I started making content.I earned a secure income from the comfort of my home, while at the same time grew an audience online doing relatable content, pop culture, memes, trends etc. I felt like I was doing the right thing and maybe it was at the time.

At the end of the internship year, I returned to university to do my final year and ultimately completed my degree with one year’s of work experience. And when I graduated in 2022, I got a permanent full-time job offer from the same bank.

That’s exactly when everything began to crumble down.I realised that the internship was my baby years. Being an intern and being a full-time worker (especially at a bank) is two completely different things.

In a short summary, I continued doing social media and worked for 2 years to around April 2024 until eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore.I quit my job and went travelling to Asia with my unemployed brother. Don’t get me wrong. It was fun. But I had no idea what I was doing.All I knew was that I wanted to get out of the situation I was in and somehow make social media work because since 2020 I enjoyed making content. So, I was basically unemployed travelling for a whole year. I had a lump sum of savings which was being drained.

Then it got worse.

I realised I didn’t want to do the content that I was doing for the past 5 years from 2020-2025. That 5-year chapter came to an end.I outgrew it.So, I stopped making TikToks. I tried other things.X, LinkedIn, YouTube (inconsistently) and pretty much none of them worked.All I knew was that I wanted to transition to self-improvement. That was something I could see myself doing that for the next 5 years.

But my problem wasn’t pivoting, my problem was trying to do everything at once.

I kept posting, making content private, and reuploading new content. My ADHD was at an all-time high and it was a continuous loop. Then towards mid 2025, I realised I couldn’t trust my own brain. I got a similar job at another bank.

By the way, this is not yet a success story, this is someone who is being brutally honest with you on where he is and how he’s going to get himself back on track. I know, not very common on social media. Everyone just boasts about their success online.

But ultimately, that is where I am in 2026. I’ve managed to save a lot of money (again), which I’m planning to reinvest into social media. Website. Products. YouTube etc.

Also, here’s a massive lesson I’ve learned with social media:

You don’t have to be everywhere; you have to be consistent somewhere.

And that’s pretty much it for the social media side of stuff. I won’t go into more here. If you want to learn from me on my lessons, but more importantly how take social media slow so that you can start on the right foot and master the foundations: branding, persuasion, content (writing and video), and marketing I’ve a got a guide.

Free here: https://stan.store/SerkanKozkiran/p/cbf

Now that you know more about my story and where I am, we can dive into the video.

In the midst of all of this, there were huge problems that were holding me back.

For the past few years, I’d wake up tired, scroll for hours, lie to myself about tomorrow and still wonder why nothing in my life was changing. I wasn’t exactly broken, but I did have a nagging feeling that I was wasting my potential every day.

That specific type of inner state will kill you if you don’t somehow find a way to get out of it.

And what I’m about to share with you here is what pulled me out of that spiral.It’s what got me consistent on YouTube and Substack. Trust me. I was lost, lazy and unmotivated until I did this.

The step-by-step formula of how not to be lazy, find motivation, discover discipline and make a real shift in your life.

1. Lower The Bar!

What I realised through years of trying to start something new but always failing:

The hardest part isn’t doing the thing. It’s starting the thing.

I don’t struggle in writing a newsletter or recording YouTube videos. But I am still at the start of this journey, which is the most difficult part. I don’t know you. I don’t what you’re goals are. But what I can do is give you basic advice to get you out of the spiral you’re in (that’s if you’re in one to begin with).

If not, why are you here? I’m not like other creators. I want you to consume from me only if the information I give you is going to be of benefit to you.

For those struggling to take action, think about the smallest possible action step.I know. In our fast-paced world everyone tells you to go all out and achieve big things. It’s what I tried doing. I tried being everywhere at once.

We don’t fail because were not capable, we fail because we set the bar so high that we never get started.

Whatever you’re doing, make the first step laughably easy. You need to build habits slowly.

• Don’t write for 1 hour, do it for 10 minutes.

• Don’t work out for 2 hours, do it for 30 minutes.

• Don’t meditate for 10 minutes, do it for 2 minutes.

Think about how you can break out of laziness in an instant. Right now, right in the moment.

You can act your way into right thinking. But you can’t think your way into right action.

Thinking your way into doing something is not going to work. Techniques, strategies, and more planning won’t do it. Only action gets you out of that state.

There are days where I don’t want to write or record. But small steps compound. Do it in tiny steps.

When you do this and take small steps, you surpise yourself so much that you question the thoughts you had prior to doing it. It seems like that person was a completely different person.

Trick: Don’t do it perfectly. Do a HALF ASS job.

I know you haven’t heard anyone say that before. But it takes the pressure off. Once you get moving dopamine kicks in. The effort alone becomes the reward. Action creates motivation. Not the other way around. Be content with small actions.

If you’re doing social media, just bloody post the first piece of content.

The tiny habit effect by BJ Fog (a Stanford behavioural scientist) shows habits stick when they start smaller than your resistance.

Lowering the bar isn’t giving up. It’s giving yourself the chance to show up.

It also affects the confidence loop. Every time you follow through on something small, you build self-trust and that self-trust becomes confidence.

Confidence is built by micro-promises kept.

Brutal truth (even if you don’t want to admit it): We raise the bar to impress others, we lower the bar to take care of ourselves. One is performance, the other is peace.

Start so small it’s impossible to fail. Repeat it until it’s impossible to stop.

This is proven by the Zeigarnik effect.

Momentum comes before motivation. Action comes before enthusiasm. Take one small step forward.

2. Build A Ritual, Not A Routine

A routine relies on will power; a ritual relies on association. Apply the same que before the same task every day. Whatever that means for you. Same place. Same playlist. Same mug.

I’ve seen a lot of success in my life from doing this. Before I write or read, I always make myself a cup of coffee. Before I exercise, I always open a podcast or audiobook for during the workout.

Overtime, your brain links that que to productivity through classical conditioning.

My workouts becomes fun because I love genuinely love learning. Reading or writing becomes fun because I love coffee. Let it become a ritual. But more importantly, make doing it easier.

When I record my YouTube videos, I set up everything the night before. The camera, mic, tripod, lights are all set up, so I don’t have to worry about anything on the day.

Don’t make it difficult.

Make it easier and simpler for your brain and body to make the shifts you want to make.

3. Break The Dopamine Cycle

Laziness isn’t a lack of motivation, it’s dopamine burnout from cheap rewards. The biggest mistake we can do is label ourselves as “lazy”, when the environment that we’re in rewards that type of behaviour.

Reframe it.

Maybe you’re not lazy. Maybe you just need to redesign your environment so that it doesn’t reward laziness.

What I mean by dopamine and cheap rewards is anything that feels amazing at the start but like poison at the end. To be precise, most of tine, that’s anything fast.

Fast content.

Fast food.

A fast life.

Try a 24-hour dopamine detox. No endless scrolling, no junk food, no passive consumption. Your brain resets sensitivity to effort and reward.When you live a slow life, suddenly reading, writing, or lifting doesn’t feel like pushing a rock uphill.

Just try to notice what it is that’s numbing you. Be conscious and self-aware of what you reach for when you are bored, anxious, or tired.

One of the biggest mistakes we make in habit change is we cut out the bad stuff but don’t replace it with anything.

This was my mistake with content creation. I stopped creating videos and immediately fell into a rabbit hole of constant consumption. Because on the other end of creation (regardless of content type or niche), is endless consumption.

When you decide to change your life by cutting fake dopamine, you also need real reward.

Move your body, start a project, cook something, take long walks, call someone for a deep conversation.

You want to do activities that feel good after, not ones that feel good before.

Cheap dopamine numbs you now and drains you later. Real dopamine costs you effort but gives you energy.

4. Add Friction

It may not look like it, but everything is in your control. So, make bad habits a little harder to do.

For example, when it’s time to work, keep your phone in another room. This transformed my life. Oh and One more thing on phones, don’t look at your phone first thing in the morning. You wouldn’t let 100 people walk into your bedroom first thing when you wake up. I know I personally wouldn’t. But you would happily let 100 people walk into the bedroom of your mind when you haven’t even woken up yet.

These are all hard to do. Every bad habit is built against us. Every algorithm was designed to target your flaws and weaknesses.

The one goal of the algorithm is to keep you glued to your phone. You beat it by giving it distance.

5. Relearn To Sit In Boredom

Let yourself be bored for just 10 minutes a day. Complete silence. Just you. That’s when your brain remembers how to focus again.

I’ve learned to sit with boredom, and it’s personally led to more curiosity, rest, and breakthroughs in my life.

In order to stop making the same mistakes, you need to allow yourself to reset.

Think about your digital devices. When they’re overused and worked, they need a reset. Honestly, I do this very often with my MacBook.

If machines need a reset, you definitely do too.

6. Reward Effort, Not Outcomes

When you’ve finished a task, don’t move on to the next one right away. Write it down.

Small wins release dopamine. Train your brain to crave effort instead of escape.

So many of us stop doing the things that are good for us because we don’t remember how good they were.

Think about it.

You always remember the bad things. You never remember how you felt after a solid workout a week later, but you do remember the stress you had before that workout.

Our brains holds on to negative experiences.

When something bad happens we cry for a month and when something good happens we celebrate it for a night. We don’t know how to deeply immerse ourselves in what’s going well.

So, wire your brain to recognise small wins. Small moments of growth. Acknowledge the work you’re putting in.

Firstly, if you don’t give yourself credit, who will? Secondaly, if you don’t give yourself credit, you don’t give yourself momentum, inspiration and the enthusiasm to continue.

7. Protect Your First And Last Hour

No phone for the first 60 minutes of your day. Move, stretch, do yoga, go on a walk. Same with nighttime. Screen off 60 minutes before bed. This lets you sleep better, focus faster, and feel human again.

Again, start reframing things.

You’re not lazy. Social media is addictive. You’re not unmotivated, the algorithm controls you. You’re not broken, you’re the product (for now).

If you find it very difficult to focus, use the 5-minute rule:

Commit to doing something for just 5 minutes. Then you can stop (if you want).

• Read for 5 minutes.

• Write for 5 minutes.

• Meditate for 5 minutes.

Remember what we said? Doing the work isn’t hard, getting started is the hard part.

Have you realised how once you start something you almost never stop? This rule bypasses resistance.

Psychologists call it the activation barrier. Let me say it again. The hardest part of any task isn’t doing it, it’s starting it.

It’s how you shift from thinking to doing. You get the hard part out the way. You put yourself in a position where it’s easier to keep going than to stop.

The brain resists starting, not continuing. Make starting easy, not optional.

Here’s how:

• Choose one task you’ve been resisting

• Set a 5-minute timer

• Tell yourself you can stop when the alarm rings

• Start

If you really want to make it work, create accountability that hurts. Make the cost of inaction visible. Tell your friends your goals. Post daily updates of your performance on social media Maybe even bet some money with your friends on who can get to the gym first.

Make not doing it painful. The rule is that if it’s easy to skip, you will.

Make skipping expensive.

8. End Each Day With A Self-Review

Each day, write down three things you did right no matter how small the achievement is. Your brain will begin to notice progress, not problems.

Then progress turns into positive dopamine.

Positive dopamine turns into momentum.

And momentum turns into motivation.

Celebrate consistency, not perfection.

That’s all from me this week!

Cheers

-Serkan

The concept of ignoring reality made me change how I think about pretty much everything.

There is an equation that runs your entire life.

Every single domain. Health. Wealth. Love. And happiness.

And most of us, including myself, have had it backwards our entire lives.

Every single decision you’ve made or pattern you’ve fallen into is built on a sequence that was already decided from the very start.

Once you understand that sequence, which I believe you will by the end of this article, a lot of the stuff that just doesn’t make sense to you will suddenly click.

The Default (Backwards) Equation

Let’s talk a bit about the default equation. This is how most people live:

1. They experience an event (the external world)

2. The mind creates a thought about the event

3. That thought creates feelings

4. You act based on those feelings

5. All of that generates more of the same kind of reality

It’s a loop that you are a part of but what you may not realise is that you’re the one giving the loop the permission to continue. All of it happens on autopilot.

Which is why sometimes at the end of each day, you may feel like nothing has changed.

Nothing in your life seems like a choice which is why the same things keep repeating.

People are stuck living the same life because of this “loop” and it can go for years and even decades.

The cycle feels obvious and natural which is why nobody even questions it.

When a bad thing happens, of course you would think negative thoughts. It’s just your natural reaction to the world.

But that is the exact trap.

If you think negative, you will feel negative.

If you feel negative, your actions will be negative because it’s coming from a negative place.

And because life is cyclical, reality will remain the same.

You’re basically allowing the outputs of life dictate the inputs. Which means you stay trapped in the same result.

Your reactions are reinforcing the very reality you’re trying to escape.

This means that your current circumstances are an energetic history. A record of where your internal state was at some earlier point in life.

I want you to really understand this.

People look at that record and treat it like live feed. They treat is as it’s happening right now.

But there’s a delay between when you change internally and when that change shows up externally.

If you’re judging your progress by what you see in front of you right now, you’re looking at evidence of an older version of yourself. It’s very misleading.

Your current reality isn’t a final judgement of who you are or what you’re capable of.

You are free to write a completely new reality starting right now.

I’m writing this article because this is one of the most liberating realisations you can have in life.

Inputs determine outputs.

Writing better inputs is the only thing that moves the needle forward.

Changing that one variable separates people who are stuck in the same patterns and people who change effortlessly.

You don’t change your life by wrestling with reality. You change it by changing what goes into the equation first.

External events and circumstances turn into thoughts. Thoughts turn into feelings. Feelings turn into action. And ultimately there is no exit point.

If you think the same way, you will get the same result.

Life can literally feel inescapable. At every point of the chain the next step feels like the only logical response to the one before it.

If nothing is changing in your life, it’s because you assume that the outside world is causing you to think, feel, and act the way that you do.

Which is actually not your fault, we were all conditioned since childhood to believe that our thoughts and feelings are caused by what happens to us.

So, no wonder why you blame other people and things, right?

You don’t even register it as a pattern, let alone a pattern you could change.

That’s why the first step is to acknowledge the default equation.

You can’t change something you haven’t noticed.

The ideal order of the equation is the reverse of what you’ve been taught.

It’s why certain people create results almost magnetically and others grind away for years and make no result.

The ideal equation looks like this:

thought > feeling > action > new circumstances (reality)

The key difference here is that you’re ignoring reality.

You’re the one choosing the starting point instead of letting your external environment choose it which makes you in control of the chain.

Let’s move on to to the first step.

Step One: Become Fully Conscious & Aware Of The Default Equation

For the love of God, please don’t skip this step. You can run a single loop for decades without ever realising that you’re the one sustaining it.

This applies to everything.

• It shows up in your relationships (you keep attracting the same kind of person or dynamic)

• It shows up in health (you fall back into the same patterns no matter how many diets or programs you try)

• It shows up in your overall general mood and energy

Why?

Because all of those things are outputs of the same equation.

Once you see this pattern in one area of your life, you will be able to see it everywhere.

The same mechanism playing out across every single domain.

If you’re not happy with your life, great.

The reason your life looks the way it is now is understandable, explainable, and changeable.

It is the outcome of a set equation. And the good thing is, equations can be changed.

But only if you see them.

How? It’s very straightforward.

Start paying attention to the specific moments in your day when external circumstances dictate how you think.

Then notice how that style of thinking is shaping how you feel.

And of course, how those emotions then go on to shape your behaviour.

Recognise in those moments that you’re running the default equation, the old sequence. The equation we don’t want to use.

An example would be checking your bank balance. If it’s lower than you what you want it to be, that is going to create a thought.

“I’m not where I should be” or “I spent too much last week”.

That is going to create feelings of heaviness.

It all happens in half a second on autopilot without you making a conscious choice in the process.

That entire little experience creates a lower state. And you go about your day carrying that energy into every conversation and decision you make.

The speed is important. It’s almost invisible.

By the time you even think about the thought, you feel the emotions associated with it, and you’ve already reacted.

Then you’re just living in the output of that reaction. This isn’t just about money. It happens a dozen times a day.

I also want you to be aware of micro-reactions. Even though it don’t seem like a big deal, reactions accumulate.

By the end of the day, you run the default equation 50-100 times without even realising it.

Self-awareness and just the act of noticing alone is powerful as every time you catch the thought, you’re interrupting a compounded process.

Overtime, those interruptions add up.

Think about your recurring problems like apps running on your phone. They’re just in the background, sitting there quietly and consuming energy. Every time you open one of them, you give it your attention and emotional investment.

You’re telling the system “Keep this one active. This one really matters!”. And so, it stays in the loop. It’s the reason why some problems follow you around for years even though you feel like you’ve dealt with it.

You only have so much emotional bandwidth in a day and if half of it is going to background processes that are just recycling old patterns, then you have that much less bandwidth to create something new.

A powerful move is to stop opening the app. Stop engaging with the older patterns when it pops up. Let it sit there without clicking on it and eventually it will time out on its own.

These patterns can only sustain themselves when you feed them your attention and energy. Withdraw the input (your emotional reactions), and the pattern loses its hold because there is nothing feeding it.

Be very selective of what gets your cognitive and emotional energy.

The most underrated skill in personal development is the ability to recognise a thought rising and choosing whether to invest in it or let it pass.

Here’s a practical exercise. We can call this the equation check. A Few times a day, pause and ask yourself: “Am I reacting to my reality or am I creating it?”

The moment you catch the thought that’s driving your reaction, you’ve already stepped outside the loop for just a second. And that second of awareness is where the change becomes possible.

In the old equation, there is no pause. So, between every thought and reaction, learn to insert a tiny gap.

We’re fundamentally changing the mechanics of the process. Between stimulus and response there is a space and in that space is your freedom and power to choose.

Do it throughout the day. The default equation is active all day long. So, your awareness practise needs to be distributed across the day too.

Step one is the foundation. Give it all the attention it deserves.

I want to be completely honest with you. This is difficult.

Maybe the most difficult thing you’ll ever do in your life because your nervous system is built to read reality first and respond second.

It’s the survival mechanism that has kept humans alive for hundreds of thousands of years. And what we’re doing here is operating in a way that is counterintuitive.

That’s why it takes real practise, patience, and the willingness to be bad at it for a while before it starts to become more natural.

The first step is where you build the capacity to override a system that has been running unchecked your entire life. It’s a big deal.

Those who take this step seriously and practise it are the ones who make the other two steps work better.

Those who skip it or treat it as obvious are the ones who end up back in the same loop six months later confused on what happened.

Step Two: Change The Equation

The only way you can create a reality you want is to stop paying attention to the reality you don’t want.

Stop complaining about your problems. If you don’t know already, complaints compound problems.

I used to talk about my problems to other people a lot. It was one of the biggest mistake I made.

Not because you shouldn’t open yourself up to other people. But because complaining is admitting your problems have importance.

Complaining is the act of bringing energy and attention to a manifestation in our reality that we want to change, and we don’t change something by bringing energy to it, we change something by starving it out.

Experience is important. If you don’t experience what you don’t want, you can never really know what you do want. So, experience isn’t the enemy here.

The problem is that we pay too much attention into the reality that we don’t want and speak that reality into existence over and over and over again.

It’s like playing the same song when you don’t want to listen to it. Don’t act against the problem, act against the solution.

It’s all about becoming a part of the solution, it’s not becoming a part of solving the problem.

Now, what do we do if we don’t go by the default equation? We change it. Deliberately choose your own thoughts to generate the reality that you desire before there is any evidence of it.

Most people skip this step entirely or do it halfway. What matters here is the direction of the equation which needs to be changed.

The default is that you wait for something good to happen, your mind thinks a positive thought about it, and then you feel good about it.

The new equation is to choose the thought. Choosing your thoughts will actually generate the feelings you want. Create the internal state deliberately and let reality organise around that.

This is you writing the equation by hand instead of letting external circumstances fill it in for you, which completely changes what comes out on the other end.

It will feel a little crazy at first. And it should. Generating thoughts before anything has even happened is a crazy move. But that’s the entire point.

You need deliberate action. Because the default system is always going to want to read reality first and respond second.

For example, if you sit with your thoughts and feelings of financial security. If you let your body relax into how you would think at that point and what that would feel like in your body, chest, shoulders, and your breathing, your nervous system will respond to that signal the same way it would respond to an event.

Your biology doesn’t check the source, it just processes the data it receives. There’s substantial research on this in neuroscience.

The basic finding is that mental rehearsal activates many of the same neuropathways as actual experience. It’s why athletes use visualisation.

When you sit down and generally feel into the state of the person who already has what you want, your biology is responding to that as if you already have it.

The beautiful part of this is that your body doesn’t argue with it. It doesn’t say, “you don’t have that yet”.

So, there is a morning practise I would highly recommend. Spend 5 minutes with yourself in the morning before you do anything. Before you talk to anyone, eat anything, or check your phone. Just sit with the version of you who already has what you want.

This isn’t visualisation. It’s thinking and feeling into a specific type of state. The internal experience of being the person who already lives the reality that you want.

The thoughts and feelings that would be present if your desired reality was your current one.

This is of course different for everyone. I don’t want you to picture something in your mind. I want you to feel the experience in your body.

If you do this consistently every morning, it becomes the state you carry into the rest of your days. You’re running the new equation from the start of the day.

One session or a few sessions of this won’t change much. But doing it every day for weeks and months will start to fundamentally change your baseline state. It compounds.

You will start to have a completely different internal state, which will show a completely different output.

Your thoughts and feelings determine the output of the equation and ultimately your life. Money. Relationships. Health. Opportunities. They’re all a downstream of an internal state that was held consistently enough for reality to organise around it.

Most people focus way too much on the external. They try to create what they want directly through effort and strategy.

But that doesn’t work because the underlying input (thoughts, feelings, and who you believe you are) hasn’t changed. The gains are always downstream. It’s always the affect. The thoughts and feelings are always the cause.

The moment this stops becoming a concept, but something you actually live by, you stop chasing outcomes and start managing your thinking and internal state which is the only lever that controls the output of the equation in a lasting way. It’s also the only part you can control.

During this, things can feel uncertain. It may look like nothing is changing. But the maths don’t lie. If an input is different, the output will eventually be different. That understanding will get you through the difficult middle part.

Step Three: Hold On To The Change Through The Delay

How do you pay attention to a reality that isn’t here yet? And how do you ignore the reality and all of the problems that are in front of you right now? It’s like being stuck between two different dimensions.

Here’s a key insight: Being able to accelerate the change that you want in your life is not about doing something different. It’s about not doing the thing that you’re doing that’s preventing the manifestation from taking place. This is the part where most people fall off.

When you start running the new equation in your life, your external reality doesn’t update right away. There is often a gap, delay, lag. Call it what you want. Most people interpret the delay as the equation not working. This step is all about patience.

It can take days, months, or even years. Essentially what you’re doing is living in two different realties. Your internal state says one thing and your external world says another.

This level of change causes tension. And tension is uncomfortable. I totally get it. But that’s also a sign that it is working. During the delay, your older reality is going to scream louder than ever.

But old outputs that show up during the delay aren’t new problems, they’re old ones already in transit. If anything, expect it. Expect your old life to be ever so present when you’re trying to change.

Think of it like an Amazon order. You pay, the money exists your bank account, but you still haven’t received the product. The same thing happens when you’re trying to change.

It can feel like the Universe, God, and life is testing you on whether you really mean it or whether you’re going to fold at the first sign of resistance.

Those who break through are the ones who can hold the new input even when the old output is still showing up everywhere around them. Holding is the real skill here. Not through concept or theory, but through practise.

The delay (as uncomfortable as it is) is the part of the process where most of the growth happens. You build the capacity to hold an internal state independently of external circumstances.

Your job is simply not to flip the equation back to the default. You don’t need to do anything else. You just need to hold position and keep feeding new inputs into the equation.

By following the morning practise from step two and the equation checks throughout the day from step one, you basically build a routine that supports the system automatically.

Let me make it clear. This isn’t about will power. It’s actual practises in place that keep the new input flowing even on difficult days.

Step one gives you the awareness to catch the default equation when it pops up.

Step two gives you the practise for setting up the new inputs.

Step three maintains the new inputs through a period where the old output is still visible.

Be very practical. When something shows up that looks like proof that nothing is changing, recognise it for what it is.

An old output that has already finished and is irrelevant to what you’re building now.

Don’t engage with it, bring your attention back to the internal state formed in step two.

That’s all.

Give your mind something specific to do in the moment of disruption. That puts the old output into context.

It shows that it’s not current evidence, but old data that’s being cleared away.

During this, don’t ask yourself questions like, “has my reality changed yet?”, that keeps you focused on the output.

Ask yourself, “have I changed?”. In any successful endeavour, the biggest result comes from you changing as a person. You know you’re building something real if you’re building it from the inside out.

That’s the only way anything lasting can be built. Not the other way around.

This means looking at the entire world as a series of interconnected webs.

Systems within systems. All interacting with each other.

What Is A System?

Systems aren’t easy. They’re complex which is why you need to study how they work.

Knowing how and why something works is how you make adjustments and personalisation’s for yourself.

If you want to change the things that are outside of you:

• The government

• Corporations

• How a work environment functions

• YOUR LIFE

Then you need to undersatnd systems.

This even applies to the goals that you set for yourself. No one just sets a goal for no reason.

A goal is meant to be out of reach.

It’s why most people don’t reach their goals and only a few do.

Because they don’t question:

• How do I accomplish my goals?

• How do I go about having a big impact on the world?

The answer is that you do it only by learning systems.

That’s one of the biggest reason to be a systematic thinker. To make a meaningful positive impact in the world.

What is impact?

Impact is change.

To accomplish your goals or create real change, you’re going to be changing some kind of system to do that.

Leaders.

Visionaries.

Designers.

Architects.

Artists.

Their lives and careers revolve around making meaningful impact in the world.

It’s also important to note that all systems have a purpose and a function. Understanding the purpose or function determines the general behaviour of what the system is doing.

The most common purpose and function of all systems is to protect itself. It is highly ordered, but at the same time very chaotic and difficult to predict.

Believe it or not, languages are a system.

They are highly ordered and structured. Its purpose is to be evolutionary and to shift.

It’s the reason why when we read Shakespeare, we don’t know what the hell he’s talking about.

Think about how the English language has evolved over the past 500 years, and not only that, but also how the larger language of humanity has evolved over the past 2000 years.

No system is designed by one person sitting from the outside. It’s not that one-man invented language. It’s self-made and self-organising.

What isn’t a system?

Scattered parts aren’t a system. Rocks on the ground aren’t a system. They don’t interconnect in an interesting meaningful way.

Books on a bookshelf aren’t a system.

There’s no meaningful relationship.

Examples of systems include:

• The rainforest

• A human body

• An aquarium

• A city or a country

• A sport

• A corporation (big or small)

• An economy

• A currency

• A university

• A car

• Militaries

• The public education

• Instagram

• Churches and mosques

• Your business.

We spoke on the one-person business in the previous article where I outlined a 7-day plan to get started. That’s a system.

This article and my entire social media is a system.

I basically am a one-man show. I do most of the stuff with no employees.

A creator who produces his own work online isn’t just a simple influencer.

It’s a very complicating system.

I don’t just make videos.

• I write

• I record

• I manage my website

• I manage any backend stuff

• I manage backup drives

• I work via several computers

There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes.

The self is a system.

Your physical body has numerous systems. a digestive system, an immune system, and so on.

But your self-image is also a system.

Your memory, beliefs, they’re all a part of the self.

It’s easier to think of it as the universe as one big system and everything within it is a sub-system.

As I mentioned in the beginning of this article. Systems within systems. They can overlap in complicating ways.

Most of the big wordly problems are all systematic problems.

Persistent Worldly Systematic Problems

Think about problems that have xisted for thousands of years. They’re not easy to step out of because it’s not human beings that are the problem, but the system that’s creating those problems.

Think about poverty.

How long have people tried to eradicate poverty? But it’s still here. It’s a persistent systematic problem.

The shrinking middle class. Every single country has had it since the beginning of human civilisation.

The environment, global warming, pollution. These aren’t new. Environmental problems have existed since cities were first formed 1000 years ago. It obviously wasn’t global warming back then, but it was something else. Maybe disease found in water pipes?

Drug addiction is another one. It has existed for thousands of years.

War, obesity, crime, marketing.

Marketing is an interesting one.

Have you realised how difficult it is to market high consciousness activities and so easy to market low consciousness activities?

Unemployment, education, depression. We have a depression epidemic. Why is that? It’s a systematic problem. Something in our society is creating it.

These are, if you’ve noticed, very difficult problem to solve.

You can’t solve most big problems because there’s a larger system behind it that we aren’t aware of.

Do you see the significance of systems?

The main aim is to understand big problems without a meaningless judgment.

Most people just sit on their couch screaming at the telly:

• “These wars are stupid!”

• “He’s a corrupt person”

• “Crime is silly”

• “Ee have such bad unemployment numbers!”.

But you can’t just sit on your couch and point fingers.

What most people should do is question their lack of understanding.

• Where are those problems coming from?

• What is creating them?

• Which forces are at play?

Once you understand the system itself, then you have a slight chance of changing it.

The same goes for you.

If you really want to change your life (now we’re stepping into personal development), then go internal.

Have a think about your own internal systems.

Your beliefs are a system of its own.

What are your beliefs?

Let’s now discuss the principles and values of systematic thinking so that we can use them to our advantage and drive success in our own personal and professional lives.

The 12 Principles Of Systematic Thinking

1. Problems Are Systematic, Not Personal

This is very broad thinking.

It’s not one person or thousands of people creating problems, it’s poorly designed systems that are creating those problems.

So, if you’re not where you want to be and are casting blame at other people or calling things evil, ask yourself why you’re doing it.

What is the larger system creating this?

For example, people who use drugs aren’t evil. We know this. Some of them can be, but not all of them.

Their drug addicts due to the environment, bad education, easy availability of drugs, the media serving such low conscious entertainment.

People don’t have anything higher to aspire to.

For those who are addicted to drugs, there’s nothing better to do than drugs.

This tells us one thing. Problems are a lot more complicated than we think. But it is a great principle and very relieving to acknowledge that problems are systematic, not personal.

1. Everything Is A System

I want you to be extremely conscious and self-aware. Everything around you, or most things around you, are a system.

You don’t have to do this your entire life, but it can be a phase.

Become very self-aware of every single system around you.

This is not a step-by-step guide. So just take whatever I say as a principle of systematic thinking.

1. Non-linearity.

The really interesting things in life are not a simple equation with a few variables. They have hundreds and thousands of variables that affect each other.

If you think about it, the game of monopoly is linear. We know the rules. It’s easy.

Now, what would be tricky is if one of the rules in Monopoly was that we could change the rules. This makes it tricky.

Now, the strategy can’t be relying on the rules. If rules can change, that makes things unpredictable.

The “system” can now take dramatic turns and Suprise you.

That’s what systems are. Systems are counterintuitive. You can’t just say “I will do this to get that”. There are many factors affecting it.

Naïve people who don’t understand a system and decide to muck around with it get the opposite of what they want.

Then they’re stuck facing the consequences.

One chaotic system is the weather. It’s unpredictable when we try predicting it too far into the future. It can also surprise you. You can’t predict beyond 10 days. We can still predict it reasonably well just a long as we understand the limits of our predictions.

Non-linearity also means that just because you have good intentions to change a system, that really doesn’t mean anything.

People who have good intentions but are simple minded get the opposite effect.

They create evil rather than good. It’s why good people actually create evil.

They assume their good intentions are enough, but you have to understand what you’re doing.

You have to study the system.

1. Local Actions Have Global Impact

This one applies to business. When you do business, you can’t just think of your company. That’s not systematic thinking.

Your company itself is an element within a larger system.

The global economy.

The industry that your company is a part of.

You need to understand that your actions don’t just affect your company.

Your business affects the industry, citizens all over the world, employment rates, taxes, currency, public opinion.

You have to take all of this into account. If not, you will fail in the long run.

The world is becoming more global by the day. Start thinking more globally. How you or what you’re doing fits into the larger system that it is a part of.

Broaden your scope.

This means having global concern rather than local tribal concern.

Simple minded people are tribal. Systematic thinking is anti-tribal.

It’s a global concern over the entire species.

Seeing everything as the same.

Being sustainable.

1. The Dangers Of Self-Interest

You have to be careful of serving your own self-interests blindly without self-reflection.

Think of an evil person that you know, then question who created them. Really contemplate on their upbringing, family history, business environment etc.

Systematic thinkers include everyone in their solutions, otherwise it’s not a sustainable system.

1. Become Conscious Of Backfiring Mechanisms.

A lot of the times, if you change something in a system, it will backfire on you. The system is its own greatest enemy.

You need counterintuitive solutions to fix counterintuitive problems.

This applies to everything from education, how companies are run, marketing, economies, taxation, healthcare etc.

The funny thing is, the more you study systematic thinking, the more you will realise that we are our own greatest enemy.

That’s what personal development is.

It’s realising,

“I am my worst enemy.”

In systematic thinking, there are no easy solutions. Violent disruptive change to a complex system is going create even more disaster, not fix it.

So, don’t overreact to systematic problems.

It’s all about balance and harmony.

It relies on both positive and negative emotions.

1. Intuition And Whole ism Versus Reductionism.

We see these a lot of these problems in universities. A lot of scientifically minded, logical, rational people over analyse everything and reduce it down to physics. Only focusing on the materialistic gross elements and ignoring all the interesting relationships which really as we know now, define the behaviour of those systems.

Whole ism is seeing everything as a whole, not just parts.

For example, it’s not just looking at your brain as one single part (for example, the prefrontal cortex), but a very complex system.

1. Being aware of false boundaries.

In reality, there are no fixed boundaries in the universe. Everything is subjective. We as humans get to decide where we draw boundaries.

This is an important power.

How we draw boundaries determines what we’re going to see and what potential solutions we come up with.

Redrawing boundaries can give you solutions you didn’t have before.

This means to change your perspective.

If your worldview doesn’t serve you, try looking at things differently.

1. The world is dynamic, not static.

Simple minded people think of the world as static.

• “This is my car"

• “This is my house”

• “This is my country”

• “This is my language”

• “This is my body”

• “This is my beliefs”

The world is static to the naïve. To the systematic thinker, most things are morphing and evolving.

My body is evolving.

My car is actually devolving.

It’s deteriorating every single day.

The government and country is changing.

The population is increasing.

The world itself is evolving.

Beliefs and ideologies are changing.

Your job, marketplace, and industry (AI!) is evolving.

Don’t have a fixed static mindset in a dynamic complicated world.

Most of the time, you won’t get the results you want because you aren’t reflecting reality.

Going back to the language analogy, every single year the dictionary publishes a new word.

1. Value Complexity, Nuance, Wisdom, And Learning.

Don’t oversimplify everything because not everything is just black and white.

Systematic thinkers value wisdom and lifelong learning. They understand that systems are complex.

You need ongoing learning otherwise you will stay stuck.

Also, don’t try to manipulate systems. Try to understand them. That’s where you solutions lies.

Invest a lot of time in just understanding systems.

A lot of people will look at you like a mad scientist. But that’s often how average people view extremely successful people.

Have a strong interest in learning. There’s so much more to learn.

1. Take Preventative Action Rather Than Fixing Problems Once They Arise

This means being forward-looking. Seeing things from a long-time horizon.

For those who own a business:

It’s not just about the next quarters profits, but sustaining the company to grow, thrive, and change the marketplace 10-20 years down the line.

It’s expecting unforeseen consequences of your actions.

If you own a company, that’s going to affect not only you but your employees.

But not only that, the entire industry.

Understanding systems, how one thing affects another makes you humble. You understand every little touch can become a huge thing.

Understanding and mastering systems isn’t just about achieving your goals.

It’s about admitting the unknown.

It’s realising you really don’t know anything.

You’re probably not a simple minded person if you’re reading this, but you generally laugh at simple minded people who say, “I know everything!”

Self-reflection is extremely important. System thinkers need to self-reflect.

Raising your consciousness will solve a lot of the problems you have in your life.

How can you solve your own problems when you can’t even reflect inside of yourself and see what your own structural problems are?

Search for the root cause of problems rather than the superficial aspects.

Dig deep.

Everything generally revolves around fear and emotional stuff, but what’s the root cause?

1. Study Patterns And Cycles

And finally.

If your work Is not solving meaningful world problems, you will get eliminated. You won’t be successful.

Before I finish , I want to show you what success looks in business, content, and marketing from a systems point of view.

Systematic Thinking In Business, Content, And Marketing

The first correct step is to identify the main purpose or functions. For most businesses, that would be marketing, sales, operations, and finance.

After you’ve identified the main purpose or functions, list out every task in those functions.

Then write down the goal of each task. But more importantly, the end goal.

What is the true purpose of each task/goal?

For example, do you create content for followers? If you do, that’s not sustainable. There’s no purpose. You should create content to generate leads.

Now, this raises questions.

• Where are you sending your followers?

• What’s the end goal?

Every task within a system should have a very clear goal.

For example, newsletters don’t come before creating content because there’s no point of a newsletter if you don’t have an email list. So, content comes before a newsletter.

For each task, write down the steps you have to follow to complete that task.

Quick shameless plug. If you are an online creator and you want guidance on how to systemise content, there’s a link below:

Grab it for free: https://stan.store/SerkanKozkiran/p/cbf

Back to it.

Seeing your business in the eye of this water pipe analogy is extremely useful.

Your marketing is the tap.

This is important.

• Your marketing essentially controls how much water (quantity) flows through the pipe (system).

For profit, you need clients.

To get clients you need sales.

To get sales you need leads.

And to get leads you need marketing.

So, the more marketing (the more you open the tap to let water flow through), the more potential leads (clients) you get entering the system.

But here’s the thing, marketing doesn’t matter if you have 10 blockages.

Most people try fixing all blockages at once.

But when you try fixing everything, nothing gets fixed.

So, the goal is to fix one main blockage.

This will feel like you’re moving slower, I get that.

But if you try fixing everything at once it feels fast until you realise you’re never actually solving anything.

By going slow, you actually move fast.

To scale, that’s simple. Just turn up your marketing.

But clear the pipe first then turn up the tap. Only once the system can handle it.

Don’t pour water into a broken pipe.

That’s all from me for this week.

Thanks for reading!

-Serkan

Oh and by the way, here’s a video of this article: Success Is Hard Until You Start Building Systems Like This

Self-education is the courage to explore your own interests and curiosities.

You should feel privileged right now because if I said that 100 years ago, I would have been laughed at.

I don’t believe most people are yet aware of the opportunities we have today. Or maybe we just haven’t caught up with the entire world yet.

For the first time in history, you can turn your interests, expertise, curiosities, and personality into a business. You can quite literally live a life that serves you by productizing yourself, without changing anything about you.

While every entity outside of you is trying to change you or make you into someone you don’t want to be, this business model is quite literally the opposite.

It’s a God-given opportunity. The opposite of what you know about business.

I know. Most people have a shit view of business.

I did too.

But by the end of this, you will have a changed view of business. At least I hope so.

Because the biggest obstacle standing between you and a one-person business is not AI. It’s the story you have been told of what a business should look like.

So, quick overview. In this article we will go over:

• What exactly the one-person business is

• Your 7-day business plan (picking a niche, setting up your offer, and getting your first sale)

• How how to scale this “business” without losing your soul.

My Biggest Lesson

Now, think about what you want to build and why you want to build it.

I’m going to be quite vulnerable and admit that I initially failed at this social media game. If you search me up on TikTok, you will see how 6 years ago my entire goal with social media was virality.

I grew an audience but didn’t actually build anything.

Then I tried multiple ways to monetise that audience through merch and other things, which did create cashflow, but ultimately the foundation was weak. I realised I was growing a hobby, not a real business.

A lot of people skip the most important part. They skip what they actually want to build and jump straight into tactics. You can see this with a lot of creators. 6 months later, they’re burned out or have quit entirely.

The One-Person Business Model

I want you to keep an open mind throughout this as the one-person business model is very different to anything you’ve probably been taught about business in the traditional sense.

The industrial-age playbook was simple.

• Learn skills.

• Get hired.

• Get paid.

The digital-age playbook is different:

• Turn your ideas into a personal brand.

• Attach it to a scalable digital business.

The internet has distribution. You can now reach millions of people without a physical store, investors, or 50 employees. You have the same access tools that fortune 500 companies use.

You’re not building a startup; you’re building a system. You don’t need a team to build something real. You don’t need a big budget to get started. You don’t need a new groundbreaking idea. You don’t need a big audience to make money.

That was my belief.

I thought I needed a million followers.

You just need an offer that solves a painful problem for a very specific type of person. That offer doesn’t need to be something completely new; you just need to make something work better.

That’s a thousand people who genuinely trust you.

There’s never been a better time. The infrastructure to do the work that you love is here. The attention, which is the audience, is online. There is low to no barriers for you to start.

We can go over and over about how effective the model is. But we don’t have to because the internet itself is also evidence of that.

If you look at the patterns, this model has produced real results for real people. Those who have started with nothing but a skill and an internet connection.

History is not unique. History repeats itself.

Take what you know (your expertise), package it (an offer), and sell it (via value) to those who need it.

Digital products are what works today, that might be completely different in 2-3 years’ time. But you see, the form in which you provide the value might change, but the concept will remain the same. Sell what you know.

We’ll touch more on it later, but digital products work because of how simple and repeatable they are. It’s basically a business where you are the product, marketing, and delivery all wrapped into one. It works and will continue to work because it’s about selling your expertise, perspective, or skill in a way that doesn’t require employees or inventory.

The 3-Moving Parts

The three-moving parts of the model is the skill or knowledge that you bring to the table, the problem that the skill or knowledge solves for other people, and the distribution channel that connects you to those people.

skill + problem + channel = a real business

It’s always been that way.

Let’s start with skill. I want you to think about what you are good at. What do you have extreme knowledge of? If you haven’t lived under a rock for the past however many years, you should have something that you’re good at, or at least something that you’re knowledgeable in.

Is it fitness, design, productivity, relationship advice, spirituality, personal finance? Anything where you are a few steps ahead of someone else in that field.

To start a business, you don’t need to be an expert. You just need to know more than the person you’re helping.

The skill or knowledge has to solve something real because people pay for outcomes, transformation, and shortcuts to the results that they want.

If your skill doesn’t connect to a genuine pain point or desire then you don’t have a business, you have a hobby.

The distribution channel is how people find you.

It can be YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, a newsletter.

It doesn’t actually matter what it is, what matters is choosing one and sticking with it.

To succeed, you don’t have to be everywhere. You need to be consistent somewhere.

The purpose of the distribution channel is to turn strangers into an audience.

I like this model because it strips away everything that is unnecessary: no business plan, funding, or permission from anyone. I personally like that last one because I hate chasing people.

So, what you need is a skill, a problem, and a way to reach people.

1 Piece Of Content = 1 Salesperson

Don’t trade hours for dollars. Instead, build assets that compound overtime.

I’m on my 4^th YouTube video but think about it, every piece of content I publish stays public forever. It’s like a tiny salesperson working for you 24/7. A YouTube video you create today is still going to work for me 2 years later.

That is mental.

YouTube isn’t the main point here. A blog on your website can also be shared and resurfaced years later.

Creators who have been consistent for multiple years have the biggest unfair advantage for that main reason. They’ve stacked more assets overtime. They’ve stuck with the boring work for a longer period of time.

Let’s do the maths.

If you publish one YouTube video a week, after a year, you have 48 salespeople or assets working for you.

In 3 years, that’s 140+. A lot of people see this the wrong way.

One piece of content may not get you massive results.

But that’s the same with everything in your life. Having one workout won’t bring massive results. Meditating once won’t either. But collectively they generate enormous value overtime.

Some pieces might hit big. You know what I’m talking about, the breakthrough content. The video that goes viral. The article that gets shared nonstop.

Again, the model is great, because you don’t need to be perfect.

A lot of your content can be just okay, while the big winners carry the entire portfolio.

90% of your content may get average views, but when you have 150 salespeople working simultaneously they collectively drive consistent traffic, leads, and sales. It’s why consistency beats perfection all the time.

Also, stop trying to predict everything. When you try predicting things, you’ve already failed because you can’t predict what works with other people.

I’ve had this before.

An Instagram carousel I spent 5-10 minutes on outperforms a YouTube video I spent days on.

The only way to win is volume, iteration, and patience. Keep posting content, keep stacking assets, and let the rest run its course.

The aim is to build a system that generates consistent results without a single piece of content needing to be perfect.

Don’t fall into the comparison trap.

Don’t belittle yourself.

A creator with 3 years of experience only has a massive advantage over the person that’s just starting out not because they’re better, but because they have more assets running for them.

Whenever you feel lost, return to the fact that time and consistency is your competitive advantage.

Digital products are pure leverage. That’s a course, e-book, template, membership, or service you build once and sell infinitely. It has above 90% profit margins with no marginal cost.

If you browse a lot of one-person businesses, most of them have a product stack. That’s different price points ranging from free content and a newsletter to a $50 e-book, a $500 course, a $5,000 coaching package, to ultimately a $10,000 service.

The Attention Framework

Giving things away for free is the cheat-code. We can see proof of this via the attention framework.

The human brain uses these exact psychological triggers to filter out background noise:

1. Scary: Highlight a genuine fear, risk, or painful problem. People pay attention to danger to avoid harm.

2. Sexy: This could mean a highly desirable outcome. It’s not always about physical attraction. It represents the “prize” your audience is dreaming of (freedom, wealth, etc).

3. Free: Provide high-quality insights or tools without asking for payment. Give away hard-earned knowledge or secrets that normally cost money to learn.

4. Familiar: Build trust through repetition and relatability (the importance of consistency!) People buy from people they recognise.

The last two, free and familiar, are the most important for one-person businesses. It’s what separates the ones that succeed from the ones that don’t.

• Content or a newsletter is the free stuff that builds trust.

• Low-ticket products are the cheap stuff that builds buyers.

• High-ticket coaching or service are the expensive stuff that builds income.

Your first product will be mediocre. But that’s fine. You publish it, receive results, and build on feedback.

That’s another advantage of social media.

You expand via immediate feedback.

That’s why people are drawn to social media and content creation. It’s not the money, it’s the freedom. Freedom to work when you want, where you want, and on what you want. The freedom to say no to people you don’t want to work with. The freedom to build something that reflects who you really are.

In the traditional path, you would trade autonomy for security.

This model lets you design your own life (which is rare).

You can build a routine around you. This means full control. You own everything. The audience. The products. The revenue. The brand.

If the platform dies or an algorithm changes, you can adapt and keep going.

It’s not the same in the traditional path. You’re renting your income from an employer who can revoke it at any time.

Start With Newsletters

My personal advice is to set up your content-funnel in a way where everything roots back to one newsletter a week.

Because a newsletter is the only one way to own your audience.

Most people on social media think their platforms are their biggest asset but it’s not the case.

I’ve heard countless stories of creators getting banned and completely losing their account. An email list is worth more than 1 million followers on YouTube.

You don’t own followers, but you do own your email list.

If I don’t like a platform, I can take my email list and start on a brand-new account.

It’s also a lean business model for selling. A YouTube video is useful, but it takes so much of my time.

With a newsletter, you just have to write it once a week.

As long as you’ve mastered writing long-form, you will get sales. You don’t have to be in front of a camera. There are no costs. And profit margin is above 90%.

You can start with Convert Kit, Beehive, Substack etc.

Monetisation includes brand sponsorships via email, selling products as we’ve mentioned, and making the newsletter paid.

The best way to grow a newsletter is writing on X and LinkedIn and after each piece of content linking it back to your newsletter as a call-to-action (CTA). You can also do it on a YouTube video.

If you want the written version straight to your email before the video comes out every Sunday’s, there’s a link to that below.

Most people think email marketing is boring until you hear the numbers.

Creator-led newsletter, “The Hustle”, by Sam Parr talking about startup news was sold for over $30M.

Morning Brew started by Austin Rief in his dorm room was sold for $75M.

Ben Collins makes 6 figures from a newsletter talking about Google Sheets.

Now, let’s get practical. None of this actually matters if you don’t build something. The next section will focus on mapping out your entire first few days, step-by-step.

Everything from picking your niche, to setting up your offer, to getting traffic to your offer. Just before we move on.

I’ve got a free Creator Business Essentials starter guide that goes into much more detail than this article. If you’re serious about getting help on learning and applying the basics of writing, branding, persuasion, and marketing click the link below.

https://stan.store/SerkanKozkiran/p/cbf

I mention the term “business” because our aim is to sell something. Something that exists in the world rather than just in your head. Most people spend months planning all of this. But if you follow accordingly, you will have a niche, an offer, a way to get to get paid, and your first piece of content out in the world in 7 days.

Parkinson’s Law

We want to do this in 1 week because the Parkinson’s law holds true

If you give yourself 6 months, you will have 6 months to complete it. If you give yourself a week, that’s when it will get done.

Perfectionism is the enemy. Ignore the urge to be perfect. Done is better than perfect. Your first content or product of anything is rough. Use social media. And I mean it. The market will give you immediate feedback on how to improve. The goal isn’t to have a complete finished product from the get-go, it’s to have a functional one. Something real. Something you can iterate on.

Day 1

Day one is all about niche.

Your niche is the intersection of three things:

1. Your skills and knowledge

2. The market demand

3. Your interests and energy

What can you do well? That’s what people will pay for. And what you can talk about for the next 2-3 years without getting bored?

Draw three overlapping circles.

In the first circle write down your personal skills and knowledge. Things you’ve learned through hobbies, obsessions, and real-life experiences.

In the second circle (market demand), do a research of problems people are actively trying to solve and are currently paying money to fix.

In the third (interests and energy), write down topics you genuinely care about and can see yourself creating content for the next 2-3 years.

Your niche, the sweet spot, is where all three overlap. List everything you can do reasonably well. Personal wins and things you had to figure out the hard way.

This can include:

• Losing 50 pounds

• Building a side income

• Coding

• Building websites

• Fixing your sleep

• Getting out of debt

• Building a following online

• Escaping burnout

Instances where you are a few steps ahead of someone else.

You also need to know if people are searching for solutions in those areas.

If there are other creators who have products and services serving the need, that’s a good thing. Competition means there’s demand in the market. You want the validation that people care.

Ask yourself: “can I talk about this every single week for the next 3 years?” It doesn’t mean you have to be a prisoner to it. Interests evolve. Businesses expand. Especially personal brands.

Intention is what matters here; do you see yourself staying curious about it for at least a while?

If topics bore you on day one, you’re guaranteed to burnout on month six.

It doesn’t matter if the market is small. When you pick topics you genuinely care about, your enthusiasm will show in the content.

At the end of day 1, you should now know your niche. Write it down. All of my content revolve around business and mindset, content and marketing, spirituality and consciousness. Slap it on every social media platform you can think of.

Day one is trying to understand yourself.

What makes you different and unforgettable?

What do you want to be known for?

Do you have a unique perspective and talent people are drawn to?

What parts of you have you been downplaying to fit in?

This is not about faking perfection. It’s about finding parts of yourself worth sharing and then owning them.

Days 2 & 3

Days two and three are all about building an offer. This is the most important few days.

The offer is the way you make a living through the value that you provide.

Don’t think too hard on what you should build. Think about the transformation the customer gets as a result of your offer.

Transformation is the currency.

It’s why creators with 1,000 followers and a $3,000 offer outearn YouTubers with Gold plaques who don’t have an offer to begin with.

If you know how to think, solve problems, and craft offers you’re not behind, you’re ahead.

What matters here is human clarity.

The beliefs that once made sense in an industrialised world are now a liability in a digital (leverage) driven economy.

Nobody buys a product or service. They buy the result the product or service promises. So, get clear on the outcome. Every good product is about transformation. It’s about getting someone from point A to point B. They have an unfulfilled desire, and your product is the answer. Your offer is the bridge between point A and point B.

The clearer you can make this bridge, the easier it will be to sell it. Remember, vague doesn’t sell.

The best offers solve painful problems and big desires. Things that keep people up at night. Things they’ve already tried to fix. Or things that they’re actively spending money on fixing.

• Weight loss

• Making money

• Relationships

• Career advancement

Areas where the pain is real and persistent.

Now, how do we deliver the transformation?

The easiest, most basic method are one-on-one coaching. Selling your time and expertise. This is the easiest because there are no products to build. But the downside is that you trade your time for money.

The next one is digital products, like a template or a mini course. This is packaging your knowledge into something they can consume on their own. A PDF guide, video course, spreadsheet etc. The upside is that it scales infinitely. Downside is that it takes time to do. But everything great takes time.

Another way to deliver the transformation is via Done-for-you (DFY) services, where you physically do it for them. Designing a website, video editing, managing ads etc. But essentially, the huge downside is that you are creating another job for yourself.

With the first one-to-one method prices can start at $100 an hour. With a digital product, the best ones are priced from $27 to $97. A service can be $500-$2K per project.

I give you those insights because the worst thing is to not price at all. It’s to not give people the chance to pay you.

A useful metric is to think about the cost of not solving the problem. If someone’s bad habits are costing them $10,000, paying $1,000 is a no brainer. Frame the price against the cost of inaction.

The offer needs to be clear. Everyone wants to make money online but can’t tell you in one sentence who they help, what they solve, and why their offer is better.

Most people build content, some build products, almost nobody builds an offer.

An offer is not a landing page, logo, or product.

It’s a promise that slices through all the noise and lands like truth in the mind of someone in pain.

The goal is to have an offer that any customer would feel stupid saying no to.

Here, we can use Alex Hormozi’s offer formula. The value of an offer is determined by:

1. Desirability of outcome

2. Likelihood of success

3. Speed of result

4. Ease of process

If someone wants something bad enough and your offer makes it feel inevitable, fast, and frictionless, you will sell. I

t’s the relief that their problem can be solved, and someone understands them.

Not what can I sell, think what painful problem I am obsessed with solving so well that people would feel dumb not to buy from me.

You don’t need a big idea; you need a unique point of view.

A brutal truth in business: If your business needs you every day just to survive, you do not own a business, you own a very demanding job.

You scale by removing yourself from the process without removing your personality form your content and product.

Day 4 & 5

Days four and five are all about setting up the infrastructure. This allows people to pay you.

The three important things you need to think about here are:

• How to describe the offer

• How to collect payment

• How people can contact you

The storefront can be simple. A notion page, a Google doc, a simple landing page. You need somewhere you can send people to that explains what you do and how they can buy from you.

Please listen to what I’m about to say.

You do NOT need to spend 4 hours picking fonts and colours. All of that is unimportant. Just spend 30 minutes getting something functional going.

• Who is the product for?

• What problems does it solve?

• What do they get?

• How do they buy?

If you don’t have any testimonials, skip them for now.

All the design stuff, such as packaging matters way less than the offer itself. Set up the payment. Stripe is the easiest. If you’re doing one-on-one coaching, have Calendly and stripe set up.

If you’re doing digital products, use Kajabi, Gumroad, or Stan Store.

The tool doesn’t matter, having a tool matters.

The fewer steps the buyer has to purchase from you, the better. The “I want this” to “I bought this” should be quick. Every extra click loses the customer. So, make it stupid easy for people to buy from you.

In terms of contact, place an email address or DM option. You want to be accessible at the beginning because every conversation is a learning opportunity. It’s feedback on how to improve your product or service. Ultimately, customers will tell you what’s missing and how it can be improved.

Now, at this point, you have a niche, an offer, and a payment method.

That’s a real business.

You’ve done more progress in a few days than people get done in months or even years.

The next step is about traffic.

The best offer means nothing if nobody knows about it.

We’ll discuss how to launch your offer and make your first sale. The last few days is when you go from: “I have a business” to “I’m making money”.

Day 6 & 7

Days 6 & 7 is all about putting yourself out there. It’s about asking for money from strangers.

It’s hard because most people have bad money beliefs.

But nothing happens until someone knows you exist.

Nothing is for free.

That’s the price you need to pay as a business owner. If you have an offer but it’s sitting in an invisible place, it’s worth $0.

These two days are all about getting visible in the right places and making the first sale. The goal is not to go viral (that was my mistake 6 years ago) or build a million followers (also big mistake of mine). It’s to get your first sale.

You can see on my Instagram. I started with my interests and curiosities first, then tried turning that into a product. I made film content, then tried monetising by making merch around it. With this 7-day plan, you actually have an offer. You know what you’re selling.

But it’s also not about money at this point. Your first sale matters so much more than the money. It’s proof of concept. The validation that your offer works. It shows that buyers value your offer enough to exchange currency.

Now you’re saying, “I have an idea” to “I have customers” which changes absolutely everything. It gives you confidence. Each sale from thereon is evidence that your offer works. It becomes easier to talk about it in your content, to sell it, and ultimately to believe in your idea.

The first one is hard, but after it, you have proof.

When choosing a platform to produce content on, think about what makes the most sense for your ideal audience.

The content format matters much less than the content actually being out there.

The hook is the most important part of your content. It can be a bold claim, surprising fact, or a relatable problem. The first two seconds stops them and makes people curious enough to keep reading or watching. You could share a story or transformation, explain why you care about the topic, what you learned, and your transformation. Always, end with a call-to-action (CTA). Follow or subscribe, drop a comment, share, check out the link in the description, DM me etc.

In the free guide below, I outline how commitment builds overtime on social media.

https://stan.store/SerkanKozkiran/p/cbf

They first see your content, like it, comment on it, follow or subscribe to you, and then sign up to your free newsletter, or grab your free guide or resource. Which then leads them to your offer.

Your free content needs to have genuine value. It needs to teach something useful, share a real insight, or solve a small problem.

It’s a proven fact that people follow people who make them feel smarter, better, or more capable.

The important thing is not to focus on your offer, but more on value. The sales will follow.

Also, please be yourself. As cliché as that sounds.

Personality and authenticity always cuts through the noise. Even if you’re different.

Actually, especially if you’re different. Use it.

Post at least 1-2 pieces of short-form content a day. What’s more important is to choose the quantity that you can sustain.

As mentioned earlier, consistency beats intensity.

1 viral post is nice. But 200 solid posts over two years is a real business.

With choosing platforms, focus on your offer. Based on your offer, where do you think your customers are? You can even go find people who fit your ideal customer profile. They could be online posting about their problems, following your competitors, in the comments section of certain posts, asking questions in communities etc.

You can then send them a real genuine message. I go into so much more detail on this in the Creator Business Essentials guide, which you can on the link above. But when people feel your consistent value, they naturally want to learn more about what you do.

How To Avoid Burnout

Now. How do we keep growing on this journey without burning out?

How do we scale without losing our soul and what makes us unique?

Most people try building a life they love, but most people just end up creating a life they hate. They create a worst version of the job they were trying to escape.

So, find a rhythm that you can sustain for two to three years. Be honest about how much you can research and produce week-to-week.

Some people can create content everyday working 12-hour days. Others prefer batching everything on a Tuesday and stepping away.

Do an energy audit every few months. Do more of what energises you and less of what doesn’t. Have a clear overview of everything.

Do certain things energise you?

And are you actually good at it?

Or do certain things drain you?

Make changes accordingly.

Cut things that drain your energy. Double down on things that fire you up. That’s how you win the long game.

Also, as you grow, there is a pressure to become someone you’re not. The algorithms can reward certain types of content, customers can have certain expectations, money can pull you in directions you didn’t plan to go.

So, be careful.

Watching yourself grow in public is the biggest benefit of the creator business. But staying true to yourself is also the biggest challenge of it.

Remember, you’re allowed to change. Your interests can evolve. Your business should evolve with that.

Pivot because you want to, not because anything or anyone else told you to.

That’s all from me.

Cheers.

-Serkan

It’s quite interesting how even 100 years ago, philosophers touched on the topic of brain rot.

As you can probably imagine, it’s relevant now more than ever. Studies show how the average person spends 7 hours a day staring at their screens. Further studies done exploring the relationship between social media use and cognitive functions have found that it reduces memory, results in less cognitive control, and erodes our ability to remain focused.

You may or may not have brain rot. In the modern world, you may have it if you struggle to have deep conversations, forget things way too easily, feel less invested in slower meaningful practises, crave content but never feel satisfied after watching it (the need to always search for more), and engage in long-form content such as YouTube or Substack but somehow still get pulled into TikTok and Instagram Reels.

The Destructive Loop

I want you to think about social media and every other addiction you have as a loop. The loop is completely invisible while you’re still inside it. The worst part of social media is that everyone around you is doing it. Everyone doing the same thing confirms to your brain that it’s completely normal. So, you never really question it.

When you’re on the train, everyone is on their phone. Just the other day I saw a family of 4, which included a baby, and everyone except the baby were on their phones. How crazy is that? Think about newborn babies. That is the first thing they see coming into the world. Their first weeks, months, and even years are spent observing a world where being on your phone 24/7 is the norm.

When you’re at home with your family, everyone is on their phone. Even when you’re at work, you can’t deny the fact that most of your co-workers are stuck to their phone.

The first and most important step is to see the loop for what it is without judging it.

You can’t leave something you don’t know you’re in.

Most people have been in it for so long that they’ve completely forgotten there’s anything else. The point I’m trying to make is that the loop only works when you’re fully inside it. When you’re not noticing it and are identified with it on autopilot.

Now. The brain’s purpose is to reinforce behaviour that produces relief. When most people scroll, they think they’re doing something that is “good for them”, when actually it’s just an ongoing loop of relief and immediate discomfort. It’s a trap. The reinforcement of fake relief enforces you to stay trapped.

Even if it doesn’t look like it, most people are self-aware that scrolling is bad for them. Even if it’s a bit. But quite often there is a stronger belief behind the tiny fragment of self-awareness. And that is the belief that you are getting back something valuable from the scroll.

Cope Mechanisms

Short-form content may look like entertainment. But if you focus on how you feel before and after each scroll, it’s a totally different topic.

I have a little thought exercise for you. I want you to try and remember what you watched the last time you scrolled. If you can’t recall more than two things, it’s because the content was meant to be consumed instantly and forgotten about immediately. And let me tell you now, that’s not how real entertainment works.

When I think about real entertainment, it’s the type that stuck with me for life. And something that sticks with you for life requires some sort of engagement, investment, and interaction.

Scrolling is passive and leaves you unfulfilled.

We know this because when you do it too much, a book, a movie, or even a real-life discussion starts to feel like too much.

I don’t know about you, but for me, real life is what you can see, touch, breathe, and feel.

I recently went to watch the Michael Jackson Movie. I’m obsessed. Ever since I’ve watched the movie, I’ve been studying his thoughts and ideas on manifestation. But that’s not what I want to talk about. I mention him because it’s insanely weird how present people were at his shows.

A video I watched of one his concerts, I believe the one in Budapest, there wasn’t a single phone in sight. People were completely present just enjoying his music. Even watching the video and not being there, it felt euphoric. Whereas nowadays, we have Spotify. We have all this good music in our ears constantly.

With scrolling, the longer you scroll, the less enjoyable it gets.

Most of the time you’re scrolling to find that one video that will make the entire thing worth it. But that’s not entertainment. It’s searching.

To search for satisfaction proves satisfaction wasn’t there in the first place.

I have people close to me in my life that I’m grateful for. When I have a real-life discussion with them, it fills me up. Which is the complete opposite feeling of what I have after a scroll. Scrolling empties you out.

Seeing social media as entertainment is one thing. Another cope mechanism is to believe that scrolling is a part of your “relaxation time”, which is the biggest illusion. It’s actually one of the most stimulating things you can do to the brain.

Stimulation is the opposite of relaxation.

Just in case you didn’t know, to relax is to be slow and intentional.

One other thing people assume is that scrolling keeps you connected with other people and the world. But it’s just passive observation. You’re not connecting, you’re just observing other people’s lives on autopilot. This is concerning because it doesn’t fail to provide real connection, it replaces it. It’s all just time and energy that could have gone to the real people you have in your life.

Some people say they scroll due to boredom. But people aren’t bored without their phones, they’re just going through withdrawal. Actual boredom existed before smartphones and people dealt with it fine. They day-dreamed, noticed their surroundings, contemplated on their thoughts, created art, sat with themselves doing absolutely nothing. That type of boredom was actually useful. It’s where creativity and self-awareness came from.

When you stop using scrolling to fill every empty moment you get back the ability to be.

The silence that comes with you when you stop scrolling is the same silence where self-knowledge lives.

It’s Not Addiction, It’s Fear

A part from those, the most important thing is fear. If I told you to stop scrolling, you would physically be able to stop scrolling, right? But it’s the fear around the stopping that makes it impossible.

Deep down, most people are afraid that they will miss out on something important. Which is a lie, because anything genuinely important will reach you regardless.

5 years later you will not remember a single Instagram Reel you watched this week, but you will remember all the hours you wasted.

The attachment to the behaviour feels real. It’s the same type of attachment a smoker would have with cigarettes. It only feels meaningful because of the repetition, not value.

Regardless if something is good or bad, the more you repeat the action, the more you reaffirm to yourself that it’s normal, and therefore good for you. Only once you see through the attachment, it loses its grip entirely.

This is a choice between known discomfort and unknown discomfort. Bear in mind, the unknown is only a few days of adjustment. You just need to make the decision.

Just in case you haven’t grasped the message. The hard part was never the quitting, it was believing you had something to give up.

But the loop isn’t giving you anything. Social media, if not used as tool, is not giving you anything. It’s not giving you entertainment, relaxation, or connection. It’s all just an illusion. The fear of stopping was the traps last defence.

You just need to nail down the clarity part. A clear understanding of what the scroll is and the purpose of it in your life. The practical side of changing the behaviour is actually easy.

But you need to make a clear decision. Say it to yourself now. I’m done with it, and I don’t want it anymore.

The only reason you want to see the next TikTok or Reel is because you watched the last one. Confirm to yourself that the last one you watched was the final mindless scroll.

This isn’t about never using your phone again or “going off the grid”. The internet and social media is a great tool when used intentionally. It’s about ending the mindless habitual loop driven scrolling that eats your time and attention without your conscious consent. Instead, seek out everything that is slow.

I want to say this again.

I’m on social media. But intentional use is completely different from compulsive use.

Work With Your Brain (Via Self-Education)

You probably clicked on this video because you remember a time when your brain felt better.

I don’t know about you, but I miss thinking for the sake of thinking.

I’m making this video because I genuinely want my curiosity back. That’s the ability to sit with a question without reaching for a distraction every 10 seconds. I want the side of me that lit up at complexity instead of shutting out.

The painful part of all of this is how scrolling drains your mental energy. The kind of energy you need for focus and creativity. It’s the reason why you feel tired after a scroll sesh even though you were technically doing nothing.

In my opinion, thinking and learning is your best way back.

Short form engages the eye, but not the brain.

The solution is to approach activities that demand more of you. Just think back to when you were a child. You were giving every bit of you with full presence to one thing at a time. Your mind was never elsewhere.

Most people forget that the brain is like a muscle. You either use it or lose it.

That’s why in the recent years, I’ve really been trying to get back into self-education. I believe self-education is the antidote. Actively using your brain is good. Thinking is the fighting.

Think about it.

When you want a better body, what do you do?

You physically work on bettering your body.

It’s the same thing with the mind. If you want a better mind, you need to improve yourself mentally. Give your brain a challenge.

Self-education also relies on intrinsic motivation. You do it for no other reason but to improve yourself. Don’t approach it to get something or have “an edge in the world”, not that it’s a bad thing to have an edge, but your intention will be wrong. Instead, do it for curiosity. Do it to get back that childlike wonder.

Modern school isn’t learning. It’s memorisation. Learning isn’t about academic achievement or competition, but the act of learning itself.

Every entity’s purpose outside of you is to transform a being into a thing. For example, a person becoming a cog in a corporate machine. You know this by looking at the organisation that you work for. Superior people at the top of the organisational hierarchy don’t even know your name. Your nature is a full on being, but you’ve been transformed into a thing because now you don’t even have a name.

That’s why directing your attention is one of the most powerful things you have control over. All possible forms of experience only have the ability to be accessed when we open our minds to the possibility of experiencing them.

Solutions

But what is the solution? The solution isn’t to go completely analogue. It’s to seek out everything that is slow. That includes meaningful slow discussions with other real people.

Brain rot is not your fault, but it is your responsibility.

You need to recognise that a big chunk of your attention is being controlled by an algorithm that has been designed to addict you.

Social media platforms invest money so that the loop that we spoke on earlier keeps going. Believe it or not, the algorithm knows you better than you. It tracks every like, comment, and share. You don’t even study yourself more than algorithms study you. And it will never tell you to stop scrolling because stopping is against its financial interest. Once you understand this misalignment in interests, you wake up.

Anything fast fucks you up. The same way fast food is bad for your body, fast content is bad for your mind. Consume longer, deeper media that encourages you to expand your imagination. That’s ultimately when you stop consuming and start creating.

Full 4-Step Plan

I don’t want to leave you on just concepts and insights. So, here’s a step-by-step guide:

1. Select 1-3 topics for self-education

Take a few days to a week. Be conscious of where your attention is drawn.

This time around, use social media to your advantage.

When you’re on social media, notice what you stop on. I wouldn’t include short form in this mix, obviously.

But which books, podcasts, or articles attract your attention? You don’t need to change yourself. Just focus on the things that you’re already consuming.

Decide on at least 1-3 topics that you are going to use for intentional self-education. Then spend at least 30 minutes to 1 hour a day consuming it without switching tasks. Let your brain soak in every piece of it.

If you find it difficult to do, pair it with something that you’re already doing.

Habits are more likely to stick when you tie them to something you’re already doing.

Do it as you walk, workout, or even alongside a cup of coffee. This has been a cheat code in my life.

People who beat brain-rot are intentional consumers. The people who brain-rot beat are passive consumers.

2. Curate

This means locate your resources.

I get it, everything is on the internet and there’s too way much information.

I recommend you find 3-5 people who you really enjoy consuming from. That can be 3-5 YouTube channels, Newsletters, authors etc.

3. Apply

If you’ve just learned something, immediately use social media to create content on it.

Don’t worry about likes and engagement. That’s not the purpose.

The purpose is to build your mind.

The brain remembers information better when it is used actively.

That’s why using your phone now as a tool to create content on Substack, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube or any other platform, you will find yourself in the top 1% of the population.

The problem was never learning. It was endless intake without application. But when you apply something immediately after learning it, the brain recognises that the information has value and rewards you for it. That’s how stronger neuropathways are formed in the brain. Knowledge without usage slowly becomes mental clutter.

You’ve probably heard it before, “the importance of small habits”.

Small habits matter because repeated behaviours shape the brain overtime.

Here, the good news is that the brain is adaptable. The same neuroplasticity that strengthens distractions can now also be used to rebuild focus.

And I’ve found that the best way to understand something is to teach it. To apply your knowledge and understand why your applying the knowledge is the key to self-education that sticks.

Put out onto the internet what you’ve learned. Here, not only are you improving your own brain, but you’re also helping other people. Your content could possibly at this point drag someone out of the wormhole they’re in.

4. Reflect

After you’ve shared your knowledge online, the gaps in your knowledge will be clearer. Social media is useful because it shows us the gaps that are missing from our knowledge.

• What did you have trouble explaining?

• Do you need to improve your writing or speaking skills?

• What technique didn’t you understand?

• What new insights did you gain?

• Did you make any connections between different concepts?

• Is there anything new that you’re curious about?

You’re self-evaluating here. Not by another person, but by you.

This puts you in the driver seat of your own brain.

That’s all.

Everything I’ve mentioned, I’m doing in my own life.

I consume long form, that’s books, podcasts, and online articles and use it as my mental nutrition.

I write a newsletter and read it out on YouTube once a week as my mental workout.

Feed your mind. Then use your mind.

It’s the only way to save yourself.

-Serkan

“The first £100K is a bitch, but you gotta do it”

Charlie Munger.

The hardest part and the best part of your financial journey will be your first £100K. I believe the first 100K changes everything, as it did for me also. Because the moment you hit it is the moment you stop worrying about tomorrow. You stop worrying about the usual stuff. Rent, utility, petrol, food, electricity, gas.

The point here is that you can’t have a long-term vision while paying rent. It’s extremely challenging. Making money is hard for a lot of people because they don’t have the physical and mental space to think on a long-term vision. I might be extremely optimistic, but I genuinely don’t think people have short-term visions. I think most people know what they want in the long run, but everyday life (the micro day-to-day stuff) gets in their way.

A lot of things helped me reach the milestone in 3 years from ages 22-25. In a simple income summary, I had a full-time 9-5 job and an internet side hustle. But as we all know, everyone seems to be doing that nowadays and most people don’t have £100,000 pounds of breathing space.

That’s why in this video we’re going to dig deeper into my own personal experience and gather useful insights and data points.

I’m going to reverse engineer everything I know so that if I did lose everything and had to make that money from scratch, these are the 6 steps I would follow.

1. Spend In Alignment With Your Goals

This first step means cutting costs wherever necessary. You can’t take any huge bets on yourself (risks), if you’ve got a huge list of recurring expenses.

With any type of income, whether it’s my 9-5 or additional income, I apply the 70/30 rule. I still do this today. I spend 30% of what I make and save and/or invest the remaining 70%.

Now, of course, I’m a 25 year old in London living at his parents house. But I do go on several holidays and eat out whenever I want to. Maybe I’m a little privileged not to pay rent, but that didn’t mean I haven’t bought other things and yet still saved a lot of money.

The purpose is to spend in alignment with your goals.

Based on your values.

That for me was travelling, eating well, but also doing it in a very balanced way. I wasn’t flying first class. I didn’t have everything. But my goal also wasn’t to stop spending entirely.

My goal was to stop spending money on things I didn’t give a shit about. I absolutely loved traveling to the US, Japan, Italy, Spain, Budapest, Copenhagen etc.

Create a 3-value category.

Three areas where you get the most joy from spending money.

For me, that was travel, food, and coffee.

Everyone’s 100K is different. I would spend money, but I wouldn’t be tied to anything that would affect my ability in saving £100K.

No monthly subscriptions. No car insurance. Nothing.

But I also didn’t take the route of:

“don’t buy a £5 takeaway coffee, that’s too expensive.”

Just being realistic a coffee isn’t going to make you any broker than you are. You can’t expense cut your way to £100K on a medium wage not buying coffee.

My approach requires you to be more self-aware, not miserable.

Now, if you are on a low overall income you might not be able to travel or do nice things. But the 70/30 still applies. You still need to increase your income (which we will take about in the final step.)

We do this because the amount you save matters way less than the habit. You can lose money, but the habit will stick with you for life. Unless you consciously try to get rid of it, which you won’t. Because we only self-improve to get rid of habits that don’t serve us.

But in a way, we are still mainly cutting costs. If you’re putting away 70% of your money the moment it lands in your bank account, you are a minimalist with spending. And this isn’t for no reason. As mentioned, this is an important first step for the later stages, as we need cashflow to start spending and reinvesting in more skills (we’ll talk more on this later.)

It’s extremely important that you do this now because looking back three years ago it seems that both the world and the economy is getting worse. I do still live at my parents’ house, but that doesn’t mean I’m not self-aware enough to recognise that the rent is going up. We receive a letter every now and then to hear that the landlord is planning to increase the rent again.

P.S. This is all happening while salaries and pay are staying about the same.

However, regardless of the economy, what we’re talking here is the 6-step system that makes saving to a £100K work.

Financial equation is not 100% your own choice, but about 20% your personal choice and 80% systematic issues.

2. Be Stingy With Your Time

A lot of people think their 9-5 is destroying their dreams while actually it’s their 5-9. It’s all the remaining hours outside of their job.

Let me ask you this.

How do you spend your mornings?

Do you wake up early?

What’s the first thing you give your attention to?

These first two steps, both money and time in alignment with your goals are foundation. The only two things you have right now is time and of course limited capital. Depending on how well you do in these first two steps, you may now have both time and money on your side.

Remove everything so that the only thing that does remain is focus.

We want to create days where you do have 2-4 hours to yourself. Agree or disagree, it takes a lot to get the ball rolling, regardless of the endeavour you choose to take on. What’s important in those hours is not to switch between tasks, but instead go all in on one thing. Which takes us to step three.

3. Go All in On One Skill To Get Paid

This requires some research, learning, and self-education.

If you observe some of the greatest in any field, their goal and desire wasn’t to have everything. It was to achieve one thing.

• An MMA fighter chases a championship belt.

• A footballer works towards lifting the trophy.

• A musician strives to hit top charts.

Their talents and paths may differ, but they all shared one trait: they chose a single pursuit and committed themselves to it completely.

Now that we are getting to the discipline side of stuff. It’s also important to have a why.

Emotional goals get followed through. Abstract meaningless ones don’t.

You have to tie your goal to your why.

You’re watching this video.

Maybe your current big goal in life is financial.

Maybe it’s to earn £10K a month or save £100K.

But why do it?

Why even save £100?

You need an answer to this before we can move on. For example:

• When I hit £100K, I will be able to quit my job and run my business fulltime

• When I hit £100K, I will be able to sleep better at night

• When I it £100K, my partner and I will be able to move towards our dream future

Your why needs to be crystal clear before you do anything else. If you have burning questions, your why answers the how. Motivation tied to meaning always sticks.

Now. Coming back to the one skill idea. In the business sense, that would be one product, one avatar (audience), and one channel until you hit £100K.

A lot of people on social media who makes content on their financial journey are hitting that mark, which they never would have been able to if they only had their 9-5 job. This is because the medium that is social media has leverage. The sky is the limit.

Just think about every other business that is not on the internet. There is always a limit to what how much they can do and how much they earn. Even for businesses that are not on the internet, the internet still plays a big part for them.

For example, restaurants rely heavily on internet reviews to get new customers. Those with the largest quantity of reviews and best ratings win. I know this because I do it myself. When I want to explore a new restaurant in the city, my first instinct is to check online reviews.

I could go on and on about how having an online presence, building an audience, and showing off your expertise on the internet is the best viable option for business in 2026.

But for now, just choose one thing. This is an extremely important step as the previous steps don’t actually matter if you are not going all in on one skill and increasing your income.

4. Self-Educate Like Mad

If what you’re doing day-to-day is not changing, then you’re aren’t learning.

Real learning always sparks behaviour change.

You could do the same thing for hours and not get decent results. This was a harsh truth I had to overcome, which is that it’s not about the hours you put in but how effective your iteration is overtime. If you keep doing the same things, and getting the same results, you have to do something different to break the loop. You have to recognise that the micro has to change in order for the macro to change. You have to go back to what you’re doing day-to-day and be truthful to yourself on how it’s not working.

Here’s my 4-step process on how to best learn effectively:

1. Consume a large quantity of the right volume by analysing the top 10% of content (we know it’s the right thing to consume as it’s already working.)

2. Study the difference between the top 10% and the bottom 90%

   (what are they doing differently?)

3. Figure out the important details that the top 10% use to shine.

4. Completely steer away from and avoid the bottom 90% and their mistakes.

5. Invest Money Smartly

Now to step five. To invest money smartly, you need to put your money in the right places. We aren’t going to talk on ISA’s or S&P 500. I’m going to talk about ways you can invest to increase your income.

I’ve recently bought a £2000 Sony camera, invested £1000 on a website that is coming up soon, and purchased several courses to understand content, marketing, branding, and persuasion. These are in the long run minor investments which bring huge leverage on my time.

A lot of rich people have gone broke, and some very broke people have gone rich. That proves it’s not just how much you earn, but what you do with the money.

Billionaires lose millions to make billions.

Millionaires lose thousands to make millions.

And most people are afraid of investing hundreds on their own education.

Don’t be most people.

6. Increase Your Income

You will always make your money from making money. Use your current capital, to make more money.

This of course is all about taking risks. Most people don’t do it because they can’t bet on themselves.

This is why self-improvement comes before business. Even if you want to take the leap of faith in business, you need to first self-improve, which is to come to terms of your own internal strengths and weaknesses. To know yourself. To know where you might fall short and see it way in advance.

Focus on growing your income. Don’t focus on trying too hard to minimise your expenses.

I honestly don’t agree with the frugal mindset because in life you have to spend money by default, but increasing your income is a choice. It’s intentional.

And everything is indeed easy for you right now. The economy might be getting worse, but starting your own business is getting easier by the day. Especially with social media, there is no ceiling to what you can earn in theory. If I could give one advice to my younger self, it would be to double down even harder on increasing your income and thinking strategically on ways to make more money.

Here’s a 2-step process on how to increase your income:

1. Have an offer

2. Find those who want it

Sell something low-ticket to the masses (£50 digital or physical product) or sell something extremely expensive to 1 person ( £5,000 product).

I personally wouldn’t advise on selling a physical product just because of all the headaches that come along with it. Manufacturing, shipping, etc. I’ve done this before. I’ve seen success with it, but it’s not the most viable option. I also wouldn’t sell something extremely expensive to one person.

I would recommend taking the first option.

If you have found what it is that you want to do, I guarantee there are people 2-3 steps behind you who also want to do what you do.

I want to make it clear that if you are already successful doing what you do, it’s because of routine. A system. Which you can package and sell to those who need it. I believe it’s the only way you can continue to do what you love.

But before all of this you will need to find those who need it and the only way to do that with mass is via social media. Which means building an audience. This is probably one of the biggest assets you can have today. It’s why everyone is doing it.

Even an airline company (Ryan Air) is popping out memes 24/7. As well as Keir Starmer, the Prime Minster of the United Kingdom.

Coming back to topic. There are other things that come into play, such as knowing your audience. But it all revolves around one thing. Information.

Knowledge is power. Knowledge of your market is profit.

I’m so glad I started social media 5 years ago. It’s the one thing I thank my younger self for. Social media is indeed the best way you can build in public because from the bat you choose what you’re already naturally good at. And if that energy comes across in your content, people themselves will reach out to you asking you how you do it. It all just comes down to people wanting a result that you already have.

With social media and content, the best thing is that you are the only one getting paid. I believe that’s the biggest benefit of starting a creator business. You don’t really need a team.

If you do have additional income, create another rule for what happens to the extra money you do earn. I just use the same rule of 70/30 as I’ve already built a solid habit of doing that.

There’s way too many things that go into this.

You need to understand the flow of money. Money flows to where value is created. Try to understand how value moves from one person to another. Whoever contributes more value to the chain, they make the most money.

That’s why effort is not as important as you may think.

What you want is impact.

And to create impact you need to be intentional.

I won’t be able to get into all of this here, so if you want more on the how to create impact in public via the creator business process, that is building an audience, and monetising your expertise, there should be a free link below.

The point is you get rewarded for the risks you take. You can’t take risks if you don’t have time and money (steps one and two).

Don’t increase your lifestyle too much while trying to do all of this because then it’s going to impact your ability to invest in yourself.

The day you stop investing in learning is the day you stop investing in your ability to earn more.

Summary

That’s all. That’s the 6-steps.

One extra piece of advice I would also give you, which is probably one of my biggest learning blocks is to start now. That’s the best thing you can do, right now.

The biggest reason for all of the success I have today is that I didn’t try to do everything perfectly. Let go of the need to be perfect. Trying to be perfect is unrealistic and right now we’re trying to be realistic.

Even when I mentioned the 70/30 rule, some months it was 60/40. But I wouldn’t put myself down for it or drop the entire thing altogether.

You won’t make the right choices all of the time. 100% of things at 100% of the time is not going to work. Ironically, the sooner you let go of trying to be perfect, the better off you’ll be. You want to be in control, but the funny thing is, the sooner you let that go the easier all of your wildest ambitions actually get.

In mid 2024 I quit a job that was paying me a £50K salary in London because it was mentally exhausting. So instead, I went travelling around Asia and was eating into my savings. I saved 100K but was depleting it. I stopped what was working and threw in the towel.

And a lesson I learned here regardless if it’s on a small scale or large scale is that we’re constantly doing this in our lives.

We miss a workout, so we throw in the towel and don’t work out for days, week, or months. It’s practically the same thing as the previous example.

“I couldn’t mediate today so I’m not going to do it at all.”

“I couldn’t start an internet side hustle three years ago at the perfect time so I’m not going to start one at all.”

There is no perfect time. But there’s also no setback that puts you so back so much that you just have to throw in the towel.

Learn from everyone. Don’t disregard people because they may have been a little more privileged than you. Everyone has something to teach.

If I only listened to the people who had my exact story, I wouldn’t listen to anybody.

Why would I? I’ve got nothing to learn.

So, keep an open mind during this journey. A person doesn’t have to be in exactly the same situation as you for you to learn something from them.

That’s all.

See you in the next one!

Cheers.

-Serkan

Bear in mind, at this point I did have somewhat of a presence on social media.

But when I looked down at my phone, it was a payment from Disney of £2,000 for a sponsorship video I had made with them.

Now, of course, I worked on this platform for maybe a solid two years, but that was still a lot of money from one single video. In that moment, I made the same amount of money I would working a whole month at my job. Although I’m explaining this story in a positive light, I want you to know what I was doing wasn’t sustainable.

In fact, I was digging myself a hole…

Because on one side I had a “stable” job, and on the other side, I was earning but not a reliable income.

And if you are an online creative, this reading is going to be extremely useful, so I recommend staying till the end.

I personally have nothing against sponsorships as long as what you’re promoting is something you are a user of. Sponsorships should complement your life.

• If you meditate, a meditation app you use could be a great partnership.

• If you have a website, and you enjoy their services, the website provider could be a great partnership.

• If you buy most of your clothes from one designer, that could be a great partnership.

Sponsorships should align with your lifestyle.

But again, as a creative, sponsorships shouldn’t be the only option you rely on. This is a big mistake.

In this article you will understand why, and by the end, what the better alternative is.

The Hardships

I’m talking on all of this from experience.

You have this cushy job that isn’t easy, but it isn’t hard. What actually makes the job hard isn’t the work like most people would assume, it’s the feeling of “I could be doing something better.”

But then, if you do approach creativity and pursuing your own work, like being a digital entrepreneur (someone who creates valuable stuff on the internet), you will quickly realise that option takes a lot more of your freedom than the cushy job itself.

So, you’re stuck in a trap between the two.

There is a lot to be said about this because if you don’t see staying in a job (your current reality) as a bad thing, you will never take the leap of faith.

“It’s good enough” is what makes you stay there. “It isn’t easy, but it isn’t hard” is exactly the type of mindset that kills ambition.

But remember that feeling of doing better? And reaching your full potential?

That will always be there, and it will eat you inside out until you start taking small steps and moving towards the version of you that you are visualising deeply in your subconscious.

What you want and what the ideal situation is, is to create freely and do so by monetising. You want to act on your creative interests, while monetising so that you can actually make a living.

But if done well (meaning if you have knowledge of social media, marketing, branding, persuasion - the foundations) then you can make a big living from it.

Don’t Sacrifice Creativity

That’s not what happens with most creators.

What happens is you leave your job, and you solely rely on things like platform money and sponsorships, completely throwing your freedom away yet again.

Here, I want to paint a clear picture of what happens. You are placing yourself in the same place as you were before. It’s the same thing as your job. An external entity outside of your control is paying you and giving you a living.

So you throw your freedom out the window yet again.

Due to this financial need to survive, you start promoting things you don’t even want to. You start investing your time and energy into making videos for brands you don’t even buy from. Again, if it’s something that you use and want to promote, there is no problem. But the likeliness of your favourite brands sponsoring you every single time is low.

I want to drill this idea into your mind that it’s not about the money. I’m talking about freedom.

The only reason you chase money is for the freedom of it.

You had money at your job, you didn’t feel right. You aren’t going to feel right doing the same thing here.

In simpler terms, it’s about the level of control that you have.

I don’t care what you think.

You can believe that you are doing it for materialistic possessions or status but if you are wise enough you’ll understand that those things become meaningless very quickly.

What you actually want is the freedom to act on your creative interests, regardless of money, and in the process to find a reliable method of monetisation so that you can keep doing it.

What I Wish Someone Told Me

I’m mad because I didn’t have someone like me telling me all of this.

What I had was public figures such as Gary Vee, who although does does give great advice, he also gives advice such as post 10 times a day.

Even if you can make 10 videos a day, don’t.

Because those who do that have an entire team behind them.

But also, when you post 10 times a day there is a high chance of a few of those videos being ones you didn’t even want to create. Posting 10 times a day might be an option for a rare few, but for the majority it isn’t.

Please understand that if you do not have this type of mindset (and yes it is a mindset), and are gearing your entire liveliness towards the platform paying you, or other brands paying you, you will end up where you were in your job.

No creativity, no freedom, no control.

The Attention Economy

So, talking about creativity, where do we start? How do we be creative, but also in that get across authenticity in that value?

Because that’s all there is to social media. You are providing value within your creativity and bringing your unique perspective with that value.

And the first place to start is to never, and I mean never, allow others to tell you what to create.

This is the reason why a ton of brand deals will throw you off course as a creative. Because then you start creating content to land brand deals, rather than producing content to create value.

Don’t create with the hopes of getting something. Create to give. Don’t formulate your videos because a brand may like them, formulate them to reach your audience and your ideal avatar.

This is how you don’t make something you love to do into something you have to do.

This is hard because everyone is fighting for attention, and when you go the attention route you do stuff you don’t want to.

The forefront of everything on social media is attention.

The new economy is the attention economy.

But where most creators go wrong is they fight for the attention, but can’t hold it.

Holding attention is where the real value is given.

Don’t invest too much into platforms because the platforms don’t care about you, they care about the attention that you bring.

Again, here’s a question for you. Are you chasing attention or are you chasing creativity? If you’re chasing attention, I guarantee you’ll lose the thing you love.

The number one way to ruin your creative spirit is to place expectations on it.

When you begin to think things like “the audience must love it” you’ve placed an expectation on your creativity.

The goal is for your hobby, whatever that is, to become a career or a business.

Protect Your Creative Spirit

I really want to get this message across: the success will come but first build the solid foundation of honing in on your creative spirit or vision.

Remember, once the entire thing is no longer fun, you’ve allowed the outside world to get into your process.

If you’re asking “what do I do? If it’s the attention economy, do I not chase it?” don’t chase attention, create it.

Stay grounded in your “why”.

There is always a solid why prior to a start.

Always go back to the drawing board.

Why did you start creating in the first place?

Who are you trying to create for?

Every secret lies there.

Go internal.

Do this by looking at your goals. If you don’t have one, then set a goal for the future. Think and contemplate on how your curiosities and interests can get you to that goal.

It’s funny because the word “creator” is everywhere. But as soon as a creator produces something, like selling a knowledge packed course, that creator is immediately demonised.

Of course, you can guess what I’m going to say.

Fu*k them.

Build your own stuff.

We’ll get to that later on, but build something for your former self. Something you wish to see in the world, but isn’t here yet.

How do you do this?

Pursue a project.

When you pursue a project, specific problems arise.

When specific problems arise, you solve them with your unique approach.

When you solve a problem with your unique approach, you hold value.

And when you hold value, there are people out there, who are two or three steps behind you that will pay you for that value.

If you have a problem, others have it too.

So create what you love, but solve problems along the way. See it as a fun game that you are a part of. A fun project.

But remember to be you in the process. Authenticity is super important.

People don’t buy into your products; they buy into you.

They purchase from you because of you.

I wrote an article on authenticity, where I shared deep concepts on how to be your true authentic self, check it out: How To Discover Your Authentic Self

Pivot With Your Interests

Moving on. I started making videos on TikTok in 2020 because I was heavily into film. But now? I’m not heavily into film. I’ve evolved from that interest.

Is that a bad thing?

No, people evolve.

If you don’t evolve, that’s where the trouble actually begins.

But even in that experience, I realised when I started making those videos, I would just create them for fun. I would enjoy the process.

But as soon as the audience and opportunities came, the joy fell.

Because now there was an expectation, you see?

But I don’t care.

I personally want to create what I want to create which is why you’re seeing me here on Substack and YouTube.

This goes true for every creator.

If you look at the biggest influencers, although influencers don’t provide “value”, but let’s just talk about it for the sake of this argument.

KSI started off with gaming, then went into boxing, and now he’s in business producing his own products. Do you see how he pivoted with his interests?

Your social meida presence evolves with you. Your content evolves with you.

Don’t be afraid to pivot with your interests.

You’re Creating A Film

I want you to create as if you are creating a film.

What happens in a film?

You have writers, producers, directors, actors. But now see it as you are all of it. The only one. It’s just you.

You are the writer, producer, editor etc. At least in the very beginning.

And if you’re extremely unsure about monetisation. Again, money always equals to value. Focus on bringing value.

Monetisation is important. Even in films, they’re making it for box office money. So even in entertainment, they’re seeing it as a business. That’s what you need to do.

There is no money without value, and there is no value without money.

All of it should be fun. Money is just the by-product. Make the process feel like play.

People who say “content creation has become the new 9-5” are only saying that because they’re treating it like one.

You think you have to be somewhere at a certain time.

No.

Make a routine, routine is good.

Schedule stuff, scheduling is good.

But ensure that it is how you want it to be. Unlike, a 9-5, where you don’t get to decide.

Summary

That was a lot.

Let’s do a quick recap before I give you two final, actionable solutions.

• Your job and sponsorships are the same thing

• Only do sponsorships that align with your lifestyle: promote what you use

• You’re never really chasing money; you’re chasing the freedom that it brings

• Don’t post 10x a day, build content systems that run on autopilot and work for you

• The new economy is the attention economy: don’t fight for it, capture and sustain it

• If the fun is missing, you’ve let the outside world interfere with your process

• Your content evolves with you—pivot your content with your current interests

• A personal brand is like creating a film where you’ve got full creative control

There are two final recommendations that I want to give you.

1. Act On Your Creative Interests But Systematise It

This is important. Every business which operates well has an undeniable system behind it. Create your own systems for writing, filming, editing etc.

I’ve got my own timetable. I only post on YouTube on the weekends. This is because I spend the start of the week writing both short-form and long-form content and keep the weekend’s mainly for recording purposes.

On the Sunday the YouTube video gets uploaded and a written version of it goes out as at newsletter to those who have subscribed to it.

I also spend the weekends at the moment building digital products.

But the point I’m trying to make is to place your focus on building systems. A lot of creators confuse the process.

There is no “one” platform to post on. There is no “right” platform. There is just one content which goes out to all platforms. One content, all platforms.

If you are a beginner, what I would say is just start creating on whichever platform you’re active on most. Start building your skills in writing, marketing, branding, and persuasion.

Talk about whatever you want, because you’re growing a community, not a following. Win trust, community, and friendship to win the game.

2. Build And Sell Your Own Stuff

As you come across problems, you come across value that is on the other side if you do solve that problem.

Remember the word freedom? This is the only way to have true freedom.

To solve a current problem in your life and sell the solution via value to those who need it.

So, create, but also build your own stuff.

Again, create systems for when you promote. Create a promotion schedule. For example, “I’m going to promote on this day”.

And remember, at the forefront of an irreplaceable personal brand is authenticity.

That’s all from me for this week.

Hope you’ve enjoyed it.

Check out the video version of this article here:

Signing out.

-Serkan

How do we regain or revive our love for learning once again?

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve completely lost touch of my childish curiosity and my deep, internal, authentic motivation. I’m not talking about the “forced” type of motivation but the one you genuinely had as a kid or a teenager growing up.

The interesting thing is that it tends to happen at the same time for everyone. You have this deep curiosity and authentic motivation up until you head to university, or even worse, full timework. Then it all seems to vanish.

The education system is alright, don’t get me wrong, you can learn some useful information taking the traditional route. But the methodology (the foundation) that the system takes its form comes from the industrialised age which is not helpful when it comes to developing a deep curiosity for learning.

This loss for learning completely goes over most people head’s.

But if you step back from the entire situation, and see it not from a human’s perspective, but from someone that partakes in the system but is not of it you can generally see for yourself.

Before, during, and after people lose their spark.

It’s during those specific phases of preparing for university, studying at university, and the end goal which is full-time work.

Because what you have to realise is that people don’t go to university for no reason. Most people do it because they’re supposed to. However, apart from the unconcious decision, there also is an end-goal. And that end-goal is often an unfulfilling and uninspiring job.

No wonder why those are the phases most people lose their zest for life, right?

One way you can clearly see this from both other people, and yourself, is through the energy of passion. During these phases, there is no passion.

Try it as an experiment.

Go to talk to someone who is a few years into university or full-time work. The responses you get will be shocking. The initial excitement and energy you get coming into this world as a new-born baby, child, then teenager is totally gone. All of which they had prior to partaking fully in the education system.

The brutal fact of it all is how people will read this and simply deny it. Their denying reality. But you get exactly what you want here on earth.

If you want to deny reality, reality will deny you.

Don’t be shocked when reality doesn’t give you what you desire, simply because your beliefs are the opposite to it. That’s not on anyone, but you.

Just simply see it for what it is. Don’t try to analyse or judge it.

See how people who want to learn stuff and think they can learn it well through the certain frameworks that school uses doesn’t revamp their curiosity and desire to learn, but actually slaughters their passion.

It kills their love for learning and their curiosity in that topic of interest.

So, we have a humongous question:

Let’s first understand why school doesn’t work.

School is all about grades. Numbers, stats, performance assessments. Your worth is simply reduced to a piece of statistic.

I say this from personal experience.

Who remembers results day?

Where everyone would receive their results and the first thing they would do is ask others what they got.

I can still hear it so clearly, other students asking, “what did you get?”.

And I get it. It’s not just about the school system. People do this later on in their jobs, in their own personal lives, and with practically anyone they interact with. But you can’t deny that most of this stems from the system which raised us.

On this there are some things we can learn from video games. One is that video games do learning extremely well. When you start a new game, it’s all based on skill-based matching. Which means that your level will always match the level of the challenge you take.

School is terrible at this. Different students have different skill levels, but all students take the same curriculum.

For the students who are too advanced, the work is too boring and not fun. F

For the students that are too behind, the work is impossible, and therefore, boring and certainly not fun.

I belong to that second group.

But here’s the most important part.

This is the trap most people fall into which consumes them of most of their energy.

Don’t fight, criticize, rant, or try demolishing the “system”. But instead, be self-aware. Recognise internally that there is an external problem. It’s actually got nothing to do with you. All you need to do is admit “this isn’t my definition of education.”

School is about grades. It’s just a reality that should be accepted and not resisted.

One common assumption (belief) we develop is that a high grade means you’re set for life. This is a big problem because this means we determine our entire lives, self-identity, as well as self-worth upon a single grade.

That is predominantly the single factor that displaces your love for learning.

Now, really deep this with me.

Why wouldn’t you feel down? Of course, you’re not going to feel curious.

For the average person, 90% of your mind is spent on pursuing higher grades, while the rest is devoted to entertainment and escapism.

It is absolutely inevitable that you give into distractions.

Imagine giving 90% of yourself into something you inherently don’t care about, how else would you be motivated to keep going? You’re going to find a way to escape, and for most people, that’s through instant gratification.

People don’t try to find a different escapism method, one that serves them better, because anything apart from instant gratification is a hard game to play.

A truthful, but brutal joke, is that I can’t tell you one thing I learned at school that has been useful to me. Not one thing.

School doesn’t talk about things that are actually useful.

• How to manage your finances

• How to master your emotions

• The importance of meditation

• The importance of life experience

• Philosophy

• Economics

• Personal development

• Self-actualisation

• How to think critically

• How to focus

• How to develop mental capacity to deal with catastrophes

• How to develop a strong and rigid character

You can’t find any of those in school.

So, the only way to get out is to take on the burden of self-education.

It’s a must. All on you. Independently.

Solutions

From this, one thing we can’t deny, is that we’re all losing our joy for learning.

Now. If you don’t care about learning, this isn’t for you. But if you do, please take the responsibility to educate yourself.

You don’t need to leave school. But you can sacrifice distraction.

Replace that time to pursue writing, filmmaking, photography, social media (not scrolling content, but producing it.)

Read books and articles, watch podcasts, engage in discussions on life, relationships, self-actualisation, philosophy, timeless advice.

Things that will help you down the road.

Build your mind on business, wealth, emotional mastery, success, etc.

Take action on the foundations and principles you learn from the book, video, course, or whatever medium you consume from.

Challenge yourself every now and then.

• If you’ve never meditated, do it for 5 minutes for the next 7 days.

• If you’ve never worked out, go for a fun run one morning

Try it out.

At the end, you have to bite the bullet, despite the costs.

Be a self-taught genius.

Don’t leave school. But navigate through the system and view the laborious and mundane tasks at school as character building.

As for the video games concept we spoke on earlier. Always look to match the level of your skill to the level of your challenge in absolutely anything you do.

Otherwise, you’re back at school. :)

That’s all from me.

See you on the next one.

-Serkan

It is my strong belief that if you are not true to yourself, you can never really fulfil your life’s work or purpose. And I think you might resonate with this. No matter how many attempts you make at the work that is in front of you, you just aren’t fulfilled or get the results that you want. And sometimes you may get the results. And people may praise you. But you just aren’t fulfilled. And I guarantee everyone who does work they dislike is this way; some are just better actors than others.

That brings us to a very important topic: how do you go about finding the true version of yourself?

Your parents don’t teach you this because they haven’t been taught it themselves. Personally, my parents were immigrants who came to this country with no English, they certainly aren’t going to teach me how to be my authentic self or find my life’s work. They’re just going to say the most popular opinion around, which they did; go to school and get a stable job.

But then, school won’t help you either. The idea of being your authentic self is not taught in schools.

School is just a system designed to train you to memorise and perform a single task for the rest of your life.

The government won’t help you either. In fact, the government has no feeling toward you. You’re just another one who drives the system.

So, how do you actually go about finding out who you really are? In this video I will share deep concepts that will help you with that question. The idea of an “authentic self” will be more clear to you by the end of this video. I do promise you that.

You’re A Creator Regardless

Let’s first understand the signs of not being the most authentic version of yourself:

• You’re not doing the work you truly desire.

• You’re not making as much money as you’d like.

• You don’t attract the right people into your life.

• You’re often in the wrong environment.

• Your health is not as good as it can be. Your happiness takes a downward turn.

Obviously there’s more but that’s the big picture. And if you experience any of those, that’s a sign you are inauthentic to yourself.

One quote which always seemed to have stood out to me:

The more I read into that quote, the more it becomes clear what Emerson was actually trying to say is being yourself (authentic) is practically going to be the most challenging task in life.

You don’t need me to tell you this. The world is always trying to make you into something you’re not. Don’t ask me why. The purpose of this video isn’t to find out why. The purpose of this video is to go inward to understand ourselves more and improve the situation from our own lens. Because that’s all you can do.

You can’t change anything in the world, but you can always choose what you want from it.

And just a side note but work is by far going to take up the majority of your life. I don’t care what you think. You are always going to be working on something. We are all creators. You are creating whether you like it or not. At your job, you are creating results for the company. I’m not sure if you are aware but you are somewhat contributing. They don’t have you there for no reason. It’s just likely that the work isn’t what you actually want to do.

That’s why authenticity is extremely important. Because authenticity unlocks purpose.

That’s one big reason you should attempt to find yourself, because as you do, you are also at the same time attempting to find your life’s work. Wouldn’t it be worth to know what you’ve been brought here to create? If so, recognise that you can’t find that without actually finding your true self. So, enough with the rambling. Let’s look at ways how you can be, rather than do.

1. Recognise your true self has and will always exist. It was present in the past, it is here now, and it will remain in the future.

I’ve always had trouble with this. I always thought that I could be myself sometime in the future. That my life had to change dramatically for me to start embodying my actual self. But that’s wrong because when you do that you’re simply numbing yourself because your future self isn’t a different self, it’s the same you. When you visualise, you aren’t visualising a different version of you, you are simply visualising the you that takes the actions that are more aligned with your inner world. You are visualising the version of you that is playing out the image of your authentic self.

If that got confusing, let’s make it simpler. If you’re asking who your authentic self is:

Your authentic self is your true thoughts and feelings in the moment.

So, first things first, you can start tapping into your authentic self simply by observing your present thoughts and feelings.

2. Recognise where you’ve disconnected or detached from your true self

This is where the problem gets big. You might not know who you are because you’ve suppressed your inner self for years, and instead took on other identities and personas in the effort to make your life better.

The reason as to why so many people say their lives are a mess is because they’ve buried the core parts of themselves. And when you do that you impact all areas of your life. Health, wealth, happiness, and love. But you see, it won’t just be evident in the external, you will also feel a lack of fulfilment internally.

I’ve already made a video on how to stop caring what others think. But the essence of that video just explains how you’re constantly trying to validate your self-image to the world.

You choose stimulation (excitement) over truth.

You’re attached to compliments. Things like how your family will compliment you if you did get that boring, but prestigious job. I’m not trying to demonise compliments here. The thing about compliments is that they’re good to the point you need them.

Compliments are valuable only as long as you feel you need them.

Because once you become attached to compliments, there is now a need and so you detach from truth.

When you give too much into others and the world, you’re sacrificing bits of you. But when you embrace your true self, you’re giving up parts of the world instead.

See how that works?

What this means is that there is a cost for being you. There is always a cost in a transaction. In this case the cost may mean that you have no friends, it may mean your spouse leaves you or you leave her, it may mean that you are lonely for a period of time. It may even mean that you are jobless. But if you are anything like me, what I would say is be yourself despite the cost.

Start this process of understanding yourself by asking yourself, do you really like the things you like or does someone else like them? Instead of acting, what would you actually be doing? The more you repeat questions like this to yourself, the more you will become authentic, and the more you will realise just how much your life is actually dictated by societal expectations. What I mean is how many rules have programmed your own mind.

So, we already know the bad habits that we don’t want to do, but give into. But quite often there is a bigger issue behind the bad habit.

So, binge-watch shows, eat junk food, go out drinking. Do it all. But then come back to yourself and process what it was that you were actually avoiding. Because giving into bad habits, we’re always avoiding something in exchange. Take part in the bad habit, but don’t let it go there. After doing it, come back, sit down, and contemplate what it was that you were avoiding. The bigger issue. Do this because there is no escape. You must revisit it. So do it intentionally.

Every time I seem to do this I realise how little the issue was. The good thing in this is that you will realise what you were actually avoiding was never intolerable. Meaning, that piece of work or whatever it is was, was never non-manageable. You were capable of it doing it all along.

3. Intentionally Seek Situations That Feel More Aligned With You

The people that are similar to you are doing what you want to be doing.

Here’s a few questions I want you to ask yourself:

• “What traits feel like a natural extension to me?”

• “what would someone like me be doing?”

• “Where would they be in the mornings?”

• “What would their day look like?”

• “Which events would they attend?”

• “What types of friends would they have?”

Keep asking yourself these questions because the people you want to surround yourself with, and the environments you want to be in, will be more clear to you once you’re honest.

4. Accept Discomfort And Stay Grounded In Challenging Situations

If you are not comfortable with certain situations, then what I would say is totally immerse yourself in that situation. Feel the discomfort.

Discomfort is a natural response to situations you aren’t feeling aligned with. You avoid discomfort when it is the very thing that will guide you to your authentic self.

The bigger the gap between how you’re behaving and how you’re actually feeling, the bigger the gap between your authentic and inauthentic self.

You accept things physically in the physical world, but hold back mentally in your internal world. There is a disconnection between the physical and the mental when instead they should be one.

We can talk about this in terms of your personal relationships. In the case of family relationships, friendships, work colleagues, or even when you’re on a date; when there is an awkward pause, there is disconnection. The larger the pause, the larger the disconnection you have with that person. And that just shows that you two do not connect. These are often moments we try controlling, but that’s wrong. Instead, just be fully present.

In any situation, especially one that doesn’t feel right, do not rush with false energy. You trying to control and fix is your inauthentic side coming into play. If you feel the disconnect, stop and ask yourself, how you can react most authentically while still keeping things under control.

It always comes back to how present you are. Especially when you feel guilt, shame, anxiety, loneliness, etc. Those are the times you must remain most present because those are the moments you are most split with your authentic self. Your inauthentic self wants to solve the problem immediately.

Summary

Those are the 4-steps. Let’s do a quick recap.

• Your true self is always there with you: connect with it by paying attention to your present thoughts and feelings

• Examine your bad habits to uncover the root causes behind them

• Seek environments and situations that feel like a natural extension to you

• Discomfort is the biggest indicator to areas you do not feel aligned

• Bridge the gap between how you think, behave, and feel to eliminate inauthenticity

A last note on all of this. If your present thoughts and feelings are your authenticity, and we know that your thoughts and feelings can change, this means your authenticity can change.

Being authentic is a continuous process.

The one way you can truly measure your authenticity is by looking at what you are settling for. That’s the one way you can truly measure how truthful you’re being to yourself.

Your version of happiness is going to be different in the different phases of your life, but you must define what being happy means to you in each of them. You can only be authentic when you know you’re happy doing the things you want to.

And I made this video because it’s hard. It’s hard when you’re inauthentic. But it’s even harder when your reality is not a reflection of your inner dialogue. And although I gave you steps and concepts, this is a lifetime process. There is no one solution. You have to make mistakes and in that understand yourself more. It’s a process. But in each mistake, or moment of inauthenticity, ensure to pattern interrupt and take the right course of action.

That’s all from me for this week.

You can also watch the video version of this on YouTube: Don’t Know Yourself? Here’s How To Discover Your Authentic Self

See you on the next one.

-Serkan

If there’s ever been a person so contradictory, so diverse, that his interests go a wide range of topics that’s me.

From a minor interest in music growing up, to a real drive for e-commerce, to wanting to learn how to code (yes, I was a part of a 12-month coding program), to venturing into finance, to dabbling with acting, and now all in on content creation.

I am probably going to be one of the most multi-passionate person you’ve ever come across, which is why this video is more important than ever. Because I haven’t just been this way for the past few years, I’ve been this way my entire life. Has it worked to benefit me or to my detriment? You will find out. Because as you can tell, I’ve got quite the advice to give on having multiple interests, how to go about managing them, and more importantly what not to do.

But before we start, please understand, no desire is wrong. You might have been raised up to believe that your feelings are fake. But I’m here to say that if you truly have an interest in an area, if it truly comes from you, then that feeling is real.

Feeling something in your body is as real as it gets.

I say that to say this. Anything that comes from the mind you can’t totally trust because it’s logical, it’s been wired in you from external forces. It’s reasoning.

This video will therefore not go against having multiple interests because the multi-passionate game is not one that should destroy you, but one that should build and prepare you for life. Because in life, nothing goes unnoticed. Every single thing counts. What you do and what you don’t do counts. The good counts and the bad counts. The aim is to be a lifelong student in the midst of all your interests. To see what hits home, and what doesn’t.

A part from those diverse interests I mentioned at the beginning, I still have the issue of juggling multiple interests now. Although I am pursuing what you would call writing, storytelling, marketing, branding – my mind still does go “should I try that other thing instead”. So, strap in, this one’s going to be long but at the end you should have a clear direction on what you need to do if you are anything like this. I will give you a process to follow that will help you if you are this type of person because I am too.

One thing I want you to do, however, is grab a pen and some paper and write down anything that makes sense. If at any part of this you have an “ah ha” moment, then write it down.

Now, let’s get straight to the problems of having multiple interests.

The biggest one is that when you are attracted to everything, or should I say every new thing, you don’t get to see how good you can be at one thing. And the main point here is how your focus is totally destroyed. You are doing it to yourself. When you approach multiple interests, your focus is literally splintered in multiple directions. And when that happens, you cannot really enjoy the fruits and labour of your work in one area. You cannot truly come to the end of something and see how good you can really be in that area.

Quite luckily, I can say that for myself I didn’t do all of the interests I had all at once. That would have been impossible.

But instead, I gave myself the time to:

• Understand why I felt a certain way about an interest

• Actually take the initiative to approach the interest

• Act on it long enough to discover whether it was truly for me or not.

You need to stay on something long enough to understand whether it is for you or not. That’s the important thing. When you do multiple things at once, you don’t have time for that.

To thrive in this new century, you must embrace being a polymath or a modern-day renaissance.

We no longer live in the past where you would master one thing. That doesn’t work now. Try it and you will realize how you can’t be one dimensional and succeed in this new age we live in. You must pursue and build yourself in all the interests you do have, because funnily enough, that’s what leads to success.

What’s more fascinating is how if you are self-aware, you will acknowledge how all of your interests somehow link. If you don’t see it now, you will soon.

Clearly from my own life, the one advice I can give you is to take one experience at a time. Don’t destroy focus. Don’t splinter your attention, because when you do, you get mediocre results. Split attention gives split results. Results you will not be impressed with. Another way of saying this; when you’re focused on everything, you get nothing.

And in fact, something even worse happens here. When you focus on everything, you end up dropping everything. Why? Because you are getting mediocre results. Why continue anything when you get mediocre results? Someone that gets results like that may commit for a while, but they won’t continue without at least decent results. And if you’re getting results like that with all of your interests because you’re pursuing all of them at once, you will eventually drop them all. I can almost guarantee it.

When Do Move On From An Interest?

What I would say is move on to other interests only when one has become repetitive, and you have become somewhat competent in that interest. This is extremely hard to do because at that level of being a master at one thing you get very comfortable. This is another problem. You master one interest and have now become very comfortable doing that one thing for a very long time.

However, that’s not the purpose of this video. If you are a multi-passionate, and highly likely you are if you’re watching this video, you have no problem pursuing different things. Because quite literally, that is our strength.

BUT, and this is BIG. The problem often isn’t that you have mastered and become comfortable at one interest, but rather you have multiple interests and don’t know how to choose or continue when you do start one. That’s the purpose of this video anyway.

And most people, like we discussed earlier don’t allow enough time for growth. There is a concept called “The Shiny Object Syndrome”, and before they become competent in one area, they are immediately attracted to the next thing. But that isn’t what you should do. What I’m saying you should do is become knowledgeable and experienced in the interest before you move on. It’s a process. If you have to force yourself to do something, then just drop it anyway because more often than not, you aren’t actually attracted to that interest but have rather been conditioned to become attracted to it. Remember the mind? Via the mind through reasoning and logic.

Therefore, the best way to pursue an interest is to see it like the beginning stages of a marriage. Hear me out. Strong interest in the beginning, strong interest during the honeymoon, and then interest gradually drops (at least that’s how I’ve heard it goes). Because the point where the interest drops is where you become knowledgeable and experienced through persistence and iteration. You see. The deeper you go the more you tap into the juices of the interest. And that’s what I want you to do. The moment it feels like a drag, persist and iterate. Don’t become attracted to the next new thing, stay on it and see it through.

The 50/50 Rule

What relates to this is what I call the 50/50 rule. I may have made this up, or I might have stolen it from someone else. But what I’ve realised from delving into multiple experiences is that in any endeavour, there is always going to be the 50% you love and the 50% you hate. It’s a part of the same coin, but different sides. This is what social media has fooled you into believing. That doing something you love will mean you definitely don’t have to do anything you dislike.

Wrong. In anything you do, there will always be the 50% you dislike. For example, a musician may love his/her work, but they still have to do things they dislike, like dealing with tax.

And so, here comes the harsh truth. Following an interest may not be fun. It certainly might feel fun at the beginning, but more often than not, the fun will wear off. What I know for certain from experience is that it will certainly not be fun “all the time”.

Valley Of Despair

A great way to describe this is with the Valley of Despair concept.

This is a concept in psychology and self-improvement which describes the process of having an interest, following it and the aftermath.

In anything that you pursue, there is always going to be a low point in growth. This happens when you get really high or excited on a goal. The interest will sooner or later begin to drop which is the valley. And if you’re asking when it sets in – when reality sets in, and progress feels slower, harder, or even stagnant. This is the stage everyone goes through, and is where you may feel overwhelmed, frustrated, or doubt your abilities.

The Valley of Despair shows you how much more you have to learn or improve.

It is the gap between initial excitement and actual progress.

And here we come to the idea of iteration and persistence yet again. What’s needed is persistence and resilience to push through to the other side, where “knowledge”, “experience”, and “mastery” becomes attainable.

Some might be at this stage a very long time. And if you’re asking how long it really lasts depends on what you’re pursuing:

• If you’re learning a new skill, it may take a few weeks to a few months

• If you’re going through a major lifestyle or personal change (e.g. career switch), it may take several months

• If you’re undergoing a very complex project or goal (e.g. building a business), it can take up to a year or more

Breaking through the Valley of Despair phase is the key to growth. I believe it’s actually “the lonely chapter” that most people go on about. And if you want to overcome it you will need grit, small wins, and consistent effort.

Reacting To Feelings Of Overwhelm

The other thing is you might be overwhelmed by how different your interests are. I’ve definitely had this (I think you can tell by the interests I pursued). So, on this feeling of overwhelm, what I would say is don’t put your focus on what your interests are, but instead the qualities that the interests bring.

Your interests might not be similar, and I think that’s the whole point. But what you’re forgetting is that almost all of your interests bring a similar-like quality. Me doing a 9-5 job and social media simultaneously developed the strong quality of me showing up. Because I literally have to show up for both. I had to upload videos and go into the office to work during weekdays. So, on this, focus on the transferable qualities and that will ultimately lessen how lost or overwhelmed you feel.

Solutions

I think I got everything off my chest. But what is the final solution? The solution is to continue being the generalist that you are, but with full focus on one thing.

There’s no harm in being a generalist and wanting to expand your expertise but make sure you do it with full focus. Otherwise, you are just wasting your time. A great example I can use that applies is content creation and how when you focus on one single social media platform, that’s when you tend to grow the most. But when your focus is divided to multiple platforms, you stall. This advice goes for any part of life. Don’t split your focus.

Take this process and mix it up however you like if you do have multiple interests:

1. Take the seasons approach: Add a timeframe for each passion. Give different interests a dedicated season. For example, focus on one interest for 3-6 months. This allows you to dive deep without neglecting your other core interests.

2. Do the 80/20 approach: Give 80% of your time to one core passion. And the other 20% to minor interests, like reading, working out, etc.

3. Create overlapping goals: Find the common ground that overlaps between interests. For example, I have a strong desire for business, writing, and speaking. So, I mix them and create content while building products that can help others. A combination of all (if you want to go deeper into how this all works, there is a free guide in the description.)

4. Do passion audits: Every few months reassess your interests. Identify which ones are still exciting and meaningful. Reallocate time and energy if certain ones feel less aligned.

If you are in your 20s, then I hope you realise that you have decades to go. Obviously no one knows when you’re going to die, but for the sake of this video let’s just say you have decades, like myself. And if that is the case, ask yourself, “why do I need to do everything now?”. Seriously, when I asked myself that question, everything got easier.

Take out a piece of paper, write down all of your interests and passions, and prioritise them. If maybe you have multiple ones that align, then you can combine.

You can’t get everything, it’s impossible. So let the low ranked priorities for later on in life. Not everything you’re interested in needs to be done now; it can be left for the future.

A final tip I would give is to focus on interests where you have a personal advantage. If you see something on the list where you think to yourself “no one can do this but me” this is where you’ve got an unfair advantage. It is your strength. So, make use of it.

That’s all I’ve got for now. If you do have strong desires of owning your life and work, and being a creative, there’s a link to a free guide below. Only do this if you are an online creative. It will teach you the basics of branding, persuasion, content, and marketing which are all foundational skills you need to be successful especially in our day and age. I can only help those doing what I do or have done in the past half a decade. Link in the description.

But just take a moment and look around at some of the most successful people of our time, do you think they just put in the actions, and that’s it?

No, because there is no point of action if there is no destination.

Before hard work, a destination must be somewhat clear.

It sounds like common sense but most people don’t have a destination in mind. In other words, they don’t know what they’re struggling for. And if that’s the case, in my opinion, I think you are better off doing nothing than purposeless action.

I mean that. Most people would perceive that as: “I don’t need to work”, but no, you aren’t going to achieve even the slightest bit without the work. I’m telling you to work, but on the right thing.

The only way you understand what’s right or wrong is if you choose the right destination from the very beginning and if it truly comes from you.

If your life sucks right now, then good. It’s meant to suck because you didn’t think your life through.

That’s why this letter is going to be important because most of your success will come from your level of thinking and strategy. And there is a right way and wrong way to go about it.

What’s the right way? It’s to acknowledge that you have full control. Because you have full control, you are the driver.

Now, imagine a driver that doesn’t know the destination?

You must have the bigger picture. You must have a vison. And then, and only then, can you re-engineer and work hard towards that vision.

I’ve been in many job interviews in the past and the one good thing I’ve noticed about job interviews is how they use that question very often: “where do you see yourself in 5 years”

You know what the surprising thing is? It’s the topic most people get stuck on.

Taking control of your life doesn’t mean to follow the crowd and do what everyone does. It’s a matter of strategic thinking. It’s about deciding where you see yourself in 5 years, in 5 months, and even in 5 days. And that should be backed by what you do today.

It’s stupid, because even when people plan out their life, they’re doing it with the opinions and values of others.

You are where you are because you’ve given into other people’s story of where you should be instead of giving into your own.

But the truth is that it’s never been about other people. It’s never been about competition. And I don’t say that to sound soft or give you a compliment. I’m saying it because I genuinely mean it.

It’s one of my strongest beliefs. Your biggest competitor is you. It’s never been other people. Why? Because you will battle more with yourself than any other person or the world for that case.

Life will always be a constant battle between your lower self and your higher self. Not other people.

You are your biggest enemy and if there’s anything that will throw you off your big vison, it’s you. Not other people.

Now let’s take a quick look into ways you fail to think and strategize. And yes, I’m talking from experience.

The first one is not being able to think in macro and micro terms. This is a skill. This is how you should think. Think macro (big things - big vision) and think micro (the little things – your daily routine).

You must jump back and forth between the macro and micro. For example, think about your big vision, and what you’re doing and what you aren’t doing to back that today.

Most people don’t do this. They either get motivated by the big vision and don’t act, or they just have no destination in mind, doing all the micro day-to-day things with no purpose.

You lack strategy if you can’t delay gratification.

You have no strategy if your strategy is to give into every little immediate fun.

You fail strategy if you are unaware of traps and dead-end avenues. You need to be able to see ahead months and even years from now. It doesn’t mean that you know everything, but you must have an idea of what’s coming. Think, what roadblocks or obstacles may there be on the journey to your destination?

That leads me on to intelligence. You may lack intel. You may assume you know everything, which is a disaster.

But like I say in every letter, information is power.

Your life purpose should be to build intel. Be open minded. Don’t only consume from one source but pull in multiple perspectives. Why shouldn’t you have knowledge that you can extract from multiple sources? It will only make you more credible.

One that I’ve struggled with my entire life is self-knowledge. To strategize means knowing yourself. How do you best learn? By reading? By listening to audios? Or by practically doing the task at hand? Study yourself. Study your own brain. I’ve found that I learn best by building.

You lack to think and strategize if you constantly chase the small prize rather the larger prize. You simply have the inability to estimate the worthiness of things. One thing I can pull from my own life is social media. I did short-form content for more than a few years, and what I realised is that I always took action that brought the small prizes.

But what I acknowledge now is how the bigger prize could be YouTube. Why? Not because it’s more prestigious to say I’m a YouTuber than a TikToker, but because I can give more value via a long-form video, and therefore create more impact. The more value you provide, the bigger the game you’re in. Always look one prize higher.

One final thing is how most people fix problems at the surface level, not at the root. Which is why you always have the same problems coming back. You are providing a temporary fix, not a permanent one. Always solve problems at the root.

These are just some of the ways you might be fuc*ing up. So, what’s the proper way to think and strategize? I’ve got 6 steps for you.

1. Intention

The first step of strategic thinking is your intention.

What is the ultimate thing you’re striving for? Have you ever thought about it? The outcome you are aiming to reach? If you can’t tell what it is then you’ve already failed strategic thinking because you have no intent on what you actually want. No intent, no strategy.

Be specific with what you want. Not vague.

Back in the past, when countries would go to war, they all had specific a intention. They would not sacrifice lives for no specific outcome. Same goes for you, don’t live a life with no intent. Start with intent, then backward engineer what you must do.

I’ve been banging on about destination because if there is no destination, then any turn in any way would be sufficient. Don’t let that be you. You need a vision. Most people don’t have this and no wonder why they lack motivation and results.

That big vision might change. But every time it does, you must align your daily doings with that big vision. Macro and micro, remember? If macro changes, go back to micro (the small things) and align. Believe it or not, this is how most successful people accomplish things that seem impossible to the average person. They start with strong intent.

2. Awareness And Planning

Now that you have figured out your intention, you have a foundation. But you need to go internal, and allocate your time, attention, and energy. That means having awareness and planning. Where is your time, attention, and energy going? Life will forever be dynamic and fluid. It will never be static. It is constantly changing, and you must be aware and anticipate the changes.

Like I mentioned (especially for the business people out there), you can do all the competitor analysis, but I want you to remember that the real competition is you. Not other people.

Are you anticipating the responses of your lower self when you’re trying to excel and grow? Are you anticipating how your mind will bring resistance, excuses, and trick you from achieving your intention?

3. Preparation Of Resources

This one’s for all the people who fail to plan, and therefore plan to fail. It was me for a very long time.

Preparation of resources.

You need to think about resources. Your actions and what you can do will be limited if you have no reserves.

Most people don’t think about reserves.

If we bring it back to the war analogy, back in war times, those countries who hadn’t thought about resources were wiped out in an instant. Because they had no troop flexibility, armour, food, supply etc.

Again, go internal. Look at your level of training, experience, hard work, discipline, unique capabilities etc. Do you know your strengths and weaknesses? This is all self-improvement is.

You need to develop yourself internally to the point of handling any and all external circumstances.

4. Focused Effort

This is by far the most important one. Focused effort. One similarity between war and real life is how the breakthrough in both come via a weak point.

In order to win a battle, you must apply focused force at a point that breaks through to victory.

How does this look like in real life? Well, look at where you are focusing your efforts.

Some people say they lack in time, energy, and attention. But on the contrary, I would say you have so much time, energy, and attention.

How are you concentrating those? Where are you putting all your eggs? Into which basket? The right one or the wrong one?

You can’t do 20 things at once. Nothing moves forward. Everyone has limited resources, like we spoke about in the previous step. You must concentrate your resources and efforts properly.

5. Organised Action

Now, it’s all about discipline.

Once you’ve got your intentions, planning, resources and where to focus your efforts, you now need to execute, or in other words, organised action.

I don’t know what it is that you’re doing so I’m not going to talk much on this. But just remember that a great plan poorly executed leads to failure. This is also true the other way, great execution with a poor plan also leads to failure. You need great planning and great execution.

This can take years. It just comes down to how bad you want it, as well as your practise of getting good at executing.

Get good at getting shit done...

• Record the video

• Create the art

• Learn to play that instrument

• Code that program

Do it over and over again, and you will execute without even asking yourself to.

6. Flexibility & Adaptability

No one knows what will happen in the near future. That’s why the last step is to remain adaptable.

Strategy isn’t saying one thing and sticking with it for years.

Proper strategy is being flexible and adaptable.

Why? Because you can’t change the environment, but the environment will constantly change.

The battlefield might look like one thing today and a completely different thing tomorrow. You must adapt to different scenarios.

I’m telling you; your plan will change. Don’t be attached, rigid or dogmatic to anything, and be adaptable to almost everything. It goes for everyone who does business. If your business plan fails, then you must go in a different direction. You must be flexible enough to change every now and then from the original idea.

Being adaptable and flexible means being open minded.

Those are the 6 steps I found to be most useful for strategic thinking.

I hope you haven’t just read this and done nothing. I hope you haven’t just listened to the things I’ve said but studied it and made notes of it. Why? Because you must feed the information into your subconscious mind. Only then does things start to take effect.

Also, don’t just accept what I say. I know a lot of creators are arrogant in that sense. But think about whether you agree or disagree, and how you can incorporate it into your own worldview, because everyone has one. See if it aligns with your values.

The simple summary is that every single move you make must have purpose. You must think where is this current step leading me? And does it fit into the bigger picture?

It’s not hard. All you have to do is think about where you want to go (destination) and ensure everything you do today and onwards is setting you up for the life that you want and be flexible enough to adapt.

This isn’t just about your work. This applies to success in general. Apply strategy to relationships, raising children, workout routines, and everything else.

Most people in life never get that raw feeling of passion in some sort of work or endeavour. That really just comes down to your lack of ability to be your authentic self.

People who are authentic see passion right in front of them in anything they do. It’s everywhere. It’s in their work. It’s in their relationships. It’s in the sports and exercises they do. Etc.

Passion is the highest expression of inner fulfilment, sparked only when you are driven by your truest self.

And I want to start this by saying authenticity is at the root of having passion in your life. But there’s much more to it. I want to clarify that purpose, passion, they’re all the same thing. They’re all just chasing the feeling of fulfilment that’s closely aligned with your highest authentic self.

99% of people don’t really start with or have passion from the beginning. It’s normal.

One of the most important things you need to note is that you create passion in your life, it starts with you.

This is also often the reason why people doom scroll all day; they’re searching for passion but can never really find it. You know what the problem is here? It isn’t scrolling. You can still scroll and intentionally learn in the process.

The problem is that people doom scroll in search of the passion that’s missing in their own lives.

That’s the harsh truth. The problem isn’t your phone, but the comfort zone you’ve built around it.

Most people are seeking that hit of external, extrinsic hit of passion, yet they forget to realise that it is an internal, intrinsic feeling. It’s a doing activity, not a static, comfort-driven activity.

It is something you partially discover and partially create.

It takes time and effort, something you strive towards.

I’m not going to tell you finding your passion is going to be easy because doing the work is literally finding your passion. It’s hard. It’s time and energy consuming, which is why most people never really get to finding it. It’s going to have to take every bit of you. Like wanting a six-pack in the gym, the process isn’t going to be easy. Constant effort and showing up is what it takes to find your passion.

Creative Failure

Let’s take a quick look at stats to show what I’m saying here isn’t just talk and how most people often do tend to quit before they get what they’ve been looking for:

• 60-70% of YouTube channels become inactive after the first year of starting

• Users stop posting on TikTok within the first 6 months

• Only 14% consistently publish regularly on Convert Kit

Let me tell you this because no one will.

You are not going to find your passion in 6-12 months. You can improve your life and mental health in 6-12 months, but to find your life’s work it is going to take much more than that.

All these people in the stats started off with seeking something. They had a burning desire in something, otherwise they would not have started. And for some content creation just might not have been for them, and that might have led on to something else that might have been for them. But for the majority of people in those stats, they just didn’t try and seek hard enough.

Some people may point to the algorithm and luck, but there is something much bigger going on, something on the individual level that is the obstacle.

These studies were based on content creation, but even outside of that, it isn’t about trying to make the algorithm work for you; but instead, shaping yourself into the person that doesn’t rely on algorithms or any sort of external system of that matter in the first place.

That is why in this letter we are going to dive deep into the ideologies that you can take on to find your passion, and even if you haven’t started exploring, how you can work on finding it.

Because once you do, I can promise you that it is one of the most rewarding feeling you could ever feel.

Who Are You?

The utmost foundation and basics come down to knowing yourself. Everything does. In order to know your passion, you must know yourself first. High chances you don’t know your passion because you don’t know who you are. The thing is, if you did know exactly who you were, your passion would be obvious driving your entire life.

And for some, it really is that way. Athletes didn’t have to find their passion because they knew who they were from the very beginning as a kid. That passion drove their entire life.

And if you aren’t in that position, then everything that has happened to you up until now has been driven by an inauthentic self. I want you to realize that whichever position you are in, an inauthentic side of you has been driving you to that position. Because in the opposite direction of purposeful, meaningful work is unfulfilling work. In the opposite direction of an authentic self, there is an inauthentic self.

It always comes back to authenticity when it is your life’s work.

And the ultimate solution is to find out who you are. If I could tell you one thing, it would be to develop a strong sense of understanding your identity. Develop it. Because you are going to need it in every aspect of your life.

If you have locked yourself up your entire life, closed yourself off to experience, right there lies your answer. Because experience is what shapes you. And if you lack experience, you lack understanding of yourself.

How can you choose a favourite in anything if you haven’t experienced enough of it?

You can’t.

You don’t know your favourite meal on the menu because you haven’t tried the different types of food on it. Same thing goes with passion. You can’t discover your passion without gaining enough experience.

The goal is to steer away from what you dislike and move towards what resonates with you. To honour and move in the direction of your most natural authentic desires.

I’m not saying to quit whatever it is you are currently doing but make an attempt to find the little pieces of you bit by bit, day by day.

EDIM Model

I personally follow what I call the EDIM Model, which stands for Experience-Driven Iteration Model.

You can literally see bits of my life documented online as proof.

Prior to writing online in 2026, I tried multiple creative endeavours. When I was around 17 (that would be 2017), I tried music. A very small part of my life but I thought I was going to be a musician. That failed.

In 2018, I delved into E-commerce where I bought a course for $175 and had absolutely no idea what I was doing. That came crashing down.

The experiences, however, put me in a certain direction and taught me that I wanted to be somewhat creative and make money online.

All of this was happening at the same time I was studying to get into Finance.

From 2018 to 2020 I started taking a very strong interest in film and acting. I attended short films and music videos around London, and even did some acting online (which you can see on my TikTok).

I built that account to 1 million followers, which is where it hit, I understood I wanted to be an online creative. And I do still have somewhat of an interest in film, but not more than creating online.

But each step I was trying to understand myself and really find where my strengths are.

What I want you to know is that each experience has led me to this moment talking to you because I went out of my way to experience and iterate. That’s the model. See what I didn’t like, to discover what I do.

Only now, after almost 7 years, I’m getting a slight sense of deep passion for what I do. With my experiences, again, I followed what I was good at.

The secret to discovering what you want to create lies in what you regularly consume.

Every endeavour I put my mind to was because I consumed it first.

• I tried music because I loved listening to music

• I tried e-commerce because I looked up to money-making mentors online

• I tried acting because I got inspired by actors.

You can probably guess what I’m doing now.

Business. Content and marketing. Spirituality and conciousness. It’s because nowadays I consume a lot of this stuff. But with each experience, I realised it was something creative that I was doing.

It all kind of connects.

I mention this model because yes, although I’m somewhat doing what I love, my experiences look like a mess. But what you need to realise is that I followed my weird sensations and contradicted myself like four times before getting here. You must go at it; it isn’t going to come to you.

What makes you weird makes you great. Your contradictions are what sets you apart and makes you truly special.

I’ve always said this and have a strong belief around this.

That doesn’t mean you have to do I what I did and try a million things. They were my interests. It means to follow your most deeply felt current authentic desires and see where it takes you. Move in one direction and adjust as you go.

Find *Your* Passion

So, here are the best ways to find your passion and ultimately discover yourself.

The first that comes straight to my mind is reading. Reading will open you to new ways of thinking that you can’t even imagine. Read as much as you can. It is super underrated, especially in our day and age. Having the opportunity to explore the minds and experiences of many great people is a privilege.

You will be amazed at how the wisdom of strangers can guide you more than the people present in your own life.

The next thing is to travel as much as you can. Travel to as many different places as you can, and even better, live there. Soak in everything the world has to offer. If you’ve lived in the same small town, or the same big city your entire life, you are closed off to experience. Living in different places will open you up to all kinds of things. Just by doing that, you will also get to socialise and meet new people. Explore new minds and expand your horizon of thought-thinking.

You feel stuck because you have confined yourself geographically, and to the narrow-minded.

So when you can, go travel.

The next thing is a contradiction to what I’ve just said but spend time in solitude. Isolate yourself at times to meet your higher self.

The reason my advice is very contradictory is because I’m getting it from different parts of my life. What I would say is, if you lack experience in things like socialising, if you have isolated yourself for a long time, then travel and meet new people. However, if you lack alone time and are always around people, embrace solitude. Don’t stay too much in one or the other.

Other ways include trying different jobs or trying new things in general. If you’ve been at the same job your entire life then you’re really not open to what you could possibly accomplish elsewhere. If you’re always doing the same things, you’re probably closing yourself off to things you may enjoy. Don’t be afraid of change, be afraid of staying the same.

Don’t fear failure, fear remaining in the same spot a few years down the line.

Summary

Let’s do a quick recap.

• Put in the work, that is where you find passion

• Always decide first, then adapt, your life’s work could be waiting just beyond your latest setback

• Focus on authenticity: develop a very strong sense of your core identity

• Experience your utmost authentic desires to let you know your favourite of things

• Follow EDIM: What makes you weird, makes you great. Be the contradiction!

• Read books, buy courses, attend workshops, whatever it takes to consume quality information

• Embrace new environments and soak in everything the world has to offer

• Forget about it all, come back to solitude and connect with your higher self

The big purpose of life is infinite continuous self-improvement. And the longer you play, the clearer your big purpose becomes. Even when I was at school, I was attending acting gigs.

Delve into your desires. Make sure to schedule things. Become organised.

And remember, what makes you weird what makes you great. Most people shy away from their contradiction which blinds their uniqueness. When in the real world, people don’t tune in for what you have to say, but instead for your unique voice.

People don’t tune in for your story, they tune in because they see themselves in your story.

And you can only allow people to see themselves in your story if you are speaking the truth and being authentic.

If you are a creative, I’ve got a free guide in the description that’ll teach you how to bring your creativity online. It will teach you branding, persuasion, content, and marketing. Basically, how I’ve managed to build myself a career online and how you can do the same.

Creator Business Essentials

Remember, the moment you know you’ve found your passion is the moment most of your problems will dissolve.

If you must sacrifice it all, this is your sign. Do it.

But I do struggle in avoiding the bad habits due to boredom and simply a lot of free time.

If you’re anything like me, you have no problem doing the good things, but there is literally 24 hours in a day, and that is a lot of time to give in to the bad habits.

And I hadn’t thought of boredom as a good or bad thing, until recently where I discovered it is a common experience that will either help you or destroy you.

Scientists have mentioned how the experience plays a role in everything, from drug addiction to academic failure.

This means boredom is so strong that it may have a part in you giving into drugs or failing life. If that’s not enough of a wake-up call, this is how some philosophers described the term:

I believe there are polar opposites in everything.

If boredom destroys one’s life, on the other side, it changes someone’s life for the better.

So, I don’t want to be misunderstood.

This isn’t me saying free time is bad; that’s why some studies suggest boredom can have positive outcomes, igniting creativity as it gives the mind free space to wander.

But the majority of research points at how it does more to affect our lives negatively than help.

And that is my personal problem with self-help. Everyone keeps glamorising and talking on the good habits, but I tend to think what you don’t do is better than what you do. What you say “NO” to is greater than what you say “YES” to. Or simply, your no is what makes you powerful, not your yeses.

But back to topic, the same study went on to say many of us would take pain over boredom, and although I didn’t believe, the study discovered how:

Here’s a link to the study if you want to check it out: https://news.columbia.edu/news/why-being-bored-can-be-hazardous-your-health

That’s why I’m writing on this topic. To share some tips on what you can really do when you do get that free time.

Concepts that have allowed me to use boredom to my advantage.

All so that hopefully you don’t fall and become susceptible to depression, anxiety, anger, academic failure, poor work performance, loneliness and isolation which the study predicts will be the case if you follow the wrong tail of boredom.

Be Bored

So, where we want to be is on the side of the study where boredom in fact helps us be more creative.

Because acknowledge that person can be you. How you don’t need to let into every distraction your monkey brain tells you to when you are bored.

As soon as that deadly feeling of boredom hits, I want you to sit with it. Give yourself the permission to be bored.

I know your entire life, like me, you have been wired to be on the go. Achieve all wordily success, right? But for this very moment, go against those beliefs.

A nice quote which sits nicely with everything I’m saying:

That is to say that who outperforms who is purely determined by who utilises boredom.

When people go into this mode, it is either:

1. “Why am I feeling this way? I need to immediately find something to do!”

or:

2. “My mind is the most powerful thing on earth, I’m just going to allow it to roam free and wander.”

It is powerful to give your mind space to drift.

That’s why you often get the best ideas in the shower, walking, working out or just whenever you are not too focused.

An undeniable fact is that true creativity is not born in distraction, but rather when you let your mind wander into the unknown.

If you still aren’t convinced, ask yourself why you see some people working 2-3 jobs and they are outperformed by the person working one.

There is something special to being committed to one goal and allowing your mind to extract the why’s and how’s of that goal via intentional learning.

The Good Old Times

What’s weird to think about is how our ancestors had this gift that we don’t (well, we do, but it’s become harder than ever to practise it.)

When our grandparents got bored, they had the gift of staring into the distance and literally doing nothing.

That was the normality for them.

They had the gift of meditating on their thoughts.

Meditation doesn’t have to be something where you sit down and close your eyes. Meditation simply just means silence and solitude.

The reason I said we don’t have this gift is because we are in constant stimulation. And it is super hard to break out of it.

In this, I recommend you to meditate. Go into a meditation state daily, whether it’s for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, or a long period.

Because meditation will show you how you may think you’re great, but you’re actually not. When all the thoughts come flooding in you will realise how weak you actually are in this world of constant stimulation which gets you to believe you’re powerful.

I don’t want this to be an article on meditation so let’s leave it at that.

The Problem Is The Solution

I think this is the only time where I will say the problem is the solution. The problem is boredom, the solution is to be bored.

The reason you do the opposite is because it’s so much easier to do so. It’s so much easier to look into books, movies, gurus, YouTube videos.

But understand that the biggest vehicle is you and what you bring. And as vague as that sounds, the problem is you and the solution is you. Look inwards.

The get very emotional on topics like this because boredom was never to look outward, but instead to go inward. But you’re never taught how.

We’ve all been busy memorising useless things like the isosceles triangle in classrooms.

Let this be a time where you allow room for your brain to roam free. That will ultimately lead you to recognising what you’ve put off. Because all of us have put off something.

Maybe it’s an activity you really wanted to learn.

Maybe you’re still contemplating on writing the next chapter of that book.

Allow your mind to wander and find that thing, and when you do, make that your boredom.

Make the thing you’ve put off for so long your boredom.

And this is the tricky part.

We want to be on the good side of boredom, and it is good to be bored doing nothing than giving into distraction, but do not stay there.

Because what often happens is you get so attached to doing nothing that you become nothing.

There is always the right time to let your mind wander and roam free, but then come back to the most meaningful work in your life, your craft, and make that your boredom. Not the distractions.

Because I don’t know about you, but for me, there gets to a point where I can’t just sit about and do nothing. We need to do something. It is in your nature to do meaningful work. Some sort of work that is going to be of impact.

Let Your Environment Suit Your Work

At this point, we’ve learned to sit in boredom when it hits, do some sort of meaningful work and make that your boredom, because you can’t just sit and do nothing.

But then distractions are still going to be there, which is the thing that is going to taunt your entire process of dealing with boredom.

So, fix your environment to suits your goals.

You will always gravitate to the most stimulating thing in your environment.

Let’s use the example of your room.

Think about the most stimulating thing in your room and recognise it is what you will naturally gravitate towards regardless.

You will always gravitate towards the thing in your environment that is of the most stimulation.

If you want to master your craft, intentionally learn and create, then you must shape your environment to what you want to become.

Your environment reflects you.

Notice how I said you gravitate towards the most stimulating thing?

If what you have in your room are video games, but on the other side of the room are books, you are naturally going to gravitate towards the video games because that is what’s more stimulating.

In this concept I’m talking about, notice that anything can be made fun, and anything can be made boring.

Test it out for yourself.

Remove your smart phone, video games, laptop, computer or any distraction from your room and see how books (that’s if you have any in your room to begin with) will all of a sudden become the most stimulating, fun thing in the room.

The only reason your work is boring (not a 9-5, but the thing you’ve put off for so long time), is because of the stimulants in your life.

Remove the distractions, and your work becomes the most fun thing.

I’m not going to give you a step-by-step process, I think you understand the concept.

Intentionally eliminate distraction and pursue the work you truly desire and make that your boredom so that it becomes the most fun thing.

And recognise that you will always snap back to the most fun thing in your environment.

Power is good

I want to finish this off with an idea on power.

Don’t give into the BS that power is bad.

Recognise how absolutely anything you do is for the power of something.

Just on the personal level:

• You meditate for a more powerful mind

• You exercise for a more powerful body

Power is good. Don’t be misled to believing it isn’t.

Because the opposite of power is something you definitely want to avoid. It’s corruption. Passive aggressiveness.

It’s seeing good in the world and the good in you but deciding not to partake in it.

The opposite of power is weakness.

Boredom is what leads to power.

Embrace boredom to make a positive difference in the world.

A survey was given to young people based on the question “what would you like to be when you grow up?”

These were the results.

For male teenagers:

• 12% listed professional athlete as their preferred career

• 11% wanted to become an online creator.

For females:

• 13% wanted to become a medical professional

• 11% put actress as their dream job.

Overall, YouTuber and blogger made top five for both genders.

Now to be fair with you I’m not surprised with those numbers.

The reason content creation is so highly admired isn’t because of the fame or the money (although they’re not bad things).

But the real reason on a psychological level is because it is the form of work that fulfils your most basic human need, which is freedom.

Think about it. When you create content, you decide when you create and what you create.

Anything other than you controlling your own time and work is slavery.

Yup. I said it, slavery still exists, it’s just that you are given something in exchange for it, like a house or a car.

That’s why a simple, yet very meaningful study cannot be overlooked.

I guarantee if that question was given to people in their late 20s or 30s the results would be very different. That’s because most of those people are already wired to say what society wants them to say.

But unlike adults, when a question is forwarded to young people, they don’t hold back from what’s important to them. The results will be natural because they aren’t yet entirely wired and are in their most authentic state.

This tells us two things:

1. The online economy will continue to grow whether you like it or not

2. The interest coming from both genders means any type of online creative work will be desired in the future.

And you might say, yes, but everyone can’t be a YouTuber or an online creator. Well, you’re forgetting the point. The point is to use and utilise the internet, what you are and what you want do does not matter, that is unique to each person.

Everyone has unique interests and passions.

As you can probably see on the internet:

• Some people make film reviews

• Some people make sport reviews

• Others make videos on meditation and spirituality

The internet is just a platform where you play out your interests and passions.

Content creation is not saturated. It will never be saturated.

As long as people change, content will change.

Meaning as long as content changes, people will continue watching others.

So, you may ask, why mention all of that in a blog that’s practically about caring less.

It’s because everything starts here.

For majority of people, their desired dream job will never end up happening because of their inability to stop caring about what others think. You see.

Others judging you for who you are is just one part of the entire process. But it is the hurdle most people get stuck at.

And before I mention anything else, just realise that caring too much about others is just one negative experience you need to become accustomed to get to the next stage.

It’s always been like that in life.

Positive experiences only come to you depending on how good you are at tolerating the negative ones.

They come after one another.

In simpler terms, the quality of your life will depend on your ability to manage tough times.

Now, let’s dive into the 4 different ways I’ve personally stopped caring long time ago, and how you can do the same.

1. Be Comfortable With Being Different

The world has engrained in you that being different is bad. Let’s be honest. It’s just the way humans are structured.

From the classes you went to, to the clubs you supported, to the games you played, to the films you watched; you wanted to be like everyone else, you wanted to pick the most popular of everything because that’s what you thought was right.

I don’t blame you. But that’s the thing.

Do what everyone does, you get the same result. Do what’s different, you get a different result.

It’s funny but we wouldn’t need self-improvement if everyone could just think for themselves.

If something unknown was to come to this world, say an alien from space, and I was to give them advice on humans, it would be to see them as mine traps. Everywhere you go, everything you see is a belief or an ideology from someone else. And the trick is to fall under these traps (belief systems). Once you do, you can’t truly think for yourself.

And before you say anything, no, the answer is not to be a monk, because they’ve got their own belief systems… See where I’m coming from?

The prescription is to start taking routes you believe to be right, regardless if it is different or not.

On a deeper level, the only reason content creation is highly desired (proved by that study we mentioned at the start), is because it is a way of work where people can truly embrace the real version of themselves.

It isn’t about content creation; it’s about being a creator of your own path.

Start embracing difference. Start to be very comfortable with being different, and you will realise you care less about what others think.

When you get a very weird desire in your mind that makes you excited, before you distract yourself with:

• “oh, this is very different”

• “this has never worked before”

• “I better stay in line with everyone else”

Do the thing.

Don’t think about it.

Because it is often your contradictions that will make you unique and successful.

2. Focus On Values, Not People

The next point is to go inward on your values.

The main problem with self-improvement and self-help is that it discards values.

There have been very egotistical people on social media who won’t get this perspective.

You have different values to me. I have different values to others. Although I’m giving you advice, your values may not align with my advice.

I believe there’s right and wrong in the world, we can’t deny that, but one advice fit for all is the biggest BS I’ve ever heard.

Just from the pure fact that everyone is different.

Let me give you an example.

Most people are against the school system, which in the big picture, is just one-way of learning, right? But those people who are against it often do the same thing they’re against. They try giving people advice saying that their one-way of doing something is the only way.

No.

People need to experiment with that piece of advice, it will work for some, it won’t for others.

Values differentiate people.

To really know someone and give them advice you must know their values first.

This is a big problem, and I’ll tell you how it all links to you caring about others.

Don’t focus on people because when you do, you go into their imagination.

Think about how ridiculous this sounds for a moment.

You steer your life in the direction based on another person’s imagination and values.

You are motivating a thought that occurred in their brain.

Even other people are not where they're supposed to be because they have followed others.

They are not where their values are, you see.

You are entirely misdirecting yourself when you put the focus on people, because people are not where they are supposed to be.

To improve yourself is not to be exactly like your favourite YouTuber or idol. You can be inspired. But you are not entirely like him or her.

Because you, my friend, might have different values to them.

The lesson is to learn from people, take a step back, measure it against your own values and see what aligns and what doesn’t.

It is impossible. Absolutely impossible. To have meaning, be purposeful, or do something for the greater good when you are going against your own values.

Just ask yourself that question before caring about what another person has to say, “if I’m going against my own values, how could I possibly provide the greatest good for others?”

You can’t.

You must be you first to actually bring something to the world.

3. Bring Meaning To What You Are Pursuing

The brutal fact is that you are human. You care. Things matter, right?

Let’s not trick ourselves into believing that we do not care, because deep down it is in our nature to care.

We’re emotional beings.

But it’s never been about not caring what others think, it’s always about choosing the thing you want to give the most f**k about.

That is the process you need to follow.

Don’t just follow anyone’s advice and be careless about it.

Choose what you want to care about the most, take a step back, and discard all else that does not align with what you care about.

The only reason you mind the opinions of others is because the thing you are pursuing lacks meaning.

If it was extremely important, if your desire for it was that strong, you wouldn’t care about others.

In fact, you wouldn’t care about the external entirely.

That’s why you need to decide on a vision.

The most successful people do this.

They decide on an outcome (a vision), and they feel eager, energised and excited driving towards that outcome day in day out until they reach it.

If you have no vision, you have nothing to strive for. A person that is still is not moving. And when you’re not moving you have nowhere to go, and no option but to fall into the imaginations of other because you quite frankly don’t have one.

See how it all links?

It’s okay to care about what others think, but not the extent that they swim in your own imagination.

And to tell the truth, most of the time you aren’t really looking for someone else’s feedback, but you are rather looking for validation.

One of the simplest forms you can tackle this is to praise your own work before anyone else does. Feel that what you are pursuing and bringing to the world has meaning before anyone else sees it. That’s the point where you are no longer begging for validation.

4. Did Someone Else Ever Truly Fulfil You?

I had this very weird realisation the past few days. And I want these blogs to be thought-provoking, so I want to ask you this question.

You might think that someone else can give you this thing, right?

Whether it be love, money, or anything material based that can truly fulfil you.

But have a think back in your past.

Maybe you got that relationship you always wanted. Or you got the job offer you wish someone would just give you.

Think about a time you extremely wished the external would give you something and think about when you got it.

Did it really fulfil you, forever?

I know it didn’t because you’re here reading a blog on how not to care what others think.

There is nothing that someone else can give you that will be of high value.

I’m talking about infinite value here.

And when I was thinking, I realised, no one can offer me that continuous fulfilment because only I can do that. Only you can give that to yourself.

And the way to do that is to ultimately stick to your own path and values.

I want to dig deep into your subconscious the idea of your own values.

The only true fulfilment will come through that.

Crafting out your own dream life, because it is aligned with every bit of you.

Solutions

I want to close this with a set of solutions and practical advice.

The first thing you should do is acknowledge what you have been doing your entire life is not working.

If that means you have been people pleasing or caring about every single person’s opinion and in that seeking validation, it is not working.

Only the truth will allow you to move on.

You can’t make right what’s not been working for you your entire life.

It’s a bit common sense, that if you are trying to please others, it’s a dead end.

You cannot appeal to everyone.

Never.

It’s never worked and it will never work.

I can prove this by the law of average.

Which is that the more success you reap, the tougher skin you must have. As the more people who know about you, the more people find a reason to hate about you.

So, just understand that it is not a viable strategy.

So, why not choose a different strategy? Why not choose a different plan?

Which is that if you want to chase after your dream life, an extraordinary life I’m assuming (I say extraordinary, because it is something ordinary people will not understand), then you need to be in the middle.

Being in the middle means to be independent of both the good and the bad.

That is the only thing you can do.

To stick to your own values, the right and wrong for you, be grounded in them and take actions aligned with them, not others imagination and thoughts.

In this strategy, you need to know what you want from life, and once you do, give meaning to that thing.

Make the meaning of it powerful.

Another very strong reason as to why the strategy of people pleasing will not work is because people admire authenticity, not fakeness.

So, you are literally shooting yourself on the foot from the beginning when you try to appeal to everyone, when that isn’t what everyone finds attractive, right?

When you’re authentic, you can’t go wrong.

Because you aren’t hiding the things that are unique and special about you.

Let’s recap.

Choose a vision. What are you willing to struggle over? Decide the pains you are willing to suffer for. If you have the wrong goal (likely to be created via the imagination of others), then realise that you are fu**ed because you are on the wrong train to the wrong destination. You are going nowhere. So, change your course of action.

Because remember, you are always choosing, whether you like it or not. So, choose the right thing.

And, once you do, go against the grain.

Whatever it is. Don’t try to be normal.

And please, the moment you realise you’re being fake and not authentic, stop and correct your course of action.

Hope you enjoyed.

If you want more from me, you can read my other letters.

Apart from that, I also have the SoloCreator Foundations, a free guide on how to launch a creator business in 2026 (the right way) by learning the basics of branding, persuasion, content, and marketing. Link is below.

Cheers!

https://stan.store/SerkanKozkiran/p/cbe

You should know what work to do for the rest of your life.

You should be in your comfort zone because that’s exactly where you will see personal growth.

You shouldn’t try new things and explore yourself because you know exactly what you’re doing.

You should sacrifice your health to do other useless work.

You should not learn or educate yourself any further because what you have learnt in the first 20 years of your life is sufficient enough for the rest of your life.

There is a good reason why none of what I mentioned actually matters in your 20s, and why you should do the opposite.

The purpose of your 20s isn’t to know what you’re doing, it’s to not know what you’re doing.

In this phase of your life, nothing should make sense. You might have bit of success with something, maybe a job or a side hustle, but again, that feeling will return.

And now I want you to understand that it’s easier than ever to waste your time and to distract yourself with meaningless things.

Don’t overlook what I’ve just said, if you take a moment to look around you, everything is a distraction. But if there is an extreme of one thing, on the other side, there’s an extreme of something else.

If you are self-aware, you will notice that it is also a time of technological advancement. Which means growth and opportunity.

In your 20s you should try multiple things. You should try to figure out what you enjoy and what you don’t enjoy.

Also, it’s okay to be a generalist. However, you will need to always keep these 3 broad rules in mind.

The 3 rules that will help you have order and meaning in your 20s, but most importantly, life in general. The 3 rules that will build your life up from the mind, body, and spirit.

Because if your life has lost sense and touch, you have lost sense and touch of what matters to you.

You feel lost because you don’t have meaning.

Now don’t get it mixed up. There’s a difference between not trying and feeling stuck and attempting to have a go at life, but still feeling stuck. In the second scenario you’re actually trying to craft purpose. You question reality.

The problem only arises when you expect that meaning from others.

You expect it from the government, parents, spouse, friends, boss. You think external things bring meaning, whereas meaning starts with you.

That’s why people who claim life has no meaning are often right. What they tend to overlook, however, is they’re the ones who bring meaning to life.

Everything points back to you.

Rule 1) Self-Education

The first rule is self-education. There is no way around it. In order to build in your 20s, you must start by building your mind.

This doesn’t mean read 100 books. Everyone is different. Everyone may look similar on the surface level, but if you really got to know each person on an individual level, you would notice how unique each person is.

You for example, could learn from watching videos. Or it could be from doing the task at hand. You could learn from teaching others.

This is what your 20s should focus on, figuring out how you best learn. And then diving into your curiosities and learning everything about it.

Do this because nothing can be built if it hasn’t first been learnt. Forget everything you know up until now because it won’t take you any further than where you are.

Ultimately, you are where you are because of the education you have. If you want to go somewhere else, you need to build your mind to the intellectual extent that is required of your destination.

For example, if you want to master social media, so that you can earn an income online and never have to depend on anyone else ever again, you will need to learn from those above you who know how to do just that.

Whichever domain you want to master, learn from the people above you in that area.

By the way, this is what you’ve been doing your entire life. Learning things you didn’t want to learn from people you didn’t want to be like.

For example, going to university and studying something from someone (a professor) you didn’t really care about.

So, what I’m saying isn’t any different than what you’ve been doing.

This is why the digital economy is huge. The only difference between the future and the past will be just that. In the past back people had limited options to what they genuinely wanted to learn and who they wanted to learn from. Now, you learn based on your passion and mentors you admire (for example, someone you are not forced to listen to with no choice).

And of course, I mean social media. If you’ve watched this video up until this point, you are listening to me because you see value in what I’m saying.

One thing you should be very careful of here is consuming too much.

The world is based on perspective, get too much of it and you won’t know what to do at all.

There’s a funny saying, if you want the incorrect answer, ask everyone.

That is indeed the biggest trap in life, to live based on other’s ideologies and belief systems.

You might say “but aren’t you doing the same thing” I’m not telling you what to learn. I’m telling you to learn. Anything. From whatever you’re interested in and from whomever you want.

Again, focus on learning from people who have achieved what you want to achieve.

Watch hours of their content. If you want to go deeper, buy their courses. Because real valuable information is never free.

Separate 30 minutes to an hour each day for learning.

But there’s also another caveat to this, which is to ensure what you’re learning is closely aligned with what you’re building.

Most people are stuck because they learn without building anything.

We’ll talk about this in a bit. But you don’t want to mindlessly consume. Once there is a link between learning and building, that’s where all the magic happens.

Rule 2) Training

The second rule is to train. Most people think exercising is just purely a physical act but when you train, you also challenge yourself mentally. When you go that weight one notch higher, it’s a knock against your mental strength.

We already know about the physical advantages. Your body looks good, you feel good, and the world respects you because it shows them your grit, determination, and discipline without even speaking a word.

But another important thing here is that you are going out of thinking mode. You leave the world for a period of time. This is why you get a bit aggressive during workouts, because there’s nothing to hold back, it’s just you.

This could mean yoga, swimming, weightlifting. Remember, every person is unique. It’s about discovering yourself.

There are people out there who get everything they want in their 30s and 40s and are still miserable because they hadn’t fulfilled the physical aspect of their life in their 20s.

I personally workout 5-7 days of the week.

You don’t need to go extreme, just have something that slightly challenges your body daily. Escape the mind, so you can get back in touch with your body.

Rule 3) Build

The world only gives back to you what you feed it.

Focus in your 20s on providing as much value as you can to others.

The good news here is that we’re living in one of the best times to do this. We are in the digital era, where, if you seriously are passionate about something and provide the utmost value in that area, it is almost impossible to not get paid in return for it.

Self-improvement is solving your own problems. Business is solving other’s problems. You step into entrepreneurship when you do both.

You might ask “how can I possibly provide value?”…

Well, value is anything that positively contributes to another person’s life.

The essential part here is that you are a creator of something.

This isn’t an easy process, which is why most people take the default path. If you take this advice, regardless of what you create, you are already ahead of 99% of people when you simply just create because you are acting on your own unique desires.

You may think the entire world is doing this, but most people aren’t building something of their own. They’re building someone else’s dream, bringing someone else’s desires to reality.

Most people want to build something of their own but have no idea where to begin.
They overthink, they wait for the “right moment,” or they get stuck consuming without creating.

If you’re in that place, wanting to start, build, and create something meaningful then I made something for you.

Creator Business Essentials, a completely free starter product that helps you understand the first steps of building something online, without the overwhelm or confusion.

Get it here: https://stan.store/SerkanKozkiran/p/cbf

Use this as your entry point into building, learning, and creating with direction rather than chaos.

It’s free because I want you to experience what focused self-education + actual action feels like. It changes everything.

There Is No Perfect Time

Weirdly, I had a gut feeling when I was 17 that I should be doing this type of content. I’m 25 now and I’m doing exactly what I had a gut instinct about 7 years ago.

In my mind, I thought there was a perfect time, but there is none.

You might have to go through a few hurdles to get to knowing what it is that you truly want, but it’s all worth it in the end, because the opposite does not have any meaning at all.

Learn how to learn and then actually learn.

Stop isolating your body and give it what it needs.

Finally, create and in that craft out some sort of purpose.

I’m not guaranteeing you won’t feel lost, I’m guaranteeing that you will. But that’s the point. It’s because you are not putting in the effort to discover yourself and find what truly matters to you.