How to Get Ahead of 99% of People in 6-12 Months (Notes from Dan Koe)

Observe your actions and see what mindless action delivers in life.

Think more deeply.

It’s easier to know what you don’t want from experience and observation, than to know what you want than just imagination.

Create the order so you are not a victim of entropy.

Something that you despise. Something that will get you angry. Because negative energy is potent and can be used and transmuted to achieve what you want in life.

If you’re at the gym and warming up, ask yourself what what your life be like without the gym and if you don’t put your all into that workout. You can get pissed off. Negative aren’t bad. They exist. They should be used, not suppressed for good.

Draw out everything, for 30 minutes, draw out everything – your entire future. Start with the anti-future. Write down everything you don’t want to happen. What do you not want to look like? What do you not want your day to look like on an every day basis? From that, it will be much clearer to you what your vision will actually be.

As you write this vision, you should feel very uncomfortable with the possibility of where you could end up in life if you do not take control of your life. With that, laser in on one, big, meaningful goal. Why? Because your anti-vision is meaningless, full of entropy, and chaos. If you do not create order for your life, you will decline into chaos.

So now, plan out and be the mad scientist that is going to work on and create that plan for your life. Every single little thing you’re going to do. This week, next week. Get extremely specific. Create the order so you are not a victim of entropy.

What do I not want to happen? What do I not want to look like?

In this world, I end up alone, years down the road, years and years down the road, sitting by myself in coffee shops on my laptop, playing around with ideas, never really amounting to any of them, always in the bleachers, and very, very alone. My peers have surpassed me, and I’m clearly that older person who got lost along the way. Who may be wise, but never learned how to apply or take action on what she saw.

I never end up working in a team of like-minded people. Never end up in community. I live an isolated, solitary life.

I start getting older, and I don’t have the money for great skin care or nice hair cuts or cute clothes. I just end up, living in a shitty studio apartment, that I do what I can to make decent, avoiding anyone and everyone I ever knew, so they can’t see what a failure I became, and take pitty on me.

I really don’t want to keep just sitting by myself in coffee shops, only working with my own self, my own reflection, my own ideas. Afraid of everyone.

I never get to travel. I never get to have anything really all that nice. I just sit around still upset about how my Dad made me feel about myself, decades later, but nothing to show for overcoming what that story was.

What’s scary is, in a way, I’m on my way to this.

This could be people, games, apps, even bad habits. Just become aware of the things holding you back.

Basically, rip the bandaid off. Get rid of them all. You don’t need to explain yourself. In other words, break your addiction by feeling like shit. There is no use on expending mental energy on people and things that do not give a shit about you.

Create a system that will prevent entropy in your life, that takes you from anti-vision and vision. And then to maintain that, you need energy. In this case, mental energy, to manifest this.

Make a habit of the boring fundamentals, and realize these are not boring. They do this like a game. You log on you repeat the same thing over and over to slowly level up over time. You stack experience, and transfer that into the real world. This is fundamental.

They may seem boring on the surface, like writing for 30 minutes every morning – its mastery over misery. Like playing tennis, you learn to hold the racket, and then eventually you learn to angle the racket or hit the ball with the racket, etc. One step at a time, you move onto the next thing, that gets you ahead of the people trying to get a quick fix.

The state where nothing else matters except what is happening right before you. You become one with the task before you.

You must learn to control your attention. When you become self conscious through attention. You tend to highlight the difference between yourself and the thing you are comparing it to you. This uses precious mental energy, that could instead be used towards the task at hand.

You can create a game out of any situation in life. If that game is fun to you, then life is more enjoyable. Because you start playing, rather than be played. We are in a world where it is create, or be created.

If a path is easier, that’s where the masses flock.

We want to live an enjoyable life on our own terms.

Macro-Level of Gaming:

A few patterns: Stacking gold, choosing a profession, leveling up your character.

The system is rigged, you can’t change it, but you can learn it. That’s how you rig yourself in the system’s favor.

Before we know it, due to the curse of knowledge and learning being the foundation of the human experience (we are always learning new things over and over and we don’t question those things). We are trained into the game, to keep it going. You think the secure path is secure, but most people genuinely just end up with too much anxiety, stress, and overwhelm. They get trapped in a jail of their own doing.

However, times are changing. More people are going remote, and choosing to do their own thing. The flaws in the system itself are revealing itself. And the game isn’t able to be patched. Even school curriculums cannot keep up with the creator economy. Also, with banking, as far as decentralized currency, there are individuals and small teams to build financial systems better for people. And we also have agencies with freelancers with a great skillset are coming in as contract workers for big companies are hiring them to do those jobs rather than hiring them as an employee.

There are also infinite paths you can take in an open world strategy game like world of warcraft. You have choices like what the character looks like, the player they are (warrior), guild they join to level up faster, etc.

With the one person business model, your brand is your goal in life. So, how you achieve that goal, your story of achieving that goal, is what your brand is, and what separates you from everyone else.

If 5 people are standing at the bottom of mountains and they reach the first peak. They all take different paths and now you can look down and help people navigate that path in a better way. Business is helping people climb that mountain in a faster way to reach that peak that you peaked.

Leveling up increases the complexity of the self. In the real-world, the main spiritual problem, is people do not change. Once they reach a point of static not wanting to change, they don’t learn anymore, stack more skills, or level up to the point of more opportunities being available to them. By upping your skill set, it allows you to take on higher level challenges. And by doing this, you open up from to have a lot more opportunities. That knowledge and experience expands your world of what is possible.

So as you develop yourself, you gain more ability to create order from chaos. You have the power to create a game out of more situations in life.

Now let’s go a bit deeper, the micro-games of life, on a situation-to-situation basis.

Micro-Games

Hierarchy of goals: you have the goal of winning as we as clarity on how to reach that goal, like sub-goals and quests.

As humans we have the ability to aim with our minds into the future.

With skill and practice and time, someone can throw a football 50 yards out and hit a bullseye. The same is similar with creating a mind for your future. Then slowly level up until you’re able to create that vision. You need a vision you can build towards.

So, sit down with a pen and paper, to create the first iteration of your vision. Then create a 10 year, 1 year, and monthly goals.

Have a place for weekly direction and reflection.

Align your daily priority tasks with those.

With these written down, which is important, because writing these things down is an anchor. You need something to build, so you have something to apply your learnings for, so then you register more opportunities for what you are building.

We survive on a conceptual level – we try to survive our beliefs. So it only makes sense we would try to survive a project or our vision for the future. And because of that, since it as the top of our mind we will notice other things we can apply to that vision and clarify that further.

10 Year:

In 10 years, I want to have a house where I can grow food, have a few animals I love, and be living with a partner that I love. I went to go on interesting trips. I want my work to take me around the world, where I’m working with other people who care about solving the same problems I do. And we also have a great time together. I want to work in a team like that.

I also would like to be running some of my own projects supporting aerial technology for good and really helping to be a big support pillar in that field and getting people into using that and considering it. That for me, is a way in 10 years, I feel maybe I could really help to influence other people and inspire other people. And also, possibly help the environment.

In 10 years, with my partner or with friends, I want to hop on a plane to go to a random concert and check out an interesting place, just for fun. Just to see some music. And, as far as music goes, I’d really like to be able to make my own music as well.

I’d like to do some travels with my Mom as well, in new zealand and Japan.

I’d like to be able to afford to go out to dinner at really nice restaurants and taste some of the best food in the world.

Financially, I am comfortable. I’m more than comfortable. I’m so comfortable, I’m able to donate tens of thousands of dollars annually to small nonprofits and to crowd-sourced campaigns.

1 Year:

So one year from now…

I don’t live in Colorado anymore. I move back to the East Coast.

I’m running Flightpath107 and am absolutely having a blast learning about and supporting what aerial technology can do for the environment and artistically. I make my own nature videos, and travel around doing that.

I’ve really established my relationships with my east coast friends, and make trips to see them regularly and am regularly making fun memories with them.

I”m either actively dating and enjoying it and feeling healthy, or I’m in a loving partnership where we share common values and virtues and are healthy together and love each other very much. I’m bringing him to spend time with my mom, my friends, and we are going on trips together.

1 Month:

I’m making 10K/month in income. I’ve systemized a lot of my work and processes so this I’m not wasting a ton of time.

If you’re so dead-set on the hierarchy of goals and your vision for the future, then your frame makes it difficult for a distraction to register in the camera itself.

There are 2 things that help create order in your game.

1. Rules

Every single video game has a set of rules you must follow. This helps you remain focused in the hear and now, while keeping our vision or end goal in the back of our head.

What if instead of getting level 50, its to see how fast you can loose trying to get to level 50.

If your skill is high, and the challenge is low, you’ll get bored.

If the skill is low, and challenge is high, you’ll get anxious.

If this happens, another desire will pop in. If you’re bored at work, its because you’re not immersed in the task, and instead thinking about the better things you can do with your time.

And the anxiety comes with self consciousness.

How do we prevent this?

You have to be constantly learning and constantly building. You need something to immerse your attention in and immerse yourself in that and develop yourself into a complex being that can take on bigger and broader challenges, to pick out the games you want to play.

Once you make a choice of what you want to do, it opens up talents and traits you can pursue. Then once you get to a certain point, you then get to do more, such as being accepted in certain guilds, etc.

Learning is the foundation of the human experience. Learning through any medium influences our thoughts. And our thoughts influence our behavior.

All this depends on how your character perceives or acts within that specific situation.

We have to create the character or player that will lead to that outcome.

So first, you need an intrinsic hierarchy of goals. You need to frame your life on a micro and a macro scale, to create rules, to narrow your attention, and focus on that.

And then, you need to consistently practice, learn, build, etc to increase your skillset, and take on higher challenges.

And then, you have higher education and self reflection. If you have a problem you can usually find some form of solution to it on the internet. So, find the ideas as creating a better life for yourself, by finding better information and not getting distracted.

Self reflection is how you guide future decision making. It is impossible to have 100% certainty in the actions you take now and how they’ll impact your future.

When you do take those actions, the only way you can know if they are good or bad, for certain, is through self reflection. And then, pivoting from there.

Games are a way of ordering consciousness to the point of obsession.

When you’re obsessed, you stop caring what people think and play to win according to your values.

Games are enjoyable and every situation in life can be mentally molded into a game.

If you want to avoid mental turmoil, your skill needs to match the challenge that any situation presents.

You perspective will determine the information available to you, and if its not structured, you will misperceive it.

Your self, a concept, is the player. With time, you want to create the character that can win the games it is best at.

Service base business – something where you’re in direct control of the outreach.

This way, you have a skill, and create a valuable offer and iterate on that so you can charge more and more.

Maybe you build an audience along the way, and that fuels your client acquisition.

You need to be careful bc soon you have a lot of clients, making good money, but you’re now working as a 9-5 still.

So, we see this as a problem, where the solution is to systemize that.

You can’t just take on unlimited amount of clients.

So now take on less clients, productize service, and build audience to point where you can sell product.

Systemization of your work flow so you can work faster and more efficiently, and eliminating things that don’t make sense to do. Or delegating low-leverage tasks.

You have to systemize in order to maintain a baseline while working certain time a day.

Let’s say you’re working 10K/month.

See everything as a potential system:

Notice the goal, notice the steps to achieve that goal, and notice the steps you need to take to achieve that goal without it falling apart.

An example, would be a librarian – they have a system for organizing books to make it easy to find, and then steps for employees to take out and return the books. But, if you have a home bookshelf and you take out one book and they end up everywhere, and you do not have a system for organizing it all, then the mental energy necessary to maintain that system, is going to fail. This is how your mind interacts with that system. That is how you order consciousness, bring clarity to your mind, and allow your mind to act.

If you hold the idea of this in the back of your mind, and associate yourself with being able to work this, you will try to survive this identity. You will feel threatened when something threatens that belief or system of yours.

So, why 4 hours? These conceptual systems or beliefs we try to survive with our mind. They require mental energy and attention.

At the start, this is very draining. You won’t have a way of organizing your mind to act on this consistently. It seems, 3-5 hours of focuses work a day is what humans can have before they need to give their focus a break. Focus is a muscle. You can’t do it well at the start.

Systems – once they are refined and been repeated or conditioned into your head and formed grooves in your brain, they become automatic and routine and normal to you.

That’s how you automate the path to the good life.

Overlay system over system in your life that leads to a better future.

When you limit yourself to only 4 hours a day, it acts as a deadline. Just limiting yourself to 4 hours and knowing you don’t have to work 4 hours, it’ll shrink time. And if work matches the time, you’ll try to fit your work within those 4 hours.

The second thing is, vision and identity.

You need a vision for your future. You need a MVV (Minimum Viable Vision) – Just get it out so you can make connections when you have certain experiences.

Write out the following and be as specific as detailed as you can:
– Who you want to be
– What you want to do for work
– Where you want to live
– What your ideal day looks like
– What you want to contribute to humanity
– What people you will surround yourself with (network and social circle)

The point here is to set a foundation for the goals you are going to try to be achieving on a daily basis with your productivity system. The problem is people do not have an intrinsic goal they are trying to achieve.

Commandment # 3: Outline 3 Priority Lever-Moving Tasks

Understand what you’re trying to achieve from a very big picture, not technical details.

So if you want to start a creator business, for example, for Dan’s levers – and it depends on the stage of development in – first priority task is write content.

#1
– Writing Content: Write newsletter, tweets, threads for two, 45 minute blocks each. 45 minutes being newsletter. And 45 minutes being tweets, threads, postings on other platforms. Because writing forms the foundation of everything he does. (He has a 2 hour writer course)

#2:
– Generating Traffic: Putting media on the internet that will bring people to follow him and dive products and dive deeper into free content. Any platform you start on, you won’t have much traffic to start on. So you, must focus most effort on generating traffic to content. This could be networking in DM, replying to big accounts. (Set bell notification for every YouTuber that has a higher subscriber count, and block out time to do that in focused work, then moving a lever bc bringing traffic to content over time.) He’s doing this on LinkedIn a lot since that is the platform lagging the most.

#3:

– Promoting Products: Now start to lead the traffic into free products to build authority more, like free value, or lead them to 2 hour writer or digital economics.

That’s where he’s at at his phase in business. And of course there are auxiliary tasks he does in the last hour of the 4 hour work day. (Though he says right now he is working 6 hours)

Most people think they need motivation when in reality they need clarity.

So every weekend, he usually swaps a few lever moving tasks for Clarity Generating Tasks.

Sunday – outline newsletters, plan week, write down ideas for tweets/threads/content, what need to be done to keep things moving w products for content within products. Then outside of those that are hard-scheduled, he’ll go on a walk for Clarity. So at 11am a 30-45 minute walk to listen to lectures and generate ideas for content. (Check out his daily routine video(.

– How can you use 1-2 hours of your week to set yourself up for seamless work sessions.

Commandment 5 is time block and work breaks.

At the start before this becomes habit, very heavily consider writing this on calendar. Put it out of your mind and put it somewhere physical. Make it known bc you’re forming a new habit here.

Schedule things in 90 minute blocks. He’ll sit down w priority tasks (lets say its writing content) and he’ll set a timer for 45 minutes and press start and then write without any distraction. No tabs open. Just what he needs only to get the writing done. once timer is off, he’ll evaluate and set time for another 45 minutes. Then once those 90 minutes are done he’ll go for a 10-30 minute walk. Just get up and re-align and bring attention and intention to a new priority task.

Commandment 6: Manipulate Deadline

Deadlines narrow your attention, The more narrow your attention the less likely distractions will register in your awareness.

When unconscious focus is narrowed in on a problem, nothing else is going to distract you from that problem.

On the positive side of things, when you have clarity on what you’re trying to do, and you’re narrowed in because you’re so immersed in it, you’ll kick into flow. The deadline is a challenge.

Four hours of work, with 90 minute time blocks, with 10-30 minute breaks.

So, you also have public deadlines, which is another reason to build an audience.

Whenever he launches a product he does it pre-sale. yes it is all mapped out ahead of time. He puts a promotion out and he gets the first sale which means its go time, and that deadline is a month out, then he has a month to get everything done. Once he gets really close, that’s when its actually more like 12 hours a day getting shit done.

Commandment 7: Manipulate Environment

Are you setting yourself to be undistracted before you work. Because you have that you’re able to get out of the bed much easier, because you’re not dwelling in bed in the morning. This helps reduce decision fatigue going into work itself. And when work itself comes up, you have to make sure and prepare for potential distractions.

Put phone on other side of room. Wear a hat. Wear noise cancelling headphones.

How can you manipulate your environment to conserve mental energy before those tasks.

Commandment 8: Wake up before distractions

Unless you try waking up early, don’t write it off.

The hours of 5-7 in the morning are sacred. There’s nothing to distract you. It is very peaceful.

In those sacred hours, no one is calling you or texting you. Even if they are its so early you don’t feel obligated to respond. The day isn’t started so not getting invites anywhere etc.

Wake up before the distractions.

Commandment 9: Prioritize Rest

Rest is not the modern notion of self-care. Rest does not mean netflix, wine, and bubble baths. That means regenerating mental energy through non-work activities., Takes your focus off of work and applies yourself to something that still matters to you.

When the 4 hours are up, you stop working. Dead stop. You do not work any longer unless the priority tasks spill over and you’re working to systemize that asap.

You have to get in the habit of stopping work and not focusing on work.

This is insanely important bc if you are constantly focused on work, you will not open up your mind for creative problem solving or any of the spiritual things in life that make life good and enjoyable and living in the present moment. If you’re constantly focused on work, you aren’t living in the present moment.

Commandment 10: Make your process more efficient

If your working over 4 hours, those problems should be systemized and solved with creative problem solving.

It’s so important to not focus on work when not working. This way you have creative problem solving, and your mind can send ideas to you. It is because you are not focused on work.

For example, when he had a lot of client work he had to:

– Build a larger audience so he had more traffic

– Create a product that doesn’t require my time

– Promote and improve that product until sustainable

– Take on less clients with new free time

None of this is instant. You have to be patient with this. You have to be on this path for life.

Commandment 11: Leverage Digital Tools

We live in a world where we are blessed to have all the tools we have access to. Once you can automate things, and invest in that kind of software, it’s life changing. Instead of manually sending everything out like DMs or newsletters, you can buy an email software that allows you to mimic what sales outreach would look like in the DMs. So you can focus more attention on building actual leverage through content.

Then use tweethunter to schedule tweets, and those get turned into other content. Type in a tweet, schedule it immediately, then forget about it.

He recommends write all this out in Notion.

Write down what you’re going to do tomorrow for those 4 hours of work. That is going to be your first system.

The next day, come back and refine it. What didn’t work? Do that for a week and note common patterns, you can turn it into a weekly system, and then abide by that and refine it with time.