You won't find rare results in an average lifestyle. If you feel lost, tired, and can't focus on making progress toward the life you promised yourself you would live. Sometimes the only thing you can do is flip the switch. Create a glitch in the matrix. Become a completely different person. Change your habits all at once. Remove every distraction from your life. Start the business. Build the project. Work 12 hours a day and forget to eat. Look back and realize you've done more in three months than you have in the past three years. You need seasons of intensity that launch you into a new baseline of living. I personally don't think that consistency is the route that people should take to achieve success. I think it's a balance. It's a cycle of intensity, consistency, curiosity, and sometimes feeling lost. That's what we're going to talk about first. Waking up at 4 a.m. gives you 3 to 4 hours of experience.

that others just don't get to have. It's a completely different reality, a quiet one. People aren't awake. Distractions lack gravity. Now, I'm not saying that you need to wake up at 4 a.m. I'm just saying create a glitch in the matrix. Do something different. Maybe stay up two hours later when you're more creative. I do think that I don't know if this is something spiritual or esoteric or whatever it may be, or maybe there's science behind it. I'm sure there is. But the early mornings and the late nights, nobody's awake. It's just quiet. The world is quiet. So your mind is allowed to have those creative thoughts and ideas that you can channel into your work. Now, the reason I say, and I wake up earlier is because there's obvious health deficits too. Going to bed very late. But the thing here is, if your mind is already pushing back on the idea

of doing something different with your life or potentially doing something extreme. This video probably isn't going to benefit you very much. So open your mind or leave to set the scene. You already have motivation. You can already focus for 12 hours a day. When you're playing a video game or scrolling on your phone, it's automatic. You don't need to discipline yourself to do it, but you know deep down that you're ruining your life, and your subconscious knows that you could be doing better. And that's why you feel terrible. So we need to create a physical, mental, and spiritual environment that makes it seamless to work on your dreams. First, we need to understand that 12-hour workdays aren't always possible or feasible, or even worth doing. I'm not here to say that you need to be in the right phase of life, and if you understand the different phases of life, you can guide yourself into that, into a season of intensity where you enjoy working that long.

Second, we need to remove the blockers that prevent you from treating life or seeing life as a video game. In other words, we need to remove the blockers that prevent you from wanting to play the video game of life. Your life needs to become more interesting than the games that you're already playing, and that goes far beyond. Just like video games, I'm talking about games that could be scrolling on your phone to receive the reward, or win the game of the cheap dopamine that you get from it, or almost anything else that you do in life. Has the structure of a video game? Watch my video. Life is a game. Here's how you win. So if you want to completely change the direction of your life, continue on. But first, I have some good news. By popular demand, the writers boot camp is starting back up under a cortex. It starts on October 28th. So if you want to master digital writing in five weeks and have everything you need to be able to build an audience.

If you've watched my other videos, you understand the importance of building an audience as a creative worker going into the future of work, or you just want a skill that allows you to pursue new career opportunities. Maybe freelancing, maybe marketing, maybe writing a book, whatever it could be. So you can go to boot camp dot cortex with a k.co SEO. And there is also now a curriculum-only version. So if you're not a fan of the cohort style, then there's the curriculum version. Getting back into it, we need to talk about the cycles of progress or the phases of life so that you can understand where you're at and how to navigate into a new phase so that you can start making progress. Because the thing here is with consistency, if you're only consistent, you're not really making any progress. We'll figure that out soon. Many people know my four-hour workday philosophy, have made many videos on it. I've talked about it a lot.

It's actually received a lot of controversy, mostly because people don't understand the philosophy or they don't watch the video. They just read the headline, and we all know what that leads to. They just see the idea and latch on to it. So it either becomes something that guides them in a positive direction, or it becomes something where it's like, no, that's impossible. That's never going to work. But if you watch the videos, you understand that that's just for a specific phase of life. The four-hour workday is for a specific phase of life, and I'm not a fan of sticking to something because by sticking to something, you stagnate and you stay the same, and you don't actually really stay the same. You start to decline unless you change and evolve. And that's what the phases of life that we're going to talk about lead to. Progress is non-linear. You don't go to the gym for ten years and build the same amount of muscle every single year.

You build a lot at the start because you're new. It's called newbie gains. Then you build muscle in cycles of consistency and intensity. You bulk and cut. Life happens and you get thrown off for a year. The next year you regain motivation and are hyper-disciplined, gaining more in year ten than you did in year three. The same holds true for productivity. You're going to get thrown off. You're going to have times where you just have a ton of motivation and you get a ton done, and you're also going to have times where you're just consistent because other goals and priorities in your life take over. But you have to know how to navigate those things so that you can move from one to another and not let the chaos in your mind build up, because you can be like, Oh, I'm not productive. I'm not making as much progress as I used to. But your life doesn't allow for that, so you shouldn't get more stressed and more anxious.

Because of that, you should learn to lean into the phase of life that you're in so you can reap the maximum benefit from it. Many entrepreneurs just think that you work 12 hours a day, day in, day out. I'm not like that. I don't like that philosophy. I haven't lived it. I think it's just stupid, and I think limiting yourself and actually creating boundaries is what allows for more creative solutions and more progress than the 12-hour workday entrepreneurs that just grind themselves into the ground. Most people don't want to live that lifestyle, but they do want to be an entrepreneur. So I'm here to tell you that that balance is possible and potentially more fulfilling. The other thing is that I personally believe that 12-hour workdays shouldn't be forced. They should be natural. You should want to do it. It should be one of those binges where you just have to. You feel like you can't stop working because you need to actualize the purpose you set your mind on.

I personally believe that no amount of work should be forced. If you have to force yourself to work or you are forced to work, change what you do for work or change your mind so that you can perceive the work in a better light, like a lion hunts and rests to be quote unquote productive. We're going to learn how to replicate that in our work. The first phase or cycle of progress is perplexity. And this is just my fancy way of making the words match because it's perplexity, curiosity, intensity, consistency. So the first phase, perplexity, is just the phase of feeling lost. And this is where most people are. They just feel lost. They don't know what to do. They're working on things that they don't care about. So we're going to start with this tweet of mine. The solution to boredom is building. Build a skill. Build a brand. Build your body. Build your mind. Build your social life.

Build anything. It doesn't matter if you don't know how. That's the entire point. You learn, act, and discover your way out of boredom. So, there are four cycles of progress, and you can think of these as chapters in a book. Because humans make sense of the world in stories. The first cycle is perplexity, which is feeling lost or confused. You're at the start of the story, and you haven't figured out what the goal or the purpose of it is yet. You're kind of just in limbo. You can't work for 12 hours a day because you don't have anything to work on. That is your own choice. You can go to work and be told what to do, but that's not something that you want to do. You still feel lost and confused because you don't know what to do with the rest of your life. Most people are in this cycle. They don't let themselves be bored. They don't let themselves go into the next phase.

They continuously just dwell in their minds and let their thoughts take over and get stuck in this trap of constant negativity, anxiety, and overwhelming confusion. And they try to numb that pain in their mind with the cheap dopamine sources that they're so focused on. So the video games or the phones or alcohol or drugs or whatever it may be. So you escape the perplexity cycle by first allowing yourself to be bored, and second, becoming curious. You have to become bored enough so that you become curious. So you need to strip your life from all of the distractions, start completely new and allow your mind to gravitate towards something good so that you can choose it. The second phase is curiosity, so you go from feeling lost to being curious about something. This usually stems from identifying a problem in your life that you want to solve, because problems and purpose exist on the same spectrum. They're just polar opposites of one another, so purpose can't exist without a problem, and a problem

can't exist without a purpose. So, once you discover a problem, you need to open your mind enough to realize the opposite side. The other side of the perspective where purpose lies. So, if you notice a problem in your life of, Oh, I don't have enough money, Oh, I feel sluggish and I don't like how I look in the mirror, I can't find a partner, I can't get a date, whatever it may be. Usually, these problems are going to start out relatively shallow because they have to. That's just survival. You have to solve the shallow problems in order to transcend your survival, so that your mind can actually open and notice the more spiritual or metaphysical or deeper problems to solve for a greater life's purpose that stems from those. And when this happens, when you get curious about a problem that you want to solve, you need to allow yourself to start searching for information. Once you have the problem and goal, framing your mind because that's how you perceive information in the world,

your goals and your problems that are sitting in your conscious mind or even subconscious mind are framing the information that you perceive. So, if you identify a problem, then you understand how it's impacting your life and you actually want to solve it, and you start to gain clarity on what you should do, you start to notice more in conversations, in books, on social media, etc. Your life starts to take shape because it's like, if I am having money problems and I can't pay the bills, then in conversations and in books, I'm going to notice the information, the highlights, the tools, the resources that allow me to solve that problem. The reason people can't make progress is because they're focused on the wrong problems. They get stuck in their head and start giving too much attention to these little negative and meaningless thoughts that pop up to just distract them, or they just distract themselves in general from the problem and never make progress towards it because it's not actually important to them.

So, in the curiosity phase, this is where shiny object syndrome is kind of encouraged. You're supposed to try everything and see what sticks. You're supposed to try different techniques and experiment with things to solve the problem in your life until you start to gain clarity and a bigger picture on what's going on. And then you launch into the next phase, which is intensity. Intensity is the climax of the story, the main battle, the most interesting and fulfilling part of your life. The 3 to 6 months go by in a blur. Pure flow state, completely focused on actualizing one meaningful goal in fitness. This is when you're disciplined with your diet and training. It's all you think about in a relationship. It's the honeymoon phase. All you want to do is build your connection with the person in business. It's building and launching a new product or going on a writing spree. Both lead to new heights in growth and revenue. This is when you pull 12-hour workdays.

and it just comes naturally. It's when the click happens or the moment, and you know exactly what you need to do. It all makes sense in your head. It's the only thing that you can think about. So, you have to take that energy and actually pursue the purpose and actualize it. That's when you reach a new phase or a new baseline in your life. The trap here is that the intensity phase can become dangerous fast. We've all heard of burnout and overwhelm, and that usually stems from trying to stick out the intensity phase for too long and not allowing yourself to transition into the next phase, which is the consistency phase. So, just to touch on that, don't try to push the book to the point of getting fat. Don't push the cut until you're scrawny and losing muscle. Don't get so obsessed with the relationship that you become needy and desperate. Don't try to push revenue higher and destroy your brand reputation. Know when to drop down to a new baseline and maintain

the progress you've made. So, that leads us into the fourth phase. We've talked about perplexity, feeling lost, curiosity getting out of that intensity. For when you find the one thing you want to go all in on, and then once you've made your progress, the fourth phase is consistency. No, consistency is not everything. Consistency is a tool to maintain progress, not make progress. Stagnation isn't maintaining progress. Stagnation is death. Being consistent with content creation doesn't get you anywhere. You must become curious and experiment with new angles and strategies. When you find the right one, you double down and see the most growth you've seen. This is personally how I grew by 200,000 subscribers when I first started doing well on YouTube, and 1.2 million on Instagram. I call these exponential events. It's the non-linear progress that you make, like in the gym where the times where you get very disciplined with your diet.

and training is when you're going to build the most muscle, even if you're in your tent of training. So during the intensity phase, that's an exponential event. That's when you're growing very fast on socials. If you're a writer or creator, that's when you're building a lot of muscle. That's when your relationships are making a lot of progress. But eventually, that's going to burn out because you can't just continue going up forever, or else everyone would be billionaires. So you have to be wise about when to take profits, like in stock trading or crypto. It's like it's not going to keep going up. So you need to figure out when you're going to step out, and you need to make a wise decision when you do that. But this is such an interesting concept to me. The exponential events that I've kind of noticed throughout my journey with social media specifically, it's like the growth isn't just linear all the time.

It's like you try different angles, you try different ideas, you experiment with different things. You don't just trap yourself in one niche and do the same thing over and over again, which is Einstein's definition of insanity. You try these different things. You notice one that does well, that's an anomaly, something that you double down on, and then you do well on that for a bit like Instagram Reels when they came around, or carousels or different things or different topics, and then eventually it dies out because the market catches on. So you have to maintain that by incorporating it as a part of your brand, and then you continue experimenting until you hit the next exponential event and you keep going. So you just go up baseline, you try to maintain, go up baseline, try to maintain. And it's more about higher lows than it is higher highs. The same thing goes with your emotions. You're not trying to sustain the higher highs. You're trying to sustain the higher lows.

So you're not trying; you're trying to not go as low. So this, the consistency phase, is where things drop down to like my four-hour workday philosophy. When I'm just maintaining, I'm doing the four hours of work a day, but there is room for experimentation inside of that so that I don't get trapped or I don't get back into the loss phase. That's the thing with all of these cycles, is you don't have to go back into the loss phase. You may feel a bit lost here and there, but if you're continuously experimenting, you're allowing yourself to get out of it quicker or reduce the time you spend there. Remember higher lows. So when I shot up to my first $700,000 month after a product launch, there was no way that I was sustaining all of that because my previous high was maybe like 2 or 300, and my baseline was maybe like 100,000. So it's like that much of a jump.

If I were to try to sustain $700,000 a month rather than going through the cycles to hit the new baselines in order to get there, then there's just not going to work out. And I can't continuously launch a product every single month to hit $700,000. Maybe I could, maybe there's a way to do that. But I like the cyclical nature. So in terms of what I do to maintain my work, that mostly comes down to writing. I need to build my audience, which is all writing this YouTube video script is writing newsletters. Writing content is obviously writing, and that's pretty much it. And then doing administrative tasks or like working with the team for cortex and other maintenance style things. But in the morning, the first thing I would do, the experimentation stuff, I would start writing a new book or I would start working on a new product, and usually those things would kind of fizzle out. But then when I come back to them,

or when I start something that actually starts to take off, that brings me into an intensity phase. So those are the cycles of progress, perplexity, curiosity, intensity, consistency. Know which phase you're in so that you can lead yourself into the next one. And now we need to talk about why you can't focus for 12 hours a day, despite right understanding those things. So let's not waste any time here. You can't focus because your mind, life, and priorities are a mess, and you haven't done anything about it. So the first thing you need to do is to remove focus blockers. Focus is about removing anything that prevents focus. You feel lost, distracted, and low energy for that exact reason. The moment you sense boredom, you fill it with the closest relief. The moment you sense anxiety, you do the same thing. Your mind is guiding you toward a better life. But instead of listening to the signals, you attempt to numb the pain of not being everything.

You could be making it worse in the long run. So, there are a few focus blockers that just keep you feeling lost. And keep in mind these are for when you're in the loss phase. This is. These are the things blocking you from going into the curiosity or intensity phase. The first blocker is the purpose blocker. You feel loss because you lack purpose. You don't know what problem you're solving. You don't know what goal you're pursuing. You don't know your part in a whole greater than yourself. Your mind is conditioned to focus on the goal society assigned to you. Your path is already known. Go to school, get a job, retire. You end up dragging your feet through life and getting bored because you don't care about those things. You fill your boredom with laziness and pleasure. Instead of building toward your own goal, you need to allow yourself to be bored. You need to expose yourself to higher potentials. You need to drop everything and see what sticks.

You need to sit with your thoughts so you can catch an inkling of vision. Because your vision clarity doesn't all come at once. You collect the little puzzle pieces until you put one puzzle piece in, and you can start to see the image, and then you're like, oh, crap. And then you start to solve it faster and then you have the whole image and then you can build it. The next blocker is environmental blockers. Your environment creates who you are, but most people forget that they're in full control of their environment. If you're surrounded by people, opinions, and distractions in both the physical and digital world, it's no wonder why you can't focus. Rip the Band-Aid off, take a day and quite literally throw away anything that one isn't important and two distracts you from what is. Don't hesitate. Now. The third focus blocker is metabolism or food blockers. The thing here is that you just lack motivation because you eat too much in one sitting.

You can't digest food well enough, or you just eat so much crap that you feel like crap, and then you can't focus. And for me personally, as a 225-pound male, if I eat anything over 300 to maybe 600 calories as a meal, I start to notice that my focus starts to go down. Because when you eat, when you're fed, you enter that rest-and-digest state. You're not in that fight-or-flight focused state. Not that you should always be in fight or flight, but this is just something to take into account if you actually want to learn to focus. So again, experiment. This is just a part of life. You start getting curious about different things. You try intermittent fasting, you try smaller morning meals and bigger later meals because if you eat too much, your body starts to move energy toward digesting the food, and you have less energy to expend on your work. So it's just this balance of where are you putting your energy?

And if it's not all into your work, then it's going to be difficult to focus for longer hours. Now, the fourth focus blocker is just knowledge blockers. You don't know enough to get the work done. You don't know what to do right now, or you just don't have the skill to take on the challenge that you're going for. So, the solution to this problem is to just bake in learning and building. As you're building the project, you need to learn in unison with it. You need to maybe go on some walks, listen to an audiobook, listen to a YouTube lecture. You need to exchange scrolling on your phone for reading something or taking a course. Now, the second way we need to get out of the lost phase is to throw your mind off the deep end. Everything starts with identity. The web of ideas that shape how you view the world, the perspective that's been shaped by decades of social conditioning that makes you desire what you desire.

If you want to love working toward your dreams, your mind must reflect that it can't be some idea you like. The sound of it has to be who you are. So how do you change who you are? You reprogram your mind. You rip yourself from your current lifestyle and immerse yourself in the information that will slowly shape how you see the world. Follow people on social media who have the goals you want to pursue. Listen to podcasts, read books, and put your money where your mouth is by purchasing courses that slowly give you ideas that compound into clarity. Wake up tomorrow and do nothing. The same. Plan the new week. Set new priority tasks. Have new conversations. Overload yourself with new information. Then step three is to think bigger and act smaller. You're now in a state of chaos because you threw yourself into the unknown. You hurled yourself into a new situation. You can't make sense of all of these things going on around you. It's up to you to create order.

You're surrounded by new ideas that you can collect as building blocks for your vision. Then you can lay those blocks day after day to create the life you want. You need a vision; without one, and by definition, you are lost. So take out a piece of paper and write down everything you hate and don't want in your life. Again, this is for an anti-vision and everything you want in your future. The body, the lifestyle, the location, the mind, the money, anything. Don't worry about being shallow because you can create meaning from it later. If you want a template for this, I have a Cortex template in the description that helps you map out your anti-vision, map out your vision, and then set your priority tasks. It's like a planner, but it's now in Cortex. And if we're still on the waitlist, you can get access within one day if you just follow the instructions after joining the waitlist. And to plug Cortex even more in the Writer's Bootcamp,

We actually use your anti-vision and your vision as your brand vision. So, that's how you turn yourself into the niches. By understanding these things, you will be coming back to this every week. Your vision will become clearer and clearer with time. As you go about this process, you are waiting for the click to happen. The moment where everything clicks, and you launch into a season of intensity. But vision isn't the only piece of the puzzle. Big goals are for motivation, perspective, and potential. Small goals are for clarity, action, and sanity. So, that's step four: to act small or reverse engineer your vision into smaller goals so you understand what's my progression for learning these things? What do I study next? So, once you have a minimum viable vision, it doesn't have to be perfect. It has to just be a starting point. Break it down into ten. Your goals, one. Your goals, monthly goals, weekly goals, daily priority tasks. Then focus on the priority task.

Everything else is for clarity. When I give this process, or when I first gave this process, people were like, Oh, you don't need to set all those goals, you just need to act. The goals aren't there to just like distract you. They're there to provide clarity. So you set clarity so that you can determine what you act towards. The goal determines the system. The destination determines the journey. Goals and the destination are greater than systems and the journey. It's not about the journey. It's about the destination. Because without the right destination, you're going on the wrong journey. You can go that way just randomly on your journey and enjoy the process. Or you can set a destination and start to enjoy the journey still more. Going toward the destination is like Peterson saying that you need a positive aim for your life. That's the guiding light, your vision, the destination. What it is, is going to determine the entirety of your life.

and the enjoyment that you get out of it. Yes, you can suffer just enjoying the journey and going about life in a chaotic manner, but I don't think that's the wisest thing to do. What I personally like to do is have two-hour work blocks just spread throughout the day, with breaks in between. So it's like Legos throughout the day where I can schedule 1 to 2-hour work blocks to knock out the 5 to 10 priority tasks that I have for that day, depending on how long I work in between the focus blocks. I just go on a walk, I go to the gym, I eat, I do whatever it is. Step number five is arguably the most important because if you understand cybernetics or intelligence or just systems as a whole, you need to iterate and improve with feedback. That is the main sign of high intelligence. Low intelligence people and systems hit negative feedback or hit a roadblock, or don't make progress or do the same thing

over and over again without the results they want because they aren't clear on their goal. That's the sign of low intelligence, is just quitting or getting stuck. In other words, high intelligence is defined by your ability to learn. It's your ability to achieve any goal on a long enough time scale because you understand that achieving a goal is possible if you work towards it. So, at the start of each week, I do a weekly review to refine my system. What went well last week? What didn't go well? What am I grateful for, and what are my focus projects? Again, the cortex template is available to duplicate and download, where you can fill all of this out. This step is important because, one, it's a weekly way to shine a light on what you should add to your vision or anti-vision. It allows you to clarify and evolve the goals that you're pursuing so that the destiny, I mean, so that the journey can take shape with the shape of the destination. And it just shows you

What minor changes can be made to improve the progress that you're making over time? So, if you were to just focus on this weekly review the entire time and iterating on your vision, then you're going to make it pretty far. That's it for this video. Thank you for watching. Like, subscribe, links in the description for a lot of cool stuff. If you're interested in creative work or are writing app cortex or just cool things that help you do life better, thank you for watching. See you in the next one. Bye!

It's actually pretty easy to focus 12 hours a day (if you do this)

It's actually pretty easy to focus 12 hours a day (if you do this)

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