改变人生不是靠自律，而是换掉身份

00:00You're probably going to quit your New Year's resolution, and that's okay. Most people do. Studies actually show that it's around 80% to 90% of people quit their New Year's resolution. And that's because most people don't actually want to change on a deep internal level. And with New Year's resolutions going into 2026, people just go about changing their life in the completely wrong way. And to me, that's sad because if you're changing your life, that has to be one of the most important things in your life, right? That has to be the only thing on your mind, you think. But for most people, it's just another thing to try to do and fail and go back to the life they were living.

00:40So when people try to change their life, what they do is they create a New Year's resolution because everyone else does, and humans want to impress others more than they want to impress themselves. We create superficial meaning out of status games, but they don't meet the requirements for true change, which goes a lot deeper than convincing yourself you're going to be more disciplined or productive this year. Now, I'm not here to talk down on you. I've quit 10 times as many goals than I've set. Many of you have probably noticed that. I mean, my face is online. The book that I said I was writing, I'm not writing it anymore.

01:15And I think that should be the case for most people. I think you should quit more goals than you set because how else are you going to narrow in on the correct goals? But the fact that people try to change their life and utterly fail almost every time still holds true, and that's So much so that the gym becomes extremely crowded during January, and then by February, it's all cleared out. It's a meme. Now, as much as I think that New Year's resolutions are stupid, I feel like many of you also think that they're stupid. I always think that it's wise to reflect on your life and change direction and do something that you've always wanted to do.

01:49And what better time to do it than now? The other thing here is that human nature is kind of a and the worst feeling is when you make a promise to yourself and then you end up breaking it, especially if it's over and over again because you start to feel helpless. And if you don't know what you're doing, you may continue that cycle for years on end, always wanting to change but never being able to. So, whether you want to start the business, transform your body, or take the risk toward a meaningful life without quitting after 2 weeks, I want to share seven of probably the most impactful ideas that I've ever shared that you probably

02:23haven't heard before on behavior change, psychology, and productivity so you can do just that in 2026. Now, this is going to be comprehensive. This is not going to be one of those videos that you just watch and forget about. I hope you treat it like that. This is something you will want to save to your watch later, to bookmark on your phone, to take notes on, and you will have to set aside time to think about it. We're going to go over six ideas, and then in the seventh {quote} idea, it's actually a protocol. And what we're going to do is we're going to dig very deep into your psyche. And if you take this seriously, you're going to get quite emotional, and it will take about a full day to complete.

03:01If you do this, your life will change in 1 day. Now, all I ask is that you dedicate your full attention to this. I know that you're used to just scrolling on social media and watching and binge-watching YouTube videos, but it's rare that you come across one video that just has the potential to change everything, and I hope that this video acts as that for you. Let's begin. The first idea is that you aren't where you want to be because you aren't the person who would be there. Now, when it comes to New Year's resolutions, people tend to focus on one out of the two things that are required for change and success. So, the first is changing your actions to make progress toward the goal.

03:39This is the least important thing and what most people do. It is second-order. And the second thing is changing who you are so that your behavior naturally follows. This is the most important thing. This is first-order. Most people set surface-level goals, hype themselves up to remain disciplined for the first few weeks, then go back to their old ways without much struggle because they were trying to build a great on a rotting foundation. So, if this doesn't make sense, let's run through a quick example. I want you to think about somebody successful. It could be a founder, a CEO, a bodybuilder with a incredible physique on Instagram, or just a charismatic dude who can walk into a group and start chatting everyone up like it's just second nature to them.

04:19Now, I want you to really think about this cuz this this has to click for you in order for you to understand that behavior change is changing who you are. Do you think the bodybuilder has to grind to eat healthy? Do they have to grind like everyone tells you you need to do, "Oh, you need to grind, you need to struggle, you need to suffer" in order to eat healthy? Does the CEO or the founder have to discipline themselves to show up and lead the team? This is actually something my co-founder Matt and I were talking about earlier about how in our past 9-to-5 jobs, we were just the worst employees ever. And so when we're going about hiring, that's constantly on our mind.

04:57What if we hire someone who just isn't as passionate about what we do as we are? Because to us, we just wake up and do the thing. To the employee who may not be a fit, they're going to completely sabotage our business. They're not going to care, they're going to get their work done late, they're not going to listen, and no matter how much I motivate them as a founder or I train them to do the thing or incentivize them, that type of person just isn't a fit and they're not going to do what they need to do. It's because their identity doesn't match the behavior required for our business. Now, to you on the surface, it may seem like the bodybuilder has to grind to eat healthy or they're so disciplined or the runner has to discipline themselves to go run a marathon or the CEO has to discipline themselves to

05:44show up and work. But the truth is, they can't see themselves living any other way. The bodybuilder has to grind to eat unhealthy. The CEO has to grind and force themselves to sleep in past their alarm clock or to take it easy at night and watch Netflix. And when they do sleep past their alarm clock or they do feel like they're unproductive, they hate every second of it. Just like you hate every second of working toward your goal because you don't have the right identity to match the behavior required to achieve that goal. And to some people, my own lifestyle seems pretty extreme or pretty disciplined. Like when I got on a podcast this past year, and they're like, "You seem like the most disciplined person ever."

06:29And I'm just I mean, not really. It's not I don't know. To me, it's just natural, and I don't say that to contrast it or compare it to anybody else's lifestyle. I'm not saying my lifestyle's better. I'm just saying I simply enjoy living this way. Like when my mom tells me that I need to take a break or go out or let loose a bit, I have to like hold my tongue because I don't want to be rude or dismissive. Because through my mind, I'm just I'm just thinking, "If I weren't having fun, why would I be doing what I'm doing?" And that's the major mismatch. Is people can't answer that. They're not doing the thing that's fun.

07:04They're doing what society told them they should do. Now, do not take this next sentence lightly because this ties it all together. If you want a specific outcome in life, you must have the lifestyle that creates that outcome long before you reach it. So, if someone says they want to lose 30 lb of fat, I often don't believe them. Not because I don't think they're a person that's incapable of it, but because there's just too many times when that same person says that they can't wait to get back to the life they used to live. "Oh, I can't wait until I can eat this again. I can't wait until I don't have to do cardio again."

07:40And that's the thing. I hate to break it to you, but if you don't adopt the lifestyle that led to you losing weight for life and find a reason with a higher gravitational pull than the one tying you to your previous ways, then you will go back straight to where you started, and you can unhappily say that you wasted the only resource that you have, which is time. When you truly change yourself, all of your habits that don't move the needle toward your goal become disgusting because you have a deep and profound awareness of what kind of life those actions compound into. You are okay with your current standards because you are not fully aware of what they are or what they lead to.

08:21And we're going to discuss how to uncover that, but you need this awareness first. You need to understand your mind. So, that leads to point number two, which is you aren't where you want to be because you don't actually want to be there. To start this off with a quote from Alfred Adler, "Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement." So, if you want to change who you are, you must understand how the mind works. That way, you can start to reprogram it. The first step to understanding the mind is to understand that all behavior is goal-oriented. When you think about it, this is kind of obvious, but when we dig into it, most people don't want to hear it.

08:59You take a step forward with your foot because you want to reach a certain location. That's a goal. You scratch your nose because you want to get rid of the itch. That's a goal. Those are very surface-level, kind of meaningless goals. And those ones are obvious as well, but there are greater unconscious goals that are creating the subgoals that you're working to at all times. You may not even realize that sitting down on the couch to relax or scroll doomscrolling on your phone came from a bigger goal that was injected into your mind either at birth during conditioning or by society by doing something they want you to do, or just by your own goal of protection or safety or pleasure or feeling good that you're just not aware of, and you don't think anything of it because it's just natural.

09:43It's an unconscious process. You do it like you breathe. You don't even notice it. And on an even more unconscious and complex level, we often pursue goals without knowing it that harm us, but we tend to justify our actions in a way that is socially acceptable or makes us not feel like a loser. As an example, if you can't stop procrastinating on your work, you may justify it with the fact that you lack discipline, but in reality, you're attempting to achieve a goal like you always are. In this case, that goal could be to protect yourself from the judgment that comes from finishing and sharing your work. So, it's not that you lack discipline, it's that you're afraid of achieving one goal, so you justify it by making not achieving that goal your goal.

10:27Another prime example is that if you say you want to quit a dead-end job, but you stay in it, you may start to think that you just don't have enough courage or you're not a risk-taker. But the truth is is that you're pursuing the goal of safety and predictability and an excuse not to look like a failure in front of everyone you told that you want to quit your job. So, the lesson here with point number two is that real change requires changing your goals. But I don't mean setting some surface-level goal because the act of doing that serves an unconscious goal that is actually harming you. That's been ran through enough in the productivity space.

11:02I mean changing your point of view because that's what a goal is. A goal is a projection into the future that acts as a lens of perception, which allows you to notice information, ideas, and resources that aid in you achieving that goal. If that didn't make any sense, it's important, but if that didn't make any sense, that's what point number three is for, which is you aren't where you want to be because you're afraid to be there. So, let's start with another quote from Maxwell Maltz. The important thing for you to remember is that it does not matter in the least how you got the idea or where it came from. You may never have been formally hypnotized, but if you have accepted an idea from yourself, your teachers, your parents, friends, advertisements, from any other source, and further, if you are firmly convinced that idea is true,

11:46it has the same power over you as the hypnotist words have over a hypnotized subject. So, that's compelling. And what I'm about to share with you is even more compelling because I've condensed just how you become who you are into this series of steps. Now, these are not like what happened every time, but this is just how identity is shaped and formed, which shapes your actions. So, if you understand this, cuz we're reverse-engineering it right now, then we can start to put the pieces together to, okay, how do we change our identity so that our behavior naturally follows going into 2026 or any other year. So, this is the anatomy of identity.

12:24First, you want to achieve a goal. Then you perceive reality through the lens of that goal, meaning you only notice important information and ideas that allow you to achieve that goal. This is the learning process. This is how you learn things. Then fourth, you act toward that goal and receive feedback that you're progressing toward it. Fifth, you repeat that behavior until it becomes automatic and unconscious. This is conditioning. Sixth, that behavior becomes a part of who you think you are. I am the type of person who {dot} {dot} {dot}. Seventh, you defend your identity to maintain psychological consistency. We'll talk about that more.

13:00And eighth, your identity shapes new goals, restarting the cycle. And if that identity is disadvantageous toward a good life, this gets very bad very quick. Now, the unfortunate reality is that you have to break this cycle between step six and step seven because you've already gone through this many times in your life, and it started when you were first born, when you didn't even have any control over your mind. Because when you're a kid, you have the goal of survival. That's literally your goal is I'm this babbling blob of flesh coming out into the world. I don't know how to speak. I don't know anything. I don't know how to survive.

13:35And it's just like, oh my gosh, the only instinct is like, I need to live. That's not even a conscious instinct. That's just the instinct that you're born with. And because of this, you are dependent on your parents to teach you how to survive. Because when we think about it, maybe you don't even have that instinct of survival, but other people around you do. Like that's just the natural order of things is you have to survive. And so, the thing there is that you had to conform. You had to conform to what your parents believe, what your parents taught you. And your parents, unless they broke the pattern themselves, they probably have the same conditioning or beliefs or ideas or values as their culture or their parents or their parents' parents or the industrial age or all of these goals that may

14:18not serve you and what you actually want. And since the way most people teach is through reward and punishment, if you don't conform to their values and goals, if you don't become their child mentally, then they may kick you out. They may punish you. Well, they will punish you. They're going to say, "No, that's not the way you do things. You do things this way." And you don't know any better as a kid, so you listen. And the thing here is that you don't ever actually think for yourself. You don't have a single original thought unless you can see through this. If you have never questioned this, then you are not an independent thinker.

14:53And nobody, I would argue, is a completely independent thinker. There's degrees. There's a spectrum. Now, to take this a layer deeper, because we're going very deep here, hopefully, once you fulfill your physical survival needs, which is pretty easy to do, at least in today's world, it happens pretty quick, then you start to survive on the conceptual or ideological level. You may not try to protect or reproduce your body anymore, but your mind is different. You still have that instinct. It just transcends to a new level. You don't try to reproduce your genes, although you do, you try to reproduce memes or information or beliefs or ideas or values.

15:30You can see this everywhere on the internet. We're in this mental or spiritual war of ideas. Because when your body feels threatened, you go into fight or flight. When your identity or your mental body, so to say, feels threatened, you do the same thing. If you are heavily identified with something like a political ideology by the process we just talked about, because you probably adopted your political ideology from your parents or another group that you found online, and even if you rejected your parents' beliefs, you fell into another set of beliefs when you were young that shaped your ideas. And if that crystallizes, that does very bad things.

16:05You can no longer think clearly or nuanced or see the big picture. And when someone challenges those beliefs, you will feel threatened. You will feel that stress response. You feel emotionally like you were slapped in the face. And since most people don't analyze their emotions for truth, you tend to get stuck in echo chambers and just double down on your beliefs. The same thing happens if you're raised in a religious household. If those ideas actually stick with you, then you're going to fight and lash out, maybe not extremely or physically, but in defense at people who are challenging you. I grew up LDS. I grew up Mormon.

16:43I saw this firsthand every single day, and it just didn't make sense to me. When you ask a question to a leader of the church, they just like go through this regurgitated script of things that didn't make sense to me. Now, that's nothing against that religion or any religion. I actually now enjoy viewing different perspectives online. I listen to a lot of Christian content. I listen to a lot of atheist content. I'm not identified with either side because that prevents me from seeing truth. And lastly, this same thing happens not for politics or religion, but for everything. For your job. Do you identify as a lawyer?

17:17Do you identify as a gamer? Do you identify as someone who would not take the actions to the life that you want to live. Now, point number four. The life you want lies within a specific level of mind. Because the mind evolves through predictable stages over time. We've talked about this many times. People love this subject. It's a freaking mind-blowing subject. But when you're born, you're like this little survival sponge that just soaks up as many beliefs as it can to survive so that you can feel safe and secure. And if you don't be careful, you can easily, very easily, get trapped in one of these stages. And this has been documented thoroughly through models like Maslow's hierarchy of needs or Susanne Cook-Greuter's nine stages of ego development or uh Christopher Cowan and Don Beck's spiral dynamics.

18:01These have each built on top of each other and evolved and become more comprehensive and apply to multiple domains. And while it's not completely like pinpoint accurate all of the time, it's a big picture. It's like orienting generalizations. So, we can at least see the patterns and identify them. And since I've talked about this so much, I've talked about it in my Human 3.0 newsletter, which is more like a like a cornerstone article that I think everyone should read. I'll link to that in the description. It's pretty long, but it's thorough. If you If you want to how to achieve anything in your life, I think I dissected it quite well there.

18:36But let's go over the 80/20 of this just so you get a refresher or you understand what we're talking about so we can move on. If you've already heard this, just understand that repetition is important for important things. So, stage one of development is the impulsive stage where there's no separation between impulse and action. It's black and white thinking. As an example, a toddler hits when angry because the feeling and the behavior are the same thing. Stage two is self-protective where the world is dangerous and you learn to look out for yourself. Like how a kid learns to hide report cards, lie about chores, and figure out what adults want to hear.

19:09Stage three is conformist where you are your group and its rules feel like reality itself, which is like someone who genuinely cannot fathom why anyone would vote differently than their family or group or would have a different religion. Stage four is self-aware where you notice you have an inner life that doesn't match the exterior. So, it's like sitting in church and realizing you're not sure you believe what everyone around you seems to believe, but not knowing what to do with that feeling yet. That is me in my past. Stage five is conscientious where you build your own system of principles and hold yourself accountable to them.

19:42So, like leaving your family's religion after careful study and adopting a personal philosophy you can defend or building a career plan with clear milestones because you believe the right efforts yield the right results. Stage six is the individualist stage where you see that your principles were shaped by context and start holding them more loosely. As an example, realizing your political views have more to do with where you grew up than objective truth or noticing that your ambitious career goals were really about earning your father's approval. Stage seven is the strategist stage where you work with systems while aware of your own involvement in them.

20:13So, it's like leading an organization while actively questioning your own blind spots or engaging in politics knowing your perspective is partial and shaped by bias you can't fully see. Stage eight is construct-aware where you see all frameworks, including your identity, as useful fictions. So, it's like holding your spiritual beliefs metaphorically rather than literally. It's knowing that the map is not the territory or watching yourself play the role of founder or thought leader with a kind of gentle amusement. I've done this a few times. I don't know if I'm fully construct-aware because with these, they're like tools, right?

20:45They're like lenses. If you're stressed, you're going to regress into a more conformist stage or more survival stage, so to say, because you're going to feel more threatened. But, I think that people mostly operate within, like, uh uh 80% of their life within a specific level. And that level slowly increases over time with certain aspects or domains of their life branching into other levels. And stage nine is the unitive stage where separation between self and life dissolves. As an example, work, rest, and play feel like the same thing. There's no one left who needs to become something. Just presence responding to what arises.

21:22Now, the spiritual people out there will hear this and praise the ninth unitive stage, but we have to understand that all of these are like tools in the toolbox. They're lenses of perception. They're not necessarily better than one another, but they're larger, higher, more inclusive than one another. They're more complex. Sometimes the highest stage, being at a unitive stage, doesn't allow you to solve a certain problem or make progress in a certain area of your life. But, the thing about the higher stages is that you have all of the lower stages as a tool in your toolbelt so that you can tap into them or pull them out when you need them from a higher perspective.

21:58Now, for most people watching this, I would assume you're between levels four and eight, mostly. So, those who are closer to eight and watching this are doing so as like a refresher or just to pass the time. But, those who are closer to four, you may not know what you want out of life. You feel like you're meant for more, but you can't make sense of everything yet. But, that's a good thing because there is a pattern. There is a way to move through these stages and get closer to the life that you want. So, that leads to point number five, which is that intelligence is the ability to get what you want out of life. And we'll start with this great quote, "The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life."

22:36That's the classic viral quote from Naval. Now, there is a formula to success. One ingredient is agency, which we just talked about in the last video. One ingredient is opportunity, which many people like to mistake as privilege because they lack the other ingredients. And the last ingredient is intelligence. So, if you have high agency below opportunity, it doesn't matter how likely you are to act toward a goal because it isn't a goal that will bear much fruit. If you have opportunity and agency but low intelligence, then you will never be fully able to benefit from that opportunity. Now, we've talked about agency, but in terms of opportunity, I can't really control your physical location.

23:14I can tell you to move, but that's a big ask. That's up to you. But, if you don't see the opportunity in the digital world or on the internet that's right in front of you, I don't know what to tell you. If you want to realize what that is, go watch any of my other videos. So, with that said, in this video, I want you to focus on what intelligence is in the context of those two other gradients and of the context of this video. Cybernetics comes from the Greek word "kybernetikos", which means to steer or good at steering. It's also known as the art of getting what you want. That's when we apply it as like a a frame for viewing the world as a human.

23:52For a machine, it's just an intelligent system that course corrects toward a goal. It's like AI. It actually is the original word for AI, but somebody, I forget who, didn't like the word cybernetics, so they changed it to artificial intelligence. So, if Naval's definition of intelligence is to get what you want out of life, then cybernetics or understanding it helps you do it that much faster. So, what cybernetics illustrates is the properties of an intelligent system, which is to have a goal, act toward the goal, sense where you are, compare it to the goal, and act again based on feedback. It's trial and error. It's experimentation.

24:28It's a scientific process. But, there's a key point here that most people miss. You can judge intelligence based on the system's ability to iterate and persist with trial and error. A ship blown off course that corrects towards its destination. A thermostat sensing a change in heat and turning on. The pancreas in your body excreting insulin after blood glucose spikes. So, what does this have to do with getting what you want out of life? Everything. Acting, sensing, comparing, and understanding the system from a meta perspective is fundamental to high intelligence. High intelligence is the ability to iterate, persist, and understand the big picture.

25:04The mark of low intelligence is the inability to learn from your mistakes. Low intelligence people get stuck on problems rather than solving them. They hit a roadblock and quit. Like a writer who fails to build a readership and quits because they lack the ability to try new things, experiment, and figure out a process that works for them. To think that there isn't an effective process you can create is verifiably false, no matter your limiting beliefs, hence being low intelligence. We're actually going to talk about why artists hate AI so much in a future video. I've been planning that one and doing a lot of research on that one.

25:37And don't get your panties all in a bunch just yet if you're an artist, but from what I've seen, it's just pointing to this definition of low intelligence. Now, high intelligence is realizing that any problem can be solved on a large enough time scale. The reality is that you can achieve any goal you set your mind to. This isn't something that can be disproven within reason. Intelligence is realizing that there is a series of choices you can make which lead to achieving the goal you want. You understand that ideas are hierarchical and that you can't go from papyrus to Google Docs in one leap. Even if the goal is impossible right now, you simply don't have the resources, which may be invented over the next few years, to achieve that thing.

26:21So, what I'm saying is most of your excuses for not achieving a goal is a sign of low intelligence. I'm sorry. Because you have more than enough resources. You can buy freaking ChatGPT for $20. Even though I don't like ChatGPT, you can buy Claude for $20. Now, when I talk about goals, this is what I'm talking about. I'm speaking from the lens of teleology or the Greek cosmos with a K, which is that everything serves a purpose, that everything is a part of a greater whole. Goals determine how you see the world. Goals determine what you consider success or failure. You can try to enjoy the journey or enjoy the process, but if you pursue the wrong goal, you will not enjoy it.

26:58Your mind is the operating system for reality. That system is composed of goals. For most people, those goals are assigned to them, programmed like lines of code in your psyche. Go to school, get a job, get offended, play victim, retire at 65. A known path that doesn't work. So, to become intelligent, you must reject the known path, dive into the unknown, set new, higher goals to expand your mind, embrace the chaos, and allow for more growth. Study the generalized principles of nature and become a deep generalist. That leads us into point number six perfectly, which is how to launch into a completely new life in one day.

27:35Now, I wrote this tweet a few years ago and it just went it popped off. I wasn't expecting so many people to actually resonate with this. And it was the best periods of my life always came after a period of getting absolutely fed up with the lack of progress I was making. So, how do you dig into your mind? How do you become aware of your conditioning? How do you reach profound insights and truths that change the trajectory of your life? The answer is through the simple, but often painful, act of questioning, which is something that so few people do. And you can tell by how they speak or give their thoughts on a specific topic.

28:08It's like you're talking to a TV or the news or the most popular social media posts. Questioning is thinking and very few people do it. So, I want to give you a comprehensive protocol that you can use to reset your life every year or whenever you feel like you need to. And this protocol consists of questions which will tie together into the form of a a list of things that you can just focus on. Now, this will require a full day to complete. It's a full day. I need you to take your time and actually do this. I'm asking you one day to change your entire life. You will need a pen, a paper, and an open mind. Now, when I observe the patterns in people who successfully flip their identity, it happens rather quick after this build-up of tension or disease.

28:52Now, specifically, I've noticed three phases that most people go through. So, you need to go through these phases as well. Phase one is dissonance where they feel like they don't belong in their current life and become sufficiently fed up with their lack of progress. Phase two is uncertainty. So, they don't know what comes next, so they either experiment or get lost and feel worse. And phase three is discovery where they discover what they want to pursue and make six years of progress in six months. Now, I say that before going into the questions because you need to understand like how it feels, how to know. You need the feedback as to whether or not what you're doing is correct because most of the time that feedback, those three phases, aren't comfortable.

29:30You're not immediately just going to be like, "Oh, yes. Um I feel so hyped and so motivated right now." You're going to feel the opposite, and that's the good sign. That's also a sign not to try to mask that up by scrolling on your phone or getting that next quick hit of dopamine. So, part one of this protocol happens in the morning. You're going to do this first thing. And this is for psychological excavation, where we're going to uncover what our vision for the future is and our anti-vision for the future is to create a frame that we can operate within. Because that's the thing. First, in order to change, we need to create a new frame or lens of perception or who our identity is going to be that we can like put on as this shell.

30:08We can shed our old shell like a crab or a lobster, get into a new one, and then grow into it until that too tight and then you reach that point of distance like this doesn't feel right. I'm not supposed to be at this point in life. I need to get out of my shell and find a new one or create a new one. So, that's what we're doing. Now, I'm going to go through these questions. I suggest that you write them down, screenshot them, do whatever you can so that you have them ready tomorrow morning when you actually do this or just come back to this video and skip to this point and create a calendar event or a reminder so that you actually do this.

30:41And I'm just going to run through these questions, so pay attention. What is the dull and persistent dissatisfaction you've learned to live with? Not the deep suffering, but what you've learned to tolerate. What do you complain about repeatedly, but never actually change? Write down three complaints you voiced most often this past year. For each complaint, what would someone who watched your behavior, not your words, conclude that you actually want? What truth about your current life would be unbearable to admit to someone you deeply respect? So, those questions are meant to make you aware of the pain in your current life.

31:13So, now we need to turn those into what I call an anti-vision, which is a brutal awareness of the life that you do not want to live. That way you can use that negative energy when you need it to aim in a positive direction. So, these are the questions to come up with your anti-vision. If absolutely nothing changes for the next 5 years, describe an average Tuesday. Where do you wake up? What does your body feel like? What's the first thing you think about? Who's around you? What do you do between 9:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m.? How do you feel at 10:00 p.m.? Now, do the same thing, but for 10 years. What have you missed? What opportunities closed?

31:47Who gave up on you? What do people say about you when you're not in the room? You're at the end of your life. You lived the safe version. You never broke the pattern. What was the cost? What did you never let yourself feel, try, or become? Who in your life is already living the future you just described? Someone 5, 10, 20 years ahead of you on the same trajectory. What do you feel when you think about becoming them? What identity would you have to give up to actually change? What would it cost you socially to no longer be that person? What is the most embarrassing reason you haven't changed? The one that makes you sound weak, scared, or lazy rather than reasonable.

32:22If your current behavior is a form of self-protection, what exactly are you protecting and what is the protection costing you? Now, if you answered those truthfully and if you're in the right chapter of your life, because if you're just at the beginning of your own book, but this helps you reach the climax, you still have some of a journey to go on. This may not completely apply to you just yet. But if it does, then you will feel this deep sense of disgust or disease or just you don't feel right. You have to do something. So, now we need to orient that energy in a positive direction. We need to create a minimum viable vision, because a vision is like a product.

33:00Your product doesn't start out the best. It starts out unclear and with time and practice and experience, it gets better and more polished and more people like the product. So, there's three questions for your vision. Forget practicality for a minute. If you could snap your fingers and be living a completely different life in 3 years, not what's realistic, but what you actually want. What does an average Tuesday look like? And use the same level of detail as question five from before. What would you have to believe about yourself for that life to feel natural rather than forced? So, write the identity statement, I'm the type of person who {dot} {dot} {dot}.

33:35What is the one thing you would do this week if you're already that person? So, you're going to answer all of those questions first thing tomorrow. That leads into part two, which you're going to do throughout the day and this is going to interrupt autopilot. It's going to interrupt how you're currently unconsciously living. Because those journaling exercises are cute, but we want real change. And frankly, that's not going to happen unless you break the current unconscious patterns that are keeping you the same. So, throughout the day, I want you to contemplate on everything that you wrote in part one. You should just think about it, right?

34:07Question Let questions trigger questions and thoughts trigger thoughts. It's like a meditation on a mantra. You're You're thinking about your vision and anti-vision and you're just letting ideas spring to mind. You're not getting distracted by today's tasks or scrolling on your phone or whatever it may be. And beyond that, I don't want you to forget to contemplate. So, what you're going to do right now is you're going to go on your phone or on your computer and you're and you're going to create reminders or calendar events with these specific questions listed inside the reminder or calendar event. At 11:00 a.m., what am I avoiding right now by doing what I'm doing?

34:44At 1:30 p.m., if someone filmed the last 2 hours, what would they conclude I want from my life? At 3:00 or 3:15 p.m., am I moving toward the life I hate or the life I want? At 5:00 p.m., what's the most important thing I'm pretending isn't important? At 7:30 p.m., what did I do today out of identity protection rather than genuine desire? A hint here, it's most of the things that you do. At 9:00 p.m., when did I feel most alive today and when did I feel most dead? Now, part three, you're going to do in the evening. This is for synthesizing all of the insights that you got throughout the day. And this is how you enter a season of progress tomorrow or the next day.

35:24So, if you follow that process, then I would be pretty surprised if you don't have at least one profound life-changing insight that you came to. So, now we need to make those known, integrate them into who we are, and act on them to begin solidifying a new level of mind or new stage of development. So, here's the questions that you journal on in the evening. After today, what feels most true about why you've been stuck? What is the actual enemy? Name it clearly. It's not circumstances, it's not other people, it's the internal pattern or belief that has been running the show. Write a single sentence that captures what you refuse to let your life become.

36:00This is your anti-vision compressed. It should make you feel something when you read it. Write a single sentence that captures what you're building toward knowing it will evolve. This is your vision MVP. Now, lastly, we need to create goals. We need to make this more practical. We have all the big picture motivational intrinsic motivation stuff, but how do we actually act? And again, these aren't goals that you set for the sake of achievement. These are lenses, macro and micro lenses that you can put on at a certain time to experience the mind of that point of view and to notice the right information and to do the right actions.

36:34When you're really narrowed in on the daily task, then you don't really think about anything else. You just do the task. But when you're really zoomed out to the level of your vision, then you think about so much. You have this unbounded uh creativity. So, three questions here. Your 1-year goal or lens. What would have to be true in 1 year for you to know you've broken the old pattern? One concrete thing. Your 1-month goal or lens. What would have to be true in 1 month for the 1-year lens to remain possible? Now, your daily goal or lens. What are two to three actions you can time block tomorrow that the person you're becoming would simply do?

37:08Now, that was a lot. I hope that was helpful, but we have one last piece to lock it all in. Stick with me here. So, point number seven is turn your life into a video game. We'll start this with a quote from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy or attention is invested in realistic goals and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order and awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else. So, you now have all of the components that lead to a good life.

37:44But now it may be helpful to organize all of those components into a coherent plan. So, now you're going to pull out a new piece of paper and you're going to write down these six things. Anti-vision. What is the bane of my existence or the life I never want to experience again? Vision. What is the ideal life that I think I want and can improve as I work toward it. 1-year goal. What will my life look like in 1 year's time and is that closer to the life I want? 1-month project. What do I need to learn? What skills do I need to acquire? What can I build that will move me closer to the 1-year goal? Daily levers. What are the priority needle moving tasks that bring my project closer to completion?

38:21Constraints. What am I not willing to sacrifice to achieve my vision from the ground up? Now, why is this so powerful? Why is are are those six things so powerful? Because it most people it just sounds like more self-help productivity mumbo jumbo. Because those components literally create your own world. And if you are meant to pursue that hierarchy of goals at this stage in your life, you will have no other option but to become obsessed. You will feel the pull to something greater. You will not see anything else as an option. In essence, you turn your life into a video game. Because games are the poster child for obsession, enjoyment, and flow states.

38:55They have all the components that lead to focus and clarity. So, if we reverse engineer what those components are, we can live in a state of deeper enjoyment, less distractions, and more success. Your vision is how you win, at least until the game evolves. Your anti-vision is what's at stake, what happens if you lose or give up. Your 1-year goal is the mission. This is your sole priority in life. Your 1-month project is the boss fight, how you gain XP and acquire loot. Your daily levers are the quests, the daily process that unlocks new opportunities. Your constraints are the rules, the limitations that encourage creativity.

39:30So, you can think of all of these as just this concentric set of circles, like a force field that guards your mind from distractions and shiny objects. The more you play the game, right? Because this isn't going to be super potent the first time around. The more you invest energy into this into building or adopting this frame, the stronger the force field becomes and soon enough it becomes who you are and you wouldn't have it any other way. Thank you for watching. If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe to my newsletter where I send out long letters on behavior change, psychology, self-improvement, business every week.

40:02Link to that is in the description. Subscribe for the next video. Thank you for watching. I really hope it was to a good 2026. Bye.