How to get ahead of 99% of people (in 6-12 months)

“The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.”

~ Paul Valery

Here’s how you get ahead of 99% of people in 6-12 months.

Become brutally aware of 2 things:

1. What you dont want to happen

2. What happens if you keep doing the same things in life.

Take a look around and simply observe people. See for your own eyes where mindless action leads.

And instead of making excuses or coverups for what you see or do, sit with your thoughts.

There’s two camps of people here:

You discard it as “inevitable reality”.

You feel judgment in your observations.

If you feel the judgement towards others, it means you have a standard against what you compare them to. So you have a standard against which to compare yourself also. Which is going in the right direction.

However, if you discard it as inevitable, if you surrender yourself to that, you’re digging yourself a deeper hole.

That same closed-minded, surface level perspective (wether conscious or sub/unconscious) is what got you where you are in the first place.

And you need to think deeper to know what you dont want rather than having grand visions.

I’m a huge advocate for having a vision (heck, I named and still name a lot of my projects around that term), but most of the time people only think of their goals when it comes to future outlook. That is an INCOMPLETE picture.

Ever notice how overly negative events in your life (or that of the people around you or of stories) have a more significant impact on humans than the overly good events?

And it is for that same reason you need an anti-vision for you to avoid. Here’s an action item for you. Grab a notebook or a piece of paper. Write down all of the things that you want to avoid.

Before you set on writing it all down, some help in grouping can be as follows:

1. Fitness

2. Money / Career / Business

3. Relationships

Once you have a few elements of an anti-vision written down, let’s get to the opposite of that. You now have the standard to measure yourself against I mentioned in the beginning. You have the bad ending in mind? Good. Lets get to the good one now.

Write some more stuff down.

Fitness goals of making it to a certain weight. Starting a specific sport. Following a diet you’ve been waiting to start.

Making X ammount of money per month. Spending less time to make the same amount of money. Buying X car, apartment, etc.

Meeting some of the people you look up to. Going out and engaging at events you’d like to go to. Fostering a romantic relationship.

Now that we have both the vision and the anti-vision - and this will be your compass on how you go through your day to day.

The only thing that matters and that shapes your perspective is the goals you set.

Until now, you were fine with binging on netflix since that didnt negatively impact your goal. Same with junk food, video games, gambling, and so forth.

Every action you take moving forward will now have a tag attached to it of either negative or positive value. If you truly value the outcome, you will notice remarks you make regarding your action (or lack thereof). This is the judgmenet I mentioned in the beginning.

With thse value tags, the only thing left to do is to get back to your workbench and apply and implement the steps neccesary so achieve the goals.

And since you wrote down the steps, you need only follow them.

That does mean pruning everything with a negative tag associated with it.

Yes it is going to be a mouthful of a shit sandwich, but that is the hard you signed up for.

And it oftentimes means reforging your existing identity. If you know you play too many video games, dissociate from that identity. If you’re a non smoker, it doesnt take any convincing for you to NOT smoke.

Likewise, if you identify yourself as someone who simply doesnt play games, that simply goes to the gym, it doesn’t take any more convinving beyond that.

Sounds easy in theory, but this implies you changing into that identity, which does take time. Not long, you should be there in 6-12 months. (Yes, 6-12 months is not that long of a time. If it makes you uncomfortable, you have some other problems you need to take care of.)

Now as part of the process - I will not talk about being consistent in this video, but I will say this:

For you to take on these new traits, for you to literally form new neural connections linked towards your goals, you will need to stop reinforcing the old neural connections.

If a business is not growing, its dying. Same way with your neural pathways. If not reinforced, they atrophy. If you do not repeat a behaviour, that will no longer be part of you.

In simpler words - for you to rebuild yourself, old you has to go.

And for old you to go, that means dropping your partying friends, your gaming friends, and everyone that encourages the behaviours with your new negative tags to it.

6 to 12 months. Take the “boring” actions you set out for yourself, and have at it.

I say boring with quotes because the actions are not really boring. They’re part of the same game i.e lifting weights daily, working on your business daily, writing daily.

The most efficient people at this, the ones obsesed about their repetitive, day to day actions view this like a video game. Same way you always fight enemies, you always go from one level to another, you clear dungeons, and what else have you.

Except doing that in-game, logging on and advancing in a video game hijacks your mind to strive for in-game rewards. Even if it takes the same ammount of time or effort to achieve an outcome as a real-life counterpart.

Every time you log on social media, videogames, you’re in a fight for your attention and dopamine. And your enemies are hundreds of PHDs with their only goal being you getting as hooked as possible on their product.

And the one way out is to transpose that striving to the real world. To do the tasks, to get the points, to stack the XP to slowly level up and approach your goals. To pull the levers that will get you closer to your objectives.

Now these are the fundamentals, you know this - but they’re not “boring”.

Dan Koe likes to call it “Mastery over misery”. They’re boring compared to the alternatives. They’re boring on the surface. But it’s what it takes.

Just like in fighting, you first learn how to throw a simple punch. Simple. Then you learn movement. Simple. Then you learn how to block, and combine them with the previous two. Simple, but compounding.

The best fighters spent their entire lives to throw a better punch.

And while you can expedite the process, 10 years of progress cannot be squeezed in 2 weeks.

And you should not expect results that quickly. It will take years, decades. It might take you an entire lifetime to polish your project - which in the end is “the good life”.

How quick for results is a stupid question. Stop asking it like that.

The goals you set yourself all contribute to a single thing - “The Good Life”. And a life takes a lifetime to build.