How to launch into a completely new life

Tell me if this sounds familiar.

You want to change your life.

Like really bad.

You’re tired of where you are. You’re tired of your physique, or how your mind is not your friend, or how you have to stress over not being able to pay the bills each month, or how you’re going to end up alone.

You finally gain the motivation to start in the gym, start the business, start talking to more people, you know the drill.

Fast forward 2-4 weeks and nothing has changed.

You don’t even know how it happened... you just ended up back in your old life without making any progress.

And this isn’t the first time. You lock in, fall off, lock in again, fall off, and 10 years go by (for some people, their entire life goes by) without breaking the habit of being your worst self.

It sucks.

It’s like you never even tried to change.

Because, well, frankly, you didn’t.

You didn’t actually try.

So what do you do?

If you look at the top athletes, startup founders, visionaries, and strategists who seem to work 16 hours a day without breaking a sweat, do you think they struggle to do that?

Or is that what they want to do?

Is it actually hard for them? No. In fact, it’s extremely hard for them to do what the average person does. It’s a living hell for them to even sense that they’re devolving into a mediocre life.

Why? Because that’s who they are.

How do we replicate this in our own life?

Buckle up.

It gets bumpy.

Become so disgusted with where you are, you have no option but to win

Rockets use 85% to 90% of their total mass as fuel during launch and acceleration, whereas coasting requires zero fuel once orbital or escape velocity is reached.

In other words, what gets you started isn’t what keeps you going.

It’s counterintuitive, as most of life’s truths are, but if you want sustainable change, then you have to brute-force your way into it.

That’s stage one.

The launch fuel. Motivation, pain, a win, a loss, or a burst of willpower. Something that launches you into an intense period of change.

There have been many times in my life when I have used what I call tactical stress.

I move into an apartment I can’t afford so I’m forced to make my business successful enough to afford it, or I go homeless, as one example. I wouldn’t go homeless of course, but I believed I would have. I’ve done that multiple times, and it’s the single greatest “business growth hack” I’ve found. It sounds extreme, and that’s the point. It’s not for everyone, it’s only for those who believe in themselves.

About 5 years ago, I would intentionally go to raves, drink, and party every 2 months or so as a form of glitch in my overly optimized lifestyle. I also enjoyed doing it. It was a nice little shock to the system. The next morning, as you would guess, I would feel horrible. I felt my progress in business and health slipping, and since those goals mattered to me, I usually woke up the next morning with renewed motivation to push as hard as I could.

That leads to the second most potent fuel I’ve found, which is a strong disgust for the life I do not want to live. That’s what almost anyone can take advantage of if they want to change. Waking up with a bad hangover is one way to do it (if you actually have a goal that makes the hangover a bad thing), but there’s another way if that’s not your cup of tea.

For the entirety of this week, here’s what I want you to do:

Observe society and see where most people end up. It’s not pretty. Usually broke, overweight, married to someone they grow to hate, and drowning in financial responsibilities that take advantage of their situation making it nearly impossible to get out. That’s the default end state of the average person’s life. Thanks, entropy.

If thinking about that for a week doesn’t light a fire in your belly (it does for me every time I think about it), the next option is to simply let yourself go until the pain is so great that you never want to experience that life again.

For many people, that's not far off. The problem is that they numb the pain. They shove it in the back of their mind because it would be too painful to face.

If you can face it for a week, that will do the trick.

But now that we have the launch fuel, how do we actually turn that into something sustainable?

You aren’t disciplined because you aren’t the person who doesn’t view it as discipline.

At this point in our history it should be possible for an individual to build a self that is not simply the outcome of biological drives and cultural habits, but a conscious, personal creation.

– Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

I’m begging you to understand this.

Do you think Elon Musk lies around in bed when he wakes up, dreading the day ahead? Do you think he hits snooze 5 times, dreaming of not having to go to work?

Do you think Arnold Schwarzenegger had to trick himself into eating healthy and training twice a day?

Do you think that high performers of this caliber consider it “hard” (in your sense of the word) to do hard things? Or do they love it?

It’s just what they do. It’s automatic.

If I am laser-focused on a goal, like cutting weight while hitting my macro targets, a cheat meal at McDonald's doesn’t sound tasty to me. It sounds fucking disgusting. You would have to pry me from my chair to get me to even lick a double quarter pounder with cheese. It would take an immense amount of discipline for me to eat mediocre food.

That sounds pretentious, I’m aware of that, but it’s going to be far easier for me to drop 10-20 pounds than it is for the person who can’t stop thinking about the next time they get to drown in grease.

People who cannot fathom this will then say, “Why don’t you have a little fun! Lighten up!” as a defense mechanism to protect their identity, but what they do not understand is that I am having more fun now than I would be going with you to eat your entire daily caloric allowance in 15 minutes just to go into a food coma and sloth around the rest of the day. Yes, so fun!

It is one of the greatest feelings in the world to be in pursuit of your potential, with little to no gap between who you are and who you want to be. You live in the flow state, a video game, taking on a string of challenging quests you choose to accept, and being rewarded amply for doing so. Maybe not in the form of money, but insight, experience, and direct feedback from reality.

But identity change is so abstract.

You can’t see your identity.

It’s not like a business where you have a direct and rapid feedback mechanism like money - if you aren’t making any, reality is telling you you’re doing something wrong, and if you are making money, reality is telling you you’re exactly where you should be revenue-wise.

So what do we do? How do we take the dirty launch fuel and turn it into a sustainable system that eventually becomes “just who I am?”

Give me 10 minutes and I’ll show you how to become someone entirely new

You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.

– James Clear

You are the statistical sum of what you repeatedly do.

And what you do is more than the physical decisions you make.

You are the accumulated result of everything that flows through you, in both directions, input and output.

Input = everything you’re exposed to. Every book you read. Every post you glance at for a split second. Every person you call a friend. Every belief your parents and teachers installed before you even had a chance to consent. The news you read to stay informed. The conversations you overhear. The people whose lives you watch from a distance.

Output = everything you produce in the world. Your decisions, actions, works, and work. What you do when no one is watching and what you do when everyone is.

That is literally the entire equation.

Input shapes the mind that perceives situations and makes decisions. Output shapes the life that presents the next input. It compounds.

To change who we are we must change this flow of information and action.

For input, the rule is simple.

Curate and protect everything your mind is exposed to on a daily basis. You must immerse yourself in stimuli that match the person you want to become and starve the person you used to be. The old you must die.

Some may see what’s below and think “Oh I already knew that.” or “That’s just basic self-help.”

But if you actually knew it, you wouldn’t be in this situation, would you? Writing it off as “basic” keeps you from seeing how simple this all is. You are not special, and you do not need something novel to change your life. You need what’s been proven to work for the entirety of human existence.

First, choose your information diet.

Most people are intellectually obese. Unfollow, mute, and unsubscribe from anything that lowers your standards or wastes your attention. Follow and read the people and ideas that raise it. Your social timeline is an environment just like any other. You live in it, and it influences you.

Second, choose the people you surround yourself with.

Their values, fears, and assumptions about what’s normal and possible leak into you even if you think they don’t. This is the most difficult part. You can try to bring your friends along with you, but it is extremely difficult to help people who don’t want to be helped.

Third, interrogate your mind for beliefs that do not serve you.

Most of your beliefs about money, what you deserve in this life, and what’s possible to achieve were determined before you could even understand the language you speak. If you haven’t become aware of these beliefs, then it’s unlikely that they have shifted. You cannot change what you have not examined.

Fourth, exchange passive for active consumption.

The difference between reading ten posts fast and one book slowly is drastic. I bet you can’t tell me about even 2 of the social posts you read yesterday. But a life changing YouTube video, podcast, book chapter, or Substack article that is created with care by someone who is passionate about what they do is something that sticks with you, and influences you for the better.

Make it so easy succeed you’d look stupid if you fail

I forgot to mention something important.

This is the second stage of change.

The first is the launch. You know, using a dirty fuel to gain the motivation to make the change in the first place. Because frankly, without it, you probably aren’t going to change your inputs, and you won’t be able to break through the atmosphere and coast with the sustainable system we are about to create.

Your outputs, or decisions and actions, occur as a four-part feedback loop:

Environment → Signal → Behavior → Payoff

This is essentially the habit loop from B.F. Skinners operant conditioning, which went on to be popularized by Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit) and James Clear (Atomic Habits).

Cue → response → reward is textbook behavioral psychology. It works.

The first step is making the desired output the path of least resistance, and the undesired output incredibly inconvenient.

The second is creating a trigger, or signal that starts the behavior that leads to the desired output, preferably on a daily basis.

The third is reducing success to the minimum recognizable version of the output (not a great workout, but stepping into the gym).

The fourth is the reward. Something enjoyable delivered right after the behavior, every single time, until the behavior is the reward itself.

This feedback loop is best illustrated with examples:

Goal 1 = Gaining muscle in the gym.

First, you curate your inputs. Follow two to three sources of inspiration and education so your feed reminds you of your goal as you make this change. Unfollow the fitness content that sells insecurity and acceptance of mediocrity. Surround yourself with at least one person who already trains, because their normal becomes your normal. Examine the beliefs installed in you about your body and what you’re capable of.

Then engineer your outputs.

Environment - Set your clothes out the night before, remove all junk food from your cabinets, and study the exercises you’re doing in tomorrows workout so you have clarity, and maybe a bit of excitement, to try them out.

Signal - Go at the same time every day. For me, that time is around 11am. If you’re just starting, set an alarm for that time, and make the alarm a distinct tone that represents going to the gym.

Behavior - Show up and only promise yourself you’ll do the minimum. One hard set. Chances are you’ll want to keep going since you’re already there.

Reward - Stop at the local smoothie place or even a gas station to get a protein shake. This was my reward when I first started. Sure, they’re probably not that great for you, but big picture the end state you are pursuing outweighs any minor damage it does.

Goal 2 = Turning your interests or writing into a business

We talk about this a lot here, so it’s a worthy example.

Inputs - Follow the creators you want to model and the thinkers who sharpen your ideas. Starve yourself of everything else, let your algorithm become a source of inspiration. Read books and long form content from people who have achieved what you want, they are your mentors. Create a new digital friend group of people who are doing the same thing - you could probably meet them in the comments of this article. Examine your beliefs about money, whether you believe it’s difficult to make, and whether wealth generation is luck or skill.

Environment - Add your idea capture app as a shortcut on your phone. Have your writing/scheduling app open so articles, posts, and newsletters write themselves. Batch your highest priority, highest leverage, and most difficult tasks in the morning.

Signal - Your first coffee in the morning at your desk, a specific song to start off the writing session, something like that, but never only relying on inspiration as a signal to create.

Behavior - Post the minimum amount of content necessary. One post a day, one newsletter a week, with the minimum quality. You just need it to go out, you don’t need it to be perfect or brilliant. Consistency both outruns and creates taste.

Reward - For me, I enjoy walks. I always want to be outside. Once I finish my 2-3 main priorities in the morning, the walk is my reward. For you it could be tracking a streak and seeing the number go up. Eating breakfast (I also like “fasting” while I work, although it’s not long enough to be considered intermittent fasting. Helps with focus.)

I think you get the point.

Launch the rocket. Become heavily inspired or heavily disgusted with where your life is. Whichever fuel you thrive on, neither is bad when channeled toward something meaningful.

Do not waste that beautifully potent fuel. Use it to create the system. Make the behavior automatic, and eventually it will become “just what I do.”

And finally, if that last example is something you resonate with, you can now sell digital products in Eden.

Not just a course or ebook, but a better way to monetize your interests and knowledge.

Think of it like a course you can talk to, or an ebook you can talk to, or even an article that helps you implement what’s inside (I could quickly turn this article into a product and sell it for $10 and link it here).

It’s your own AI, with your knowledge inside.

You no longer need to build or maintain your own AI app, and you don’t need to worry about AI costs. We handle that for you.

So, if you sell an ebook or course, or if you give out prompts or Custom GPTs, or you have something valuable that would be worth selling - you will make more money (and your product will be perceived as more valuable) if you sell it on Eden.

Info products are not even close to dead, they just haven’t evolved to live in the AI age.

It’s your knowledge, and other people can chat with it without needing you there.

Learn more about it here.

Or use this custom AI to help you come up with a profitable digital product idea. It also helps you build it.

Thank you for reading.

Talk soon.

– Dan