Your mind is a process that holds limitless potential.
Success in the conventional status-denoting sense of the word can be achieved by fine-tuning your conditioning in a specific way.
This video by Alex Hormozi shows quite clearly what the functioning of a brain conditioned to success in today’s world works like.
Here I have organized the summary into a framework.
1 | WHAT is to be done?
1.1 Macro Goal - Impress the future version of you.
Ethics is an optimization problem.
Minimizing regret is a damn good heuristic.
If you’re at the top of the status game, you rarely get anything but sycophancy from the people below you.
The people above you rarely care enough about your problems to help you out.
So there’s no one else whose feedback can really help you.
1.2 Micro Goal - What steps do you need to take?
Understand that your brain works to ensure that you survive, and does not care that you thrive.
The threats you detect to your survival are dependent upon your conditioning.
When piece of identity that is essential to your ego is threatened, the body responds as though the biological organism itself is threatened.
Either the underlying belief changes, or the world changes.
If this post has resonated with you till this point, being “successful” is already somewhat essential to you.
The part of you that sabotages your success and harshly judges you is your present self extrapolating from the actions of your past self. 1
It ensures that you don’t make promises that you can’t keep.
Invert the problem.
You already know what you need to do.
Negate every self sabotaging thought and Take Souls from every harsh critic inside your head.
2 | HOW to DO - Operationalize.
To achieve any end, there is a means. That means is always some form of technology in a suitably broad definition.
People are technology, your brain is technology.
Technology is reliable when it inherits the scientific principles of falsifiability and predictive power.
A skill is a person’s ability to reliably affect the world a certain way. More complex skills are composed of simpler skills.
The fact that you opened this post shows that you can reliably operate the internet. A toddler does not possess this skill. But if they were instructed at a level which they were comfortable with, such as pointing to the individual keys, they could do it too.
Your skillset is the corpus of the ways in which you can reliably affect the world.
The more skilled you are the more the broader the way in which you can reliably affect the world.
Learning2 is when you react differently to the same conditioning. Intelligence is the rate of learning.
Learning is an experiment on the environment; a jump of awareness that redefines how you react to a stimulus also changes how the world reacts to you.
By repeating the new learned reaction many times, you establish its reliability and add its effects to your skillset.
This learning is domain specific. Confidence doesn’t transfer if the conditions are too different.
If something was learned, then it can be taught3, although how much you learn from an experience is a function of prerequisite knowledge and intelligence.
3 | WHY to do it ?
You do it because you decided to be “successful” in your definition of that word, to impress your future self.
Invert again.
What is stopping you from becoming successful?
3.1 External Conditions - It's Hard.
What makes you extraordinary is not what you do its how long you’re willing to do it for
Chances are you’re already in some endeavor that you thought was good for you at some point in time.
There’s no basis for the implicit assumption that success should come easy.
Most people don’t do hard things in their life, so they don’t know what hardship looks like.
The desire to quit, the uncertainty and the self doubt, the isolation from people around you - all this is what ‘hard’ actually looks like.
To attain “success” in the traditional sense, all you have to do is stay the course.
Hormozi explains his concept of Opportunity Hopping:
Uninformed optimism - Informed Pessimism - Valley of Despair - Informed Optimism - Winning.
Almost everyone quits when they are at the lowest in some endeavors, whoever remains gets all the remaining benefits.
A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.
3.2 Internal Conditions - No Motivation.
Motivation in this framework comes from (perceived) deprivation; There can be actual deprivation of food or water, or perceived deprivation of something you want.
It is the energy released to counteract a perceived lack.
A lack becomes apparent only through comparison.
There is no point comparing with people below you, because it pulls you down to their level.
There is no point in comparing with people above you, because this creates conflicting incentives. (them failing also achieves your goal, so you will invest some energy towards it).
The only person its useful to compare yourself to is the person you genuinely want to become.4
As long as you have not already achieved your goal (impressing future you), this perceived lack will always remain.
Hence, you have infinite motivation.
4 | HOW to BECOME someone who has certain traits ?
Personality traits we describe people with are linguistic shorthand for behaviors we frequently observe them engage in.
This unfortunately ossifies our identities instead of letting them be dynamic fluxes of activity.
So, if you want to be a certain type of person, you have to do the things that type of person does, bringing us to a quote by James Clear:
Each habit is a conscious vote for the person you want to become
5 | WHEN should you Start?
Invert again.
Why not start now?
5.1 Macro Level
If you’re swamped with projects at your work or your university, it is counterintuitively the best time to start a new habit that sticks.
If you can make it work in the worst conditions, it becomes easy in the normal conditions.
5.2 Micro Level
If you physically don’t have enough time to schedule something that you are prioritizing into your day, then you are being inefficient with what you’re prioritizing higher or not working hard enough.
Smart. Busy. Broke. You can’t be all three.
If you are sure about the fact that you don’t have enough time in your day and you’re spending it optimally, then you should also be okay with not getting anything apart from what you’re currently getting.
5.3 When-Then Fallacy
“I’ll do it when I have more time” is the wrong approach fundamentally.
If you do not change your priorities and your process, you will never have time.
Changing these things is what will allow you to have time for the activity.
Conclusion
Now you know what to do, how to do it, why to keep going, how you change who you are, and when you should start.
The longer it takes for you to change yourself given all this knowledge, the less intelligent you are, and the more useless the last 5 minutes you spent reading this were.
Criticism and Insights
The focus on action is quite an interesting concept here, both in terms of identity and in terms of skills being collections of instructions. It reminds me of David Bohm’s rheomode- or a process philosophy type of conception of things.
The parts related to identity are quite interesting again, as they signify a movement from a system where the primary framework for the formation of identity was authenticity to prolificity in terms of Hans Georg Moeller’s usage; It is a kind of bittersweet performativity that mourns authenticity but also celebrates the revolutionary potential implicit in the freedom to mold your identity with conscious actions.
The operationalizing of people and skills is a powerful technique; It is basically what one would get if we applied the scientific method to skills and people. However, in some senses, it also seems to be exactly what Heidegger warned against. Excessive technological usage has rendered everything available to us a resource to be used.
There is no systemic critique here. Though it realizes the transitoriness of the self in one aspect (conscious action can help you become who you genuinely pretend to be), it still posits the existence of some true authentic ‘future you’ isolated from the material and social conditioning in which your conception of that idea evolved.
Deriving motivation from linking the concept of self image to success is a rather slippery slope (especially if it is not linked with an adequate analysis of where your conception of success comes from). Also the justification for not comparing yourself with people more successful than you seems to be a bit lacking.
Other interesting things from the week:
Finally started meetings in the Quantum Field Theory reading group I started in my college.
This video on String Theory.
This article about tech resumes .
Started researching learning theory and went through the resources on Justin Sung’s website (I will probably read through the report next week).
Started watching this series of videos on Difference and Repetition. I will probably start trying to chug through the book in upcoming weeks.
This interview with the entrepreneur David Park.
I got a double bass pedal and started practicing!!
Is your current definition of success irrational? Where does it come from? Those are questions you must answer for yourself.
in Hormozi’s definition, and for the purposes of this framework.
Possibly under very specific circumstances.
Although this is naive in some ways, as your idea of the person you want to become is also inextricably linked to the people in your life.