The Method

This letter is a continuation of Tuning Your Systems

let’s discuss how to master almost anything as you trek toward becoming a new you:

1) Expand Your Mind

All real change is identity change.

Your level of mind dictates what values, beliefs, and standards are available to your identity.

You don’t care about global problems because you haven’t solved the personal problems that restrict your mind from seeing them as important.

The purpose of humanity is to expand your level of mind to that of The Universe.

You must allow yourself the room to discover new goals by tossing an anchor into the unknown.

Create a massive goal that acts as the spotlight in the unknown.

You don’t set this massive goal for practicality or achievement.

You set it for vision, direction, and filtration of opportunities.

Focus on making it as desirable as possible.

• If you had all the money in the world, what would your average day look like?

• What kind of environment do you want to live in? Is there a specific location? Do you want to travel?

• Do you want a family? What do you want that life to look like? Visualize an average day of family time.

• How long of a workday do you want to have? If you could do anything, what would you do for work?

• How do you want to look and feel? Describe your body, energy levels, and how you want to present yourself to the world.

• What does your ideal day look like? Map out every hour.

• List out anything else that comes to mind in terms of a specific future that you want to build for yourself.

To make this even more potent, turn this vision into an anti-vision to round out the perspective of your ideal self:

1. What is the bane of your existence?

2. Write out the opposite of every question about your vision.

For even more firepower, create a vision board. Add images to a scrapbook, software, or wall that makes that future more tangible.

Remember that nothing is permanent.

You will discover inklings for your vision as you trek along this path. Be open to changing what you want as you discover what you don’t want.

The pain of not reaching your vision should outweigh the pleasure of mediocrity.

Not only does a massive goal provide vision, it allows you a perspective to adopt when it’s time to make a decision.

Filter every single opportunity you receive through your vision.

Say “no” to everything except for that which aligns with who you want to become.

Start short-circuiting the faulty programming your mind runs on through conscious choice.

2) A Hierarchy Of Goals

Most people don’t need motivation, they need clarity.

An ordered mind is a happy one, and a hierarchy of self-generated goals makes it hard for depressing distractions to penetrate your awareness.

While big goals are for vision and filtration, small goals are for practicality and progress.

Now, break your vision down into goals for each domain of your life – mind, body, spirit, business. Relationships are synonymous with spirit here.

Yes, this will be time-consuming. Keep this written somewhere safe so you can change things as you go.

For all 4 domains of life, create:

• 10-year goals

• 1-year goals

• Monthly goals

• Weekly goals

Then, every day, you are going to write down 3-5 priority tasks that move the needle toward these goals from the ground up.

Knock these tasks out first thing in the morning before responsibilities and distractions have time to wake up.

3) How To Learn

Learning comes from struggle, not memorization.

You don’t learn by studying tutorials all day.

You learn by building a project and facing reality.

Projects are goals that you can measure and iterate.

So, turn a few of your 1-year or monthly goals into a project.

• Ideate a way to build something tangible (you must do work)

• Write down milestones you can reach.

• Create an outline in a notes app or notebook.

• Brain-dump any ideas that come to mind.

Do this for mental, physical, financial, and spiritual development.

This primes your mind for pattern recognition-induced meaningful dopamine.

Your projects add additional “rules” to your perception of situations.

You now have a place to write down high-signal information that you receive as you educate yourself and interpret feedback while building.

Start, then learn. You must learn and build in unison to truly learn.

When you build something, you encounter real problems that require a new level of mind to solve.

Only then can you search for information to expand your mind and solve those problems. This is impossible when watching tutorials all day.

4) Skills Are Groups Of Techniques

Building a project isn’t the end of learning.

To build a project, you must acquire skills along the way.

But you don’t “learn a skill.”

You learn a technique, experiment with it, and continue adding techniques until you can combine them in a way that leads to your desired outcome.

You don’t learn Photoshop as a skill.

You create a project, search for a technique to complete one aspect of it, and continue learning techniques until you finish the project.

Trying to learn the software itself is almost useless and takes much longer.

There are 10+ different techniques to remove the background of an image.

Knowing multiple techniques will allow you to remove the background seamlessly from almost any scene.

You don’t learn copywriting as a skill.

You learn techniques for:

• Capturing attention

• Holding attention

• Enhancing the perceived value of your product or idea

• Etc

There are dozens of techniques for each, and the more you learn, the better you get at copywriting as a skill.

Everything is a skill.

Life is a skill that encapsulates health, wealth, and relationships as skills until broken down into techniques you can practice over the course of your life to master life itself.

All skills are mental.

Skills mental systems that become more efficient with practice to achieve your desired outcome.

There’s more that you need to know about this but I can’t fit it all into one letter!