DAN KOE

If you're anything like me, you think new years resolutions are stupid. Because most people go about changing their lives in the completely wrong way. They create these resolutions because everyone else does – we create a 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. If you're one of these people, I'm not here to talk down on you (I tend to be a bit harsh in my writing). I’ve quit 10x more goals than I’ve achieved. I think that should be the case for most people. But the fact that people try to change their lives and utterly fail almost every time holds true. However, as much as I think new years resolutions are stupid, it’s always wise to reflect on the life you hate so you can launch yourself toward something that much better, as we will discuss. So whether you want to start the business, transform your body, or take the risk toward a more meaningful life without quitting after 2 weeks, I want to share 7 ideas you probably haven’t heard before on behavior change, psychology, and productivity so you can do just that in 2026. This will be comprehensive. This isn’t one of those letters that you read through and forget about. This is something you will want to bookmark, take notes on, and set aside time to think about. The protocol at the end (to dig deep into your psyche and uncover what you truly want in life) will take about a full day to complete, with effects that last far longer than that. Let’s begin. ## I – You aren’t where you want to be because you aren’t the person who would be there When it comes to setting big goals, people tend to focus on one of the two requirements for success: - Changing your actions to make progress toward the goal (least important, second order) - Changing who you are so that your behavior naturally follows (most important, first order) Most people set a surface-level goal, 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 life on a rotting foundation. If this doesn’t make sense, let’s run through an example. Think of somebody successful. It can be a bodybuilder with a great physique, a founder/CEO worth hundreds of millions, or a charismatic dude who can chat up a group without a shred of anxiety entering his mind. Do you think the bodybuilder has to “grind” to eat healthy? Does the CEO have to discipline themselves to show up and lead the team? To you, it may seem like that on the surface, but the truth is that they can’t see themselves living any other way. The bodybuilder has to grind to eat unhealthily. The CEO has to force themself to lie in bed past their alarm clock, and they hate every second of it (there is nuance here, just entertain me for a second). To some people, my own lifestyle seems a bit extreme and disciplined. To me, it’s natural, and I don’t say that to contrast it with any other kind of lifestyle. I simply enjoy living this way. When my mom tells me that I should take a break, go out, and have some fun... I hold my tongue from telling her, “If I weren’t having fun, why would I be doing what I’m doing?” This next sentence may sound simple, but it is baffling how many people don't get it. If you want a specific outcome in life, you must have the lifestyle that creates that outcome long before you reach it. If someone says they want to lose 30 pounds, I often don’t believe them. Not because I don’t think they are capable, but because there are too many times when that same person says, “I can’t wait until I'm done losing weight so I can start to enjoy life again.” I hate to break it to you, but if you don’t adopt the lifestyle that led to you losing the 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 straight back to where you started, and you can unhappily say that you wasted the resource you will never get back: 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. We will discuss how to uncover this, but we need to build up to that. You say you want to change. You say you want to “become financially free” and “get healthy,” but your actions show otherwise for a reason. And it goes a lot deeper than you think. ## II – You aren’t where you want to be because you don’t want to be there > Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement. – Alfred Adler If you want to change who you are, you must understand how the mind works so that you can start to reprogram it. The first step to understanding the mind is to understand that all behavior is goal-oriented. It's teleological. When you think about it, this is kinda obvious, but when we dig into it, most people don’t want to hear it. You take a step forward because you want to reach a certain location. You scratch your nose because you want to make the itch go away. Those ones are clear, but most of the time, your goals are unconscious. You may not realize that when you sit on the couch in the middle of the day, you are trying to burn time before your next responsibility, as one simple example. On an even more unconscious and complex level, you pursue goals that can harm you, but you justify your actions in a way that is socially acceptable and doesn’t make you seem like a loser. As an example, if you can’t stop procrastinating your work, you may justify it with the fact that you “lack discipline,” but in reality, you are 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. If you say you want to quit your dead-end job, but stay in it without any real reason, you may start to think you don’t have enough courage, or that you were never really a “risk taker,” but the truth is that you are pursuing the goal of safety, predictability, and an excuse to not look like a failure to everyone else in your life who sees working a dead-end job as a sign of success. The lesson here is that real change requires changing your goals. 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. I 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. Now let’s dig a bit deeper, because if you don’t understand this, it only becomes more difficult to get out. I send out letters like these 1-2x a week. If you don’t want to miss them, join here. You can also read my book free, other letters, etc. ## III – You aren’t where you want to be because you’re afraid to be there > 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 met a professional hypnotist. 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, it has the same power over you as the hypnotist’s words have over the hypnotized subject. – Maxwell Maltz Here’s how you’ve become who you are today, and how you will become who you will be tomorrow. This is the anatomy of identity: - You want to achieve a goal - You perceive reality through the lens of that goal - You only notice “important” information and ideas that allows you to achieve that goal (learning) - You act toward that goal and receive feedback that you are progressing toward it - You repeat that behavior until it becomes automatic and unconscious (conditioning) - That behavior becomes a part of who you think you are (”I am the type of person who...”) - You defend your identity to maintain psychological consistency - Your identity shapes new goals, restarting the cycle, and if that identity is disadvantageous toward a good life, this gets bad very quick The unfortunate reality is that you must break the cycle between steps 6 and 7, but this process starts when you are a child. You have the goal of survival. You are dependent on your parents to teach you how to survive. You had to conform. And since the way most people teach is through reward and punishment, unless you adopt their beliefs and values, you will be punished. You don’t actually think for yourself until you see through this. But your parents have also gone through this process throughout their entire lives. That’s where it can get dangerous. Your parents, unless they broke the pattern themselves, were conditioned by the culturally accepted ideas of success from the Industrial age. They also carry the best and worst conditioning from their parents and their parents’ parents. To take it a layer deeper, once you fulfill your physical survival needs (which is quite easy to do in today’s world, you’re practically born into safety), you start to survive on the conceptual or ideological level. You may not try to protect and reproduce your body, but you absolutely protect and reproduce your mind. It’s not difficult to see the war of ideas on the internet, and the participants are individual and group identities. When your body feels threatened, you go into fight or flight. When your identity feels threatened, the same thing happens. If you are heavily identified with a political ideology (by the process we talked about just before), you will feel threatened when someone challenges your beliefs. You literally feel the stress. You feel, emotionally, like you were just slapped in the face. Since most people don’t analyze their emotions for truth, you tend to get stuck in echo chambers and double down on claims that harm yourself and others. If you were raised in a religious household, and did not think for yourself, you will fight and attack others who threaten your psychological safety within that little bubble. The same thing happens when you unconsciously see yourself as a lawyer, a gamer, or somebody else who would not take the actions to achieve a better life. ## IV – The life you want lies within a specific level of mind The mind evolves through predictable stages over time. When you’re born, you’re like a little survival sponge that absorbs whatever beliefs you can (which are heavily dictated by your culture) so that you can feel safe and secure. And if you don’t be careful, your mind may crystalize and it may make it difficult to live a meaningful life. This has been documented enough in models like Maslow’s Hierarchy, Greuter’s stages of ego development, Spiral Dynamics, and Integral Theory, each building off of one another, but it’s also not difficult to observe in society. I’ve talked about these many times, and synthesized them into my own Human 3.0 model with various AI prompts to uncover your level of development and a path forward (open in a tab to read after if you'd like), but here’s the 80/20 of the 9 stages of ego development as a refresher (because repetition helps reveal things you didn’t notice before, and there are new people reading these letters): - Impulsive — No separation between impulse and action. Black and white thinking. I.e. A toddler hits when angry because the feeling and the behavior are the same thing. - Self-Protective — The world is dangerous and you learn to look out for yourself. I.e. A kid learns to hide report cards, lie about chores, and figure out what adults want to hear. - Conformist — You are your group and its rules feel like reality itself. I.e. Someone who genuinely cannot fathom why anyone would vote differently than their family or group. - Self-Aware — You notice you have an inner life that doesn’t match the exterior. I.e. 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. - Conscientious — You build your own system of principles and hold yourself accountable to them. I.e. 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 effort yields the right results. - Individualist — You see that your principles were shaped by context and start holding them more loosely. I.e. 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. - Strategist — You work with systems while aware of your own involvement in them. I.e. 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. - Construct-Aware — You see all frameworks, including your identity, as useful fictions. I.e. Holding your spiritual beliefs with metaphorically not literally, knowing the map is not the territory, or watching yourself play the role of “founder” or “thought leader” with a kind of gentle amusement. - Unitive — Separation between self and life dissolves. I.e. 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. For most people reading this, I would assume you hover between 4 and 8, which is a huge gap. Those closer to 8 are reading this are doing so to either learn something or pass time in a non-destructive way. Those closer to 4 are really looking for a change. You feel like you are meant for more, but you can’t make sense of everything yet, because there’s obviously a lot at play. The good thing is, it doesn’t really matter what stage you are in, because moving through any of them follows a pattern. ## V – Intelligence is the ability to get what you want out of life > The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. – Naval Ravikant There is a formula for success. One ingredient is agency. One ingredient is opportunity (which many people like to mistake as “privilege” - because they the other ingredients). The last ingredient is intelligence. If you have high agency but low 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. First, we’ve talked about agency before here. In terms of opportunity, I can’t tell you to change your physical location, but if you don’t see the abundance of digital opportunity right in front of you, I don’t know what to tell you. With that said, I want to focus on what intelligence is in the context of these two other ingredients and this letter. For that, we look to cybernetics. > 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.” So, if Naval’s definition of intelligence is getting what you want out of life, understanding cybernetics helps you do that much faster. Cybernetics illustrates the properties of intelligent systems. • To have a goal. • Act toward that goal. • Sense where you are. • Compare it to the goal. • And act again based on that feedback. 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 toward its destination. A thermostat sensing a change in heat and turning on. The pancreas excreting insulin after blood glucose spikes. 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 (with the definition we are using here). High intelligence is the ability to iterate, persist, and understand the big picture. The 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.) High intelligence is realizing any problem can be solved on a large enough timescale. The reality is that you can achieve any goal you set your mind to. 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 fell swoop. Even if that 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. When I talk about “goals,” and as I will continue repeating, I am not speaking from the typical lens of self-help, although that’s a helpful lens to adopt at times. I am speaking from the lens of teleology or the Greek kosmos – 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,” but if you pursue the wrong goal, you will not enjoy it. Your 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 the job. Get offended. Play victim. Retire at 65. A known path that doesn’t work. To become more 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 growth • Study the generalized principles of nature • Become a deep generalist I understand this may not be the traditional definition of intelligence, but that sequence of steps leads to an extraordinary level of connections in your brain, leading to what we would observe as an intelligent person. Pair that with agency and you've got a winner. That leads us into the next section perfectly. ## VI – How to launch into a completely new life (in 1 day) > The best periods of my life always came after a period of getting absolutely fed up with the lack of progress I was making. 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? Through the simple, but often painful act of questioning. Something that so few people do, and you can tell by how they speak or give their thoughts on a specific topic. Questioning is thinking, and very few people do it. I want to give you a comprehensive protocol that you can use every year to reset your life and launch into a season of intense progress. This protocol helps you ask the right questions. These questions will cover the macro to the micro: where you want to be, what you need to do to get there, and what you can do immediately to start moving the needle toward that reality. This will require one full day to complete, so I recommend you follow along with the exact protocol. You will need a pen, paper, and an open mind. When I observe patterns in people who successfully flip their identity, it happens fast after a build up of tension. Specifically, I’ve noticed 3 phases that people tend to go through. - Dissonance – They feel like they don’t belong in their current life, and become sufficiently fed up with their lack of progress. - Uncertainty – They don’t know what comes next, so they either experiment or get lost and feel worse. - Discovery – They discover what they want to pursue and make 6 years of progress in 6 months. So, our goal with this protocol is to help you reach the point of dissonance, navigate through uncertainty, and discover what it truly is that you want to achieve, so much so that the clarity is overwhelming and distractions no longer hold their weight. This protocol is structured so that it can be completed in one day. In the morning, you do a psychological excavation to uncover your own hidden motives. During the day, you prompt yourself with interrupts to keep you out of autopilot and contemplate your life. At night, you synthesize the insights into a direction you will start to move in tomorrow. I cannot guarantee that this will work for everyone, because I cannot guarantee that everyone reading this is in the right chapter of their own story that would make these points impactful. You can’t place the climax at the start of the book and expect it to be interesting. Part 1) Morning – Psychological Excavation – Vision & Anti-Vision First we must create a new frame, or lens of perception, for your mind to operate from. This is like creating a new shell, leaving your old one, and slowly growing into it over time. It won’t feel like it fits at first. That’s a good thing. Set aside 15-30 minutes (the length of one YouTube video... you can do it) to think about and answer these questions. Do not attempt to outsource this contemplation to AI. I want you to break past the limiter that is on your mind. If you can’t answer these immediately, come back to them later. - What is the dull and persistent dissatisfaction you’ve learned to live with? Not the deep suffering but what you’ve learned to tolerate. (If you don’t hate it, you will tolerate it) - What do you complain about repeatedly but never actually change? Write down the three complaints you’ve voiced most often in the 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? Those questions are meant to make you aware of the pain in your current life. Now, we need to turn those into what I call an “anti-vision,” which is a brutal awareness of the life you do not want to live. That way, you can use that negative energy to aim your efforts in a positive direction and act from a place of intrinsic motivation. - If absolutely nothing changes for the next five 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 9am and 6pm? How do you feel at 10pm? - Now do it but for ten years. What have you missed? What opportunities closed? Who 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 five, ten, twenty years ahead 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? (”I am the type of person who...”) 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? - If your current behavior is a form of self-protection, what exactly are you protecting? And what is that protection costing you? If you answered those truthfully, and if you are in the right chapter of your life, you will feel a deep sense of dis-ease and possibly disgust for how you are currently living. Now, we need to orient that energy in a positive direction. We need to create a minimum viable vision, because your vision is like a product. It starts out unclear, but with time and experience, it grows stronger and more potent. - Forget practicality for a minute. If you could snap your fingers and be living a different life in three years, not what’s realistic, what you actually want? What does an average Tuesday look like? Same level of detail as question 5. - What would you have to believe about yourself for that life to feel natural rather than forced? Write the identity statement: “I am the type of person who...” - What is one thing you would do this week if you were already that person? Answer all of those first thing in the morning tomorrow. Part 2) Throughout The Day – Interrupting Autopilot – Breaking Unconscious Patterns These journaling exercises are cute, but we want real change. Frankly, that’s not going to happen if you don’t break the current unconscious patterns that are keeping you the same. Throughout the day, I want you to contemplate on everything you journaled in part one. Beyond that, I don’t want you to forget to contemplate. Please take this seriously. You aren’t going to change by doing the same thing for the rest of your life. You need to consciously force a pattern break. Take the time right now to create reminders or calendar events in your phone. Include the question in the reminder or event so that you can immediately start thinking about it. The more random and non-conflicting with your schedule there are, the better. • 11:00am: What am I avoiding right now by doing what I’m doing? • 1:30pm: If someone filmed the last two hours, what would they conclude I want from my life? • 3:15pm: Am I moving toward the life I hate or the life I want? • 5:00pm: What’s the most important thing I’m pretending isn’t important? • 7:30pm: What did I do today out of identity protection rather than genuine desire? (Hint: it’s most things you do) • 9:00pm: When did I feel most alive today? When did I feel most dead? To add a bit more fuel to the fire, schedule these questions during times where you are either commuting, walking, or lying around. • What would change if I stopped needing people to see me as [the identity you wrote in question 10]? • Where in my life am I trading aliveness for safety? • What’s the smallest version of the person I want to become that I could be tomorrow? Part 3) Evening – Synthesizing Insight – Entering A Season Of Progress If you followed that process, I would be surprised if you didn’t have at least one profound insight that could alter the course of your life. Now, we need to make those known, integrate them into who we are, and act on them to begin solidifying our journey to a new level of mind. - After today, what feels most true about why you’ve been stuck? - What is the actual enemy? Name it clearly. Not circumstances. Not other people. 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. This 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. Lastly, we need to create goals. Again, these aren’t goals that you set for the sake of achievement, because goals are just projections. They are unreliable and make you feel bound to something that will inevitably change. Instead, think of goals as a point of view. A lens that you can exchange to enter the right state of mind to perform the action that will lead away from the life you don’t want. Do not worry about some kind of finish line, because as we will find, it doesn’t exist. Enjoyment is found in progress. - One-year lens: What would have to be true in one year for you to know you’ve broken the old pattern? One concrete thing. - One-month lens: What would have to be true in one month for the one-year lens to remain possible? - Daily lens: What are 2-3 actions you can timeblock tomorrow that the person you’re becoming would simply do? That was a lot. Hopefully it was helpful. But we have one last piece to lock it all in. Stick with me. ## VII – Turn Your Life Into A Video Game > 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 in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else. – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi You now have all of the components that lead to a good life. Now, it may be helpful to organize all of your insights into one coherent plan. Pull out a new page and write down these 6 components: • 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 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 one year goal? • Daily levers – What are the priority, needle-moving tasks that bring my project closer to completion? • Constraints – What am I not willing to sacrifice to achieve my vision from the ground up? Why is this so powerful? Because these components literally create your own little world. If you are meant to pursue this hierarchy of goals at this stage of 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. You turn your life into a video game. Because games are the poster child for obsession, enjoyment, and flow states. They 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. All of these act as a concentric set of circles, like a forcefield, that guard your mind from distractions and shiny objects. The more you play the game, the stronger this force becomes, and soon enough it becomes who you are, and you wouldn’t have it any other way. – Dan

The future belongs to the high agency. Sounds cute. Everyone thinks they're high agency. But most people aren't. About 50% of the population do not have the cognitive development to be so. Here's why it's more important than ever and how to practice it:

If you were secretly recorded during your next "deep work" session and had to watch it after, you'd probably find that 90% of the work you're doing is unnecessary, and most of the needle-moving tasks could be done in 2-3 hours, maximum.

If you have multiple interests, don't let anyone convince you that you should narrow your focus. You may be confused for a while, but if you stick it out, you will blow past everyone else.

Your best ideas will never come from trying to have them. You must let the creative process play out automatically. You must read more, do more, experience more. Then you must give yourself time to do nothing because that's when your mind will put all the pieces together and shoot out an idea that may change everything.

"Value-based content is dead." I've seen this take circulating for months now. And on the surface, it makes sense. AI can generate a "how to" post in seconds. Educational content is everywhere. The barrier to entry for sharing information has dropped to zero. But if value-based content were actually dead, it would mean that it is no longer "value-based," because it is no longer valuable. The content that changes your behavior, that you save and come back to, that you send to a friend still exists. It's just getting pushed out with AI generated BS. What people really mean is that basic educational content is dead. The "5 tips to grow on social media" posts. The surface-level how-to threads that anyone can write (or prompt AI to write for them). Value as a whole hasn't disappeared. Just like with skill acquisition, it's abstracted up a layer into the domain of personal narrative, original thought, and taste. It's the kind of content that can't be replicated by typing a sentence into ChatGPT and hitting enter. This is surprisingly good news if you're just starting out. Because while everyone else is racing to produce more volume, praying they win the algorithm slot machine, the actual opportunity is in the opposite direction. It's in the depth, context, and perspective that only you can provide. If you'd rather watch the YouTube version of this article, watch it here. ## I – The psychology of value > We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. – Anaïs Nin Most "value-based" content feels interchangeable. Anyone could post it and nobody would know the difference. There's no energy signature that is yours. The fault lies in how creators are taught. Be objective. Share facts. Teach proven frameworks. They feel like if they don't do "what works" they won't make it, but they aren't experienced enough to know what works. Value isn't objective. Value is perception, and perception is shaped by the goals someone is trying to achieve. Two people can read the same book and walk away with completely different insights. A student trying to pass a test will notice different sentences than an entrepreneur trying to build a business. The information is identical. The value extracted is not. Your audience is composed of individuals with unique goals, and those goals determine what registers as valuable to them. This means you can't create "objectively valuable" content. You can only create content that's valuable to someone with a specific goal and those someones are randomly scrolling social media and have a brief window in which they can be exposed to your content. Expecting one great post to just magically appear in front of the right people is silly. It takes 6-12 months to see any form of traction start to pick up. The broader the goal that your content helps people achieve, the more likely it is to spread to more people. A more specific goal results in a more niche audience, which is great, but it may be more difficult to get in front of these people. That's why people recommend doing high-ticket products or services at the start and focusing on manual outreach, because it's easier for you to just find and target those specific people. This means you have to pick. You must have a perspective. You must share what you think rather than what you think you should think because some course taught you to think it. The reason "value-based" content is dying is because anyone can ask AI to generate it on the spot. It doesn't require taste or personality because it has been templated and frameworked to death. That said, that doesn't mean AI is the cause. The person using AI is the cause, and I believe most people will be using AI for content in the future, which makes some people upset (for now, let me know how you feel in a year or two). This is where the labor question comes in. Writers get angry when other writers use ghostwriters. "They didn't actually write it." But readers don't care. James Patterson's audience cares about the story, not who typed the words. Patterson provides the vision, the direction, the taste. That's where the value lives. A film director doesn't manually operate the camera. They don't build the sets or mix the audio. But no one questions whether Spielberg "really" made the movie. Value lies in the distinction between labor and direction. Content is moving the same way. From content creator to content director. The people who resist this are the ones who've made labor their identity. They can't separate the typing from the thinking, so they assume no one else can either. But your reader only sees the output. And if the output is good (original, opinionated, and shaped by taste) they don't care how it was made. Create the content you want to see in the world, because guessing that's not more generic AI-generated posts that sound like everyone else. ## II – The slop spectrum > We live in a world without taste because taste requires judgment, and judgment requires hierarchy. We've been taught to reject both. Taste is slowly cultivated over time through exposure, repetition, comparison, and the willingness to say This is better than That. The modern world wants everything to be flat, interchangeable, and instantly gratifying. Real taste excludes. To have taste is to believe in an objective reality. To turn one thing down in favor of another. To say no to inclusion. – Lobo on X There was plenty of slop before AI existed. The generic how-to threads. The recycled tips repackaged with a new hook. The "value-based content" that said nothing original and helped no one change their behavior. That was human slop. We just didn't call it that. The variable that separates slop from signal has never been who created it or what tool was used. It's taste. And taste requires discernment. It's the experience that allows you to say what should and shouldn't belong. Most people won't do that. It's easier to produce content that offends no one, excludes no one, and says nothing. Slop exists on a spectrum. One one end, you have slop and on the other you have art. Artists all have their panties in a bunch right now because people using AI have the audacity to call themselves "AI artists." But it goes both ways. We don't call food "stove art." We don't call books "word art." Art is something that transcends the norm. Art is as subjective as value. Not everyone who draws cool looking doodles on a page creates art. Most of it is closer to slop when we look at the entire spectrum. Most "artists" don't create art. Most "AI artists" don't create it either. But there is absolutely a way to create something with AI that moves the soul of another. If you deny that, you are blinded by ideology. That said, it's not easy to do. Pertaining to content, on one end, you have content generated with zero personal context. You type a generic "write a thread about productivity" and publish whatever comes out. No vision. No curation. No taste. No ideas of your own. The AI is guessing based on the average of everything it's been trained on, which means the output is, by definition, average. It's fine if you're just trying to speedrun an audience that doesn't care about you, but I'm assuming most people reading this want "being a creator" to resemble something meaningful. On the other end, you have signal. Content that could only come from you. Your experiences. Your opinions. Your taste applied at every decision point. The spectrum in between is determined by how much personal context you pass off to the AI. Think about it like directing a film. If you hand a camera to someone and say "make a movie," you'll get something generic. But if you provide the script, the shot list, the color palette, the pacing notes, the references (if you make every meaningful decision and use the crew to execute your vision) the film is yours. The labor was distributed but the taste wasn't. The same applies to content. Most of the famous creators you love and watch daily have teams of people in charge of the production. Hormozi probably just sits down and records the script that was given to him, but that doesn't mean it isn't valuable, and it doesn't mean that some of it isn't art. The more context you provide like your past writing, your notes, your curated ideas, your specific opinions on what works and what doesn't, the further you move from slop toward signal. To do this, start by creating an idea museum. If you already have content, go back through it. Pull the best lines, the ideas that resonated, and the frameworks that landed. Put them in a document. That's your context library. That's what you pass to AI when you need help executing. You would be considered a bad leader if you didn't pass off all of the knowledge you have to a team member to succeed at the project. The same applies here. Sometimes you are going to have to get your hands dirty and go in manually if it you need to. If you're just starting out, do the same thing with other people's content. Save the posts that stop you mid-scroll. Save the ideas that make you think "damn I wish I wrote that." Collect the paragraphs from newsletters that change how you think. Build a museum of taste. Over time, you'll notice patterns. Naturally, your mind will take the same shape, and you will notice your own ideas starting to emerge. That's how you develop this skill. Exposure, repetition, comparison, and the ability to curate would should be made vs what shouldn't. The people afraid of AI are the ones who never developed taste in the first place. They were producing human slop, and now they're competing with machines that can produce slop faster. ## III – How to provide your unique form of value > You will never have access to another person's state of mind, and they will never have access to yours. This is the essence of human uniqueness. – P&P Volume never mattered. Everyone said it did. I can hear Alex Hormozi and Gary V (all respect to them) screaming "Post more! Publish more! The more content you put out, the more chances you have!" It can obviously work, just like anything can, please don't be one of those people who comments the exception, but it never really made sense to me, because when I tried it, my ideas started to suffer, and ideas are really the only thing that matter in this game. You can produce a hollywood level YouTube video, but if the core idea followed by subsequent high signal ideas are not there, then the video will not do well. Personally, I'd rather create the minimum amount of content to be consistent and post that across all platforms without worrying about repeating myself. As an example, my newsletters have always been unconventionally long. They range between 2500-5000 words depending on the topic compared to 500-1000 words that marketers say is the sweet spot. Years later and I can confidently say that was my edge. I wanted to nerd out for a long time in my newsletters and videos, and since the ideas were pretty good, they stood out compared to everyone else's. With AI, everyone can produce more volume. Thousands of posts scheduled in advance. Content calendars filled for months. The algorithm slot machine spinning faster than ever. But more volume just means more noise. More people praying for a viral hit without realizing the lottery was never the real game. What's actually happening is simpler. AI is accelerating the death of average content. The baseline is rising. And the things that have always mattered are mattering more. Originality of thought. Novel perspectives. Opinion over fact. Storytelling. Singal. Let me explain that last one a bit more, because I've said it a few times. Your brain notices important ideas. When you read something that clicks, something that feels true in a way you hadn't articulated before, your brain releases dopamine. You feel a spark of excitement. You want to share it, save it, come back to it. That's signal. It's your brain hinting at what is valuable to you. Signal is the thing AI can't manufacture. Because AI doesn't get excited due to a sequence of uncountable events since birth that have led to the mind deciding that something is important enough to notice. AI doesn't have a mission (aside from the one it is assigned) that frames your mind to notice what aids in the achievement of that mission. It doesn't have taste. It pulls from the average of everything it's seen and produces the average of everything it's seen unless instructed to follow the personal process that you've reverse engineered by though reflection. You, on the other hand, have a specific path you're walking. A specific future you're building toward. A specific set of problems you've solved and are solving. That's your mission, and your mission determines what registers as signal to you. In my eyes, the best route to take is mission-based over topic-based. I've discussed this before here. Topic-based is the traditional approach. Pick a niche. Pick a target audience. Become the "go-to" person for that topic. It works. But it boxes you in and is incredibly easy to replicate. If you fail or want to pivot, you're starting over from scratch. That doesn't sit well with people who know that they are going to change over the next 6-12 months. This path is anti-continuous learning, anti-polymath, and anti-human. Mission-based is different. You're not building authority in a topic. You're leading people toward a transformation. And anything that moves people toward that transformation becomes fair game for your content. When I have a clear mission, like helping people become "future-proof" (*cough* the name of this newsletter *cough*), that is when my best work was born. Ideas flood in because I have a filter. Anything that helped people become valuable, adaptive, and free is worth writing about. And that can be anything from philosophy to business to psychology to daily routines. Things I like writing about. Creating in alignment with a mission is taste applied to content strategy. The ideas that excite you (the ones that make you stop mid-scroll and screenshot) those are signal. Lean into them. Write about them. Don't water them down because you think you're "supposed" to talk about something else. Being a content creator is more meaningful now than it's ever been. The internet doesn't have to devolve into a sea of slop you don't want to see. If it did, no one would log on. People are hungry for signal. For original thought. For creators with missions they believe in. ## IV – How to actually grow on social media (from zero) Now, I know it's bad taste to talk about growing on social media on social media. Nobody wants to be the person who grows by telling people how to grow. But surprise surprise, there is value there. People want it. If you don't want it, that's fine, you don't have to continue reading if you don't want to. Every time I talk about this, I feel like it goes over people's heads because when I look at how they implement what I talk about, I do not see this anywhere. And that's unfortunate, because it's the most important part. You cannot rely on the algorithm alone. Everyone is competing for the same thing. Everyone is posting content and praying it goes viral. Everyone is playing the slot machine. Everyone is hoping the algorithm gods smile upon them. And yes, sometimes it works. Sometimes you strike gold. But you can't build a business on sometimes. Actual growth is slow and steady with occasional spikes when the algorithm decides to favor you. The spikes are a bonus, not the strategy. It's better to act like they're never going to happen. If you don't want to rely on the algorithm, you need to work to get your content in front of other people's audiences. That means people sharing or interacting with your content, but if you understand psychology and incentives, doing that as a beginner is as hard as winning the algo lottery. That means you have to network. I know people are allergic to that word. Many get into social media because it feels like something they can do alone. No boss. No coworkers. Just you and your keyboard. But you still have to develop your social skills. The internet doesn't change human nature. It actually amplifies it. It scales it. For over 150,000 years, humans lived in small, close-knit groups. Survival required social cohesion, trust, and cooperation. Those who were more loyal to their tribe had a better chance of surviving. They hunted more effectively, defended against predators, and supported one another through hardship. This is how your brain is wired. Robin Dunbar, the anthropologist, found that humans can only maintain about 150 stable relationships. You can observe this number in hunter-gatherer tribes or military units or modern business teams. When we try to build alone, we're fighting against thousands of years of evolutionary programming. Social media is no different. Every creator you follow is in a group chat with other creators. They talk strategy. They share each other's posts. They help each other grow by using basic traffic mechanisms like replies, quote posts, reposts, DMs. Some groups engage with each other's content every morning. Others share posts in a private chat and everyone reposts. The specifics vary, but the principle is the same: tribes grow faster than individuals. If you think this sounds fishy or weird, I get it, but good luck in business if you aren't wiling to form alliances, find mentors, and play the multiplayer game. These groups are where I met lifelong friends, business partners, and even co-founders. It's kinda like finding a group of friends to play video games with. You party up and strategize how you're going to win. Start by commenting on posts from people you genuinely enjoy. Not for engagement. Not as a "growth hack." But to seed a relationship. Say something worth saying. Add to the conversation. Be a person rather than a bot farming impressions. Then DM them like you would anyone you're trying to meet. Not the LinkedIn corporate pitch. Not "Hey! Love your stuff! Let's hop on a call!" Just be normal. Act like you're texting a friend. Talk about something specific they wrote. Listen to a podcast they were on and comment on something that resonated. Tell them how what you do relates to what they are doing. Share an article that you think they would also like and leave it at that. Tribes form with shared interests and mutual benefit. Aside from building a tribe, the other method is leveraging authority. Quote other people's content with your own insights so they feel compelled to follow you or share you with their audience. Write longer pieces where you discuss someone else's ideas. Bonus points if they have a decent following, because it benefits them to share something that makes them look good. You can write about an idea from Naval or Huberman, tag them, and even if they don't see it or repost it, other people recognize the name. They're more likely to read because they already trust the source you're referencing. You're borrowing credibility while adding your own perspective. That's how you grow without waiting for the algorithm to save you. My last tip is this: Create the content you want to see in the world. If there were any "best strategy" to follow, it would be that. Why? Because you are the niche. There are people like you who can benefit from what you've achieved. There are people who are at a similar level as you who want to join you on your mission. If you create for your past, present, and future self (paired with the strategies we discussed) you shouldn't have a problem making this work. – Dan

The best way to learn something is to write about it, in public, but only if you care about learning. When you write, you are forced to organize thoughts into words. When you teach someone else, you feel obligated to understand the topic.