There’s a viral post called “How to Fix Your Entire Life in One Day”. https://x.com/thedankoe/status/2010751592346030461
It focuses on mindset, and identity level change. It says “you’re just afraid of winning and that’s the problem”. It says “it’s about knowing what you want”. You just need to journal and gamify. It argues.
It’s quite long and complex.
You can’t fix your life in 1 day. But you can commit to a process that will span 6 months. I describe this process as follows:
First: accept money and engagement as north stars. Not forever. These are quantitative measures of how much other people approve of your work. Cognitive dissonance about capitalism, money and what it means can get in the way of just getting out of bed and doing things.
Second: accept health as a constraint. Getting rich and famous and getting sick or fat are non-starters. Health is not wealth. You can get top .1% results in the gym, and if your career is in a bad spot, it’s still a big problem. But if you get the top .01% in wealth, and you feel like crap all day every day. That is also not winning.
What does that mean? Low impact cardio every day. Weight lifting 3-4 times a week. Go outside to get some sunlight. No processed foods. 3 meals a day, and stop eating after dinner. It fits in 2 lines, not a 600 page book of optimization. You can optimize later. But nuts and bolts first.
Your goal here isn’t to solve the meaning of capitalism, life, and ideal health. Accept this as a crutch. If you’re reading about how to fix your life, you need simplification not complexity. Maslow’s hierarchy. Accept this frame might be wrong, and execute anyway because the alternative is yet another day of doing nothing.
Still feel distaste at materialism? Do a controlled experiment. Open your calendar and put a date 6 months or 1 year from now where you write that you’ll re-evaluate financial movement with a health constraint as a north star. The worst case scenario is you’ll have more money, better health and a clear appreciation that those things don’t matter for you. A good risk reward bet.
The way you change your life is by setting minimums not maximums.
My observation: you’re far better off building stuff people want, getting money while staying in shape rather than trying to crawl your way out of whatever hole you’re in with ‘mindset’, or ‘clarity’. Or gamification. Doing this saves mental ram. And this doesn’t require ‘philosophical completeness’. Later, once your money is churning in and your health is in a good spot: you can start fixing other areas.
This crutch works well because it converts the invisible, and unactionable into concrete physical manifestation you can see results in for a bit. It’s better to start out material, and then go abstract. The alternative is Nietzsche mode - generating beautiful abstractions while your life falls apart. Out of your chaos might arise a shining star. But more probable: a hellish day to day, chronic health problems and your phone ringing off the hook from debt collectors.
Third:
You can predict what you enjoy. You can predict what that enjoyment costs you. Therefore you can model your own happiness, and anything you can model, you can measure. And anything you can measure, you can improve.
This stands against the marketing story - that satisfaction only comes after some life milestone. Once I become an astronaut, I will finally feel good.
If you spend less than 10% of your life in processes you enjoy, you’re not going to be satisfied. If you spend 50% of your life in processes you enjoy, that are extremely addictive - your life will also eventually implode. That has nothing to do with money, or health. Which is why it’s a separate pillar.
I built the following ChatGPT prompt to help you identify specific non addictive, high utility activities. “Make an interactive quiz for me. Provide a series of activities based on my chat history. Add activities to the list for breadth that aren’t confirmed by chat history, but are believable. Include personal life, and social activities even if they are not part of my chat histories. Activities in the quiz should have two bars: how much I enjoy them. And how addictive they are. At the end, output me a list of things that I enjoy a lot that I don’t find too addictive”.
For me: it took 15 minutes
The result painted a simple picture of market research, swimming, actively reading philosophy, posting content people enjoy, discretionary trading, spending time speaking to my family. For you it will be different. But the overarching thing you can grasp after force ranking a large number of activities: life is composed of processes. Outcomes are a tiny percentage of lived experience. Processes are the day to day mechanism to improve things, and deserve more of your attention because they are the only thing that can actually be optimized.
Make it actionable: spend 1 hour a week more this week on things that scored the highest on the quiz and see if this week was better than last week. I’m not saying to spend all day fishing / in leisure time, which is why we have the next section.
Fourth: cut the Gordian Knot
Work through this prompt on ChatGPT - inspired by Peter Thiel’s advice
“First have a conversation with me about everything I am doing right now. The goal is to take an inventory of all the stuff I am working on.
Next: identify what 10 year plan these activities are contributing to
Finally, ask the question: “what would need to change regarding the activities you listed so could you reach your 10 year plan in 6 months?
If an answer cannot be reached, make some proposals.
If an answer is reached identify the 3-5 things that could be cut to free time moving towards the big objective”
The Pareto Principle doesn’t go far enough because it’s locked in your local context. A lot of the time, to get the phase shift you need, requires asking something in the context of your long term 10 year goal that is supposedly driving behaviors today.
The reason why the 10 Year Thielism works: chances are you are dying a death of 1000 cuts. Our minds excel at justifying the things we are already doing as urgent. When oftentimes, those ‘urgent’ things are just excuses to avoid the thing that actually matters. Productivity procrastination protects your ego. If you never go for it, you won’t have to find out you were wrong.
But deep down, we know that the move is probably to “go for it”, but to move that out of the subconscious mind you have to articulate the “it”. Which is the why of this exercise. Koe views external validation as noise. Conditioning to escape. I view it as bread and butter. Get your money up. Get your health up. Do more stuff you like that isn’t addictive. And try and compress the timeframe from where you are now to where you want to be. Work with the prompts. Make a plan. You don’t change your entire life in 1 day. But you can agree with yourself that you’ll do what it takes to change it in 6 months.