Get Ahead Of 99% Of People With Deep Work & Monk Mode

I've been diving into powerful concepts that can propel you ahead of 99% of people within 6 to 12 months. This journey starts with brutal self-awareness, strategic planning, and fundamentally reframing how we approach life itself.

Becoming Brutally Aware: Your Anti-Vision

The initial step is to become intensely aware of two critical things: what you genuinely don't want, and where you're headed if you maintain your current course. Observing the general populace reveals where thoughtless action leads, and it's rarely a desirable place. This isn't about superficial judgment; it's about deep introspection. Surface-level living often contributes to undesirable situations, so we need to think deeper.

It's often easier to define what you don't want through observation and direct experience than to conjure a perfect vision from pure imagination. While having grand ideas for the future is good, augmenting that with an "anti-vision" is remarkably potent.

"Negative energy is very, very potent. It can be used and transmuted to actually achieve what you want in life."

For me, this resonates with working out. When I'm warming up on the treadmill, I sometimes visualize what my life would be without consistent gym effort or where I'd end up if I didn't put my all into a workout. This thought can make me feel angry or "pissed," and that negative energy, when recognized and transmuted, becomes a powerful motivator. Negative emotions aren't bad; they exist and should be leveraged for good, not suppressed.

Creating Your Anti-Vision

To effectively create your anti-vision:

Sit down with a notebook for about 30 minutes.
"Become a mad scientist" and thoroughly draw out your entire future.
Start specifically with the anti-vision. Write down every single thing you do not want in this life:
- What do you not want to look like?
- What do you not want your future to be?
- What do you not want your day to look like on an everyday basis?

Reflecting on your anti-vision should evoke a strong sense of discomfort. This feeling of unease about where you could end up if you don't take control is precisely the fuel you need.

Laser Focus on Your Vision and Plan

This discomfort should then compel you to "laser in on one big goal," your true vision for the future. This vision must be meaningful, as the anti-vision often stems from meaninglessness, mindless action, and the grip of entropy.

"If you do not create order for your life, you will decline into chaos."

In that same notebook, alongside your anti-vision and emerging vision, plan diligently. Continue being the "mad scientist" for the project of your life:

Create a detailed plan and strategy for exactly what you are going to do.
Break it down day-to-day, week-by-week.
Write out every single thing you'll do for the next week.
Get extremely specific to build order and avoid becoming a victim of entropy.

The Art of Disappearing

When I speak of "disappearing," it's not a literal vanishing act, but a metaphorical and exaggerated concept to convey a crucial message:

"I'm saying disappear from the things that don't belong in your life. Cut them out. This can be people, games, apps, or even bad habits."

The goal is to become acutely aware of what holds you back. The most effective approach, in my experience, is to "rip the Band-Aid off" and eliminate them without explanation. This is about breaking your addiction to negative feelings, which often arise from expending mental energy on people and things that don't truly serve you. That redirected mental energy then becomes vital for manifesting your vision and maintaining the system you've built to prevent entropy.

Mastering the Boring Fundamentals

Success isn't found in flashy tactics but in the consistent habit of "boring fundamentals." These repetitive actions, seemingly mundane to an outsider, are the core of mastery.

"Most successful people, they take the same repetitive actions on a day to day basis in a game in like a game that mimics the real world, you are logging on and you are repeating the same thing over and over to slowly level up over time, right? You're you're killing monsters. You're going through dungeons, you're doing the same thing to stack experience. So you need to transfer that into the real world and move the levers that will actually take you towards your goals."

These are principles, not just tactics. What might appear "boring" (like writing for 30 minutes every morning) is actually "mastery over misery." Consider a sushi chef who spends years perfecting rice preparation, or a tennis player who practices racket grip, angle, and stroke endlessly until it becomes unconscious and effortless. This automation frees up mental energy to tackle more complex challenges, putting you ahead of those seeking instant results that typically take years.

Stop asking, "When will I see results?" The answer—"it takes years," "an entire lifetime"—can easily throw you off track. Life is a project built through constant trial and error, just like science. Embrace this long-term perspective; perfecting your life project is a lifelong endeavor. This entire process—self-awareness, strategic action, and prioritizing long-term mastery—is the common origin story of every successful person.

Life as a Game: Achieving Flow State

Have you ever experienced that optimal human state where nothing else matters, you feel confident, immersed, and completely at one with the task at hand—be it a sport, a game, or writing? This is the flow state:

"A state of consciousness where nothing else matters except for what is right in front of you, what your attention is immersed in. You lose the sense of self-consciousness and self-centeredness that leads to anxiety or boredom or just suffering in general."

In this state, you stop caring about external opinions, know intuitively what to do next, and gain deep satisfaction. Suffering, manifesting as anxiety or boredom, often arises from self-consciousness and self-centeredness, which are heavily influenced by the ego and how we control our attention. When we become self-conscious, we compare ourselves to ideals (e.g., a pimple on our face compared to an idea of clear skin), splitting our attention and wasting precious mental energy.

The key to controlling our attention and unlocking this state is by treating life like the game it is. My generation often channels the obsession cultivated in video games into real-life business success. This is because games, business, and other external constructs provide:

A desirable hierarchy of goals.
A structure to frame our attention.
Challenges that narrow our focus.
A requirement for skill that matches the game's demands.

The few who understand this can create a game out of any situation by molding their mind to these aspects. When the game is fun, life becomes more enjoyable because "you start playing rather than being played."

"We're in a world where it's create or be created. So if you can't mold your mind to create your own reality or create your own game that you play and you have fun playing in life, then your mind will be molded. And it already has been molded to play external status games that society has created for you."

These external status games include paths like going to college or getting a job, which are often laid out by others and may not align with your personal goals, leading to unnecessary suffering. Sovereign, independent living, building your own thing, is difficult and uncertain. Because the mind craves order and certainty, the masses often flock to seemingly easier, more secure paths. This video's purpose is to raise awareness for those who want to build their own path, be independent, and live life on their own terms.

The Macro Game of Life

Think of an open-world strategy game like World of Warcraft. We recognize patterns: stacking gold, choosing a profession, leveling up. While the metaphor of life as a video game is common, let's delve deeper.

"The system is rigged. You can't change it, but you can learn it. That is how you rig yourself in the system's favor."

The conventional path to success is pre-programmed into the collective psyche, often designed to maintain the system itself. Many find this "secure path" leads to anxiety, stress, and overwhelm. However, times are changing. The rise of remote work, the creator economy, decentralized finance (like Bitcoin), and the proliferation of skilled freelancers are exposing the flaws in the old system faster than "the programmers" (e.g., school curriculums) can patch them.

In this context, there are:

NPCs (Non-Player Characters): Those who simply do what they're told, go along with the system, and never question it. They are "just there."
Players: Those who question the system, understand it from a big picture, and can navigate it to achieve their own success.

Macro Game of Life Figure 1: Path from Birth to Death, illustrating infinite paths to success.

Just like in an open-world game, there are infinite paths you can take. My graphic illustrates the journey from birth to death, with "now" as the present moment. Your past experiences shape your path to "now," while the future presents countless avenues to "success" or "winning the external game." In WoW, you choose your character's race, class, profession, quest path, solo or group play, and guild. In life, it's choosing a skill to learn, a business model, or a sport. Your unique journey, how you achieve your goals, becomes your brand and distinguishes you.

"If five people were standing at the bottom of a mountain and life being infinite mountains, so five people standing at the bottom and they reached the first peak. Well, first they look up and they all draw different paths on how they're going to reach that first peak. And then there's just infinite mountains to climb. But once you reach that peak, you can look down and you can help people navigate that path up in a better way, right? That's what business is, is helping people solve their problems or climb the mountain in a faster way to achieve their desired outcome, which is reaching that peak that you've reached."

Leveling Up Increases Complexity

A common "spiritual problem" in the real world is a refusal to change. People identify with their beliefs, jobs, or other finite aspects of the external world, stop learning, and cease stacking skills. This limits opportunities.

"By improving your skill set, by learning and executing and taking on challenges, it allows you to take on higher level challenges. And by taking on higher level challenges, you give, you open up room to take on a lot more or have a lot more opportunities because that knowledge and experience expands your awareness of what is actually possible."

Metaphorically, reaching "max level" in a game means you can navigate the world freely, stress-free, and do as you please. By continuously learning, increasing your skill, and embracing a ladder of challenges, you expand your capabilities, opening up more opportunities and the ability to "pick your battles" in life. This is how you gain the power to create order from chaos within the macro game of life.

The Micro Games of Life

Beyond the macro game, we can apply game principles to everyday, micro-situations.

Setting a Hierarchy of Goals

Games always present a clear big goal (winning) along with sub-goals (quests) to guide you. Without these sub-goals, a grand vision can be overwhelming and not fun.

"We don't want to be poop hurled at the ground like our monkeys do. We want to have a vision that we can build towards?"

I recommend sitting down with a pen and paper, or a planning tool like my Power Planner (mentioned in the video), to outline the first iteration of your vision. It doesn't need to be perfect.

Create 10-year, 1-year, and monthly goals.
Establish a system for weekly direction and reflection.
Align your daily priority tasks with these larger goals.

Writing these down is incredibly important; it acts as an anchor. While animals survive on a physical level, humans survive on a conceptual level—we identify with and strive to sustain our beliefs, projects, and visions. When your vision is top of mind, your awareness will naturally register opportunities and insights that can be applied to clarify and pursue it.

Understanding the Frame of the Game

Your perspective or worldview acts like a camera, framing your reality. Even with a blurred background, the field of view constrains what registers. By consciously molding your perspective, a significant problem can be reframed as a minor road bump. If your attention is tightly narrowed on your hierarchy of goals, distractions will struggle to penetrate your "frame."

Two elements are key to creating this "frame of the game" and ordering your consciousness:

Rules: Every video game has a clear set of rules.
- On the macro scale, your values serve as your rules. Acting in alignment with these values constrains your attention and makes life more enjoyable.
- On the micro scale, you can create rules to eliminate environmental distractions for deep work (e.g., closing browser tabs, using the Pomodoro technique, defining clear steps, wearing noise-canceling headphones).
- You can also create "games" out of mundane situations. For example, when taking a walk, set rules like "never step on a crack" or aiming for a specific step count. Even when observing something you usually dislike, like sports, understanding its rules can make it enjoyable. Or, if your partner enjoys antique shopping, you can create your own mini-game, like finding "the stupidest rock" or "the stupidest antique," transforming a dreaded activity into something fun for both of you.
Mechanics: If you've never played a game, it won't be fun. Your initial attempts will likely be poor, requiring practice on low-level challenges. You'll observe top players with awe.
- In a video game, mechanics involve a series of key presses or mouse clicks.
- In board games, it's about effective, creative, and forward-thinking strategy.
- In sports, it's the conditioning and coordinated movement of your body towards a goal.
- Crucially, your perception or "frame of the game" dictates how you choose actions that lead to winning.

Feedback is vital for knowing how well you're performing. If you make a wrong move, your perspective widens, distractions can penetrate your awareness, and you lose focus on the game. How do we improve our mechanics and skill? Through practice. In games like World of Warcraft, players log in daily for repetitive tasks—farming gold, crafting armor, mining ore, repeatedly running dungeons for XP. You need to program these specific mechanics into your brain until you get results with less effort, which is essentially habit formation. By automating daily decisions aligned with your goals and vision, success becomes almost inevitable.

The Delicate Balance: Anxiety and Boredom

This concept, adapted from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's work on Flow, highlights a crucial balance.

Anxiety, Flow, Boredom Figure 2: Skill-Challenge Match, illustrating anxiety, flow, and boredom zones.

The skill-challenge match is incredibly important. When you start a game without knowing the rules or having played before, it's not fun. It takes time to grasp. This is why I always recommend just starting. Learn as you go, gain real-world experience, and avoid getting trapped in "tutorial hell."

Consider being a Level 1 character fighting a Level 50 in World of Warcraft. It wouldn't be fun; you'd lose instantly. But you can reframe the game:

"If you're a level one and you have to play against a level 50, how can you mold your perspective to create a better frame for that game? Like if you instead of beating the level 50 as your goal, what if the goal was to see how fast you could lose against the level 50? Then it'd be kind of fun and you'd be interested in playing the game."

Boredom occurs when your skill is high and the challenge is low. Your focus breaks from the task, and self-centered thoughts about what you'd rather be doing take over. If you're bored at work, it's likely because you're not immersed and are thinking about other desires.
Anxiety strikes when your skill is low and the challenge is high. Your attention turns inward, towards self-consciousness ("Wow, I'm not as good as I thought," or "That girl is way out of my league"). Distractions and problems penetrate your awareness, leading your attention downhill.

To prevent both, you must continuously learn and evolve. If you want an enjoyable life, you need something to immerse your attention in, continuously progress at, and develop yourself into a complex being capable of taking on larger, broader challenges, thereby creating more opportunities in the world.

"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 remember the hours I spent creating my character in World of Warcraft as a kid—choosing race, class, appearance, and considering how it would align with my personality and playstyle to win. Later, choosing a profession opened up new talents, traits, dungeons, and guild opportunities. Our early learning, largely through repetition, conditions our psyche and self-concept. What we learn and consume directly impacts our thoughts, behavior, and perceived opportunities. Winning the game of life depends on how your "character" perceives and acts in any given situation.

Creating Your Character

To create the character or "player" that will lead to your desired outcome:

Integrate Everything: You need an intrinsic hierarchy of goals. You must understand how to frame your life (macro and micro), create rules to narrow your attention, and consistently learn and build to increase your skill set and tackle higher challenges.
Self-Education and Self-Reflection: We live in an age where information is readily available. Use self-education to find solutions to problems you encounter while building a better life. This often requires sifting through "dirt to find gold," reading things you might not initially be interested in. Those who get bored will likely distract themselves. Self-reflection is how you guide future decision-making. Since it's impossible to have 100% certainty about how current actions will impact the future, self-reflection after taking action is the only way to truly assess their efficacy and pivot as needed. Your worldview and environment are unique, so even external advice needs to be filtered through your direct experience.

The Four-Hour Workday Philosophy

The idea of a "four-hour workday" became a deeply ingrained concept for me, stemming from misinterpreting Tim Ferriss's The Four-Hour Workweek as "workday." This idea became a positive "problem" in my subconscious, driving me to seek solutions whenever my work extended beyond four hours. This conceptual identification with the four-hour workday profoundly shaped my life's direction and decisions. I didn't see working longer as an "end of the world" scenario, but rather a challenge that I knew could be solved to achieve success in less time.

Business Application

For creators, the path often involves:

Starting with a service-based business (direct control over outreach, skill-based offers).
Iterating and improving until you can charge more and acquire clients.
The trap: If you keep landing clients without systemizing, you can build yourself into a new 9-to-5, hitting a cap on earnings or working 16 hours a day.
The solution: Productize your service once your audience is large enough, or systemize your workflow. This requires significantly less hands-on work.

"In business it comes from systemization of your workflow so that you can work faster and more efficiently. And it comes from eliminating things that just don't make too much sense to do, or delegating or outsourcing low leverage tasks and working on the things that you actually want to work on."

For the past three years, approximately 90% of my days have involved under four hours of work. It's not foolproof, and sometimes I work more (e.g., currently 6 hours a day), but I still view anything beyond four hours as a problem to solve through systemization. The goal is to continuously raise your baseline so that your four hours of work yield greater results. It's like a "bulking and cutting" cycle in business: during growth (bulking), you might accumulate "fat" (inefficiencies) in your business. Then, during the "cutting" phase, you streamline and systemize to comfortably maintain a four-hour workday at an elevated level of output or income.

While this philosophy is primarily for creators, it can be adapted for traditional jobs. Even in a job, you can use these principles to save time on tasks, freeing up more time for other priorities (e.g., finishing agency work in 2-3 hours to work on personal business for the rest).

Why the Four-Hour Workday is Important

Conceptual Survival: Humans survive on a conceptual level, identifying with beliefs. If you identify with the belief of a four-hour workday, you'll inherently work to make it a reality. This can form a powerful, positive identity that fuels a better future, transforming struggles into learning experiences for creating superior systems.
Depth of Focus: Our capacity for deep focus is extraordinary.
- Task Positive Network: Engaged when focused on external tasks, beneficial for productivity.
- Default Mode Network: Active when external focus shifts inward, fostering creativity and allowing new ideas to emerge.
- Focus Matrix:
  - Unconscious Narrow/Open Focus: Leads to stress, anxiety, reactivity, feeling lost or overwhelmed.
  - Conscious Narrow/Open Focus: Leads to efficiency, being task-oriented (flow state), creativity, relaxation, and joy. Becoming aware of your current state allows you to consciously shift your focus towards positive outcomes, typically by eliminating distractions and focusing on the task at hand.

Figure 3: The Focus Matrix, distinguishing conscious vs. unconscious narrow/open focus.

Evolution and Entropy:

"Evolution is forced on us by the fact that systems fall apart with time unless they become more efficient. We can't stop and remain in the same place. Even to remain still, we must advance."

Humans possess a natural desire to know more (the "curse of knowledge") and an endless thirst for knowledge that aids survival. With our unique minds, we build systems to solve problems, leading to better outcomes in all domains of life. For example, the tractor was a creative solution to the physical energy expenditure of carrying water and plowing fields.

Entropy: This is the supreme law of the universe, often called "nature's tax," representing the measure of disorder in a system. Therefore, creating efficient productivity systems is crucial for the survival and evolution of our work. A system has an end goal, a process to reach it, and requires specific, quality energy to fuel it.

Recap & Actionable Takeaways

Recap:

Games Order Consciousness: When you're obsessed with a "game," you stop caring what others think and play to win according to your intrinsic values.
Life as a Game: Every situation in life can be mentally molded into a game, making it enjoyable and helping you avoid mental turmoil.
Skill-Challenge Match is Key: To avoid anxiety (challenge too high) and boredom (skill too high), your skill level must appropriately match the challenge presented by any situation.
Perspective Shapes Reality: Your worldview determines the information available to you; an unstructured perspective leads to misperception of yourself and the situation.
You Are the Player: Your "self" is the character. Over time, you want to consciously create the character that is best equipped to win the games it chooses to play.

Actionable Takeaways:

Cultivate Your Anti-Vision: Dedicate 30 minutes to writing down everything you explicitly do not want in your life. Use the resulting discomfort as powerful motivation.
Define and Plan Your Vision: Based on your anti-vision, clearly articulate your long-term vision. Break it down into concrete 10-year, 1-year, monthly, weekly, and daily goals. Meticulously plan the steps to achieve them.
"Disappear" from Distractions: Identify and ruthlessly cut out people, apps, games, and bad habits that are holding you back. Redirect the mental energy you save toward your vision.
Embrace Boring Fundamentals: Commit to repetitive, consistent actions as the path to mastery. Shift your focus from "when will I see results?" to the long-term process of continuous improvement.
Reframe Life as a Game: Consciously apply game principles—setting clear goals, establishing rules, understanding mechanics, and balancing skill with challenge—to make everyday tasks enjoyable and maintain immersion.
Continuously Learn and Evolve: Actively increase your skill set through self-education and real-world experience. Regularly practice self-reflection to evaluate your actions, guide future decisions, and adapt your "character" for ever-higher challenges.
Systemize for Efficiency: Analyze your workflow to identify tasks that can be outsourced, delegated, or automated. Strive to "cut the fat" in your processes to optimize your output and free up time, aiming for maximum impact with focused effort.