Seeking advice is hindering your success (and here’s the reason why)

The pitfalls of seeking advice without understanding the learning process

How do I start a business? How do I start talking to people? How do I start pursuing my goals? By starting, advice is not starting. Asking for advice makes you stupid.

Most people ask for advice because they fear the embarrassment and failure that everyone else went through to achieve their goals. Now, don’t get me wrong; advice is not always a bad thing.

But if the 99% of people who are unsuccessful ask for 99% of the advice, maybe there is a lesson there. That’s why there are books upon books on how to start a business or how to get six-pack abs. And 99% of people still don’t have those things. And 99% of the questions that people ask are so vague that they are literally impossible to answer.

It’s just a waste of time to ask in the first place because it’s like, Yes, let me write four books and create 100 videos on the subject so you can completely understand it to the point where you can avoid all trial and error and failure that I went through to get what you want.

Write your own book and live your own life. Stop sitting around and doing things that don’t result in experience boosts. You will never get a truly actionable answer by outsourcing your entire learning journey out of fear of that journey. The problem is a lack of understanding. People don’t understand how to learn.

They’ve never sat down and contemplated what the learning process looks like, and most people haven’t asked for advice on how to learn. So my point is that people are asking the wrong questions from the start. When they approach a new goal, they don’t have the learning process to frame their decisions.

The steps to genuine growth and success

Step one is to have a conscious, meaningful goal. Step two is to start forming the habits that allow that goal to be achieved. Step three is to manage the pain and emotions that come with identity change. Step four is to program your mind with information relevant to that goal. Step five is to experiment with different techniques. Step six is to seek technical advice.

Implementing the steps for goal achievement

When you encounter problems along the way and when you get to that last part. Advice is only as good as it is specific to your situation. Books, podcasts, articles, and social media content have great advice, but only 0.001% of it applies to the exact situation you are in.

The millions of bits of information you can perceive at this very moment of your life will be vastly different in the next second and completely different from anyone else’s experiences and interpretations of that experience.

Only once you are in a state of pain, struggle, or challenge can you receive the insight necessary to transcend it to the next level. There is a process for receiving the best advice. That way, you don’t get mentally overweight with useless knowledge.

So let’s break down identity, change self-experimentation, and learn how to ask for the best advice so that you can actually get results.

You Don’t Need More Advice You Need To Change Who You Are Most people don’t need more advice. They need powerful ideas to shape their worldview and decision-making.

That way, they can make better choices, figure it out for themselves, and reap the dopamine that comes from trial and error. The reason you haven’t achieved a goal is that you aren’t the person who would have achieved it.

Forming habits for goal achievement

Every new goal you set is like throwing an anchor into the unknown. Every new goal you set demands a new worldview, specific skills, and beliefs that form who you are. Like a video game.

There’s a reason you are in level one. You lack the character development that turns you into a level 100 in video games.

Risks aren’t real. In real life, risks are real, but they’re often overinflated with thought.

Managing identity change

All change requires a change in identity. You can’t just ask for advice and expect it to give you the experience necessary to reach the level of the goal you’ve set for yourself.

And when was the last time that you actually took the advice that you asked for seriously? And out of all of the advice that you’ve gotten and not necessarily asked for, how much have you actually listened to? Because technically, every single thing you read is advice.

There’s an underlying lesson behind it. But how many things did you learn today? How many lessons did you actually integrate into your being? Today, most advice isn’t applicable to your current level of goals, and understanding a level 100 is going to tell you something that makes sense to them but not to a level 10.

People don’t realize that the difference in experience is exponential in a game. Each level requires more experience. Getting from level 10 to 11 may require 300 experience points. Getting from level 99 to 100 would require 100 times that amount.

As a beginner, you don’t have to change too much. You can change a few habits. Set aside an hour a day and you can replace your income within a year or so. After that, the real self-development journey begins.

Progress starts to slow down. Like the newbie gains phenomenon in the gym.

You gain strength and muscle rapidly for, like, the first year, and then it starts to become a slow and painful grind. And if you don’t back that pursuit with a philosophical sense of mastery and meaning, then you’re not going to stick it out.

If your identity is not patient, focused on long-term risk tolerance, and a lover of failure, you will lose.

Programming your worldview for success

The first step to changing who you are is programming your worldview. Your worldview influences the openness of your perspective. The openness of your perspective influences your perception of situations.

Your perception of situations influences the decisions you make. The decisions you make influence how you act.

Your actions form an information feedback loop that programs your identity or sense of self. Your identity shapes your worldview, and your worldview shapes your identity.

So, how do you begin to change who you are? Is treating self-education and skill acquisition as a part of everyday life a necessity? Because it baffles me that so few people actually do this.

They want to become a better person. They want to achieve great things.

They want to be at peace. But they don’t realize that their ability to maneuver toward these desirable outcomes comes from having the skill to do so.

Skill is where the mind meets life. Skill is cultivated through education and practice. The difference between where you are and what you want is skill, not belief, not knowledge, not environment, not socioeconomic status, not your upbringing.

All of those are variables—powerful ones that are trumped by skill. It all starts by programming your mind with the right inputs. Swap mindless scrolling for intentional learning of the same thing, just a different way of approaching it.

A different intention. One has a goal. One doesn’t swap video games for building new projects. So the same thing as building projects is a video game in the real world.

And I’m not telling you. We’ll talk about this in the next newsletter. I’m not telling you to quit video games. I’m telling you that you need a foundational habit of learning and execution in your life.

And if you don’t have those things, then you have no business doing other things. If your daily life doesn’t consist of the things that bring you peace and progress, then what? Like, what are you doing? Your debt swap, sleeping in for a morning walk with a podcast? Because just filling your mind with this information that will expose you to new potential for your life is a very good thing to have.

It brings some clarity and vision to your mornings. Learning leads to an awareness of opportunity. Awareness of opportunity creates motivation, and continuous learning every single day changes your decision-making with time.

Identity change

The Pain of Identity Change: The second step to changing who you are is understanding the pain of identity change. Changing who you are is like sculpting a work of art.

By the time you turn 18, you are like a giant square slab of marble that looks, feels, and acts ugly.

The first decision is the most painful: a commitment to change. To pop an arm out of the marble against its will. So you can start sculpting away. But be careful. If you strike too hard, you may destroy the entire slab.

You must make small, precise taps to sculpt your ideal mental physique. Every situation that you go through in life presents a small tap that can be made.

You must approach situations consciously when you feel that spike of anxiety because you’re entering something that’s unknown. You have to pause and push through. The pain is temporary. Pain is pleasure; death gives life.

Step three to changing who you are is understanding that pain is rather enjoyable and that death gives life. It allows life to happen. I was listening to an older Frank Yang Roof talk video and he brought up an interesting way of looking at things where he’s not saying that this is absolute truth.

This is just him theorizing and philosophizing. And I thought it was really interesting when he said that.

He first said we have two drives. We have the sex drive, which is creation and survival and extending our lives in the matrix or the video game of life, and then the death drive, which is destruction, absolute oneness, or returning to infinity.

We enjoy pain, but many people hide from it and inflict more unbearable pain with surface-level pleasurable activities that keep you comfortable.

So some seek out the good pain. The one that brings meaning and fulfillment or allows you to let a part of yourself die so that another part can grow. So when you’re in the gym, people enjoy that pain when they are pushing through and seeing that progress.

And it feels good because what you’re doing is tearing apart or destroying muscle cells so that new ones can grow or they can expand; they can transcend on this physical level here.

But again, there’s something like mental bodybuilding where you allow a certain part of your identity to die so that a new one can spring up and emerge and transcend the old one so that you have a higher, more holistic self.

So the lesson is that you want to kind of curate an environment like the gym, but in multiple areas of your life, to generate suffering that leads to new life.

And so this is also what monks and mystics are doing when they are trying to kill the ego or experience ego death: they are shedding layers of thought to the point where they are becoming more at one with what is or nothingness.

Now, we don’t have to go too far down that rabbit hole course where that would change the topic entirely. But I just thought it was interesting to think about that and to take that into account.

Many people subject themselves to something that is much more painful because they are pursuing pleasure and those who pursue pain enjoy doing that.

Holistic understanding

So now we understand that all change requires a change in identity. Now we need to understand the power of self-experimentation and how it is the only way to solve your problems through good observation.

The Power Of Self-Experimentation (How To Solve Your Problems For Good) Most smart people I know, when they want to learn something, immediately Google what they want and go down the rabbit hole.

Everyone else asks for all the information to be given to them. I rarely get a complete answer and get distracted within 5 minutes.

That is a previous tweet of mine. I just thought it was an interesting observation. Self-experimentation is the only way to solve your problems for good Self-experimentation and self-reliance go hand in hand.

They feed into each other. Self-experimentation is how you avoid the dangerous nature of prescriptions and how you give advice.

Here’s a hypothetical problem: not having enough money to do what you enjoy with your time. So person A follows exactly what a money guru says.

They start investing a few bucks here and there. They play it safe with their stocks. They downgrade their car so they don’t have that monthly expense, and person B pulls advice from multiple sources to make decisions for themselves.

They use advice, but only to discover principles that can be integrated into pursuing their goals. They study religiously but do not attach to business, health, or social ideologies that keep them stagnant.

Eventually, with education and effort, it clicks, and they know how to make it work. I recently saw a post on Instagram that said something about how wealth generation is slow, which I agree with, but not as slow as they made it seem.

The post was about how every person who has become a millionaire under 30 either did it from an inheritance, a high income, or a large income event like crypto, and the person who shared the post mentioned that they’ve been budgeting for so long, they’re like 35.

They’ve been doing this for ten years and they’re only halfway to a million. And I say this for perspective. In some cases, I feel like it’s inspiring.

I was inspired by someone when I heard that they were doing the same thing as me and they hit their first $1,000 month.

The main lesson of this video is that when you read advice like this, you’re like, Okay, all people under 30 only reached it because of this. There’s no new way that I can create.

There’s no new path that I can forge by doing my own thing.

There’s no amount of education or skill that I can acquire that will allow me to surpass the average limits that people impose on themselves. And that’s exactly the thing: you can create a new path.

There are so many technological advancements happening right now this very moment that you’re in such a beautiful place to start making progress and doing what you want. That wasn’t a possibility a few years ago.

That’s what I’m saying here: the advice that that person gave about people under 30 only hitting $1,000,000 because of X, Y, and Z is like, yeah, you may have been right ten years ago, but now there are many cases studies arguing against that.

The thing is that I can’t teach you the exact path because it’s highly individual. It’s the scientific method: trial and error, discovery, hypothesis, iteration, and figuring it out for yourself just by making it a part of your lifestyle.

People are like, Oh! I will do this for a month and see if it works out.

No, do it for your entire fucking life and see if it works out. And so I can’t teach you the exact path, but I can give you things like the metastructure, the systems, and the principles to make it work.

And that’s why I wrote this article. But I’m saying that the entire lesson behind this article is that you need to take it upon yourself to get results, pull from multiple perspectives, and experiment with things until it works.

You can’t just blindly trust me or anyone else with your success. That’s why people go to school, blindly trust the school, and then end up in a life that they hate because they’re the product of that entity. They aren’t a product of themselves. They didn’t create themselves.

The process of achieving any goal

So let’s walk through steps or a system that allows you to achieve any goal you want. Have A Conscious Goal Step one is to have conscious goals and provide a frame for your decision-making.

I don’t want to hear that regurgitated systems are greater than goals. Advice that you got from James Clear. You don’t have a system without a goal. Simple as that. You need a goal that grows into a vision, one that you keep top of mind so you can collect fuel for the motivation that it gives you.

You don’t just feel ultra-motivated out of nowhere. You sit with a goal, experience life, and generate reasons to achieve that goal through study and observation. The more energy you invest in a goal through education and effort, the stronger the gravity of that goal.

It begins to pull you toward its understanding effortlessly because the big picture is greater than the technical details.

This is like an operating principle, and I learned this from Leo Guru with Actualize.org.

Please watch his video, 65 Principles for the Good Life. I watched that maybe five years ago and have been watching it every year since. Every single principle in that book is like another book.

The video is like, as you go through life and revisit that video, you’re like, Wow, like he was right the entire time. You may not understand some of them initially, but this principle—big-picture understanding is greater than technical details—is so important.

It’s also saying that principles are more incredible than tactics. But this does not eliminate the need for technical details and tactics. Right. None of this stuff is black and white, just like how systems don’t remove the need for goals.

You will fail in business if you do not understand every moving piece of the business you are trying to build; you will fail in fitness if you don’t have a holistic understanding of your body, nutrition, and training; and if you don’t understand the vast negative impacts of the environment, modern foods, and stress, you will succumb to them.

Awareness makes positive decision-making much, much easier If you don’t have a big-picture understanding of what you wish to achieve, you become susceptible to ideologies that are, by definition, untrue.

In a relative world, you will fall for get-rich-quick schemes, fad diets, and strict advice just to start over from scratch. When you realize they aren’t sustainable, when you approach a goal, education and effort go hand in hand to create understanding.

So, purchase general books, listen to podcasts, and follow social media accounts that address various perspectives.

Pursue your goal with the time you have and implement what you learn. Action solidifies actual knowledge, and you should adjust your decision-making as you learn. You will suck at first, but that’s the reality of any new endeavor.

Experiment with various techniques

As you educate towards your goal, I’m talking about your daily education habits and immersing yourself in the information that will allow you to acquire the knowledge. To achieve a goal, you will discover techniques to test in business.

This looks like writing advice, lead generation advice, best business models, and anything else you can find with a quick Google search. This is easily accessible information that anyone can and will find and try to do.

There’s a lot of competition here and I wish I could give concrete advice, like explaining how to experiment with things, but it’s as simple as just experimenting with the things that you learn by trying them out.

When you learn something new and the dopamine increases, and you’re like, Oh wow, that’s good advice. I need to understand, like, I need to note this down and try it, then actually try it and try to get results. And once you do that enough with multiple techniques, you start to create your own.

where if I go to the gym and I experiment with high-intensity training like Mike Mentzer high volume training, maybe something completely different, like CrossFit training and then running, and from all of those I pole principles and do what I enjoy.

But I understand that I’m still making progress, whether it be optimal or just enjoyable. And I can start to craft something that really suits me and gets me the best results because it’s sustainable.

And it’s the same thing with me trying and failing at seven different business models. I try all of these things. I let truth blur in the middle of, Oh, okay, I need to connect these dots.

This is what makes a business work. And then eventually I create something that is very unique to me because I have this amalgamation of skills and interests and just who I am that allows me to build something relatively unique.

Systematize what works

As you gain clarity on what you want to do, there will be levers that bring you the most results. Certain techniques will get you 1% better results than the next person.

That is your edge because that 1% compounds. I can write 30 minutes every morning and repurpose that content for all platforms. With time, I realized this was what brought in the followers and sales.

It’s content for any business model, not just like me talking to you now about the businesses I’m going to start in the future and the ones I have had in the past. I saw writing as a lever for traffic.

I saw a newsletter as an infinitely repurposed piece of content.

It took me a long time at first because I wasn’t efficient. I didn’t have the skill under my belt, so it took longer. But now it takes me about 30 minutes to an hour in the morning. That’s what I do.

And the things that I do now won’t look the same as an absolute beginner because, on something like social media, you’re going to have to reply like a madman to get eyes on your account. Practice writing content that gets shared and brings in followers.

Build a product or service that solves your own problems and start to write longer-form content to build trust and make sales. Because it’s like I say, Oh, I write 30 minutes every morning.

But if you don’t have a product that allows you to do that, then it doesn’t really make sense. You’ll have to think big picture about your business and realize, okay, I’m going to have to dedicate time to this. Once that’s automated, I start dedicating more time to this, and then eventually, you create this system that allows you to sustain everything.

Conclusion: beyond the fluff — embracing actual growth

So this article wasn’t the most actionable, but I feel like it’s critical. It’s again time to frame your decision-making because for every piece of actionable advice that people just drool over, there’s 100,000 people that don’t see any results with it.

So stop masturbating mentally to all actionable advice and no fluff or give me pure value. Don’t leave the fluff in there. Just take it all out.

You don’t understand what fluff is and why it’s important, and you only perceive it as fluff because, well, what one person perceives as fluff, another person perceives as just pure value.

So there’s a reason behind that. And you are ignoring that or just being like, Oh, the fluff of this article or this book is so like, why is it even there when that’s what changes lives? Don’t be an advice junkie; do what you want and get better at doing it through education and effort. Have a great rest of your week.