Podcast

How to Achieve Your Goals So Fast It Feels Like Cheating

The Koe Cast

Last highlighted March 22, 2025 Source ↗ ← All highlights

The Mind Game
- Most people pursue unconscious goals instilled by parents and society, hindering their personal fulfillment.
- To achieve anything, individuals must envision it as possible and develop the necessary skills. Transcript: Dan Koe To start dissecting your mind so we can understand it, we need to understand the first thing, which is how your mind interprets reality. Most people are pursuing the unconscious goals that their parents and society put into their head. They are playing the game of being a useful worker rather than a free and fulfilled individual. People try to play the game of starting a business or losing weight with the programmed mind of an employee or overweight person and wonder why they fail. They don’t understand that to achieve anything in life, you must become the person who both sees that as a possibility and has the skill to achieve it. To reinvent yourself, you need to understand this. The mind makes sense of the world in stories. A story or game provides the mind with a frame to maintain order and clarity. It gives you fulfilling steps to take toward the end goal. And if you don’t understand the story you are living out or the game you are playing, you can’t make sense of your place in the world. You lose purpose. Entropy ensues and you get lost in chaos. How your mind interprets reality is largely dependent on your identity or who you are. And your identity is a web of ideas and goals and beliefs and values that act as this mental filter. And as we’ll discuss in a few minutes, there are nine stages of ego development and each of those stages kind of comes along with goals, beliefs, and certain things that occupy your mind As you grow through them. So a lot of the times when you are just starting out in self-development or any kind of development, pursuing anything more in your life, your identity wasn’t created by you. It was created by your environment, by your parents, society, the culture you grew up in, maybe the religion you grew up in, or the things you grew up watching on TV, or the news. And we’ll learn how to overcome that, but for now you need to understand that the mind selectively allows information into your mind, and your goals, beliefs, your identity shapes That. It shapes what your mind can perceive. In a very poor example, one person’s mind could be able to see this camera. Another person’s mind wouldn’t be able to see this camera. But you can think of that as information. Obviously, you can probably see this screen right now. But the words coming through, some people are just missing the point completely of what we’re talking about here. They’re going to continue to miss the point because their identity and how they interpret the information doesn’t land in their head. You notice information that helps you achieve your goals. You notice information that aligns with what’s important to you or your values. You notice information that confirms your beliefs. So two different people at completely different levels of development with different goals can both read the same book or watch the same video and come to completely different conclusions About it. The thing there is that those conclusions, what you get out of something is then used to make decisions. And those decisions compound into a life of success or failure your choices create who you are. You make more choices that creates who you are, that determines how you perceive reality in a certain way to make more decisions and then it compounds over time. Do you see why this is important yet? You fail at almost everything you do because you fail to interpret reality in a way that provides you with the you actually need to succeed. In any given situation, you can interpret it in 1,000 different ways. Maybe five of those interpretations will help you succeed, but your mind can’t comprehend those five ways yet. You can’t make progress because your mind rejects the information you need to make progress. (Time 0:04:04)
Levels of Mind
- Your identity, a dynamic entity, shapes your reality perception and decision-making.
- Conventional stages of ego development, where most people reside, limit their ability to achieve goals. Transcript: Dan Koe It’s a living, breathing, and evolving entity. You aren’t helpless. You’ve just learned to be. So now we understand how the mind interprets reality on a surface level. But now we need to understand how to reach a new level of mind. How do we adopt these new goals, these new values, these new beliefs so that we can interpret reality in a new, expanded way to notice more information that helps us actually achieve The things we want to achieve. So here, there are nine different stages of ego development. Ego, identity, self, we’re going to consider those synonymous for now. It’s your interpretive filter for the world. It’s your storytelling engine. It’s how you make sense of the world. But this is a concept by Susan Cook-Greuter, The Nine Levels of Ego Development. It’s one of her research papers. So the first three stages fall within the pre-conventional category. There’s three categories. There’s pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional. So in the pre-conventional, there’s symbiotic, impulsive, and opportunist. But we’re not going to go over these because most people grow out of these stages by the age of 10 to 12. In these stages, you’re just dependent on others to fulfill your basic needs. There’s no distinction between self and other. You just think others are there for you to fulfill your needs. That’s about 5% of the population. Now, the conventional stages is about 75 to 80% of the population. So most people that fail to achieve the things they want in life are within these conventional stages. The first is the conformist stage where your identity is defined by your relationship to a group, like high school students focused on popularity or Bible thumpers who never questioned Their beliefs. Conformists base their decisions around what the group does and obey authority. Now, this isn’t limited to high school students or Bible thumpers. It’s limited to people who just conform to the group and can’t think for themselves. (Time 0:08:43)
Escaping Convention
- Identify individuals stuck in conventional development by their regurgitation of popular beliefs.
- Avoid blindly copying others’ paths; instead, think critically and develop unique problem-solving approaches. Transcript: Dan Koe The next stage is the expert stage. So these are skill-centric engineering types or the average scientist. They are good at tackling complex problems and working on tasks, but they’re bad at identifying if they are working on the right task, or they’re also bad at shifting their focus once They realize they’re working on the wrong tasks. And usually this is because they are still chained to a specific ideology or belief system from their past that they were conditioned into. The next stage is the achiever stage. So this is the quote unquote pinnacle of development for the Western world. You can think of it as self-help and business focused people who want to make a lot of money and achieve a high level of status. So 80%, I would say, of educational content on YouTube or any kind of social media is focused on this. Even if the YouTubers like Alex Hormozzi aren’t solely, if they don’t have to be the same level of mind as you, but when they’re teaching how to make money, how to make money, and you’re Going to them out of this stress and survival to attain some high level of status rather than some deeper meaning behind it, which there’s nothing wrong with this, right? Everyone goes through these stages. Everyone pursues status at some point. Everyone pursues vanity at some point. You go to the gym for vanity and stay for the therapy. So this isn’t bad. It’s just good to understand these so you can identify, okay, I’m here and there is something more and I can reach another level. And at that level, there’s a better life waiting for me. You can identify these people, the people in the conventional stages of development, by just talking to them. Because when you talk to them, it’s like they’re kind of regurgitating religious beliefs, or it’s like you’re talking to a TV or a mainstream news channel, or you’re like, haven’t I Heard all of this before in like one of those popular self-help books? That’s how you can kind of identify who they are. The main characteristic here is they haven’t developed the ability to expand beyond a popular worldview and think for themselves. So it’s like monkeys copying other monkeys and you fail at achieving the goals you want to achieve because you expect that monkey who achieved what you expect to be able to do the same Exact thing as them without critical or deep thinking or solving complex problems. (Time 0:10:33)
Moving Up
- Advancing through stages of ego development requires time and can be accelerated through meditation.
- Even accelerated, reaching higher stages can still take years of consistent practice. Transcript: Dan Koe It takes years to develop through these stages. So you may not be able to achieve your goals this year or in two years. It takes a while to reach the pluralist strategist and construct aware stage that kind of allows you to view situations from multiple perspectives to pull the best information in and Make the right decisions. So the question here is, even if it takes years, it can be accelerated. Ken Wilber actually found, I believe it was through research. Either way, go research Ken Wilber, read his books. It’ll change your life. But he found that the simple act of meditation, 15 minutes of meditation a day or more, drastically increases how fast you can improve through these stages. So that’s step one to going up is just meditate more, practice mindfulness, dive into that domain. (Time 0:14:33)
Truth in Mistakes
- Growth involves horizontal expansion within a level and vertical transcendence to higher levels.
- Mistakes are the most reliable source of truth, providing tailored feedback for self-correction. Transcript: Dan Koe But aside from that, how do you move up? How do you increase your level development? So we’ve learned how the mind interprets reality. We’ve learned the levels of mind. And now the third thing is that mistakes are the only source of truth. So there are two types of growth. There’s horizontal and vertical. Horizontal growth is expanding within the level of development you are in. You are learning, acquiring skills, and acquiring knowledge. Now, vertical growth is transcending to a new level after a period of struggle, pain, or wrestling with your own beliefs to the point of needing to adopt a new perspective to view the Struggle from a new light so that you can overcome it. It’s like Einstein said, or supposedly said, that you can’t solve a problem from the same level of mind that created it. You have to transcend. And if you don’t, you’re stuck with that problem and you won’t achieve the polar end of a problem, which is a goal. So the key to growth is just that, a continuous self-education, skill acquisition, and not numbing yourself from the pain or problems that spring up as you get further in. You increase your level of development making mistakes, realizing them, not ignoring them or suppressing them, but leaning into them and self-correcting toward the evolving string Of goals you are trying to achieve. Now here’s the main problem. Most people try and try and try just to fail and fail and fail because they try to match someone else’s map to their territory. Courses, books, podcasts, teachings, advice. They don’t realize that these things are maps. They are guides, not truth. They are useful, but only if you understand that they are nothing but a candle off in the distance that guides you through a dark room. They do not determine the direction of your steps or if you stumble into a pit of snakes. Further, you do not have access to someone else’s state of mind. You do not have access to how they perceive the world. You do not have their same exact identity. So this leads to one crucial and counterintuitive realization. Mistakes are the only source of truth, not the thoughts in your head, not the advice of a billionaire. Failure is the only teacher that is absolutely 100% tailored to your situation. Failure has a signal-to ratio of 100 to 1, but you hate failure. You let it rule your life. You ignore it and dig your head into more courses, books, and podcasts. Everything you learn that is not derived from mistakes is derived from theory. It is derived from a map. (Time 0:15:20)
Strategic Thinking
- Develop strategic thinking by creating a central idea that adapts to changing circumstances.
- Define strategic intent, the overarching goal influencing perception and information gathering. Transcript: Dan Koe It is but a conjecture formed through the interpretation of mistakes made by another person. And that leads to the question, how do you make better mistakes in the right direction and learn from those mistakes in a way that leads to success? And lastly, for the end of this video, how do you fail before you even start so you can start learning immediately? So now you understand the mind. You understand growth. You understand how you perceive the world, which is extremely important for now becoming a strategic thinker and creating a strategy for your future. So we’ll start with a quote from Lawrence Friedman. Strategy is not a lengthy action plan. It is the evolution of a central idea through continually changing circumstances. And that’s just the thing. Most people’s lives are mediocre due to a lack of strategic thinking because most of them aren’t in the strategist stage, that sixth, seventh level of mind. But you don’t have to be there to create a strategy. You can do that. You can create a strategy to get to any of those stages. Now, successful people, on the other hand, are highly strategic. They don’t just let life happen to them. They reject the default path they were assigned. They choose the game they want to play, both for their ideal life and the games that allow them to get there. They become the person that can win that game through skill acquisition and learning. So to win any game that you choose to play, you need a strategy. Now for all of this, I’m going to be speaking, but on the screen, I’m going to be filling out a template slash worksheet for creating your own strategy. So again, you can download that with the link in the description. And if you decide to use Cortex for your note taking, your second brain, for saving external highlights, for capturing ideas, for writing, for whatever it is that Cortex can help you With. If you download the desktop app on Mac or Windows and you press Alt or Option C, what that will do is open up a floating chat window. So as you’re watching this video, you can take notes inside of there, or you can press Option D and that opens up a floating note. This has been one of the features that people really like about Cortex. So you can open up the strategy document floating next to you as you go about watching this video. So now the first thing you need is strategic intent. You need direction. You need a new goal from which your mind perceives the world. So first, think of everything that you hate about your current life. The job, the body, your routine, how you feel. Start somewhere. And then second, think of a few potential possibilities for your future life. Starting a business, being fit and energetic, living out your ideal day. Now don’t dwell on this and write a few things down and continue. Choose the macro game you want to play. Now the point behind step one, the first pillar of strategic thinking, which is strategic intent, is to just create an aim, an overarching filter, something to work towards. And this starts to frame your mind to notice the right information in alignment with that intent, so you pick up the right information. You aren’t just going about learning certain skills blindly. Your intent frames what you learn. (Time 0:17:39)
Self-Analysis
- Analyze your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) to understand yourself.
- Leverage strengths, overcome weaknesses, exploit opportunities, and address threats strategically. Transcript: Dan Koe Go watch the last video on how to learn anything 10 times faster than anyone to understand this better. The second step is self-analysis, because you need to understand yourself so that you can work with your strengths and overcome your weaknesses. Because with this, your identity clearly isn’t serving you here. That’s why you’re watching this video. So to become aware of the different parts of your identity, we need to do a SWOT analysis, S-W strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. So for strengths, what comes easy to you? What are your strengths and talents? And if you respond with a cop-out answer of nothing, like, oh, I can’t do anything, I’m not good at anything, you are lying and already can’t see past the reactions your lower self is feeding Your mind to spit out like a robot. Think harder. Now for weaknesses, what are you notoriously bad at and how is it impacting your progress? The third is opportunities for growth. What can help you overcome your weaknesses and leverage your strengths? This could be learning skills, taking courses, meeting new people, etc. And last, threats. What threatens your progress? This could be friends inviting you out to a party, a lack of time, a fear of failure, whatever it may be. Now with all of this, you can come back to it and add to it over time because these may not come to you right away. You can’t just think through all of these things. So you may have to come back to this note. And by the way, if you aren’t writing this down in the template yet, I did actually improve the strategic advisor prompt from the last video. So if you want to chat with AI for it to break down and rip apart your entire strategy, you can pop that into an AI tool as well and just ask it for feedback on your entire strategy so you can Go to that chat all the time and share your progress and it will help you overcome blocks and give you clarity on what to do next. (Time 0:20:38)
Strategic Preparation
- Immerse yourself in an environment aligned with your goals, changing information sources and social connections.
- Create a conducive environment by eliminating distractions and investing in resources that support your goals. Transcript: Dan Koe And here’s an example of what this prompt spat out to me when I told it I wanted to build an audience. So it gets pretty granular and very clear on what you need to do. It’s very helpful. Now, the third step after understanding yourself is just strategic preparation. So the question is, how do you change your identity so that you act on your strategy with ease? And you start by immersing yourself in a completely new environment. You change the books you read, the information you consume, the people you follow, and everything else to reflect the goal you are trying to achieve. You open your mind to new perspectives and allow them to challenge your beliefs of what’s possible. So delete most of the apps on your phone. Unfollow most of the people you follow. Buy three new books, cue podcasts to listen to on a walk. Invest in resources to learn the skills you need to learn. Have pre-written messages that declines your friends’ invitations to go out. Anything that does not align with your goals is by definition a distraction. (Time 0:22:22)
Concentration of Force
- Focus your energy by building real-world projects that offer structured learning through mistakes.
- Select high-leverage projects and identify priority tasks to maximize progress towards goals. Transcript: Dan Koe You need an environment that is solely conducive to you achieving your goal. Now step four is concentration of force because we understand ourselves. We have the direction we want to go. We don’t have any distractions around us and we’re ready to learn. So now we need to focus our energy on the goal. And as we discussed in the last video, the only way to actualize a goal is to build a real world project. That’s the only way to learn as well. So a project is a vessel for making mistakes and overcoming those mistakes in a structured way. So you write down three to five projects you could build to achieve the goal. You choose the highest leverage project that has the most advantageous outcomes, and you map out the three to five priority tasks you can do on a daily basis to make progress on the project. So an example of this, if you’re trying to quit the job you hate, then a project related to that is maybe building a personal brand or starting a weekly newsletter or just starting a business In general. It doesn’t have to be content creation related, but social media is like the highest leverage thing right now. That’s where you attract people to your work. So I have to toss it in here, but if you want to learn how to write in a way that builds an audience around your skills or interests, then check out To Our Writer. (Time 0:23:16)
Disciplined Execution
- Establish a new routine that prioritizes goal-oriented actions, including focused work periods and supportive activities.
- Execute priority tasks daily, aligning all activities with your strategic objectives. Transcript: Dan Koe So now we have a way to channel everything that we have into just daily execution. So step five is that, discipline, disciplined execution. So you need to replace your old routine with a new one because you probably fell into your current routine without knowing it. And if your actions create your future, you are falling into a future without knowing it, and it’s probably not one you’ll care about. So you execute your three to five priority, lever-moving tasks for one to two hours in the morning, or one to two hours at night. I think this should happen in the morning because I personally don’t think that anyone is a night owl. Everyone is bound to their circadian rhythm, and by staying up extremely late, that disrupts your health more than you could ever know. Feel free to go down the circadian and light health rabbit hole. If you were to wake up and go on a walk in the sun every day and get more sunlight, you would be a morning person. The next everything you do throughout the day should fuel your work. What you read, what you scroll, your conversations, going on walks instead of distracting yourself, eating well. The only thing on your mind should be strategizing how to overcome obstacles of the game. (Time 0:24:30)
Adaptability
- Embrace adaptability, recognizing that strategies evolve based on feedback and experimentation.
- View mistakes as sources of truth, guiding adjustments and leading to continuous improvement. Transcript: Dan Koe And this will become seamless once we create a pre-mortem soon. Now, step six isn’t really a practical step. It’s more of a mental step. It’s adaptability. Because a strategy is like everything else in life. It is not static. It evolves with feedback. You need to be able to identify when things aren’t working, go back to your strategy, and experiment with something new. And remember, mistakes are the only source of truth. Experimentation is how you make mistakes. Thus, experimentation is the only way to achieve what you want in life. It’s going to be uncertain because anything that is certain isn’t a mistake. (Time 0:25:33)
Study and Mastery
- Study general principles of strategy and reality, including philosophy of mind and universal laws.
- Master fundamentals through consistent practice, focusing on refining core skills daily. Transcript: Dan Koe It’s not the source of truth. If it’s certain, it’s the map or theory of someone else. Now, step seven is another unpractical step, kind of a mental step, where you need to study the general principles of both the strategy you’re trying to execute and reality in general. Now, to get started on the reality portion i would recommend studying the philosophy of mind or hermetic philosophy so read the book the kabbalion for just the seven laws of the universe Just dive down that rabbit hole as well because those are like the fundamentals of reality in general and what’s allowed but to achieve mastery in what you’re doing you repeat the boring Fundamentals. You live in a plateau for the most of your life, and most people try to escape that plateau by numbing their mind with cheap pleasures or cheap stimulation or food or scrolling on their Phone, and then they get trapped there in that plateau. They never continue to make upward progress slowly because they want to achieve rapid progress really fast. So you master the fundamentals. When you are learning a skill or you’re doing your priority tasks in the morning, those are usually the basics, just done with taste and style. So you need to continuously study those, refine those, practice those every single day. For something like writing a newsletter or social posts, it’s the hook. A lot of people fail in this regard, and I see them fail because they start off by following the fundamentals and the principles of good writing, and then they try to do it in their own voice, In their own way, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You just have to bake your own voice into the principles. You stopped writing compelling hooks. People stopped paying attention. People stopped caring, and then you got mad of like, okay, people only like it when I’m this attention grabbing person. (Time 0:26:06)
Pre-Mortem Technique
- Use the pre-mortem technique to anticipate and address potential failure points before starting a project.
- Visualize failure, identify causes, prioritize threats, and brainstorm solutions to increase resilience. Transcript: Dan Koe You have to grab attention. It’s aside the point. Okay, moving on. The pre-mortem technique. How do you fail before you even start on this strategy so that you’re much more likely to follow through with it? Because that’s most people’s problem is they just can’t start. So a quote from Michael Porter is that the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. So we need to figure that out. Because most people don’t fail because they can’t complete their project, they fail because of internal psychological thought processes that take control of their focus and lead To the belief that success isn’t possible. So a few examples here are paralysis by analysis, by over-researching or not taking action, losing sight of the big vision due to others’ opinions, lack of complementary skills like Writing and audience building to be able to find customers for your work or your business, whatever you’re starting, financial insecurity to the point of accepting that you need to Focus on the job you hate, burning out and not having a coping mechanism that refreshes you, getting bored with the mundane work that gets results, the desire to do something fancy and High status instead of something that you enjoy or gets you out of your situation. Because the thing here is that when you’re in the middle of a project, when you’re deep in it, you’re stressed, you’re automatically, when you’re stressed, your mind narrows further. You’re kind of temporarily regressed into a lower state of yourself. It’s like we go over those nine stages of ego development and you can be in the highest stage. You can be construct aware, unitive, master mystic, but when your head is stuck in a bucket of water and held there, you’re going into survival mode and you’re going to kick and flail Like an old caveman that’s pinned by a beast. And that’s kind of what it’s like being in the middle of a project. You’re so consumed by the project. So the best way around this, or at least to help with this, is the pre-mortem. A pre-mortem is a strategic thinking tool that identifies failure points in any project before it even begins. So here’s what you do. This is also included in the worksheet, and I’ll also show screen recordings on the screen of me filling it out. The first thing is to imagine spectacular failure. So visualize your strategy failing horribly. What does it look like and where does your life end up? This is like the anti-vision that I have talked about many times before. We have the strategic intent, which is like the vision. And then we have the anti-vision, which just helps you frame that so much more. The next thing is to list the causes of failure. So brainstorm all possible reasons for the failure. Include psychological reasons like personal weaknesses, self-sabotage, lack of knowledge or skill, and external factors like not having enough money. Then next, you prioritize that list of failures. So reorganize the list and place the most threatening at the top. Then last, you brainstorm solutions. So for each cause of failure, brainstorm potential solutions. You can ask Kai or Cortex AI as your strategic advisor to help with these. So now you have all of this awareness. You understand how the mind works. You have a clear action plan to achieve your goal. (Time 0:27:46)