The Art of Strategic Thinking (How to Become Wildly Successful at Anything You Do)

Stop obsessing over tactics

00:00Everyone is racing to be successful right now. And as you'd guess, 99.99% of them will not in fact become successful because they're all obsessed with the wrong thing. They're obsessed with the clawed code skills that they're collecting from Instagram posts that tell you to comment a keyword in order for them to DM you so you can follow them so that they can send you the link to the skill that you're going to try once and never use again.

00:18They're obsessed with the YouTube videos that teach them how to build a profitable business in five actionable steps. And I still don't understand why people are so obsessed with actionable steps and bullet point summaries because that's not going to help you in the slightest if you don't have understanding or context or experience.

00:36They're obsessed with tactics. You know, the same knowledge that everyone else has access to. Do you not realize that all the information you could ever need to make a hund00 million is readily available to you online, in books, or just inside of an AI chat if you talk to it long enough?

00:55Have you ever stopped and wondered why everyone in the world isn't making millions of dollars right now? Have you ever considered that the actionable advice you crave so much won't get you anywhere unless you know how the pieces you're picking up fit into the entire puzzle?

01:07So, why is this? Why are so many people trying to desperately aim for success but get nowhere close to achieving it? One is because they're exchanging one form of cheap dopamine for another more insidious form. I would argue that endless tactic collection by endlessly consuming YouTube videos around business and self-improvement is worse than just doom scrolling brain rot videos because you're getting a sense of fake progress.

01:39At least with the doom scrolling videos, you just feel bad about yourself. But with the self-improvement in business and even this video, you feel bad about yourself, but you also get this false certainty that you're making progress just by watching the video.

01:46The second reason is because they don't have a strategy that allows them to use the tactics they're collecting to their highest degree. Tactic collection or tactics in general, which is just execution. Strategy is positioning. Tactics is execution.

02:04If you don't have a strategy that one exposes you to the right tactics that you didn't even know about in the first place or didn't register as an opportunity, then you're just going to be thrown around like a puppet by internet marketers because they know how to capture your attention and persuade you that something is valuable, even if it may not fit your specific situation and your specific mind.

02:23Now, if you're this type of person who just collects tactics, I'm not trying to belittle you. I do the same thing quite often right now and I did it a lot more in the past. I got stuck in tutorial hell. I took all the courses. I tried and failed at seven different business models.

02:36Facebook ads, SEO, drop shipping, web design, digital art, and a few more. And I wouldn't even consider them businesses. I would consider them hobbies because I would learn the high value skill and that felt good. I would start the LLC and that felt good.

02:52I would build the website and try to write the copy for it so that it's persuasive and that felt good. But when it came to actually getting a customer, getting someone to pay me, I was nowhere to be found. And the missing piece was a strategy.

03:04But not just a strategy, the ability to think strategically because how else are you going to create a strategy? And that's an incredibly difficult thing to learn. But that's what we're here to talk about. That's the secret behind Steve Jobs, Alexander the Great, military strategists in general.

03:23Most great and successful people that we look up to have the ability to think strategically. They may not say that that is their superpower or their secret because they may be unconsciously competent, but that is exactly it. It all comes down to strategy.

03:35And that's what I'm going to show you not only how to learn, but how to do in this video. We're going to create a life strategy. and you're going to learn the principles that you can take and apply to anything that you do, be it business, sports, relationships, anything.

03:53We're also going to talk about the nine traits of a master strategist and especially how a lack of strategy means a lack of control over the outcome of your life. As we begin, the only thing I ask of you is that you actually listen and attempt to implement what I say.

04:10You take notes. you actually do something aside from just watching the video and then letting it leave your mind 30 minutes later. So section number one, strategy is getting yourself into a superior position while at the same time

IStrategy is getting yourself into a superior position

04:23making sure your opponent is in a worse one. And this section is all about understanding the quote tactics flow from a superior position from Bobby Fischer who is a chess grandmaster. Now let's walk through a simple chess match. I'll try not to bore you here.

04:35We'll make it quick just so we can get to the point. But player one in the chess match spends the first part of the game doing things that look boring. They aren't attacking. They aren't capturing any pieces. And from the outside, it looks like they're not doing anything.

04:45They're just moving their pieces to certain squares on the board. And in a game like chess, you're playing on a grid, but not all of the squares on that grid are created equal. It's the same with life. A piece in the center of a board can reach many more places than a piece stuck behind a corner.

04:59Now, in the game, player one slides a rook onto an open lane where nothing blocks it. They place a bishop on a path that points straight at the enemy king. They place a knight on a square near the middle of the board. And meanwhile, player two has pieces just getting in each other's way.

05:18Their most powerful pieces are trapped behind their own pawns. Their king is stuck in the middle of the board because they never found a safe moment to tuck it away in a corner. Player two was only reacting to player one's moves. So player one moves their knight to a square where it can attack player two's king and queen at the same time.

05:31And in chess, this is called a fork. So your opponent can only save one. Those are two very powerful pieces, the king and the queen. So losing either one is not good. So of course, player two has to move his king so he doesn't lose the game.

05:51But that leads to player one being able to take their queen, which is the most powerful piece on the board, and it's essentially game over at this point. But the thing here is the lesson is that any player who got to that exact arrangement of pieces could have played that game-winning move.

06:04The reason player one got there is because they spent the entire game building up to it. So if you were to remove any of those boring steps from the start, the fork or the game-winning tactic wouldn't exist. The knight would have gotten blocked and the king would have escaped as a defending piece arrived.

06:22So the real lesson is strategy is getting yourself into a superior position while at the same time making sure your opponent is in a worse one. Strategy is the work of making your position better and your opponent's position worse move by move until the gap between the two is so large that tactics start appearing on their own.

06:42Now the interesting thing here is that in the game of life, you are both the opponent and the player. Every decision you make changes your own position. And most people are just completely blind to where they are. If the average person's life were a chess match, they probably have gotten into a game-winning move before, but they didn't even realize it.

07:01They weren't able to act on that opportunity because it was just unconscious to them. They didn't have the cognitive flexibility or architecture, which we're going to talk about in the next video, to actually know when they can execute on a specific tactic to get a big reward.

07:11That's why strategy has to come first. Because if you want to actually succeed at building the side business or the creator business like we talk about here or just building an aesthetic physique or becoming healthy or simply getting what you want out of life, you can't be like most people because most people spend zero time strategizing.

07:35They don't engage in intentional strategic thinking. Like think about your own life, right? I do this all the time. We all do. But when you're just going about your life, are you actually thinking or are you just reacting to thoughts and emotions?

07:45Are you understanding what's going on in your head or are you just letting it play out? Both have their benefits, right? They're different modes of thinking. There's creativity and there's productivity. Creativity benefits from a more open focus, letting your mind be kind of chaotic and then picking picking certain ideas or pieces and synthesizing them together.

08:04And then productivity is more strategic, more focused, more hierarchical. But most people don't engage in productivity in that way. They engage in a very narrow state of stressful focus based on urgency or scarcity because they have to to survive.

08:17And that is not a good place to be in. And lastly, if you observe society, you will see that plain tactic level thinking is very disastrous. And that leads into section number two, which is that the average person lives

The average person lives in a mindless cycle of struggles they can't escape

08:36in a mindless cycle of struggles they can't escape. So, thank goodness you aren't actually on a battlefield because you'd probably be dead. Most people commit highly predictable strategic mistakes that if they were in a truly violent setting, they would lose and winners would be studying what they did so that they could do the exact opposite.

08:54Getting married too early or late, not developing mastery in anything, trusting that AI can do everything for you. And I'm saying this as someone who is not anti-AII completely because everything is a religion nowadays and we don't have to treat anti- AI or the flavor of the day drama that's going on that's been happening every 3 months.

09:12It's just a different thing that people get obsessed with and cry about and play victim with and virtue signal on social media. You don't have to engage in that and you can see the signs of lower levels of thinking in those people and you can avoid them.

09:25Again, we're going to talk about that in the next video. But other examples, chasing money over meaning, irresponsibly going into debt, staying in a bad relationship, not investing in education, climbing a corporate ladder that leads to nowhere, the list just goes on.

09:36The average person does not try to solve their problems or their struggles. They get stuck in a routine where they live the same day over and over again because that's what the conditioning process led to in their lives. When they were born, their parents and teachers injected values and beliefs into their head that put them on the default path heading toward the goal that society wanted for them, which is go to school, get a job, retire at 65, the industrial paradigm.

10:01And most people never question that. And by the time they turn 20, it had become so conditioned in their mind that it's just habitual. It's just unconscious. It's just what they do. it doesn't cross their minds to snap out of it, engage in strategic thinking and change the direction of their life so that they can eventually reach a more advantageous position where their problems aren't so painful.

10:25They still have problems. Everyone still has problems, but they're of a lesser magnitude. They're more fun and creative problems to solve. You start to see life as a puzzle rather than a death sentence. So, what I'm saying is that everyone has a strategy, but for most people, it's not one that they created.

10:44it's one that they were assigned. Their strategy is again, go to school, get a job, retire at 65, be a good student, make a a decent amount of money, even though it's not that much. Be humble. Don't stick your nose out. Your dreams aren't worth pursuing because they're risky, which doesn't make sense because risk is the only way to get reward.

10:56It all just doesn't make sense when you actually think about it. Especially going into the new paradigm, which is AI, information, all of that stuff. It requires a completely different strategy. Whether or not you agree that culture and society should be heading in this direction of AI and information that doesn't mean that it's not happening.

11:17People are so mad that oh jobs are going to re be replaced even though I don't know if that's going to be the case but that's what people are saying. No matter what it is you need to create a new strategy so that you can thrive in the future rather than being stuck in the one that you were assigned that was only somewhat beneficial to the old way of life, the American dream.

11:40So, how do you actually start to get out of this mindless and honestly meaningless way of living? And you may not be completely in it, but this still applies to you to start to create your own strategy. Well, you think of it as if you're on an actual battlefield because in many ways you are.

11:52You're living under this guise of modern comfort and convenience where everything is just easy and you're allowed to just coast through life and do the bare minimum in order to survive. But if you were on a battlefield, think of the general.

12:05His own life was on the line. That forced strategic depth. He had to be strategic in order to win or else he would die. You need pressure. You need tactical stress. You need to put yourself in a position where you must craft a strategy or you lose or else you're just going to lose either way.

12:29Move into an apartment you can't afford. Book the plane ticket to somewhere you've never been. Invest in the business software, the course, or coaching. even if you think it's a scam because at least your finances will be put on the line and you can't live in a shroud of false comfort anymore.

12:40So, you get it. You need a strategy and you need to develop the skill of strategic thinking because without those every single decision you make in life becomes arbitrary. It doesn't matter. It it is quite literally meaningless because it's not aimed in a specific direction.

12:51That doesn't feel good to think about. That every single thing that you do every single day without a strategy does not get you anywhere. I'm being hyperbolic, but that's for a reason to actually get you to take this seriously. And if the outcome of your life is the accumulation of the decisions you make, then this is arguably one of the most important

How to build a superior life position

13:15things you could ever do. That leads to section number three, how to build a superior life position by going so deep you see patterns in everything you do. Now, in the book of Five Rings by Miiamoto Mousashi, there are nine precepts or principles every strategist should follow.

13:27One is don't think dishonestly. Two, training is the way itself. Three, get acquainted with every art. Four, know the ways of all professions. Five, understand gain and loss in worldly dealings. Six, develop intuitive judgment about everything.

13:41Seven, perceive what can't be seen. Eight, attend even to small things. Nine, do nothing useless. A strategist in Mousashi's mind is someone who goes so deep into one discipline that they discover something universal at the bottom of it. You notice patterns that aren't specific to business or relationships or swordsmanship or chess.

14:06They are constants. And once you see those patterns and notice them across domains, you become far more effective within all domains because you are never really starting from scratch. You have an understanding of reality as a whole on your side.

14:16We'll go into how to uncover these like universal patterns so to say, but the first time I became aware of this is when I started in business. Because for most of my life, I had been into fitness and in the gym and studying nutrition and all of this stuff just in my free time.

14:28And when I started building the business and actually seeing some success with it, I'm like, this is progressive overload, right? If you know what progressive overload is where it's like slowly increasing the weight over time. You're not trying to jump up in huge leaps and bounds of weight.

14:47You increase by 2.5 lbs or 5 lbs. And the nutrition you eat has to fuel the recovery to facilitate that. and you use that as a metric for how much you're growing. Because if you can focus on that, that is a great proxy for muscle growth, for understanding how much muscle you're actually building and whether or not you're building muscle is if you're consistently getting stronger over time.

15:05So all of the variables have to come together in order to build muscle, which is the end result. But in business, making money, the same exact thing happens. You need all of the variables to come together. And you're not aiming for a a viral explosion of sales like many of the startups are.

15:23You're aiming for the slow consistent growth and year after year you look back and you're like, "Holy crap, this has been an exponential line." Now, the nine precepts or principles that we went over define what this strategist or master strategist looks like on the outside.

15:35So, the modern idea of a generalist is usually someone who knows a little about a lot. They're a jack of all trades. But what Mousashi is describing here is a bit different. There's the generalist, there's the specialist, and then there's the master or the strategist.

15:48And this also maps quite well to the stages of ego development and spiral dynamics. The strategist stage is quite achievable and comes with the following qualities. The first is systems thinking. So, strategists see competing systems and perspectives simultaneously while achievers who are the self-helpers or the businessmen operate within a single system of success and achievement.

16:12They're also comfortable with paradox. So they can hold contradictions like being both pro and anti-AII rather than resolving them into clear or false answers. They focus on process over outcome, so they care about how things happen and the principles at play, not just the results.

16:30They're aware of constraints, so they see how their assumptions and frameworks shape what they perceive. They have a sense of meta awareness, so strategists can observe their own meaning-making and not just deploy expertise or navigate social dynamics.

16:40And they have principled flexibility. They have strong values but adapt methods fluidly versus rigid rules or social conformity. The most important trait there in my opinion is the ability to hold paradox or to hold multiple frameworks or perspectives.

16:53What that means is not engaging in black and white thinking which is the lowest form of intelligence. And this is one massive trap of social media. Every time you log on that's all you see and you react to it and you get addicted to it without even knowing it.

17:10and you slowly degrade your mental capacity to hold paradox. So, as a side note, the solution to that is to become a curator. You need to carefully protect your mind and curate your own sources of information and where you're getting information from.

17:23This is why we built the reader and idea capture inside of Eden. You can save a link to anything like this YouTube video and then open it in a reader so you can highlight it and keep your curated information in one place, organized on boards.

17:36And for people who are creators who actually use social media for research, we have a discover feed which shows you the top performing posts. So then you can save those to boards, reverse engineer them, study them, and then use them as inspiration to synthesize into your own writing or work or YouTube scripts or newsletters or social posts.

17:53So if you want to start building your garden for ideas, you can start with Eden, the idea capture portion, and reading is free via the link in the description. Strategists see their own constructions as choices. their identity, their values, their worldview.

18:12The master or strategist receives the benefits of both the generalist and the specialist. Both the ability to be good at many things so they don't narrow their mind to one area of study limiting their potential and the ability to excel significantly at one thing so they can get outsized results, preferably in a meaningful domain.

18:29So that is our goal to become someone who can embody these precepts or principles of the strategist. And closer to the end, I'll actually give you a shortcut or as close to a shortcut as you can get to just studying these universal principles directly so that you can notice them in your life.

18:41And for this section, I think the most actionable point is the ninth precept, which is to do nothing useless. Make that your operating principle for the next year and you will do incredible things. If you were to simply audit your thoughts and behavior for usefulness, you would rapidly turn your life around.

19:01As I said, scrolling on social media, getting sucked into the dogmatic black and white thinking is useless. The mindless way of life is a useless way of life. So the questions now are what do you actually master? What is your form of training?

19:14How do you begin to understand gain and loss? How do you begin to embody the principles of a master strategist? And most importantly, in my eyes, how do you do something useful? That leads to section four, which is how to think so strategically you finally take back control of your life.

19:32So thankfully we can study what makes a good strategy or what strategic thinking looks like and then we can reverse engineer it. Take the principles and start to apply them to our life. And these principles have been refined and iterated on over centuries of military and war and sports and business.

19:45You have a massive amount of historical wins and losses that you can look at. And the beautiful thing is that all of these apply to your own personal life and success. I've personally compiled seven of them here. So if you sit down and actually do this and follow through with this, your life will change.

20:04That doesn't mean that your strategy is going to be a winning strategy. You can still lose, but it sure helps you in not being trampled over by your opponent, which is

Principle 1 - Vision

20:16often yourself. So principle one of strategic thinking is vision. And I love this quote from the account orange book on X. No one ever suddenly gets lucky. If the stars suddenly align for you, you actually align them consciously or not by choosing where to live, who to learn from, who to marry, who to befriend, what lifestyle to maintain, what risk to take, and what vision to believe in.

20:34Now, if you don't have a vision, you're lost. You do not have intention behind your actions because you don't know what your actions are leading to. You're holding 10 darts in your hand and those represent the 10 bold decisions that will determine the outcome of your life.

20:53But you don't even have a dart board to aim at. In other words, you don't even have a chance to hit the board. You don't know where the board is. But of course, there is a benefit to actually being lost. I'm not saying that you should never feel lost in your life because when you're lost, you have a decision to make.

21:04You either let entropy drag you into oblivion, which is that your life gets slowly worse and worse over time without you really noticing it until it's so bad. It's like your room getting messy. You don't clean your room one day and then shirts appear over here and then you don't clean it the next and you start to notice dust is gathering and eventually day after day it becomes a pig's thigh and it's normal to you.

21:27That's the dangerous part is that it doesn't just rapidly get dirty. It happens slowly over time in this way where you don't even notice it. And then it's so much harder to get out. And that's what's happening when you feel lost. You have to make the decision to figure it out.

21:40Experiment with new things until you find that one thing that's worth going all in on. The void is where success is born. Now, a vision is the ultimate outcome that you're aiming for in life. It is not a vague wish. It must be as specific as it can possibly be.

21:59It must be compelling enough to motivate and guide every action because until you're clear about what you want, you can't have a strategy at all. Once you are clear, you can reverse engineer every step and iterate as you go. So, if you want to become someone who is emotionally resilient or deeply self-aware and financially independent by 35, that's very specific.

22:16That allows you to evaluate every daily decision against it. Scrolling social media for 2 hours probably doesn't move you toward that. And without vision, you wouldn't even register that as a problem in your life. As another example, if you want to build a 50,000 follower audience or newsletter in the personal development space that generates enough revenue to quit your job in 18 months, again, that is very specific.

22:34That is doable. You can actively see whether or not your actions are leading toward that. And then you can course correct when they're not. where you can educate so that you know what to do and you know what tactics to apply and you know whether or not the tactics apply to you so you don't get sucked down the distraction rabbit hole on social media of people trying to tell you their business model is better.

22:57Every piece of content that you write, every platform choice and where you choose to grow on social media, every monetization decision can be evaluated against the intent. And now since everyone's talking about building a personal brand these days and I'm with them, I do think it is the future in many ways, especially as a value creator, not necessarily an influencer that contributes to brain rot and ruining people's minds, but someone who explores their curiosity and shares what they learn and provides some form of value.

23:20I do believe that that is a very good path to go down for people that want to go down it. Now, I actually created something pretty cool. The link is in the description, but all you do is you fill out five questions, and this is completely free.

23:33I built it kind of just for fun, but you fill out five questions and then it researches what's working in the market. And then at the end, it spits out a personal brand strategy for you that you resonate with and it builds a board inside of Eden with a swipe file of posts that you can use as inspiration to create your first post because they're based on what works and what's performing in the market.

23:51So, it's pretty cool. Try it out. And if you're listening to the Spotify version of this video, just go to eden.so/brand-strategy. Now the thing here is that vision is very difficult to create just by thinking about it or imagining it. It's very difficult to think about what you want and actually know whether or not that's what you want.

24:12So instead it's easier to start with inverting it, right? An anti- vision or creating a post-mortem for your life. And a postmortem is essentially writing out every single thing that went wrong so that you can avoid it. So that's step one. That's what I want you to do.

24:29I want you to stop, take out your notes, take out a piece of paper, and just quickly write this down and you can iterate it and add to it over time. First, write your anti-vision. Just one paragraph. Think of exactly what you don't want the outcome of your life to be.

24:42The second thing is a post-mortem. So, reverse engineer why that anti-vision would have happened in the first place and what mistakes were made and how to avoid them. And from there, it's much easier now to think about what your starting vision could be, your MVV or your minimum viable vision because it does evolve over time as situations change.

24:59So you just need one paragraph, one idea of what your vision is right now so that you have something to improve because you can't improve what

Principle 2 - Research

25:12doesn't exist. So principle number two is research. And we'll start with a quote from Devin Ericson. worry less about which career skills AI will take over and more about whether you are training to be and training your kids to be high agency perceptive self-motivated people who can navigate an unknowable future with an adaptable mind.

25:25So in a war a general sends out spies, studies the terrain and learns the enemy's habits and tendencies because you need intel before you act. The question is when was the last time you studied yourself? When was the last time you audited your habits and what kind of life they were compounding into?

25:45When was the last time you paid attention to how your mind reacts to silly little things that end up clogging your headsp space for hours on end, removing you from your path? Most people have zero intel on how to start a business, how to build a career, what healthy relationships look like, how to stay lean and healthy, or what the mastery process looks like.

26:02they get a little spurt of motivation like for a New Year's resolution, go about it blindly and obviously fail because they didn't engage in research and self-education. That's not a habit for them. So before you begin improving your life with something like a spirituality practice or anything else, you want to study multiple traditions, read the research on different techniques, talk to people who've done it for years, follow a range of social accounts in that domain, and understand your own psychological patterns and what tends to trigger you.

26:31You don't just grab the first meditation app that shows up on an Instagram ad or the first tactic that someone tells you for clearing your mind and being happy all the time that you saw as a tweet or a YouTube video. The same thing goes for social media.

26:42If you're treating this as something that you actually want to do well at, you need a strategy. You need to study what other people in the market are doing. You need to understand what works and you need to let that inform your strategy. You need to use a research tool like Eden or the other ones and scroll the discover feed and see what's working and scroll social media and save posts so that you have them ready when it's time to write.

27:07You curate lists of creators and you study them. You don't just blindly scroll social media. And once you have enough research, you begin to strategize how can you wedge yourself into the market by doing what works, but by doing also what is unique.

27:20This is the downfall of starving artists because all they want to do is practice their little art, but they're they won't merge it with business. They won't integrate the two. They think that by simply going about it in a business way just strips all the humanity and soul from it when that's not anywhere close to the case.

27:38You're just not thinking. Again, you're thinking in black and white. You're letting other people's beliefs and polarizing opinions infect your mind and you're not questioning them. You're not coming up with your own opinion on the matter. Because obviously if your goal is to actually see success and then you go and do something completely different because your beliefs are tainted, then that's not ideal.

28:01So if you just want to write as art, then go ahead and do it. But don't expect anyone to give you your attention just because you spent a lot of time writing because time does not equate to value. It is okay. It is perfectly okay to treat writing or art as a hobby.

28:13But if you're trying to do this as a form of meaningful work, then it is a business. Now, principle number

Principle 3 - Preparation

28:25three is preparation. And this is where you identify your resources, the resources that you specifically have and your gaps. Because you wouldn't just drop into a battlefield without food or logistics or weapons or support. And so once you know what resources you have or the ones that you don't, you can start building reserves so that eventually you can execute on your strategy.

28:46The resources that most people need to look for are money, time, knowledge, skills, the location you live, connections, and relationships. All of those things are valid resources. Just because you don't have money doesn't mean that you can't create a strategy to say start a business because you can still develop skill.

29:05You can develop knowledge. And if you're young, you have plenty of time on your hands, right? The ones who are past the age of 20, 25, 30, when they're very ingrained in their habits and they have bills to pay and all these responsibilities, they don't have much time or money on their hands.

29:17So, if you lack those resources and they're very difficult to get, what other resources can you go after? Where can you leverage yourself? As an example, before attempting some kind of major life change like quitting a job or ending a relationship or starting a new project or venture, you'd probably want to build your financial runway.

29:34decrease your expenses, develop the emotional regulation skills you'll need, and line up support systems. You don't just rush into battle. In other words, you need to hedge against risk because every goal comes with risk. And as you go deeper and deeper into the hierarchy of goals you're trying to achieve, the risk only gets greater and greater.

29:52You may start a business as a oneperson business like we talk about with something like an information product or a simple AI product, but then what's next? Are you going to build a team? Are you going to expand? Are you going to go into e-commerce?

30:03What else are you going to do? Or are you going to stick and make it a lifestyle business, which is perfectly valid, but if you want a greater return, if you want more money or potentially more freedom or just whatever you want in life, what is your vision?

30:19Then you're going to have to build the resources so that the risk of doing so doesn't absolutely destroy you. So, if you don't have many resources, then it probably wouldn't make sense to start crypto trading or start stock trading or day trading because you're just going to lose all your money.

30:38You're gambling at that point and that's not a strategy. You are much better off starting smaller so that you can acquire resources. That is the beginning of your strategy is how do I do something that allows me to get the resources I need to do what I eventually want to do.

30:53So the way that I went about that is social media. I knew that it was free to access. I didn't need any money to start the business. I didn't need any money to create an info product. I didn't need any money to write a book. And then that allowed me to acquire the resource of money so that I could invest into a bigger business that I wanted to build which is Eden the software business and eventually soon s the neutropic business.

31:11So if you have these high and mighty dreams of doing something massive right which I think is a very worthwhile thing to do and to think about but it's not feasible for you right now. What are you doing about it? Just because you can't start the business you want to start now doesn't mean you can't start another form of a business that allows you to start that business.

31:29Otherwise, you're never going to be able to start the one you want to start. Now, speaking specifically to young people, you have so much time on your hands. You are in one of the greatest positions you can possibly be right now at this point in your life.

31:46And if you have these high and mighty dreams, in my opinion, the best thing you can do is just hedge against risk as much as you can so that you can take risk and have nothing to lose. What that means is selling everything you own. Living in a depression apartment as Devon calls it, aka an apartment that costs nothing.

31:58You just have no standard of living for your young years. And you cut all your expenses so that everything you have can go into the thing that you're building because you have the resource of time, but you don't have the resource of money. So you need to pull all of your reserves in and put it toward generating the resource of money.

32:18Now principle number four of strategic thinking is

Principle 4 - Focus

32:25focus specifically concentration of force. So a quote from Greg Macau from the book essentialism. Is there a point at which doing more does not produce more? Is there a point at which doing less but thinking more will actually produce better outcomes?

32:38So focus or concentration of force is the military principle of focusing all of your resources at the decisive point rather than spreading thin. The best example of this is France in 1940 where the French had more tanks and troops than the Germans and they had far more raw resources but they distributed their armor or tanks evenly across the entire front.

32:57So every sector had a few tanks. The Germans took every panzer they had and drove them through a single point which the French thought was impassible. So they barely defended it. Focus is about where you put what you have. And in life you only have so much of it at any given time.

33:10Most people try to change their life and place 10% of their attention into diet, sleep, exercise, meditation, relationships, their side hustle, and more when they would get better at all of them faster if they focused on the single bottleneck holding them back the most.

33:30I don't think people understand that enough. That focus does not decrease your progress in all areas. It increases them in all areas. By focusing on one thing, you increase every other area. And for most people, the single bottleneck is money because money buys anything.

33:46So if you focused solely on solving your financial struggle first, then that frees up more resources to put towards other areas of your life like diet, you can afford higher quality food. When you have more money, you're in a less stressful state.

34:04You can think more creatively. It benefits your creative work and spirituality. And with those three things, a clearer mind and a better diet and more energy and potentially more time to go and exercise that benefits your relationships. And the same applies to business.

34:17On something like social media, there is more to growth than just content. So cross-osting to all platforms takes away time you could be spending building connections with people that will help you grow. You'd gain more followers by focusing on one platform first, which can then be used as leverage to grow on the other platforms faster than you would have in the same amount of time, spreading your force across all platforms.

34:33One tangible example of that is that I chose Twitter or X as my first platform and I solely focused on that. I built connections on that platform and I still know and talk to those connections today. But when I had somewhat of a large following on Twitter, when I decided I wanted to deploy my strategy on Instagram and grow there, I found people with a large following on Instagram and said, "Hey, I have a large following on X.

34:57Do you want to help each other grow by sharing each other's content on either platform and that alone allowed me to grow on Instagram so much faster than anyone else just starting from scratch?" This is something we teach in week four of

Principle 5 - Execute

35:16the creator boot camp. Now principle number five of strategic thinking is just execute or execution and from Alex Herozi strategy is how you choose to allocate your limited resources against unlimited options. Proper execution of strategy is the continuous act of jumping between macro vision and micro daily action ensuring that the decisions you make have aim and intention.

35:36This is the core of what strategy is. Doing the opposite of what 99% of people do because most people do not think outside of their conditioning, assigned goals or repetitive routines. But how do you actually execute effectively? This is where everything starts to come together.

35:54First, you practice holding your vision in the back of your mind. Write it down somewhere and look at it every morning. It must become a part of who you are through repeat exposure. Second, take note of what you learned from studying your opponents or yourself.

36:06Meditate on it. Contemplate it. Let it marinate in your mind so that it can start to make connections. Third, identify the primary resource that you can leverage. For young people, it's time and freedom most likely. For some, it's capital. For others, it's an internet audience.

36:18For more, it's a weird set of interests and knowledge. And yes, for many, it's AI, but not from the low-level sense. AI gives high agency people the ability to do so much more. It gives low agency people a reason to play victim and complain.

36:29But the trap for the high agency person is that now they have unlimited options. They can do anything. So concentration of force strategic thinking is even more important than ever because you can do anything with AI. But that doesn't mean you're going to get anywhere.

36:47And fourth, choose your concentration of force play. Where is the single highest leverage point? The one that would unlock progress in more than one domain. The thing that makes everything else easier. And from there, we have a soft plan, but it needs to be crystal clear.

36:59We have to reverse engineer our vision down into a hierarchy of goals that allows us to gain perspective and clarity on our daily actions. They can't be so far away from each other. You have to see how your daily actions slowly contribute to your vision because in many cases, they're not going to directly contribute to it.

37:19You're going to take a daily action and you're not going to be able to see how it actually is creating your vision. That's why you have to break it down and see the entire system. So, take your vision and then work backward to one-year goals, 90-day objectives, weekly priorities, and daily habits.

37:32Every step should trace back to the intent or vision. If it doesn't, set it aside. That is your sign to take the piece of paper that you took out earlier

Principle 6 - Adapt

37:45and to write this down with everything else. Now, principle number six is adapt or adaptability. And a quote from Mihi Chetmihi, "It is not possible to experience a feeling of control unless one is willing to give up the safety of protective routines.

37:58Only when a doubtful outcome is at stake and one is able to influence that outcome can a person really know whether she is in control." What that means is that a rigid strategy or routine is a losing strategy or routine. Especially in today's world where the rate of change is extreme, right?

38:10During the industrial age and up until now, not too much change. That's why it's so deeply ingrained to go to school, get a job, retire at 65 because the societal system was built up according to that paradigm with the goal. But now with AI and disruption and all of this stuff, everything is changing every 3 to 6 months.

38:28And the rate of change will only increase and it's going to filter out so many people who get stuck with a rigid strategy and aren't able to adapt. So, in my eyes, the future belongs to the true strategist at this higher level of thinking that we'll dive into more in the next video because masters can adapt on the fly because they have the universal principles that they can apply to all domains.

38:52They don't necessarily need to relearn everything. They don't need to upskill or reskill or re-educate because they can do that extremely fast on their own. So your job is to respond to what's actually happening then and there on the battlefield, not your mental fabrications of worst case scenarios or your fantasies that are not yet real.

39:11So if you committed to a morning routine as an example, but your job schedule changed, you don't just abandon the routine. That's what most people do. Don't do what most people do. The vision and intent of your strategy doesn't change, which is becoming, let's say, more disciplined and grounded.

39:24That's why you created a morning routine. But the tactics do. If a particular meditation or business strategy stops working after six months, then you need to change. You need to experiment and try something new. You need to be in the constant state of experimentation.

39:37And that's just the principle that systems fall apart over time. You should expect that. Think of the notion system that you built out 6 months ago and don't use now or the clawed skill you downloaded and don't use anymore. You have to be skilled enough to know when something isn't working.

39:53The same is true with social media. I have people come to me all the time and it's like, "Dan, I posted this and it was supposed to work according to all of these things that I learned, but it didn't work. What do I do?" You adapt. You experiment.

40:04You keep trying. This isn't a job. You don't just study and train a repeatable set of tasks. You have to have the entrepreneurial mind, the creative mind. You have to be in this constant state of taking in what's going on and interpreting it and then outputting it and then slowly getting better at that entire process over time.

40:23Now, the way you actually practice this is review, reflection, and prediction. You need to schedule this weekly. You need to review your week, see if you're on track, reflect on your progress, and predict where you're heading. And this doesn't need to be in any fancy template or thing that you download.

40:35This is like just keep a piece of paper by your computer. I have this little tiny notebook where I just jot things down because I understand that if I try to keep up with a note-taking system, I don't keep up with it. That's not how your mind works.

40:48It kind of has to be messy. You have to embrace just putting an idea down and letting it get lost. And if it's important, you will remember it. That's the library feature of Eden. You just drop ideas in and we auto tag, autocategorize everything for you.

40:59But you don't even need that. You can use Apple notes, you can use the notebook, you can use anything. Just get in the

Principle 7 - Study of Principles

41:10habit of writing things down. Now, the final principle number seven, the principle of all principles of strategic thinking is the study of principles. Now with this section, I encourage you to adopt the belief that everything is a skill. Everything is a field of study that you can stack experience in and get better at.

41:27Money, mindset, beliefs, relationships, business, social media. Everything that you think is luck is not luck. It's skill. It's only luck because you're gambling and you don't have strategy. And strategy itself is a field of study with principles that hold across domains.

41:45The more you study strategy and its principles, the better you become at applying them to your own life situation. It is a lifelong ongoing practice. So read Sunzu, read about cognitive biases, study how habits form, learn the principles of negotiation, study why content goes viral, study how attention economics works.

42:02You don't just copy what other creators do. You study the principles so you can come up with your own moves. That is essentially what originality is because nothing is original. Nothing is authentic. It honestly peeves me when people like people get in little arguments on social media of like, "Oh, you copied my idea and you copied my idea."

42:20But you're just looking through the lens of specificity, right? Did they copy your niche? You guys write about the same topics. Did they copy how you walk? You guys both walk. You're both human. You both speak the English language. Did you come up with that all on your own?

42:33Did you come up with any of the words that you speak on a daily basis? Did you create the clothes that you wear? Have you actually audited the beliefs in your head? How original and authentic are you actually? Why do you treat this as some form of high value that you can stand on to virtue signal to other people when you'd get much better results in life when you actually leaned in to what nature and authenticity is?

42:52Now, I'm not saying that plagiarism is good by any means, but I am saying that people take it way too seriously and that people are allowed to have similar ideas. They're allowed to post similar ideas under their brand because they resonate with it.

43:05But yeah, if it's a direct rip, then yeah, credit the person. But if it's just an inspired idea, welcome to how the world works. Now, beyond that, I believe that the best way to study true principles is to study reality itself because strategy is the application of reality's principles to human goals.

43:22So, I want to leave you with many different things that you can go down a rabbit hole afterwards, right? I'm going to give you a long list and I want you to pick one and I want you to go and read that thing or buy the book or whatever it is, just read it.

43:36And I'll break these up into categories. The first category is just formal systems. The first is cybernetics. The study of feedback loops, control, and self-regulation in any system, mechanical, biological, or social. So go down a rabbit hole with AI or Google about cybernetics.

43:49Systems theory, which is the study of holes, interconnections, stocks, and flows, emergence, and leverage points. Go and buy a book on systems thinking. Third is thermodynamics, especially the second law. Because entropy always increases. Every ordered system requires energy input to resist decay.

44:06Your habits and routines will fall apart otherwise. Aka clean your room. I'd recommend the book Flow by Mihi Chetmihi for that one. Even though it's not about thermodynamics, it's a good read though. Now, in the category of philosophical traditions, study taoism, which is the Tao or Dao.

44:19I always forget which one it is as the ineffable underlying principle of reality. It's woe, which is action in accordance with nature, not forced action. yin-yang, complimentary opposites, and cultivation of effortless mastery. And then there's perennial philosophy, which is the claim that all major wisdom traditions share a common metaphysical core.

44:42There's an ultimate reality. The human self can participate in it, and the purpose of life is to realize this. This is like the antithesis of black and white dogmatic thinking. The next category is integrative metaprameworks. The first is integral theory by Ken Wilbur, which maps reality across quadrants, levels of development, states of consciousness, and types.

45:00And then there's spiral dynamics which is a model of value systems development through tears. It models how humans construct meaning at different stages which for a strategist is studying reality because it's constructed by the observer. The next category is the esoteric or symbolic.

45:12So hermetic principles or the cabalon the book mentalism correspondence vibration polarity rhythm cause and effect and gender. A compact set of lens that have influenced a lot of new thought traditions. This is where as above so below comes from.

45:24And then there's also yian alchemy. So the psychological and spiritual process of transformation. It's a framework for how deep change actually works in a person or system. And then the last category is the strategic or mathematical. So game theory, the mathematical study of strategic interaction, zero sum versus positive sum games, the prisoners dilemma, Nash equilibrium, and then there's evolutionary theory.

45:47So selection, adaptation, fitness landscapes, variation, and retention. And all of these are just lenses that point at how a different facet of reality works. If you were to simply study these domains or those things for the next year, your understanding of almost every skill or discipline or domain or area of learning would rise with it.

46:05You will naturally be better at everything you do in life. So, I hope all of that was helpful on strategic thinking. Again, if you want a garden for ideas, a place to curate your knowledge, to save ideas, to save social posts quickly on mobile, to research top performing content if you're a creator or writer, and to just have a place where you can dump ideas without worrying about the organization while being able to find them later.

46:31This is essentially what I do for videos like these is I read a lot of stuff. I save a lot of stuff. I highlight a lot of stuff. And then when I choose a topic, I just ask the AI chat to look through my library and it can find novel relations and connections between all of the ideas I've saved and give me potential ideas that I can include in videos like these.

46:49The quotes that I used throughout each section was actually done via that process. So, I'll leave it at that. Thank you for watching. Again, I hope you enjoyed the video. Like and subscribe while you're still here. It's just a simple button click that most people forget to do.

47:00So, if you could do that, I'd appreciate it. And I'll see you in the next video.