A Dangerous (But Effective) Strategy To Get Out Of A Rut

"Stupid" Decisions

00:00I was thinking earlier this week and I realized that the best decisions that I've made in my life are the ones that other people think are stupid in 2018 I wasted my life savings and maxed out my first credit card in hopes that my dreams of building a massive e-commerce business would work in 2019 I got rid of everything I owned because of the situation that I was in flew across the country stayed there for a bit realized it wasn't for me I didn't like not having a Wi-Fi connection and my client calls on Zoom not working so I flew back and I moved into a place and during that

00:36time as well I also quit my job so that I was able to do that and I knew that every single freelance client that I had that allowed me to quit the job could disappear at any time I knew like that wasn't a huge possibility but at the same time it could happen that was sitting in the back of my mind in 2020 I signed a lease that was two times more anything that I've ever were paid before and anything that I thought that I could afford so this forced me into the mindset that I had to make my business work from 2021 to present I moved locations about every six months and I

01:14didn't really do this consciously it's not like I plan to move every six months it just happened naturally but every time I did it I moved into a place that was just a bit above my comfort zone in terms of what I could afford and I was okay with this because I knew that the only limits in the digital world in terms of business were the ones that I believed and another thing with moving is that I found that it was just a great way to push myself into the unknown because when you move to a new place I figured out that around every six months is when things start to really become

01:46normal to you you fall into a routine you know the friend group that you have there you know the places you can eat the places you can walk the things you can discover the pla the things that are in your vicinity you've pretty much explored everything fizzy physical to you and so we can talk about diving into the unknown in like the mental realm and how that can be explored infinitely with the internet but it's just a good thing to note and understand that you can get into a comfortable spot with the place that you're living and it can really impact how far you progress in life

02:18simply because you just become comfortable without knowing it and people think this is a good thing because it makes them not have that much stress when it comes to just their everyday life which is a good thing but you're not pushing yourself into the unknown in every domain that you can whether it be physical or mental or financial and so with moving this Force like pushing into the unknown and knowing that I couldn't afford certain things force me to make my business go from 50 000 a month to a hundred thousand a month to 200 000 a month plus and having surges here and there of

02:52upwards of seven hundred thousand dollars a month and it would be hard for me to credit any of this to any single business video or book or podcast or anything or course where people think that they can just get all of the information that's not how it works you need experience you need something that pushes you forward you need to figure things out for yourself and make it work with the knowledge that you gain you can't just acquire knowledge and then not do anything with it or sit and do nothing with the knowledge because you're comfortable in the place that

03:22you're at so this is also when I moved to Austin Texas with people like JK Molina and Dakota Robertson and my editor Devin and again we were there for six months and I we kind of figured out the location we got what we needed out of it and we made a ton of progress in business especially being around those right people and so after this I moved back to Scottsdale Arizona and we broke our lease in Texas just because we wanted to get out we wanted to experience something new and I hadn't lived in Scottsdale before because I always perceive that as like too high

03:54above me it's a pretty nice place to live and so funny thing I'm in this transitional period now I'm in a temporary spot I was in Phoenix before and now I'm going to be moving in a week to a spot where I sign like a nine month lease but honestly I'll probably break it in six so we'll see where that goes and that's the thing that I've noticed is this is where I thrive this is where I make the most progress it forces me to publish anything that I've been putting off or act on the ideas that I've had in my mind if I'm moving somewhere and I know that I need the resources or I know

04:28that my bank account is going to fall a bit lower than the standard that I have for myself then my survival is going to be threatened I'm going to be put in this state of stress and I'm going to have to work to survive and if people don't have a way of creating the resources in order to let them do those things like having a business like I keep talking about then it's going to be very hard to progress to a certain point or do what you want to do with your time or achieve that autonomy or Freedom that everyone wants and this is also the time where I'm just super productive

05:00feel like the flow of information and the idea generation and just my output on the things that I do they're so focused because I have that singular goal in the back of my mind of wherever I'm moving or whatever I'm doing there's different strategies to this but life becomes so much more meaningful because it's easy to filter the signal from noise in the day-to-day situations that you go through simply because you're so dead focused on accomplishing a goal that you're forcing yourself to hit by throwing yourself into the unknown doing something that you can't back out of

05:32like signing a lease or doing something related to that and forcing yourself to reach that new level if life feels meaningless it's because you aren't training your responsibility muscle you haven't lifted the emotional weight to add more to the bar and see progress on a deeper level than muscle so this is

Tactical Stress – The Secret Behind Abnormal Results

05:50all to say that we're here to talk about my concept I call tactical stress because I've noticed this pattern that we're talking about multiple times in my life and how beneficial it has been to me I would argue that it is the secret to abnormal results and it is a very extreme and potentially dangerous strategy a way to preface this concept is by explaining how a goldfish only grows as large as the tank that it is put in so if you put it in a small tank it will only grow to a certain amount if you put it into a large tank it will grow to fit that and this also brings in

06:23the concept of Parkinson's law which states that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion so if you give yourself 10 minutes to do a task it's going to take 10 minutes if you give yourself a week to do a task it's going to take a week but that stresses the importance of deadlines and how to set a true deadline that actually forces you into action which we'll talk about later what I call tactical stress is quite similar to both of these tactical stress is the conscious decision to force yourself into a Do or Die situation knowing that you have the

06:52skill to make it work and have no choice but to overcome your fears the result is a season of intensity that propels you into the next level of your life when you have an understanding of this concept you can use it to get out of a rut right because when you identify as being in a rut or you're like wow things are getting very stagnant in my life and you become aware of that now you will have a tool to get yourself out of it because normally you wouldn't have a tool and you're like [ __ ] I'm stuck in this rut I have no way out and then eventually like life happens and you

07:22eventually get out but this is a way to

The Philosophy & Psychology Of Tactical Stress

07:25force your way out let's dig into the philosophy and psychology of tactical stress before we get into the actual strategies that way you have that big picture understanding you know why it works because this is a huge problem with just general how-to advice is people don't have the depth they don't have the true understanding of why it works and so they miss certain things when they actually go to act or they don't have the mindset or the perspective available to them to note patterns when they are acting to realize oh this was a mistake now I need to make

07:54a better decision right the purpose of tactical stress is to launch yourself into the unknown or the land of infinite potential and when you do this if you launch too far you become overwhelmed with information it becomes difficult to metabolize that information which we talked about in the last video on mental Aesthetics or mental bodybuilding where going about life and perceiving information which is what we're doing at any given moment if you push too far into something that you don't know too far into your like out of your comfort zone then you're exposed to all this

08:27chaotic information that you don't yet know how to order in your mind or actually make use of or it's just too much and you can't filter it so like your body not being able to just food when you eat so much and you feel like [ __ ] it's the same thing with your mind and so when you do this consciously and you know that you can acquire the skill and education necessary to make this goal work that's where the magic really happens of course you don't want to throw yourself too far into the unknown with the example we used earlier of course I'm not going to be able to buy

08:56like a billion dollar house and expect myself to reach that point in business it has to be just above your level if you're a level two then you need to aim for level four not level 100 and when you do this you're forced to create Clarity from chaos it's gonna feel a bit chaotic at first you're going to feel that stress that tactical stress so you set a goal that is borderline impossible force yourself to achieve it and transmute the stress to study and act your ass off until it becomes reality doing this does a few things pertaining to psychology first it creates a frame

09:30of reference your goal has to stay top of mind the entire time that you're doing this when you launch yourself into the unknown it has to be out of the pursuit of a goal that is in the unknown your goal or any goal in life because at any given moment we are acting towards a goal whether you're conscious of it or not most people are acting towards the unconscious goals that Society assigns to them like going to school getting a job retiring at 65 or really anything just marrying someone that they don't enjoy or like simply because they're supposed to marry someone or like the

10:03stereotypical like oh you become a doctor but I don't want to become a doctor but you stay in that job simply because it's expected of you that's what I mean by you're always pursuing a goal even right now I'm clearly pursuing a goal of making a YouTube video but unless you're doing absolutely nothing you're pursuing a goal so the point of this is to set a goal that way you have that frame of reference that way you can filter signal from noise you can filter the important information if I set a conscious goal to make a hundred thousand dollars in business and I act

10:35on this tactical stress strategy of moving into a new place buying something that I can't afford or another strategy that we talk about later once I do that and once I'm forced into that mindset then everything I see is going to be through the lens of how is this going to serve my goal when I'm scrolling on social media for entertainment the goal of entertainment then I'm going to ignore any valuable information that could benefit my future but if I'm building a business then I'm going to filter through the memes and [ __ ] and get to the value that I see I'm

11:07going to like that and eventually you're going to condition yourself into that state of being an education where I'm going to see an account that's giving something valuable like this video for example I'm going to go I'm going to watch more of their videos their algorithm is going to start to feed me more videos and then eventually character begets action it's going to shape who you are over time the information that's circulating in your head and is top of mind and it will influence your actions that's the first thing is that it creates a frame of reference the second second is that it

11:38creates a deadline a true deadline and everyone knows that deadlines are useful in productivity but but most deadlines aren't real when you fly across the country or invest your life savings in coaching the deadline is as real as it gets you only have so much time to make it work if you fly across the country to become a digital Nomad then how much time do you have until your bank account hits zero and you become homeless in a country where you don't even know the language you either make it work or you let it fall apart and that's the prerequisite here is if you don't have a

12:09track record of being ambitious and taking action on certain things this strategy isn't for you dude do not please do not do this because I know it's going to come back and it's like oh Dan told me to fly across the country and waste my entire life savings and now I'm homeless so don't do that but the third thing is that it Narrows your focus because when your mind is narrowed on a goal this is very similar to the frame of reference where your mind is narrowed on a goal let's say like when you're actually working on something you're focused on writing let's say

12:39you're writing a newsletter and you know exactly what to do you have the clarity to act you have the education to understanding the prior resources and a plan to actually make it work and especially with a deadline like me posting a newsletter every Saturday I need to get that done and when your mind Narrows in distractions can't really block it because you're so focused on it so this is another way to end just being a slave to distractions now one thing that we do have to talk about before we go further is removing your money limits it's it's safe to say that at a certain

13:12point you will have to start a business or become an entrepreneur to get to where you want to be in life unless you settle for something less which of course there's nothing wrong with if you're actually happy with that but that's not the audience that I'm talking to here like I know my audience and I know that you guys want more the only reason I was able to do this time and time again to increase not only my call quality of life but my income so rapidly over four years is that I had a business that I had control over in order to make more money in four years at let's say a

13:49corporate job maybe you can get like a five to ten percent boost in salary if that I bet that's extremely rare so let's say you make a hundred thousand dollar salary in four years ten percent 110 000 salary really with all of that work if you actually Focus that work towards a business I don't see why in four years you couldn't go from a hundred thousand a year to a hundred thousand a month if not more in business all that it takes is a proper strategy the right skill set a compelling offer and enough traffic to sell one hundred thousand dollars worth of a product and yes I'm aware that's an

14:23oversimplification but that doesn't mean it's wrong or not worth listening to

Strategies For Tactical Stress

14:27finally let's talk about the strategies for tactical stress now this is where things get touchy so I I would encourage you to keep an open mind throughout this but I'll also these are not the only things you can do to implement this strategy there's quite a few things and I encourage you just to discover your own but these are just the ones that

Launching A Product Before Building It

14:45have worked for me so number one is launching a product before actually building it right because this is a huge problem I see with creators Freelancers really anyone that's trying to launch a product or service is that they just take forever to build the product and then they never end up launching it and they never end up making money so instead of actually building the product build the landing page build how you're going to sell it and accept pre-orders for it not even pre-orders but just set a launch date let's say I want to set a launch date of January 1st I start

15:18promoting three weeks out every week up until then and once I make the first sale once I actually make the first sale then the pressure's on I have to deliver I have to build the product before January 1st and that's an MVP that I can continue to iterate on you're not going to create the perfect product first time around that's what a minimum viable product means is something that you get out and you test and you iterate with customer feedback so this will obviously require you to have marketing and sales skills so you can actually sell something but aside from that I would

15:49just recommend watching my one person business playlist here on YouTube or enroll in digital economics if you just want all of my systems and everything given to you for actually building launching promoting a product and even before that building a brand writing

Location Hopping

16:03content literally everything the second strategy is location hopping which we've talked about so to recap I would pretty much move locations every six months or so if not less if not more and once I felt like I just became way too acclimated to the location I became too comfortable I wasn't making much progress my income stagnated my business stagnated my ideas stagnated it was because I wasn't in the both physical and mental they play into each other a lot the physical and mental environment that would be conducive to those things I knew all of the restaurants I knew

16:36most of the the people that I'd run to run into every day I knew whether or not it was going to benefit my future to actually make friends with certain people and I go on a lot of walks so it's not really new anymore that's a great way to generate ideas is just walk down A New Path throw yourself into the unknown take a different route to work there was no further room for discovery for me this concept also holds true for building a business versus working a job is with a job I think it's good practice to like job hop every six months to a year to increase your salary if you can

17:06but you can also get stuck in a job and just get trapped in this robotic anti-human state of living both a business you can do that too but you have full control you can throw yourself out there by launching a product and force your business to grow you have full control over how far into the

Investing In Education

17:25unknown you push the third strategy is investing in education I used to be a course hoarder like really I I would purchase I think I purchased like 50 software development courses when I was learning programming and I would just hoard them and I'd watch them and I'd build projects along with them but I didn't really learn anything and that's the thing they helped me build my knowledge and education to an extent but they never really led to any tangible results especially in terms of income which is the main reason we're all really learning things and after seeing

17:55some success with freelance web design I knew I wanted to go all in on social media I'll be talking about this in one of the next two videos about just like how to actually grow on social media the things that people don't tell you about it because I saw the potential to infinitely grow my readership over time if I could get one follower then I could get a million and if I could get a million then I could get 10 million and so if I had 10 million or 1 million followers I was kind of set for life if I had a product that sold I saw that building an audience with valuable

18:24writing that they wanted to read would allow me to build and sell anything I wanted to make a living as long as the customer wanted it as well this is the driving force behind why I created to our writer is because I saw the power of of writing and building an infinite readership that would allow me to sell anything according to my interest that seems like a logical option for people that want more out of life and want to monetize what they enjoy learning about and improving their self with and improving others with that's how you make money so during this time when I

18:56made that decision of I want to go all in on social media what did I do I invested 3 500 in a coaching program so there's always two camps here there's one camp that is like wow these people are charging five to ten thousand dollars for coaching that's insane like I would never pay for that it's because one you probably don't have the money two you haven't experienced good education before three you don't see the potential you don't believe you don't have the mindset you don't have the awareness and of opportunity that's available in the online business space

19:26and then there's a second Camp which they enjoy learning they see the potential they believe they know that they can be a part of it and so they invest and they the the purpose of that investment for me I didn't even I only showed up to one coaching call and I'm not mad about it I'm very grateful that I did that I showed up to one coaching call and the only thing that kicked me into action was wasting that money 3 500 bucks down the drain I went to the coaching call I realized oh I already know all of this stuff why am I not doing anything about it and I started

19:58doing it but if I didn't spend that money I wouldn't have done it I wouldn't

Material Items

20:00have made that realization strategy 4 is material items so this is a touchy one because it's just common like the most common thing like money doesn't buy happiness uh you don't need a fancy car a fancy watch a fancy house all of this stuff and I mean that's a half truth I agree to an extent but there is utility behind those things as long as they aren't like shallow surface level Pursuits where honestly a lot of the good things in my life came from being what other peoples would perceive as materialistic and they taught me about the thing that I purchased where I

20:36purchased a forty thousand dollar watch one time and I went home got home put it on and just hated what I saw I did not like it I returned it the next day thank goodness that they had a return policy but aside from that it taught me like oh I'm never gonna buy a fancy watch again unless it really means something to me or I know the history behind it or it's something that I truly enjoy or it's a hobby like watch collecting and like I have someone much money that I don't have to worry about it like you need to think holistically about an individual situation they're in before you judge

21:08them on oh like they just bought that that car because they're coping or they just bought that watch because they're trying to impress people and on that point there is utility in that where I drive a fairly nice car that's the one thing that I allow myself to like splurge on is my car and if you're wondering it's a Mercedes gt63 S it's pretty fast it sounds good it's matte black so it's on brand but it is a status game and I'm aware of that and I feel like if people are aware that they're playing status games then it helps you not become a slave to those things but you'd be surprised in how

21:42many opportunities just the car alone or the way I dress right maybe not right now with like a Vance thing but when you dress nicely or you go to nice locations or you live in a nice location you have access to these this network and opportunities that are just given to you if you look good let's say you look like a homeless guy because you don't care in your hyper-spiritual hippie but you're struggling to make money and survive and deep down you actually hate your life nobody's going to come up and talk to you or want to talk to you if you dress nicely and you're presentable

22:16and you show that you invest in how people perceive you then people are going to come up and talk to you and if a billionaire comes up and talks to you and gives you a million dollar opportunity that's available to you now now that's more of a luck game but it is a game and it affects your mindset it's abundance being able to spend this money knowing that you have the resources and knowledge and education to make it back the thing with that is is just don't let materialism consume you mechanics can enjoy cars because that's their entire life right you wouldn't expect like I'm

22:50not going to judge a mechanic for buying the most fancy Ferrari in the world because that's what they love that's what they've spent so much time developing their mind and expertise around that's what makes life meaningful

Degeneracy

23:02to them now strategy number five is another touchy one but it's degeneracy now a lot of the huberman cult and straight edge people don't really like talking about alcohol or they think that nobody should ever drink alcohol in their life or do any form of recreational drug and I don't think that in the slightest obviously there's addiction obviously there's many things and excuses that people could come up with I would encourage you to set your narrow identity and ideology about alcohol aside for now and realize that some people can just have a drink with dinner or go out and get screwed up

23:37occasionally this happened in my past but like I would drink a decent amount like in college obviously and a bit after college I don't really drink like a ton right now but I'd say like one two drinks a week at dinner with friends and I don't know it always makes me think to like how some people in foreign countries like Italy or whatever like they smoke and they drink excessively and they live longer than the biohackers and people that are overly stressed about their health simply because the ones that are stressing about their health the stress is more unhealthy than

24:11smoking a cigarette all the time and so they die earlier and that's one thing that always sticks out to me is like if you're so neurotic about just having a drop of alcohol like you're that's probably more unhealthy than the guy that's having a drop of alcohol so my point with degeneracy being a strategy for tactical stress is if you feel all pent up and you feel like you aren't making progress but you're working towards a goal then maybe you need to go out maybe you need to have some fun maybe you need to let loose maybe you need to let loose a little bit too much

24:39because the next day when you wake up and you feel like [ __ ] and you really see what it's like to not be able to make progress towards your goals you feel the struggle that it takes you don't have ideas you don't have anything you're just sitting there stuck and you're like why did I do that and then the next day or two days after when you're feeling better that surge of energy allows you to attack at full

Emotional Transmutation – Turning Stress Into Fuel

25:01force and that brings us to our last point of just emotional transmutation or allowing yourself to be angry allowing yourself to have those negative emotions and feel into them and bounce back out the other side to use stress in a good way you stress EU stress that's a thing a good stress where you are channeling it into a better future and another thing you have to understand here is that regret is a necessary part of life you can't avoid it and those that try to avoid regrets end up regretting their decisions more because they're like I wasn't supposed to do that when the

25:36person that knows regrets are a part of life I regret that I'm gonna change because most people dwell on their regrets as if they can change them when they can't they can only change the choices that they make right now so you have two options view them as ugly stains that make life worse or view them as cracks that can be sealed with better future decisions there is one pattern that I've noticed and everyone that is trying to improve their life the pain of where you are must outweigh the pain of what other people think people will think you are stupid for making stupid

26:07decisions people will talk about you when you are making big changes most of the time they just want to entertain themselves they don't want the information behind your decisions and you will learn to ignore them with time what's the other option let your dreams die on the Shelf because people say something you don't like that's a great way to end up like everyone else I hope you enjoyed this video my friends we're kind of going back to more like Rants and just me going off the cusp I like doing this a lot more so I'm going to keep doing it hopefully you guys like it

26:39let me know if you do art of focus my book is coming soon early November there is a link to sign up just to get updates first link in the bio to our writer in Link in the description if you want to learn high impact writing how to build your brand just online and then digital economics how to turn yourself into the business a master class with all my systems and strategies other cool free stuff like power planner seven days to genus ideas challenge all that's in the description until next time peace