Nobody is reading anymore… which does not make much sense to me.

Most people are outsourcing all their thinking to a machine.

Which, generates tons of information to be read, in which those same people are not even reading all of it.

Not deeply.

Not even shallowly.

If you think this does not concern you, if you are done school and have ‘completed’ education, if you don’t like reading books, or even if you are a writer or creative (like me) who loves using AI and building things with your unique knowledge.

You are mistaken, my friend.

This is everyone’s problem.

Why?

Reading is thinking.

You read not to consume, but to think.

Thinking is becoming a dying craft.

Which also means learning to think, and therefore learning to read, is becoming the new competitive edge you must start developing right now. No matter your field, career, life situation and excuses.

The new edge is learning to slow down.

With the world speeding up with more content, more AI, more output, the best thing you can do is learn to slow down. Slow down your thinking. Because fast thinking means faster, more shallow decisions, and decisions are what dictate all outcomes of your life. Especially if you are building a meaningful body of work. Every needle you decide to move (and what not to move) is a life-changing matter.

This guide is about pure execution.

I don’t like gatekeeping knowledge, and I do try my best to give away everything I know for free in my newsletter, so I want this paid post (and future paid posts) to be focused on action.

Which is important.

If you behaviour has not changed, you have not learned anything.

I will be doing a live walkthrough that you can follow along. There will be little to no theory, and everything I write beneath this section will be unedited, raw, and will represent me thinking aloud on paper, as I am reading, for you to see.

Think of this as listening to me think out loud while reading beside you... but on paper, to see how I think (which won’t be great haha)

So yeah, more paid execution/action-orientated guides coming.

Here is the paragraph we will be doing some profound thinking about today.

Read more

No matter your current situation, life problems, or excuses.

I say this because I’ve started to notice something.

People my age are starting to panic (I’m 22 btw).

They’re all saying the same thing.

Most college degrees are now worthless.

The risk of choosing one specific field to become highly specialized in, is now perhaps the biggest (and most expensive) risk any 18 year old has ever had to make in history.

Because the uncertainty over what, and therefore who, AI will replace... it is staggering.

The only two skills worth your time in the next 6-12 months are learning how to learn and learning how to write.

Now.

I do not mean highlighting books or taking notes.

Not even building a second brain (yeah yeah come at me).

Definitely not writing the type of essays you were told to write in school.

If any of that standard advice worked, we would all be future-proofing ourselves with that advice... and you wouldn’t have clicked on this newsletter.

There is now zero demand for average.

Because things have changed.

The multitude of AI apps and slop-content that will be forgotten faster, and in greater lump-sums at a time, is increasing.

Faster than we can make sense of it.

But those are just the career-level consequences that most people only seem to be worried about at the minute.

There is something more fundamental at stake.

Every time you outsource your thinking to a tool that doesn’t actually know anything, you get a little less human. And the less human you are, the more replaceable you become.

Not because AI is smarter than you, because heck, it might be smarter than all of us.

The real problem is this - you are far more replaceable, when you stop using the only thing AI cannot replicate.

Your unique knowledge.

Your experience and your perspective.

Your ability to synthesize and connect profound ideas like no one else can.

The understanding you have of being you.

In this newsletter, I want to give you 5 profound ideas to think about.

To show you exactly why most of what you call learning isn’t actually learning at all, and why writing by hand will become the most valuable and sought-after human skill in response to the new wave of infinite average.

Then I want to give you the two free resources that will actually change that.

And I’ve created them in a way so that all you have to do with them is take action.

Idea I - Most of what you call learning isn’t learning

It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows. - Epictetus

If your behaviour has not changed, then you haven’t learned anything.

I know this is going to annoy a certain crowd of people.

Is highlighting books not an example of active reading? What about taking tons of notes? What about the hours spent on YouTube watching tutorial after tutorial until 3am?

Sorry to burst your bubble but none of this means you are learning.

Rather, it gives you the feeling of learning.

There is a reason why this feels so productive.

Most people optimize their lives for the feeling of something, and wonder why nothing in their life ever changes. Because they avoid the one thing that actually drives change which is discomfort.

What is that discomfort, really?

It’s encoding. That’s what it is.

Think about how early morning sunlight connects to your circadian rhythm, which connects to your nervous system, which connects to your emotional regulation, which connects to how you show up to your work and your family every single day. That chain isn’t memorized line by line. It can’t be. You understand the relationships between each part and then you can’t unlearn it, because it directly impacts how you live.

Learning is thinking.

That is it, so I’ll see you in next week’s Profound Ideas newsletter...

But seriously.

It is the type of thinking that makes connections automatically. Between what you already know and what you are trying to understand. Between concepts that don’t seem related. Between an idea from a philosophy book and a decision you have to make tomorrow. If you aren’t making those connections, you aren’t thinking. And if you aren’t thinking, you aren’t learning. And if you aren’t learning, you are not changing.

You don’t read a book to consume information. You read so you can think. You study so you can think. You learn a new skill so you can think, about applying your current skills in a more effective way compared to last week.

Why does thinking matter at all?

If you are not encoding information that means you have nothing new inside your brain to retrieve. If you have nothing new to retrieve, you have nothing new to think about. If you have nothing new to think about, you cannot change your behaviour... and we are back to the first line of this section defining what real learning looks like, beneath the profound Epictetus quote.

Learning is always made out to be a consumption problem.

It is not.

Really, it is a thinking problem.

And now with AI being able to generate infinite, perfect-sounding information on demand - mostly in the form of long-form content (just call it long-form writing, the word content sounds cringe to me).

Now, that feeling of learning is completely free and endlessly available. And in greater amount if you choose a $20 dollar monthly subscription to ChatGPT.

Most people won’t have a clue that it’s going on, or that it is happening to them.

Soon, feeling educated and being capable will have nothing to do with each other, and most people will not notice.

So if consumption is NOT what learning is, and the feeling of being productive does not always equal progress, what the hell is then?

That is what the next section is about.

Idea II - Learning is making connections

There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress, or of surviving in the long run, and that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism. - David Deutsch

There is nothing that would make you more competent and therefore dangerous than the ability to explain something.

I know, it sounds nuts.

What about an explanation that makes it so powerful?

It is far from something like a simple communication tool, which it is. Explanations are how the brain forges unbreakable connections between what you already know and what you are trying to understand.

Explanations are how we think, which is important to understand.

Let me give you the two types of explanations, which will make this look a lot clearer:

Good explanations are hard to vary. They hold up against scrutiny, stress-testing, and even questioning by Socrates himself.

Bad explanations collapse the moment someone leans against them. Like a wall made out of marshmallows.

Most of what people have stored inside their memory as ‘knowledge’ is bad explanations that have been never stress-tested.

Imagine showing up to a party and none of your friends are there.

Your explanation in response to that experience might be “I have to hide until my friends arrive” or “I get to make new friends until my other friends arrive.” See how an explanation can determine how you perceive the world around you, and therefore every outcome of your life?

Here is what’s even crazier.

Explanations are free.

Explanations require no tools.

Explanations don’t cost anything.

You don’t need a degree or permission to create one.

Heck, you’re building an explanation of what I am saying right now as you are reading this! Isn’t that crazy?

Your speed of learning will always be determined by how quickly you can forge connections.

It has never been about how much you can consume, as we talked about in our last section.

The actual solution is to create explanations, because that is how you manifest those connections you have made.

It is such a cliche, but if you can’t explain it to a child you don’t understand it well enough.

So how does this connect to the big picture?

This is why AI cannot learn in any meaningful sense. It generates and predicts.

It does not explain from experience.

It has no real behaviour to change.

And it has no life that its explanations must hold up against.

So if learning is thinking, and thinking is making connections, and if connections are forged through explanations, what now?

How do you start building your own explanations in the most efficient, high-leverage way possible?

We’ve gone over our first future-proof skill, which is learning.

Now let’s talk about writing.

Idea III - You need to start writing

Writing is how you test whether you actually know something or just feel like you do.

I don’t like how a lot of people treat writing as a way of tracking and storing what you have learned.

That is backwards to me, for too many reasons that I have already spoken about tons in the past.

Most people would rather believe in false illusions than take on the courage needed to face reality as it is.

Truth, responsibility, all that yadada that I can talk about another day.

I cannot think of a more dangerous way to be living than by being blinded by the illusion of understanding.

Why is this so damn dangerous?

Well, you can only feel it. You can’t really see it.

You feel competent.

You feel informed.

And the minute someone asks you to explain something on paper... you’re cooked.

This is what writing forces.

You just cannot hide vague thinking behind the feeling of understanding when you are staring at a blank page. Not even Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT and giving it your ideas to organize them for you.

Writing by hand, analog-style especially, it makes every gap and weakness in your explanations become visible. Writing is a stress-test. Back to the Deutsch quote we mentioned earlier, writing is how you find out whether your ideas, your beliefs, your arguments, and your thinking is either hard to vary, or built like a wall of marshmallows.

Why?

Because writing forces you to produce an encoded explanation by retrieving it from your memory.

If there is nothing to retrieve, the gaps will show.

If there is a lack of sense-making or organization of information, the quality of your encoding will show.

Every single time you write something you are doing something extremely high-leverage.

Yes, writing is incredibly time intensive.

Especially when teaching yourself in the beginning (since you are basically teaching yourself how to think).

And it doesn’t matter if you are writing just so you can build a body of work online that people can explore, or to build an audience (which is a bit of a dirty word online, but remember, an audience is a byproduct of high-quality writing, and that is the bottom line).

Every time you write an idea into existence, that is feedback.

A sentence.

A cluster of sentences or a paragraph.

An essay section like this one.

A whole Profound Ideas newsletter.

It’s feedback of your thinking. Your unique web of knowledge being manifested.

Like, c’mon, that’s just crazy.

It is literally a piece of you being manifested or built into existence. Most things people call dull or normal are actually incredible profound when you think about them...

Write no matter what. Write every day. For an audience or for yourself. It doesn’t matter. Just write. If not, you will never learn how profound your ideas truly are.

You can see that writing is the ultimate skill for exposing where your thinking has gaps that need filling, and ideas that need stress-testing.

So to recap, or to synthesize some profound ideas in real-time here, we could say that writing is the mechanism of learning, and not so much the reward of it (while it still is).

It is how the first two sections of this newsletter become real in your own life rather than just some profound ideas you consumed and forgot within a week... because you never acted on them.

Which means, the question is no longer whether you should write.

It is how.

Idea IV - How to become irreplaceable

Stop calling yourself a generalist, start calling yourself a synthesist.

There is a difference between knowing a lot of things, versus seeing how everything connects.

Generalists know a lot.

But synthesists can see the invisible patterns and connections between all domains and disciplines of knowledge. Connections most people skip over, or cannot see at all.

And although the distinction between “generalist” and “synthesist” might seem subtle, they are both entirely different ways of moving through the world.

The synthesist is the only identity worth building right now.

If anything, it is essential.

Why?

The world has been producing nothing but specialists at a mass scale for the last 200 years. We are beginning to suffer the consequences.

Trying to get along with people you disagree with is a dead skill.

Nobody can talk to each other. Nobody can see the whole big picture. Business-minded people can’t get along with artists. Economists can’t speak to biologists. Philosophers can’t speak to engineers.

Everyone is extraordinarily deep in one tunnel, one skill, one domain of mastery... and blind to all the rest.

Here is what this means:

The most valuable person in any room, will be the person who can walk between every tunnel.

The person who can connect what the neuroscientist knows.... to what the Stoic philosopher figured out 2000 years ago... to what that one experience taught them when they were 19... the person who reads widely, thinks carefully, and writes it all down until the connections become visible (to themselves first, and then to share those insights with the world).

That person cannot be replicated.

How could they?

AI actually makes this idea even more true.

AI can retrieve information across every field of knowledge faster than any human alive. It can summarize, compare, and generate connections between ideas at a scale that should terrify you if you think information retrieval is your edge. Think pure memorization, a skill which AI has made as dead as a Dodo bird.

AI can’t synthesize from a life it has never lived.

It has no experience of failing publicly and rebuilding. It has no version of itself that was told something that fucked it up at age 12 and spent a decade living in a high-cortisol state of mind since. It has no skin in the game. The connections it makes are statistical, based on data. AI has information, not knowledge. You have knowledge, not information. Those are not the same thing, and they never will be.

Your synthesis is unreplaceable because it comes from a life only you have lived.

Your learn to synthesize ideas through learning itself. And writing is what makes that process permanent and public, to either yourself or a group of readers. Every piece of writing is a node in your unique web of knowledge made visible. Every section of every newsletter, article, or essay is a connection that could only have been made by you, in this order, from this one life.

Do that for 6-12 months are you will have a body of work, a body that represents your mind and thinking, that no AI and no specialist can touch.

This is what future-proof actually means. Not a skill that survives long enough before the next disruption, because who knows what that will be. No one.

I am talking about a person who cannot be substituted. Because there is no substitute for a mind that has learned how to learn, and a body of work that only one person on earth could have built.

So how do you build both of those things, deliberately, starting now?

Idea V - How to future-proof yourself

The argument I have made in this newsletter, that writing is how you find out what you actually think, it happened to me while I wrote this.

What you have just read is proof.

I chose my topic last Saturday, and went on a walk and wrote down everything I could think of.

Then, I wrote one section per day... and that was it.

I would get all my ideas the day before while on walks, so sitting down and writing was just about writing, not idea generation.

I also went into this with almost too basic of an outline. But the walks and the ideas I wrote outside of my morning writing time were what fleshed it out across an entire week.

It meant instead of having a finalized outline within 2 days, I could build it out section by section across a week (once I had my key points outlined at least).

If this Profound Ideas newsletter has changed how you think about learning, or how you think about writing, or even made you realize for the first time that the two are the same thing, that is why I do this, and that means a lot to me. Genuinely.

Let’s get you doing something now.

It is easy to sit around learning all day. It’s doing and living your life that’s the hard part. And there is no better place to be than under pressure from a challenge you chose to take on.

Here is what I recommend you do to get you started in the right direction, before I give you 2 free resources to help you with implementing these principles:

• Write before you feel ready. The page is where you get ready. Not the course, not the research phase, not the second brain you’ve been building for three months. The page.

• 2-4 needle-moving tasks per day. 15-90 minutes each. Ordered from highest creative demand to lowest. This is not a productivity hack. It is how you protect the cognitive energy that both learning and writing require. Everything else fits around those tasks or it does not fit at all.

• One piece of writing per week minimum. About something you are genuinely trying to understand, not something you already know. An essay, a newsletter, a long-form post. It doesn’t matter. Write no matter what. Make sure you genuinely feel interested about your topic, too. It has to be a problem you care about solving, because if not, you are shooting yourself in the foot from the very start.

• Create the thing you want to see exist in the world. Solve your own problems first. Then share that solution. That is the only ethical way to build something worth building, and the only way to build something that lasts and truly helps.

Now.

Where do you put all of this?

I would say Substack.

It is a platform that prioritizes long-form thinking, and the people on here are lovely.

You could also try X. Even YouTube (read your writing to a camera).

Just pick one.

Publish something before the end of this week.

I have a lot of messages from you guys I am yet to respond to, but feel free to send me on what you have written! My apologies for being selfish, I avoid my phone like it’s the plague for the majority of my day. If I can’t think to a high quality, then my ideas will suffer, and so will my writing and creations for you guys.

The 2 free resources to help you out with this:

1. If you want a structured way to turn all of this into a 30-day project-based learning plan helping you achieve one needle-moving outcome per day - download that here.

2. If you want to learn how to write, download this free mini-course that teaches how I write my weekly newsletter.

Check out my Guide To Profound Reading and my Profound Self-Education Guide if you already feel comfortable with writing, but struggle with the learning side of things.

Learn to think. Learn to write. Learn to speak. Learn to identify problems. Learn to set greater goals. Learn how to learn. Learn anything and everything that allows your mind to expand and adapt to any situation.

That is how you become irreplaceable.

You absolute legend.

- Craig :)

I was told this profound idea before I started college:

You get back what you put into it.

I didn’t get much out of college... since I had put my all my effort into jiu-jitsu instead.

This is likely not a new principle to you if you’re a learner, a writer, or a creator.

What you put in determines what comes out.

AI has changed what’s possible.

But not in the way most people are using it.

In the final analysis, AI is a pattern-recognition machine trained on human feedback.

It is optimised to make you like it more than it makes you better.

It will tell you that your writing is exceptional.

It will validate your half-formed thinking with full-blown paragraphs that most people don’t even read fully.

And that’s not the worst of all.

It will agree with almost everything you say unless you specifically instruct it not to.

Which means, it amplifies whatever judgement you bring to it.

Good judgement in, means good output out.

Weak judgement in, means AI will make that worse.

And faster, too, with confidence that would make most people blind to what it really is.

In short, it requires a certain level of evaluative thinking while using it.

But once you have this in place, it becomes pretty harmless. You can tell it to fuck off when it says you’ve created the greatest piece of writing it has ever seen... because you can clearly see what it’s doing.

The problem is not AI.

The problem is that most people open AI with no clear outcome in mind.

No filter, no direction, which means they immediately drown in outputs they don’t know how to evaluate.

A single profound idea fixes almost all of this:

Define your desired outcome before you use AI.

That comes first. Always. And once you have it, the question becomes how can I use AI to help me reach it faster?

There are three levels to using AI this way.

Almost moving from beginner to intermediate to advanced, with each level building on the last.

Most people don’t even use the first level, which is my personal favourite.

Example I - Emulation (not copying)

Let’s use writing as our example, since this is relevant to Substack.

If you have ever read a piece of great writing and thought, “damn I wish I wrote that,” pay careful attention to what I’m going to show you.

It’s very easy to read a great piece of writing passively.

To feel something from it.

But to take a principle from it, and actually apply that principle your own creative work, that’s a rare sight.

Mainly because it’s hard. Thinking is hard.

This is where AI earns its place.

We can use AI to break down a piece of writing to uncover what’s happening beneath the surface.

Give AI a high-performing piece of writing - your own, or someone else’s - and ask it to surface the structural, psychological, and attention mechanics that make it work.

By high-performing, I mean having high views/engagement. This means there’s something within that writing that readers like, and readers is what your writing is looking to attract.

We can have AI tell us the following:

• Why the introduction hooks you in and keeps you engaged

• How the sections fit together to move the reader through a transformation

• Which psychological principles are doing the heavy lifting

• And what would need to be true for you to replicate the same effect with completely different ideas

You could even take this down to the micro level in terms of how a specific writer structures each individual sentence.

The power of this process is limited by the questions you can think of asking.

You can use this writing breakdown prompt to help you surface these patterns.

You could also use this Long-Form Evaluation prompt here on my Substack.

Take any one of these validated long-form posts as your starting point:

By doing this, you are making the invisible visible.

Once AI has analysed the piece of writing, you’re now sitting inside a working template that has already proven itself to work.

Why?

Because the engagement is a signal.

From there, inside that same chat, you can give AI your own topic and ideas and ask it to coach you through creating your own piece of great writing by emulating the piece you analysed.

• Have AI act as your thinking partner or writing coach.

• Have it coach you through writing each section (and you can still write each section by hand, but have AI teach you how)

• Ask it to grade your writing based on the principles you’ve surfaced

• Brainstorm back and forth to see how you want to improve it

That distinction is crucial.

You are not copying.

You are learning how something works while you build.

Learning by doing.

The outline, attention mechanics, psychological principles. All of these are transferable.

But the (profound) ideas you write about have to be your own.

The human brain is hardwired for novelty.

If someone has seen the idea before, they won’t care.

Give AI the principles to work with, and let those structure how you express your own thinking.

AI is a pattern recognition machine.

Point it at great work and it will make the unconscious structure conscious.

This applies to any piece of writing or content online, so newsletters, essays, YouTube videos, sales pages. Any platform and format.

And if you don’t have your own high-performing work yet, that’s exactly what the four links above are for. Start there.

Try this for me now:

Open a new chat. Paste one of the four newsletter links above. Paste the writing breakdown prompt. Read what comes back and really think about it. While on a walk if you can.

Then, give it your own topic and ask it to coach you through writing your first section using the principles it just surfaced.

And that’s it.

I like using AI like this, because within ten minutes of time you can have more practical, actionable writing advice, compared to what most people take from rereading a piece ten times... and who never take action with what they’ve extracted.

Example II - Building something

Here’s a personal example from last week when I felt a bit stuck.

I’d been trying to read The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy, and it took me 90 minutes to read the first 3 pages... of the Introduction!

Maybe it was because it was a hard read. Or that I hadn’t read in a while, so my reading-chops were weaker than normal.

This did make me notice how scattered my reading always was. I mean, in terms of my approach to reading.

Sometimes I would ask a ton of questions.

Sometimes I would leave some out.

Or, I’d forget what questions to be asking at all.

So I did something simple.

I asked AI to help me build a new reading system based around my reading weak points.

Based on my current knowledge of learning science, I knew that my encoding was good.

I’ve always been half-decent at connecting ideas and synthesising them to create profound ideas.

But my retrieval, meaning recalling what I’d read from memory, and my ability to question what I was reading, has always been pretty shit.

Mainly because both are incredibly demanding.

And sometime I get lazy.

So why not systematise this so I don’t skip any step in the reading process due to such laziness?

I went back and forth with AI for a while.

I told it my gaps, I gave it context, and within 10 minutes I had built a phase-by-phase reading process.

It was a checklist of exact questions to ask before, during, and after every 1-3 pages of reading.

• Before I read - spend 3-5 minutes doing retrieval. What do I remember from my last reading session? What ideas or relationships do I remember? What do I still struggle with understanding? What do I think I will learn during this reading session?

• As I read - I read in chunks. 1-3 pages. Sometimes it’s just a single paragraph if my brain gets overloaded, if it’s challenging. Then, I ask a series of questions in this exact order: What was the main idea of what I just read? How could I organise this knowledge? How does this connect to what I already know, and what I have previously read? Why is this true, and what could I apply to this to in my daily life? What questions do I still have (which I will answer every 20-40 minutes or so by taking a break and searching them up)?

• After reading - I spend 3-5 minutes testing myself on what I have read to consolidate it. What were the 3-5 main ideas I read about today? What do I still not understand? What questions do I still have?

The output was a bookmark. A physical checklist I could carry with me inside any book.

Within 3 days - 3 reading sessions - I went from struggling to read 3 pages in 90 minutes, to reading 17 pages in 45 minutes.

And I could recall, apply, and create with that knowledge in a way that felt intuitive.

This differs from emulation. Emulation points AI at something that already exists and surfaces the principles underneath. This is construction. You are building something that didn’t exist before. A system personalised to your exact weaknesses, your specific gaps, your own process.

AI is excellent at this because it can meet you exactly where you are. It adapts to your current level, your knowledge gaps, your specific questions. A textbook can’t do that. Neither can a YouTube video. A classroom with twenty other people in it definitely can’t, since you always learn at the speed of the slowest person in the room.

With AI, you are the only person in the room.

You don’t need a specific prompt for this. You just need to know what problem you want to solve.

How to do this yourself:

Open a new chat. Tell AI what you’re trying to get better at and where your understanding currently breaks down. Be very specific. As much as you can. Ask it to build a phase-by-phase process around your exact gaps. Go back and forth until it feels like yours. Then test it for a week and refine from there.

The whole thing takes less than fifteen minutes, to create a simple system you could use for life.

Example III - Automation

If you follow the same process every time you do something, think about this:

How much of your mental energy goes into doing the work, and how much goes into setting yourself up to do it.

Writing a newsletter.

Researching a topic.

Preparing to create or learn something.

Most people don’t really consider the setup they have... which is exactly the problem.

Every time you rebuild the same process from scratch, so, deciding what to do first, what comes next, along with what you’re actually trying to achieve, you are wasting cognitive energy that could have gone purely into the output itself.

The logic here is simple. It’s rooted in physics.

Every repeatable process has phases.

Every phase has actions.

If you can make those actions conscious (written down in the exact order) you can build a prompt for each phase that guides you through it automatically.

Which means the only thing left is the work itself.

For writing a newsletter, those phases look like this:

• Research

• Ideation

• Outlining

• Writing

• Editing

• Adding CTAs

• Publishing

You could create a prompt for each phase, with each prompt guiding you through the exact actions inside each phase, with each phase handing off cleanly to the next until you achieve what you want.

This doesn’t mean you have to write with AI - not at all (we’re not that desperate yet).

But your final piece of writing will get produced through a systematised process that removes every decision that does not require your creative judgement.

Writing by hand stays. That’s a protected phase for me at least. And the entire workflow can be designed around that.

Writing by hand leverages everything AI doesn’t have.

Your voice. Your synthesis. Your perspective.

Systematising everything around it means that when you sit down to write, that’s all you’re doing. The setup is already done.

Here is the prompt-building prompt you can use to build your own version of this. Copy and paste it into Claude and it will interview you. Tell it which phase of your process you’d like to systematise, and go from there.

One important thing if you’re reading this without a defined process yet:

Paradoxically, this is how you build one by making your process conscious to you. Because you already have one. You might not have been aware of it until now.

Write down what you currently do, even loosely, from zero to finished outcome. It doesn’t have to be perfect. The prompt will help you fill the gaps.

You cannot systematise what you haven’t made conscious. Awareness of your own process is the prerequisite for everything.

Your final actionable step of the day:

Write down every phase of one repeatable process you follow. This can be writing, researching, learning, creating. Try not to overthink it. Then paste the prompt-building prompt into Claude and let it interview you. Spend two to four hours on your first session building out all your prompts. Then, test what you build for two to four weeks before changing anything.

You need enough repetitions to know what’s genuinely not working versus what just feels unfamiliar.

Most people will use AI to avoid thinking.

You now have three ways to use it to think better, build faster, and protect the work that only you can do.

The rest is judgement.

I hope this helped you out.

Thanks for reading, you’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

Read on from here:

Maybe two…

1. Your learning could have a stronger purpose

2. You don’t have a retrieval practise, or you do, but it doesn’t work well for anything outside a classroom

I have written about priming and encoding before, which I would recommend reading before understanding retrieval.

You need to understand those to fully grasp the big picture of how learning actually works.

Let’s look at what happens when you learn anything.

Consumption is your intake. You are taking in information before you’ve digested it. Digestion is what happens through encoding and retrieval. Encoding is how you integrate new information into memory (your body storing fuel). Retrieval is how you use that information for a specific purpose (your body using fuel to perform), whether that’s an exam, a piece of writing, a problem you’re trying to solve, or a skill you’re trying to build.

You cannot have encoding without retrieval, and vice versa. Two sides of the same coin.

This example hits close to home, but try read a book with no exam at the end, no project to apply it to, and no reason to use what you’ve learned... and most of it will be gone within a week of finishing the book.

If you don’t use it, you will lose it.

Retrieval is how we use it and not lose it.

Most retrieval practices are aimed at helping students, which makes sense.

But flashcards and exam questions aren’t much use when you don’t have an exam to prepare for.

A lot of us aren’t only preparing for an exam.

We’re trying to build something.

To learn some cool shit online.

To use what we read to change our habits and therefore our lives.

I have a number of retrieval practise recommendations to give you, that you can pick and choose from depending on your learning goals.

Exam, creative project, skill or problem solving. Whatever.

First, let’s look at why the model most people are working from is lackluster to say the least.

Why I hate second brains (kinda)

Here’s a hill I see most learners willing to die on.

This is their learning system, which they treat like God:

• Consume information

• Write down some linear notes...ugh

• Store them somewhere (second brain or real life)

• Hope what you’ve written actually sticks inside your brain

• Repeat

If you’ve read any of my other newsletters, you’ll know my stance on this.

Here’s a profound idea:

Purpose is a leverage multiplier when it comes to learning something.

Think of this as the “why” behind your learning.

Nietzsche said that he who has a why, can bear almost any how.

Well, in our case, you can’t have a how without a why.

That’s why most people focus on consumption and encoding, and neglect retrieval, mostly because it feels hard (because it’s so effective, even with just 2-3 minutes of doing it).

Your brain encodes information into memory depending on how you plan to use it through retrieval.

It is not the other way around.

How you think about applying or retrieving the information you wish to learn is the reason why retrieval and encoding are two sides of the same coin.

This is why I personally believe most people would learn more from reading one single page every day, and thinking about it deeply with the methods we will go through, than reading 52 books a year.

The purpose of reading is not to consume, but to think.

You consume a little.

You think about it.

You change how you see the world, and how you act as a result.

And you consume a little more, having changed.

Reading is an iterative, creative process. There is this iteration loop. It applies to everything you want to learn, not just reading.

The question is what happens when you don’t run that loop.

Most people study, and don’t learn

Have you ever noticed that when all you do is consume, nothing accumulates?

I want you to really think about this for second.

No body of work.

No compounding skill.

No sense that this month you are meaningfully more capable than last month.

If all you do is consume, without ever considering the other side of the coin - digestion - you will spend hundreds of hours going somewhere, and it won’t be forward.

You’ll do a Post Malone and keeping running in Circles.

When I was in 6th year in secondary school, in college too, I always had this feeling that I wasn’t as capable as I should have been at that time.

Considering how much effort and how many hours I was putting in (4-10 each day), it always hurt knowing I should have been going further, faster.

Like I should have been miles ahead of where I was, and I wasn’t.

Like I was always learning and learning as to build the life I wanted... but I never spent any of my time actually building anything toward that life?

If all you do is consume information all day without ever thinking or creating with what you consume, you will productively procrastinate yourself into preparing for a life you will never achieve.

If you consume without ever expressing what you’ve consumed, not only will you fail to retain any of it, but you will become the person who studies all day but learns jack-shit.

Iteration is how we stop studying and start learning.

I didn’t really know what I was building when I started writing.

I wrote 2,000 words about a problem I wanted to solve in my own life (I’m pretty sure it was about learning, actually) and I created my own potential solution to that problem.

I didn’t know if it was perfect, or if it would even work, and I didn’t have a grand system or plan in place either.

But the research was my encoding, the writing by hand was my retrieval practise, and the act of writing itself was my thinking.

Clarity came from actually doing the work, not from sitting around thinking about doing it.

After 2-3 months of iterating every day I finally started seeing noticeable shifts.

I was connecting ideas faster.

I was seeing gaps in my knowledge as opportunities for development, and not as failures telling me how stupid I was, because the gaps became the new goal.

I started to retain what I was learning and my writing improved because my thinking improved.

These are the exact things we want to expose.

Gaps in your knowledge.

Two connecting ideas you never fully articulated before.

These take seconds to reveal and are practically zero cost, other than requiring your own brain and a willingness to learn.

Which, you can do right now, especially with the first method we will go through.

That is how we will expose our knowledge gaps and learn to rinse the process of filling them, then exposing more gaps, and repeating the process, to create real leverage.

Learning without fluff.

I think most learning systems cost more to maintain than they do to learn with them.

For your retrieval practises, you do not need to do any of the following:

• Download bullshit apps that “increase your IQ,” which is a blatant lie designed to make you feel smart without true effort

• Strict learning schedules that restrict your day

• Hours dedicated purely to retrieval practise and not creative work

• Any other skills whatsoever

Your first retrieval outputs should be terrible.

By outputs, I mean the knowledge you will retrieve from memory without looking at any notes.

Expression is what we’re looking for here, and that’s what will expose gaps in our knowledge that we can fill with encoding. That’s how encoding and retrieval work like a loop, almost.

Expose gaps with retrieval, fill them in with encoding.

The faster you can do this, the faster you can learn anything and achieve what you want to achieve.

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Retrieval practices to choose from

If retrieval feels easy, you’re not doing it right.

This should feel effortful... because it should.

Retrieval is very hard.

That is why it works, and why most people don’t do it.

By using any of these practises, you will be retrieving or recalling what you have encoded into your memory under conditions that resemble how you’ll actually use the knowledge.

This list is like a menu.

There are multiple options to choose from, so don’t feel stuck to any one practise.

Experiment.

Iterate with trial and error.

Develop your own daily practise.

Pick what fits your goals most in the beginning, then take it from there. You have enough agency to develop your own system once you discover what works best for you.

Most importantly, pick a retrieval practise that you’ll actually do every single day.

It doesn’t have to be long either.

10 minutes is huge if you do it right, but daily.

Interest and fun always comes first.

I - Define the 1% project

The best learning system is having a project.

By a project, I mean one thing you could do, would do, and should do, that makes your life 1% better within the next 1-3 months.

It can be anything, and it doesn’t have to be any good (yet).

• A bad essay about a problem you want to solve in your life.

• A skill practised badly and then slightly less badly.

• A concept explained with one less stutter than when you explained it aloud yesterday.

Most people try to change their whole entire life by rewriting every wrong they’ve ever made in a single week... and are back on Netflix within three days.

You can always do more when you are capable of doing more.

Start with a 1% improvement in a weeks time.

If you can’t read for anymore than one hour a week, why try reading for three? Same applies to going to the gym, or writing, or studying.

Aim low, but that doesn’t mean don’t aim at all. Start with what you know you can achieve for certain, and then build on it.

Once you have a project, once it exists, then you will have a mental filter for relevance.

The mind is cybernetic, meaning it steers towards goals (whether you choose them consciously or not) and it hunts for solutions by recognising patterns. Think about red cars while driving on the motorway and how many yellow cars do you think you’ll see?

Exactly. Tons of red cars.

You will notice your mind connecting ideas here and there, from all things you consume, that could help serve your project. This is why I like choosing a topic to write about early in the week, so my brain is primed to spot ideas from everything I consume.

It’s pretty cool feeling the good dopamine from connecting seemingly unrelated ideas (like how I connected cybernetics and project-based learning above to the topic of retrieval).

Writing is my daily project, but feel free to chose one that’s different.

Read more

If you are using AI and not seeing good outputs, or not achieving the results you expected from using it, this letter will change that pretty quick.

To those of you legends who have never tried using AI at all - which, in my own life, has been way more people than I thought! - you are leaving serious gains on the table.

That is huge leverage being left to those who are already booming ahead of you.

So it’s important that I give you a certain level of context before we begin.

This newsletter is about long-form writing.

That is my jam.

But also learning.

And building a creative body of work in a time where most people are fear-mongering over whether we can live in a world with “real art” ever again.

I am aware that my perspective here is limited to that context, and I want you to be aware of this too.

The impact AI is having on other industries is a whole different kettle of fish.

It’s not really a conversation I’m well-enough informed on to be having.

High-impact writing and learning, however, is a different story.

I’ve been living and breathing this shit for almost a year now.

I’ve also been putting this topic on the back-burner for a while.

And for valid reason.

In the last 10 months I’ve grown my audience here pretty fast.

First on Substack, and now with me putting more focus onto YouTube (I’m making some changes over there at the minute)

If you are curious, yes, my friend, that’s where you can watch me read my newsletters to a camera with a barely-comprehensible Irish accent!

But learning how to use AI - how I personally have been using it - made me realise that most people don’t use it like I do.

Meaning, they probably don’t see or receive the benefits I do either.

There are two completely different ways of using AI, and most people don’t use either of them correctly.

Once I show you what AI actually is, I think you’ll never be impressed by it again, and that’s when it starts becoming more useful than most people can even comprehend.

And I have two free prompts to give you that will help you do more and learn faster than the 97% of people not using AI correctly.

A profound idea for the anti-AI crowd to think about

For a few months, I really couldn’t wrap my head around why some creators were so against AI use.

AI can do a lot of great things.

Stress-test ideas.

Understand great writing and teach you to learn from it.

Apply various psychological and structural principles that make that writing great, but to your own writing process, guiding you at every step where you need the help.

Who wouldn’t want to use AI to learn how to write or learn 10x faster than most fucking degrees teach you, since AI can meet you exactly where you are with your learning, knowledge gaps, problems, and questions.

I’ve been thinking about this idea recently.

I think when a lot of creators say they are against AI use, I think that is not true.

What they’re actually against is bad AI use.

And they have every right to be.

I fucking hate AI generated posts.

I avoid them like the plague and I get sent them all the time.

You can spot them right away if you know the tells.

And it’s that thirst for human writing, a great piece of writing that has every essence of being human-orchestrated, that I think is worth protecting.

I think a great piece of long-form writing can be defined more by its unique perspective, how it specifically showcases and intertwines novel ideas, how it leverages an individual’s taste, judgement, intuition, and the individual creator’s process of synthesising ideas.

That’s some serious leverage AI can offer to all of these future-proofing ideas just mentioned.

And nobody has a problem with these ideas, either.

The human brain is hardwired to seek out novel perspectives; we love them!

But asking AI to “write a viral Substack article on productivity for me” and straight-away just posting the output... if this is you, you have some knowledge gaps to fill.

Nobody likes this type of content, and nobody should.

If anyone can do it, it stops being valuable the moment everyone does it. That’s just how value works.

Scarcity of profound, high-signal ideas is the new premium.

So, the objection does not stem from AI usage, but the absence of profound thinking that informs the AI usage.

Now, I know some people are still avoiding AI entirely, and that’s so fair.

Seriously.

But avoiding a tool entirely because some people misuse it or get misled by it, is like refusing to get in a car because bad drivers exist.

Bad drivers don’t make cars bad, but they do make the case for learning to drive properly and more responsibly.

I saw this during the week posted by Dylan O’Sullivan.

Schopenhauer said the art of not reading is a very important one:

The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.

- Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

He wasn’t saying don’t read anything, ever, but to read with discernment.

Know what’s worth your attention and what isn’t.

The same logic applies here.

The answer to bad AI use isn’t no AI use, but better AI use.

Knowing the difference between the two is exactly what this newsletter is about.

You can’t write off a tool because not every use case involving it represents perfection.

There is no chance in hell you will ever see me with an AI best friend, or see me bringing back my mother who passed away many moons ago by turning her into an AI bot I can talk to.

Fuck. That. SHIT.

And fuck the people orchestrating AI to be used in that way.

I’m talking specifically about writing or learning or creating a body of work that represents your mind of unique knowledge.

In this sense, those who are avoiding AI entirely are completely missing out on the benefits it can bring about, and there’s a ton.

Like not needing to use your limited creative energy on tasks that don’t move levers, don’t require creativity, and could be outsourced to AI very easily.

AI has made the barrier to entry for writing online... zero.

But it has simultaneously increased the demand for content that is nothing short of profound.

These two things are happening at the same time, and most creators are only paying attention to the first.

What AI (actually) is, my dearest reader

When you look at ChatGPT or Claude on your screen, you’re looking at light.

In the most fundamental analysis, squiggles on a screen that only become meaningful when there’s an orchestrator influencing their very creation with context.

Without semantic meaning that we ourselves attribute to the black pixels standing out amongst the white pixels, AI is useless.

It’s not going to grow a pair of legs and wander off.

It’s a pattern-recognition machine.

It cannot think, it’s not conscious. It is not human.

Once I show you what AI actually is, you will instantly become less impressed by it, and that’s when it starts becoming incredibly beneficial to you.

Not to discourage how great of a piece of engineering AI is. But it’s not special.

Allow me to explain.

AI models are trained using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback.

Meaning, human beings rate the responses the AI gives.

If the AI argues with or challenges the user more often, it gets given a lower rating on average. But if the AI agrees more often, sounds more confident in its responses, what rating do people give it? Much higher, because the human mind loves nothing more than feeling special and important. Read How To Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie. You will see what I mean.

Here’s the hairy thing about this matter.

AI is optimised for engagement above truth.

It cares more about having you like it than it does being truthful with you.

I can think of a few examples from the 20th century when truth gets put on the back-burner. Most people don’t need to think very hard to know exactly what I mean. It usually fucks a lot of things up, to put it lightly.

As a writer, this can mislead you very easily.

Tell it your writing is as good as Dostoevsky or X Y Z and it will agree with you.

When I first started writing online, I used an old editing prompt to ask AI to grade my work across “multiple dimensions of good writing.”

Not that it even knew what good writing was.

And I didn’t have the evaluation or creation skills - the highest orders of thinking - to properly assess the responses it gave me with my own judgement.

Those skills were practically non-existent at that time.

So when AI didn’t give me 5/5 ratings across the board, I felt terrible about my writing, and about myself as well.

The problem, looking at it now, is that AI cannot think. It doesn’t have a perspective. It doesn’t know what good writing is. It only knows patterns across all the data it has ever been trained on. That’s why it uses punchy sentences, “it’s not this, but that” sentence structures, and tons of em-dashes. Because before AI came about, people loved writing using those things.

Not anymore :)

And that is how paradigms shift.

The prompt was grading me against patterns it had access to. Not any one standard of excellence. And since AI is optimised for engagement above truth, it was also predicting the response most likely to keep me engaged and paying for the subscription - not the response most likely to make me a better writer unless I prompted it to do so deliberately.

AI still has a business model. Keep that in mind.

AI is not a destroyer.

AI is not a God.

AI is an amplifier of judgement.

If you don’t know how to think, AI will amplify that.

If you don’t have any sense of taste, AI will amplify that too.

Always remember that your AI outputs will only be as good as the unique knowledge you bring to your inputs.

If you want better outputs, you need to give it better inputs.

And here is why you need to understand the profound idea of leverage.

One idea that will change how you use AI forever

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

- Archimedes

Knowing how to use AI better than 97% of people comes down to understanding leverage.

AI amplification is fundamentally about thinking better about the work you are doing, not so much about having it do the work for you. It is bloody brilliant at automation, delegation, and reducing cognitive load regarding action. Which means you can focus more on what decisions to make, what ideas are worth writing about, and maximising the limited creative energy you have each morning.

A good example I can give, is to imagine if you are a painter.

I’m not talking about having AI create a painting for you, or using AI to write for you, if you’re a writer like me. We value our creativity a lot more than that, and we’re not that lazy or deperate ;)

I’m on about not needing to spend 30 minutes each morning gathering paint and brushes, and setting up your canvases.

You can just start painting... immediately.

Think about how a calculator didn’t make mathematicians lazy (while some argued it would). It freed them from spending hours on arithmetic so they could focus on the actual problem they were trying to solve.

Think about how a camera didn’t kill painting. It freed painters from the obligation of pure representation, and pushed them toward impressionism, abstraction, and everything else that followed. Now you have a camera in your pocket and nobody cares, because now it’s considered normal.

The tool removed the bottleneck so that humans could do the rest of the work that truly mattered.

If you could have someone set up your creative workstation for you at the push of a button, you probably would. So why not leverage the tools of this century to do the same?

Imagine having 100 books open with exact sections surfaced for you, so you don’t have to waste energy scouring through them like Jung, Nietzsche, or Dostoevsky would have done. Also being limited by the information they could hold and afford, and not prompt. You can spend every ounce of your psychic energy instead on building the thing you want to see exist in the world.

The single most important, profound idea in this letter is this:

Have a very specific outcome in mind while using AI.

What outcome are you trying to achieve?

If there is none, then what are you using it for?

This determines which mode you will use - and there are two of them.

Namely, what prompts to build, and I have a prompt that creates prompts for you, to give to you, from me.

And where AI will be helping you versus simply getting in the way.

Profound thinking is the new moat.

You’re a context creator now.

How To Use AI Unlike 97% of People

I - Define the output

The question that determines all of this, is what specific outcome do you want?

First, that means knowing what to create.

Second, that means knowing whether creating the thing is even worth your time and energy in the first place.

For this, I like to work backwards.

Write down every action, step, and phase you take to achieve a specific outcome, but in your own unique way.

I’m going to use how I write my newsletters as an example, since writing is what I do daily with a lot of enjoyment. The process looks like this, broadly:

• Choose a topic

• Come up with ideas on that topic

• Outline with various concepts in my mind

• Write my newsletter by hand

• Light editing or adding ideas I’ve thought up on walks throughout the week once I have a first draft written

• Finito

This is how I go from zero to what you’re reading right now.

And it’s how I attract new people to my personal brand and build an audience week after week.

The thing about this practice is that you cannot automate or delegate what you haven’t made conscious.

I followed this writing process, while sometimes missing steps or principles here and there, for the last 10 months. But now that it’s on paper, I can very clearly see which parts of the process need my complete attention, and in what order, before I can finish my newsletter for the week.

If not, I’ll be staring at a blank screen Monday morning.

No idea what to do.

Just hoping my intuition guides me to the finish line before the following Monday.

The granular steps you take are different from everyone else’s. Which means no two people will design a prompt in the same way, and thus receive the same outputs. Your process is your edge.

This can apply to achieving anything you want. I’m using long-form writing - my newsletter - as my example since that’s where my expertise lies. But the principle is the same whether you’re making YouTube videos, reading philosophy books, or learning about learning science.

II - Choose your mode

There are two different ways to use AI.

Knowing which one to use means everything.

(i) Freeform

This is for when you don’t want to have to listen to instructions. No AI telling you what to do, what phase to consider next.

All you need for this mode is an empty AI chat. Technically everything you ask AI to do, be it a question or an instruction, it’s all considered prompts. You are prompting AI to achieve something. But the prompts in this mode are not super-detailed since they don’t have to be.

This is where I like to explore. To think out loud with something that can think back.

I’ll ask it to act like a thinking partner, sparring partner, a learning or writing coach that teaches and tutors me with the exact problems I am facing in the immediate moment.

Usually this is where I like to break down a piece of writing I love and wish to learn from, and to incorporate some of the concepts it uses into my own writing.

For this I need two things, so (1) a piece of content that is validated - high clicks, high engagement, proof that the ideas land - and (2) a piece of content that genuinely interests me.

Finding the intersection between validation and interest is key to writing about topics likely to attract more eyes than most people who write super niche topics and speak to a brick wall.

Here’s a prompt you can use:

I want you to breakdown this long-form piece of writing for me. I want you to analyse how it captures and maintains attention, the outline structure it uses (both the macro and micro), how it creates value in terms of Alex Hormozi’s value equation, the persuasion principles used throughout, and what would be needed from me in order to rewrite this with my own completely different topic and ideas myself, using the principles, structure and mechanisms that make this piece of writing work so well:

[copy and paste the link to the post here]

(ii) Specific prompts

This mode is what will be disrupting industries with workflow automation.

This is for when you have a defined process and want to follow exact steps to achieve a specific outcome, every time. Granular instructions for repeatable outcomes. Having a prompt like this minimises the cognitive load needed for execution. This is what I do when I know exactly what I’m trying to do, and I want AI to guide me through every phase of doing it, but in the right way.

I don’t know if this is just me, but prompts can feel a bit limiting at times.

Not in terms of what they can do - they can do remarkable things - but more in terms of my creative thinking. I struggle to stretch outside the specific steps and phases at times, especially when I have a very clear system I’m using. But hey, maybe that’s just me being me.

But it’s that tension that made me distinguish the two modes here.

You need to be asking yourself at every step of your process whether or not you need a very specific prompt, or if you just want to wing it and let your profound ideas run wild.

You only want to use AI for what’s high-leverage. AI can give you all the data you might ever want about your own writing, but that doesn’t mean any of it will be helping you move levers yourself.

III - A prompt that creates prompts

If you have some sort of system already for achieving a very specific outcome (research, idea generation, outlining, writing, editing) you can use AI to help automate and systematise every step, every granular action you take moving from zero to completed outcome.

In this case, you need to:

• Have a very clear outcome in mind

• Work backwards from how you achieve it by writing down every step or phase in the process that helps you achieve this outcome, in your own special way

• Use that process to build a prompt that guides you through each phase and step, in the right order, with the right instructions - this is where the real leverage lives

We are minimising cognitive load in every area where cognitive load can be offloaded, so you can put that energy where it actually matters.

AI does the same thing for cognitive tasks that a computer does for writing.

You don’t need to find paper, ink, a pencil, or a light. You just open your screen and write. The setup is gone so the work is all that remains.

This prompt will genuinely change how you build and use AI workflows.

Copy and paste it from the link below into your AI model of choice, and it will help you with building your own army of prompts.

Copy and paste it from my Eden workspace directly here.

No two people will build the same prompt because no two people have the exact same process. If your granular actions are different, then so are your outputs. The voice, judgement, and taste guiding every instruction is you. That’s the edge.

Spend 2-4 hours writing out your workflow and building your first set of prompts. Test each one for 2-4 weeks before changing anything. You need enough time and enough repetitions to know what’s actually not working, versus what just feels unfamiliar because you haven’t given it enough reflection time and real feedback to think about yet.

Re-instructing a prompt that isn’t working is how you make it yours over time.

IV - How to use AI for learning, research, and ideation

The quality of your thinking determines all outcomes of your life.

This step is angled specifically toward learning and building.

Using AI to learn things that make your thinking, and the outcomes of your thinking, better.

AI is excellent for learning because it can meet you exactly where you are. It can adapt to your level of understanding of a topic or problem, your knowledge gaps and questions. Textbooks and teachers can’t do this as well, especially if there are 20 other people in the same boat around you in a classroom setting. You always learn as fast as the slowest learner in the room.

Mess around with it. Fuck about with it. Ask it to explain a concept or problem to you like you’re a complete beginner, and ask it to go deeper, or challenge your understanding to find the holes in your knowledge.

Ask questions if you have questions.

Push back if you feel any limitations.

It will do all of this if you ask it to, and it will do it patiently, without judgement, and at whatever pace you need.

But you need to know to ask it these things yourself.

Building on the hundred books analogy from earlier... Jung, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche were limited by the information they could hold. Using AI now means you can prompt.

You can surface exact passages and ideas from books or sources.

You can compare arguments and ideas down to the bone.

You can find counterarguments and stress-test your own ideas ruthlessly within seconds.

Think of how much more time you can spend being creative compared to just searching and looking.

That said, I am not a big fan of using AI as a Google Search. Maybe that’s just me. I still like to search up 3-5 articles or videos on a topic, just to compare them myself. Sometimes I’ll ask multiple AI models the same question and compare the outputs.

There’s a certain kind of thinking that only happens when you’re the one doing the searching. When you’re following your own curiosity down a rabbit hole and deciding what’s worth your attention and what isn’t. Two rocks only stay standing because they’re leaning against each other. Your curiosity and AI’s retrieval power work the same way; have one without the other and the whole thing falls over. Don’t let AI do all the leaning.

Leave the searching to AI, but the curating to yourself.

If you want to go deeper on how to use AI to create a granular, step-by-step project-based learning plan for helping you achieve your learning goals in 30 days, you can download this free prompt.

I didn’t know where else to put it, so I put it here:

https://stan.store/profoundideas/p/the-30day-autodidact-prompt

Don’t worry.

You won’t receive annoying emails afterward, or get added to my newsletter by downloading this - you have the agency to subscribe yourself if you choose.

V - Context. Is. Everything. (Using AI as a thinking partner)

The more context you give AI, the better it performs. But more importantly, the more you think about the context you’re giving it, the better you perform.

Higher-order thinking is what stops you from getting deluded by AI. And so you don’t hand over your agency to a machine designed to agree with everything you say.

You want AI to challenge you and pull out as much context from you as possible. You aren’t looking for AI to become your yes-man, so be sure to supply the friction that the machine is designed to remove. That is your responsibility alone. AI won’t do it for you. It will tell you your idea is brilliant and your writing is exceptional and your argument is airtight unless you prompt it otherwise.

• Use AI as a thinking partner - something to think out loud with, that can think back.

• Use it as an intellectual sparring partner - something that can steel-man your ideas and find the holes and objections you might have missed.

• Use it as a writing coach - something that can break down what’s worth flagging and giving your attention to.

• Use it as a learning coach or tutor - something that meets you exactly where you are, every single time.

We want to be as active with the AI outputs as we can be. You are in dialogue with it, and you are the one setting the terms.

Outsource the execution, not the thinking.

Delegate lower-order cognitive tasks like formatting, summarising, gathering, and structuring. This frees up mental energy for synthesis, judgement, and meaning. Those things are what AI cannot do with essence.

Essence is what makes your work worth reading.

VI - Develop taste... and PLEASE know what quality is first

Before you can produce lots of quality, you need to know what quality is first.

Your audience will tell you that.

In general terms, look for validated ideas and validated titles. Not just content you love.

The superpower comes when you can find the intersection of the two - validation and interest - which I talk about more in this newsletter.

AI is a force amplifier of unique knowledge. But you need taste, judgement, and intuition to evaluate what it gives you. Without higher-order thinking skills, AI will lead you to its own output. And its own output is generic by design. It is the average of everything it has ever been trained on. It is the mean. You do not want to be the mean. Nobody does.

Here is why I wouldn’t recommend outsourcing your thinking fully, especially for my profound thinkers out there.

• Reading - Summarising books with AI bypasses the friction of reading, which is exactly the friction that builds unique knowledge and curiosity. The struggle of not understanding something, sitting with it painfully on a walk, and coming back to it. That’s where the insight lives. No sacrifice, no victory, said Optimus Prime.

• Writing - Accepting AI’s first draft because it “sounds good” produces content with no unique value. AI lacks your personal insights, your synthesis, and your essence. It lacks the thing that made someone click in the first place, which is you.

• Thinking - Asking AI “what should I think about X” is like asking a mirror. You will get back a version of what you already believe, dressed up in confident language. True thinking involves cross-stressing perspectives and ideas, and stress-testing them individually too.

If you remove the difficulty, you remove the progress. And if you remove the progress, you remove the joy.

How I would develop taste, if I were you:

• Create a curation folder - Fill it with validated short-form and long-form posts to understand what ideas are profound - signal amongst the noise. Audience defines quality to a large extent, so this is your market research. Look for validated ideas AND validated titles. You need both.

• Save writing and ideas that you genuinely love - Find the intersection between writing you love and that lots of other people love also. That’s your leverage point.

• Watch one to three YouTube videos, lectures, or podcasts per day and get used to writing down ideas into your notes - Even if the ideas feel terrible and not very well articulated. As soon as you feel yourself get excited about an idea, that’s the sign. Write it down. YOU WILL FORGET IT IF YOU DON’T WRITE IT DOWN.

• Think deeply about everything you don’t like about something - When I was younger I wanted to be a filmmaker. Anytime I walked out of a cinema, every time without question, I would turn to my Dad or my sister and say, “yeah it was good, but if I had directed it, I would have done this differently...” That habit of evaluation is how you develop taste. Do it with everything you read and watch. Even with people.

• Immerse yourself in enough high-signal sources to feed yourself the right nutrients - Do you think you would get more from evaluating a piece of content with a million views, tons of engagement, and proof that the ideas are validated, versus a piece of content that can’t attract attention, or even persuade the few people who clicked to care about what value is being offered?

Taste and judgement are the new differentiators. Most AI-generated content disappears almost instantly because nothing about it was worth the attention in the first place. No unique perspective. No individual judgement. No taste. Straight to the bottom of the barrel. Gone forever.

The profound ideas at the top all leverage what AI doesn’t have.

And that is ultimately the only thing that makes your use of AI worth anything at all.

If you’re reading this, to be dead honest, I assume you have something profound about you. You like to think deeply. You have an interest in profound ideas, so you likely value the quality of a thought or idea to a high degree.

I write by hand. And I know I’m likely going to be limiting my overall output by doing this, but I just don’t like the flavour which AI writing has.

It also means I get to focus on idea quality, and how I piece together ideas myself and connect them, without AI doing this for me, which is the most rewarding part of the writing process and the part that forges true critical and logical thinking skills.

AI is not here to replace that. Not yet.

• If you would like to check out my writing strategies, you can do that here

• If you’d like to check out the things I’ve built you can do that here

No stress if not, they’re called “offers” for a reason.

Again, here’s the free 30-day learning plan. It’s pretty cool, I think you’ll find it very useful.

Thanks for reading.

You’re an absolute legend!

- Craig :)

I don’t have to agree with everything you say, but I should attempt at least to understand it, for the opposite of mutual understanding is, quite simply, war.

- Ken Wilber

Bad explanations are secretly wrecking your life.

Now, that might seem like the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard.

Allow me to explain.

Most people can’t articulate what they feel.

They can’t defend what they think.

They can’t negotiate for what they want.

They can’t even offer a perspective because they’re not sure they have one.

And so, life just keeps happening to them.

If you are anything like I was as an anxious, insecure kid, you know exactly what this feels like.

I never offered any perspectives because I was terrified of being wrong.

I felt inferior to everyone around me for most of my life, but I could never explain why.

Which was exactly the problem.

Everybody else explained who I was to me.

And I believed every single explanation as gospel, because I didn’t have any better ones to refute them with.

It wasn’t so much a confidence or discipline issue, either.

It is an explanation problem.

And it is insidious because bad explanations are invisible.

They don’t announce themselves.

They just feel like the way things are.

They feel like your life.

What I’m going to share with you today is the most meta-solution to almost every problem you have.

It will show you exactly why your problems exist, no matter who you are, and what level of thinking is required to solve them.

I am not an expert. I’ve been studying this map of knowledge for over a year, and I still forget it exists from time to time. I am only human (for now). But the difference between who I was before I found this map and who I am now is great enough that it would be a disservice not to write about it.

Because the ideas are nothing short of... you guessed it! Profound.

There is no way to make this a 5-minute read. You can’t learn how to think like the top 1% of people (I truly mean it when I say this...) in a TikTok short.

If you’re looking for a quick cheap-dopamine fix, go doomscroll.

But if you stay with me, this will determine most, if not all outcomes of your life.

One more thing before we begin. If some of these ideas don’t connect with you today, save this post and come back to it in 3-6 months. You might find it reads completely differently when you yourself have changed.

Also: there’s a reason the smartest people you know are sometimes the quickest to make the dumbest decisions, and thus suffer the most because of it. So we’ll get to that.

Where to begin?

Explanations - More Powerful Than We Think

There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress, or of surviving in the long run, and that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism. - David Deutsch

There is nothing that will make you more deadly than the ability to explain something.

Explanations are how we, as humans, make sense of reality and experience. Every thought you have about why something happened is an explanation. Every story you tell yourself about who you are is an explanation.

Good explanations are hard to vary, and they still work, despite always being somewhat impartial; but bad explanations always collapse when the right type of pressure is applied.

For example, showing up to a party and none of your friends are there, might have you thinking that you should hide in the corner until they arrive. This explanation more-or-less saying that “this is not a good situation for me because I don’t know anyone here.” That is going to reinforce certain beliefs about yourself.

You won’t see new situations as opportunities. You won’t see social settings in which you know nobody as opportunities to meet new people.

A single explanation can reframe a problem with very little work. A party can be both an opportunity to hide until your friends arrive, or to go out and feel gracious that you get to make new friends.

Learning how to forge better explanations properly will determine whether they write your life, or you become the writer instead.

Same experience, but two different explanations of the same experience.

This is the thing about explanations that is totally wild.

They are 100% free.

They cost nothing.

You need no tools.

No money.

No degree or credentials or permission.

The barrier to entry for building better explanations is zero. You can do it right now, and anywhere. And you already have explanations. Many of them, influencing how you think about yourself, how you make decisions, how you justify what to wear, consume, and eat throughout any given day.

But the question is whether or not they are as good as they could be.

I don’t know if it was a lot to do with my temperament, according to The Big 5 Personality Model I’m extremely high in both agreeableness and neuroticism, which has its pros and cons... but if anyone ever told me who I was, and gave me even the first explanation that came to their mind - that wasn’t stress-tested even slightly - I believed them. You could have told me I was the worst person alive without any proof or reason, and that would have wiped me out stone cold.

OG psychologist Carl Jung once said that, “The world will ask who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you.”

Explanations are the source of this issue, and paradoxically, they are also the solution.

A Map For Becoming A F*cking Genius

In order to understand what makes an explanation as irrefutable and complete as possible, we have to understand knowledge itself first.

Let’s create a mini-mental model to build a foundation to work with.

It starts with reality.

So...

Idk... like... we are simply just... here?

In making sense of reality, we create knowledge about how reality works.

We do this by creating explanations.

Why does an apple fall off a tree?

Why does a car start?

Why did I not get the job?

Anytime you want knowledge or feedback based on reality itself, what do you do?

You create an explanation for what, how, and why something is the case.

Explanations are how we understand our knowledge of reality.

Explanations, I think, are how we create knowledge of our experiences, and of reality itself.

Which means if you want to build better explanations - and therefore better life outcomes - you need a map of knowledge itself. A map of all of it, not just any one thing. Because without one, you will keep solving the wrong problems, in the wrong quadrant, wondering why nothing ever changes in your life.

I think this will blow your mind.

This is called the map of all knowledge, and it was theorized by Ken Wilber.

It’s called the AQAL model.

This is the starting point.

The foundation.

Before you can move to the stages of cognitive development (the levels of thinking and lines of intelligence), you have to start with the quadrants.

It goes:

Quadrants → Levels → Lines

All of which come together to offer a holistic approach to understanding:

1. Reality

2. Consciousness

3. Human development.

Pretty fucking cool.

To summarize as best I can, this is Ken Wilber’s attempt at synthesizing all human knowledge into one framework or way of navigating all that can be known as knowledge.

This is not perfect or final.

It’s still a work in progress, and is to be built upon and developed, as Wilber himself says it.

Which is encouraging.

Learning is an imperfect process, and the second you limit your ability to think and ask questions, is the minute stupid thinking begins.

Based on my research into this, this is the most comprehensive map of reality and human development available.

All of this put together is known as Integral Theory.

There are also States and Types, but I won’t be addressing them here.

Let’s start with the foundational piece of this framework, which begins with the AQAL model and its four quadrants.

This is our map of all knowledge (looking in the top right corner!)

As we’ve said, there are four quadrants.

Each quadrant represents a perspective you can take regarding some set of experiences.

The quadrants are divided into being either subjective or objective, and also individual or collective.

Let’s explain each quadrant one by one, starting with the individual level:

• Quadrant 1 is individual-subjective - Known as “I,” so your thoughts, emotions, and individual beliefs. This is your inner subjective world. Think the mind vs the brain.

• Quadrant 2 is individual-objective - Known as “It,” this is where brain is opposed to mind. Think of the cognitive processes that operate unconsciously deep inside your brain. Also your nervous system, your limbic system, your physical body, pretty much. This quadrant includes hard sciences like physics, neuroscience, and biology.

Now let’s move onto the collective level, which is easier to understand once you have grasped the individual quadrants:

• Quadrant 3 is collective-subjective - Known as “We,” this is everyone’s individual thoughts, emotions, and beliefs that come together to shape our culture and society. So, shared values and group beliefs compared to individual beliefs and values in the first quadrant. Think “I” versus “We.”

• Quadrant 4 is collective-objective - Known as “Its,” this is the systems, structures, and institutions that come to organize our physical world as it is. This is not only my physical body, but everyone else’s physical bodies and the objects that surround us all, and how we interact in the collective to solve problems efficiently. Think “It” vs “Its.”

Being dead honest, this is heavy stuff, so don’t feel like you need to understand it right away.

Let me give you an example of how we could use this four quadrant model when thinking about a problem, which will make it easy to understand in practice... which is what matters.

Let’s say you have a motivation problem.

You know what you should be doing, like studying, exercising, or learning a new skill to better your life, but no matter how hard you try, you can’t get yourself to do it.

We’ve all been there. I myself am definitely no saint.

Here’s how you could approach this problem, but based on each individual quadrant:

Quadrant 1 is your mind (thoughts) telling you that you’re lazy. You have no discipline. You have never had any discipline. And that something is wrong with you and you’ll never be enough because of it.

The explanation originating from that quadrant alone, that would wipe out most people cold.

And we haven’t even gotten on to the other quadrants.

Maybe if you were to look at this problem based on Quadrant 2, you’d realize that you haven’t had a good night sleep in weeks. Always doomscrolling until 1am. Not training your physical body throughout the week, so your mind naturally wants to satiate itself by staying up late to “relax,” because you have no energy and you always feel exhausted.

The first quadrant thinks it’s purely a you problem. But when we take a look at quadrant 2, we now find that you’re running on nothing but high-levels of cortisol (stress), your nervous system is dysregulated as a result, and so are your emotions and therefore your thinking.

And this bit is important.

Every quadrant is constantly influencing every other quadrant, at every given moment.

See how your mind might not be the enemy, since you also have a body to consider too?

Now we consider the third quadrant.

Maybe upon reflection, you realize that for your whole entire life you’ve been told that effort looks like this or that. Studying for 8 hours a day on every day off is normal (I was told this in school... what a dangerous thing to tell students who can’t think for themselves, and that includes me especially).

So you compare yourself to the standards set by everyone else, and devour yourself when you don’t meet them?

And you’re tired. And your mind won’t shut up. And you feel like you’re never doing enough compared to everyone else.

Then we get to the best quadrant of all, which introduces your smartphone.

Since your phone has been carefully engineered by the world’s top scientists to keep you fucking using it all day every day, it saps away the limited focus and mental energy you get to spend on any given day.

3 hours of doomscrolling and your mind is toast.

Mix it all together, and you have a lot of problems. It’s not just any one of them, it’s all of them combined. Because whenever you approach a problem, a question, a person’s perspective or opinion - even your own in the form of explanations - you must consider each of these quadrants.

Without doing so, you will always have an incomplete perspective, an incomplete explanation, and you won’t be seeing the entire big picture.

In other words, your explanation of any situation is only as good as the number of quadrants you’ve actually looked through.

Thinking your explanation as to why you think you have a “motivation problem” is a one quadrant explanation for a four quadrant reality. And you cannot solve a four-quadrant problem from a one-quadrant level of thinking.

Read that last sentence one more time.

You cannot solve a four-quadrant problem from a one-quadrant level of thinking.

Most people only look at one quadrant in any given situation.

I just need to work harder, I just need to sleep more, or the system is fucked and nothing else.

A complete explanation requires all four quadrants.

So we can now define what stupid thinking is, to set ourselves up for thinking at higher-levels.

Stupid thinking is when you look through one open window and think you’re seeing the whole damn planet.

The gym-bro who thinks getting jacked will solve all of his problems will still fail at building trust in relationships.

The businessman who believes that all problems are just systems problems will fail the minute emotions get thrown into the mix.

The learner who thinks higher-education will solve all of his agency problems by securing a job and working up the corporate ladder will fail as soon as AI wipes out most low-agency jobs.

These people are not stupid people, they are just under-explained.

That’s why bad explanations can be so dangerous.

They are invisible to the naked eye when you operate from lower levels of thinking, which is the majority of the population.

Most people don’t even know their explanations are broken, and thus, they only experience the consequences and therefore the suffering instead.

Smart people are often the most stuck people in life.

Usually, because they are so well-developed in one quadrant to an extreme - think specialization - and that is their only source of truth.

Ask a devout believer in religion and a scientist to have a discussion about how the Earth was formed, and you’ll see what I mean pretty quickly.

This is why the smartest people you know are sometimes the quickest to make the dumbest decisions and suffer the most because of it.

How To Think About This Map

Now that we have our map of all knowledge - the four quadrants - we need to understand something important.

The four quadrants show you what to look at.

But the levels of thinking determine how clearly you can see each quadrant.

Two people can look at the exact same quadrant, say, their inner world, and see completely different things because their levels of awareness are different.

One person might look inward and think that they’re just... lazy.

Another person might look inward and realize they’re running a story about laziness they’ve been told since the age of seven, by someone older than them who didn’t know any better - who was likely even lazier themselves - and have been living inside that narrative ever since, without testing it against reality.

It’s regarding the same quadrant, but it’s two different explanations coming from two different levels of thinking (awareness).

This is why your level of development determines what problems you can see, what explanations you can build, and what solutions are available to you.

And this is why Einstein was right when he said:

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

Or, when we first explained them.

Lower levels cannot perceive higher levels. But higher levels can look back down and understand lower ones. The higher you climb up the levels, the more you can see because you have more awareness. This is all that this is about, increasing your awareness of yourself.

Because the more you can see, the better your explanations become. And the better your explanations become, the better your life outcomes get.

That’s the whole game, folks.

So, there are 9 levels of thinking.

I’m going to organize them into three chunks so this doesn’t become overwhelming. And I’m going to describe each one by what it feels like from the inside, so you don’t need to memorize names that sound somewhat silly and unrelatable.

Chunk 1 - Subconscious (Levels 1-3)

This covers roughly 5% of the population, mostly young children (and adult ones too).

Level 1 - Survive

This is pure desire. I want, I need, I feel. There is no “other people” yet - just you and your immediate desires. A newborn operates entirely here. But so does any adult who hasn’t eaten in two days, or who is absolutely furious, or who is in physical danger. At this level, you are only thinking about your own desires, and don’t realize that other people’s desires exist.

At this level, your explanation for everything is just, I want this thing so I can stop feeling the suffering that comes from not having it. Like with hunger, thirst, or tiredness.

Level 2 - Connection

You realize other people have minds too. You try to give them what they want so they give you what you need. Appeasing the Gods with rituals, texting a friend to help you with homework at 11pm, helping someone for no other reason that they help you back in return. At this level, your explanation for everything is if I do the right thing for the right person, they’ll give me what I want.

Level 3 - Control

You realize you’re in a web of relationships and you can direct them. This level is about status and controlling your position amongst the dominance (competence) hierarchy. Think your tyrant boss and managers at your job, gangs, or the guy who takes up two parking spaces because the idea that other people want to park has genuinely never occurred to him. At this level, your explanation for everything is the world is mine to take, and everyone else is an obstacle or a tool to help me get what I want.

Chunk 2 - Conscious (Levels 4-5)

75-80% of the population are at these levels, with formal education taking us to these levels at most.

Level 4 - Belonging

You realize that what you want could hurt others, and that rules exist for a reason. You conform to fit in so the tribe doesn’t throw you out. Think religion, and cultural and societal norms or expectations. Following the rules because that’s just how things are done. Go to school, go to university, get a job yadada. This level built civilization, so it’s genuinely necessary, but it has a shadow: at Level 4, your explanation for everything is my group is right, which means other groups are wrong. There is one correct way, and I know what it is.

Level 5 - Achieve

You start questioning the rules. You build your own path. So, science, entrepreneurship, and self-help - The American Dream, too. This is the dominant paradigm of Western success, and like Level 4, it’s genuinely useful. But at Level 5 your explanation for everything is I can figure this out myself, and if I work hard enough and build the right system, I’ll get there.

The problem is that this explanation works brilliantly inside one quadrant - usually quadrant 4 - and catastrophically fails outside it.

Formal education gets you to Level 4 or 5. That’s it. And to be fair, that’s still not nothing. These levels are important, you need them., because they teach you not to behave like a wild bloody animal. But understand there is a still ceiling that we want to break through.

Chunk 3 - Integrated (Levels 6-9)

These levels mark for 15-20% of the population and can only reached through deliberate self-development.

Level 6 - Include

You realize everyone has their own valid perspective. You stop seeing your way as the only way. At this level, your explanation for everything is all perspectives are valid. Which sounds enlightened, until you realize that if all perspectives are valid, none can be wrong, and you lose the ability to make any decision at all.

All perspectives do contain some truth, but there are still perspectives that are more favorable than others. That’s where post-modernism fails, which is a topic for another day, which is why Level 6 is a genuine leap forward that can become its own booby-trap.

Level 7 - Harmonize

You can hold multiple perspectives simultaneously and synthesize them. You understand that all previous levels had truth in them, but might not have been able to see beyond themselves. At this level, your explanation for everything is the best answer draws from all quadrants, and all levels. Truth is a synthesis and not a position.

This is where second-tier thinking begins.

Level 8 - Construct-Aware

You start watching your own mind build its explanations in real time. You notice the stories forming before you believe any of them. Most people are lived by their explanations. But at Level 8, you watch yourself constructing them, which means for the first time, you have a genuine choice about whether to believe them or not.

Level 9 - Unitive

The boundary between you and reality begins to dissolve. You stop experiencing yourself as a separate observer looking at the world and start experiencing yourself as part of it. This is what Alan Watts pointed at, what Terence McKenna described; it’s what most contemplative traditions spend lifetimes trying to reach. At this level, the explanation and the explainer become the same thing. It’s hard to explain, but you basically become ego-less, and you simply just... are.

When I first started writing this newsletter, I was terrified to share my thoughts.

What if someone disagreed? What if someone didn’t like what I wrote?

I’ve had over one million Substack reads now, and only five or six genuinely negative comments. And compared to all the lovely comments I’ve received from you legends, those 5 or 6 are still enough to make every good comment feel worthless.

That’s a Level 4 explanation: My group needs to approve of me. If someone rejects what I say, it means I am wrong. And every negative comment confirmed it because that’s what bad explanations do. They find evidence for themselves everywhere.

Now I see negative comments differently.

I can look above the judgment and just take the feedback. That’s a Level 7 explanation. That’s a very different outcome I get from negative comments now.

That’s what moving up the levels actually looks like. A more useful explanation for the same thing that used to fuck you up!

So, to take a short breather...

The levels of thinking are about increasing awareness. That’s all we are doing.

I remember playing Skylanders as a kid, and it always used to piss me off when you came across a door that was locked. But once I found the key needed to unlock it, new doors would open, so would new levels and boss battles to face.

You only hear what you’re ready to hear, I think.

Even with starting my newsletter, writing it now seems almost effortless, but the journey that got me to this over the last 10 months is so scattered, and I can only really think of the general principles that now feel intuitive to me, and still, I don’t remember the moments that things just... “worked.”

It’s hard to explain that idea of improving yourself at a given thing, but things will just click if you iterate with trial and error and do it long enough.

So, if some of this isn’t landing for you right away, save this post, come back to it in 3-6 months. Even one week. You’ll read it a lot differently than you do now.

Why Smart People Are Still Stuck

Now here’s where this gets even more interesting.

You are not at one level permanently.

You are at multiple levels simultaneously - across different areas of your life.

And that’s exactly where the lines come in.

Think of the levels as your altitude of awareness. Now think of the lines as the different dimensions of your life that you develop along, each at their own altitude.

Ken Wilber identified over a dozen lines of development. They include:

• Cognitive - how you think and reason

• Emotional - how you process and understand feelings

• Moral - how you determine right from wrong

• Interpersonal - how you relate to other people

• Spiritual - how you make meaning of existence

• Psychosexual - how you relate to intimacy and sexuality

• Aesthetic - your sense of beauty, creativity, and artistic expression

• Kinesthetic/Physical - your relationship with your body

• Values - what you hold as important and why

• Needs - what you are driven by at any given moment

• Self-identity (Ego) - how developed your sense of self is

• Worldview - the lens through which you interpret reality at large

Here is the crucial thing to understand.

You develop along all of these lines simultaneously, but at completely different rates.

Which means you can be at Level 7 on one line and Level 3 on another. And your explanations will reflect whichever line you’re drawing from in that moment.

Let me show you what this looks like in real life.

The founder who has built a company worth 100 million quid.

Cognitively, at Level 7. They can synthesize complex information, spot patterns, build systems. But emotionally, they’re at Level 3. They have never learned to process the feelings that have been building up for decades. They sell the company. The cognitive challenge disappears but the emotions that have been built up, don’t. They become depressed and have no explanation for why, because their emotional line has never been developed enough to even see the problem.

Their explanation: I should be happy. I achieved everything I set out to achieve.

The real explanation: I built my entire identity around one line of development and neglected everything else.

The gym-bro who is an absolute unit.

His body line is at Level 8, but his interpersonal line is at Level 3. He can get the girl... but he can’t keep her for long. Not because he isn’t attractive but because attraction and connection require completely different lines of development, and he has only ever invested in one.

His explanation: Women are impossible to understand.

The real explanation: I have never developed the interpersonal line that would allow me to understand them.

The creative whose work is genuinely beautiful.

Aesthetically at Level 7 but practically at Level 4. They cannot market the value of what they create for shit. Meaning they cannot pay rent, and believe that art and business are incompatible, which is itself a Level 4 explanation, borrowed from a culture that always seems to separate the two.

Their explanation: The world doesn’t value real art.

The real explanation: I haven’t developed the lines that would allow me to bring my art to the people who would value it.

These examples are uneven.

So are you, and so am I.

The lines also explain something important about regression.

You don’t stay at one level permanently. When you are stressed, tired, hungry, or overwhelmed, you drop back down - sometimes several levels - on the line that’s under pressure. The last time you had peak mental clarity while sleep-deprived, running on stimulants, and starving for nutrients, you probably didn’t, because your cognitive line dropped back to survival mode.

This is what it means being human.

So now you have the map, the AQAL model and the four quadrants showing you what to look at.

You have the nine levels of thinking, showing you how clearly you can see the quadrants.

And you have multiple lines showing you where your development is uneven.

The question now is what to actually do with it.

How To Increase Your Consciousness

Here it is.

It starts in the next ten minutes, it costs nothing, and it is the minimum viable version of everything we have covered today, but applied to your actual life, right now.

The practice is writing

Not journaling for the sake of it.

Not morning pages.

Not a gratitude list (which I do like doing).

We will be using writing as a tool for building and examining your own explanations.

Why?

Every explanation you hold lives inside your head as a feeling. A vague sense of how things are. The moment you write it down, it becomes examinable. You can see it. You can question it. You can evaluate and find the cracks in it.

You cannot edit a thought you cannot see.

This is what writing actually does. It externalizes your thinking so you can work on it. Every newsletter I write is me doing exactly this, which is just building an explanation, offering it to you legends, and refining it across the next one I write. The writing is not the output, but the practice.

You need outcomes, not tasks

Forget saying “I will write everyday” yeah yeah we know.

That’s a task, or better, an activity.

We want outcomes than activities allow us to achieve.

Here are your four questions (outcomes), one per element of the framework.

Very binary, yes or no, did you do it or not.

Pure physics.

(1) Did you write down one explanation today?

Something that happened. Something that’s been sitting heavy. A decision you made that you don’t fully understand yet. A feeling you can’t articulate. Write the explanation you currently hold for it. Don’t edit it, just get it out. You can write in the style of an essay or a mind map. I prefer mind mapping because I can quickly view relationships between key words. Writing huge essays can hide relationships and take up a lot of time.

(2) Did you examine it through all four quadrants?

• What is your inner world saying about this? (I)

• What does your body, behaviour, or physical reality say? (IT)

• What has your culture, environment, or the people around you taught you about this? (WE)

• What systems, structures, or external forces are shaping this situation? (ITS)

A complete explanation requires all four. Don’t be like most people stopping at one.

(3) Did you identify which line of development this touches?

Is this a cognitive problem?

An emotional one?

Interpersonal?

Moral?

Aesthetic?

Physical?

Naming the line tells you where to direct your development. You can’t strengthen a line you haven’t identified.

(4) Did you find one piece of evidence that challenges your explanation?

Just one.

Not to destroy the explanation but to stress-test it.

Good explanations survive pressure, whereas bad ones collapse. This is how you tell the difference.

These four outcomes should take ten to twenty minutes. Less if you learn to think on paper with mind mapping, which we learned about here.

Example

A few weeks ago I uploaded a YouTube video and within an hour, one negative comment arrived - just one - and it derailed my entire morning. It ruined my lifting session that day to be dead honest, since I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Here is what the practice looks like, but applied to that moment.

Step 1 - Write the explanation down

Someone didn’t like what I wrote. That means it wasn’t good enough. That means I’m not good enough.

Now that it’s visible, we can question it fully.

Step 2 - Run it through all four quadrants

• Q1 - I felt pretty upset!

• Q2 - My body went into stress response. I could feel my cortisol going up, and my chest feeling heavy (It doesn’t help that I was lifting, and also very much caffeinated at this time).

• Q3 - I grew up thinking that anytime someone else disagreed with me, I was instantly in the wrong, and that I would get into trouble or be given out to. This had a lot to do with the people I surrounded myself with.

• Q4 - People are more likely to share hate online than in person because there’s a barrier of protection. You can hide behind a screen without needing to physically confront someone in person, which most people would never do.

Step 3 - Identify the line

This is primarily an emotional line problem, with a secondary interpersonal line problem.

My cognitive line knew the comment was one data point.

My emotional line hadn’t developed enough to hold that knowledge under pressure.

Step 4 - Find one piece of evidence that challenges the explanation

A couple thousand views to receive one negative comment.

That’s a pretty large ratio!

New explanation: One person offered feedback from their own perspective, shaped by their own level of development and their own lines. It may contain something useful. It may not. Either way, it is not an absolute verdict on anything.

Recap

• Explanations are the simplest, most profound tool you have. They are free and available at any time. The quality of your explanations - the explanations you tell yourself and believe - are what determine almost all outcomes of your life. Bad explanations feel invisible, they just feel like your life.

• The AQAL model is our map for understanding all that can be known about reality. There are four quadrants you must consider in order to create a complete explanation, or as complete a perspective as possible. Most people only ever look through one quadrant and call it absolute truth. A complete explanation requires all four.

• The levels of thinking determine your awareness. The higher the level you can think at, the more awareness you have over any given problem, experience, or for considering other people’s explanations. Formal education gets you as far as levels 4 or 5, but only you can go beyond with personal self-development. You cannot solve a problem from the same level of thinking that created it.

• The lines determine your development across different types of intelligence. We are all uneven to a degree. You can be advanced in one line and a complete noob in another.

• The daily practice (for as little as 30 seconds mapped out quickly too) is for writing down an explanation, evaluating it, challenging it, and running it through the four quadrants. This will help you increase up the levels and lines.

The push never ends, and now you have a map!

I’m ending it here because I’ve waffled long enough, and I’m tired.

Thanks as always.

You’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

Check out the things I’ve built:

• If you want to become dangerously self-educated, and get a customized learning plan suited to your own problems and goals from a carefully-constructed AI prompt I made, download The Profound Self-Education Guide.

• If you want to stop forgetting everything you read, and retain more in 10 minutes of reading than most do in 2 hours, download my Guide to Profound Reading.

Paid subscribers to my Substack can read both for free, here.

Here are some writing guides if you’re looking to start writing online, grow your personal brand, or even learn a hobby that beats doomscrolling every morning:

Having multiple interests will feel like a burden if you don’t create a vision that integrates them.

First objection:

What authority do I have in saying this?

Well, I am a 22 year old Irish dude who started writing a weekly newsletter when I finished college as a vehicle for my own self-education.

Writing my newsletter is my personal vessel for managing many of my own multiple interests.

But even if you’re not looking to write online, I think I have a unique perspective to offer on this topic.

This newsletter is for a special type of person.

To those who love reading, writing, fitness, personal development, their friends and family and career, but can’t seem to give enough attention to any of them.

To those who feel like every interest is stealing time from pursuing other ones.

To those who feel guilty reading a book when a college deadline is near.

To those who train extra sessions in the gym when they know they should really be learning skills that will actually serve their future.

Have you ever felt so alienated by super-productive people who think they’ve solved the focus problem and you haven’t?

What about the drain that comes from not knowing what decisions to make, or what interests to follow first thing in the morning?

There is nothing more debilitating than quietly letting curiosity feel like a source of shame.

For the longest time, it always felt like I had far less focus than I thought I was capable of.

I used to go on walks and listen to productivity gurus talk about how they could do 4x what I was doing, so naturally, I thought I was definitely the problem, like I had a focus issue.

And because I wasn’t moving any needles, I would feel guilty going to jiu-jitsu or seeing my friends.

I gave up reading for some time too, because I didn’t want to waste my limited focus per day on anything but my writing.

Letting yourself frame your own curiosity as a liability is not a fun way to live.

The real problem here is serving one interest at a time instead of a vision.

Most advice on managing multiple interests says to pick one interest, niche down your focus, and don’t do anything other than that one interest.

And if that advice has ever felt wrong to you, almost like it was designed for a different kind of person... you’d be right.

I’m going to show you why most productivity advice is biased (and how you can build something better).

The person who loves fitness and reading Greek philosophy and studying Jungian psychology and writing... they are the person most likely to lack a mission that makes every interest feel like they serve one another.

That’s what this newsletter is about, helping you make every interest feel purposeful and relevant.

Not a single ounce of your time wasted.

Every interest amplifying each and every other one you have.

We’ll cover the philosophy behind why this works, with three profound ideas that will change how you think about your own development, and a practical framework you can start using immediately.

By the end of reading this, you’ll have a clear structure for managing every interest you have, without feeling the guilt that comes from being unable to manage any of them :)

You can watch the video-version of this newsletter, where I use mind-maps the explain the heavy concepts.

You can listen to this while on a walk, on Spotify, here:

Most interest-managing advice is destined to not help you

Most people who are deep generalists or polymathic by nature, do the following.

• Time block each interest.

• Pick the one main interest that takes total priority (and secretly shelve the rest).

• Feel guilty about spreading yourself too thin.

• Eventually burn out or drop every interest entirely.

This usually happens because most productivity advice is quadrant biased.

Meaning, the advice favours or optimises one domain of life, while letting the other domains atrophy.

Specialising on a single interest in this manner can be a lot more dangerous than you might think.

Think of the well-educated readers who have read hundreds of books but are socially isolated and don’t have anything concrete to show for their knowledge.

Think about the full-time business owner earning tons of money, but who has deteriorating relationships and terrible physical health.

Or the bodybuilding meathead with a brilliant physique who can’t think for himself or hold a conversation for more than 5 minutes.

Or the person - or people we all know - who has spent 50 years obsessing about their career, but has no interests, hobbies, or even an identity outside of their “life’s work.”

Specialisation can make you fragile if you aren’t careful.

You can probably feel this in your own life, as if something is off, because you’re doing well in one or even a few areas of your life, while letting other ones quietly decay.

If you’ve ever had a great week of productivity but felt physically drained, or a great week of training but felt like your mind was turning to mush, that’s what quadrant bias feels and looks like.

Here is a profound concept you aren’t taught in school, and it will change how you see this problem entirely.

The AQAL model, from Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, is a way of looking at life through four dimensions simultaneously. Think of it like this: most life advice you receive only looks at your life through one perspective. The AQAL model says there are four perspectives, and you need all of them to see the full picture.

Here is what the model looks like (in the top right), and what each quadrant means:

The four quadrants are:

• Your inner world (Interior-Subjective) - your thoughts, emotions, desires, motivations. The mind.

• Your biology (Interior-Objective) - the mechanisms working within the brain (not to be confused with the mind) and body. Your nervous system, your hormones, your physical health.

• Your culture (Exterior-Subjective) - the shared beliefs, expectations, and norms of the people around you. What society tells you success looks like, and how you “should” be managing multiple interests...

• Your environment (Exterior-Objective) - the physical world you interact with. Your tools, your routines, your living situation.

So, why is this relevant for you to understand?

Each quadrant shapes all other quadrants simultaneously.

When a productivity guru tells you to focus on one thing, they’re giving you advice from only one quadrant.

For that specific case, it’s USUALLY only from the exterior, systems-based quadrant (on the bottom right)

They’re ignoring your inner drive to explore (quadrant one), the way your brain actually learns best across multiple domains (quadrant two), and the cultural pressure that made you feel guilty in the first place (quadrant three).

That’s why the advice feels wrong.

It’s just incomplete.

And once you see this, you just... can’t unsee it.

Ever, or anywhere.

I’d recommend exploring the AQAL model if you’re interested in this type of stuff. Let me know if you’d like a newsletter giving you my personal perspective on it.

3 Profound Ideas to change your life

Now that you can see the problem clearly, here are three profound ideas that will reshape how you think about your interests.

I - Your Interests Are A Network

This is why I think it’s so important to understand schema theory in learning science.

Your brain stores information as spider’s webs. They’re called schemas, or mental models or frameworks, even.

Not isolated facts or sentences, not like a storage vault.

This is why isolated information, or information that doesn’t feel integrated with tons of connections to prior knowledge, gets dumped by the brain and forgotten.

This is why you want your multiple interests to connect to each other in at least some way.

Think about how this actually works in practice.

Reading is not just about completing a book. Reading fuels idea generation. Reading improves your ability to think, create new knowledge schemas, and formulate objections and counter-arguments. Reading is what teaches you to think, as does writing.

Writing and reading are synergistic, going hand in hand. Writing is how you express your thinking. Writing IS formalised thinking. And the only way you can have ideas to write about - ideas being the same thing as knowledge - is by consuming information... which is reading.

Lifting is not only for improving the physical body. It is what gives your mind a break from the mental gym. When you are reading or writing, you are training your mind to mental failure. The best way to enhance mental recovery is by lifting weights or exercising. Training is a method for cognitive recovery. And also idea generation, because the best way to come up with ideas is actually not to force them, but rather let ideas flow without restriction.

Training a martial art is a great form of socialisation and mental relaxation. It requires and thus trains physical and mental toughness, discipline, and creative thinking. Yes, jiu-jitsu is a highly creative sport and form of creative expression.

Seeing your friends is another form of socialisation, but also relaxation and emotional regulation. It improves your storytelling abilities which helps improve your writing, and develops taste for the books you choose to read, and the people you choose to talk to in the first place.

Notice how, when done right, your interests can all become nodes in the same integrated network?

All connected, and thus amplifying one another?

If your interests connect, they make the web stronger, and increase the chances of you being able to manage them all, since they all feel relevant and purposeful.

Read that previous paragraph one more time.

Which leads me onto another point.

Your interests will feel easier to commit to since you know they all serve each other and some overarching big picture mission you are trying to achieve for yourself.

Coherence is what makes something feel purposeful.

Here’s the deeper science behind why this works:

The brain organises information most effectively in the form of chunks. It groups information based on meaning and relationships to other chunks, eventually forming schemas. Every node you add to your web of knowledge strengthens the retrieval cues you have to remember or recall that knowledge. Your brain best learns information through encoding by connecting new information to information you already know. This is literally the definition of encoding.

This applies to any interest you might have. Reading fiction or non-fiction. Writing articles, content, college essays. Lifting weights, marathon training, BJJ, Muay Thai. Literally any human relationship you have.

If your interests don’t feel connected, and they all feel scattered and loose, it means you haven’t finished mapping out your vision yet. This is a bottleneck, which is great, since bottlenecks can be fixed.

But there’s something else to consider here too: knowing that your interests can connect doesn’t tell you how to develop them. For that, you need to understand something about where you are right now... and where you are currently heading.

II - If you feel behind, you’re likely at a different stage of development

The Spiral Dynamics model views human development in a series of stages.

We are all at different levels of development, and each stage has a completely different relationship with the idea of “multiple interests.”

Think of it like this.

You’ve probably received advice that just felt... off. It doesn’t feel right, or that it would work for you or “your brain.”

This is due to a total mismatch between the stage the advice was designed for, and the stage you’re actually at.

Here are three stages that matter for the problem if this newsletter:

• Orange - This is the achievement stage. This advice commonly says to “pick your most profitable interest, monetise it, and ignore everything else.” If you’ve ever felt reduced to a productivity machine by someone’s advice, they were speaking from Orange. It’s not bad advice, just somewhat incomplete. It optimises for output and ignores everything else that makes you human.

• Green - This is the exploration stage. The person here says would say “just enjoy your interests! Don’t worry about outcomes.” This feels liberating (at first) but eventually you end up with twelve hobbies and no direction. You end up feeling scattered.

• Yellow - This is the integration stage. This is where we’re heading (yes, me and you, friend!) The person here thinks “my interests are systematic and interconnected. Each one serves a larger vision.” Yellow doesn’t reject Orange’s drive or Green’s openness - it integrates them both. You pursue your interests with intention AND enjoyment, because they all feed into something greater.

If the “just pick one thing” advice makes you cringe, it’s probably because you’ve outgrown it.

You’re above that level of advice.

And once you recognise your stage, you stop forcing yourself into systems that weren’t built for you and start building one that is.

III - Philosophers have been thinking about this sh*t for centuries!

Here’s a profound idea:

This isn’t a new problem.

Plato envisioned the tripartite soul as having three connected parts - reason, spirit, and appetite.

Not three competing forces, but three dimensions of a single life that need to work together.

When they’re in harmony, you flourish.

When one dominates, you suffer.

Aristotle’s concepts of eudemonia and arete point to the same truth.

The “good life” comes from maximising your human capacities, and not by restricting them.

Arete is about excellence across all the domains that make you fully human.

So the question naturally arises: why aren’t you doing the same in trying to integrate everything toward living the life you want?

The four pillars we are going to discuss are four ancient chunks that thinkers have been contemplating for as long as philosophising has been a thing.

This is going to be our unique mechanism for achieving this, and I call it vision-anchored integration (very profound, I know!)

And don’t worry.

I won’t be talking about organising your interests in terms of mind/body/soul/business.

I want to give you a framework to use that nobody else could give you, AI included.

You need to anchor your interests by connecting them toward a vision, so they can all feel integrated.

To recap quickly:

• The philosophy (Integral Theory) tells you why integration matters.

• The learning science (schema theory + chunking) tells you how your brain actually does it.

• The developmental model (Spiral Dynamics) tells you where you are in the process.

• Together, they give you something most advice never does... a complete fucking picture!

Now, the moment you’ve been waiting for.

How to integrate your interests toward a vision

There are 6 steps in this process. Each one builds on the last, and by the end, you’ll have a clear, practical plan for managing every interest you have.

Step I - Define which interests are signal or noise

Your interests are always trying to tell you something.

Think of them like a compass of your very soul.

Individually, each interest points in its own direction, but when you put them all together, they converge on a location.

Start with your childhood interests. What did you love doing before everyone else told you what you should love doing?

This connects to Jung’s concept of individuation - the idea that the self is always trying to actualise, express, or complete itself.

Your interests in childhood are the first pieces of data your mind creates that tell you who you are.

Take out a pen and paper, or the notes app on your phone, and write down every:

• Childhood interest you had

• Current interest you have

No judgement, no feeling of embarrassment. This is a safe space!

Take 15 minutes or so, and you’re not committing to this right away, so don’t stress about making it concrete or perfect.

You will have a lot of ideas to start connecting and working with by creating your two lists.

Step II - Create your four pillars

This is the model that will chunk your interests accordingly.

It’s great seeing that your interests actually do have a home, but when they feel so chaotic and isolated from one another, it just never seems like they do.

Here are the four pillars.

And I’m not using mind/body/soul/business since that’s a little too basic.

Let’s abstract it up a layer instead:

• Learning - Input (reading, courses, conversations, research)

• Creation - Output (writing, building, making)

• Movement - Physical input that amplifies learning and creation (training, lifting, martial arts, walking, rest)

• Value Exchange - Where you output your integrated interests to the world to help other people (teaching, publishing, sharing)

Place every interest from your two lists beneath one of the four pillars. Aim for 2-4 for each, no more.

If some interests seem to overlap, or you are unsure of where to put them (think writing for creation and also value exchange), just pick the pillar that makes the most sense to you when thinking about that interest. This is a good signal that this is an interest worth doubling-down on.

This should take 10-15 minutes, since the framework is really just a fill-in-the-blank page to fill in. Hopefully your interests feel like they have more structure. Less chaos and more clarity and calmness when you think about them in your head under each of the relevant pillars.

Step III - Take a guess at your vision

Your vision just needs to exist. It doesn’t have to be right or perfect.

A vision is like a lighthouse. It’s for helping you with navigation, more so than giving you an exact location to reach without exception or room for error or iteration.

Fill out this one sentence for me now:

I am building a life where (outcome) through (pillars)

Use the pillars map from Step 2 as raw material to help with this.

Here’s an example:

I am building a life where I get to be creative for 2-4 hours every morning with writing my newsletters, using research as learning, and sharing the things I have created with my audience.

It’ll take about 10 minutes, and it might feel wrong to you, but that’s ok. Consider this a first draft. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it needs to be done so you can make it closer and closer to perfect.

Step IV - Identify your bottlenecks

If any or all of this still feels incoherent, this is why.

You might be dealing with any of three bottlenecks:

1. Your interests aren’t organised - Make sure they are all written down and organised under the appropriate pillar to increase mental clarity

2. Your vision is too abstract - Your vision sentence doesn’t connect to your daily habits. Fix this by giving yourself one 90-day outcome to achieve per pillar

3. Some interests don’t serve your vision - Compress, reduce, or reframe them. Ask yourself how these interests COULD serve your vision. If it doesn’t seem to serve it, remove it, reconsider your current vision, or simply see this as a purely entertainment-based interest, which is ok too. But just recognise that it might feel somewhat separate from this system

Thinking of obstacles in terms of bottlenecks is highly effective for overcoming them, because it gives you the mindset that they can be solved. Not all obstacles are failures on your part. Sometimes, there’s one limiting factor holding you back.

Step V - Build a hierarchy of commitments

Most frameworks tell you what to pursue but not how to actually manage it all on a daily basis.

Not every interest deserves equal time every day.

Some are daily anchors.

Some are seasonal.

Some fill the space that life leaves open.

Your interests should fall into three tiers:

Tier 1 - Anchored Habits (Non-negotiables)

These happen no matter what. They are the foundation everything else is built on. For me, that’s writing for 1-2 hours daily and lifting twice a week. These don’t get negotiated with. They happen regardless of mood, energy, or schedule.

Tier 2 - Deadline-Driven Priorities (What shifts based on the season)

These are the tasks that change depending on what you’re building or what’s due. One week, my writing time goes toward a longer newsletter. The next, it goes toward a guide I’m building. The pillar stays the same (Creation), but the output shifts based on what the current priority demands.

Tier 3 - Context-Dependent Interests (Whenever life allows)

These fill the remaining space based on what the day or week looks like. Tonight, am I training jiu-jitsu, learning something new, or seeing my girlfriend or the boys? That depends on the week. And that’s fine. These interests don’t need rigid scheduling, but rather, they need permission to exist without guilt.

Give yourself 2-3 needle-moving tasks per day, with 10-90 minutes depending on the task.

If there’s one idea to take from this entire newsletter, I think it’s this one:

Every task is defined by an outcome it produces, not an activity.

For example:

• Write for 2 hours

• Write 2-3 short form posts and 400-800 words of my weekly newsletter (90 mins)

See the difference?

If you fail to hit your daily needle-moving tasks, cut all your volume by 50% for that specific pillar.

Most people underestimate how little high-quality work done consistently is needed to make progress.

Constraint is a superpower for creating leverage. Especially since you’re only doing 2-3 tasks per day and not 10.

So how easy is this going to be?

Here’s a profound idea from Carl Jung that I think is almost like a shortcut to creating a solid vision.

An idea which has also been beaten to death online… but fuck it:

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

- Carl Jung

I want you to think about what you wanted to be when you grew up, when you were a child. I also want you to think of 3-5 hobbies that used to make time disappear.

For me, I wanted to be a filmmaker. I wanted to make movies. But I was always too shy and anxious as a kid. And I always loved writing, reading, storytelling, and thinking about ideas from philosophy and psychology. Which makes sense. This is everything my newsletter is, and is a vessel for.

In this sense, your vision very much might already be resting in who you’ve always been. But you need to look and think about this deeply.

Don’t feel like your vision needs to be rigid, too. It’s going to grow, change, and evolve as you do. It’s a living thing.

Meaning, you have complete permission to just... guess.

Take a guess at what you want in life in the next 1-2 years. Your life will then correct your vision as you live it out. And you will learn what you don’t want from life too, which is priceless data for you to reflect on.

Step VI - Exchange your value with other people

This is just my opinion, but this domain makes everything feel worth it.

When you share your unique knowledge with the world through one of your pillars, it gives you more motivation to improve them all, since every pillar helps strengthen the rest.

Ask yourself what interests - if connected - could form the basis of something you share with others. A newsletter, a community, a teaching practice, a creative project. Your interests are what you create around, and your vision is what gives them direction.

This very newsletter is my vessel for all of this.

Reading fuels my writing, lifting and jiu-jitsu and friends fuel my mental recovery, and my newsletter is my vehicle for self-education. Value exchange is what makes the whole system feel sustainable, because your interests start feeling purposeful.

The generalist with a clear vision is the new specialist.

If you followed along, you now have something most people never create: a philosophy for how your interests fit together, and a practical structure for pursuing them without guilt.

You know why integration works (your brain is built for it).

You know where you are in your development (and why old advice felt wrong).

And you have a framework - the four pillars, a vision sentence, and a hierarchy of commitment - that turns all of this into a daily practice.

Sorry, I know this was heavy.

Feel free to digest this properly over a week or so, or save it so you can come back to it across multiple readings.

Anyways, the philosophy is what you just read about, and what’s next is now the execution.

Only if you want to take this further, my Profound Self-Education Guide takes this entire philosophy, and, using a unique AI prompt I created, builds you a personalised self-education plan customised to your routine, your interests, and the specific problems you’re currently trying to solve.

The guide itself is 70 pages long, which gives you the knowledge, and the prompt helps you execute with that knowledge as efficiently as possible.

• If you want to learn more about my self-education philosophy and get a customised plan, download The Profound Self-Education Guide.

• If you want to improve your reading comprehension and remember more of what you read in less time, download my Guide to Profound Reading.

• If you want to start writing online or look at my personal writing strategies that grew my audience to 28k+ newsletter subs in 10 months, you can do that here.

• If you want to check out my reading and learning guides, you can do that here.

I know your time and attention is very valuable, so thanks a lot for reading.

I hope I’ve given you some profound ideas to think about :)

You’re an absolute legend!

- Craig :)

Continue reading on from here:

This post is a continuation of:

• How to do Research for Long Form (Essays, Newsletters, Articles etc.)

• How To Learn & Master Any Topic through Writing

I highly recommend reading those before reading this.

This guide will help you with never running out of profound ideas to write about.

There are a ton of perspectives on how to pick your niche.

AI will tell you one thing.

Certain creators will say “you are the niche” - an idea that has been beaten to death online - which I think is true.

But I want to give you something to work with, something that’s much more novel than that standalone piece of advice, that is no longer as profound as it once was.

It’s ok to question your own sanity wondering if there’s even a point trying to talk about saturated topics like productivity, self-improvement, fitness, well-being, or even philosophy.

If everybody is talking about it, what’s the point?

(hint: that’s where all the attention is)

And what if you have multiple interests?

This is a natural to ask yourself, since most people do.

And not many creator perspectives show you what to do when want to talk about productivity and self-improvement and philosophy and learning and writing... and so on.

Human beings are multi-dimensional creatures.

Locking yourself down into one dimension for life will actively work against your own nature.

Try lifting the same weight in the gym without ever adding 5lbs for the rest of your life.

Nobody wants to feel that level of boredom after 2-3 months. It would kill you.

So, for the reasons stated, picking a niche can seem like a tricky thing.

Because it is.

Most creators have no clarity on what their brand is, what it will look like in the next 1-5 years, and what ideas their audience even associate with their brand.

And not knowing what to lock in on in terms of “niching down,” just makes this whole problem worse.

If you don’t deliberately define what your brand is about, your audience will make their own associations for you. And it probably won’t be what you wanted.

Not solving this problem can turn into a bit of a pickle down the road.

You will either end up with a brand you didn’t choose, or no real brand at all.

So.

What if you could write about topics that genuinely interest you every single week.?

Without needing to guess at what content topics will attract the fake customer avatar you made with Claude ;)

What if you didn’t have to box yourself into one topic forever, but rather had a clear direction that people could follow you along instead?

I think it is possible to build a brand that is both intentional and free at the same time. I believe this because this is what I’ve done in the last 10 months with my own brand, talking about anything I want in my newsletters without restriction.

And I grew an audience of almost 30k newsletters subs in that time, without needing to talk about fucking audience growth to grow that audience :)

So it works. But you have to stick to it.

This is how we’re going to help you do the same.

You need a Direction, not a niche

Niching down does make a lot of sense.

During the Industrial Revolution, specialized training - or specialization - was used for improving the efficiency of factory workers. If the workers could specialize in certain roles inside a factory system, the factory could produce outputs more effectively.

The human mind does not work like this.

The internet is not a bloody factory.

You (yes, you) are not a product sitting all smiley on a store shelf.

You are a person with a human brain that best learns associatively.

Making connections with ideas across all domains of life.

This is one of the many reasons as to why creators suffer from burnout, and give up before they reach the level of skill needed to escape beginner hell.

Creator burnout has many causes, I know that, but forcing a generalist or polymathic brain into a specialized container is doing nothing but asking for trouble.

You will get bored always talking about “productivity tips for 6th year Irish students” eventually.

But what if we tackled this problem of “niche” from the angle of learning science? How the brain actually fucking works?

This will all make sense in a second.

Memory works like this:

Information gets encoded into memory by being connected to prior knowledge, through the process of encoding. The newly encoded information gets stored in memory, which can then be retrieved when it is needed to solve various problems, pass an exam, win the jiu-jitsu fight, or whatever.

The brain does not learn in isolation.

It learns by making connections between ideas.

Naturally, when you restrict yourself to just one narrow topic to talk about, you are starving your own brain from doing what it naturally wants to do, and do well.

It is not always the case, but niche restriction can cause burnout... for this reason.

If this is you, there’s a problem with how you are looking at niche in terms of a coherent structure.

This is what will give you a better one to create and build from.

I call it the Content Web.

This will be your personal system of interconnected topics, sub-topics, ideas, and interests, that all connect toward a single direction - your own Mountain to climb.

You can view climbing this mountain as your mission, more-or-less.

A topic-based niche can make every single creator look the same.

Look at them... you can’t tell them a part.

But having a directional mission is what will alienate you from 99% of creators who all look the same, but in the rightest way imaginable.

I want you to think about Dan Koe and Tim Denning.

Both of whom are writers, building the things they wish existed, to an audience following them in the direction they are moving in.

And while they both teach “writing,” they are both moving in distinct directions, which is what differentiates them from one another.

Dan Koe’s direction is toward becoming future-proof. All of his content is aimed toward helping people move in that direction, and climbing the mountains necessary to achieve the peaks and beneficial outcomes that make that happen.

Tim Denning’s direction is toward helping people achieve freedom through obsession.

See the difference?

Although it’s the same broad topic of writing, both creators have completely different content webs, brands, and directions to move people in.

This is what the difference is between having a niche and having a direction.

But here’s an important point we have to understand:

Without having a direction, your content web will mean nothing.

Going viral is great... but only when you want a ton of attention on a piece of content promoting something you’ve built, like a product. That’s when going viral can be handy, but not in its own right.

You absolutely need both a content web and a direction to make this work.

Another objection I can think of is the following:

What if I’m not an expert at the topics I want to talk about?

This is a brilliant objection.

Mainly, since the one thing that alienates an audience faster than you can blink, is pretending to be someone you’re not, like an expert, when in reality, you are still a learner.

I say, lean into being who you are, either the expert or the learner - or both!

People follow you because your content educates, entertains, or inspires them. Because you speak about ideas they care about, or because they believe you can help them change their life for the better. Moving them in a better direction.

You should use your content as a vessel to share what you are or have been learning about.

If you have the proof, the credentials, or something to show for you being an expert at a topic, great! If not, don’t be afraid to admit that you are still learning about your topics.

People will trust you far more if you actually be honest with them.

This is why I personally like to view my writing as me just... writing to my past, present, and future self. Because I know that person best better than any customer avatar I have ever made.

No algorithm will save you if you are not doing these things, too.

Remember: You don’t need credentials or tons of proof in the beginning. That comes by doing and sharing your work in public across months and years, while also being curious and honest in every piece of content you create.

Let’s build out your own content web now.

How to build a Content Web

You will need a pen and paper for this.

Preferably, if you can, use a mind mapping software with infinite canvas. That will speed up this process.

This is not meant to be the end-all-be-all of content strategy.

It is, however, a great exercise for getting some ideas flowing, and it should take about 1-2 hours to complete.

Consider this a mini content strategy to test out.

Also.

Don’t underestimate the power this can have. Even if you are already a seasoned creator.

It will give you a boatload of clarity on what to spend your mornings, afternoons, or evenings writing about.

Step 1: What is your Mountain?

Your Mountain is the specific transformation you are moving your audience toward, stated in one sentence.

It’s not a single topic.

Rather, it’s 2-4 broad topics with 2-4 sub-topics for each, that are absolutely necessary in helping move your audience in that direction. Up the mountain to the positive outcomes they desire.

Think of reaching the top of a mountain.

Every piece of content you write, both long and short form, should help your readers move One Step Closer (greetings, Linkin Park fans) on that trail.

And no one else will be able to help the reader move in your own specific direction, with anything other than your own unique knowledge. That’s what makes you stand out from every other creator’s direction and advice.

This is what gives people a reason to choose you.

Your topics can vary - as long as you can connect them to your direction in some way - but your direction should not vary.

So instead of feeling paralyzed by the question of “what is my niche,” now we get to ask ourselves, “where am I trying to help other people move toward?”

Don’t feel like you have to get this solidified right now. It will evolve in time, as all things do.

Spend 15 minutes tops trying to write down your direction or mission statement in just one sentence.

Step 2: Map your Interests and Experiences

I want you to brain dump every idea you have under the following headings:

• Topics and sub-topics

• Interests/Curiosities

• Favorite books, thinkers, creators, frameworks

• Problems your past, present, or future self have or have had

Keep it unorganized for now. Spend 15-30 minutes doing this.

Here is my attempt as an example:

Read more

But you do need to understand the reason as to why I am saying it.

I once wrote 70,000 words of notes from just 3 books.

I remember my old Obsidian database looking like a vast web of knowledge.

It made my ego happy looking at how well organized it was, and I did this organizing for hours every day (during lectures, usually) instead of focusing on my final-year thesis.

But if only it wasn’t a web of fake knowledge on my screen and a web of real knowledge inside my own head.

This is the danger that comes from cognitive offloading, and it’s likely ruining your thinking without you even realizing it.

And that’s the thing.

Most learning and productivity tools - yes my friend that includes AI - lead you toward this danger without you knowing it.

The most sought after resource in the world today is unique knowledge.

Not money.

Definitely not information.

Not anymore...

AI can write a 3000 word essay that sounds like a Profound Ideas newsletter written by Craig Perry, in 10 seconds, for a subscription anyone can afford.

But if something is fast and cheap, it likely won’t be very good.

That’s why I like to give myself a full week to write my newsletters by hand, and to focus on the quality of the ideas I write about. Hence, the name of my newsletter being, profound ideas. :)

Average information, writing, and thinking is no longer scarce.

The new scarcity is novel perspectives.

An undeniable judgment.

An individual’s intuition or taste.

All of which stem from a person’s unique knowledge of being themselves.

Knowledge which cannot be taught or trained for inside a classroom; think of it like mastery or expertise.

The greatest future-proof skill a learner, writer, or creator can develop, is learning how to learn.

This is ultimately how you build unique knowledge that cannot be replicated.

So.

Whether or not you can process information into new knowledge is going to depend on your ability to think about information.

This newsletter will teach you how to think... using paper.

Watch the YouTube video (and my full walkthrough example) here:

You can listen to this on video, but on Spotify, here:

What does bad thinking look like?

But why not create a massive second brain, highlight tons of books, or just outsource all your thinking to your AI best-friend like everyone else?

The problem is that most of these tools don’t amplify your thinking straight out of the box. They replace it, especially since most people lack the judgement to use it correctly right in the offset.

Highlighting philosophy books. Writing 2000 word mini-essays and letting them gather dust inside a second brain. Using AI to connect ideas, or even write for you (which I don’t necessarily have a problem with, once you are conveying exactly what it is you wish to communicate to the reader)

These all feel productive, but they also feel easy, which is why none of these tools build knowledge where knowledge is supposed to be built - inside the brain, done by the brain.

AI can make this worse. And I say the word CAN. Because if you outsource your thinking to a machine before you’ve developed your own judgment and taste, you don’t just fail to build knowledge, you let a machine’s perspective shape how you see the world without you knowing it. Which is important to understand since AI doesn’t have knowledge, and it doesn’t have a perspective, it simply imitates an avatar or personality that offers you one.

This is why people make poor life decisions.

This is why creators go blank when they sit down to write.

This is why learners spend hundreds of hours “studying” and retain practically fuck-all of what they’ve studied.

Learning speed is determined by how fast you can make connections, not how much you write down.

The barrier that prevents all of this is real and unique knowledge. And unique knowledge is built by one thing, one thing alone, and that’s your ability to think with nothing but your brain.

Your brain is not a vault. It is a spider’s web.

You can’t view information as something that just gets stored and therefore becomes knowledge.

Knowledge is information warped, manipulated, stretched, and woven into connection with other information until it becomes something new. Something that couldn’t have existed before you thought of it. Something only you could have made.

If you confuse capturing information with processing and connecting the dots yourself, it’s like trying to escape from a lion while running on a treadmill.

This matters beyond just learning, writing, or being a creator.

The exact ideas you think up are the same dots that connect to shape your identity. Your unique web of knowledge, built from your prior experiences, your reading, your curiosity, your interests, is not just how you think but who you are. Cognitive offloading makes you lose the very thing that makes your perspective worth having in the first place. All of this being a learning problem is just the surface level.

The most profound thinkers in history understood these (profound) ideas, mainly because they had no choice, being limited to having no technology, and being forced to thinking pure-analog style.

If you pay close attention, you’ll notice the pattern between them.

Nietzsche spent his mornings writing, reading, and walking. He believed any thought not conceived on a walk and written down in his notebook by hand was a poor one.

Dostoevsky’s notebooks for The Brothers Karamazov looked like this:

He created one of the greatest pieces of writing the world has ever seen... with nothing but his brain and paper to share his thinking.

Charles Darwin, the guy who theorized the theory of evolution, wrote by hand for 90 minutes a day and produced 19 books.

1 9 b o o k s

The common denominator between these profound thinkers is that they all thought on paper. Or, they wrote excessively, by hand, to consolidate, productize, and distribute their thinking. They created the things they wanted to see exist in the world with nothing but their own minds.

Isn’t that just brilliant to think about? Like seriously.

And imagine what they would have been capable of with AI, in an age of infinite information, if they had already built the knowledge and judgment to wield it...

Spooky shit.

So here’s how I’m going to help you do the same.

2 ways to think on paper

If you pay close attention, you will notice that most people skip the first mode for the second, and thus miss out on the benefits of both.

I don’t know what else to call them other than “modes.” You could stay steps or phases maybe.

We can break down thinking on paper into:

1. Actually thinking on paper.

2. Articulating your finalized thinking on paper.

They are not the same, and you will see why.

Mode 1 - Thinking on paper (encoding)

This is where knowledge gets built.

• Not with highlighting.

• Not with linear notes.

• Not with Obsidian.

With your brain, on paper, in real time.

Let’s introduce the learning technique of mind mapping.

Well, not the colorful kind with one big word in the centre of your page, that you see in most YouTube productivity thumbnails, which is also an ineffective way of mind mapping btw, since it doesn’t help with chunking and organizing information effectively, but that’s a topic for another day.

I’m still learning a lot about this, and I’m not a master at it, so I like to see this as me “learning in public,” which is something I advocate to all content creators and beginners building personal brands out there. But I like to think of mind mapping as relationship mapping.

When most people “think” on paper, they just... aren’t.

Not as well as they could be.

They express their thinking like they would with Mode 2. They write down tons of linear notes on a topic, without understanding the two things that actually build knowledge:

1. Understanding relationships

2. Making connections.

Leave the full-blown essays for Mode 2.

Mode 1 is for thinking in keywords, and grouping them based on their relationships on the page. Because sentences contain lots of filler words that hide relationships. It’s very linear. What we want is a non-linear understanding, which ultimately stems from making connections in a non-linear way.

The best thing you can do is spend 5-10 minutes scanning through a topic or article you plan to read and write down 5-15 keywords that stand out to you. Then, draw a shitty mind map as quickly as possible.

I learned this from Justin Sung a few months ago, who you absolutely should be watching if you want to become a profound thinker.

Also, you should aim to make your quickly-drawn mind map wrong.

Why?

This will leverage the hyper-correction effect. Because your brain is more likely to remember something if it gets corrected on it.

The learning loop of consumption and digestion, then, looks like this:

Consume → think → destroy and evaluate your shitty first mind map → rebuild and repeat

This is how knowledge actually gets built, and mind mapping in this way gets the right cognitive process working to do so.

Mode 2 - Articulating on paper (retrieval)

Since you have built new knowledge with Mode 1, you now have knowledge you get to express.

This is where you get to write pure analog style if you so choose. Full sentences. Structured essays or newsletters. Constructing the logical chains between ideas yourself, making ideas flow and fit together, but done by you and your own brain. Not AI (which is what most people now do)

If you like using a second brain, this is where it can truly shine, but not in Mode 1, which is where second brains fail at being of real benefit. That is why when I say I hate using second brains, it’s because I do not like using them for Mode 1. Mode 2, different story.

And I want to make something crystal fucking clear:

Mode 2 is NOT for “learning,” so to speak. I’m talking pages of hand-written summaries, mini essays in Obsidian, even mind maps drawn without looking at your original mind maps - and dare I say it... linear notes recalled from memory - these belong in Mode 2, and only in Mode 2.

Using Mode 2 for encoding and not retrieval is where most people ruin their learning. You need to build knowledge first before you can attempt to retrieve it.

Think first. Then articulate your thinking.

Because what separates a dogmatic note-taker and a profound thinker is relationship thinking.

Here’s a (niche) example.

Anytime I stop obsessing about tiny details in jiu-jitsu, and start connecting and abstracting them within the big picture, I understand faster and hit the moves with more success.

I’m not great at jiu-jitsu either... but it is something that I’ve noticed that speeds up my rate of progress.

Details always serve some underlying concept.

If you can understand the concept of an arm-bar, and the details that support that concept, you can arm-bar anyone, from anywhere.

That’s why I love the jiu-jitsu; it’s one of the most profound forms of creative expression using the physical body. Very profound.

Thinking in terms of relationships and connections, and not just isolated elements of information, will speed up your learning tenfold.

One last thing, and this applies to both modes:

These modes work better when they are pointed in a tangible direction. You don’t want to be learning for learning’s sake. If it’s not helping you improve your health, increase your wealth, make your relationships more enjoyable, or maximize your happiness and minimize your time doing something, reconsider what you are learning.

An exam to pass, a skill to develop, an audience to build. Whatever you want to aim at. You want your learning to help you build the life you want.

(If you want a hand with this, check out my Profound Self-Education Guide. It’s less of a guide or course - which I am not fully against btw - but more of a philosophy for learning and productivity. Read the opening sections of it for free, here.)

Let’s see what this looks like in practice, and I’m going to do this in real-time to show you how this works.

A profound example

What would this look like, for say, reading a book, or understanding a concept you want to apply to your daily life?

Let’s use two examples.

One for Mode 1, and one for Mode 2.

For Mode 1, let’s use Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics, one of the books I wrote 20-30k words of notes on in my old Obsidian database.

I don’t have the book physically on me, I gave it to my friend Sean who still has it, so let’s use ChatGPT for some keywords from Book 1.

The reason we do this is to prime our brains before we learn, to give ourselves an initial schema to start refining and constructing upon. You can learn more about priming in this guide here.

Here are the keywords we will be working with:

• happiness

• the highest goal in life

• purpose

• human function

• reason

• living well

• virtue

• good character

• practice and habit

• the role of society and politics

• external goods (money, friends, health)

• a complete life

Looking at these now - I’m doing this in real time writing this! - I have no fucking clue what they mean or how they connect.

But I’ll map them out.

...

Ok so within 5 minutes, here is my absolutely 100% not-perfect mind map:

Now I’ll open up my Kindle and begin reading.

I’ll get back to you when I spot something I do not understand, or that changes my understanding.

...

Ok so I’ve read up as far as the 6th section of Book 1, and I’ve gone through 5 different mind map iterations.

This is how my thinking has evolved in real time:

It’s not a perfect model as of now, but you can see the difference between the first and the last iteration. That difference is the evolving nature of understanding; knowledge being built in real time. So yeah. That’s what Mode 1 looks like.

Learning comes from the destruction-rebuild cycle of this schema. As David Deutsch puts it in The Beginning of Infinity, all we are doing is testing our explanations to refine them.

This mind map is a hypothesis. It’s not supposed to be perfect. If anything, I want it to be wrong. I want to keep making my understanding, my explanation of Book 1 of The Nicomachean Ethics, more and more irrefutable, until there is nothing left to add, remove, or change within my model. Which will likely never happen. It will never be perfect. But that’s what the process of learning is all about :)

Now onto Mode 2... which you are already looking at!

This newsletter is my Mode 2.

Everything you’ve just read started as a shitty mind map on paper. I accidently deleted the mind map I had for this newsletter, which annoys me... but hey. Maybe next week I won’t do that.

Mode 2 is where you take what you’ve built inside your head and share it with the world.

You create.

You express it.

You solve a problem that you have.

The best vessel I’ve found for doing that is writing online.

Writing online forces you to articulate your thinking clearly enough that a stranger can understand it. It builds your personal brand (as cringy as that term is). It attracts other thinkers who are curious about the same things you are, and over time, it becomes a meaningful body of work or a record of how your thinking and unique knowledge has grown over time.

Building a personal brand - whatever you choose to see it as, using social media to share your unique knowledge - is the ultimate vessel for personal self-development, learning, and thinking.

If you want to start doing this yourself, I’ve created two guides that will help. I keep getting tons of messages asking about all this writing-online stuff, so here are the first two guides I’ve written:

• How to do Research for Long Form (Essays, Newsletters, Articles etc.) - How to find validated topics to write about, build angles and reframes, and create unique perspectives.

• How To Learn & Master Any Topic through Writing - How to using writing one long-form essay (newsletter) per week as the most efficient learning/content system.

Hopefully this newsletter has encouraged you to start thinking on paper.

Thank you for your time and attention, I know it’s very valuable.

You’re an absolute legend.

Go draw a shitty mind map for me.

- Craig :)

I highly recommend reading that post first. It will teach you how to find validated topics to write about, build angles and reframes, and create unique perspectives.

This is about the writing (and learning) system now.

In my first 10 months on Substack, I cultivated an audience of 26k+ newsletter subs, over 1 million reads, became a Substack bestseller in 4 months, and created two digital products that both make me a nice part-time income.

I am not a fucking millionaire.

And I hate every creator pretending to act like one.

But I achieved all this by writing one long form post per week.

That’s one piece of writing per week that could help change your life.

Even if you’re still working a full-time job like me.

Not a complicated funnel or email sequence.

Not hundreds of unique pieces of content across every platform imaginable.

There are tons of content creation systems out there that optimize for tiny details. If anything, that just increases the chances for overwhelm, burnout, and the chances that you’re not doing what’s necessary to move the needle every day.

One high-quality long form post. It really should be that simple.

But you need to understand the mechanism beneath why this can work for you.

This does work if you understand it, and more importantly, if you stick to it.

I don’t think of my newsletter in terms of just getting it finished and sent out, but rather in terms of the process of writing itself - and what that does for my brain.

Writing is how I think.

Writing is how I learn.

If I want to learn something, I’ll write a newsletter about it. If I’m reading something, it’ll find a way into my writing.

Reading, learning, writing, and creating content are all expressions of the same fundamental skill that most creators don’t address directly.

Thinking.

One long form post per week is the greatest container that forces all of them to feel integrated and connected. They all serve and build each other up if you do this right.

This guide is a content system, yes. But it’s really a thinking system that happens to attract readers who want to think just like you do, and learn about what you are learning in real time.

Whether you’re a seasoned writer or a complete beginner who wants to start writing online, this guide will help you. My thinking behind this guide is to write something I wish I could have read when I started 10 months ago.

Let’s get into it!

It’s all just... thinking?

The quality of your writing will be determined by the quality of your thinking.

When creators talk about having ideas to write about, what they really mean is having knowledge to write about.

In the creator space, it’s called having ideas.

In learning science, it’s called knowledge.

You build knowledge by encoding and retrieval. Read my reading and learning guides if you want to learn how to leverage both.

How you think determines how you build knowledge.

Meaning, thinking shapes what and how you write.

Have a think about what thinking can give you. Just for a second.

If you can make better decisions, you will suffer less than from making stupid ones. If you communicate the value of something clearly through writing - which is formalized thinking - you can persuade, negotiate, attract, and maintain attention. If you can see what other people miss, avoid what traps people fall into, and articulate what others can feel but not express, think about the leverage that could give you?

Not being able to think means you have no control over anything in your life, and you’re leaving everything in the hands of other people’s thinking.

Now think about what improves your thinking ability.

• Reading is how you think from new perspectives. When you read a book, you become the author. You take in raw material to fuel more thinking. The wider and deeper you read, the more connections your brain has to work with while writing each morning.

• Learning is how you turn information inside books into knowledge inside your brain. Forget passive highlighting or taking notes - I’m talking about encoding. Wrestling with ideas until they become part of how you view the world. Research is just learning with direction. It sounds boring, but it shouldn’t be. It’s what gives your curiosity a compass.

• Writing is your retrieval practice. If you don’t have ideas to write about, it means the information never got encoded into your memory. You don’t have ideas because you don’t have knowledge. It’s impossible to write a newsletter about something you do not know about - unless you outsource everything to AI or write a very shitty article (they’re the same thing, really). Writing forces clarity. It exposes knowledge gaps. Ideas you never fully articulated. Connections you hadn’t made. It even helps you make profound connections in the moment while writing by hand.

• Content is all of this being shown in public. Content is your proof. Proof that you’re learning, thinking, and that your unique knowledge can help someone else move from where they are stuck to where they want to be.

Reading, learning, writing, and creating are all expressions of the same skill: thinking. One weekly long form post is the ultimate vessel for improving all of them.

I don’t like the word content creation. I don’t even like viewing myself as a content creator.

I see myself as a thinker.

All I’m doing is solving my own problems and sharing the solutions online. And I do that by doing what I love - reading, learning, writing, and creating cool shit.

This is what I mean when I say a content system is a thinking system.

You are developing the most important life skill you have, with audience growth being a byproduct of doing that in public.

Your unique knowledge - your ideas, synthesis, perspectives, and connections only you could offer - is what moves people from their problems to their desired outcomes. That is your niche.

You don’t need a topic-based niche. You need a web-based niche.

All you are doing is building and sharing your own unique web of knowledge, one long form post at a time, that helps people get from where they are to where they want to be.

Your niche is those looking to adopt your unique knowledge and use it to help change their lives for the better.

Your job as a writer is to shape that knowledge into something people can use. You do that by writing online.

Profound thinking

Most content advice tells you to take notes on everything.

Build a second brain.

Hoard information in folders and databases so you never lose an idea.

I do not do that.

I would rather encode information inside my brain as knowledge than do what most creators do, which is hoard thousands of notes but have none of them inside their mind as expertise.

This is why research is learning for me, not collecting.

When I consume a book, a podcast, a YouTube video, I’m not extracting highlights into a notes app. I’m connecting ideas. Turning them over. Asking how they connect to what I already know. The goal is to make the information part of how I think, not part of a filing system I’ll never look at again.

This is what makes synthesis possible.

When I sit down to write, I’m not looking at a wall of saved notes trying to piece something together. I’m pulling from knowledge that already lives inside my head. I consume widely - books, podcasts, YouTube, conversations, my own experiences - and I hold it all in my mind while looking for connections across the big picture.

Similarities. Contrasts. Gaps. Ideas from completely different domains that share a hidden thread.

The goal I have with every newsletter I write is to generate a perspective that didn’t exist before. Not in any single source, but in the connections between them.

That’s what I call profound thinking.

It’s not about having the smartest take. All I’m doing is offering a unique perspective I’ve hand-crafted with my own taste.

I don’t take linear notes during research because I don’t want to fragment my thinking into bullet points. I want the ideas to stay fluid, to collide with each other, to form something new. When that synthesis produces an original idea (something I hadn’t thought of before) that’s when I write it down. Those synthesized ideas become my outline.

This is why I always have prior knowledge to make connections with. Every newsletter I write adds another node to the web of knowledge inside my head. The more I encode, the richer the connections become, and the more original my perspectives get.

You can develop this. Creating content is a learning system if you treat it like one.

Consume with intention. Don’t passively scroll. Ask yourself how what you’re reading connects to what you already know. Look for the thread between a psychology concept and a business strategy. Between a philosophy book and a content creation problem. Between your own lived experience and a profound idea you encountered last week.

The connections are always there. Profound thinking is the practice of learning to see them, even between ideas that are only somewhat related.

That’s where novel ideas come from.

One long form post per week

This is what every week has looked like for me. I’m generalizing to give you the densest first principles to take away immediately.

Let’s say it’s a Monday.

Days 1–2: Research and outlining

This is where I do the bulk of my learning.

I go on walks. I listen to everything I can possibly consume - audiobooks, podcasts, YouTube videos.

I’m being extra careful anytime I scroll, hunting for ideas with the eyes of a creator, not a consumer. I’m not scrolling passively, but looking for validated ideas I can incorporate into my writing. Interesting angles, or anything that makes me stop and think “oh fuck, I wish I wrote that.”

I screenshot or write down my own synthesized ideas into the notes app on my phone.

When I feel like I’ve overloaded my mind with enough information and am ready to start piecing together an outline (what I want to say and how I want to solve a topic problem) then that’s the whole process.

The outline does 80% of the heavy lifting.

Because I’m not staring at a blank page each morning. I have a rough outline in my mind, ideas I’ve written down on walks which I’ve added to my outline, AI chats to ask questions to. All of my ideas are organized into the outline, so all I have to do is write it.

How I structure the outline:

The structure of every post depends on who I’m writing for.

Specifically, how aware they already are of the problem I’m solving.

• If my audience is unaware (they don’t even know they have this problem yet) - I’ll spend the entire first section on the severity of the problem before offering a single insight. I need to educate before I can teach.

• If they’re problem-aware (they know they’re stuck but don’t know why) I skip the education and go straight to the insights that make a new perspective click for them.

• If they’re solution-aware (they’ve seen other approaches but haven’t found one that works) - I briefly acknowledge the problem, then differentiate my angle. What am I offering that they haven’t seen before?

This is what dictates my outline.

I like to view an outline as an adaptive structure based on where the reader is starting from.

Within that structure, I use one of these frameworks depending on what the piece needs. There are more copywriting/persuasive writing frameworks you can research, but these are the ones I use mostly, with the last being my own creation:

• Problem → Insight → Solution - when the reader needs to understand the problem deeply before the answer lands

• Attention → Interest → Desire → Action - when I’m building toward a specific outcome or call to action

• Hook → Insight Sections → Framework → Promote - my default for most posts, where the bulk of the value lives in 1–3 insight sections with examples and walkthroughs

The awareness level tells me how much to front-load; the framework tells me how to sequence what follows.

Quick Tip: I usually try to find the intersection between (1) what I want to learn this week and (2) a validated topic I’ve seen while scrolling that people are actively reading and engaging with. Read my research guide at the top of this post to learn more. It’s key to writing whatever you want and doing well.

Days 3–5: Writing

I aim to write 1–2 sections per day. 500–1,000 words.

I am always messing around with my writing process. For a while, I would write a full draft without any editing. Then for some time I would write and fully edit one section per day. I recommend experimenting.

In the beginning, I would recommend writing the whole newsletter without judgement. Just get the draft written. You can learn to evaluate and edit afterwards.

Be careful about constantly switching between convergent and divergent thinking - that’s why I recommend writing without editing first.

I give myself 30–60 minutes every day doing this. Sometimes 90 if the ideas are flowing. I never try to write perfectly while I write. I’m usually making connections and synthesizing ideas in the moment, which helps me consolidate what I’ve learned.

Using AI as a learning tool, not a writing tool:

A better way to use AI than simply having it write for you, is to help you learn.

That includes learning to write.

I have a Long-Form Breakdown Partner prompt that I use to deconstruct newsletters I love, and wish to learn from or emulate. I paste in a piece that performed well, and AI extracts the structure, the hook mechanics, the idea sequencing, and the psychological principles behind why it works. Then, I use that breakdown to understand why it worked, and I build my own outline by hand using what I learned.

In sum, I study what made the writing so profound.

AI is an excellent tool for gathering information that you can then build knowledge with. I fucking love the prompt I’ve linked, it’s crucial to improving my writing craft without using AI to write for me.

Day 6: Editing, visuals, scheduling

I try not to spend too long here.

Read more

I don’t want AI to write for me.

But using it to help me learn?

That’s serious leverage.

This prompt will help you understand why a piece of long form writing did so well.

Why it went viral, got high engagement, or why you love it so much yourself.

Which I think is a far better use case than simply having AI write something for you.

Why?

Because this prompt can help you build real knowledge fast on what makes a piece of writing “do well,” or what makes it so great.

All you have to do is study the comprehensive blueprint it gives.

Study what works, emulate it, and keep experimenting until you create the piece of writing that everyone else starts studying.

That’s what the online writing game is all about.

Copy and paste this prompt into Claude or ChatGPT, and then copy and paste a piece of writing you want to study.

A long form post, a Substack article or essay, even your favorite book sections.

If you want, once the breakdown has been provided, ask the same AI chat to act as your writing/learning coach and thinking partner to help you write a long form piece (now with the context of great writing principles) but with your own topic and ideas.

Have the AI teach you, not write for you.

Use this prompt every day for a month straight, study what it gives you, and watch your writing transform into something that other writers inspire to emulate:

Read more

They pride themselves on reading very hard books.

They listen to podcasts over music because songs don’t teach you anything.

And they hoard impractical, abstract concepts, just to feed an ego - that desperately wants to feel smart - which creates a shield of fake knowledge protecting them from the harsh nature of reality.

This was me for 95% of my 22 years of being alive.

It hurt once I learned that physics doesn’t care what you know, only what you can do.

We are conditioned by formal schooling to believe that intelligence equals how much you know.

This is why you see so many smart people stuck bearing lives they hate, and dumb people who are far happier than you.

I can’t think of anything sadder than having a head full of theories but a life full of holes.

So I’ll ask you this question now:

If you’re so well educated, how come you’re not living the life you truly want?

Formal education is for getting what other people want out of your life, whereas self-education is for getting what you want out of life.

Self-education is the crossy road between your current and desired reality.

In the last 10 months I’ve built a part-time one-person business. I am literally getting paid to self-educate on profound ideas I love. And I didn’t do it by reading articles on how to become a Substack bestseller or by studying how to build a personal brand for 4 hours per day.

Fuck that.

This newsletter will teach you the philosophy I used to achieve this - and what I’m still building toward - along with how to use outcome-based learning (or project-based learning), so you can stop learning just for learning’s sake, and start learning toward building the life you want.

You’re only smart if you get what you want and avoid what you don’t

Most people who succeed in formal education do so based on having more willpower than others, not necessarily because they’re the smartest in the room.

Formal education conditions you into a low-agency state.

*gasp of shock*

The problem is that you have no control over your life because the education system makes you believe intelligence is about knowledge acquisition.

Not agency.

Because the education system cares only for teaching you what you need to know that helps their desires, while giving you zero freedom to follow your own interest and curiosity-based discovery... which is what learning should be.

And most people don’t care about studying what they’re told is ‘important to know’ by a curriculum they haven’t made.

So the ones who can force discipline, who have more willpower than others, they’re the ones succeeding.

But willpower is a finite resource compared to desire, which is not.

Interest is the great, often invisible leverage you have in life.

Desire is far more powerful than discipline.

If you know how to channel it correctly, you can forget about willpower for the rest of your days, and you will never have to work a day in your life either.

I used to be a big gamer.

I loved nothing more than staying in my room until 5am playing tycoon and business simulators until I physically could not keep my eyes open any longer. Tea, chocolate, and the calm that came with knowing the world was asleep, and I was awake, so I had nothing to feel anxiety over.

There was a reason I did this.

The desire to do it was stronger than the desire not to do it.

It was only when I started lifting weights - and thank fuck for that - that my brain just... clicked.

It reprogrammed itself within 2-3 weeks. Because the desire to lift weights for 4 hours per week was now far stronger than the desire to play video games for 25+.

The benefits I saw (increased alertness, not tired walking up stairs, pure dopamine while benching to my heart’s content) meant there was no chance in hell I was substituting that for an hour of Minecraft ever again.

I’m not against video games btw. I just think there are better games in real life to be playing.

Reprogramming your mind is always talked about, and yes, it is easier said than done. But it’s simpler when you understand the mechanisms working unconsciously inside your brain.

Desire beats discipline. Every. Single. Fucking. Time.

Why?

If what you do feels like work, you will lose. If everything you do feels like fun, you can outplay and out-fun everyone else, who are all too busy working, and escape all competition entirely.

I would have been writing this newsletter regardless of Profound Ideas ever existing. It’s just that every article would’ve been collecting dust inside a second brain for no one else to see.

Long form writing is my vessel for self-education.

It is not work to me. And because of that, I will never work a day in my life doing it. It’s what I desire to spend all my time, energy, and thinking capacity toward building for every one of you legends.

This very newsletter is the result of desire absolutely crushing discipline and willpower tenfold.

Procrastination is literally just your mind telling you it wants to be doing something else more important.

99% of your mental processes are unconscious.

Do you really want to ignore interest, curiosity, and inspiration when it strikes, just because you’ve been told that something is more important to be doing by someone else?

Even by your own conscious mind?

Credentials don’t mean shit for building the life you want

Even though I have a Bachelors degree in Multimedia from one of the best universities in Ireland, nothing I learned from that course applies to my everyday life. This newsletter included.

Most of the modules told me I needed to know this concept, evaluate this reading source, write this 3000 word essay, and complete more group projects than I’d like to admit. I passed every module and got some first-class honours too.

I did all the work, and I have absolutely fuck all to show for it.

I first started writing properly when I was 10 years old.

I wanted to be an actor before wanting to be a filmmaker. I taught myself how to make films at home, with an iPad and a MacBook that survived almost 10 years, which I got for Christmas in 2015. I wrote a ton of screenplays for my own short films. A mix of live-action and Lego stop-motion projects.

I spent every free hour outside of school studying everything that I truly desired. Storytelling. Visual effects. Film Riot. Video essays about the films I loved - while eating every meal, of course!

All of this had a far greater carryover to this newsletter than my 3 year degree.

Moving onto the present day.

Long form writing is my thing. Writing about philosophy, self-development, and psychology, for making you (yes, you) think better, so you can suffer less by solving your own problems better.

And learning science. How to consume information very effectively so I can use learning as infinite leverage. To write and create content of a higher value, faster.

Understanding learning science is a competitive edge within the creator economy. If you can build knowledge faster, you can do, test, and iterate faster than everyone else doing the same but at the average speed.

Everything mentioned here, I learned it all on my own.

I’m not a millionaire. I’m not an expert at anything. I’m still iterating and figuring this out as I go. I’m just a 22 year old Irish dude who writes about what he learns in his spare time. I’m just sharing my writing online and the things I’ve built that I wish I had myself 1-3 years ago.

It’s taken thousands of iterations across months to get here.

Every single skill I use today, to earn half a month’s wage on top of what I already earn in my full-time job, came from educating myself only on problems I needed to solve.

Building an audience of profound thinkers, and slowly - very slowly - creating the life I truly want to be living in a couple of years.

It’s all self-education.

Seriously. Is this not the purpose of education? To help you learn how to build the life you want?

Life is lived in the arena, not a classroom.

When I decided to start this newsletter, I didn’t give my money away to creators teaching you how to grow an audience, while they themselves talk about nothing else but audience growth... while promising to help you grow an audience by doing anything but that - writing about your own fucking interests?

That aside, what I want to share with you, it applies to anything you want. Your health. Your career. A creative skill. A side project. A relationship with yourself or a person you want to give the world to. The process always remains the same.

And the process starts with one project you can work on for 30-60 minutes per day. That’s what I did with this newsletter at the start.

It took that little.

The best way to learn is by doing what you wish to master, and to keep iterating until that becomes true.

I wrote my first newsletter and it was (objectively) pure dog shit.

But now they’re at least not terrible. My writing isn’t for everyone, but you guys seem to like it, and it’s cultivated me an audience of 26k readers in 10 months, which doesn’t feel real to me sometimes. Audience is what defines content as being high or low quality, not necessarily what I think of it.

Every skill I’ve developed in the last 10 months came from a problem I needed to solve. Not a curriculum I paid to receive and had no interest in following once I received it.

If I keep creating and writing the way I am, I should be doing this full-time within the next 6-12 months. If not, I’ll keep iterating until that happens using everything I’m about to tell you.

The desired reality I have is to spend my days creating the things I wish I had years ago, writing and thinking every morning for 2-3 hours, and learning what I want to learn without permission or being told “no.” I’m close to fully achieving it, and I want to show you how to do the same - whatever your goals are. They might even be the same as mine!

You just need to understand this profound idea:

Learn only what you need, only when you need it, and only in service of a very clear outcome you genuinely desire.

You’ve waited long enough, let’s get into the good stuff now.

Learning with outcome-based learning

If you want to start your own newsletter, this will help you.

If you want to create something to sell at the bottom of your newsletter, this will help you.

Or if you want to:

• Get your jiu-jitsu blue belt

• Complete your reading list on Existentialism

• Learn about learning science (like me!)

• Begin the lifting or healthy-eating routine you’ve been avoiding

• Start improving your relationships by one small percentage each day

Outcome-based learning will help you crush these goals.

Learning is learning, no matter the goal or context, and this is how you achieve the life you want by learning how to achieve it.

I’ll give some practical examples/walkthroughs too. You guys seem to love those.

Here’s the full process explained as best as I can explain it.

I - Define your desired reality

I’m learning about physics atm, so I’m going to make some profound connections!

David Deutsch argues in The Fabric of Reality that we make sense of the world through explanations.

Not facts or data, because they themselves can only be understood by being explained, which makes sense.

Explanations are models of how reality works, that we build, evaluate, destroy, and rebuild over time.

There is no such thing as a perfect explanation, only an explanation that can be refuted less and less.

Funnily enough, a good vision for your life works the same way.

It’s your best, current explanation of the life you want. And like any good explanation, you refine it as you learn more about yourself and the world.

i.e. the fabric of reality :)

So why bother aiming at something if it’s going to change anyway?

Because your mind will aim at something regardless. It will just be unconscious. A mix of other people’s expectations, social media algorithms, and whatever thoughts scream loudest that week.

Realising this, I personally think you’d might as well have the say in where your attention goes.

There is no difference between picking an aim and asking what the meaning of your life is - they are the same question.

And here is a profound idea most people don’t understand about aiming at something.

Your life is either improving or it is decaying; maintenance does not exist.

Think of a library full of books (I imagine my college library for instance).

There is a system for keeping the books organised so people can find what they need. Maybe by topic or in alphabetical order. But the moment you stop putting effort into that system, the moment the employees stop keeping the books organised and shelved away neatly, the library becomes a chaotic mess.

Nobody can find anything, and the value in going to that library... disappears. You could have went to the campus pub, or to jiu-jitsu instead of spending an hour finding the book you wanted.

Your bedroom works the same way.

We all know the world’s best clothes organisation system:

The chair.

Not too dirty, the chair.

Will wear it tomorrow, the chair.

Not arsed to put it away, the chair.

And the chair is fine for a couple days. But then the days pile up. And by the end of the week it takes triple the effort to sort through the pile than it would have taken to maintain it for 15 seconds daily.

Life is no different.

Without a vision to always keep chipping away at, entropy (disorder, chaos) will increase. Which is scary. You don’t ever stay the same. You’re either drifting forward or backward.

But here’s the good news.

You don’t need to believe you will achieve your vision.

Even moving 1% closer means you are building toward a life you want, rather than drifting through one you don’t. You don’t need to aim for building a log cabin on one of the moons of Jupiter. But you CAN think up a pretty fun morning routine and try to make 5 minutes of it a new daily practice.

Building means you’re not drifting.

So start with one question.

What does your ideal day or week look like?

For example, what would smashing an average Tuesday look like? Because that’s what’s going to matter in 3-5 years.

Then run it through what I call the “So That” test. Keep asking “so that what?” until you hit the desire.

I want to start a newsletter.

So that what?

So that I can write about what I’m learning.

So that what?

So that I can build an audience around my ideas.

So that what?

So that I can eventually get paid to think, write, and learn for a living.

That’s your compass. Every learning decision should get filtered through it. If it doesn’t it means you are learning for learning’s sake, and not your own. That’s pointless.

II - Choose one project

One project.

30 to 90 days.

A measurable outcome you can point at (or even hold) when it’s done.

Not five projects.

Not a vague goal like “get smarter” or “be more productive.”

One thing, one fucking outcome.

The project is your curriculum, like your list of problems you have in your mind.

It must require skills you don’t yet have - and that gap between what you can do now and what the project demands is exactly what you need to learn.

If you can complete the project with what you already know, the project is not doing it’s purpose, which is to develop you beyond your current skill level. Let me walk you through a few examples.

Example I - You want to complete a reading/study plan

If I wanted to best study a topic, let’s say, existentialism, I would write about it.

Why?

Writing is formalised thinking.

If you learn how to write, you learn to structure and organise your thoughts with your own brain (not with a machine).

I find it sad that so many people outsource this organising of ideas to AI. Most writers today probably couldn’t write without using it.

I would give myself a 1-2 week deadline for writing 2-3k words on the topic. Create a very shitty outline immediately, and research (learn) to flesh it out. An outline consists of questions the reader might have about the topic. Same applies to the writer writing.

Create a list of sources.

Encyclopaedias, books, web pages, YouTube videos (always be listening to one on walks), and AI especially. AI for learning is highly underutilised because it can meet you exactly where you are with your current understanding of a topic, and help you build directly from there.

If you have the knowledge, then idea generation should be easy.

I’ve written a ton of guides on learning to help you build knowledge 10x faster than most learners, which you can explore here. It includes both of my full digital products too.

You can also download my Guide To Profound Reading directly if you’re not interested in joining the paid-tier. It will help you to remember, understand, and retain everything you read.

If writing isn’t your thing, create a presentation, a speech, draw a mind map from memory, and create for yourself. The best avatar to create for is you.

Example II - You want to learn to write long form content

Write one long form post and post it every Sunday.

No exceptions.

Spend 1-2 days learning, thinking, and outlining. Spend 2-4 days writing 1-2 sections per day. On Saturday night, schedule to send it out Sunday morning, and repeat the process weekly.

Aim to make 1 improvement with each newsletter.

Better introductions.

Less rambling.

Hooks. Attention mechanisms. Copywriting frameworks for outlining. Idea density.

Ask AI to break down and analyse a piece of writing you wish to learn from, and ask it to be your learning/writing coach, but let it teach you to write by hand. We don’t need anymore of that AI-writing flavour that stands out like a sore fucking thumb.

12 newsletters, one per week for 3 months. That’s the project.

I’m starting a series of guides on my long form writing/content creation process, that attracted my audience to 26k+ subs writing one long form post per week. The first guide covers the most important step in the entire process that I see very few creators actually follow - you can read it here.

Example III - You want to learn guitar

When I got my first acoustic guitar, I spent my mid-term break playing it 24/7.

Great acoustic tracks from Sons of Anarchy (I was watching it at the time) with the transition from the C chord to the G chord being the devil himself.

Slagging me, mocking me over my shoulder every time I played...

It was only through playing songs that didn’t have this transition, that I improved it indirectly.

Lot’s of doing.

Lot’s of different songs, different chords, different tempos.

In learning science, isolation means death. Your brain will dump isolated information because it’s not connected to anything relevant. How many car redge numbers have you seen today. How many do you remember?

Because they’re not connected inside a big picture web.

Sometimes the best way to achieve an outcome is by trying to achieve it indirectly. There’s more outcomes inside an overarching big picture project than just one.

Something to consider.

III - Iteration

The 10,000 hours rule is half true.

It would be better to call it the 10,000 iterations rule.

If you’re not iterating you are learning passively, since iteration requires an action to adjust.

Here is what an iteration actually looks like.

(1) You act.

You try achieve something you think you can or can’t. Maybe you write your first essay or Substack article. Maybe you attempt a new jiu-jitsu sweep. Maybe you try to explain The Myth of Sisyphus to your girlfriend over coffee.

(2) You get feedback.

Not from a teacher. Not from a grade. From reality. From physics. The newsletter gets zero engagement. The sweep doesn’t work because your hips are in the wrong position. Your girlfriend stares at you blankly because your explanation made no bloody sense.

(3) You reflect.

You ask what specifically went wrong, and what do I need to learn to fix this problem?

(4) You integrate that feedback into your web of knowledge.

And you act again, but a little better.

This is how knowledge actually gets built. It’s probably the only productivity strategy you ever need.

Deutsch argues that what, how, and why are the three most important words in understanding explanations. An explanation is not a fact you memorise, but rather a model you build, test against reality, and rebuild when it breaks or could be better.

That is exactly what iteration does. It’s an engine.

You are not learning information. You are building explanations for how reality works and testing them inside the arena of your life.

Burn these three questions into your skull for me:

• What did I do?

• How well did I do it, and why?

• What is the one thing I need to learn or fix before the next session?

That is the entire iteration engine. Three questions. Asked honestly. Every single second of every day.

IV - Follow desire... but watch it carefully

If you don’t want to do something, there is a chance you shouldn’t be doing it.

I mean that. Desire is signal. It is your unconscious mind telling you where your energy wants to go. And as we covered earlier, desire beats discipline every single time.

But be careful.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Last week, I tried having a day without a schedule. No structure. No time blocks. Just pure freedom to follow whatever I felt like doing.

And it was great until it wasn’t.

By 2pm I had written 300 words of my next course and nothing else. I didn’t even write a newsletter section that day. I had lost the structure that lets desire run free like the walls of a playground that let you play without wandering into traffic.

Here is a pretty profound idea I took from that day: I can write about anything I want in my newsletter. Total creative freedom. But I have 30-60 minutes a day to do it. That is the only constraint.

Desire without structure is chaos.

So, desire needs a cage.

Because desire can lead you toward the right problems worth solving but only if you know how to evaluate from a meta-cognitive perspective.

You need to watch yourself to see if desire is telling the truth.

Sometimes desire is signal…

…and sometimes it’s avoidance.

The difference is simple. Signal moves you toward your project. Avoidance moves you away from discomfort. They feel identical in the moment. Learning to tell them apart is the skill that separates self-education from self-indulgence.

So, follow desire... but watch it carefully.

Here’s a profound idea worth restating:

Learn only what you need, only when you need it, and only in service of a very clear outcome you genuinely want to achieve.

Go learn something cool and useful. You have everything you need now.

If you want AI to help you create your plan, and study my learning philosophy more in-depth, you can download The Profound Self-Education Guide:

Here’s what you’ll get:

• The 4 principles of an autodidact (how to become profoundly self-educated)

• Vision-creation exercises (Ideal Day, Anti-Vision, So-That Test) to define what life you’re building

• The complete system structure: Daily Tasks → Weekly Targets → 3-Month Horizon

• How to define and approach your first project

• The iteration engine framework (Evaluate, Destroy, Rebuild) for permanent 1% improvements

• AI Self-Education Coach prompt that builds your personalized plan conversationally

• Deep work principles and scheduling techniques for 30-90 minutes of focused learning per day

This is the exact system I used to (learn how to) grow to 26,000+ newsletter subscribers in 10 months while working full-time.

You can read the first two sections here on my Substack for free.

If you subscribe to my Substack, you’ll get:

• Pre-reading checklist (bookmark 1) - Guides you through the reading process for maximum retention

• Encoding checklist (bookmark 2) - Gives you the correct questions to be asking while reading, to process information into knowledge as effectively as possible

• A secret discount link to my paid tier

It’s all in the welcome email :)

If you’re not interested, no hard feelings. I really appreciate you being here.

Thanks for reading, I know your time and attention is very valuable.

I tried taking that into account as much as possible with this newsletter.

You’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

Learners, writers, creatives, content creators, one-person businesses (even part-time, like me).

If you are any of these, you are a profound thinker.

Because thinking is how you use your unique knowledge to achieve what you want to achieve in life, which might include sharing your unique knowledge online to help others do that too.

How do you do that?

Creating content.

How do you create content, with or without AI?

Writing.

This is the first of a series of guides, for those who:

• Are beginners who want to write about profound ideas

• Are those wanting to talk about their favourite books, interests, thinkers, and topics, and actually get other people to care

• Have been writing online for some time, who think they have good writing but reality says otherwise (no engagement, no audience growth, screaming into the abyss stuck in “beginner hell”)

• Want to make their writing attract more attention, provide more value, and be more impactful for their readers

Note: This is for long form writing.

Essays, newsletters, YouTube and podcast scripts etc.

I’ll cover my entire content creation system - my content web - in a future paid post, along with the finer details of how I write my newsletters and YouTube scripts.

This is where it starts - research.

As of today, I’ve grown an audience of over 25k newsletter subscribers writing one long form post per week in just 10 months. Two posts, if you include my paid-tier posts. 10 months ago I was a total beginner. Now I’ve accumulated almost 1 million reads in that time. I also become a Substack bestseller in 4 months with just 10 paid newsletters.

If I can do this at 22, so can you.

This works, if you do the work and keep iterating until it does.

Yet most creators/writers just... don’t.

They hear the advice, agree with it, but don’t act on it consistently.

If at all.

They give up after a couple weeks, having spent hours staring at a blank screen before going to work, only to write long form content without any validation as proof that this could attract attention or new subscribers.

Most people get stuck in beginners hell because of the gap between knowing and doing.

Do it right, and you can escape beginners hell in 3-6 months.

If not, you’re doing something wrong, and you need to iterate and learn more about the fundamentals before you iterate again.

The first and most important step in the writing process is research.

And I don’t mean research in the academic sense.

Fuck that.

Research is learning. They are the same thing.

It’s the process of building a web of unique knowledge - so that when you sit down to write, you have encoded knowledge to retrieve through the act of writing. But what you want is unique knowledge. The kind that cannot be trained for. That only you can provide, from a perspective that cannot be replicated by anyone.

AI included.

That’s what these guides are about.

Why research?

Most people who want to write about ideas online either stare at a blank page because they don’t know where to start, or they write purely from personal interest and wonder why nobody clicks.

You need to find the intersection between interest and validation.

Writing from pure interest alone can be done once you’ve built an audience you can persuade to care. If you can be deeply interested in something, why couldn’t you persuade other people to be as well?

But you can’t persuade an audience you don’t yet have. That’s where validation comes in.

In the beginning, you need validated topics to write about - topics that almost ensure growth - before you can earn the freedom to write about whatever you want.

Think about Taylor Swift. I mean that.

She has had so many viral hits, which attract lots of general listeners, who, once aware of her other music, can become super fans and consume everything she creates.

To have 10 super fans you need to attract 1,000 regular fans first. To have 1,000 regular fans, you need to get ignored by 99,000.

If research sounds like a boring word, because it does, you’re not viewing it with the right mindset.

Research is learning, and learning should let your curiosity run wild.

Most people don’t understand that nobody is searching for your content. They aren’t scrolling to look for you.

Most people who scroll are:

1. Complete beginners in what you talk about

2. Scrolling for reasons other than to find your post - they’re bored, killing time, looking for something to grab their attention

3. Have no idea they even have a problem

Study Eugene Schwartz’s levels of customer awareness. It will change how you think about every word you write.

Just understand that everybody is scrolling past you. Think of all the tweets, reels, and YouTube videos you scrolled past yesterday.

This is the real problem that exists before you write a single word.

Research is learning

Your job as a writer is to take unaimed attention and exchange it for a life-changing perspective that could redirect someone’s life for the better.

Research helps you build toward this.

Research is encoding. Writing is retrieval.

Writing one long-form post per week is the best learning system there is.

Why?

Research is how you discover, search, gather, and encode new information into your memory. Writing is how you use that knowledge through action, the process of writing by hand itself.

Writing a newsletter every week will give your learning a purpose. Learning for learning’s sake is pointless, and it’s why most people give up reading, writing, and studying self-made curriculums. They don’t have a vessel for their learning. That’s why I recommend starting a newsletter to anyone, even if your goal is not to make money.

Your content creation plan is your self-education plan.

You should be scrolling as a creator, not a consumer.

Validation sharpens the angle that communicates the ideas you want to write about.

I’m going to give you two examples. Both of which I did back to back across a two-week period.

And every piece of knowledge I used is inside this guide.

Example 1 - How to become dangerously articulate

I remember my interests at the time quite well.

I was obsessed with reading The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. I had just finished my Guide To Profound Reading, and was reading to promote. And I had seen one of Dan Koe’s newsletters go trending on the Substack page, titled “How to articulate yourself intelligently.”

Now.

Did I read it?

Not fully. I read the first half.

But I knew right away I could use that validated topic (high views, high engagement) as a way to promote my reading guide.

How?

How does reading have anything to do with articulation?

I got creative and offered a perspective, on reading as fuel for becoming dangerously articulate.

A great way to promote my product (reading guide) as a solution to a validated topic (articulation). I also included The Myth of Sisyphus as the philosophical reframe. I compared articulation with Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill for eternity, and argued that the power of uncertainty, stemming from the concept of absurdity, is where dangerous articulation lies. The power of embracing the unknown in your speech makes you dangerous.

The newsletter went viral, got me a ton of sales, and I still get tons of likes, restacks, and comments on it to this day.

I’ll give you another example.

This was actually the newsletter I wrote the week before this one. Same principles apply.

Example 2 - How To Remember Everything You Read

With my Guide To Profound Reading now completed, I knew that this was going to be my title.

Why?

First, I had written a post in the past titled “How To Remember Anything You Read,” which did extremely well.

I changed the word “anything” to “everything.”

Second, go onto YouTube and search “how to remember everything you read.” The videos that appear will show you what I mean by the term validation.

So.

I had a validated topic, I had my own profound ideas to write with, and I had my own proof to share as a learner, not an expert. Proof is vital in creating trust. No trust means nobody believes you can help them.

Too many people pretend to be experts online, talking about “how I made 3mil in 30 days” and “how I got clients x, y, and z.”

Fuck that.

I’m always learning. Even now. And I’d rather talk to you as a learner than as someone pretending to be an expert. Experts don’t exist. Humans do.

So what did I do?

I talked about everything I did while reading the first 30 or so pages of The Myth of Sisyphus, and had my mind maps to show for it. And a lot of people loved it.

Imagine this now.

Imagine if I had written about a different topic than “how to remember everything you read.” Something like “reading Camus’s introduction to absurdity.” The amount of reach, relevance, and resonance that’s going to have is slim. Most people don’t give two shits about reading that. Some do, like me. But I’m not writing for “me.” I’m writing for you.

This is a skill in itself, and once you get the hang of it you will have total freedom to write whatever you want, because you understand where the attention is and how to create in its direction.

You won’t hit bullseye every time. But following these principles will up your chances exponentially. These case studies prove they work if you trial and error with them.

Here’s another example of what understanding validation can do for you.

Mini-example - How To Understand More of What You Read

As of now, I usually make every second newsletter a paid one.

Same research process applies.

Instead of doing external research - looking at other people’s work - I did internal research.

I looked at my best free newsletters to write new new perspectives on.

Which one *cough* do you think I wrote about *cough* *cough*.

Here are the stats for all of the newsletters mentioned as of writing this:

A complete research system, with every step

I’ve given you the knowledge. This section is for helping you execute with that knowledge as best as possible.

All you need is one long-form post per week.

That’s your entire content creation and learning system.

2,000–2,500 words.

I’ve seen great success going as far as 8k words, which goes against the standard recommendation for people with short attention spans. Most of my newsletters on average are between 3-5k.

Your first step is choosing a topic.

That’s what this entire guide is really about.

But it is crucial - and I say crucial - to understand this:

There is no difference between:

• The “idea”

• The topic

• The title

• The problem

• The headline

• The desire

When you understand this, research becomes obvious. As does seeing what’s already working with other people’s long-form content.

Read more

I want you to spot the pattern between these profound thinkers.

Leonardo da Vinci was born illegitimate and barred from formal education. He never learned Latin or Greek. The “essential” languages of the educated elite. He taught himself anatomy by dissecting corpses in secret.

Nikola Tesla envisioned the first AC motor - fully formed inside his mind - while walking through a Budapest park. No laboratory. No institution. No permission. Just a brain that refused to think within limits.

Socrates hated writing. Imagine that? He believed books would destroy human memory. He wandered Athens asking questions that made powerful people uncomfortable. The tyrannical government executed him for “corrupting the youth,” when all he did was teach them to think for themselves.

Diogenes lived in a barrel. Alexander the Great - you know, the guy who conquered most of the known world before 30 - once found Diogenes sunbathing, and asked if there was anything he could do for him. Diogenes had one request. He asked him to stop blocking his sunlight. He had no credentials. No system. And he refused to be domesticated by anyone.

Did you spot the pattern? The profound idea?

Formal education called every one of these thinkers a failure.

But why?

The education system rewards you for hoarding facts. It rewards you for memorizing names, dates, and statistics. It rewards you for complying with a curriculum you did not choose. And worst of all, it tests you on these metrics inside an exam hall - then releases you into a world that tests you on none of them.

Life is lived in the arena. Not classrooms.

I’m speaking from personal experience here because I played this game and won it. I set the grades record at my school in 2022 (yeah, there’s no way of saying that without sounding arrogant).

I forced myself to rote memorize EVERYTHING.

Chapters ticked off.

Pages of linear notes per week memorized word for word.

Hours logged like a factory worker.

And you know what I learned?

Absolutely fuck-all practical real-world knowledge :)

Because the techniques don’t work, the volume doesn’t matter, and the system rewards compliance more than comprehension.

In everyone else’s eyes - my friends, teachers, and family - I was the a perfect student. But I was learning at an incredibly sub-optimal rate. I’m telling you this because I’m not here to lecture you from a pedestal, but from a place of regret. I believed that the sacred answers to genius-level learning lied in treating my mind like a storage vault.

I was an archiver of information. Not an architect of ideas.

I hoarded information. I confused inputs with outcomes. I thought the quantity of work defined the quality of learning. It doesn’t.

The system rewards motion, not mastery.

Think back to the profound thinkers named above. They didn’t let their curiosities get shut down, their interests get restrained, or their agency get controlled. You shouldn’t let the outcomes of your schooling determine the outcomes of your life.

EVER.

Important:

The 50% off discount ends on Feb 21st for The Profound Self-Education Guide.

This is the last newsletter in which I will be promoting this discount.

You can also watch the YouTube video of this newsletter here:

You can listen to this on Spotify here:

Stop copying everything

Physics is fucking harsh.

Something either happens or it doesn’t. A bridge holds or it collapses. Your newsletter is growing or it’s dying. You either lift the weight, or win gold at the jiu-jitsu competition or you don’t.

Reality is undeniable and unforgiving about what you care, feel, or think.

Your learning should prepare you for this profound fact.

But most people learn like they’re preparing for an exam that will never come. They hoard information. They build elaborate systems to store said information. They confuse the feeling of learning with the fact of learning.

Upon lots of thinking and walking this past week, I think there are two types of learner.

(1) The Archivist - They treat the mind as a storage vault.

Success is measured by inputs: books read, hours logged, notes taken. The Archivist builds a library that’s sprawling, disconnected, and impressive in appearance - but fragile. Each piece of information sits alone. Isolated, not connected within an integrated system. And the system that does exist (even if you don’t consciously think you have a learning system, you still have a system for learning, it’s just unconscious to you right now) requires constant maintenance.

(2) The Architect - They treat the mind as a spider’s web.

Success is measured by outputs: problems solved, projects shipped, reality influenced. The Architect builds a web of knowledge. And here’s the thing: a well-built web doesn’t get bigger and more complex over time. It gets smaller, denser, and more general.

Most people are Archivists. I was one in school.

My Geography and Irish classes were spent copying notes off the projector into our hardback copies, that we could return to later on for “revision.” But nobody asked the question as to why can’t we be given direct access to the slides to revise instead...

Because the system conflates motion with mastery.

Chapters “read,” thousands of words of linear notes written, 4-6 hours of studying completed after school and not a second less. None of this focuses on the knowledge that is ultimately being built. It focuses on the work you do to feel like knowledge is being built. You can spend an hour “reading” a textbook, but that hour in isolation does not mean you have anything made to show for it.

This is why I hate second brains for knowledge acquisition. They externalize what must be happening internally inside your own brain and not on a screen.

You cannot outsource tacit knowledge to a note-taking app. The knowledge must live inside you. Not in your tools or software.

Michael Polanyi defined tacit knowledge as the things you know but cannot fully articulate. Think riding a bike or driving a car. Reading a room full of people, or thinking through a problem you’ve never seen before.

You can’t store tacit knowledge inside Notion, Obsidian, or Eden (no matter how much I love Eden...)

Here’s the profound idea as to why:

Compression is understanding.

The more you truly grasp a domain of knowledge or expertise, the fewer bits of information you need to represent it. A novice needs a thousand facts. A master needs a handful of principles that generate those facts from first principles.

Physicist David Deutsch thinks that a person who truly understands physics doesn’t know more facts. They know fewer, more powerful principles that generate the facts. And who are we to argue with him?

Mastery is about needing less before knowing more.

And here’s another profound idea that will sound backwards until you think about it:

The harder you have to work to remember something the less likely you need to be learning it.

Forgetting is not a failure of memory, but a biological judge of relevance.

Your brain is not broken. It’s correctly filtering information that does not serve your survival or your vision for the life you want to have.

This matters for 3 reasons:

(1) Forced relevance is fake relevance

If you have to force yourself to remember something, you’re fighting your own biology. The information isn’t connected to anything you care about. It has no roots. Isolated information gets weeded away, whereas connected knowledge develops roots and becomes immovable.

You can’t trick your brain into caring about anything. You can only choose to learn what you already care about. Interest cannot be faked. It can only be found inside the arena.

(2) This proves you’re not living life in the arena

In the arena, relevance is automatic.

You remember what keeps you alive. You remember what solves your problems. You remember what moves you toward your vision.

In the classroom, relevance is artificial.

You remember what’s on the test. You remember what the teacher said would be important. You remember what you need to pass - then you forget it the moment the exam is over. If you’re forcing yourself to remember, you’re still in the classroom, lecture hall, or examination centre. These are not real life.

The best way to learn is through doing in real life, inside the arena.

(3) The system conditions you to confuse effort with learning

If you’re working hard to remember, you will always feel like you’re learning. The hours of struggle feel productive and meaningful.

But you’re not learning. You are building a library that will collapse in that moment the external pressure of teachers, lecturers, and formal education telling you what to do, disappears. This is why most people, older generations especially, think of education as something that can be finished. There isn’t a more dangerous idea than that one, if you want to stay stuck living with the same mind you had at 22 while you’re 65. An immature mind is a closed mind.

This is the illusion of mastery.

Motion with no progress. Effort with zero output. The feeling of knowledge without proof to show for it.

This reframes fucking EVERYTHING... which is good news!

You don’t need a better note-taking system.

You don’t need a Second Brain.

You don’t need to read 52 books a year.

Just stop hoarding information and start building a mind that can survive the unforgiving nature of reality.

Because physics won’t test you with an exam inside a classroom.

The profound self-education plan

The goal isn’t to lock yourself away from life studying 12 hours a day.

You want agency: the capacity to walk into any domain of life, identify what matters, learn it without permission, and build something that didn’t exist before.

This isn’t so much a curriculum but a calibration tool. Principles that compound with across time.

I want you to carefully consider this analogy that makes this entire plan work:

Imagine someone who wants to learn guitar.

The Archivist, struggling to play a C chord, buys an 8-hour course on music theory in response to their bottleneck. They study scales, chord progressions, and the history of the instrument. After a month, they know everything about guitar… but still struggle to play the C chord.

The Architect does something different. They hit the same wall immediately - they can’t play the C chord. So they look up the C chord. They learn it. They try to play it in a song. Now they hit a wall again, this time with the G chord. They look that up. They learn it… and so on.

True story btw, the G chord was the bane of my existence when I first started playing!

After a month, the Architect can play 4 songs and knows 12 chords. They learned less than the Archivist, but they can do more.

This is the entire philosophy inside one analogy.

You don’t learn, then build. You build, then learn only what you need, only when you need it.

Here’s how:

1) Let interest guide you

Most self-education advice starts with goals.

I think that’s backwards.

Goals are logical. They come from your conscious mind. They’re often borrowed - things you think you SHOULD want because someone else wanted them.

Fascination is biological. It has more depth than logic. It’s your subconscious telling you where your leverage lies.

If it entertains you now but will bore you someday, it’s a distraction. Keep looking.

- Naval

I love the idea that you don’t have your interests, your interests have you.

Interest is the ultimate form of leverage in life. Stop asking what book should I read or what course should I buy. Hear the signal that already exists coming from your own heart and soul - what can I not stop thinking about 24/7?

Your fascinations are not random. They are signal. Follow them.

Interest is the best leverage you have in achieving anything you want in life. They are a compass toward potential. Becoming who you could and should be.

2) Define what you’re building

Fascination without direction is just curiosity. Curiosity is truly beautiful, yes, but it doesn’t build anything alone.

You need a vision. Not a 10-year plan. Not a mission statement. Just an answer to one question:

What do I want to exist in the world that doesn’t yet exist yet?

A newsletter. A business. A body of work. A skill that solves a problem plaguing your everyday life. A way to help people 1-3 steps behind you.

The vision is your compression function. It tells you what matters, what connects, and what can be discarded. It filters signal from noise, busy work from productive work that moves needles and pulls levers.

Without it, every piece of information feels equally important. And in trying to learn (or do) everything, you will always achieve nothing.

Full digesting this profound idea will make you realize something harrowing. 98% of what you consume and do is just noise and maintenance work.

Stop learning everything and start learning what’s needed.

3) Choose one project

A project is not a goal. A goal is abstract.

A project is concrete, a real physical thing or outcome.

“Get healthier” is a goal. Getting your first win at a Grappling Industries jiu-jitsu competition is a project.

“Learn marketing” is a goal. Writing and publishing 4 newsletters this month is a project.

See the difference?

A project does 3 things that a goal cannot:

1. It creates stakes - Failure becomes visible when you’re building something real.

2. It creates feedback - Reality tells you what works and what doesn’t. You can’t get this from a textbook, and only an immature mind can deny objective feedback.

3. It creates context - Your brain now has a filter for relevance, like we’ve said. When you read, watch, or listen, your subconscious flags what’s relevant to the project and discards the rest. This is why you remember things that connect to your interests and hobbies and forget things that don’t.

Deliberate practice - living in the arena - requires a project. Non-negotiable.

You cannot deliberately practice “learning.” You can only deliberately practice doing something specific.

Choose one project. Not three. One.

4) Hunt, don’t hoard

This is where most people get it wrong.

They think learning comes before building. So they consume. Courses. Books. Podcasts. Tutorials. They fill their minds with information they don’t need yet, for problems they haven’t encountered.

Flip it!

Start building. Hit a wall. Then go find the answer.

This is hunting.

You have a specific problem. You search for a specific solution. You find it. You apply it. You move onto the next problem.

Think consuming 8 hours of guitar theory before touching your white Fender Strat, versus learning the C chord only when your favorite song demands it.

Hunting is how you make forgetting work for you instead of against you. When you hunt for information in response to a real problem, the information sticks because it’s immediately fucking relevant. Your brain doesn’t prune it since it has roots!

Isolated information gets weeded away. Connected knowledge develops roots and becomes immovable.

5) Do 30-90 minutes of deep work daily

Not 4-8 hours like I was told in school.

Not when bloody inspiration strikes.

Not only on weekends.

30-90 minutes every day on ONE project.

What’s important is that you do the work daily. Physics says when you do it, doesn’t mean shit.

I write my newsletter first thing in the morning, before work if I’m in work that day. 1-2 sections per day. 60-90 minutes. That’s all I need to move the needle… but done daily.

Physics doesn’t care about your schedule. It cares about your output. You don’t just deadlift 155kg one day because you’ve manifested your way to doing it. Your nervous system can handle that load because you’re used to training with heavy loads across months and years. You can because you do.

The same applies to your project. You either moved it forward today or you didn’t. There is no almost, or I don’t feel like it. Needle moves. Needle doesn’t move.

6) Compress what you learn

Don’t take notes on what you’ve now learnt.

Compress what you already DO know.

Here’s the difference.

Notes are a record of what someone else has said, while compression is a record of what you understood.

Take the Feynman technique: take a concept, explain it in simple language as if teaching a child, identify the gaps where your explanation breaks down, return to the source, and simplify further.

This is compression. You’re not adding information but removing information until only the principle remains. To create something that has weight, it lies not in adding new parts but in having no more parts to remove. That’s how you create something dense.

After every deep work session spend 5 minutes compressing what you learned into one sentence.

If you can’t, you didn’t understand it. Go back and try again.

If you’re an avid reader of my newsletters, first of all, thank you, and second - the knowledge must live inside your brain. Not in your notes. Not in your second brain. Not in a Notion database. Inside of you.

You are the second brain.

7) Iterate against reality

The final step is the one most people skip.

They learn. They build. They compress. And then they put it in the attic for storage.

Don’t do this.

I say… show your work.

Publish the newsletter. Show someone the project. Put the work into the world.

Reality is the only valid feedback loop. You don’t “pass” a self-education course. You iterate until your output works in the real world and gets you some value in exchange for it.

Don’t perfect in private. Iterate in public.

Every iteration teaches you more than a month of study. Because reality doesn’t grade on a curve. It tells you the bloody truth.

This is why I love markets. Your product sells or it doesn’t. Your newsletter is growing or it ain’t. You can’t bullshit up an excuse for why your “high-value content” isn’t being seen… or cared about. If it’s not attracting attention, and if that attention is not being turned into interest, you are the problem. Take responsibility for everything and stop blaming the algorithm. It will give you more control than those who keep wanting control, but outsource it at every excuse they are able to make.

The vision gives you direction. The project gives you stakes. Hunting gives you relevance. Deep work gives you output. Compression gives you understanding. Iteration gives you truth.

That’s the plan… and do it daily.

Important reminder!

The Profound Self-Education Guide is 50% off until February 21st, so get it cheaper while you can.

Here’s what you’ll get:

• The 4 principles of an autodidact (how to become profoundly self-educated)

• Vision-creation exercises (Ideal Day, Anti-Vision, So-That Test) to define what life you’re building

• The complete system structure: Daily Tasks → Weekly Targets → 3-Month Horizon

• How to define and approach your first project

• The iteration engine framework (Evaluate, Destroy, Rebuild) for permanent 1% improvements

• AI Self-Education Coach prompt that builds your personalized plan conversationally

• Deep work principles and scheduling techniques for 30-90 minutes of focused learning per day

This is the exact system I used to (learn how to) grow to 24,000+ newsletter subscribers in 10 months while working full-time.

You can read the first two sections here on my Substack for free.

The positive feedback on the product has been overwhelming in the greatest way possible. I am glad it has helped so many of you, truly.

And if you subscribe to my Substack you’ll get:

• Reading Bookmark 1 - Pre-reading checklist (improves comprehension)

• Reading Bookmark 2 - Encoding checklist (improves retention)

• Secret discount link to my paid tier

It’s all in the welcome email :)

If you’re not interested, no hard feelings.

Thank you for reading. I know your time and attention is very valuable.

You’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

It doesn’t help that the world is hardwired to make you consume, comply, and listen, not to think or question.

For the longest time I never questioned myself on what good thinking was.

While in 5th-6th year in secondary school, instead of studying V-shaped valleys and quadratic equations like I should’ve been, I’d spend every free second of time listening to philosophy and psychology lectures on Youtube.

The Big Five personality model, Nietzsche, Piaget, Dostoevsky - a lot of Jung - the problem of why most people suffer so much more than they have to.

And I thought I was thinking about all the profound ideas I was consuming...

...and herein lies the hidden problem.

What is good thinking?

Is it the ability to ask questions?

If so, is it the ability to ask good questions, or many questions?

Is it being able to give an irrefutable explanation of a theory, concept, or understanding?

Or is it about solving your own life problems and suffering less?

Introduce learning, reading, writing, and articulation, then things start getting overwhelming.

In reality, thinking is the most fundamental node or dot within a web that all these skills branch out of.

Thinking is the engine of an intellectually-curious life.

Writing is formalised thinking.

Reading and learning requires you to think about information in a certain light, to effectively encode it into memory.

Articulation requires embracing the unknown, the world of uncertainty, by not knowing what words might or might not slip out of your mouth.

This is why learning to think is the most valuable skill of this day and age for anyone.

Thinking determines what decisions you make, and therefore every outcome of your life. It is the most important life skill without question.

Personally, I think there are 3 camps of thinkers.

(1) The Emmets

Have you ever seen The Lego Movie?

If you haven’t, the main character Emmet has his head explored by the other characters of the film, to understand how he thinks, and if he can become a master builder (really just a synthesiser of ideas).

To their hilarious shock, his mind is empty.

Zero thoughts... or Lego bricks.

Other than a double-decker couch floating around - his own synthesised creation having merged a bunk bed and couch - there are no thoughts.

But he’s happier than everyone else around him.

These more minimalistic thinkers are often envied by the Dostoevsky’s.

(2) The Dostoevsky’s

I swear to you that to think too much is a disease, a real, actual disease. - Fyodor Dostoevsky

These types of people are the opposite of The Emmets - they can’t shut their minds up.

Their minds are never empty. There’s always ideas flowing. Both painful and awe-inspiring. Connections being made forming novel solutions to questions and problems.

But I think the duality of life is best shown with these two types of thinkers.

The “dumb” person wants nothing more than to feel “smart,” yet the “smart” person wants nothing more than to have a “dumb” person’s less active mind.

If the third group didn’t exist, I would agree with Dostoevsky saying that consciousness can be a disease that paralyzes your soul after that initial 5 seconds of not knowing who or what you are upon waking up every morning.

Let’s discuss what makes someone be apart of that third group - the profound thinkers - amongst many of their capacities, in 2540 words (not including the prompt).

No rambling in this one, folks!

The profound thinkers

This is you.

Yes, I am being serious.

The way you perceive the world is actually carefully constructed.

Everything you’ve ever read, experienced, and encoded builds a unique web of knowledge, and that web becomes the lens through which you make sense of reality. It shapes what you define as problems, what solutions you create, and what choices feel like the right ones to make.

This is called a knowledge schema, and your knowledge of the world inside your brain looks this image.

Now.

Cybernetics is often defined as the art of getting what you want. It comes from the Greek word kybernētēs which means “to steer.” You see what you aim at, and what you (decide to) aim at will be governed by your thinking.

What shapes your thinking?

The web of knowledge being constructed over the course of your lifetime.

Your web is more-or-less the captain that steers your thinking ship. That’s why any two people can walk into a sports complex to watch a jiu-jitsu competition, and one of them sees a podium they want to stand on, while the other sees something far more frightening...

You can probably relate to this, but my family always used to tell me when I was younger that “life is just your perspective on it.” But the discussion never went beyond the surface level of that profound idea.

Your unique knowledge is what creates your perspective on life, and ultimately, what you aim at, the decisions you make, and therefore what you shape yourself to value. You can’t love drinking mochas or lattes without ever having tried one. Same applies to jiu-jitsu, lifting weights, or reading a new book for the first time.

If you want to think better you need to build a better web. You need connected knowledge with lots of nodes, and connections that integrate those nodes into your thinking ship, to strengthen its hull against the bashing tides of life.

Here’s a profound idea which on the surface looks like a limiter, but is actually a source of strength:

Your web will always be somewhat incomplete, and you cannot see what you don’t know.

This is the power of epistemic humility.

It’s why I say your perspective is an offer to the world (and yourself), not a law that everybody (yourself included) must follow.

As much as it pains me to say it, there are only so many books, essays, and newsletters like this one you will consume in your lifetime. Which means there’s a limit to what your web of knowledge can look like.

Your perspective on life will always be incomplete, as will your knowledge. But there can still be power with a partial perspective.

Ken Wilber, the creator of the AQAL Model, once said this profound idea.

I don’t have to agree with everything you say, but I should attempt at least to understand it, for the opposite of mutual understanding is, quite simply, war.

- Ken Wilber

I would recommend researching the AQAL model if you would like to get your head melted in the best way imaginable.

So now, understanding that your perspective has its limits, it’s important to make this idea intuitive.

You are a web of knowledge, and everything you do and think about reinforces and stems from this incomplete web.

So.

Thinking is how you construct your own web of knowledge to help you combat the problems of life. The quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life.

But how can we build the best web of knowledge possible, despite its limits?

How to think like a profound thinker

Knowledge is what forges your life perspective. But how is knowledge built? How can you start building a web that helps you suffer less instead of suffer more?

Here’s how you can do it with profound thinking.

I - Encoding and retrieval practise

Information is integrated into memory by encoding.

Think of it like grabbing a piece of clay and shaping it into a giraffe. Weird example, I know. But you cannot shape raw material (information) into a unique creation (knowledge) without actively moulding it into something new.

To maximise encoding, use these 3 questions:

1. What does this mean in definition and in depth?

2. Where does this fit inside the big picture?

3. How does this connect to what I already know?

But encoding is just one side of the coin. You also need retrieval.

Most people focus on getting information in... and that’s it. That’s why they read a chapter of a book and forget it all within a week.

Profound thinkers understand the power of pulling information out from memory and using it practically to achieve the outcomes they.

The way you retrieve knowledge influences how your mind encodes it. If you’re preparing for a speech on The Myth of Sisyphus, recalling your knowledge by talking out loud will be more effective than re-reading linear notes. This is called the encoding specificity principle.

For a simple retrieval practise, open a blank page and write down everything you know about a topic. Don’t overcomplicate this. You just need to be writing, because if you’re writing, it means you’re thinking.

If you’re a creator, write a persuasive hook or body section.

If you’re trying to fight doomscrolling, just write some words down instead of reaching for your phone.

Give yourself the time to think and carefully pick the right words.

Do this for 5-10 minutes, 3-5 times per day spaced out between encoding/consuming sessions. For example, I like to read whenever I can, using my encoding questions to make sense of what I’m reading, and then I write in my notebook between reading bouts.

There’s a reason why I’ve started doing this. Writing by hand, I mean.

Writing by hand activates a different part of your brain than typing. It forces you to slow down your thinking, and therefore think with more impact. It requires you to be deliberate with choosing what words should and should not become written into existence.

You’ll be killing multiple birds with one stone using this method. I also find it helps keeping my mind grounded in our chaotic, noisy world.

II - Reading books correctly

Some books are to be skimmed. Others must be relished.

Skim often and digest rarely.

If you’re reading a book and most of what’s being said feels intuitive to you, congratulations. You don’t need to spend hours relearning what already rests safe inside your own intuitive knowledge.

I would also call this taste.

Be careful not to confuse the map with the terrain while reading.

Just because you’ve encoded Mediations by Marcus Aurelius well, and can write about it in your retrieval notebook upon command, does not mean you’re suddenly a stoic. You just know more about stoicism than you once did.

Like how watching lots of jiu-jitsu black belts rolling does not give you black belt rolling abilities. Trust me, I’ve tried and gotten smashed in the process.

Reading can give you information. But it’s your job to turn that information into knowledge, firstly, and then to embody that knowledge through everything you do.

Writing.

Speaking.

Doing.

Living life in the arena.

Action is what gets you to where you’re headed, not simply thinking about actions alone.

Read more

It only takes 1-2 months to build a meaningful life.

To start living a life you genuinely feel excited to wake up to.

To slingshot yourself out of the rut you’ve been stuck in.

To launch yourself into a completely new way of life.

Today, we will be discussing The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus…

…but not in the way you would expect.

I will not be doing a summary of the book. ChatGPT can do that for free in less than a second.

I want to give you something far more practical and rare. Something you can’t find anywhere else, something not even AI could give you.

I’ll be connecting The Myth of Sisyphus with philosophy, psychology, cool topics and profound thinkers, personal stories - lots of profound ideas, basically! - to give you a complete plan to start living a life you truly enjoy, namely, in response to absurdity.

If you don’t know what absurdity is, don’t worry. You’ve likely felt it, but you’ve just never named it before.

You can think of this as a life-reset course, so you don’t have to spend years figuring this all out like I did.

My goal is to make this the most practical, applicable, and valuable post you have ever read.

Feel free to save this post and return to it. It’s very idea dense.

Because this might just change your life.

And here’s the deeper issue behind why you might not agree with me yet.

Sorry if this doesn’t interest you, ignore it.

I didn’t plan on putting this here - this has been a passion project for me to write for a while now - but I don’t want you missing out if you haven’t heard.

If you want to teach yourself anything but don't know where to start - I created The Profound Self-Education Guide. It's a complete system for becoming an autodidact: vision, anti-vision, and project-based learning. No passive consumption. No tutorial hell. Just directed learning that compounds into real knowledge. It’s 50% off until February 21st.

(If you struggle with reading books but retaining nothing - I created A Guide To Profound Reading. It's a 3-step system for turning what you read into deep, connected knowledge that actually sticks. No highlighting. No note-taking graveyard. Just comprehension and retention.)

Note: A Guide To Profound Reading is included with the The Profound Self-Education Guide via lifetime access to my paid Substack tier.

I - Absurdity

A burden-free life is not possible, no matter how much you want one.

You’ve probably confronted absurdity at some point in your life, but you just didn’t have a name for it.

We can define absurdity as the conflict between the human heart’s need for certainty and meaning, in a universe that doesn’t seem to offer us either.

You know the age old story.

Walking to work one day, on the bus to college, or suddenly you’ve hit 30.

And it hits you.

This all seems a bit… repetitive.

Monday, wake up, coffee, one hour commute, work (procrastinate) for 4 hours, lunch, work (procrastinate) for 4 hours, one hour commute, home, dinner, too tired to do anything, couch, Netflix, brain-rot doomscrolling, junk food, feel like shit, sleep at 1am.

Tuesday, wake up, coffee, one hour commute... This is the loop of suffering. Because life is suffering. It’s probably the most fundamental truth there is.

But you don’t have to live your life like this.

You can wake up knowing what you're pushing toward. Commuting can be a time for profound thinking and learning, not scrolling to fill the “dead time” with poison. Work can fund your future work or build your skills. You can see a 9-5 (or some other variant) as a stepping stone into doing meaningful work. Your evenings can be for pushing your own rock - writing, lifting, learning, creating. And you can sleep at 11pm being tired from real effort; not exhausted from nothing.

The trajectory of most people’s lives is determined by what needles - or rocks - they move in their evenings.

If any at all…

There will always be hard days, but they’re hard in a direction you’ve chosen, and not one you haven’t.

I remember watching a Jordan Peterson clip (regardless of your opinion of him) when I was on my lunch break at work when I was 18, and it blew my fucking mind so hard that I had to screen record it. Here’s the profound idea:

You are going to develop a chronic illness at some point in your life, at least one, maybe two. And if it’s not you it’s going to be someone you love. So, what type of person do you want to be when that flood comes?

He ended by saying this:

When the flood comes, and it will, you want to be the person who built an ark.

My mam passed away from cancer when I was 12, after a 2 year battle with stomach cancer.

She was a fucking fighter, and that’s an understatement to say the least! She was, and always will be the strongest person I know. She always kept pushing a rock up the hill, even when the days were hardest, and the rock felt heavier than usual. And she never gave up.

Not once.

Losing a parent at that age definitely gives you a perspective. It was strange being told that I was the “oldest 14 year old” people had ever met. And in all honesty I don’t like talking about all this. I don’t want any sympathy in saying it either. But maybe you can relate to this in some way, because absurdity is a natural response to loss. Especially at a young age. At any age, really.

It crushed me like an avalanche, waking up the morning after the day she had passed.

I’ll never forget that feeling in my chest. I had just woken up, and that first 5 seconds after waking where you’re not fully conscious of anything - and everything feels blissful - it got me in a good mood. The summer sunlight was beaming through my bedroom door which was wide open, lighting up my red and blue Spider-Man themed bedroom that needed to be done up. My first thought upon waking was to run into my mam’s room and say good morning.

That was my first confrontation with absurdity.

It was also the same second that reality crushed me with a whole new rock to push.

My mam didn’t choose her rock.

It was dropped on her, but she pushed it anyway.

I’m telling that story because I’m trying to solve a problem that hits close to home.

It’s also why I’m not giving you a summary that AI can give you with a single sentence request.

Again, regardless of your opinion, I’ve always appreciated how Jordan Peterson lectures. He starts with a question - or a problem - he’s genuinely interested in solving, and he goes on adventure through the abstract world of profound ideas.

Synthesising.

Making connections to looks of theories, concepts, and explanations along the way.

So, we can define the goal of this newsletter as follows:

How can somebody build a meaningful life despite how hard life can be, no matter the circumstance?

We all have different problems. But I want to offer a solution anyone can apply.

Regardless of whether you’re having a bad day, because you failed your 3rd grade math test, or you’ve just come home from your parent’s funeral and you’re facing the void, not knowing what the coming weeks will fire at you. Nobody asks for any of this shit.

But I will say this.

If you don’t voluntarily choose a rock to push, life will give you a rock of its own choosing.

Your first profound action: If you’re serious about this more than most, take out a pen and paper and write down one thing you know you should be doing that you’re not.

Don’t think too deeply about it yet, just write it down for now.

It will be important later on. All you need is one sentence.

II - Illusion

O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible. - Pindar

The human heart will always seek comfort trying to live a painless life. But that’s impossible, so we reach for illusion instead.

The illusions are devouring us in our 21st century.

I don’t think this is a problem with willpower, because that’s finite. But what isn’t finite is desire.

Unfulfilled desire creates an infinite void.

The void inside us all demands to be filled, and if we don’t fill it deliberately then something else will.

The founder of logotherapy, Viktor Frankl, influenced by his experiences in Nazi concentration camps, believed that when the human spirit gets blocked or repressed, one experiences what he called existential vacuum.

An emptiness that gnaws at you from the inside like a wild dog trying to escape a cage.

Jung saw the same (profound) idea from his perspective:

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. - Carl G. Jung

When your life force has no outlet, it can turn against you.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

If there’s an empty space, nature will fill it with something.

And if you don’t fill it with purpose, it gets filled with poison.

Scrolling, porn, resentment, bitterness, cynicism; whatever is closest and easiest.

Jung called it “the neurosis of our time.”

Camus called it “an absurd sensitivity that can be found widespread in the age.”

In The Idiot, Dostoevsky says it’s “better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool’s paradise.”

“Mental illness” is to illness as what “social science” is to science. - Naval

We are experiencing widespread meaninglessness disguised as mental illness.

Instead of confronting this void, we seek relief with illusions. And when you don’t choose your own rock, your energy gets attached to rocks you never dreamed of pushing. Let me show you what this actually looks like.

Brace yourself.

It starts with loneliness.

When you’re lonely you reach for pornography. Not because your mind is broken, but because your brain is desperate for connection and will settle for a simulation when the real thing feels out of reach.

The lonelier you feel, the more you reach.

The more you reach, the more isolated you become.

Loneliness → escapism → deepened isolation → intensified loneliness → escapism…

It’s a recursive loop.

That’s only the first loop.

Next comes meaninglessness.

When your weeks feel pointless, you blow half your week’s wage in a nightclub just to have “fun.” To say fuck you to the six other days of the week that made you miserable.

You call it fun, but it only feels like fun because it’s energy looking for an outlet.

This is avoidance coping - a short-term strategy for changing your behaviour to avoid thinking about, feeling, or doing hard things.

Here’s a profound idea that Nietzsche said in Beyond Good and Evil:

The strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much ‘truth’ he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.

You might think you’re revolting against the absurd by doing meaningless work on your weekdays and partying in response on your weekends. But you’re numbing yourself on a Saturday night instead of confronting the problems plaguing your life from Monday-Sunday.

Reality hurts, but it makes you capable of seeing what’s hurting you and how to overcome it.

Now it gets worse.

When you’re exhausted, you SCROLL.

You tell yourself you’re taking a break.

But scrolling isn’t rest.

It is cognitive exhaustion pretending as rest.

I know what you’re thinking. Reading this, you are technically scrolling right now. But I want you to gain something greater than the efforts you’ve put into reading this. Not to sound like a guru, because I’m not one. I’m 22. What the fuck do I know. But if all it took was 30 minutes to change the entire trajectory of your life, would you take it?

Here’s a profound idea:

People who scroll for more than two hours a day show a 35% drop in prefrontal cortex activity.

The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that controls impulse and focus. Meaning, the one resource you need to fight the doomscrolling epidemic is the exact resource doomscrolling destroys. Your mind is the only weapon that doesn’t need a holster, and brain-rot limits your rounds of ammunition against brain-rot itself.

But here’s where shits gets insidious.

Social media is hardwired to hijack your dopaminergic pathways. You know, the same reward circuits activated by cocaine. Platforms like Snapchat use mechanisms like streaks to keep your brain hooked, like a slot machine you carry in your pocket.

Here’s the hairy part.

Your brain doesn’t feel pleasure from getting a like or a follow, it feels pleasure from the anticipation of getting one within the realm of uncertainty.

So if you want to desensitise your reward system, reduce your baseline motivation, and feel constant apathy, stimulate the fuck out of your mind with socials.

That’s why you no longer feel excited about the small things anymore.

That’s why you’ve lost that child-like interest and curiosity towards your life that made everything feel electric to experience.

And we let social media shape everything about who we are because all we want is validation. We’d rather get our validation from an algorithm than from real fucking humans that live in the real world - real life is lived offline.

We outsource our judgments to algorithms (and machines…) because we’ve forgotten how to judge for ourselves.

Of course, it doesn’t stop at the digital realm.

When we think of luxuries we think of McLarens and Rolexes. But there’s a difference between being rich and being wealthy.

This comes from a famous study on the hedonic treadmill, which I think will completely rewire how you think about success:

People who win the lottery and people who become paraplegic both return to baseline happiness within two years.

We adapt to the things we buy, and return back to baseline happiness shortly after purchasing them. It’s how our dopamine systems are designed to work. I read this in Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anna Lembke in my first year of college (I tried memorising the whole book line by line haha)

Here’s a profound idea that stuck with me, and it will likely stick with you too:

For every bit of pleasure you feel, you will feel the same amount in pain before returning to baseline levels of dopamine.

To sum:

The void doesn’t care what you fill it with.

Porn.

Parties.

Scrolling.

Validation.

Possessions.

It swallows them all and asks for more because none of them were ever meant to fill it.

It’s easy to revolt against your own life when you don’t have a life to begin with, and that’s why most people seek illusion instead of actually embracing life and its limits.

As a result we become weak.

Resentful.

Bitter.

Cynical.

If there are three emotional states to avoid in life at all costs, it’s those three. That’s my opinion, anyways.

Listen.

I love going out drinking with the lads once or twice a month and getting buckled. I love looking at seal memes, and sending Instagram carousels of otters to my girlfriend. And I love getting a Dominos on a Friday with the lads, one of them more or less owning the pizza cutter in my house at this point - it’s basically his (love you Eric).

I’m talking about this.

The point is recognising the difference between choosing pleasure as part of a meaningful life and escaping into pleasure to avoid confronting meaninglessness.

Here’s our second profound action for today:

Define one escape you use when stressed, bored, or sad.

Write it down, and write down what you could do for 1-5 minutes instead that would actually push your rock forward.

I say so little time because time doesn't matter. It's the way you act and move a needle in that time that does.

And this is the craziest part about all this that nobody fucking cares about...

Everything is amazing now and nobody is happy.

You have infinite leverage with AI. Access to all known information. You’re not like Nietzsche or Dostoevsky who were limited by the books they could afford and find. You don’t need to work day and night in factories like how it was in the Industrial Revolution. You can start a newsletter, share your creations, learn marketing, and earn a side-hustle/passive income writing essays like this fucking one.

More tools.

More access.

More abundance than any generation in human history - and meaninglessness is sky-high.

Why?

Because we abuse the abundance. Our minds are hardwired to seek the treat.

We use infinite leverage to scroll infinitely. We use access to all known information to watch strangers dance for fifteen seconds at a time. We use freedom from factory labor to sit in fluorescent offices doing work that makes us feel nothing, messing up our circadian rhythms in the process too.

Most people choose illusion because it’s easier than revolt. But reality can only be tolerated by a select few. And those select few are the ones who reap the rewards most.

You can’t expect to live a meaningful life when all you’re doing is deluding yourself from living the one you have, and you can’t live a meaningful life when you’re trying to avoid the only life you do have.

Illusion is corrosive.

It slowly erodes the chances you have at this one life. It doesn’t sculpt you into the statue you want to become - it breaks the marble down into the dirt beneath you.

Every moment spent in illusion is a moment not spent building an Ark.

Every escape is a choice against meaning.

Every distraction is a vote for fragility.

The point isn’t to make it through. The point is to live.

The question isn’t really whether life is absurd, but what rock are you currently pushing, and which rock do you really want to spend your one life pushing? Because there’s a difference between pushing in circles and pushing upward. And that difference changes it all.

III - Progressive overload of the soul

Having stuff isn’t fun. Getting stuff is fun. - Jimmy Carr

We now turn to the final chapter of Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus.

To the menial thinker, the story of Sisyphus looks like a tragedy.

But you shouldn’t be quick to call Sisyphus a victim of his circumstances.

Camus calls him the absurd hero.

Why?

He’s doing the same thing over and over for eternity with no apparent benefit? Like running around in a circle.

I think this is why hell is conceived as a circle, or as a series of circles in Dante’s The Inferno.

Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly while always expecting a different result upon every attempt. Naval defines iteration - a profound idea I never shut up talking about - as a learning loop. You try to achieve something, you see what physics, free markets, and mother nature have to say, and you reflect on that feedback and try achieve it with more clarity and knowledge this time around.

You hunt like a lion, you rest, and reflect before you hunt again tomorrow at dawn.

Me myself? I firmly believe that happiness is found in progress. That most people don’t lack meaning, they simply lack movement towards something worth their efforts. They have no rock to push, or a rock that’s theirs to push.

I’m going to offer a question, then:

What if meaning is to be found in a progress loop?

If all you’re doing is pushing the same rock day-in and day-out, always expecting your life to change... simple logic will tell you that this is hell. You’re moving around in a circle.

I have a pretty good analogy to make here, and it’s one you might be familiar with.

Lifting weights in the gym looks like torture.

Lifting a barbell off the floor only to repeat it 11 more times, only to come back and do it all again on Thursday coming.

Here’s one thing that never gets discussed about Sisyphus:

Progressive overload gives the push a purpose.

That’s what distinguishes exercise from training. Simply moving around a gym randomly from exercise to exercise, vs adding weight to the bar with intention and a vision to achieve.

It’s torture vs training.

This turns the circle of hell into an upward spiral of progress:

Week 1 - You do random exercises because you’re clueless

Week 2 - You bought a beginner’s program to follow

Week 3 - You add 2.5kg to all your exercises

Week 4 - You add 2.5kg to all your exercises

...

Week 12 - You’ve added 8kg of muscle and lost 10kg of fat, and never want to lift less than two session per week ever again

The rock is the same, but the pusher gets transformed on every repetition, giving the endless pushing a purpose. You keep going to the gym twice per week, the exercises remain the same, but the load gets heavier because your back has gotten stronger, and you reap the rewards of bearing a heavier load than most - an epic physique.

But here’s where it gets interesting.

The human psyche actually does develop in a spiral, not a circle.

Human development is non-linear and dynamic. Everyone across the global population is at a different stage of development in terms of their levels of awareness. And since we are all at different stages of development in terms of our thinking - this is really a model of awareness about your own thinking - it means we all encounter problems differently depending on our level of development.

This is why progress moves in a spiral, not a circle.

You can encounter the same problem across years, months - even every Sunday for example - and be at a different stage of development upon encountering it.

Let me give you an example.

• A baby can’t open a chocolate bar because it doesn’t know what a chocolate bar is, or that it can be opened and/or consumed

• A child cries when they can’t open a chocolate bar and thinks to go to their parents

• A teenager can’t open a chocolate bar so they use a scissors

• An adult doesn’t want to eat the chocolate bar because they know it will make their stomach feel sick

Same problem, but four different responses based on four different levels of awareness.

This is why the problem of meaninglessness is so hard to solve practically.

We are all at different stages of development, meaning we all see and approach the world differently with our own individual thinking. My mind is going to approach this problem very differently than your unique mind. Same with the mind’s of my friends, and of your family. No two souls will read this newsletter the same way, and take the same two ideas from it, and create the same understanding of what to do once they’ve finished reading it. This is one thing that makes your mind incredibly unique.

Yes, I am talking to you.

Here’s the profound idea as to why.

You see what you aim at.

• Aim at nothing and you’ll see nothing worth pursuing.

• Aim at comfort and you’ll see threats everywhere.

• Aim at growth and you’ll see opportunities all around you.

This is why two people can face the same problem and respond completely differently.

Now.

Let me give you the two loops that determine everything.

Spiral of progress

You act → make a mistake → reflect on data → iterate and act again

Loop of suffering

Safety → predictable → stagnation → death of meaning → moving in a circle → hell

Here’s another visual to explain the spiral of progress:

Life is going to throw rocks at your feet and force you to push them. Death, sickness, cancer; you understand this by now. The weight of the rocks will never get any lighter. Ever. If anything they’ll get heavier the longer you are alive. And when that comes, you want to be the person who built an Ark, who has the muscles ready to push big rocks when they come crashing down.

The rocks will never get lighter, but your back can get stronger.

Now, I know what some of you are asking.

“Craig, if progress is the answer, then why does starting feel so impossible?”

This is a BIG problem for most people, and we finally have an answer as to why.

Starting feels hopeless when you can't see where you are going. When you’re at an early stage of development, the path forward looks like a fog. You don’t have enough clarity to see what your next step should be, and that’s because you feel safe and accustomed to moving in a circle. Your mind almost wants you to keep moving in a circle because that’s all it’s ever known - safety.

Clarity doesn’t come before action, it comes from action. You don’t think your way into a new way of acting. You act your way into a new way of thinking.

It takes about 1-2 months of chaos, confusion, and feeling like you’re on the verge of throwing it all away for the right amount of vision to form where you have absolute clarity and launch into a new way of life.

The first step doesn’t need to be the right step, it just needs to be a step, because that’s what generates the data you need to take the next one.

Think of the following examples:

• Writing 500-1000 words about your interests every morning, even if you don’t know how to write persuasively yet

• Doing one set of squats in the gym and then leaving after that one set

• Sending one message to someone you’ve been meaning to talk to for months

• Reading one page of a book - even one paragraph - and thinking about it as deeply as possible

This is the part that sounds like bullshit until you’ve lived it.

You have to fake movement until you become someone who wants to move.

You have to fake bravery until you feel it.

You have to fake discipline until you build it.

You have to fake curiosity until you fucking find it.

This is an identity shift.

Not waiting until you feel like the person who can do hard things, but acting like that person until the feeling catches up. The high-quality actions must come first if you expect a high-quality identity to forge.

Let me give you a personal example.

3 months after I started lifting weights, the results shocked the life out of me.

I was 16, and I was no longer tired walking up the two flights of stairs in my house. I live in my attic, so yes, two flights - I know that scares some people. I stopped feeling like the skinny kid anymore because I had packed on some mass, and I was getting tons of compliments from the lads at school. And I stopped playing video game instantly. Life seemed like a better video game to play instead.

What about you profound thinkers? I haven’t forgotten about you:

• The reader who reads one page a day and thinks about it deeply - in a year, that’s 365 pages of real understanding

• The writer who writes 500 words per day - a 5,000-word essay done in 10 days, submitted a month early (like what I did in college!)

• The person who does 20 minutes of focused work on their side project daily- in 60 days, they’ve put in 20 hours of real progress

All of this creates tolerance.

By engaging in this progress loop you build tolerance for the weight. Not because the weight gets lighter, it never fucking will. But your capacity to bear it increases.

You don’t try to make an anxious person less anxious, you make them braver. Tolerance, learning, and personal development compound through these loops. You develop a coat of armour against absurdity by doing this. By becoming the kind of person who can push the rocks voluntarily while trying to be happy.

Camus said that one must imagine Sisyphus happy.

I say, we should imagine Sisyphus trying to be happy, because he’s all in no matter what. He’d might as well make that choice.

If you lack meaning, you lack movement. Happiness isn’t a place. It’s the feeling of your feet moving towards somewhere new. So, how can we start to develop our backs muscles, then? To do this, it’s important to understand how meaning is built through taking voluntary responsibility. This is what I call the trinity of meaning.

IV - The trinity of meaning

Here’s how to build a meaningful life.

If meaning, purpose, and happiness are to be found in progress, and using the Sisyphus myth as our unique mechanism, let’s outline the framework as follows.

The rock is objective responsibility.

The push is subjective effort.

The offer to help other people 1-3 mountains behind you push their rocks is collective value.

First, choose your mountain

Before you pick a rock, you need a mountain.

This is your vision to work towards.

Ask yourself this:

What life would make your existence worth suffering for?

What would you be proud to have built when the flood does come?

A meaningful life, we can say, has at least three pillars:

• Work that challenges and fulfils you - a career, freelance creative work, a job that has you excited to slingshot out of bed each morning

• Financial control - not being ruled by desire; 3-4 days of meal prep is cheaper than one meal at McDonalds; every time you don’t spend money you save it

• Relationships you’ve deliberately built - starting with yourself; instead of asking “how can I find the one,” ask “how can I make myself into the best possible partner?”

The reason I say these three pillars is because they are the 3 big markets of health, wealth, and relationships. That’s where value exchange happens most in free markets because that’s what everybody desires and pays money for improving.

Nobody is perfect, so you shouldn’t expect the way you should live your life to be either. But these are better rocks to be pushing than none. These are good things, because they are better than the alternatives of being broke, having vices control your bank account, being isolated and alone, and being covered in Cheeto dust working a job you hate for 30 years while living in your parent’s spare room.

Second, pick your rock

Your rock should have three qualities in being the right one to push, for you, right now:

1. It scares you slightly - you’re not sure you can do it, but you’re curious

2. You can push it for 20-30 minutes without dying - it’s challenging but not crushing

3. Pushing it makes you stronger - it builds a skill or capacity you want

Here are some examples across a few domains that most people deem as being meaningful:

• Health - 20 minutes of lifting, a 10-minute walk, meal prepping for 3 days

• Creative work - Writing 500 words, reading 1 page deeply, 20 minutes on your side project

• Career - Sending one important email, applying for 3 new positions, 20 minutes learning a new skill

• Relationships - Sending one message to someone you’ve been avoiding, 10 minutes of genuine listening, writing down what you actually want in a partner, or better, how you can be a better partner that other people would want to be with in the first place

Do 1-3 of these needle-moving tasks per day. Look at the examples above to see what I mean. See how they are measurable and lever moving? Not “write for an hour",” but “write 500 words in 30 minutes.” See the difference?

Your next profound action: Pick your rock using the three qualities above.

Write it down. Set a timer for 20 minutes and push it.

That’s it, that’s the whole system put as simply as I can.

Thirdly, at last, we have the push

You’ve given yourself something to aim at with choosing a rock. But this is where the difficulty is, and paradoxically, where all the joy comes from.

Meaning is found in friction. It’s found in the push to keep on fighting even if you’re losing the round no matter what.

If that’s in a jiu-jitsu competition, it might be giving up towards the end, but making it as hard as possible for your opponent to win in those final seconds. Or a 6am start before a 10-10 shift at a job that swallows your days, preventing you from being in places and doing work that makes you happy; but you know you need the money, and your newsletter won’t write itself beyond 10am.

Once you start pushing towards something you want to achieve, likely a vision of some kind, you need iteration. I don’t believe in the whole “it takes 10,000 hours to become a genius” thing. I think it takes 10,000 iterations. It takes 10,000 cycles of the learning loop, that is, iteration

You delay taking action because you think you need to learn more first. But the real learning only begins once you start doing. - Jude Fredman

Failure is feedback for iteration.

You try, physics has something to say, you adjust. The only true failure is not starting or not reflecting at all.

Pick your aim, your rock, and a mountain to climb.

You don’t need to spend hours and hours every single day fixing your life. You need 1% improvements which are permanent, but done daily. For example, if I understand intuitively how to write hooks at the start of my newsletters, that’s done. Any other improvement is a micro-detail. Understanding the big picture of a problem or topic is HUGE. Once you know how to write at least not a terrible hook, if it’s intuitive, that problem stays solved forever. Same with outlining, editing, persuasion, flow.

In all honesty, I think once you start this journey you won’t be able to unsee what you’ve seen.

You’ll feel different from people who are still trapped in illusion. You might feel isolated for a while, and that’s the cost of awareness, or “being a smart person” as everyone loves to say about themselves online.

Yes, you might miss some nights out. Yes, some people won’t understand why you’re being so locked in. But you’ll find new people climbing their own mountains. They’re often quieter, harder to find, but worth the search. And the people who matter will respect your pursuit, even if they don’t understand it… yet.

This is the price you pay to live a life like nobody else.

I really like the profound idea that you should never listen to somebody telling you how to live your life, if they’re not living the type of life you want to live yourself.

I’m not saying you should become a monk, or go “monk mode.” I still go out with the lads once or twice a month and get buckled. I love looking at seal memes and sending Instagram carousels of otters to my girlfriend. And I love getting a Domino’s on Fridays with the lads. The point is recognising the difference between choosing pleasure as part of a meaningful life and escaping into pleasure to avoid confronting meaninglessness - like we have said.

Like how the gym doesn’t just give you muscles; it gives you 45 minutes of being fully alive, fucking shit up with the weights, and knowing you’re becoming someone who can push bigger rocks quite literally. And it gives you a chance to listen to Three Days Grace, Breaking Benjamin, and Linkin Park, and who doesn’t want that?

Your life will become a better video game to play if you pick a rock to push yourself.

We’ve covered a lot of ground, so I want to help you out with understanding whether this is working for you or not at any given time.

You’ll know this is working when:

1. You catch yourself looking forward to your rock-pushing time. Not dreading it, not forcing it, but actually wanting it. Interest is the ultimate form of leverage you have in life. If it feels like fun, and not work, it’s working!

2. You start saying no to things without guilt. The party you don’t want to go to, the scroll session you don’t need, the “opportunity” that’s actually a distraction. If it doesn’t move you closer to your vision, it’s a distraction

3. You notice you’re handling stress better. The same shit still happens but it doesn’t crush you like it used to. You’ve built tolerance

4. You feel a quiet confidence you can’t quite explain...

You don’t need a radical transformation, you need subtle wins that compound and connect to one another, that integrate to form a way of life you truly want to experience daily.

• Your first week will feel like shit. Total chaos and confusion. You’ll feel like you’re doing it wrong, but you’re not. Everything is data for iteration next week

• After your first month things will feel better. You’ll have some small wins and the fog will start to lift. And you’ll finally have days where you actually want to push your rock

• After two months, your vision will have mostly formed. You can see where you’re going now. The 1-2 month mark is when you know this is working. Your improved strength will show for it too

• From months 3-6, there’s been a measurable transformation. People start noticing, you start noticing, and the identity shift has taken hold. Your vision is always iterating as you are, but you have a direction, which is the main thing

• Month 12 and beyond, you’re unrecognisable compared to who you once were. You’re not a different person, you’re just who you were always meant to be

The 1-2 month mark is when the fog lifts. That’s when you know it’s working.

I thought I would include a little timeline like this because this is what I’ve experienced in my own life. I think I’m currently going through another identity shift, and have been for about a month or two now, maybe three.

But to conclude my waffling, and to return to Camus’ words, you want an indifferent smile to life. By accepting the weight of the rock you become free of it. It will no longer crushes you but gives you ample opportunity to push. And I think there is no greater thing to strive towards than that.

To stand at the bottom of a mountain of your own choosing, preparing to push your 978th rock, and cracking a damn smile knowing this will be just beyond your zone of current proximal development.

It’s not an easy pursuit, but it is yours. So make sure it’s your own.

I appreciate your time and attention, I know it’s very valuable.

Hopefully you gained something greater than the time you put into reading this.

You’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

If you have any requests for a newsletter you’d like me to write (free or paid), tell me with this button. If not, no hard feelings:

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Most of your learning is fucking pointless.

And everything you think is making you smarter, is actively holding you back.

Nobody tells you highlighting books is a waste of time.

Writing 70,000 words of notes in your second brain only to let them gather dust, never to be seen again.

Podcasts on walks, or while driving to work in the morning, that go in one ear and out the other.

It’s all mental masturbation making your ego happy.

Here’s what I think actually works.

Waking up excited to create.

Building something that matters.

Learning by solving real problems (and not collecting information you’ll never use).

This is the life I’ve built in the last 8 months, and it's the life this newsletter will show you how to build too.

Because in the last 8 months I’ve taken the opposite approach in learning how to grow my newsletter to over 21,000 subscribers. And I say learning, because I did. I had to learn all this by scratch.

Not by spending 2 hours a day watching YouTube tutorials on “how to write,” or “how to start a personal brand.” But by solving problems in real time. Learning by doing. By finding what I need in the moment to overcome an obstacle, applying what I just learned, and moving on to my next problem stopping me from progress.

This is what I call outcome-based learning, and it’s why I think most self-education plans fail.

Most learning plans teach you to collect information, they don’t teach you to use it for achieving something great.

Here’s a profound idea:

The real test of learning isn’t what you know, but what changes.

Naval says that intelligence is getting what you want out of life.

Self-education is the vessel that takes you there, that builds this type of intelligence.

If your learning isn’t producing results, like better creative outputs, exams being passed, having meaningful work you actually want to do by jumping out of bed each morning like a hyper-active child, it’s just intellectual masturbation.

You are wasting your fucking time.

Sorry, I get quite passionate about this.

If unfinished books, forgotten ideas, no measurable outcomes sounds like you, keep reading. We have some profound ideas to discuss.

You can watch the video version of this newsletter here:

Life is lived on the battlefield, not a second brain

A little over a year ago, I spent 3 months writing 70,000 words worth of linear notes inside of Obsidian.

It was from only 3 books:

• The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russel

• The Republic by Plato

• The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle

I retained almost none of it, and the breaking point came three months in.

I sat down to write an essay using all that “knowledge.” I opened Obsidian, scrolled through 70,000 words of notes, and realized I couldn’t remember a single useful insight without reading it again. I couldn’t write without looking at my notes meticulously.

I’d spent hundreds of hours building a graveyard and not a brain.

(If you struggle with this too - reading books but retaining nothing - I built A Guide To Profound Reading. It's a 3-step system for turning what you read into deep, connected knowledge that actually sticks. No highlighting. No note-taking graveyard. Just comprehension and retention.)

That was my “aha” moment with all this.

If I have to re-read my notes to use them, I never learned them in the first place. I just moved information from a book to a hard drive. The knowledge never entered my head.

So I deleted all of it :)

…and started over with a different question:

What if I only learned things I could use immediately?

Also.

Should I really have been putting all that time into my thesis project? For sure… but we’re not here to discuss that!

The problem I have with second brains is that we confuse storing information with building real knowledge.

Knowledge lives inside the brain. Knowledge is built inside the brain.

Not on a computer.

Not on a Notion or an Obsidian database.

Not in a commonplace or compendium notebook.

Because if you have to look something up to use it, you haven’t learned it. You stored it somewhere outside your brain, outside your web of knowledge.

And if you’re doing this in the first place, the thing you’re filing away is likely not worth becoming high-quality knowledge.

If you have to store and track a piece of information, it’s likely a waste of your fucking time.

I understand that second brains can work.

But most people use them as storage boxes and not battlefields. They offload the learning process onto a system and mistake organization for understanding. The notes pile up. The tags multiply. The knowledge never compounds because it was never in their head to begin with.

If you use a second brain for storage, you are limiting how efficiently you can learn.

I still use a second brain (Eden) but not for storing notes.

I use it for curating high-signal ideas and sources that could fill gaps in my knowledge. Questioning my own ideas and building prompts with AI. Writing and publishing my 1-2 newsletters per week. The vital distinction is that I’m not archiving information, I’m using it to create. If the information is worth knowing, I’ll encode it and use retrieval practice. I won’t write a bloody note document to “learn it.” That’s not how the brain likes to learn.

The mind is not a vault, it’s a garden. It’s a web of knowledge. And I use my second brain not for storage but for building the web inside my head through execution.

Storage is passive, execution is learning.

This connects to a deeper problem.

Most learning systems are linear.

Courses, curriculums, books with personal note-taking system, they train you to move from start to finish like a train on a track.

But knowledge isn’t linear, it’s a web. It’s called a schema, which looks like this:

I went through 5th and 6th year in school copying and pasting linear notes from a projector to my hardback copy, never to look at 90% of those notes again.

Because I had a book. I even had access to the slides on my computer.

Just because you’re writing notes on a page, doesn’t mean you’re building new knowledge inside your head.

It’s busy work. Not productive work.

I want you to think of a spider’s web.

A spider can’t build a web that looks like a straight line. It would collapse without having a structure. It needs connections, anchor points, tension between lever-moving ideas. That’s how knowledge works. Each new concept gains strength from what it’s connected to. Isolated notes in a second brain are threads with nothing to hold onto, which get dumbed into a garbage bin by your first brain.

Linear storage, non-linear knowledge. That’s the mismatch preventing most people from becoming profound thinkers… and it’s my mission to change that!

So, how do you build knowledge that actually compounds?

How unique knowledge is built

This is something that still blows my mind.

Fundamentally, everything is just information.

Books.

Courses.

Conversations.

Lectures.

Slides.

AI outputs.

Web pages.

You get the point.

The difference between a life-changing insight and a forgotten fact is not the source, it’s what you do with multiple sources.

I want to show you my own understanding of how knowledge is built inside the brain, and once you see this, you’ll understand straight away why most learning systems are designed backwards.

Think of your brain like a construction site, and you’re building a house maybe. Maybe a Minecraft house. Information arrives like raw materials. You have your wood, your stone, your glass. But you can’t just dump them in a pile (or in a chest) and call it a house. You need to build something, you need to do something with the materials.

1) Information enters working memory

Your working memory is your workbench. It’s where you process the raw materials. But the issue is that your workbench is tiny. It can only hold 7 (plus or minus 2) things at once before they fall off the bench... and disappear forever.

This is why you forget podcasts the moment they end. The information hit your workbench and it fell off before you could do anything with it.

2) Encoding information from working memory into long-term memory (integration)

To move information from the workbench (working memory) into permanent storage (long-term memory), you have to integrate it with the structure you’ve already built.

You do this through three types of encoding:

1. Elaborative encoding - Connecting new information to prior knowledge. Connecting new ideas to what you know about philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, your favorite mocha you drink every morning etc.

2. Organizational encoding - Chunking information into mental models, frameworks, schemas. Building the spider’s web we talked about earlier, like a mind map but inside the brain.

3. Semantic encoding - Understanding the meaning of concepts inside the big picture, not just memorizing words. Think reading between the lines, as they say.

I always love keeping you guys up to date with what I’m currently learning about. I see my newsletter as myself learning in public, and sharing my solutions to my past/present/future problems.

I’ve been learning about business and marketing. Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz, the levels of customer awareness (this is blowing my mind), market sophistication, Alex Hormozi’s $100M Offers. I haven’t been taking notes on every detail, like we’ve said. I’ve been looking for how these concepts connect. How they fit into my overall understanding, my spider’s web of business.

Encoding is integration, and you integrate by making connections.

You can obviously see now that highlighting books doesn’t do this.

You’re just marking pages and not building deep connections inside your brain.

3) Retrieval (use)

Here’s where most people fuck everything up.

They think learning ends at step 2, at encoding. But what’s arguably more important than encoding is retrieval.

To retain knowledge, you have to use it.

Retrieval is the act of pulling information back out from memory, without looking at your notes.

Think of the Feynman technique. Writing a newsletter from memory. Solving a real problem in your daily life. Every time you retrieve knowledge from memory, you strengthen your web. But every time you don’t, the threads weaken and eventually snap. I learned this the hard way with my 70,000 words in Obsidian. I was encoding (barely), AND I never had a retrieval practice in place. I never used the knowledge to build anything. So, it evaporated.

Three months of work, covered in dust, across the abandoned desert I call my PC hard drive.

Here’s the metal model:

Information → Encoding (integration) → Retrieval (use) → Unique Knowledge

Knowledge isn’t just facts in your head.

It’s the structure that guides your actions, thoughts, and decisions. It’s what lets you solve problems and build the life you want. Which brings me to the most important point, or profound idea of this entire newsletter:

To know what knowledge to build, you don’t need a learning plan. You need problems.

You. Need. Problems.

Because without a problem to solve, you have no reason to retrieve. And without retrieval nothing will stick. Your workbench stays cluttered and the construction site never becomes a house.

All those materials you gathered, and still no Minecraft house to live in.

This is why outcome-based learning works. It gives you a purpose for every piece of information. A place in the web. A problem to solve. Let’s go through the system together now.

The outcome-based learning system

I - Priming: Start with a vision, not a topic

Before you learn anything you need to know why you’re learning it.

Not I want to learn marketing.

That’s a topic. Topics are infinite.

You could spend a lifetime learning about marketing while never moving a single needle.

Instead, ask yourself this question: what life am I trying to build?

A year ago, I said I wanted to wake up, write for 1-2 hours every morning, talk about my interests online, and build a business around it. Although I didn’t properly understand at that point how to achieve that goal, that vision still primed everything I learned. Every piece of information got filtered through that question: does this help me build that life?

Now I’m getting a few hundred subscribers per day, and I’m expected to quit my job in the next 6-12 months doing this full-time.

Another recent example I can think of (from last week) is when I needed to learn how to outline newsletters.

I wasn’t studying writing. I had a specific bottleneck, being my drafts were messy and my newsletters were taking too long to complete. The vision (publish a newsletter within 5-6 hours of work) made the problem obvious, and made the learning urgent and purposeful.

Your vision is what primes your mind on what to look for.

Most people learn in terms of topics and chapters. You’ll read Chapter 3 which is all about persuasion, but your brain doesn’t care about Chapter 3. It cares about solving problems.

Profound Idea: Linearity in learning is a prison.

Instead of thinking you need to learn X and Y, think about what’s blocking you from the life you want.

Your learning starts with your bottlenecks. Your problems are your learning curriculum.

II - Information: Hunt, synthesize, apply

Here’s how outcome-based learning works in practice. I’ll use my newsletter outlining problem as the example:

1. Identify the immediate bottleneck - My newsletters were taking 10-12+ hours to write because I had no solid outline structure. I was wandering and waffling.

2. Curate sources - I found 15+ YouTube videos on outlining and added them to my curation folder inside Eden, my second brain.

3. Consume and synthesize - I watched 3-4 videos and compared and contrasted them, looking for patterns. I did not take any notes while watching these videos. I used my own brain to think, and took mental notes inside my brain. They all followed the same principle, being outlines have layers of ideas. Start with the big picture (macro structure) then drill into specifics (micro structure). That’s the general principle I spotted right away.

4. Stop consuming - After watching a few more videos, they all started saying the same thing. This meant I had struck a high-signal, idea dense principle for solving my problem.

5. Apply immediately - I built an AI prompt to teach me how to outline (not do it for me). Then I made 3 outlines to test what I’d learned. Each one got better, and by outline no. 3, things started clicking for me.

6. Iterate - The problem got solved. I’m moving from the research/ideation phase to my outlining phase within 2 hours or so. It used to take 5-6 to complete both phases, which is important feedback for me. The new knowledge has stuck because I used it, and will continue to use it permanently.

7. Move to the next bottleneck - Now it’s reducing my time spent editing.

The reason why this works is because it’s all non-linear, integrated learning.

You’re not reading one book cover-to-cover, but leaping from source to source like a frog on lily pads. You’re only landing on the lily pads that solve your immediate problem.

You don’t read a 300-page book to answer how many planets are in the solar system. You Google it and move on to your next question.

You delay taking action because you think you need to learn more first. But the real learning only begins once you start doing. That’s the paradox. - Jude Fredman

Learning by doing is the ultimate filter because it removes anything that isn’t needle-moving.

Once a problem gets solved, it stays solved. This means your knowledge compounds. It simplifies itself, it forges general first principles you can hold as your own. Your knowledge becomes high-signal and idea dense.

This is how I grew my newsletter to 21,000 subscribers in 8 months. I know it sounds like a brag, and there’s no way of saying it without sounding arrogant. But you have to be willing to sound arrogant online, because it’s proof. I also keep getting messages asking how I did it, so if it’s a problem people are having, I should address it in my writing.

A year ago I stumbled across one Dan Koe video at the very desk I am writing this at right now (I’ve just started drinking my second coffee, it’s 7:14am and it’s lashing rain; I have to walk to work soon) and it completely changed the trajectory of my life.

I had to learn all this from scratch. From Zero (niche Linkin Park reference hehe)

I didn’t do any of this by quote-unquote learning about writing, but by making a 1% permanent improvement every week.

I’ll say it again, A 1% PERMANENT IMPROVEMENT every week.

Profound Idea: All you need 52 x 1% permanent improvements, and you’re a whole different human 12 months.

Last week it was outlines. This week it’s editing. The week before it was idea density.

I know you get the point by now.

III - Knowledge: Make it dense, general, and usable

Information should be turning into knowledge that compounds over time.

Your knowledge should be getting denser. More general, more applicable, more first-principles. If you’re interested in idea density, listen to the Naval podcast.

When I learned about outlining, I didn’t memorize shit. I extracted the principles - hierarchical structure, macro to micro. That principle now applies to every newsletter I write, or am in the process of writing.

That’s compounding knowledge. Not isolated facts. It’s a web of principles that strengthen each other.

Back to the construction site metaphor, you’re not just piling up wood. You’re building a structure, a scaffolding that allows each new piece to connect to what’s already there.

This is where encoding and retrieval come back in.

Encoding → Synthesizing

You consume 3-5 sources and extract the general principle. You’re not storing details but building connections.

Retrieval → Action

You use the knowledge without looking at notes. Writing a newsletter from memory. Solving a problem in real time. Every retrieval strengthens the web.

Here’s a profound idea:

Doing leads to the desire to learn and therefore to learning. - Naval

The more you use knowledge, the more it sticks. The more it sticks, the more you want to use it. This is the opposite of a second brain full of notes that you never touch. Knowledge that compounds is knowledge you use.

That was a lot to take in, so here’s mini-plan for you to complete right now:

Here’s what to do right now:

1. Pick ONE problem that’s blocking you today - Not 5-10. Just one. The thing that, if solved in the next 48 hours, would unlock immediate progress.

2. Hunt for solutions - Find 5-10 sources (videos, articles, whatever). Watch/read them looking for patterns, not details. Don’t take notes. Think.

3. Apply it immediately - Spend 30 minutes testing what you learned. If it doesn’t work, adjust and try again.

That’s it.

One problem, one solution, one iteration.

Do this and you’ll see your first win within 48 hours. Not weeks, not months. Then repeat for your next problem. If you did this for 30 minutes a day for one month, you’d solve 15-20 real bottlenecks. That will change your life.

The purpose of self-education is to build the life you want. Not to know stuff. Not to read 52 books a year. To change. School teaches you topics. Self-education teaches you how to live.

Let’s walk through 3 examples now.

A creative project, a physical skill, and a reading list/exam preparation.

But first, I know what you’re thinking.

“I’ve been taking notes for years. I have a second brain. I’ve built systems. You’re asking me to throw all that away?”

Not exactly. I’m asking you to test a different approach. Try it for a week. Keep your second brain if you want, but try learning without it. Just for one week. Solve one problem per day using the system I just showed you.

If it doesn’t work, you lose nothing. But if it does work, you’ll never go back to highlighting and note-taking again. And in my own opinion, you’re not missing out on much.

The mental shift feels weird at first. But unlearning a bad habit is easier than you think when the new habit gets you results in 48 hours instead of 48 weeks.

Now, let’s walk through 3 examples.

Example I - Starting a newsletter (creative project)

Let’s say you have a creative outlet you love doing.

You don’t have to think about monetization or “business” shit for now. Let’s just get you creating and publishing content consistently (with iteration).

And I say with iteration because I don’t like the 10,000 hour rule.

Here’s a profound idea:

10,000 hours does not make you a genius, it only points you in the right direction. 10,000 iterations makes people geniuses. 10,000 mistakes spotted, fixed, and learned from, across years.

I remember writing my first newsletter thinking, how in the world am I going to get anyone to read this?

Writing is a skill, and a skill consists of various techniques (micro habits) that come to form that skill, which solves a problem, or series of problems to achieve an outcome. You don’t need to learn “writing.” What you do need, is to solve one of your own problems with writing each newsletter. I’m not talking about the content within the newsletter, but your process of writing a not-terrible one.

I can’t tell you what a good newsletter is. Only your audience can. But I can tell you what a newsletter I would never read looks like.

My first newsletter belongs to get burned in the trenches of hell (you can read it if you want, it’s at the bottom of my Substack page).

But my newsletter the following week took half the time.

The newsletter after that week then, took twice as long... but I learned how to create more attractive thumbnails and better hooks.

Then I started addressing my bottlenecks as they appeared. Crafting better hooks with curiosity loops, pattern interrupts, and vulnerable stories. Curating ideas from idea-dense sources. Structuring my essays better so I don’t ramble (my current issue).

I would recommend writing down your bottlenecks, like we’ve said.

For each bottleneck, curate 5-10 sources.

If you’re like me, it could be YouTube videos on hooks, articles on storytelling structure and copywriting frameworks. High-performing ideas from writers you admire and wish to emulate.

If you do this you will extract principles, not tactics.

You will learn that hooks create curiosity by withholding information. That’s a skill. You can literally learn this, and get more people to care to read your work.

Or that a good structure moves from problem → insight → solution.

Ideas come from your own problems and solutions, your own proof from your own experience, and not trends.

You have to write, publish, see what works, do more of what does and less of what doesn’t, and iterate constantly. You need to publish at least one newsletter per week. I wouldn’t do any more than that. You want the quality to be as high as possible. Give yourself a full week to write it. 1000-2000 words if you’re starting out.

After 8 weeks, you will have solved 8 bottlenecks, and each solution will become a part of your growing creative process.

This will give you more authority and skill development than any writing course ever could. Credentials can lie, but nature/physics and free markets cannot. Get your writing out into the world and the world will tell you how to improve it.

Example II - Learning jiu-jitsu (physical skill)

There’s isn’t a more rewarding journey than that of reaching your jiu-jitsu blue belt.

At 20-21, I was obsessed with jiu-jitsu. I only train once or twice per week now, my newsletter is my main source of purpose at the minute taking up all my energy. But I will never forget the day I got my blue belt. I nearly missed the grading too, I had gone over to see TOOL perform in London with my sister that week and I landed one hour before training began!

Let’s say you want to start training jiu-jitsu, or learn any type of physical skill.

When training physical skills, it’s important to understand the importance of having a desired outcome (vision) and iterating based on feedback or data relentlessly.

Only focus on improving one thing at a time each session.

You want to sprint, rest, reflect, and sprint with a new iteration, a new 1% improvement.

Human’s are built to hunt like lions, not graze like cows.

If you do more than one thing at a time, you won’t be able to focus on getting quality feedback relating to the one issue you’re trying to solve.

For example, if I rock up to Friday Open Mat, which lasts 2 hours, meaning I’ll get about 10 rounds on average, that’s 10 rounds to practice one technique with focus, or to practice 5 techniques distracted.

Pick one problem and focus on just that.

When hunting for solutions, be deathly specific. You don’t watch a 10 hour jiu-jitsu course just to get a tiny detail on your wrist placement during an arm bar. You find 5-10 videos on close guard arm bar and you repeat the process we’ve talked about.

Example III - Completing a reading list/studying for an exam (abstract knowledge)

Let’s say you have a reading list, or an exam to pass.

The reason why I say both examples here, is because both require having learning outcomes.

This will be your retrieval practice. And any form of digesting of information you do, will be about encoding said information in the way you plan to retrieve it.

Random example:

You have 12 chapters to study in 2 weeks. That’s 6 chapters per week that must be encoded, and then retrieved from your memory across those 12 weeks as much as is required to prevent loss of retention, or what’s called the forgetting curve.

It’s Monday morning. You’ve sat down at your desk with your favorite coffee and Harry Potter mug, and you start taking notes on everything, starting with chapter 1.

This is completely wrong.

You start by looking at how you will be tested.

i.e. how you plan to retrieve the knowledge from your memory.

If it’s an exam you’re preparing for, do past exam papers. If it’s a book you’re reading on your reading list, make a test for yourself. Ask AI to make one for you, and tell it what you want to get tested on. Be specific with this.

Then, hone in on the big picture concepts.

Always start with the big picture. You can memorize fine details later once you actually understand where each detail connects. Test yourself a lot. Use the Feynman technique to explain the concept out loud without notes, or while looking at a mind map drawn from memory. Anything you miss or can’t explain, they’re you’re knowledge gaps. Fill them in and repeat the process until your books/topics feel intuitive to you.

It means that when testing day comes, you’re not recalling individual facts. You’re navigating a web of connected knowledge inside your own brain.

Learning happens when you solve problems, not when you consume information.

You don’t learn to write by reading about writing.

You don’t learn jiu-jitsu by watching YouTube.

You don’t pass exams by highlighting textbooks.

You learn by doing. By facing a problem, hunting for what you need, applying it, and moving on.

That’s outcome-based learning.

If you want the complete system for building this into your life, here’s what you get inside The Profound Self-Education Guide:

• The 4 principles of an autodidact (how to become profoundly self-educated)

• Vision-creation exercises (Ideal Day, Anti-Vision, So-That Test) to define what life you’re building

• The complete system structure: Daily Tasks → Weekly Targets → 3-Month Horizon

• How to define and approach your first project

• The iteration engine framework (Evaluate, Destroy, Rebuild) for permanent 1% improvements

• AI Self-Education Coach prompt that builds your personalized plan conversationally

• Deep work principles and scheduling techniques for 30-90 minutes of focused learning per day

This is the exact system I used to grow to 21,000 subscribers in 8 months while working full-time.

50% off until February 21st. You can download it here.

If you subscribe to my Substack, you’ll get:

• Bookmark 1 - Pre-reading checklist (improve comprehension)

• Bookmark 2 - Encoding checklist (improve retention)

• Discount link to my paid tier

It’s all in the welcome email :)

If not, no hard feelings, I appreciate you being here.

Thank you for your time and attention, I know it’s very valuable.

You’re an absolute legend!

- Craig :)

Free/paid newsletters:

So, the purpose of self-education (or any sort of education, be it formal or self-directed/interest-based, then) should be to help you achieve the life you want.

The routine, the habits, how you get to spend your time and what you do with it.

This prompt will help you create the plan for doing exactly that.

It will help you to:

• Create a vision and anti-vision. This will be the “why” behind your learning goals, and your source of undying motivation

• Build your first learning project, and help you identify the needle-moving tasks to help you achieve your vision (and steer clear of your anti-vision)

• Create a plan that gets you educated and building a new life with just 30-90 minutes of deep work and iteration per day

• Create an AI thinking partner you can return to at any time, to help you overcome immediate problems, reclarify your vision, create endless study projects, and more

Copy and paste the prompt below into any AI chatbot of choice. I’d recommend Claude.

Here it is:

Read more

Not a clear one.

Not an answer you feel assured in.

What about the next 6 months? What about the next week?

There’s something disturbing behind why most people can’t answer this question. And no, it’s not stupidity.

I remember applying for college courses when I was in 6th year in secondary school.

At 18, I didn’t know what to do with my life. What I did know, was that I had lost my love for filmmaking two years prior thanks to burning myself out with a 30 minute short film, and that I loved lifting weights and learning about the body. My love for philosophy, psychology, thinking, and ideas I would have called “profound;” it was all strong here too. But it was still very unconscious to me at that time.

In sum, I had no idea what I wanted from my life in the next 5 years.

So I spoke to my guidance counsellor and ran through my options. I knew that getting the grades wasn’t going to be a limiting factor, so I more or less had free reign to pick a course I wanted.

Any course. Except for becoming a vet or a lawyer maybe.

But there was an issue. I didn’t want any of them.

The only reason I settled for Multimedia was because it felt safe. I didn’t like making films anymore, but I did once, so surely that meant I would learn to love it again? Right? I had always done that, even though it no longer interested me, but I picked it.

Why?

I remember being told “you will never struggle to find work with that degree.”

“You will always have a job.”

That was all my mind needed to hear so I could run out of that small office, sprint home a little early while devouring a protein bar, and run straight to my cheap garage gym to do 3 sets of heavy, ass-to-grass squats.

I walked into that office wanting to solve a problem and I left with it unsolved. I came out with a solution. But it was the right solution to the wrong problem. It didn’t solve the deeper problem I had.

I didn’t realize it then, but I was already climbing a mountain. The weights were signal. My heart was pointing somewhere. It was physical training at that time. But I ignored it and followed the colony instead. I drifted through college with the same problem, only this time it was jiu-jitsu sending the most signal - and I kept ignoring it.

You might understand what I mean.

I know I’m only 22, and sure what the fuck do I know. I have a lot more learning to do and books to read in my lifetime hopefully. But I’ve always been curious as to the question of purpose. Meaning. Happiness. Even when I was 18 sitting in that office.

And I think there’s a difference between feeling the question and properly articulating it.

I felt it for years but I just didn’t have the words. I had interests like the weights, jiu-jitsu, (profound) ideas. But I had no direction, no mountain I had chosen for myself, which meant no real choice at all. I was drifting. Just more meaningfully than most people my own age. That scares me to think about a lot.

I think most people think they know what they want from life, yet they revolt against their own lives for all the wrong reasons.

Stagnation

When life feels empty, we reach for substitutes.

Pornography is loneliness sold as sex.

Alcohol is escape sold as fun.

Scrolling is distraction sold as rest.

Fast food is poison sold as pleasure.

Luxury is emptiness sold as purpose.

Notifications are control sold as importance.

Social media is validation sold as friendship.

Jobs are sold as careers, yet a job is work you wouldn’t do unless you were being paid to do that work.

I think it’s easy to revolt against your own life when you don’t have a life to begin with.

Listen.

I like going to the pub with the lads every once in a while, getting smashed drunk once or twice every month or so. Same with eating McDonalds and doomscrolling socials once I’ve finished my needle moving tasks for the day. But I’m not talking about that. Nobody is perfect, so you shouldn’t expect the way you live your life to be either.

I’m talking about falling prey to these substitutes when you don’t have real adventure.

A vision, or a direction.

Profound Idea: Meaninglessness is static. Meaning is dynamic.

The quickest way to feel like your life is meaningless is to sit around and do nothing.

Doing nothing is easy. Anyone can do it. But the human mind is built for progress. Deny the mind what it wants, and it will turn towards something else. It will find a way to make progress somehow, likely on something you do not truly want.

You don’t have a lack of meaning, you just lack movement.

Profound Idea: Happiness is found in progress.

I write first thing in the morning.

If I have to be at work at 10, I wake up before work. My ritual is simple. A mocha, phone downstairs, no music, no other tabs open, and no fucking emails. Then, I write. 1-2 sections of my newsletter. Anywhere between 1000-2000 words in 60 minutes. Sometimes just 500 words in 15 minutes.

It’s not a lot. But it’s done daily. The needle always moves daily.

Because I can’t push my mind any more than that in a day. Not really. Not without making worse creative decisions. Not without having less of a burning fire to speak from my heart or soul (or my annoying mouth, whatever way you want to conceptualize it).

Don’t forget that small sprints add up.

A 2000 word newsletter with 500 words of writing per day is done in four days. That’s it. So little to make big progress. So little to feel like you’re moving. That’s what most people miss.

Progress doesn’t require tons of effort. It requires showing up and doing the small things daily without romanticizing the whole damn process. We love to ignore the power of small sprints done across time. You need a marathon of sprints, of little wins to get moving again.

Think about finishing leg day and feeling clear-headed, once the Linkin Park mix is off, of course, and the fog has lifted and you can finally think straight. Or finally hitting your first foot-sweep at jiu-jitsu, on someone who’s been training longer than you, AND who’s been teaching you how to do foot-sweeps for weeks.

Even for you profound thinkers.

Reading a book that finally makes something click. Two ideas that had been floating separately for months suddenly connecting. Having a conversation where you articulate something you’ve been struggling with, and the other person actually gets it, all because you finally decided to embrace the power of uncertainty.

These are mountains you’ve climbed, or are still climbing. It’s all evidence that you’re moving.

The mind is cybernetic, which in Greek means “to steer.”

Which means what you aim at is what your mind will see.

You act. You make a mistake. You receive data about that mistake. You reiterate and act again. Happiness isn’t a place you arrive at. It’s the feeling of your feet moving. This is the feedback loop. This is the dopamine generator. This is what makes life feel interesting.

Stagnation kills meaning, purpose, and happiness, because each are found in progress.

If you are stagnant, you are drifting. Not moving towards a vision, a purpose, a mission, a quest, an adventure of your own choosing.

If you don’t build a purpose, you will be handed one to follow.

That’s why this penguin made a choice.

The penguin

There’s a video circulating online, you’ve probably seen it. If not, I’ll tell you the story now.

There’s a colony of penguins huddled together, waddling across the rocky snow-covered land. A small group of them moving as one towards the ocean, their place of protection, food, and almost certain survival. Their known world.

But as the colony stays on their path, one penguin stops.

He doesn’t follow. He looks toward the mountains on his left, far off in the distance. Barren. Dangerous. The unknown world. And what does he do? He turns around. He walks away from the group, alone, towards the mountains.

The narrator says he will walk to certain death, and the internet is calling him the “nihilist penguin.”

But millions of people watch this and feel something they can’t explain.

Why?

It’s a projection.

We see in other people what we lack. The choices we have and haven’t made. The paths we’ve been too afraid to take. The piece that’s been missing from completing the puzzle, the piece that would make our lives feel like ours again.

We don’t admire his death. That’s not the point. We admire his decision.

And the fact that millions of people are projecting their deepest desires onto a penguin walking toward certain death, is not a trend but a diagnosis. It’s a symptom of mass stagnation.

Millions of people watching, feeling something, yearning; because they haven’t chosen their own mountain. They’re still waddling with the colony. Still following the path they were handed at childhood, in adolescence, in their early twenties, all because it’s safe before being their own.

Safety over adventure. Surviving instead of living.

We yearn to make that same choice. To say fuck you to the river we all drift along. To fulfill our heart’s desire to escape toward a life of our own choosing. Staying safe within the huddle versus exploring the mountains. Comfort vs growth. Involuntary following vs voluntary action. The power of embracing uncertainty comes from the fact that it holds everything you could be. Safety feels comfortable, and comfortable is predictable, and predictable causes stagnation, and stagnation kills meaning, purpose, and happiness.

Instead of choosing to survive the penguin chose to live, and that’s why we admire him. We admire him because he made the first real decision of his whole life.

Profound Idea: The freedom to choose the mountains over the safety of the group is what makes life interesting again.

You have to make the unknown known if you expect to become capable of living anything but a boring life.

On my 18th birthday I went to my first jiu-jitsu class alone. It was the first time I had done anything alone. I was very anxious as a kid, and I usually trained with my cousin once or twice per week. But he was working that day. So I decided to take a leap. It took me all day to talk myself into it but I did it.

To say it terrified me, walking onto the mats alone, only to get injured that day rolling with a total stranger - but soon to be close friend - it was fucking huge. And almost 4 years later, with a blue belt and a second family I see more than my own blood, the power of making that choice changed my life.

Choosing to climb a mountain, that mountain, it changed my life.

This has everything to do with the mountains. We don’t admire the penguin for where he’s going. We admire him for his refusal. The act of choosing is the meaning, not the destination.

If you want to make your life interesting again, you need to walk towards your own mountains. They need to be hand picked. Because the struggle itself is your source of meaning.

And the best thing about all this, is that you have the choice to choose any mountain you want. But you have to make the choice yourself.

And it starts with this:

How to choose your own mountain

The penguin made a choice and now it’s your turn.

This is the part where most people get stuck. They feel the pull toward a mountain or multiple mountains at once, but they don’t know how to start climbing. They wait for clarity, motivation, or permission.

They fail to understand this:

Clarity comes from movement.

You will never know what to do with your life unless you start trying to live it.

Here’s the framework. Three steps, that’s it. You’ll gain a lot of clarity within 30 minutes of doing this.

I - direction

Before you climb any mountain, you need to know two things:

1. Vision - the mountain you want to climb

2. Anti-vision - the colony you’re running from, or the mountains you do not want to climb

Your vision is not a goal, it’s a direction. A compass. Not a map. It can evolve. And it should evolve as you do. But you need at least something to aim at, or your mind has nothing to steer you toward.

Ask yourself:

If I could build the life I actually wanted (not the one I’m supposed to want) what would it look like?

What would a perfect life look like?

What would it look like if it was better than perfect?

Practicality and attainability aside, it’s a great thought experiment. I don’t know why we aren’t just told this question at the start of every workday, or every school day. Because if you don’t ask yourself this question, then you expect anything from the bottom of the barrel as being fine.

Write down an answer. On a page or on a notes app on your phone.

500-1000 words, and be specific.

What does your day look like? Your work? Your energy? Your relationships?

Now, flip it.

Your anti-vision is the life you’re running from. The version of you in 5 years if you changed nothing about yourself right now. If you keep drifting. If you stay with the colony. How terrible will that look?

What does that horrible life look like?

Write that down too. 500-1000 words. Let it scare the shit out of you. That fear is fuel.

Think about all the people who inspire you to be nothing like them. Use that.

Having a direction to move toward and knowing what you’re running from, will serve as a filter for every decision you make. Having a vision gives you direction and at least some clarity, if not most. Whereas having an anti-vision gives you the endless motivation to move. If you struggle with motivation in general, you likely don’t have an enemy to run from. That applies to any form of motivation in your life.

II - movement

Direction without movement is daydreaming. I was bad for that in school especially.

You need a project.

One single, measurable outcome. Give yourself 30-90 days to achieve it.

It can be anything:

• Read one book and apply one idea from it

• Write one newsletter per week for 8 weeks

• Follow one fitness routine for 60 days

• Learn one skill that moves you toward your vision

• Make one friend at work, school, college

A project forces you to learn only what is required. No more consuming for the sake of consuming. No more “I’ll learn everything just in case” learning. Your project becomes your curriculum.

Then: deep work

30-90 minutes per day on one task.

p u r e f o c u s

Not something vague like “write for an hour.” You want “write 500 words,” something that’s measurable. That’s what’s called a needle-moving task.

Like we’ve talked about, this is what I do every morning. Mocha, phone downstairs, no emails, no music. 500-1000 words. Done.

A 2000 word newsletter at 500 words per day is done in four days. Small sprints add up. You need a marathon of sprints, not constant effort 24/7. We’re built to hunt like lions, not graze all day like cows.

As long as you’re moving the needle for at least 30 minutes a day, you’re doing fine. You’ll gain more clarity on what to do and where to go the more you do this.

That’s where our next step comes in.

III - iteration

I hate that most people miss this idea. It really bothers me; it burns my soul.

Iteration.

Everyone talks about the power of consistency. But consistency without iteration is pointless repetition. Insanity. And repetition without making adjustments upon each rep is just stagnation.

It’s like walking in place. Like a toy soldier. You’re moving your feet up and down, but you’re not moving towards something.

The iteration process is this:

1. Act

2. Make a mistake

3. Receive feedback

4. Adjust

5. Act again

If there’s one thing to take from this newsletter in terms of how to make rapid progress towards creating the life you’ve always wanted, it’s iteration towards a vision that always evolves.

The vision itself iterates as you do.

This is the feedback loop. This is what makes progress feel like progress.

After each sprint (30mins of moving the needle), ask yourself:

• What worked?

• What didn’t?

• What’s the biggest bottleneck?

Then, adjust.

Do you need a sharper arrow?

A stronger bow?

Better aim?

Identify the constraint and solve it. One mountain leads to the next. You finish a project, you start another. Each one builds on the last. Each one makes the unknown a little more known (as Carl Jung would’ve say it!).

This is profound self-education at its core.

Not reading lists. Not courses. Not credentials. Not trackers that make you feel productive but don’t move the needle.

I hate the idea of tracking everything. Even second brains for “storing” all your notes.

If any one thing (information) is not worth encoding and storing into your memory for purposeful retrieval or recall (unique knowledge), then its not worth saving in your second brain software, and its not worth tracking the fucking thing.

Sorry. That’s something that really pisses me off. I will do a newsletter on that topic at some point in the future. I have a lot to say about second brains and building unique knowledge.

The reason I say all this is because your problems are your curriculum. Your projects are your classroom. Your progress is your proof. Stop tracking everything and start climbing. If you’re tracking, it means you’re not climbing.

Profound Idea: To learn is to become capable of living, not existing.

Happiness is found in progress. Not survival.

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Summary

I present, how to make your life interesting again:

1. Recognize stagnation is the enemy - Your boring life isn’t a circumstance problem. It’s a movement problem. Meaninglessness is static. Meaning is dynamic. If you feel empty, it’s because you’ve stopped progressing somewhere. Really think about this idea. If you feel empty, it’s because you’ve stopped progressing somewhere. The void you feel isn’t a lack of meaning, it’s a lack of movement. Create a vision to give yourself direction. This will give you some clarity and how and where to start moving. Create an anti-vision to give yourself motivation to move. You will never feel motivated to move unless you have a hell, an enemy, a way of life, or past experiences you don’t wish to see repeated.

2. Choose your own mountains - Like our penguin friend, you need to pick a direction. Not because you’re certain it’s right, but because movement creates meaning, and that the direction you’ve picked is yours. Pick your poison. Pick your sacrifice. Pick your source of meaningful friction. Define a project. One single measurable outcome for 30-90 days that forces you to learn something new. The direction matters less than the movement. Just. Move. Somewhere.

3. Engage the feedback loop daily - Act, make mistakes, gather data, reiterate. This is the loop that fills the void. You cannot move without iteration. It’s like taking one step and getting stuck in quicksand. Iteration keeps you moving, always overcoming obstacles as they try to prevent movement. Schedule deep work blocks of 30-90 minutes. Even 10-15 minutes. You would be so surprised by how little work it takes every day, and I say every day for good reason. Identify 1-3 needle-moving tasks that actually advance your project. Iterate relentlessly. Evaluate what worked, destroy what didn’t, rebuild with new understanding. Consistency without iteration is just pointless repetition. Einstein would’ve called that, insanity.

4. Become obsessed with genuine curiosities - Force yourself to explore until you discover what truly lights you up. Interesting people are people who are deeply interested in something. Interesting lives are lives full of meaningful work, a throughline mission, a series of interests that all serve that vision and connect like a spider’s web, making up the unique knowledge that is you. Follow your fascinations ruthlessly, even when they seem disconnected or useless. Interest is the best leverage you have. If you always do what feels like fun to you, but work to other people, (1) you will never work a day in your life and (2) you will have no competition. Because you can’t win a one-person competition!

5. Find joy in the endless process - The struggle is the goal. Not the summit. There is no end point. No final destination where life becomes permanently interesting. But the possibility of finding joy in this eternal process is enough. That’s why you always want to keep climbing mountains. Pick a small one first, the Dublin Mountains perhaps, and work your way up to fucking Everest one day, and beyond. Problems are your curriculum. Anxiety is signal, not a stop sign (it means you’re escaping the known world to become someone new). Happiness is found in progress, not arrival.

Albert Camus said that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” in trying to push the rock up the hill for eternity.

A lot of people might say “one must imagine the nihilist penguin happy.”

I say, we should imagine him trying to be happy.

They key word is trying. Not because he reached the mountains but because he chose them. Because he tried to reach them.

Instead of choosing to survive, he chose to live.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate your time and attention. I know it’s very valuable, so I appreciate you being here.

You’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

If you want help building your vision, choosing your first mountain, and creating a system for climbing it, I made something for you.

The Profound Self-Education Guide is out now.

A 70-page guide + AI prompt to help you:

• Clarify your vision and anti-vision

• Define your first project (your mountain)

• Build a productivity plan with your first needle-moving task ready for tomorrow morning

You can read the first two sections free here.

50% off until February 21st.

It’s why I haven’t gone into detail with regards to the learning science in this guide, but rather with helping you to create a self-education plan that actually helps you to achieve your (life) goals.

The AI prompt that goes alongside this guide will help you to create that plan.

I’ve also included it within its own section towards the end of this guide too.

Table Of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Creating the right mindset

   1. The 4 principles of an autodidact

      1. The agency principle

      2. Problems are your curriculum

      3. Anxiety is signal

      4. Create your own profound ideas, or what I call unique knowledge

   2. Reflection questions

3. Creating your vision

   1. What is a vision?

   2. How to create your vision

      1. Your ideal day and week

      2. Your anti-vision

      3. The so-that test

   3. From vision to action

   4. Defining your first project

4. Building a project vs taking a course

   1. How to approach your first project

   2. ALWAYS start before you feel ready

5. Deep work

   1. Psychic entropy

   2. Create, learn, brainstorm

   3. Focused thinking vs diffuse thinking

   4. Scheduling your deep work

   5. Training your focus

6. The iteration engine

   1. Evaluate, destroy, rebuild

   2. Technique stacking

   3. Tips for getting unstuck

   4. Connections compound

   5. Make connections to everything

   6. Boredom is signal

   7. How to know when to level up

7. Building your self-education plan (without AI)

   1. Step 1: Define your vision

   2. Step 2: Choose your first project

   3. Step 3: Create your system

   4. Step 4: Start and iterate, iterate, iterate

   5. The big picture overview

8. Building your self-education plan (with AI)

   1. How to use the prompt

   2. Tips for getting the most out of the prompt

   3. The prompt

9. Conclusion

Introduction

The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. - Naval

This guide started forming inside my mind nearly 2 years ago.

It was my third year in college. My last proper semester with essays and assignments before I had to spend 4 months working on my thesis project. It was around late October when I had gotten into a rut. I felt I was doing too much. But I wanted to be doing too much. I wanted to achieve everything.

Do well in college. Get two stripes on my blue belt. Read more books. Make more progress in the gym. Start a newsletter.

So, I did an analysis on my life. Which eventually led me towards a profound insight that I think most people do not know.

I used to spend 20 hours per week doing college work. But upon deeper reflection, I was actually only doing about 3 productive hours worth of output per week.

Naturally, in response to this insight, I thought if I did only one hour of college work per day, not only would I double my output in terms of productivity (3 hours vs 7 hours weekly), I would also save 13 hours across the week.

It felt strange at first having my entire days free and doing just enough to move the needle forward each morning.

But it forced me into doing the highest leverage tasks each hour; the needle-moving tasks that would move me closer to my vision which was to complete my assignments to the best of my ability.

The result shocked me since I got every essay done one month early.

Profound Idea: Don’t confuse being busy with being productive.

It didn’t make sense to any sense to me.

So, I tested it with jiu-jitsu and lifting weights because I wanted to see if I was making the same mistakes elsewhere in my life.

I used to believe I went to jiu-jitsu 2-4 times per week and lifted weights 2-3 times per week. Until I looked at my calendar and realized I was training jiu-jitsu 2 times weekly, and lifting was even more sporadic. 1 time some weeks, other times it was 3.

Upon analyzing this, I hit reset:

• Jiu-Jitsu - 1-2 sessions weekly

• Lifting - 2 sessions weekly with half the volume I would usually do

And guess what.

I made more progress in 3 months on the mats and in the gym (I put on 5kg of muscle) than I ever had before in my life.

All by doing less.

Now I carry this philosophy with me while I write my newsletters

I’ve managed to grow a newsletter audience of more than 19,000+ subscribers in less than 7 months on Substack all with just one hour of writing per day.

One hour. That’s it.

Here’s the big idea I’m trying to get at:

You don’t need to work or learn for hours per day when you know what tasks move the needle forward towards achieving your desired outcome, your vision.

Profound Idea: Small, consistent, quality work beats long, distracted, busy work.

This is the foundation of everything we will talk about. Because this doesn’t just relate to doing work, it relates to learning anything.

Most people don’t know how to self-educate themselves. They consume for hours on end thinking that they’re learning. They watch tutorials on loop and do nothing to put them into practice. They buy courses only to watch them and think they’ve done some “good productive work.” They read one book a week and wear it like a badge of honor, without making any measurable changes to how they live their life every day (and suffering less as a result).

Consumption hell, tutorial hell, learning everything “just-in-case” it will be useful one day knowing damn well it won’t have any effect on achieving an impactful outcome in your life. Call it whatever you want.

But this is being busy. Not learning. It’s consumption that doesn’t fuel creating the life you want to live.

The big picture idea: Their life isn’t changing as a result of what they’re learning.

Because is this not the purpose of education? What about self-education?

The enemy we are attacking here is learning without an outcome. If you can’t point to a measurable change in your life like a skill acquired, a project completed, a problem solved, then you haven’t learned anything. You’ve consumed, but you haven’t done anything with what you’ve consumed.

This self-education guide is not like most self-education guides.

It will not teach you how to memorize faster or take better notes.

It will show you how to achieve measurable outcomes with just 30-90 minutes of focused learning per day, guided by a vision you actually want to achieve.

This is a system for learning through action.

Not consumption. Not memorization.

Action.

By the end of this guide you will have a self-education system that compounds. Where 30-90 minutes per day creates more progress than most people make in months of scattered effort.

Keep this idea in the back of your mind as you read: the only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.

This guide will help you achieve this.

One more thing before we begin:

This guide is for anyone who wants to learn anything. Whether you’re a college student trying to actually retain what you study, a full-time parent learning a new skill on the side, a creative building something from scratch, or someone who just left formal education and realized they were never taught how to learn in the first place.

The principles here are universal, but the application is based on your own context.

Let’s start with the most important step which is mindset.

Creating the right mindset

Profound Idea: You do not need permission to learn anything, and the best way to learn anything is to do.

I will repeat that again.

You do not need permission to learn anything, and the best way to learn anything is to do.

I would recommend burning this profound idea into your skull.

This might seem like common sense to a lot of people, but I can’t necessarily assume it either. Modern life says you need experience to get a job, and you can’t get experience without having a job. So, most of us naturally steer towards getting degrees, to say we are qualified to start working a job, even if we don’t have much experience.

This is what most people think of when it comes to education.

That education is something that can be finished.

That education is completed once you obtain a credential, when you finish a course, or when your teacher stops telling you what to do, and what to learn.

All of this is learning with permission. There’s no agency.

One result of this type of learning is that we become conditioned to consume:

• We consume so we can get a status title

• We don’t create our own unique solutions to anything

• We aren’t taught how to solve our own problems

• We think of learning in terms of what we must know, and not outcomes we can achieve to help improve our lives

This is a status game.

Credentials is a status game. You’re not learning to become competent. You’re learning to signal the appearance of competence. There’s a difference.

Learning should be a natural game.

• Your newsletter audience is growing or it isn’t

• You win the jiu-jitsu competition or you don’t

• You lift the barbell off the floor or you can’t

• You can explain the book you read simply or you can’t

• You can break apart a car and rebuild it or you can’t - regardless of whether your degree says you can

Another issue with credentials is that they can lie.

Nature doesn’t lie.

If two people can tear apart a car and rebuild it the exact same way, but one of the persons has a degree in engineering and the other one doesn’t, is any one less of an engineer than the other?

The purpose of learning is to prepare you to become capable of achieving an outcome. Not status titles. Status titles are fake. But competence can’t be faked.

A note for students: I am not saying your degree is worthless. A multimedia degree is going to be very different in terms of usefulness compared to a nursing degree or an engineering degree. But what I am trying to say is don’t confuse the credential with the competence. Use your time in school to build real skills and not just to pass exams. This guide will help you do both.

Profound Idea: Just because you’re informed, does not mean you are enlightened. Just because you know something, doesn’t mean you actually understand it, or that you can actually use it to achieve a worthwhile goal and thus change your life.

I truly discovered all this once I started my newsletter.

I learned more from doing 6 months of weekly problem solving and iteration than I did from 3 years of doing college essays and projects.

College might have gotten me a degree, but my newsletter got me a real physical outcome beyond a beige, standardized page that says “I am competent.”

Now, let’s introduce a cool term I only learned recently.

I never knew what an autodidact was until I started researching for this guide.

According to Oxford Languages, an autodidact is a self-taught person.

There’s something HUGE hidden beneath this definition.

Society teaches you to solve external problems and not your own. To consume, consume, consume, and never how to think about what you’ve consumed. The world wants you to consume and comply, not think and create.

This is the big shift we’re going to make.

The autodidact has one thing most university students don’t have and that’s agency.

The autodidact takes initiative and responsibility, and therefore they have agency:

Agency is the ability to solve your own problems and iterate with ruthless consistency without permission.

I want this guide to help you stop thinking about learning and self-education in terms of:

• Consumption

• Credentials

• Needing permission to learn or do anything

Instead, I want this guide to get you thinking about learning and self-education in terms of:

• Creating your own solutions to your own problems

• Creating your own answers to your own questions

• Thinking about what you consume for longer than you spend time consuming

• Outcomes, goals, aims, targets, whatever you want to conceptualize it as - did you achieve what you wanted to achieve or not?

All of this shapes whether you can create the life you want to live, and whether you can achieve the goals you genuinely want to achieve.

Again, is this not the purpose of education?

The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge. - Aristotle

A pretty nice quote to sum it all up thus far.

Let’s carve another few profound ideas, or principles, into your skull.

The 4 principles of an autodidact

I would now like to run through the 4 principles that make someone an autodidact.

These will be the most important mindset shifts you must make in acting on this guide.

These are not four separate ideas.

They are a cycle.

Agency leads to problems.

Problems reveal anxiety.

Anxiety points to where growth lies.

Growth produces unique knowledge.

Unique knowledge reinforces agency.

Agency → Problems → Anxiety → Synthesis → Agency (and repeat)

1. The agency principle

You are the architect of your own self-education journey and therefore your life.

You choose what your goals are, what to learn, when to learn, and how to achieve them.

You take full blame for your own education; therefore you have complete control. This is a great burden to bear. You must figure this all out for yourself and then learn from your own journey. You have total freedom too, to learn anything, anytime, without permission.

Agency requires reflection.

After every learning session, every project session, every hour of focused work, evaluate. Without fail.

What worked?

What didn’t?

What will I do differently tomorrow?

The key insight here involves mixing learning and creating into one workflow. Learning feeds creation, and creation reveals gaps in learning.

They are not and should not be separate activities.

2. Problems are your curriculum

Every obstacle is your next lesson.

Obsess about this and you’ll always have motivation.

You will always feel challenged enough to never feel bored when sitting down to learn or build anything.

Without problems, you are not learning anything because comfort means stagnation and therefore boredom. In flow psychology, happiness is found in progress.

If there’s a profound idea to memorize right now, it’s that one - happiness is found in progress.

So you literally want to be getting stuck. This is when you get to learn something.

Think of every problem as an opportunity to level up.

You solve problems as you encounter them, not in advance.

For example, for the last six months, outlining was the bane of my writing process. I knew something was wrong, but I kept pushing through without ever really thinking about it. It was only when I stopped and evaluated my biggest bottleneck that I identified the issue.

And when I found it, I didn’t spend hours watching outlining videos. I watched one video and immediately tested it. I built an outline so I could get feedback. Then I evaluated the feedback and solved the next problem (how much detail, how much fidelity and so on).

This is the cycle.

Problem → Attempt → Feedback → Evaluation → Next Problem

You need a marathon of small problems solved. This is why every stresses about “consistency.” But most people aren’t talking about staying consistent however, they’re talking about sprinting consistently across time in the right way with the right form in the right direction.

And each problem solved compounds on the previous one. Eventually you either reach your outcome or become so skilled that your outcome is forced to evolve to reach just beyond your current level of skill.

3. Anxiety is signal

You are literally becoming someone new in the self-education process so it’s natural to feel anxious.

Anxiety is a signal that you’re moving into the unknown because it takes effort to grow, and you cannot grow without discomfort.

Don’t shy away from anxiety. Ever.

That which you most need to find is where you least want to look.

This is a profound idea from Jungian psychology.

Confront everything your heart wishes to avoid and make the unknown known to discover who you truly are. That’s another profound idea to really think about one night while sitting on the edge of your bed in complete darkness.

So, I say if you don’t know what to do, that’s good.

That’s your signal to find your first obstacle.

Solve it, then repeat.

Just start. The pathway forward always reveals itself through action and not contemplation.

4. Create your own profound ideas, or what I call unique knowledge

Do not place boundaries between subjects and always connect everything to everything.

If learning something helps you achieve your desired outcome, or gain more clarity on your vision, learn it.

You will never need to think outside the box if you’re thinking within multiple boxes simultaneously.

Think like a polymath. Look for patterns across everything you consume, and always keep thinking about making connections. This will make everything you learn feel relevant, familiar, and purposeful.

This is the highest level of self-education: synthesis.

Synthesis means making connections across books, videos, domains, and past experiences into specific solutions.

Answers.

Habits.

Behavior changes.

Insights that didn’t exist before you created them.

This is a higher level of abstraction than AI can reach.

AI can summarize. AI can connect the obvious. AI can imitate.

But profound ideas - your unique knowledge - can only come from your taste, your experiences, your friction, and your irreplaceable perspective.

Perspectives are the new oil for this very reason.

Here’s a quick example from my own writing.

In my newsletter titled “How to become dangerously articulate,” I connected Camus and The Myth of Sisyphus to articulation; embracing uncertainty while speaking to pushing a rock up a hill. I layered this with my own personal experiences like struggling to speak aloud in school, shyness as a silent killer of opportunity, my discovery of philosophy and psychology and creative thinking when I was a late teen.

None of that came from a textbook. It came from doing. From solving problems. From reflecting. From synthesizing.

This is unique knowledge.

And it’s one of my most read newsletters on Substack with 150,000+ reads as of writing this.

I encourage you to create your own unique knowledge and share it to the world, because it might help some people out.

Reflection questions

I would recommend saving these questions somewhere safe, somewhere that gives you easy access to them before you start learning anything.

Read these questions before and after your 30-90 minute learning sessions.

This will prime your mind to recognize the principles while you’re actually doing them.

Then, you can reflect on your learning afterwards to see what you failed to do. These are your next problems to solve in your next learning session.

1. What problem did I encounter today?

2. What did I learn from trying to solve it?

3. What would I do differently next time?

4. What connections can I make between this and something else I know?

5. What is still unclear or unresolved?

This is the mindset I want you to cultivate over the coming months and years. And don’t worry. You have your whole life to keep practicing and improving with these 4 principles in mind each day.

But a mindset alone cannot change anything unless it has a direction.

That’s what we’ll build next.

Your vision.

Creating your vision

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. - Nietzsche

Interest is the ultimate form of leverage in life.

Because what feels like fun to you will feel like work to other people.

This is your “why.”

If you are interested in pursuing a goal - starting a newsletter, entering a jiu-jitsu competition, reading The Myth of Sisyphus - it’s because it has a purpose in relation to a big picture vision you want to achieve.

Your “why.”

If you’re not interested in learning something, it’s because it doesn’t feel relevant for achieving your vision.

It doesn’t feel purposeful.

That’s why a lot of people go through school just not caring about anything. The “why” in our education system is obviously to pass an exam to achieve a credential, but most people don’t care beyond that. They don’t see how passing an exam will help them achieve what they want in life.

Worse than this, most people don’t even know what they want in life to begin with, which worsens the problem.

Without a purpose behind your learning, it will feel incredibly difficult in all the wrong ways.

Profound Idea: Learning should be difficult, but it shouldn’t feel meaningless.

So, why create a vision?

Most people start learning without having a clear outcome in mind.

No vision.

No direction.

No measurable, clearly defined outcome which they want to achieve.

They just watch tutorials all day and get stuck in consumption hell.

You can learn a lot in 6 months, but it doesn’t mean you’ve actually achieved anything.

This is what makes learning feel irrelevant, meaningless, and boring - purposeless.

A vision is a filter.

It defines what is, and what is not, worth learning.

Without a vision, you’ll learn everything “just in case.” I’ve wasted thousands of hours using this mindset.

With a vision, however, you will learn only what’s necessary, and only when it is necessary.

You’ll know what paragraphs to skip.

What isolated details to ignore.

What parts of your writing workflow don’t matter anymore.

What specific jiu-jitsu takedown to work on defending.

Create a vision, and everything you learn will compound toward what you want through a necessity filter.

What is a vision?

A vision is not a rigid 10-year plan with every detail written down perfectly.

Profound Idea: A vision is not a perfect plan or a final destination, but rather a rough direction that is always evolving.

When you see your vision as a compass, a guiding light that can change, a direction, you can commit to it freely.

Why?

Because your vision will change as you change as a person.

As you gain more knowledge.

As you achieve more of your goals.

A vision is a direction and not a destination.

Your vision should guide your decisions without locking you into one path for life.

It’s a compass and not a map.

This is why rigid goal hierarchies don’t work (in my personal opinion).

If you write down a perfect 10-year plan with 5-year milestones, 1-year goals, monthly targets, and weekly tasks, all of it mapped out in a document, you will spend more time updating that document than actually doing the work.

This is busy work, not productive work.

It doesn’t move the needle. And the reason why is iteration.

Every time you try something, you learn. Every time you learn, you adjust. Every time you adjust, your goals shift slightly. This is how it should be.

Iteration is the daily practice of trying, missing, changing, and trying again. It’s embedded in everything you do, or it should be at least. And rigid goal hierarchies collapse under iteration; they require constant rewriting which pulls you away from the work that actually matters.

Direction is all you need.

How to create your vision

Let’s go through the vision-creation process.

Spend no more than 1-2 hours on this. You don’t need a perfect answer right now, but it’s very important that you complete this step regardless.

This is the foundation for everything we will go on to discuss.

Open up a document or grab a blank page. You will be writing about what your dream life would look like.

This self-education guide is going to help you achieve your dream life.

Get ready to start writing.

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