There's a way to achieve anything effortlessly
...and it's far more powerful than willpower
I think you are working way harder than you need to be.
For the majority of the 22 years I’ve spent being alive, I’ve always tried to be perfect.
I used to judge myself anytime I missed a goal.
Even by a single percentage.
When I missed a workout.
When I read 19 pages and not 20.
When I couldn’t seem to get myself out of bed any earlier than 10am.
Every time I had set out to achieve something, it felt like a World War was going on inside my mind.
People you see that make effort look effortless, you don’t see what they are aiming at inside their minds.
Their own ideals.
And the ideal you currently have might be poisoning you.
The ideal you are unconsciously moving toward right this second, that was handed to you by society, older generations, and an algorithm.
You are fighting against your own mind because you’re putting all your effort toward the wrong ideal.
In this essay, I will give you 5 profound ideas to make you become someone who knows exactly what to aim at, so you never spend another day wandering.
And yeah.
It will make everything you do feel effortless.
Listen to my barely comprehensible Irish accent read this essay to you, you beautiful human:
Idea I - You focus on trying harder because you don’t have an ideal to aim at
You have been spending the wrong currency.
The first thing most people instinctively reach for, when trying to achieve something, is effort.
More willpower... which is finite.
More discipline... which is willpower.
Stricter plans and longer to-do lists... which require discipline.
But if effort was really the limiting factor to success, then the hardest worker in any room would always be the most successful.
Charles Darwin, you know, the guy who theorized the literal theory of evolution, wrote 19 books in his lifetime writing for 1-2 hours per day.
Let that sink in for a second.
19 books, with 1-2 hours of writing per day, that is leverage.
How so?
I think you should try jiu-jitsu. Really. Even if you think it’s not for you, it will teach you that leverage matters more than strength. Because if you can apply the right amount of pressure, against the right breaking point, you can break someone’s arm with very little force using an arm bar.
What you do matters more than how hard you do it.
In jiu-jitsu, the person who applies leverage and skill beats the person trying hardest, randomly without direction, every damn time.
Because strength without any meaningful direction will exhaust you physically, mentally, and emotionally.
If you keep failing forward, good. If you keep failing without moving forward, it means you’re not aimed at something you have purposefully chosen.
I think most people, especially those in their 20s or 30s (like me, I’m 22), are so misdirected in what they are aiming at, that they put it down to pure laziness.
If you procrastinate on every task you try to achieve - to me, at least - it means one thing.
Your mind would rather be doing something else.
Procrastination and laziness are a signal that your unconscious mind would rather be aiming toward something else entirely.
That signal is not a flaw, it is useful information.
The question is whether or not you decide to pick up on it.
You need to stop trying harder.
And you need to question what you are really aiming at.
Because you’re aiming at something already. You’re just not conscious of it right this second.
Idea II - You’re already aiming at something, you just didn’t choose it consciously
Your psyche cannot operate without an aim.
Which means your psyche is always moving toward some aim.
There is something deep within your mind right now. It may or may not be conscious to you as of this second. But it’s determining where your attention goes. What feels meaningful to you. What feels valuable and irresistible to you. And it’s what organizes every decision, and therefore every outcome, of every day you are alive.
Beliefs.
And they’re mostly borrowed... since what you believe to be true and beneficial is shaped by the information you take in through your eyes and ears.
Social media algorithms show you the positives or negatives of any given topic or idea, based on what you engage with more (either the positive perspectives or the negative ones).
The loudest voice in any given room determines (to those who lack higher levels of awareness) who sounds and therefore is the most powerful, and therefore who is right.
Anyone you watch, and I mean anyone, in the real world or the digital world. They are shaping what you think, whether they are intentionally trying to or not, what you believe to be true.
I’ve been dying to discuss this idea with you that I’ve been learning about the past while.
The human psyche is hardwired around belief systems.
Think religion, any sort of morning or night-time ritual, a routine you follow for achieving your goals. Even why the fuck people who say they aren’t religious... still put up a Christmas tree in December. Which is absurd when you think about it.
Everything I just mentioned.
It fulfils the attempt to impose conscious order before entropy (disorder and uncertainty) does it for you.
Which means you don’t decide whether you get to have an aim for your life.
You have one already.
And it’s likely then, that you are not comparing yourself to who you want to be, because it is too easy to compare yourself to who other people appear to be.
And when you don’t have your own ideal to strive toward, you take on other people as they appear to you as your ideal.
This is why comparison feels so fucking painful. It’s tribal thinking, yes. You don’t want to be abandoned by the tribe. Hence the need to be like everyone within the tribe.
And it also means you’re not measuring yourself against a chosen standard. You’re measuring yourself against a moving, borrowed standard. A standard that belongs to someone else, shaped by what they themselves have carefully crafted to show you... on a fake, digital world that looks like the real world.
The second you start building your own ideal, comparison loses most of its power.
Because you can stop looking left and right. You start looking forward.
You don’t decide whether to have an aim.
You decide whether it’s yours.
So, what does a chosen aim - a deliberate ideal - actually look like?
Idea III - You need to write a bad first draft
An ideal is not a 1930s-USSR five-year plan.
It is not a perfect vision.
It ain’t some perfectly articulated plan of attack against your current self.
It is anything but perfect.
And that is what makes an imperfect ideal... perfect.
Here are the two most important questions you will ever be asked in your entire life.
It sounds delirious, but bear with me.
What do you want your life to look like?
Who do you need to become to live it?
I don’t know why we’re not just told this.
You’re told to go to school. Get a degree. Get a job. But nobody asks you what for. What lies beyond those things. That’s why most people my age (in my own life) are drifting without any clear aim. And they’re telling me this themselves, and it honestly hurts me.
They were never told about these two questions.
This is what you are going to do for me now.
Write a bad first draft.
Take out a page (yes, write by hand, your brain likely needs some desensitization time anyway, I know mine does).
Write as poorly as you can, and aim to write it as poorly as you can.
Write down everything you think you want (not what you should want) about what you want your life and self to act, think, and feel like in the next year. It can be as long or as short as you want. 500 words in a good minimum.
The fool is the precursor to the savior. I think it was Jung who said that.
You need to be willing to be a fool at first, before you can become capable of becoming wise. Which is why the bad first draft of who you want to become is still a draft. You cannot improve something that does not exist.
If you’ve seen the movie Pinocchio where Geppetto wishes upon a star before Pinocchio becomes real. The star is above him in the night sky. It’s above him. Yes, I’m speaking figuratively here. Because your ideal should always be above you and beyond your immediate reach. This should always be the case.
You need a direction to be moving in constantly.
An ideal you can almost never fully attain, so that your vision evolves as you do, and that you can keep moving in a direction, constantly, no matter what. No finish line.
I spent five months failing at turning this newsletter, Profound Ideas, into an SEO blog before I discovered that a personal brand was the right aim. Staying in one place is the same as falling backwards.
A vision only gets clearer the more you try move toward it.
Nobody has ever figured out who they are by thinking about it. I’ve wasted a lot of time thinking when I really should have been acting, exploring, and iterating with trial and error like a madman.
Now that you have an aim, here is what it can actually do for you.
Idea IV - What effortless actually looks like
Effortlessness is the absence of internal conflict.
When you have a clear ideal, every task either serves it or it does not.
You won’t need to debate with yourself over whether or not you should write today, if your ideal is to be able to think deeply, connect ideas like nobody else can, and have a perspective on your life that nobody else seems to have with their own.
Then you’re not going to want to doomscroll. You’ll want to buy a notebook, block every app on your phone with an app blocker (I highly recommend this).
And fucking write.
Most of the effort people associate with work actually comes from fighting themselves about doing the work or not.
I want you to run everything you do across a given day - starting with today - and ask:
Does this serve my ideal life or character I am trying to build?
If yes, super.
If not, then why is your mind giving your scarce amount of daily attention to it?
Attention is finite, and what you give your attention to determines the entire trajectory of your life.
Because attention determines what you end up seeing, and therefore start thinking about, and then do.
Think about it this way.
Two people sit down at the same desk, at the same time, with the same laptop open. One person sees one hour of writing as a chore they’ve been dreading all day. Like how some of my friends view writing essays like this one!
Whereas the other person sees it as the most important hour of their day. Likely, since it is the very thing that moves them toward their vision.
Two very different perspectives on what is worth your attention or not.
The only difference, though, is what each person is aiming at.
You do not need more focus.
What you need is less distraction.
The ideal is better at telling you what not to do, than actually telling you what to do.
So what would doing the right things look like if you were trying to smash an average Tuesday?
Idea V - Only do what is required to move the needle, then stop
One task.
30 minutes.
Then stop.
The higher end of what you could do looks like this.
1-3 tasks per day, 30-60 minutes each.
You only need to be doing 1-3 things per day that pull a lever.
To move a needle.
I can spend 30 minutes per day writing one section of this essay, for example.
These essays have on average 3-6 sections. I send my essay out to my email list via my newsletter on Substack. And that newsletter can get anywhere from 10-40k+ reads per week (or more, depending on if they go viral on Substack and YouTube).
I can reach over 40,000 people every week by writing for just 30 minutes per day.
That is the type of leverage a needle-moving task can... yes, leverage.
Time does not mean shit.
The quality of your focus does.
You can achieve more needle-moving tasks in 1-2 hours of pure focus than in 8 hours of busy, distracted work.
Aim low. But that doesn’t mean don’t aim.
You can spend 5 years trying to break through a brick wall by punching it with your bare hands. But the person holding the sledgehammer, will always break through the wall by doing more productive work, in less time, with more focused effort using the right type of leverage.
A needle-moving task means the smallest action that still moves the needle. And it likely won’t look super impressive to flaunt on Instagram to the world, letting everyone know how productive you are sitting in a college library :)
Don’t wait until you feel ready. You will never feel ready. So do it badly. Do it briefly. Do it daily. Until you become someone who finds joy in doing leveraged work, little and often.
Identity follows behaviour. Not the other way around.
Carve out the time before you plan the tasks you’re going to do.
Get up one hour earlier if you have to.
Give your world whatever it needs, so it can leave you alone for 30 minutes, in silence, to think.
If you don’t want to do the work, question the vision.
Not yourself.
Not your pure-fucking “laziness” that you keep telling yourself about.
You just might not be aiming at the right thing yet, which is why you don’t currently feel the benefits of doing the thing.
Let’s wrap this up.
You need one aim.
You need one hour per day.
You do not have to feel guilty for not grinding your life away.
You understand what leverage is now.
You understand that most people who appear to work more than you are simply doing busy work.
You understand what productive work actually looks like, and that laziness is a symptom of not having an aim.
So build a great aim that terrifies you.
People who make work look effortless... they aren’t actually doing all that much of it.
But they are aimed at something they actually do want.
You have everything you need to start.
Thanks for reading.
You’re an absolute legend.
- Craig :)
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I read this and then listened on yt. It’s very enlightening and inspiring. I'm a big proponent of daily journaling to get the mess out of my head and to make space for clear and #profound ideas.
Listened again. Need those ideas to sink in.