Your brain needs a meaningful project to wire itself around

A 6-step plan for building a life-changing project, in about an hour or so.

In this essay, I will help you do one thing:

Build a meaningful project.

Even if it’s your first one.

By a project, I mean a new thing you will build toward each and every day. Literally anything.

A new physique.

A better relationship.

A topic/reading list.

An exam to pass.

A jiu-jitsu blue belt.

A project is something that, I personally have found, to be the best way to bring your ideal future into the now. Something to launch you out of bed each morning. Like an ecstatic child excited to create and build something new and beneficial for your life.

And maybe other people’s lives too (which doesn’t hurt).

I really hate that a select few people online are selling grindset-productivity as a God to people who don’t yet have the awareness and agency to question them. I think you’ll burnout and fail if you listen to them. And those same people who believe they are grinding all day, they are just doing busy work, and not productive, needle-moving work.

I used to write my weekly newsletter on my lunch break at work, and in 5 minute sprints while hiding in the jacks throughout the day. Thanks to my 2 digital products (my reading guide and my self-education guide), my exclusive paid guides here on my Substack paid-tier (my learning and writing strategies), and (the little help from) YouTube AdSense, I’ve moved to part-time hours in my job.

Now I write for 1-2 hours every single morning, because I built upon those lunch break and 5 minute writing sessions.

I’ve been writing these essays and sharing them online for a year now.

And I’m not a fucking millionaire.

I still have a job, and I have zero intention with ever selling you a bullshit identity/transformation like “escape the 9-5,” even in my upcoming long-form writing course that will be launching in the next month (it teaches my writing/content system).

But I have learned a lot in this last year while doing this whole personal brand thing. And I’ve made more mistakes in the last week than most people tell you online across their whole career :)

To start with:

The thing that will make having a meaningful project to work on as meaningful and seamless as possible, is having an aim.

Yes, I know it sounds esoteric and abstract.

But my goal here today, is to make that profound idea as practical and actionable as possible, by giving you a 6-step plan that will outline your meaningful project, in about one hour or so.

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You can watch the YouTube version of this essay below:

And listen to this while on a walk on Spotify (c’mon, the weather is booming atm)

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Pushing rocks

You are already pushing a rock toward an aim you may not have chosen.

If you don’t build a purpose you will be handed one.

If you don’t give yourself an aim your mind will pick an expedient one without you knowing.

If you don’t have a meaningful project to work on, how do you expect to change your life into the life you want it to be?

I think the quickest way to make your life feel a hell of a lot more meaningless, is to always wait around until you have the thing you want.

More time.

Lots of money.

Tons of energy… you know the story.

I caught myself out, like, 2 months ago.

I was lifting, and I was thinking how I’d love to try get my first gold medal as a jiu-jitsu blue belt. I was thinking how I’d do it once I launched my writing course, and then if I started a service of some kind (I’ve been considering it).

And then I taught… “you stupid fucking piece of shit.”

Sorry, my self talk isn’t usually that negative. But that is quite literally what I thought.

Why do I want to wait until I have more money, or quit my job, or reach X or Y date or [insert arbitrary milestone here].

You can literally just do things. So why start only when you have the things, since doing things is… literally how you get things?

Have you ever seen that gorilla video?

If you haven’t, you can search it up, but it’s a video of a basketball team throwing a ball around to each other and you are told before hand (this is important) to watch and follow where the ball goes. I watched that for the first time when I was 17 in my youth project, and I taught I was the smartest person, thinking because I knew about psychology and philosophy, that I’d see past this trick right away.

When the youth leader asked if anyone saw the gorilla moving around in the background, it floored me.

Absolutely. Fucking. Floored me.

You’ll only understand fully if you’ve seen the video. But the profound idea behind it is that you see what you are aiming at.

Once more.

You see what you are aiming at.

The human mind is a master at locking onto a target and ignoring everything else that isn’t that target.

If I ask you to think about red cars while we’re on a drive together, in my girlfriend’s Suzuki Swift that I’m insured on, how many blue cars do you think you’ll see?

Exactly.

At least 10 red cars.

My point:

If you haven’t given yourself a target, well, you already have one. It’s just unconscious to you, and it was implanted in there by somebody else online, somebody else you know, perhaps a parent or a teacher or an external body like the education system, the news, or the government. I know you already get the jist behind why that can get pretty hairy…

Most unnecessary suffering in a lot of people’s lives comes less from their circumstances and more from what they are aiming at.

When I was 17, I was aimed at answers.

I was suffering a lot back then. Most of it unnecessarily, in my own mind. And it led me toward profound ideas. This is literally why my newsletter is called profound ideas, btw. Philosophy, psychology, reading and books, and learning to write (not like the way I write now, though). And tons of prime Jordan Peterson and Academy of Ideas.

Lots of ideas that were esoteric and abstract, yes, but I found them to be so practical and beneficial once I actually applied them to my own life.

I had zero free time with the Leaving Certificate back then. I had no part-time job or the level of freedom you’d have with a car.

But I did have a direction, and it served as the foundation for, quite literally, what you are reading this on right now.

A profound question for you to consider:

What are you currently aimed at, and therefore, what are you not seeing?

Let’s do some thinking together, now, through what you actually need to do, in order to start changing in your life.

You need to build something dense

I screen-recorded this profound idea while on a lunch break at work when I was 18, it was an Instagram reel.

I listened to it about 8 times in a row, because it too, like the gorilla video, absolutely fucking floored me:

You are going to develop one, maybe two chronic illnesses at some point in your life. And if it’s not you, it will be somebody that you love. So what type of person do you want to be when that comes? You want to be the person who built an ark.

I don’t like talking about this.

But maybe this might help someone who has also gone through this, is going currently going through it.

It’s been just about 10 years since my Mam passed away from stomach cancer.

For about 2 years it was chemo every Thursday and trying every diet under the sun. We still saw family every week, but we could never really go out and have days together like we used to.

I’m not looking for sympathy saying any of this.

If you know, you know, it was just a hard thing to go through.

So… why am I saying this to you?

It really taught me that some people get rocks dropped on top of them, that they have to push nonetheless.

I was 12 when she passed, I’m 22 now, and I do miss her terrible. But I don’t spend every second wishing my life away to have her back. Which might sound like a terrible thing to say, but I don’t think it is.

I have my personal brand, my writing, lifting weights, my girlfriend, my Dad, my jiu-jitsu club, my friend group (we call ourselves “The Big 5” that I see every Friday), and I love music, and books, and learning and ideas, and eating good food and going on walks and caffeine and blocking my phone for 12 hours at a time.

I would love to see her again. Even though I don’t think I’ll get ever get the chance.

But I don’t think I need her back to feel fulfilled in my life ever again.

You have to build a life that justifies all the shit that comes with being alive. You have to choose your own burdens, to help you combat the burdens that will try and take you out at the ankles.

There will always be hard days.

Also, I’m 22. So what the fuck do I know.

But I think we should at least choose to make those days hard, but in the right direction, toward the right goals that you yourself have chosen.

The body you have built, the mind you have forged, the soul you have cultivated, and the vocation you end up with, will each be determined by what rocks you push.

Nobody is coming to push your rocks for you.

Which, is a profound idea that should excite you more than anything you’ve read all year.

Let’s build your meaningful project, together, now :)

How to build a meaningful project

Step 1 - Plan for your death and move backwards

That’s a profound idea that my girlfriend sent me last Thursday.

Plan for your death and move backwards.

What life do you want to have built across your only one life?

I hate sounding like a guru saying that. But it really is a practical question if you think about it practically. You don’t need a 10 year plan because you can’t see that far anyway. There’s too much uncertainty, so think 3-6 months at minimum, and 1-3 years maximum.

In the next 5 minutes, write down the type of life you’d like to have, if you could have it, and if you actually tried to go out and get it.

Be honest here.

If you write down the life you ‘think’ you should want, versus the one you actually want, you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot before step 2.

Step 2 - Write down your ideal life and character

Write a bad first draft.

A bad first draft is still a draft.

And you can’t edit a draft that does not exist.

Write down your answer for these two questions now, in two separate documents, or on two separate pieces of paper:

• What does your ideal life look like?

• What does your ideal character look like, that would be needed to build that ideal life?

500 words each is a good minimum. That’s like 15-30 minutes of writing each.

And spending one hour to give you a clearer aim than you have ever thought about across the decades you’ve spent being alive, I think that’s a worthy investment of your time.

By all means, if the profound ideas are flowing, feel free to do more!

Neither answers have to be perfect, you literally just need something written down that you can reread, evaluate, reflect upon, and then edit once you start your first project.

While writing, think about what it would feel like to have both the ideal life and character.

I say feel, because you don’t actually want things for having them. I still haven’t fully recovered from hearing this first myself.

You want things for how having them makes you feel.

Step 3 - Choosing your first project

You need to choose one skill.

Your skill should help you move closer to living your ideal life and building your ideal character in some way.

If it does both, you have chosen an excellent skill.

If you’re stuck, here are four categories to pick from:

• Mind - a course, a reading list, a degree, a high-value skill like writing

• Body - lifting, BJJ, sprinting, running

• Soul - a relationship, a meditation practice (I call it a boredom practice), spirituality

• Vocation - a personal brand, a part-time one-person business, creating and sharing something online through writing

Reminder: only one skill, because that will be your one project

My own example:

The first project I clearly defined for myself was this very newsletter. I wanted to learn to write, think, and talk about ideas I thought were so profound and useful when applied to your life, and to market them in a way as to make other people care about them too (marketing is the same thing as persuasion).

Step 4 - Start absurdly small

Aim low.

That doesn’t mean don’t aim.

I sat down with one of the lads and talked about this profound idea a while back. He was struggling with being productive and getting college work done (he’s an architect). So we sat down and did a fundamental analysis of his time.

He was spending about 40-50 hours per week in college. Lectures included. We drew it all out on a Google Calendar, so we could see what time was being allocated to where.

Guess how much actual, productive, needle-moving work he was doing.

About 40 minutes per day outside of lectures.

I realized I did the same thing in college months before that conversation.

I was doing 20 hours per week of “college work” and producing output for only… 3 of those hours.

My solution was cutting back to one hour of college work per day. Hard limit. Nothing more than that. And I ended up getting all my assignments done one month early because of it.

The idea:

Sometimes, all you need to do is as little as possible in order to see progress.

500 words of writing takes 15-30 minutes. But done across four days, and this essay that you are reading right now, is finished.

Find the lowest effective dose.

The lowest amount of work that still moves the needle, and do it every day.

But also, you need to negotiate with yourself.

If not, you’re going to get fed up, because you’ve set too high of an expectation for yourself, then feel oppressed, then fall back to doomscrolling till 3am every night while covered in Pringles and Cheeto dust.

Step 5 - Bring your ideal future into the now

Do not wait for conditions to be perfect to start living the life you want.

Begin by bringing your ideal future into the present moment.

Example:

I wanted to write for 1-2 hours every single morning. I didn’t wait until I quit my job to do that. I started with 15 minutes on my phone while lying in bed before work. Then, I got up earlier and did 30-60 minutes with a coffee before work.

If you don’t start by trying to live the smallest version of the life you do want, today, then you’re never going to live it.

Aim low. That’s a Jungian idea, that is.

The gap between your life as it is now, and the life and character you want to have, it closes only by moving toward it.

You move toward it by trying to live it, today, and every day after that.

Step 6 - Ah yes, iteration

Remember that draft you wrote in step 2?

Yeah.

It will change.

Because so will you.

You will have a draft 2, and a draft 3, and a draft 4, a draft 5, draft 15, draft 107.

If something isn’t working, or if you don’t feel motivated (as motivation always runs out after that initial honeymoon phase) then you need to iterate.

What do I mean by iterate?

You need to reflect on what you loved doing, what you hated doing, and change one thing.

Iterate ruthlessly like a mad man.

It took me over 60 of these long form posts to figure out how I like to write.

Think about that for a second.

60 long-form pieces of content across more than a year.

And I still feel like I am learning something new about this craft all the time. Because I am iterating. Trial and error every week. I’m experimenting, plotting, scheming up new ways to make these essays better for you absolute legends.

Even if something feels like it is wrong or it stops being enjoyable, that’s still feedback.

Reflect on it.

Iterate somewhere, and genuinely try to listen to what you enjoy doing.

There’s enough bad actors out there selling you productivity as a God.

Just have follow the fucking fun, and you’ll never have to worry about burnout.

Thanks for reading this one, it means a lot. I know it was a bit personal, but that’s what I wanted to test out this week to see how I felt about it, and to see how you legends engaged with it too.

You’re an absolute legend.

Thank you for having an interest in interesting ideas.

- Craig :)