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

Everyone is racing to be successful right now.

And as you'd guess, 99.99% of them will not, in fact, become successful because they're all obsessed with the wrong thing.

They're obsessed with the clod code skills that they're collecting from Instagram posts that tell you to comment a keyword in order for them to DMU so you can follow them so that they can send you the link to the skill that you're going to try once and never use again.

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

They're obsessed with tactics.

You know, the same knowledge that everyone else has access to.

Do you not realize that all the information you could ever need to make $100 million is readily available to you online, in books, or just inside of an AI chat if you talk to it long enough.

Have you ever stopped and wondered why everyone in the world isn't making millions of dollars right now?

Have you ever considered that the actionable advice you crave so much won't get you anywhere, unless you know how the pieces you're picking up fit into the entire puzzle?

So why is this?

Why are so many people trying to desperately aim for success but get nowhere close to achieving it?

One is because they're exchanging one form of cheap dopamine for another, more insidious form.

I would argue that endless tactic collection by endlessly consuming YouTube videos around business and self-improvement is worse than just doom scrolling brain rot videos, because you're getting a sense of fake progress.

At least with the doom scrolling videos, you just feel bad about yourself.

But with the self-improvement in business and even this video, you feel bad about yourself.

But you also get this false certainty that you're making progress just by watching the video.

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

Tactics is execution.

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

Now, if you're this type of person who just collects tactics, I'm not trying to belittle you.

I do the same thing quite often right now, and I did it a lot more in the past.

I got stuck into hell.

I took all the courses I tried and failed at seven different business models Facebook ads, SEO, dropshipping, web design, digital art, and a few more.

And I wouldn't even consider them businesses.

I would consider them hobbies because I would learn the high value skill and that felt good.

I would start the LLC and that felt good.

I would build the website and try to write the copy for it so that it's persuasive, and that felt good.

But when it came to actually getting a customer, getting someone to pay me, I was nowhere to be found.

And the missing piece was a strategy, but not just a strategy, the ability to think strategically because how else are you going to create a strategy?

And that's an incredibly difficult thing to learn.

But that's what we're here to talk about.

That's the secret behind Steve Jobs, Alexander the great military strategist in general, most great and successful people that we look up to have the ability to think strategically.

They may not say that that is their superpower or their secret because they may be unconsciously competent, but that is exactly it.

It all comes down to strategy.

And that's what I'm going to show you, not only how to learn, but how to do.

In this video, we're going to create a life strategy, and you're going to learn the principles that you can take and apply to anything that you do, be it business sports relationships anything.

We're also going to talk about the nine traits of a master strategist, and especially how a lack of strategy means a lack of control over the outcome of your life.

As we begin, the only thing I ask of you is that you actually listen and attempt to implement what I say.

You take notes, you actually do something.

Aside from just watching the video and then letting it leave your mind 30 minutes later.

So section number one strategy is getting yourself into a superior position, while at the same time making sure your opponent is in a worse one.

In this section is all about understanding the quote.

Tactics flow from a superior position from Bobby Fischer, who is a chess grandmaster.

Now let's walk through a simple chess match.

I'll try not to bore you here.

We'll make it quick just so we can get to the point.

But player one in the chess match spends the first part of the game doing things that look boring.

They aren't attacking, they aren't capturing any pieces.

And from the outside, it looks like they're not doing anything.

They're just moving their pieces to certain squares on the board.

And in a game like chess, you're playing on a grid, but not all of the squares on that grid are created equal.

It's the same with life.

A piece in the center of a board can reach many more places than a piece stuck behind a corner.

Now in the game, player one slides a rook onto an open lane where nothing blocks it.

They place a bishop on a path that points straight at the enemy king.

They place a knight on a square near the middle of the board, and meanwhile player two has pieces just getting in each other's way.

Their most powerful pieces are trapped behind their own pawns.

Their king is stuck in the middle of the board because they never found a safe moment to tuck it away in a corner.

Player two was only reacting to player one's moves, so player one moves their knight to a square where it can attack player two's king and queen at the same time, and in chess this is called a fork, so your opponent can only save one.

Those are two very powerful pieces, the king and the queen, so losing either one is not good.

So of course player two has to move his king so he doesn't lose the game.

But that leads to player one being able to take their queen, which is the most powerful piece on the board.

And it's essentially game over at this point.

But the thing here is, the lesson is that any player who got to that exact arrangement of pieces could have played that game winning move.

The reason player one got there is because they spent the entire game building up to it.

So if you were to remove any of those boring steps from the start, the fork or the game winning tactic wouldn't exist.

The knight would have gotten blocked and the king would have escaped as the defending piece arrived.

So the real lesson is strategy is getting yourself into a superior position, while at the same time making sure your opponent is in a worse one.

Strategy is the work of making your position better and your opponent's position worse.

Move by move into the gap between the two is so large that tactics start appearing on their own.

Now, the interesting thing here is that in the game of life, you are both the opponent and the player.

Every decision you make changes your own position, and most people are just completely blind to where they are.

If the average person's life were a chess match, they probably have gotten into a game winning move before, but they didn't even realize it.

They weren't able to act on that opportunity because it was just unconscious to them.

They didn't have the cognitive flexibility or architecture, which we're going to talk about in the next video, to actually know when they can execute on a specific tactic to get a big reward.

That's why strategy has to come first, because if you want to actually succeed at building the side business or the creator business, like we talk about here, or just building an esthetic physique, or becoming healthy or simply getting what you want out of life.

You can't be like most people because most people spend zero time strategizing.

They don't engage in intentional strategic thinking like, think about your own life, right?

I do this all the time. We all do.

But when you're just going about your life, are you actually thinking, or are you just reacting to thoughts and emotions?

Are you understanding what's going on in your head or are you just letting it play out?

Both have their benefits, right?

They're different modes of thinking.

There's creativity and there's productivity.

Creativity benefits from a more open focus, letting your mind be kind of chaotic and then picking, picking certain ideas or pieces and synthesizing them together.

And then productivity is more strategic, more focused, more hierarchical.

But most people don't engage in productivity in that way.

They engage in a very narrow state of stressful focus based on urgency or scarcity, because they have to to survive, and that is not a good place to be in.

And lastly, if you observe society, you will see that plain tactic level thinking is very disastrous.

And that leads into section number two, which is that the average person lives in a mindless cycle of struggles they can't escape.

So thank goodness you aren't actually on a battlefield because you'd probably be dead.

Most people commit highly predictable strategic mistakes that if they were in a truly violent setting, they would lose and winners would be studying what they did so that they could do the exact opposite.

Getting married too early or late, not developing mastery in anything, trusting that AI can do everything for you.

And I'm saying this as someone who is not anti-air completely, because everything is a religion nowadays and we don't have to treat anti-air or the flavor of the day drama that's going on, that's been happening every three months is just a different thing that people get obsessed with and cry about and play victim with.

In virtue signal on social media.

You don't have to engage in that, and you can see the signs of lower levels of thinking in those people, and you can avoid them.

Again, we're going to talk about that in the next video.

But other examples chasing money over meaning irresponsibly, going into debt, staying in a bad relationship, not investing in education, climbing a corporate ladder that leads to nowhere.

The list just goes on.

The average person does not try to solve their problems or their struggles.

They get stuck in a routine where they live the same day over and over again, because that's what the conditioning process led to in their lives.

When they were born, their parents and teachers injected values and beliefs into their head that put them on the default path, heading toward the goal that society wanted for them, which is go to school, get a job, retire at 65.

The industrial paradigm.

And most people never question that.

And by the time they turned 20, it had become so conditioned in their mind that it's just habitual, it's just unconscious.

It's just what they do.

It doesn't cross their minds to snap out of it, engage in strategic thinking, and change the direction of their life so that they can eventually reach a more advantageous position.

Where their problems aren't so painful, they still have problems. Everyone still has problems, but they're of a lesser magnitude.

They're more fun and creative problems to solve.

You start to see life as a puzzle rather than a death sentence.

So what I'm saying is that everyone has a strategy, but for most people, it's not one that they created, it's one that they were assigned.

Their strategy is again, go to school, get a job, retire at 65, be a good student, make a decent amount of money even though it's not that much.

Be humble.

Don't stick your nose out.

Your dreams aren't worth pursuing because they're risky.

Which doesn't make sense because risk is the only way to get reward.

It all just doesn't make sense when you actually think about it.

Especially going into the new paradigm, which is AI information, all of that stuff.

It requires a completely different strategy, whether or not you agree that culture and society should be heading in this direction of AI and information, that doesn't mean that it's not happening.

People are so mad that, oh, jobs are going to be replaced, even though I don't know if that's going to be the case.

But that's what people are saying.

No matter what it is, you need to create a new strategy so that you can thrive in the future, rather than being stuck in the one that you were assigned.

That was only somewhat beneficial to the old way of life, the American dream.

So how do you actually start to get out of this mindless and honestly meaningless way of living?

And you may not be completely in it, but this still applies to you to start to create your own strategy.

Well, you think of it as if you're on an actual battlefield, because in many ways you are.

You're living under this guy's of modern comfort and convenience, where everything is just easy and you're allowed to just coast through life and do the bare minimum in order to survive.

But if you were on a battlefield, think of the general.

His own life was on the line that forced strategic depth.

He had to be strategic in order to win or else he would die.

You need pressure.

You need tactical stress.

You need to put yourself in a position where you must craft a strategy or you lose, or else you're just going to lose.

Either way, move into an apartment you can't afford.

Book the plane ticket to somewhere you've never been.

Invest in the business, software, the course, or coaching.

Even if you think it's a scam, because at least your finances will be put on the line and you can't live in a shroud of false comfort anymore.

So you get it.

You need a strategy, and you need to develop the skill of strategic thinking.

Because without those, every single decision you make in life becomes arbitrary.

It doesn't matter.

It is quite literally meaningless because it's not aimed in a specific direction.

That doesn't feel good to think about that.

Every single thing that you do every single day without a strategy does not get you anywhere.

I'm being hyperbolic, but that's for a reason to actually get you to take this seriously.

And if the outcome of your life is the accumulation of the decisions you make, then this is arguably one of the most important things you could ever do.

That leads to section number three how to build a superior life position.

By going so deep, you see patterns in everything you do.

Now.

In the Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi, there are nine precepts or principles every strategist should follow.

One is don't think dishonestly.

Two training is the way itself.

Three get acquainted with every art, for know the ways of all professions.

Five understand gain and loss in worldly dealings six develop intuitive judgment about everything.

Seven perceive what can't be seen eight.

Attend even two small things nine.

Do nothing useless.

A strategist in Musashi's mind is someone who goes so deep into one discipline that they discover something universal.

At the bottom of it, you notice patterns that aren't specific to business or relationships or swordsmanship or chess.

They are constants.

And once you see those patterns and notice them across domains, you become far more effective within all domains because you are never really starting from scratch.

You have an understanding of reality as a whole on your side.

We'll go into how to uncover these like universal patterns, so to say.

But the first time I became aware of this is when I started in business, because for most of my life, I had been into fitness and in the gym and studying nutrition and all of this stuff just in my free time.

And when I started building the business and actually seeing some success with it, I'm like, this is progressive overload, right?

If you know what progressive overload is, where it's like slowly increasing the weight over time, you're not trying to jump up in huge leaps and bounds of weight.

You increase by 2.5 pounds or 5 pounds, and the nutrition you eat has to fuel the recovery to facilitate that.

And you use that as a metric for how much you're growing, because if you can focus on that, that is a great proxy for muscle growth, for understanding how much muscle you're actually building and whether or not you're building muscle is if you're consistently getting stronger over time.

So all of the variables have to come together in order to build muscle, which is the end result.

But in business, making money, the same exact thing happens.

You need all of the variables to come together, and you're not aiming for a viral explosion of sales like many of the startups are, you're aiming for the slow, consistent growth, and year after year you look back and you're like, Holy crap, this has been an exponential line.

Now the nine precepts or principles that we went over define what this strategist or master strategist looks like on the outside.

So the modern idea of a generalist is usually someone who knows a little about a lot.

There are jack of all trades, but what Musashi is describing here is a bit different.

There's the generalist, there's the specialist, and then there's the master or the strategist.

And this also maps quite well to the stages of ego development and Spiral Dynamics.

The strategist stage is quite achievable and comes with the following qualities.

The first is systems thinking.

So strategists see competing systems and perspective simultaneously, while achievers who are the self-help or the businessman operate within a single system of success and achievement.

They're also comfortable with paradox, so they can hold contradictions like being both pro and anti-air, rather than resolving them into clear or false answers.

They focus on process over outcome, so they care about how things happen and the principles at play, not just the results.

They're aware of constraints, so they see how their assumptions and frameworks shape what they perceive.

They have a sense of meta awareness, so strategists can observe their own meaning making and not just deploy expertise or navigate social dynamics.

And they have principled flexibility.

They have strong values, but adapt methods fluidly versus rigid rules or social conformity.

The most important trait there, in my opinion, is the ability to hold paradox or to hold multiple frameworks or perspectives.

What that means is not engaging in black and white thinking, which is the lowest form of intelligence.

And this is one massive trap of social media.

Every time you log on, that's all you see and you react to it and you get addicted to it without even knowing it, and you slowly degrade your mental capacity to hold paradox.

So as a side note, the solution to that is to become a curator, you need to carefully protect your mind and curate your own sources of information where you're getting information from.

This is why we built the reader and idea capture inside of Eden.

You can save a link to anything like this YouTube video, and then open it in a reader so you can highlight it and keep your curated information in one place, organized on boards.

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

So if you want to start building your garden for ideas, you can start with Eden.

The idea capture portion and reading is free via the link in the description.

Strategists see their own constructions as choices their identity, their values, their worldview.

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

So that is our goal to become someone who can embody these precepts or principles of the strategist.

And closer to the end, I'll actually give you a shortcut or as close to a shortcut as you can get to just studying these universal principles directly so that you can notice them in your life.

And for this section, I think the most actionable point is the ninth precept, which is to do nothing useless.

Make that your operating principle for the next year and you will do incredible things.

If you were to simply audit your thoughts and behavior for usefulness, you would rapidly turn your life around.

As I said, scrolling on social media, getting sucked in to the dogmatic black and white thinking is useless.

The mindless way of life is a useless way of life.

So the questions now are what do you actually master?

What is your form of training?

How do you begin to understand gain and loss?

How do you begin to embody the principles of a master strategist?

And most importantly in my eyes, how do you do something useful that leads to section four, which is how to think?

So strategically, you finally take back control of your life.

So thankfully we can study what makes a good strategy or what strategic thinking looks like, and then we can reverse engineer it, take the principles and start to apply them to our life.

And these principles have been refined and iterated on over centuries of military and war and sports and business.

You have a massive amount of historical wins and losses that you can look at.

And the beautiful thing is that all of these apply to your own personal life and success.

I've personally compiled seven of them here, so if you sit down and actually do this and follow through with this, your life will change.

That doesn't mean that your strategy is going to be a winning strategy.

You can still lose, but it sure helps you in not being trampled over by your opponent, which is often yourself.

So principle one of strategic thinking is vision.

And I love this quote from the account Orange Book on X.

No one ever suddenly gets lucky.

If the star is suddenly aligned for you, you actually align them, consciously or not, by choosing where to live, who to learn from, who to marry, who to befriend, what lifestyle to maintain, what risks to take, and what vision to believe in.

Now, if you don't have a vision, you're lost.

You do not have intention behind your actions because you don't know what your actions are leading to.

You're holding ten darts in your hand, and those represent the ten bold decisions that will determine the outcome of your life.

But you don't even have a dartboard to aim at.

In other words, you don't even have a chance to hit the board.

You don't know where the board is.

But of course there is a benefit to actually being lost.

I'm not saying that you should never feel lost in your life, because when you're lost, you have a decision to make.

You either let entropy drag you into oblivion, which is that your life gets slowly worse and worse over time without you really noticing it until it's so bad.

It's like your room getting messy.

You don't clean your room one day, and then shirts appear over here, and then you don't clean it the next.

Then you start to notice dust is gathering, and eventually, day after day, it becomes a pigsty.

And it's normal to you.

That's the dangerous part, is that it doesn't just rapidly get dirty.

It happens slowly over time in this way where you don't even notice it, and then it's so much harder to get out.

And that's what's happening.

When you feel lost, you have to make the decision to figure it out.

Experiment with new things until you find that one thing that's worth going all in on.

The void is where success is born.

Now.

A vision is the ultimate outcome that you're aiming for in life.

It is not a vague wish.

It must be as specific as it can possibly be.

It must be compelling enough to motivate and guide every action.

Because you're clear about what you want, you can't have a strategy at all.

Once you are clear, you can reverse engineer every step in iterate as you go.

So if you want to become someone who is emotionally resilient or deeply self-aware in financially independent by 35, that's very specific.

That allows you to evaluate every daily decision against it.

Scrolling social media for two hours probably doesn't move you toward that, and without vision, you wouldn't even register that as a problem in your life.

As another example, if you want to build a 50,000 follower, audience or newsletter in the personal development space, that generates enough revenue to quit your job in 18 months, again, that is very specific.

That is doable.

You can actively see whether or not your actions are leading toward that, and then you can course correct when they're not.

Or you can educate so that you know what to do and you know what tactics to apply, and you know whether or not the tactics apply to you so you don't get sucked down the distraction rabbit hole on social media of people trying to tell you their business model is better.

Every piece of content that you write, every platform choice, and where you choose to grow on social media.

Every monetization decision can be evaluated against the intent.

And now, since everyone's talking about building a personal brand these days and I'm with them, I do think it is the future in many ways, especially as a value creator, not necessarily an influencer that contributes to brain rot and ruining people's minds, but someone who explores their curiosity and shares what they learn and provides some form of value.

I do believe that that is a very good path to go down for people that want to go down.

It now actually created something pretty cool.

The link is in the description, but all you do is you fill out five questions and this is completely free.

I built it kind of just for fun, but you fill out five questions and then it researches what's working in the market.

And then at the end it spits out a personal brand strategy for you that you resonate with.

And it builds a board inside of Eden with a swipe file of posts that you can use as inspiration to create your first post, because they are based on what works and what's performing in the market. So it's pretty cool.

Try it out.

And if you're listening to the Spotify version of this video, just go to Eden.

So strategy.

Now the thing here is that vision is very difficult to create just by thinking about it or imagining it.

It's very difficult to think about what you want and actually know whether or not that's what you want.

So instead, it's easier to start with inverting it, right?

An anti vision or creating a post mortem for your life.

And a postmortem is essentially writing out every single thing that went wrong so that you can avoid it.

So that's step one. That's what I want you to do.

I want you to stop, take out your notes, take out a piece of paper, and just quickly write this down and you can iterate it and add to it over time.

First write your anti vision. Just one paragraph.

Think of exactly what you don't want the outcome of your life to be.

The second thing is a post mortem.

So reverse engineer why that anti vision would have happened in the first place and what mistakes were made and how to avoid them.

And from there, it's much easier now to think about what your starting vision could be, your MVPs or your minimum viable vision, because it does evolve over time as situations change.

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

So principle number two is research.

And we'll start with a quote from Devin Erickson.

Worry less about which career skills AI will take over, and more about whether you are training to be and training your kids to be high agency, perceptive, self-motivated people who can navigate an unknowable future with an adaptable mind.

So in a war, a general sends out spies, studies the terrain, and learns the enemy's habits and tendencies because you need Intel before you act.

The question is, when was the last time you studied yourself?

When was the last time you audited your habits and what kind of life they were compounding into?

When was the last time you paid attention to how your mind reacts to silly little things that end up clogging your headspace for hours on end, removing you from your path?

Most people have zero Intel on how to start a business, how to build a career, what healthy relationships look like, how to stay lean and healthy, or what the mass reprocess looks like.

They get a little spurt of motivation, like for a New Year's resolution, go about it blindly and obviously fail because they didn't engage in research and self-education.

That's not a habit for them.

So before you begin improving your life with something like a spirituality practice or anything else, you want to study multiple traditions, read the research on different techniques, talk to people who've done it for years, follow a range of social accounts in that domain, and understand your own psychological patterns and what tends to trigger you.

You don't just grab the first meditation app that shows up on an Instagram ad, or the first tactic that someone tells you for clearing your mind and being happy all the time that you saw as a tweet or YouTube video.

The same thing goes for social media.

If you're treating this as something that you actually want to do well at, you need a strategy.

You need to study what other people in the market are doing.

You need to understand what works, and you need to let that inform your strategy.

You need to use a research tool like Eden or the other ones, and scroll the discover feed and see what's working, and scroll social media and save posts so that you have them ready.

When it's time to write.

You curate lists of creators and you study them.

You don't just blindly scroll social media, and once you have enough research, you begin to strategize.

How can you wedge yourself into the market by doing what works, but by doing also what is unique.

This is the downfall of starving artists, because all they want to do is practice their little art.

But they won't merge it with business.

They won't integrate the two.

They think that by simply going about it in a business way, just strips all the humanity and soul from it.

When that's not anywhere close to the case, you're just not thinking again.

You're thinking in black and white.

You're letting other people's beliefs and polarizing opinions infect your mind, and you're not questioning them.

You're not coming up with your own opinion on the matter.

Because obviously, if your goal is to actually see success and then you go and do something completely different because your beliefs are tainted, then that's not ideal.

So if you just want to write as art, then go ahead and do it.

But don't expect anyone to give you your attention just because you spent a lot of time writing.

Because time does not equate to value, it is okay.

It is perfectly okay to treat writing or art as a hobby.

But if you're trying to do this as a form of meaningful work, then it is a business.

Now principle number three is preparation, and this is where you identify your resources, the resources that you specifically have and your gaps.

Because you wouldn't just drop into a battlefield without food or logistics or weapons or support.

And so once you know what resources you have or the ones that you don't, you can start building reserves so that eventually you can execute on your strategy.

The resources that most people need to look for are money, time, knowledge, skills, the location you live, connections, and relationships.

All of those things are valid resources.

Just because you don't have money doesn't mean that you can't create a strategy to say, start a business because you can still develop skill, you can develop knowledge, and if you're young, you have plenty of time on your hands, right?

The ones who are past the age of 20, 25, 30, when they're very ingrained in their habits and they have bills to pay and all these responsibilities, they don't have much time or money on their hands.

So if you lack those resources and they're very difficult to get, what other resources can you go after?

Where can you leverage yourself as an example before attempting some kind of major life change, like quitting a job, or ending a relationship, or starting a new project or venture, you'd probably want to build your financial runway, decrease your expenses, develop the emotional regulation skills you'll need, and line up support systems. You don't just rush into battle.

In other words, you need to hedge against risk because every goal comes with risk.

And as you go deeper and deeper into the hierarchy of goals you're trying to achieve, the risk only gets greater and greater.

You may start a business as a one person business, like we talk about with something like an information product or a simple AI product.

But then what's next?

Are you going to build a team or are you going to expand, or are you going to go into e-commerce?

What else are you going to do?

Or are you going to stick and make it a lifestyle business, which is perfectly valid?

But if you want a greater return, if you want more money or potentially more freedom or just whatever you want in life, what is your vision, then you're going to have to build the resources so that the risk of doing so doesn't absolutely destroy you.

So if you don't have many resources, then it probably wouldn't make sense to start crypto trading or start stock trading or day trading, because you're just going to lose all your money.

You're gambling at that point, and that's not a strategy.

You are much better off starting smaller so that you can acquire resources.

That is the beginning of your strategy is how do I do something that allows me to get the resources I need to do what I eventually want to do?

So the way that I went about that is social media.

I knew that it was free to access.

I didn't need any money to start the business.

I didn't need any money to create an info product.

I didn't need any money to write a book.

And then that allowed me to acquire the resource of money so that I could invest into a bigger business that I wanted to build, which is in the software business.

And eventually, soon Sonder, the new tropic business.

So if you have these high and mighty dreams of doing something massive, right, which I think is a very worthwhile thing to do and to think about, but it's not feasible for you right now.

What are you doing about it?

Just because you can't start the business you want to start now, doesn't mean you can't start another form of a business that allows you to start that business.

Otherwise, you're never going to be able to start the one you want to start.

Now.

Speaking specifically to young people, you have so much time on your hands.

You are in one of the greatest positions you can possibly be right now at this point in your life.

And if you have these high and mighty dreams, in my opinion, the best thing you can do is just hedge against risk as much as you can so that you can take risk and have nothing to lose.

What that means is selling everything you own.

Living in a depression apartment as Devin calls it, a.k.a an apartment that costs nothing.

You just have no standard of living for your young years, and you cut all your expenses so that everything you have can go into the thing that you're building because you have the resource of time, but you don't have the resource of money.

So you need to pull all of your reserves in and put it toward generating the resource of money.

Now, principle number four of strategic thinking is focus specifically concentration of force.

So a quote from Greg McCown from the book essentialism.

Is there a point at which doing more does not produce more?

Is there a point at which doing less but thinking more will actually produce better outcomes?

So focus or concentration of force is the military principle of focusing all of your resources at the decisive point, rather than spreading thin.

The best example of this is France in 1940, where the French had more tanks and troops than the Germans, and they had far more raw resources, but they distributed their armor or tanks evenly across the entire front.

So every sector had a few tanks.

The Germans took every panzer they had and drove them through a single point, which the French thought was impassable, so they barely defended it.

Focus is about where you put what you have, and in life you only have so much of it at any given time.

Most people try to change their life and place 10% of their attention into diet, sleep, exercise, meditation, relationships, their side hustle, and more.

When they would get better at all of them faster if they focused on the single bottleneck holding them back the most.

I don't think people understand that enough.

That focus does not decrease your progress in all areas.

It increases them in all areas.

By focusing on one thing, you increase every other area, and for most people, the single bottleneck is money because money buys anything.

So if you focus solely on solving your financial struggle first, then that frees up more resources to put towards other areas of your life, like diet.

You can afford higher quality food.

When you have more money, you're in a less stressful state.

You can think more creatively.

It benefits your creative work and spirituality.

And with those three things a clear mind and a better diet and more energy and potentially more time to go and exercise that benefits your relationships in.

The same applies to business.

On something like social media, there is more to growth than just content, so cross posting to all platforms takes away time you could be spending building connections with people that will help you grow.

You'd gain more followers by focusing on one platform first, which can then be used as leverage to grow on the other platforms faster than you would have in the same amount of time, spreading your force across all platforms. One tangible example of that is that I chose Twitter or X as my first platform, and I solely focused on that.

I built connections on that platform, and I still know and talk to those connections today.

But when I had somewhat of a large following on Twitter, when I decided I wanted to deploy my strategy on Instagram and grow there, I found people with a large following on Instagram and said, hey, I have a large following on X, do you want to help each other grow by sharing each other's content on either platform?

And that alone allowed me to grow on Instagram so much faster than anyone else just starting from scratch.

This is something we teach in week four of the Creator Bootcamp.

Now principle number five of strategic thinking is just execute or execution.

And from Alex Hermosa, strategy is how you choose to allocate your limited resources against unlimited options.

Proper execution of strategy is the continuous act of jumping between macro vision and micro daily action, ensuring that the decisions you make have aim and intention.

This is the core of what strategy is doing.

The opposite of what 99% of people do, because most people do not think outside of their conditioning, assigned goals or repetitive routines.

But how do you actually execute effectively?

This is where everything starts to come together.

First, you practice holding your vision in the back of your mind.

Write it down somewhere and look at it every morning.

It must become a part of who you are through repeat exposure.

Second, take note of what you learn from studying your opponents or yourself.

Meditate on it. Contemplate it.

Let it marinate in your mind so that it can start to make connections.

Third identify the primary resource that you can leverage for young people.

It's time and freedom.

Most likely.

For some, its capital.

For others, it's an internet audience.

For more, it's a weird set of interests and knowledge.

And yes, for many it's AI, but not from the low level sense.

AI gives high agency people the ability to do so much more, and it gives low agency people a reason to play victim and complain.

But the trap for the high agency person is that now they have unlimited options.

They can do anything.

So concentration of force strategic thinking is even more important than ever because you can do anything with AI, but that doesn't mean you're going to get anywhere.

And fourth, choose your concentration of force play.

Where is the single highest leverage point, the one that would unlock progress in more than one domain?

The thing that makes everything else easier.

And from there we have a soft plan.

But it needs to be crystal clear.

We have to reverse engineer our vision down into a hierarchy of goals that allows us to gain perspective and clarity on our daily actions.

They can't be so far away from each other.

You have to see how your daily actions slowly contribute to your vision, because in many cases, they're not going to directly contribute to it.

You're going to take a daily action, and you're not going to be able to see how it actually is creating your vision.

That's why you have to break it down and see the entire system.

So take your vision and then work backward to one your goals, 90 day objectives, weekly priorities, and daily habits.

Every step should trace back to the intent or vision.

If it doesn't set it aside, that is your sign to take the piece of paper that you took out earlier and to write this down with everything else.

Now, principle number six is adapt or adaptability.

And a quote for me accept Mihai.

It is not possible to experience a feeling of control unless one is willing to give up the safety of protective routines only when a doubtful outcome is at stake and one is able to influence that outcome, can a person really know whether she is in control.

What that means is that a rigid strategy or routine is a losing strategy or routine, especially in today's world where the rate of change is extreme.

Right?

During the industrial age and up until now, not too much change.

That's why it's so deeply ingrained to go to school, get a job, retire at 65 because the societal system was built up according to that paradigm, with the goal.

But now with AI and disruption and all of this stuff, everything is changing every 3 to 6 months and the rate of change will only increase.

And it's going to filter out so many people who get stuck with a rigid strategy and aren't able to adapt.

So in my eyes, the future belongs to the true strategists at this higher level of thinking that will dive into more in the next video.

Because masters can adapt on the fly, because they have the universal principles that they can apply to all domains, they don't necessarily need to relearn everything.

They don't need to upskill or reskill or reeducate because they can do that extremely fast on their own.

So your job is to respond to what's actually happening then and there on the battlefield, not your mental fabrications of worst case scenarios or your fantasies that are not yet real.

So if you committed to a morning routine as an example, but your job schedule changed, you don't just abandon the routine.

That's what most people do.

Don't do what most people do.

The vision and intent of your strategy doesn't change, which is becoming, let's say, more disciplined and grounded.

That's why you created a morning routine.

But the tactics do.

If a particular meditation or business strategy stops working after six months, then you need to change.

You need to experiment and try something new.

You need to be in the constant state of experimentation.

And that's just the principle that systems fall apart over time.

You should expect that.

Think of the notion system that you built out six months ago and don't use now, or the cloud skill you downloaded and don't use anymore.

You have to be skilled enough to know when something isn't working.

The same is true with social media.

I have people come to me all the time and it's like, Dan, I posted this and it was supposed to work according to all of these things that I learned, but it didn't work. What do I do?

You adapt, you experiment, you keep trying.

This isn't a job.

You don't just study and train a repeatable set of tasks.

You have to have the entrepreneurial mind, the creative mind.

You have to be in this constant state of taking in what's going on and interpreting it and then outputting it, and then slowly getting better at that entire process over time.

Now, the way you actually practice this is review, reflection and prediction.

You need to schedule this weekly.

You need to review your week, see if you're on track, reflect on your progress and predict where you're heading.

And this doesn't need to be in any fancy template or thing that you download.

This is like just keep a piece of paper by your computer.

I have this little tiny notebook where I just jot things down because I understand that if I try to keep up with a note taking system, I don't keep up with it.

That's not how your mind works.

It kind of has to be messy.

You have to embrace just putting an idea down and letting it get lost.

And if it's important, you will remember it.

That's the library feature of even.

You just drop ideas in and we auto tag auto categorize everything for you, but you don't even need that.

You can use Apple Notes, you can use the notebook, you can use anything.

Just get in the habit of writing things down.

Now the final principle, number seven the principle of all principles of strategic thinking is the study of principles.

Now with this section, I encourage you to adopt the belief that everything is a skill.

Everything is a field of study that you can stack, experience in and get better at money, mindset, beliefs, relationships, business, social media.

Everything that you think is luck is not luck.

It's skill.

It's only luck because you're gambling and you don't have strategy.

And strategy itself is a field of study with principles that hold across domains.

The more you study strategy and its principles, the better you become at applying them to your own life situation.

It is a lifelong, ongoing practice.

So read sunset, read about cognitive biases.

Study how habits form.

Learn the principles of negotiation.

Study why content goes viral.

Study how attention economics works.

You don't just copy what other creators do.

You study the principles so you can come up with your own moves.

That is essentially what originality is.

Because nothing is original, nothing is authentic.

It honestly peeves me when people, like people get in little arguments on social media of like, oh, you copied my idea and you copied my idea, but you're just looking through the lens of specificity, right? Did they copy your niche?

right? Did they copy your niche?

You guys write about the same topics?

Did they copy how you walk?

You guys both walk.

You're both human.

You both speak the English language.

Did you come up with that all on your own?

Did you come up with any of the words that you speak on a daily basis?

Did you create the clothes that you where have you actually audited the beliefs in your head?

How original and authentic are you?

Actually, why do you treat this as some form of high value that you can stand on to virtue, signal to other people when you'd get much better results in life, when you actually leaned in to what nature and authenticity is.

Now, I'm not saying that plagiarism is good by any means, but I am saying that people take it way too seriously and that people are allowed to have similar ideas.

They're allowed to post similar ideas under their brand because they resonate with it.

But yeah, if it's a direct rip, then yeah, credit the person.

But if it's just an inspired idea.

Welcome to how the world works.

Now, beyond that, I believe that the best way to study true principles is to study reality itself, because strategy is the application of reality's principles to human goals.

So I want to leave you with many different things that you can go down a rabbit hole afterwards.

Right.

I'm going to give you a long list, and I want you to pick one, and I want you to go and read that thing or buy the book or whatever it is.

Just read it and I'll break these up into categories.

The first category is just formal systems. The first is cybernetics, the study of feedback loops, control and self-regulation in any system, mechanical, biological or social.

So go down a rabbit hole with AI or Google about cybernetics systems theory, which is the study of holes, interconnections stocks and flows, emergence and leverage points.

Go and buy a book on systems thinking.

Third is thermodynamics, especially the second law, because entropy always increases.

Every ordered system requires energy input to resist decay.

Your habits and routines will fall apart.

Otherwise, aka clean your room.

I'd recommend the book flow by me.

Set me high for that one.

Even though it's not about thermodynamics.

It's a good read though.

Now in the category of philosophical traditions, study Taoism, which is the Tao or Tao.

I always forget which one it is as the ineffable underlying principle of reality.

It's Wu Wei, which is action in accordance with nature, not forced action, Yin yang, complementary opposites, and cultivation of effortless mastery.

And then there's perennial philosophy, which is the claim that all major wisdom traditions share a common metaphysical core.

There's an ultimate reality.

The human self can participate in it, and the purpose of life is to realize this.

This is like the antithesis of black and white dogmatic thinking.

The next category is integrative meta frameworks.

The first is Integral Theory by Ken Wilber, which maps reality across quadrants, levels of development, states of consciousness and types.

And then there's Spiral dynamics, which is a model of value systems development.

Through tears.

It models how humans construct meaning at different stages, which for strategists is studying reality because it's constructed by the observer.

The next category is the esoteric or symbolic.

So her medic principles or the Kabbalah on the book mentalism correspondence vibration polarity, rhythm, cause and effect, and gender a compact set of lens that have influenced a lot of New Thought traditions.

This is where, as above, so Below comes from.

And then there's also young and alchemy.

So the psychological and spiritual process of transformation, it's a framework for how deep change actually works in a person or system.

And then the last category is the strategic or mathematical.

So game theory the mathematical study of strategic interaction zero sum versus positive.

Some games the prisoner's dilemma Nash equilibrium.

And then there's evolutionary theory.

So selection adaptation fitness landscapes variation and retention.

And all of these are just lenses that point at how a different facet of reality works.

If you were to simply study these domains or those things for the next year, your understanding of almost every skill or discipline or domain or area of learning would rise with it.

You will naturally be better at everything you do in life, so I hope all of that was helpful.

On strategic thinking.

Again, if you want a garden for ideas, a place to curate your knowledge, to save ideas, to save social, post quickly on mobile to research top performing content.

If you're a creator or a writer, and to just have a place where you can dump ideas without worrying about the organization while being able to find them later.

This is essentially what I do for videos like these is I read a lot of stuff.

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

The quotes that I used throughout each section was actually done via that process, so I'll leave it at that.

Thank you for watching again. I hope you enjoyed the video.

Like and subscribe while you're still here.

It's just a simple button click that most people forget to do.

So if you could do that, I'd appreciate it and I'll see you in the next video. Bye!