Joshe

Nice profile pic 😉. Those eyes are doing something!

You should definitely seek out leverage and identify threats, but only while in an operable structure. If your goal is financial freedom and you're looking for leverage or protection outside anything you’re actually doing, you're delaying contact with the only thing that can teach you. I spent 15 years doing this and am much further behind than I'd like. I was supposed to be free by now, but I'm not. I've paid for these insights. Learn from my mistakes. Example, I have high self-efficacy, can figure most things out and have a cognitive edge over most people, so I always assumed I would easily acquire financial freedom because how hard could it be competing with average people? "If these fools can do it, so can I!" I had all these ideas about how all I had to do was learn how to build websites, digital products, learn SEO, online marketing, and it's off to the races. I thought that I'd out-maneuver or out-SEO everyone because I would find the leverage they'd miss and I'd put in more work than them. I was happy and complacent in the loop of collecting knowledge and theory without testing it, because I thought I was stockpiling leverage. I had knowledge and ideas, but no true operational knowledge. No matter how many articles I read, it was all too vague. I didn't know what advice was right because I wasn't testing any of it. It was only about 10 years later when I actually made a website and tried to compete in the real-world that I found out all my ideas about how easy it was going to be was all bullshit. If you had 24/7 exclusive access to the best business mind on the planet for a whole year, he couldn't guide you to financial freedom because the bottleneck is not access to intelligence, wisdom, or advice - it's access to feedback. Only seek leverage for your near-term problems - don't stockpile. This one principle takes people with very little development from rags to riches all the time. When it comes to making money, intelligence doesn't compound the way we all think it does.

What would you say to someone who insists they need to study hydrodynamics before they learn to swim? You'd tell them: get in, fail, adjust, repeat. That's also the loop for money. You need a functional foundation, which is: an offer, an audience, and a feedback loop. Pick a simple service, try to sell it, fail, adjust, repeat. This is the only theory that adds money to your bank account.

Sustained enjoyment isn't a mindset - it's a consequence of efficacy and agency. Enjoyment comes from experiencing that your effort works (efficacy) and agency (felt control + efficacy + predictable results) is what makes that enjoyment persist. You can't "enjoy the work" until you have enough efficacy to experience agency in it. This is why people grow to enjoy things they initially disliked once they become competent. Nobody starts out loving Excel spreadsheets. It's only when they can bend it to their will they start to enjoy it. Before efficacy, there is no enjoyment. There can be willingness to try and curiosity, but enjoyment only comes after efficacy and agency. A med student reading a textbook can enjoy it if they're understanding it and everything is clicking. But if they're reading the same page five times and nothing clicks, they can't enjoy it no mater how committed they are. Also, a med student might not feel "I'm becoming a doctor," but they can feel "I understand this chapter." Small efficacy and agency wins like this sustain them more than the vision of becoming a doctor.

Structure creates early leverage Leverage produces agency Agency generates motivation Motivation makes discipline tolerable Discipline stabilizes long-term effort Structure creates leverage by turning effort into visible progress. Once progress is visible, motivation and discipline activate without force. That's the loop you want to engage. @blankisomeone You can get financial freedom with little skill acquisition. People do it all the time. I acquired technical skills and I make money with them, but I see so many people way less competent than me who put in way less work than me, making way more money than me. Check out the Youtube channel "Upflip". This channel has tons of examples of how people with little skill are making insane money with low-barrier businesses. The biggest advantage of starting at the bottom is you have tons of options. Check out this kid making bank. He's not some skilled, extraordinary grinder. You could have this business off the ground in no time.

@Leo Gura How can OP tolerate long horizons where effort doesn't quickly restore agency?

That "urgency" is fear. Fear of staying locked into what you perceive as hell, and you see no clear way out. This creates a very heavy load. This desire to escape is so strong that it dominates your experience. It nags at you all the time and pressure accumulates. "Patience" is not the antidote. You only need patience if you continue feeding the problem. The antidote is to forget about the outcome and submerse yourself in work, and trust that reality will see you through while you get your ducks in a row. The good news is you're still young. You have plenty of time but you have to get going because it goes by fast. Breaking free from your loop will take some time, but the mind is malleable. If you distract it with work for long enough, it will drop the fear that currently dominates. Doom thoughts keep your fear alive. Starve it out by replacing the doom thoughts with productive action, such that the slate of consciousness is preoccupied with processes other than fear generation. This is the mechanism behind all psychological change.

100%. If "grieving widow" dominates your Erika Kirk frame, it's the same thing as thinking "Trump is a great man who pours his heart into doing everything he can to make America great". Structurally, there's no difference. Structurally, you're being a conformist and skewing reality due to blindspots in the domain of reading people.

How to uproot the baser drives and act like a robot? The simplest strategy that comes to mind is that of David Goggins: just quit being a bitch and do it. lol. But it doesn't work like that for most people - Goggins has a unique motivational structure. Some of the things involved are energy management, habit removal and formation, inertia, entropy, motivation, interpretation. Each of these play a role in why you can't just behave like a robot. People get this idea that they can override all that and just be like Goggins if they only had the right perspective, but it's not that simple. Maybe the real question is something like: How can you want to work 10 hours a day? I think energy, habits, and interpretation are the levers, but it's very complicated and each person would need a tailored strategy. Another strategy would be instead of trying to force behavior, design systems that turn you into the person you want to become over time. That's probably best for most people. Self-help often fails because loads spike all at once and makes people crash and burn, which opens the floodgates and everything they've been trying to keep out comes rushing back in. So maybe implement change very slowly, such that you barely perceive any agitation from the changes. Also, when you do change, be careful not to associate it with your identity, like "I'm someone who works 10 hours a day". This increases load. Now if you miss a day, it's not just a missed day, it's an identity threat. This is subtle but I think it's a big reason for failure. No matter your strategy, I think you need ample, clean energy. If you're running on fumes, stressed, or depressed, the whole pursuit will be a neurotic nightmare.

Exactly. And accepting that lot takes courage and sacrifice.

For leverage in all problem spaces, the best you can do is to always be vigilant about what is true or false. Everytime you get something wrong, get to the bottom of how it happened. Over time, clarity compounds.

PLEASE GOD!!! LET THIS BE THE ONE THAT SAYS I'M NOT OUT OF MY FUCKING MIND!!! 😂

Yeah, conversing with you here has prompted me to dive deep into motivation. I've learned a ton about motivation in the past few days. It's such an interesting and fruitful domain of inquiry. Some ideas: Motivation: Energy released to restore or expand control at the currently engaged layer. We unconsciously shift between the layers, thus making motivation inconsistent. Your nervous system is made of stacked control loops, running at different layers of reality. A control loop is the opposite of being at the mercy of things. Motivation is the fuel released when a control loop is active and solvable. We are not driven by one goal, one value set, or one motive. We are driven by multiple feedback systems, layered on top of each other, each trying to regulate something different. Motivation depends on which loop is active. We don't "lose" motivation - we shift loops. So much to explore here.

"Pussy-getter" or "lover of pussy" or "Don Juan / Casanova" seeped into identity. Common among youngsters and sometimes can take a while to outgrow. Some never outgrow it. When I was 25 or so, I went to hang out with a bunch of dudes in their 40s after the bar closed. We were playing cards, drinking, and snorting around a kitchen table, and the host had porn playing on the big screen in the background. That was some odd shit. Like bro, you don't watch this stuff with your buddies. lol. It reminded me of my 14-yr-old horniness when a picture of a girl's coochie was worth taking care of. lol. Poor souls. Don't be too hard on them.

It's not wrong at all - it's a necessary step in knowing who you are and why you are that way. I'm sure you do actually value those things. I guess all I'm trying to say is: Imposed meaning is only effective if it's compatible with your motivational structure. You can’t commit your life to something your nervous system won’t power. I mean, you can, but it will almost certainly fail. My outlook is a bit unorthodox and not entirely compatible with actualized.org, so sorry if this threw a wrench into your LPC work.

Right, you derived the values from deficit. Not that that's wrong or anything - it's only natural - but deficit-derived values are about fixing what hurts, not about what you're actually pulled to. They describe what would reduce suffering or restore balance, not what actually pulls you forward when you're stable and regulated. If you use deficit-derived values as an identity or a compass, the direction they initially provide disappears as soon as the deficit is addressed. If suffering gives you purpose, then relief takes it away. I've lived through this. If your purpose is derived from suffering, your motivation will get wiped out when your suffering ceases and then you'll be back at zero asking "what do I really want to do?" But by that time, your identity is thoroughly woven into the purpose. Untangling that mess can take years. This is why I think it's best to figure out what actually motivates you beyond survival and regulation - because it's too easy to value the opposite of what hurts us, and those values don't say much at all about who we truly are. I'm no life coach or anything - just sharing a trap I see with "values as a compass".

So the dominant signal here is you are strongly motivated to create and maintain inner and relational harmony. Motivational profiles: Regulation – motivated to stabilize the self Connection / Care – motivated to stabilize others Understanding – epistemic motivation / making sense of things Building – instrumental motivation / making things work in reality Expression – symbolic or aesthetic motivation / giving form to experience Every profile is willing to engage in friction, but each is willing to suffer different kinds of friction more than others: Regulation -> emotional instability, inner chaos Connection / Care -> relational strain, responsibility for others Understanding -> confusion, uncertainty, cognitive overload Building -> failure, iteration, constraint, inefficiency Expression -> vulnerability, exposure, ambiguity of reception What matters enough to hurt for? Which difficulties do you engage in that you don't regret? Which of these frictions do you not resent over time? What kinds of problems are you happy to keep showing up for? Which difficulties don't feel like a waste of time? These are powerful questions for understanding not only who you are, but what you truly value. When you keep showing up for a certain class of problems, you are implicitly saying those problems are the most valuable ones, thus pointing to your actual values as opposed to the one's on paper. Repeated behavior under friction tells all.

Your mother is there, just oblivious. Don't diminish her for that. She's as real as you. You want everyone else to know the things you've discovered so you don't have to be alone, but that is asking for too much. They almost always don't have the capacity, courage, interest, etc. You're own your own in your conscious explorations.

Then you're asking me to surrender the most stable principle evident inside reality as I know it: cause and effect. I've been there. It doesn't offer anything except escape, which is quite the cost that I'm not willing to pay. You can train yourself to ignore causality, but you’re still operating inside it whether you acknowledge it or not. It’s bypassing the very structure that makes understanding possible in the first place. Ignoring the most core principle of reality does not seem wise to me. Anyway, we're getting nowhere. I'll consider your thoughts. Thanks for the back and forth. I hope you're doing well.

The "G" in "God" is a progression. Before you could spell the word, you first had to learn what "G" was. Then, what did it take for you to understand what "God" is? Did a very complex process precede that understanding? So complex that you can't even map it out? Did you understand "God" before you understood what a "G" was? You'll say "NO! It happened and then I realized the "G" doesn't even exist". Then, you come back to reality and I ask you to clarify yourself and you try your best to convince me a fucking "G" doesn't even exist. lol

I know you're not really cold. It's a defense mechanism to protect your big heart. lol

Can you say you know anything that isn't the result of a complex progression? You don't just "arrive". There's ALWAYS a progression, and that progression is complex and varied.

I see. Well, I admit that I don't think I'm that spiritually advanced, so I always leave room for error in these types of convos and remain open-minded. Still - I know human psychology very well. I know that when people experience a "surrender" (I've also experienced this), it's not truly a spontaneous thing. It's the result of a long process and an eventual culmination of many things they've processed, which is incredibly complex if you mapped it out. That's all I was saying. If you collapse it into a single thing, I think it would serve to confuse more than facilitate. The path to "surrender" is long an arduous. One doesn't simply magic wand their way like Mario.

I'm not 100% sure of anything except consciousness exists and certain things within it cannot intelligently be denied. Consciousness can only know a thing by a process of discovery (fact). In your consciousness, what led to you knowing you were wearing frosted glasses most of your life? I can't tell you exactly what, but I can tell you the discovery was the result of a very complex process, involving much contemplation, observations, questions, etc. This I know, the same as I know 1 + 1 = 2. The structure that underlies 1 + 1 = 2, is the very structure that supports my claim that you cannot know the map until you traverse it. Taking off the glasses involved much complexity. You don't simply "take off the glasses".

There's really just one rule: Take care of yourself. That's what reality really wants for you. Because if you can give it that, that means you're doing your job as a human. It just so happens that if you take care of yourself, reality will take care of you. This is literal truth. Not that it will be easy, but it will be manageable and keep you in the light and keep upward trajectory possible. If you don't take that initiative and participate in that, then brother, as you already know, you will suffer immensely. I know the things that lurk in the darkness of that world and they only grow stronger when you isolate yourself and double down in telling the world to fuck off. So, get back into the world and figure out how you can contribute. You may have to forgive yourself and/or others for certain things. And you may have to forgive reality for being so brutal with you. But if you can do that, you can make amends. That's your path forward. Forgive reality. Forgive others. Give that much for a little while and WATCH how your life turns around. It will be quick to show you that's all it wanted all along. If you submit to reality, the quality of your life will almost certainly skyrocket in as little as 3-6 months. I was once at rock-bottom because I rejected reality. When I submitted, reality paved the way out of the darkness, like literal magic! The greater the sinner, the greater the saint.