The law of attraction says think of something and the universe delivers it.

The law of attention says something quieter but more honest: your mind can only ever act on what it notices, and most of us notice far less than what’s actually available to us.

Attention is the widening of the lens - not wishing something into being, but training yourself to actually see the options, people, and openings that were there all along, hidden in plain sight because you weren’t looking.

Once you see more, you still have to choose - and that choice, not the noticing, is where the real power sits.

Quantum physics has a strange, distant cousin of this idea: in Wheeler’s participatory principle, a particle has no definite state until it’s observed - reality, at that tiny scale, seems to need a witness to become real.

It’s a poetic echo, it points at the same intuition on a human scale: what you attend to is what becomes real to you - and what becomes real to you is what you’re able to act on, and eventually, become.

If there’s anything that can give you a big advantage in life it’s waking up to a simple morning routine.

Wake up.

Wake the f*ck up.

• Read for 20 minutes.

• Write out things you’re grateful for

• Write out 3 things you want to accomplish and see it accomplished

• Cold shower

• 30 Minutes Exercise

• Reach out to 5 people

• Get outside

Make it so automatic that you don’t need to think.

This compounds and gives you a huge advantage.

Subscribe now

We treat our problems like enemies that must be conquered through sheer force of will.

But there is a fundamental flaw in the frontal assault: energy flows where attention goes.

When you “muscle” your way through a failing project or a suffocating environment, you become more deeply entwined with it.

You are giving that situation your most precious asset - your attention.

In the economy of the mind, what you attend to, you amplify.

By fighting your reality, you are actually feeding it.

If you want to escape a situation that no longer serves you, you don’t fight it.

You outgrow it.

1. Recognise the Echo

The trap is treating reality as a rival. When you push against a situation, you validate its power over you.

You are essentially saying, “This problem is big enough to define my daily life.”

Instead, practice Radical Recognition. Acknowledge the facts without the emotional friction.

Think of your current circumstances as what it is - a lagging indicator - the echo of past decisions, old systems, and yesterday’s energy, and a signal.

You don’t argue with an echo.

You can’t change it.

You simply start making a different sound.

Once you stop resisting the “echo,” the energy you used for the “battle” is suddenly available for creation.

And you create a different echo.

There is a profound logic to this in certain cultures, like the Aymara or the Malagasy, who perceive time differently than the West. To them, the past is in front of you, and the future is behind.

Why? Because you can see the past. It is known, mapped, and visible. The future, being unknown, is what creeps up from behind. When you look at your current ‘problems,’ you are looking at the past. You are looking at what has already happened. Trying to change the ‘now’ is like trying to change the plot of a movie while the credits are already rolling

A Māori proverb also describes "walking backwards into the future" while keeping eyes fixed on the past for guidance.

We can also use the Chinese concept Wuwei.

“The ancient Chinese called this Wu Wei. It’s not about doing nothing; it’s about ‘effortless action.’ It’s the realization that you don’t have to break the wall to get to the other side-you just have to stop treating the wall like it’s the most important thing in the room.”

2. Realise You Are the “Source”

Most people live “outside-in.”

They wait for the environment to provide the signal before they decide how to feel or act.

If the metrics are down, they feel defeated. If the structure is rigid, they feel trapped.

To outgrow a situation, you must flip the script and live how reality actually works “inside-out.”

You are the source of your next reality.

Your internal state - your focus, your frameworks, and your daily output - is the blueprint.

The physical world is merely the manifestation.

If the blueprint is solid and you refuse to change it, the building eventually follows. If you let a “sh*t situation” dictate your internal state, you are effectively letting the construction crew (entropy) design the house.

3. Cultivating the “Outbound” Environment

There is a massive difference between being “unaware” and being “outbound.”

Being “outbound” means you stop being a consumer of your current limitations. If you spend all day analyzing your current situation, you are just reinforcing it.

You need to curate a “Future-State Bubble” that reflects where you are going, not where you are.

• Audit your inputs: If your environment is structural and limiting, look past the structure.

• Surround yourself with the “After”: Engage with the books, the people, and the high-leverage frameworks of the reality you intend to occupy.

You aren’t ignoring the fire; you are overcoming. it, and seeing past it to the future you are creating it.

4. The Sovereignty of Vision

In any restrictive situation, the “realistic” path is a slow crawl.

To leapfrog the constraints, you need to prioritize your vision over your visibility.

People might call this “delusion,” but that is just a word for a vision that hasn’t materialized yet.

Every major pivot or breakthrough in history looked “delusional” the day before it became the new standard.

This isn’t about lying to yourself; it’s about maintaining your own sovereignty.

If you only believe what you can see, you are limited by your eyesight.

If you believe what you are building, and the future you are creating, you are guided by your inner light.

Creating Your Future

Reality is a lagging indicator.

It wants to grab your attention because attention is the only thing that keeps it alive.

Stop wrestling with the mud.

Stand up, look past the mess, and start operating at the frequency of the person who has already moved on.

The moment you realise you are the Source, the old situation doesn’t just improve - it vanishes.

You become too big for them.

That’s why a big part of it starts with your aura. '

Feeling good, being positive, visualising, and listening to the sound of echo and letting it past while refining your own sound.

The reason this is so important is because our tools are much more powerful

We get started not by asking how can we improve or get out of a certain situation but with the question, what incredible things do you want to create?

Signal is any input or action that has compounded value or high-leverage impact. It usually feels quiet, and meaningful and non-disposable.

Noise is the average, background, entropy. Noise is high-volume, low-value information that creates the illusion of progress. It’s anything that has no signal.

Noise isn't always bad or wrong, it's just the default state.

These are relative to you and your journey. One persons signal can be another persons noise. The opposite of noise is therefore not silence, it's intentionality.

You can find more signal by doing less. Removing the noise. Solitude and doing fewer things more deeply.

Subscribe now

Resonance

Resonance - is anything that connects and vibrates - establishing a pathway.

It’s what happens when two signals align.

You read a book and it feels like it was written for you. You meet someone and the conversation goes deep immediately. You hear an idea and it clicks something open that you didn’t even know was closed.

This is also what happens when content goes viral. The idea may have already been half-formed in millions of people's heads. Someone articulates it clearly and it spreads like a tuning fork striking the right note. Everyone recognises something they already felt but couldn't say.

The key thing about resonance is that you can’t force it. You can only create the conditions for it. Which is why noise is its enemy - when you’re surrounded by noise, resonance can’t happen because your signal is buried.

In practical terms resonance is:

• The conversation that changes your thinking

• The book that arrives at exactly the right moment

• The person who reflects something back to you that you couldn’t see yourself

• The idea that connects two things you knew separately into something new

Resonance is why signal is important.

Subscribe now

Why It Matters

The Value of Signal

Signal detection is the difference between being a "player" and being "background noise.

If you don’t want to fade into the background.
If you want to have agency, to be an active player in the game.
To navigate the world and achieve something, you need to be able to navigate signal from noise.

The Background (NPCs): People who react to whatever noise is loudest (news cycles, notifications, social pressure). They have no “tuning,” so they have no agency.

It’s like those people who are walking in the background of this game. They are the NPC. They have no agency, reacting to whatever happens around them.

The Players: People who have a high Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR). That’s you. They do less, but what they do has “gravity.”

It’s like main character energy.

Being the hero in your own story.

If you are afraid to be yourself. To do the things you want.

You’re not a player, you’re a non-playable character.

The Density & Power of Signal

Density is what gives signal its weight. And weight, at scale, creates gravity.

Signal is dense because it uncovers a pattern, or a deeper truth. The idea that explains ten other things at once, that leads to something new, to progress. The conversation that reframes something you thought you already understood. That’s what makes it non-disposable, and valuable. That’s also what makes resonance feel almost eerie sometimes, with resonance - it’s not new information, it’s recognition of something that was already true.

It’s why when a leader speaks with signal, you can feel the resonance. It’s an epiphany, a wow moment. It’s being excited, energised, and aligned.

Density is about how strong the signal is. Gravity is about how attractive it is.

Gravity of Signal

When someone has a high signal-to-noise ratio - when they do less but more intentionally - they develop a kind of gravitational pull. Things come to them. Opportunities, people, ideas seem to find them disproportionately.

Because:

• They’re clear on what they want so they recognise opportunities others miss

• They’re memorable because they stand for something specific

• They’re trusted because they don’t say yes to everything

• They have bandwidth because they’ve eliminated noise

The paradox is that doing less creates more gravity. Most people think visibility comes from volume - more posts, more meetings, more activity. But the people with real gravity are often the ones you hear from rarely but remember always.

It’s the difference between a star and static. Static is everywhere and means nothing. A star is specific, directional and navigable.

Identify Your Tuning

Identify Your Tuning: Since signal is relative, you have to be clear on your “frequency.” If your goal is to build an autonomous organization, a conversation about AI architecture is high signal. If your goal was to be a chef, that same conversation is noise. Know yourself.

Solitude is the "low-noise floor" that allows you to hear your internal resonance. You can't find the signal in a crowd because the crowd's frequency is too loud. But it’s much more than that, that’s just one example.

Silence and isolation isn’t the goal; Intentionality is.

But there are a lot of mistaken beliefs about solitude and signal. It’s not that it’s better to experience more solitude, and cut off people, it’s that the default is to experience very little.

The Barbell of Going Deeper

But there are values at the ends - A barbell strategy.

A few days of solitude allows you to resonate, and remove the noise to understand and synthesize, but many people never experience the necessary solitude.

This is like Monk Mode.

The other side of that is the connection. Much more intentional and real high-Intensity Connection. Developing relationships proactively. Globally, intentionally reaching out. This isn't "hanging out"; it's deep rapport, high-leverage meetings, or collaborative "flow states."

The thing is that they actually go together much better.

Most people spend their time doing neither. People suggest a balanced life. But the barbell - avoids the “mushy middle” - the mediocre center where most people spend their lives.

By avoiding the “mushy middle,” you avoid the “background noise” of the average person. The “mushy middle” is where most people’s agency goes to die - it’s the land of “kind of” busy, “kind of” social, and “kind of” focused, and it’s everywhere.

Take small talk for example. Small talk is useful - it’s how you warm up a conversation, build rapport, find common ground before going deeper. The cost isn’t the small talk, it’s when it never goes anywhere. When it stays at weather and pleasantries and you both walk away having revealed nothing and learned nothing. That’s noise.

Most people's frequency is actually polluted by external input - what their parents wanted, what society rewards, what their peers are doing.

Frequency Pollution

The dangerous thing about frequency pollution is that it feels like your own thoughts. It’s not obviously external like someone telling you what to do. It’s been internalised so deeply it feels like your own voice. Which is why so many people spend decades pursuing things that never quite satisfy - they’re optimising for someone else’s frequency while believing it’s their own.

Solitude is essentially clean air. It doesn’t give you the signal - it just removes enough pollution that you can finally hear what was always there.

This is the ultimate hack of the Intelligence Age- if you don't tune your own frequency, the algorithm will ghost-write your life as an NPC.

Developing Your Own Frequency

How do you listen to your own signal?

“Listening to your own signal” assumes your internal signal is already clear and trustworthy. But sometimes your internal signal is itself distorted - by fear, conditioning, ego, trauma.

So part of tuning is also cleaning the receiver, not just listening harder, by igniting the flame within you, and nurturing your own signal, and allowing it to grow and develop, and explore.

How do you tune your frequency?

You tune your frequency when you have calibrated yourself internally. You are the source and creator and decider of your life - not what others say and think, or what you think you should want.

It’s like building a lighthouse. You need to first build and develop it, then shine the beam of your signal.

This maps onto Paul Graham’s Maker’s Vs Managers schedule. Makers need long uninterrupted blocks; managers work in short slots. Most people default to the manager schedule by accident. But the barbell says do both - just more intensely and never mixed. Deep solitude for the maker mode, high-intensity connection for the manager mode. The middle is where both get destroyed.

There is a certain amount of courage needed to tune your own frequency.
Because there is a Cost of Divergence. By going against the crowd there is a friction. It takes courage to trust your receiver more than the outside noise.

You tune it through clarity of purpose first. You can’t know what’s signal until you know what you’re building. Most people’s frequency is fuzzy because their goals are fuzzy. The more specific and honest you are about what you actually want - not what you think you should want - the easier it becomes to filter everything else.

You tune it through experience and reflection. You don’t always know in the moment whether something was signal or noise. But if you reflect consistently - what energised me, what drained me, what moved things forward, what didn’t - patterns emerge. Over time you develop an instinct for it. That instinct is your tuned frequency.

You tune it through elimination. Less about adding the right things, more about removing the wrong ones. Every time you say no to something that feels like noise, your signal becomes clearer. It’s like turning down the background volume so you can hear what’s actually playing.

You tune it through honest self knowledge. This is the hardest one. Most people don’t know themselves as well as they think. They know their preferences but not their actual wiring - what genuinely moves them versus what they’ve been conditioned to pursue. Solitude helps here because it removes external validation and forces you to sit with what actually resonates when nobody is watching.

And interestingly - other people and experiences can help you tune it. The right conversation with the right person can suddenly make something click about what you actually care about.

Your own frequency isn’t static, it’s constantly changing.

It isn’t a static setting you find once and forget.

It’s a dynamic calibration.

The New Operating System for the Intelligence Age

This is a central part of what I call Alignment in the Superhuman curriculum.

The framework for how I think we need to think and operate in the intelligence age.

It’s absolutely necessary for us to upgrade ourselves at the same rate or faster than we are developing technology.

Lets Resonate

This is part of a bigger framework I'm developing. If it resonates, let me know which part landed most - That's my signal on where to go deeper next…

What are some examples that you’ve found in your own life or ways to distinguish between noise vs signal?

What does it take to be great?

It starts with a deep desire.

Without this, we won’t make the necessary sacrifices, and instead, succumb to short term pleasures or get sidetracked.

A clear why is essential.

Why be great?

Because you can.

Somewhere inside you is a truly great person ready to emerge.

It’s far more fun to operate at an elite level – to be able to really make things happen.

The path is not easy, but at a certain level, the returns on your effort grow exponentially, opening up a completely different reality.

Most struggle along with little to show for it in a debt of mediocrity.

The path to greatness is not without risks, but so is ceding your fate to the whims of nature.

By deciding to become great, you are taking your destiny into your own hands.

If you are not controlling your life, what is?

I want to be able to make the world better, be a force for good, and help others.

What else is needed to be great?

Once you have that deep desire, you soon realise that it’s not just about effort (time and energy). You need to understand yourself, manage energy levels and focus and apply attention on the right things.

Exercise is the keystone habit that uplifts everything else; diet, sleep, focus, energy, time management and attention. Quality sleep too. Diet, consistent times, exposure to morning light, all help with energy, sleep and the circadian rhythm.

Recently I discovered how much of a performance enhancer proper breathing can be. Deep belly nasal breathing can absorb up to 20% more oxygen than shallow mouth breathing while also calming, relaxing and promoting clarity.

Training the direction of the mind with meditation. Journaling and writing can help to reflect, understand, and improve your internal operating system. The right relationships are essential, if neglected can limit us.

It’s about applying attention to those highest leverage external tasks, but usually, the limits and challenges in the external world point to something internal. Our external and internal worlds are so intertwined that they are effectively the same.

Life experience is not objective, you are the creator and all results serve as feedback.

There is no limit to how much you can improve.

There are just different levels, and the time it takes to reach them.

What does a superhuman core look like?

• Clarity of vision & purpose – positive visualisation, goals, knowing why.

• Awareness – mindfulness, feedback, brain dumping them.

• Logic, emotional and processing power – reading, writing, name emotions to control them.

• Sheer energy – physical & mental vitality – sleep, health, diet and exercise.

• Extreme resilience, calmness & antifragility – voluntary hardship, reflection, preparedness.

• Control of time, and the application of discipline & focus – time blocking, awareness, environment, distraction.

• Faith, satisfaction and gratitude.

• Throttle and balance – knowing when to pursue and when not. When to care and when to let go.

• Alignment of all the above.

What does it not look like?

• Being perfect. Failure is part of the path.

• Constant busyness.

• Rigidity – instead be flexible.

• Arrogance – instead be humble.

• Emotional detachment – instead, find balance.

• Burnout, getting lost, understanding traps.

This is the work.

The real work, but also the reward.

The external, visible goals are the training ground, and the byproduct.

A difficult business negotiation is not just a potential win or loss; it’s a chance to practice your calmness and emotional power. A complex project is a training ground for your focus and logic.

By focusing on building your internal “superhuman core” you become the type of person who doesn’t chase success, but defines and then attracts it.

Instead of chasing outcomes and focus on building your capability.

The external achievements then inevitably follow.

The goals, opportunities, challenges, stakes and rewards continually get bigger as you level up and expand your capability, awareness and consciousness.

The key is to find the ways to accelerate this cycle of growth and expansion of awareness and attention.

A cycle of going after goals, preparation, reading, writing and reflection and teaching. Hormesis, and deliberate discomfort.

Skill stacking.

Exertion and recovery.

This is a central part of the Superhuman Curriculum

We are currently witnessing the biggest societal disruption since the Industrial Revolution.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what a curriculum for the future should look like, and written about that here

If knowledge and AI tutors are now abundant, what and how should people learn?

Introducing - the Superhuman Curriculum.

Subscribe now

I discussed this a bit on how to prepare a career for the new age

In this article I’m going to go deeper in how to prepare and build your education to succeed in this age.

Asking how schools and universities should transform is a valid question, but we should first zoom in and zoom out: What should the optimum human learn? And how should society look? Those are the two questions we must answer before we ask how universities should adapt.

I’ve written more about that here

Here’s the more detailed framework

The Great Split - Superhuman Player Vs NPC

We are approaching a Great Divergence. The middle class is evaporating, leaving two distinct paths:

• The Passive NPC: Those who let AI curate their reality, feed them content, and make their decisions. They are becoming ‘economically irrelevant’ - biological processors in a world run by silicon, AI and robots. This is the default path that the world is moving toward.

• The Superhuman Player: Those who use AI as an extension for the mind to become superhuman. They ascend and operate at a level never before possible.

I touch on this a bit in how to design your dream life

Which do you choose?

More and more of our systems are guiding and pulling us towards the passive NPC so in order to become the Superhuman Player you need an enormous amount of willpower or a system.

You can’t stop a habit but you can replace it.

What does it mean to be human?

In this new age we must consciously decide and define what it means to be human, and that is the idea of the Superhuman. This is what this curriculum is about.

The Superhuman Curriculum

The Superhuman Core

One of the critical ideas of this curriculum is the importance of individual agency to choose and design and become the architect of your life. It starts with a superhuman core.

And the desire to build your dream life.

Exponential is the Natural Way

I strongly believe that we should be growing exponentially, otherwise there is something in the way. We often hit some ceiling of growth, such as through a low leverage loop trap.

Super Learning

This is the critical skill and foundation. We need to learn how to learn so that they can bootload any number of skills or knowledge at any time.

How? AI coaching, mentors, content, feedback loops. Fast iteration, reflection, mirrors, synthesis, and direction.

Above that we have the 4 internal tools of leverage

4 Internal Tools of Leverage

Focus
Energy
Understanding and
Identity

These are critical skills and tools to develop to be able to operate. There are more practical skills. While they may seem basic, they are far more important now. If we lose focus or can’t manage our energy, we are not able to produce or create. They are critical to get right to perform at the highest level.

Focus is all about direction and goal setting, clarity and executive power.

One of the ways to improve clarity is to review definitions and your own internal philosophy.

Energy is about energy and time management - diet, sleep, daily rhythm, scheduling. This includes fitness and health.

Understanding is one of the deepest and biggest ones. Understanding is about awareness, emotional regulation, and resilience. It also encompasses a deep comprehension of how the world actually works - market dynamics, human incentives, and geopolitical shifts - which could almost be another curriculum of itself.

Identity and narrative is all about upgrading the internal story to achieve goals, being aware of it and rewriting.

Focus and energy may seem basic but they are pillars that are absolutely necessary. Some deep understanding is necessary to understand how the world works, and most people do not have complete understanding because we are in a new world.

Multiple Domain Expertise

These are two (or more) fields, skills or industries. Such as learning petroleum engineering and writing, or learning management and engineering.

One of the problems we have is that much of our world exists in silos. In the industrial age, it was necessary to have specialisation like in Adam Smith’s pin factory. In this new age the specialist suffers from lack of perspective and narrowing of view. To counter this, it’s necessary to study two or more unrelated industries. This can help, especially in a siloed world, because there are often similarities and connections that can be made between fields that are not obvious. All of knowledge is connected in a tree of knowledge and there are relationships and patterns between everything.

The synthesis and cross domain pollination happens naturally when people understand two domains deeply.

It is also very necessary to have two or more fields of expertise. These are fields in which to apply oneself, as we will come onto later

I’ve written more about that here.

Alignment

This is one of the most important parts of the framework and it’s at the center. This is the alignment of yourself, the market, the knowledge and the world. It’s spiritual, it’s about lining everything up. Without alignment, you are simply moving fast toward the wrong destination.

This becomes extremely important to be aligned in the right direction. Philosophy, ethics and community are part of it.

In the Intelligence Age, we use the 4 Levers (Code, Content, Capital, and People) to amplify our efforts. These levers act as force multipliers. If your direction is off by even 1°, that deviation is magnified exponentially by the power of the tools you use.

The Three Spheres of Alignment

To achieve this, you must synchronize three distinct areas:

• Internal Alignment (The Self): This is the “Spiritual” component. It is the marriage of your unique talents, your internal narrative, and your genuine curiosity. When you work on something you are naturally obsessed with, “work” feels like “play.”

• External Alignment (The Market): You must align your output with what the world actually needs. High-leverage skills applied to a dead market result in zero wealth. Alignment means finding the “Product-Market Fit” for your soul.

• Temporal Alignment (The World): This is about timing. Are you building for the world of 1990 or 2030? Alignment requires a deep understanding of geopolitical shifts, technological cycles, and where the “puck” is going.

You no longer have to "force" yourself to be disciplined because your actions are a natural byproduct of your identity. You aren't just "doing" work; you are expressing your "Life’s Work." In this state, your use of Leverage becomes effortless and your compounding becomes exponential.

Aligning yourself with the principle of emergence.

Multiple Geographies

Many people are brought up in one location. The advantage is to have a deep understanding and ability to navigate two or more geographies. This breaks free from the culture and life of one and allows you to have greater perspective, but also arbitrage between them. You can choose the one that is best, and usually out of all the choices, the one you choose is likely to be better in some way to the one you were “spawned” in.

You can read more about choosing and building your geographical stack here.

Leverage

In the industrial era, you traded your time for money. In the Intelligence Age, you use Leverage to trade results for wealth and impact. Leverage is the “Force Multiplier” / amplifier that allows one person to do the work of thousands.

It’s necessary to understand them all but specialise in one or two that you are best suited at.

1. Capital

Capital is the most traditional form of leverage, but it requires the highest level of judgment to master.

• Cultivate logical judgment about where to allocate resources.

• Build real financial literacy - budgeting, forecasting, and cash flow mastery.

• Understand risk deeply - not to avoid it, but to price it accurately.

• Practice capital allocation - placing bets where the upside outweighs the downside.

2. Code

Code is the most “permissionless” lever. It is a digital army of robots working for you while you sleep.

• Think in architecture and systems - write for scale, not one-time use.

• Understand tools, stacks, and ecosystems - what you build on shapes how you build.

• Train your logic and communication - code is read more than it’s written.

• Apply prioritization, decision-making, and feedback loops - great code is iterative and lean.

3. Content

Content is how you scale your perspective and influence. Like code, it works for you 24/7 without needing your presence.

• Master expression and storytelling - it’s not what you say, it’s how it lands.

• Study psychology, markets, and audience behavior - relevance beats creativity.

• Learn the tools and platforms of distribution - virality is algorithmic.

• Aim for clarity and precision - be understood, not just heard.

4. People

Leading people is the oldest and highest-stakes form of leverage. It requires a “Superhuman” level of emotional intelligence and clarity.

• Develop talent judgment - know who to bet on, and when to let go.

• Cast a bold vision, lead with energy, and inspire with purpose.

• Design systems with smart incentives and KPIs - what gets measured and rewarded, gets done.

• Build culture and trust - not through perks, but through truth, care, and high standards.

Life’s Work

Through combining all the above we get some output. This is the creation of whatever it is we are aligned to create. Life’s work is essential to practice, to improve, to show your expertise and to improve, and to build what you want.

This then feeds back into the system, so it exists as an organism that is constantly refining and improving, and if all is aligned, it compounds exponentially.

Explore more about work in the AI age here.

How to learn it?

The curriculum is now much more advanced than it was before because the tools are much more powerful, and so are our abilities. The whole model is a curriculum but it’s also a map for what to learn. You just build each part and they all exist as a system. You’re always learning, you’re always seeking greater alignment, you’re always creating work.

The curriculum of the future is a map, not a set of textbooks. You don’t “finish” it; you install it.

The first stages are for building the foundations. Then you should focus on the three parts - superlearning, alignment and life’s work, as all the other parts exist as part of the foundation already that just need maintenance.

Then we can achieve another level of transcendance and human flourishing.

If you find this interesting and you’d like to learn more about The Superhuman Curriculum and how to upgrade. You can learn more and join the waiting list here.

The Emergence Curriculum

I’ve also created another kind of curriculum that goes together with this, and that’s the emergence curriculum.

This is based on the idea that we are made of the sum of our inputs, but we become something greater - so we should identify and curate the best resources and learn from them to incorporate them into us.

The Emergence Curriculum is more like a source material philosophy: it argues that what you become is the sum of your inputs, so you should curate the highest-quality ones possible. It's the raw material that feeds the architecture.

The debate usually misses the point because it treats consciousness as binary - like a light switch - either on or off. But when you look at your own experience, you realize consciousness is a spectrum.

It isn’t something you have; it’s something you expand.

We are all moving along this spectrum, and the “higher” we go, the more the world transforms from something happening to us into something created by us.

One of the levels of consciousness is the shift from victim to creator. There are then other shifts that - life happens through me; I am in "flow" with the universe, and then the ultimate one which is there is no separation; I am life, the world, and everyone and they are also me.

• The Weather Happens To You

• You Create the weather

• You Are the Weather

The act of realising that you are the creator of your life and it is coming from you not at you is the most defining moment in consciousness in this step. Once you realize you are the architect, the question is no longer “What will happen?” but “What will I design?”, and then “What am I?”

How To Design Your Life

Moving up the spectrum requires three foundational pillars to stabilize your “Creator” status:

1. Meditation: To create the space between stimulus and response. This is where your power to choose lives.

2. Solitude: You need to escape the influence from those around you at lower frequencies. To design a life that is truly yours, you must first silence the echoes of everyone else’s expectations. Solitude isn't about being alone; it is about reclaiming the sovereignty of your own mind so that your designs are authentic, not adopted.

3. Elimination - Saying no to what you have so you can say yes to what is next is one of the defining parts.
   
   “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.” — Warren Buffett
   

4. Non-Negotiable Habits: These are the “rules of the game” you set for yourself so you don’t have to rely on fleeting motivation.
   

   
   Output = (Daily Habit)365 * Internationality
   

5. Writing your life into existence - by journaling and content creatio value is in the transformation of the author, not just the production of the text. This puts a new meaning to the creator economy as not just an economic shift but a consciousness shift.

6. Get inspired and around those that raise you

“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean, in a drop.” — Rumi

As AI gets better at tasks, the most valuable human skill becomes Intentionality. A machine can follow a prompt, but only a conscious being can decide what is worth building in the first place.

AI is a tool for the ‘What’; you are the master of the ‘Why.’

Moving from victim to creator isn’t just a spiritual idea - it is the practical act of taking command of your own programming.

So the question how to design your dream life?

Shifts from a subtle -
“how to get” to
”how to discover or explore your dream life” to
”how to discover and understand yourself”

What we get out of life is very much a result of the kind of questions we ask.

And this is what I think we are missing with AI when we question at what stage AI will become conscious - rather than the real question which is - how can we use AI to understand ourselves and expand our own consciousness - how conscious can we become?

This is what I look into more in the Superhuman Curriculum.

Subscribe now

Read More

• James Clear (Habits & Compounding) - 3-2-1 Thursday

• The Marginalian by Maria Popova (Viktor Frankl & Philosophy) - Beautifully written essays on Viktor Frankl, solitude, and the “What am I?” stage of consciousness.

• Susan Cain (Solitude & Depth) - The Quiet Life with Susan Cain - Tools for protecting your “Quiet” time and using solitude as a superpower for your “Creator” phase.

• Sloww by Kyle Kowalski - Deep-dives on regarding the “4 Stages of Consciousness” and various spectrums of awareness.

I was recently having a debate with a family member.

I asked them to define the terms “modern”, “normal” and “well-respected”

These are concepts that were central to their argument.

Their struggle to clearly define these words is far too common.

We bedrock of our lives and reality is on words that we often don’t really understand what they mean.

This is a huge barrier to clear thinking.

Subscribe now

In this article, I’ll argue why

1. Clear definitions are the essential first principle for clear thought

2. Why you should spend time clearly defining the barriers to words - understanding them, and deciding what they mean to you.

3. Why that can give you a huge advantage.

4. I’ll introduce the four types of Words you must master to become an elite thinker.

   1. Evaluator Words

   2. Primitive Words

   3. Compound Words, and

   4. Amorphous words

A quick search online, and often the words we find in online dictionaries are very simplistic, and even include the words themselves.

To elevate economic thought it’s essential to take some time to really define words.

This is first principles thinking.

It’s like reconstructing or organising your reality.

When you go deep on this, it’s like understanding mathematics and you’ll have a deeper understanding of the nature of reality. It gives you an incredible sense of peace, and clarity.

Here are the four types of words and my four rules.

1) Evaluator words - Cut these out entirely

“Bad, good, big, small, difficulty, better, worse, expensive”.
Any word that you can say: “Compared to what?”
”Modern, normal, and well-respected” are also evaluator words.
They are are relative to something that is usually not stated.
If they are being used, then it’s essential to include what they are compared to.
Realise that when they are used without referring to what they are being compared to, they often actually say more about the communicator than the object.
Avoiding these forces clarity.

2) Primitive Words - Define these clearly

“Time, pain, resource, goal”
These can have vague meanings.
These are the building blocks of reality.
Defining them gives you clarity.
All of these words need to have clear boundaries.
What is and what is not this word.

3) Compound / Composite words - Understand These

“Hardship, disaster, justice, hurrying, working, beautiful”
These are the majority of our words, and understanding these is more about putting together the building blocks of our reality and their relations with each other.
It’s almost like studying Physics.
For “hardship” now you’ve got to define “pain”, and how hardships relates to this.
You have a deeper understanding of what this actually means.
Without understanding primitive words such as pain or evaluator words, we can’t fully understand these words.

4) Amorphous words - fill these with what they mean to you

“Success, happy, love”. Realise that these are empty containers. If you don’t fill them with your own specific definitions (using primitive words), society will fill them for you - usually with things you don’t really want. These are vague words that mean different things to different people, that can lead to lazy and unclear thinking - if we don’t define them our communication and language deteriorates.

Defining words becomes even more important as we increasingly use AI for analysis. If we don’t define words, then our terms resort to the average, a mixture of different definitions, and our thinking becomes sloppy, rather resorting to emotional dialogue.

Here are some words I’ve defined recently that are different to online, official definitions, and how most people define it.

And hopefully this article will have given the benefits of clearly defining words and confidence to define them for yourself and challenge others.

______________________________________

Some of My Definitions

Pain - The subjective interpretation of a biological signal indicating that a threshold has been crossed, limit has been reached, or boundary has been breached.

Distraction - any stimulus or activity that takes you further away from your goals.

Focus - the act of putting something into your field of view at the exclusion of everything else.

Relationship - the consistent and mutually agreed upon exchange of value between two people or entities by clearly defined behavioural standards and boundaries.

Leader - a person who sets a mutually advantageous vision and persuades and aligns the interests of others to achieve that vision, continually, until it is realised.

Trust - the firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, and integrity of a person, entity, or object and the willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of another party because you expect that they will perform a particular action important to you, without the need to monitor or control them.

Purpose - The fundamental reason for which something is done or created, or for which something exists.

Clarity - The quality of being coherent, intelligible, and free from ambiguity.

Simplicity - the state where the unessential has been removed so that an entity can better perform its purpose.

Elegant - simple in an attractive, refined or sophisticated way.

Refined - removing the non-essential parts, or carrying out some specific process, to make it more elegant.

Authentic- The state of alignment where internal beliefs, external words, and visible actions are identical.

Vulnerability - The intentional lowering of defenses (armour) at risk of pain or loss to increase the chance of some benefit (often connection).

Engagement - The connection between two entities where attention and energy are successfully transferred.

Boredom - The painful psychological state of low arousal and lack of external stimulation, due to excess potential, or lack of meaning, which forces the brain to seek new goals or activity.

In the following article I share more about writing and how it’s changed my life.

It’s attention.

Attention is the only scarce resource in the intelligence age.

Which makes the mastery of attention your primary goal.

Subscribe now

But what is attention?

In order to understand it and to maximise it, we have to be able to define it.

I would define attention as:

The selection, direction and application of mental energy, towards a specific direction

We can’t understand attention without understanding focus.

Focus has two similar, related definitions

1. the act of putting something into your field of view at the exclusion of everything else

2. Focus is the central point of interest, activity, or concern around which other elements revolve

Attention is the resource; Focus is the tool.

Attention is the light, focus is the lens.

In order to improve attention, like we would improve our physical bodies, we have to break it down into the different parts. Strength, agility, stamina, etc., and then work on improving each part.

There are multiple aspects of attention

• Executive (Meta) attention - which manages other types

• Selective - the ability to ignore distractions

• Intensity - the power of attention

• Depth - how far attention can go - eg., something that is far away

• Breadth - how many things can be held in attention at once

• Sustained - the ability to sustain it over time

• Shift - the ability to shift attention between topics

• Divide - the ability to put attention on multiple things

In order to improve our attention, the first step is to understand it deeply.

When we define it, we can see that a big part of what makes our attention better is limiting what we apply it to.

Narrowing the lens, allows our attention to have more power.

This is counterintuitive to us, in a world seeking continual growth, and more.

We think more light = more power, but more light dispersed, is less powerful than less light concentrated into a laser.

The second step is to consciously make an effort to improve it.

On a macro level, the problem is that our economic system is designed for a previous age.

To succeed in the future, we must stop letting the economy farm us, and start guarding our attention as the precious asset it is.

With our drive towards GDP growth, attention, our most valuable resource, is not measured, it is a resource to be farmed to maximise and monetise.

Any future economic system should at least recognise the value of attention.