How to get what you want out of life.
The three principles that turn potential into reality
How to get what you want out of life.
Become the person who gets it.
Someone once asked Naval.
“How do you make more friends?”
He replied.
“Become someone people want to be friends with”.
It really couldn’t be more simple.
Or more complicated.
But the truth always contains both sides of the coin.
We all want comfort, status, community, wealth.
You grow up as a kid looking up to your idols.
Athletes, artists, entrepreneurs, thought leaders.
Your older siblings, your parents.
They seem to have the confidence that comes with having everything you’ve ever wanted.
They’ve got it all figured out. And when you grow up you will too.
But soon enough you realize that’s not their reality.
Most of those people are actually miserable.
Still endlessly searching for the life they’ve always wanted.
Settling for a life they don’t really want.
Or worse have no idea what they wanted in the first place.
They never explored their endless potential deeply enough to know the depths of what life has to offer them.
This is the trap we’re all fated to.
Accepting a life shaped by society’s expectations.
Or living an unfulfilled but comfortable life that’s only half of our potential.
Unless you take control of your life and learn to become.
Become the type of person who gets what they want.
How to get what you want out of life.
I’ve always felt I was meant for more.
Meant to bring some sort of value to the world.
Like I had something to give that no one else could.
I think deep down we all feel that way. And it’s true.
My whole life I’ve seemed to have this cycle where things will go really well for a couple years and then go horribly for the next few.
I kind of just learned to expect it but for some reason I always thought things would get better one day and just stay that way.
Obviously that’s wishful thinking.
After my most recent set of shitty years (2021-2023) I decided to make a change.
I decided to figure out why things were so bad for me and how I could get what I wanted.
The following is a list of principles and steps that I’ve discovered through studying successful people and applying those lessons to my life through trial, error and iteration.
And I started getting what I want.
Here’s how to get what you want.
1. Curiosity killed the cat (but made the man rich)
The foundation of knowledge is curiosity.
If you’re not curious about how to get more out of life you’ll just accept whatever you’re given and wonder why things never worked out.
This is what gets most people.
And for most of my life, until recently, what got me.
They think they’re going to live their lives the way they are and one day, someone or something will hit them in the face and their dreams will come true.
Their life will do a 180 and they’ll know how to get rich, find a partner, build a business, be at peace.
Nothing in the universe works that way. All things change through process:
Plants grow through photosynthesis
Businesses grow through marketing, sales and distribution
Babies learn through repetition and immersion
The process of becoming the person that gets what they want takes change.
It doesn’t happen from a singular event.
If you want peace of mind you have to be curious about peace.
Study meditation, spirituality, philosophy.
Test what you learn, see if it works for you, keep what works and delete the rest.
This is the process of acquiring knowledge and skills, then iterating on them.
Getting what you want out of life starts with curiosity.
To get what you want you have to know what you want.
Living a life you hate isn’t the worst thing you could do.
The worst thing you could do is live a life you never questioned long enough to discover you hate it in the first place.
You have to start questioning everything in your life.
Just like a 3 year old who endlessly asks “why?” even when you’ve given them every answer you have.
Because what is possible for your life comes from what you know is possible.
Get curious about why you don’t have what you want and then get curious about what skills you need to get it.
2. How to know what you want
Awareness + Focus = Attention
Everything you experience in this life happens within your attention.
If you’re not focused on it, for you, it’s effectively not real.
What you give your attention to determines your life.
It’s how you build skills, interests, relationships, projects, everything.
When you get curious about something you pay attention to it.
Pay attention long enough and it eventually becomes part of your life and identity.
Things you focus on grow.
You focus on your relationship long enough and you go from friends to partners to married.
You focus on your physique long enough you go from skinny to jacked.
You get the point.
When you don’t consciously use your curiosity and attention to benefit your own life, it will slowly be taken over by the interests of others.
You give hours of attention to what your boss wants, a few more to your friends and family.
Then just general life, cooking, cleaning etc.
Whatever’s left most people waste on binge watching TV because they’re too exhausted to focus on something that would contribute to their goals.
This is how life gets away from you, by accepting your defaults and not being conscious of where your attention goes.
Our attention is constantly being hijacked.
Social media
Netflix
YouTube
Responsibilities
It’s all taking up the most valuable resource you have. And there’s only so much of it.
The mind craves order.
That’s why Netflix and doom-scrolling are stealing peoples lives.
They are structured games for consciousness to play.
Your life is made up of thousands of these games.
Reading, playing video games, hanging out with friends.
The games you play the most become part of your identity.
I’m a reader, I’m a gamer, I’m social.
But when Netflix, doom-scrolling and being a people pleaser start to take up most of your attention, you become someone you never meant to be.
You end up anxious, overwhelmed and lost. But that’s exactly where you start.
“All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.”
— Charlie Munger
The easiest way to figure out what you want is to know what you don’t want.
It’s called inversion thinking.
Start a list and add:
Activities that you do but don’t know why you do them (ex. spending time with people you don’t really like)
Things/people in your life that leave you frustrated, anxious, overwhelmed etc.
Anything you do out of obligation and not interest
Picture the worst life you could end up living and write it down
This is your anti-vision.
It’s everything you don’t want out of life.
These are the games taking up your attention that could be given to things that would build the life you want.
Once you have this you have direction.
Start replacing the things on this list with your genuine interests and vision of your dream life.
Next to every item of your list write something you could replace it with.
This is where you start to discover what you want.
But it’s not just about writing lists and creating vision boards.
You have to have skin in the game.
Life is lived in the arena.
So how do we take our vision and turn it into a life?
3. Skin in the game
Purpose is created not discovered.
The universe doesn’t come with an assigned meaning.
But that doesn’t leave it meaningless.
In the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari he talks about how Humans became the dominant species because they’re the only animal capable of imagination.
We’re the only creature that creates ideas of myths, fairytales, and things that don’t exist.
This is how society was formed.
We imagined stories about laws, cultures and religions.
This is gave us structure and meaning beyond lions eating us and the winter leaving us frozen.
It gave us a reason to escape the lions, and help each other survive the winter.
That’s how the game of mankind was formed.
And it’s one you’re playing right now.
You get what you want out of life by deciding what’s meaningful to you.
You use your curiosity to discover new possibilities.
You use your attention to focus on those possibilities and see what they have in store. Then you imagine structured games that make them real in your life.
Games that give you reasons to grow, take risks, and connect with others.
Then you experiment to test your skills, knowledge, and ability.
Once you’ve developed enough awareness of what’s working for you and what’s not you repeat the cycle.
If you want to get rich, you don’t sit around waiting for money to fall in you lap.
To get something you’ve never had you have to become someone you’ve never been. The current version of you isn’t incapable of having wealth.
You just lack the relevant knowledge, skills, and experience to make more money than you are right now.
Here’s the process of becoming the person that gets what you want:
Get curious
In this example, if you want to make more money you have to get curious about why you may not be making the money you want.
Is it a problem with opportunity to move up at your job? Do you lack the skill to apply to higher paying jobs? Are you in a situation where you were never taught how to make money for yourself?
This was the case for me. I had skills in music production but lacked the knowledge and confidence to apply to a studio or network and build a business for myself online.
Explore your situation, everyone’s different. Then you get curious about what you’d need to learn to make more. What skills would you need? What types of people would you need know?
Skin in the game
Now use your attention to create a project (game) that gets you what you want:
1. Goals
Set a large goal. Big enough to make you a little uncomfortable. For example $10,000 a month. For most people that’s a lot of money.
Then break your large goal into smaller goals.
Instead of $10,000. Start with $100 or even $10.
Whatever you think would be easy or at least doable. It should be a challenge but not overwhelming.
As soon as you do that your mind should start flooding with ideas of how to make $10 dollars.
It becomes a game.
How do I get what I want?
You won’t be able to make $10,000 immediately.
The point is to give you a long term focus.
Because becoming who you want will take time and sustained attention.
Not days.
Real change takes months at least.
2. Seek new knowledge
Start following accounts that teach you what you want to know.
Get engaged in the community online.
Watch tutorials, buy a course, read a book, ask someone on social media.
Start seeking how you’ll achieve your goal.
What you’ll need to know.
What you don’t know.
And what you’ll need to do.
New habits, beliefs, behaviours, connections etc.
3. Experiment in public
Life doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
You need to build your project in public.
Start posting about what you’re doing.
Don’t get lost in tutorials, and endless learning.
Knowledge without action is useless.
The ability to act on what you know and get what you want defines intelligence.
If you don’t act on what you’re learning it’s pointless.
Once you act you learn how valuable your knowledge really is and that gives you direction on what to learn next.
Building in public holds you accountable.
It gives you reason to learn more and improve.
It connects you with a community of people who have the same goals.
It creates the path from who you are to who you’ll become.
Don’t just imagine doing something new.
Start doing something new.
Learn as you go, one step at a time.
Documenting your journey helps you build a personal brand.
It becomes your resume, portfolio, progress tracker, network and school.
The Takeaway
This is how I’ve turned my life around.
I’ve improved my health, intelligence, physique, peace of mind, finances and relationships.
You can do this with every area of your life.
You don’t have to do it all publicly but you should do some of it publicly.
The opportunities it could bring into your life are endless.
To improve your health:
Make a game of diets and exercise.
To improve your spirit:
Meditation and faith.
To improve your creativity:
Video editing, painting, singing, content creation.
Anything in your life will improve and grow if your curious, focused and create a structure of learning, building and improving your abilities.
DM me.
How are you going to start becoming the person who gets what you want?
I’d love to follow your journey.
‘Til next time.
Get curious, pay attention and get some skin in the game.
Don’t betray yourself by wasting your potential.
Question your defaults and become who you want to be.
— Edamame Dufflebag