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Before we start:

My friend Ben Chan, just released his new course Creator Launchpad.

The man went from $0 → $12,500/mo in a matter of 13 months. I got his course and it's pure gold.

Everything you need from Branding, to storytelling, to creation offers, landing clients, launching products & lead magnets, to writing emails that sell, and what to do for the first 90 days is covered in there.

And he’s been kind enough to give the first 10 people who use the code HUSSAIN40 40% off on the course.

Click here to get it.

Now… onto today's newsletter…

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If you had 24 hours with Elon Musk, what would you ask him?

Here are some questions I thought of:

• What do you eat for breakfast?

• What's your morning routine?

• What time do you go to bed?

• How do you create wealth?

• How are you so productive?

• How do you become creative?

• How many hours do you sleep?

• What type of water do you drink?

• How often do you brush your teeth?

• How do you become a good leader?

• How do you make sure that you're a good parent?

Surely he's gonna give you pure liquid gold of advice that will give you clarity, solve your problems, and lead to eternal happiness, right?

Wrong.

Most people are better off without getting his advice.

Not because he's wrong, but because he's too far advanced that any piece of advice he will give you is irrelevant to you.

He's at level 1,000 and you're still at level 1.

Most people are better off getting advice from someone who's still a "beginner" but is 1 or 2 steps ahead of them than to get it from someone like Elon.

Most people ask for advice because they're too afraid of what others would think of them. They try to outsource their journey and struggle that is unique to them, and them only, in the form of advice.

The problem with asking for advice is most people ask questions that are so vague that it is almost impossible to answer (which makes their question pointless to start with).

You will never get a truly actionable answer by outsourcing your entire learning journey out of fear of that journey.

And even when you DO get an actionable advice answer, 99% of people don't take action on it.

Just go to your bookstore and you'll see countless books about:

• How to eat healthy

• How to lose weight

• How to be confident

• How to start a business

• How to be more productive

• How to become a better parent

• How to become a good speaker

• How to approach women and get them to like you by using this never-heard-before technique called "speaking to them"

But most of these books go unread.

The problem isn't that the advice is bad — it's people who are asking the wrong questions from the start.

The problem is a lack of understanding. The problem is most people don't know how to learn. They've never sat down and thought about what the learning process looks like.

They think the learning process looks like how they’ve been taught in school.

Sit in class for 8 hours, have a teacher shove information down your throat, study hard (aka, memorize what you've been "taught"), do the exam, if you fail, repeat it, if you pass, you go to the next level.

It's systematic. Like flipping a coin. Either you pass or fail.

But the learning process is anything but that.

If you look at how science was built, it's from trial and error. Through chasing curiosities, experimenting, hypothesizing, doing controlled experiments, theorizing, and only when it's proven and replicable that it become a fact.

The Mental Masturbation Cycle

We live in a dopamine-addicted society.

Everything is quick and easy.

We switched from cooking to ordering takeaway.

We switched from working out to sitting on a couch.

We switched from building and learning to playing video games.

We switched from dating and meeting a partner in the real world to watching porn.

I mean, just think about it, why would you do the hard thing when you could easily substitute it with something that's guaranteed?

You get to have all the pleasure without the pain…

or so you thought…

You see, the problem with early gratification is that it gives you pleasure now, but more pain later compared to doing the hard thing, which is pain now, but more reward later.

This is what people are trying to do when they ask for advice.

They try to avoid the pain that comes from the journey and learning through failures. So they seek for advice, some do it in the form of questions, others in the form of content, because getting advice makes you feel like you're making progress — you're getting information and insights on how to do the thing — but you're never making any progress, because you're not acting on it.

Advice will never give you the experience necessary to reach the goal you set for yourself — it's only experience that will get you there, you get experience by doing the work.

Not to mention, most pieces of advice you get are useless, even if they're highly actionable.

I'm being serious…

Most people don't act on the advice they've received. This is why they're stuck in life. This is why they're miserable with themselves (they don't know they're miserable because they're blaming others for their lack of action, understanding, and skill).

Books, podcasts, articles, emails, social media content all have great advice, but only 0.001% of it applies to your exact situation.

Just ask yourself:

“When was the last time you asked for advice and actually listened to and took action on?”

"How many lessons and pieces of advice have you integrated into your psyche and life?"

Because every piece of content you consume is advice after all. Whether it's said implicitly or explicitly.

Because I know for myself, I haven't made most of the advice I received into my daily life. I don't even remember the advice I got.

All I remember is feeling good and going like "Yeah, you're right, I'll do that," but a few minutes go by and I go back to my default mental programming.

And here lies the problem.

Default mental programming.

How To Make Real Change

You want to become a better person.

You want to achieve great things.

You want to be at peace.

But most people don't realize that their ability to move toward these desirable outcomes comes from having the skill to do so — the ability to learn, change, and adapt their identity to become the person who can achieve them.

Skill is when your mind meets reality.

Skill is obtained through education, practice, and real-world feedback.

The difference between where you are now and where you want to be is skill.

Not belief. Not knowledge. Not environment. Not your friends. Not your socioeconomic status. All those are variables. Powerful ones, they can make your journey 100x easier, but they are all beaten by skill.

Now, this isn't to say that you aren't where you want to be because you're not working hard enough. Because I know, most people work hard. Very hard. But they're working very hard on the wrong things.

So the first thing you need to do is to know where you're going and set a goal.

1) Set A Goal

Working hard is very overrated in today's society.

We have tools, automations, and AI to do the work for us.

You don't need to work hard anymore to see results or change your life.

A concept I had to drill into my head was:

"What you do and how you do it matter much much more than how much force you're applying."

So before you start working hard, you need direction on where you want to go.

Notice how I said direction, and not having things figured out.

Because you don't need to have the entire plan laid out, you just need to know where you think you want to be.

If you don't know what direction to take, choose the one that gives you the most energy.

When you pick the direction that feels right to you, start walking in it.

But most people won’t do this— they prefer to work really hard without thinking where they're heading, only to realize 10 years later that they've been going in the wrong direction the entire time.

Once you know where you want to go, start setting goals.

Goals are guidelines. Goals provide a frame for your decision-making. You need a goal that grows into your vision. Program your mind with information relevant to that goal.

Without goals, you feel lost.

This is why most people are miserable.

I don't want to go into too much detail about goals in this newsletter, because I already went into it in The Mental Health Epidemic.

But to keep this short, without goals, you don't have clarity on what you want to do in life.

You become aimless. Nothing to strive for. Nothing to aspire to. Nothing to change. You just become another "thing" that wanders this earth.

But when you have a goal, you feel motivated. You're driven. You have something to achieve. You have something to direct your entire focus and attention to. You have something to obsess over the minor details.

When you chase goals that mean something to you, time melts. Hours go by like minutes. Effort becomes easy. Focus comes naturally to you. Everything clicks.

That, my friend, is the taste of flow.

The taste of chasing a goal that means something to you.

2) Reprogramming Your Mind

You can't achieve your goals because you haven't become the person who can achieve them.

All change, whether it's in work, relationships, business, life, requires a change in identity.

And here's where things get interesting…

The human mind is great at one thing:

Turning its beliefs into a reality.

You see, thoughts influence emotions.

Emotions lead to action.

Actions lead to behavior.

Behaviors that go unchecked for years turns into habits.

Habits determine your identity.

Your identity determines the type of life you'll live.

Your thoughts = your life

So it all starts with programming your mind with the right inputs:

• Swap mindless scrolling with intentional reading

• Swap video games with building projects and learning new skills.

• Swap fast-food content like book summaries, Instagram Reels, Tweets, and Threads with reading longer, challenging books.

They're literally the same things but done differently.

I'm not saying you need to quit any of them. I'm saying you need a foundational habit of learning, building, and executing on a daily basis.

(I still play video games every once in a while. Sometimes I play so much that I get so sick of myself that I stop playing and go back to writing, learning, and building. I don't do all of this because I have to. I do it because I want to. And this is what I'm trying to do here. I'm trying to show you that you can build something pleasurable, purposeful, and profitable without cutting out everything that brings you joy. You just need to do with balance.)

At first it's painful — but that's what moving in the right direction is supposed to feel like, pain.

People actually enjoy pain, but they hide from it and inflict more, unbearable pain with surface-level pleasurable activities that keep you "comfortable".

Some, allow for the good pain — the pain that forces you to let go of an old part of you to allow for a new, healthier, better part to come, fill its place, and expand.

You need to curate an environment that generate suffering (like the gym, running, or doing anything that's hard). In the gym, you literally destroy your muscles on a tiny microscopic level so later, when you go home, they can rebuild and become bigger.

This doesn't mean you need to always live a life of struggle. But you need to be intentional with how you generate suffering.

David Goggins is a good example of this — he doesn't have to run as much as he has, but he wants to do it. Because that's the only way he can grow and challenge himself.

3) Self-Educate & Experiment

A lie I always told myself:

"I don't know where to start."

Bullshit.

You know what you need to do, you're just trying to find an excuse to avoid it.

You see, most people already know what they should do, but they ask for advice, hoping they'll hear something different so they can go:

"Aha! See! That's why I didn't start, because if I started then I would've done things wrong."

But that never happens.

People love to overcomplicate the start because they're still running on the mental programming of what they were taught in school.

"If you don't succeed from the first try, you're a failure."

But that's not how reality works.

Every time you get the chance to do something new, do it. Fail. Nobody expects you to nail everything on the first try.

Start unprepared. Develop the skill of figuring it out as you go. This is probably one of the best skills you can develop as a human being. Fail. Refine your approach. Try a different method. Use real-world feedback to make progress. Fail often. Failing is your key to success.

I remember when I started writing online. I experimented with almost every single method out there before I finally succeeded.

I tried writing platitudes, I failed.

I tried being a reply guy, I failed.

I tried writing threads, I failed, horribly

I tried at writing micro story tweets, I failed.

I tried writing "value" tweets, I failed.

I tried writing "value" long form posts, I failed

I tried writing long form storytelling tweets, did well until the trend died, then I failed.

Went back to tweets, failed, again.

At this point it was almost 14-16 months of me trying to make it with writing, spent over $5,000 on writing courses. Experimented with almost every single method, I was on the brink of giving up, until I decided to give threads another chance, and it worked.

The only reason why it worked this time is because I failed for all the times before.

Every failure I had made me a better writer, gave me lessons that I can carry over to my next adventure.

Eventually, all the lessons stacked up on each other will lead to success.

You need to realize, the only way to truly solve your problem for good is by self-experimentation and self-education.

There is no piece of advice that will give you the experience necessary to solve your problems. There is no mentor who will do the work for you.

The same thing happened with me when I started going to the gym.

I started with an Upper & Lower split, then moved to Push, Pull, Legs split, then added running, once I realized I was working out too much (6 days of strength training & 5 days of running) I decided to cut the gym down and created my own split that fits my schedule.

(let's not even mention the amount of exercises I had to experiment with during those 2 years).

4) Seek Specific Advice

I'll repeat this again,

You need a goal. Goals frame your decision-making. I don't want to hear that regurgitated phrase of "systems are better than goals".

Systems work best when you have a goal. Systems help you get to your goal faster. I see many people have systems but no goals, which makes their entire system pointless.

They're efficient at doing things that they don't even need to do in the first place.

They're busy, but not effective.

Once you've experimented long enough, understand where you're at in your journey and know what problems you have, that's when you seek advice.

When you ask for advice, make it specific to fit your situation.

General questions lead to generic advice.

Generic advice doesn’t give you clarity — it confuses you.

Look for a mentor who's 1 step ahead of you — not 100 steps (because the level 100 is playing a different game than you and they understand how to do things differently) — you first need to learn how to play on your level and after you become more advanced look for more "expert" mentors.

5) Integrate Advice With Your Own Experimentations

This is arguably one of the most important steps you can take.

Most people close their minds when they receive advice.

They stop thinking for themselves.

They take action, they grind, they build, but they don't stop to think, review, and see if they're getting results or not.

And when they're not getting results, they don't stop and contemplate how they can tweak and modify the advice they've been given to fit their situation.

You see, what works for me won't work 100% exactly the same for you.

There's going to be a difference.

That difference might be 1%, 5%, or even 50%.

The difference comes from our lived experiences, memories, and the thousands of tiny decisions and micro-habits that have been accumulating for decades.

You must seek to understand why it worked for someone else and how it applies to your situation.

Stop the mental masturbation of only consuming “actionable advice and no fluff” when you need the fluff to understand the nuances of life and methods.

Don’t be an advice addict.

Do what you want. Get better at doing it through self-education, self-experimentation, and effort. Systemize what works and evolve with time.

That’s how you get ahead of 99% of people.

With that said, that's all for today.

Thank you for reading and enjoy the rest of your day.

- Hussain

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PS:

Another reminder to get Ben's course.

If you're looking to buy 1 course that covers everything you need to get started in your first 90 days and land your first client, Ben's course is the one for you.

Use HUSSAIN40 at checkout to get 40% off.

(Again, the code is only for the first 10 people who use it)

Click here to get Creator Launchpad.

I don't promote anyone's course unless I know that the material is top-quality, so rest assured, I know you'll find it valuable as much as I have.