The Scattered Mind's Guide to Success
How to Play Games You're Uniquely Suited to Win
Self-Awareness as a Skill
The average person has the self-awareness of a nematode. Their sense of self doesn’t go past their favorite pizza topping and who they want to win the game on Friday night. Spend five minutes chatting in your local gym sauna and you’ll know what I mean. Spend enough time with normies and you’ll actually take pride in the fact that you’re bad at being normal. You’re not missing anything.
What disservice it is to spend your whole life never truly understanding who you are. Even worse, consolidating your sense of self in a trivial sliver of time.
There are Two Types of People
My college had some of the best lacrosse players in the country (big flex, I know). I knew two guys on the team in particular that I still think about to this day. Similar skill, similar ambition, totally different life outcomes.
Greg still lives in the town I went to school in. He works a job he hates, has zero prospects, and is borderline obese. The photos he posts on Instagram show a man who has lost his spark.
Kyle is crushing it. He went on to get his MBA, has a high-paying finance job and recently got married. I spoke to him recently, this guy’s dialed.
Greg was actually better at lacrosse. He made it his whole personality. One track mind. His sense of self was: I like lacrosse.
Kyle liked lacrosse too, but he knew that lacrosse was just a proxy for his true passions: Teamwork, competition, camaraderie, linear achievement of goals.
Kyle took inventory of his past and overlaid it with future life paths. He knew that lacrosse was temporary so he prioritized building a second life path: Excel in business school, use his athletic/academic prowess to land an internship, funnel all his innate drives & skills into his career post graduation.
Greg just liked lacrosse. Why would he care about school if lacrosse is life? I had a group presentation with him once. We got a D.
Greg wasn’t any less talented than Kyle. He learned all the same lessons and fundamentally had the same tendencies. He just never took inventory. He never extrapolated his skills past “good at throwing ball into net”.
Greg lost, Kyle won.
PART 1: EXCAVATION
How to Find Your Edge
Play archeologist with your past. Go back as far as you can remember, retroactively document your experiences. Pivotal moments, canon events, wins and losses. What sticks out to you?
The Childhood Obsession Test
What interests did you have when you were really young?
You are statistically most likely to become world-class at that which you were obsessed with as a child. It takes 10,000 hours to become world class at something. If you started at 7, you had a major head start. Not only that, what you do as a child fundamentally alters your hardwiring. You are in a psychedelic-level state of neuroplasticity up until around age 7. The things you do in adolescence set the groundwork for your perception of reality.
I played so much Pokemon as a kid it’s baked into my worldview. Before that it was dinosaurs. After that it was anthropology & evolutionary biology. These all seem unrelated, but dig deep enough and you will find the vein between it all.
For me, I’ve always been obsessed with taxonomy, evolution, biology. The natural world and how animals like us evolve around it. My answer to “If you could live in any time period when would it be?” was always 1855 on Darwin’s ship to the Galapagos. This is my hardwiring. I love uncovering the subtleties of species, most importantly our species. Understanding why organisms act the way that they do. How their environment influences them. Why some humans have long limbs and others have short ones. Why we think the way we do and how we can use that to our advantage.
I am less of a biohacker and more of a bioexplorer.
The Tendency Audit
Go deeper than just interests. Focus on tendencies:
What came easy to you but hard to others?
What felt like play to you but work for your peers?
What things came so naturally that you didn’t have to work for it?
This will be hard, and I implore you to recruit the help of your parents (and even grandparents).
The Process Autopsy
Don’t just think about what you did, think about how you did it.
I scored significantly higher on essays I wasn’t able to prepare for. I aced all my presentations when I was making stuff up on the spot. Preparation ruins intuition. It forces what would otherwise be a fluid exploration of ideas. I apply this same principle to my writing and speaking today. No notes, no preparation, just making space for the ideas to flow.
Think about how you prepared for exams. How did you study? Everybody has different learning styles:
Visual learners
Reading/writing learners
Conversational learners
Auditory learners
I’m a conversational learner. I learn by talking about what I’m learning. That’s why I started Twitter in the first place, to act as digital scaffolding for refining what I learn.
Do you see the thread here? Everything I do is a logical extrapolation of who I am at my core. Amplified and consolidated into avenues that are high leverage, low friction, and most applicable to my unique wiring.
Real-World Applications
I HATED creating fancy presentations in school. Wasting precious time on trivial redundancies like formatting, color coding, and visuals. I preferred simple, straightforward text for optimal comprehension & clarity. This is why I write on Substack and Twitter instead of editing feature-length videos and creating fancy Instagram carousels.
My friend Rocky was likely very different as a child. He probably loved the presentations, the design, the nuances. He knew his hardwiring, and played a game he was uniquely suited to win. Now he makes some of the fanciest, most aesthetically congruent epicurean content out there. Good on you, Rocky.
PART 2: BECOMING A SELF-OBSERVER
The Daily Awareness Practice
What was the last thing you did that made you feel good? What made you feel bad?
What task today gave you energy? What task drained you?
What is one thing that if you did more of tomorrow, you would have a better day? What about less?
What is one annoying thing that, if removed entirely, would drastically improve the quality of your life? What’s stopping you from removing said thing?
Most people couldn’t tell you what they did today, let alone how they felt about what they did. They can’t even begin to build a life that suits them because they don’t know what they’re suited for.
The Cultural Vacuum
To be fair, we used to not have to make many decisions at all. We did what our fathers did who did what their fathers did and so on. We had tradition, culture, moral and religious scaffolding that outsourced a lot of our decision making. We still hold remnants of this time in our last name.
But the cat’s out of the bag now. The powers that be (they) have torn it all down. They’ve gutted your culture, purged your heritage, and left you in this lonely, dry, and dystopian identity vacuum. They want you identity-less, they want you insultingly unaware. An unaware, unidentified individual is a controllable individual. A consumptive one who builds identity around what he has, not who he is. Nietzsche spoke about this briefly at length.
The only way out of this vacuum is to build your own personal blueprint. To gather empirical data on who you are, how you do things, and what drives you toward a life of fulfillment.
The 3-Week Tracking Protocol
For the next 3 weeks, write down EVERYTHING that brings you above or below your cognitive baseline. For every thing you do, mark down its effect on your psyche:
Example:
Had constructive phone call with business partner: +3 energy, +5 optimism, +4 drive
Put together document for client: -4 energy, -6 mood, +5 overstimulation
Do this with biological interventions too: food, supplements, health routines. Gather as much data as possible.
Pattern Recognition & Extrapolation
Once you have enough data, extrapolate. Piece together the puzzle, find the threads. Play scientist with yourself.
This requires a level of meditative separation most simply do not have. I didn’t. But I knew enough to know that about myself. And knowing myself, I knew that meditation was boring and went against my ADHD hardwiring. But I did know that I love gamification. All of us do. So I downloaded one of those meditation apps that tracked progress through levels and streaks, and practiced guided meditation every day for six months.
How did I know this would work?
Because I had already followed step 1. I used to be obsessed with Call of Duty, specifically leveling up guns. You’d have to shoot me to study for longer than 20 minutes at a time, but I played COD for 6 hours straight some nights. Totally fixated on leveling up my guns. I didn’t care about winning. Didn’t care about stats, only cared about leveling up my guns. Same with Skyrim and skill trees.
So I simply found a way to meditate that followed my existing hardwiring: Leveling up my skill tree (Meditation +50).
From Data to Action
Once you spend about 3 weeks of doing this, you’ll have enough data to start connecting the dots:
Instead of saying:
“Calls with my business partner give me energy”
You can extrapolate:
“I work best when collaborating with people toward a shared goal”
Instead of saying:
“Writing reports drains me”
You can say:
“Tasks that require rigid, non-creative, or monotonous work rob me of my spark”
Now you can confidently start working toward a life where you spend all your time doing things that give you energy which you can use to do more of that thing, creating a positive flywheel. You can assign a value to abdicating yourself from redundant tasks, from things that steal your spark. This no longer becomes a hunch feeling, but a logical and pragmatic decision for the betterment of yourself and everybody else around you.
The Multiplication Effect
If you can spend time doing things you love, that you’re good at, and that come easy to you, you will do more, produce more, and provide more value. You will burnout less and become even better at that thing, world-class even.
Spending time on things that drain you does everybody a disservice. You become a grouch, you lose all your aura. Not only are you unable to capitalize on your gifts, you can’t share them with anybody else.
This is an ego hurdle more than anything. Just let it go man. Accept the fact that you suck at excel sheets. Instead of brute forcing your way through them, ask yourself “what systems could I implement to make this as easy as possible?”.
The Goggins types want you to brute force your way through it, which is a good strategy if you’re room temperature IQ. But if you have the cognitive faculties, you’d be a fool not to use them.
PART 3: ALIGNMENT & BUILDING YOUR WORLD
The Subjective Side of Success
Once you’ve identified what you can do, now align that with what you CAN’T NOT do.
What is the one thing that will eat away at you if not pursued? What keeps you up at night? Do not shy away from this. I used to come home from the bars in Mexico and go straight to my computer. I’d write an entire thread, a storm of tweets, or just ramble in my notes for hours. Same thing with videos. Its like an urge I have, an addiction. If I don’t outwardly express my thoughts, I feel my insides eating away.
Most people hide from this, call it a distraction. But you cannot compete with somebody who loves the game. Whose default wiring gives them no choice but to embrace their given activity. Alignment my friends.
Building A World Around Your Strengths
Just because you’ve identified your strengths doesn’t mean you’ve earned the right to shrug off your weaknesses. You’ve got to EARN the right to not do the shitty stuff.
Hate doing dishes? That’s fine. You better be so good at the other stuff that you can pay somebody to do them for you. If you can’t do that, find a SYSTEM that makes whatever you hate significantly less painful.
My Minimalist Solution
I spent a year eating out of one bowl with one pair of chopsticks. I clearly identified that things held me back. They distracted me, overwhelmed me, drained me of precious energy. The benefit I got from owning things in abundance was outweighed by the pain of clutter, distraction, and overstimulation.
So I asked myself “what would this look like if it were easy?”. Answer one was to pay for a maid, answer two was to get rid of all of my things. I went with number two. I became a hardcore minimalist. Things you own end up owning you. I got rid of all of it. For three years, I lived out of one suitcase. This enabled me to live a life of freedom and adventure that would otherwise be impossible. Tyler Durden spoke about this briefly at length.
The Trade-Off
Building a life on your terms takes sacrifice. People stay at jobs they hate because they need the paycheck to pay for things they don’t need. They do not have the cognitive flexibility nor the testicular fortitude to imagine a life outside of those terms. And I don’t blame them. The alternative isn’t always glamorous.
I would have rather committed seppuku with a butter knife than get stuck in the rat race. I had a clear value hierarchy, with security and materialism at the very bottom. So the solution was simple: Move to a foreign country, live frugally, work on honing my skills and building a life I was uniquely suited to (eventually) win.
I gave up on playing games I had no interest in winning. Just like how I gave up on ever playing D1 basketball (I’m a stocky white guy). Based off my past data gathering, I knew that uncomfortable environments were where I flourished, so I sent it.
PART 4: BECOMING GOOD ENOUGH TO OVERCOME YOUR WEAKNESSES
You Are Entitled to Nothing
Remember, You are entitled to NOTHING. Whatever you want, you must earn it through smart work, hard work, and results.
I was 20 when I identified that I was an ideas guy. I had one goal: to get paid for my ideas. It took me FIVE YEARS of steady progress to get to the point where I deserved to get paid for my ideas.
Every year up until that point, I had to prove myself. To prove that my ideas were valuable by executing on them personally. From service to product, I personally had to go and get results to give my ideas worth. If I focused exclusively on my idea generating skill tree, I’d be that annoying person on the internet pitching ideas with no comprehension of implementation.
So I stayed true to my north star strength (ideas), but enlisted supporting strengths to amplify its value. I found other things I was good at, things that were tangibly valuable: Marketing, team building, creative work. I learned skills that I didn’t like, but were necessary: Systems, automations, analytics. I always kept my finger on the pulse of which skills were stepping stones and which skills were my core drivers.
Don’t Lose the Plot
Some people get sidetracked. They want to open a retreat center but need money to make their dream come true. So they move to Miami and start a drop shipping company. At some point, they lose the plot. Their goal posts have shifted and they forget entirely about their dreams. Now their life sucks and they don’t know why.
Do what you have to do, but never lose the plot.
Prove Your Worth
If you want to lean on your strengths, PROVE THEIR WORTH. Build immutable evidence that you are as good as you say you are. You need a repertoire of results, figures, and statistics to prove that you are actually valuable.
Then and only then can you start outsourcing what you’re bad at. You must earn the right to not do certain things. If I wasn’t good at what I did, I wouldn’t be able to take the liberties I do. I would not be able to partner with equally capable people with synergistic skillsets.
Get Competent AF
Regardless of what you’re good at, you must become good at getting good at things. This comes down to meta-learning. Leaning on your strengths is not an excuse to be incompetent at your weaknesses.
True strength comes from being T-shaped. Well-rounded, versed, and capable, but one secret sauce that makes you special.
The more broadly competent you are, the more flexible you are. The more you can jiu-jitsu your way into opportunities and ideal trajectories for success. Find your secret sauce, become competent enough at everything else that you can justifiably hone in on your strengths.
Key Takeaways
In short, The Scattered Mind’s Guide to Success is as follows:
The Excavation Process:
Mine your childhood obsessions for hardwiring patterns
Audit your natural tendencies vs. learned behaviors
Analyze your process, not just your outputs
The Observation Protocol:
Track energy/mood impact of every task for 3 weeks
Extrapolate patterns from raw data
Build systems that align with your wiring, not against it
The Building Phase:
Identify what you CAN’T NOT do
Create systems to minimize what drains you
Earn the right to outsource weaknesses through proven competence
The Competence Standard:
Prove your strengths with tangible results
Become T-shaped: one superpower, broad competence
Never lose the plot while building stepping stone skills
Check out other articles in this vein:
Just the other day I thought I need to be more systematic about my approach - this read came at just the right time. Anybody here who wants to try this and be my accountability partner?
Hope Greg doesn't read this