If you’re not consciously designing your life in the 21st century you’re like a leaf in a hurricane.
There are so many distractions that you must apply proactive effort to stand against them—and even more to move against the wind in your own chosen direction.
If you don’t do this, you’ll remain a cog in someone else’s machine (and never freetire yourself).
But the good news is that the alignment you found in the previous sections of this course transforms you from a leaf into an aerodynamic supercar, able to go wherever you please at amazing speed.
Now, you’ve probably tried to improve your life before.
The U.S. self-help industry is valued at *$45.92 billion.*¹
Since billions of dollars are being spent here, it'd be reasonable to expect to see millions of people thriving.
So where the hell are they?
In 1983, University of Washington Psychology professor Robert Kohlenberg published a book called Migraine Relief.
What’s special about this book is that the author went on to run tests around it. And he discovered what he calls “the number one problem with self-help books”.
Only 20% of study participants read the entire book, and only 2 to 4 percent followed the book’s recommendations.
Everyone thinks they want the result a self-help book promises. But they don’t want to do what’s necessary to get it. Which means they don’t really want it. What they really want is for the author to wave a magic wand. (And to be fair, the marketing teams behind a lot of these books make it sound like that’s exactly what’s on offer.)
This puts us, as a species, in a desperate spot:
If even the people who buy self-help books can’t help themselves, how the fuck is everyone else going to solve their problems?
And the problems, of course, are pretty nasty in 2024…