1
CONTENTS
Introduction 2
The Anti-Fragile Mind Manifesto ............................................................................................................ 3
PART 1: Omnigame Fundamentals 4
The Game Of Life ..................................................................................................................................... 4
Resonance ................................................................................................................................................ 5
Psychomagnetics ..................................................................................................................................... 6
Catabolic vs. Anabolic 7
State of Resonance ................................................................................................................................. 7
Catabolic Resonance ............................................................................................................................... 8
Anabolic Resonance .............................................................................................................................. 10
Shifting States 12
The Internal Narrrative ......................................................................................................................... 12
Beliefs Are The Foundation .................................................................................................................. 13
Psychomagnetic Activation .................................................................................................................. 14
Three Piece Machine ............................................................................................................................. 15
Important Caveats ................................................................................................................................. 16
PART 2: The Anabolic Axioms 18
Everything That Happens To You Is The Best Possible Thing That Could Have Happened ........ 18
If You Don't Get What You Want, You're Getting Something Better .............................................. 21
Pain Is Just Power Wrapped In A Puzzle ............................................................................................ 23
Every Game Is Winnable If You Play Big Enough .............................................................................. 27
Every Action Is Easy Enough If You Make It Small Enough .............................................................. 32
Evolution Is As Smooth As You Are Humble ..................................................................................... 35
Joy Is As Accessible As You Are Faithful ............................................................................................. 39
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The only true answer to intense negative circumstances is to inject your positivity with steroids and
equip it with a rocket launcher. It is this fiercely radiant posture that you will come to know as
Anabolic Optimism and it will make you an invincible and infinitely evolving force of good should
you have the bravery to practice it.
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PART I: OMNIGAME FUNDAMENTALS
The Game of Life
There’s a game that everybody is playing all of the time. It’s the game of trying to get what you
want, or if you prefer, trying to want what you already have (in reality, you need both). In other
words, it’s the game of trying to move away from suffering and achieve satisfaction.
I call this attempt to achieve satisfaction the omnigame of life. The prefix "omni" means "of all
things", which seems appropriate since this pursuit of satisfaction seems to encompass pretty
much every interaction in life.
The idea is this: In every moment, you have either a conscious or unconscious desire. Your
mental and emotional state is predominantly a result of how those desires are mapped and
ultimately fulfilled. The problem is that most of us lack skill in playing this game and
subsequently end up dissatisfied with our results.
When your omnigame is weak, you constantly feel like you are losing, missing out, are not good
enough, and frustrated. If you can improve your omnigame, then you can increase the frequency
of success and satisfaction you feel and achieve in all areas of life.
I believe that you’re meant to be a winner. Meaning, I believe you’re meant to feel like you’re
winning almost constantly. I’m not talking about a win here or there - I’m talking about a nearpermanent state of being. This means spending the majority of your time feeling like you’re getting
what you want, or wanting what you already have.
Does mastery of the omnigame mean you become omniPOTENT (becoming all powerful)? Not at
all. You can certainly become more effective, but true mastery of the omnigame is found in the
way you handle the scenarios of NOT getting what you want and still ending up feeling like you're
getting ahead.
Sound paradoxical? It's not, but it takes a bit of explaining, hence this guide.
If you can develop mastery over the core mechanics of the omnigame that I'll be showing you,
you'll be able to cultivate anabolic optimism and start exponentially increasing your level of
progress and satisfaction in any domain your wish.
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Resonance
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Resonance is an allignment between head and heart. It is when your rational and emotional
mind are either in a state of conscious or unconscious "agreement".
So when someone asks you if something "resonates" with you, they are asking if something both
feels right and sounds rationally acceptable as well.
This is contrasted with a state of dissonance where your head and heart disagree. We'll talk more
about how to heal such states in a bit.
Resonance can either be positive or negative.
Positive resonance is when the feelings are pleasant. This is an "attractive" motivational force that
draws you toward something that is both rationally and emotionally deemed "good."
Negative resonance is when feelings are unpleasant. This is a "repellant" motivational force that
drives you away from something deemed rationally and emotionally "bad."
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Conversely, an active state is when your body enters into the resonance as well and you ACT
according to the resonant impulse. So if you feel like eating, think it is a good idea TO eat, and then
go about the act of eating, then you are in a state of active resonance.
Active resonance is the “effortless action” that flows through our mental, emotional, and
physical activity as a result of synergistic alignment in our psyche. Autopilot, flow, being in
the zone, trance, reactivity, entrainment, hyperfocus etc. are all forms of resonance.
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Psychomagnetics
The most important characteristic of resonance is what I’m calling psychomagnetism, which
refers to the principle that whatever you resonate with, YOU GET MORE OF.
It’s like your consciousness is a special magnet - depending upon how you tune your
psychomagnetic field determines what sorts of experiences and results you ultimately attract.
We all intuitively understand this. If you resonate with hate, conflict, and resentment, you’ll
get MORE hate conflict and resentment in your life, not less. If you resonate with love,
cooperation, and gratitude, you’ll get MORE love, cooperation, and gratitude.
This idea has been around for thousands of years and spoken of in almost every religious tradition
in some form or another. Today it is commonly referred to as the “law of attraction” (though that's
not it's only name). However, every tradition comes with it’s own baggage and assumptions (for
better or worse) and I’d like to start this conversation fresh, hence, 'psychomagnetics'.
The core of psychomagnetic theory is this:
x
Your thoughts are instructions for what you WANT MORE OF (the configuration
of the psychomagnetic circuit).
x
Your emotions are like electricity that AMPLIFY and CHARGE those instructions
with power.
x
Your actions are when you connect your charged instructions to the physical
world to create a mutually affective feedback loop (the circuit) between you and reality.
So basically the thoughts you think are instructions for what you want, your emotions are the
battery to power those instructions, and your actions are the way you plug those instructions into
the omnigame of life.
When practiced effectively, psychomagnetic skill allows you to consciously SHIFT your active
resonance. This lets you go from unproductive states of reacting poorly, to productive states
where you fall into a flow of beneficial behavior.
In other words, you gain control over your own psychological "playlist" that controls the rhythm
and flow of your thoughts, emotions and actions. So if the “song” you’re currently resonating at
causes you to dance to a beat that leads to undesirable results, then you can change the track to
a better tune and get better results.
The core challenge here is that many people are completely unaware of their own
psychomagnetic ability and use it to their detriment rather than their benefit.
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CATABOLIC VS ANABOLIC RESONANCE
If our goal is to shift from less desirable states of resonance to more desirable states, then the
first thing we need to do is figure out which states are the ones to be avoided and which ones
are to be pursued.
It would be great if things were so simple as "pursue the good feelings of positive resonance"
and "avoid the unpleasant feelings of negative resonance" but our world is not so black and
white.
We cannot simply pursue immediate gratification and expect to get favorable results in our life
(as any addict can attest). So if quick pleasure isn't the goal of our psychomagnetic model, what
is?
To this end, we’ll be looking at the two poles of psychomagnetism: catabolic and anabolic
resonance.
Catabolic Resonance: Pattern of activity which leads to a net breakdown of things, devolution
or withering.
Anabolic Resonance: Pattern of activity which leads to a net build up of things, evolution or
thriving.
Now there’s a bit of a yin-yang like relationship between these two states - each has a bit of the
other in them. So for example, a state of catabolic resonance might actually build something up
(like an addiction, or cancerous growth) that ultimately leads to a greater breakdown.
Likewise, an anabolic process might require a smaller breakdown for a greater gain like how you
must tear down muscle fibers if you wish ultimately to build them up and make them stronger, or
destruction of old and dysfunctional ways of doing things in order to adopt better methods.
Our goal here is to abolish all net catabolic patterns and learn how to function purely in the realm
of net anabolic resonance. This is not to say that there is no power to be gained on an overtly
catabolic path, but I do NOT recommend walking this path. (You can hear more about this in this
video I did).
The big issue is that many people habitually fall into states of catabolic resonance that
break them down and hold them back from thriving in life in a sustainable and authentic
manner.
Let’s now take a deeper look at how that happens.
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Catabolic Resonance
We have all been in states of catabolic resonance before. Any time you have been “stuck in a rut,”
caught in a “negative spiral,” or just caught acting out undesirably, you were in a state of catabolic
resonance.
Unless a shift is made to counter this state, the psychomagnetic law of "you will get more of what
you put out" demands that one catabolic response to a negative event will attract MORE catabolic
activity and MORE negative events.
A catabolic resonance usually starts with some kind of ‘bad’ event. This perception of
‘badness’ is the frequency that begins resonating in the mind, the emotions and ultimately
the actions. As this resonance goes unchecked, it creates a psychomagnetic charge that
attracts more experiences of the same frequency.
So for example, let’s say you showed up in a way that was less than ideal – maybe you
unintentionally made a social gaffe at work and drew some criticism from those around you. This
sort of event is usually followed by a negative emotion such as shame, embarrassment or stress.
Remember how the psychomagnetic formula works: the thought (instruction) in your mind is “I
screwed up and I’ve lost status” and the negative feelings associated with that thought charge it
with power. If that charged thought gets plugged into the omnigame via action to complete the
circuit, then there’s an extremely high chance it will lead to a feedback loop of MORE screw ups and
status loss.
This doesn’t happen instantaneously or magically - it’s just plain old cause and effect: If you do not
adjust your thinking around the ‘bad’ event, then your consciousness will do what it does best:
expand out into a network of associated thinking and feeling which will ultimately affect your
actions and experiences.
So if you are holding the emotion of shame and embarrassment, then your thoughts will follow
that psychomagnetic frequency. This might look like replaying the situation over and over again
from worse and worse angles or perhaps bringing up all the other times you’ve made similar
mistakes. This just makes that core negative emotion stronger and stronger.
As the negative emotion burns stronger, the thoughts will spiral darker and before you know it, you
can end up feeling like the biggest loser in the world, with all of your life’s mistakes playing through
your mind as evidence of your buffoonery.
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Instead of just being concerned with the little gaffe, you now are worried that you’re the biggest
joke of a person and no one takes you seriously. As these thoughts and feelings bounce around in
your head and heart, they will eventually find a way out through your body in the form of an action.
If you think you’re a fool and also feel like a fool, how do you think you’ll act?
When you have a highly emotionally charged thought, it takes a massive amount of willpower to
prevent that from being acted out and ultimately plugged into the omnigame as an instruction for
what you want.
So for example, if you worked yourself up internally as we’ve described, then the next time you’re in
a social situation all you’ll be focused on is avoiding making another mistake. You’ll be nervous,
tense, and more likely to hold back and unable to be present and focused.
The net result is that this will lead to a higher probability that you MAKE another gaffe or come
across as less likable than if your thoughts and feelings were resonating on a different frequency.
By resonating with the thought of “I’ve screwed up and lost status,” you’ve psychomagnetically
attracted MORE of that very thing.
This is a simple example of how social anxiety and poor social skills manifest for people worldwide.
Of course, it can get much more complex as people adopt different coping mechanisms, but the
fundamental principle is that your thoughts and feelings determine your actions and experiences,
and these actions and experiences feed into your future actions and experiences.
This is just one example but it can show up in a bunch of other ways:
•
If you are worried about being rejected by women, you're more likely to show up as
needy/insecure etc. and end up getting rejected more
•
If you are constantly worried about not having enough money, your mind will filter the
world through the perception of scarcity and you will be blind to opportunities to tap into
financial abundance.
•
If you are angry with yourself for being unproductive (with no supplemental & corrective
thinking) then you'll just want to escape the "slave driver" experience of yourself which just
leads to more escapism and lost productivity.
EVERYBODY has a way in which they spiral downward, OR, at the very least, have an area
where they FAIL to spiral UPWARD as well as they would like.
These are just small examples, but the forms of catabolic resonance cover all areas of life,
ranging from sexuality, career, relationships, health, to self-discipline and beyond.
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To summarize:
Catabolic resonance refers to states of automatic activity where you use your
psychomagnetic power to attract the experiences which break you down and limit you.
If you start with negative thoughts and negative feelings, you will ultimately take negative
actions and experience negative results.
If left unchecked, these results create a negative feedback loop that will simply create
more and more negative results that break you down further.
So the big trends from this are:
• If you resonate lack and desire, you just get more lack and desire: If you never feel like you
have enough or have what you want, then getting more things won’t change that. You’ll just
need more and more, never feeling satisfied.
• If you resonate with victimhood and resentment, you will get more victimhood and
resentment: If you view yourself as a helpless victim and your negative state as someone else’s
fault, then you’ll ALWAYS feel that way and find someone to blame for your unsatisfying life
and live perpetually in a state of powerlessness.
• If you resonate with conflict and discord, you will get more conflict and discord. If you go
around looking for fights, you’ll find them, and very quickly these fights will come around trying
to find YOU.
Anabolic Resonance
Instead of catabolic resonance, we want to be in a state of anabolic resonance where we are
thinking good thoughts, feeling good things, and getting good results.
Perhaps you know some people like this - they are almost always in a good mood, they seem to flow
through life and everything seems to work out for them. These are people who have learned how to
put good energy out so that they get good things back.
Bad things don’t seem happen to these people because these people don’t let themselves SEE their
experiences as bad. They just see opportunities and wins.
Looking at the list of examples we outlined in the previous section, we can flip them for the person
resonating anabolically:
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x
If you are happy with yourself regardless of what women think, you're more likely to show
up as confident, interesting, and strong and ultimately have more romantic success.
x
If you hold yourself as someone who is already wealthy, then you'll think and act like a
wealthy person. Guess how wealthy people act? In the ways that generate more money.
x
If you run off the thoughts of someone who is already a productive person, then your
emotions and actions will follow suite.
When applied as global principles you get:
x
If you resonate with abundance and fulfillment, you get more abundance and fulfillment: If
you learn how to cultivate gratitude and satisfaction, then you’ll get more and more things to
be grateful and fulfilled by. The people who embrace what they have as an awesome gift use
it as such, and therefore get the best results they possibly can.
x
x
If you resonate with ownership and opportunity then you get more ownership and
opportunity: If you embrace the fact that you always have the ability to choose your
RESPONSE to your situation then you can make sure that you use that response to the best
of your ability. The people who consistently honor this power successively unlock MORE
power.
If you resonate with peace and cooperation then you get more peace and cooperation: When
you try to work with people rather than against them, you will tend to find people automatically
flocking to your side. And even if you can’t find alignment on a particular issue, the
disagreement tends to be far more amicable and perhaps even lead to greater respect and
connection down the line on other matters.
You might be thinking "That all sounds nice, but how the heck am I supposed to resonate positively
all the time? Isn't it inevitable that I'm going to experience negative emotions and act out
catabolically?". Two points to make about this:
First, catabolic resonance tends to only get truly bad when you don’t address it. One catabolic
action does not usually create a massive breakdown (barring extremely bad edge cases). Simply
developing self-awareness and baseline resonance shifting skills will be enough to keep a catabolic
feedback loop from spiraling out of control.
Second, we need to remember that point we made about the yin-yang earlier. You can make any
negative situation into a smaller catabolic experience that ultimately serves a larger anabolic aim.
My point here is that you don’t need to have perfect self-control in order to live a life of
predominantly anabolic resonance. Just a basic understanding of the skills and the will to use
those skills.
So, what are those basic skills? Well that’s what the rest of the guide is for!
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SHIFTING STATES
The core point of control we have in the psychomagnetic model is the narrative we operate on.
The narrative refers to the story we are telling about the facts of a situation. This narrative forms
the "music" of our "emotional magnet".
There’s a glass of water on the table. Will you tell the story that the glass is half full, or that it’s half
empty and probably filled with poison?
As we mentioned previously, you can think of your narrative as the circuit that your emotional
energies flow through and are manipulated by. This flow creates your psychomagnetic resonance,
which is either anabolic or catabolic depending on whether it builds you up or breaks you down
over time.
The tricky thing about your internal narrative is that you have two main players inside of you vying
for control over what story you operate on. I call these different aspects of your psyche your primal
and terminal selves.
Your terminal self is the logical and higher-level thinking aspect of your being. This part can
be quite intelligent and directive, but alone, it lacks power.
Your primal self is the emotional aspect of your being. This part can be incredibly powerful,
but it can be very irrational and self-destructive if left to it’s own devices.
You can compare these aspects to the classic image of the elephant (primal/emotional self) and the
elephant tamer (terminal/rational self) who rides on top the elephant.
Who is really in control, the elephant or the tamer? It kind of depends:
• How well trained is the elephant?
• How much do the desires of the elephant and the trainer align?
• How skilled/educated is the trainer?
• How good is the relationship between the elephant and trainer?
The general issue we run into that leads to catabolic resonance is when our primal self runs off of
unhelpful and emotionally reactive narratives, and our terminal self is not skilled or present
enough to steer the primal self in a better direction.
So for example, let’s say you get into your car to head out to work, but your car won’t start. Your
immediate primal narrative might be something along the lines of:
“This sucks! I’ll be late and that’s bad! Something is probably broken and that will cost money and
THAT’s bad. My boss will be so mad at me and that’s bad too! I probably won’t get that promotion
now too, and that’s SUPER bad!”
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This narrative is likely not experienced as a clear voice speaking these words. For primal narratives,
you’ll experience them as emotional sensations - i.e. you’ll just feel pissed off and anxious.
However, if you were to translate those feelings into words (which is a very powerful skill) you’ll
find out the story your primal self is telling.
Now unless your terminal self can step in and offer a better perspective, you’ll resonate internally
with this narrative and it’s only a matter of time before it slips out into your actions in the form of
cursing, yelling, etc.
If this resonance isn’t shifted, you’ll be in a crappy mood and displaying crappy behavior all day.
Later that day you might find yourself in a screaming match with your significant other, being an
anonymous asshole to someone online, or perhaps acting out some addiction to escape your own
miserable experience.
All this is because once you’re in a catabolic resonance, you’ll be more likely to apply that same
filter to everything else you experience as well. It’s kind of like if you were to wear a pair of green
tinted sunglasses, everything you look at would look green. Same thing can be said of a narrative.
If you resonate with a negative narrative, everything you experience will be affected.
The solution to these reactive, catabolic, emotional narratives is that our terminal mind
must come in and offer a different perspective. We need to be able to tell a BETTER story
about the situation.
If we can do this then we can tap into an anabolic resonance that will lead to the most productive
flow of activity possible given the circumstances.
Beliefs Are The Foundation
The heart of a catabolic resonance is a primal narrative of “this situation is bad because X”. In
order to shift to an anabolic resonance, our terminal selves need to be able to present an
alternative narrative of “this situation is good because Y.”
Both the obstacle and key to creating this kind of narrative shift is your BELIEF SYSTEM. Your
beliefs act as the foundation upon which you build your mental stories about the world. If your
beliefs are incompatible with your new narrative, then it will be like trying to build a brick house on
sand - it won't hold up.
If you want to be able to constantly shift into a narrative of anabolic optimism, then you’ll need to
internalize the beliefs that can support such a resonance.
There are a particular set of such beliefs that I believe allow for the GREATEST support of anabolic
optimism. I refer to these beliefs as the anabolic axioms and they are what we cover in detail in the
second half of this guide.
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The axioms are a series of layered thought patterns with the first one of "Everything
that happens to you is the best possible thing that could EVER happen to you" at the
top of the pyramid and subsequent ones supporting the axioms which came before.
The goal will be to use these thought patterns to construct a new narrative so that you can shift
into an anabolic resonance any time you find yourself struggling with bad vibes.
Psychomagnetic Activation
The big challenge to utilizing new beliefs to create new narratives about your experience is the
emotional resistance to adopting new patterns of thinking. You probably have a part of you that
looks at that first axiom of “Everything that happens to you is the best possible thing that could
EVER happen to you” and immediately says “yeah right, no way I buy that!”
You cannot ignore this emotional resistance nor just force your way through it. Well, I guess you
can, but often that just causes more harm than good. Any resistance you just repress and white
knuckle your way through doesn’t disappear. It’s much better to deal with it as it comes up rather
than stuff it in the closet only to have it spill out all over the floor later in an uncontrolled manner.
Instead of just trying to “force” a new narrative to achieve a better resonance, the better option is to
follow the path of psychomagnetic activation:
1. Shift your self-talk to change your operating narrative
2. ACT on your new narrative by doing SOMETHING in alignment with the
new narrative
3. Adjust talk/action based on inner and outer feedback
So let's break this down:
Step one is for your terminal (rational) self to show up as a strong leader and good friend to your
primal self. It first starts by speaking to your primal self - feeding it the new perspective. There
might be resistance to this way of thinking, but it should at least open up the emotional self to
some change.
So either with a mental voice or actually out loud, you must talk to yourself in a "head to heart"
fashion. To be clear, talking to yourself doesn't mean feeling to yourself. You must actually create
and hear the words of the new story in your head.
In the second step, you’ll want to take some kind of action in alignment with the new narrative. This
action can be either internal or external. The action can be big and powerful as quitting your job, or
asking out a long-time crush - but more often it’s something small like writing a to-do list, doing a
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visualization, or perhaps even just physically relaxing and adjusting your posture to align your
physical body with a state of confidence and ease.
There’s a ton I can say about all the different methodologies and tricks for activating a narrative to
shift your resonance, but we’ll have to save that for another guide. Basically you just need to ask
yourself “what internal or external action can I take that is in alignment with the narrative I want
to shift into?”
In the third step, you simply need to monitor what happens and adjust accordingly. Once you act,
you’ve created a circuit that plugs the new narrative into the omnigame. This will create a
feedback loop. Your job then is to pay attention to and work with what comes up in your
emotions and circumstances as a result of your action.
So for example, say you’re feeling really tired and are trying to shift into a state of productivity.
You might inspire yourself with some good self-talk (step 1) and then go active by beginning to
work on a project (step 2).
Now, maybe after a few minutes you get into the zone and you’re resonating where you want to
be - awesome. For step three you just need to ride that wave.
But what if as you get going you just feel even MORE tired? If you just keep pushing you'll likely
either do poor work or set yourself up for a crash later. If you are paying attention, your step
three might be adjusting your plan by going to take a nap first so you can get up and kick butt in a
little bit.
Three Piece Machine
Basically you can think of yourself as a three-piece machine: head (rationality/terminal self), heart
(emotional/primal self), and body (circuit creator/activator). If you can get two out of three of
these pieces running on a new narrative, the third will generally follow.
The sticking point for most guys looking to improve their omnigame will be in shifting their
emotions. Don’t worry about shifting them directly. Shift the thoughts, shift the actions, and in
most cases the emotions will follow. If they don’t then you just need to try a different set of
thoughts and actions and maybe get a bit of targeted guidance.
In this guide we'll be primarily focused on what thoughts to think in order to shift into maximum
anabolic resonance. However, based upon this "three-piece machine" idea, you cannot just think,
you must also put your body in motion and ACT in order to activate the new circuit.
Basically
you
can
think
of
yourself
as
a
three-piece
machine:
head
(rationality/terminal self), heart (emotional/primal self), and body (circuit creator/
activator). If you can get two out of three of these pieces running on a new narrative, the
third will generally follow.
15
The sticking point for most guys looking to improve their omnigame will be in shifting their
emotions. Don’t worry about shifting them directly. Shift the thoughts, shift the actions, and in
most cases the emotions will follow. If they don’t then you just need to try a different set of
thoughts and actions and maybe get a bit of targeted guidance.
In this guide we'll be primarily focused on what thoughts to think in order to shift into maximum
anabolic resonance. However, based upon this "three-piece machine" idea, you cannot just think,
you must also put your body in motion and ACT in order to activate the new circuit.
Figuring out what these actions look like will be on you, but it doesn't need to be too hard. Once
you have the new thoughts you want, all you have to do is:
1. Ask yourself "what internal or external action can I take to support this new
narrative?"
2. Do that thing.
You do those two things, then very quickly your emotions will get on board. It’s very easy to do
good things when you want to. This ability to shift narrative, activate, and emotionally align is
improved with practice and repetition. I can think of no skill more important or beneficial to
practice.
At this point we are almost ready to start diving into the axioms, but I’d be remiss if I did not add
a few important asides first.
Important Caveats
Before we start looking at the first anabolic axiom of "everything that happens to you is the best
possible thing that could EVER happen to you" I need to take a second to make a few important
points to properly frame this rather radical notion. First:
The anabolic axiom is something that you can ONLY apply to YOURSELF and you must recognize
that it’s a perspective about MINDSET not a moral judgment of events.
I believe evil exists. I believe that evil things can happen to you (and probably have). The
anabolic axioms are NOT saying that evil you experience is actually good. However, it IS saying
that you can turn all evil TO SERVE the good through the way that you respond to it.
The main thing I want to make crystal clear is that I do NOT think it is good that anyone gets
abused, raped, assaulted, killed or suffers any other kind of horrible thing. I condemn evil as
evil, and tragedy as tragic. However, the brave soul who is accosted by such challenges can
choose to use the perspective of anabolic optimism to turn that hardship into an exponentially
greater gain.
16
Evil only wins when it reigns victorious in our hearts and minds. Tragedy is only truly a
tragedy if that is where the story ends. The hero who perseveres in these trials can turn any
evil or tragedy into growth points that strengthen him on his journey to victory.
Just think about every good story ever told - there MUST be hardship or else there’s no meaning.
Without challenge, there is nothing for the protagonist to use to fuel growth. For the person who
accepts this principle, life becomes like an epic adventure filled with amazing characters to meet,
puzzles to solve, monsters to defeat, and treasure to collect (more on this in axiom #2).
With that being said, I need to reiterate that you should focus on only applying this perspective to
YOURSELF. I do not recommend telling someone who is upset over getting dumped, fired, or being
dealt some other challenge that this was the best thing that could ever happen to them (at least
not immediately).
People who do not share this mentality and are suffering should be extended appropriate levels of
pity and compassion. Chances are you’ve been there, and callous indifference helps no one. You
can help hold the space for someone to step into a more positive way of thinking, which is what
I’m trying to do here, but you cannot force someone to embrace this way of thinking. To try to do
so would likely cause more harm than good.
An Additional Note On Pain
The most challenging part of life and practicing anabolic optimism is dealing with pain. Obviously,
we want to remove as much unnecessary pain as we possibly can.
However, I want to be clear that our goal isn’t to remove ALL pain. This is what the addict attempts
to do, which only leads to exponentially MORE pain. Instead, we want to embrace all necessary
pain and USE it in a helpful manner. When you understand how to deal with pain it can be
incredibly valuable, adding depth, breadth, and intensity to the omnigame of life.
The issue is that when pain is beyond one's ability to manage, it can literally make people want to,
or actually, kill themselves. I hope it goes without saying, but if you find yourself contemplating
suicide or just feeling too overwhelmed by your pain to work with it productively, PLEASE GET
PROFESSIONAL HELP!
This guide was written for the average person in the developed world with average problems.
There are PLENTY of people though for whom this guide alone will not be enough for working
through their challenges.
There’s nothing wrong with needing more support, the only wrong thing would be to not get it! Get
the help of a therapist, doctor, loved one, etc. so that you can move toward a more thriving life.
17
PART II: THE ANABOLIC AXIOMS
The time has come to dive into the meat of this guide and begin discussing the anabolic
axioms. As stated previously, these ideas are designed to help you create a new belief
system that will allow you to tap into anabolic resonance as frequently and as efficiently as
possible.
The seven axioms are laid out in an intentionally progressive order. The first axiom opens
the door, and the following axioms help you continue through that door and overcome the
typical roadblocks to progressing further down the anabolic path.
If you are looking for a methodology on how to practically integrate these patterns of
thought into your life, I recommend combining this guide with my
METASCRIPT METHOD
journaling technique. If you use these axioms as the "source code" for constructing your journal
entries you will very quickly internalize them and tremendously increase your anabolic power.
1. EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS TO YOU IS THE BEST POSSIBLE
THING THAT COULD EVER HAPPEN TO YOU.
When the path forward is unclear, often the best place to start is by first deciding where you
absolutely do NOT want to go. Once you figure out the “anti-goal” the actual goal becomes clear.
It was this strategy that ultimately brought me to the first anabolic axiom (which I refer to as
the “master” axiom).
In our situation here, our goal is to identify the mindset that will allow for maximum anabolic
resonance. If we were unclear on how to achieve it, we could follow the aforementioned
strategy and start by identifying the mindset that would move us the furthest away from our
goal.
What's the most negative mindset you could think of? I asked myself this question when trying
to figure myself out in my early 20’s. I came up with "Everything that happens to you is the WORST
possible thing that could EVER happen to you."
18
There are definitely some people who seem to think this way. They find fault with everything and
everyone they come across. Even if something good happens, it's never good enough.
While this clearly provides a strong "anti-goal" for someone looking to live an anabolic life, when I
reversed this notion and came to the idea of "Everything that happens to you is the BEST
possible thing that could EVER happen to you" it initially seemed like a far too absurd and
extreme notion to hold any practical value.
Clearly, bad things happen to us all the time, right? If we were to call these things good, at
best we'd be lying to ourselves and at worst we'd create a psychotic disconnect from reality.
But to my surprise, as I continued to play around with the idea, tremendous benefit
followed. Every "bad" moment became a journey of transformation as I opened up my
mind to try and view it as the best possible thing that could ever happen to me.
Situations that were previously unbearable and bringing me great anguish became sources of
tremendous inspiration and growth. I quit addictions, improved relationships, built a successful
business and created a body of intellectual work that has helped thousands of people all around
the world. All of this sprung forth from the anabolic fountain of this axiom.
Heart of the Omnigame
When you start attempting to live according to Anabolic Axiom #1, a strange thing begins to
happen. All of life becomes like a game. This has hit me so profoundly that it spawned the whole
“omnigame” concept and even my “Play a bigger game” tagline.
The fundamental challenge to this game is to figure out a perspective of seeing "bad"
events as actually "good" and working to your benefit.
Seeing your current circumstances as good is the easiest way to tap into an anabolic
resonance and all of the ease, power, pleasure, and cognitive synergy that comes from
seeing yourself as winning.
Note: Since the typically undesirable events prove to be the biggest challenge to embracing anabolic
optimism, this is where we will put our focus. But I hope it goes without saying that you want to
embrace ALREADY desirable events as gratefully as possible.
A brief consideration of this prospect will inform you that your greatest obstacle to accomplishing
this is the inevitability of pain. Pain, by it’s very nature is undesirable. How could something so
intrinsically undesirable yet so pervasive be embraced as good?
19
Perhaps you can think of a few examples where pain is useful, but what about ALL pain? If we can
construct a framework that would allow you to turn ALL pain to your benefit… what would
happen? Answer: You’d become psychologically invincible and be acting at your anabolic potential.
Now I can’t claim that I’m anywhere close to that level as there is a near infinite skill ceiling to this
game, but even journeyman level ability here unlocks an entire universe of possibility.
So to get started with this, you must simply begin asking yourself how you could view every event
that comes up as the best possible thing that could ever happen to you.
Don’t work yourself up about this and tie yourself in knots if you can't find the perspective right
away. This is a game of skill and you need to put in the study and practice. However, I'm not sure I
can think of any ability more worth investing in than this.
The Measure of Progress
As you internalize the perspective that every moment is a perfect gift, then you will be filled with
the anabolic resonance of gratitude, peace, joy, and the crown jewel - passion. You can see the
increase of these in your life as signs of progress.
These aren’t just nice things to feel, they are also perfect psychomagnetic tools. What you
resonate with, you attract more of:
When you resonate with gratitude, you get more things to be grateful for.
When you resonate with peace, your peace becomes more comprehensive and
indomitable.
When you resonate with joy, your enjoyment of life becomes brighter, more radiant, and
infectious.
And finally, when you radiate with passion and perpetually attract more of it, you’ve fully
embraced the JOURNEY OF BECOMING which allows you to live a life of constant growth
and embrace every moment to it’s fullest.
In theistic spiritual terms, the person who has mastered anabolic optimism is the person who
has truly internalized the belief that God is all powerful and all good. That even in the presence
of sin/suffering/discord etc, that there is only perfect gift for those who choose to believe.
I’m a spiritual man myself, but my hope is that I can present things in such a way here that you
can come to this perspective by rationality and experience alone. I’m fully convinced that the
path of anabolic optimism offers you the best life you can live.
20
In order to supercharge your journey here, the following axioms contain the secrets I’ve
uncovered over the years to help you succeed in embracing Axiom #1 and take your
psychomagnetic power to the next level.
2. IF YOU DON'T GET WHAT YOU WANT, YOU'RE GETTING
SOMETHING BETTER.
The first challenge with holding the master axiom of "everything that happens to you is the best
possible thing that could ever happen to you" is when you run into an experience that you frankly
did not want.
This is where the second axiom I refer to as the "winner's rule" comes into play: "If you
don't get what you want, you're getting something better."
This is the most optimistic perspective you could take in the face of not getting what you
specifically were hoping for. When you embrace it as a mindset axiom, it allows you to stay in
the anabolic game when life throws you a curveball.
The big challenge to embracing this perspective is that it’s often not immediately obvious the
WAY in which you’re actually getting something better. At first, all you can see is that you’re
getting something you don’t want and have to wade through the catabolic emotional reactions
that come up automatically.
In order to overcome this challenge, we must utilize humankind’s most potent superpower:
creativity. You must use your creative faculty to imagine the ways that what you’re experiencing
can work phenomenally in your favor.
When you can come up with a believable narrative where you’re actually winning rather than
losing, you can shift into anabolic resonance.
Embracing The Hero's Journey
One of the most powerful ways to increase your ability to follow the winner’s rule is to familiarize
yourself with the concept of the “hero’s journey”. This is the typical path of character
development that almost all the heroes of our greatest stories go through. More than that
though, it’s the psychological pattern of human evolution.
21
One of the most powerful ways to increase your ability to follow the winner’s rule is to familiarize
yourself with the concept of the “hero’s journey”. This is the typical path of character development
that almost all the heroes of our greatest stories go through. More than that though, it’s the
psychological pattern of human evolution.
It would be too much for me to offer a technical breakdown of the hero’s journey here, but for the
interested, there are a huge number of resources on this topic if you do a little research. However,
we CAN boil things down to the bare essentials and offer some examples.
The basic format for the hero’s journey is this:
Trial —> Growth —> Triumph —> Repeat
The hero faces some kind of trial. This trial IS a trial because the hero is currently not powerful
enough to render the circumstances trivial. This trial creates hardship and consternation for the
hero.
But in the face of this difficulty, the hero leans in (at least eventually) and GROWS from the
struggle and becomes stronger. This strength ultimately enables the hero to overcome the
challenge and win the day.
The process then repeats in the “sequel” with a new challenge and a new kind of growth (that is, if
the sequel wants a chance of being compelling).
The most important thing here is that challenge is a NECESSARY part of the hero’s journey.
If there’s nothing to overcome, the hero doesn’t grow (and never actually becomes the
hero). If there is no obstacle, there is no evolution.
In other words: the deeper the canyon, the higher the peak. If life gives you a canyon, the anabolic
optimist is already looking forward to the peak. The deeper the canyon goes, the more beautiful
the view when you get through it.
If I were to ask you what the most valuable lessons you’ve learned were, there’s a high probability
that those lessons came at a steep price. At the time, you probably viewed those situations as
disasters. If you’ve grown from them as the hero does, then you can look back on them now from
a position of strength and possibly even gratitude (depending on how anabolic you can go).
22
So for example, I was a porn and sex addict. Dealing with this at the time was monstrously
difficult. However, in overcoming that challenge I learned an absurd amount about the inner
workings of the human psyche, built a successful business, and have helped a tremendous
number of people who struggled with the same things. All that would not have been possible
without the initial challenge.
Does this mean I view porn and sex addiction as good? No, of course not. Did I want to deal with
the pain of the addiction and eventually the pain of recovery? Hell no. But I do see that by
choosing the anabolic path in that scenario, I could turn all that darkness into an even greater
light and am ultimately much better off by having gone through that journey.
Ironically, if you’re a nerd like me who has always loved superheroes, comics, movies, sci-fi/
fantasy books, videogames etc. you might actually have a leg up with this axiom. When you’ve
consumed the hero’s journey in a thousand different forms, it becomes easier to imagine how
your current challenge might work as a compelling plot point in your own personal adventure.
The best stories all demand significant problems. The greatest heroes are made by overcoming
the toughest odds. A life without challenge is a life without zest, progression, or meaning.
So next time you feel like you’re losing, ask yourself: “How does this plot point serve to
develop me as the hero of my own story?” or, if you’re a gamer, “How does this challenge
offer me the chance to level up?”. You might not be winning by getting exactly what you
want, but you're getting something even better with the opportunity to evolve.
3. PAIN IS JUST POWER WRAPPED IN A PUZZLE
So far we’ve covered the axioms:
1. Everything that happens to you is the BEST possible thing that could EVER
happen to you.
2. If you aren’t getting what you want, you’re getting something EVEN BETTER.
Sounds nice, but how the heck are you supposed to think this way when you are suffering
through something downright painful? It’s one thing to watch your favorite fictional hero take the
hits in a movie, but if you accept you’re the hero of your own life then YOU will be the one getting
hit.
The challenge is that if you want to follow the axioms you’ll need to figure out how to see any
pain you experience as good and useful. This is the exact opposite of the way we tend to view
pain.
23
So for the anabolic optimist, pain becomes a mindset puzzle - where you must figure out
how the pain you are experiencing can work for you rather than against you.
This goes against our default conditioning to reflexively reject and avoid pain. While
understandable, reactively running away from pain and toward pleasure does NOT lead to a good
life. Living in this simple pleasure seeking binary often gets you caught chasing short term
pleasures while your life stagnates or outright goes up in flames.
So when you experience pain, the question becomes “how can this pain work for me?”
Pain as Power and Passion
In order to reliably solve this puzzle, you need to begin looking at pain as a source of
POWER. Pain is just energy. Depending on the psychomagnetic circuit (mindset) you’re
resonating with, pain can drive you toward your goals, or break you down.
While it’s ultimately the same mechanisms when you trace it all the way down, there are three
general ways you can see pain functioning as a form of beneficial power. Pain functions as a
currency, as motivation, and as meaning.
When you understand these perspectives, pain is not something to be afraid of, it is something
you can understand as the doorway to passion.
Passion is the process of meaningful sacrifice. When someone lives passionately it means
that they are living in a way where they are sacrificing the lesser in pursuit of the greater.
This can only happen with an anabolic relationship with pain.
Let’s break these three down with examples so you can understand what I mean.
Pain as Currency
We all know that pain is currency, it’s literally how the economy works: You get paid money for
engaging in useful pain (labor). You can then trade that money, which is a store of that pain, for
the fruits of other people’s pain. But pain as a currency goes beyond mere financial transactions.
Intelligent practice of discipline is the ultimate human superpower. By practicing discipline in your
morals, productivity, self-development, etc, you maximize your chances of getting what you want
out of life.
24
But what exactly IS discipline? It’s a trade. When practiced intelligently, discipline is the act
of trading some discomfort in the moment for a greater return on pleasure over time. From
this perspective then, you can view pain as a currency that when spent wisely, unlocks your
ability to get most things worth having.
So for example, when you are trying to build a habit, it’s similar to taking out a loan to buy a car.
x
How expensive the car is, represents how hard the habit is to build
x
The principle amount you’re able to put down on the car represents how much
discipline you’ve already developed as a person
x
The monthly payments represent the trade of comfort you need to engage in for
each repetition of the habit
x
Paying the car off means that you’ve traded enough comfort (i.e. forced enough
psychological adaptation) to internalize the habit and make it second nature
Looking at pain in this way can help you step out of emotional reactivity around it and begin taking
a more objective and beneficial steps when dealing with struggle. But furthermore it helps you
realize that passionate living is the result of constantly making meaningful and compelling trades
with your comfort.
Pain As Motivation
Pain and pleasure are the two poles of the psychomagnetic circuit. Pain pushes, pleasure pulls.
When you get pain pushing you away from bad things and pleasure pulling you toward good
things, you’ll take off almost effortlessly like a rocket.
Now, when those circuits get crossed and pleasure pulls you to something bad, or pain scares you
from something good, you have a problem (more on that below). But there is a very
straightforward way to use pain to anabolic ends:
When you are afraid/worried/or resistant to something bad happen, embrace that painful
stress as fuel to take productive action.
So for example, let’s say you just got laid off from your job. This will likely fill you with the pain of
financial anxiety. You can view this stress as EXACTLY what you need. Your brain is basically saying
“hey, we need to get a new job, here’s some energy (in the form of stress) you can use to bang out
a new resume and fire off some job applications.”
25
Taken to a deeper level, I believe the pain of stress actually acts as a prerequisite trigger to
facilitate certain neurological changes. Similar to how a muscle needs stress to grow, your brain
needs either pain or pleasure to drive changes. By learning how to voluntarily embrace pain as a
change agent unlocks whole new levels of self-determination compared to those who only know
how to chase pleasure.
The problem is that you will not be able to use this stress as fuel if you REJECT it. If you just
try to escape the pain with drugs, alcohol, porn, TV, videogames, etc., you’ll actually cut
yourself off from its motivational power.
Additionally, using stress as fuel requires both skill and strength. The less you’ve done it, the worse
you’ll be at it at first. As you do more reps of converting stress into action, the more comfortably
and efficiently you’ll do it until it can actually start feeling GOOD!
It’s similar to how when you first start lifting weights, your form will be bad, it will be very
uncomfortable, and you won’t be able to lift much weight. But as you get your reps in, you’ll get
stronger, more stable, and likely even come to ENJOY it.
Pain as Meaning
Finally, pain serves a gateway to meaning. There is no feeling of triumph if there was never
challenge. There is no climax if there was no ache of longing. There is no love if there is no
sacrifice.
When you learn how to wield the meaningful power of pain, it allows you to generate significance
where before there was just tragedy.
So for example, let’s say a loved one dies. No doubt this will thrust you into deep emotional pain.
You can however reframe that pain as a method to generate gratitude and appreciation for that
person. You could use that pain to drive you to honor their memory by living in a way they would
respect and admire. You could use that pain to drive you to appreciate the people you still have
around you.
For another example, imagine you have a headache. If that headache is brought on by a night of
drinking, you can use that pain as motivation to avoid doing that again. If there is no clear reason
for that headache (like the migraines I get), you can use that pain to help you grow in your ability
to practice positivity and self-care in the face of discomfort (a skill of unbelievable value).
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No More Suffering
The practical result of axiom #3 is to find your way out of suffering. Suffering is a state where
you are rejecting your current circumstances (usually painful ones) as bad.
Rejecting your current experiences as bad is not a recommended practice because this
mental negativity effectively adds an EXTRA layer of psychological pain on top of any
other discomfort you're already facing. On top of this, suffering triggers a catabolic
resonance which is likely to just attract MORE suffering.
They say pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. This is true ONLY if you know how to
solve your pain puzzles. If you can find value, meaning, or motivation from your current pains,
then you can stop rejecting those experiences and subsequently shed the thorny catabolic
blanket of suffering.
Do I expect you to be able to do this flawlessly 100% of the time starting from day one? No of
course not - but that IS the goal to aim for! There is nothing that causes more suffering than
pointless pain. So as long as you give your pain a job, you can hold it close and make it work for
you.
All you need to do is to figure out how to mentally redefine the sensation of discomfort and
see it as working for you rather than against you. In other words, will you view your workout as
a trip to a horrible torture facility were your muscles and lungs are set on fire? Or will you
view it as a trip to the human upgrade facility where you trade discomfort for an infusion of
strength, power, and energy?
Not every situation is so straight forward, but if a videogame had only one level it’d get boring
far too quickly!
4. EVERY GAME IS WINNABLE IF YOU PLAY BIG ENOUGH
In the last axiom we talked about how you can turn pain into power if you can solve the
mindset puzzle of figuring out how to see the pain as working for you. As you practice this,
you’ll eventually run into what seem to be unsolvable pain puzzles where you can’t help but fall
into suffering and either rage against your current circumstances or feel hopelessly defeated.
27
If you find yourself in this situation, it’s likely a result of what I call “playing small.” When
you are playing small, you are entered into the omnigame with a fixed and rigid mindset. If
you are locked into a narrow and limiting perspective then you will often find progress
blocked. If you wish to keep winning then the omnigame will often ask you to level up and
expand your life and view of the world.
There are four main ways people tend to play small and stay stuck in the face of challenge:
x
Fixed Goals
x
Fixed Expectations
x
Fixed Beliefs
x
Fixed Identity
In order to overcome this pattern of self-limitation you need to play a bigger game. This concept is
so important that I’ve made it the tag line for the entire Universal Man project. Let’s walk through
some examples for how playing bigger can help you overcome each of these blocks.
As a general theme for these examples, let’s imagine that you’ve got your sights set on getting a
promotion at your job:
Fixed Goals
In the case of fixed goals, it’s pretty straight forward to see how they can get you stuck with an
unsolvable pain puzzle. A fixed goal means that you have your eyes set on one specific outcome
and pursue it without flexibility.
So for instance, let’s say you’re gunning to get a promotion at your next performance review. Now
let’s say that when the review comes, you don’t get the promotion. From a fixed goal perspective,
there's no way to see yourself as "winning". You didn't get the thing you fixed your sights on so
you lost.
If you keep hanging on to the mentality of “I want THIS promotion at THIS time” then there’s no
way to walk away from that failure without FEELING like a failure. Beyond that bitter pill, you will
walk away with an unsolvable pain puzzle of frustration, disappointment, and maybe some anger
and anxiety which can all easily turn into a catabolic spiral.
However, if we play a bigger game here, we can absolutely find a way in which this situation
serves you. Here are just a few perspectives to illustrate this:
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x If you think you deserved the promotion, you can see this as a perfect wake up call that you
are not being properly being valued and take this as an opportunity to start looking for a
better company to work for.
x If you know your work slipped due to lack of discipline, you can use this pain to fuel you to
improve your efforts so that you can have your work reflect the quality that best represents
your dignity.
x Maybe you've been working super hard but use this as a realization that there's more to
your life than making a bit more money. You could use this as a spark to put less emphasis
on your career because there are more important things in your personal and family life
you should be focusing on at this moment.
x Finally, perhaps maybe you take the upset you feel as a sign that you might be identifying
with your career too much and use this as inspiration to learn how to focus on living in a
way where you generate your own affirmation rather than relying on external validation to
find peace.
Fixed Expectations
Fixed expectations are similar to fixed goals, but rather than getting unhelpfully attached to the
outcome, you become unhelpfully attached to your expectation of the journey.
Fixed expectations are when you get attached to the idea that the path forward will look
the way you want it to. You get stuck in an unsolvable pain puzzle if you remain attached
to that expectation when reality decides to go a different way.
So for example, let’s say you want to get this promotion and are initially told that you can do it if
you just keep up the work you’ve been doing. You think “okay, yeah that’s easy enough!” and start
getting pumped on the idea of achieving your goal.
However, imagine that part way through the quarter your boss lets you know that the business
landscape has changed and now you are going to have to successfully handle an additional set of
responsibilities if you want that promotion.
If you just keep thinking about “I was only supposed to have to do X amount of work, but now I
have to do so much more! This isn’t fair! Wahh!
I see this with guys in addiction recovery very frequently. They think they will be able to kick
something like porn addiction with only a moderate amount of effort.
29
(usually after a number of failed attempts) they realize that they are going to have to put WAY
more effort into the process.
There can be a temptation to just sort of throw a temper tantrum and refuse to adapt to the facts.
This helps no one and just creates suffering.
The key to these situations is to simply take the truth in and play a bigger game. In the case
of the promotion, the bigger game means either leveling up your efforts OR finding some
better use for your energy than pursuing the promotion in the way your boss has defined
things.
Either way - you can’t just bury your head in the sand, you must adjust according to the facts in
front of you or else you’ll do the opposite of level up in life.
Fixed Beliefs
The things you believe shape your experience of reality. When you hold limiting beliefs you limit
your capacity to progress in the omnigame. Limiting beliefs in the realm of this example of
pursuing a promotion could be something like:
x
I can’t be happy unless I get this promotion
x
My boss will never recognize my work
x
Since I didn’t get the promotion in the past, I’ll NEVER get the promotion
x
If I don’t get the promotion, all my efforts will be meaningless - I’d be better off
not even trying then
Almost always, if you want to win big you must think bigger. This requires that you adopt more
empowered and expansive beliefs such as:
x
I absolutely can get this promotion
x
I’ll be totally okay even if I don’t get this promotion, but I’m all in on the game of
pursuing it
x
If my boss shows resistance to giving me this promotion, there’s a good chance
I’ll be able to bring him to my side
x
I know I’m worth a higher pay rate and work the part, so if these guys won’t
recognize me, I’ll be able to find someone who will
There is a ton I could say about the different categories of beliefs, how they evolve, and which
ones people get stuck on, but that discussion would warrant it’s own guide.
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The main thing to take away here though is that if you are feeling stuck in an unsolvable pain
puzzle, then you’ll definitely want to ask yourself if there are any limiting beliefs that are keeping
you from seeing other ways to win.
Fixed Identity
Speaking of your beliefs, there are a specific subset of beliefs that are important enough to
warrant their own discussion. These are the beliefs around your identity. The story you tell about
yourself as a person is the most important narrative circuit in the entire psychomagnetic system.
If you have a fixed identity, it essentially means that you are not open to change. If you are
unwilling to change, then you will inevitably find yourself in unwinnable situations.
So for example, if you SEE yourself as a low income wage slave, then you will think like a low
income wage slave, feel like a low income wage slave, and ultimately act like a low income wage
slave. Guess what kind of result you’ll get from this? The life of a low-income wage slave.
If you want to get a promotion then you need to think, and act like the person you WANT to be.
Once you get some inertia, you’ll start feeling like that person too. Before long, your
circumstances will catch up to that identity.
Allowing your identity to level up is one of the most important parts of playing a bigger game. If
you try to stay small and comfortable, then you’ll just keep replaying the same levels of life over
and over again.
Man was meant to grow. If you do not accept growth in yourself then you are fighting against your
own nature and are destined to a life discolored by stagnation and rot.
When to Stand Firm
While most of what we've covered so far in this axiom is about shifting your goals or perspectives,
sometimes the right answer is to stand FIRM in your convictions.
Sometimes playing the bigger game means REFUSING TO GIVE UP YOUR GOAL. In this kind of
scenario, the growth point is in abandoning all limiting beliefs, doubts, and complaints that would
have you abandon your cause.
So when you should shift and when should you stand firm? The best answer I've found is that
you should choose the path that would cause you to admire yourself more. So if you saw
someone else confronted with the same circumstances and situation, which path would you
cheer for most? Be the hero you want to see.
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5. EVERY ACTION IS EASY IF YOU MAKE IT SMALL ENOUGH
Once you’ve embraced the reality that you can always win if you’re willing to play a bigger game,
the next challenge you’re likely to run into is overwhelm. Playing a bigger game doesn’t always
feel easy, comfortable, or simple.
The immediate issue is that bigger games introduce new variables to manage and issues
to solve. Your rational brain can only keep track a few different things before it starts to
get overwhelmed and anxious. Unless you know how to properly handle this challenge,
you will end up in a catabolic resonance.
For example: You might decide that in response to not getting the promotion you wanted, you
were going to play a bigger game by searching for a new job. You now need to figure out where to
apply, how to get your resume together, when to give your notice, how you’re going to talk to
your boss, all while confronting your worries that this might be a big mistake. That can feel like a
lot to take on.
Sometimes though it’s not so much the number of the new issues, so much as it is the intensity of
the issues. For instance, maybe you get rejected by a woman you ask on a date. You could decide
to play a bigger game and use this as an opportunity to practice your own self-affirmation. The
challenge might just be extremely intense feelings of inadequacy and/or resentment.
The solution to this overwhelm is anabolic axiom #5: Every action is easy if you make it
small enough. By breaking tasks down, you reduce the amount of psychological resistance
and discomfort you feel toward an action.
The end result of putting axiom #5 into practice is that you break down big games into extremely
simple, easy, and winnable “mini-games”. In other words, you are focused on doing the next best
thing, one tiny step at a time.
The reality is that we are only ever capable of doing very small and easy things at any one time.
All great and complex things are accomplished as a result of stringing these small and easy
actions together in a coordinated manner. Overwhelm is the result of looking at the big game all
at once rather than seeing the small and simple sub-steps that would lead you to victory.
Training your brain to think and act based on super simple actions is what I call win conditioning.
I like this terminology for two reasons: first, a “win condition” is the set of requirements to win
any specific game (which is something you must be constantly defining in your mini-games).
Second, this process is literally about conditioning your brain to identify AND win these smaller
games (which subsequently net you neurochemical hits of dopamine and serotonin with each
small victory).
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The core idea then can be boiled down into these two points:
x
x
Only concern yourself with what you can directly control
Only focus on small and manageable pieces of that control at any given moment
Following these concepts allow you to massively increase your ability and consistency of falling
into anabolic resonance and productive flow states.
Decide then Do
In order to effectively practice win conditioning, you must separate your DECISION MAKING from
your DOING. The reason for this is because your brain is not good at switching contexts. Every
time you switch contexts, your brain needs to file away everything it WAS thinking about and tune
into everything relevant for the task you just switched to.
When you fail to separate your decision making from your doing, you end up constantly having to
switch between deciding WHAT to do (i.e. “manager mode”), and then actually DOING it (i.e.
“worker mode). This is a bad move because it’s the startup of each of these states which requires
the most effort.
The trick is learning how to batch your activity in each of these states so you don’t always need to
ramp up momentum again. So for example, it’s better to plan your day and produce a to-do list all
at once in the morning or night before (decision making) vs trying to reactively decide the next
thing to do as you go through your day.
The person who practices the former will end up with much greater productive flow and the
person who practices the latter will end up burnt out quickly and surfing the internet.
Here are few simple guidelines for managing your decision making and doing. They might sound
overly obvious, but are you doing them? Most people don’t. Until you get this down, more
advanced productivity tips are moot.
• If you don’t know what to do, you need to give yourself permission to stop, think,
gather information (if needed), and make a clear and broken down plan.
• If you do know what to do, stop thinking and put your body in motion.
• Try and create separate periods of decision making/planning and doing in your schedule
The idea is that you need time and space to create a clear set of instructions for yourself when you
are in decision making mode. These instructions are the small actions that create the win condition
for your game. From there, you just need to shut off your brain (to the extent possible) and put
your body in motion and get on with winning.
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I could (and probably will) create a whole course on productivity and planning, but at the very least
you just need to be able to create to-do lists for your day or any chunk of time you’ll be tempted
to use in a self-sabotaging way. See my Man of Action YouTube series for a much deeper dive into
the productivity stuff.
Micro-Actions
Now, most of us are at least somewhat familiar with normal planning where we use a calendar
and a to-do list to map out our days and projects. However, we can take this a step further to truly
super charge our ability to stay anabolic. This is where micro-actions come in.
The idea is that if you feel like something is “hard” then your brain is focused on something too
big. In that case, you need to break it down further. While this can sometimes be useful to do on
paper or in your to-do list app, the real power is when you can do it reflexively in your head as
needed.
The harder something feels, the more you want to break it down. Or in other words, make
the game you are playing easier and easier to win.
One of the hardest things for me is getting out of bed in the morning (I joke with my wife it’s
because my brain is so big it takes a long time to boot up). The mental command of “get out of
bed” is usually too big of a game for me to win in one move, so I’ll end up lying there for another
15-30 minutes if I try that approach.
To find victory much more easily, I break things down. First step is to just think of getting out of
bed, and visualizing myself starting the day. Thinking is easy, I can do that. Next, I take some deep
breaths and fill my brain and body with oxygen. Again, other than just thinking, breathing might
be the next easiest thing.
From there, I’ll literally focus on getting my body in motion by pulling back my covers or even just
wiggling my fingers. By this point, it’s taken about a minute tops and I’m be rolling out of bed with
relative ease.
I use this somewhat silly example because in reality, IT’S NOT SILLY. We all struggle with
getting ourselves to do trivial things because we haven’t properly broken them down.
You can always deconstruct anything you do into simple physical actions. If you take the
time to clarify what those actions are, you cannot argue that they are indeed easy. You’ll
be blown away how much this can make a difference with removing resistance.
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Mental Actions
Now sometimes, the issue isn’t so much with the physical actions, it’s with what you’re doing in
your brain. The bottom line is that if you think unhelpful thoughts, you’ll get unhelpful emotions
and then take unhelpful actions.
So for example, if you are stuck in some form of limiting thinking that we talked about in the
previous axiom, you’ll have trouble getting your emotions and actions in the right order.
The key then is to recognize when you need to focus on a simple MENTAL action. Most
mental actions can be summarized by just “pointing your awareness in the right direction”
and then letting your brain work it’s magic. This usually means tuning into a more anabolic
narrative.
So for example, say you are fuming about that promotion you didn’t get. All you need to do is shift
your awareness to thinking about how you’re actually okay and even better off.
Another example would be that you can get pissed about the fact that you have to do your
commute in the rain again, instead you can focus on listening to that podcast you’ve been meaning
to get to.
Yeah, you might need to flex some willpower to make these mental shifts, but that's no different
from having to use some physical energy to take physical action.
As you practice intentional mental action you’ll get better at it. Creating new thoughts is always
the hardest and might require some journaling, talking, or learning. But once you have the good
perspectives you just need to focus on remembering them at the times you need them.
6. EVOLUTION IS AS SMOOTH AS YOU ARE HUMBLE
We've now seen the power of playing a bigger game AND the power of breaking those big games
down into extremely small and easy to win "mini-games" in any given moment. This is a very
powerful success machine, especially when applied with the other axioms we've covered. If you
point this machine toward a goal, you'll probably get there.
The problem is that many of us have something that gums up the gears of this machine causing
our success to come to a grinding halt. That thing is dysfunctional pride. I'm not talking about
being "proud of yourself" I'm talking about self-limiting egotism.
When you are 'too proud' in this manner, you behave as if you were so special that you shouldn't
have to adapt effectively to reality and then subsequently act like an emotionally reactive victim.
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For situations like this, we need another axiom - meet number 6: Evolution is as smooth as you
are humble.
Oh, you aren't getting what you want? Oh, you don't want to change and work toward making
things better and instead just want to spiral into catabolic reactivity?
Get over yourself.
The truth is that humility is the lubricant to personal evolution. Humility is what will allow
you to shift and adapt to any given situation in the most effective way possible.
True Humility
Some people have unhelpful baggage around humility so I want to make a few points about it. I'll
list out the limiting belief (LB) and then share the empowering belief (EB).
LB: Being humble means thinking about how terrible you are.
EB: Being humble means being honest about how you stand, objectively evaluating your status
while also remembering your inherent and inalienable dignity. In other words, humble people
objectively see the truth of their relative status (be it favorable or not), but honor their dignity
unconditionally.
LB: Being humble means you put everybody else's desires before your own.
EB: While humble people do often enjoy serving the good of others, they ultimately submit
themselves to operating according to their hierarchy of values and responsibilities. Sometimes
you should put someone else first, sometimes you must focus on prioritizing yourself, often you
look for a win-win. Humility is doing the work to circumstantially sort this out and act accordingly.
LB: Humility means playing small and not aiming for any big goals.
EB: Humility means submitting yourself to serving the greatest good in the best way you are able.
Sometimes, that service seems relatively small. Sometimes that service can be massive and world
shaping. The humble person doesn't question it once they have the clarity, they just do it.
LB: Humility means you never talk about how good you are.
EB: Humble people certainly don't brag pointlessly, but sometimes your responsibilities or
aspirations demand that you let other people know about your value or competence. It's prideful
to think that everyone should already know what you can do. Humble people put themselves out
there so that they can do their good work.
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Greasing the Gears
Now that you have a feeling for the brand of humility I promote, let's look at some examples of
how humility can help you break through three of the most common blocks I see pride creating.
I'm going to slightly exaggerate the role of the ego, but I'm only doing it to better illustrate how
things work, I do it with all appropriate levels of compassion for whatever your current struggle
may be.
Too Proud to Play Bigger
When you are too proud to play a bigger game, your ego shows up and says "Wahhh why can't I
just play my little game and win the way I WANT to!? Wahhh it's not fair I can't get what I
wannnnt!"
This is when you are unhelpfully attached to the thing you're not getting and subsequently fall
into victimhood around the circumstances at hand. This prevents you from seeing another way to
win.
So for example, imagine it rains during your trip to the beach. A humble person could easily shift
into thinking of how this is an opportunity to have a different but kind of trip that could be just
as, if not MORE valuable, but the prideful person just keep whining about how it's raining and
that their plans are ruined.
Too Proud to Take Small Steps
When you're too proud to take small steps, your ego basically says "Wahhh I don't want to be
doing THIS stupid little stuff, I want to be at point X way further along and more special than
where I am now! This sucks, I'm not doing it!"
This kind of pride is basically the pride of impatience - the idea that you shouldn't have to
wait and work your way to where you want to go.
This is the guy who could deadlift 315lbs and then got hurt / fell out of shape, but then won't go
back to the gym because he's too embarrassed (proud) to lift smaller weights and build himself
back up.
Likewise, it's the guy who tries to adopt a full-blown complex productivity system when he hasn't
even been able to make a basic daily to-do list.
I see this kind of impatience a TON in my work in helping guys quit porn. They want it all - quit
porn, optimize habits, conquer major projects, find the perfect girl etc.
As I'm fond of saying: You can have it all, just not all at once.
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My other go to is a Navy Seal training mantra of "slow is smooth, smooth is fast." When applied
here, the idea is that if you're humble enough to just focus on slowly and consistently winning the
small games in front of you, you'll get to winning the big games as quickly as possible.
If you just try to rush things because you're too proud to take small steps, you'll just keep crashing
over and over again, never getting anywhere.
Too Proud to Be Wrong
This one is particularly pernicious. If you are unwilling to admit that you were wrong on
something, it's almost impossible to course correct in your life.
Just think about the term - "course correction" if you need to correct something then it must have
been incorrect. In other words, unless you are humble enough to admit that the direction you
chose to go was less than optimal, then you'll just keep going in the wrong direction to protect
your pride.
Maybe you've been living like a slothful and indulgent sack of hammers for the past X number of
years. Unless you're humble enough to call it like it is, you won't be able to justify getting help or
changing course.
"I'm exactly where I want to be!" cried the prideful man as he sinks up to his neck in quicksand.
Adaptation, Honesty, Affirmation
At it's core, dysfunctional pride is an unwillingness to accept the truth of things. It is the denial of
facts that make you feel lesser. In other words, pride is an attachment to feel good lies.
The problem with this is that if you create your map of reality using faulty information due to
these lies, you will keep falling off of cliffs, getting stuck in pits, and wandering into bears nests
because your map is inaccurate.
At it's core, humility is submission to the truth that you know while simultaneously acknowledging
that this truth is often incomplete. This balance is what lets you do the best with what you know,
while always being open to evolving and adapting as new information and experiences come your
way.
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7. JOY IS AS ACCESIBLE AS YOU ARE FAITHFUL
Congratulations - you've made it to the seventh and final axiom of this guide! This is the final
boss showdown where we confront the ultimate catabolic challenge: DOUBT
If you do not believe that goodness awaits you, then you will be living life from a place of
fear.
For example, when you doubt:
x
That good outcomes can always be obtained
x
That bad things can always be turned toward a greater good
x
That pain really can be a source of power
x
That that there is a greater and more meaningful life to be found outside of your current
perspective
Then how could you NOT live from a place of fear? You will be living in a reality where you just
might get screwed and doomed to a meaningless and hellish existence.
Now to be clear here, I'm not condemning logical thinking by any means. Rational doubts and
worries must of course be considered - but the anabolic axioms are more existential in nature.
From where I stand, existential doubt is the result of bad storytelling. It's the result of focusing
on negatives and unknowns to weave a narrative that breeds only nihilism, depression, and
angst.
I completely understand why someone might come to such a dark conclusion about the nature
of reality with all of the pain and suffering in the world. But with that being said, this is a guide
for the people who don't want to live this way!
Faith and Joy
If you would like to break free from such a bleak existence, then you will need FAITH!
Faith is the ability to believe in something that is not fully understood or explicitly
proven.
Faith can be either useful or not, depending upon what you put your trust in. In general we want
to hedge our faith based upon our level of rational certainty. I usually act as if the weather
forecast is relatively accurate, but if I'm going on a trip and it calls for sunshine the whole time,
I'll probably still bring an umbrella.
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But when it comes to matters of narrative (which encompasses the entire existential realm), faith
can go much further than reason alone. This is because the bigger questions of life exist outside
the realm of verifiable fact: Does God exist? Does your life matter? etc.
When there is no verifiable fact, all that exists is perspective. And as we've covered, the perspective
you invest in is the one you will ultimately resonate from. So what happens when you begin to
build your faith in the principles of anabolic optimism?
Faith in the axioms grants you access to unconditional JOY. Instead of having to WAIT for
the joy of some win, you can access that joy preemptively because you know that you're
ALREADY WINNING.
The majority of people in the world spend their lives waiting to feel good. They always have some
goal or desire they are waiting to have fulfilled before they can be happy.
They spend their life thinking that only once they get that promotion, romance, new house, they
can be happy. If only that politician was elected/impeached, that bully left them alone, or they lose
those 15 extra pounds they could find joy.
The issue is that if you let yourself think this in one set of circumstances, what prevents you from
CONTINUING thinking this way? Nothing, and this is what will happen. Even if they get wish XYZ
fulfilled, the average person will just immediately set themselves to locking their happiness away
behind some other future event.
Faith allows you to believe that the goodness is already here, and the victorious outcome is
already secured. All you must do is act that faith out by sticking to the anabolic path and honoring
the axioms.
This kind of faith allows you to start experiencing life from a state of PLAY. It's like life
starts to become like a movie or videogame.
You don't get upset when the protagonist faces conflict or drama in a movie - this tension is what
makes the movie interesting. You don't get upset when your videogame avatar is beset by
hundreds of monsters - the joy of defeating them is why you're there in the first place!
The only block to keeping you from truly embracing the omnigame in this way is a lack of faith that
you will truly ALWAYS be okay. You can enjoy a movie, even if it has a crummy ending because you
know that after the credits roll, you're not affected in any consequential way. You have complete
faith that just because you character dies in an online shooting game, you know your actual
wellbeing (beyond perhaps being frustrated) is completely unaffected.
In many ways, I believe this return to a playful life via faith is what Jesus famously told us that we
must become like children in order to enter the kingdom of heaven.
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Do I expect you to be able to pull this off perfectly? Not at first, of course not. The kind of faith I'm
talking about here is a profound spiritual discipline. However, you can begin taking steps to build
this faith right now.
The First Step
At this point you might be thinking "yeah, that all sounds really nice… but I don't have enough faith
in myself that I could actually stick to a path like this! I'll just end up falling off the wagon falling
into a catabolic spiral like I always do!"
If you don't start having faith in yourself then you'll self-sabotage before you even get
anywhere. If you don't believe that you'll be able to climb the mountain, you'll come back
down ASAP if you even set foot on it in the first place. This means abandonment of the
anabolic path and resuming the same tired old catabolic patterns.
We'll use our final section in this guide to tackle this foundational issue of self-doubt. Let's start off
with the facts:
You've never been perfect. If you have, then you wouldn't be reading anything written by me. This
means you've got a whole history of poor behavior you could dredge up as evidence of why you
shouldn't trust yourself to follow the anabolic path.
Now hopefully, you haven't always behaved terribly. Hopefully you've got some periods in your life
that you can look at where you are authentically proud of how you overcame the challenges you
faced. If that's the case, awesome, you can use that as evidence that you're capable of doing hard
things and begin building your faith from there.
But what if that's NOT the case? What if you've never really admired the way you've lived and
showed up in the world? Or what if your previous periods of thriving were distant past or in
circumstances far removed from your current situation? How can you trust yourself under these
conditions?
There's only option: start building trust right now. Decide that you matter enough to care for in
this way and begin thinking and acting from an anabolic framework.
You must believe you are worth your own effort. You must believe you are worthy of the
good things this effort will bring. You must believe that you are capable of taking those
actions and you must PROVE it to yourself by starting NOW.
You need to value yourself enough to play big, step small, be humble and have faith. Don't be
afraid of mistakes or hardship because the anabolic path can turn all setback into gains, and all
pain into power.
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At its core, faith is about CHOICE. Without faith in anything, we are all deterministic cogs bouncing
you
between
one
relativistically
trivial
task
to
another.
But
with
faith
can decide that existence matters, decide that YOUR existence matters.
Once you decide on that, it opens a door. Faith in yourself is one of the only things that can be
earned immediately, even if just in small amounts. Go do something good, even if it's something
seemingly insignificant, and then ACKNOWLEDGE IT AS GOOD. Clean your room, say something
kind to someone, or open a book to better yourself.
If you can do small good things, you can do great and wonderous things. This is what anabolic
optimism is all about - the belief that things are actually far better than they might initially appear.
The omnigame of life is a massive, sprawling drama. What part do you want to play? If you don't
know, then you at least know what you DON'T want to do and can start by cutting that stuff out. As
you do that you'll be able to level up into bigger and more compelling things.
I believe you can soar as high as you want if you ride the winds of anabolic faith.
This short guide is just a baseline framework for much bigger ideas to come, but in many ways it is
some of the most precious information I've acquired in my life. I hope it serves you well.
Play big,
Mark Queppet
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