"Out of the box" without the thinking

You’d be amazed at what you can accomplish when you give yourself no choice – Alex Hormozi

This post’s title was supposed to be “Change the environment to change myself“. Because you should always try to change it for the better. It’s the most elegant path to progress.

But while writing it I honestly asked myself what the fuck is a “good environment“?

And even worse, how do I answer the question correctly for billions of people of different age, gender and social status, all living in different cultures and having the freedom to choose their environment constrained in different ways?

But then I remembered what makes the I Grow Younger approach different.

We aim high into the near-impossible realm of world changing ideas.
We find the structures built into all human beings and the world itself.
We develop a deep understanding of all relationships in those structures.
We then simplify this to create an intuitive unified theory of the field.
We explain it with real world examples. If they don’t exist, we create them.

The mental journey towards defining a “good environment” with one single rule was a fascinating one. And it has a lot to do with thinking and a lot to do with boxes – but not in the way you think.

Here is what makes us who we are in any given moment:

Our genes
Our past and the stories about ourselves we tell based on it (identity)
Our current environment

Our genes are already cast, we’re already there, no action needed on this one.

Our past is a matter of interpretation, supports vast changes or perspective and the stories and identity we base on it are a product of… our genes and our past environment.

Therefore the environment of today (combined with the genes we cannot influence) will shape our stories and identity of tomorrow.

So it turns our everything we can do to change our future is all about what we surround ourselves with and how do we react to it. But reacting still comes from our genes and past. You can see where this is going.

A healthy attempt of strategic conscious improvement can only have one direction – Outgoing and one place it happens – The Game of Life. You cannot improve your Game of Self by force and trying can be counterproductive. But you can change your environment and it will do the magic.

Much of this process is subconscious and chaotic, but with a good degree of self-knowledge it’s possible to steer the wheel most of the time. Just don’t aim for full control – it’s impossible.

First we need to swallow our ego and just admit how we’re all massively influenced by our environment, including people around us and culture. Denial won’t help.

Тhe only meaningful plan is to change and improve everything changeable around us. This is an ongoing process as we need different Game of Life situations over time to match our growth opportunities in our Game of Self path.

But the world is such a mess and sometimes we are our best and worst selves in the most unexpected circumstances. Self-knowledge is never complete. How do we construct the best for our progress when we don’t even know ourselves now and both the future us and the world are full of unknowns?

This complex construction is a process greatly enhanced by the power of intuition. The problem is most people either don’t have the intuition developed or suppress it due to Sheep mode. Taking action without a clear reason in your head is scary enough to be blocked by our fears if they happen to be in charge at the moment.

A typical vicious circle many people can fall in is:

Sheep mode → Fears make us cautious, we need a reason for every action → Less trust in our intuition as it provides only results, no reasons → Less intuition, more thinking → More thinking, less doing → We end up stuck in deeper Sheep mode → Even more fears → Even less intuition → … → Negative ruminating hell.

So I’ll just give you a substitute for intuition, a Golden rule that will hold true almost every time. And just like all good rules, it’s very simple and doesn’t require much extra thinking. Here it is!

There is only one universally good direction in life – outwards.

The good things in life: Love, Freedom, Empathy, Meaning, Hunter mode are all about opening up to the world and its people.
The bad things in life: fears, lack of freedom, lack of meaning, Sheep mode, addiction, anxiety, depression are all about closing into ourselves.

And this is a two-way relationship. Open up and you invite the good, close up and you’re stuck with your worst. But the good also opens you up to more good. “The secret” is not entirely bullshit, the “Law of attraction” is a real thing – it just doesn’t apply to everything in your life.

So we need one main thing from our environment – structures that help us open up. But how do we know which are the ones? By their shape.

Humans interact internally and externally only with two (very different) types of structures:

Flow structures – they move things and bring endless change, like rivers.
Box structures – they divide space and time and obstruct flow, like mountains.

It takes a very powerful river to carve its way though a mountain. So if there are many big mountains around, there are no big rivers, just small ones. But if there are huge, powerful rivers, they will carve their way and flow freely, weakening the mountains on their way.

The first key lesson is that boxes and flows are not two sides of the same coin, they are categorically different, do not complement but rather destroy each other, like fire and ice. This is key to all that follows. But how to tell them apart in life?

How to intuitively, without thinking, tell a flow from a box?

Boxes have boundaries, limits, borders. You can explore and find out exactly where they end and another box begins. Boxes are defined only by other boxes!
Flows don’t have any boundaries, they flow in every direction where no box blocks them and mix in beautiful, transcendental ways. Flows are defined only by other flows!
Boxes can be measured. Flows cannot be measured but you can feel when they grow stronger or weaker in time. There is no way to compare your flows with someone else’s though. This is why comparing yourself to others is useless and counterproductive.

However how do we know if there are no boundaries or we just cannot find them? In time you’ll learn to spot every boundary. But there is also another differentiation hack. Boxes and flows act differently when divided.

Divide a box in two and you’ll have two boxes, smaller in size than the initial one.

Divide a flow in two and you’ll have two flows, each of them as strong as the initial one.

Boxes follow math, while flows seem… out of touch with reality? How the fuck does this work?

The secret is that the flows we care about are not in the real world. They are your states of being.

They just… are. And divided they continue to be.

An important note – the real world has one true flow (that also just is) – nature. But there are more good news. The world is full of things you can do and some of them change you into flow states of being. In this article we’ll call way too many things “flows” so that you learn what you can use from your environment. In case of real world stuff this just means that such “flows” bring you closer to being in a flow state of being.

Let’s say you have a barrel of wine (a box). You can pour it into many different bottles (smaller boxes) and it will get proportionally less. No surprises with the boxes.

Now imagine the wine was made with love, care and expertise and is therefore amazing wine.

Does the number of bottles you distribute it in change this? Of course not. It’s great and stays great everywhere it goes. Because it just is like that.

It’s the same with all the flows in your life. When you truly love, you love everything in life a bit more, not just the guy/girl. When you have healthy self-love, it’s just who you are. It flows everywhere you go, because… it’s you.

You have both boxes and flows in your mind. However, the boxes are in you. The flows are you. Wherever you go, they are there already.

This is why motivation (a flow) is universal. If you feel motivated for something, you feel motivated for everything.

This is why creativity (a flow) is universal. If you feel creative in something, you feel creative in everything.

So whenever you wonder is something a flow, just ask yourself is it truly, wholly part of me? Does it touch everything in my life? And be realistic. Winning an Olympic gold medal doesn’t touch your whole life. It’s a very beautiful and challenging box. But still just a fucking box. After you achieve it life goes on and you’ll need something else. Boxes cannot bring true long-term happiness.

The very definition of these structures tells us which are good and bad for us. Flow opens us up. Boxes close us in.

There is no better guiding principle in the whole area of mental health:

The good in mental health has a flow structure because it opens our heart and mind. Especially our central flows of love, empathy and meaning.
The bad in mental health has a box structure because it closes our heart and mind. Including addiction patterns and too much logical thinking!

Sometimes is takes the right perspective to differentiate. Love and fear may both seem like flows. Love is a true flow, even if there is a direction to your love (a person), when you have love in your heart it touches everything in your life, just like flows do. But can’t fear be a flow too, all those anxious young people feeling lost, isn’t their anxiety (despite living in the safest and most comfortable time in human history) just the same in reverse? No.

While love is transcendental and knows no barriers at all, fears and anxiety need at least one big barrier. The one between yourself and the world. This barrier I call “The Wall of Mirrors” or simply “The Wall’. It basically walls you in one giant box.

Yes, in case of depression or anxiety we can become a box ourselves. How does this happen? Either from serious trauma that triggers an equally serious defensive coping mechanism… or because of too many smaller boxes within us that block all our flows.

Since I’m not a clinical psychologist and trauma is studied well, I’ll leave the traumatic cases to the professionals and focus on the equally common case of death by a thousand cuts – how the smaller boxes of modern life (like living in atomized communities and spending 6 hours a day on our phones) lead to forming a Wall too.

In this case the smaller boxes like the phone lead to bigger ones like a lousy job or unfulfilling relationship which gradually merge, leading to broken or missing human connections and lack of meaning. In the end, left with no flows, the boxes score the ultimate victory by uniting into this Wall of Mirrors.

The person with depression, who doesn’t want to get out of bed, is just so much separated from the outside world that they stop feeling its flows and either don’t want to engage with it at all or take no joy from engaging. When you’re inside The Wall of Mirrors and instead of the world you only see your own reflection everywhere, the pressure on yourself becomes way too much, usually causing anxiety or other serious mental health problems.

Looking upon your own (often negatively twisted) reflections that much makes performance seem more important than joy and status more important than self-love and human connection. It’s a bad place to be in since performance and status can’t really bring us long-term happiness.

If any of this strongly resonates with you, seek therapy immediately. The Wall has a strong self-preserving force and breaking out of this powerful ancient trap often requires external help. The Wall drains your strength in order to preserve itself. All the exhausting negative thoughts, all the excuse generation and all the excess logical thinking people with a Wall experience is just The Wall fighting to survive and remain dominant on every possible level. And guess what you could do if you had that strength back? That’s right, use it to destroy The Wall!

No matter if you’re in therapy in not, if you have the big Wall problem or are just fighting smaller, yet unmerged boxes, this guide is meant to help you return to the flows. Read until the end to learn which exact experiences helped me turn everything around and live a flow-dominated life.

If you or any of your loved ones is really struggling, have hope. Humans absolutely have the resilience and strength to make it though such a moment. You can do it. I know if for a fact that you can. People have bounced back from unimaginable rock bottoms. Things can and usually do get better.

Remember, people thought the most hated real life wall of our times, The Berlin Wall, (1961-1989) would never fall. And then suddenly it was gone in days, just like that. Because when the Wind of Change started blowing, suddenly everyone realized they don’t need or want a Wall. This is the exact moment I want you to experience! Let’s see what we can do about it 🙂

For a start we need to understand where all of this comes from.

Why does our brain do so much boxes and thinking if it’s counterproductive?

It’s a long story, first evolutionary and then cultural. The first creatures that evolved a nervous system hundreds of millions of years ago had three core goals in life – survive, eat and reproduce. Some of these goals like finding food and eating required a process-oriented brain capable of high focus in order to “search and destroy” the food. Other goals like not being eaten by something bigger required a fluid, intuitive brain that had a general awareness about the world and the creature’s place in it.

But nature is harsh and you need to have both functionalities at the same time – you don’t want to be eaten while you’re focused on finding your own prey or even while eating it – wouldn’t that be a bummer. So focus and general intuitive awareness have to coexist. And this is how the brain hemispheres evolved. They are both involved in everything we do but their battle for dominance is not conscious (it would have been extremely tiring and confusing).

Early humans already had a massive advantage thanks to their highly developed left side of the brain. We invented language, built more and more complex tools and could predict and plan for the future. All of those abilities were at the start spectacularly bad. But evolution doesn’t give a shit about quality (or… anything actually) it’s a mindless process that just… selects the selected. It can be summed up like this:

If you’re not a loser, you reproduce.

Given enough generations, we managed to preserve the progress and slowly improved. Until we gradually took control over the world. And let’s not fool ourselves – we did it in the harsh ways of nature – with violence.

Survival was no longer in question for humanity. But for each individual human it still was. Disease, famine, wars, social struggles meant that for the large majority life was physically very hard. But challenges can be good for mental health and so is living in tight groups. So mentally people held their ground and when life was too harsh or just beyond comprehension, turned to religion to outsource their fears and doubts. Thinking and planning in a world of scarcity was key for both survival and the slow steps for science and development of the human kind.

But then life changed in the direction we had not evolved to handle. It changed for the better.

All our genetic experience in suffering and surviving against the odds became a mere artifact. Sometimes it helped, sometimes it got in the way.

Because the odds are now in our favor and we want more than survival. We want happiness, guaranteed if possible. But we collectively forgot happiness is a flow and it’s pointing outwards. It needs other flows and less boxes. Even thinking whether you’re happy is a box and it’s not helpful.

In most of the world life suddenly (only within a few generations – a tiny period for evolution to be able to react to) became physically easier. We fought off most disease and hunger and got iPhones instead. Wars are now rare and women and marginalized groups have the best time in recorded history. Almost every real world stat except for the environmental ones is at its best point. Ever. Less violence. More healthcare. More education. More opportunities. More access to information. You name it.

The problem is although it was a actually a mix (you cannot change a world you don’t intuitively understand, duh), left brains and boxes took all the credit for the progress. And we subjugated our right brain via our culture and abysmal education system, suppressed our intuition and forgot flows exist. But boxes cannot replace flow. Tinder swiping is not love. A corporation is not a hunting party. An apartment block is not a village. We ended up lonely and have a clear crisis of meaning – one that for-profit social media apps can never fill (not that they really try). We’re not built for this. We need the flows back! And actually we desperately want them back. We are just scared to let go of the boxes that stand in their way.

It’s a chicken-egg problem: We need strong flow to destroy the boxes but they are in the way of any strong flow attempts. So we need to gather all our self-love and desire for freedom, take a deep breath and start with a leap of faith. There is no other way. Baby steps won’t do this one.

This process is popularly known as “letting go” but usually no one tells you what you actually let go of. Because often the things you let go of on the surface are not the actual Game of Self problem, they are just its projection in The Game of Life.

You should let go of your lousy job or stale relationship not just because they suck but because they represent boxes in your mind you no longer want there. They prevent you from being yourself, steal chunks of your time for no good reason and get in the way of your natural flow. True life-changing work can happen outside of the “job” box just as true love can exist outside of the “relationship” one.

The real problem is not the lousy boss or girlfriend/boyfriend you don’t really love. The real problem is the boxes that represent them within you in the first place. And I can assure you that those boxes are there, because for the people without them it would be structurally impossible (or at least extremely improbable) to end up in your situation – they would rather be unemployed for a while than have a lousy job and would rather be alone than with someone they don’t truly love.

Without flows even if you quit the job, you’ll end up in a similar one (another box). Even if you break up, your next partner is very likely to be similar (another box).

Only flows improve things and true letting go is not exchanging one box for another. It’s embracing flows and ditching all possible boxes.

Unfortunately the world is not pushing you in the right direction for most of this process. Have you heard this popular quote?

“The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.“

WTF!? No it isn’t!

This quote embodies our left-brain-dominated world better than anything. Yes, if your left brain is always on top of your conscious thoughts and decisions, you will be able to serve (yourself) but will not find any meaning and happiness. Because you need flows for them. In the master role you will be helpless and it’s very likely that you’ll be mean to yourself. But… why use just half your brain and the less appropriate one at that?

The right brain with its awareness, intuition and creativity is actually a wonderful master but a terrible servant. You can have that if you wish. And it’s better. Not in general. It’s just better suited to our current age.

The relatively safe and comfortable life of the modern human needs flows and meaning a bit more than boxes and thinking. But instead of letting our brain lean gently to the right, we push it to the extreme left with everything from school to jobs to our whole society, based on too many rigid rules.

The reality of our modern life is that We need and love flows but we Cope with our problems and confusion By inventing boxes. As the overcomplicated world gives us a lot to cope with, it’s tempting to introduce more and more boxes into our lives and become more closed. But if you want to remember just one world from this post, let it be this one. Resist. Every time you feel the urge to put something in a box, Resist. Every time other people and the world impose their box-based thinking unto you, Resist. Each time you do, you get closer to the leap of faith that will turn the tide by letting flows back into your life. And there is no going back from there. Because you’ll love the change.

I promise you, if you do just this one thing, resisting the boxes, every second, everything else in life just falls into place. Every wise advice you have ever heard is just an extension of living without boxes. All the pillars of happiness – living in the present, forgoing your ego, not chasing dopamine experiences, focus and give it all, the search for meaning – every single one of those is about prioritizing your natural flow over some box(es).

The boxes make you weak and unhappy. You need flows, even if they bring chaos to your life. No matter the identity story you tell yourself, I’m sure you want to be strong and happy. And you have to do just one thing, although very scary…

Live outside the box! When life serves one to you, take it as a challenge, grow out of the box.

The concept of boxes vs flows in The Game of Life is also known as “playing a finite game” (known players, fixed rules, an agreed-upon objective) vs “playing an infinite game” (known and unknown players, changeable rules and the objective is to keep playing the game).

Flows like love do not come with rules and you cannot win, you just have to keep playing (loving). So love is an infinite game.

Life itself is complex, long and full of flows. Long-term freedom, which we use to measure progress in life is exactly that – to be able to play the infinite game fully.

Life is an infinite game. This is why the boxes’ ability to help you in life is so limited – they can only help in the small, short-term, structured “finite game bubbles” in the vast see of unknowns – the one you just have to dive in sooner of later.

What do I have to give up to live outside the box?

Nothing that you cannot live without! All the true value in life is carried by the flows. Boxes just do their box thing and get in the way.

The flows in our mind:
Love, energy, creativity, curiosity, unobstructed time, nature, spirituality.

The boxes in our mind:
All internal and external Categories and Labels, goals, plans, time slots, the boxes we live in, rules and dogma. All numbers.

Still in denial, fan of boxes? The examples how they fail are endless.

Intuition vs thinking:

Intuition is a flow process. This is why it’s powerful, yet harmless.
Logical thinking is a box process. This is why it’s exhausting, prone to errors and potentially harmful.

Entrepreneurship vs a day job:

Entrepreneurship is a flow structure with progress in high regard – good for your mental health.
Most day jobs are box structures with stability in high regard – bad for your mental health.

Society and how to help the marginalized – especially interesting:

Respect and compassion are flows and can never backfire. Listen to “I have a dream” or any other speech that actually changed history and you’ll not find in it many box-terms like “Cultural appropriation” or “Gender nonconforming“. Instead it’s full of flow language like: “No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” This is how you inspire people and bring change!
Identity politics (both left and right wing) is based on boxes and this can screw up even the best intentions that most left-wing activists have, just due to box-structures and poor messaging. It’s currently bitterly dividing well-meaning people in the US in a downright dangerous way. The boxes are in the root of this. Us vs. Them is always based on a box.
Of course Gender nonconforming people exist and should be equally respected but does every state of being really need a label that much? Structurally it’s so much easier to just respect everyone for being human, no matter how different. And a society-wide structure of labels that everyone is supposed to follow somehow takes our focus off the easy win and sets us on a different path, one without powerful flows. One where we are all more easily offended, walk on eggshells and discourage contrarian thinking. I don’t have a single label I identify with and life goes on just fine. The fewer boxes, the better.

There also are some fascinating examples where boxes and flows overlap in space or time:

Stories are so powerful because they connect box structures into a flow, being an unique hack into our minds that loves flows.

Higher love is so powerful and magical because it turns a box (another person) into a flow (the feeling of the other person being a part of you).

Interestingly the concept of money is a flow structure improving a box-dominated ecosystem 🙂 This is why I actually like it. But in order for it to work for everyone, you should like and understand it too.

Long-term success (which we measure in long-term freedom) is what Simon Sinek calls “an infinite game” – unknown rules and the goal is to continue playing forever, there is no clear win. It’s a flow structure.

Long-term happiness is also a flow structure – a way of life more than anything specific. Individual events (boxes) cannot sustain long-term happiness.

Constructing the best environment is much easier than you think. You just need to be able to tell a box from a flow. They are so different from one another that this should be doable for anyone without external help.

Everything in your environment that can be a flow, better be a flow.
Every box you can remove from your life and your mind, just remove it.

We only accept boxes when they serve a specific, short term purpose as part of processes:

No labels unless needed for a process.
No goals unless needed for a process.
No plans unless needed for a process.
No rules for sane people while basic ethics work.

Your life is one whole. Your love, meaning, friends, fun and work can all be one beautiful intertwined mess. Trust me, the small inconveniences will be far outmatched by the huge energy and motivation resulting from not mentally dividing yourself into pieces. Who could ever think this was a good idea in the first place?

The boxes in your mind are bad for you and rarely reflect reality. But in order to remove them from your mind, you need to also remove them from your life.

Other people’s lives are also one whole.

In many ways the world is one whole. Or at least should be given our common interest…

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.

Marshall McLuhan

The change starts with you. Consider sharing this post with people trapped in boxes too.

OK, I want a life out of the box. How do I restore the flows?

First you should have some idea about your current state and a way to not just feel the moments of progress but also the moments of regress back to the boxes. We need some metric that helps us answer the following question at any given moment:

How do I know if boxes or flows dominate my thinking right now?

There is a beautiful flow-based question that directly fits our criteria:

How much do I care if I’m right?

If you don’t care if you’re right or wrong and you’re fine with the future showing or even not knowing ever, you have successfully embraced flows. This is the path of happiness and surprisingly, success in most fields. People are wrong so much of the time that obsessing over being right separates them from reality. And this is never a good sign.

If everything you care about is being right, more than being free or happy, your life is crushed by the boxes and you’re in for a long and hard battle against them.

Most people are somewhere in the middle of the above spectrum, thus being partially screwed by the boxes. The direction you take from there will decide a lot in your life. Don’t fuck it up. Resist the boxes.

There is a key relation between Hunter vs. Sheep mode (a biological spectrum, related mostly to hormones in your body) and Flow vs. Box thinking, which is a spectrum in our mind, related directly to the brain hemispheres and strengthening specific neurological pathways over the years.

Hunter vs Sheep mode is a mostly chemical battle of love-based and fear-based emotions and all our biological reactions to them… with our body as the arena.

Flow vs Box thinking is culturally and intellectually influenced but the main factor is the structured archive of all these Hunter vs Sheep battles and the actions they foster, which each change neurological patterns in the brain a bit.

This is why in the direction post we strongly emphasized the importance of actions for the hunter-sheep spectrum. You may feel love and/or fear but the feeling itself will not leave a strong neurological mark unless it’s some extreme situation and it’s super strong. But when you act, this act leaves its mark on the brain forever. You want to leave marks that help you in the future – and those are left by hunter actions that empower your flow pathways.

When the hunter in you wins and you spend time in hunter mode, flow patterns are strengthened, because you open up and there is space for them. Your life force is then actively flowing with no internal barriers.

When the sheep in you wins and you spend time in sheep mode, box patterns are strengthened, because sheep mode generates problems, they need coping and coping always comes as a box structure.

The “How much do I care if I’m right?” question is also valid for hunter and sheep mode determination. But you have to answer with your heart, not your mind.

If your heart doesn’t care if you’re right, you’re in hunter mode.
If your heart cares if you’re right a lot, you’re stuck in sheep mode.

Because the need to be right is simply a coping mechanism.

If you answer the “How much do I care if I’m right?” question with your mind, it’s no longer the same question about how you feel, rather a test which brain hemisphere will give you the answer. This is how you find which one is in charge at the moment.

This relationship goes two ways. If you’re used to thinking in flows due to long Hunter mode times in the past, many Sheep mode triggers (“wrong box” ones) will stop working, meaning you increase your chances for more Hunter mode time in the future.

Regardless of the subtle body/mind difference, Hunter mode + Flow thinking and Sheep mode + Box thinking are the two typical states you can find yourself in. And you already know which one you need for happiness and progress. So let’s construct an environment stimulating Hunter mode + Flow thinking.

To construct the best current and future experiences for positive change, you need to;

Know how a human functions in general
Know how you’re different from other humans
Know all the options the world offers, including out of the box ones

A. How humans work in general.

You share more than 99% of your genes with your fellow humans. Trust me, we’re much more the same than we are different. The reason we seem different is that we are much more engaged in activities that showcase our differences (eg. thinking) than in natural activities we react similarly to. Here we’ll focus on those universal ones.

Humans evolved to live in nature, not in boxes. Most people do not spend enough time in nature and thus miss on a lot of physical and psychological benefits directly baked into our biology.

Humans are meant to move a lot. If you live a stationary lifestyle you can compensate with a lot of sports, the more exhausting yet fun ones, the better. I play soccer, tennis and squash. Sports involving some kind of ball are somehow more enjoyable and inspire hunter mode, while “boring” sports like running and swimming can have other types of value like being meditative/therapeutic and finding out the actual limits of our bodies.

Humans are social creatures and need socializing in person. Screen socializing is a trade-off compared to the real thing. So meet people.

Humans are easily influenced by their peers so surround yourself with the best people you can find. You should have a floor requirement for legacy peers (such as family and childhood friends) and a much higher one for new peers.

If someone around you is consistently toxic, you have the right to kick them out of your life, even if it is your spouse, sibling or parent. There is only one ultimate responsibility in life and it’s for creatures that cannot take care of themselves – children, pets and people with severe health problems that have no one else to turn to.

Healthy grown ups have to earn each other’s attention by not being assholes. No human relation should be taken for granted.

How about our criteria for new peers?

We can make a long “box checklist” but I’ll instead use this great simplification that uses emotional flows rather than thinking:

If you can be yourself around someone and are happy in silence with them, it’s a worthy friendship or relationship.

The quality or your closest human relationships is the most important indicator for health and happiness.

Seek true love, a strong flow. Seek true friendships. They are both priceless. True “Higher” love will not only benefit your love life. It will improve every single aspect of your life. Because it rewires your brain and changes you and you participate in your life all the time.

You should also be aware of the fact that someone might genuinely respect and love you but still overwhelm you with bad advice because they don’t understand you and the world. This happens all the time with parents and grandparents, often on topics such as higher education and career. So love is not enough. For most of the time you need around people who haven’t lost their touch with reality. You need folks who you can trust emotionally and intellectually. One is not enough, you need both.

Often smart, nice, overly moral people stick too much around family and friends who believe in complete bullshit and are of course very keen on sharing it. The nice, moral people tell themselves they are smarter than that and are not influenced while they have a duty to be there for their friends or family. But in reality no one has a duty to listen to bullshit and it’s just a projection of their moral fears and their inability to say no.

Having to block the bullshit is as extra effort and it takes mental bandwidth, pushing you away from reality and the clarity of mind you so desperately need in the current muddy information landscape.

If someone’s clearly questionable beliefs cannot be changed and they push them to you every time, it’s healthy to increase the distance. This is an act of self-care you have the right to.

We don’t mean complex ideas, intellectual humility and broadening our horizon here. It’s the really crazy uncles lost in conspiracy theory rabbit holes we’re talking about. Value your energy and time. Listening to bullshit is not free!

Instead you could be listening to people who help you on the path to truth and intuition and inspire you for greatness.

Now that we have some basis for the biological, emotional and intellectual factors of your environment, let’s see how it all fits to you.

B. How you’re different from other humans

This is not an area I can help very much in. Only you know you. But still, here are some hints on how to get to know yourself better over time.

Observe, but don’t rush to judgement. You should be aware of what’s happening in your life but if you try to analyze it immediately, you distort the picture. Leave things to settle. Time will clear the fog and make everything obvious. This don’t mean not to act based on your recent experience. Just not to label or overthink the past before enough time has passed.

Diversity of experience – If all of your days are the same you will not really develop broad self-knowledge. You need to see your reactions in different situations and some of them need to be out of your comfort zone. Diversity often comes with speed – try different ideas and activities in less time. Without overwhelming yourself of course. If it’s no longer fun, you took too much on your plate.

Shield yourself from harmful distortion – You can take external feedback on your behavior but never on your thoughts and feelings. No one else is in your head to know what you think and how you feel. If someone is telling you they know better what is going on in your head, it’s Gaslighting and a huge red flag for this person. Your story is yours to write. Intruders are not welcome!

And finally, genetics – While the brain is quite adaptive, some traits are largely genetic. Highly Sensitive People for example can benefit a great deal by simply knowing they are who they are.

C. Know all the options the world offers, including out of the box ones

This is the hardest one. The world is very complex and often messy with confusing logic and weird emerging systems and properties. Where do we even start?

We start with you and a simple question: How many big, life-defining, healthy, flow passions do you have in your life? (in the future we’ll just call these “life flows” or “flows”).

If it gives you infinite energy, motivation and joy but unlike say cocaine cannot be easily defined (put in a box) and it lasts, it’s a life flow. Think exciting stuff that hypes you so much, it can keep you up at night many times.

If you have two or more life flows you’re doing great, you need to balance:

Following your flows
Increasing your long-term-freedom so you can keep following them in the future
Keeping an eye for new flows just in case

If you have one life flow and control your interaction with it (eg. science or art – you can always invent or create), you are still fine, you need to balance:

Following your one flow
Increasing your long-term-freedom so you can keep following it in the future
Search for a second flow to balance and help the first (voluntary)

If you have one life flow and don’t fully control your interaction with it (eg. sports or higher love – stuff you can lose access to, say if you get injured in sports), you are in danger of losing your only flow. You need to balance:

Following your flow
Increasing your long-term-freedom so you can keep following it in the future
Search for a second flow to balance and help the first (mandatory!)

And finally we arrive at the situation most people are in: They have zero flows in their life or family is their only flow. Now don’t get me wrong, family can be a beautiful flow experience. However it’s not one you can develop much in terms of your environment. From all the factors in your life apart from your genes, family is the slowest-changing one. It mostly is what it is. If you want to change your environment and your life in a month or two, family is unlikely to be the key positive engine for this. Good change comes from chaos and we don’t typically associate a happy family with much chaos in it.

To have zero non-family flows means you have no idea what you’re doing with your life. You feel something is missing on many levels – meaning, motivation and behavior. On the behavioral level you may be faking it and living a very active life. But you cannot fake the lack of meaning.

In this case you have to balance only 2 things:

Increasing your long-term-freedom so you can keep following any flows you find
Search for your first flow

Since this is the most common situation and the one in which people require the most help in and it largely overlaps with the situations where you have flows already, we’ll work on this one only.

There are two major problems in the way of freedom-increasing and searching for our first big flow.

1. We don’t have the big flow yet, so we have a lot of coping boxes in its place which reduce our freedom.

2. The process of searching for our first flow cannot really be constructed as boxes (constructions) cannot either find or create flows. We need to rely on chaos to do much of the work. To welcome chaos we need to “let go” of many boxes and be patient. So we need to resist the cultural pressure for finding our passion immediately. Time will help if we let it.

So how do we somehow turn the tide, invite chaos and plan the unplannable?

There is only one strategic solution: the unique phenomenon of flow-demanding structures.

As structures are boxes, how can they facilitate flow? Indeed 99% of them can’t. The other 1% are the things that turn lives around. How? By being a chaotic box that destroys all smaller boxes in it and leaving just the flows. By giving you no choice.

Imagine you get lost in a forest (assuming it’s safe, no dangerous humans or animals, as most European forests are). You see no paths, no civilization, just you and trees and the sound of birds chirping.

The forest is technically a box (as all places are). But if there are no paths, 100% of your possible journeys back to civilization are flows. There are no guardrails. No boxes to fit into. Just you and infinite possible directions.

The forest is a box, so you can plan going into it. But then unless you want to stay there forever, you have to somehow find your way back, which is a flow.

Usually in life flows create more flows and boxes create more boxes.

The forest model is the only magical one that can strategically create a flow out of a box. And it’s precious. Nothing can stop you from going to the forest right now if you decide. In rare, medically diagnosed exception cases, like being so anxious that you would have a panic attack in the forest, you might actually suffer – and thus should avoid this approach. But for almost all people the forest experience is guaranteed to improve mental health. Flows are so much healthier than boxes that being able to experience a flow at will is beyond powerful. Combined with exercise, time spent in nature and away from your phone and the hunter mode associated with inevitably taking responsibility in an adventurous context, it’s a giant win-win-win.

In time, you will learn that life is fill of metaphorical forests. Like entrepreneurship, art and other fields where you have to choose a path in an uncharted territory.

And you only need to start. Once you do, you’re already lost in the forest and there is no going back. You’ll find the flows. As you have no choice. Even better, you’ll enjoy them.

Usually when we feel low, we cope by giving in to the boxes: they are familiar and some boxes like your phone bring dopamine. This behavior is meant to stabilize us. But it’s evolutionary a hopelessly outdated reaction. It evolved in a time when everything in the environment from the forest to the neighboring tribe was way more dangerous. The time when we didn’t fight for happiness and meaning. We fought for fucking survival!

Today the boxes have already played their important role to make life safe and comfortable but they have overkilled it and usurped most of our entire lives. They cannot bring us any happiness and meaning. It’s simply not what they do. Since our complicated and planned-in-detail life has only boxes in the plans (since you cannot plan or construct a flow directly), we seem doomed to be unable to strategize any change. Do we really have to rely only on chaos and chance? No, because of the forests.

Since the forests force us into flow, we simply need to know all the forests the world supports. Have a map if you will. Combine it with the instinct to search and find them, even and especially when you’re feeling low (at the expense of the coping boxes and dopamine) and you restore the power over your future. Progress can be summed up like this:

Construct the future that will force you to let go of the boxes.

So where are typical forests found? Luckily in our very diverse world you have many options. I’ll divide them in two categories – popular and unpopular forests.

Popular forests have two hidden disadvantages and one clear advantage – they are easy to discover, even if you’re pretty stuck in life, since they are culturally popular and acceptable. Actively engaging in arts, sports or even passive but wholesome experiences like going to the cinema to see a good movie, are great examples. Everything that is a flow experience and even better bookable (you can commit to it with a minimal effort, like buying a movie ticket online) has the same structure as going to the forest. You commit at the start and then you surrender to the flow (as long as you’re not constantly looking at your phone during the movie of course). I should also include meditation here based on multiple studies, even though I haven’t ever meditated myself.

The best popular forest is dancing. It’s impossible to be unhappy when you dance. Never miss a chance to move it. Actually via dancing you can understand the structure of the “forest” in the first place. It may take a targeted effort to get your ass off the chair or couch and start moving. But then flow is the only thing left and you can go for hours. Now imagine if you had tens of similar beautiful experiences, secret unique ways to “dance” that you discovered yourself or with loved ones and most people have no idea about? Wouldn’t that be life-changing and make you feel a special soul, enriching the Universe? Those are the unpopular forests.

Where are the hidden disadvantages of most popular forests? They miss two key features the unpopular ones often have:

The sense that you’re doing something unique, that you’re creating a new type of fun, not just experiencing it.
The perception of physical danger.

Everyone can go to the movies. But the hype of some of the unpopular forest experiences is incomparable. You’ll see why below.

And why the fuck do we need perceived danger!? Here is why.

The boxes are powerful. Most modern people have a phone addiction, usually due to social media. The phone and the apps in it are boxes. Checking your phone is a typical box behavioral pattern. The average person checks their phone a whopping 58 times a day. This causes anxiety which can show if you’re in the cinema and don’t check it for 2 hours. See how the boxes are trying to ruin your flow of watching a good movie.

One way to elevate flow is to do something you consider extreme (out of your comfort zone) that you equate to physical danger while it being in reality relatively safe (examples below). The idea is that a moderate adrenaline spike caused by a situation of perceived danger will make you stop checking your fucking Instagram (or whatever your addiction is). In the cinema there is no danger so the boxes creep up.

In summary the popular forests are easy and much better than nothing! And the world is on your side on this one. You have venues. You have trainers. You have art teachers. You have meditation apps. You have Bob Ross, a master of flow. But you already know they exist. Which is… a disadvantage. Not a lot of foundational creation and with the exception of some sports, no physical danger, real of perceived. So you will have to fight the boxes in countless tiny battles, many of them being hunter/sheep ones against inertia so you can try to commit to going into the forest in the first place. Things can get better in time but you will need self-love, patience and persistence.

But is this really the best we have? Isn’t there a way to hit the boxes hard? We already learned that the more you destroy them, the more there is space for flows, where does this positive feedback loop start? Where is this first domino to push and then joyfully watch the boxes disintegrate, never to return?

Your hidden superpower, a typical I Grow Younger approach as most kids would consider it obvious, is unpopular forests.

Now what the fuck are unpopular forests? Simply all flow experiences that combine getting out of your comfort zone with committing not to go back in it until every road back is a flow.

Danger perception, physical movement and sounding crazy to most people are all massive advantages.

I’ll give you some ideas but it’s very important that you make some of those up yourself. Just remember all the stupid things you did as a kid – you need more of those again. Grow Younger!

A. In Nature

Nature is the perfect place where you can find unpopular forests. You body is already moving around, you’re far away from distractions and there is no one around to judge you, which makes this type friendly for flow-beginners. Let’s go!

1. Getting lost in actual forests! – I have improved my mental health significantly by getting lost in forests, both alone and in small groups. This is something that cannot really be described, you have to experience it. Just like love or any true flow. Of course make sure the forests don’t have any actual dangers from the human or animal kingdom. Most temperate forests close to civilization are pretty safe.

Nature has the beautiful feature that you can very easily dial up and down the difficulty level. You can start small by taking shortcuts between paths and gradually increase the distance you cover with zero paths and civilization around. Keep an offline map app on your phone just in case but try not to use it unless a true emergency happens (which should be a very rare case).

Getting lost has one final big advantage for treating low confidence – it near-guarantees the feeling of success. Note that success (Game of Life) and the feeling of success (Game of Self) are very different things. I know people with a confidence so low that they never admit they succeed in anything, classifying every outcome as either “bad (I failed)” or “normal (expected)”. This reinforces their internal story that success is impossible for them. If such a person gets lost in a forest the outcome becomes binary: get out safely or bad shit happens. The odds of bad shit happening are actually way lower than 1% (and I’m talking sprained ankles, not fatalities, nothing that will really negatively impact your life much). The perceived danger is much higher to an unexperienced hiker though, they think they are genuinely in danger. After we find civilization again, it’s hard to not take it as a success internally. We’re programmed on a very low level that averting danger is a success. This is why perceived danger is such a good addition to this. If you repeat this enough times, you will also observe how things just seem scarier than they actually are, which should embolden you to face your fears more.

2. Straight line hiking – Same as the above but harder (do the above first if you haven’t). Instead of wandering around and choosing your terrain and direction, you just let the terrain choose you 🙂 Take a beeline in a forest, regardless of terrain (as long as it’s not life-threatening like cliffs or bodies of water). Fallen trees, bushes and small rivers and swamps you can cross if possible. You can choose terrain only at a very small width of 1-2 meters, you have to follow the beeline always if possible.

I have only done this once but it was a wild ride even in a downwards direction (I suspect up a slope it will be very exhausting). The beeline took me and my friend into a fallen forest where every meter of progress was a pain in the ass. But if was great fun. We managed to follow the beeline for a few kilometers before a steep river valley made us finally abandon it. There were unnecessary river crossings, going up and down slopes defying all logic and a lot of mud and bushes. An unforgettable experience. The emotional footprint of overcoming so many annoying obstacles in a single day is just awesome, your whole body tells you that you’re an unstoppable juggernaut. You feel like you can do anything after this hunter but also flow-like experience! Highly recommended for mood and confidence boosting.

3. Snowy slope-sliding – I’m a lifelong skier and skiing has always been a passion for me. But I discovered that some of my favorite slopes can also offer a similar, yet different experience. Here is what I do. After a day of winter hiking around the near-city mountain I time myself to arrive at the top of a big, relatively steep (coded part blue, part red) ski slope in the break between day and night skiing. The ski-lift is stopped, so there isn’t a single skier. The slope has just been groomed and is perfectly smooth. And I put on my… raincoat. And slide 2+ km down in several takes lying on my stomach, gliding on the perfect snow.

There is a safe stopping area at the end as well as full visibility of the path (otherwise this whole idea would be very unwise) but it has happened that I encounter ice patches and feel I cannot stop or even slow down for 200-300 meters. Just sliding down with 35-40 km/h and just my clothes between me and the ground. And while it may sound crazy, not much can go wrong. Just pick your slopes and even if conditions look great, make smaller goes before you do a big one for the first time. As long as the slope is wide and not very steep, you have clear visibility of your path and an area to stop, it’s safe.

There is nothing to bump into and you’re already lying down so you cannot fall unlike from skis, sled or bike. It’s probably safer than skiing where much more can go wrong. Skiing gives you the feeling of control though, you can make turns and stop faster. With the raincoat sliding, especially for first timers it feels so uneasy to give away that much control over your relation with time and space. Your position and velocity in 10 seconds from the start are more uncertain than an elementary particle in quantum mechanics. It’s the ultimate “letting go” activity that is not an actual extreme sport with falling, flying, sailing and similar high adrenaline stuff, requiring lots of training, planning and equipment. Because you don’t actually do much at all. You lie down and a kilometer of planet Earth slides beneath you, literally the snow is sliding 10 cm from your face, and the moving corduroy pattern in the snow has a mesmerizing, almost hypnotizing effect. Just like simply lying directly on a lawn has this relaxing, connecting feeling of flow, this is the flowing, moving version of the same flow feeling. An ultimate triumph of flow over all boxes. I have done this 15+ times and 10+ of my friends have tried it. Some of them would do it again and some more anxious ones probably won’t. But for everyone it was a special experience. The most common first words after it are a variation of “I was so scared before it, but it was not actually scary, even though it felt uneasy to give up that much control. I wish I was more relaxed so I could feel more of the fun”. These are the words of wisdom by people that, even if just for a moment, replace their boxes with a flow. Oh, and not a single person tried to check their phone while sliding down or immediately after. I guess this is the benchmark for a truly happy experience in today’s world.

B. In everyday life

This is the most diverse category as the everyday life of people differs widely. You will find your own forests here, just look at how your days go and search for clues. Just a few examples to show a key idea – you’re allowed to use (ethically) other people to help construct your forests!

1. Movement in crowded places (anti people-pleasing training) – When in the metro/subway or another really crowded place with a flow of people you can go with the flow, just following the person in front of you. Or you can play around 🙂

If you have a people-pleasing problem, there is no way around it, the solution is exposure therapy, you have to displease people with minimal adverse consequences until you get over it. So what do crowds have? People! And you don’t know a single one of them, perfect sandbox to train in. This is the best time to potentially cause some minor inconvenience.

When you are a people-pleaser, you’re at one extreme end of the how-much-do-you-emotionally-care-for-human-beings-and-their-validation spectrum, with zero-caring psychopaths being at the other extreme end. Both these extreme ends suck (unlike some similar ones). However, since progress is hard and slow and it’s impossible to overdo it in a short time, in order to move to the center, sometimes it’s easier to borrow some structures from the other end instead of the middle – this way you have a stronger structural force pulling you in the same direction. This is just common sense in many cases. If you constantly feel cold you don’t change your thermostat by 2 degrees, you do cold plunges. Extremes can help as a tool, even if not desirable themselves.

So what would the extreme look like, how would a psychopath see people? As objects in their way. Now you don’t want or need to suddenly turn stone cold and emotionally see them as objects – this would be impossible in your state even you tried. But if you regularly treat them as objects in your physical behavior, you will start the brain rewiring needed to move past the people-pleasing problem. Of course no significant real life harm needs to be caused, it just needs to feel like it. But you’re a people pleaser so you will feel any tiny non-pleasing action of yours greatly amplified. We now have the structural solution we need! Hurry between them. Even better, run when the crowd density allows it. Just run past them as if they were traffic cones!

Running between people may seem to cause a large inconvenience but remember, each individual person only gets bypassed once, so their collective loss of convenience is shared, making their individual loss of convenience very short lived. For you it’s one big ass flow experience, for each of them it’s a potentially negative but very tiny box experience, if any at all. The vast majority of people will just ignore your craziness.

Wait, did I just say flow? Yes, running between people is a flow experience – because running in a moving, unpredictable path with frequent direction changes is one. So we have a great start – the power of a flow.

What else does running between people say to you about yourself?

You’re fast and thus capable; Speed is a great feature, a prerequisite to Scale and Freedom.
You’re agile and can maneuver around life’s obstacles, even if they are moving.
You always see the best paths and openings. You’re not just fast, you’re strategic.
You don’t give a fuck if you seem crazy to other people. You’re past your validation needs.
You’re a hunter.

What’s not to like?

On a very rare occasion you will misjudge the space between people or they will make a last moment random movement and you will actually physically bump into someone. It’s inevitable. But the world won’t end. Apologize whole heartedly with your most compassionate smile and life moves on.

While unfortunate for the bumped-into person, they will live, the chance that you actually injure someone are near-zero. For you any one of those moments are precious. The cherry on the top of your anti people-pleasing exposure therapy. Literal life changing moments. In the worst case scenario the bumped-into person may be grumpy but this moment would hardly change their life. And given you didn’t do it deliberately and apologized whole-heartedly, you didn’t do anything unethical as whole. While the practical benefits of this flow experience are huge.

I have practiced crowd-running for many years and still enjoy doing it from time to time. It helped me significantly with low confidence and people-pleasing issues.

2. Fast, balanced walking in public transport or airplanes – Remember when you were young and tried to look cool by not touching the handles in buses and trying to balance, imagining the bus floor is a surf of skateboard? Never did that? You missed a lot.

The act of physical balancing is a very good one for mental health, it boosts confidence and makes you feel you can handle any obstacle. But while getting your slackline out in the park requires time and organization, the bus is already there under you. Sometimes bus stops are right after an intersection where the bus turns. In this case, given the bus is not crowded, a beautiful flow experience is to get out of your seat and walk to the first/last door (whichever your direction is after getting off) during the turn of the bus. If you try to stand in a turning bus without grabbing any handles, it’s hard and weird, just like surfing is a for a beginner. But fast walking in a turning bus is just like walking on sloped terrain (even those the bus floor is flat, centrifugal forces make if feel sloped). You can do that, you’ve been on a slope – it’s just about not trusting your eyes seeing the even floor and listening to your body instead. It’s all about feeling those accelerations with your every muscle. It’s an amazing flow feeling! I’ve done this dozens of times and it’s quite dope… for a bus experience.

Seems too hard? There is an easier version.

In planes (and sometimes trains) whenever you go to the toilet in the front or back, you have to pass between endless rows of seats. Do this as quickly as you can with very fast walking. Since people often spread a bit into the lane, it takes good body coordination and balance to not bump into knees and elbows. This feeling of flow is worth it though. Again, we give ourselves a massive amount of good signals – we’re on top of the world, having physical fun on a plane (remember this is considered impossible), while valuing our time and not caring what other people would think. Win-win-win.

In the cases of crowd-running and balanced walking it might seem to people around you that you are a arrogant show-off – even though these activities you typically do alone with only strangers around and people usually tend to show off to their friends, not strangers. Regardless, you can give zero fucks about what these strangers think about it. It’s healthy and important for you and neutral for them so fuck their opinions! If they don’t run between people in the crowd it’s their loss. They don’t get the free fun, exercise, time saving and mental health improvements such as overcoming people-pleasing. Being mainstream is almost never the best option. There is usually an alternative that looks crazy but is wise, considering our misunderstood mix of ancient evolutionary biology and imperfectly constructed society. Also, do you agree we live in a crazy world? If so, play to the tune – act like it, be a little crazy! Otherwise you lose the flow, you lose coherence with the actual driving forces in your environment and start coping with this decoherence inviting Sheep mode, inertia and all the boxes… and then it’s hard to get the flows back in your life.

3. Getting off public transport just in time after working to the last possible second – While running among a subway crowd or pacing a lane make your space experience a flow, there is another benefit you can get out of public transportation – making your time experience a flow too. Most people do something in the bus, subway or train. They look at their phone, work on their laptop or simply read.

Since I’m no fan of smartphones, I usually work on my laptop. But the idea will work to an extent in other cases too, as long as you’re not engaging with your phone in an addictive way – then the following advice will not be valid.

So imagine you’re sitting down, working on your laptop and the subway approaches your stop. Most people will feel the train slowing down, put their laptop in a backpack and get up to be ready. And then wait for 15-20 seconds for the train to grind to a halt, open the doors, for the people in front to get off so we can finally get off too.

Getting up, putting your laptop in a bag and going to the door takes less than 10 seconds. So why begin the process 20-30 seconds before?

This might feel like a tiny thing but it’s actually not. Every time you get up early, you give yourself a real-life signal that avoiding a very slim chance of missing your stop is more important than the work you are doing. That you don’t do something important and meaningful and that you’ll let the fear of a minor box event (missing your stop) affect a major flow (your workflow). This is not the story you want to tell yourself about you.

Of course perceptions differ. If you’re used to giving yourself half a minute of doing nothing before getting off and you don’t have much such relaxation time, by all means go for it. I’ll always try to rid you of meaningless experiences and I have examples of what they usually look like. But if one of those happens to be an unusually meaningful one to you, just ignore this piece of advice and move on to something where our core vision aligns – there you can use my methods.

Standing up at the last possible moment, and getting off with zero waiting (but also zero rush and zero anxiety) is your ideal version of this. And how do you get there? Practice!

If you do this every day, you’ll have massive improvement in a lot of areas – you give yourself meaning, became faster, learn to work under pressure, face your anxieties so they can dissipate (exposure therapy). You’ll also learn to feel time as a flow. Not having to wait for short meaningless periods is a key in that. Unless you are very tired, those moments don’t give you much, they just fragment your already-way-too-fragmented life.

The goal of this experience is to help you feel time as a flow and stop feeling anxiety about deadlines and potential small losses. It’s worth it. I’ve practiced it for years and still love doing it.

You might ask are the crowd-running, balanced walks and perfect timing attempts really… unpopular forests? They are. If you try them you’ll experience the same exciting feeling you get when lost in a forest, no boxes around you, one of the very few moments in your life where you’re completely free with zero constraints around.

In the forest you fight the boxes by keeping them far away, diminishing their power over you. When you run around people, balance between them and smoothen time transitions to perfection, it’s a different story – you show yourself that the boxes don’t control you – you control them instead. The power is with you – the power to combine them into a beautiful flow. While the methods vary, the end result is the same as the forest – a flow you can actually plan, practice and improve incrementally, just like any other skill – but a way more life-changing one.

Moreover, the structure of the unpopular forests where you commit once and only flow paths are left for you after this, is possible for many of these everyday activities. Consciously running slightly late is a perfect motivation to move fast and smooth and be creative with public transportation. Working on something meaningful will make you use every second when traveling, instead of fragmenting your life with waiting. You can commit to inevitable future flows on so many levels by just living your life to the fullest.

These creative experiences will bring you real joy and fun and will also limit the power of the likely most prevalent box in your life – your smartphone – over you. The phone can mostly give you fake fun and coping boxes. When you’re hyped by real fun, you don’t need or want any of those, leaving the device powerless. Its addictive power diminishes with every such moment.

Transportation is not boring, it’s your special sandbox to experiment with. Play around.

4. Sleeping on bean bags – I discovered this one by accident when I was too lazy to go home after an office party and slept in the office. Just get two bean bags in a row and lie on your stomach on top of them, you can also add a pillow and blanket if you wish.

Your body will experience a lot of unpredictable movements over the bean bags during the night. You may wake up on their edge or even on the floor. The unpredictability of this experience, the loss of control over your position in space reminds me a lot of the snowy slope sliding. It’s remarkable how you can sleep so well while not having much control or even conscious awareness about your body position. It’s… interesting. While bean bags should not be able to cause an injury to people with normal physique, make sure your knees don’t get into weird twisted positions.

When you wake up after sleeping on bean bags you feel relaxed but also kind of… energized!? Since your muscles went though different relaxation phases dependent on your changing body positions, it feels a bit like unconscious yoga.

But the best feeling is in the mind. Somehow flowing in the hug of the bean bags just makes your brain full of joyful flow too. The body and the mind are so connected that it would not surprise me if the physical flow experience you had for a whole eight hours really activates the brain’s right hemisphere (unfortunately the non-dominant one in most people), because it’s its job to figure our your place in the world… or on the slowly shifting bean bags.

If you want to try a less extreme version of the same, there are longer bed-size bean bags made for actual sleeping. When it’s one, not two shifting objects below you, the experience is much closer to a normal bed, while still keeping some of the flow-related benefits. This is how I sleep at home but I still enjoy the crazier version with 2 bean bags and still do it when I stay over at our seaside office.

By now we have a flow-attracting plan for your life slowly forming – flow sleep on bean bags, flow traveling and moving around in space and time, flow fun in nature.

But surely, surely in work we cannot avoid the rules and boxes? Flows will be much harder to find there since this is not nature, space and time. This shit is rigid systems, invented by control-loving humans!

When you dive in though you see the boxes fall apart. Unhealthy myths get busted. The flows of meaning and creativity and the desire for freedom will destroy any boxes if you truly believe in these foundations.

C. In your education, jobs, career and entrepreneurship journey

Are your lousy job and copy-pasted career ideas made of boxes? Let’s replace them gradually with flows! You spend a lot of time working so being in hunter mode and interacting with flow structures are key to your overall wellbeing and personal growth.

1. Mixing flows to create your work flow – Work is not by itself a flow, it’s just a complex collection of exchanges between people and systems. Many of those exchanges are flows (like feeling appreciated at work). They will be part of your life all day, every day. It’s impossible to separate your work from the rest of your life. Thinking you can do it is downright naive. Such attempts will only result in work becoming a half-a-day box that you dislike – and no out-of-the-box experiences in the evenings can compensate you hating half your day. Just do everything possible to keep work a flow and avoid having non-process-related boxes that stick for too long and block this flow.

In the scaling post we already talked how love and work are great together and you should hire people you deeply care about and feel close to them. This doesn’t only apply to hiring. If you genuinely feel your coworkers are decent people, show it to them. Be just as warm as you would be to lifelong friends. Too much distance is of no use between well-meaning people. You work together, so what? You’re still humans! And humans on the same team at that. You being stuck in a team with a random coworker is like an arranged marriage. You know what people do in arranged marriages? They try to make them work by being gradually more loving and vulnerable and succeed more often then not. If they can manage to build a marriage from scratch with a random person, you can manage some shared files and tasks!

Every relationship with every person, random or not, will be one of a kind in your life. Make it count! Love-first is the basis of all relationships, including work and mentor ones. Don’t hold back.

This is the greatest thing about flows – you cannot overdo them! You cannot be too loving, too compassionate, too respectful, too motivated, too creative or too responsible.

The more the better, sky is the limit with flows! And mixing them only makes it better. Responsible and creative? Great!

2. Welcoming procrastination for tasks when not letting other people down – Procrastination gets a very bad rep. But we forget its huge advantage. It’s a flow. It’s actually your internal flow protest against boxes such as exams, projects and deadlines. It’s your internal voice shouting “Anything but this!”. Can we make procrastination… productive? I believe we can as flows have unlimited potential, we just need to guide it. Here are the guidelines for “good procrastination”.

Be honest about who you’re letting down! Is it just yourself? Or other people too? Do they deserve to be let down and is it good or bad for them if you collectively fail, abandoning/destroying something bigger? If you let just yourself down or the people in your team are dicks and deserve to be let down, or even if they are great but you’re all in some rotten boat together (like a shitty university or lousy job), then fuck it, it’s not unethical to let your/their project burn. Overly moral people have a huge problem here as for them any abandonment and/or destruction is out of question, even when it’s for the greater good.
If, on the other hand, you see that you’re objectively letting people down (not systems, not your parents’ expectations, actual people who will suffer damage in their lives, not in their perception of you) for no good reason, use this thought to fight inertia and get shit done. Every significant delay in important communication is letting the other side down – this is the worst kind of procrastination, don’t do that.
Do not feel guilt or shame because of a natural signal you cannot control. Regardless of the answer above. It will not help. Give your best and acknowledge you cannot control everything about yourself. Procrastination is just a signal that there is no meaning for you here and you want to search for it elsewhere. It’s natural and healthy when you point your time and energy in a good direction.
Do not cave to external pressure and never let others induce guilt and shame in you. No person who really means well should do that. You’re morally allowed to aggressively repel such attempts.
Once you get past the ethical questions, the guilt and the shame, you can explore the practical side. An exploration of your long-term-freedom-based choices and your scaling journey are good starting points.
While procrastinating always avoid other boxes and especially addict behavior. If you’re susceptible to addiction while procrastinating, you don’t have a procrastination problem, you have an addiction problem.

Our excuses are usually a major obstacle to any progress. We don’t do what is good for us and always, always find an excuse why. But with procrastination we can flip the tables. For not doing what the world expects from us and not feel guilty about it, we need an extremely good excuse. So good that in fact it might be this all-important thing we always knew we should have done long ago. When people procrastinate they are laughably desperate for a good excuse. Students not wanting to study for an exam will do just about anything of value they can think of, even if they have never done it before. Like clean their dorm room! Been there, done that.

The thing is, when you don’t want to do a project clearly holding no meaning to you, literally anything productive might be better than grinding on. So procrastination is the danger alert and excuses become new paths in life, better ones.

Procrastination is part of you. Have faith in it. It’s just telling you that you either need a more fun way of achieving your goal… or that your goal is not worth it in the first place. Most likely because it’s a box while you need flows.

Any force moving you closer to the flows is worth exploring. Procrastination is capable of being such a force.

3. Spending (wisely) a bit before you can afford to – Every time we do anything it influences the future in two different ways. The Game of Life consequences of our action and the signal we give ourselves in The Game of Self.

Depending on the situation the consequences may be much more important. But people forget the other cases exist too. Let me take you to a day I’ll never forget in my entrepreneurial journey about 15 years ago.

I was running a young web business while being a freelancer chess coach and player. I had no access to capital and no savings and no office either so the days were full of buzzing around for meetings with clients, chess coaching appointments and doing web design and SEO from the office of a friend. Not being able to drive or having a car, in order to be most effective I used a mix of running and public transportation to get around the city. It was fun, it was exercise, it was affordable and I loved it. The feeling of running to catch the bank before closing time and then making a wire transfer while sweating and barely breathing is one of the most entrepreneurial feelings you can experience.

I almost never used taxis even though in Bulgaria they are not expensive. It seemed to me like avoiding a fun, healthy challenge and indulging in comfort instead.

Until one day I was late for a meeting and it was raining like crazy and I spontaneously stopped a taxi to make my life easier.

After that day it was only taxis, ever, several times a day for all journeys. Even though technically I was not ready to afford it yet, as it increased my life expenses by 15-20% and I had no clue if I will be able to increase my young business revenue that much. And again, I had no savings and any backup plan in case money ran out would require taking a loan from a friend.

That day I understood that you just have to believe and act as if the success of tomorrow happens today. Because it does happen today! It’s today’s actions that form it. And part of it is to act like you’re already there.

Give yourself the signal that failure is not an option!

When you look at entrepreneurial stories, you’d be amazed at how many successful people burned their bridges and went all in in a downright unwise way. But many of them made it. Because the people who burnt the bridges gave their faith and conviction a boost. The people who left the bridges there just in case gave their doubts a boost.

This is one case where “fake it till you make it” may not work – faking belief might leave you with doubts, failures and burnt bridges. But if you truly feel you can make it, act the fuck like it! Never ever, never, never, never allow yourself to be afraid of success. Change may be scary, success is change so there will be a background anxiety to it – don’t feed the fear monster or you’ll self-sabotage yourself on all levels. If you want it, believe it’s possible and fight for it! And show this spirit to yourself with your actions. Including wisely investing today the money you’ll make tomorrow – exchange them for time and energy, for removing distractions and educating yourself.

The success of tomorrow is born today by creating the identity that supports this success.

Why is this piece of advice here? Spending the money you are earning in real time is a flow way of living. And it’s a very valuable one because it helps you feel the flow of money. Savings are only a good idea if you cannot invest the money into yourself productively. If you can, just do it!

4. Value your time highly before its value is actually high – Same as above, the time you invest productively today will bring the growth of tomorrow which means it’s much more valuable than the people around you and the world in general will acknowledge. The world does not assume growth but you want to have the identity of someone who is growing in life. So a key feature is that you should value your time now more, even if the environment disagrees.

This means always trading your time for good money, good education, good impact or good fun. Do not compromise with the quality of any of these! If there are constraints like having to work a lousy job to make ends meet, use this to spark your motivation, your drive for freedom and your creativity. Tough times are when you rip apart your Game of Self barriers and truly grow. Been ashamed to ask a small loan from a friend so far, even though you desperately needed some cash? Now is the time to face and fix the shame. Never let a crisis go to waste! If you are ethical and work hard, you have every right to request that your work is appreciated and paid well. Capitalism does not support fairness by itself. You have to believe you deserve more and constantly fight for it. Ask. For. More.

This also applies to your spare time. Value it and don’t waste it. It’s not just your time, it’s the time of potential-future-successful-you and therefore has a high potential worth. Make it count!

Why is this piece of advice here? “Feeling” time so you know intuitively how to value and invest it is a flow process. Changing value over time is a flow. Time windows like 9-to-5 jobs are boxes that usually block progress. In order to grow, you need to get out of the “time boxes matrix” and start feeling it.

5. As an entrepreneur price your products and services high even before the quality reflects the price – I’ve seen countless cases of businesses which fail because the prices are too low. On the other hand I’ve never seen a business fail because the prices are too high – if no one is willing to pay, you can always lower the price but also some people and companies have a fetish for paying high prices and don’t mind spending crazy amounts of money. So it’s almost never a mistake to charge more. Just justify it to yourself and the buyer. Let that boxy left brain help for once and come with some logical excuse for why the price is high.

What should go into pricing a product or service? Only the market! Your costs don’t matter. Your experience and knowledge don’t matter. Nothing matters except how many people would fucking pay the price. It’s math. Detach pricing from your self-worth and emotions otherwise you will lose touch with reality and suffer unneeded losses.

Keep in mind that your product may be in a rough beta with visible problems but the shiny competitor may actually sell a product even worse. Or have bad support. Or too aggressive sales. Or sell the customer data to 74658356 email spammers. Capitalism does not incentivize the best behavior. If you’re ethical, don’t assume the competition will be so don’t overthink it. Raise the fucking prices! If you sell something expensive, buyers will assume it’s good. Step two – actually make it good!

Why is this piece of advice here? Pricing only according to the market is a flow process as the market evolves constantly, making intuition the decision maker. Pricing each product based on your costs and efforts for it is a stupid box approach that will underdeliver. And even if you factor your time in the box way, after the last point you know how valuable your time actually is. Ask for more money until a significant amount of people stop paying. And having different prices for different customers is not a sin, it’s optimization of flows.

D. Relations and forms of communication

1. Mentoring – being a mentor to someone you care about is extremely fulfilling. But you have to genuinely care about your mentee. Letting someone inside your head and giving them all your knowledge and experience is a special kind of love. This is why in practice it’s the mentors who chose who to help.

It’s impossible to find a mentor. The mentor finds you. You just need to be there and show potential, intellectual interest, commitment and gratitude.

True mentoring is about love, trust and giving up control. To give all your knowledge to someone else is always economically risky – they might beat you to future opportunities you both fit. However, fuck that fear! The mentor has so much flow benefits from what they do:

Structuring their own knowledge while sharing it;
Brainstorming with someone they feel a connection with;
The joy of helping someone else grow in their favorite field;
The joy of feeling part of a team in their favorite field;
A heartfelt reminder of their own successful journey;
Being challenged and thus bursting their intellectual bubble;
Having someone potentially successful in the future be thankful for life;

Mentoring is an unpopular forest – you start and then anything can happen. Few things have fewer guardrails in life than mentoring. Peaceful Warrior is a beautiful movie about how chaotic this process actually is.

2. Chaotic gifts – Speaking about chaos, if there is something in our lives with a lot of flow potential that we’re usually ruining by putting it in a fucking box, it’s gifts.

Gifts we get wrong as a society on so many levels. A gift is meant to be from the heart so mandatory birthday and Christmas gifts ruin a lot of their value – you should give one only if you feel like it and are happy with your choice.

If gifts were not occasion-related people would be happy when they got one and learn that expectations are counterproductive when they didn’t. A total win-win!

Even with the current peer-pressure system where gifts are expected at a certain day, you can play around.

Late gifts – if you come up with a really good gift but it needs time or simply need time for a better idea, just miss the date. Tell the person you’re working on it and the world wont end! I’ve given gifts months late and no one was mad at me – on the contrary, people feel more special.

Random time gifts – You can make anyone you love a gift at any time of you feel like it. No occasion gifts are the best!

Multiple gifts – If you really love someone and enter this amazing store where you want to buy every third item – buy the person three small things, of five or nine… There is no limit on how many things you can buy someone if the things are cute and will be received with joy.

Experience gifts – Someone always wanted to do a bungee jump but never had the courage – the choice is clear! Experiences are usually better than objects. There is always a small chance they might not like it. Don’t let this stop you! Life does not come with guarantees.

Unexpected, targeted, life changing gifts – Sometimes you really want to send a strong flow signal to someone you love. Like “have more self-love” or “you’re amazing and can do a lot of good in the world if you believe in yourself”. A targeted gift is a wonderful opportunity to send a strong message.

For example one of my closest friends lacks enough self-love and is self-critical regarding appearance and performance. As I had already personally experienced that the road to self-love was detaching it from performance and “deserving love” and making it an unconditional flow, I got her a very weird gift. She received a fictional “cheque” piece of paper with my signature that stated that all undeserved tips she made for one year ahead will be reimbursed by me. She could play around with my money (up to a stated amount) and give underperforming waiters and taxi drivers random tips and thus do real life actions that contradict her mental everything-should-be-deserved model, a box directly in the way of her self-love flow.

Gifts that help your loved once overcome barriers and live out of the box are the very best!

3. Emails are often better than chats – It took me some time to appreciate the hidden potential of emails, including personal ones. Just like the letters from before digital times, emails are more of a flow than a box. They can be short or long, read now or later and answered now or later or even not ever. You can handle hundreds of emails per day because emails are neatly structured while hundreds of chats a day would be a mess. You can also write a single one for hours if you feel like it. One of the best, highly enjoyable things you can do is write someone you care for a long, well-crafted email.

Emails can be saved, re-read and treasured in there own unique way just like paper letters. There is true joy in slow, asynchronous communication. There is true freedom to write when you feel like it and not have to care how a small delay in your response might get interpreted. And there is true power in opening out when you’re your best self.

But most of all, chat messaging results in time boxes, fragmenting your day and preventing you to do deep work. In the mix of chats and calls we do every day, we forget the advantages of email for productivity and mental health. Give slow, deep communication a chance, you’ll be amazed.

Writing a big-ass honest email has the structure of an unpopular forest. It’s unusual in our age, takes some conviction to start writing, but once you get out of the box and start opening up on those lines, it’s a flow all way long. And whoever receives it can take their time with their reaction. They have zero pressure and all of the space and time they need. It’s good to give people space and time.

4. Open letters – When you feel you were treated very unfairly and are really upset about it and you also suffered a material loss as a result (eg. not just a hurt ego), you need some form of healthy venting. You also want for it to be productive – to win you back lost resources like money, attention, trust etc.

Probably this was done not by a single person but by some big indifferent system like a corporation, the government, a university etc. The best way to hit them back without leaving yourself full of toxic emotions is to publish on a dedicated website an honest open letter about what happened and try to spread it everywhere. I do not recommend doing this against people unless the circumstances are really in your favor but systems you can hit even when you’re 70-80% right in your conflict with them (eg. you were also not a saint but they acted much worse) – they are big slow MFs that cannot fight back a smart flow blow – they are only capable of boxes.

Of course this will not work everywhere, don’t open-letter Putin or the mafia or you may get into very real trouble.

Open letters are powerful because you can spend days crafting them, choosing language carefully – if the facts tell that you’re a victim, be the victim at the start. But then make a glorious comeback. Commit to fighting injustice. Be emotional. Speak for the whole world against the perpetrators. And most important of all – end by offering a concrete solution that would be disastrous to them but is doable and sounds great to everyone else. This is how you win allies. If you cannot come up with such a solution yourself, ask different experts and compare what they say.

Of course be careful that any facts presented are true or you might get into legal trouble. But if you just paint a generic picture in an emotional way with the right words, you’re largely defended by free speech laws. You can use creative language like “a shark is just a big fish but unlike other fish it would happily eat you – and this is why big corporations and institutions are aggressive and mean, it’s just evolution”. Who are they gonna sue, Charles Darwin?

Flow open letters leave companies and the government helpless, you will most likely just be ignored unless it really blows up in the news (and this means you won big). Any replies from them will likely just pour fuel into the fire bringing more media interest to the case.

But even if the result is moderate (it doesn’t go super viral or into the media) the winners are still winners and the losers are still losers.

In the corporation or institution people know each other and employees will learn, potentially damaging internal culture and motivation. More important from your standpoint, it’s very unlikely they will ever try to fuck up with you again. The PR team will tell everyone “don’t mess with this crazy person or you will create us additional work“.

Public perception might also suffer. If your solution (say proposed regulation) is something the market didn’t consider much before, stocks might be affected. The Cambridge Analytica scandal cost Meta (then Facebook) about $6 billion over 6 years in fines and legal settlements. But the scandal itself put under question their whole business model of colleting user data to serve ads, resulting in a massive $134 billion (!) loss due to a 24% stock plunge in a matter of days. The stock recovered in 2 months but this was a lesson for all past, current and future Facebook shareholders that they will never forget.

If it’s the government, no one there likes such letters since they can be picked by the opposition during the next elections. You can ping the opposition yourself if they don’t notice of course. Just stay away from doing a political spin yourself, politics is an ugly fight in the mud where no one wins.

And what are your wins from the open letter?

Psychologically you’re out of the unbearable injustice box – you turn it into a justice flow, recycling all bad emotions and turning them into good ones.
You made an ultimate Hunter move by starting a David vs Goliath battle.
You test all your friends and allies for free – you will not get support from the people you expect!
You will find new friends and potentially clients and partners among people who choose to help.
You attract attention and trust on social media, social trust is a precious resource.
You make the world a better place by exposing injustice.

In summary, you may be small but you wield the power of flows – something the corporate MFs with their protocols and boxes can never ever do. The jury of billions of humans on social media is always ready to embrace your flow case if the truth is on your side and you’re vulnerable, passionate and committed. In David vs Goliath battles everyone roots for David. Whenever a Goliath system really messes up your life, use this advantage to hit back (again – only if it’s safe and the Goliath doesn’t employ armed thugs).

Been there, done that – Google personally persecuted and banned almost all of my websites in 2013-2014 and I responded with an open letter seen by only about 12000 people. Google didn’t publicly react but they didn’t dare touch my websites for years from then on. Just from a tiny semi-viral open letter with zero advertising budget. Imagine if I had poured some money into social media ads and press releases…

You are powerful when you feel and wield flows in life.

E. In The Game of Self

1. Welcoming internal uncertainty – Life is full of uncertainties. We have evolved to seek internal certainty at all costs because when we were evolving the world was so hostile that it just didn’t work to not know what is going on. Therefore we still carry in our biology this strong anxious reaction for when we cannot define things and put them in their respective boxes. However, the world has changed in big ways.

A. The world now is much more complex. If before you either did understand a simple concept (me chase animal, me kill it, me eat it) or could not understand it even with your best efforts (lightning scary – me not know anything about it, others also don’t, it just scary, me avoid it). There was no middle ground and the knowledge of the elders was the cap that your own knowledge could reach. There was no reason to hold opposing concepts in your mind at the same time, it was just confusing.

We still have this in our biology to this day. It’s no wonder that most people today, despite all their access to information, still don’t have a good understanding of say both left and right wing political ideas – it’s just against our biology to keep opposing ideas simultaneously in the mind. This comes from tribal times and makes us tribal in the present age too. Only with high levels of awareness about our own shortcomings, intellectual humility, critical thinking and love for the truth can we overcome this division.

A complex world gives you the reason for creating deep intuition and deep knowledge. This takes a long time for ideas and concepts to connect in your brain and requires periods of intellectual uncertainty – when you have unproven hypotheses in your brain, ones waiting to be confirmed of dismissed. Quality education is impossible without having periods where the dots are not connected yet and you don’t know what is going on. If you give up on uncertainty you just think you’re always right while usually being wrong – this doesn’t lead to progress.

B. The world is much safer for the average person. If in ancient times uncertainty lead to you potentially dying from one of the many dangers around, including other violent humans, now this danger is near-zero. So you can afford uncertainty, even though it’s uncomfortable.

The benefits of intellectual uncertainty are already clear, but can we benefit from… emotional uncertainty?

I believe we can. The world is full of polished stories that don’t represent the truth but trigger an emotional response within us. All variations of the hero’s journey are such stories, while in reality life is incredibly messy and chaotic, preventing most people from having such a big-ass journey in their lives. The problem is stories have the power to bypass all our filters and become part of us, giving us the emotional certainty of an identity.

But is this identity the most useful one we can assume? Usually not. This is why we need a healthy amount of emotional uncertainty so our identity is flexible and can evolve over time. In the dynamic world of today you cannot afford to have a static identity, it will only hold you back.

Emotional uncertainty will greatly help you with giving and receiving love. You will be able to accept that over time love varies in strength and direction, just like all natural flows do. And this is absolutely normal.

Love is the strongest flow of them all which means it’s more incompatible with boxes than anything else. If you train yourself to not care about the “relationship” boxes, statuses and expectations and to fully erase anything transactional from love, you will find it’s an endless source of energy and happiness. Just love the people worth loving and leave yourself to the flow.

Emotional uncertainty will greatly help you with self-love, since when you remove the boxes/labels, the rigid identity and the conditional (“the deserved”), the unconditional flows remain and stay strong. Self-love is one of those unconditional flows. It’s never deserved or undeserved. It just is. Give it the space it needs!

Emotional uncertainty will help you stay closer to reality over time. When we form memories of a messy situation in life it’s tempting to frame it in exact box terms eg. “everything was my ex’s fault”. But framing is itself distortion. If we resist the boxes and just leave time to pass, we’ll avoid the distortion and gradually build an intuition about the past based on reality, not a on a layer of first-responder coping mechanisms.

How do we achieve emotional uncertainty? Just stop trying so hard to be certain. Sometimes it’s fine to not know what is going on. Time is needed to connect some dots. Give yourself the time.

2. Removing expectations from others and the world in general.

Once you are comfortable with internal intellectual and emotional uncertainty, the final win against the boxes is to stop expecting anything from the world around you.

This is especially hard to do since the core human superpower is prediction – it’s the largest scale difference between us and animals. Intelligence is all but defined by our power of prediction. However, there is a subtle difference between predicting and expecting.

Prediction is just a flow of data, experience, intuition giving us the odds of potential future scenarios. It’s opening your mind to the richness of the world and it’s possibilities.

Expecting is collapsing all of this rich nuance into a single box. It destroys all the advantages of prediction and much more. Here is why.

If the expected event happens, you lose, because:

You waste time and energy, analyzing the same situation twice (first in your thoughts and then after it happens), instead of doing something productive or fun instead; Doing double the thinking (known as ruminating) does not mean better choices at all!
You become increasingly unaware of other potential outcomes that could have been, your worldview narrows.
There is a risk of becoming cocky about your prediction powers, leading to bigger future fails. Remember prediction is about odds and prediction skills cannot be measured by a single event.
If the event is positive you lose much of the joy. Happiness is reality minus expectations.
If the event is negative you had negative emotions before it happened and negative emotions when it happened, in effect doubling the negative emotions experienced over time.

But if the expected event doesn’t happen, which is much more likely given they are so many ways it can turn out different, you didn’t win either:

Thinking about scenarios that end up not happening is a waste of time and energy.
You lose confidence in your power to predict and your intuition in general.
If the event-not-to-be is positive, you feel extra disappointed and need time to emotionally recalibrate.
If the event-not-to-be is negative, you feel relieved. Still the expectations brought unnecessary anxiety about something that never happened.

So when do expectations help you? Never! They are just a box, a cunning trap where you catch and butcher the beautiful nuanced flow of prediction, just because of your desire for certainty.

Once you overcome the desire for certainty, you’ll soon be done with expectations too. But you need one final realization to complete this. That the world and its systems and people are inherently imperfect, and usually deeply flawed inside even though they desperately hide it. Everything and everyone is a work in progress, just like you.

Just like you can love yourself despite all your shortcomings, it’s healthy to have a general love for the world and everything in it, despite understanding the reality of how imperfect everything is.

Ring the bells that still can ringForget your perfect offeringThere is a crack, a crack in everythingThat’s how the light gets in

Anthem by Leonard Cohen

Children are brought up and educated to value perfection. We’re not reminded enough that the imperfect is worth loving too. That it’s worth understanding. That it’s worth fighting for.

If you want to help people feel and act better, you have to first accept them for who they are.

If you want to improve flawed systems, you have to understand the driving forces that made them this way.

Expectations that people will act in any certain way will mostly lead to disappointments, failed friendships and relationships. You can do your best and choose the people around you for the beauty of their hearts but even the best ones will fail you from time to time. No one is perfect. Don’t expect it from anyone.

Systems are even worse as unlike people they are inherently indifferent. Even if you believe that they are built for your own good, evolutionary forces make every system fight for its own preservation at all costs. The ones that didn’t do this are almost all extinct, outcompeted by ones with effective preservation mechanisms.

You can only expect good from a system if you don’t jeopardize its current form of existence with your actions. The moment you try to change a system, all its ugly self-preservation mechanisms will try to crush you in response. This makes actually changing the world for the better a highly creative endeavor while grinding along old paths will just trigger stronger opposing forces from the powers that be.

For a basis of that creativity, in order to spot the good ideas and ignore the bad ones, you need the skill of intuitive understanding and the resulting power of prediction. However the way to think about your own future is only intellectually. The moment you involve your emotions, the beauty of prediction becomes the trap of expectations. So don’t. How? Involve your emotions positively elsewhere. Love, play, explore, learn. Be present.

Don’t consciously think about the future, let alone plan. Your intuition and mind are already there thanks to the power of prediction. Your heart’s place is in the current moment. The future will come to it with zero effort. In a flow, if you allow it.

Finally a special note about the worst boxes ever – the expectations from future you. They look like this:

“Once X is over…

I’ll be able to/I’ll have the time to/I’ll have the money to

do Y…”

There is no worse collection of signals you can send yourself:

I’m currently helpless regarding Y, I need to wait until I’m not helpless.
Y is not truly important to me (otherwise I would have found a way to prioritize it now)
I don’t really like X either, just waiting for it to end so I can focus elsewhere
My life is a collection of boxes like X and Y and I can only do one box at a time.
My life timeline is separated into time boxes, it’s not a continuous flow.
I’m placing needless pressure regarding finishing X and starting Y on future me (what if they are no longer the best options when the time comes?).

This let-the-boxes-out phrase is such a ridiculously accurate prediction of disaster that simply saying or thinking it a few times is enough to make X never-ending and Y never-happening. I kid you not, I’ve seen this play out so many times, whenever I hear anyone say this, I immediately change my internal prediction for their Y to an epic fail. Not because the phrase itself will make the person fail. It’s because only future losers will say it in the first place due to coping reasons.

Never ever use anything similar to this phrase. Nothing makes you as weak and as defeated by the boxes as it.

Say goodbye to the center of your comfort zone for good. Its edge is where the magic happens.

Don’t think “outside the box”, or much at all for that matter. Logical thinking is just a justification while you already chose emotionally, even if the process was not conscious. It’s of limited use.

Since your (likely dominant) left brain will always push you to think in boxes, the solution is not to think outside the box from time to time.

The solution is to destroy the boxes as a foundation of your life and embrace flows. And the unpopular forests are your superpower tools for this. Use them wisely and joyfully develop your own ones too.

I just realized this whole post became my unpopular forest – I dove into the topic of strategic self-improvement and was lost in it for 2 months with no guardrails and just my intuition. I remembered many of my own struggles and how success came with flow experiences and never in any other way. My approach could seem like thinking outside the box but it’s nothing like it. There is no thinking and no boxes – just flows.

Nothing will ever be the same for you either. You just read a 18926 word post containing all of my truly big life lessons. 30+ years of diverse experience in one text, which I’d really appreciate a share of.

If you just do the following, everything will feel simpler, happier and more meaningful:

The world has way too many boxes. Destroy their projections in you, embrace flows instead. Don’t think, just be. All the time, on every level, everywhere.

You now know how to achieve the impossible. Welcome the superpower. Make it count.

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Dimitar Georgiev - Biko

19 days ago

I personally disagree with the notion of “removing expectations” from the article, which suggests, “Once you overcome the desire for certainty, you’ll soon be done with expectations too.”
Having expectations doesn’t necessarily limit personal growth; instead, it often reflects one’s plan and vision for the future. A life without expectations can imply a lack of direction or purpose. Expectations set goals and benchmarks that guide actions and decisions.

Dismissing them in favor of complete spontaneity risks falling into aimlessness. Planning is essential, and it inherently involves setting expectations to strive towards progress.

Who do you want to be tomorrow?

Author

Kalin Karakehayov

18 days ago

Reply to Dimitar Georgiev - Biko

I agree that having a general direction and vision is very important. A vision for the future can exist as a “flow” without specific “box” expectations though.

How to intuitively, without thinking, tell a flow from a box?

Why does our brain do so much boxes and thinking if it’s counterproductive?

What do I have to give up to live outside the box?

Still in denial, fan of boxes? The examples how they fail are endless.

OK, I want a life out of the box. How do I restore the flows?

How do I know if boxes or flows dominate my thinking right now?

A. How humans work in general.

B. How you’re different from other humans

C. Know all the options the world offers, including out of the box ones

A. In Nature

B. In everyday life

C. In your education, jobs, career and entrepreneurship journey

D. Relations and forms of communication

E. In The Game of Self

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“Out of the box” without the thinking

How to intuitively, without thinking, tell a flow from a box?

Why does our brain do so much boxes and thinking if it’s counterproductive?

What do I have to give up to live outside the box?

Still in denial, fan of boxes? The examples how they fail are endless.

OK, I want a life out of the box. How do I restore the flows?

How do I know if boxes or flows dominate my thinking right now?

A. How humans work in general.

B. How you’re different from other humans

C. Know all the options the world offers, including out of the box ones

A. In Nature

B. In everyday life

C. In your education, jobs, career and entrepreneurship journey

D. Relations and forms of communication

E. In The Game of Self

80

SHARES

Studying life takes time. Sign up for our finished work!

Follow for smaller bites of our work!

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