Supremacy
Last updated
Last updated
Have you noticed how good 20-year olds are at flaunting entrepreneurial success on social media?
Or how 30-year olds with a decade of that experience produce confessional videos of how miserable they have been behind the scenes despite the material success.
So what happens in the 40s? Or beyond?
Many go quiet. Focus on family. Settle into a groove that does not rock the boat.
I too was a young hotshot Internet entrepreneur in my early 20s.
I published half a dozen courses and ebooks on areas of productivity, life direction, getting organized, time management — and then I got deeper into stoic philosophy.
I became a minimalist.
To the point that I felt a gnawing dissatisfaction with the status quo.
I decided that early-life success was premature in life and might distract me away from a bigger purpose.
One of my productivity programs sold at 8% conversion rate. If you’re in business at all you know 8% is very very good.
I achieved 7th position for sales volume in a multi-million dollar affiliate competition against leading marketing gurus at the time.
But I pulled the plug on it all.
I had this habit of learning something, and then moving on.
Abandoning what I’d done to date, in favor of a new question, a new challenge.
I even received commission checks from companies whose products I promoted and I never cashed the checks.
It wasn’t about the money to me at that time, although I should have cashed the checks.
But for me, it was about the discovery. The question that I was searching to answer.
That question that we all have.
What they heck am I really supposed to be doing?
I learned that…
50% of marriages end in divorce.
And that doesn’t mean the other 50% of marriages are happy, does it?
I learned that…
People go through mid-life crises.
That did not sound like a positive outcome for half a life’s effort.
Despite signs of success on social media many people, are miserable to the point of depression.
I learned that motivational gurus who get up on stage and earn tens of thousands of dollars for a speech, are whiney ass miserable arrogant pricks behind the curtain.
I felt an imposter syndrome in my late teens, back in the late 90’s, when online success was practically unheard of.
I often had lunch money for a restaurant, but I settled for a butterd bagle because that’s what my school mates were doing.
I felt alienation at school because they were dealing in trading cards, talking football, and I was planning my next online product launch… or client campaigns.
After a decade of freelancing, I reached 27 and decided to become a corporate marketing manager.
I launched the Search Engine Optimization department for a London ad agency, and wrote adverts for a dozen industries.
I beat the ad agencies best clients ad campaign by 510% for lead generation, with 1900% extra ROI.
I began reading the literature of business and marketing and learned the ugly history of the Public Relations profession.
That it was invented by Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays who adopted Nazi Germany propaganda, brought it to America, and called it Public Relations, or PR for short.
I read that customer focus groups in the 1950s discovered that mothers felt guilty to their family for buying ready mix cake mixtures… so the brand put the instruction on the packet to ‘just add 1 egg’. And sales sky rocketed because that effort alleviated the guilt trip.
Lessons like that made me even more jaded, about business, about society.
What I’ve learned in my 20-year career in banks, corporates, marketing agencies and web3 communities is frightening, appalling, and disheartening.
It’s often said that sometimes you have to hit rock bottom.
So… what do we do with:
Various disappointments, even shrouded by success.
Rejections or failures in professional-life and in personal-life.
Awareness of the wastefulness of our time, which is life, because of burdens of financial pressure…
…especially when we see the over-sized prosperity of celebrities, or politicians, and entrepreneurs younger than us making it big...
Teenagers who bought bitcoin and buy penthouses atop Dubai skyscapers...
The sloshing of money… around an obviously broken economy…
Built on a house of cards imminent to collapse.
…benefiting the big banks and creepy corporations who profit despite people’s hardship.
Not only are they not solving problems — they’re even creating them.
Confusion abounds about deeper purpose, worthwhile direction, and the cultural calamities we see today.
I came to realize that society is set up to make us yo-yo back and forth between a stoic numbness and a superficial hedonism.
It’s either:
Keep your head down and grind, build wealth for no real purpose at all, or at least a boring retirement nest egg.
Or... stop taking life so seriously, and just take what you can get from it, live a little, until you’re old and grey.
Last year I stumbled onto something new that solves that pendulum swing between
Stoic Numbness
and
Mindless Hedonism
A way out of the maze which traps countless people.
Probably including you.
A way to achieve Supremacy in life.
So here is:
The golem enemy of your Supremacy.
I’ve hinted at the first part of the enemy already:
That is the…
Shortcut Salesmen
Slick big-shots who hook your attention with promises of rapid success… offering easy solutions that ultimately lead you astray from meaningful progress.
Many of them get rich only by selling you a program about how to get rich. They are playing the ultimate chicken or egg scenario. And they are selling their soul while fooling you.
2nd are the
Power Brokers
Elitist gate keepers who wield influence through middle-man positions of power that block you from rightful opportunity… such as certain corporate managers, industry insiders, and politicians who use their status to gain unearned power by suppressing innovation and freedom of choice.
Even if you can detect and outmanoeuvre the Shortcut Salesmen and the Power Brokers, you also face a less formidable but equally deadly part of The Enemy:
Productivity Pirates
Anyone who distracts you from focus, from daily discipline, whether through socializing, unnecessary administrative tasks such as government paperwork, or casual interruptions and media entertainment. They raid your focus and steal your productive time.
You know it’s true. I certainly know it’s true.
Then the 4th component of the enemy is:
The Status Quo
An invisible force that resists change and keeps us all stuck in outdated systems or mindsets.
Exerting coercive influence and pressure, pushing us to conform and discouraging our boldest innovations, self-expression or personal growth.
Then comes the 5th and final enemy of Supremacy.
Can you guess?
It’s your own
Inner Slacker
Your lazy, self-indulgent, comfort-seeking alter ego.
Always urging you to procrastinate and avoid hard work in favor of meaningless indulgences and quickly forgotten instant gratifications.
As of 2024 urgency to defeat that 5 component enemy enters new heights.
Artificial Intelligence is set to disrupt everything — with the rapid rise of a new cognitive ecosystem.
An economy built on 2 vectors:
accelerating speed of technology, and
augmentation of human capability
I currently work in the AI industry, with access to leading AI scientists, and the picture they paint for our very imminent future is scary as hell.
You will be given a choice in the not too distant future.
On the one hand, merge with machine to become a cyborg robot freed from the burden of human emotion — joining an artificial super intelligence — and no one knows where that will lead to.
Or, achieve Supremacy, this decade, making AI your servant, so that you can choose to retain a fully human self-directed destiny, with the protection, profit, and continued human emotions of pleasure.
There is no middle.
Cyborg Robot
or Humanity.
I’ll see you on the next one.
