Dan Koe

Normalize not having an opinion on things you don’t understand.

Which is almost everything.

Avoid getting distracted by things that seem important on the surface, but don't align with the future you want to create.

Curiosity > knowledge > skill > results > refinement

Just one hour. Please.

Your attention is your most precious resource: https://lnkd.in/gF9EZKfA

Please believe in yourself

6 months

Stop focusing on what skill to learn. All individual skills are replaceable. Focus on developing yourself and your mind to a level of complexity that makes any skill you acquire irreplaceable. The skill isn't about the skill itself. It's about the mind behind it.

The more you write, the more ideas you have.

The more you move, the more energy you have.

The more you rest, the more time you have.

Results demand momentum.

Progress disappears when you hide in your head to avoid engaging with reality.

Build your mind with books, self-reflection, and writing.

Build your body with the gym, long walks, and nutrient-dense foods.

Build your business with skill acquisition, problem-solving, and self-promotion.

Becoming multidimensionally jacked is the path to the good life.

I wrote a second book.

A short and philosophical take on money and discovering your life's work.

I made it free because this is one of those things I just want in as many hands as possible.

The paperback is not free for clear reasons.

Links below to read:

you can start over from scratch

Mental obesity.

Focus is a muscle.

Start with 4 sets of 20 minutes.

Rest between sets.

Progressive overload still applies to mental lifting.

When you get stronger, add more weight.

Increase to 4 sets of 45 minutes.

Train your focus to hit your ideal financial physique in record time.

You need to be delusional if you want to succeed: https://lnkd.in/gkPkJiCX

The most undervalued skill is the ability to zoom out and see the big picture of any personal, professional, or social situation.

The minor details that you get obsessively emotional over mean much less than you think.

Do your most important work when the world is asleep.

You need a project to build.

Something that you can invest your focus into. Something that has more gravity than distractions. Something that will bring you one level closer to the life you want.

Study less, build more, and your skill set will be forced to grow.

probably not suitable for LI but here we go

If you want to make $1 million in 1 year, break it down.

$1,000,000 / 12 = $83,333 per month

$83,333 / 30 = $2,777 per day

Land one $5000 client every other day.

Or sell 18 $150 products a day.

Thats 720 people to a page that converts at 2.5%.

Build a product, distribute.

When you know (on a deep, internal level):

- What to do
- How to do it
- Why you're doing it

Distractions disappear, focus is seamless, and the universe conspires in your favor to carry you toward the desired outcome.

Motivation isn't necessary when clarity is peaked.

Reading is how you acquire new knowledge.

Reading is how you expand your worldview.

Reading is how you spot new opportunities.

Reading is how you train your focus.

Reading is how you absorb 10 years of experience in 8 hours.

When you're bored, pick up a book, not your phone.

"I can't write about it because I'm not an expert."

My friend, writing is how you *become* an expert.

You start writing.

You realize you don't understand the topic.

So, rather than quitting, you learn. You research. You self-educate until you have something worth writing.

That's literally what the job of a writer is.

To learn and explore your interests so that you can become a vessel from which someone else can learn, from your perspective.

This is why I love content so much, or being a "personal brand."

Yeah the followers and all that is nice, but the real benefit is that you get to learn about your interests for a living.

If you have thought about writing online, but have no idea where to start, I put together a little custom AI (free) that spits interviews you and spits out a comprehensive personal brand strategy.

Try it here, it goes pretty deep and shows you what's possible: https://lnkd.in/gQpfHYTi

The biggest trap I see is that people try to find the perfect idea that will go ultra viral before they post.

Unfortunately, you will never know with absolute certainty when a post is going to perform well.

You just get better at making estimated guesses over time.

However, if you want to make better guesses as a beginner (to give yourself better chances at going viral), do this:

Go to Eden (https://eden.so)

Go to the Discover tab filled with outlier content

Find a viral post, any viral post

Hit the lightning icon, then "Reverse Engineer"

That will tell you exactly why the viral post worked in a chat.

Then, say "Interview me to pull content ideas out of me, then use the viral post principles and post structure to give me 5 content ideas with variations."

Now you don't have to start from scratch.

And you're off to a much better start than 99% of beginners.

We're in the middle of the digital renaissance: https://lnkd.in/gapYiiTD

I'm sure many can relate

4 habits. Mind, body, spirit, business. 1 hour a piece, minimum. As a foundation, that will take you so much further than doing 0 hours.

Also, if you create content, try Eden.

It researches outliers in your niche and gives you ideas you can write about daily.

You can quickly turn those ideas into fleshed out posts (based on your identity profile), repurpose them into images or carousels (the image below was made in the Eden chat by just asking for a text post), and research any creator from any platform.

Oh, and scheduling is dropping soon. This post was scheduled from my Eden - the same post went out on Instagram with a different caption.

Try it here: https://eden.so

Try them for a week

I spent 15 years trying to max out every area of my life.

Fitness as a teenager. Then books and ideas. Then seven failed businesses before one worked. Then a spiritual phase that changed how I saw all of it.

Each one felt like the answer while I was in it. The real answer was seeing how they connect.

Here's the simple version:

1. Score yourself 1 to 10 in mind, body, spirit, and work. Write down one real example for each score.

2. Find your lowest score. It's usually the one pulling the other three down.

3. Give that one area 90 days of focus.

4. Pick one daily action for it that's small enough to keep going past week two.

5. Score yourself again after 90 days. Expect a new problem to show up. Good. Solve that one next.

I turned this into Human 3.0. It has 21 lessons and an AI coach that asks for proof when you score yourself too high.

Map your life in 30 minutes:
https://lnkd.in/gjj6TXtR

The most dangerous place to be isn't rock bottom.

It's the middle. Comfortable. Fine. Nothing is on fire.

I've noticed a few patterns in people who are stuck there:

They never learn anything new unless they're forced to. Learning became a thing they did in school. No books, no skills, no curiosity.

They don't set goals unless their finances make them panic. No ambition pulling them forward. Only fear pushing them.

They talk about what's happening in the world instead of what they're building. Politics, news, other people's moves. Anything but their own.

I don't think this is laziness. I think it's what happens when life gets just comfortable enough that the urgency disappears. You slide into coasting and don't notice when the switch happened.

I'll be diving deeper into this in future letters. The last one was on taking advantage of the digital renaissance. Read it here if you'd like: https://lnkd.in/gapYiiTD

Try everything until you find that one thing

Funnily enough, these have everything to do with making money.

My favorite kind of people.

I believe we are in the middle of a Second Renaissance where polymaths and self-educators will thrive. I'm writing a manifesto about it.

The letter goes out soon: https://lnkd.in/gvqFGdmX

Full letter on this topic going out in a few days: https://lnkd.in/gvqFGdmX

Pick literally any idea you love and stop worrying about your f*cking niche.

If you found an idea valuable, then others can find it valuable too, if you know how to articulate it.

Beginners get so trapped in the thought that if their idea doesn't fit into a tiny little box then everyone will forget about them and nobody will pay them.

That's not how any of this works.

Instead of focusing on some tiny niche, focus on putting your mind in public.

The ideas you find important.

Your beliefs and opinions.

Your personal stories (even if you think they're boring).

Teach the skills you learned and why you learned them. The tools you use and why you use them. The product you built and why it will help the people who share similar values and ideas as yourself. That's a much easier way to sell, and it's fun to do.

I'm running a bootcamp on exactly this.

To show that your niche is your worldview, and how to get out of beginner hell by writing content about your interests in a persuasive way.

That's how I've grown to 5m+ across platforms, and how previous bootcamp students have gained their first 1,000 to 100,000 followers that actually care about what they say.

Enrollment to the creator bootcamp closes in a little under 36 hours.

Join here if interested: https://eden.so/bootcamp

Write more essays: https://lnkd.in/gWdG3DtQ

Don't get discouraged when you reach the top of the mountain just to realize it wasn't the top.

Most social media tools suck.

(I've tried them all over 7 years of doing this.)

They promise you'll go viral. They promise fast growth without any skill or understanding. Now they're going "fully agentic," which only works if you already know what you're doing.

And when everyone has an advantage, it's no longer an advantage.

I love AI. But letting it write everything for you, especially as a beginner, is a death sentence. You may get lucky with a few posts. You may even gain followers. But can you replicate it? Does your audience care who you are? Or are you a one hit wonder?

The creators you love, the ones whose ideas actually change your life, understand that the creative process (capturing, resurfacing, and synthesizing ideas) is your edge while everyone else races to pump out slop.

So we built the actual solution.

It's called Eden. The second brain for creators.

It has every scheduling, analytics, auto-dm, and outlier research feature the others have. But it also has the ideation process built in, which cannot be skipped.

Here's how it works:

1) Save inspiration from anywhere

Paste any social post link (we transcribe it). Pull in X or Substack bookmarks. Connect Kindle, Snipd, or Readwise. Highlight YouTube transcripts and articles in Reader mode. We auto-tag everything so our Deep Synthesis agent can surface connections across your library.

2) Research what's working

Outlier research for every platform, not just YouTube. We have a corpus of 3M+ posts and growing. Scroll Discover for inspiration, search any creator's top posts, or use Deep Social to search across all of it.

3) Create in one place

You work on Boards. Build shareable swipe files, or draft with your library, chat, and ideas open right next to you.

4) Chat with anything

Claude and ChatGPT are blind. They can't read social links or see what's trending. Eden's chat pulls from the sources you actually research: posts, videos, articles.

5) Publish to every platform

X, Instagram, LinkedIn, Substack, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts. We're one of the first to support article scheduling to X and Substack. Write once, schedule, done.

6) Or run it all from the MCP

Eden is the social research MCP. Connect it to Claude or any agentic workflow and you get trends, any social link, any account, your analytics, and publishing. No scrapers to pay for. No infrastructure to maintain. You do the thinking, AI handles the busy work.

We also built 4 free skills for deep topic research, brand strategy, and a content command center (linked below on the MCP page).

If you're a creator, Eden is your base. It's where you write, research, and publish every single day.

Try it free here: https://eden.so

How to turn your mind into a source of income:

1) Start a personal brand (obviously)

2) Study content, social media, and attention like your life depends on it (most people fail here)

3) Turn a pain, passion, or process into a digital product

Now you have two levers - make your content better and make your product better.

As many of you know, Eden helped you with the content side.

But now it also helps you with the monetization side, in a way that no other platform can.

You can now turn your knowledge into your own AI product.

I.e. a course that you can talk to.

Start your store here: https://lnkd.in/gnPd_FUr