Modern Creator
Marcus Stadon · YouTube

"Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)

A 61-minute identity-engineering protocol that argues self-improvement is the trap, and total psychological reconstruction is the only path that sticks.

Posted
1 weeks ago
Duration
Format
Essay
educational
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9.6K
605 likes
Big Idea

The argument in one line.

Self-improvement fails because it targets behavior, not identity — and the only reliable path to lasting change is destroying the old self across all six dimensions of identity at the same time.

Who This Is For

Read if. Skip if.

READ IF YOU ARE…
  • You have tried habit systems, morning routines, or productivity frameworks and found yourself snapping back to old patterns within weeks.
  • You believe your results are stuck not because of effort but because of something deeper you cannot quite name.
  • You are comfortable with dense, philosophy-adjacent content that cites Nietzsche, Epictetus, CBT, and neuroscience in the same breath.
  • You are willing to accept that the problem is not your habits but who you believe yourself to be.
  • You are open to a structured framework that treats identity as an engineerable construct rather than a fixed trait.
SKIP IF…
  • You want a quick tactical checklist — this is a 61-minute systematic framework, not a listicle.
  • You are already operating from a stable, goal-aligned identity and are looking for execution tactics.
  • Dense philosophical framing frustrates you; this video cites Theseus' Ship, Viktor Frankl, and Lisa Feldman Barrett as load-bearing arguments.
TL;DR

The full version, fast.

Self-improvement fails because it targets behavior, which is downstream of identity. The Omnimorphic Embodiment protocol addresses all six dimensions of identity simultaneously: emotion (engineer it via focus and physiology), action (vote for the new self with every choice), thought (use metacognition and WHOOP visualization to interrupt and replace looping narratives), environment (detonate the social, physical, and digital museum of your past), attention (change the questions you ask to change what your RAS filters in), and appraisal (cognitive reappraisal to strip negative meaning from events). Change all six at once and the old identity runs out of evidence; neglect any one and it drags you back.

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Chapters

Where the time goes.

00:00 – 00:42

01 · Why radical change requires self-destruction

Nietzsche cold open, thesis stated: self-destruction precedes creation, psychological rebirth is the mechanism.

00:42 – 02:23

02 · The self-improvement trap

Self-improvement is band-aid on bullet wound. Behavior is downstream of identity. Tyler Durden: self-improvement is masturbation.

02:23 – 04:21

03 · Omnimorphic protocol introduced

Framework named and defined. Six dimensions: emotion, action, thought, environment, attention, appraisal. Central aim: embody the version of you for whom the goal is inevitable.

04:21 – 13:43

04 · Stage 1: Emotion

Emotion is engineered, not received. Two levers: focus (internal/external) and physiology. Frame: what would the inevitable self feel today?

13:43 – 20:24

05 · Stage 2: Action

Action is the only way to change external reality. Three elements: routines, habits, inputs. Every action is a vote for old or new self. Seek discomfort.

20:24 – 27:55

06 · Stage 3: Thought

60,000 thoughts/day, 90% identical to yesterday. Metacognition creates separation. Interrupt-replace protocol. WHOOP visualization.

27:55 – 32:11

07 · Stage 4: Environment

Environment is a museum of your past. Social, physical, digital cues constantly re-encode old identity. Detonate it.

32:11 – 37:02

08 · Stage 5: Attention

RAS filters 11M bits to 50 conscious. What you ask yourself determines what you notice. Change the questions, change the filter.

37:02 – 41:55

09 · Stage 6: Appraisal

Appraisal is the active layer of belief. Epictetus: it's not what happens, it's how you react. Cognitive reappraisal via CBT: notice, pause, ask what else this could mean.

41:55 – 47:55

10 · How the six stages form one engine

The six dimensions are nodes in a self-reinforcing loop. Change all simultaneously or the untouched nodes drag you back. Omnimorphic: no failure point.

47:55 – 52:37

11 · Identity and the Ship of Theseus

Belief is the atomic unit of identity. Identity is a dynamic cluster of beliefs held by evidence. Ship of Theseus: replace every plank, a new ship emerges.

52:37 – 54:55

12 · Method acting your inevitable self

Method acting as the operating metaphor: embody the character until the feeling arrives. Daniel Day Lewis, Heath Ledger, Jim Carrey. The art comes first; the identity catches up.

54:55 – 59:40

13 · The old self fights back

Psychological immunity: the old self deploys resistance when threatened. Resistance is a phantom. Four steps: seek, feel gratitude, act, sit.

59:40 – 1:01:31

14 · Destruction and creation as one move

Two sides of the coin: offense (becoming new) and defense (destroying old). Break the addiction to who you have been.

Atomic Insights

Lines worth screenshotting.

  • Self-improvement targets behavior, but behavior is downstream of identity — which is why habits snap back the moment discipline runs out.
  • You do not rise to the level of your desires. You fall to the level of your identity.
  • Emotion is not weather that happens to you — it is a state you are constantly engineering through focus and physiology, whether you realize it or not.
  • The body leads the mind. Changing your physiology — posture, breathwork, cold exposure, movement — changes your emotional state before your thoughts catch up.
  • Every action is a vote for the old self or the new self. There is no neutral move.
  • Discomfort is not a warning sign. It is the literal sensation of the old identity being threatened — which means you are going in the right direction.
  • 90% of your 60,000 daily thoughts are identical to yesterday's. Running the same internal scripts produces the same outcomes.
  • You cannot be the thinker and the observer of thought simultaneously — metacognition creates the separation that gives you a choice about which thoughts to act on.
  • Visualizing only the outcome reduces motivation. The WHOOP method — Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan — requires also picturing friction and your response to it.
  • Your environment is a museum of your past self, constantly re-encoding an outdated identity through hidden cues. Detonating it is not optional.
  • The Reticular Activating System filters 11 million bits of sensory data per second down to 50. What you pay attention to is your experienced reality.
  • Questions are attention-direction tools. Negative questions like 'Why does this always happen to me?' search for confirming evidence of the old self.
  • Appraisal is belief in action. Two people experience the same event and walk away with opposite conclusions because their appraisal systems run different filters.
  • Identity is not a fixed structure. It is a dynamic cluster of beliefs held together by evidence — which means changing the evidence changes the identity.
  • The old self has one weapon: resistance. Disarm it by feeling gratitude for resistance as a signal of forward motion, and it loses its power.
  • People are addicted to familiarity even when familiarity produces outcomes they hate. Breaking the identity requires breaking the addiction first.
  • Method acting the inevitable self means embodying it before it feels natural. The identity was always a costume — the old one just felt like skin.
Takeaway

Identity is an engineerable construct, not a fixed trait.

WHAT TO LEARN

Most change attempts fail not from lack of effort but from operating on behavior while leaving the identity that generates behavior untouched.

01Why radical change requires self-destruction
  • The argument that radical external change requires radical internal change is not motivational rhetoric — it is a claim about the causal structure of behavior.
02The self-improvement trap
  • Self-improvement targets behavior, but behavior is a downstream output of identity — which is why habits installed without identity change tend to collapse under pressure or boredom.
03The Omnimorphic protocol introduced
  • Belief cannot be switched on directly, but it can be changed indirectly by generating new evidence through behavior, environment, thought, and attention. Identity shifts as the weight of evidence accumulates, not through an act of will.
04Stage 1: Emotion
  • Emotion is not weather. It is an engineerable state with two accessible inputs: what you focus on internally and externally, and what you do with your physiology. Taking responsibility for your emotional state is the prerequisite for controlling it.
05Stage 2: Action
  • Every action is a vote for the old identity or the new one. Actions taken under comfort tend to confirm the old self; actions taken through resistance tend to build the new one.
06Stage 3: Thought
  • The average person runs 60,000 thoughts per day, 90 percent identical to the day before. Breaking out of that loop requires metacognition — the ability to observe thoughts from a position of separation rather than being swept along by them.
  • Visualizing only positive outcomes reduces the motivational drive to act. The WHOOP method requires also imagining friction and your planned response to it.
07Stage 4: Environment
  • Your physical, social, and digital environment is a museum of your past self, continually feeding evidence back into the identity you are trying to leave. Redesigning the environment is not cosmetic — it removes a continuous source of identity-confirming data.
08Stage 5: Attention
  • The Reticular Activating System filters 11 million bits of sensory data per second down to 50 bits of conscious awareness. The questions you habitually ask yourself determine what those 50 bits contain — which means question design is attention design.
09Stage 6: Appraisal
  • Appraisal — the automatic assignment of meaning to events — is the active layer of belief. The same event produces different emotional and behavioral outcomes depending on what frame it is evaluated through, and that frame can be deliberately interrupted and replaced.
10How the six stages form one engine
  • The six dimensions of identity are not independent — they form a self-reinforcing loop. Changing only some of them while leaving others intact gives the untouched nodes enough material to drag behavior back to baseline.
11Identity and the Ship of Theseus
  • Identity is not a fixed structure. It is a dynamic cluster of beliefs held together by evidence — which means changing the evidence changes the identity.
  • The Latin root of identity means the same — identity is who you keep repeating, which means it can be changed by changing what you repeat.
12Method acting your inevitable self
  • Method acting an identity — acting as the person you intend to become before it feels authentic — works because identity is not a fixed object but the role you keep repeating. Change the repetition and the identity follows.
13The old self fights back
  • Resistance to goal-aligned action is not a signal to stop. It is the survival mechanism of the old identity — which means feeling resistance while moving forward is confirmation of progress, not a warning.
  • People are addicted to their current identity not because it produces outcomes they want, but because it is familiar. The familiarity itself is the draw, independent of the results it generates.
14Destruction and creation as one move
  • Becoming a new identity and destroying the old one are not sequential steps — they are simultaneous. Every vote for the new self is a vote against the old one.
Glossary

Terms worth knowing.

Omnimorphic Embodiment
The protocol presented in the video: total simultaneous transformation of all six dimensions of self (emotion, action, thought, environment, attention, appraisal) to engineer a new identity. Omni = total, morph = transformation.
Inevitable self
The specific version of you for whom your goal would be unavoidable — the person across whose identity the Omnimorphic protocol is mapped.
Psychological immunity
The survival mechanism the old identity deploys when it senses an attempt to override it, manifesting as resistance, apathy, doubt, fear, or shame.
Metacognition
The act of observing the activity of your own mind from a position of separation — standing on the riverbank watching thoughts flow past rather than being swept along in the river.
WHOOP
A visualization protocol from researcher Gabriele Oettingen: Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan. Visualize the goal, then visualize obstacles and your planned response — not just the win.
Appraisal
The automatic assignment of meaning to whatever your attention has selected. The active layer of your beliefs — where held conclusions meet real events.
Reticular Activating System (RAS)
A brain structure that filters 11 million bits per second of sensory input down to roughly 50 bits of conscious awareness. What you ask yourself determines what it lets through.
Cognitive reappraisal
A CBT technique for interrupting an automatic negative meaning and replacing it with an alternative interpretation — asking what else this event could mean rather than accepting the first reading.
Allostatic load
The cumulative physiological cost of stress; cited here in the context of pure outcome visualization, which research suggests reduces the motivational drive to take action.
Ship of Theseus
A philosophical paradox about identity continuity: if every plank of a ship is replaced over time, is it still the same ship? Used to argue that identity is not a fixed object but an accumulation of replaceable beliefs.
Resources

Things they pointed at.

09:40channelLisa Feldman Barrett (neuroscientist)
24:26bookGabriele Oettingen / WHOOP visualization research
24:12bookViktor Frankl quote (Between stimulus and response lies your power)
30:37bookAtomic Habits by James Clear
37:20bookEpictetus — The Enchiridion
40:46productVipassana meditation
1:01:20linkDiscipline Masterclass (Marcus Stadon) ↗
00:10linkPDF from this lesson ↗
Quotables

Lines you could clip.

00:14
“Self destruction precedes creation.”
Five-word thesis that stands alone→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
02:07
“Self improvement is masturbation — it's stimulation without creation.”
Provocative Tyler Durden quote, no setup needed→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
02:31
“You do not rise to the level of your desires. You fall to the level of your identity.”
Quotable standalone insight, high shareability→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
11:58
“Responsibility is the prerequisite of control.”
Clean aphorism, zero context needed→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
56:38
“The most addictive drug in the universe is your current self.”
Counterintuitive hook, punchy→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
54:00
“The identity was always a costume. The old one just felt like the skin.”
Poetic reframe, strong standalone→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
The Script

Word for word.

Read-along

Don't just watch it. Burn it in.

See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.

metaphoranalogystory
00:00Nietzsche said it best man, you must have chaos within to give birth to a dancing star and that line it just gives me shivers every time because he's stating the only fact you need to get rich.
00:14Self destruction precedes creation.
00:19To radically change what you get in this life you first must radically change who you fundamentally are. Call it a psychological rebirth.
00:28Now to understand how to actually execute that change it's imperative we debunk a vicious trap which blocks most people from this radical transformation which is self improvement.
00:41Self improvement is like applying a band aid to a bullet wound, painting over the cracks of a crumbling building, the monk mode discipline, wake up at 5AM stuff. It feels productive but it's surface level.
00:56It operates at the level of behavioral change which of course action or behavior doesn't happen in isolation, it's a downstream effect of your identity which is why no matter how many habits you stack into your day nothing seems to radically change.
01:14Maybe there's just a new coat of paint but nothing radically has changed in your life.
01:20Tyler Durden from Fight Club, excellent movie, said it best, self improvement is masturbation, it's stimulation without creation.
01:30People love to consume the idea of change without ever actually becoming somebody new and that's the problem. Self improvement is not the move my friend. It's all all of the leverage is found in identity.
01:43It's not self improvement, it's self destruction because you do not rise to the level of your desires or your short term behaviors. You fall to the level of your identity which is just who you believe yourself to be.
01:57And so the crucial reframe here is your identity is not who you are, it's not a truth, it's a tool that you use to manipulate your outcomes and so you destroy the old self that is holding you back from your goals and you cultivate a new one that supports those goals.
02:18But this identity shift is not something you can just do. Right? Self destruction and transformation requires a very specific protocol known as omnimorphic embodiment.
02:29Omni meaning total, morph meaning transformation, total transformation of who you fundamentally are.
02:37Now this may disappoint some people but this isn't some sort of woo woo manifestation technique. What we're doing here is consolidating the relevant insights from the last hundred years of neuroscience, psychology, behavioral science and much more into a repeatable, reliable protocol for intentionally shifting identity to achieve certain desired outcomes.
03:05Now let me be very clear before we go into this protocol which is you will be radically changing the fabric of who you are.
03:14I'm giving you the bullets, I'm giving you the tools, use it at your own discretion in whatever direction you want. I'm not telling you where to shoot. That is the disclaimer.
03:24I'm now legally protected. I'm not a lawyer. The central thesis, the central aim of this protocol is very simple, to embody the version of you for whom your goal is inevitable.
03:39The wording there is crucial. It's a version of you right now for whom the goal would be unavoidable. It would be improbable for you not to achieve it and we approach that frame across the six and that is six.
03:52Six components or dimensions that create yourself or identity. The first is emotion, then action, thought, environment, attention, and appraisal.
04:04These six are interconnected into this web that create your identity in a very interesting and fascinating way in which we'll zoom in on later, but the crucial point here is omnimorphic, is total transformation of each and every six of these components all together all at once because if you neglect any they will come back to bite you which explains why most people snap back to their old life like an elastic band.
04:30And so we'll go through each individual components and how to take control of them and align them with your goals, and then we'll zoom out to see how they all connect with each other in this interesting system that creates your reality.
04:45The first component is emotion. Emotion at first principles refers to a brief subjective feeling paired with a characteristic bodily sensation.
04:59Now the big insight that I've come to this year and it was a tough pill for me to swallow, the brutal truth to accept was that emotion isn't something you're just subjected to.
05:13It is a state that you're constantly engineering whether you realize it or not. Most people believe that emotion is like the weather.
05:21If it's raining, it's raining, there's nothing I can do about that. If it's sunny, great. And they think their emotions are just happening to them.
05:29They're like a paper airplane in a storm and wherever that airplane goes they're along for the ride, there's nothing they can do about it, but this fundamentally isn't the case and this is a belief that I had to change which is you can take radical responsibility for your emotions because you are engineering them whether you realize it or not and you are engineering and modulating your emotions through two specific levers.
05:54The first is focus and the second is physiology. And so let's dive through both and I'll show you how to modulate your emotions by using these levers. Focus refers to what you direct your attention toward right?
06:12We have consciousness and that is what your that is the component of reality which your attention has landed on. And so we can modulate emotion by modulating focus specifically both internally and externally.
06:30Right? So you're always focusing on something internally, the thoughts that are arising in this passing moment, what you're replaying, simulating, fantasizing, ruminating, catastrophizing, and everything in between.
06:47The different scenarios which you're running through on your mind to a large degree are determining how you feel. The thoughts you think and the emotions you feel are inextricably linked in this this self reinforcing loop.
07:01What you focus on within your mind I. E. What you think about is to a large degree going to determine how you feel.
07:09Now you have the ability to engineer your thoughts, you also have the ability to choose which thoughts you entertain with and which thoughts you just let pass.
07:18Using those two capabilities, those two unlocks, you can choose which thoughts influence your emotions through modulating your internal focus you can modulate how you feel.
07:32The second dimension of focus is external. This is everything that's going on outside of your mind. Well, nothing is really going on outside your mind this is all mind but you know what I mean.
07:44What you point your senses at and what you act on. So this is in the realm of action but also just what you're observing and what you're paying attention to in your environment.
07:54You know we'll explore this later with the fifth component attention but we absorb 50,000,000 bits of sensory data every single second and yet out of that 50,000,000 we are only consciously sorry it's 11,000,000 I'm getting mixed because it's out of those 11,000,000 bits we are only conscious consciously aware of 50 and so you are consciously aware of about 0.0001% of your total sensory data that is coming in.
08:25And so to a large degree what you externally focus on is what you're experiencing, but that isn't what is actually going on.
08:34Two people can go through the exact same circumstance and walk away with entirely different conclusions depending on what those 50 bits landed on. And so what you want to do is modulate your focus externally on the things that serve you rather than them serving whatever negative emotional spiral you're in.
08:54We can look into this more in the fifth component when it comes to modulating attention, but it's worthwhile knowing that partially your emotions are an emergent property of what you're focusing on.
09:07They really are if you break them down at first principles, emotions are your body's reaction to what is going on in your mind and in reality at large. So that's the first lever we have.
09:18The second is physiology. Your that's wrong. Your body leads your mind.
09:24Your mind does not lead your body. Your body leads your mind. Now this is the cutting edge of neuroscience on emotions.
09:34There's a neuroscientist called Lisa Feldman Barrett who's done a lot of studies on this which is the relationship between your mind, body, and your emotions. We're not gonna get into the technical nitty gritty here because it's actually not too relevant to the the protocol, but the headline is your body budget, your energy levels, how you feel in your body to a large degree determines your emotional state and there's this bidirectional relationship which is constantly feeding back and forth.
10:04This is all under the the guise of predictive processing in neuroscience. Super interesting stuff if you want to look into it I highly suggest you look at Lisa Feldman Barrett. Very knowledgeable.
10:15And so the the body leads the mind in the way that you feel. If you energize the body the mind will follow. And so we can energize or we can change our physiology which is the state of our physical body through different protocols you know exercise, breath work, Wim Hof, cyclic hyperventilation, different types of breath work can change your your nervous system from parasympathetic to sympathetic.
10:41If you're apathetic you wanna psych yourself up, you may wanna do some hyperventilation. If you're feeling nervous you may want to calm down a little bit and that's a different breath work protocols.
10:52There's different stuff for different emotional states. You've got cold exposure that doesn't just mean cold plunging that could be splashing water on directly onto your face, uh, activates the the dive reflex which is again going to activate a parasympathetic state, spike norepinephrine or adrenaline.
11:10You can change your physiology again through posture. Something as basic as making yourself sit sitting with a better posture or doing certain physical movements change your emotional state.
11:24There's a lot of scientific evidence around this. Just movement in general, going for a walk, being outdoors is calming.
11:31And so depending on the emotional state that you have, we have two levers that we can use to modulate and change it. What we focus on internally, externally, and what we do with our physiology.
11:44And so taking the frame of I am responsible for my emotions is one of the most liberating things you can do Because if you do not take responsibility for your emotions, you're not in control of them. Responsibility is the prerequisite of control.
11:59And so taking responsibility and at least trying your best to try modulate your emotions when they're not serving your goals with focus, with physiology is incredibly liberating.
12:10Now the frame in which you approach this is very simple. You ask yourself the question, what would the version of me for whom my goal is inevitable feel today?
12:22What emotional states would they be running through in this specific context or this event or this action or this opportunity? Right? This all comes back to this inevitable self.
12:32This question will be asked on every single component of the dimensions of self because ultimately that is the version of you who achieves the goal. And so what does that individual feel?
12:46Understand those emotional states and then modulate these inputs what you're focusing on in your mind corresponding thoughts, confident thoughts to breed a confident emotion for example. Change your physiology. Energy you know, energize your body and the mind will follow.
13:02You can use these tools to modulate your emotional state which is an incredibly powerful tool, but you need to have this belief that you can change the way you feel.
13:13Do not just think it's like weather. You are in control of it whether you realize it or not. You can engineer it and so engineer the inputs that produce those emotional states that you recognize in that inevitable identity and that is the first component that you need to change.
13:30Ultimately if you don't change the way you feel not much else is really going to change because to a large degree how you feel determines what you do, what you think, and all the rest of it. As I said they're interconnected we'll get into that.
13:42The second component is action. Now action at first principles refers to any purposeful or automatic output that produces a change in external reality no matter how small. Now there's a ongoing fierce debate on the role that action plays in the achievement of your goals.
14:02We can simplify this into two camps. You have a manifestation camp who just to to quite a large extent, guess, dismiss the impact that action has in terms of achieving your goals.
14:19Some people will go as far to say that action is relevant and you can sort of operate on the quantum field or the spiritual plane or the mental plane or some variation of this. It will differ depending on what guru you're listening to and what esoteric framing they put on it. As you can probably tell I'm not too keen on that philosophy.
14:37And then you have the other camp which are kind of like a hustle bro or these like productivity gurus who are super focused on action and will neglect any other aspect beyond that. These two camps have fallen into the tribalistic trap. They're they're lost in binary thinking.
14:54Ultimately the nuance is this, action is the only way we can interact with the world around us and we can make change. I don't care how good of a manifesto you are.
15:04If I put you in a dark cave and you're not allowed to leave that cave, don't care how good you are at changing your frequency, your vibration, or visualizations, or your affirmations, you're not changing anything outside of that cave.
15:17And anyone who tries to convince you that you are and explaining that through some sort of quantum method or spiritual esoteric you have to ask yourself why is it being framed in this really complicated convoluted way when it could all just be explained through psychology and neuroscience?
15:34That's a question you need to ask these individuals. But also okay action is the only way we interact with the world around us and make change but it also doesn't happen in isolation.
15:45It's not the only thing going on and so focusing on it entirely which is what these productivity bros are doing is a mistake. You see most people know what they need to do they just don't do enough of it because they are not in in control of their emotions, their thoughts, the other components which create their actions, their beliefs, their identity.
16:06And so you know if action were just something you could just do, well then people would do it. It's not that simple.
16:13And so the nuance is that action doesn't happen in isolation. Yes. There are other things influencing it, but it's also incredibly important if you don't take action nothing will change.
16:23And so what we do is we change everything all at once. Why just change action alone when you need when you can change the things that influence it as well?
16:33And that's the philosophy of omnimorphism total transformation of everything. Now the frame in which we approach action is again very simple.
16:42You ask yourself the leading question, how would the version of me for whom my goal is inevitable behave in whatever context you're trying to discover behavior in? And you need to identify three things from this inevitable self, Their routines, their habits, and their inputs.
17:00Now the routine is the structure and rhythm of their day. Their morning routine, you know, how much they work on, you know, do they work on Sundays, these these like these different questions you need to ask yourself.
17:11You know, when are they going to the gym? What are they doing? Structure and routine is your best friend.
17:15Stick to it. Identify what your inevitable version of you does and stick and go and do that routine.
17:22Habits. Identify all of the unlocking habits.
17:26Not just the random habits that feel good like probably waking up at 5AM has got nothing to do with your goal. It doesn't have a direct impact.
17:34Figure out the habits which genuinely move the needle in your goal. The repeated behaviors that are executed without thought.
17:43Write down the habits that this individual has. And then crucially write down the inputs that the inevitable self executes on.
17:53These are the needle moving actions that move you toward the outcome. You're gonna have one or two inputs and in a business context this is the thing that actually moves the cash.
18:02The first action you need to take typically it's gonna be sales or marketing related. The thing that actually moves the needle. Identify your inputs and spam them.
18:13Spam the inputs. You know the line from Humosey, do so much volume it would be unreasonable for you not to succeed.
18:20That is the perfect frame to approach this from. Do not neglect action. I don't care how much work you do with your thoughts or emotions if you do not change your actions nothing will change.
18:32You need to look at action as a vote. Right?
18:36We're undergoing this process of identity destruction and then creation, but to do this you need to look at and reframe action as a vote for the new or old identity.
18:50Every present moment that passes you are offered an opportunity to take action and you can either take action in alignment with the old self which means you're voting for it or you can take action in alignment with the new self which means you're also voting for it.
19:07You can cast a vote for one or the other. There is no other way. And so how do you know which self you're casting the vote for?
19:14It's very simple. The actions you take under comfort are most likely casting the vote for the old self and the actions taken under pain are casting votes for the new self and this is all in the context and pursuit of your goal.
19:27And so really the frame that you need to look at this is seeking discomfort. Discomfort meeting resistance and taking action anyway through the fear, the apathy, the anger, the guilt, the shame, the doubt, dread.
19:42Those are the growing pains. That is the actual signal that you are moving closer towards your identity.
19:49You're going through this process of metamorphosis and you are shifting, you're destroying the old self. Every vote is an arrow that you know a bullet that you can shoot at that old identity.
19:59It is the literal sensation of changing who you are and so you need to go out and seek that sensation of discomfort and vote for the new self.
20:10Action is incredibly important tool. You need to recognize it, it's important. Use every single present moment that you can to take relentless action and cast a vote for this new identity to destroy the old one.
20:25Now the third dimension of self is thought.
20:30Thought at first principles refers to the transient mental content. In visual, auditory, or abstract form.
20:38Now most people are lost in this unmitigated rushing river of mental noise and chatter.
20:47It's this churning of catastrophization, fantasization and daydreaming and and living in this simulation that's not real, this rushing river of thought and narrative.
21:01And the stats here are pretty potent and pretty sobering. The average person thinks 60 to 70,000 thoughts per day.
21:1090% of those thoughts are identical to the ones they had the day before.
21:15They're running the same narrative, the same scripts, the same patterns and therefore they achieve the same outcomes.
21:22Now out of those thoughts 60 to 70,000 that they're having they're having most of them lean completely negative and so it's this cycle of automatic negative thoughts that are running the exact you know throughout every single day of your life and most of them are the exact same. Now most people recognize these thoughts as themselves.
21:44They think that they are the thinker. That's who they are and therefore they follow it.
21:51They treat it as if it's part of them and therefore they act in alignment with that individual. But of course the thinker isn't who you are and we can debunk this very easily by doing a very simple thought experiment or try not to think experiment.
22:08I'm gonna ask you not to think of a certain thing and if you were truly the thinker behind your thoughts you'd be in perfect control of that. Do not think of a green apple.
22:20Don't think of a green apple right now. You see? What was that?
22:24I mean you're not in control of your thoughts. The thinking is a process of the mind in the same way beating is a process of the heart.
22:33It happens to you not from you and that's the crucial point you need to understand. And so we can break identification with thought but you can only do this when you observe your thoughts.
22:45You cannot be the thinker if you're both observing the thoughts at the same time and so we achieve this state of observation through a skill known as metacognition.
22:58Metacognition refers to the act of observing the activities of your mind and it's metacognition which creates separation from this rushing river of mental noise.
23:11Instead of being the thinker that is lost inside it and therefore being influenced by your thoughts, you are now standing on the riverbed or the riverbank and you're now watching your thoughts go past.
23:24And as you become the observer of your thoughts you create separation from them. There's this quote from Viktor Frankl between stimulus and response lies your power.
23:33It's your power to choose how you want to respond. When you're the thinker identified with your thoughts you don't have a choice. If you think something that's what's happening and that's that you know that's that's that's what you think and so you behave in alignment with that thought.
23:48But with metacognition you create separation from this rushing river and therefore you regain the ability to choose how you want to respond and the types of actions that you want to take, liberating your ability to create new outcomes, escape this loop of 90% of the same thoughts.
24:07And the process here is simple, so we've got a protocol we can run through here in terms of how to interrupt and replace your thoughts. And again, you need to ask yourself what would the version of me for whom the goal is inevitable, what would they think on a daily basis?
24:20How would they speak to themselves? And that's the way we wanna interrupt. So the first stage is interruption.
24:26You need to catch yourself in this automatic negative thought spiral the moment it occurs. Right? What you'll notice is how often you're distracted by your own thoughts and you'll get better and better at catching them the more metacognitive you are.
24:42And metacognition is something you train through Vipassana meditation. It's it's something I've spoken about at length in other lessons if you want to seek that out and learn a bit more about that.
24:53The second step is replacement. Now once you've interrupted the thought we do have the ability to conjure up unique thoughts.
25:01So we don't have the ability to control our thoughts, they're just coming at us, but we can add a couple of new thoughts into that river. And so you swap whatever negative catastrophization or visualization you are running for a positive version.
25:14This is not aimless sort of positive thinking. We go through a very specific protocol here. It's called WHOOP and this is from a scientist called Gabrielle Uttagen.
25:25I don't know if I mispronounced the name there, but she's done a lot of research on visualization and there's a really good insight here not exactly relevant to this but I think you should know which is anybody who's talking about visualizing the outcome assuming that you've already achieved the goal and feeling the goal as if it's already been achieved, there is very compelling scientific evidence to suggest that that sort of visualization of the outcome reduces your allostatic load which reduces your motivation to take action.
25:57And so that type of visualization alone is fairly ineffective. The type of visualization you want to follow follows the structure of wish, outcome, obstacle, plan.
26:10Okay. So the wish and outcome is visualizing the outcome and then you achieving it, but the crucial point here is you need to visualize the process, the actions that get you there, and you don't want to visualize it all going well and and picture everything going swimmingly because of course it won't.
26:29It's not going to be a walk in the park. And so the crucial point here is anticipating friction and based on that friction setting an implementation intention.
26:39An implementation intention is a fancy psychological word for if x happens then I will do y. If this thing that will probably go wrong, if it does go wrong, I will do this thing. And you visualize these intentions.
26:54You overcoming the adversity, the resistance, and you do this on a loop.
27:00You keep going through different bouts of adversity and this doesn't necessarily have to be a formal practice that you do every single day. You can just notice yourself getting lost in your own mind throughout the day and you interrupt it and you replace it with a form of positive visualization where you actually out you go through the outcome that you want, you create a positive expectation effect, a positive placebo effect, you you you but you don't just fantasize about it you actually visualize and picture the plan and something going wrong and overcoming it.
27:36That's the idea. And what we're doing here is killing the looping narrative that your old self is clinging onto and it's running these scripts on repeat in these patterns which are holding you back and you cultivate a new rehearsed narrative, the way that you think to yourself and at the very least you are not reacting to your old thoughts anymore in a way that controls your behaviors.
28:01Now that brings us on to the fourth component which is environment. At first principles your environment refers to external configuration of your social, physical, and digital cues that surround you and continually continuously feed evidence back into who you are.
28:20A cue in this context refers to a contextual trigger that prompts behavioral or psychological response.
28:30Mostly this is happening non consciously but behind the curtain of your conscious awareness. You need to understand your environment that you exist in, the physical, social, and digital environment that you operate in in a daily on a daily basis is a museum of your past.
28:47It is littered with cues that are constantly encoding an old outdated identity that no longer serves you.
28:57And so your old identity, doesn't matter how much behavior you try and change, is constantly encoding itself through your environment, through these hidden cues, and so you need to go through a process of destruction and cultivation.
29:13You know there's a scene from Fight Club and I guess this whole video is Fight Club Coded because they do talk about this idea of self destruction and transformation where he detonates his apartment. The first stage to changing as a man is destroying your apartment.
29:28Now I don't reckon recommend you detonate your apartment, but you do want to radically change your surroundings to a large degree destroying the cues that hold together your old self and cultivating new cues that support your new self.
29:43So through your social, physical, and digital environments ask yourself the question, what would the version of me for whom my goals are inevitable, what environment would they exist in?
29:56And social is the people, the friends, the family, circles, the types of relationships you have and most likely the version of you for whom your goal is inevitable, you're surrounding yourself around different people or at least you're exposing yourselves to new people for whom the the behaviors which you need to do are normalized and the minimum expectation.
30:19Physical environment this is simple. This is your where you're working, where you operate and it has to be conducive. It has to make the actions easy and obvious and these this is basically the whole book of Atomic Habits is engineering your physical environment.
30:33Next is your digital environment which to a large degree people spend most of their day on. You need to engineer your digital environment in a way that doesn't bring back all the old habits that represent your old self and cultivate new cues.
30:47Perhaps you put your phone on grayscale or you permanently do do not disturb or whatever you want to do to reinforce a new version of yourself that represents this inevitable identity. Ultimately, the reframe here is detonation.
31:02The as much change you can make as possible is the move.
31:07Right? Even if that change isn't necessarily relevant to adding new cues, just reorganize your environment in a very radical way. That is the best approach here because you just want to change things up because that forces your brain to move that that forces your brain to shift from system two which is this sort of automatic primal limbic system which is just operating on these patterns into system one which is more forebrain focused.
31:34You activate your PFC or prefrontal cortex and it forces you to think. When you change your environment it forces you to think about the environment and therefore the behaviors that you want to take instead of running on these automatic grooves and loops which you've programmed in. And so again operate from this question and spend a long time designing your environment your social, physical, and your digital environment.
32:00Do it once and it will serve you for the rest of your life because your identity is constantly being encoded in the background whether you realize it or not. And so that now brings us on to the fifth dimension of your identity which we need to shift to undergo this process of self destruction following the omnimorphic protocol and that is your attention.
32:26Attention is the gatekeeper of your experienced reality. Attention at first principles refers to awareness concentrated on a specific component of reality.
32:38Right. We have a reality as a whole and you have consciousness. You can look at your consciousness like the spotlight and wherever that spotlight lands on that is your attention.
32:48And so as I mentioned earlier, every single second you are unconsciously, your sensory channels are receiving about 11,000,000 bits of information every single second through your eyes, vision, hearing, everything altogether.
33:05And there's a part of your brain called the reticular activating system which I'm sure you've heard of before and that is what is selecting what and you actually notice. What actually reaches conscious awareness.
33:18Now what's so remarkable here is how radical the filtering actually is. Out of those 11,000,000 bits of information that you receive, you are only consciously aware of 50.
33:3250. You are experiencing maybe 0.0001% of the total sensory data that's coming in.
33:41You are experiencing a tiny sliver of what is actually going on in your reality. To a large degree, what you pay attention to is determining your subjective reality.
33:55Now of course, what you subjectively experience determines what you subjectively feel.
34:00Therefore what you think about, what you do, and then ultimately your results to a large degree. It is your attention that determines much of everything else that happens in your life through your RAS.
34:15And so the direction in which this filtering goes is incredibly important because if we're filtering out every single opportunity, if we're not noticing the opportunities to take action or if we're constantly filtering things the things that are going wrong or that represent our old life and that old identity, we're gonna struggle.
34:38And so we need to modulate your attention if you wanna stand any chance at changing your circumstances and your behavior. And we do this through questions. You see questions are this incredibly useful tool that we can use to modulate attention.
34:56Giving a tactically phrased question and having a question that already has presupposed conclusions within them forces your brain to search for the answer.
35:12This is very important because most people ask themselves questions that presuppose a negative Why does this always happen to me?
35:21What's wrong with me? Why can't I get this right? They're trying to find the answer for the mistake for something that's holding them back that represents that old self.
35:30But the moment you start asking yourself questions that presupposes change, that presupposes your ability to overcome adversity, you change your attention.
35:40Ask yourself the question, what would the version of me for whom this is inevitable be focused on right now? What would they be doing? How would they be feeling?
35:50What would they be thinking? Where is the best opportunity for action? You see this presupposes there is a best opportunity and so your brain forces the look function.
36:01Let me find that opportunity and you're going to find the best move on the chessboard by asking yourself these questions with tactical presuppositions. What am I grateful for that confirms this is working?
36:15What is the highest leverage move available to me today? Asking yourself these questions forces your filtering mechanism to go in a different direction and find information that gives you an answer to this question.
36:30Now this question is worded in a way that presupposes information that will support your current identity oh, sorry, your your desired or your new identity.
36:44And so what we're doing here is modulating attention by changing the questions that you ask yourself. Change the questions, you change the filter.
36:52So those 11 those 50 bits now shift into something that actually serves you rather than just running the same subjective reality which is keeping you chained to where you're currently at. The sixth and final dimension of self.
37:08I know we've been through a lot. This is dense, but I promise you this is all gonna interconnect in a very powerful way is appraisal. Appraisal at first principles refers to the automatic assignment of meaning to whatever attention has selected.
37:24There's this quote from Epictetus who is a very good stoic philosopher. I highly recommend his book. It is not what happens to you but how you react to it that matters.
37:36He said this over two thousand years ago and it still holds up today. Ultimately, things are things.
37:43Events are neutral and this may not immediately seem obvious, but hard does not exist in objective reality.
37:55Big does not exist. These describers, these adjectives that we add to reality are subjective.
38:03They originate from our own mind. Things are just things until you add interpretation to them, and appraisal is that layer of interpretation.
38:14You can look at appraisal like the active layer of your beliefs. Right?
38:19Your beliefs refer to held conclusions your mind holds as true. Appraisal are those conclusions in action.
38:28Appraisal is those the the meaning that you hold in your belief being moved into its active form. Right?
38:36So this is why two people can go through the exact same event and walk away with entirely different conclusions. You see this a lot with politics.
38:45This is the easiest way to see it. You watch a political debate and you look at the comments section, one person says another thing, the other the other person saw a completely different thing. The event itself is the same objectively.
38:57The subjective experience of it is different. Now most people are subjectively experiencing their old self's appraisal system based on their old self's beliefs.
39:08Rejection proves you're unworthy. Setback, uh, proves you'll never make it.
39:14Whereas, we need to modulate our appraisal in a way that rejection redirects you to the right path. Setback is data not a verdict.
39:21So this would be a big example for sales for example. People who look at sales rejection as sort of a blotch on their self worth versus someone who sees a sales rejection as data for their next call and as a positive rather than a negative.
39:36The same event, two entirely different appraisals of what that actually means. And so what we need to do is use cognition or thought to interrupt appraisal and this is the basis of CBT Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
39:53Now we don't need to do therapy to gain insights from this so let's quickly run through this. The first step is noticing. Appraisal usually comes with emotional charge.
40:03That's the signal of appraisal running. That that's your mind has assigned meaning to something and the emotion is the reaction to that meaning. And so just notice that your mind has appraised a certain situation and especially when you feel negative emotion that should be a punctate, that should be a clear indicator that you are running a negative appraisal and this should be interrupted.
40:27So the first stage is noticing. The second stage is pausing. The space between stimulus and response is where the work happens here.
40:35You pause before your response and in that pause you just ask yourself the question, what else could this mean? Pull from the inevitable self's frame.
40:46What would they interpret this event as? Look at different perspectives of viewing the situation, viewing the the event or the context or the opportunity.
40:57And just ask yourself, how else could I look at this? In what way is this thing good? Is a very powerful question.
41:03Again that presupposes good linking back to that fifth component attention. And so by going through this process which they use in CBT which is cognitive reappraisal, asking yourself what does this actually mean?
41:16Looking at it from a different angle, you kill the meaning that confirms the old self and you cultivate meanings that hold together a new one. You know, throughout every single component that we've gone through here, I'm talking about destroying and cultivation.
41:31Destroy the old self, self destruction, but identity can never it doesn't leave a vacuum.
41:37You're always gonna believe in something, and so at the same time you're destroying your your old actions, old environment, your old thoughts, your emotions, you need to cultivate something new that represents this inevitable identity, and that's the importance of approaching it from that frame throughout every single component.
41:55But now we've gone through the six dimensions that create a self. Right?
42:01The the emotions they feel, the actions they take, the thoughts they think, the environment in which they operate in, the attend what they focus on, the where their attention lands, and ultimately the appraisal, the meaning that they assign their reality determines who you are.
42:20That that that is your identity in action. And so these all interrelate into this self reinforcing loop.
42:28Now as I was walking through this, I'm sure you could hear me referencing different and other components and how they interrelate with each other, but these six dimensions are not six separate problems. They are nodes in one engine that work together. Every second of your life, you are producing this loop.
42:47There is a loop, this self reinforcing loop that is happening on autopilot every single day of your life. And so let me run you through this loop of how every node interacts with each other.
42:58So let's let's first start off with action which is what you actually do, the behavior. The actions you take determine the outcomes that you get. Right?
43:07We can agree on that. If I'm in a cave I'm not changing anything outside of that cave. I've got to leave the cave and take actions with my body to change external reality.
43:16Now the outcomes that you get serve as evidence for the type of person that you are. That evidence supports beliefs that you hold. Those beliefs hold together your identity.
43:27Right? Belief is the atomic structure of identity. You can look at identity like a brick wall.
43:32Beliefs are the bricks that hold together that wall. Now the beliefs that you hold to a large degree determine what you pay attention to, what's important to you, and what that means.
43:46Remember appraisal is the active layer of belief.
43:51Appraisal is just the meaning that you assign something and that meaning comes from the preconceived notions you had about it stored in your beliefs based on the evidence that you create.
44:03Now what you pay attention to and what that means to you to a large degree determines your emotions and your thoughts. How you think and how you feel.
44:13How you think and how you feel, you've got to ignore this this was a mistake, determines your actions. And then again your actions determine your outcomes which produces more evidence, reinforces the same beliefs, which creates the same attention and appraisal systems running the same automatic negative thoughts, running the same automatic negative emotions, which were reinforced the same automatic negative action.
44:37Now most individuals are running on this automatic loop every single second of their life and the beliefs that they already hold that form through childhood through random experiences are controlling every single aspect of their life and therefore their outcomes which is why you know the people who just try to change with their behavior you know they just try and intervene at the level of behavior get wiped out.
45:02Most people snap back like an elastic band. They don't create lasting change because the emotions and the thoughts and the attention and the appraisal and beliefs are still running in the background that eventually control their actions. The vast majority of the action you take is happening below the conscious curtain of awareness and so there's only so much you can do with conscious will.
45:24There's only so much discipline that you can allocate. This is the power of omnimorphic change. Now of course also on the other side of the coin if you just try and change your thoughts and emotions, your attention and appraisal, nothing will change because you're not changing your actions which create your outcomes.
45:39And so you cannot be binary here. You need to change everything all at once. If you neglect one of these nodes, they're gonna create a feedback system.
45:47Right? So if if we neglect our environment or what our outcomes for example, our outcomes are still going to reinforce our old self.
45:58It's going to act as feedback for our old identity. And so even if we get everything else right, there's a good chance that our environment pulls us back because there's such overwhelming data in that section of ourself.
46:11Our environment, it may seem like it's out there, it's all going on in here and the cues assigned to it is very much a large degree a part of who you are. By default, the loop is calibrated to one thing which is confirming who you are already, magnifying magnifying and maintaining the existing beliefs that you already have, creating the existing outcomes through the habits and the existing behaviors which you take.
46:38And so omnimorphic embodiment, it's all six simultaneously.
46:43This is what I call holistic change. No node is left untouched. The old self runs out of evidence.
46:50The system has no choice but to converge on new identity. What you're doing is providing such overwhelming evidence in such a short period of time that your old identity has no choice but to die.
47:04It just doesn't have any evidence. Nothing feeding it anymore. You can look at each component, each dimension as oxygen for an identity.
47:12It can either be feeding the fire of your old identity or the new one and so you it cannot be it cannot be either way.
47:21You you have to choose the old or the new and if you neglect one of them the fire of the old self is still gonna be burning bright which is why people fail to create lasting change. And that is where omnimorphic reality plugs into.
47:33It removes any failure point from the equation. It is this reliable simple but repeatable pro protocol you can follow to reliably shift your identity, fundamentally change who you are, and this change is happening all through the layer of belief.
47:53Now belief is not something we can just switch on and off like a light switch. I cannot just say I believe in some I cannot just say I believe that the sky is red when I know it's blue.
48:08Right? You cannot just change your beliefs in the same way you can change your thoughts or your emotions or your actions. And so we change our beliefs by changing the evidence of those beliefs.
48:20Right? We change our actions first. We change our thoughts and our emotions and what we pay attention to and what that means to us.
48:26We change these first and then the belief takes that feedback and there's new evidence that supports these new empowering beliefs.
48:36But the process of change is happening through belief. Your identity is just who you believe yourself to be, it's a construct. And so every revolution of the loop deposits evidence into your self-concept or your identity.
48:49That accumulated weight of evidence is what you experience as who you are. Who you are is just this cluster of random beliefs that you have. Your identity is not this permanent structure and we can explain this through the I think it's a parable or a fable of Theseus' ship.
49:05I'm not gonna explain the full story but there was this famous man called Theseus and he went on a big mission on this ship. And this ship was saved in ancient Greece for a very long time and the ship got very old.
49:18And so over time they had to replace the the wooden planks that made up this ship. But eventually they get they got to a point where the original ship was no more.
49:28Every single plank from that old ship had been replaced. And so by this point, is that still the same ship? All of the planks of wood are the exact same, but everything has been replaced over time.
49:40At what point does that become a new ship? Identity is the exact same. Each plank is just a reference or a belief.
49:48References are just the evidence which hold together certain beliefs. Change one belief at a time and the identity is shifting, it's dynamic, but there is no solid identity which you can touch. It's this dynamic moving cluster that is an emergent property of the beliefs that you hold about yourself.
50:07You see the etymology of identity or just the the origin of the word identity comes from the Latin idem meaning the same. Identity literally means the person you are being, the role that you are playing.
50:23You can think of identity like the character that you're just repeating. Identity is just who you repeat and the role that that is. And so what we're doing with omnomorphic embodiment is changing the person that we repeat.
50:37We are changing the planks of wood on this boat that creates your identity. And by changing all of the planks of wood, by changing the references and therefore the beliefs, we fundamentally change who you are.
50:49You change the entire boat and that's the process of destruction into creation. Replace every plank and nothing of the old ship remains, nothing to recognize.
50:59You haven't improved. Now this is the problem with self improvement optimization. Most people are trying to improve the old ship.
51:05They're trying to optimize the the self that is keeping them the same, which is why they see marginal gains, but nothing really exiting the comfort zone.
51:14They're not radically changing who they are, and so they're not radically changing what they get. Identity was never really a thing in the first place. It's not this solid thing that you can touch.
51:24It was an emergent property of every belief that held in place by every dimension of the self. Okay. So the the it's important to understand it.
51:33Belief creates your identity. Okay? Your identity is just a cluster of beliefs you hold about yourself.
51:40What we can call a self-concept. But your beliefs are formed through the dimensions of yourself.
51:47Those are the six things that we went through here because this is where your beliefs find evidence. What you think is evidence. What you do is evidence.
51:55How you feel is evidence. What you pay attention to is evidence. You get the idea.
51:59And so we can use these six dimensions of self that we ran through as nodes, as as tools that we can use to engineer evidence for a new identity. It's nuanced. I get there's a lot of density of information here, but this is the cutting edge of how you actually change who you are and therefore your results.
52:19And this could be related to business, making money, but you know anything in human endeavor. I mean this could be any goal health, wealth, relationships, you name it.
52:28You identify the version of you for whom that goal is inevitable and you engineer them across these six components of self. Now the big way that you approach this, the frame in which you need to approach this is the method. The method is a I'm I'm not an acting specialist, but it's essentially when you absorb yourself with your character behind the camera and out you know, when you're not behind the camera or when you're in front of the camera and when you're behind the camera.
52:58You act as this individual throughout your entire day or at least during the shoot. And there are some famous examples of this. Daniel Day Lewis in Daniel Plainview in the I think the movie is There Will Be Blood.
53:10Great movie. Famously, Heath Ledger playing the Joker lived as the character until it consumed him. Perhaps it probably killed him, many would argue.
53:19Jim Carrey playing Andy Kaufman refused to break set character on set. These people are method acting. They're absorbing themselves with the character, and still it just becomes a part of who they are.
53:31The crucial point here is you method act this inevitable identity. You identify who they are across these six components and you stick to that.
53:39Now at first it's going to feel alien. At first it will feel foreign, but remember identity is just the role that you're repeating.
53:47All that you're doing through omnimorphic embodiment is changing that role, changing the character that you're playing. And so after a long enough time the cost the identity was always a costume.
54:00The old one just felt like the skin. It's it's not permanent.
54:06And so by repeating something else for a long enough period of time, that can feel just as normal. And you just need to go through this transition period of it going from alien to normal, which all of these actors have famously done and to a large degree changed who they fundamentally are through this process of just absorbing yourself with this character, with this individual.
54:27Now this is a version of who you are. You can become intimately familiar with this individual.
54:34It's a version of who you are and in fact sometimes you are probably being this person when you are at your very best. What you wanna do is cultivate this as a minimum standard, as something you you know you won't drop below as a minimum tolerance and that's the person you become.
54:51You commit to it. You method act and you go no matter what.
54:56Now what you must understand is this is not as easy as just becoming a new person. That's an oversimplification because the old self will always fight back.
55:04The real war isn't becoming someone new, it's destroying the version of you that won't let you become someone new. Right? Your old self has something known as psychological immunity.
55:15It's the survival mechanism that the old self deploys the moment it senses an attempt to override it. Right? Every living organism on this planet has a survival bias.
55:27It biases survival or it wouldn't be around. It's an evolutionary trait.
55:31You need you need to bias survival, and your old self, your old identity, the beliefs that hold it together is no different. When it feels threatened it uses its defense mechanism and that defense mechanism is resistance.
55:46Resistance at first principles can be defined as emotional friction toward goal aligned action. The usual suspects are the same perhaps it's apathy, doubt, anxiety, fear, anger, sadness, guilt, shame, whatever it may be. People have different flavors of resistance, but it's all emotional in nature.
56:02Resistance is a phantom, a literal sensation of an old identity being threatened.
56:08Whenever you feel negative emotion, you know that you're sitting outside of your current comfort zone. Comfort zone is just what you deem is familiar, and so you know for a fact that your old self feels threatened and therefore you're going in the right direction.
56:22Remember we were talking about seeking discomfort in the second component that is action. Now as I've said previously in this lesson, hard does not exist in objective reality.
56:35The resistance that you feel, the obstacles that you feel are not going on out there. It's all going on within the mind. Hard is what the old self calls anything that doesn't confirm it, that threatens its existence.
56:47Right? The barbell isn't hard, it's not heavy, it just is what it is. There is no description.
56:52That that's all subjective. The old self is voting against it and you're experiencing that vote as difficulty. And so you're in a perpetual war with your old self.
57:02You need to destroy it. You see, most people are addicted to their old self. You know, the most addictive drug in the universe is not sold in a blacked out BMW by a sketchy man.
57:12No. The most addictive drug in the universe is your current self. You know, people are addicted to their to familiarity despite familiarity creating outcomes that they hate and they fear.
57:25That is the crucial point. It doesn't matter how much you hate the life. You are still addicted to the familiarity of it.
57:32And so the way that we overcome and destroy this old self is through four steps. Firstly, seek out the resistance.
57:40Resistance is a is an indicator that you're going in the right direction, that your old self is threatened and therefore when you take action through it it will degrade. Every action you take in the face of discomfort is a vote for that new self and therefore degrading the old self.
57:54They exist on a polarity. Seek out the resistance. Secondly feel gratitude for it.
58:00This is a reframe. This is a cognitive reframe following the the lessons from CBT Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. If we can cognitively reappraise what resistance means as something that is good, it's a green light, it's petrol for progress rather than something that holds you back, feel gratitude for it, it flips the entire equation on its head.
58:20Resistance now becomes something you want rather than something you avoid. The third is of course take action. Once you have found the resistance you feel gratitude and then you instantly beeline toward taking imperfect action.
58:34You move through it, you cast the vote for your new self. And then fourthly you sit in the pain.
58:41You need to become comfortable with discomfort. This is a really good skill to master.
58:47The new self is built in the space of discomfort.
58:54It's what the old self deemed as deemed as something that's a threat, and you need to identify those threats as opportunities and something that you can be comfortable with. Most people fear fear itself, and if you can become comfortable with the feeling of fear, with the feeling of doubt or anxiety or sadness or guilt and just be okay with it.
59:14Not necessarily love it, but just be comfortable with the feeling of discomfort. You become unstoppable.
59:21You become an antifragile system which is essentially what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. The resistance can't hurt you because you feel gruff you want it.
59:29You feel grateful for it. You flip the entire equation on its head. The old self weapon has now become your weapon to degrade and destroy it.
59:37That's the process of self destruction. Because all of these tools that we we named up here in terms of embodying the new self, this is offense, this is becoming the new version of us.
59:48It doesn't matter how good we are at becoming if the old self can just drag us back through that negative resistance. And so you need to be good at offense and defense, defending yourself against this resistance and taking action through it.
1:00:03And so there's two sides of the coin, self destruction and self creation. Killing and cultivation.
1:00:12It's always they exist on a polarity, the old self and the new self, and so you need to be doing both and that's the crucial point here. You need to approach every component, every dimension of the self from a pros from a perspective of where can I destroy the old?
1:00:28Where can I cultivate and grow the new? You know, this exists everywhere in nature. You cannot plant something new without unrooting the old, and that's the exact same process we're going through here.
1:00:41It's all about breaking the addiction to who you have been. Disarm the only weapon the old self has and it has no more influence over your outcomes and your behaviors.
1:00:55And that's the entire protocol. That is everything that you need to know about shifting your identity.
1:01:02It is your identity above all else which determines your outcomes. If you're not able to modulate it, you won't be in full control of your behaviors.
1:01:12Now this is a system that plugs in to my broader mindset system that you should definitely check out.
1:01:20I've got a full master class on discipline. It's a game changer and not many people have seen it so you can get a competitive advantage in on that one. I'll see you in there.
1:01:29Thanks for watching. Godspeed.
The Hook

The bait, then the rug-pull.

A Nietzsche quote about chaos and dancing stars is an unusual cold open for a wealth video — but the provocation lands: self-destruction precedes creation. In the 61 minutes that follow, Marcus Stadon does not talk about habits, systems, or hustle. He makes a case that the identity running your behavior right now is the only thing between you and the outcomes you want, and that changing it requires total obliteration of every dimension of the self — simultaneously.

Frameworks

Named ideas worth stealing.

02:23model

Omnimorphic Embodiment

  1. Emotion
  2. Action
  3. Thought
  4. Environment
  5. Attention
  6. Appraisal

Total simultaneous transformation of all six dimensions of self. Each dimension is both a lever to pull and a node in the identity loop. Neglect any one and it feeds the old self.

Steal forAny coaching or transformation offer where habit-based approaches have failed the client
25:45acronym

WHOOP Visualization

  1. Wish
  2. Outcome
  3. Obstacle
  4. Plan

From researcher Gabriele Oettingen. Visualize the goal, then specifically visualize the obstacles and your planned response. Outcome-only visualization reduces motivation by lowering allostatic load.

Steal forGoal-setting exercises, sales objection prep, any performance context requiring mental rehearsal of friction
43:00model

The Identity Loop

  1. Action
  2. Outcome
  3. Evidence
  4. Belief
  5. Attention/Appraisal
  6. Emotion/Thought
  7. back to Action

The self-reinforcing engine running on autopilot every second. Each node feeds the next. By default it confirms existing identity. Omnimorphic change hijacks all six nodes simultaneously.

Steal forExplaining why clients relapse; showing why piecemeal change fails; framing total-system interventions
57:58list

Resistance Protocol

  1. Seek the resistance
  2. Feel gratitude for it
  3. Take imperfect action
  4. Sit in the discomfort

Four-step protocol for overcoming psychological immunity. Resistance is reframed as confirmation of forward motion rather than a stop signal.

Steal forProcrastination coaching, any high-friction behavior-change context
CTA Breakdown

How they asked for the click.

VERBAL ASK
1:01:20next-video
“I've got a full master class on discipline. It's a game changer and not many people have seen it so you can get a competitive advantage on that one.”

Low-pressure, value-framed redirect. The description also links to a free PDF, an Instagram follow, and a related video. No product pitch anywhere in the video.

MENTIONED ON CAMERA
1:01:20linkDiscipline Masterclass (Marcus Stadon) ↗
00:10linkPDF from this lesson ↗
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Storyboard

Visual structure at a glance.

open
hookopen00:00
self-improvement trap
promiseself-improvement trap00:42
protocol intro
valueprotocol intro02:23
emotion lever
valueemotion lever04:21
action as vote
valueaction as vote13:43
thought protocol
valuethought protocol20:24
detonate environment
valuedetonate environment27:55
attention filter
valueattention filter32:11
appraisal
valueappraisal37:02
identity loop
valueidentity loop41:55
ship of theseus
valueship of theseus47:55
method acting
valuemethod acting52:37
resistance
valueresistance54:55
CTA
ctaCTA59:40
Frame Gallery

Visual moments.

open00:00self-improvement trap01:09Frame at 01:55 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)01:55Frame at 02:41 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)02:41protocol intro03:27Frame at 04:13 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)04:13
open00:00self-improvement trap01:09Frame at 01:55 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)01:55Frame at 02:41 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)02:41protocol intro03:27Frame at 04:13 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)04:13emotion lever04:59Frame at 05:46 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)05:46Frame at 06:32 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)06:32Frame at 07:18 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)07:18Frame at 08:04 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)08:04Frame at 08:50 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)08:50Frame at 09:36 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)09:36Frame at 10:22 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)10:22Frame at 11:08 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)11:08Frame at 11:55 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)11:55Frame at 12:41 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)12:41Frame at 13:27 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)13:27Frame at 14:13 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)14:13action as vote14:59Frame at 15:45 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)15:45Frame at 16:31 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)16:31Frame at 17:18 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)17:18Frame at 18:04 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)18:04Frame at 18:50 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)18:50Frame at 19:36 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)19:36Frame at 20:22 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)20:22Frame at 21:08 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)21:08Frame at 21:54 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)21:54thought protocol22:41Frame at 23:27 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)23:27Frame at 24:13 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)24:13Frame at 24:59 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)24:59Frame at 25:45 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)25:45Frame at 26:31 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)26:31Frame at 27:17 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)27:17Frame at 28:04 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)28:04Frame at 28:50 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)28:50Frame at 29:36 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)29:36detonate environment30:22Frame at 31:08 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)31:08Frame at 31:54 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)31:54Frame at 32:40 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)32:40Frame at 33:26 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)33:26attention filter34:13Frame at 34:59 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)34:59Frame at 35:45 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)35:45Frame at 36:31 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)36:31Frame at 37:17 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)37:17appraisal38:03Frame at 38:49 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)38:49Frame at 39:36 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)39:36Frame at 40:22 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)40:22Frame at 41:08 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)41:08Frame at 41:54 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)41:54Frame at 42:40 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)42:40Frame at 43:26 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)43:26Frame at 44:12 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)44:12Frame at 44:59 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)44:59identity loop45:45Frame at 46:31 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)46:31Frame at 47:17 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)47:17Frame at 48:03 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)48:03Frame at 48:49 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)48:49ship of theseus49:35Frame at 50:22 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)50:22Frame at 51:08 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)51:08Frame at 51:54 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)51:54Frame at 52:40 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)52:40method acting53:26Frame at 54:12 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)54:12Frame at 54:58 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)54:58Frame at 55:44 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)55:44Frame at 56:31 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)56:31resistance57:17Frame at 58:03 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)58:03Frame at 58:49 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)58:49Frame at 59:35 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)59:35Frame at 60:21 from "Self Destruction" is how you actually get rich (but it's brutal)60:21CTA61:07
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