RED PILL OR BLUE PILL – jailbreak your mind with the 5Bs
If you don't find your purpose
– you will be given one.
If you don't create your workflow
– you will be assigned one.
If you don't build your own business
– you will become a replaceable cog in somebody else's.
People are conditioned to adopt to society's game – to ease life's uncertainties.
To opt out of anything that doesn't make sense to you anymore AND lead a good life, you need cashflow, which in most cases is the result of your workflow, which is shaped by your mindset or mindflow. Truth is: these 3 pillars are incredibly powerful because they massively impact what kind of life you live and what your future will look like.
If you aren't happy with your status quo and where your life is going, now is the time to jailbreak your mind, stop playing someone else's game, set up your workflow and start building your own thing.
In this blogpost we will jailbreak your mind plus I will give you the 5Bs that changed my life.
To build a better life, you first need to understand what got you here
Most people are marching towards goals that were given to them: go to school, get good grades, go to university, get a job, where it get's even better: start as a Junior Consultant, become a Consultant, raise to Senior Consultant, get promoted to Principal Director, Associate Director, Director ... you get their game plan. And if the company is growing fast because people spend all their midnight oil? You just make up some more intermediate job titles, right?
If you haven't found your purpose yet, it might be tempting to just keep yourself busy climbing this arbitrary ladder – or is it a hamster wheel? – because each level promises a bit more salary, a slightly bigger car, a few more shares... awesome stuff! 😐
However, lacking clear purpose and workflow, your life may gradually decline, accelerating into chaos, burdened by responsibilities and work that bring no joy–transforming you into someone you no longer recognise nor respect.
Routines are comfortable. And the mind craves order. A solid workflow allows you to focus your attention. If frequently repeated, "muscle memory" kicks in and makes your action seamless. Flying on "autopilot" towards your dream, is a great thing. But for many, this "autopilot" is likely to be the very reason why working your job may suck, but not enough to make you quit and pursue something meaningful like building your own business.
Not only in the Matrix: Life is a challenge and our choices come with consequences. If you are a professional gamer, there's nothing wrong with staring at the screen most of the day, even though it's probably subtracting from other areas of your life. Or if you are an athlete, you probably follow a certain diet and say no to junk food, smoking and excessive alcohol to perform better.
Certain people value certain things based on where they center their life, focus their attention, build their identity, and what they want for their future. Choice is personal and should be respected.
Don't limit your existence by going to work for the best part of your life, paying for all sorts of things and hoping you get back enough so you can retire decently one day. "Getting back enough" seems wishful thinking if you are born post-1980, in a world with already overstretched institutions, rising tensions and AI just getting started.
Are we doomed?
I am an optimist by default, but when you don't have clarity on what's your goal and how to achieve it, it can feel overwhelming and depressing, especially if you're already exhausted and feel you can't trust anything these days.
Maybe you are surrounded by "Pessimism Aversion", something I recently came across in the book "The Coming Wave-Al, Power and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilemma" by DeepMind's Co-Founder Mustafa Suleyman, where he defines Pessimism Aversion as
"The tendency for people, particularly elites, to ignore, downplay, or reject narratives they see as overly negative."
The implications of AI on conventional employment come to mind.
Or, if we don't develop the necessary skills for future challenges, our minds can become dysfunctional and messy – in a state of entropy – similar to how old buildings deteriorate without proper maintenance.
Good thing is that you can undo or reverse this entropy or messiness by setting your goals consciously, creating a path to achieve your dreams and focusing your actions on things you can control. These actions include daily self-education and practice and over time you start seeing opportunities instead of problems all around you.
What's important:
You need a game plan, YOUR game plan. There isn't any other way, because if you don't have one, society and your employer do, and they've been planning our lives for centuries. If you don't set your OWN goals and acquire the skills necessary to take on the challenge, your destiny will be handled by others. And can you blame them if your future well-being isn't their priority nor concern?
This is what you can do:
Against this backdrop, let's finally dive into the domains of a meaningful life and true wealth, which I call the 5Bs. This is how you unf*ck your life and fight entropy. This is how you flip the script to your advantage and get your life back.
Becoming jacked in these 5Bs and creating your daily actions around them– is key to the good life. The 5Bs for True Wealth are:
You need to continuously and consciously build these 5 foundations, which are interconnected and define your wealth and well-being. (Note that the term wealth stems from the old-english word for well-being.)
Take baby-steps, 1% improvements on each foundation to create remarkable results in all domains of your life. If you want to go deeper on the power of 1% improvements, I recommend you check out, "Atomic Habits" by James Clear.
The 5Bs are critical levers to steer your own happiness and – at the same time – represent enduring opportunities to offer solutions to humanity's most pressing problems, hereby not only being eternal markets but also very profitable ones.
And this is great for the creator economy, where you and me can build the best solutions to personal problems. And then sell our solutions to people facing similar problems to help them save time and progress quicker. Some critics fail to recognise the importance of making money from selling your solutions, hereby overseeing that paying for a service empowers – especially smaller – creators by giving them the very means to invest themselves in time-saving solutions provided by others. This cycle, boosts the quality of life for all involved, creating mutual benefits – and who wouldn't appreciate a win-win?
By adopting a daily habit for each domain of your life, success becomes inevitable. So if you aren't building your 5Bs every single day, what the hell are you doing?!
Since you know the answer, I won't bother with any specific habit formation approach here. (Though we might do a course at some point...) I also started One-to-One Coaching Sessions for those of you who want to go deeper in the topics we discuss here or for people who struggle with implementing the stuff I show on our YouTube Channel.
The only way to make your new habits sustainable and seamless is to align your daily actions with your future goals.
The challenges that frame your current perspective determine your daily actions and future outcome. The first step to change your life is to become brutally aware of what currently does not work.
What is the worst case scenario if you continue with the same mental, physical, relational, intellectual and financial actions – or inactions?
Then use these answers to lay down the foundations for your vision and start executing towards your dream future.