From Zero to $1M: The Mental Architecture of Wealth

How I went from 0 savings at 36 to building a systematic wealth machine in 16 months - and the principles that will make my wealth inevitable

Sep 07, 2025

16 months ago, I had zero savings and zero dollars in investments. I heard that people invest, but I didn't have any kind of conceptual knowledge and didn't understand what needs to be done to build a wealth engine. Today, I am doing the math, and I can't believe the numbers myself. I didn't think this level of progress was possible.

At 36 years old, I had a net worth of $0. Zero portfolio. Zero understanding of systematic wealth building. I had some cash just because I was progressively increasing my income, but my relationship with wealth was still purely reactive - I was getting a paycheque from my corporate job, but all of it was mostly spent on my lifestyle - restaurant food, travelling, paying rent, car and stuff like that.

Before we dive in, I want to emphasize that I'm not some kind of financial guru. I'm not here to tell you how to grow your financial intelligence; all I'm doing here is just documenting my own journey. I'm a practitioner first and foremost. I am just another millennial learning how to figure it out, but my results signal to me that some of my mental models are working, so this is my way to organize and capture them.

Hopefully, it will help someone who is a little bit earlier on the path. For the most part, I am writing for the version of me 3-5 years ago; I am writing for my future children. I'm also writing this with full awareness that my future self in 3-5 years is way more competent and would probably read this with laughter. But that's okay. That future me would not exist without the work of the current me. That's what evolution is about.

As I continue my journey, I want to be able to look back at these reflections on what I've written before. It's also going to create a trail for people after me to follow and learn something useful for their lives. Maybe it will be you who can benefit from this.

This article is not a teaching moment. This is documentation of a mind upgrading itself in real time. I'm sharing the thinking system I wish someone had explained to me at 25 or earlier, when low financial intelligence around money kept me broke despite increasing income.

If you recognize yourself in where I started, this set of principles might change your trajectory, too.

1. Optimize for Income

In 2019, I was living in South Korea, making roughly $30,000 annually working as an English teacher. Rent was $500, the rest $2,500-3,000 went to... nothing systematic. Playing, consuming, living - existing without intention to build wealth, without thoughts of tomorrow.

This is my timeline in the next 5 years:

2019: Immigration. Moved to Canada, first job at nonprofit - $50K CAD
2020: 111 days of job hunting, then joined Caseware at $55K (I still remember that negotiating that 5k more felt surreal)
6 months in: Immediate correction to $65K (proved exceptional performance quickly)
Year 2: Promoted to Senior Talent Partner - $65K to $95K (applied leverage)
Year 3: Promoted to Principal - $95K to $115K
Year 4: Minimal raise to $119K (3% annual raise - the clear signal that I hit my ceiling)
May 2025: Exited to Right Hand as Principal - uncapped income ceiling

The Core Delusion during this first phase of development: I thought income progression equalled wealth building. I was optimizing for salary increases while completely ignoring systematic capital deployment. And to be fair, someone would say there’s not much to deploy when you are at 50k in Toronto. Fair enough. And my life would not have been the same if I hadn’t created other income sources. Hence, the principle: optimize for income, optimize the mindset.

My mental models were:

Enjoy your life because you don’t know what will happen tomorrow
I don’t have enough extra cash to invest; I will invest when I have "extra" money
Investing is very complex and hard to understand
Investing requires very complex strategies and constant optimization

The gap between intellectual understanding and systematic execution was enormous. I just couldn't see it from the inside.

This mindset was a pile of BS. I am glad I met people who showed me the opposite:

The power of compounding interest (money makes money just by sitting there if allocated properly)
Even 100$ saved and invested will make a difference in 30 years, it will be $574.35 BUT (the more money you have, the more the snowballing effect - every investment makes your nest egg compound and grow faster)
Investing is simple (literally done in 5 clicks on the app)
Investing is boring (the strategy that I follow is literally allocating the money, and forgetting about it for 30 years). Some of the best financial minds follow this strategy, e.g. Morgan Housel (side-note: read all his books)

So this is principle 1. Focus on doing things that will increase your earning capability. How? First, upgrade your mental operating system.

2. Upgrade the Mind OS

I remember clearly that it was just one single psychological block that was sitting in my head that prevented me from progressing on my money journey. The opportunity cost of that last block was probably enormous, because I was already making decent money for some time, but I did nothing with it - just spent it.

Here is the bug in the program:

I have had that ethos that I'm a spiritual being and I'm a spirituality coach, non-duality coach, metacognition coach (I didn't even have the word metacognition in my vocabulary at that time, but I knew that's what I wanted to do). I wanted to help other people to walk that path of consciousness evolution.

I want to help people become more spiritual, but money? No - money has all the wrong energy. Money is low frequency. Money obsession means that you're stuck in materialism and consumerism, and you want to prey on those who come seeking spiritual guidance. How are you different from all the fake gurus out there who start cults, monetizing their following?

This is the beauty and the downside of an intelligent mind. It creates a web of bullshit that sounds smart and convincing.

I was stuck in this belief all my life, basically. Definitely from the moment I started doing inner work myself.

Coming from a family where we never talked about money, and no one taught me how to think about money or gave me any foundation of financial intelligence, also didn’t help.

Everything I knew about money was from different scraps and bits and pieces of information collected from everyone - friends, mass media, some YouTube videos, etc.

And to be honest, never in my life have I had this hunger for building wealth - all I wanted was to grow spiritually. Little did I know at that time that the latter would actually become the very core of all the skills the world would be willing to pay me for.

A few months into my new corporate career, and I knew it - you're not going to get too far in life with a corporate job and a corporate salary. It doesn’t matter how much value you create - you are chained to a fixed rate. Work hard all you want - the hour of your life still costs the same. This is a broken game.

Naval Ravikant shares a great mental model here: set an aspirational hourly rate. 500$ / hour, 5000$ / hour, whatever. If the number seems crazy, you are probably on the right track.

Why?

Here is why:

If you don't know the value of one hour of your life, then the world is going to tell you, and you are going to believe it.

That's exactly what's happening within the framework of a corporate job. You're subscribing to the construct that one hour of your life equals XYZ dollars. For you to live this lie and sell your life like this, you need to give your permission to be used in this way by the corporation. You have to be complicit.

The truth is:

If someone's paying you for your skill, it means the free market will pay as well.

Go to the free market and confirm it for yourself. Your experience dealing with the free market will be the validation of two things:

The value that you can create
The value you're able to negotiate

In the process of that validation, you will learn that these two are very different things. You will have to deploy all the skills you have: relationship-building skills, trust-building skills, negotiation, persuasion, resilience, grit - these skills will directly reflect in the numbers you will see on the paycheque you get.

Nassim Taleb writes:

"The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates and a monthly salary”.

You gotta kill your addictions. You have to find those bugs in your program and destroy them.

Ultimately, what killed the bug in my program was the pursuit of excellence.

I wanted to be better at my craft. I wanted to be better at business. So I've invested in a coaching program, which at that time seemed very expensive. I've thrown thousands of dollars at it, but it was worth it.

Side-note: If anything I've learned from all my coaching investments is that coaching always pays for itself 10-1000x. Sometimes the return on investment materializes immediately.

Honestly, looking back at the program, I cannot even remember what I've learned in it (probably a lot of puzzle pieces that I have collected), but that one thing, that one line of code, unlocked the flow of money for me.

Funny enough, it was just a question that the head coach asked me in one of his first messages on LinkedIn to me, even before I paid and engaged in the program.

After I had given him some context, he simply asked me one question:

"So you think somehow that making money is not spiritual?"

And that was it. A seed of doubt that my way of thinking is flawed. That was enough.

That was before ChatGPT. Now we have this beautiful AI machine that can be used for your mind QA, to find and kill those bugs. But at that time… At that time I didn't fully realize that my old belief had cracked.

By the end of the program, I fully embodied and integrated the opposite belief - money can be a spiritual practice.

The whole belief system has evolved. I understand now that if I have more money, I can serve more people, I have more freedom with my time, and I can build, using my money, more scalable knowledge systems that ultimately can help someone out there who needs it. And if you have money, you can also invest in your own spirituality - invest in things that would help you expand your consciousness and consequently your capacity to serve others.

The bug was killed. The new code emerged:

Becoming rich is the ultimate form of service.
To humanity, to yourself, to those you love the most.

Money doesn't have a + or - sign in front of it. It's not negative or positive. It's neutral. Money is energy. Money is fuel. Money is a lens that reveals your true inner self. Wealth makes a wicked man more wicked. Virtuous men more virtuous. Money it a litmus test - it simply reveals your true nature through amplification of who you really are.

“Money is only a tool.
It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.”
~ Ayn Rand

As I'm saying this right now, I feel the resonance. Saying all this feels very natural to me. But I remember the time when it wasn’t. Errors in the Mind OS create ineffective execution. Ineffective execution leads to poor life results.

Mental upgrade changed the game forever, because money started to flow. And what I actually confirmed through experience is that my mind was very capable in the art of making money. It was only held back, choking on the leash of that silly limiting belief hiding in plain sight. But finally, the mind was set free. And it started creating results.

I scaled my coaching, and 4 months ago, I jumped into the opportunity that is fully aligned with my values of autonomy, sovereignty, freedom, and independent wealth creation. Right now, I'm able to earn through what appears to be a high-value skill in the future economy - the ability to read people’s minds and co-create their reality.

What is it inside your mind that you don’t see that is holding you back?

3. Design your Inner Circle

If you want to progress in life, you have to inject yourself in the right ecosystem. I can write the whole article about that alone.

How do you define what is the right ecosystem (company) for yourself
What you need to be looking for in your leader / mentor / coach
How to select opportunities
How to evaluate opportunities
How to design your decision-making frameworks

Ultimately, your ability to discern these things on your own is just a function of knowing yourself and your personal deep meditation on the following questions:

What is that that I want to do with my life?
What is a life well lived?
What are my deepest fears?
What is the story I want to have lived before I arrive at my last night? Why?
What's my vision? What are my core values? How am I going to get there?
What kind of reality am I creating for myself and those I love right now?
What is the Future Me I am currently optimizing for?

When it comes to hard decisions in life, instincts don't lie, so listen to your gut.

Unfortunately, that's precisely the problem so many people are experiencing - the problem that I solve as a non-duality coach.

As a human progresses through life, the Human Mind becomes that monstrosity - a never-shutting-up, constantly chattering machine that blocks all the inner wisdom, all access to deeper intuition. White noise.

I am on a mission to help people learn how to tame and quiet their minds and, as a result, to discover that their inner wisdom and intuition have always been there, and they can be used in creating meaningful career transformations and desired reality.

To progress in your understanding, you can find the right tribe.
The tribe can also be built.

Here's this principle applied in talent acquisition.

When you hire the right person, you don’t need to manage them. Management becomes guidance, coaching, and direction-setting; not hand-holding. True A-players are self-directed in their growth and training. They may officially work 9 to 5, but the ones who excel will naturally push beyond those hours, working hard to sharpen their craft before or after. That’s what you’re really looking for: the ultimate craftsman. Someone who is obsessed with the mastery of their domain. That obsession makes them unstoppable.

We can invert this principle and apply it to thinking about the managers as well.

This is precisely what you're looking for - you're looking for a craftsman. A person who is obsessed with becoming the best in class at their craft, however now, their definition of craft, their professional ethos is constructed around the notion of growing other humans.

Apply the same TA principle for your Inner Circle: whenever you select your leader (mentor / coach / friend / spouse / partner, etc), you are hiring them for your life.

You are acquiring talent that would help you to change yourself and progress in the game.
You're building your Personal Board of Advisors. And you are the CEO / Chief Talent Officer of your Life.

To be aligned with people on values, you need to have clarity on your values. To be aligned philosophically is to find people who see the world through the same prism.

The person you are hiring to be your leader in life needs to be open-minded enough to listen to you, but direct and kind. Share feedback for growth, never to put you down. Be a better craftsman than you, ideally. Most importantly, they need to be personally invested in your life, not just as a company representative, but as a human, because they see that life and work are not two but one, and nurturing them in you simultaneously will bring the desired performance and business results.

Once you're in the company, everything is simple. The main principle here:

Understand what is their definition of Success. Help them attain it.

Their job as a manager is to help you succeed. Your job as an employee is the same - it is to make your leader get whatever they want for themselves and their loved ones. They, just like you, protect what is important for them through their job.

So ask yourself a question of how you can help them get what they want, and then reverse-engineer it into your personal systems that would lead to their success.

Example: In the talent game, the goal for my manager is to build a highly effective talent acquisition engine that will acquire the highest-quality talent possible as cheap as possible, as fast as possible, as diverse as possible. That's it. That's a function for any kind of recruitment system within the business.

And that's what I’ve had to become for my leader.

I was that talent acquisition system that gave an output of a team of recruiters while still being a single human. My personal best was 14 closed roles in one month - not some junior folks but Directors, Leadership, Principals - hires critical to the business. To create value that I was creating for the business, you need a team of 3-4 people. So when the time came to ask for money, it was easy for me to ask him, and for him to bring my ask to the execs. Everyone at the high table could clearly see the ROI that I create.

And that’s what you do as an employee. Think like a CEO, and look at yourself as if you were the hire for your business. Operating expenses have to make sense.

The business cares only about 3 things:

How much money you make for them
How much money you save for them
Have you improved the process in a meaningful way (which again translates into either cost efficiency, speed, or results on the bottom line).

Everything else is irrelevant. As long as you are a cog in the corporate machine - that’s all that matters.

So you have to know your numbers better than anyone else.

If you are a line on a spreadsheet, what are the numbers $ that are written next to your name?

You need to know what investment the business is making in you and what return on investment you are producing. That awareness creates your positioning. Positioning is what gets you those salary bumps.

4. Apply Leverage

One of the things I've learned from my manager is that he always said, "Always take the call." Meaning: Always explore the opportunity if the opportunity knocks on your door.

So I did. I explored an opportunity despite my commitment to my leader, community, and our work. And I am glad I did.

Fun fact you can learn from a recruiter: If you're going through an interview process that is 7 rounds long, you can be certain - they absolutely have no idea what they're doing.

Intelligently designed interview process lasts:

For a junior / intermediate role - 2 rounds
Senior - 3 rounds
Executive Level - 4 rounds + dinner.

That’s it. This whole thing can be executed in 1-2 weeks.

In my second year, I went through the process that took 7 rounds. After 3 initial calls, round 4 was in person. I came to the office, and when it was finally my turn to ask questions, I started grilling them.

One of the questions that I asked was: "Tell me - how do you make decisions here? What tells you that the business is reactive? What tells you the business is proactive? What tells you that you have a clear strategy to execute?"

The moment they start to fumble, you know it - there is no strategy, they are figuring things out on the fly. Which is ok if you're in an early-stage startup, but it's way more concerning if you're Series C or above.

This skill of pattern recognition in businesses will help you in your career. Map and understand all the different types of organizations out there:

What are the early-stage startups?
What are the series A, B, C, D, E, and F?
What are the Fortune 500s (large corporations)?
What are the nonprofits?
What are VCs and PEs?

You have to understand the beast before you enter its den. When we say “Culture,” what we really mean is “Process”. Whatever the culture they have in the org, will either shape you into what you need to become, or do the opposite - inhibit you.

It was clear at round 4 that it was not the right role, and maybe a sane person would have withdrawn a long time ago, but at a certain point, as I was going through these 7 rounds, it just became a challenge. All I was thinking was, "Will I be able to convert this offer?"

I think this is a useful mental model for people out there because, having coached so many, I know it is a very natural thing for people who go through career transitions to go into that inner chaos state and anxiety, and raising internal importance about the fork on their path, and how they need to make the biggest decision in their life about taking this job or staying put.

You don’t.

You don't need to make any decisions until you have an offer.

Until you have an official contract, it's all just talks - the dances of shadow demons in your head, ripples on the water.

What I encourage my clients to do is to hyper-focus on honing their ability to transform these conversations into offers.

It doesn't matter at the end of the day whether you're going to accept the job or not; opportunities come and go. You make a wrong move, you can fix it later; it is not the end of your life - you can always course-correct. But what is truly valuable is having that confidence in your sharp ability to convert opportunities into offers, and then closing deals. On your terms.

That’s Reality Creation 101. Generating excellent opportunities and converting them into excellent offers will require you to deploy all of your skills:

Negotiation
Communication
Persuasion
Influencing
People-reading skills
Judgment
Clarity
Confidence
Presence
Energy

These are the actual skills that are actually making all the difference in your career and help you to manifest the reality that you want.

Reality is created through communication.

In its essence, the reality creation is basically the manipulation and orchestration of other people.

“Manipulation” is not the right word (don’t scold me for that, let me explain). The right word is “Alignment”.

Alignment means: you make people do whatever you need them to do through aligning their incentives, points of view, philosophical angles, thought processes, and logic, in order to create a mutually beneficial and pleasant collective reality. (I am telling you, I just want everyone to have a good time :))

7 rounds of hopping through the hoops, aligning the humans in the other org, and an offer of $95,000 was materialized.

Timing is everything in our game, and because they took so long deliberating, they actually came very close to the promotion cycle at my company. The timing was perfect for me. I presented the new offer to my business. They matched it.

The word “leverage” too might sound a little manipulative. It’s not. It just comes from understanding another principle:

No one is interested in paying you more except you.

The current business is not incentivized to pay you more because they already have you. The new business, on the other hand, is incentivized to pay you more because they want to acquire your talent.

When you're making your current employer face the risk of losing your talent, you're introducing a new incentive for them that pushes the business to do the math and make a hiring decision. If hiring you at a new rate still makes business sense for them, then adjust the compensation.

You see, such quantum leaps of 46% salary bumps are definitely a function of your skill and the ROI you create. But more than anything, they are also a function of such factors as timing, positioning, trust equity, reputation, and the relationships you have in the business.

Be careful with playing the leverage card. If you're not willing to walk away, bluffing gets risky.

5. Master your Mind

I'm writing a separate article on pattern recognition. I want to build is actually a full signal decoding library that hiring teams (and not only) can leverage.

When I interview people, more than anything else, I am looking for the metacognition skill.

Metacognition is the rare ability of people to observe their own thinking process, the ability to iterate and improve their thinking systems without fully associating with their thinking mind.

That ability ultimately translates into the whole subset of skills, such as:

Growth mindset
Adaptability
Open-mindedness
Creativity
Patience
Emotional intelligence
Social intelligence
Adaptability
Intellectual Humility
Curiosity
Learning velocity

These are the actual skills that make someone top talent. And all these skills are really one Meta-Skill - the skill of self-awareness.

Your mind is a pattern recognition machine. When you don't have a lot of experience interviewing people, your mind doesn't have enough data points, so that’s why inexperienced hiring managers struggle to recognize what good looks like or can’t read what is hidden between the lines of a resume or LinkedIn profile.

With experience, once you pass a certain threshold, your mind is so trained that it produces almost an instant insight into someone's cognition. You see a lot in the first 60 seconds. How high-functioning they are. How humble they are. How authentic they are. How eloquent they are. How intelligent they are. A little more digging into the story, and you can tell if their mind was capable enough to will something truly remarkable into existence. Their life results are the true IQ test.

That ability to “see” people can be trained.

A lot of people ask me what is the difference is between talent acquisition work and coaching work. For me, it’s the same thing. I am coaching leaders and founders on how to hire better, and I am coaching talent on how to go through those scary life/career transitions from a place of wisdom and stillness.

Ultimately, both coaching work and recruitment work stem from one meta-skill: the ability to understand the human mind.

You have heard this before. They say: "Master yourself, and you will master the world."

Everyone knows this quote, but very few people actually grasp the wisdom that it truly encapsulates.

Mastering yourself means that you have absolute, full clarity into the nature of your own mind, into how this little chattering black box is functioning and operating.

Not only that, but because you have such a deep degree of insight into your own mind, you have developed the ability to reprogram your mind, rewire it to your needs, shaping and forming it to the life circumstances you are finding yourself in or whatever the life results you're trying to manifest, whatever your life goals may be.

If you fully and truly understand your own mind, you will be able to learn how to use this as a tool to program yourself and design your identity very intentionally. You will choose your thoughts. Thoughts will drive action. Action creates experience. Experience reinforces identity. It’s a loop.

By extension, you will excel at reality creation because once you understand your own mind, you will be able to understand the mind of absolutely every single human you meet in life.

You see, people are different only on the surface. They seem different to you when your pattern recognition system is untrained. But if you gain insight into human nature, you will see, under the surface level of psychology, culture, tradition, religion, language, and all external conditioning that we absorb from this world, all humans have the same operating principles.

Everyone battles impostor syndrome
Everyone struggles with confidence
Everyone is afraid of death
Everyone is optimizing for minimizing suffering and maximizing the best experience for themselves
Most people live in the illusions that the thinking mind is conjuring for them

Learn how to read your own mind, and you will read any human as an open book.

And if you can read them, you can understand them. If you can understand them, you can manipulate them. Again, I'm not using the word "manipulate" in some dark NLP snaky psychology way.

Manipulating is simply aligning - orchestrating and educating fellow humans through the art and science of communication in a way that is conducive to their growth, their well-being, their success. Optimizing for the synergy. Creating non-zero sum games. Everybody wins.

That’s it.

This is the essence of what they call manifestation.

Nothing mysterious or esoteric here.

The more you progress on the path of self-mastery, the more you will progress on that path of World Mastery.

Cutting through the bullshit of the world. Cutting through the bullshit of other humans who dwell in illusion. Cutting through your own bullshit.

Moving through the world calm, stoic, unfazed, unbothered. Increasingly immune to the contamination and impositions of this world. In full control of your inner reality - your states, your emotions, your thoughts, your attention.

This is the meta-principle of reality architecture.

Master your Mind.
And you will master the World.

6. Increase intensity to compress the time

I learned this principle when I was studying for my biophysics test during my PhD.

You’ve seen this before: diligent students (who apparently exist) study systematically every day during the whole semester. A lot of students are probably fucking around the whole semester just to cram everything in one night before the exam. Of course, I was the latter.

Naturally, I had other priorities than studying such a boring subject as biophysics, so I memorized the whole book in the last 4 days before the test. Nailed it. Was it sustainable? Absolutely not. It was a pain in the ass, and a week after the test, the knowledge absorbed was completely gone. I couldn't remember anything. But that experience taught me a better lesson:

Learning = Intensity x Time

Meaning: if you want to learn something faster and deeper, you either ramp intensity or you increase the time you invest in the activity.

The same principle can be applied in life. If you're acquiring new skills, all you have to do is max out your reps. Do you want to build the body of your dreams? Max your reps. Whatever your occupation is, you want to be the best in class, top 1%? Max your reps.

Taking recruitment again as an example, I'm being paid for my pattern recognition skills. Those skills take time to develop, but here is a simple math: if you are meeting 100 new people every week, for just 2 years, you would have 10,000+ data points within your Mind OS. And if those 10,000+ are dispersed across a variety of functions and roles, seeing patterns becomes inevitable.

The more people you meet, the sharper the system is. You can accumulate your data points through years of experience, or you can compress the time through sheer intensity. The only question is how much pain are you willing to sustain to save your lifetime?

When I first joined Caseware, I asked all my senior colleagues how much time it was going to take me to grow into a senior talent partner and a principal. They all told me that it usually takes 5-7 years to become a senior and 10-12 years to become a principal.

I remember the thought that pierced my brain at that moment: "This is insane, and I don't have this kind of time." So I've done this in 2 years. One to level up to Senior, one to Principal.

How?

By maxing out intensity.

Another principle at play here that I think is not so obvious to many: the principle of compounding and exponential growth.

If you work 10% harder or 10% longer every day, it may seem logical to predict that by the end of the year, you will have a 10% higher output.

Not true.

Your output will be higher. Way higher if done right.

My first year, I was working for my reputation, for my skill. I was grinding 3 hours every day on top of my 9-5. I would log in 6:00 a.m. in the morning, and by the time so-called normal people started their day at 9:00, I would have already done 3 hours of good work. Needless to say that it not only gives you the sense that you won the day, but you look at the scorecard after a year of grind and the scorecard doesn't lie. My output was 70% higher.

What is interesting, that the real compounding effects started to happen only in years 2 and 3. My first year, I worked for my reputation. In the following years, my reputation worked for me.

Every person within the business knew what I could deliver. The word spread. All hiring managers wanted to work with me. They knew that Chengeer gets shit done, and they will get high-quality, diverse, intelligent talent at a very high speed.

I'm sharing this with you not because I enjoy watching my ego beating its little happy ego drum. I'm sharing this to illustrate the principles applied:

Skill = Intensity x Time.
Reputation is the ultimate currency.
Skill and Reputation compound just like money.

You can accelerate and collapse timelines through your execution. Your reputation becomes your signature and opportunity magnet. You get access to work and master-players that are not available to mediocre performers. Nothing beats hard work ethic. Even talent. But when talent meets hard work ethic, one becomes unstoppable.

7. Build a Writing Discipline

Another application of the above principles is writing.

Compound writing skills (read: thinking skills) by maxing your reps.

After I sold my startup, I was burned out - lying in bed for weeks, feeling like shit about myself and life. Sleeping late, waking late, binging Netflix, wallowing in my own failure like a pig in mud. Then my friend (and co-founder) challenged me: “You are so good with words. Why don’t you start writing about your journey?”

I had nothing to do, and so I did. I started a writing challenge. (Do you want to see real cringe - here is my first post on Medium back in 2017).

The goal was to write 30 essays in 30 days. I ended up writing 43.

The first 42 went completely unnoticed - zero likes, zero traction, no one gave a shit. But the 43rd? Went viral. Thousands of views. Messages from strangers around the world were reaching out, telling me how my words resonated, how the article helped them. That was my “aha!” moment. I knew - I was onto something here. And so I started writing. Consistently.

With time a new life principle consolidated:

If you’re failing, you’re probably not doing it long enough.

Had I quit before hitting that critical mass of thoughts published online, I would have never gotten to that experiential confirmation that I was on the right path.

I continued writing on Medium. Later, I thought that blogging for free won’t get me anywhere, so I decided to write a book. It took me 600+ days and 4 iterations. Painful, exhausting, sometimes demoralizing. In hindsight, I could have stayed in blogging and compounded my work there, and I would have probably won even bigger, albeit in a different way.

But on the other hand, that experience of writing a book transformed me.

Was it Stephen King who said this?

The book that will change your life is the one you will write yourself.

That insight for me now became an embodied experience. Day in and day out, coming back to it, bleeding words through your fingertips, logging 3-4 hours every day of disciplined deep work, thinking deeply about life and the nature of things, rewired my mind completely.

The book sucked. It was not any good, by any of my standards. Looking back, it still looks and feels like an amateur hour. Very raw. Very low mastery of words. But that is precisely the point.

You have to give birth to your creation.
Shipped is better than perfect.

The whole process of skill acquisition follows the same principle. You have to push past the phase when you suck, to get to the phase when you are decent, to then eventually get good, until you finally become great. And when you become great, you fall in love with your craft, and your craft loves you back. This is when you start walking the path of mastery.

You write not for recognition, not for money, not for accolades and applause. You write because you can no longer NOT write.

Writing becomes your second nature. Thinking deeper than anyone else becomes your second nature. Your mind gets sharp. It becomes a scalpel that cuts deep right to the core of things - and that ultimately becomes your differentiator.

Shallow minds are many. Sharp minds are rare.

Craft exists for a purpose.

When I write, I ask myself these questions:

When I am no longer here, will the ideas I lived by still be alive in the world?
Will they still be making things better?

That’s what I care about.

I write to be a sharper thinker, organized thinker, disciplined thinker. And the nice side-effect of being better at thinking skills is that your life starts to fall into place. The Universe responds to you in ways you cannot imagine. You create opportunities other people call luck.

When I immigrated in 2019 and started posting on LinkedIn, I already had the cycles in me. I had the confidence of the blogger, I released my poor tortured book on Medium, and I got it out of my system. Now, I was facing a whole new world - the world of LinkedIn.

I was careful at first, posting quotes, then quotes with my thoughts, then images, then long-form meditations, then articles. The traction came slowly, then more consistently. Things started to change. People started to notice and resonate with the way I think, and they started reaching out - not just with likes and comments, but with gratitude messages in my DMs. They said that my writing helps them. They told me my words felt true. There it was - the Resonance.

Writing practice became a sacred ritual. It helped me to amass a certain following, and networking effects started to kick in. People started to notice, and new opportunities found me. It was writing that helped me to land both of my jobs (Caseware and Right Hand). Fun stuff.

At Caseware, my manager told me what happened a year after he hired me. He thought that I was an arrogant asshole, looking at my smug face made him want to puke (I had a terrible profile picture back then), but he was reading my content more and more, and the cognitive dissonance was rising in his mind. The “asshole” image was clashing with the depth of the thoughts I was projecting. He was intrigued enough to call me. That call changed both our lives. 3 rounds in 3 days, and I turned down all my other offers to join the place that became a crucible for my recruitment skills.

At Right Hand, I and my leader Z found each other because we were reading each other’s content. Our thoughts scattered on LinkedIn entered each other’s orbits, and upon absorption, created inner resonance. When we hopped on a virtual coffee chat, it all just clicked. The confirmation was right there - in the space between us - we saw that world the same way, coming from the same place of inner work done. That was actually the whole year before the conditions aligned for us to work together, but when they got aligned, it was the same story all over - 3 calls in 3 days, and even on the 2nd call, Z said: “It’s just writing on the wall. We are destined to co-create together.”

That’s how I know.

Writing is how you become the author of your reality.
Quite literally.

You don’t need to be a thought leader or (God forbid) LinkedIn influencer.

Write for yourself.

Write for your mind.

Writing, as a metacognition practice, will help you to get your thinking outside of your head, capture it in a physical form, enabling you to look at it critically, and finally realize that the stuff that is locked in between your two ears, creating all that noise, is NOT you.

You will see that the content of your mind is constantly flowing and changing. Your Concept of Self is flowing and changing. And the only logical conclusion from that is that it can be changed by design.

You can work with your mind as a system. Cleaning it up, uninstalling the programs that are no longer working, deleting the whole chunks of broken legacy code that have been slowing you down for years, and installing intentionally and meticulously designed mental programs that are not only more functional, but would also bring you to that sacred place of inner peace.

Writing will change your life. That’s a promise. But only if you have the true sincere desire to understand the inner workings of your mind.

8. Uncondition your Self

Writing will push you to immerse and study deeper the art of language and the science of communication. NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), perceived by many as some pseudo-science, is actually a working model for building mind architecture.

You will see:

Language is the Code for the Mind

In language, if you pay attention, you can start noticing the whole paradigms that condition entire cultures for generations.

Example: in English, people say "do or die." In Russian, we say "die but do."(Clearly, for Russians, even death is not a legitimate excuse to not get shit done).

That's why the stereotype of Russians as ruthless, stoic, emotionless warriors exists. It's not an accident. It's cultural programming, etched into language and reinforced by history. Why are they like that?

These are the people who endured famine, rebuilt after devastation, and carried the heaviest burden defeating fascism in the Second World War. The war killed millions of men, leaving generations of men after them to be raised by women, shaping a generation of weak men in a way, by the way (us). Some of us had it rough in life. Rough hardens you.

For someone raised in the post-Soviet world, Stoicism doesn't feel like philosophy - it feels like muscle memory. Those ideas that Marcus Aurelius and Seneca were writing about - that life is suffering, that endurance is virtue, that pain is not to be avoided but is a teacher that can teach you a lot about your life and yourself - these programs integrate naturally into our Mind DNA.

But it is not about the Russian mind, it is about your Mind, whoever you are. Start investigating, and you will see - there are countless lines of code like this running in our subconscious mind.

Some things in your conditioning may help in life. Most of it is useless garbage.

Which of your current beliefs truly serve you?

I caught some in mine that did not. The post-Soviet narrative that "money is evil" is a mindset of limitation. Capitalism is painted as predatory, individualistic, selfish. To be a capitalist means to be a greedy, egotistic pig. But is that so?

Luckily, I found Ayn Rand (or she found me?) Ayn Rand shares a whole different mental code.

Capitalism reframed as merit. Your intelligence, grit, and ambition can be rewarded, and there is nothing to be ashamed of. Each man can create the reality in accordance with his ability and intelligence. Ayn Rand (who was actually also Russian; born Alissa Rosenbaum) saw human beings not as slaves to systems, but as free creators capable of building their own destiny. She was a champion of Freedom and an evangelist of Autonomy.

She wrote:

“Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice.
It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.”

The so-called “World” will confirm everything you believe in. You will find confirmation through your faith in the things that seem true in your head.

Perception is Reality.

Whatever Ideology, Culture, Tradition, Religion, Political Stance, Philosophy or School of Thought you are subscribing to, that shall become your limitation.

You must uncondition yourself.
Your freedom depends on it.

You have to train your mind to develop that ability to cut through its own delusions. To eliminate all this web of lies that has been absorbed without a fraction of critical thinking. This is a sign of spiritual maturity in a human.

To not accept the truths we were taught to accept. To treat every thought as a lie and every belief as false. To learn how to lean on your own intelligence and sift through the whole content of the mind, demolishing and reassembling it from first principles over and over again.

Culture, tradition, and religion are not inherently bad - they all carry bits and pieces of truths somewhere within them, but they also serve as heavy distortions for your perception. People take the answers they find as given - that creates a civilization of sheeple. Blind. Compliant. Constantly scared and confused.

If you seek precision in your map of reality, you have to absorb the world in its absolute totality - no limitations of opinions - but a full range of possibilities, perspectives, worldviews, languages, philosophical currents, disciplines, and human form manifestations.

The mind that can do this is psychologically mature.

Discard what serves you no longer and consciously assemble your own operating system. Grounded in truth, not some bullshit hearsay from those who are neck deep in their god-knows-where inherited delusions.

At its core, this is my mission.

I am here to help those who started waking up to:

Pressure-test the code they inherited and absorbed through life
Reinvent the mind from first principles
Build a map of reality that is grounded in Truth, not conditioning

That's how you stop being a prisoner of your culture - and start becoming a citizen of the world. Global Mind. Universal Consciousness. Absolute acceptance.

A free man is a man free from the limitations imposed by his own people.
A free man is the man who has attained Freedom from Self.

9. Build a Money Philosophy that will drive your Behaviour

I don’t have a monthly money routine. And I know that a choir of financial gurus will tell you to “pay yourself first”, “allocate your money into buckets”, and “stay disciplined”, but I don’t know how to operate like that. (Yet).

If anything, this probably is the guiding principle itself:

Listen to everyone. But then, listen to no one.
Find what works for you through trials, testing, and rapid iterations.

One mental model that really stuck with me came from my friend, a CPA who also happens to be my financial coach. He taught me most of what I know about investing. His advice was simple but powerful: “Treat your investments like expenses.”

Just like paying your rent or phone bill, allocating money has to be non-negotiable.

Every month you are not investing, you are selling away the lifetime of your future self.

I’ll be the first to admit - I’m not disciplined enough. My cash flow is sporadic. I hunt, I kill, I get chunks of money as a bounty, and then I allocate those chunks into investments.

There’s no real financial rigour. I don’t budget even though I know I probably should. I spend money freely on things that bring me joy. I can definitely be better at managing my expenses. I say all this because I know:

Financial Intelligence, just like any other form of intelligence, takes time to grow.

You grow it through learning and implementation.

One guy who moved the needle for me was Ramit Sethi (I Will Teach You to Be Rich). One of his guiding principles: define your own rich life. If you don’t, the world will define it for you, and then you end up living chasing someone else’s vision of rich life, not your own.

Ramit’s version of a rich life is unique to him. He loves buying expensive clothes but drives an old Toyota Corolla. He always books business class for flights over 6 hours. He loves luxury hotels and good service. At one point, he even decided that he wanted to get haircuts every 2 weeks instead of 3 because he just wanted to always feel fresh and sharp. This is his Rich Life System.

Mine is different. My definition of a Rich Life is this: do whatever you want, with whomever you want, whenever you want. That’s my definition of Freedom. To be free, you need so-called FU money. FU money is the number in your account that lets you look anyone in the eye - your boss, your executive team, your business partner, the whole world with its nonsensical impositions - and say: “Go fuck yourself”. FU money is the ability to say No and walk away.

For now, this is my Rich Life System - my system is a game of optimization for that notional number.

To enable that number I follow this philosophy:

“Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
~ Gustave Flaubert

That means cutting life down to bare bones. The same concept is described in Essentialism (by Greg McKeown) or the famous Pareto principle.

20% of the things you do create 80% of your life results.

I don’t care about:

Houses with backyard pools
Flashy cars (I don’t even drive)
Expensive watches
Fancy clothes
What other people think of me

What I do care about:

Optimizing my life for the free time I can spend on deep thinking and reality creation
Best tech and a high-speed internet to enable my work
My mind
My health
The well-being of my family & friends
A yoga mat and a quiet space to think

That’s is rich life enough for me.

I spend without hesitation on food. Good food matters. It’s joy. It is the fuel of life. We are wired to break bread and bond over a good meal. That’s my Dad’s conditioning at play too: no matter what is going on in life, there is always food at home (protecting the family and making sure they are fed, warm and safe). Plus, restaurants are expensive in Toronto, and my wife is a foodie, so I accept this rule of my rich life: I spend on food if that brings true joy. And that is the first degree of freedom that I have been optimizing for.

Here is a model.

Money buys you 5 degrees of freedom:

Food freedom: buy whatever food you want without worrying about money.
Travel freedom: freedom to go wherever you want, whenever you want, ideally first-class. (Not there yet, but working toward it.)
Ownership freedom: you buy and own expensive shit and it doesn’t bother you much (planes, houses, villas, boats, etc.) OR / AND you own cash-generating assets (businesses, land, equity, etc.)
Time freedom: the ultimate. Not needing to work unless you choose to. Doing whatever you want, whenever you want, with whomever you want. Or doing nothing at all. Sitting at home. Travel. Hiking. Watching butterflies flapping their wings in your personal Zen garden.
Mental freedom: Inner peace - reduced anxiety that comes from knowing that you have money to cover any expenses or potential threats in your life.

This is my Rich Life.
Optimizing for freedom in all its forms.

What is yours?

10. Freedom is Elimination

I think a lot about Freedom.

We can lose freedom over time. Shit in life just has a tendency to happen.

Black swan events, macroeconomic shifts, AI disruption, or even such a banal thing as lifestyle inflation.

The whole corporate game is rigged like that, betting on you to inflate your lifestyle.

Once a year, in your corporate job, you'll get an incremental change in your salary that would not have a material effect on your life. So you think: "Okay, what can I do with it? It is just a 3% salary increase.” Maybe it is a bonus or a 10k salary bump, but essentially, it doesn't change much. Because we don’t get money in large chunks, we spend it. This is the lifestyle creep.

Another amazing rule that I've learned from my financial coach CPA friend states: Whenever there is a major life change, for one year, we do not make any significant life changes.

Example: when their second baby was born, they decided that they were not going to make huge investments or purchases - they're not buying a house, and they're not gonna move into a new rental house, they are not investing in an investment property. All these opportunities are on the table for them. They took none.

This is a damn good rule if you ask me.

I was recently presented with an opportunity from my rich friend who offered me to live in her gorgeous detached home while she is working abroad. Killer opportunity, that would probably inflate my expenses at least by another 1000$. Tempting? Hell yes. Can I afford it? Yes. But do I really need it? No. Making the move is optimizing against my Rich Life system.

That extra 1000$ spent on lifestyle inflation and not invested will come as 100,000$ in opportunity cost later on in life.

It doesn’t matter to me where I work, in a one-bedroom or a mansion. Physical space is irrelevant when it comes to creating violent original work. The only space that matters is the space of my mind.

That is probably an important guiding principle in life:

A rich man is not the one who affords all his wants.
A rich man is the one who tamed the one who wants.

This is the core guiding principle in my life. This is the core principle of all rich and successful people I know:

Ruthless elimination of non-essential.

Pavel Durov - the creator of the “Russian Facebook” called VKontakte (now vk.com) and Telegram messenger - one of the richest men on this planet, owns nothing.

No cars, no planes, no land, no house.

Why? You ask. He asks: What for?

People buy these houses, spend all their cash that could have been deployed, then they fix it, patch it, furnish it, spend their time and hard-earned money on decorating, re-decorating, planning decorations… Pavel said, “Fuck that” to all this crap. He can see that this is a massive opportunity cost for him. Spending his opportunity cost on ownership and everything associated with ownership, he sees as squandering his lifetime on non-essential.

What is the true price of his lifetime?
He designed all his life systems in alignment with the answer to this question.

What is the true price of your lifetime?
Find your answer. Optimize for that.

11. Do the Math

Why am I writing today about all these principles? Because right now, that is what I am focused on - I am running all these thought exercises to tighten my financial operating systems and build a robust wealth creation engine with accurate future modelling.

Here are some numbers that boggle my mind:

Half of Canadians have a net worth below ~$520K (keep in mind that this number is heavily distorted by the ultra-wealthy).
Average Salary across the nation: 60,000–67,000 CAD
Top 5% Income Threshold: 162,210
Top 2% Income Threshold: 190,000
Top 1% income earners in Canada make ~$316K+/year - about 7× the median household income (~$70K).
$316K+/year income will put you in 0.1% globally
The top 1% of Canadians own roughly a quarter of all wealth, while the bottom 40% collectively own less than 2%.
A Canadian under 35 years old typically has only ~$159K in net worth, while those 55–64 average ~$873K (that shows how much wealth is age-dependent).
Globally, if you have just $100K USD (137K CAD) in net worth, you are already in the top 10% of wealth worldwide.
The median global wealth per adult is only ~$8,000 USD (meaning the typical Canadian, even at the lower end, is vastly richer than most of the planet).
More than half of global adults have less than $10,000 USD in total assets.
Meanwhile, the top 1% worldwide control over 40% of global wealth.
Historically, stock markets (like the S&P 500) compound at ~6–7% real returns annually (meaning $1 invested at birth grows 30× by age 65 without doing anything else).
Meaning: If you invest $50,000 once at birth and let it compound with historical real stock market returns: At 6% real annual return → about $2.2M by age 65; At 7% real annual return → about $4.1M by age 65

137,000 CAD. Think about it - this is how much you need to have on your account to be in the top 10% of humans on this planet.

Now think about this: how fast will you get to that number from zero, following the traditional model of: "Get a job, stay on a job, do good work, and save what you can." Something tells me - not fast, especially considering the rising cost of living.

I will share with you my wealth-building system. It is very boring:

Keep your burn rate stable. Do your best to avoid lifestyle inflation
There's a limit to what you can optimize with savings. Focus not on saving but on increasing your income and earning capability.
Optimize for surplus cash. Big chunks. Invest in VEQT.
Forget about your money for 30 years. Let the time and compounding work for you.

That's it. And I know my strategy is simple as hell, and again, this is not financial advice. My job is not to tell you what to do with your money. My job is to show you how you can train your mind so that your mind develops new capabilities to go out there and earn more - more money, more freedom, more time for your future self.

I don’t have my FU money.

Yet.

But I know that one day I will get there. Maybe it will take 8 years. Maybe less. How quickly it's going to happen will depend on my execution. Plus, there are so many factors at play that are intangible and probably harder to calculate, such as:

The compounding interest on my skill
The compounding interest on my network
AI disruption and the transformation of the economy it will create
New potential job opportunities emerging
Leverage and investment opportunities
Becoming a parent
Black swan events

These are just some of the many variables in this equation. And that is why my system is plain dumb. It is built to protect me from my own stupidity. Time will tell if I made the right bets. But it is not about me.

What bets are you making?

12. Build an AI Intelligence System

I want to introduce something most people don't know how to do - building your own AI financial intelligence system using Claude Projects.

You can design a Claude project specifically as your financial expert or financial intelligence coach. For a system to work well, you’ll need data.

I've been using an app called Money Manager since 2022. Minimalistic and robust, it has everything I need and then some. I wish I'd started tracking my money earlier, and it is what it is, but today I have 3 years of clean financial data: expenses, earnings, transfers, investment allocations - all my data is captured to the single cent.

When it comes to money:

You don't control what you don't understand. And you don't understand what you don't measure.

You need your own money manager. My app works for me. Excel might be your thing. The tool does not matter. I am talking about the principle.

The principle is to track absolutely everything: inflows, outflows, patterns that reflect your behaviour.

To understand the latter that’s what I do:

I take screenshots from my Money Manager app
Copy-paste them into an LLM and extract the financial data. (Or download the Excel file from the app)
I upload the data into the project knowledge of my dedicated Financial Intelligence Claude project
Bonus: Do the metacognitive work to create your identity profile first. Upload into the project knowledge maximum context on your life - who you are, your psychological profile, your personality tests, your reflections on your goals in life and aspirations, where you are in life, in your career, job, money. What are your core values, and where do you want to go? (Note: I have a Claude Project for this purpose too, called Meta-Journal; a model trained on all content of my mind).
Then add your financial milestones. What are you trying to accomplish? What is the aspirational net worth number you have? What is the FU money? What is the lifestyle that you want to afford? What is your Rich Life? What is retirement for you? When will it happen and in what form?

This project will evolve with you. The more you know yourself, the more data you collect, the better you will train the model, and the more proficient it will become in modelling projections of your financial future, giving you a roadmap and guiding principles for your execution.

Build your AI Financial Intelligence System. See what you’ll learn.

13. Optimize for High-Income, Future-Proof Skills

First rule of survival in the modern jungle.

Learn how to use AI tools.

Understand how LLMs work. Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude - are all different tools that are better at different jobs, and should serve a specific function.

Gemini - learning and knowledge synthesis
Perplexity - research, news and trends observation
ChatGPT - metacognitive partner, second brain, fast cognition
Claude Projects - dedicated custom models for every area of your life

They can be (and must be) leveraged together in combination as a toolkit. You can build the whole AI systems that feed on each other, making each other sharper with time.

For example, because ChatGPT has its persistent memory system in its design, you can use it as a Clone of your Mind, but without its weaknesses, biases, distortions, and blind spots. You can use it as an identity and metacognition system.

I use Claude Projects as an army of AI Assistants - custom models that serve me as experts in certain domains of my mind. I have:

My health expert
My wife’s health expert
Writing and Content Creation system
Knowledge & Synthesis (a space where I learn)
AI Oracle: for future modelling and predictions
Finance & Investments: your financial intelligence system
Meta-Journal: a space where I work on my mind
Strategic network: top talent at my fingertips
Client work: I have a project for each client I am working with - an expert on their business and my tailored recruitment assistant
Coaching work: a project for each client that serves as a replica of their mind + their personalized coach tailored to help them with their particular challenges

All these systems feed on each other. They cross-pollinate. I create artifacts within individual projects that I upload into all my life projects.

The financial system feeds into the meta-journal system and vice versa. I'm thinking: how can I build myself intentionally into the next level of consciousness as an operator and an investor?

Be intellectually curious. I don’t say “you should be intellectually curious”. There's no "should". Either you have the intellectual hunger or you don't. If you do, you pursue understanding of the nature of things.

Humans are ultimately driven by the same thing: they want to create a better experience for themselves. So naturally they start asking the question: How can I get the life that I want?

That brings you to the first principles thinking. You need to understand how the universe and macro systems actually work and operate.

That brings you to AI and educating yourself intentionally to understand how businesses work, how the economy works, how markets work.

Learn from people in the trenches - true experts and practitioners - technologists, economists, entrepreneurs, builders. What's the projection on how AI will disrupt the world? What's going to change? What skills will go obsolete, what skills will be evergreen?

That will inform your skill acquisition strategy. What skills have you been historically over-indexing on? What skills do you need to ramp up now to thrive in the economy of the future?

That's what I do as a coach. I serve people who've been historically over-indexing on “wrong” skills - hard skills and technical skills that are going to become archaic and obsolete in the next 5-10 years (skills easily replicated by AI).

While people were pursuing jobs that rewarded technical skills, I obsessively developed my human skills. Right now, the tables have turned. Machines will do everything better. We are not ready for what is coming.

Those who realize this are focus their L&D efforts on:

Judgment
Leadership
Intuition
Spiritual intelligence
Metacognition
Self-awareness
Trust
Kindness
Persuasion
Negotiation
Communication
Clarity of thought
Courage
Confidence
Resilience
Grit
Discipline of the mind

These are the actual skills that make the difference in your life. And you can develop those - through coaching.

Those who get sharp on those skills will dominate the future. Those who fail to get sharp will be left in the dust.

Which one will be your destiny?

Last words: Go Fucking Deep

Destiny is not written. It is being created this very moment.
Each moment. Every moment. Here and Now.

Destiny is what you do when no one is watching.

Destiny is the deep and unapologetic intent to create whatever the fuck you want, and not stop until you do.

I won’t stop until I see $1M in my account, but 1 million is just a mental milestone.

It used to be a lot of money, but not anymore. Not in Canada, not today. At the moment of writing (September 2025), I'm living in Toronto, and the prices for housing are outrageous. Houses are 1.3 to 1.7 million dollars, apartments in downtown start are 500-700k. How do you get there as an immigrant? How do you even get there as a 3rd generation Canadian coming from a middle-class family?

Maybe a better question is - do you really need to get there? :)) Buying a house might be a justified lifestyle decision, but is this an intelligent financial decision? I am not convinced.

Here is a simple equation.

If you have $1M deployed in investments, and you let them compound at 6%, after 30 years, your $1M will become $5,743,491.17

That’s quite an opportunity cost if you choose not to invest that one million.

For most people $5.7M is enough to retire on.

Of course, this projection is an oversimplification. This model suggests that during the next 30 years, you do nothing.

Chances are you won’t retire when you hit your 1 mil. Hitting the $1M milestone will open your horizon and the path to 10M, and then more. You will be in a different space mentally, intellectually, psychologically. Maybe you will play the games you want to play, while still creating value, getting paid for your work, and accumulating wealth even faster. Maybe this is just me projecting what I would want to do with my time post FU money.

$1M is a mental construct. I know that the Future Me who has this cash is going to function and operate from an evolved identity. But I find these thought exercises useful - they push you to think about capital deployment, they push you to think about how you can make your money make more money.

People say that one way to calculate your FU money is to take your annual expenses and multiply them by 25. So if you spend, for example, $50k a year, then the math is $50,000 × 25 = $1,250,000. That’s why my FU money is 1mil :) I know that with those dollars in your bank account, the number of fucks you give about potential threats coming from life decreases exponentially.

This FU money game is all a process; it’s a long-term project. Every quarter, you can come back to your models to recalibrate your financial model with your new knowledge, new experiences, new skills that you've acquired and new network effects that occurred in the meantime.

Capture your data, feed it to the model, and improve it over time so it grows and evolves with you as you grow and evolve in your understanding of self and the world as a human being.

Now that I'm here, I know that 1M is within reach, and I'm going to get there - it will just take a bit of time. How much time is a function of execution. Execution is a function of my intelligence. My intelligence is a function of my self-awareness.

Everything in life is awareness. This is an economy of awareness.

An aware human controls where his attention goes. Unaware one gets his attention hijacked by the Maya (Illusion) of this world.

The meta-principle:

Where attention goes, energy flows.
What you focus on, you expands.

If you want to expand your money, you have to focus on growing it. You focus on the thoughts about wealth generation, and your thoughts become stronger over time. You upgrade your thinking systems through an iterative process. The process of constantly upgrading your mind leads you to understanding the game, and ultimately, playing it better. The more you play, the more the game evolves you as a player. The better player your mind becomes, the more entertaining the game gets. The more entertaining the game, the more you focus on it. Loop closed.

Funny enough, the more your mind understands the inner workings of itself, the more interesting life gets.

One can only truly play if one is truly aware.

To be aware is to play the game from a place of transformational Truth.

And the Truth is that we are naked.

We came naked into this world. We will depart naked. There is nothing or no one we will be able to take with us. Death is the last journey. Something happens behind the curtains. Maybe it is the last night, maybe we disappear, maybe we reincarnate.

Maybe we are destined to live a life of a different human, maybe we will be born into a new life in a body of a pure baby to start this silly game of life from scratch. We don’t know. What we know is that Death makes us question the meaning of life.

Deep thinking about meaning makes us more intelligent.

The highest form of intelligence is the ability to observe your own Thought.
Without judgment.

We only truly become intelligent when we become self-aware.
Aware of the Illusion of Self.

If you channel your attention inside, if you just close your eyes for a moment, sit still, and breathe, you just might find the answers to your questions. You will come to understand that you are dead already. Your time is limited here. So be kind to others, be kind to yourself. If your desire to understand is sincere, with time, you will realize that the very separation into some kind of “self” and some kind of “others” really is an illusion.

Serving people is serving yourself.
Serving yourself (making yourself better for others) is serving people.
We all - are One.

There is no 2.
There is no duality.

And once you get it. Fully. Completely. You can return to your game. Carry wood, chop water. But now play your game differently - play it consciously. Remember that you are playing the current game because you have subscribed to it.

You are the creator of your reality. You are dreaming your personal dream into existence. The only question is, are you doing it aware, or is this dream happening to you on autopilot?

Are you the creator of your experience, or are you being created by some pre-written programs in your mind absorbed from this so-called “external world”?

Your attention invites the content you consume. The content you consume creates your thoughts. Your thoughts generate more thoughts - internal noise appears. And if we live in the noise, we are confused and conflicted. When we are confused and conflicted, we are afraid to take action. Through our inaction, things that truly matter to us stagnate.

You see…

The game itself is bullshit.
And 1 million is bullshit.
Everything the world wants you to believe is one pile of monumental bullshit.

The NOT bullshit is the relationships you have built, people you have helped on your path, love that you felt and helped others to feel. That’s how you will measure your life at the end of it.

Wealth creation is just a game, and it's a fun game you can enjoy playing. Some people play Pokémon cards, some play American football, butting heads. Some build businesses, others write their meditations on Substack. We are all into our own type of weird. It is important to remember that the game is just a game, that all of it don’t matter.

You can get on a plane tomorrow, and it will explode 5 minutes in the air. Maybe someone drops a piano on your head while you are taking a stroll down the block or stabs you in a subway. Morbid? Maybe… Still better than living in the illusion of: “It will never happen to me…”

Maybe Death won’t come to you this way.

Maybe you will get to live to your late 90s, to see your grandchildren growing their children, and you shall arrive at the place of your last breath on this planet, slipping into the last night quietly and peacefully in your home bed, with all your loving family members gathered alongside you.

Who knows?

160,000 people die every day.

That’s 2 every second.

Your time is ticking.

Tick tock…
Tick tock…

What is the Future You before Death you are currently optimizing for?

Or not.