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Disappear And Come Back Unrecognizable (12 Rules To Change Your Life)

Dan Koe
9 min readMar 17, 2025

I don’t say this to sound arrogant.

But I’ve never had a problem with knowing what I want in the future.

When people say “I don’t know what I want,” what they’re really saying is “I don’t want to do the work it takes to get what I want.”

It’s not that you don’t know what you want. It’s that you know what you don’t want — meaning you know what you want — and are hiding from it it takes to get away from it.

I’ve always known what I wanted because it’s extremely simple to observe society and know what I don’t want:

  • A job I hate
  • Work I hate
  • A body I hate
  • A partner I hate
  • A mind that hates me

From that alone, it’s easy to figure out what I had to do:

  • Become an entrepreneur no matter how many times I fail (it took 7 failures)
  • Gain the power to get rid of work I don’t want to do (writing on social media for leverage)
  • Go to the gym and work on my nutrition
  • Allow those 3 things to open up more opportunities in every domain of life
  • Let that path create a peaceful mind from the progressive overload of responsibility. Weights feel lighter as you get stronger.

Everybody knows that some form of this path is what they are meant to do.

Your psyche craves actualization and transcendence. The depth of your being wants these things, but your ego is distracted by things it thinks it wants.

That’s the problem.

You don’t have a way to focus your mind.

You don’t have a plan for your future that has more gravity than the distractions in your life.

You struggle to maintain a long-term time horizon and get trapped in never-ending short-term stress-inducing tasks.

How would it feel to have one single framework that would determine the entirety of your success? One that you can refer to whenever you feel lost?

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Dan Koe
Dan Koe

Written by Dan Koe

Building Kortex, the future of writing apps. Find me everywhere @thedankoe

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