Member-only story

If You Are Smart, You Have $100,000 Trapped In Your Head

Dan Koe
9 min readMar 19, 2025

The only way to control your income, and therefore your life, is to create a product.

Since the day you were born, you were taught to go to school, get a job, and save until you can retire and finally do what you want.

You were conditioned to obey the authority. To learn things you don’t care about so you can work for people you don’t care about so you can eventually live a life you care about… and with a simple observation of society, that day is unlikely to ever come.

Without realizing it, you were programmed as a line of code in society to sell a product for someone else.

Your entire life has been spent building everyone’s dreams but your own.

The good news is, times are changing.

The decentralization of work has begun.

There are more opportunities than ever.

Remote work is the norm.

Freelance work has increased from 36% of the workforce to 46.6% since 2020.

The creator economy is projected to double from $250B to $480B by 2028.

Thanks to the internet, the power is shifting back to the individual.

I realized this early.

--

--

Dan Koe
Dan Koe

Written by Dan Koe

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

Responses (5)