Member-only story

How To Actually Achieve Your Big Goals (That Will Change Your Life)

Dan Koe
13 min readMar 8, 2025

Non-members can read this article here.

If you want to understand why most people don’t achieve anything great, you need to understand this:

Learned helplessness is a psychological condition where a person or animal learns to behave helplessly in a particular situation, even when the opportunity to avoid or escape it is available. It occurs after an individual has experienced repeated aversive stimuli (e.g., pain, failure) that they cannot control. As a result, they come to believe that their actions have no effect on the environment, and they give up trying to change their circumstances.

You know those people.

You probably have that friend who never believes they can’t do anything. It’s difficult to talk with them because it’s just depressing. Like dude, how can you not see that it is possible?

You see this everywhere online.

People don’t even try anymore, and there’s a deep reason behind it.

They’re presented with opportunities to start a business, meet new people, or change their life as a whole and their unconscious, automatic, and programmed response is:

  • Sounds like a scam
  • I can’t do that because…

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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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