Author Your Own Reality

What I’ve been reading this week: Cyber Patterns

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Now, onto today’s piece…

I was an introverted child.

In elementary, middle, and high school, my face would often turn bright red when I was called on to answer a question.

It was embarrassing.

I was self-conscious about it for a long time.

But while I hated being the center of attention, I was great at paying attention to others.

Observing.

Analyzing.

Noticing.

My observations and curiosity naturally led me to question many things.

Like an annoying toddler, I had the tendency to constantly ask “why?” about the world.

Why do people behave the way they do?

Why do people choose their respective careers?

Why do people want what they want?

Throughout my personal search for these answers, I’ve come to a relatively depressing discovery:

Most people don’t have a conscious “why” for their habits, desires, and career choices. Instead, they live on perpetual autopilot — blindly following the path set for them by the society they were raised in.

Of course, this makes perfect sense.

Humans evolved to live in small tribes, so to survive it was necessary for each person to conform to the culture of the tribe (for cooperation purposes).

However, this trait no longer serves us in the modern age.

In a world with infinite choices and opportunities, conforming to the beliefs of the community you were born in dramatically limits the possibilities of your potential.

The Default Path

If you observe closely enough, you’ll find the majority of the population possesses minimal control over their own lives.

Everything gets dictated for them:

• They can’t control the company schedule they live on

• They can’t control the rush-hour traffic they commute in

• They can’t control the tasks demanded of them by their boss

• They can’t control the performances of the sports teams they root for

• They can’t control the trends and news they consume on social media

The average American lifestyle is one of extreme passivity.

There’s no intention. No initiative. No critical thought. No active control over their very own lives.

Life is happening to them, not for them.

Instead of consciously reflecting on the life they want to live and actively making decisions to achieve it, most just aimlessly follow the default path because “it’s what everyone else is doing.”

The problem? This path is a slippery slope.

It’s the reason why one of the most popular deathbed regrets is:

“I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

But your fate doesn’t have to be this way…

Lifestyle Design 101

The truth is, most people’s goals in life aren’t authentic goals. They’re “conditioned goals” that society has convinced them they should want.

So the first question to ask yourself when it comes to authoring your dream reality is:

“What do I really want?

It’s not what your parents want from you.

Not what your friends want.

Not what the luxury lifestyle influencers on Instagram want you to want so you can buy their scammy courses.

What do you want for yourself?

Since you’re reading this, you probably want to build your own creative thing and achieve freedom.

This is the exact realization that struck me early last year.

And looking back, the reason I was able to actualize this dream reality is because of one potent mindset shift:

Stop living passively. Start living a life of intentional action.

Here’s how:

Optimize Your Time

One of the biggest roadblocks I hear from creators:

“I don’t have enough time to create consistently.”

Listen, I get it.

Everybody’s busy.

And you gotta pay the bills somehow.

But if you really want to be the author of your own reality, you need to find a couple hours a day to write and move the needle forward.

Here’s some tactics that worked for me:

Find a 9-5 with plenty of down time on the job. When I first started my creator business, I worked at a kava bar in San Diego that rarely got busy.

Only one employee worked at a time.

This played to my advantage, because I spent 85% of my time at work writing content. I literally got paid by a kava bar to write Twitter threads.

By working a job that doesn’t require much active attention, you can get paid to work on your dream until it becomes reality.

Audit your leisure time. Most people spend their free time passively watching Netflix or scrolling Instagram.

Instead, use your free time to actively self-educate yourself and start publishing your content.

Once I overcame the fear of creating online, I became obsessed with writing and building an audience. It was the first thing on my mind every morning.

And over the course of just 3 months as a full-time university student and part-time employee, I went from thinking I didn’t have enough time to build a creator business to:

• Writing 5 Twitter threads/week

• Getting my first online writing gig at an agency

• Growing my audience from 100 to 10,000+ followers

If you want it bad enough, you’ll find the time.

Reprogram Yourself

As I mentioned earlier, you are a human — which means its in your nature to be programmed and influenced by your surroundings. You can’t change your nature, but you can change your surroundings.

And the single greatest way to reprogram yourself is to throw yourself into the fire of the arena you want to play in.

For me, this took the form of investing time and money into:

• Courses

• Communities

• 1-on-1 coaching

• Tweeting every day

• Deleting Instagram and Snapchat

• Unfollowing everyone who didn’t inspire or teach me

• Joining group chats with other creators around my level

By spending a significant portion of my days and my net worth on these things, it became the ultimate forcing function for starting, learning, and morphing into the identity I wanted to become:

An entrepreneurial writer.

I now had friends on Twitter, a coach, and a gaping hole in my wallet holding me accountable to stay consistent.

There was no way I could turn back.

Sunk cost fallacy is often spoken about in a negative context, but you can also use it to your advantage.

Stay Undistracted

When you actively optimize your programming, systems, and habits — it just becomes a matter of time before you achieve your desired reality.

However, many people struggle to stay on track.

Some of my creator friends I started out with have completely quit.

Why? I suspect it’s because:

• They get caught in the dangerous trap of comparison.

• They get overwhelmed by what their friends and family might think.

• They get stuck in the vicious cycle of chasing the New Shiny Object.

It’s sad to see. In some way, their lack of tweets resemble the death of a dream.

There’ll be bumps along the journey, no doubt (I’m experiencing a bumpy week myself as I write this).

But the one idea that has kept me consistent through it all is the following quote:

This life we live in was created by people no smarter than you.

Government leaders, celebrities, famous artists, etc. None of them are smarter than you.

The creators you admire who found freedom are definitely not smarter than you, either (trust me — I’ve met some of them).

They just reprogrammed themselves, optimized their habits, and took deliberate action in accordance with the life they wanted to live.

They actively chose what they wanted out of life instead of passively accepting what other people wanted for them.

They authored their own reality. Why can’t you?

Matt’s Discoveries

My 3 favorite finds this week:

I started doing Morning Pages every day this week. It’s stream-of-consciousness journaling that’s meant to trap all your subconscious worries on paper. Tim Ferriss calls them “spiritual windshield wipers.” I can see why — highly recommend.

The Catalyst — My good friend Andy launched a creator newsletter on how to turn audiences into cults. Dude’s got some major wisdom to share.

I’ve been playing this vinyl deep house DJ set in the background on my TV at night. The cozy vibes are unparalleled.

Thanks for reading.

Go have yourself a reflective week.

Matt Mic

P.S. For those of you who want to take this full-time creator thing seriously…

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I’ll see you next Monday. In the meantime, catch me over on Twitter.