the war of art.

read the war of art by stephen pressfield. understand the force of resistance.

art is a lover.

do you spend every waking moment with your partner? when you’re not together, are you thinking “i should be spending time with my partner?” do you suffocate your partner?

do you apply love, grace, flow, listening to her energy and flowing with her? ecstatic moments and the whole range of human emotion — disappointment, sadness, anger, frustration, joy, tenderness, excitement?

try treating your art the same way.

you are not an artist.

you are an Artist. there’s a difference. you’re the supreme conduit & facilitator between your inner universe and the eternal creative life force energy. act accordingly. be the facilitator, not the identity.

process over output.

are you properly cultivating the conditions for love, depth, richness, vision to come through your creations? focus on this first. then we can be less concerned about daily output. the juicy stuff will come through, ebb and flow.

show up.

Reliably show up with an open heart, and the will to share whatever spirit you can muster.

sit down and do the work every day. it’s a consistent push from yourself to do this. it gets easier. read the war of art. take cold showers or ice baths.

what would it feel like if it were easy?

art isn’t meant to be an arduous process. we know what it feels like when things flow and is easy and we like what we’re making. we’re able to envision this feeling and consciously feel it in our bodies. what would the process be that would be smooth and seamless? write it down, feel it. keep feeling it. eventually this state will seep its way into the process.

tune in.

attune to your creative life force.

meditate, float, yoga, tai chi, walk, coherence, pray.

do something easy.

make your minimum “showing up” practice super simple. if it’s not coming, do something else you like that comes easy to you. the goal is to ease into the flow.

can’t force the flow.

you can try. i reckon it won’t work most of the time. show up. if the flow isn’t there, hitting the gas pedal doesn’t make her appear.

momentum.

we underestimate the power of compound daily interest of attention & effort. keep showing up and the growth is rapid. once you get a sense, extrapolate & envision. man, i’ve grown this much in 6 months — where will i be in a year?

remember why.

why do you create? go rediscover the feeling that compelled you down this path.

nature, conversation, art gallery, museum, concert, romance, road trip, plane trip, retreat. we don’t rely on inspiration, but it’s a ritual that we need to continue returning to to keep the fire burning brightly.

frame shift.

“when in doubt, zoom out” — reggie watts

quiet the noise.

the more noise you let in, with continuous stimulation, the less space there is for your own channel; space is necessary for your to alchemize your feelings and experience into whatever is yearning to be animated by the flow.

minimize news, sports, feeds, instagram stories, whatsapp, imessage to a set amount per day.

create boredom.

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it will make your life & art better.

admire the classics + other artforms.

if your only inputs are your contemporaries, your art will be the same shit they’re making.

consume the great works across all art forms. understand the timeless expressions they contain. take that as inspiration for your expression.

have a side project.

‘deep play’ - something with no purpose, but that you enjoy getting better at. it allows your art to breathe.

brew your style.

it takes a while to develop your style. keep making stuff and keep making stuff, without excessive stopping and critique, especially if you feel you’re still derivative. with time, love, and energy, your own style will emerge. but you need to go through the hours of daily creation to get there.

• How the Dopamine reward system functions

• How to think about Dopamine

• Protocols to increase baseline levels of dopamine

• Protocols to ensure you’re not living in a deficit state -- to maintain system-wide dopamine to ensure consistent motivation and satisfaction from life’s experiences

Why should you care about Dopamine and/or change your behaviors?

Dopamine is a major factor in regulating our quality of life:

• how much satisfaction and pleasure we’re able to feel from experiences

• belief in our ability to accomplish things

• how motivated we are to do things

And - irregular behavior patterns that create dopamine deficit states can be the cause of anxiety, depression, and ADHD.

How it Works - Peaks and Dopamine Deficits

When we indulge in a dopamine-releasing activity, our baseline dopamine levels peak.

After the peak, there’s an equal and opposite dip below baseline.

We experience the dip as a craving — i.e. wanting another drink, bite, or notification.

If during a dip, we attempt to get back to our baseline by engaging in the activity again, it will rise slightly temporarily, but then drop even further down into a deficit, creating more craving.

Feelings of restlessness, depression, or anxiety can be a result of being in this perpetual deficit state, where you’re fighting just to get back to baseline.

An example of this is opening your phone to check notifications. And, after a few minutes, feeling a craving, and checking them again. This second time, the burst of pleasure from checking is much less, and you feel much more restless and unmotivated afterwards.

How to Effectively Regulate the Dopamine System

Dopamine is a Currency

Understand that dopamine is a currency. When you use it, you have less available system-wide.

1) Recognize what things give you a major peak.

Common peak-inducing activities:

• Social Media

• Novel information (news, etc.)

• Text messages

• Pornography

• Orgasm

• Nicotine

• Alcohol

• Chocolate

• Cannabis

• Amphetamines

2) Save it.

Be aware of spending on things you don’t deem important to your well-being.

Spend it wisely on things you deem important, and for rewards that equal the effort:

• Hitting a goal you’ve set out for yourself

• Meaningful work

• Social connection

• Life’s pleasures: art, nature, special meals, experiences

• Developing your craft or hobby

Be conscious of peaks

• Not too high

  • Layering peak-inducing activities, or having major peak inducing activities, will inevitably result in a dip/deficit state. Layering will reduce your innate motivation to do that activity in the future (i.e. always listening to music + drinking pre-workout before a workout)

• Not too often

  • Frequently indulging in peak-inducing activities will keep you in a deficit state, craving more of the thing

    • i.e. checking Instagram or Whatsapp every hour will give you an initial peak the first hour, but the pleasure will diminish each subsequent time you check it, and drive you further into a deficit

    • This deficit state can materialize as a restlessness, anxiety, lack of motivation to follow through on hard work, lack of satisfaction in life, or lack of self-belief to achieve hard things. You’ll need more and more stimulation (dopamine-releasing activities) in order to simply feel content.

3) Weather the Dips

When you experience a dip, stay with it.

Resist the craving to do something to get back to baseline — this will drive you further into a dip and keep you in a perpetual deficit state; restless, craving, anxious, unmotivated.

4) Do Hard Things

Challenging, effortful activities train your reward system, and induce a natural rise in system-wide dopamine levels.

Examples:

• Effortful focus/work on a task

• Challenging workout

• Ice bath / cold shower

• Sauna

It’s been proven that you can rewire the system / train it to enjoy challenging activities, by subjectively telling yourself “this is good, I’m retraining my reward system, doing hard things is rewarding.”

My Personal Changes

I want to enjoy the simple pleasures of life — nature, a meal with friends, music. I’ve struggled to fully enjoy these things for much of my adult life, and I understand that my perpetual dopamine deficit state is largely the reason.

I don’t want to feel anxious, restless, or needing more and more in order to feel content, complete.

I want to be innately motivated to develop my craft as an artist, believe I’m able to, and have the neurochemical life force to do it.

Things i’ve modified:

• limiting whatsapp/imessage — checking messages 1-2x per day only

• limiting checking of email

• cannabis less frequently

• sugar on rare occasion

• cacao less frequently

• alcohol on rare occasion

• limiting of news feeds

Final Thought

Before doing something you know is going to spike a dopamine level, you can ask yourself — is this a worthy use of my currency?

Is it worth the dip?

Am i acting from a place of filling a craving, to get back to baseline? Do i want to simply exacerbate the feeling?

Or am I consciously deciding to engage in this activity because I feel it’s worth it & part of enjoying life? (i.e. eating chocolate dessert with friends)

What is the Joe Dispenza method/formula for?

A formula for utilizing the Placebo effect - the conscious directive of the mind towards a desired outcome - to initiate transformation or create a desired future reality.

It helps to create lasting change in your life — to get out of your conditioned patterns of the way things have always gone, to creating a new future self and reality.

This process of synchronizing your energy to a future reality works to draw experiences to you in the form of new opportunities, synchronicities, and coincidences in your life.

Common areas of focus the method is effective for:

• Health / Illness

• Abundance / Wealth

• Partner

• Life circumstances, opportunities

Dispenza developed this method after both using his mind to heal himself from a paralyzing spinal injury, and researching for years the common threads behind hundreds of cases of spontaneous remissions and healings.

It’s largely metaphysical, but he’s bringing scientific measurements of physiological states (HRV, Coherence, Brainwaves, Epigenetics, Immune Response) to help validate and reproduce results.

Overview

Goal

The goal of this method is to:

• Transform old patterns and ways of being that keep you stuck in the same life

• Train your ability to manifest the life you desire, and catalyze synchronistic miracles in your life

To do that, we need to:

• Train how to unwire old stress and victim-based patterns that are stuck in our minds/bodies

• Train how to tap into ‘the field’ — the source of all manifestations; being open to possibility & the unexpected

• Define what we desire — circumstances, emotions we want to feel, and the person we want to be

• Train how to create heart + mind coherence — a physiological, psychosomatic state that shifts our energy patterns to manifest things in our life

• Practice cultivating and integrating a state of coherence & gratitude in our waking lives

  • Logging miracles, big or small, to compound the effect of gratitude

  • Noticing where we feel lack in our life, and choosing to feel the emotion of fullness in that area would feel like (i.e. loneliness → connection)

  • Developing a watchdog awareness of unhealthy self-indulgent thoughts and emotional patterns and choosing to shift our energy to coherence (i.e. despair, hopelessness, worry — emotions that torture us and make us feel good as victims, rather than pull us through an experience)

    • Note: emotions such as sadness, grief, anger are different and are meant to be felt fully — the goal is not to bypass these emotions; it’s the emotions that are self-indulgent and spirals that we aim to shift.

Roadmap of the Practice

• 45 - 60 days of consistent training using Joe Dispenza’s meditations (4-5 days per week)

• Define future states — emotional states, the person you are becoming, things you’re manifesting

• Daily practice of watching out for thoughts, behaviors, emotions that don’t align with the future you’re creating

• Daily practice of feeling as the future self — cultivating heartmind coherence, gratitude, and state shifts

Ideal Result

After this period of training, you’ll have rewired patterns in your brain nervous system, and you’ll be able to do this without as much effort — maybe a shorter Void + Coherence practice, less frequently, or consciously practicing during daily life.

You’ll have integrated the ability to:

• Attuning to and staying open to the unknown field of possibility, rather than assuming, predicting, and eventually manifesting the same situations in your life

• Staying in a state of heartmind coherence + gratitude

• Shifting your states

• Defining what you want in the future, and being in the state to pull it forth to your present

A vision of life after training:

• A state of: what miracles could the field deliver me today?

• Open to all possibilities

• Healing of physical ailments

• Synchronistic events + spontaneous opportunities

• Manifesting your future visions and future self forward to the present

• Enjoying the journey of life in a state of gratitude + presence; enjoying the mystery of how things unfold

This may seem very esoteric - but his weeklong trainings have produced medical miracle after medical miracle.

It appears he’s tapped into a way to unlock the potential of the mindbody connection.

A couple guiding principles

• Everything is figureoutable. Most people that have started online businesses figured things out on the way

• You don’t need to create a $10MM+ rev business to be ‘successful’ - honing your goals down to specific revenue targets that sustain your financial freedom helps to clarify this

• You don’t need to invent something new - something slightly better, marketed to a different audience, or to a new purpose can be successful. You simply need a certain slice of the pie (market share) to hit your goals.

• This may take time and research - but if you’re committed, is worth it.

Step 0: Target Monthly Income

This is well known from the 4 Hour Workweek, but a crucial step - how much money do you want to make per month, after taxes?

This number is crucial, because it allows you to reverse engineer. If your goal is $20,000/mo, and your product turns out $20 net profit per sale (after cost of goods, operating expenses, etc), then you need to sell 1,000 units per month.

Step 1: Ideate

Scratch your own itch

Starting Point

• Write down every activity you do on a daily basis - everything.

• Write down every activity you engage in occasionally

Take this list, and answer these questions:

• Is there a product/service that can make these activities can be improved?

• Is there a product/service that can make these activities more enjoyable?

Take the first list, and write down every product or service you use for each activity. Continue to write down every product and service you use.

Take this list, and answer these questions:

• Is there a way you’d improve any of these product or services, even by 10%, or a simple feature?

• Is there a way you’d brand any of these products or services better?

• Is there a product or service you use that’s marketed to a completely different audience or use case, but you use it for something else?

All of these are potential business ideas.

Apply something from another world

Here, you follow the same principles, except your starting point is products on the market, rather than products that you necessarily already use.

Starting point: go through indiegogo, Kickstarter, and Amazon to find interesting products that are marketed to specific use cases

Ideation Questions:

• Is there a way you’d improve any of these product or services, even by 10%, or a simple feature?

• Is there a way you’d brand any of these products or services better?

• Is there a product or service you use that’s marketed to a completely different audience or use case, but you use it for something else?

Ask your friends & family

Here, the starting point is a list of products and services your friends use.

Starting point: ask your friends all the products and services they use.

Ideation Questions:

• Do they have an idea of how they’d improve any of these products or services?

• Is there a way you’d improve any of these product or services, even by 10%, or a simple feature?

• Is there a way you’d brand any of these products or services better?

• Is there a product or service that’s marketed to a specific audience or use case, that can be marketed to a different niche?

Step 2: Validate

Once you’ve got a few good ideas, it’s time to validate whether people will actually want to buy it.

Best ways to validate, from strongest signal to weakest:

• Create a prototype for people to test, give feedback, and see if they’d be willing to purchase

• Create a landing page, run ads to it, and simply refund people’s money after they purchase if you don’t have inventory

• Pay someone with a big following / newsletter in the niche you’re targeting to run a survey about the product on their IG / newsletter

• Survey friends and family to gauge interest

Step 3: Launch

Once you’ve got an idea that you feel confident will sell (and hopefully a few customers waiting to purchase), it’s time to launch and start selling.