Your life won't change until the ideas are yours.

Hey. It’s January 2.

Everyone else is telling you to learn more, read more, stack more frameworks, chase more insights. I’m here to say the opposite: the most powerful thing you can do this year is deliberately know less.

I’m not talking about becoming stupid. I’m talking about unlearning the borrowed certainty that’s keeping you stuck.

Because here’s what I’ve seen, in myself first, then in way too many people who message me: The smartest, most thoughtful people are often the most stalled. You’ve read the books. You’ve got the models. You can explain your patterns in exquisite detail: why you sabotage, why you overthink, why you repeat the same betrayals. You’re full of insight. And nothing much changes.

That’s the trap. We’ve turned knowledge into a hiding place. Understanding feels so good, so productive, that it becomes the whole game. You sharpen your internal map while the territory stays exactly the same.

I lived it. I built a successful real estate business doing exactly what I was “supposed” to do:

• hustle

• scale

• follow the script everyone hands you for success.

Money came. Status came. Misery came with it. I was successful on paper and empty inside. So I quit. Burned it down. No plan, no safety net. Just a blank page and a question: who the hell am I when I stop borrowing everyone else’s idea of a good life?

That’s when everything actually shifted. Not because I consumed more wisdom. But because I started from zero. My zero.

The Ownership Ladder

Most people never leave Level 1: Borrowed Knowledge. This is what school drilled into us: answers are out there, pre-packaged, handed down by teachers, parents, culture, experts.

You consume conclusions from books, podcasts, gurus. It feels smart. It feels like growth. But it evaporates the second real pressure hits. Because it was never yours.

A few climb to Level 2: Critical Consumption. You start questioning the borrowed stuff. Does this make sense? Does it hold up to logic, to evidence, to your life? You poke holes. You debate. You refine. This is better. Critical thinking wakes up. But you’re still playing in someone else’s sandbox. Still dependent. Still not creating.

The real freedom, the real novelty, the real different life? That’s Level 3: Deliberate Forgetting & Blank-Page Creation. You let go of what you were taught, what you taught yourself, what felt so certain. You start from zero. Raw experience only. You sit with your patterns, your confusion, your failures, and you write your own theories first.

Messy. Unpolished. Earned through discomfort.

Only after you land on something that feels undeniably true do you go check if science, neuroscience, or anyone else mapped it too.

That’s where original ideas are born. That’s where a life that doesn’t look like everyone else’s gets built.

I’ve been living Level 3 for years now. I stopped reading self-help a long time ago. Which makes zero sense on paper, because I wrote Unf*ck Your Thinking, loved doing it, and I’m deep into writing the second one right now.

But here’s the thing: I never wrote those books for you. I wrote them for me. To wrestle my own chaos into something that made sense. To understand why I was miserable at the top of the ladder everyone said to climb. Blank page first. My questions. My failures. My conclusions. Only then did I dip into the research to see if it held up. Turns out, it mostly did. But because I earned it first, it stuck. And ironically, that’s why it resonates with people.

Why Your Brain Rewards the Hard Way

I still read. I still listen to podcasts. A lot, actually. But I flipped the order. My curiosity comes first, then I go hunting for validation.

Here’s why that matters:

Your brain doesn’t change much when it recognizes an idea. Recognition feels good. Dopamine fires. You nod. You screenshot. You move on.

But recognition isn’t learning, it’s confirmation.

Real learning only happens when your brain is forced to generate something on its own. When you struggle to form an idea from scratch, different circuits light up. Multiple systems have to coordinate instead of passively agreeing. That friction is the signal.

The brain basically goes: “Oh. This matters. I had to work for this.”

That’s when it rewires.

That’s also why I deliberately feed my brain wildly unrelated inputs. One week it’s the neuroscience of storytelling. The next it’s planarian flatworms (those little regenerating freaks that can be trained to fear light, get decapitated, grow an entirely new head and brain… and still remember the fear).

Yeah. That’s real.

Their memory persists even when the physical structure that supposedly “held” it is gone. When you expose your brain to distant domains like that, it’s forced to bridge gaps that don’t already exist.

That collision is where novelty comes from.

Not depth in one lane.

But tension between lanes. That’s why the hard way works. And why it sticks.

The 2026 Reset: Start from Blank

So here’s the move, if you’re dumb enough to trust me:

1. Pick one pattern that’s still running you.

2. Open a blank page. Write your own theory about why it’s there: what it protects, what it costs, what it’s really saying about you. No research yet. Just you.

3. Live with it. Test it in one small way. No grand overhaul.

4. Notice what happens. Adjust. Write again.

5. Only now..go see if the world has anything useful to add.

That loop is the difference between collecting insight and owning your evolution.

The Unifying Principle You’re Probably Already Seeing

At this point, if you’re paying attention, you’re probably noticing a pattern. And yes, you’re seeing it correctly.

There is a unifying principle underneath everything I’m talking about here.

It’s not learning faster. It’s not better habits. It’s not stacking smarter frameworks. It’s removal. If Second Life had a first principle, this would be it: Less borrowed ideas. Less inherited definitions. Less noise disguised as wisdom.

Not because learning is bad, but because most people are already over-informed and under-original.

When your mind is full of other people’s conclusions, there’s no room left for your own. No room for friction. No room for the uncomfortable process of figuring things out from first principles.

This is how I actually started my Second Life. I subtracted.

I removed beliefs that were never questioned. I removed identities that were built as coping strategies. I removed information diets that made me feel intelligent but unchanged.

Even practically, the pattern held. I removed meetings. I removed unnecessary coordination. I removed complexity that existed only to justify itself.

And life didn’t get emptier. It got a whole lot clearer. And things started moving very fast.

The same principle applies to learning, thinking, and identity. The less you borrow, the more you’re forced to generate. The less you consume, the more you’re forced to confront. The less you add, the more signal appears. This is why becoming beats learning.

Becoming requires space. Learning, the way most people do it, fills every inch. Second Life isn’t about becoming more impressive. It’s about becoming less distorted.

And that only happens when you start removing what never belonged in the first place.