I spent the first 30 years of my life in a cage.
But no-one else could see it, much less free me from it.
It was a long, slow crawl to freedom, but I made it in the endâand it was worth it.
Now I help other people achieve their definition of freedom and success in a matter of daysâand I want to see if I can do that for you through this post alone. But first, let me tell you how it all started for meâŠ
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My earliest memories are of asking "why?"âin precisely the way a dedicated truth-seeker should. But there was no context for that kind of questioning in my English small-town culture, so my deepest curiosities were dismissed.
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get anyone to tell me why they were placing so many rules on me.
So I struggled through 7 years of primary (junior) school before, on arrival at secondary (high) school, I found something that, by comparison to everything Iâd been presented thus far, felt like freedom: I started playing drums.
I thought the path of the rock musician would be my escape, but I was wrong. To my surprise, my drum teacher was no different to my classroom teachers, who encouraged me to suffer through dull exam work now in exchange for some vague, abstract reward later.
But unlike my classroom teachers, my drum teacher had little power to stop me rejecting his methods. I refused to do things his way, instead aiming directly at my musical heroes and learning to play like them by osmosis. This felt like freedom compared to the classroom, but I didn't know at the time how many levels of cultural rules Iâd have to contend with after school.
I couldnât have expressed this at the time, but I knew in my gut that something very wrong was going on everywhere I looked: people were sacrificing their wellbeing for material successâand they werenât even happy about it! Nonetheless, my broke, miserable, diabetic teachers had no problem telling me how I should live my life.
But once I escaped school I found that instead of sacrificing my wellbeing for academia, I was sacrificing it for musical development. I practised for hours every day through my teenage years with no guidance on how to protect my body. And eventually I "sold out", travelling hundreds of miles around the UK each weekend to play cover tunes I hated for very low pay. (Social media wasnât a thing back thenâthe only way to survive as a musician was to play the gigs that were available.)
Approaching 30, I couldn't play for 5 minutes without my thoracic spine feeling like it was on fire. My shows were like torture, and the drives home were even worse.
So even though I tried to rebel, I couldn't escape the cultural trend of sacrificing wellbeing for success. Even among the rebels: the rock and jazz musicians, the "suffer now/reward later" dynamic was inescapable. This attitude wasâand still isâso embedded into our culture that people didnât even know they were trapped in it.
Now, you may know someone who's achieved material wealth and security by putting themselves through hell. And that person may be very well practised at displaying pride in those achievements. But most of these people can't be alone with their thoughts for even 30 seconds. In exchange for their "success", they twisted themselves so grotesquely out of shape that they can't even imagine what true satisfaction feels like. (You know the kind of satisfaction I'm talking about: the satisfaction that depends upon nothingâthat cannot be attained, only revealed in stillness and quietude.)
Of course, our parents and schoolteachers couldn't have conceived of the world we live in now. That's why they presented us with such a narrow vision of life, and encouraged us to hide within its boundaries. Even as they saw the internet begin to revolutionize global culture, they were afraid of the unknown. That's natural. But that doesn't mean we have to continue to subscribe to their outdated world-view. In fact, our brightest future demands that we don'tâŠ
In 2024, you no longer have to sacrifice your wellbeing to acquire wealth.
Of course, if you're someone who wants to amass as much money as possible, no matter the cost, there'll always be the option to work 16 hours a day. But if you're someone who just wants reasonable material success, good news: I'm proving that you're more capable of doing this when you put wellbeing first.
I already made 6 figures online with zero stress, and I'm going to prove that it's possible to do 7.
But how? Well, let's pick up where we left off in my storyâŠ
The Solution to My Troubles
In 2015, I began studying Alexander Technique. My trainer in this niche discipline showed me that the physical pain I was experiencing was not caused by any illness or injury, nor by any circumstance but, rather, by me. I discovered that my pain was caused by tension, my tension was caused by stress, and my stress was caused by a constellation of faulty ideas I'd been stacking up since my earliest years.
Alexander Technique was my first introduction to the possibility of non-doing as an option in life, and my trainer was the first person who ever told me that I deserved to be well, physically and mentally. And further, he told me that becoming well was actually my best shot at the success I'd been seeking my whole life.
I didn't believe him.
But I'd reached the end of the road in my efforts to make things work the way my culture told me to. So I had no choice but to believe this man, who represented so radical a change of perspective for me that I had to re-examine everything I'd ever been told.
A year after beginning that study, I found my first dharma teacherâthen things got really wild.
By prioritizing wellbeing in the deepest sense, I've enjoyed greater material success than I ever thought possibleâwithout compromising my health, my values or my integrity. If I were to hop in a time machine and tell Dan of just 2 years ago that he was going to earn $10,000 in 48 hours heâd laugh in my face. But now it feels totally ordinary.
If youâve been following me a while, you know how Iâm doing it. I write about what's most important to me, the change I want to make in the worldâopenly and honestly. This, naturally, attracts like-minded people (like you). These people are at various stages in their own journeys, which means some of them are seeking guidance. They message me and ask for help. Then, if we're a really good fit, we do some work together. Working with these people is a dream because they care about the same things I doâand this means they're happy to pay me well for the help I give them. It's profoundly win/win.
6 Steps to Real Success
So how did I get from teaching people music for $40 an hour to teaching people how to change the world for $300? Iâm going to lay it out for youâŠ
1. Stop
The first thing you have to do in this process is the thing everyone finds scariest. I was the same.
You have to stop what you're doing.
I know it might feel like everything will fall apart if you do. But I also know that if you're resonating with the earlier parts of my story above then what you're doing currently isn't working for you.
So you need some kind of practice that helps you to stopâin the broadest sense.
For me, it was first Alexander Technique. If you can find an Alexander Technique teacher within an organization called the Interactive Teaching Method then I strongly recommend visiting them. But if you can't, you're not lost.
My study and practice of dharma and, later, nonduality, was arguably more profound. Though, of course, I can't separate out the effects these 3 disciplines had on me. It was an intense 5 years studying them all.
But let me make it simple for you. To begin with, just do this guided meditation of mine.
2. Reset
Once you've found some spaceâin the mind, in the heart, on your calendarânow you can begin to reconsider the pieces of your life.
Here are some potent journal prompts to help you with this:
- Who are you? (Not "how do other people see you", but who are you as you experience yourself, in the deepest existential sense?)
- What do you love?
- What do you hate?
- If you could wave a magic wand, what one change would you make in the world?
- If you had $1 million in the bank, what would your daily routine be?
Answering these questions honestly will remind you of your core values. The degree to which your life circumstances involve compromising on these values is the degree to which you must change if you want to achieve real success, fulfilment, satisfaction.
3. Align
So now it's time to make some real changes.
What does your current life look like, compared to the life you illustrated in question 5 above? Write about the differences if you need to. Then planâin baby stepsâfor how you're going to change your life to the ideal one you visualized.
Perhaps you're in a job that has no progression right now. Or perhaps there's progression, but it's out of alignment with your core values.
Perhaps your partner isn't ambitious and wants to settle down already. Or perhaps you never really felt the two of you were as compatible as you'd have liked.
This phase in people's journeys in typically difficult. On that Alexander Technique course I took, there was a trend among trainees: around the second year, a shocking number of them would break up with their partners. This was because it was in that second year that trainees started to change a lot. So they grew away from their partners.
If that hadn't happened to me, I'd never have broken up with my ex and met my wife. A good outcome, but the change was still hard at the time.
The Ultimate Alignment
If you've been reading my content, you'll know I'm a strong advocate for what I call the purpose-based business model. In this model, myself and my clients use the leanest, simplest, easiest means to:
- Represent the change we want to see in the world
- Communicate it to others
- Build an audience around it
- Facilitate the change at scale
- Profit
It just so happens that, right now, the best way to do this is through social mediaâX in particular, where ideas are king. If you want help starting or growing your purpose-based business, click here.
4. Plan
Once your heart, mind and circumstances are aligned with your gut, you can look to the future. Way into the future. Check out my previous post on how to design your 50-year purpose-based business plan.
5. Act
Once you have your plan, all you have to do is take one baby-step at a time. If you ever feel confused or overwhelmed, the solution is simple: break the current phase of your plan down into smaller steps.
Of course, this all requires a lot of high-order thinking and proactivity. This is why I always do this important work in the morning, when everyone else is in bed and distractions are minimal. This time is sacred. If you feel you donât have this time, itâs vital that you create itâsomehow, somewhere. You must be ruthless with your calendar. Axe an existing obligation and deal with the fact that someoneâs not gonna like it. Pay someone to clean your house or mind your kids for a while.
The reason most people donât do this is that the work Iâm talking about here is important, but not urgent. Itâs easier, in a way, to just start putting out fires from the moment you wake upâto do what everyone else wants you to do. Why? Because then you donât have to think. Youâll live your whole life in a reactive, rather than a proactive state. And yes, that might seem easier day by day, but itâs a ticket to severe regret on your deathbed.
Thereâs great benefit in choosing and aligning with your heart mission. Not just for you, but for the millions of people you can benefit. Donât let them down.
6. Acknowledge
This step is often neglected, but itâs very important:
Acknowledge your successes, no matter how small.
The winner effect is a well-known psychological phenomenon, which proves that when you acknowledge your successes, you prime yourself for more of them. Sadly, our culture programs us as children to do anything but acknowledge our successes. It punished us when we failed, and rewarded us for âtaking partâ. Thatâs a damaging duo. For growth to occur, failure must be framed as a learning opportunity, and successâthough it doesnât have to be grandâmust be genuine.
So you must take matters into your own hands:
- If youâre practising mindfulness, acknowledge the success of a mindful breath
- If youâre writing content, acknowledge the success of a published tweet
- If youâre serving clients, acknowledge the success of a fulfilled deliverable
This activates positive reinforcement, and it will change your whole freaking life.
Time to Build Your Utopia
If thereâs one thing I want you to take away from this post, itâs that thereâs no real success without fulfilment.
Weâve all heard the stories of miserable millionaires.
No amount of money, nor any other traditional metric of success, has the power to make you feel successful.
If it did, every rich person would be fulfilled, content, satisfied. Everyone who had money would feel successful. But they donât.
You must decide what your definition of success is, then go after it without compromise using the steps above.
If you need help with this, Iâm here to serve you. This is what I do with my existing clients, who are all awakening to the deepest truth of their beingâthen building their purpose-based businesses on that unshakeable foundation.
To explore whether doing some work with me is right for you, click here. Weâll explore some questions about where youâre at and where youâd like to go, then see if teaming up would help you to get there quicker.
With love from my desk,
dgđ
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