Winning is hard. There’s no getting around that. What most people get wrong is they conflate “hard” with “suffering”. But that’s not a given.

The extent to which doing hard things causes you to suffer depends entirely on your neurochemistry. Once you learn to HACK your neurochemistry to serve your interests, taking winning actions become your default mode. And not only that, but your ABILITY to successfully execute those winning actions increases by an order of magnitude.

When you combine a significant increase in the amount of winning actions you take + the quality of those winning actions, guess what happens? You WIN.

This combination of “more & better” is a powerful accelerator to your life trajectory. You can achieve it without aligning your neurochemistry, in the same way you can swim against the current of a river and still make progress—but why would you?? Fix your neurochemistry, and you’re swimming WITH the river. This is 100% in your control, and today i’m going to give you the playbook.

Your neurochemistry = your brain’s response to stimuli. It’s the system of chemicals (neurotransmitters) that control how you feel, think, and act. Everything you do—working, training, scrolling, eating, talking—triggers different neurochemicals like dopamine (motivation), serotonin (mood), and norepinephrine (focus).

KEY: You do not need to understand exactly how all these neurochemicals work in order to hack them successfully.

Do you need to understand how your car works to drive it? No. You just turn the key, take the handbrake off, hit the pedal and steer. This is exactly the same. If you’d like to pour through scientific journals and hyper niche podcasts episodes to learn about it all, you’re welcome to. But i’m not a scientist, i’m more like a driving instructor. My goal here isn’t to educate you on how the engine works—I’m here to teach you how to drive.

Mastering your neurochemistry doesn’t mean hard things suddenly become easy, it means they become ENJOYABLE. You like doing them. They feel good in the moment, and they feel REALLY good once complete. Again, they’re still DIFFICULT, but instead of having to crack the whip and verbally lacerate yourself in the mirror just to get going, you’re naturally drawn towards them. Why? Because mastering your neurochemistry affects 3 key areas:

This is so f****** important. People will literally go through life thinking…

“I’m not a motivated person”

“I don’t have a long attention span”

“I’m not good at solving problems”

They believe it’s inherently WHO THEY ARE, which is bullshit. The truth = you’re just a bunch of electric signals and chemicals in a meatsuit. Change the electric signals & chemicals and you change the person. This is 100% in our control—and it’s more important today than ever.

In today’s world, nobody’s “default mode” is high performance. Not a single f*cking person. Why? Because there’s an all out assault being waged on your neurochemistry.

Mega-corporations got the jump on us because they figured out the secrets of hacking neurochemistry first. They discovered how to STIMULATE the brain in a way that serves THEIR interests—and they got us good. But now it’s your responsibility to take back control. If you don’t learn how to hack your own neurochemistry, you will forever be a slave to the interests of corporations, who spend BILLIONS of dollars to weaponise your mind for their profits.

This should be the first place you look whenever:

You need a mental checklist to go through, fixing NEUROCHEMICAL ISSUES before you even begin thinking…

“maybe i’m not a high performer”

“maybe there’s something wrong with me”

“maybe this isn’t what i’m meant to be doing”

Fix your brain first. Then and ONLY then should you start trying to infer meaning about who you are, your aptitude, and whether you’re on the right path or not.

This is the fun part. Armed with the 7 tools, and the desire + willingness to actually USE them, you are now on the precipice of an entirely NEW reality. No matter what level of performance you’ve been operating at up to this point—even if it’s “high” by 98% of people’s standards—I guarantee that at least ONE (if not all) of the following tools will take you to the next level. Again, you have to actually APPLY them. But it’s a tiny price to pay for what you get in exchange.

As a final warning, the following actions will make you even more of an “extremist” than you likely already are. If you’re surrounded by people who don’t care about and/or don’t understand winning, you will feel like an outsider. Different. Not “normal”. Good.

There’s a reason most people don’t win, and why most who attempt to win, fail. The pull to conformity is a powerful force—if you can’t resist it, it will keep you trapped forever. With that being said, here are the 7 tools for “hacking your neurochemistry” to make winning easy:

The first “neurochemical mountain” to conquer is stimulation control. Like i said before, the default state in 2025 is overstimulation. Most people’s brains are so cooked from all the TikTok brain rot content, junk food, and cheap entertainment that focusing on ONE thing for HOURS at a time is simply outside of the realm of possibility. And before you think “i’m not like that”, remember it’s not binary, it’s a SPECTRUM. It’s not “are you over stimulated or not?”, it’s “HOW overstimulated are you?”.

There are 2 main things to focus on here:

Another way of saying this would be “shifting your tolerance for boredom”. No activity is inherently borning. Things are only boring relative to the amount of stimulation you’re used to.

Right now, the idea of working on a single task or problem for 8 hours straight might feel impossibly tedious, but if you’d been locked in a padded cell for 3 months without ANY stimulation, it would feel like the most exciting thing in the world.

This is a HUGE opportunity for making winning 10x easier. The more you can increase your “tolerance for boredom” by reducing your baseline level of stimulation, the EASIER it’ll be to attack the difficult problems & tasks that “move the needle” towards your goal, and the longer you’ll be able to concentrate deeply on those things.

Charlie Munger once said, "I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded because I have a long attention span." Edwin Land—the founder of Polaroid—said, "My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn't know they had."

Having a long attention span is a superpower. You might think, “well both of them grew up before smart phones and social media!” and you’re RIGHT. But that’s a good thing. In a world where EVERYONE is overstimulated (including most “high performers”), having a long attention span gives you a greater competitive advantage than ever. Yes it’s harder, but once you develop it, you gain an immediate edge.

Here’s HOW you actually do it:

a) Eliminate the obvious garbage

The more “cheap dopamine” you get, the less motivation you’ll have to do the work that counts. The optimal amount of garbage short form brain rot content is ZERO. Any consumption above zero will have a negative effect. This is a TINY sacrifice given what you stand to gain in life (if eliminating TikTok videos is too big a sacrifice, how much do you really care about your goals?).

On top of this, minimising highly processed food, and other forms of “cheap” entertainment will have a positive effect on your baseline stimulation levels. No one is perfect. And there may be a case for occasional “indulgence”, but if your goal is sustained high performance, you should keep it to an absolute minimum.

b) Tactical boredom

Boredom is a TOOL. If you’re chronically overstimulated, a full day without any screens will act like a zamboni for your brain—resetting your tolerance for long form/high effort activities. In your daily life, I recommend not touching social media until at least midday (insane ROI for focus), and going on long walks without using your phone or listening to podcasts. It’ll continually reinforce your tolerance for low stimulation activities, and give your subconscious time to process the days inputs + feed you solutions to problems.

c) Practice

Elminating cheap dopamine & leveraging tactical boredom lower your baseline level of stimulation. The other half is expanding your attention span / ability to focus via practice. Deep work is like mediation—you set an intention (the task you want to complete) and you focus on it as hard as you can.

At some point, an automatic thought will pop up—something completely unrelated to what you’re doing—and you will have a desire to “chase” it i.e. take action on it. It could be a YouTube video you wanted to watch, a message you were meant to send, an old friend who’s Instagram you haven’t looked at in a while—whatever it is, you will suddenly feel like it’s the only thing that’s important in the world.

Your only job is to take a deep breath, write it down, and get back to work. That’s deep work: you set an intention, you focus hard, you have an impulse, you write it down, you re-align your focus back to the original intention. Every time you repeat this process, you’re essentially flexing your “focus muscle”, which becomes stronger and stronger over time.

Your inputs = the content/information you consume on a regular basis. Every piece of content you absorb is rewiring your brain, training it to crave certain rewards, shaping how you think, and dictating what feels “normal.” In other words, the content you regularly consume has a massive impact on your success.

I put inputs into 4 categories, with 1 being the least useful/most destructive, and 4 being the most useful/least destructive. Here’s the breakdown:

THE IDEAL: Eliminate all consumption of cheap dopamine & motivational dopamine (1&2) and ramp up your consumption of tactical & transformational content (3&4). Making this shift will naturally improve your attention span, as well as elevating your thinking to the level of the winners you want to become like. I’d say it’s one of the very few “cheat codes” to succeeding faster. Try it for 2 weeks, and I guarantee you’ll feel your mind expanding.

Re-framing is a way of hacking your neurochemistry via shifting your attitude. It’s amazing to think that your perception of an event can change what neurochemicals are released, but it’s 100% true. Your attitude towards stress, failure, hard work, and difficulty determines whether these experiences fuel you or break you.

If you see stress as a threat, your brain floods with cortisol in a way that paralyzes you—your body tenses up, your thinking gets cloudy, and you start seeking escape instead of action.

But if you see stress as activation energy, your brain redirects cortisol and norepinephrine to sharpen your focus. You lean into the pressure instead of resisting it.

If you see failure as proof that you’re not good enough, your dopamine system crashes, and your brain rewires itself to avoid risk. You hesitate, second-guess, and shrink back from challenges.

But if you see failure as proof of forward motion, your brain keeps dopamine firing—because now, every mistake is just data, feedback that sharpens your execution.

(NOTE: You can’t trick your brain into seeing failure as forward motion. Failure must actually be moving you forward, and for that to be the case you must be analysing your failures, learning from them and implementing changes moving forward. Your action changes your perception)

If you see hard work as a necessary evil, your brain associates it with pain. You drain dopamine just by thinking about it, making motivation feel impossible.

But if you see hard work as a game, a privilege, or a proving ground, your brain starts linking effort to reward. Suddenly, pushing harder releases dopamine, and discipline stops feeling like punishment.

If you see difficulty as a sign you should quit, your brain pumps out stress chemicals that trigger avoidance. Every obstacle feels heavier than it is.

But if you see difficulty as a biological signal of growth, your brain keeps dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin in play—you start enjoying the process because you associate discomfort with leveling up.

The stimulus doesn’t change, but your neurochemical RESPONSE changes as a result of your ATTITUDE towards the stimulus. Putting this into practice means constantly reminding yourself of the “mental framing” you WANT to adopt. Write it somewhere you can see it always:I LOVE PRESSURE, IT DRIVES ME TO HIGHER LEVELS OF PERFORMANCE

FAILURE ISN’T A TOMBSTONE, IT’S A STEPPING STONE

HARD WORK IS A PRIVILEGE, AN OPPORTUNITY TO PROVE MY COMMITMENT

THE HARDER IT IS, THE GREATER THE OPPORTUNITY FOR GROWTH

Every time you come up against any one of these things, take a deep breath, and look at your reminders. Each time, you’re training your brain into a “winning attitude”.

Understanding positive & negative reinforcement is the key to understanding everything you do (or don’t do). Your brain is a machine that chases rewards and avoids pain—the only question is what it has been trained to associate with each. If your brain links effort to pain and distractions to pleasure, you’ll procrastinate, hesitate, and sabotage your own goals without even realizing why. But if you flip the script—if you start rewarding winning actions and punishing weak ones—your behavior changes effortlessly.

The things you do the most aren’t who you are—they’re just what your brain has been conditioned to seek. If you can rewire the reward-pain equation, you can rewire your habits, motivation, and long-term trajectory. If hard work feels good, you’ll do more of it. If distractions feel bad, you’ll avoid them. It’s that simple.

Strategies to introduce positive/negative reinforcement:

This is one of THE most effective strategies you can implement for changing your behaviour “automatically”. By automatically, i mean that by doing this, your behaviour will NATURALLY shift in the direction of your goals.

Why? Because when you do the right things, the results show progress, and you get positively reinforced for those actions via positive emotions. When you don’t do the right things, the results show zero or negative progress, and you get negatively reinforced via “bad feelings”.

For example, imagine you’re trying to lose weight, but every morning you step on the scale and see you’ve GAINED weight. How long do you think you’re going to keep eating the same amount of food before you take action? How long would you continue watching your weight go in the OPPOSITE direction of your goal? You would automatically start making better choices. You would SEE the cookie, and the first thought in your mind wouldn’t be the pleasure of a bite, it would be the SCALE. The scale that never lies—and that you’ll have to face AGAIN tomorrow morning. With this image in mind, you would surely lose all desire for the cookie.

Without measuring & tracking results, it’s easy to LIE to yourself—but winners understand that FEELING like you’re making progress is not the same as making progress. You must align yourself with an objective scoreboard, and check it daily.

Measuring & tracking your INPUTS is another way of creating “mini-wins” for the ACTIONS you’re taking in service of your goals. Examples of things you could track and celebrate:

It will depend on your goal + the actions you’re trying to take. Key = create as many opportunities for process-based wins as possible.

Everyone says “you’re the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with”, but it’s really that you’re the average of the 5 people you COMPARE yourself to/most want to impress.

The reason this impacts your behaviour is positive/negative reinforcement. If the 5 people you compare yourself to all exercise daily, but you never exercise, you’ll feel “less than” every time you make the comparison (negative reinforcement), thereby increasing your desire to exercise.

This is one of the most effective ways to leverage positive/negative reinforcement to get what you want. Either find a peer group of people who are more successful than you, or if you can’t, spend more time listening to podcasts/reading biographies of winners—it has practically the same effect.

I used to think that work was a necessary evil to get the things i wanted. I’ve since learned that work can be the best/most rewarding part of your life, IF you do it in the right way. It doesn’t necessarily matter what kind of work you’re doing, so long as:

Ideally you also have some aptitude & affinity for what you’re doing, but competence can be developed and any work “done well” can be enjoyable. What’s more important is HOW you do it.

Work becomes intrinsically rewarding when you focus on doing it as well as you possibly can, and constantly improve your abilities. When you complete your work in this manner, you’ll find that doing the thing itself FEELS good. That acts as positive reinforcement for doing the work, which in turn increases your DESIRE to work.

Imagine that. Imagine you couldn’t f*cking wait to get back into a “deep work” block, because you LOVE how it feels so much. Imagine how much better your work would be. Imagine how much more you’d get done. Imagine how much you’d start WINNING.

The longer you spend in “high performance mode”, and the more you understand the negative repercussions of low quality actions, the worse you’ll feel about taking them. It’s a very natural form of negative reinforcement that results in you losing all desire for the “self sabotaging” behaviours you used to indulge in. You’ve been through it enough times that you can future-pace the shame, guilt, and frustration you’ll feel if you do the wrong thing, so you just stop doing it. Whether this is “healthy” or not doesn’t matter. It just happens. And it works.

Trying to win without optimising your health is like filling a race car with vegetable oil and expecting it to perform. Your body is your operating system. If it’s running like shit, so will everything else.

Most people think of health in terms of aesthetics or longevity, but it’s much bigger than that. Your energy, focus, stress tolerance, and even willpower are all biologically driven. If your sleep is trash, your neurotransmitters are imbalanced, or your body is inflamed from garbage food, you’re fighting an uphill battle.

Sleep: Deep sleep is a neurotransmitter reset—if you skip it, your dopamine, serotonin, and cortisol are out of whack before the day even starts. Fix it.

Training: Regular exercise spikes dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins, making motivation and discipline effortless. You don’t “find time” to train—you make time.

Sunlight & Nature Exposure: Sunlight in the morning regulates serotonin and locks in your circadian rhythm. Green spaces lower cortisol. Both make execution easier.

Cold Exposure & Breathwork: Cold plunges and controlled breathing spike norepinephrine, sharpening focus and resilience.

Nutrition: Your brain is made of fats, amino acids, and micronutrients. Eat like garbage, think like garbage. Prioritize protein for dopamine, healthy fats for brain function, and micronutrients for neurotransmitter balance.

Your brain isn’t separate from your body—it runs on the fuel you give it. Fix your health, and everything else becomes easier.

Your brain is a reaction machine—it constantly responds to what’s around you. Your environment triggers neurotransmitter releases that determine motivation, focus, energy, and stress levels.

Most people think willpower controls behavior. Wrong. Your surroundings shape your dopamine cravings, cortisol spikes, serotonin levels, and ability to focus. If your environment is set up for distraction, your brain will default to failure. If it’s built for high performance, winning becomes automatic.

Here’s how environment design directly hacks your neurochemistry:

Your brain seeks what’s in front of it. If you’re constantly exposed to your phone, notifications, junk food, or a TV in the background, your dopamine system will crave those things instead of deep work or execution.

Solution = make the habits/behaviours you want to avoid as inaccessible as possible, and “winning habits” as easy as possible.

Ideas:

How you implement this will depend on what you’re trying to achieve. The important thing is that you actually do it.

If your environment is cluttered, noisy, chaotic, or unpredictable, your brain perceives threats—even if they’re minor. This leads to chronic cortisol spikes, which:

Solution =

Norepinephrine is the neurotransmitter of attention. When you enter deep work, your brain releases norepinephrine to sharpen focus and eliminate distractions.

But if your environment constantly pulls your attention elsewhere, you never reach the levels of focus needed for peak performance.

Solution =

Remember: Focus isn’t about trying harder—it’s about removing friction. If your environment makes distractions impossible, deep work becomes automatic.

Serotonin controls mood, confidence, and emotional stability. A low-serotonin environment leads to feeling drained, unmotivated, or uninspired.

How to create a high-serotonin environment:

KEY = Stop relying on willpower to alter your behaviour. When you design your environment to promote the behaviours you want & eliminate the ones you don’t, winning actions become DEFAULT actions.

Flow state is when your entire brain locks in on a task effortlessly. Time slows down, distractions disappear, and execution feels automatic. If you’ve ever experienced flow state, you’ll know it’s the source of your best work—which makes it the source of your biggest wins. It’s also the thing that makes work intrinsically rewarding, an enjoyable activity in and of itself.

This isn't just mental—it's a neurochemical state where dopamine, norepinephrine, and acetylcholine fire together. If you’ve ever been so immersed in work, training, or a creative project that you lost track of time, you’ve hit flow. But most people can’t access it consistently because their neurochemistry is out of sync.

For flow to happen, your brain needs 3 key neurotransmitters firing in balance:

Dopamine is the seeking & reward chemical—it makes the process feel exciting and engaging. Flow happens when dopamine is released in anticipation of success (you feel drawn into the task).

The “hack”: Start tasks with a clear challenge & end goal—your brain releases dopamine when it detects an opportunity for progress.

Norepinephrine increases mental clarity, reaction time, and intensity. Too little = distracted, unfocused. Too much = anxiety, stress. Flow is when it’s at the perfect level.

The “hack”: Use deep work rituals like caffeine, breathwork, or physical movement to spike norepinephrine before focus sessions.

Acetylcholine enhances memory, pattern recognition, and problem-solving. It’s what makes you feel hyper-aware and precise when in flow.

The “hack”: Optimize hydration & nutrition—acetylcholine is depleted by dehydration & poor diet.

Why Most People Struggle to Enter Flow:

Constant distractions = no sustained focus.

Too much stimulation = dopamine burnout.

Stress & anxiety = norepinephrine overload.

Unclear goals = no challenge-reward loop.

The modern world destroys flow. The constant context-switching of social media, notifications, and shallow work prevents your brain from entering deep focus mode. This is a skill you have to develop. The more you do it, the easier it is to enter “flow state” (and the more you’ll want to!)

Another issue is people expect to be laser focused from the minute they sit down. When it doesn’t happen immediately, they think “this is no use” and allow themselves to get distracted. They don’t understand the “cycle of flow state”:

Most people quit during the “struggle phase” because they assume it should feel effortless, but flow usually kicks in 15-20 minutes after you begin. You have to push through.

Your identity is the operating system that runs in the background of your brain. It dictates what feels rewarding, what feels stressful, and what actions your brain reinforces.

Neurochemistry isn’t just about what you do—it’s about who you believe you are. Your brain releases dopamine, serotonin, cortisol, and norepinephrine based on whether your actions align with your internal self-image.

If you see yourself as lazy, undisciplined, a “loser,” then you will feel heavy resistance to WINNING actions, and your brain will actively work against you.

If you see yourself as disciplined, relentless, a natural winner, then you will feel a powerful pull toward WINNING actions, and your brain will work in your favor.

Your neurochemistry follows your self-image. If you see yourself as weak, your brain will align with that reality. But if you shift your identity, your neurochemistry will rewire itself to make winning feel natural instead of forced.

THIS IS SO IMPORTANT. PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THIS ENTIRE ESSAY:

WHEN YOU SEE YOURSELF AS A WINNER, WINNING ACTIONS BECOME YOUR DEFAULT MODE. WHEN WINNING ACTIONS ARE YOUR DEFAULT MODE, YOU WIN.

If you can successfully alter your self-image, you can get anything you want in life—and while it may still be difficult, it won’t FEEL hard, to you it’ll just be “living”.

Okay great, so HOW do you actually shift your self-image to that of a winner?

The truth = it takes time + effort. How long it takes will depend on how long you’ve held & reinforced a weak/negative identity and how extreme you’re willing to be with your actions.

The formula is as follows:

Craft the winning version of yourself in vivid detail. What do they believe about themselves? What do they do everyday? How do they do things? WHY do they do these things? What does their internal monologue sound like?

Be as specific as you can. The more clearly you can see it, the easier it’ll be to become it. YOU CAN DO THIS AT EVERY LEVEL. Even if you already consider yourself a “winner”, there are always ways you can step it up.

Start ACTING like your winning self. If you feel resistance, GOOD. Resistance is a signal that you’re breaking old patterns. Start small. Celebrate your consistency in taking actions in alignment with your NEW identity. And don’t try to change everything all at once. The goal is to make LASTING improvements.

Acting like your “winning self” will require pure willpower, up until the point you start getting positive reinforcement for doing it. One way this comes is simply feeling good about yourself. But “feeling good about yourself” will only last for so long if your actions aren’t generating RESULTS. You need PROOF that your new actions are creating new outcomes, and the way you get that proof is by tracking your progress (measuring and logging your Key Performance Indicators daily).

High performing friends. Biographies of history’s greatest winners. Winning social media pages. Visual cues in your environment. FILL YOUR BRAIN with stories and ideas associated with winning. Brainwash yourself into a new identity.

The more quality action you take, the more you’ll win. The more you win, the more you’ll identify as a winner. But there’s a trap. A lot of “winners” make a monumental effort, start winning, start believing they’re INHERENTLY a winner, stop taking as much action, and lose all of their hard-fought gains. You have to constantly remind yourself that you are ONLY an winner because of the WINNING ACTIONS you consistently take. Remove the actions, and you will lose the results.

The longer you go taking winning actions & stacking victories, the more you’ll reinforce your “winning identity” until it completely overrides the “old you”.

Nothing you’ve just read will make an iota of difference to your life if you do nothing with it. Right now, you must write down your plan for putting ONE of the 7 tools you just read in to practice. No doubt something spiked a flurry of ideas in your brain—pick whichever one feels like the greatest opportunity for you and DO IT. Even if it means just getting up and cleaning your desk of clutter, do it!!

Reinforce to yourself that you are not just a PASSIVE consumer. You are an ACTION TAKER, willing to do anything and everything to increase your probability of success. That single trait will define your life. Above all else, DEFAULT to taking action. That’s what the tools are there to help you with. But implementing the tools requires action. Thinking of it like investing money to make more money. You’re investing action in the tools to make FUTURE ACTION easier & more effective.

I also recommend you come back to this essay periodically to review the tools. If you EVER feel unmotivated, unfocused, or incapable of winning, START by “auditing” your neurochemistry. Most people judge themselves and make inferences about who they are, and it cripples them. Instead, recognise that something in your brain is working AGAINST you, and use the tools to get it back in alignment with WINNING.