Dangerous Ideas That Will Rewire Your Brain

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Each of these ideas will short-circuit your mind.

You’ll read them, think “oh, sh*t,” and probably be stuck dwelling on at least a few of these ideas for the next week or two. This is a great outcome. Breakthroughs stem from dangerous ideas we accidentally discover.

I got each of these ideas from 12 years of daily social media reading, 100s of books, and people I met in life who challenged me. I offer them to you as a gift.

At least one of these ideas will completely change your life. Let’s go.

I promised you dangerous ideas, and this one is borderline lethal.

There’s a rapper named Ye. I don’t like him. I find him repulsive. He’s not my cup of tea if you catch my drift. But in recent years I’ve still studied his earlier career. I chose to study him because I don’t like him and I wondered why.

Despite his craziness, there’s always something you can learn.

He says anything he wants, including deeply racist stuff. He’s made every mistake you could possibly make, including pissing away a billion-dollar Adidas deal and losing his wife and kids forever.

Yet the guy always bounces back.

People always forgive him. The crazy stuff he says is quickly forgotten. The reason is he has raw talent that is so rare people will do anything to be near it. So he can say and do the most evil stuff and it will never ruin him because talent transcends reputation.

He’s a master of obsession, self-belief, storytelling, and getting people to believe in themselves. And it turns out those traits transcend everything else.

It’s wild and dangerous to consciously understand that, but it’s true, despite whether you like him or not. This is why you, too, must embody those traits.

(Raj Shamani)

On the surface, the desire for comfort seems smart.

Get what you want and live the easy life. It’s totally logical. But the paradox is when you have no pain and your basic needs are met, there’s no motivation to change. Change isn’t a must so you’ll chuck it on the back burner and light up a blunt.

The most powerful moment of my life was when I had $1.2M stolen from my digital wallet in about 30 minutes.

On the day, I wanted to jump in front of a train. I lost the money my wife and I had put aside to buy our first house so we could have kids.

It was a dangerous moment.

Thank god, I instantly saw the emergency and reached for a reframe instead of a death wish.

Fast-forward to now and I am so damn grateful for that theft. I almost want to pay the thief a fee for changing my life. When the theft removed my financial comfort, it made me get to work and change my mindset. I made $6M shortly after.

When comfort takes over you’re no longer hungry or desperate. What you’re left with is complacency which makes you lazy.

It’s why office workers get trapped for decades.

It’s too easy to earn 6-figures, get underpaid, go to the comfortable office with free coffee, and just settle for less than you can be.

When all the danger is removed it becomes easy enough to stop fighting. Now you’re trapped in average hell. It’s extremely hard to escape. Trust me, it took me 5 years to leave behind safety.

Comedian Adam Carolla said back in the day that, “if you want to destroy somebody’s life, just give them free rent in a sh*tty little house.”

If you return decades later, they’ll still be living there.

Nothing will have changed. They didn’t get a great deal, but it was too much of a good deal for them to let it go. So they didn’t. They won’t go and do things to change their life because there’s no reason to.

The good enough house, fancy car, and okay romantic partner are hard things to leave behind. They become part of our identity and we fight to keep them.

Instead of focusing on what you lack, think about how all the things you have may actually be the true barrier to getting what you want.

Here’s another dangerous idea to say out loud: what if modern life is the problem?

Alcohol, drugs, junk food, prescription medications, vaping/nicotine, excessive tattoos, lip filler, booty implants, liposuction, calling everyone ADHD.

The old way of life is to do none of that. It’s to leave the body as is. It’s to not solve problems that don’t really exist. I live a deeply spiritual life because I do none of these things. I accidentally live closer to a monk than a modern human.

When I tell people I have less than 10 mins a day of phone screen time, people look at me like I’m crazy and just took a dump in front of them.

I think in the next few years living like a monk and going back to simpler times is going to become a trend. It’s the crux of my modern freedom philosophy.

Less is more.

(Jeremy Haynes)

This is not the politically correct way to say it, but screw it. If you’re offended, then you probably need to be offended more often.

Modern life is full of cowards. People who take no risks. People who label stress as toxic instead of a normal part of living. People who can’t deal with the smallest setbacks – their dog dies and they disappear for a year to recover.

Alex Hormozi is violently allergic to people who are afraid of losing: “Losers becomes losers by being afraid of losing.” You win in life by understanding losing is part of the game. You have to lose a lot to win.

So if you’re hesitating because of a fear of losing, you’re guaranteed not to win. The only real wisdom and education comes from losing. Everything else is information overload, and based on theories instead of reality.

Pray to god you lose more.

This might sound wild to say but I crave struggle more than I do s*x, ice-cream, or millions of dollars.

If your life is a story and you went to the cinema to watch it, you’d hope, just like watching any other movie, that some cool stuff happened and there were some huge blow ups and nukes that went off.

Struggles help you experience nostalgia.

One of my fondest memories was starting my first business with my brother. We’d work really late filling up our vending machines, then pass out on the floor of a vacant shop infested with mice. At the time it sucked. Looking back, I wish I could go back. I had blonde hair, no understanding of risk, and could sell steaks to vegans.

The come up is where the beauty hides. Being insanely naive is gorgeous too.

I shouldn’t tell you this but I will. And it’s silly.

Whenever I see someone yawning, I instantly duck and look away. People get taken aback by it when they see me do it. I’ve done it since I was about 12. I learned to do this because I discovered that yawning is like a deadly virus.

When I see someone yawn it instantly makes me feel tired. So I don’t allow other people’s tiredness to infect me. Later that idea bled into my financial life as well.

I realized people who were perpetually broke influenced my worldview in a deeply negative way. The only way out was to apply the same technique of avoidance.

In recent weeks, soccer player Erling Haaland has become a cult figure for his dangerous ideas that challenge everything we’ve ever known about human psychology. In one viral video, he said this:

If you tell yourself you’re going to be tired, you’re going to be tired.

The thoughts in your head shape your reality. The cool thing is you get to mess with those thoughts in any way you choose, and the mind is unable to tell fact from fiction – or even total delusion.

We all say this. Don’t you dare lie. I say it too.

Every time you say “I need to think about it” neuroplasticity is working against you. You’re training your brain that when a decision is to be made you will hesitate. That becomes a habit. Then it becomes a neural pathway so deep it secretly makes you say maybe to every opportunity and never do anything worthwhile.

The learned skill of indecision is the kiss of death. It’s hard to become an adult decision maker again when you’ve said “maybe” 5000 times in a row and practiced this terrifying habit the way an Olympic swimmer practices winning a gold medal.

Every decision must be a yes or a no. Maybe is ruining your life.

Most people spend more time negotiating with themselves than living – Naval Ravikant

Overthinking is always labelled as a loser thing to do.

What if it wasn’t? Well, it doesn’t have to be. If you like to overthink everything, then keep doing it, but with one change:

Only overthink the positives of every situation.

Tony Robbins once said, train your mind to believe everything is happening in your favor. The car crash happened so you’d be late to the job interview you didn’t want. The guy or girl left you so you could go on that date that turned into the love of your life. You lost the house so you could make money to now own your dream house.

Life is working in your favor if you see it that way.

And when you see constant negatives as positives, you brainwash yourself into thinking anything is possible. That dangerous mindset will make you violently attack any goal and win.

(Anaïs Nin)

This idea has been at the center of my life for 12 years.

It made me realize my difficult childhood, past trauma and mental illness, and all my failures, rejections, and embarrassment color how I see the world. The person I am determines how I react to every piece of news or setback.

While these limitations are hard-coded into our brains by the time we’re mature adults, they can be brought back for great benefit.

Proactively writing down what happened to you in your life, then seeing on the page how these events are likely coloring your world is powerful.

Until you’re aware of what is controlling you, it’ll keep sabotaging opportunities and you’ll accidentally label it bad luck or “It wasn’t meant to be.”

The world isn’t messed up. Past trauma is just making it feel that way.

On the surface, a mediocre job isn’t that harmful.

It feels like you’re drinking the occasional can of Coca-Cola instead of feeling like you’re sniffing cocaine a few times a day. While that’s how it feels, the damage goes far deeper than that.

I found that when I worked soulless corporate jobs, I was bored out of my mind and craved work that had more creativity and imagination. After a while I noticed a pattern. I’d come home and also crave mindless entertainment.

So I’d watch a football game or binge some useless sitcom TV show like Seinfeld. Then I’d tell myself I’d be in bed by 10PM so I could wake up early for work the next day. But I’d end up watching TV until midnight and passing out on the couch from exhaustion. This pattern repeated daily for years. It slowly killed me.

I told no one because I was embarrassed.

No one talks about the link between boring jobs and the heroin-type addiction of mindless TV. I suspect this trend is why reality TV shows and day-in-the-life TikToks – that involve watching other people living their life – are so popular.

You’ll do anything to distract yourself from reality. Don’t let yourself.

Harvard-trained psychologist Lorwen Harris Nagle says “A life with no hard things trains your brain to fear everything.”

It’s what she said next that took my breath away and almost caused me to pass out.

She says an easy life makes your brain’s memory center get weaker. It also makes emotions harder to regulate. Holy crap. Someone should be shouting this from the rooftops or putting it on billboards.

If all you ever do is easy stuff, you’ll fear everything. And in those fears hides all the opportunities that make you come alive and help you to unlock your full potential.

Fear isn’t temporary. It’s a daily habit you trained yourself to do. The same thinking that got you into this mess isn’t the same thinking that gets you out.

An abundance of free information and PhD-level AI is dangerous.

It’s now common behavior to drown in information. How-to content on TikTok and Youtube is now the new form of entertainment. You consume it because it gives you dopamine and makes you think you’re progressing instead of procrastinating.

I’ve run a multi-million dollar education company for the last 12 years. The uncomfortable truth I’ve discovered about learning is that more information slows people down. You likely don’t need more information.

The change you seek is secretly a psychological one, not an informational one.

You already know enough about what to do. That’s not the problem. The problem is action, and that’s psychological. Once you overcome that, the problem changes to a need for iteration. Only after that does a lack of information perhaps become a problem.

This isn’t common knowledge. But I’ve seen this pattern every day and can’t unsee it. The good news is it’s easy to solve. The bad news is 99% of people won’t solve it because they can’t see the problem and they won’t take this essay seriously.

Such is life.

It’s dangerous to consume ideas like this.

They’re so polarizing and counter-culture they’re easy to dismiss. I know I dismissed them for years and just went back to the couch and ate my Vegemite sandwiches. But if you dare to look inside the system that runs the world you see patterns.

Hidden inside those patterns are the real wisdom that will help you get everything you want and more.

You must be daring enough to consume those ideas and think through them. If you do, you might discover the idea that leads to your next breakthrough. If not, you’ll live in an echo chamber of your own creation, and become best mates with your one true enemy: your ego.

Choice is yours. I recommend you be dangerous and violently seek wisdom.

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