It took me 40 years to understand that the cheat code to life is to just do whatever the f*ck you want and avoid what everyone thinks of you.

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It’s highly unlikely you’ll hear about a donkey being a badass.

A Californian couple found a donkey named Diesel in the wild who’d been roaming around since he was born. They took him in. When Diesel was three the owners took him on a hiking trip. A mountain lion scared Diesel and he ran away.

The family looked for Diesel for weeks. They even used drones. They couldn’t find him. The most likely outcome was he died.

5 years later an athlete named Max was running in the Californian wilderness. He discovered a herd of wild elk. Pretty cool. He filmed the herd for his Instagram.

Leading the pack, bizarrely, was a donkey.

They moved in total unison. Max’s video of this badass donkey went viral. The original owners saw it. Diesel was still close to where he was originally lost. It’s also an area where there are zero wild donkeys. They said:

“Finally, we saw him. Finally, we know he’s good. He’s living his best life. He’s happy. He’s healthy, and it was just a relief.”

Diesel’s bizarre path in life is hard-coded into his DNA. Donkeys often feel the need to protect livestock animals. They can kick and charge predators with their teeth out.

Some call donkeys guardian angels.

Diesel took his protective nature and applied it to the herd of elk. They then became his adopted family and he protected them like his children. There were signs that Diesel had killed coyotes and attacked mountain lions to protect his elk family.

His prior human owners don’t want to take him back.

They think he’s happier being this new badass version of himself. It’s also near-impossible to capture a wild donkey in an area as large as the Californian wilderness.

So Diesel is now a rare, free, wild donkey. He can do whatever the f*ck he wants.

He doesn’t care about labels or what other donkeys do. Or what animals he’s supposed to hang with, because he’s just a simple donkey. Diesel doesn’t give a f*ck. When other animals judge him for being an elk-daddy he ignores them. And if anyone dare touch his family he will kick their skinny little ass.

This isn’t just the story of a donkey.

It’s the cheat code to life. You can do whatever the f*ck you want and ignore what everyone thinks of you and nothing bad will happen. In fact, people will learn to enjoy and celebrate your weirdness like they did with Diesel the donkey.

Change is hard.

You want to change but you turn it into a 5 year goal with KPIs and board meetings. Slow change becomes a slow death. It doesn’t need to be this way.

There’s another lesser used strategy. You can abruptly decide to just change your entire life in a day. Writer Dan Koe posted this on X and 206M people agreed. It broke the internet. Not because it was a new idea, but because it was a reminder: you’re born free and have the free will to do whatever you want.

I faced the same crossroads and didn’t change my life in a day right away. It wasn’t me. It was other people. They told me not to change. They’d grown comfortable with my banker persona. It made them feel safe. It made them feel good.

Me changing equaled their suffering.

They didn’t want that. So they helped me come up with excuses not to change. I didn’t understand what they were doing. I thought they wanted the best for me, but deep down they wanted the best for themselves.

Selfishness is human nature.

I eventually realized the psyop I was living and did change, but I had to cut out most people from my life as a result. Not fun.

People said I had gone rogue. In a way, I had.

In the space of a day I burned my entire career and life to the ground. I burned the boats so I could never go back. I spoke out online against my former life to ensure I twisted the knife I stuck into everyone who ever supported me.

They all hate me now. Good.

If you’re not careful, you’ll become someone else’s puppet and they’ll run your entire life without you consciously being aware. This is the default by the way.

At first, it makes sense to consider how others think of you.

Maybe you don’t want to piss anyone off because it could cost you your career. Maybe you don’t want to accidentally offend anyone which is kind and noble. Maybe you consider what your family thinks because you love them.

But this is a delusion.

Thinking about what other people think makes no sense because you can’t actually control what people think of you. You don’t have mind control powers.

I do everything I can to show people online the real me, yet some still think I’m an evil bunny from the deep state out here to sell AI to them and get them to go on a date with Andrew Hate.

Doesn’t matter how hard I try, not everyone gets me. That’s because they don’t know me. And I can plead all day long that “Timmy is a good guy, amigo” but it doesn’t matter. How they see the world is a result of their beliefs, upbringing, past trauma, and social media feed.

I could be Mother Teresa and they still wouldn’t see it that way.

We all, to a degree, see the world with foggy glasses. Once you understand this fact of life, you stop caring about what anyone thinks of you because you realize you have no control over their thoughts.

And spending time on things you can’t control is a waste of your life. It has zero value. It’s the definition of insanity. This one idea has the power to free your mind and get you back on track so you can experience modern freedom.

Writer Jason Pargin shared an interesting theory about male sculptors.

He says older artists secretly carved small pen!ses on their sculptures, so women would think that size was normal and that their husband must have a massive c*ck.

The insight in this idea has nothing to do with pen!s size. It’s a demonstration of how society does things to manipulate how you think and feel.

Instead of letting the true pen!s size shine in all its glory, the artwork is manipulated and “chopped back down to size” to please some elitist class. In Australia we call this tall poppy syndrome. We chop people back down to size when they grow too tall.

The cheat code is to resist being chopped back down at all costs.

Stand tall in all your morning glory.

This is the part where I have to piss off a few people. Sorry.

Doing whatever the f*ck you want does require some level of moderate wealth. You can’t escape modern slavery by making $1000 a month. It’s too hard. One trick I’ve found is to choose a leadership role in society at all costs.

Doesn’t mean you need to lead millions of people either.

But it does mean you need to think, act, and inspire others like a leader does. When you do, the value you create and therefore the money you earn drastically increases. Parenting two girls taught me more about leadership than any Simon Sinek book or Ted Talk ever did. So if you have kids you have an advantage.

It’s also wise to layer in acting like an owner. That means you seek to own your career, own assets, and own your time.

Most people don’t lead anyone and rent everything, so they never access basic levels of freedom. The opportunity for you is to do the opposite of most people – and it doesn’t require privilege or any extra skill.

I make wild decisions based on the story they will create.

Because true freedom isn’t living the same day on repeat for 40 years, where every day blends into the next and everything feels the same. No.

True freedom is randomness.

And to proactively make your life random, and therefore more interesting, you must treat each day like an act from a Star Wars movie.

Adventure cannot be overestimated.

The reason most people don’t choose it is because it comes with discomfort and uncertainty. But those two perceived poisons are actually the elixir to the good life.

If your life was a movie you’d have cliffhangers, plot twists, new characters, varied locations, and wild stunts.

Spoiler: your life is a movie. Make it worth watching. Stop filming worker bees making honey, and go produce a thriller better than the movie Obsession.

This essay sounds like a great rah rah. You might now want to go and hug a hippie.

But you won’t actually go live this modern freedom way of life unless you have a strong enough reason to. So we must look at the other side. If you don’t do whatever the f*ck you want, you will be told what to do.

You will commute to an adult daycare, put your bag in a kindergarten locker, play ping pong and arcade machines at lunch, and clock out at 5pm like everyone else. You’ll spend most of your time in pathetic, boring meetings that could have been an email.

Every day will look and feel the same. You will live for the weekend, and the only time you will feel free is when you go on your two short holidays a year (if you’re lucky).

You’ll feel free while sitting on the beach in Greece until you check your phone and there is an urgent message from your boss that you need to reply to. Or some pain in the ass customer is blowing up in your inbox because they are constipated and haven’t poo’d for a week.

It’s easy to get trapped in normality because it’s repetitive and easy.

Fun and pleasure are time-boxed and become a carrot that’s dangled in front of you, the rat, to nibble on a few times a year. The rest of the time you’re bored and miserable wondering if you can be more than you currently are.

I waited 40 years before I just decided to do whatever the hell I want. I told myself I could be free one day at 65 when I’m retired. But honestly, I got sick of waiting. I started to believe there must be a better way.

Only when you question reality does a new reality appear in front of you.

It’s as if living a normal life is the 2D version of reality, and a 3rd dimension opens up when you discover there’s a whole new way of living.

Why be trapped when you can be free?

You must do whatever you want.

You must have more randomness in your life. You must find a way to be moderately wealthy. You must decide to no longer be trapped by the opinions of others.

Living any other way just becomes mental slavery, and it only leads to deep regrets later in life when it’s too late to change and your highest levels of energy are gone.

Mental freedom feels incredible.

To change you must make new decisions, and stop living in indecision. You must make decisions that seem crazy to your former self. That’s when you start to come alive and get fired up. And that energy and aura is life-changing.

P.S.

Now that you’re fully in IDGAF mode, consider this.

Most people are missing this era’s biggest opportunity in digital business.

Why?

Because they’re worried what everyone will think of them.

Those of us who don’t care what others think...

Well, we just take action and earn.

Check here to learn how my clients and I are enjoying healthy profits each week with a format most are afraid to even try.