Psychbot 3: Becoming an Exponential

9 min readJun 22, 2024

This is the third post building out the concepts of Psychbot and the Exponential Self.

Click Here to read Psychbot 2: Dream Walking and Becoming the Archetypal Hero.

The audacity of man is to climb the peaks of the earth and reach to the stars. With the elements of the earth in hand, he extends his reach to the moon, but still the stars are farther. Man harnesses the energy of the stars in engines and extends his reach into space, but still the stars are farther.

The exponential self is a framework for thinking of how to harness the exponential forces of modernity to maximize your impact in the world.

This chapter covers exponential forces of self improvement and the corresponding archetypes related to harnessing those forces through developing skillsets.

I’ve been a student of self improvement for decades. Amidst the years of study and implementing habits, there was a question that baited the hook and dragged me into a larger pursuit of self improvement.

What habits maximize my potential?

The Achilles Heal in self improvement books is the obvious but often ignored reality that becoming an incredible habit machine and cultivating the right identity will not cause your success to accelerate exponentially by itself. You must focus your effort like a laser on a subset of skills that have the potential for massive success.

If you’re pouring all your habits into flipping burgers at McDonald’s, I don’t care what habits you practice, you’re not going exponential until you evolve beyond that skillset.

The good news is there’s a beginning to every exponential path that starts where you are today. That same burger flipper could become a manager then learn how to run a franchise. Running a franchise has more innate potential in the form of management leverage and capital leverage.

The opportunities you pursue either have the recipe for rapid acceleration or they don’t. Your exponential growth will be limited by the constraints of your personal habits, self identity, skillsets, and yes, the opportunity itself. This requires the insight to differentiate between an opportunity with leverage and one without.

What does a leveraged opportunity look like?

In order to maximize your acceleration toward wealth, fame, success, or impact in the world you first should understand what forces underlie exponential success stories.

One good exercise is to pull up Forbes list of billionaires and try to reverse engineer how they achieved such massive success. What did they do, and what environment did they play in?

You’ll find is a lot of them were operating in private equity, investing, technology, entrepreneurship, and similar fields. Many industries generate a few billionaires, and any industry can generate millionaires. However, you’ll see similarities within those billionaires’ biographies. What you don’t see are people working a normal 8am-5pm job.

If you’re less interested in wealth and more interested in other societal impact, you can do a similar activity by looking at and reading biographies of the different geniuses, influencers, and achievers of your chosen field.

I’ve asked myself a few questions about these peak achievers:

· How did they become so influential, wealthy, famous, or successful? Insert the attribute of your choice, but make sure you’re looking at people with a massive impact and seeing the cause effect relationship of their actions.

· What are the habits, skillsets, and beliefs to cultivate for that type of success?

· What environment do I need to be in to accelerate me toward a similar level of success?

· What life experiment can I run to take a step toward the success, identity, or skillset that unlocks my exponential growth?

Fully embody the lessons from your study and create experiments to run in your actual life. As you read exponential success stories, you’ll begin to see the cause and effect relationships that lie underneath the narratives.

I list exponential forces below that I’ve discovered in the journey toward my peak. This certainly isn’t an all-inclusive list, but it gives you a framework to search for your personal exponential to ride into massive success.

The First Exponential Force

The first exponential I always discuss is the exponential of habits.

Something every person can control is the habits the enact in their own life. Habits layered upon habits organize information within a person’s mind and operate as an exponential force. A human in the modern age is positioned at a unique moment in history where the entirety of human knowledge is at one’s finger tips. All it takes is the correct organization of that information into actions, networks of actions, networks of information, and networks of people to create exponential results.

I’ll delve more into this later in my writing when we discuss the Psychbot and the Life Operating System. However, I think the best place to begin is to discuss the exponential forces within human society.

The Pareto Principle: 80/20 Fractal

For those of you who haven’t heard about the 80/20 principle, basically Pareto discovered a rule that held steady across people, organizations, and many different fields. This rule was called the Pareto Distribution. Essentially, self improvement literature takes a key finding from Pareto, namely that 20% of time, effort, and resources across many human endeavors account for 80% of the results.

For our purposes, this rule can be applied to say that 80% of your ouput comes from 20% of the work you do.

It holds true also that 80% of the value created in any organization is accomplished by 20% of the people. This realization provides a gold-laid path to grow exponentially more successful. If you can focus 80% of your effort and 80% of your team’s effort on the 20% most valuable work you do then you can dramatically improve performance.

This 80/20 rule gets more interesting when you start viewing it as a fractal. In other words, each time you refocus your time on the 20% that gives you the 80% output, you also open a new 20% that allows you to repeat the process and massively improve your output.

Estimate the value of your time for different tasks at work. Focus on more valuable activities, and delegate less valuable activities.

When I started my entrepreneurial career, I was in digital marketing. Early on, I hired a virtual assistant based on the advice in Tim Ferriss’s 4 Hour Work Week in order to hand off my lower value time and focus on my higher value activities.

I found that some tasks could be completed by a low-cost virtual assistant from the Philippines ($5/hr). Other tasks required a U.S. located entry level employee ($15/hr). Still other tasks required me to hire a project manager or marketer with experience costing closer to $50/hr. Finally, the highest value tasks I did were worth around $100/hr.

By hiring a virtual assistant and entry level employee, I handed off the lower cost work, which freed me to work on higher value tasks.

Soon after, I started hiring freelancers and employees to do the $30/hr and $50/hr tasks. I eventually reached a place where I was paying for my whole lifestyle off of 2 hours per week. This allowed me to reinvest my time to buy businesses, and the value of my time skyrocketed. Lower value activities were worth $50/hr. Average level activities were worth $200/hr. My highest value activities were worth as high as $1000/hr.

There is no ceiling to this method of upgrading the value of my time. This became the practical way for me to scale my success and points to one of the first keys to exponential thinking: the leverage of management.

Exponential Force of Management

The exponential force of management is a key way to leverage your skills, money, and ideas. If you can train a person for your tasks and manage them, then you can multiply your effort by two. Train two people, and you can multiply yourself by three. By training people, building processes, and continually growing in management, you’ve tapped into an endless source of growth leverage.

This is the slowest of the exponential leverage paths and one of the most complicated, but it’s important to understand since it’s one of the most common and oldest way to achieve exponential acceleration.

Exponential Force of Capital

Capital leverage can come in the form of debt or investment. Debt uses a bank’s money lended to you at interest to massively amplify your action. Investment uses investor’s money to do the same with less risk of failure but also less reward to you individually.

Many of the modern millionaire and billionaires took advantage of the funding vehicles available in today’s marketplace to leverage their personal growth.

Look at the list of the richest people in the world and you’ll find a lot of hedge fund moguls, real estate magnates, and private equity operators. These people are masters at taking capital leverage and merging it with management leverage in order to generate wealth. Wealth is one form of an external store of self improvement.

Common people with uncommon dreams can master this force of exponential capital to massively increase their rate of success.

The practical wisdom of harnessing that exponential of capital is the core of what investing is. Investing money well produces exponential returns. Money grows in an exponential fashion, and if harnessed it can propel your success at that same speed.

The capital exponential begins with a saver’s mindset and should evolve into an investor’s mindset after the basics are met (emergency fund, budget, living below one’s means…etc). Investing at its heart is a game of partnering with other people’s dreams and receiving a return for their success.

To learn more about this perspective on wealth generation, investing, and the exponential force of capital in my three part series: Catching FIRE: The Ultimate Guide to Financial Freedom originally published on DrupsInvesting.com:

I also explain my methodology for harnessing capital and management exponentials in 32% Return: The Investing Strategy that Beats Billionaires.

The next exponential force we’ll discuss is technology.

Exponential Force of Technology

Another exponential leverage point is technology. Technology is unique because it’s a form of information with little to no scaling friction.

The key here is that you’re operating in the realm of information. Information that produces value operates as an exponential force as it scales in large markets.

The technology exponential often takes the form of software or hardware, but it can really be any new innovation that solves a problem for a large number of people with minimal unit cost and low growth friction.

Some of the biggest companies and most successful exponential people made their money off hardware and software. This includes Google’s founders, Apple’s Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Microsoft’s Bill Gates.

Patents and intellectual property are other good examples of information value that scales. Whether one person licenses a patent or ten million, the core per unit cost of the patent is near zero. That means if your patent solves the right problem, it can lead to massive value creation. This is true of many types of information ownership that creates monetary value. If you can solve a problem for a billion people then it only requires you to capture a small percentage of the value you created for an explosion of success.

Modern governments provide the infrastructure to own valuable information through patent protection. Modern infrastructure can turn information into a value network through software and hardware. All of these converging inventions have come together to allow the exponential self to harness many types of ideas into exponential engines of value creation.

Technology, software, hardware, monetizable ideas, and patents offer an exponential path to success when buttressed by the first exponential of habits. We’ll build out this concept more in future posts.

Exponential Force of Media

Media is another information exponential force that produces value with near zero per unit cost. By media, I mean video, writing, audio, and other similar forms of communication that have a low, oftentimes near zero unit cost and can be distributed globally via the internet.

By mastering the exponential of media, a writer can write one book and distribute it to millions of people at little to no additional cost to the writer. This low cost of replication produces the opportunity of going viral. This similar dynamic occurs in podcasting, blogging, video creation, audio creation, and writing.

In this article, I discussed a group of exponential forces that we’ll build on to create a framework for exponential self improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this article, follow me to get future articles in your inbox.