Psychbot 1: The Exponential Self

5 min readMay 29, 2024

Greatness is not found in the experts’ books that discuss the failings of feats greater than their own. Nor does it light the night’s dreams of the day’s fearful. Nor is it found in the empty talk of those who dare not step into battle.

No, greatness is in the heart of the warrior. The one who grapples with all his might and is thrown down again and again. Bruised. Bloodied. Broken. His failures are etched into him by the scars the world inflicts. He knows the thrill and devastation of spending his everything to achieve his highest.

At his peak of achievement, he knows transcendence. But if he fails, at least he was not a shadow hiding in the story of an unlived life.

We live in a day when a person can go from poverty to billionaire in less than a decade.

Indeed, two hundred billion is within reach of a single mere mortal with a decade or two of work.

Let me reframe that.

As a quick example, I’ll use money as a short hand for measurable contribution, and set aside the forms of contribution that aren’t so easily quantified.

A single person (at the time of this writing) can capture the value of five million people’s average annual societal contribution. That’s impressive. However, the value that an exponential person can bring to the world is even larger.

Businesses built by a founder or small founding team, within one lifetime, can stretch across the world. The largest business as of this writing is just shy of a three trillion dollar valuation, and it was founded merely fourty seven years ago.

Using the market valuation as a crude estimate of value to society, a single business built within one lifetime by two founders has produced the equivalent value of forty million people (as measured by the median person’s income).

Two founders produced approximately an eighty million person impact to the world within their lifetime. With our integrated world, our network of human action has achieved truly astounding feats.

Mark Zuckerberg achieved the exponential growth of Facebook and became a billionaire at the age of twenty three. That was only four years after he had founded Facebook.

The exponential currents of our age are so strong that if we can effectively harness them, the speed that we can grow wealth, influence, and impact is astounding.

You may or may not become a billionaire, but many 1,000’s of people have rode their exponential to millionaire status in their twenties or thirties, retired early, or lived a life of meaningful impact.

I call a person who harnesses that exponential path and achieves an explosive path to success, wealth, and impact, the exponential person.

The question I have mined in the quarry of self improvement, is how do we sculpt our own exponential? Self help is often aimed at an ambiguous goal of training oneself and visualizing a future state of your choosing. However, it’s ambiguous about the best path to travel to achieve your highest impact.

One person’s self improvement leadz to a slightly better than normal life with a linear line of success. Whereas another person with the same time on this earth builds habits that propel them to become exponentially more wealthy, influential, and successful. Perhaps you, as one person, can carry the impact on society of a million normal people.

Time is the great equalizer of every individual. Each person has the same 24 hours in a day. The question I seek to answer is how can you harness your time to reap a million-fold impact in the world?

The path you choose determines the speed of your success. I’d much rather become a millionaire in 5 years than 50.

The common tools provided to normal people don’t allow them to achieve that type of success. People suffer from poor habits, unarticulated goals, and lack any concept of exponential skillsets. I rode my first exponential in my early thirties, and it took me to a millionaire status in 4 years. This was without any inheritance, mentorship, or an insider’s edge.

I was a blind man leading myself.

I realized in looking back that if I would have only had a different mindset I could have shaved a decade off my exponential growth. This realization led me to ask what else might be possible?

What I did you can do too, and even more.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think wealth is the only exponential game worth playing, but wealth provides an easy way to benchmark success in order to get our foundational principles of building an exponential path to success. Furthermore, wealth is an exponential engine, and there aren’t that many exponential forces that have the potential to produce the type of meteoric rise that my study on the exponential person examines.

Developing an initial exponential is the first stage we discuss. It takes a special type of training to mold yourself into someone who can build an exponential engine and ride it to the stars. In my writing on the exponential man, I’ll overlay this with my specific habit engine I use, and I attempt to offer a buffet of self improvement options that will help any person dedicated to improving themselves.

Furthermore, at each phase of success the challenges you face change. That means you must evolve at each stage to continue riding your exponential.

Underneath it all, you, the exponential person, must discover the motivation and yearning for adventure to first begin your journey. Then, train to become your highest self, and finally bind yourself to an enduring meaning that will sustain you over the long term. Becoming an exponential person is critical to achieving exponential results.

Without the correct mindset and habits, you can’t even get to the starting line. However, if this challenge excites you and gives voice to a call within you. Join me in an examination of the Exponential Person and enter the habits of Psychbot.

Click Here to read Psychbot 2: The Exponential Self, and subscribe to my feed to follow all my posts.

Psychbot 1: The Exponential Self

Written by Joseph Drups