Creator Dan Koe posted again recently, pushing the “self-growth” question from the usual topics of productivity, discipline, and dopamine management into deeper psychological structures. In the opening of his article, he points out that after many people reach their 20s, they start to notice others around them gradually stop believing in themselves.
What’s truly dangerous is that this state of lost belief can infect others like a virus. He believes that life is, at its core, a “mind game,” and that most people can’t change—not because there aren’t enough methods, but because they underestimate the survival instincts of their old identity.
Why does your life keep stalling? This isn’t something you can change by watching a video
Dan Koe describes a loop that’s extremely common among the 20-to-35 age group: people get inspired by a video, a book, a conversation, or some external trigger. Suddenly they feel, “This time, I really need to change,” so they start a business, go to the gym, learn a skill—like life is finally entering a new phase. But usually within less than two days, a week, or two weeks, the enthusiasm quickly fades, and in the end they return to the very life they clearly hate. The next time a new burst of motivation appears, they start from zero again—then fail again.
Over time, this repeating cycle becomes the backdrop of life, until a year, two years, or even ten years pass and people suddenly realize they’ve barely made any real progress.
He believes this isn’t just laziness, and it’s not a problem that can be solved by watching yet another “how to increase productivity” video. The real key is that the human mind itself is a survival system. People don’t only pursue physical survival; they also pursue psychological and conceptual survival—that is, maintaining their existing identity, beliefs, values, and worldview. When someone tries to pursue a goal that would completely change who they are, the old identity feels threatened, and protects itself through anxiety, fear, procrastination, rationalization, and instant gratification.
To explain this, Dan Koe borrows the concept of “memes.” He points out that memes aren’t just funny images on social media; they’re the cultural replication units in Richard Dawkins’ original definition, including language, beliefs, values, definitions of success, definitions of failure, and group identity.
In childhood, parents pass their memes on to you; after entering school, the education system further reinforces certain beliefs through reward and punishment mechanisms; and as adults, social media, politics, brands, fitness circles, diet plans, tech camps, and all kinds of digital tribes continue to shape people’s understanding of “who they are.”
Failure fears success; success fears mediocrity
That’s why Dan Koe describes a phenomenon of “everything becoming religion” emerging in modern society. Political stances, morning rituals, food choices, fitness identities, minimalism, gamers, the Apple and Android camps—even AI supporters and the anti-AI groups—all build their own identity communities in a religious way. On the surface, people are “choosing,” but in reality they often confirm which tribe they belong to through their actions. When an individual’s goals threaten the identity system, the mind triggers defense mechanisms that pull them back into the familiar life they already know.
Dan Koe condenses the difference between successful people and unsuccessful people into a single line: failure fears success; success fears mediocrity. This doesn’t mean successful people have no fears—it means the things they fear are different. People without a fitness identity will feel threatened when they start living a healthy life, because that implies they might have to give up late-night snacks, parties, the couch, and high-calorie foods.
But people who truly identify as “healthy” will actually feel uneasy when they can’t exercise or can’t eat clean food. Business is the same way: people who truly see themselves as entrepreneurs may not be able to sleep when revenue declines, and they proactively look for strategies and fix loopholes until things improve.
Treat mediocrity and stagnation as threats—four methods to change your life
Therefore, Dan Koe argues that the core of self-change isn’t “forcing yourself to be more disciplined,” but redesigning the survival mechanism of identity. When you can make your mind no longer treat “success” as a threat, but instead treat “stagnation, mediocrity, and retreating to your old life” as threats, discipline stops being merely an added external pressure, and instead becomes behavior that naturally extends from identity.
Method 1: Find a change reason with massive gravitational pull
This reason may come from a book, a conversation, an experience, or a moment that happens to hit you. It may not be something you can force into existence, but it often shows up when you break out of your familiar life and enter an unfamiliar environment. Dan Koe believes that most people, the moment they wake up each day, have the past’s feelings and memories take over immediately—commute stress, work disdain, old habits, and old emotions recreate the same kind of future. Real new insights often appear only in the unknown.
Method 2: See what kind of person you don’t want to become
He advises people to observe all of their behaviors throughout the day—from waking up in the morning, to working during the day, to resting at night—then honestly write down: if you keep living like this, where will your future go. If the answer is true enough, it usually makes people feel disgusted, and that disgust can become a powerful fuel for driving change.
But the problem is that most people aren’t honest, because the old identity that’s trying to be evaluated is exactly the one evaluating your current life. The old identity has survival motives, and it avoids being overturned through rationalizations, downplaying problems, and fantasies that the future will naturally get better.
Method 3: Change your environment faster than recalibrating your old identity
Dan Koe believes that parts of the “old self” are stored in the surrounding environment, including the accounts you follow, the apps on your phone, your bed, your daily routes, your social circle, and your content consumption. Depending on different friend circles and different information feeds, a person can even become different people. Therefore, he suggests an extreme approach: reset your phone, or at least keep only the necessary apps, and no longer return to the original social platforms and websites that keep pulling you into the same loop.
Going further, a short departure from your familiar environment—even just staying in an Airbnb a week, a few hours away—may also help you cut off the triggers of repeating the same day.
Method 4: Create distance between impulse and reaction
He believes the real way to interrupt old patterns isn’t to immediately do something else, but to first “do nothing at all.” When your hand reaches for your phone, you want to eat late-night snacks, you want to escape work, or you want to rebut someone’s viewpoint, the most important thing is to pause for those few seconds, observe the impulse, and not immediately feed the old identity with familiar feedback. Training in delayed gratification—such as meditation, cold showers, fasting, etc.—can help.
But more crucial is a state approaching all-day meditation: letting yourself become an observer, so you can magnify your perspective to see the situation clearly, and also narrow your perspective to focus on action.
Pain is part of life—don’t let results hijack you
However, Dan Koe also reminds people at the end that success isn’t the finish line, because a person may simply replace one survival game with another survival game. Switching from “afraid of being overweight and poor” to “afraid that my career isn’t big enough, and my body isn’t good enough” may indeed make life more successful on the material level. But if the identity structure hasn’t changed, the person will keep moving their goals forward endlessly.
Business owners may earn 100 million dollars and still not feel satisfied; fitness competitors may get their pro card and still fall into new anxiety. This is also why many business and fitness influencers appear highly disciplined, yet are still chased by higher standards.
So he proposes a more mature state: throw yourself into what truly matters with immense intensity, but when things don’t succeed, you can be unusually calm. This isn’t pretending you don’t care, and it isn’t escaping early into spiritual or transcendent narratives. It’s that, after fully participating in the life game, you gradually see the difference between pain and suffering.
Pain is part of life. When things fail, revenue declines, and training gets derailed, of course there will be impact; but suffering is the second layer of pain that gets added when identity refuses to accept reality—for example, “This shouldn’t happen to me,” “I’m doomed,” “I’m a failure.”
What Dan Koe’s article truly wants to say isn’t simply to encourage people to work hard, work out, start a business, or improve efficiency. It’s pointing out: the difficulty of changing your life is that you aren’t just fighting laziness—you’re fighting an entire old-identity survival system. The ideal personality in the end is a contradictory but powerful state: afraid enough of mediocrity that you’re willing to take high-intensity action; and not enslaved by results enough that even if you fail, you won’t fall apart. People like this both play the life game and also start to understand that the game itself isn’t everything.
This article, “Life is a mind game: Why do people always decide to change, yet return to the starting point after a few days?” first appeared on Lianxin ABMedia.
