What is self hacking?
Self hacking is the practice of maximizing and optimizing your human potential across all of the 9 vital life domains—to such a degree that your efforts yield multiplied and compounding returns on your efforts, energy, work, and investment.
Do you ever feel like your life just needs to get more optimized?
Do you feel like you could perform at a higher level, and just achieve more, do more, and be more—every single day?
If so, you’re not alone.
There are a lot of people who feel this way.
However, the sad truth of the matter is that the vast majority of people don’t actually put effort into solving the problem.
As humans, we have an incredible amount of potential.
Not only do we possess our inherent evolved potential, but we also have the potential to continue to evolve and become better over time.
And self hacking speaks directly to the process of bringing out the very best that we’re capable of, by virtue of proper utilization of all of the different behaviors, resources, faculties, and thought processes that we currently have at our disposal.
For me, this process began after I went through a particularly difficult divorce and life transition.
Back in 2017, I had to perform a total life reset.
I basically had to restart from scratch after experiencing a divorce that led to my family falling apart.
This was a difficult period of time.
And in all honesty, it was actually a make-it-or-break-it kind of moment for me.
I was going to either need to figure out how to succeed in life for real, or I was simply going to be doomed to continue repeating the same disastrous behaviors that had led to failure to begin with.
So I got to work—and started creating a self-hacking, life optimization process/routine/regimen that would eventually lead to me succeeding in all of the ways that matter the most.
Now, granted, I’m still on this journey.
I have by no means completed my self-hacking or self-development journey.
This is a life-long process.
Every day, there are new things to learn.
Every day, there are new boundaries to explore and new challenges to conquer.
However, when I figured out how to optimize my life through this self-hacking alpha mentality process, I started getting much better results and seeing a lot more forward progress than I’d ever seen in my life before.
And in this guide, I’m going to show you all of the steps that are required to actually make this process work.
I’m literally going to walk you through my own self-hacking program, which I created through trial and error over the course of 6 years following my failed marriage.
This is the system that led to me not only coming back from the emotional and financial ruin of my failed marriage, but that also led to me becoming a better, more successful version of myself than I’ve ever been before.
And guess what?
Every day, I continue to get better and evolve to a higher level. I continue to expand my life to new horizons, and I continue to accomplish new objectives that never would have seemed possible before.
And it’s all thanks to a self-hacking process that I call the alpha mentality.
Let’s dive into it.
Note: If you’re interested in the content matter of this post, then you’ll definitely be interested in our master guide to leveling up your mind, body, and spirit. Make sure to check that out to get a full rundown of the entire process, from beginning to end, along with a full list of resources and other guides.
The 9 Self-Hacking Steps Required For Total Life Optimization
1. Embrace The Alpha Mentality
Read my deeper guide to embracing the alpha mentality here.
You’ll quickly realize that all 9 of these steps are associated with different, crucial, and vital life domains.
I actually call them The 9 Vital Life Domains, and they’re an integral part of my self-hacking alpha mentality system.
This first part speaks to the need to wake up and embrace the alpha mentality—from the very beginning of each and every morning.
Since this is the first vital life domain, this is the very first thing you should focus on at the beginning of your journey (and at the beginning of each and every day).
To put it simply, I wake up and avoid the trap of getting sucked into social media and scrolling through posts.
I avoid escapism (until my meaningful work is accomplished), and I avoid getting wrapped up in other vital life domains until the appropriate time of the day arrives to take care of them.
Instead, I’ll put on some gentle instrumental music.
I’ll meditate.
I’ll read through The 18 Vows of The Oath of Kings and Queens, and I will commit myself to living with intention—to pursuing my purpose—and to continue striving to be the best man in the room.
When you skip this important step, you miss out on a crucial and foundational mechanism that will actually help to drive you towards success and full life optimization.
You miss out on the mode of being of the alpha mentality.
We have to get clear on our purpose and our mission every single day—but we also have to get clear on our determination to make intentional choices about that purpose.
And the alpha mentality is the tool that empowers you to do this.
2. Mind Your Business
Read my deeper guide on minding your business here.
This vital life domain guides the infrastructures of your life that are required to keep it on target, sustained, and moving forward.
In other words—every single day, you’ll want to sit down and make a plan for things like:
- Generating enough money to pay your bills, and to support your family and lifestyle
- Keeping your house clean
- Maintaining your car
- Seeing to the responsibilities, commitments, and obligations of your house, station, family, and tribe
Every day, you have an opportunity to create as much value as possible in the world.
And really, all of this high-value substance comes from your ability to stay disciplined with what many people consider the ‘small things’ in life…
Things like:
- Making your car payment on time
- Making sure that you show up to work a little bit early, in case you run into a setback
- Getting your kids’ clothes laid out for school the night before, instead of rushing and falling behind in the morning
When you do a good job of managing the small, but vital life infrastructures that help to hold your life together, this frees and equips you to excel at all of the other things that matter as well.
A life that allows the ‘mind your business’ life domain to fall apart is going to quickly become a life that continues to fall apart.
And nobody wants their life to fall apart.
3. Get Your Money
Read my deeper guide on getting your money here.
The vast majority of people live their whole lives just showing up for work, getting a paycheck, and then spending that paycheck on bills and escapism.
But here’s the thing.
If we truly want to optimize our lives, increase our value, increase our effectiveness, and self-hack our way to the destiny that we truly desire—then we need to be focused on the business of building financial assets for ourselves.
Financial assets are basically businesses or investments that earn you money while you sleep.
See, as long as you keep trading money for dollars, you’ll always be stuck on the financial hamster wheel.
And this will continue to take time away from the other vital life domains for the rest of your life.
Therefore, the truly optimized alpha mentality individual must have a plan in place to build assets that’ll eventually lead to financial freedom.
Financial freedom is basically the definition for the state of having enough money coming in while you sleep, through your assets, that your lifestyle and expenses are all paid for without you really needing to trade any significant extra time for money.
This frees you to build more assets, and invest in other crucial areas of your life.
Building assets can be a difficult thing to figure out.
For me, this was (and continues to be) a big challenge.
However, that’s no excuse to not do it. And the more work you invest into figuring it out, the easier it gets.
If you don’t have any assets in motion, then start today by making a plan to create your first one.
If you have no idea what to do, then make a plan today to start doing some research… to figure out a plan that’ll lead you to a better financial future.
For example:
- You could buy a rental property and rent it out
- You could start an online business that generates sales or leads while you sleep
- You could buy a vending machine and sell snacks
- You could start your own laundromat
- You could start a podcast and sell advertising on your episodes
These are all examples of assets that will eventually earn you money while you sleep if you leverage them correctly.
Obviously, it takes time, effort, and sometimes cash to set these things up.
However, starting today, if you truly want to hack your life and become the best possible version of yourself, it’s crucial that you start investing in this vital life domain as soon as possible.
4. Pursue Your Purpose
Read my deeper guide on pursuing your purpose here.
Do you know what your life purpose is?
There are a lot of humans in this world who actually operate at a highly efficient level.
And yet, even some of these ‘high performance’ people tend to feel like their lives don’t have a lot of meaning—because they keep running around in circles without reaching any significant destinations.
This all speaks to a lack of purpose.
As alpha mentality humans, we must be clear on what our purpose in life is.
And every single day, we should be putting effort and energy into moving the needle to help us achieve those long-term goals.
Do you know what your long-term goals are?
To begin this process, start writing down some goals that you’d like to achieve in your life.
You should write down goals for your day, week, year, 5 years, and 10 years.
You can even go longer than that, and create long-term life goals that you want to accomplish before the end of your days.
Aim high, and make sure to write your goals down using a SMART goal format.
This really matters.
When I started setting goals, getting clear about my purpose, and making sure to write down my goals on a daily basis—I started making tremendous progress in all of the vital life domains that mattered.
Plus, I could see that I was making progress toward where I really wanted to be in life.
This empowered me to see that my life work has significance, and that it’s all leading to something amazing.
So get clear on your purpose.
Visualize it, brainstorm about it, and make sure that every single day, you write it down so that you know exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing.
5. Level Up Mind, Body, And Spirit
Read my deeper guide on leveling up your mind, body, and spirit here.
If you want to fully optimize your life, then it’s crucial that you set some time aside every single day to invest in leveling up and bettering yourself.
Every day, you should be:
- Working out
- Learning something new
- Investing in the quality of your spiritual life—to make it more peaceful, reverent, and fulfilling
People who neglect these daily necessities tend to live unbalanced lives because they just never reach their fullest evolved human potential.
We have tremendous potential as humans.
However, if we don’t take full, radical self-responsibility for developing this potential, then we’ll just stagnate and always stay in the same place.
This is not a recipe for life success.
This is a recipe for disaster!
If you’re not improving, you’re stagnating.
And if you’re stagnating, guess what?
You’re actually deteriorating.
This means that your life, in all of the most significant ways, will just continue to get worse instead of getting better.
Self-development is crucial to real, successful, optimized alpha mentality self-hacking.
6. Embark On Your Hero’s Arc
Read my deeper guide to embarking on your hero’s arc here.
When I talk about the hero’s arc, what I’m really talking about is the process of taking risks, having adventures, facing failure, and achieving forward momentum in life.
A lot of people live their lives perpetually in their comfort zone.
They don’t take risks or do things that scare them, because they’re afraid of the possible negative repercussions.
But here’s the thing.
If you want to live a truly optimized life, you can’t neglect this vital life domain.
In some aspect of your life, to some degree, every single day, you need to be leaving your comfort zone to have adventures that’ll bring you closer to your purpose.
You need to be discovering new things, experiencing new things, and experimenting with better ways to live.
Along the way, you’re going to face failure.
And this is part of the crucial process of becoming a better person.
When you face failure and get knocked down, it’s important that you learn how to get back up, analyze your failures for lessons, and then try again to accomplish the objective.
Eventually, this will lead to victory and success.
And this is a crucial part of self-hacking that most people simply overlook.
It’s uncomfortable to leave your comfort zone.
But if you never do it, you’ll never truly optimize your life—and you’re going to leave massive opportunity and potential on the table.
7. Master Your Dating Life (Experience Deep Human Intimacy)
Read my deeper guide on how to master your dating life here.
One mistake that a lot of people make when they’re trying to self-hack to get the best results out of life is ignoring the fact that humans are inherently socially cooperative creatures.
In my life, I discovered that the basis for success in this vital life domain was actually centered on the concept of intimacy.
Simply put, when you master your dating life and you create real, vibrant, incredible, sexual, and relational intimacy with an intimate partner. you unlock a fundamental and ancient key to survival and evolution within your human DNA.
The truth of the matter is that humans didn’t evolve to be solitary creatures.
And yet, in today’s modern world, more people are alone, isolated, and deprived of real, vigorous, deep-reaching human sexual intimacy than ever.
It’s crucial to master your dating life so that you can attract high-value partners who will walk together with you, nurture you, and invest in you to the highest degree possible. And you should also learn how to do this for your intimate partner as well.
8. Build Your Tribe
Read my deeper guide on how to build your tribe here.
Beyond the experience of mastering your dating life and cultivating an intimate relationship, humans also thrive when they live in a team-focused, cooperative tribal infrastructure.
This infrastructure should ideally have many different layers.
If you truly want to self-hack and unlock your greatest human potential, you’ll want to cultivate not only an intimate relationship, but also a family, a circle, a tribe, and a greater overarching community.
As a human, if you’re not plugged into these types of social infrastructures, contributing to them, and working toward an ecosystem that facilitates greater survival for everyone involved—then you’re missing out on a huge part of your inner power and potential as a human.
9. Contribute To Your Legacy
Read my deeper guide on how to build a lasting legacy of greatness here.
One interesting thing about humans is that we have a deep and instinctual drive to find meaning and purpose in life.
Not only is this important, but it’s also actually crucial for unlocking your greatest alpha human potential.
When we allow futility, nihilism, and hopelessness to creep into our minds, we succumb to a beta-mentality disease that really paralyzes our ability to perform at our highest level.
Therefore, it’s crucial that you, as a human, figure out how you want to make a difference in the world, and how you want to create a lasting legacy of greatness that will outlive your mortal lifespan.
This creates a sense of meaning, purpose, and greater legacy and achievement.
Every human should cultivate this for themselves.
Any human who neglects this will be leaving a huge amount of value and power on the table.
This is a vital self-hacking principle that you should not ignore.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this post has helped to open your eyes to the 9 vital life domains, and how they must all be pursued in balance in order to properly self-hack the human organism—to bring forth its greatest creative and life potential.
In other words, if you start investing in all 9 of these vital life domains a little bit more every single day, you’re going to find that your life is going to significantly improve in effectiveness, value, satisfaction, fulfillment, and even happiness.
It doesn’t have to be perfect, and you don’t have to accomplish it all in one day.
The point is to strive to become 1% better every day, and to continue to invest in all of the ways that matter most to work your way to a better future—one step at a time.
That’s all I’ve got for this one.
Go with grace my friends, and never give up your power.
This is Joshua K. Sigafus signing off.