Rian Doris

You have a big goal. You think about it often. But if someone asked you how today's to-do list moves you closer to it, you'd struggle to answer. The solution is a goal stack. A goal stack is a reverse-engineered chain that connects a distant ambition to what you do today. Each layer feeds the one above it: Layer 1: High Hard Goal (1-5 years). An ambitious target that pushes you past your comfort zone. Layer 2: Break it down into annual targets, quarterly milestones, monthly objectives, and weekly tasks. Each level builds on the previous one, creating a logical progression toward the High Hard Goal. Layer 3: Daily Goal-Directed Actions. The single most important task you can do today, the one domino that triggers a chain reaction toward your High Hard Goal. At the end of each workday, take 10 minutes to plan tomorrow. Identify three goal-directed actions. Set wildly specific micro-goals for each. Then take the first step of the first step before you stop for the night. Open the document. Title it. Save it in the right folder. When you do this, your daily actions connect upward through the stack to the thing you actually care about. More on this in the article below: - Rian

Forcing yourself to work no more than a specific number of hours per week will make you more strategic The increased leverage you’ll get from being more strategic will more than compensate for the limited hours.

Purpose - the belief that your work affects something beyond yourself - upgrades your perception of effort from “expense” to “investment”.

After living as a minimalist nomad for three years, I settled into my dream house in LA. Before I knew it, everything changed. I filled my house with gadgets, supplements, and stylish clothes spilling out of a walk-in closet. My mornings turned into untangling chargers to find one that works, searching through headphones to find a matching pair, and digging through too many clothes for the climate. By the time I sat down to work, my mind was foggy from all the micro-decisions. I was burning through cognitive fuel before I even opened my laptop. Where do I put it? Do I need it? Is it charged? Where's the other one? These micro-decisions stack up and drain the same mental energy you need to enter flow state and do focused work. Having a home base in LA meant having more stuff. But things got out of hand. So I ran a possession purge: I removed everything from my room except the bed and couch. I kept the 15% I actually needed and got rid of the rest. The difference was immediate. My environment went quiet. Nothing was competing for my attention or pulling me into low-level problem-solving before the day even started. I could wake up, sit down, and slide straight into a flow block. Flow state became easier to access and lasted longer because there was nothing in my environment creating friction. The less I owned, the less I had to manage. The less I had to manage, the more mental capacity I had for the one thing that actually matters: advancing my craft. Minimalism leads to maximalism in performance. - Rian

@facelessecom Yes.

@RianSweetDoris Your brain basically tricks you into wanting things more than having them

Dopamine is about anticipation, not attainment - it spikes in the chase and drops on arrival. Turns out the cliche “it’s about the journey, not the destination” is grounded in biology.

If you need lots of discipline, something's broken. Sustainable motivational fuel comes from the six intrinsic motivators: curiosity, purpose, autotelicity, relatedness, autonomy, and mastery. Maximise these, and the “pull” will be so strong that discipline becomes irrelevant.

When I joined secondary school, I got into athletics. I wanted to throw a shot put. A gloriously simple sport where you use your whole body to throw a heavy steel ball as far as possible. When I started, I assumed my training would involve throwing the steel ball. Over and over, as hard as I could, until I was able to throw the ball further and further. But it turns out that when you train shot put, most of your time is spent doing other things. Squatting, building core strength, working on explosiveness. I stuck out the training. When I went to throw again, the shot put went much further, despite barely training my throw directly. The distance my throw had gained was a result of the surrounding inputs—the leg strength, mobility, technique. Accessing flow state works similarly. If you want deeper, longer, more consistent flow, the instinct is often to chase the state directly — to try harder to get in the zone. But flow, like my ability to throw the shot put further, emerges naturally when the other variables are nailed. The three surrounding stages of the flow cycle — struggle, release, and recovery — are your leg strength, your hip explosiveness, your footwork drills. Master those, and your ability to access and sustain flow deepens on its own. More below:

The average number of possessions in a typical American household is often cited as 300,000 items. For every possession you own, some increment of your attention is captured. Each possession represents a piece of information the brain needs to process, requiring attentional resources for recognition, categorization, and decision-making, thereby contributing to the cognitive load. On the extreme end, this "thinking about things" turns material possessions into extensions of our identity and self-expression. This can turn any threat to our possessions into a threat to our very selves. When this happens, possessions become even more destructive to our attention. As the godfather of flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi put it: "The problem is that the more the ego becomes identified with symbols outside the self the more vulnerable it becomes... the sudden loss of one's possessions results in a 'shrinkage of our personality, a partial conversion of ourselves to nothingness.' To prevent its annihilation, the ego forces us to be constantly on the watch for anything that might threaten the symbols on which it relies... which distorts reality so as to make it congruent with the needs of the ego." And this "thinking about stuff" doesn't just zap away your time and hijack the resources you need for productivity and flow... It also clogs up your creativity by degrading the quality of your rumination. Put simply: Possessions possess the mind. That's why minimalism leads to maximalism in performance. More on this in the article above. - Rian

Minimalism leads to maximalism in performance.

@StephanieRX8 Thanks! Let us know how it goes.

@RianSweetDoris I am so doing this! You may have just changed my life with your beautiful presentation. I will come back in a few months and tell ya how it went. 💯🥰🤑😂🤣

Every possession you own captures a slice of your attention. Spartans, Samurai, Stoics, Mongol warriors, and monastic scholars all practiced the same thing: they removed everything that distracted them from what mattered most. You lose a shirt in a cluttered closet, scratch your watch on the way out, trip over unopened packages by the door, and spend your commute thinking about all of it instead of preparing for the day. "Thinking about things" is the real cost of ownership. Each object becomes a micro-task competing for cognitive bandwidth before you've even started your actual work. Cognitive Load: The Science Psychologist John Sweller's research on cognitive load explains why. Your brain has finite working memory, like RAM in a computer. Overload it, and everything slows: focus degrades, creativity stalls, decisions get worse. The prefrontal cortex, your cognitive command center, has a hard capacity ceiling. Every irrelevant possession unnecessarily spikes that load. Possessions Block Flow State Flow, the optimal state of consciousness, requires all of your attention focused on the present moment. Possessions work against this by fragmenting that attention. A pair of pants might take 10 seconds of daily thought. A Rolex could demand 10 minutes. A house can absorb a full hour. Across the average American household (roughly 300,000 items), the cumulative cognitive tax is enormous. Your Default Mode Network, responsible for creative insight during idle moments, gets choked when it's processing possession-related noise instead of generating ideas. How to Apply Minimalism for Flow Step 1: Find Your Minimalist Sweet Spot Tier 1 (Aggressive): Own only what advances your craft. Everything fits in a backpack. Tier 2 (Tempered): Balance comfort and flow. Small, efficient home with multi-functional items. Tier 3 (Mild): Each item chosen with intention. Winston Churchill operated here, surrounding himself with books, paintings, and artifacts that fueled his thinking. Step 2: Run a Possession Purge Block off a full day, gather everything you own into one room, and sort each item into keep or cut. Aggressive filter: "Is this a tool that advances my craft?" Less aggressive filter: "Is what I assume I'll get from this worth the cost of ownership?" If it's not an obvious "yes," the number of considerations that flood your mind reveals the cognitive weight of that item. Step 3: Maintain It Performance maximalists: Remove something for everything you bring in. Less extreme: Before any purchase, ask: "Is acquiring this worth the temporary neurochemical reward it brings?" Backup: Run an annual purge to reset. What Changes Now Minimalism drives flow by reducing cognitive load. Flow drives minimalism by making work intrinsically rewarding, so you want less stuff. That loop compounds over time. Minimalism in possessions leads to maximalism in performance. More on this in the article below. - Rian

@LexTemperatus Absolutely! Thanks for sharing.

Brother, Rian, what an amazing article I always thought they renounced worldly life; instead, the pattern is now clear: they were fixated on the important things, and had no space for giving attention to other things They only owned things necessary to them and evaluated the cost of ownership not only in monetary terms but also with attention. This is something I have never come across before, and it is wonderful. Thank you for this

@Edoardoisback Thanks for sharing!

@RianSweetDoris real ! as I grow up I let go of many material stuff, I cleared a lot of mental space