Sorry for being one day late.
And before starting:
The topic for tomorrow's ADHD live session at 12 pm CET is going to be about:
How I organize my life in Notion to think more intellectually:
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Building a business has never been easier, but developing a business worth building has never been harder.
You’ve probably felt it.
You scroll through YouTube or any social media app and find hundreds of “businesses” that just try to hijack your attention.
The word “entrepreneur” used to be associated with innovation, progress, growth, and moving the world forward. Now it is mostly associated with someone who hijacks your attention from one app to another.
We have lost the idea that building a business can be an intellectual act, not just the pursuit of money, status, and wealth.
Herbert Marcuse, in One-Dimensional Man (1964), argued that the system profits from your mediocrity. It feeds you enough dopamine and distractions — cars, entertainment, comfort, sexual freedom, career advancement — to keep you from asking what you actually want.
The world has become shallower, a copycat, and increasingly obsessed with monetizing whatever captures attention.
If you want to build another revenue-making business, you can stop reading. This isn’t for you.
But if you’re an idea-rich person who believes business should mean more than maximizing revenue, you are warmly welcome to continue reading.
Most entrepreneurs are rich in business, but poor in mind.
Centuries ago, entrepreneurs were intellectual thinkers, philosophers, visionaries, innovators, and creators for humankind’s greater good.
- Leonardo da Vinci combined art, anatomy, engineering, architecture, and invention.
- Nikola Tesla transformed his understanding of electricity into systems that helped power the modern world.
- Henry Ford turned ideas about production into infrastructure that reshaped industry and everyday life.
Somewhere in the last century, money became the master of most entrepreneurs.
The operator replaced the entrepreneur, and the courageous inventor became the attention merchant. Instead of discovering genuine needs, founders manufacture them. Instead of telling the truth, they fabricate stories for investors. Instead of respecting their customers, they design systems to capture and monetize their attention.
Money has become the God of most entrepreneurs nowadays.
Aristotle called it the difference between bios — mere life, survival, comfort — and eudaimonia, a life of purpose.
The comfortable human has everything in abundance: safety, food, comfort, longevity, but he has renounced the very activity that would count as eudaimonia (good divinity). He's stopped exercising practical wisdom toward a good he cares about because he's stopped caring about any good beyond his own comfort. "We are what we repeatedly do".
The entrepreneur created the modern “hustle” culture as an escape from their own minds.
If you work 12 hours a day and stimulate your mind 12 hours a day, is there any room to really think?
The Way Out: Intellectual Entrepreneurship
Intellectual entrepreneurship is my idea of returning to the era of real thinkers. Real work that produces new, innovative outcomes and moves humanity intellectually forward, without the sole focus on making revenue.
It is the path you choose to follow toward mastery, your passion, your goals, and your direction in life.
Like real thinkers such as Leonardo da Vinci, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, etc., in the past, when most innovation happened.
→ This intellectual pursuit becomes your lifestyle, your business, and your identity.
You stop associating with the bullsh*t of society. You stop following the advice everyone listens to online (like last week’s letter, the YouTube video version or even the Spotify audio version).
You detach yourself from the opinions of others because you have your own opinion.
1) You treat your work as a spiritual calling.
→ It’s, in my opinion, following your curiosity, intuition, or childlike wonder and turning it into a business to be able to continue this pursuit as a lifelong calling.
2) You organize your life around your work. Protecting at least 2 hours daily for intellectual work.
→ It’s what I preach with a slow and flow-focused morning routine. And why I work 4-6 hours every day. It keeps me sane and focused on my goals, while still leaving time for health and relationships. (Most of your intellectual/thinking work gets done in 4-6 hours.)
3) You create space for boredom.
→ It is going for a walk without stimulation. It is going for a run without blasting music into your ears. It is reading and writing down your thoughts in deliberate silence, before the outside world gets too loud.
4) You make decisions and choices with purpose towards your goals.
→ Not “how to read faster”, which is stupid and another form of overconsumption. But slow, purposeful reading that leads to new ideas and new neural connections, which takes time. Where you try to organize in your head so you can find the information again if you need it. (Like the purpose of my Chaos To Clarity System) You build an internal hierarchy of goals and knowledge to solve your own problems.
5) A systemic way of taking notes, capturing ideas so that reading and reflection accumulate into something usable.
→ Not another brain dump document, where you write down your notes and never find them again. A real second brain, where your brain is externally organized, and you are able to find every idea again, without the conscious effort of searching for it.
How I Organize My Life in Notion to Think More Intellectually
You can’t think if you don’t write.
Writing is the most crucial skill for an intellectual entrepreneur, or for any human being, to develop. Without it, you are unable to think intellectually.
It took me 5 years from my first business (photography) when I was 19 to running my own startup (Xanevo), and another 2-3 years afterward to develop real, deep intellectual thinking.
I was annoyed that I wasn't living up to my intellectual potential. I thought that I couldn’t be that dumb. Looking at society, there are more dumb people than me. But I kept failing at writing a simple email reply.
Like my school teacher in the last year of school (when I was 18) told me, I write like a 4th-grade student.
So I wanted to change my mind, organize my ADHD mind, and develop a thinking system for genius-level work.
This system led me to write over 330 newsletters, and honestly, I never thought I would become a writer with ADHD. I always thought I was dyslexic. Turns out, it was just a skill issue.
For tomorrow’s live session in the Discord community (at 12 pm CET), I would like to give you a full breakdown of how I organize my life in Notion to think more intellectually (it’s easier to showcase than to explain it):
- It starts with a hierarchy of goals. (90-Day Framework)
- Picking a topic I want to research and write about
- Having weekly and daily habits that compound
- Collecting, organizing, and writing in Notion
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Thanks for reading!
Jeff
Whenever you're ready, there are 3 more ways I can help you:
​1) Read more on my blog. (Published Content)​
​2) ​Discord Channel: The Main purpose is to provide a free ADHD community with weekly Wednesday (8 pm EDT) group live calls to help people make their ADHD life easier.
3) Weekly Bonfire: A tribe of creators, entrepreneurs, and ADHD people who meet at weekly bonfires to create, share knowledge, build businesses, collaborate together, do audience share, and keep each other accountable.
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