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If you have low ability to self-coerce i.e. "make yourself" do something, everything you have ever wanted is behind the valley of illegibility. The mainstream routes towards success are safe, reliable, and nearly universally rely on moderate-high ability to self-coerce. If you do not have that you are probably not going to succeed in them. Even if you succeed in them by compensating with intelligence or wit you have 50/50 odds of being miserable. What is not commonly told is that there are other routes to success that are far, far more fulfilling. You can find them, but you have to do it yourself. The route is not clear, most of it looks like fumbling around in the dark- illegible. Self-coercion is the most important element to talk about first. The correct answer is not to never use it, but to use it very skillfully in a completely different way than normies use it. In the US at least default cultural scripts for how to do things have immense, ambient self-coercion. This works pretty ok for normies because they have the coercive capacity to maintain it and they don't get too messed up by the consequences of self-coercion. You do not have either of those traits. There are probably scripts firing in your head about how you "should" do something, or you "have to", or you just need to "try harder". These are not just useless, they are actively harmful. You do not have the capability to execute these. Your brain learned them from the people around you and is desperately firing them constantly trying to get you to live up to the mainstream image of success which you were encultured to. When it inevitably doesn't work, your brain fires them harder. It's essentially random flailing in a pit of spikes, it hurts like hell and does not ever get you any closer. There are cases where you want to use discipline, which is the healthy, transcended version of self-coercion, as little as possible to get as big of a bang as you possibly can. Ideally the time you spend disciplining to do something should be less than 10 percent of your total time. The goal is to make what you're doing as fun, easy, and natural as possible. Feelings of "I should" or "I have to" are the enemy to be minimized. Things which are worth disciplining are things that affect the whole rest of your life. Getting to bed early and consistently, or doing some amount of exercise are good examples. The rest of your time should be spent following your gut. If you do not immediately know what that means, check my next tweet. Nudge your decision making slightly, but not very much from your gut towards things that produce an artifact like art, tweeting, or making videos, towards things that are social or engage other people, and things that make you feel better after you do them. If you think you "should" do something but won't, and there's another useful thing you actually will do but isn't quite as good, always do the thing you actually will do. Examples are art, joining a sport, developing a skill, writing, making youtube videos, posting on twitter, selling things, and at the limit running a business. There's a weird property to the universe that I can't prove to you yet, you'll have to take it on faith. If you spend a lot of time doing something, learning, or developing a skill just because you love it, it will usually come back to benefit you in some way, sometimes dramatically. Yes, if you were to practice becoming a lawyer for two hours a day for 5 years that probably has a higher expected return than practicing wood carving. But you'll actually do the wood carving. And that wood carving can convert into a social media account about wood carving, friends and connections, opportunities, commissions, selling your sculptures, and more. Frequently it won't even be in the original field you were part of. You'll probably find that you meander around and jump into new fields, unrelated to the one you were originally working in. This is expected and good. As long as you are doing something, growing, expanding your capabilities and your network, it will pay off. If you want to read more advice on how to cross the valley, the number one account to follow is @visakanv He fully crossed the valley of illegibility, and his account is a treasure trove of advice on how to do it yourself. @nickcammarata is a good example of someone who fully crossed the valley of illegibility and is incredibly fulfilled. nitter.cf/nickcammarata/status/1… @chrislakin crossed the valley of illegibility, and much of his account is secretly about crossing it. Sasha Chapin crossed the valley and has a wonderful article about it called "Surrender as a non-stupid life strategy" on the website which must not be named. Cate Hall and her book "you can just do things" details skills about how to cross the valley of illegibility.