If Strategic Transformation has us acknowledging that we are not yet the kind of person who can use their passions to harmoniously fulfill the financial, professional, and personal purposes that are either destroying or creating our ability to live a good and dignified life then we can,
…humbly accept that we lack the capabilities to do so, which means we must enter into training that is as unconventional as living a life of passion and purpose.
But not any training will do. It must be strategic, which means it must be focused on fulfilling our specific professional, financial, and personal purposes.
And to do that, we must know all of the impacts, parts, and practices of each.This is what we accomplished in the Purpose 1.0 Course.
Now, with those clear objectives identified, we can begin…
…designing and building the structures and strategies that will allow us to harmoniously fulfill them.
But do so in ways that generates more deployable levels of time, energy, creativity, and currency as we go rather than depleting them. This we learned in the Mastery 1.0 Course.
Now of course it would be…
…arrogant as well as irresponsible to think we could design, build, and develop the structures and strategies that will allow us to use our passions to harmoniously fulfill all of our purposes,
…within what has become the most competitive, dynamic, and technologically advanced marketplace this planet has ever seen,
…using only our common knowledge or what we learned in traditional schooling.
It is for these reasons that we must adopt the study habits and processes that will allow us to become and remain an Expert at becoming an Expert.
Expert at Expert Distinction
Expert at Expert – To obtain the ability to design, build, deploy, measure, and modify the Strategic Operating Practices that produce and maintain the positive impacts of a purpose fulfilled, as well as eliminate and prevent the negative impacts of a purpose unfulfilled.
Expert at Expert: Positive Impacts
Information Into Outcomes - The act of going through your day produces the knowledge required to fulfill your purposes BECAUSE you will know how to convert information from your experiences into effective strategies.
Know Exactly What to Study - As an Expert at becoming an Expert, you know exactly what to study and when to study it BECAUSE it is directed by your POWER BASED priorities.
Peaceful & Powerful Progress - It is here that you can take a deep breath and settle into peaceful and powerful progress BECAUSE you will be increasing your time, energy, creativity, and currency every day.
Expert at Expert: Negative Impacts
When you fail to become an expert at becoming an expert, you jump from book to book, training program to training program without making meaningful and sufficient progress, causing you to have wasted the time, energy, creativity, and currency you put into it BECAUSE your study time is neither strategic nor effective.
When you fail to become an expert at becoming an expert, you jump from book to book, training program to training program without making meaningful and sufficient progress, causing you to have wasted the time, energy, creativity, and currency you put into it BECAUSE your study time is neither strategic nor effective.
Outside of being an expert at becoming an expert your confidence fades BECAUSE you are no longer producing new and more valuable outcomes.
Outside of being an expert at becoming an expert your confidence fades BECAUSE you are no longer producing new and more valuable outcomes.
Outside of being an expert at becoming an expert, you are more likely to live in the anxiety and regret that comes from squandering the opportunity you had to progress toward the fulfillment of your purposes BECAUSE you have no practice in place intended to do otherwise.
Outside of being an expert at becoming an expert, you are more likely to live in the anxiety and regret that comes from squandering the opportunity you had to progress toward the fulfillment of your purposes BECAUSE you have no practice in place intended to do otherwise.
Expert at Expert: Parts and Practices
ALGORITHMIC vs HEURISTIC - Learn how to convert low-value, easily outsourceable cookie-cutter ALGORITHMIC solutions into customized HEURISTIC solutions SO THAT you can fulfill your unique objectives in a way that works for your particular self and situation.
ALGORITHMIC WORK
Algorithmic work is the execution of known strategies and tactics that consistently produce intended outcomes in static environments
Algorithmic workers focus on doing rather than results, on compliance rather than creativity.
When dynamic situations arise, the algorithm accepts pre calculated losses, prioritizing its own survival and growth over any individual’s desired outcomes.
Algorithmic work is commoditized, easy to outsource, and devalued because you are repeating something that already exists. In competitive and dynamic environments like ours, this kind of work becomes obsolete.
Examples
Following a predesigned workout routine simply because it exists, forcing yourself to comply with it even when it clashes with your personality and schedule, and expecting it to somehow produce results meaningful enough for you to stick with it.
Executing a business plan that is not designed around using your passions to produce the time, energy, creativity, and currency required for you to fulfill your unique professional, financial, and personal purposes.
Punishing a child based on their wrongdoing rather than the intended behavior.
HEURISTIC WORK
Heuristic work requires fundamental knowledge and using fundamental knowledge requires humility, confidence, courage, action and analytics.
Fundamental Knowledge because you must understand how each underlying principle works individually and how it impacts the whole in order to design new solutions. It allows you to see all of the pieces of the puzzle.
Humility because you must recognize there is a gap between where you are and where you need to be and that you cannot cross it without help.
Courage because you must act without knowing the outcome.
Action because each move is a test, and each test produces information. It is trial and error, but with a process that converts error into results.
Examples
Designing or modifying a workout routine to blend with your personality and schedule in order to produce the levels of energy, self confidence, and authority you require.
Designing or modifying a business plan to leverage your passions and your unique gifts to produce the specific deployable amounts of time, energy, creativity, and currency required for you to fulfill your unique professional, financial, and personal purposes.
Designing or modifying a behavior modification strategy that produces the levels of desire and discipline your child needs to develop into a successful adult.
One of our strategic objectives is to multiply our value as we divide effort.
We are valuable to others when we help them with important things.
We are extremely valuable to others when we help them with important things that they are unable to care for without our help.
And if they were unable to care for them, that means an algorithmic process has failed them and they will now need a heuristic one designed for their particular self and situation. They need an expert.
Sniper Stalking Formula
Expert at Expert: Parts and Practices
PURPOSE - Identify and remain focused on the positive impacts of your purpose to be produced and the negative ones to be mitigated and eliminated SO THAT all of your thought, action, energy and design lead you to your objective.
Purpose – Keeping Your Eye On Your Target
When you train a sniper how to stalk, the first thing they must do is to find their target. This is their purpose. Once they have their eyes on the target they can never take them off and this is where humility comes in.
They must accept that their intuition will not get them safely to their final firing position (FFP) where they will take their shots.
They must hold tightly to their target or they will drift off course and get caught or run out of time.
Once the sniper students have their…
…eyes on their target, they must move from their current position to their final firing position.
Because they are in a dynamic and unknown environment with no preexisting or proven paths to follow, they need mastery of the fundamental principles that govern the type of domain in which they are operating.
In this case, it is the domain of predation, which requires a fundamental mastery of camouflage, concealment, and movement.
Camouflage breaks the link between what something is and how it appears, allowing exposed terrain to become usable terrain.
Concealment reveals the hidden highways running through seemingly open ground, paths a student can walk or even run through without being seen.
Movement, timing, and the behavioral patterns of the hunted tie it all together to turn an impossible path into a probable one.
This is the same thing we…
…need to reach the professional, financial, and personal purposes that make up our lives.
Once we have our eyes on our purposes, we can never take them off, or we will drift and squander our time, energy, creativity, and currency.
Because we too operate in a competitive and dynamic environment with no preexisting or proven paths to follow, we must master the fundamental principles that govern the type of domain in which we are operating.
In this case, it is the domain of professional, financial, and personal purposes.
Personal purposes tell us what a dignified life is.
Financial purposes tell us how much time, energy, creativity, and currency we require to live it.
Professional purposes tell us where we will use our passions to produce our financial purposes.
Together, these principles allow us to design and find the paths that work for our particular self and situation, turning what once seemed impossible into something probable.
Now, with our eyes on our target and a mastery of our environment, we can now take action.
ACTION - Take action SO THAT you can generate and reveal the unknown or missing information that applies to your particular self and situation.
Action
To know how to take meaningful action, we need to understand the difference between action and movement.
Within ACTION, there is effort, a meaningful objective, and measurable indicators of progress.
Its purpose is to produce required INFORMATION and desired progression.
Within MOVEMENT, there is only effort. Movement does not lead to any meaningful objective, and the only way to measure it is by how tired you feel at the end of the day.
Its purpose is to have you feel like you are doing something so that you do not worry about your current and future situations.
The difference between the two is so subtle that it often goes unnoticed. To become an observer of both, we must first define what is meaningful. We must be and remain present to our purposes. The moment we forget them is the moment we go from action to movement.
So once the target is located, the…
…student must take action. I have seen many run out of time and fail because they were afraid to advance.
This is why the heuristic process requires courage, which is not the absence of fear but taking action despite the fear.
Since fear is generated from ignorance and false beliefs it is the generation of truthful information that makes the fear manageable.
Action in this case means…
…finding a route forward so he can reach a final firing position. He does not know whether the path is perfect, and he cannot see the entire route from the start.
It is the need for perfection prior to progressions that can leave even a seasoned Navy SEAL floundering at the starting line.
Perfection is a second cousin to cowardice, and cowards never get to see more than they have already seen, leaving them to live a life dictated by external events rather than purpose.
The purpose of action is not correctness. It is to produce information. To climb a tree or sneak out into the open to see what you cannot see.
Action reveals what planning cannot. It exposes terrain, timing, blind spots, and truth. Waiting for certainty guarantees a kind of failure that is permanent.
Now that our sniper student has spent up to 30 minutes flat on his belly so low that his face is dragging on the desert floor, he has produced more than just sweat. He has produced information.
INFORMATION - delivers the missing pieces and exposes the weak and flawed ones. It is what we need for the final debrief process that pulls it all together.
Information
Information is the truth revealed through action. It is the accurate, real-world data you generate when you interact with your environment.
Information when combined with purpose tells you what is working, what is not, what to stop, what to start, what to modify, and what to maintain.
It is the feedback that aligns your strategy with reality and replaces fear, guesswork, and assumptions with clarity, direction, and confidence.
As soon as the student begins moving, the environment starts speaking.
He notices new lines of sight.
He sees where others get caught.
He discovers avenues of concealment that were, well, previously concealed.
He learns which routes are safe, which are exposed, and which will collapse under the pressure of time.
Information in this…
…context is not subjective or emotional. It is factual. It is the measurable result of action.
Information transforms, and when debriefed, converts effort into wisdom by showing what reality actually is, not what you hoped it would be.
Information is the ingredient of an effective strategy. And to change the recipe, we need to debrief.
DEBRIEF - Subtract the results that your action produced from the intentions of your purpose to identify your gap SO THAT you can use the new information generated by your actions to redesign, build, deploy, measure, and modify the next iteration of your strategy.
Debrief
A debrief is the deliberate process of comparing what you intended to produce with what you actually produced.
This is done so that you can identify the GAP, use the INFORMATION to reveal which TACTICS are weak, flawed, or missing,
…and then adjust those tactics by asking yourself what needs to be stopped, started, modified, managed, or maintained in order to build an effective STRATEGY.
Debrief Formula
INTENTION – Results = Gap
GAP + Information = Reveals Tactics that are weak, flawed or missing.
TACTICS + stop, start, modify, manage, maintain = Effective Strategy
In stalking, the student must…
…manage his psychology as well as his ego to stop long enough to take what he has learned and redesign his approach.
PSYCHOLOGY – because the moment he begins moving toward the target on a path that is uniquely his, his nervous system shifts into threat detection and the kind of doubt that comes from breaking from the herd starts to take root.
This is conformity-based risk aversion, the internal pull to wait for certainty and wait for others before taking action.
This is the exact opposite of what soothed his fear and bolstered his confidence during Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL training, BUD/S.
In basic SEAL training, to be with the herd was real-time confirmation that you were succeeding. As previously mentioned, algorithmic strategies are for the masses.
But now, in a heuristic environment, as he pulls his body forward through the dirt, his heart rate elevates, his senses narrow, and his mind starts generating imagined outcomes, most of them negative.
Fear of being seen, fear of making a mistake, fear of running out of time, and fear of the unknown all work to push him into hurried, sloppy movement. Not because it is effective, but because it seems like the fastest way to get it all over with. The fastest way to rejoin the herd of students who have passed. His psychology wants relief, not precision.
If he does not manage this, he will move too fast, misread the environment, and overlook the subtle information that is too confident in its truth to yell out to him.
Managing psychology means regulating the internal pressure long enough to think, observe, and redesign his approach based on reality rather than emotion.
EGO – because ego cannot tolerate interruption, correction, or adaptation. Ego wants to believe the intuitive plan was good enough. Ego wants to believe he already knows what he is doing.
When he sees or hears other students ahead of him, seemingly closer to their target than he is, ego tells him he is behind, that he must speed up, that he must catch them.
It convinces him that proximity is proof of progress, that superiority is earned through comparison, and that matching their pace is more important than following his own strategy. But as C. S. Lewis wrote,
“The man who turns back first is the most progressive.”
In stalking, turning back, slowing down, or correcting course is often the only real progress available and arguably the real test.
Ego wants speed, recognition, and validation. It whispers that stopping to second guess is weakness, that slowing down or turning around means falling behind,
…and that modifying the plan is evidence of some inherent flaw in his instinct. None of that works in dynamic environments that require heuristic processes.
Stalking requires an incredible amount of confidence because it is where humility comes from.
The student needs to be humble enough to admit that the plan was incomplete, or was missing something, or was flawed, and that the new path must come from new information, not pride.
If he does not manage his ego, he will continue on the path he thought was right rather than the path that is effective.
In our professional, financial, and…
…personal lives we must also manage our psychology as well as our egos so that we can pause to redesign, rebuild, and realign our approach based on the information we generate rather than the emotions we feel.
PSYCHOLOGY – using your passions to harmoniously fulfill the financial, professional, and personal purposes you created for yourself is incredibly rare, which means the philosophies, strategies, tools, training, and tactics you require and deploy will look nothing like those around you.
That difference triggers the same conformity-based risk aversion you saw on the stalking field.
The herd will not be doing what you are doing. Your nervous system will push for relief instead of strategic precision. Your psychology must be managed.
EGO – in traditional masculinity, being wrong is frowned upon. Traditional masculinity chooses being right over being effective.
It mocks course correction. It resists humility. It clings to the original plan simply because changing confirms failure.
But effective leadership and effective living require the opposite. They require admitting when a strategy isn’t working and pivoting based on new information rather than remaining persistent through pride.
You may have noticed that…
…there was more on psychology and ego here than on the formula itself, and here is why. The formula is nothing new.
There are many versions of it. The OODA LOOP, the after action review, the feedback cycle.
They are all algorithmic and easy to follow, and they are among the most powerful tools in performance. But the question is, why do people not use them? Why do you not use them?
The answer is simple, but to find it you must deploy this HEURISTIC process and treat it as a discipline. You must take action and begin figuring out why you do not do this every day.
Because if you are not designing and deploying something new every day, you are becoming stale, and your value is fading.
Value requires newness.
“Only on the FRINGES of an ecosystem, those outer rings, do evolution and adaptation occur at a furious pace; the inner center of the system is where the entrenched, non-adapting species die off, doomed to failure by maintaining the status quo.”
– Yvon Chouinard –
It is the Sniper stalking formula that moves you from the trenches to the fringe. It is where the Experts at becoming Experts live.
Strategic Writing
When we write, we expand our understanding in ways that produce new thinking—thinking that leads to more powerful distinctions, which allow us to better identify and fulfill the purposes for which we were created.
1. I need to gather specific info on what i designed to fulfill a purpose, what I actually did and how it worked or didn’t so I can keep redesigning prioritizing by power more and more
2. It would prevent me from trying or realizing that trying and evaluating and redesigning is the only way to learn and improve the path to my strategic goals and needs
3. I can already feel myself working better in flow, and doing so in a fundamental and strategic manner provides progress as I learn both what works and what does NOT WORK. Knowing that I can be continuous is uplifting and destressing
4. I can effectively and gradually keep reaching toward my strategic objectives by using the expert at expert techniques to learn how to keep learning ways to be more effective and focused and harmonious
1: Explain why becoming an Expert at becoming an Expert is required of anyone who is committed to using their passion to harmoniously fulfill the financial, professional, and personal purposes they were created for.
Anyone who is genuinely committed to using their passion to fulfill financial, professional, and personal purposes is choosing to operate inside living systems—markets, organizations, families, bodies, cultures—that are constantly changing and often in tension with one another. These systems do not respond reliably to intention, desire, or effort alone. They respond to what is designed, deployed, and sustained in practice.
Because no single skill set, role, or area of expertise remains sufficient across time and contexts, the pursuit of harmony across life domains cannot be solved once and then maintained by inertia. What produces alignment at one stage of life may create imbalance at another. What succeeds professionally may introduce hidden personal or financial costs. Without the capacity to observe these effects and redesign one’s operating practices accordingly, even well-chosen passions eventually become sources of friction, stress, or stagnation.
2: How would arrogance and naivety stop someone from truly becoming an expert at something?
True expertise emerges only through an ongoing cycle of action, feedback, measurement, and modification. Arrogance and naivety each interrupt this cycle in different but equally limiting ways.
Arrogance prevents expertise by rejecting feedback before it can be examined. When a person assumes their understanding is already sufficient, disagreement is dismissed, failures are externalized, and results are explained away rather than investigated. Past success becomes a shield against present correction. While experience may continue to accumulate, it is no longer refined by reality, causing skill to stagnate and error to harden into habit.
Naivety, by contrast, prevents expertise by accepting models without adequately testing them. The naive individual mistakes theory for practice, underestimates complexity, and assumes that effort or good intention will naturally produce results. Because their understanding is insufficiently stress-tested, they are repeatedly surprised by constraints, trade-offs, and unintended consequences. Learning remains shallow because outcomes are not rigorously measured against expectations.
Although they appear opposite, arrogance and naivety share a common failure: both avoid full responsibility for results. Arrogance assumes correctness without evidence; naivety assumes correctness will emerge without disciplined verification. In both cases, the essential work of revising one’s models in response to reality is avoided. Without this willingness to be corrected, true expertise cannot form.
3: How can a continuous state of fundamental and strategic study have you operating in a steady state of peaceful progress?
A continuous state of fundamental and strategic study enables peaceful progress by stabilizing both direction and execution. Instead of reacting to pressure, change, or uncertainty, study provides an interpretive framework that keeps action coherent as conditions evolve.
Fundamental study anchors action in first principles and enduring human concerns, preventing short-term demands from overriding long-term purpose. It clarifies what matters, why it matters, and which trade-offs are acceptable, reducing internal conflict and the pursuit of progress that later proves misaligned or destructive.
Strategic study governs how action is designed, deployed, measured, and adjusted within real systems. By emphasizing leverage, constraints, and feedback, it turns effort into cumulative progress rather than repeated exertion. Practices evolve in response to results, not assumptions.
When study is continuous, learning precedes crisis and correction becomes routine. Progress is evaluated by trajectory and coherence rather than isolated outcomes. The result is peaceful progress—not the absence of challenge, but sustained movement that remains aligned, adaptive, and grounded in reality.
4: What would now be possible for you if you were operating in a way that each day increased your deployable levels of time, energy, creativity, and currency?
If each day I increased my deployable levels of time, energy, creativity, and currency, my experience of progress would change from strain to surplus. I would no longer operate under constant urgency, where effort is consumed just to keep pace. I would operate from growing capacity.
With more deployable time, I could move from reacting to demands to deliberately designing what comes next, addressing root causes instead of repeatedly managing symptoms. Increased energy would raise the quality and consistency of my effort, allowing sustained progress without cycling through exhaustion.
As creativity became more available, problems would shift from obstacles to design challenges. I could generate options, test solutions, and discover ways to reduce effort while increasing impact. Growing currency would reinforce these gains, turning effective action into durable resources that buy flexibility, reduce risk, and support my purpose.
As these capacities compound, progress would begin to create more capacity rather than consume it. This would make possible a wider range of deliberate choices—pursuing purpose without chronic pressure, growth without burnout, and ambition without sacrificing stability or integrity.
1: Explain why becoming an Expert at becoming an Expert is required of anyone who is committed to using their passion to harmoniously fulfill the financial, professional, and personal purposes they were created for.
Becoming an Expert at becoming an Expert is one of the fundamental prerequisites for being able to use our passion to harmoniously fulfill the financial, professional, and personal purposes we were created for. If we do not become an Expert at Expert, we will only spend our power (time, energy, currency, creativity) without replenishing it, let alone gaining enough to invest further. This leads to a vicious cycle where the more power we invest, the more depleted we become, instead of achieving the harmonious fulfillment of our purposes.
2: How would arrogance and naivety stop someone from truly becoming an expert at something?
Such a person may create an SOP, but they do not actively work on it in the following weeks, months, and years. They just follow the already created SOP day by day. In this, arrogance and naivety merge: both the arrogant and the naive person overlook changes that affect the procedures outlined in the SOP, that would need to be adjusted, improved, or removed. Over time, such an SOP loses its significance, and following it can ultimately lead to failure, both in the specific activity at hand and overall, considering all other activities or parts of life that it impacts.
A common trait of both arrogant and naive people is complacency. Actively working with an SOP requires dedicating time, energy, currency, and creativity. Complacent people are unwilling to make this, because in their arrogance or naivety, they are convinced that what they created is already perfect and needs no further modification. The opposite is true.
3: How can a continuous state of fundamental and strategic study have you operating in a steady state of peaceful progress?
The key words are: continuous, fundamental, and strategic.
CONTINUOUS means regular, daily study, where progress is gradual and almost imperceptible day by day. Rather than specific results, it is our feelings and instincts that tell us we are growing. Only over a longer period of time do specific results become noticeable.
FUNDAMENTAL means that these are the basic things that need to be studied, without which growth would not be possible. Fundamental refers to WHAT to study.
STRATEGIC means HOW to study. We figure out which study methods work best for us, when and where we learn most effectively.
If we know what, how, when, and where to study, and if we study continuously, we will become aware of our growth, which brings us inner peace and the ability to fully focus on our studies with enthusiasm and playfulness. Instead of discipline, we are actually playing; we ENJOY the study. Rather than being in a state of “I need to do something,” which leads to gradual exhaustion, we are in a state of “I want to do something,” which, on the contrary, is a source of energy.
4: What would now be possible for you if you were operating in a way that each day increased your deployable levels of time, energy, creativity, and currency?
I would function without friction, both internal and external. The different parts of my life would complement each other, with one being a source of power for the other and vice versa. I would accomplish more things, activities, and goals, but instead of stress, I would experience inner peace, which itself is a source of enormous energy. This, in turn, would lead to fully functioning in a state of flow.
In this regard, I already feel a significant change, while also realizing that this is actually just a fraction of the journey I want to take and enjoy every day.
1: Explain why becoming an Expert at becoming an Expert is required of anyone who is committed to using their passion to harmoniously fulfill the financial, professional, and personal purposes they were created for.
I know that passion alone doesn’t produce results. It requires mastery, and that’s something you keep working at. If I want my passion to support my life in all areas, I have to keep training and improving. What seems to matter most isn’t just what I know right now, but how quickly I can learn, apply, and get better at what’s next.
2: How would arrogance and naivety stop someone from truly becoming an expert at something?
Arrogance can make someone think they already know enough, which shuts down learning. Naivety seems to do the opposite—it underestimates how much work and depth this really takes. Either way, both can slow you down because you’re not fully seeing what’s required to actually improve.
3: How can a continuous state of fundamental and strategic study have you operating in a steady state of peaceful progress?
What I’m learning is that consistent study starts to remove a lot of the guesswork. When I spend time on both the basics and the bigger picture strategy, things feel clearer. That clarity builds some confidence, and I can move forward without overthinking everything. It feels less reactive and more steady, like I’m actually in control of my progress.
4: What would now be possible for you if you were operating in a way that each day increased your deployable levels of time, energy, creativity, and currency?
I would create real momentum. If I’m improving how I use my time, energy, creatively, and currency, everything starts to open up with more power. I’ll have more options, make better decisions, and feel like I’m actually building something instead of just maintaining where I’m at.