Buckle up because this’ll be a long one – Reading Time: 28 min

Being lazy saved me. I wasted 8 years on hustle culture and got absolutely nowhere, while this method changed my life my life in 8 weeks. I’m not exaggerating.

1. The Price Of Hustle Culture

Get up at 5am, meditate, exercise, work, work, work – read, study, stress – don’t look back, don’t fall behind, don’t miss out, don’t stop moving, don’t stop doing, don’t stop to think-

I used to berate myself for being unable to keep up with the stress and pressure of always having to do, do, do. 

I’d get bursts of energy every week or so and desperately try to get into a healthy routine, only to fall back a couple of days later. It was frustrating and exhausting, and it bit huge chunks off my self-esteem. 

That is until I learned about flow, working through resistance – and the importance of working with instead of against yourself.

I used to think that I was lazy, unmotivated – and not trying hard enough. 

The truth was quite the opposite. And today, I can honestly say that I’m grateful for my “laziness” – now that I’ve finally found a method that works for me. Now, you might be wondering why, how, or what the fuck – which, well…

2.1 Why Hustle Culture Didn’t Work (For Me)

There are many reasons why hustle culture isn’t the most effective way to reach your goals and live a meaningful life.

After discovering the method I’ll break down in depth below, I realized that I’m not lazy at all. I just have a low tolerance for wasting time on things out of alignment with my values, purpose, energy and passion. Instead of finding a method that appealed to my strengths and the way my brain worked.

Hustle Culture taught me to push through my emotions, ignore my sensitivity, to do things ‘even if you don’t feel like it’ and to always have the same routine. But my strengths were my emotions, sensitivity, passion and sense of flow.

Every single time I tried to change my life – It felt like self-punishment and denial.

Every single time I tried a new routine – It felt like I was pushing against myself.

Every time I set a goal – I felt dread.

2.2 Hustle Culture Dosen’t Lead To Success

That’s a bit of a lie. It does lead to what others have decided success looks like. It’s actually perfect for achieving a very specific type of lifestyle.

But ask yourself: Will Hustle Culture Actually Bring You A Lifestyle That You Genuinely Would Enjoy?

Notice how I’m not saying:

• A lifestyle that you desire.
• A lifestyle that you wished you desired.
• A lifestyle you think the person you wish you were would desire.

But a lifestyle that fills you up. A lifestyle where you enjoy the mundane day-to-day moments. A lifestyle that is compatible with your individual preferences, strengths and flaws.

Self-help should guide you in the direction of an everyday lifestyle that is healing. It should not be a one-time fix. It should not give you ultimatums for what success is, looks like, and unsustainable quick-fixes for how to achieve goals you don’t even want to achieve.

And so much of hustle culture removes passion and individuality – and hyperfocuses on this tailor-made perfect one-size fits all routine that is in no way sustainable.

Also, as I’ve introduced in a previous post (how find purpose in life 101) – you create a sense of purpose by consiously spending your time on what you find meaningful. Not through milestones or by hyperfocusing on the endgoal.

I want you to be able to use your unique strengths, values and mind to reach your personal idea of success. Not to waste time on working in ways that deprive you of those strengths for a goal that looks shiny, but is plastic.

When you ignore your needs, values and personal rythm – you’re not participating in self-help. You’re not nurturing a closer relationship with yourself, you’re not healing. To bulldoze yourself is not self-love, it’s self-denial.

And thank the gods for the laziness that protected me from this kind of spiral.

2.3 Hustle culture guises itself as self help – in my eyes, it’s self denial.

You don’t achieve success by pushing against your body, passion and intuition.

My inability to push against my emotions – my laziness – saved me from:

• Creating a successful life that I didn’t even want.
• Achieving goals that required a lifestyle compleatly out of alignment with me
• Denying myself and ending up in burn-out

My intolerance for self-denial saved me.

To hustle means to focus on what you produce, while through shifting your mindset to intentionality – you focus on the pleasure of striving and also the meaningfulness of the action itself, not the end result.

Because if the striving is soley stressful to you, and carries no enjoyment… Then why are you pursuing the goal?

• Is the goal truly something you genuinely value and desire if you constantly have to discipline yourself into doing it?
• Do you actually desire the lifestyle that reaching the goal would entail?
• Or are you trying to inadvertently meet a need through achieving said goal whilst having no passion for it?

You’re always ‘wasting’ time—so spend it on what truly matters to you.

2.4 Waste time on things you think makes your life matter.

And I know that someone out there is ambitious, emotional, passionate and willing – but hustle culture just does not work for them. Someone who wants ways to use their sensitivity to their advantage, and to achieve goals that actually matter to them, in ways that feel fulfilling and meaningful right now – not in a week, not in a month, not in ten years.

You want purpose and fulfillement and passion now.

And I will tell you what I WISH someone told me a couple of years ago.

So when I incoorperated the principles below, I changed everything…

• The way I set goals
• My routine and habits
• How I developed those routines and habits
• How I manifest
• How I made both basic and complex decisions
• How I handled emotions and stress
• How I handled setbacks

The following theories are not scientifically proven, although they are inspired by psychological theories. But since this method worked for me, and might work for others, my intention is to spread it like wildfire – so that one day, perhaps it will be incoorperated in advice, school, and workplaces to increase progress and decrease stress at the same time.

I’m more consistent and energized now than I ever was with hustle culture.

I realized that you can – have yourself – your passion, laziness, emotions, and purpose.

And also have success.

Here’s How.

The Method: Flow And Resistance

Have You Ever Wanted Two Things At Once?

Have you ever…

• Wanted to study, but ended up scrolling on your phone instead?
• Desired and feared something at the same time?
• Wanting to start a new habit, but ending up falling into old patterns a few days after?

Let’s break it down to a simple principle: You’re not one person.

Your psyche is complex and has multiple streams of consiousness.

What the hell does this mean?

The best methaphor to conceptualize this idea is the movie Inside Out (2015).

For those of you who haven’t watched the movie; it’s about a girl named Riley. In Riley’s head, there are thease little creatures that embody her primary emotions; joy, sadness, disgust, anger and fear.

The emotions all have access to a controlboard in Riley’s head – and they all ‘cast a vote’ on what she’ll be feeling toward any event in her life.

Our brain works a bit like this. It gives us the illusion that we’re one being, thinking one stream of thought, when really – we are a bundle of all-living cells, and we have multiple desires, needs, wants and motivations.

Sometimes, thease motivations clash. That’s when we have resistance.

Fatima: A Practical Example

Fatima desires good grades so she can become a veterinarian. But she restricts herself so much in her day to day life that another part of her takes over: The self that wants freedom.

Since she actively resists her need for freedom, thinking of it as a waste of time and childish, it comes out when her defenses are down. At night. She ends up doomscrolling until late to subconsiously rebel and regain a sense of leisure. She is unaware of why she does this.

Because you think you have a singular motivation. And because of that, you bulldoze other needs, desires and drives inside of you. But you can’t do so forever.

If Fatima noticed the internal resistance within her – that whenever she sat down to study, she felt trapped and restricted, and worked with that part of her – she could create more intentional, mindful and effective ways of meeting that her need for freedom – while still being able to study.

Perhaps she needs to spend time on art, take walks to new places, watch a movie.

If Fatima learned to ‘befriend’ her own need for freedom – it wouldn’t need to express itself at night through mindless doomscrolling. Because she could meet it directly and in intentional ways.

Because you can’t heal yourself out of a need.

You can only choose to meet it directly – or subconsiously in roundabout ways.

Fatima belives that in order to succeed, she must work hard. She believes that if she dosen’t work hard, she dosen’t deserve the success. And that rest, play and freedom feels like a failure, like she’s slacking off and like she isn’t doing enough.

Problem is: Fatima isn’t aware of the hidden need that she’s resisting. And she thinks she’s simply being lazy and unproductive – which makes her feel like more of a failure, and motivates her to study even harder to compensate.

Her sleeping patterns makes it so she has less energy for studying. And also less time for studying, because she keeps returning to her phone whenever there’s pressure.

Which makes her feel even more stressed because now she has less time to study. Which makes Fatima restrict herself even more – which makes her need for freedom increase.

Do you see the problem?

Hustle culture adresses the symptom, not the root problem.

What do the two people above have in common? None of them will achieve their goals through hustling.

Their internal desires contradict each other. They have dual needs, dual desires, dual motivations. They are unaware of their internal motivations, and it’s causing their behaviour to seem erratic and undisciplined.

This is what we call ‘resistance’. Which is precisely what hustle culture does not incoorperate. An internal conflict that seperates your actions from your desires.

I spent 8 years trying to hustle – working against different parts of myself and continuously falling back into the same old routines. Getting frustrated, trying to become more disciplined, trying to do more and be more. I thought I was lazy and it filled me with so much shame to not be able to stick to my routines.

I was in resistance to the goals I was trying to pursue. No shit I didn’t get anywhere.

Learning to pause, and to work through resistance first is what got me out of this relentless cykle. It’s what changed my life.

Working through resistance is what made me more progress in 8 weeks, than in 8 years.

It’s when you learn to become aware of dual motivations and needs that’s making your actions contradict your desires – in order to befriend and work with them, instead of against them.

The Parts Are There For A Reason

Let us get one thing out the way, right off the bat: Every single part of you is there for a reason. It’s not there to piss you off, it’s not there to restrict or block you. Every single part of you is trying to meet a need – how it believes it can do so is another question entirely.

Tomas: Example From The Blogpost “How Transforming Your Self Concept Will Transform Your Life”

Tomas grew up with hypercritical parents. He learned that to win affection, he must be impressive and successful.

This strategy was useful in getting his need for validation and love met growing up – it genuinely served him. He would read the room, figure out what everyone wanted, and then become that person.

But he never deconstructed this self-concept.

So he still tries to ‘win over’ friends and partners by being what they want him to be (at least in the beginning). But then, as the relationship deepens, Tomas starts to reveal who he really is.

His friends and partners ends up feeling cheated – because he isn’t doing the things he promised to do when he was trying to ‘win them over’.

Tomas now feels like no one loves him for who he really is… Because he has a self concept that stops him from expressing his authentic self in the first place… Because he believes that ‘people love me for what I do, not for who I am’…

Which inevitably becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

He desires to be loved for who he is. But because another part of him believes that he can only be loved for what he does; his actions are contradictory.

If Tomas decided to read a self-help book on relationships without working through his resistance first – he would use self-help as another way to increase his personal image. He quotes books, meditates and finds ways to be even more impressive because he’s into self help.

He swings back and forth between two desires: One minute, he’s honest – the other avoidant. He half-assess his internal work, telling himself that he’s making progress on his relationships by ‘communicating honestly’ when he’s really just quoting self-help books on what he believes would be honest communication without actually needing to be vounerable.

See the full Blogpost on How Transforming the self concept will transform your life here

There isn’t a “wrong” part of you that you need to “get rid of” – that’s the opposite of working through resistance.

In fact – disowning a need, motivation or drive in you creates more resistance. And it will lead to you subconsiously meeting the need instead of directly.

The Fatima example is a way to ground this idea. But this happens everywhere.

• Manipulation is a roundabout way to meet emotional needs through other people (because you believe people wouldn’t desire to meet your needs unless you trick them into doing so)
• Someone who thinks they can sustainably exercise in ways that feels like self punishment so they can get their ideal body (you can’t punish yourself into self-love, that’s a contradiction).
• Partners stuck in a push and pull dynamic where they chase one minute (desiring connection) then run away screaming the moment the other person shows interest (fear of intimacy).

How to Work Through Resistance First

Working through resistance first is the opposite of grinding. It’s the opposite of doing the things that you have resistance to. It’s the opposite of discipline. And the way I’ve learned to do it is quite extreme.

Every time you feel the tiniest hint of resistance – pause. Literally.

I’d been trapped in a cykle of continuously exitedly beginning to work out – only to fall back to square 1 a couple of weeks later because of sickness or injury. This cykle had been repeating for years.

So this time, after I’d learned about working through resistance – I worked out in a compleatly new way.

I would start the workout and the moment I felt even the slighest bit of resistance – I would stop. I would sit down, and I would figure out what the resistance was.

• Sometimes it was my focus: Working out felt like self-punishment. So I had to sit with the emotion and reframe my attitude toward the workout until the resistance eased – before I could start working out again.
• Sometimes it was a thought: To self-soothe when I got frustrated of having lost strength due to a long-term illness (stubborn influensa, nothing serious). I had to reframe my mindset until the resistance eased.

But simply reframing your mindset around an action didn’t work through the entire session.

• Eventually, I had a realization. The action in and of itself, of strength training, felt like self-punishment more than it felt like self-care. I realized how much strength training drained my emotional energy. I’d thought I loved strength training for many years. But in that session, I realized how much I didn’t. So I switched my workout to dance workouts on youtube instead.

Now guess what? I’m consistent with my workouts – I even look forward to them.

Notice how I’m still exercising, still moving in the direction of health. But because I’m creating as little contradiction within myself as possible, and because I took the time to ensure all my needs were met – I could maintain the routine.

Because I took the time to work through the resistance that would have dragged me back into the same old cykle first.

And so, I tried this on all areas of my life. On all the habits I hadn’t been able to stick to previously. Because I had unknowingly resisted the habits I was trying to impliment.

I worked through that resistance first, it dissolved, and suddenly I didn’t just not need discipline to pursue them head-on – I had a genuine joy in pursuing them because my ‘parts’ weren’t actively contradicting each other.

I’ve written a blogpost on how to discover hidden belifs, attitudes, emotions and thoughts in the blogpost titled How Transforming Your Self Concept Will Transform Your life 101.

Working Through Resistance Is The Opposite Of Toxic Positivity

Toxic positivity is about using a positive mindset to escape, avoid, reject and ‘push away’ negative emotions. Now, does the words ‘escape’, ‘avoid’, ‘reject’ and ‘push away’ sound like words that inspire softness, openness and warmth in you?

Absolutely not.

There is nothing wrong with uncomfortable emotions.

It’s the exact reason why I avoid using the term ‘negative’ emotions in this post. Because I want to stress the fact that there are uncomfortable, and comfortable, emotions. But none of them are right or wrong.

• To work through resistance is to embrace negative emotions.
• You must feel the emotions fully, and be compleatly present with them.
• Your emotions are sources of information: just like physical pain, it tells you when something is out of alignment.

If you put a hand on the stove – you’d experience pain and pull it away. Pain is an illusion. Pain dosen’t exist until the brain interperates it. But it’s very real to you, and no one would say not to adhere to physical pain, right? That would be silly.

Apply the same logic to emotion.

Just because an emotion, thought or belief isn’t necessarily consistent with reality – it’s still a warning signal, it’s still real to you, and it’s still worth adhering to.

Just because something’s physically painful dosen’t mean you should stop doing it. Just like exercise isn’t bad, but perhaps your technique is off, and you need to learn how to move correctly to avoid injury. Again, apply the same logic to emotion.

Because if you push against your emotional warning signals – your mind will ensure you meet its needs weather you like it or not. Just like if you ignore your body’s signals, it will ensure an injury or illness that will just set you back.

Accept Your Pain

Every single decision you make will come with pain.

• Going to sleep earlier means sacrificing the precious time of leisure you have in the evening.
• Becoming a veterinarian means a lot of mental energy toward studying.
• Becoming famous means a lot of public scrutiny and unwanted exposure
• Entering a relationship means risking the vounerability that comes with intimacy

While I encourage you to adapt according to your needs, an equally important note is that just because there’s pain involved in a decision does not mean you shouldn’t do it. Instead, what I encourage you to do is to become aware of the pain you’re avoiding, and to either find ways to make it acceptable, or to find ways to soften the blow.

Question your motivation for doing things. Identify the need you’re trying to meet, what needs you may resist through the decision and how to meet them in alternative ways. Don’t resist resistance. The need is there to serve you, not to piss you off.

This is actually the first thing I do whenever I set a new goal: To identify the motivation behind the goal, and to identify possible pain-points – so as to lessen the resistance once I begin working toward the goal.

• Fatima needs to make a decision. Studying to become a vet will come with a lot of restrictions and her mental energy will mostly go to her studies. Other activities may need to take a backburner, and the career she’s chosen could be a continuation of this.
• Perhaps Fatima decides that she values her freedom over becoming a veterinarian, and decides to quit her studies to work with animals in a way that fits her needs better. She’ll have less prestige and will have to work through her resistance of feeling like a failure, or she’ll overcompensate and return
• Or perhaps Fatima’s passion for her work

WARNING: Working Through Resistance Will Come With Consequences

There will be a lot of consequences to this lifestyle (because it is a lifestyle). And in order for you to make a consious decision over weather or not to do still pursue it, despite the consequences (you can begin to practice releasing resistance through understanding the following consequences).

• You will be inconvenient and a burden.

You will be inconvinient to others, to yourself, to your plans. You might have planned this big day of deep-cleaning your home. But the thing is; if you feel the slightest bit of resistance, and you decide to commit to this method, you need to sit down and work through the resistance before lifting a shirt off the floor.

There is a chance that people will find you difficult, a burden, silly and overdramatic. Because society teaches us to be good. It teaches us to be complacent, to bulldoze our needs and to ignore our inner warning signals.

• You will realize that things you used to like are not for you.

This is an in-depth transformation. With productivity – it encourages an external change before an internal. But this is an internal change, and it will influence all areas of life.

Chances are as you connect more to yourself, and befriend the coping mechanisms you developed to survive in your enviroment – things that you have adjusted yourself to will become absolutely unbearable to handle.

Imagine that you’ve lived all your life with a firealarm beeping in your house.

In order to survive, you were told to put earplugs in.

But now, you remove the earplugs. And suddenly, the firealarm that used to be a soft background noise you mostly ignored now becomes so unbearable that you’ll either smash the firealarm or move out – you just can’t live with that noise anymore.

Your body warned you for all your life. And now, when you tune back in – it’s likely that things will dramatically change.

• You may fall out of touch with the world around you.

There may be a lot of convenient things around you that will become unbearable. Foods that are popular that now becomes impossible to eat, common activities or topics of conversation that now makes your skin crawl, common trends and companies that you now get an uneasy feeling around.

You may find that common activities for people your age are no longer compatible with you. Your job starts to feel unbearable. You will discover that many things in your life are actually very, very far from the life that you actually value.

Your sensitivity will be turned up to the max in a world that dosen’t (yet) value sensitivity.

This is terrifying unless you understand the concept of manifestation. You may start to feel hopeless – like you’re trapped and that no matter what decision you make, it will lead to inevitable pain. Like sure you hate your job – but what’s the alternative? You start to realize that most of the jobs in your reach are unbearable, and to turn up your sensitivity feels dangerous and painful. With no escape, it will feel unbearable.

But for you manifestation nerds out there, let me tell you a secret: The emotion behind the pursuit of the goal is more important than what you do.

• You can’t punish your body to get a body that you love.
• You can’t trap yourself in a job you dislike for financial freedom.
• You can’t sacrifice yourself for a relationship and expect to feel fulfilled and seen in it.

Thease are all emotional contradictions.

If you want a body that you love, you must move in the direction of self-care.

If you want financial freedom – you must move in the direction of decisions that make you feel free and abundant.

If you want to feel seen and loved by the people around you – you must move in the direction of expressing your authentic self and to act from a place of self-love.

Because of manifestation, you can’t pursue a desired outcome in the opposite emotional fingerprint of what that desired outcome feels like. That becomes an energetic contradiction, and will pull you further away from your manifestation.

Know that you can be happy, and also be ok in the world. I will delve deeper into this in an upcoming blogpost, because I think this method is 100% more in-depth than most manifestation advice out there. Sign up for the email list if you want to get notified when the post is published.

• When one area of your life changes through this method; they all do

It’s not so much about what you do as the underlying mindset of what you do that matters.

You could think of this in two ways; one spiritual, one more grounded in science. I happen to be a believer in both, but you don’t have to share my spiritual beliefs to use this method.

Perhaps you decide that the following consequences are not worth it to you. Which is compleatly fine! Many people live with resistance for all their lives and are perfectly fine. So if you want to leave us here, then thank you for reading this far.

If you are ready for an in-depth transformation, despite knowing the pain of it, then feel free to continue reading.

• Sometimes, this method will feel counterproductive

When you’re getting overly stressed and scared of consequences – I want you to focus first on delving into your fears.

• You’ll discover a lot of uncomfortable truths about yourself.

Why Working Through Resistance Will Change Your Life 1: Common Sense

Your brain creates new, positive pathways. If you start to question your beliefs regarding one area of your life, it will be impossible not to do the same for other areas in your life. If you’re constantly checking your body for resistance – it will get easier and easier, until you’re so hyperaware of it that the slightest bit of resistance will send alarm through your entire body.

• You start to notice that you get an unpleasant feeling around that person.
• You start to realize you actually like those clothes you thought were silly before.
• You start to realize that what you thought was a personality trait of yours was actually an old copying mechanism

If you become aware of your WHY, your FEARS, your DESIRES and your BELIEFS in ONE area of your life – rest assured you’ll slowly begin applying the same LOGIC to ALL OTHER AREAS OF LIFE.

Why Working Through Resistance Will Change Your Life 2: Manifestation

This is where I go haywire on my spiritual beliefs, feel free to skip it if it’s not your cup of tea – feel free to read if you’re curious.

• Basic Manifestation is what you believe manifests.

But something I’ve realized is that there is an incredibly important component to this that no one talks about:

• What no one talks about is the actions you take to achieve your goals.
• The Mindset In Which You Make Decisions Manifests.

When manifesting, you must be aligned with the emotional signature of your desired outcome when you take action toward your desire.

You can’t work a job that makes you feel trapped to manifest financial abundance.

You can’t punish your body into a body you love.

You can’t reject parts of yourself (like I shouldn’t feel that way) to be a more aligned person.

That would be an energetic contradiction.

You achieve your goals when the emotion you have while in pursuit of the goal is a match to the sensation of having achieved the goal.

I will go more in-depth on how to ground manifestation in actions in a later post – because it really is a fascinating subject that I think is not really talked about in the manifestation community. Personally, I believe that our emotions constantly communicates what we manifest. And to learn to work with them, and to use them as intuition for what actions has a similar energetic signature to your desired outcome, is my favourite manifestation method.

Feel free to join the email list if you want to return when we go more in-depth on those topics.

This Method Isn’t Just About You – It’s Rebellion

It’s also a rebellious way to live your life. In my blogpost titled How to Find Your Purpose In Life 101 I introduce the concept that in order to live a meaningful life, you must be dedicated to wasting time on things that you decide are meaningful.

Hustling is about producitvity – about pursuing the final milestone. Intentionality is about pouring your entire soul into crafting a lifestyle that’s fulfilling, not a milestone. I go more into this in the blogpost how to set goals you actually want to achieve.

It’s about…

• Deconditioning what you think is right and wrong
• Deconditioning what society deems valuable
• Radical self acceptance
• Questioning even the most basic assumptions society has.
• Slowing down in a world that’s all about efficiency.
• Questioning what success looks like

Want More Like This?

We’re not one cohesive being. There are conflicts in us: multiple desires that battle to get their wills across. To work through that resistance is how we learn to pursue success downstream instead of upstream. It’s a way for us to manifest without blockages, and to stick to routines without the need for discipline.

In a future (compleatly free) blogpost, I will write a step-by-step guide about how to set mindful goals through this method. Feel free to sign up for the email list to get notified when it’s published. Otherwise, feel free to check out my youtube channel or check out other posts like this one below.

If you leave us here, then I hope you have a lovely day!