Use A.I. to make your life ridiculously simple (copy my prompts)

I know so many people who have at some point in their adult lives, thought about leaving everything behind, moving away to some secluded place, and living a simple life.

Maybe you haven’t thought about doing anything to that extreme, but you probably have thought about doing something that is considerably different to make your life far more simple than it is today.

So, if you truly believe that simplicity is the best path in life, then read closely because today I want to share with you a few pointers on how to make your life so ridiculously simple that it honestly might feel illegal.  But instead of just giving you a list of things to do, I’m going to give you an approach that leverages the power of artificial intelligence to do so with ruthless efficiency.

And if you read to the end you’ll walk away from this article with a different perspective that might be the very thing that saves your life. So pay attention.

I know guys who have mid-six figure jobs who have contemplated walking away to become a barista or something just to rid themselves of the BS they live with on a daily basis, and to enjoy a more connected an peaceful life where they can be fully present.

I understand, because I did something like this myself. I quit my corporate job that took me years of schooling and work experience to land. I got rid of about 99% of my material possessions. My car, my furniture, my personal items, and most of my clothes.  I got rid of basically everything, and then I went on to sell my home, and I moved to Portugal with whatever could fit into two pieces of luggage.

So quite literally, with the exception of investments, every material possession that I own at this stage in my life can fit into one single moving box with room to spare.

Yet, I live in abundance.

In exchange for all of my stuff, and a fancy job title, I gained time and autonomy. I wake up with no alarm clock.  I spend much more of my time outdoors working out while soaking in the sun, hiking and spending time on the beach, and most importantly writing these articles to share my thoughts with the world.

I waste almost zero mental energy on worrying about where to put things, or my things getting lost or stolen, or needing to maintain stuff.  I don’t pay a car note, I don’t worry about oil changes.  Playing office politics and jockeying for promotions is no longer a part of my reality.

My life is considerably simpler than not only my past life, but also the lives of most 30-40 year olds who also have an advanced degree and a 10-15 year history of climbing the corporate ladder.

And the thing I want to make clear here is that I am not rich.

I just learned a long time ago that the narrative that was sold to all of us about how life should be lived is a false narrative, and I made a conscious decision not to continue following it.

Instead, I created a new narrative for myself that not only flipped a lot of previously held beliefs upside down but also put me on a trajectory towards a simpler, a slower, and a more connected life.

And so now I’m sharing with you my process for making life incredibly simple, so that you can spend more of your time enjoying yourself and doing things that bring you fulfillment… And also so that you can spend less time stressing out or worrying about things that are keeping you in survival mode, and preventing you from being fully present in life.

But since we live in the information age, I would be remiss to not offer you a methodology that leverages the power of A.I. to make the process of simplifying your life that much easier.

So with this process I am using Cerebrix (formerly known as Cerebrum-X) which is the customized GPT that I created specifically for people like yourself who want to be more intentional about how they live their lives.

You can also just use the generic ChatGPT if you’d like, but I created this process through Cerebrix, so using it will give you better, and more highly-customized results.

With that said the first step in making your life ridiculously simple is to…

Know your purpose for wanting to make life more simple

Your pain is your purpose.

Your reason for doing most things in life is usually rooted in pain.  Most actions that you take are for the purpose of alleviating some form of pain or the anticipation of future pain. 

When you eat, you are alleviating the future pain of hunger and malnourishment.  Or when you go to work, you’re preemptively alleviating the pain of getting fired, having no income, and needing to search for a new job.

So when you desire to live a simpler life, that stems from a form of pain that you are experiencing, or anticipate that you will experience at some point in the future.

If I had to guess, that pain might be in the form of being stressed, exhausted, having constant anxiety, or maybe it’s the pain of being unhealthy, and not having as much freedom and personal sovereignty as you’d like.

And maybe wanting to live a simpler life also entails the future pain of regret for making your life so complicated that you weren’t able to be fully present, and then when you’re much older looking back and realizing that it never needed to be this way.

It’s up to you to figure out the major pain points in your life, but once you do, you have the foundations for discovering your purpose along with the values that you should align your life with.

In other words, your purpose is to alleviate you’re life’s biggest pain point, and from your purpose you can establish a set of core values that will guide you the rest of the way.

I talk all the time on this platform about my method for discovering your purpose and your values, so I won’t go into detail here, but here is a prompt that you can use to trigger a sequence of questions that, once answered, will recommend a few purpose statements that address your major pain point in life.

You can accept any one of these, or use these purpose statements as inspiration to create your own.

Once you do this, you’re ready to move to the next phase which is to…

Eliminate and minimize distractions with ruthless intensity

I have learned that the fastest and most efficient route to solving most problems runs through the process of elimination. This might be counterintuitive because the narrative that you have most likely heard your entire life is that more is better.

More money is better, more responsibility at work, more square footage in your home, more closet space, more followers on social media… more, more, more….

I cannot begin to try listing all of the examples of more being perceived as better, and neither should you. Instead, the best thing to do is to search for specific instances where you have been erroneously persuaded that more is better.

I call this the complexity trap.  It is the belief that you NEED to have certain things to live a full life, but in reality, those things merely make life more complicated than necessary.

If you stop what you’re doing, and take a moment to inventory everything in your life, every object, every relationship, every habit, and then you ask yourself, “is this adding complexity to my life?” or “is this making my life more complicated than it needs to be?”, then you will realize that probably over 90% of your whole life is really just an assortment of things that do the complete opposite of making life more simple.

When you become aware of all of the elements that actually add chaos to your life, you can then begin to minimize or fully remove those things.

This is how I ended up selling my luxury sports car in 2016, and being car-less ever since.  This is how I ended up leaving my corporate life.  And this is how I ended up owning fewer possessions than the average household that lives below the poverty line.

I don’t have an Amazon Prime account. I don’t have a Netflix subscription.  Yes I can afford these things, but they’re misaligned with my purpose, so they don’t have a place in my life at this moment.

I’m still working on this myself. Simplifying your life is a journey, not an event. Lately I’ve been seriously questioning my relationship with my phone and with social media, and perhaps in the near future I’ll take it to even greater extremes like deleting my social media altogether or going back to a non-smart phone.

If you want to use AI to help you with minimizing and simplifying, then I recommend prompting it to inventory your life based on the information you feed into it and to provide suggestions for different areas of your life where you’re falling into the complexity trap.

Here is a prompt that I created to help you do this…

As you can see I now have a list of things which likely have made my life overly complicated, along with recommendations for minimizing or eliminating the impact that they have on my ability to live a simpler life..

Successfully incorporating minimalist principles into all aspects of your life will set the stage for you to take things to the next level which is…

Focusing your psychic energy on furthering your purpose

As I mentioned before, knowing your “why” gives you a sense of direction. You may not know exactly what you want in life, or exactly how your life should play out.  However, when you have direction, you can begin to explore different opportunities.

Since you have taken steps to ruthlessly eliminate and minimize your life, you should now have more bandwidth to focus your attention on things that matter most to you.

Since you minimized your expenses, you should have more financial flexibility to invest in things that are aligned with your life’s purpose.

Since you eliminated distractions like toxic friendships or self-destructive habits, you have more energy to channel into building healthier relationships with people who build you up, and into cementing more constructive habits that bring true and lasting fulfillment.

For some people, what matters most is their family or their children. For other people it is super important to them to create and share amazing experiences with other people.

There really is no right or wrong, so long as it is truly what matters to you, and not something that you only care about because society has convinced you that it is important.

You need to translate your purpose and your values into actions and habits conducive to a lifestyle that is aligned with your purpose.  So if your purpose is to break free of the rat race and start living a slower and more connected life, then what needs to change in your daily life for this to happen?

Do you need to learn new skills? Do you need to move to a geography that allows for a lower cost of living?  What do you actually need to do to create the lifestyle that YOU want?

Since you have already undergone the process of subtraction, you should have more time, energy, money, and emotional capacity to begin making lifestyle alterations that center your daily life around your purpose.

For me, after getting rid of most of my things, I moved to Portugal because this aligns with my ideal of a simpler life. But moving to another country isn’t something that you just do overnight. I hired an immigration attorney. I traveled to Portugal to find an apartment. I applied for a visa. I moved money around.

Lifestyle adjustments are made one at a time, but it’s the accumulation of small actions that eventually lead to transformational change.

So to create a series of small lifestyle adjustments that culminate in a radically simpler life that’s aligned around your purpose, you can prompt A.I. to recommend a customized blueprint which is what I’ve done here using this prompt.

And the output in this case gives me three suggested roadmaps that I can implement with each roadmap broken into short-term, medium-term, and long-term strategies for taking positive actions that are aligned with your purpose.

You should build from what A.I. gives you, because of course you still need to be integrally involved in creating the blueprint for your life.  Don’t just outsource it to A.I. and leave it at that. That’s lazy and probably won’t end well.

But once you know where you’re going to focus your energy, and you have a plan for doing so, then you’re ready to…

Create a system to contain psychic entropy and to drive transformational change

There’s this concept of psychic entropy, which I’m not sure who coined it, but I learned about it through Mihaly Chickzentmehi’s philosophy’s on the flow state.

Just as entropy is the tendency for things in the universe to descend from a state of order to chaos, psychic entropy represents the mind’s tendency to become distracted and unfocused.

Phsychic entropy is the underpinning of stress, anxiety, and mental chaos. In the context of living a simpler life, it is psychic entropy that puts most people on a never-ending detour.

It introduces countless distractions that cause you to lose focus on what really matters.  So you want to introduce a solution that provides your mind with guiderails to keep it focused on your purpose and to prevent it from becoming a chaotic environment.

As a former engineer I would be remiss to not bring up the necessity for establishing systems as the solution for psychic entropy, because systems are the antidote to chaos.

So it is important to create systems for yourself that are conducive to living a simpler lifestyle.

You may be wondering why I would talk about the importance of building systems because the word “system” implies complexity, but systems are the hallmark of simplicity because they create structure and order.

In the simplest of terms, systems put certain aspects of your life on autopilot, thus reducing the opportunity for you to make bad decisions, and increasing your likelihood for making good decisions consistently over a long period of time.

So the system that you set up for your life, will help you to keep the things that unnecessarily overcomplicate life to a minimum, while directing much of your energy towards the activities that will align your life with your purpose.

You can instruct Cerebrix or ChatGPT to help you develop a lifestyle system that does all of this in a structured manner so that you don’t do all of this work only to succumb to psychic entropy, and end up spinning in circles.

And with the right set of instructions, it’ll provide three different lifestyle systems that you can adopt to ensure that you maintain order as you make transformational lifestyle adjustments, rather than operating in chaos that could cause more problems than they solve.

So from here you can chose a system that you think is best suited for you, and of course you can modify as necessary.

With all of that said, simplicity comes with elimination of the unnecessary and alignment towards what matters most. Both are required.

One thing you’ll notice is that simplifying your life entails not only minimizing distractions and removing the things that overcomplicate life, but also adopting habits that align your daily actions with your greater life purpose.  I want to make clear that both have to happen in unison for you to truly feel like you are living in harmony with yourself, free of stress and anxiety, and all the other things that have motivated you to do all of this in the first place.

If you follow this process then you will for sure, find yourself living a life that is far more peaceful and present than you are currently living today.

This is the recipe for living a ridiculously simple life.

On a slightly different note, I wrote this essay with the help of Cerebrix (formerly known as Cerebrum-X), and if you’d also like to use an A.I. tool specially designed to provide structured feedback and detailed life-coaching advice then you can download it here. With it, you’ll also get complimentary access to the database of prompts and workflows that’ll help you work through some of life’s most common problems.

While you’re at it, also check out the “Self-Reinvention Cheat Code” which is a field manual that I created to help people like you start your life transformation process, and have you on a new path in just 60 days.  So pick that up when you’re ready to get started.