“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.”

Morpheus in The Matrix

You’ve probably seen the movie The Matrix. It’s a far-out, fanciful tale in which the protagonist learns that civilization as we all know it isn’t actually real – instead it was all created by other people.

Like I said, it’s super crazy conspiracy theory stuff.

Except…

the world as we know it was created by other people.

Every class you took in school was willed into existence by a panel of bureaucrats (people), taught by a person, using books written by people.

Every product you’ve bought was designed, manufactured, and sold by people.

Every company you or your friends or your dad worked for was started by people and is run by people.

The stock exchange? People in a room.

The government? People in many rooms.

Money? Paper that people think is worth something.

We’re all just fancy monkeys who figured out how to sell each other things really efficiently, hurtling through space on a giant rock.

Once you realize that – really truly internalize it – the world opens up like an oyster.

Sure, some of it feels bad (as Morpheus would say, the red pill tastes bitter). You’re really going to hate taxes when you figure out what’s truly going on there.

But most of it is a fantastic opportunity for you.

You realize that you’re just as much a person as Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Warren Buffet. You have all the same body and mind as Ghandi or the Dalai Lama.

You get to choose what you do, and you can start 100% from scratch, down a path entirely untrodden, entirely your own.

It feels weird at first, squinting as you try to peer through the haze of the Matrix.

I still remember quite clearly the one overriding feeling I had when I first started selling consumer products over the internet, taking money from strangers for a product that didn’t even exist yet, on a website I built (with no degree).

I kept feeling like someone was going to come stop me. It just didn’t seem right that I could make $100k in a month from my bedroom, in my pajamas, with no discernible skills or track record.

But no one ever came to stop me.

Because that’s life in the Matrix – you can bend reality to your will if you just try.

You have to try though. And it helps to see the Matrix for what it is.

PS – if you want to replicate the solid crash feeling of a true red pill like the one Neo took in the movie, go try to understand how hedge funds make money. That’s some matrix shit right there.