Consumer To Creator – The Million Dollar Dopamine Switch

Last updated: March 9th, 2019

Do you mindlessly browse Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn?

• Have you ever thought about why you do this?
• Honestly, what exactly are you browsing social media for?
• What do you get out of social media?

The short answer is you’ve voluntarily entered a series of dopamine-driven feedback loops offered to you by tech companies.

No one made you do this.

Zuck didn’t put you in a headlock and force you to spend 300 hours of your life looking at Instagram thots.

Zuck and many other tech CEOs just made it incredibly appealing for you to consume their technologies.

Primarily through dopamine-driven feedback loops.

Dopamine is a taboo topic that tech companies don’t like discussing publicly for obvious reasons.

Tech companies would prefer if you didn’t realize you’re allocating your most valuable finite resources (time, attention, energy) to learned behaviors that typically don’t leave you with any lasting real-world accomplishments to show for.

Tech companies are “rewarding” you, me and billions of other people with likes, favorites, impressions and various other gamification tactics.

But if just about everyone in society is consuming these technologies, what’s a person to do?

From the perspective of an online entrepreneur, I know exactly what you should do.

You have to make the switch from consumer to creator like your life depends on it.

Based on the overall direction the global economy is headed, there’s a chance your livelihood could depend on you making the switch from consumer to creator.

Allocating your time, attention and energy to the process of creating is the most obvious solution everyone in the world has immediate access to right this second.

What is the million dollar dopamine switch?

Once you decide to stop consuming bullsh*t and start creating valuable products, insights and media of your own, you flip the “million dollar dopamine switch” and get your brain addicted to the specific behaviors associated with generating revenue for your online business.

The million dollar dopamine switch is a conscious decision you must commit to.

You will entertain revenue-generating feedback loops only from here on out.

It’s a lifestyle.

To put it simply, there are specific behaviors that open the floodgates to making significant money with an online business.

Business people refer to these behaviors as revenue-generating activities.

I like the term millionaire behaviors to keep the concept simple and easy for everyone to understand.

“Which specific behaviors has a millionaire already taken to achieve the same result you want?”

To get what you want (i.e. enormous online business profits) – you first have to become aware of the specific behaviors that generate revenue for your online business model of choice.

Then, you must force your brain to associate those specific learned behaviors (“millionaire behaviors”) with a reward.

The easiest way to do this is to start making money with your online business as fast as humanly possible.

When you earn your first dollar bill with an online business, your brain associates that reward (your first digital dollar) with the specific behaviors you had to perform to earn that first digital dollar.

When people ask me for advice on how to start a profitable online business, I tell them to make their first dollar on the internet as fast as humanly possible.

Why is this?

Because making your first dollar online is the most powerful natural drug in the Universe.

This is how you exploit dopamine to get what you want. Enormous online business profits.

You exercise ruthless control of your inputs. And you make damn sure that your inputs lead to real-life rewards. Like dollar bills.

Making money on the internet forces you into a positive dopamine-driven feedback loop that leads to real-world accomplishments and rewards like:

• Having the ability to generate revenue on command from anywhere in the world
• Living anywhere you want
• Designing your own schedule
• Total freedom

How tech companies use dopamine-driven feedback loops to build billion dollar digital assets

Let’s talk more about the little burst of euphoria you feel during the exact moment that you discover a really juicy tweet, YouTube video or news headline.

Dopamine tells your brain when you’re about to feel pleasure. Dopamine helps your brain learn specific behaviors that lead to rewarding outcomes.

Dopamine’s role in pleasure and reward is that it helps your brain to recognize “incentive salience.” This means that it’s like a little red flag to your brain, saying “hey, pay attention, this is about to feel good, and you want to remember this, so you can do it again.”

Psychology Today

To put it simply, tech companies leverage dopamine-related stimulation to motivate you towards or away from certain outcomes. Dopamine recognizes incentive salience.

There’s a reason why iPhones come with a default feature called Screen Time which shows you exactly how much time you spend using different apps on your smartphone.

Tech companies are literally training you how to behave. And they know it’s getting out of hand. So tech companies are increasingly giving consumers convenient options to take back some control.

The other day, I spent 2 hours and 11 minutes on Twitter without realizing two hours basically blew right past me.

While I use Twitter to promote my personal brand, I could have used those 2 hours and 11 minutes more productively. I mostly consumed tweets rather than created tweets during those 2 hours. This was a day where I consumed content other people created. In other words, I f*cked up.

Luckily, this was just an off day for me.

I am a creator most of the time.

Chamath Palihapitiya, Venture Capitalist and ex-Facebook VP, has some fascinating insights to share regarding how social tech companies operate.

Facebook, according to Palihapitiya is built on psychology that creates a feedback loop of dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with reward-motivated behavior. This creates a kind of feeding frenzy for social media reactions, that drive people to indulge in a series of tasks in the pursuit of Likes on Facebook, and having only short term, empty achievements to show at the end of it.

Tech2

Here’s the reality.

Tech-based, dopamine-driven feedback loops aren’t going away anytime soon.

If anything, these feedback loops are going to get a lot more intense over time, as humans transition into more of a Virtual Reality-like simulation every single year.

This is going to be an enormous pain for everyone. Too much tech usage obviously isn’t healthy.

But every major pain in society leads to opportunity for savvy online entrepreneurs.

Online entrepreneurs typically have to follow consumer attention in order to generate online revenue.

We have to be aware of where consumer attention currently is at the present moment, and where consumer attention is headed in the future.

If consumer attention is currently on Google, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube – this is where online entrepreneurs need to be.

Therefore, your best option is to switch your learned behaviors away from consumption and towards creation.

Instead of feeling excited about discovering other people’s digital assets (websites, information products, YouTube videos etc.) you’re going to train your brain to feel excited about creating your own revenue-generating digital assets.

Just to be clear, here’s the official definition of asset:

An asset is a resource with economic value that an individual, corporation or country owns or controls with the expectation that it will provide a future benefit. 

Investopedia

Online Heaven shows you how to create digital assets like affiliate websites that have the potential to generate online income forever.

Learning how to create digital assets is one of the most important decisions you will ever make.

There are only three groups of people who make significant money online

Because you’re still with me here, I know you want to make the switch from consumer to creator.

This is a genuinely life-changing decision.

Becoming a creator is how you generate explosive online income, and position yourself to live anywhere, do anything and live like a free human being.

In fact, there are only three groups of people who make significant money online:

• Creators
• Marketers who understand the importance of scale
• Delegators

(Delegators are the biggest digital rainmakers of all. But learning to delegate typically happens after you’ve spent some time creating or marketing products. I will cover delegation on Online Heaven another time, because delegation is a very different but incredibly important topic.)

Most online entrepreneurs make money on the internet through two paths:

• Creating offers
• Marketing offers at scale for a share of the profit

The classic “make money online formula” is as follows:

Traffic + Offer = Profit.

• Creators make offers (i.e. create attractive products or services)
• Marketers influence consumers to purchase offers, sometimes using affiliate links

If you want to make significant money online, you’ll want to have a solid understanding of both creating and marketing.

You can learn how to create and market products very easily.

This stuff is not hard.

• Creating SpaceX is hard
• Creating a cash-flowing website, or marketing a nutritional supplement on the internet is some of the easiest stuff you’ll do in your lifetime

I’m a fan of online marketing in general.

But creators and marketers are becoming more and more intertwined.

Creators are marketers. Marketers are creators.

This article helps you transform from consumer to creator, so this is what we’ll focus on today.

By focusing on the process of creating digital assets, you’ll naturally learn online marketing and even delegation on-the-go.

Start creating digital assets like your life depends on it

My digital asset of choice has always been website content.

I’ve had great success with affiliate websites largely because the content creation process has always come effortlessly to me.

I’m at a point where I know if I produce 15 to 50 pieces of high-quality long-form web content on a single website, that website will generate a healthy ROI over time, and can be sold after 1 or more years.

Each piece of web content I create is considered a digital asset.

Once the website is cash-flowing, the entire website becomes a digital asset on its own. Websites can generally be sold for a 30x multiple of their average monthly net profit (more or less).

However, just because I love building profitable websites doesn’t mean you need to do the same exact thing.

I recommend letting your competitive advantages dictate the type of digital assets you create.

• You’re a creative writer? Start creating web content.
• You’re a smooth talker? Start creating podcast episodes.
• You’re entertaining and charismatic as hell? Start creating YouTube videos.

Transforming from consumer to creator ultimately comes down to this easy 3-step formula:

1. Start creating digital assets for a good market that has money to spend
2. Change your behaviors according to the outcome you want to achieve (adopt millionaire behaviors)
3. Persist

This process is easy.

But most people never get started with this process.

You know the reasons why.

This article exposes the reasons:

• Negative dopamine-driven feedback loops
• Unwillingness to change behaviors
• Thinking like a consumer rather than a creator

What’s most important is that you start doing what you have to do right away.

Make the switch from consumer to creator today.

This single switch is going to be worth millions of dollars over the course of your lifetime.

The million dollar dopamine switch will set you free forever.

Reward your brain with my free online business emails

Do my daily emails include a bit of incentive salience to keep you hooked on my content?

Yeah. Pretty much.

The key difference being I don’t actually want you dependent on my content. I build internet companies for a living. Online Heaven is primarily my way to give back to you and everyone else.

I want you to focus on creating digital assets so that you can set yourself free.

With that said, when you subscribe to my private email list, I will send you carefully crafted emails and offers that genuinely help you win at online entrepreneurship.

I believe everyone should be given the opportunity to set themselves free.

Special credit

Special credit is attributed to a bloke by the name of T&M who runs the Vanderkilt website. T&M helped me become aware of the importance of changing your behaviors in accordance with the outcomes you want to achieve in online business. This article would not exist today without T&M’s help. For more details on developing life-changing awareness and behaviors, you can check out my review of T&M’s Weaponized Psychology System.