How This Girl Changed Her Life Without Trying

What if there were a way to completely reinvent your life without even trying?

There is.

The story of Lauren Jumps proves that it is possible.

Dr Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — the author of "Flow" and whose work has revolutionised our understanding of peak human experience — would agree.

We are told to follow the conventional path:

• Go to university

• Get a degree

• Get a good job

• Pay your bills

• And work fucking hard.

The thing is, the conventional path works. That's why so many people do it. However, it often leaves out the most critical steps in motivation science.

Without these crucial steps, it's common to feel drained, frustrated and disillusioned about where you are in life.

Lauren's story offers us an entirely different perspective.

A science-based view of why we need to try less, not more.

Lauren is a fantastic example to cover because she wasn't born with extraordinary talent or unwavering discipline. I would say she is a good archetype for the average person by most metrics.

Her success demonstrates what can happen when deep psychological drivers, as explained by neuroscience, are correctly aligned. Lauren did not intentionally stack these drivers.

It just happened.

She only followed what most people do not dare to follow.

Curiosity and play.

Ironically, when she had zero expectations, she was rewarded with an abundance of results most of us can only dream of.

Over the last five years, Lauren Flymen has become the world's favourite skipping influencer. She has over 5 million followers on social media, has received huge brand deals, and even launched her app.

And none of it was planned.

As stated in "The Art of Impossible" by Steven Kotler, curiosity is the starting point of the impossible.

And so that is where we will start too.

Feeling Lost

Before Lauren's success, she was on the conventional path as well.

She went to university, earned a degree, and secured a job to pay her bills. It was comfortable and safe, but it was also draining and passionless. Then, COVID-19 happened, and everything was about to change.

The world began shutting down, and Lauren was laid off from work. She was stuck at home like so many others with very little to do. It didn't take long for boredom to hit.

And that boredom was the best thing that could ever have happened to her.

She attempted DIY projects around the house but soon grew bored with them.

The gym was shut so that she couldn't do her regular training. Running wasn't an option because running sucks.

She needed a way to exercise. Better yet, she needed a project to work on.

Then she had an 'aha' moment.

It was a moment of excitement and eagerness that comes with curiosity.

A community of jump ropers were posting their videos online.

It looked fun.

And she wanted to join them.

So, with her curiosity piqued, she ordered a random jump rope online.

Now the project begins.

Where projects start

COVID allowed Lauren to be bored for an extended amount of time.

The act of being bored allows the mind to widen its perception so that you can see your problems from a new perspective.

Perception is like what you see out of the windshield when you're driving.

But perspective is when you glance down at your GPS to see exactly where you are.

That's the first disservice most people do to themselves. They curl themselves up into a ball of cowardice when they face a problem.

They fail to realise that problems are where life happens.

Problems are where projects start.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Lauren's life was in a state of chaos.

Her wedding was cancelled. She lost her job. She couldn't go to the gym. Running sucked. DIY projects were boring.

Her mind gave her skipping as a possible solution to her problems. It gave her something to do. Jump rope was a project she could pour herself into during a time of great uncertainty.

But it wasn't forced.

It's like when you have great shower thoughts that give you a breakthrough. Your subconscious mind was working on the problem in the back end. When it's ready, an idea will crack through to the conscious mind, and if that idea sparks intense curiosity, you have a winner.

However, we often don't allow our minds to ponder the problems in our lives. We distract ourselves with endless entertainment. TV, social media, and video games — anything that is externally stimulating, prevents the brain from shifting into alpha waves.

Instead, overstimulation of the visual system triggers the brain to shift into beta waves, which are responsible for maintaining wakefulness and alertness. If you've ever been scrolling your phone late at night and you feel tired but wired, this is why. We need alpha waves and later delta waves to allow us to reset.

The answers you are looking for will be found in the silence you are trying to avoid.

What should you do instead?

Experiment inward. Rest, nap. walk, meditate. Engage in activities that induce alpha waves and wait for curiosity to spark.

The feeling of curiosity is very dopaminergic.

Meaning that when you experience curiosity, you are given intense spurts of dopamine, motivating you to explore further. Dopamine is why we look at something over in the distance and want to know what's over there.

It comes back to resource collection. The more curious our ancestors were, the more they explored, the more resources they found and the more likely they were to survive.

Curiosity, driven by dopamine, is encoded in our biology.

Whenever you have the feeling of want and desire, that's dopamine.

Typically, we associate dopamine with the neurochemical that drives instant gratification. It is, but dopamine is also responsible for the pursuit of long-term goals.

We experience that as curiosity.

This is how all great projects start, but unfortunately, most people don't follow their curiosity. They learn this lesson when they are on their deathbed. They listen to the voices of friends, family, teachers, and managers above their own.

And for what?

Trying to be consistent with everyone else's expectations?

Their memories are plagued by 'I should have done this' and 'I should have done that.' Not living a life not on their terms is their biggest regret.

Is that what you want?

No — obviously.

Projects are the same.

If you are not intensely curious about what you are doing, stop. Do something else.

Does this mean that everything you are curious about will become a life-changing project, just as it was for Lauren?

No.

Curiosity is what gets you started. Other drivers are what keep you going.

It takes trial and error to find a perfect match fit for you. You need to experiment outward until you find that project that stacks the other drivers. Jump rope was the project that stacked the other drivers for Lauren.

However, a few weeks into her project, Lauren had a significant problem.

As you will see, it comes back to the brain's major neurochemicals.

Stacking Motivation

I was surprised to hear Lauren say she was frustrated that she wasn't progressing at the rate she expected.

Frustration occurs when our expectations are greater than our reality.

From the outside, it seemed like Lauren was improving rapidly.

But we have different expectations of ourselves than we do of other people.

We are always our biggest critics, and that initial frustration is always going to be there. Our skill is not properly matched for the challenge at first. Most people gave up at this point before they got good enough to go through the dip.

But Lauren didn't.

She found herself frustrated but unable to pull away from the rope. That's one of the brain’s major neurochemicals at work — norepinephrine. It pings on when focus and alertness are needed.

Clearly skipping demands focus.

Motivation science tells us that the more neurochemicals involved in a task, the more likely we are to continue doing it.

Lauren had stacked dopamine and norepinephrine into skipping, but according to her, she still wasn't learning fast enough.

Something else was missing.

She decided to tap into the community of jump ropers she saw online.

But there was a slight problem.

If you want to be in a community, then you need to be in the community. Which meant she had to film herself and post it online. Up until this point, Lauren had never filmed her training sessions.

Because she was embarrassed, she didn't want her friends and family to see that she was trying to learn jump rope. So, Lauren decided to create a dedicated Instagram page for her project.

The Lauren jumps Instagram page was a way to connect with the community, track her progress and hold herself accountable. Now that she had an active community, she was able to share her training sessions and receive feedback, tips, and encouragement.

The community added oxytocin to the neurochemical stack. Motivation for training increased. She became so obsessed with training that she injured her knee from overuse.

It was clear by now that curiosity had turned into passion.

It is easy to forget that the page was never meant to be anything more than a passion project for her. No one had ever created a massive following from skipping before. Being a "skipping influencer" did not exist.

But then Lauren started to get good. Like really good. Learning was successfully accelerated.

I remember the first time I saw one of her videos. It would have been after a year or so of her progress.

I was stunned.

I had done some uncoordinated skipping in school, and to see her basically dance with a rope was impressive, to say the least.

Plenty of others agreed.

People enjoyed watching her videos so much that some even started to reach out to Lauren.

They were also curious about skipping and wanted to learn from Lauren. So, she started posting tutorials. Just like that, the third motivator in the trifecta was stacked.

Purpose.

Purpose seems to alter the brain in significant ways. It reduces the reactivity of the amygdala, which is the threat detection system of the brain. A less reactive amygdala means there is less resistance to the tasks and enables greater focus.

Whenever Lauren would train, she would receive powerful feel-good chemicals like endorphins and serotonin. Endorphins are released after exercise to encourage further exercise. The reuptake of serotonin occurs when you feel satisfied. Lauren's project was stacking neurochemicals on neurochemicals.

Curiosity went to passion. And passion went to purpose. But it didn't stop there.

She had so much motivation to keep improving. So, every time she learnt a new move, she would learn a slightly harder move to keep challenging herself.

She continued experimenting as much as she could. What I am talking about now is the fourth psychological driver in motivation — Mastery.

Mastery is the desire to get as good as you possibly can Like curiosity, mastery is very dopaminergic. It's why gamers are so driven to level up their characters in a video game as much as possible.

Mastery is the opposite of instant gratification. It's not cheap dopamine given to you for free. Dopamine from mastery is earned from a lot of effort.

But it doesn't feel like a lot of effort. It doesn't feel like you are trying excruciatingly hard to brute force a result. It is simply what you want to do.

See, when motivation is properly stacked, you no longer need discipline. Discipline is a byproduct of intense motivation.

This is why Lauren stayed so consistent with her project. It's just what she wanted to do. That is evident in the good vibes she brings to her videos.

By now, the project had become more than just learning to skip and a form of exercise. It became a creative outlet for Lauren. Her job as a sales manager deprived her of creativity. So it was refreshing to have something she could be creative with.

Lauren started experimenting with her own unique style.

Fast footwork, shuffling and speed were staples in her routines.

When she started to notice that she could do more in her videos than what she was doing, she increased the production value.

Endless experimentation and iteration of her style kept the project feeling fresh and challenging.

As stated in The Art of Impossible,

Flow is the biggest neurochemical cocktail of all. Flow mixes dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, GABA, glutamate and acetylcholine all in one activity. People describe flow as their favourite experience. Psychologists call it the source code of motivation.

Flow is the secret sauce to success.

If you can get into flow regularly, you will blow past everyone else.

I haven't heard Lauren talk about flow, but it would not surprise me if, during her sessions, she gets into flow. She improved so rapidly and had fun doing it. Both are common markers of flow doing its magic.

By early 2021, Lauren acquired over 100K followers, secured a brand partnership with dope ropes and found sponsorships by other big brands. This allowed her to leave her unfulfilling 9-to-5 job and to go full-time on her jump rope project.

But when you reach new levels, you also face new devils.

Lauren wasn't just the girl who was learning how to skip anymore. She was now the creative director and owner of a media company.

This meant that even though she no longer had a job to juggle, she had less time to train. And that meant she needed new systems.

So, she made the decision to dedicate 6 hours a week to practising her routines and her progressions. The rest of the time would be spent selecting songs to skip to, designing the choreography for each video, producing the videos and running the business.

Three more years of experimentation and iterations made things feel a little stale. She needed a new challenge.

So she launches an app called Fancy Feats to get as many people as possible into jump rope and help them continue like she did.

At the time of writing this, Lauren has 3 million followers on Instagram, 2 million on YouTube and who cares about TikTok.

At the centre of all of Lauren's success was fun.

She achieved more by trying less.

Her story is the story of a project that moved from:

• perspective to curiosity

• Curiosity to passion

• passion to purpose

• purpose to profit

Wealth, status, and influence come secondary to curiosity, passion and purpose.

So my question to you is, what is your project?

But before you go out and try to replicate Lauren's success by following your curiosity, you need to know this.

The transformative power of projects

Lauren's story, like all success stories, is an example of survivor bias.

A good example is the story of the American planes that returned to base during WWII. They were riddled with bullet holes in the wings and fuselage. But nowhere else.

In an attempt to make the planes safer, the engineers suggested putting extra armour on the damaged areas of the plane. But the Hungarian mathematician Abraham Wald suggested putting armour where the holes weren't.

The planes that returned show us the holes that didn't take the plane down, not the holes that did.

For every one Lauren who makes it, there are countless others who don't. That's the thing, we don't see the people who don't make it. But what exactly do we mean by make it?

This is why I like Lauren's story because it's accidental success.

She didn't try to make it.

I think if she went into the project with the definition of making it being 5 million followers across social media and making millions per year, then I don't think she would have.

The best projects are the ones you want to do, even if you never make a cent from it. Ironically, those are the exact projects you are most likely to make a lot of wealth from because it shifts the formula for success in your favour.

Even if you never make an income from it, imagine how much better your life will be with a project you love, are passionate about and gives you a feeling of community and purpose.

That shit matters more than anything.

Experiment in, out, down and up

So, what project will you build?

Take inspiration from Lauren's journey.

She let her mind chew on the problems in her life until an idea that sparked curiosity cracked through the surface.

The only objective was to exercise, have fun and improve at a skill for herself. She found herself unable to pull away from the project despite her initial frustrations.

Tapping into a pre-existing community accelerated her learning and enhanced her motivation. She tapped into it despite her fear of judgment.

Curiosity to passion was achieved.

She experimented down by learning and imitating others as much as she could. Every new move learnt was replaced by another harder move.

When she got good enough, she started inventing her own style that no one else was doing.

She documented her entire progression. People liked her content, and her following began to build. Beginners at jump rope were inspired and wanted to learn from her.

Passion to purpose was achieved.

Brand deals and sponsors followed.

Purpose to profit was achieved.

And profit is used to build another project like the app.

But it all needs to start with experimenting to find a match fit. Start in and then go out. Repeat until you have something that you can't pull away from. When you have that thing, don’t stop.

Build the project.

Josh