Why "RetardMaxxing" Doesn't Work Long Term
How Pure Action Keeps You Stuck
Most of us have lived more in our heads than in real life.
Thinking of problems that never come, failures that never arrive.
Successes and fantasies that we don’t have the balls to reach out and grab. And that leaves us anchored to the spot. Because it’s easier to think your way out of taking action than it is to get your teeth kicked in for having an earnest go.
For most of human history, men were physically required to show up. You hunted, you built, you fought. Having a strong physical vessel and foundation was an instrument of your success.
But that necessity is no longer the case. Now, you can technically live in a shoebox apartment, have your food sent to your doorstep, make money and meet women online without ever leaving your bedroom.
Society is optimised for this. And it has produced a generation of men who are extraordinarily good at preparing and extraordinarily bad at doing. Men who consume but don’t create. Men who plan but don’t pursue.
Man is created. He is not pondered.
So it’s no surprise that men started reaching for a solution. The current answer the internet has produced is retardmaxxing: pure, unfiltered action. That instinct is correct. It’s exactly why it has resonated.
But the way it is being taught is incomplete.
Pure retardmaxxing may be the first step to get out of your head. But without direction you will spend the rest of your life spinning on the hamster wheel of low leverage work, permanently. Always busy. Never compounding.
Pure retardmaxxing may get you off the couch. It will not get you to the top floor.
And if you want to move like a professional operator, with relentless action and velocity toward your full potential, keep reading.
The Ceiling of the Retardmaxxing Philosophy
I’ve been lucky enough to track what pure retardmaxxing looks like, with a family friend I have known for over 16 years.
He was retardmaxxing before this term ever existed.
This guy has travelled across Australia collecting antiques, has accumulated millions in collectables from buses, to tractors and vintage revolvers. He’s bought a military tanker on a whim, flipped a coin for a caravan and won a donkey in the process. He’s got more stories than cents, and is the best example I have seen of building an impressive life through pure, unfiltered action.
He owns multiple investment properties, millions in antique assets and this is something cautious budgeters and planners could never achieve.
But every blunt instrument has a ceiling.
His life is chaos. He has always worked a dead end job with no progression. He is constantly doing back breaking work, has 10+ projects always in rotation and has to drive a bus to maintain his investment taxes.
He’s the type of guy that wants to do everything himself, because delegating is a waste of money.
He has speed, but no directionality. And without directionality you cannot build leverage. Without leverage, every result requires the same amount of effort as the last one. Nothing compounds. You are permanently trading time for money at the same rate, no matter how much action you take. That is why he drives a bus despite sitting on millions. The action never stacked. It just accumulated.
He’s stuck on a self inflicted hamster wheel, where just a small amount of strategy and tactical awareness could have placed him in a completely different station in life.
These are the types of people who complain about not getting ahead, who work incredibly hard but feel like they’re stuck in quicksand.
But what happens when you’re the chronic overthinker and strategise too much?
The Chronic Overthinkoooor
The more common archetype is the chronic overthinker. And modern life amplifies this particular individual and the way that they think.
Strategising, planning, and having directionality in life is incredibly important. But if you overdo it, if you think about failures before they even arise, you end up in a state of paralysis. You get nothing done. You avoid the work and replace it with analysis instead.
It makes you feel productive. But it is the most comfortable position to be in. And comfort is the trap.
There is also another version of this. Doing endless theoretical research under the belief that it is going to help your implementation phase. And it does, up to a point. But past that point it is another pseudo barometer for success, another comfortable substitute for the only thing that actually matters above all else: execution.
Most people are not taking too much action. That is a very rare position to be in. Typically it is inaction.
And I am more guilty of this than the opposite.
If I had implemented what I am about to share with you, I would have condensed five years of business success into two. But I hid behind the mirage of perfectionism. I did not want to make mistakes. I did not want to cop the scrutiny from the thousands of people who read my work. And that held me back considerably. It stopped me from releasing products. It stopped me from writing particular things. It made everything take longer than it needed to because of the over analysis of what other people think.
But the reality is this. Being in the arena is not a comfortable situation. It is far easier to be a spectator, to critique and criticise somebody else’s body of work, than it is to step into the arena yourself and have yours judged.
Neither man has the answer. The retardmaxxer has speed but no directionality. The chronic overthinker has a direction he has thought about extensively but cannot bring himself to move toward.
One is all throttle.
One is all map and no road.
Neither has velocity.
How to Operate With Relentless Velocity
A man with velocity works both smart and hard.
He executes relentlessly, but every rep is pointed at something. He is not producing output for output’s sake. He is not grinding for the sake of grinding. Every action is moving toward a specific destination, and after every action he stops, audits, and adjusts before going again.
This is the difference between the man who makes 500 YouTube videos and stays stuck in the same place, and the man who makes 50 and breaks through. The first man is retardmaxxing. Pure reps, no iteration. The second man is operating with velocity. He executes, gets the feedback, audits what worked and what didn’t, and goes again with more precision than the last time.
I know this because I lived it. Within my tenth video I had a viral piece of content (back when I was posting martial arts content, and recorded this in a hotel when I was travelling through Europe FYI).
Not because I was the most talented or the most experienced (this was recorded on my iphone, which was sitting on an ironboard of a hotel in Madrid).
I was doing both. I had the theory and I was executing against it simultaneously. Every video was a test. Every result was data. The feedback loop was rapid because I was both in the arena and paying attention to what the arena was telling me.
That is the velocity concept & there are X things that are the secret to relentless velocity.
1. Directionality
Directionality is knowing exactly who you want to become as an individual and taking the next effective step toward that version of yourself.
There’s no use if you’re getting started in business asking yourself how you can make 100million, focus on getting your first sale, stack momentum from there.
If you’re overweight, going to the gym everyday and eating 1500 calories from day 1 is going to burn you the fuck out. What is the next step you can take to getting you into a calorie deficit? Focus on that until that method plateaus (this is exactly what I do with clients).
The better you get at identifying the next step, the better you find what obstacles are getting in the way of speeding up your velocity of getting to that next step, the better your directionality.
We do this across the physical, financial, social, mentality & experiential realms in the peak potential protocol.
But the focus should be on finding the next step you can take, and taking it as rapidly as possible.
2. The Feedback Loop
The faster you can move from executing to refining, iterating, pivoting, and re-executing, the better.
Most men run out of momentum on their goals because the feedback loop is too slow. The reward is too far into the future. The gap between action and result is too wide to sustain the motivation to keep going. What billion dollar social media companies understand, and what most men never apply to their own lives, is that rapid feedback loops create compulsive momentum. Instagram, TikTok, and every other platform engineered to keep you hooked is built on the same principle: fast feedback, constant reward, immediate response to behaviour. They use it to addict you to their product. You can use the exact same mechanism to addict yourself to your own ambitions.
Nobody in human history has applied this principle with more ferocity than Elon Musk.
In 2006 SpaceX launched its first rocket. It exploded. In 2007 they launched the second. It exploded. In 2008 they launched the third. It exploded. Most men would have stopped. Most companies would have stopped. Elon read the data from every single failure, iterated, adjusted, and went again. By the fourth launch Falcon 1 reached orbit. The explosions were not failures. They were the fastest feedback loop in the history of aerospace engineering. This is a man who watched hundreds of millions of dollars detonate in real time and called it progress. Because that is exactly what it was.
Tesla does not release a finished product and walk away. Every vehicle on the road is a live test. Software updates ship overnight. Features appear, get pulled, get refined, and get redeployed. The car you bought last year is a different machine today. Not because Tesla got it wrong the first time. Because iteration never stops. The product is always in motion, always improving, always responding to real world data that no amount of planning could have produced from a boardroom.
Then there is X. Features shipped and pulled within days. Entire product changes reversed and rebuilt in real time. The conventional approach is to plan for six months, present to a committee, approve a roadmap, and ship in a year. Elon ships on Tuesday and reads the response by Friday. The feedback loop runs so fast that by the time a competitor has finished their first planning meeting, he has already tested, failed, iterated, and improved three times over.
One of the most effective tools which I use for building your own feedback loop is the end of day audit.
Your exact outputs for the day.
The three things you need to execute tomorrow.
The things you have learned that need to be iterated and improved.
And a full brain dump to power down, rest, and recharge so you come back sharper the next day.
Use a pen a paper when doing this, not your notes app or laptop.
3. An 80/20 Bias Toward Action
The ratio is simple. 80% execution. 20% strategising & planning.
Don’t get stuck watching youtube videos, reading books and listening to podcasts as the majority of your action based activities.
I have a friend who has wanted to start a business for years now, the ‘ideas’ guy.
He has been writing business plans, SWOT analyses as to whether or not the business will work, consuming Hormozi content like crack cocaine (ironic because Hormozi pushes an action based approach).
And what results does he have to show for it? Sweet fuck all.
If you look at the objective reality of most peoples execution models, it’s 80% planning, 20% executing, and we have had that baked into our brains since high school. Most of the term is spent learning and theorising, then the action based elements (the final exams & tests), make up closer to 10% of the entire year.
That’s why you see kids stressed, anxious and eventually, drilled and conditioned to think they need an MBA to start a business & other false flags of permission to start putting your balls on the line and getting your feet wet.
Flip the ratios. 80% of your time is spent relentlessly executing, 20% is spent iterating, pivoting and strategising. At a macro level this looks like:
End of day audits (which take literally 15-20 minutes)
End of week audits (which takes 30-40 minutes)
End of 12 week peak audits (which take ~1 hour)
This is the full cadence we build inside the Peak Potential Protocol. But the general rule is this: protect your execution budget above everything else. Plan at the edges of your day and your week. Execute in the middle of both.
The man who flips this ratio is a operating a breakneck velocity compared to the average man who sits on paralysis by analysis.
Stop Retardmaxxing, Starting Building Velocity
You have now met both men.
Neither is stupid. Neither is lazy. One runs too hot. One thinks too long. Both are leaving an enormous amount on the table because they never installed the loop.
The retardmaxxing instinct is correct. The bias toward action, the rejection of paralysis, the willingness to get your teeth kicked in and go again. All of it correct. What it is missing is a vector. Speed without direction keeps you on the ground floor permanently, busy for decades and standing in the same spot.
The answer is velocity. Directionality that tells you where the execution is pointed. A feedback loop that runs fast enough to compound. And an 80/20 ratio that protects the execution budget above everything else.
You already know which man you are closer to. You felt it reading this.
So here is the only instruction that matters: identify the one thing you have been speculating about past the point where thinking gives you anything useful. The product, the decision, the piece of content, the conversation you keep rehearsing. Set a deadline. Take the shot. The market will calibrate you faster than your own mind ever will.
Stop retardmaxxing. Start building velocity.
The top floor is not reserved for the smartest man in the room. It is reserved for the man who runs the loop fastest and points it at something worth building.
That man can be you. But only if you get out of your head and into the arena.
J.Krucial
Best thing I've read this week!
Bro the fact you went so deep on retard maxing made me crack the fuck up..