Welcome to the Inner Game Bible!
I refer to this as the “bible” of inner game because it may be the
most comprehensive guide to inner game yet written. What is inner
game? It is an umbrella term for the mental states, understandings, and
techniques that are most conducive to success with women. These are
the concepts and techniques that allowed me to date some of the most
beautiful women in the world, become a millionaire in my twenties, and
befriend billionaires, celebrities, and entrepreneurs around the world.
Though many clients come on my Bootcamp to learn dating techniques,
their biggest successes come from the mental transformation that takes
place over the course of the weekend. The extent to which you apply these
concepts will determine your confidence, competence, and resilience,
and turn you into the type of man that attracts women naturally and
effortlessly.
Disclaimer #1:
This is not medical or psychiatric advice, and is in no way a cure for
serious mental health disorders including, but not limited to, depression,
anxiety, bipolar, suicidality or schizophrenia. If you suspect you are
suffering from a psychiatric condition, please seek professional medical
attention.
Disclaimer #2:
No amount of inner game concepts or techniques will do any good
without action. This guide is meant to HELP you take effective action,
not replace it. If you do nothing but read this guide, your life will not
improve in the slightest. It may simply make you even more aware of your
shortcomings as a man. Use this as a companion to the action you are
taking in the outside world. Do not use it as a substitute.
Chapter 1 The Conscious Condition:
What is the experience of being conscious, and why is so frequently
fucked? Let’s do a little audit to find out… Life begins with little to no
context. You are given a large amount of arbitrary sensory stimuli (e.g. the
external world) and a cognitive processor (e.g. your brain) to make sense
of it. The sensory stimuli are ill-defined, and the processor is imperfect.
We do not even have the context to know that a stimulus is a signal from
the outside world. This is to say that when we first hear a sound, we don’t
even recognize it as a sound. Light is not even perceived as light, it is
simply random and chaotic stimuli. Essentially, everything is uncertain,
save for a few base desires like wanting to be warm and the enjoyment of
sucking on your mom’s tit. As we grow, patterns begin to emerge from the
stimuli. We notice that some sights are accompanied by particular sounds.
Those sounds are accompanied by particular feelings, etc. You’ll notice
that there are some events and phenomena that occur with a high degree
of certainty, but in general the amount of ambiguity is huge. Through the
continual recognition of these patterns, our conscious experience begins
to become more complex, adding in thoughts, memories, emotions, and
later on belief structures. As we grow up, these inner entities begin to
spar with external structures (other individuals, legal systems, social
expectations, political hierarchies, to name a few), and our experience
becomes increasingly complex yet again. Since our emotions, our
perceptions, our genetic predispositions, our beliefs, and the beliefs of
others are often in direct contradiction to each other, uncertainty never
really goes away.
You may see what you think is a car in the distance, only to realize
a split second later that it was flash of light. You may start to suspect
that the world works based on certain principles, only to find that the
religion your family subscribes to forcefully claims that the world is
guided by different set of principles, only to later discover that both
you and your family were dead wrong and yet a third set of principles
is more accurate. This haunting sense of uncertainty in a world with
life and death consequences is what gives people so much existential
dread. It is easy to be anxious when your best guesses are routinely
proven wrong and routinely accompanied by pain. Many of our social
silos spring directly from either the desire to quell this uncertainty, or to
capitalize on its exploitation. Religions gain followers by selling absolutes
from an omnipotent being (What could be more comforting than that?).
Politicians win races by promoting their own certainty and promising
future stability. Even sports teams allow individuals to forget their own
fragility by identifying with something stronger and more meaningful than
themselves. The uncertainty that accompanies the navigation of the outer
world is made more confusing by the instability of our inner world. Our
thoughts, emotions, belief structures, and memories are constantly in flux,
making even previously encountered situations seem novel and unique.
In terms of success with women, an inability to control and utilize
your inner states and navigate the outside world leads to undesirable
outcomes. An internal locus of emotional control is paramount to
attracting high-quality females. No woman wants a man who has less
certainty than she does. No woman wants a man that is frequently
depressed, anxious, or lost. This holds true with any goal in life. We choose
CEOs and presidents who project certainty and stability because we know
that those features (if real) get results. In a world that is so complex, how
do we start the process of better navigation?
Well first, we need defined goals. It is impossible to get somewhere
if it is not completely clear where we are going. And for different parts of
life, different goals are needed. For our leisure time, we may desire peace
of mind and contentment. In our careers, we require focus and aggression.
To start this process, we have to:
1. Break down and compartmentalize our inner world
2. Define what aims are best for each part
3. Outline how those aims are achieved.
I see many guys become confused by tidbits of inner game advice that
often contradict each other. Eckhart Tolle seminars don’t exactly align
with Tony Robbins conferences. Here, we are going to work on each piece
separately, defining precisely when and where that piece is useful. “A place
for everything and everything in its place.” While each of these pieces is
useful on its own, they are exponentially useful when we combine them
and are able to shift between them at will. Music gets its beauty from the
variation and combination of its chords and notes. But before you can
perform a whole piece, you need to know how to play the individual notes
perfectly.
Human psychology:
In order to change and perfect your inner state, you first need to
understand it. This is much harder than it seems. Most people believe
they have high levels of self-awareness, but studies show that the average
person’s self-awareness is poor. If you want to test this, go ask one of your
best friends what their biggest blind spot is. They will likely get it dead
wrong, and you’ll know this because we can all see what others’ blind
spots are, but not our own. Self-awareness is one of the most important
skills to build if you want to be successful. Self-awareness is different than
self-consciousness, which is more about a heightened pre-occupation with
oneself through shame and guilt than true self-knowledge.
Building self-awareness first starts by understanding that you are
not different psychologically from anyone else. This is hard for people to
swallow, and it is this exact difficulty that advertisers exploit. Everyone
thinks that they are the one person for whom advertising doesn’t work.
The easiest person to manipulate is the person that thinks they could
never be manipulated. The hardest person to manipulate is the person
that is constantly studying all the ways other people are manipulated, all
while assuming they are no different from those other people. So now that
you’ve accepted you are not different (Right?) let’s get to know a few of
our cognitive biases.
Selfishness:
The first thing that you need to understand is just how self-involved
the average person is (self-consciousness, not self-awareness). This is not
a value judgement on people, but rather a reflection on how our minds
work. Practically everyone’s thoughts are primarily about themselves 99%
of the time, and for good reason. People who are relentlessly thinking
about their own survival will survive more often. People who relentlessly
think about how to get the best mate, the best resources, and the best
outcomes for themselves will consistently attract the best mate. Many of
these thoughts are subconscious, while our conscious thoughts involve
more socially acceptable content. After even a few generations, those
with the most surviving offspring will logically be those who put their
own needs first. This is not contradictory with the incredible amount of
sociability and cooperation seen in the average person. Rather, the person
who is best able to navigate social situations, and get others on their side,
will also be the person best serving to their own selfish interests in the
long run. A man with a hundred trusted friends is going to have a better
life than a liar or a thief. Examine your own thoughts for a day, were they
mostly about yourself or others? Did you think about what you wanted for
lunch, or what the homeless guy down the street wanted for lunch? Don’t
fall into the trap of thinking that this inherent selfishness means people
are evil, or the trap of thinking that this must mean selfishness is a virtue.
It’s simply a statement of how our minds work in order to increase our
probabilities of survival and reproduction. When interacting with others,
and when examining yourself, understand that each person’s priorities will
primarily be centered around themselves in some way, shape, or form.
Incentives:
Because our thoughts and priorities are vastly skewed towards
our own interests, we tend to make decisions almost entirely based on
incentives. Simply put, we seek to avoid personal pain and move towards
personal pleasure. It often confounds people why others do not seem
interested in their pet social causes, why people cheat on someone that’s
been loyal to them, or why someone will prefer the company of someone
who is dumb and fun over someone who is smart but dull. People are
constantly making split-second evaluations on which decision will provide
them value NOW as well as in the future, then act on those decisions.
What constitutes value in our minds is often much different than what
society would say is valuable, and what constitutes “a rational decision” is
often very different than what we want to do and will do. Furthermore,
our most base desires are often hidden within our subconscious and
are not completely known to us. If you look closely, you will see people
responding to direct incentives more than any other motivator. We go
towards things that will offer us the most long or short term value, and
move away from things that will take value from us. Since we also have a
need to see ourselves as moral and to see our decisions as consistent with
our self-image, it is MOST advantageous psychologically for people to
make the decision that will gain us the most value, while rationalizing that
what we did was actually the right thing to do. Let’s take the example from
above. The person who cares about their pet social issue may be operating
under the incentives of wanting to be a part of a group, wanting to
further a cause that secretly benefits them, wanting to feel moral or even
morally superior, or some combination thereof. He will then rationalize
that his involvement is entirely based on his moral fortitude. The person
he is trying to attract to his cause may not see any of those benefits for
themselves personally, and will therefore not join the cause. He will then
rationalize that the cause was not worthwhile, or that he is too busy
doing other morally-just things. People—yourself included—rationalize
constantly. This is the only way we psychologically survive. If people were
ever fully presented with how inconsistent they are with their conscious
vision of themselves, it would quite literally trigger a nervous breakdown.
Are there times when people transcend their adherence to incentives?
Yes, but even that may be based on an incentive for self-actualization,
which the person believes will bring more pleasure and less pain in the
long run. If you want to understand and influence yourself and others,
you must constantly be analyzing incentives of yourself and others, and
engineering incentives that will make the actions you desire from yourself
and others natural.
Selective Attention and the Pygmalion effect:
A husband who was originally attracted to his wife may rationalize
that she is the only women he will ever be in love with. He will tend to
magnify her features and diminish her flaws in his mind because the
connection, the attraction, and the sex provide him so much emotional
value. Years later, when he is bored and finds a willing women who is
now more attractive than his wife, he will then start to notice his wives
flaws, even though they were there the whole time. Instead of reflecting
on all the times she supported him, he will reflect on the one time she
belittled him in front of his friends. What’s more, he will become UNABLE
to see the past and present positive qualities of his wife, because his
subconscious has become convinced that more value will be brought to
his life through a new relationship with the second women. This cannot
be stressed enough: it is not that he is focusing on her bad attributes, it’s
that he literally is incapable to see them anymore. This is called selective
attention and it is regulated by our reticular activating system (RAS), a
part of our brain that is responsible for what sensory input and memories
are available to us. Because of the enormity of the sensory input of our
environment, it is impossible to focus on even a small fraction of it at any
one time (this includes our memories). Our brain has to make extremely
fast decisions on what to focus on, or we will become overwhelmed and
undergo a psychotic break from information overload. This is why people
can have drug induced psychosis from hallucinogens: the drug takes away
our ability to filter. How does our RAS choose what to focus on? Correct, it
chooses based on what has positive or negative value in our environment.
If your brain has concluded that you will be better off reproductively by
cheating on your wife, it will focus on all the reasons why you should cheat,
and why that would not be inconsistent with your conscious values. So
it will find everything wrong in your partner, your friend, your business
partner, even if they haven’t done anything wrong.
This selective attention phenomenon is also enlightening because it
is the underlying mechanism behind the Pygmalion effect, better known
as the self-fulfilling prophecy. This effect refers to people’s tendency
to get the outcomes they most expect, and to attract the outcomes
they think of most frequently. It was popularized by the movie “The
Secret”, which misattributed the underlying mechanism to energy fields
and magic. The phenomenon actually works as follows: What we think
about most (or what we expect to happen) primes our RAS to see things
associated with those thoughts and expectations. Because we are only
seeing the small sliver of reality that is directly related to those thoughts,
the emergent beliefs become stronger, and our attention becomes even
more selective. We then make decisions within and around those parts of
reality that we are now perceiving, thus ensuring the outcome that aligned
with our original expectations. Your brain also does not expend energy
on outcomes it does not believe possible, and will therefore guide you
away from actions that would make those outcomes happen. This is very
important to understand, because it is related to many of the following
sections. What you focus on becomes your reality, and you cannot focus
on everything all at once.
Biases involving perception of other people:
Due to this pervasive magnetism towards value and incentives,
along with our selective attention, certain high-level rationalizations can
be found consistently in almost everyone. One of the most famous is the
Halo Effect, or our tendency to attribute positive attributes to those who
we already perceived as having value. You see this all the time in men who
will ignore an attractive women’s lack of personality, insisting that she’s
actually really interesting. Women do this as attributing abusive behavior
to “love” in partners they are still in love with and attracted to. If we see
an initial value in a person, whether it be intelligence, attractiveness, or
power, we will assume that their other character traits are positive as well.
It is important to understand that bias (of this sort and others) cannot
be completely eliminated. We simply don’t have enough mental ram to
protect against it at all times. There are related but distinct biases that
are equally powerful. Social proof – the ability to judge a person or thing
based on how others have judged it – is another way for your brain to
quickly evaluate what in your environment has value. People will buy a
product that they see their friend buy, because it is less cognitively taxing
than analyzing each new product. This is also the reason why women
are attracted to men who they see other women are attracted to. Since
women’s attraction to men is based more on behavior than physical
beauty, it’s harder to evaluate. When they see other beautiful women
giving that man attention, it’s a safe bet that he actually has something
going on in his life. Likewise, people tend to refer and defer to those in
positions of authority, in part because of the social proof that a known
position of authority implies. People will even defer to someone simply
because they are wearing a lab coat, because the lab coat acts as a mental
shortcut your brain uses to determine who has value in that environment.
This is in large part why armies and police units wear uniforms.
Biases involving perception of the future:
Humans also happen to be particularly bad at predicting what their
future will be like and make rational decisions even when they do know
what is in their future. People tend to vastly overestimate the utility
of having something now versus having something in the future. For
instance, if given a choice between $100 today, or a chosen amount one
year from now, most people will not take the postponed option unless
the payout is $150 or more. They value the $100 today, even if nothing
they could invest that money in would give them a 50% return. This is
called temporal discounting, and it is based on our inability to realize
that the future usually resembles the present. People put off smoking
until tomorrow because they imagine their future selves as having more
will power and imagine the future task as being easier than doing it in
the present. This same effect happens when imagining a future project.
When I first started graduate school, I envisioned it as an industrious but
smooth part of my life, with few road bumps. The actual experience was
nothing but road bumps, unexpected situations, and headaches. This is
quite literally why history repeats itself. We imagine the future in ideal
terms while seeing the present and past in real terms. We also tend to
overestimate our chances at succeeding at things with statistically poor
success rates, because those who succeeded are more visible than those
who did not. For instance, a famous singer may tell you to follow your
musical dreams, while the other 99,999 singers who failed will never get a
chance to warn you since they aren’t on TV. Along this vein, it particularly
hard for people to understand statistics in an emotionally compelling way.
Telling you that only 1/100,000 people succeeded at something will never
elicit the same emotion as telling you the heartbreaking story of one of
those failures. This means we have to put the onus on ourselves to make
future-based decisions on careful thought, not emotion. It also means that
we can’t reasonably expect others to do the same.
Biases that create bad behavior:
By now, it should be becoming pretty obvious that humans are not
rational creatures. We base almost all of our decisions on emotion, and
even when we try to be logical we usually miss the mark. This section is
meant not to depress you, but to enlighten you, take some of the surprise
out of human behavior, and set you up to understand future sections. This
last part on human psychology can be particularly hard to swallow when
thinking how it applies to us. Imagine you are a German citizen born in
1921. By the time you are 12, you are conscripted into the Nazi youth,
where you are shown pieces of propaganda over and over. At age 18 you
are drafted into the army, where you learn of your countrymen’s part in
the mass genocide of Jews, Gypsies, and the disabled. Would you rebel?
Refuse to fight? Almost all of us believe we would be part of the very few
who did not go with the grain. Yet estimates of those who truly rebelled
are put at 1 in 10,000 or below. To add insult to injury, not only would
you probably not rebel, you most likely would be an active and willing
participant in the party. Groupthink, which you have probably heard of
before, is our tendency to see the humanity, positivity, and uniqueness
in our own group (the ingroup), while ascribing negative, dehumanizing
attributes to those in a different group (the outgroup). When we look
throughout history and question how one tribe could so willingly
slaughter another, it helps to understand that were not even capable of
understanding that the other tribe was human. I emphasize the phrase
‘not capable’ because groupthink is completely involuntary. Anyone who is
a part of a group that they identify with succumbs to groupthink to some
degree. This is not something you can shut off or edit out, it happens in
spite of you. Some of atrocities we see committed because of group think
are helped by two other pervasive biases. The first is our brain’s use of
heuristics, or mental shortcuts based on stereotypes. Since we do not have
enough time to process nuance in every situation, our brain relies on broad
generalizations when encountering something new. Each new person we
meet is subconsciously assumed to be like the last few people we met who
looked like them. This is compounded by confirmation bias, which is our
tendency to only see evidence that confirms what we already think to be
true. So when we become blinded by groupthink, it becomes doubly hard to
see how, since we only see evidence confirming our original feelings.
Don’t become paranoid or judgmental when you see these biases
play out in the real world. On the contrary, you should use this knowledge
to build a happy life. How is this possible? Because a happy life can only
happen when you are a student of reality. When you see the landscape for
what it really is, it becomes much easier to navigate it. This is exactly what
we will be talking about in the next chapter: belief structures and how they
are built.
Chapter 2: Belief Structures
A belief structure is the foundation on which a person’s actions,
moods, goals, and relationships are built. What we believe about the world
tells us what to pay attention to, where to extend our energy, and what the
rules of the game are. A strong, well thought out belief system can support
a happy productive life. A weak belief system will be easily demolished and
lead to insecurity. A belief system built on falsities can result in major falls.
And a belief system built on bitterness and resentment will lead to a life of
misery.
Is it possible to change your belief system? Yes. Most people believe
they choose their belief system based on evidence, but more likely it was
built arbitrarily by circumstance. You start with certain genetic personality
traits like openness, agreeability, risk aversion, and then environmental
influences are built on top of that. For instance, imagine you are born
with a predisposition towards introversion. When you first start school
you are hesitant to talk to your school mates, and by the time you do,
many friendships and cliques have already been formed. This makes it
even harder to open up and you develop a rudimentary belief that people
don’t like you. Later on through confirmation bias this belief becomes
more complex, and by the time you are an adult you belief that people
specifically don’t like you because you aren’t attractive and people are
shallow. This then becomes a belief that ‘looks’ are the main predictive
factor in success, sociability, and romance. This belief structure seems
very real to you, because you have gathered so much evidence for it along
the way. However, it is not necessarily the most accurate belief system,
and it is certainly not the best belief system for success.
As you can see, our belief structures are heavily influenced by
selective attention and the biases we discussed previously. So how
do we build a structure that is not only good for us, but objective as
well? First, you need to understand that no belief structure will ever be
100% accurate. There will always be some error, and a fair amount of
subjectivity. Two of the smartest men who ever lived, Albert Einstein and
Max Planck, could not reconcile their respective theories of the universe.
To this day, it is assumed that both theories are correct, but no one has
found a way to connect them mathematically. If the two smartest people
in the world, along with all their successors could not gain a complete
understanding of the universe, then you and I don’t have much hope. Let
go of the idea that you will ever have complete knowledge or complete
objectivity. Strive for objectivity, but realize there will always be many
errors.
The next step is to understand which parts of our belief systems are
going to be objective and which are not. Philosopher René Descartes was
known for locking himself away to examine and question his core beliefs to
understand his own belief system:
“To conduct my thoughts in such order that, by commencing with
objects the simplest and easiest to know, I might ascend by little
and little, and, as it were, step by step, to the knowledge of the
more complex.”
For pragmatic purposes, we’ll define here three category of beliefs.
»» Facts - The first category of belief includes facts based on
unquestionable, empirical evidence. The axioms. These include
what we know from research, engineering, historical events, etc.
These also includes the things we see, hear, feel, taste, and smell
empirically that are unanimously agreed upon the human race
because they are not based on any subjective interpretation. These
include the laws of physics, such as gravity and inertia. If I were
to drop a rock from my hand and it were to fall to the ground, it is
unquestionable that the rock has fallen to the ground. If a person
were to put their hand on a hot stove, it is unquestionable to pull
your hand away. Going back to the school example, if you walk into
your school, it is unquestionable that your school mates are human
beings, you are in the presence of them, and that you happen to
be feeling some new emotion that makes you want to talk to them
but prevents you from engaging in that behavior. Obvious, but
important. All of our beliefs are built upon these fundamental first
category beliefs. Without getting too philosophical about how
we know something is true or untrue, we consider this category
includes events and phenomena we can reasonably know for sure
are to be true for us and unanimously agreed upon across the
whole human species.
»» Deductions - The second category of belief includes things we
can deduce from what we know for sure. These are beliefs that
we can deduce from beliefs in the first category, ranging from
things we can directly deduce through logic to looser subjective
interpretations that make some degree of sense with the facts
we have available. This is where things get tricky. Some beliefs in
this category are more plausible and true to the facts than others.
If I say “this country goes to war about once every twenty years,
humans are capable of a lot of aggression,” that is more plausible
then “this country goes to war about once every twenty years,
because all men want to kill somebody at some point in their
life.” Going back to the school example, a second category belief
might be more accurate such as “I’m feeling this emotion and not
talking to my schoolmates because I have an introverted tendency
where I enjoy being alone more than being with other people” or
more distorted like “I’m feeling this emotion and not talking to my
schoolmates because there is something wrong with me.” It is in
this category that it becomes important not to overreach based on
things we don’t know, and to watch what flavor of subjectivity we
add to our beliefs. Occam’s razor: the simpler explanation with less
assumptions is usually the more correct one.
»» Interpretations - The last category of belief are things that are
completely subjective. They are often deductions made mostly of
the second category beliefs. These would be beliefs like “People are
inherently good”, or “Life is a blessing”, “Life is a curse”, etc. Going
back to the school example, a third category of belief might be
“Because it is hard for me to connect with my schoolmates, there
is something wrong with me to the whole world” or “Because my
schoolmates don’t connect with me, they are shallow, therefore all
people are shallow.” Poisonous beliefs of these variety are called
Cognitive Distortions. These are beliefs that are 100% perception
and almost completely devoid of objectivity. Yet, we all have beliefs
of this kind so it’s important to recognize them.
A belief structure has an incredible amount of subjectivity built into
it, far more than you might expect, even when based on the same facts.
This is in part due to linguistics and framing. An example of framing might
be: would you rather save 10 people and let 1 person die, or would you
rather kill 1 person if you let 10 people live. The outputs of the scenario
are the same, but the framing often orients people to choose the first
option. If I frame a fact even slightly differently than the guy next to me,
and we both use those differently framed facts as foundations for what we
believe, we will soon find ourselves in vastly different territory. Imagine
two towers built on the same ground, but at a 5 degree angle difference.
By the 100th floor each tower would be crooked when compared to the
other. This is complicated even further because people do not all use the
same facts, other people forget to include many facts, and some people
neglect to use facts at all.
So now we’re going to start building a belief structure. Though it
is impossible to just force yourself to adopt a new belief structure, it is
possible to change your current belief structure gradually over time by
consciously focusing on what interpretations you make. It should be said
that I will be making some judgement calls on what types of beliefs are
good for you and what types are bad for you. We can argue all day about
the philosophical implications of that, but I’ve spent my life seeing which
beliefs make people successful and which beliefs make people miserable.
I’m a big believer in seeing the world objectively, and so I will never ask you
to make beliefs that are not based on facts. There is no better example of a
belief not based on facts than the belief structure built on Victimhood.
Victimhood is the belief (popular these days) that the world is
unfairly stacked against you. The incentives for this belief structure is
that it frees the believer from having to expend energy trying to succeed.
It also gives the believer a salient identity, that of the downtrodden
martyr. The problem with this belief structure is that it precludes the
believer from ever making progress. If progress was made, then the
believer’s entire identity would collapse, causing an existential crisis. Do
not underestimate the lengths humans go to in order to maintain their
identities. People all over the world willingly suffer to maintain their
current identities and justify their current and past behaviors than accept
to themselves they were wrong and arbitrarily torturing themselves for no
reason. Breaking down and moving away from the victimhood structure
starts with noticing your interpretations that involve you being betrayed,
disadvantaged, unable, ripped off, or hopeless. You do not need to directly
get rid of these thoughts, just noticing when they happen and being aware
of their subjectivity and malignancy is often enough for them to fade
over time. You’ll need to be on the constant lookout when you have these
interpretations.
Like the above example, in order to build a strong structure we
need to be mindful of what we can reasonably assume as fact, and what
interpretations we make out of those facts. This can take practice, and it
is better to err on the side of assuming most things are interpretations
unless you really have a lot of evidence for them. Be especially wary of
interpretations that you have been calling facts, because these will be
more difficult to break apart. The Victimhood mentality subject might
say it is a fact that the world is against them because of their status,
life situation, upbringing, culture, etc. when this is actually a human
interpretation since there is little to no actual connection between cause
and effect. Through repeatedly sussing out what is fact and what is
interpretation, we start to build a structure that is not only more objective,
but has more interpretations that are CONSCIOUS rather than arbitrary.
These interpretations should follow facts as plausibly as possible, but
with a degree of subjectivity that is conducive to success and happiness.
I will say this again because it bears repeating: the goal here is to build a
structure that is MORE objective than usual, not a free-for-all subjective
fantasy dreamland.
It is also important to remember that these belief structures are being
built around other inherent structures already present in our minds and
in our bodies. Our brains are not blank slates, and we cannot have any
belief we want and still expect to be happy. For example, humans have a
nearly universal need for some level of acceptance and approval. Though
some people certainly have less of this than others, it would be foolish to
believe that you will be happy without any sort of connection, comradery,
or approval from someone at some time, even though it is possible to build
beliefs that allow you to not care what 99% of people think. We can also
not change our sexual orientation simply based on what belief structures
we build. It is crucial to be mindful of what structures are there to begin
with, and which of them are genetically beyond our control.
Beliefs around Identity and Ego:
Another unavoidable psychological silo is the need for a sense of
identity. There is both a dark side and a light side that can come out of
this. The dark side leads to identification with groups or ideologies, which
trades objective, rational thought for the mental security couched in
group identity. As we discussed above, much of the world’s evils emerged
from groupthink and the pursuit of their ideologies, so it very important
to recognize when you have become identified with these structures. It
is perfectly alright to be a part of a group, or to recognize the good points
within an ideology. But when a part of our personality becomes being
a part of that group or adhering to that ideology, we will protect those
structures at the cost of our individual agency, as if they were ourselves.
Study libertarianism, Buddhism, feminism, etc, but do not take the label
of libertarian, Buddhist, or feminist. The other dark side of identity is the
inflated ego. Ego, generally speaking, is the our conception of who we
are. It is good to have a strong sense of who we are, but identifying with
this conception can lead to terrible decisions and a miserable existence.
This is a subtle point, but identifying with our self-conception is the act
of not being able to withstand it being hurt, bruised, or challenged. If
you know that you are smart, but that you can’t stand someone calling
you dumb, your ego has gone too far in creating a self-conception
around being smart. On the other hand, having a self-conception that
is flexible and unhurt by challenge creates confidence. Knowing what
you will and will not stand for and what values you hold helps maintain a
healthy ego. It’s also good to have a sense of self strong enough for you
to remain unfazed when another strong personality comes along. This
structure is strengthened when you define it, but don’t attach yourself
to it. Remember, the conception of who you are is there to help you
navigate the world, but it is not literally you. You can build a healthy sense
of identity and certainty by answering the three sacred questions in the
Sacred Questions Guidebook. You can avoid ego-identification by being
aware of the times when you feel hurt because your sense of self was
hurt. Instead of getting emotional, take note as evidence of how your ego
is structured and go back to the Sacred Questions Guidebook to find out
what you truly value.
Appreciation:
In order to live a happy life, your belief structure has to be one
that allows you to feel joy and see the good in the world. In order to be
successful, there needs to be a belief that there are avenues in the world
that will allow you to succeed. I don’t believe in positivity over rationality,
or positivity for positivity’s sake. What I do believe in is cultivating an
awareness of where things are already going well, and cultivating an
appreciation for those things. The Pygmalion effect, which was mentioned
in the first chapter, is extremely powerful. One of my assistants had a
habit of meeting successful people simply by walking up to them and
talking to them as if he knew them already. When another one of my
assistants Captain asked him what mindset he had that allowed him to
do this, he responded, “Well, my baseline assumption is that if they don’t
tell me to leave, then they must be enjoying what I’m saying, and it’s all
good”. Contrast that with what the average guy’s assumptions are when
he is talking to a successful person or beautiful women. Most people
assume that the person has no interest in them unless that person actively
encourages them to keep speaking. Was Captain’s assumption true, or
is the average person’s assumption true? Well, in this situation what the
actor believes to be true actually becomes true. It is the same way with
our conception of the world at large. We have objective facts about the
world, logical deductions from those facts, and then interpretations from
those facts and deductions. Those interpretations manifest as results not
by magic, but by the responses from others to our assumptions. If you
walk into a business meeting assuming a negotiation will go your way (and
you’re well prepared), the other people in that meeting will respond to
you in kind. Many times women will go home with a guy that acts as if he
deserves her. No one wants to make a big deal out of anything, and so they
will treat people in the way that person appears to expect. How do you
implement this? Start to consciously assume that things will go the way
you want them to when you take a well thought out action. In moments of
subjectivity, err on the side of conceptualizing the world as a place where
joy and success are possible. This does not mean be naive, facts are still
facts. Only an idiot believes their interpretations beyond those facts are
objective.
Self-Limiting Beliefs, and Toxic Beliefs:
Our ability to be effective in the real world is largely related to our
belief structure surrounding our own limitations. These are popularly
called “Self Limiting Beliefs” in the self-help world. This can be tricky,
as many people take this concept to mean that any limit in life is just a
self-limiting belief. There are real limits in life, and you need to be aware
of them. You aren’t going to become a billionaire through your passive
income project that only takes you 10 hours a week. You aren’t going to
date Emily Ratajkowski someday. Don’t be a fucking clown. These types
of beliefs often get in the way of real success, because they focus on a
far off ideal rather than an attainable outcome. Again, this comes back
to sussing out facts from interpretations. Facts include how much you
have in your bank account, what education level you have, and what
skills you’ve already mastered. Limiting beliefs are those thoughts that
assert what success will or will not happen based on how confident you
are, how nice people were to you in the past, or what your parents said
you were good at. These are a type of a broader category called toxic
beliefs that are often the product of past trauma. While other parts of
your belief structure can be changed simply by being aware of them, toxic
and limiting beliefs take a bit more of an involved approach. Awareness,
as always, is the first step, but this is then followed by interruption and
reframing. Interruption is the cutting off of a thought process that you
know to be toxic. If you cannot cut it off easily, it is best to mentally speak
back to the thought in a forceful manner. This means loudly responding
to the thought with “Stop” or “No, I’m not going down this road”. Once
the thought has been interrupted, you then reframe the thought or belief
into either a more nuanced thought, or a less limiting thought. This may
sound goofy, but for those with years of trauma or limiting beliefs this is
extremely effective. An example may be believing you are not worthy of
love. When you become aware that this thought process is starting again,
you interrupt the stream with “Nope, not doing this again” then add either
a nuanced reframe “being worthy is subjective and isn’t based on reality”
or a less limiting reframe “I am worthy of love and appreciation”.
Validation:
The last belief structure we will discuss is our belief around
validation from others. Validation starts as a necessity when we are young
and rely on our parents for survival. After that our need for validation
is largely a product of habit, our ego and our existing belief structure. As
discussed above, humans do have some inherent need for companionship.
However, this becomes toxic when that need morphs into a desire to define
ourselves based off the whims of others. Building a validation-free belief
structure comes from changing our self-moderating thoughts from being
outwardly focused to inwardly focused. This means that when we feel doubt
over one of our actions or words, you do an inward audit on whether that act
aligned with your own morals and values. This is in contrast to an outward
audit to see if it aligns with what others like. This starts as a conscious habit
and soon becomes unconscious. It is the act of consistently looking inward
that gives a belief structure its stability.
Other structures:
There will inevitably be other parts of your belief structure that you find needs changing. Remember that the process is always the same:
1. Determine what parts of your belief are facts, which parts are
deductions, and which parts are interpretations.
2. Take control of the interpretations, be careful what facts you
selectively focus on, and make sure your deductions follow sturdy logic.
3. Become aware when those belief structures present themselves and
when you need to consciously make alterations.
4. Repeat whenever these faulty interpretations arise.
Chapter 3: Confidence and Self Esteem:
Now that you are taking conscious control over your belief
structure, you’re in a position to start building real confidence and selfesteem. Real self-esteem does not come from the validation exercises
your elementary school teacher put you through. It is not a superficial
project, nor something you can attain through mental trickery. It is a real,
tangible measure of who you are. There are those who get confidence
through stupidity and unawareness, but this opens them up to making
mistakes that may ruin their life. There are also those who gain confidence
through being at the top of a hierarchy. If this confidence is earned and
can be felt in all contexts, then its real. However if it is solely based on
condition and circumstance, then it will disappear as soon as you are put
into one of the many other hierarchies in our society. Real self-esteem
has four parts: competence, integrity, management of insecurities, and
exploration.
Competence:
Competence is the ability to do life’s most important tasks well.
There are tasks that every person needs to master, and there are those
that will be specific to your life.
General areas most vital to your confidence will be:
»» Social dynamics and the ability to stand up to social pressure
»» Problems solving abilities
»» Resourcefulness
»» Ability to bring value to other people’s lives
»» Adaptation to new environments
Areas that will be more specific to you include:
»» Your chosen career specialty
»» The hobbies you pursue
I can already hear the objections: “But Derek, what if I’m not good at those
things? Give me the magic pill so I can be confident right now without
having to do anything!” Sorry, but no. Real confidence is rare because
real competence is rare. This does not mean it is unchangeable. To the
contrary, competence is something that can be very consistently gained
over time. However, the problem is most people don’t become competent
for the same reason most people never improve in any area of their life:
it takes concerted effort and strategic thought to become more effective
life’s main tasks.
Competence creates confidence by decreasing cognitive load and
increasing relaxation. Competence means that you know how to do
something so well, that you don’t need to think about it, and you can use
that mental energy to think about something else. When you are in a
situation you do not know how to handle, your mental RAM is overtaxed.
This overexertion of your mental capacities is called having a high
cognitive load. Too much cognitive load creates stress and decreases your
ability to improvise. As you encounter a situation over and over again,
effective action becomes habit, less mental RAM is taken up, and cognitive
load decreases. What people call confidence is often synonymous with
relaxation, and relaxation is a side effect of performing tasks that are easy
or habitual.
So how do you become more competent in both general and specific
areas? Though this is a broad topic that varies depending on which field
you are looking to be competent in, there are some overarching principles:
Specialization:
Those who are the best in the world at their chosen specialty almost
universally have focused on that skill to the exclusion of everything else.
Though being singularly focused is not necessarily the best life strategy
for happiness, the concept holds true. If you want to be the best in the
world, pick one thing. If you want to be exceptional, pick two things. If
you want to be very good, pick three things. If you want to ensure you
suck at everything, pick ten things. Ideally, you pick 2-3 things in life that
you want to be very, very good at and limit other non-essential hobbies.
It also helps to pick things that will increase life’s core competences, like
resourcefulness or social dynamics.
Consistency:
It’s been said that successful people do the same productive things
that non-successful people do, but successful people do them consistently.
The power of consistency, which we’ll define as ‘working on something
every day or week for long periods of time’, cannot be overstated. This
comes from the compounding effects of habits on your body, neural
pathways, or outside project. Exercising once a month has almost no net
effect on your life. Exercising once a week has a minimal effect. Exercising
6 times a week has effects hundreds of times greater than the previous
two examples. Progress is not additive, but exponential when based on the
number of days you practice a habit in a row.
Strategy and Adaptation:
People often become confused as to why hard work alone does not
directly translate into competence, wealth, or success. This is because
hard work without consistent adjustment to the actions you are taking
is almost never fruitful. Image you work 80 hours a week as an fast food
worker. Will you get wealthy? Probably not unless you find a strategy
that doesn’t translate hours into minimum wage. Likewise, a competent
person needs to be constantly trying to perform more effective action.
This means careful thought on how to improve, how to solve sticking
points, and where to go next. “What could I have done differently?” “How
can we make it bigger? Better? Faster? More?” Ideally, you should work on
one growth area or sticking point at a time, keep working until it becomes
habit, and then move on to the next point of improvement.
Mentorship:
It is nearly impossible to become truly competent at a skill without
teachers and mentors. No one is smart enough to figure out a complex skill
on their own, and those who try usually end up only becoming better in
their own heads. Mentorship includes books, online programs, and formal
education, but the best mentorship is personalized and face-to-face. Find
the people who embody exactly the competence you want in a given area,
go reach out to them, and go learn from them. This is the number one way
to shave years off your learning curve, and for many disciplines, the only
way to achieve any success at all.
Organization:
It is hard to become great at something without an overarching
organization to your life. This means both figuratively through
organization of your habits and projects, and literally through organization
of your living space, files, etc. The speed at which you progress is directly
proportional to how organized your life is. Have checklists, algorithms, and
files that reign over your daily, weekly, and yearly actions. Create feedback
mechanisms so that you if you’re on track or off track. Create structures
that hold various parts of your mental and physical life.
Integrity and Certainty:
As you build competence in life’s fundamental areas and in your own
specialties, you will be molding your character in parallel. Character is the
degree to which you follow your own values and morals, and is also known
as integrity. In the same way that your friends all know who in your circle
is trustworthy and who is not, your brain keeps a tally of how much you
live up to the values you define and the promises you make with yourself.
Your brain then decides how much to trust you, and this self-trust or lack
thereof is reflected externally as confidence. The word integrity applies
both to a man’s character and to real physical structures. In the latter, it
denotes how much pressure and stress a building can withstand. In this
same way personal integrity is the degree to which you can withstand
internal and external pressure before the promises you’ve made to
yourself are broken. Luckily, character is not static. Everyone breaks
self-promises or goes against their values or morals to some degree on a
regular basis. Building character is the process of defining those values
and morals (which you will do in the 3 Sacred Questions Guidebook),
and then following them more and more consistently over time. We are
looking for steady improvement and diligence, not perfection. Despite
what action movies would have you believe, character is always in flux
and is not something you are born with. Detailing the answers to the 3
Sacred Questions is also what builds certainty, which is a product of selfknowledge and knowledge regarding how the world works. The more you
know where your boundaries are and what ideals you represent, the more
certain you will be in unfamiliar situations. It is worth noting here that
certainty and integrity represent the positive side of self-image, known
also as self-knowledge. As long as this knowledge is used for navigation
rather than identification, it is healthy.
Masculinity and Maturity:
At this point, you should be gaining a better understanding of who
you are. In the next few chapters, we’re going to take the structure we just
built and expand on how it relates to the outside world. This starts with
a discussion on masculinity and what it means to be a man. Masculinity
is not a popular subject these days, in part due to a belief structure that
masculinity is entirely a product of social conditioning, and partly because
people associate masculinity with aggression and violence. However,
“real men” are still craved by women as partners and by men as friends,
mentors, or father figures. Learning to be a man is not just an exercise
in subjectivity and linguistics. It is a real process that has held reverence
in nearly every culture on earth, with themes that transcend social
conditioning. It is important to have an understanding of what it means to
be a man as this is heavily tied into knowing what your place is in society.
Imagine the human endeavor as a long story. In order to know how you
fit into that story, you must first know who you are (your inner values and
morals, which we discuss above), then you must know what roles you play,
and then you can begin to figure out how your story fits into the overall
story. So here we’re going to talk about those overall roles.
What is a real man?
In order to understand what a real man looks like, it first helps
to figure out what a real man is not. Who is the most quintessential
man in modern western mythology? James Bond fits that description.
He’s athletic and ruggedly good looking. He fucks beautiful women. He
protects his country. He even kills other men, but for a good cause. James
Bond is the perfect illustration of what is considered masculine. But what
else happens in a James Bond movie? Well, he takes insane risks that
can only work out using equally insane stretches of the imagination. He
never gets shot by the thousands of bullets being fired at him. He’s never
physically or mentally fatigued. He somehow travels from country to
country without an airline ticket or passport. In this way, James Bond as
a pinnacle of masculinity is not replicable. He’s a caricature. There is no
way to be anywhere even close to being like him in the real world. This
is important to understand: society’s expectations of what you should
be as a man are not realistic and are not attainable. Many men spend
their whole lives trying to impersonate a myth, without ever taking steps
towards becoming a real man. You see this in the quintessential tough
guys, who are always trying to prove that they are better at fucking and
fighting then the man next to them. Since it is inherently impossible to
be invisible, infinitely strong, or even infinitely good, these men become
pinnacles of insecurity more than anything else. They look like clowns,
not heroes. The point is this: In order to become a “real man”, you have to
do so within the framework of the real world. This means the structure
must be built around the flaws, hiccups, and failures of real life, instead of
pretending to be built above them. This inescapability of the limits humans
face is called the human condition. And you can’t become a man without
this condition in mind. A real world man is someone who is adept at solving
real world problems.
What is the transition from boyhood to manhood?
In the societies of antiquity, boys were expected to become men
much quicker than we expect now. This was generally because there
was more work, danger, and risk involved in life before the industrial
revolution, and males did not have the luxury of growing up on their own
timeline. This created the need for a definitive transition point between
boyhood and adulthood. In Judaism, this transition was marked by the
Bar Mitzvah, in Spartan and Greek cultures this transition was marked by
the start of their martial training. These transition points were important
because it created a clear barrier between when you were cared for by
others, and when you began to care for others. In modern day America,
these cultural milestones have been replaced by legal and educational
milestones. Graduating from high school, getting a drivers license, or
being of voting or drinking age are now how we signify this transition. The
roles of a man, and the transition rituals into being a man, are now less
defined. Now, many men never make the transition at all.
What is maturity?
Modern man’s failure to launch from boyhood to manhood is
accented by modern definitions of maturity, which promote token signals
of maturity over real growth. Having kids does not make you mature.
Getting married does not make you mature. Having a house does not
make you mature. If those were true signs of maturity, why are there so
many deadbeat dads, divorces, and mortgage defaults? Likewise, maturity
does not mean living a boring life. On the contrary, you should be living a
life more approximate to your dreams as you age. There is nothing noble in
conformity and failure.
Features of being a man:
Now we have an outline of the three problems with modern
conceptions of manliness: unrealistic expectations of masculinity, an
unclear transition being a boy and being a man, and an unclear definition
of maturity. So if these are the problems blocking boys from becoming
men in modern society, what helps boys make this transition? And, what
does a “real man” actually look like? As a starting point, growing up is the
transition from needing or wanting from others, to self-sufficiency and
providing for others. This can be broken down into four parts: The ability
to be alone, the ability to provide for others, the ability to create, and the
ability to lead others,.
1. The Ability to be Alone: When you are young, your survival is
entirely dependent on your parents; more specifically, on your
parents’ attention. If you cry and are not fed, you may literally die.
As you grow older, you subconsciously associate attention and
validation with survival. The need for acceptance from a community
as well as the desire for friends also comes from our survival instinct.
More people on your side means more protection and resources
when times are tough. It then makes sense that we would have a
strong craving for attention, validation, and acceptance from others.
Why is it then that those who are most popular are the same people
that are most comfortable with being alone? We talked in Chapter 1
about the human instinct for selfishness. In evaluating who we want
to be around, it makes sense to gravitate towards the person who
could give us the most. How do we evaluate who could give us the
most? Well, a quick mental shortcut is to identify who seems to need
the least from others. This is not the loner, who by default needs very
little from others because he is simply unable to get anything from
others due to social ineptitude. Rather, it is the person who is equally
happy being with others as he is being alone. Part of being a man is
the ability to stand alone and still be OK. It means not constantly
trying to syphon off money, status, or emotion from others. This
ability is in part acquired by getting enough resources through your
own initiatives to survive on your own. This part of the transition
to being a man is marked by moving out of your parents’ house and
getting a job. Emotionally, it means the ability to generate validation
and positive emotions internally, instead of seeking them externally.
Men that are loved by others have emotionally cups that are
constantly overflowing, rather than seeking to have others fill their
cup for them. This allows them to stand alone without a decrease in
life quality.
2. The Ability to Provide for Others: Once you are truly comfortable
being alone, you can begin to give to others. The men we most admire
in pop culture, history, and our own lives are those that others
can rely on. As boys and teenagers, there is not much we can do
for others, and instead we are always looking for what others can
do for us. As you grow older, you begin to realize that the human
condition and human suffering extend beyond just yourself. Even if
this emotional milestone is not met, most successful men realize on
a pragmatic level that they have to be of value to others if they want
to reach high levels of success. How you handle this is what really
typifies true maturity. By this I mean, do you have others lean on you
because you are truly strong enough to bear that burden? Or are you
doing it as a weasely backdoor way to get more validation? Or to not
achieve your own potential?
3. The Ability to Create: Once you can both be alone without crisis
and also take on pressure and burden from others, you can then
start taking an active role in creating things in the outside world.
This can range from traditional creative pursuits like a new form of
art and music, to creating a business, to even creating a community
for others. When transitioning into a part of their lives where
others can lean on them, men realize the value of being of use to
individuals. When you start to create, you realize the value of being
of use to large groups of people all at once. People gravitate towards
communities, music, art, and businesses that have strong missions
because it allows them to transcend the human limitations we
talked about earlier. When you identify with community or mission,
you are no longer just yourself. Your sense of ego and identity now
includes an entity much greater than yourself, with ideals and aims
greater than those you could achieve alone (keeping in mind the
pitfalls of groupthink by remembering to not sacrifice your personal
values or identify completely with that entity). Similarly, a piece of
art, music, or literature allows you to transcend those limitations,
however briefly, by being absorbed into the new world that the
piece creates. Creation also has more tangible rewards for others,
such as employment, education, or a product that solves a common
problems. Creation is an important stage of growth because it
requires extended thought outside of yourself. You cannot create a
business without at least having some sense of what other people
want. You can’t create a community without a very strong sense
of how other people function. Those who do not pass through this
stage often take the role of full time critic instead. Since they lack
either the competence, patience, or energy to create something
outside themselves, they instead spend a life judging and critiquing
the creations of others. As a temporary role, the critique can be very
useful. For instance, many corrupt organizations were taken down
by savvy journalists. However, as a permanent role, being a critic
without creation is a trap. Without actually taking some part in the
creation of society at large, it is hard to grow up. There are simply too
many life lessons that are missed out on when you never attempt to
make something on your own and see how it fairs in the real world.
4. The Ability to Lead Others: This stage of growth is often the
hardest to get to because it involves a high degree of social
intelligence and competence. Not only do you have to get people to
trust you, but once they do start following you, you have to lead them
to a place that’s actually worthwhile. Like the social critic, there are
many people that enjoy testing the leader, but not many people that
would make good leaders in their stead. Leading requires you to play
a real time game in which everyone’s motivations and actions are
considered. This is not something you can do consistently without
thought that extends widely beyond yourself. Although there have
been many morally corrupt leaders, there are very few of these weak
leaders that last very long. In practice, this does not mean you need
to raise an army. Rather, it means you need to build your competency
to a point where you are comfortable making quick decisions for a
group, and those around you trust you enough to follow your lead.
A good leader is also willing to follow others when it makes sense. If
you become that guy that insists on always being the leader, you’ve
missed the point. Having the ability to lead a group, while not having
the sensitive ego, is the true sign of competency and maturity.
A few more thoughts on being a man:
If you want to be a man that naturally attracts women, the absolute
worst way to go about that is by making women the most important area
in your life. Your girlfriend or wife may say she wants to be the most
important thing in your life, but guess what? She doesn’t. She wants to be
important to you, but no woman wants a man whose mood and sense of
self-worth is dependent on her. Find something that is meaningful to you
beyond just getting pretty girls. As men, we usually pick something that
we can quantify, like money. But that too can cause problems because
it ignores a deeper urge for meaning. Use the 3 Sacred Questions to
guide you towards this deeper meaning. This chapter has illustrated
the steps needed for growth in confidence and self-esteem, and they
have all involved extending your reach beyond just your petty interests.
Likewise, if you find a goal that reaches beyond just getting women or
just raising capital, you’ll find that the women you do meet want to stick
around longer. Finding things that are important to you beyond just your
girlfriend keeps you steady, and a steady man is going to be much more apt
to keeping his girlfriend (or attracting one) when things get rough.
Chapter 4: Mental Toughness
An indispensable part of growing up is the ability to cultivate mental
toughness. While the last chapter talked about the confidence, selfesteem, and the overall process of becoming a man, the skills and frames
in this chapter are what will help you tackle everyday struggles. While
Chapter 5 will deal directly with psychological tools solely related to
productivity, this chapter is focused on getting yourself to sit down and
do what you need to do. That’s what mental toughness is: the ability to do
what you need to do, when you need to do it, whether you feel like it or
not. The first step in this process is to realize that it doesn’t always matter
how you feel.
When Buzz Aldrin was asked what his crew would have done
had a technical malfunction made it impossible to get back to earth, he
responded that they would “continue trying to fix the problem until the
lack of oxygen caused us to go to sleep”. That’s a pretty calm reaction
to being left on a cold distant rock to die, but that’s exactly the type of
mentality that astronauts are trained to have. As I’ve mentioned before,
the future is often conceptualized as a smooth path in which you will have
less hiccups and more will power. In reality, the future will likely be just
as complicated as it is now, if not more so. This means there will be an
unlimited amount of roadblocks and unexpected problems. Your ability to
navigate these problems depends on your ability to handle suffering and
your self-discipline.
Stoicism and Suffering Well:
Stoicism is a philosophy started in Ancient Greece right after the
time of Socrates. Its primary focus is on dealing with life’s inherent pain by
cultivating the ability to suffer well. Life is uncomfortable. If you have any
doubt about this, go look at the yearly revenue generated off illicit drugs in
the USA alone. People do almost anything to alleviate life’s discomfort, and
it is well known that the most successful people in society are those that
can stand discomfort the longest. Suffering well first means accepting that
some portion of your day, every day, is going to be either uncomfortable
or outright painful. There is no escaping this (if you try, it will be replaced
with a new type of suffering, like the pain of regret, the pain of weakness,
all of which do not align with your long-term goals). Accepting this
suffering beforehand gives you perspective when it happens later in real
time. When you start to become aware of the negative spikes in your
emotions that happen throughout the day, you can then start building the
muscle of taking actions that stand in contrast to your emotions. This is
also called right action. Stoicism in practice means A) Keeping a mental
map of your long-term goals in mind during these times of suffering, B)
Accepting and not fighting the suffering, then C) Taking action that is
aligned with your long-term goals and not with your emotions. These
steps are simple but not easy, and your ability to refine each step over time
will be directly proportional to your success.
Discipline vs. Willpower:
The words discipline and willpower are often used interchangeably,
but could not be more different. Willpower waxes and wanes, while
discipline is static. Willpower is an emotion that compels an action, while
discipline is a way of life. People often rely entirely too much on willpower
to accomplish their goals, only to fail when their willpower runs out. As
a definition, willpower is the ability to take right action or add increased
effort in an unstructured situation. So, if you’re thinking about going to the
gym today, but haven’t yet decided, that takes willpower to go. Or if you’re
doing bench presses and you’re unsure whether you can do another rep
but you power through, that’s willpower. Both situations are unstructured
and ambiguous. In the first situation you are taking right action, in the
second you are adding effort. Obviously, the tool of willpower is extremely
important since carves the path for proper discipline, not to mention we
find ourselves in ambiguous and unstructured situations that need right
action all the time. But discipline is the sustainable practice for long term
success.
Discipline, by contrast, is a combination of structure and resolve. As in,
you give yourself a specific set of instructions, and you resolve without
equivocation that you will follow those instructions. Example: I’m going
to go to the gym every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday at 5pm.
It doesn’t take willpower to follow that instruction. Willpower implies a
decision, with discipline there is no decision to make. You’re going to go.
This is why it doesn’t take “willpower” to get up and go to work. It takes
energy, but not willpower. There is no decision, you have to go no matter
what. Since resolve is binary and structure is not, we build more discipline
by adding more and more structure. This has the effect of decreasing
the amount of decisions we have to make day to day, eliminating what’s
called “Decision Fatigue”. This decrease in decision making and increased
reliance on structure also lowers anxiety, because you know exactly what
to do and when to do it. You should never feel like you should be doing
something that you aren’t. For instance, grocery shopping every Sunday
at 5pm, and buying a set list of the same healthy foods every time, ensures
that willpower will not be burned up during the week through constantly
deciding what to eat. The decision has already been made through
structure, and the resolve makes this task monotonous rather than
effortful.
The best resource on building this type of structure can be found in
the book “The Checklist Manifesto”. The book encourages the use of
set algorithms and checklists for each part of your life that you will be
engaging in over and over. For instance, by systematically following a
consistent morning routine, you may be able to add more healthy habits
and get to work earlier. Instead of making 20 different decisions every
morning, you simply follow your refined checklist.
Stoicism and Discipline are crucial to mental toughness because
they alleviate much of the anxiety of stressful situations. Revert back to
the lessons from these two concepts when you find yourself overwhelmed
by anxiety in the face of tough situations. Buzz Aldrin was able to
navigate catastrophic situations by following a set structure that was
planned beforehand, rather than engaging in the panic of trying to force
the situation to work in real time. That’s discipline. He uses Stoicism by
refining the ability to take right action in spite of the heightened emotional
state, accepting the brutal facts and inherent suffering baked into reality.
Happiness:
Happiness, despite being desirable on an emotional level, acts as a
magnifier in every area of your life. You work harder when you’re happy,
you make better decisions, and you attract more people. However, there
is a lot of confusion about what happiness is, and how to get it. Happiness
is not one just one feeling or phenomenon. It is an umbrella term for
several different metrics, each of which adds to overall “happiness”
when increased. Overall happiness is a mixture of emotional resilience
(dealing with negative emotions), positive happiness (increasing positive
emotions), contentment, and meaning. Thus, taking on a perspective of
happiness increases your mental toughness by decreasing the seriousness
of reality.
Emotional Resilience:
Studies have shown that people feel negative emotions more
intensely than they feel positive emotions. From an evolutionary
perspective this makes sense, since extreme negative events like death
or social ostracization have a greater effect on your life than an extreme
positive event like winning the lottery. Knowing that, the first part of
obtaining happiness is the ability to mitigate negative emotions. By this I
do not mean trying to “feel good” when there is something going seriously
wrong in your life that needs to be handled. Negative emotions serve
as guideposts to get your life in order. There will occur cases of random
automatic negative emotions that appear for no reason and serve no
utility in the context of your life goals. If you have some negative emotion
that continues to act as an obstacle to your goals, perform the following
exercise:
»» Decide how much time per day you want to spend feeling this
emotion.
»» Mark this time in your calendar
»» Resolve that you will spend ONLY this time in your day to feel this
emotion, so that you can focus on moving forward with your life.
»» After you’ve made this decision, resolve to lock yourself in a
closed space for that much time per day to do nothing else but
feel that emotion (no phones, no social media, no books, etc. etc.
No distractions). This is time dedicated SOLELY to feeling this
emotion. Even checking your phone for an important update will
ruin the exercise.
»» At the end of the time allotted, ask yourself: “What else could I
have accomplished with my time instead of doing this?”
»» Continue to do this daily until the emotion goes away.
»» Repeat the exercise whenever the emotion or any other negative
emotion arises.
This exercise works best if you don’t have time to do it. I could just tell you,
“Stop feeling being a little bitch and start being useful,” but the brain needs
to experience the disutility of feeling this emotion in full effect to realize
that it is not useful. There have been times in my life when I felt some
seriously negative emotions (and for good reason!). This exercise has
worked for me every time.
Thought Emotion Loop:
It’s estimated that 95% of your thoughts are the same day to day.
This can be a terrifying statistic for someone who wants to change. What’s
more, your thoughts and emotions are deeply intertwined in a feedback
loop. What you think sends signals to your body to prepare it for the
situation at hand. These can be acute signals based on how you perceive
an immediate situation, or chronic signals based on your beliefs about the
world. This is a very tangible effect: your thoughts about a given social
situation can cause your sympathetic nervous system to activate, flooding
your body with epinephrine and cortisol. Your thoughts about how the
world works can cause this system (as well as many other hormonal
systems) to be turned on more often, or even permanently in the case
of PTSD. On a visceral level, we feel the content of our thoughts in our
body on a moment to moment basis. When you feel or think something,
the neuropathways that fire are strengthened, and you are more apt to
feel or think that way again. Most people have feelings that they have
experienced before pop up periodically throughout the day, or in the
background as a base emotion. These emotions then make you more liable
to have thoughts pop up that you associate with these emotions (feeling
angry for no reason and then finding a reason to be angry). All this creates
a thought emotion loop: thoughts that cause emotions, and emotions
that cause thoughts. This can create upward spirals or downward spirals,
depending on the structure of the thought emotion loop.
Breaking the loop through thoughts:
There are several reliable ways to break this loop from the thought
pathway. The first is to change your beliefs about the world, which was
covered earlier (this is deeply entwined with creating more certainty in
your life, which was also covered earlier). The other methods are adding
nuance, reframing, and automatic thought stopping.
Reframing is the act of judging a situation in a new context. This was
originally named by Aaron Beck, the father of cognitive behavioral therapy
and expanded upon by Richard Bandler, one of the fathers of NLP. There
is an old Taoist story that illustrates reframing perfectly: A farmer’s horse
runs away, and his neighbors give him their sympathies. He says, “We’ll
see…” The next day the horse comes back with three other horses, and
his neighbors tell him what good luck he has. He says, “We’ll see…” The
next day the farmer’s son breaks his legs taming one of the new horses,
and again his neighbors give their sympathies. He says, “We’ll see…” The
day after that a military official comes to town to recruit all the young
men to war, and does not draft the son because of his injury, and again the
neighbors say that it was good luck all along. Again, he says, “We’ll see…”
Though the context of this story was reframed through an evolving
situation, we reframe thoughts all the time by seeing them through
various mental lenses. The loss of a family member who has been sick for
years can be seen as a tragedy, or it can be relieving knowing that they are
no longer suffering. In day to day life we rapidly switch through different
frames depending on what we are thinking about, what situation we are
in, and how we are contextualizing those thoughts in that moment. As I
said in the section on beliefs, this is not about ignoring objective reality.
It’s about realizing that any situation can be perceived in any number of
ways depending on how you mentally organize it. For negative thoughts
that consistently pop up with no real purpose, active reframing can take
the edge off and cut the cord between the thought and the negative
emotion. All this takes is the realization that our perceptions of ambiguous
situations are largely an active choice depending on what other facts
we relate them to. This can be done on a micro level by relating the
situation to other facts about the situation (the horse ran away, but horses
often come back) or on a macro level by relating the situation to your
overarching beliefs (the horse ran away, but I’m resourceful so I’ll figure
it out). This can also be done by asking yourself what the core meaning
of this thought is that upsets you so much. For instance: “The horse ran
away,” “Ok so what does that mean?” “It means I may not be able to farm as
effectively” “Ok, so what does that mean?” “It means I’ll make less money
this year,” “Ok, so what does that mean?” “It means I’ll starve to death,” “Ok,
so that’s the core fear. Do you really think you’re going to starve to death,
or will you probably figure something out?” “I’ll probably figure something
out”. Many times we don’t know what the core fear is outright, and when
it’s revealed you can see how ridiculous it is. It’s amazingly simple, but
when you just create a connection of thoughts in this manner, you’ve
begun changing the thought loop into an upward spiral.
Adding nuance is the next technique to break the thought emotion
loop, and it is highly related to reframing. In Cognitive Behavior Therapy
(CBT), patients are taught to add nuance to overblown, black and white
thinking. David Burns, who popularized CBT, calls these types of thoughts
cognitive distortions. They are negative thoughts that in no way reflect
the complexities of the real world. They are in the third category beliefs
that are completely subjective. Examples include black and white thinking
(you’re either a success or failure), emotional reasoning (I feel hopeless
so the situation is hopeless), or jumping to conclusions (The first meeting
went badly, therefore the whole project is fucked). By adding in nuance,
thoughts cease to represent catastrophe and instead reflect a complex
and changing world. This largely takes the emotional content out of
thoughts and breaks the thought emotion loop. Adding nuance starts with
being aware of what you are thinking, and where cognitive disturbances
arise. Any thought that oversimplifies the world in a negative way, or is
based on information that you assume rather than know is a cognitive
disturbance. When you become aware of those thoughts, slow them down
and think through them logically. Is the project actually going to fail, or is
this just a poor meeting that needs to be addressed? Is success binary or a
gradient, with everyone falling somewhere between 1% and 100%? You’ll
notice that by adding nuance, you give yourself more agency and control
over the situation. Being 30% successful is a lot easier to change than
being an abject failure. This isn’t positive thinking or a self-help trick, it’s a
way to make your thoughts MORE realistic, not less.
Lastly we come to automatic thought stopping. This is an everyday
technique for negative thoughts that come up over and over despite
the above techniques. Automatic thoughts are largely the difference
between a real problem and an insecurity. If you’re overweight, thinking
about how to structure a new diet means you are engaging the problem.
Constantly thinking about how you’re fat and worthless is an insecurity.
Unproductive thoughts can be a time and energy suck, and its best to have
a set way to deal with them. Automatic thoughts can lead to rumination,
which in turn leads to negative emotions that trigger more negative
automatic thoughts: downward spiral! Because of this, these thoughts
should be stopped when they first come up and do not have time to fester.
First comes awareness, followed by a set stopping message that you tell
yourself. Something along the lines of “No, I’m not engaging in this again”
works well, followed by consciously focusing on something else. Luckily
(and unluckily), almost every adult in the western world has a device in
their pocket that is excellent for distraction. After you’ve used a stopping
message, check your phone as way of getting your mind onto something
else.
Breaking the thought-emotion loop from the side of emotions
is largely a product of A) being aware when negative emotions hit and
catching the accompanying thoughts that arise, and B) healthy lifestyle
habits. In particular, the lifestyle habits that decrease negative emotions
are A) Getting 8 or more hours of sleep a night, B) Eating a diet that is
heavy on fruits and vegetables and low on processed foods, sugar, and
complex carbohydrates, and C) Daily exercise. Each of these is equally
important, and I go in depth into each of them in the lifestyle handbook.
One of the most important things you can do manage the thoughtemotion loop from the side of emotions is to change your environment.
One aspect is to be wary of the music you listen to. I don’t like to listen to
music at all, except when it’s inside of the club. Does it reflect the emotions
you’re feeling? If so, change your music choices accordingly. Another
aspect is the people you surround yourself with. If you surround yourself
with pessimistic people, you might find that you have become pessimistic.
This is another crucial reason why people need surround themselves with
other people pursuing their same or similar goals, especially coaches who
have succeeded in achieving those same goals, since they have taken on
the worldviews, mindsets, and emotions required for success in those
fields. You can’t become a successful artist when you’re spending time
around operations managers; you can’t become a successful entrepreneur
if your peers are Tibetan monks. While books and manuals are useful,
nothing beats being around these people in real life. Overall, your
environment changes the inputs to your brain, and a change of input helps
you better assess these cognitive distortions.
You should not feel guilty or shameful for having these cognitive
distortions. At some point in our evolutionary development, they
mattered a good deal! When humans had a lesser understanding of
their own existence in a world filled with danger around every corner,
these distortions served as quick short-cuts to save their lives. Always
being right and excessively blaming successfully averted danger from
themselves to others. Jumping to conclusions helped humans make faster
decisions in the world to protect themselves when danger was imminent.
If Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection is correct, then the people who
didn’t have these cognitive distortions simply could not survive in the
old world and as a result were killed and ended the genetic lineage
responsible for less distorted behavior. This is the case with most human
qualities. Evolutionary biologists argue that the human face is shaped the
way that it is to best handle a punch. Heuristics and biases help make fast,
good enough, energetically inexpensive decisions. Each of the 7 Deadly
Sins were once behaviors that helped with survival. Gluttony because
food was scarce, Lust to propagate the species, Greed to survive longest,
Sloth to conserve energy, etc. etc. Even upon the introduction of these
sins thousands of years ago, Catholic chodes still struggle with them
now! In the modern world, cognitive distortions are less than useful since
they prevent you from achieving your self-defined goals. Use the above
processes to rebuild your thought emotion loops, improving your mental
toughness.
Positive Happiness:
This is the experience of good emotions, and it is the pillar of
happiness that most people think of when the word “happiness” is used.
It’s important to realize that while this type of happiness gets the most
attention, it can’t survive without the other pillars of happiness that
are outlined in this chapter. This type of happiness is also sometimes
thought to be interchangeable with pleasure, when in reality happiness
and pleasure are related but distinct entities. Some amount of pleasure
is necessary for happiness, but a constant search for pleasure is a sure
fire road to depression. The neurotransmitter dopamine is released in
our brain when we experience a pleasurable activity. When dopamine is
released in large quantities from a given stimuli, it downregulates itself
and will not be released in the same amount if that stimuli is experienced
again in quick succession. So if you eat a donut, and then eat another
donut immediately after, the second donut won’t provide quite the
same amount of pleasure as the first. If you have enough traditionally
pleasurable experiences over and over, your brain will not only release less
dopamine for those experiences, but also for new pleasurable experiences
as well. This is commonly referred to as “the hedonic treadmill”, where
those who come into a large amount of money eventually are no longer
excited by new luxurious experience, since a life of luxury has become the
norm. What’s more, serotonin (the neurotransmitter released when you
are happy) is also downregulated by dopamine. So too many traditionally
pleasurable experiences in quick succession can cause a decrease in
overall happiness. The solution to this is not to cut out all pleasurable
experiences. Instead, it is to cut out truly toxic pleasurable experiences like
drugs, use nontoxic pleasurable experiences sparringly, and focus the rest
of your energy on long term happiness.
Long term Happiness:
Long term happiness is highly dependent on the lifestyle you build
and the social connections you create. By “Lifestyle”, I do not necessarily
mean a baller lifestyle filled with strippers and golden toilets. Lifestyle just
means living a life where you work on the things that interest you, have
hobbies and novel experiences you enjoy, with people you enjoy being
around. This is discussed at length in the Lifestyle handbook. As related
to happiness, a good lifestyle is one where you have something to look
forward to. A fun event or an enjoyable experience on the horizon goes a
long way in terms of day to day happiness.
Social Connections:
Social connections, and connectedness in general, is quickly
becoming a big field of study in the psychology of happiness. Everything
from self-esteem, to life satisfaction, to lifespan is increased with
increased social connection. Other studies have shown that disorders
like depression and addiction are partially dependent on feelings of
alienation and a lack of social connections. For you this means having
a wide social network, deep connections with select people, and high
quality communication with the people you surround yourself with. Oddly
enough, this is largely opposed to the traditional life plan. People will
go on and on about how having a wife and kids is important so that you
don’t die alone. But if you look at the people that follow this advice, they
end up with less social connectedness, not more. Married couples tend
to socialize less than people who are single. When they have kids, social
situations become rare or stop all together. About half those marriages
end in divorce, meaning that the main social connection those people
have ends abrubtly. As for kids, I have yet to see the adult that visits their
parents more than once a week. More often, children move to a different
city when they grow up, or are too busy to visit their parents regularly.
Focusing entirely on romantic relationships or family is a poor substitute
for healthy social connectivity. Instead you want to focus on having deep,
high quality (low drama) connections with a variety of people, in addition
to having a strong romantic relationship.
Some of these relationships will be business or productivity based
relationships, but the most important of these are with people you can
laugh and have fun with. Laughter is evolution’s natural anxiety reliever.
Think about some of the horrors our ancestors had to endure. It is no
wonder that humor, and its ability to make reality seem not so harsh,
appears to some degree in every culture on earth. Studies have shown
that people who are able to laugh together connect more quickly, and that
people who find the most humor in everyday life are those that are the
happiest.
Appreciation:
Gratitude also gets a lot of attention as being critical to positive
happiness. This word, however, is easy to misinterpret. Gratitude can
often imply that you owe the world something, that you need to be
grateful for all the things life has given you. Appreciation is a better
word to define what we are going for, because it doesn’t carry any moral
connotations. Appreciation happens naturally, being grateful is something
you are supposed to do. Specifically, studies have shown that appreciation
works best if it involves small things that happen throughout the day,
rather than appreciating abstract concepts like how lucky you are to
have food and shelter. Small, conscious thoughts of appreciation when
something goes right during your day is highly correlated with an increase
in positive happiness.
Contentment:
If positive happiness is happiness you feel when you get what
you want, contentment is the happiness you feel when you don’t want
anything else. Traditionally, the quest for positive happiness was reflected
in western philosophy and culture, while the search for contentment was
typical of eastern philosophy and culture. If the west is dopamine and the
constant search for pleasure, the east is serotonin and a lack of craving.
The Buddhist tenant that all suffering comes from craving, is starting to
receive scientific support. When you experience a craving, a large amount
of dopamine is released in your brain. These dopamine pathways however,
do not give you a sense of pleasure. Instead they signal a deep discomfort,
and a promise that you will feel a large amount of pleasure if you give into
the craving. When you do give in, the amount of dopamine released in your
pleasure pathways is less than the amount promised, and the experience is
almost always less pleasurable than you anticipated. What’s more, we are
programmed to not remember this gap between anticipation and reward
the next time. When the next craving hits, the new release of dopamine
causes us to feel that giving in will indeed this time bring the promised
reward.
Why would our brains be built this way? Because a restless,
insatiable person will eat more, gather more resources, and sleep with
more mates. However, a constant search for more is not the best recipe
for happiness, even if it creates some notable people. Contentment
then, is the opposite of constant craving. It is a deep, non-begrudging
acceptance of what is. The non-begrudging part of this is key. Acceptance
does not mean that you ‘accept’ that the world is a terrible and unfair
place. It means that you choose not to pass any judgment on reality or
spend mental energy fighting things you can’t control. You don’t get mad
that the sky is blue. You realize that the world is a somewhat chaotic and
disorderly place, and you make a conscious choice not to emotionally react
each time you are faced with disorder. You accept the facts about your life
in the same way you accept that ice is cold and fire is hot. It just is. When
you take the resistance towards those facts out of the equation, a serious
amount of mental energy is spared.
After you’ve stopped fighting the facts of everyday life, you can start
to turn that acceptance inwards. When you feel the cravings or random
emotions that we talked about, you can choose to not take those seriously
either. This is mindfulness. Mindfulness is the act of becoming more aware
of your silly thoughts and emotions so that they have less power over
you. When you’re a kid and you lose a toy or get into a fight, you think
you’re going to be upset forever. You have no perspective on the emotion
you’re feeling. As you grow older and things don’t go your way, you still
get upset, but part of you knows that the situation isn’t life altering and
the emotion will fade with time. Mindfulness takes that process to its
logical conclusion. You feel the emotions fully, but choose not to engage
in them or identify with them. This doesn’t take years of meditating in
a cave with your thumb up your ass. All it takes is building the habit of
labeling emotions and thoughts as they come up. As I said earlier, 95% of
your daily thoughts are repeats. If you can begin to label your thoughts
and emotions as they happen in categories, you’ll see that the same 15
or so categories of thoughts and emotions arise over and over. The act of
labeling them creates distance, because it’s no longer you being angry, it’s
you experiencing anger. The power is stripped from the constant cravings
and wild emotions.
As you become more aware of your thoughts, you’ll realize how
many of them are about the past or future. These are not “learning from
the past” or “planning for the future” thoughts, which are helpful. Instead
they’re usually bullshit thoughts about random events that don’t matter
or catastrophic situations that are never going to happen. Spending
thousands of dollars on ‘vibration’ seminars or crystal workshops just
means that you’re one of the only people on earth dumber than the person
running those shows. I was never much of a fan of them. But what I did
learn from books like “The Power of Now” is that the only real access you
have to your life is through the present moment. Everything else, the past
and future, is quite literally an abstraction. It only exists in your own head.
You can only enjoy life’s rewards if you’re engaged while experiencing
them. Eating a steak isn’t all that great of an experience if your mind is
completely absorbed in thinking about what you’re going to eat tomorrow.
Presence is easy to attain, if you just make a habit of noticing when
you’re lost in useless thoughts about the past and future, and bring your
thoughts instead back to what you are doing. You’ll find that you’re anxiety
goes away as well, since almost all anxiety is based on dreading the future
or ruminating about the past.
Meaning:
Most people attempt to design their life to get the most amount
of rewards with the least amount of work. In this quest, they choose
easy jobs over hard ones, short academic careers over long ones, and
modest goals over large ones. Since the good jobs are taken by the few
with ambition and work ethic, most people are assigned jobs with little
to no upside besides a paycheck. They spend the next 30 years saving for
retirement – that golden era when they can finally do all the nothing they
want. What happens after they retire? Statistically, within ten years they
die.
People with no sense of purpose lead bleak and short lives. Victor
Frankl, a psychiatrist who spent several years in a Nazi concentration
camp, noticed this when accounting for which prisoners survived. Those
with a sense of meaning, an overarching purpose beyond day to day
survival, frequently outlived the others. Since then, meaning has emerged
as an indispensable ingredient in the psychological recipe for happiness.
Study after study has shown meaning and purpose as a life extender
and happiness enhancer. Much unhappiness comes from a constant
preoccupation with petty self-involved problems. In general, focusing
on something outside yourself, preferably something big, gives you a
reprieve from such thoughts. It also gives you something that needs to be
accomplished besides your own survival. Ironically, someone who focuses
on the survival of others is more likely to survive longer themselves, all
other things being equal.
However, meaning does not necessarily have to be selfless. On a
micro level, meaning can just mean making progress on a goal. In fact,
studies have shown that the feeling of progress, on any level, is a huge
boon to happiness. This means that you should have realistic goals that
you can track and quantify. A level above that, adding more meaning to
your life involves helping the people in your particular tribe with their
problems. This has the dual effect of creating deeper social bonds while
also giving you a core sense of use and purpose. In my tribe, we are
constantly looking for new ways to help each other out.
On a macro level, your purpose should be one that spans decades,
peaking when you are middle aged or older. Once again, complete
selflessness is not what we are talking about. If helping people is your goal
and something you find fulfilling, great. But your macro purpose can also
be building a business, a complex piece of art, or a lifestyle.
You don’t have to decide right now what the meaning is of each
level of your life. A search for meaning is enough. Overtime, the different
answers will come to you. Some answers may be good for a particular
period of your life but will evolve and change over time. Simply knowing
how essential this aspect of happiness is is often sufficient for it to start
appearing in your life.
How to apply this to game:
You may have notice that there is little about interacting with
women in this guide. This is purposeful. A robust inner life should be built
simultaneously with your ability to socialize and meet beautiful women.
However it should also be largely separate from it. Many men get into
pick-up to such a deep extent that the responses of women become their
guiding north star. There are many ways to live your life wrong, but this
way is one of the worst. A healthy psychology is not only separate from
attracting women, it supersedes it. Your morals, your beliefs, and your
life’s purpose has to take precedence over what one, or all, women you are
attracted to think. Oddly enough, when you put this first, your interactions
will get better automatically. Don’t take this as an excuse for less action,
use it as fuel for more. If life is no longer based around the whims of
others, then approaching becomes an easy afterthought. Live your life
with real internal character and integrity. The rest will follow.
Now that you have some of the tools to be mentally tough, through
effective application of Stoic principles, the practice of discipline, and the
deep work on happiness. Let’s take a look at how some of these practices
are applied in real life.
Chapter 5: Tools and Mindsets
Now that we have covered the foundational principles of the human
condition, belief structures, confidence and self-esteem, and mental
toughness, you are going to need some tools and mindsets that will help
you out in the field.
Biases & Heuristics:
Lots of decisions have to be made in a day. Thousands. Major
decision-makers in business, politics, etc. understand this and have made
it a practice to create a discipline out of their routines so they spend less
time and energy making trivial decisions and spend more time and energy
making decisions that matter greatly to their futures and the future of
their people. They have to spend time thinking carefully about these
decisions because the brain is riddled with little short-cuts to make the
decision-making process less taxing. For example, if every time I saw an
animal display it’s sharp teeth I were to carefully ponder the safety of my
current situation, it wouldn’t be long before I was eaten. In the human
brain, display of teeth is emotionally represented as danger or aggression.
Why? Because all of the people that didn’t think that were eaten, and their
genetics discontinued. If all the people that didn’t think that ‘sharp teeth
means danger’ were eaten, no one remains but the humans that think
that sharp teeth does in fact mean danger and to run away. We call this
a heuristic: it is a method to make quick decisions, because even though
A doesn’t imply B directly, we’ve seen A enough times to know that B will
usually follow (e.g. teeth doesn’t imply danger, but teeth implies biting
implies being eaten implies danger). A bias is very similar, in that evidence
over time causes one to lean in one direction or another direction. We
are biased towards eating fatty and sugary foods over produce and whole
foods because the former usually tastes better than the latter. Biases can
be developed through direct experience (e.g. eating the sugary foods),
through second-hand experience (e.g. your friend, that you trust, offers
you the sugary food), but most biases are passed on genetically through
hundreds of thousands of years of preference (e.g. sugary & fatty foods
provides more energy, so eat as many as you can get your hands on so
that you can survive). Biases and heuristics have allowed human beings
to survive at the top of the food chain for a very long time, however in
the modern world, many of them have proven to be a disutility to social
dynamics. Don’t fret! We’ll break down the ones you need to know so that
you are aware of what they are, when they happen, and how to navigate
around them. Keep in mind, you will never be able to get rid of all of
your biases and heuristics, they are simply too useful. We will however
show you how to manage the ones that get in the way of your dating and
financial goals.
Biases & Heuristics in Game:
Groupthink is the phenomenon that occurs within a defined
group of people in which the desire for harmony and conformity results
in sometimes irrational beliefs and dysfunctional decision-making
outcomes. A related phenomenon is the Bandwagon Effect, which is the
phenomenon in which people do something simply because everyone
else is doing it. Additionally, Status Quo Bias is an emotional bias towards
maintaining the current state of affairs, which further fuels conformity.
In the same manner that the laws of gravity hold molecules together, that
laws of human biochemistry dictate cells to coordinate to make organs,
that laws of human physiology and biology dictate organs to coordinate
to make human beings, these are some of the laws that create groups,
communities, and societies.
Note, I said ‘laws’, not suggestions. When you go against groupthink,
bandwagon effect, and the status quo, it is SUPPOSED to be hard,
because you are challenging evolution and creating pressures to evolve
yourself into something that people can begin to follow instead of the
default blind follower. If anyone does something, it is because it is easy
to do, and conformity is easy. If you wonder how large groups of people
can believe in such astoundingly irrational beliefs, it is because they have
sacrificed their individuality to the group, and now take on the beliefs of
that group.
And look how easy it is to create such a belief: suppose you have a
group of people who live in harmony. Suppose one of those people were to
get angry and demand that we all get free chocolate! “We get free water,
and it costs money for people to clean the water, and if it costs money for
people to make chocolate, then we should get free chocolate!” The group
members seem to like this, because the argument makes sense, however
this is Belief Bias in action, which is the effect where someone’s evaluation
of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of
a conclusion (of course chocolate should be free since water is free!).
There are a few group members that are not so convinced, they see
right through this individual, however the individual creates enough
social pressure on the naysayers that they feel compelled to reduce the
anxiety they experience by just conforming with the individual and going
along with it (groupthink). This is compounded by the other members
following in suit (bandwagon effect). Now you have what seems to be
an autonomous entity (the group) which is making decisions on its own,
propagating the message that chocolate should be free for all who want it!
Ridiculous? Absolutely. Does it happen in real life? Just look around. You
can identify the people who have fallen victim to groupthink by the degree
in which they all talk about the same information (this is called the Shared
Information effect, where members of the group tend to talk about things
in which the ingroup members are already familiar). Freedom! Equality!
Fairness! Sound familiar?
How does this apply to game? Understand this. When you go out
into a bar or nightclub, it is supposed to be difficult because there are
mechanisms like the ones above (and many more) that intentionally make
it difficult to quickly convey your personality to the affection of another
individual. You see that everyone else is having fun, people are dancing,
and people that are talking to each other already seem to know each
other. You may be compelled to stand alone until you are welcomed into
a group, stand really close to your wing, form a chode crystal with your
buddies, but these are the forces of groupthink in action. Understand
that these forces affect everybody, including yourself, but the difference
between you and everyone else is that you accept these forces, and walk
forward in the face of them to live the life you intend to live for yourself
according to your answers to the 3 Sacred Questions. Follow this process:
• Accept your own susceptibility to social grouping laws
• Realize that every other person around you is equally susceptible to
these laws
• Take right action in the face of those forces
There is no reality where you make these forces go away. You understand
that they are there for you, for me, and for anyone else you might
encounter. This goes back to the Stoic philosophy that we talked about
earlier, about suffering well. The suffering in game arises from going
up against the face of social pressures that create groups with strong
boundaries. With this knowledge in mind, how do you expect to quickly cut
through the noise and make yourself known and compelling to the woman
you desire in the social situation in front of you? In order to accomplish
this, it is important to understand the concept of adaptation.
Adaptation in Game:
When weightlifting, if we didn’t get stronger, would we ever lift
heavy weights? When studying, if we didn’t get smarter, would we ever
read if not for enjoyment? When talking to new people, if we did not
become better conversationalists, would we ever go into a novel social
situation? One of the core tenants of evolution by natural selection is
adaptation. Without adapting to the constraints of our environment
over time, we could never survive. This extends across all living things,
from building huts to building skyscrapers, there is constant adaptation
within and across lifetimes. One can argue that human beings are such a
successful species due to our ability to adapt to our surroundings.
If you constantly lift a heavy weight, and struggle to do so for some time,
your reward for that behavior is that your body adapts to the weight,
and then it becomes easier to do so later on. If you constantly read
dense literature to master a subject you care about, and struggle to do
so for some time, your reward for that behavior is expertise at digesting,
philosophizing, and executing on the content. So, tell me this, if you go
approach lots of women, and struggle to do so for some time, what is
the result? That’s right… MORE SEX! If you go into an interaction, she
tells you goodnight, and you didn’t make the sex happen, does that mean
that you are bad with women and that you should stop? Maybe it means
you’re bad with women, maybe it means that her boyfriend just broke up
with her and she’s not in the mood (or a litany of other arbitrary reasons),
but it certainly does NOT mean that you should stop! It means that you
have just begun. Adaptation doesn’t stop when you enter the nightclub,
and if you think that it does, or that there is something fundamentally
wrong with you, then you need to revisit the earlier chapters to properly
build your belief structure more based in reality, actively work on your
confidence, and develop your mental toughness. The exercises in the
above chapter for mental toughness are not for you to masturbate over
into a Kleenex with your bulk lube from Alibaba, they are meant to assist
you when you are taking right action. With all this in mind, how do you
adapt in game? You do it through disciplined confrontation of social
pressure.
Social Pressure:
As I had mentioned above, humans are exceptional at adaptation.
What I did not mention is that humans are extraordinary at adapting to
extraordinary situations, revealing parts of themselves that they did not
think they knew existed. For examples of this, observe any human in a
major Olympic event, or any human put in extremely adverse situations,
voluntary or involuntary, such as Victor Frankl’s case when he had to
endure the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp. To the Olympian, they
had adapted by applying to themselves increasingly intense physical
pressure (heavier weights, higher jumps, faster sprints, etc.). To Victor
Frankl, he had adapted through facing increasingly intense psychological
pressure (little food, loss of loved ones, witnessing of horrors). In order
to improve your ability to have access to any sort of woman or any sort
of lifestyle that you may be looking for, you must adapt to face these
environments by facing increasingly intense social pressure.
Social pressure is simply weightlifting for your social acuity. Facing
social pressure means facing the socially hard thing to do, when the
easier option is available. This means sending your food back when your
server put on extra pepper when you asked for none, it means engaging
in a disagreement over a point of view in your lecture hall that you hold
despite the professor and students having an otherwise unanimous
approval, and for our purposes, it is walking up to a girl you’ve never seen
before and who has never seen you before to engage in a conversation
leading to romance.
Social pressure isn’t always as intense as a disagreement. There is a
wide spectrum. For some people, it’s just asking for the time, or crossing
the street, or even talking on the phone. The same way it was once hard
to lift a 10lb. weight, it might be hard to ask an old lady for directions.
But, if you consistently face increasingly intense social pressure, you
continuously adapt and find yourself able to face even more intense social
pressure with ease, until you are able to walk up to a group of people with
ease, pick the girl you like, and start chatting with her. It has to be hard
before it becomes easy, and it must become easy before it can become fun.
I would challenge you to find your edge between social scenarios you can
handle with ease and social situations you’ve been intentionally avoiding.
You want to be pushing on that edge constantly, every day, to get thicker
skin in this domain. If you don’t go to the club, but you can still walk around
during the day time, you need to start just going to the club and consider
that a victory. If you don’t get physical with women, but you can still talk
to them comfortably, you need to start engaging with them physically in
some simple way, even if it’s just a touch on the shoulder, or some of the
other physicality techniques we cover, and consider that a victory. Having
a wing or a coach to push you is the best way to find this edge and move
past it.
It is important to emphasize the ‘discipline’ aspect of this practice.
Like we mentioned before, you can’t just face social pressure once or
twice to become adept at handling it. It must be consistent. Moreover,
if you become quite seasoned at handling highly intense situations, that
doesn’t mean it stays there forever. You have to build it up again if you had
changed your lifestyle to avoid these situations.
I emphasize social pressure so much because game is easy to do,
but hard to learn, and it is hard to learn because people are not used to
facing social situations outside the comfort of conformity and the social
principles at work that make it difficult to make progress in this area.
To put it all together, if you have trouble talking to girls because you
don’t know what to say, then you need to apply social pressure by talking
to them anyways with nothing to say then figuring it out when you get
there. If I knew what to say before I talked to a pretty girl, it wouldn’t work
out! You must build this skill too. If you have trouble going into mixed sets
because there are other guys, then you need to put one foot in front of the
other to go talk to those girls anyways. The lesson is clear: the more you
take on these behaviors, the more you adapt, and the more you adapt, the
better able you are to handling them in the future. It has to be hard before
it becomes easy. Social pressure will help you get good fast and access
parts of yourself that you didn’t know even existed.
Meditation
I’ve never been a fan of meditation, I always felt I was already always
calm and could do something more useful with my time, but my friends
have recommended that it does have value and helps keep them more
focused in chaotic situations.
Writing
For a period of my life I would spend something like 80 hours a week
just going out, thinking about pickup, thinking about my interactions,
about how I could make them better, what else I could do, how I would
do it differently in this situation, that situation, etc. You have to be smart
about your progress and thinking about what you are doing in detail
and sharing these thoughts with your trusted peers. When you write
something down, you experience it twice, meaning you learn quicker.
Moreover, it gives you a lot more clarity when you’re out in the field
because you are strategizing ahead of time based on past experience.
Core mindsets
Here are some of my core mindsets that helped me take action when
I needed to do it, whether I felt like it or not:
Champ or chump?
In other words, is the behavior I’m currently engaging in a champion
behavior that will lead to champion outcomes and a champion life? Or,
is this a chump behavior that every other chode is doing to lead to some
mediocre outcome.
She’s pretty, I hope we get along
You don’t know the girl, she doesn’t know you, but you’d be interested in
learning more to see if you both are a good fit. The LAST thing on your
mind should be, “I hope she likes me.” There’s no thought and no statement
that makes you seem weak to yourself and weak to the girl. Do not engage
in these thoughts.
Happiness is the alignment of your thoughts, words,
and actions
This is a quote from the chode Gandhi that I bring up on my Bootcamps
and VIP talks. I’m not sure Gandhi and I would have gotten along, however
when you live in alignment of your thoughts, words, and actions, game
becomes a much easier practice. If you’re feeling nervous, go tell her
you’re feeling nervous, and do so nervously. You’ll notice your mood going
up rapidly once you can continuously live in alignment of your thoughts,
words, and actions.
Conclusion
If you implement the above, you’re going to be far into the top 1% of most
desirable people on Earth. You have all the info you’d ever need to get
whatever you want in life. If you haven’t already, GO COMPLETE THE 3
SACRED GUIDE BOOK RIGHT NOW!
Those who have already know this was a life changing event, that left you
with tremendously more guidance, certainty, and sense of purpose in
every area of your life.
If you have any struggle implementing these principles and want a
personal accountability mechanism to help ensure your success, please go
to rsdderek.com and join THE BROTHERHOOD.
If you need live coaching to help you internalize and implement the
lessons from this program even more RAPIDLY, join me on Bootcamp
while I’m still available. You can find my schedule here: rsdderek.com
Very best!
~D