Avoid unhealthy influences in your life

At a time of year when most people are being relentlessly positive and talking about what they want to do next year, let’s go against the grain and talk about what we don’t want to do: hang out with bad people.

Part of being a successful person, whether in dating women, in business or otherwise, means surrounding yourself with good, healthy influences. The temptation is to keep all of your existing influences (your existing social circles) around you, regardless of how little they contribute to your current endeavours – because none of us like to “cut the cord” of a relationship or friendship that we have had for a while.

But to be successful, you have to be ruthless with the social circles you maintain. Every so often, it’s a good idea to do a status check on your friends and ask the question, “Is hanging out with these people conducive to achieving my current goals?”

When you start improving your dating life, a lot of people who are not good with women and uninterested in improving that area of their life will hold you back. They may criticise you, judge you or be otherwise unsupportive. This is not going to make the work you need to do easier!

So be ruthless with the people you choose to spend your time with. I periodically “cull” my social circles to make sure I have the best influences around me for achieving my current goals. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I stop being friends with people, just that I am careful how much of my time I devote to maintaining those relationships.

Here are some characteristics of highly unsuccessful people to watch out for. These are qualities you should both check in yourself and in the social circles you choose to maintain.

1.    They discuss problems instead of devising solutions

Do you ever sit around with certain people and discuss issues in current affairs, your jobs, your relationships etc.? Have you ever noticed that most people are quick to offer their analysis of “what is wrong” with something, without actually offering a solution on how to fix it? A classic example is that a lot of people are quick to criticise the way an established government runs the country without offering alternative solutions. People literally spend hours talking about this. What a waste of time.

Unsuccessful people love to criticise and offer their perspective on why something isn’t the way it should be. They do this because it helps them to feel intelligent and secure when other people listen to them and agree with their expert analysis.

The successful man isn’t concerned with appearing intelligent or having others listen to his wandering thoughts: he focuses his time on devising solutions instead of talking about problems

Don’t hang out with people who complain and criticise a lot. They are problem-focused people and unlikely to amount to much in life.

2.    They focus energy on maintenance rather than growth

If you’re not growing, you’re wasting your time. True happiness comes from constantly striving to achieve new goals: growing further and learning new things.

Many people think, “If I can just get that one thing and maintain it forever, I’ll be happy.” This is a fallacy, as evidenced by all the people in unhappy marriages and bad relationships that were once good, and those who worked and trained hard to get highly desirable jobs that no longer please them.

We evolve over time and what we want changes. We should continually set the bar higher and be trying to achieve new things. If you spend time with people who work to maintain the status quo of their lives, you will notice that they seem listless and bored. Avoid these people and spend time with those who like to grow.

3.    They want what others want instead of what they want

If you ask someone why they want something, whether it’s a harem full of beautiful women, one true love, or a social circle full of models and actresses, they should be able to tell you exactly why they want it.

If you keep asking, “Why?” of them and the final answer is, “Because that’s what I should want” or “Because I have always wanted that,” then they have no good reason to want it. They are simply seeking it because the world had conditioned them to seek it.

People who work towards goals without understanding why they are working towards them are wasting their time. One day they will wake up and realise that they didn’t even want to achieve those goals in the first place: that they were the goals of others rather than their own.

Surround yourself with people who are working hard but understand why they are working hard.

4.    They explain themselves to those whom do not matter

When you reject or question the status quo, people around you will typically challenge you and criticise you.

It’s tempting to defend your viewpoints to anyone who challenges it, but when you do so you accept that their view is more important than yours. This is your life, therefore their view of it is less important than yours.

Don’t waste time explaining your endeavours, thoughts and passions to those whom you do not recognise a similar or higher level of achievement in. You are not here to persuade others around to share your viewpoint, you are here to achieve your goals – regardless of whether the rest of the world shares them or not.

5.    They talk a lot about what they are going to do

Unsuccessful people talk a lot in the future tense. They always have plans, ideas and outlines for what they are going to do, but spend very little time implementing these plans.

Don’t talk constantly about your plans. The more time you spend talking about them, the less time you are spending actually implementing them.

The world is full of unsuccessful people with great ideas and seemingly high ambitions, but very few people put in the time and energy that is necessary to realise those ideas and ambitions.

Avoid people who talk a lot in the future tense!

6.    They engage in short-term solutions

Unsuccessful people seek short-term relief from their unhappiness by distracting themselves from their problems rather than addressing them with sustainable and real solutions.

Excessive drinking, smoking, and promiscuity are often symptoms of this. This is not a judgment on those things: I know people that are very successful that do enjoy an occasional cigarette, drink or like to have casual sex. But they are doing it because they enjoy those things, rather than as distractions from other problems they may have.

Long-term solutions to problems take effort to implement, but are ultimately worth it. Anything you use to distract yourself from the problem will give you a few moments’ respite, but leave you unsatisfied in the long-term.

7.    They lie, cheat or steal as a solution

People who lie, cheat or steal in order to achieve a goal do not really achieve it, but have simply manipulated a false outcome. Inevitably, the outcome will not be sustainable, or it will not give them the real happiness they sought.

Don’t hang out with people that use these methods to achieve their goals. They may seem successful at times, but their success is precarious and short-lived. Inside, they are deeply unhappy people and know that they will never achieve real success.

Be careful whom you spend your time with. Unhealthy influences pervade the world. Learn to recognise them and steer clear of them – your success in life depends on it.

Soul

Powerful conclusions for dating and seduction

I’ve learnt a lot from reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I highly recommend it for everyone. It reinforced the way I feel about a lot of things, and explained things that I felt deeply but never really had the ability to explain.

Here are some of my favourite quotes and why they are relevant to sex, love and relationships.

Why you should never lie to the women in your life:

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked. And if one gains the immediate purpose of the lie – the price one pays is the destruction of that which the gain was intended to serve. The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on.

Why, if you’re a woman, you should never let others make you feel like a slut because you slept with a man you were attracted to:

Did I feel a physical desire for him ? I did. Was I moved by the passion of my body? I was. Have I experienced the most violent form of sensual pleasure? I have. If this now makes me a disgraced woman in your eyes – let your estimate be your own concern. I will stand on mine.

Why you should never “settle” for a relationship that you or her are not truly happy in:

It’s your acceptance of this place that I want. What good would it do me, to have your physical presence without any meaning? That’s the kind of faked reality by which most people cheat themselves of their lives. I’m not capable of it.

Why sex with a high quality woman will always be more enjoyable and better than that which is less meaningful:

Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophies. But, in fact, a man’s sexual choice is the result and sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you about his valuation of himself. No matter what corruption he’s taught about the virtue of selfishness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment – just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! – an act which is not possible in self-abasement , only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as his standard of value. He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience – or to fake – a sense of self-esteem. The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer – because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut.

Soul

Artist's representation of Mr M

Congratulations to my friend, colleague and all-round inspirational guy, Mr M, who was ranked in the top 10 pooooaahhs in the world by TSB Magazine:

TSB Magazine Blog Archive The Top 10 Pick Up Artists of 2008

I’ve personally known the guy for two years now. I won’t lie, I was skeptical at first and thought, “I can blow this little guy out of the water.

However, as time went on, I learnt more from him than I could possibly have imagined. We currently share an apartment and find ourselves constantly having fun and learning together. He’s always disturbing me by running into my room with his latest “game breakthrough”.

His ability to pull at high end nightclubs, playboy parties and places where every blonde girl has a few inches of height on him still amazes me.

He doesn’t see himself as a pick up artist, rather this is just what he does: he is good at meeting women and he is good at teaching others to do so. We both agree this is good way of thinking about our identities.

Yes, top 10 lists are always subjective, but props to Mr M for making it in.

“PUA” is just a label. What’s important is the dedication and hard work this man has put in to improve his ability to succeed with women and to teach this to others.

Congratulations again, man.

Soul

PS: props also to Cajun for hitting number 3! This guy is another one of my favourites at Love Systems and I look forward to spending more time with him

Jealousy can be very unhealthy

Today I’m going to talk about how to deal with bad emotions such as jealousy, envy, anger and low self-esteem. I’ll be focusing on the examples of jealously and envy, but you can use this process to deal with any bad emotion that you have to tussle with.

A lot of people berate the experience of these emotions and wish they didn’t have them. The fact is that emotions are evolutionary adaptations to help us survive and prosper in the world. It’s true that sometimes they can lead to bad choices, but these choices are ours to make. Most of the time, it’s not so much the emotion that is unhealthy but rather the action that we choose to engage in based on how we’re feeling.

Social conditioning further confuses the issue: whereas some emotions might stem from a real evolutionary or biological basis, others arise from the social influences around us.

Let’s take the emotion of jealousy, for example. Many of us have at one time or another had a casual “fuck buddy,” whom we were sleeping with but was free to sleep with other people herself. If you have at one time felt that you didn’t want her to sleep with other men (even though she was not your official and exclusive girlfriend) or you allowed her to but told her you didn’t want to hear the details, then you were experiencing jealousy – the fear of losing what you had to someone else.

Where does this emotion arise from? In evolutionary terms, the loss of a partner is only important if you’ve decided to mate with that person or are cohabiting with her. For most of us, this isn’t the case with a fuck buddy.

The emotion actually arises predominantly from social influences. The world conditions us to accept monogamous, exclusive relationships as the norm. Those of us who want to and are willing to challenge the norm might engage in non-exclusive relationships but we still get the residual emotion of jealousy – because deep down, we are still affected by those norms and emotionally subscribe to them.

Think about it. Everywhere around you, you see men getting jealous over women talking to or sleeping with other men: in the movies, in books, in your family and with your friends. You become accustomed to the idea that when one woman is sleeping with one man, she should not look at or talk to another man. Therefore, even if you logically challenge that norm, internally and emotionally you still feel jealous and accept that as “just the way you feel”.

Let’s examine the issue logically. If you’re casually dating a woman and she goes on a date with another man, it goes well and she goes home with him, you might feel a twinge of jealously.

Now on one logical level, you have every right to feel jealous because there is a chance she will be more attracted to this man than you and she will spend less time with you and more time with him.

That’s ok. But if you act on that jealousy by refusing to allow her to talk about the other man or by trying to prevent her from seeing other men, then what you are really doing is slapping a pair of handcuffs on her and saying, “I’m so worried that you might meet men of higher value than me that I am going to restrict your freedom to do so.”

If she meets a man who does have more value than you to her, wouldn’t you lose respect for her if she wasn’t attracted to him? It would indicate a willingness to settle in life for less than what she fully wants, which is an inherently unattractive quality.

When you get a good job with a company, if you’re offered a job with a better company a year later, wouldn’t you want to take it? If you didn’t take the better job and stayed with your current one out of loyalty, then ultimately you’d start to resent your job, causing yourself great unhappiness and probably performing worse in your job – an unhealthy outcome for both you and your employer.

It‘s the same in relationships. A woman shouldn’t stay with you because you have emotional handcuffs on her. She should stay with you because she continually assesses the market and determines your relationship to be of very high value to her.

If she meets a guy that gives her more value than you do, then fair play if she sleeps with him or spends time with him. If you let your jealously prevent her from doing so, then in the short-term you might have “safeguarded” some time with her, but in the long term she is going to realise there are stronger men out there and your relationship will eventually break down.

Therefore, the best way to deal with the jealous feeling is not to slap a pair of handcuffs on her by asking that she doesn’t date other people or even that she doesn’t tell you about it if she does, but by focusing your energies on being as strong a man as possible – so that she will want to be with you instead of any of the lesser men she may meet.

Here is the process for dealing with potentially unhealthy emotions like jealousy:

1. Try to understand the root cause of your emotion. Does it have a firm rational and logical basis or does it simply stem from social conditioning?
2. Consider the actions you can take to effect the best possible long-term outcome.
3. Challenge the unhealthy emotion by taking the healthiest action (the one that produces the best long-term outcome) every time you feel the emotion. The unhealthy emotion will dissipate after doing this a few times.

You can apply this process to other negative emotions as well. Let’s look at envy for example. When we see a fellow man, particularly if it is someone we are not socially aligned with, having more power than us, we feel envy: we want his power.

Because of social conditioning, we tend to look to others for how to behave, so we think to ourselves, “Right, I need to be better than him.” But strip away the social influence and you realise, “I need to set out to achieve higher goals for myself, regardless of what anyone else is doing.”

Considering the actions you could take, you could try to destroy some of this other man’s value. You could spread lies about him, injure him, steal his girlfriend, or just as bad, spend time actively criticising him to other people. In the short-term you might succeed in lowering his value, but ultimately all you’ve done is try to pull him down to your own lowly level.

You could, instead, focus your time and energy on bettering yourself and achieving your own power. It might take longer, but in time you will have greater power than you know what to do with; and all those who spent their time focusing on short-term, ineffective strategies like the above will be left trailing.

After doing this for a while, you would destroy the envious feelings that you once experienced and the only person you would compare yourself to is yourself.

So the next time you experience an emotional kick in your stomach that you think could be bad, think to yourself, “Why am I feeling this and how should I best act to produce an effective and sustainable long-term outcome?”

Soul