A Little Mistake That Cost My Best Friend 5 Years of His Life.

Summary: IamGale here, the psych and marketing guy of TRP, I’m going to tell you a very personal story of loss, suffering, and recovery. This is the story of my best friend. He's very close to me and this is his journey. You’re going to learn a lot from this tale.

I first met Nick when he 12 years old. We related on so many levels that we instantly connected. He was shy. He loved drawing, painting those little Warhammer figurines, and played GTA just like me. Since I loved all those things we quickly bonded.

But Nick was a little odd. This story starts when we’re both 16 and at highschool. Despite the fact that he was incredibly tall for his age (6’3) and decently good looking, Nick never really expressed himself at school.

He would just become a chameleon around other people. A wallflower. He never expressed his own opinions because he had crushing low self-esteem and would hate when anyone judging his ideas. So Nick parrotted everyone else. He was a mega follower. At least in school.

He made me promise to never tell anyone, but Nick led a double life.

While at school he was on the basketball and football team, but he led a completely different life at home. You could say he followed Law 38: Think as you like, but behave like others. But it ate him up inside. All his “friends” shat on the kids who played computer games. So he hid that part of his life, despited that he was a huge gamer! This is where the downwards spiral started. He thought he had to follow the crowd and couldn’t be open about what he wanted to do.

He told me he went to go see a psychiatrist once. They had this conversation:

”Were you happy as a child?"

”I don’t know… I don’t remember being happy."

And we talked about that response. For Nick, it was normal to feel empty. In high school, he started getting into drugs, binge drinking at school, all while never talking to girls. Unfortunately, he developed bad acne and became very self-conscious so Nick became quite the recluse. There were periods where we didn’t talk for months.

But he would tell me when he started new projects and it wasn’t good...

See Nick lived a double life online. He played this computer game called Runescape, a massive online browser multiplayer game.

Runescape became his fix. It was better than weed or drinking for him. He spent literally every minute he could on the game improving his character. And it wasn’t a good influence because he started to get into dark stuff.

He told me later that he had these schemes of scamming people online. He would hack and sell these Runescape accounts on weird niche forums.

I only found out later that these weren’t schemes. That he actually went through with it and made money from it.

I was getting scared for Nick. I thought I might lose my best friend to an online video game and to the dark places of the web. I didn’t know how far he would go. He said he wanted to buy stolen credit cards online and order thousands of dollars of stuff from amazon (he pussied out of this one).

When I was at his house, his mom would beg me to help him. She would beg me to get him to stop playing. Nick’s mom had tried everything to stop him. She would take away his computer, cut the internet, stop feeding him, but Nick always managed to get back to gaming.

What’s surprising is Nick never went full Omega. He continued to live this weird double hacker life. He still played basketball and football for the school. He didn’t even like those sports, but Nick really wanted to fit in. And it would help him go to parties.

In an ideal world, I think Nick would have wanted to be a really popular high school kid. But instead, he just got by. He wasn’t great at basketball, but he was tall. He wasn’t great a football, but he was big. He wasn’t great socially, but most people left him alone.

But things turned around for him.

I thought Nick was finally going to break free from his anxiety and low self-esteem because of this one event.

After March break, Nick comes over and tells me he just had the best and worst vacation of his life.

His family went to a Dominican all-inclusive resort for Christmas and there Nick met two girls. This was very unlike Nick because he was a complete virgin and shy guy before this.

But Nick told me how he hooked up with two girls! With a giant grin on his face, he tells me that he basically fucked a black chick.

We’re still in high school at this point and I was impressed. But Nick was really nervous around girls, so I knew there must have been something more to this story.

This was the bad part that would eat away at Nick for years to come.

He told me he hooked up with two girls but that each time the same problem came up. Each time he couldn’t get it up. But he tried so hard and he was so nervous throughout the whole thing.

He told me got a hand job from a girl but he just couldn’t get hard. And then the girl left him there and he just felt so ashamed.

Then on another night, he brought this other young black girl back. She was down to have sex but again--he couldn’t get it up. He told me he went to the washroom looked at himself in the mirror. And started screaming at himself. Just berating himself how he was a fucking loser. He was just getting angry that he couldn’t perform.

I think he thought that he might never get the chance to get laid. He thought the world was going to end in 2012 with the Mayan Calendar and thought he would die a virgin… He was a little too into conspiracy and didn’t have much confidence in himself.

And he was right. Nick wouldn’t get laid again until many years later. But that didn’t stop him from getting oneitis on this dumb girl for the rest of high school.

Nick started doing bad shit.

He apparently created a bot net of Runescape characters to make money for him… He continued to scam people online and would buy random shit on eBay with the money he was making.

He even started doing this at school.

He’d offer to write essays for his friends, but secretly he would outsource the whole essay to this outcasted overweight girl.

He started drinking in school. Smoking Weed after school. I thought this was kind of stupid. We had a fight over this that went like this:

"Yo, you need to get drunk for philosophy class, it’s awesome."

"You’re becoming an alcoholic at 16."

"Fuck you, come drink with us."

That’s when I lost touch with Nick. See Nick got some street cred because he would pick up at the liquor store for other kids. Since he had his older brother’s ID and was really tall, he had a high success rate. I felt bad because I was the first guy to pressure him to go pick up.

Nick was scared shitless the first time he did it… But we peer pressured the hell out of him and he went through. He became our guy to pick up, but he took it a little too far. He started picking up all the time.

At this point we kind of lost touch. He got caught up in the outcast crowd and continued to live his double life.

Next time I talked to him was on our Prom bus. Around 20 of us bought a bus to take us to prom.

Prom was the biggest disaster of his young life. I’ve never seen him cry as much as he did on that night.

We were on the bus and Nick was going to town with the tequila.

And Nick finished a whole mickey of Tequila before he even got to prom! And like an idiot he left it in his jacket pocket. The security guards caught him, and wouldn’t let him into prom.

He started screaming like a 5-year-old at the security guards. Our principal even came down and just looked at him with the worst shame. After screaming failed, he balled up and cried. Then he vomited and cried some more.

His mom came to pick him up and apparently he balled the whole way home.

See Nick’s secret dream was just to be popular and get laid in high school. But by getting barred from prom, this became impossible for him. His dream was shattered. He was shattered physically and mentally.

But the funny thing is Nick didn’t remember anything after getting on the bus. His mom and I had to tell him what happened and I just felt bad for this guy.

After that, we both went to the same University and this trend continued there. Unfortunately for him, his skin got way worse. He developed severe acne and eczema on his face. He wouldn’t leave his room. To make it worse his hairline receded heavily…

The only thing that made Nick happy was playing that game Runescape

But then in the summer, they banned him. Apparently they did an investigation into his bot net and scams. They permanently banned all of his accounts.

This crushed Nick more than prom because he spent the last 3 years perfecting all his character. He was more in love with that game than with his life.

He told me there was nothing left to make him happy. It took him a year to get over this, which sounds a little ridiculous but he really created a close connection with this game.

It wasn’t all bad. Nick got into making cool YouTube videos and he soon found his replacement fix. He started making gaming and short goofy films and some of them got really popular on YouTube.

Nick craved validation and all those views made him happy.

But because he had really low self-esteem he never read any of the 100s of comments his videos got. I told him he was being ridiculous, but he didn’t listen. One bad comment would overshadow dozens of good ones in his head and so he just never read them. He couldn’t handle it.

You see for years Nick never really lived. He never got the validation he was seeking in real life.

He lived under his own self-imposed prison. While a lot of people praised Law 38: Think as you like, but behave like others, it crushed him. Other than me he never told anyone about what was really going on his life.

He bottled it up because he was so concerned about what other people thought of him. He had trouble making new friends and would wait until people talked to him. His solution was to always go with the flow and avoid conflict at all cost.

He had the regular desires of a teenager. He wanted to get laid, have lots of friends, make lots of money, but that never really happened for him. He just binged watched TV shows and stayed in.

While he’s not terrible looking, Nick believed he was ugly.

Apparently when he was younger people said he looked like he had down syndrome and he kept repeating that insult in his head.

He would take constant pictures of himself to see if it was true. When he got acne and started losing his hair and got glasses… Well, that didn’t help. But there was a glimmer of hope for Nick.

Nick started going on Reddit a lot after he got banned from Runescape. He loved the seddit subreddit because he dreamed of being one of these PUA gods. Of course, that never happened because he hardly approached anyone, but it became his main fantasy.

I told him that he probably need to take care of skin, fitness, first but Nick just liked to fantasize.

Nick became an armchair theorist lurker. For years, he would read this shit and never apply it. And he would just complain about how shitty his life was… It was hard to hang out with him.

And so all throughout his youth, Nick never really lived.

It was so sad because his low self-esteem kept him from fulfilling his potential. Luckily, Nick had something that kept him going. He had dreams of impacting millions.

He wanted to create stuff that millions of people would watch, read, consume. He wanted to have an impact, and that dream kept him going during his darkest days.

During the dark days where we would go months without speaking to a girl.

The worst part was that Nick had no one to talked to… He really couldn’t make new male friends and it was sad because he’d just feel empty.

I remember when Nick had a birthday party for himself. And almost no one showed up.

He started texting people begging them to come. He was even begging people he wasn’t even friends with to come. I told him, to screw those people and that we could just enjoy the night together.

But in his eyes, he was “unpopular” and the fact that no one came to his party proved that fact to him.

He took a theater class to open up more, but he just couldn’t connect to anyone there. He couldn’t act for shit. He had difficulty showing emotions. He theorized that he had Aspergers (which was bs) because his social life was so shitty.

But he did make one new friend who made his dick hard

Nick got his first girlfriend in University! And started having sex for the first time. Man, he was so happy. He was finally living part of his ideal life. He couldn’t believe he had been missing out on this for 18 years… And he got to have sex before the end of Mayan Calendar. But you know what happens to beta guys in relationships. Yea… they get whipped.

Suddenly, he spent all his time with this new girl. She became his life. Her friends became his friends.

Nick was just an extension of her life.

I told him to watch out, that he should get his own life and stop glowing over how great his girlfriend was, but he dismissed me. He was happy and he didn’t want to fuck it up. But time fucked it up. Soon Nick would tell me about how his girlfriend wouldn’t have sex with him… He wouldn’t admit this because he still thinks kindly of her, but for months she used him for emotional validation.

He wasted most of his time at University with this girl. It was only until his senior year that Nick really stopped wasting his life.

He discovered this weird new subreddit and started making radical changes in his life

In our last year of University, he discovered this new subreddit called TRP. You might have heard of it. He started lifting regularly. Then he started acting more confidently. He started asking for raises at his job. He started demanding more from girls and stopped being a pushover.

He stopped being a beta and broke up with his girlfriend. He started getting plates, and he started making more movies. Some of them started to win awards and got national press coverage.

Nick changed his life when he started hustling and started being honest with himself.

He started listening to Joe Rogan, Tim Ferriss, Mike Cernovich, and hundreds of other amazing male role models that got him motivated to fearlessly go after what he wanted.

See Nick's mistake was that from 16-21, he was a follower.

He consumed but hardly created. He mindlessly went with the flow of life.

That mistake cost my friend 5 years of his life. Now years later the guy is a real hustler. He skins is way better and he's in great shape. He's on finasteride and minoxidil for his hair. He’s following his own life, creating his own plan, and lives by his own values. Don't let 5 years go by. I challenge you to live by your own plan right now.

But I have a secret to tell you:

Nick wasn’t my best friend.

Nick was me.