A guy at reddit asks that rarest of things, an interesting question, which got started from this post. The guy says, “I was the outsider for a long time (I box professionally) so I had this idea that it doesn’t matter what the average person says or think, I can do whatever I want. I was super disagreeable and would keep grudges (and of course I lost friends like that). This was my most recent realisation, after finishing my study abroad year in Madrid. Having (the right) friends give you an unwavering amount of confidence and motivation, whether it’s picking up a girl or starting a business.”
Furthermore, “the contrast thing is also very true. A lot of my friends think I get girls mostly because of boxing plus I study at a top university in the UK, but the reality is because I paint and post it on Instagram.” Yet he says grew up in poverty. He asks, though: “how did you figure all this out?” It took me a while to figure out how to answer him, because to answer it with any level of honesty demands detail. So I took a shot:
Getting hit in the face (figuratively, mostly, took boxing lessons but never fought), failing, flailing, struggling, reading Peter Thiel (one of the great geniuses of our age, even when he’s wrong), reading broadly + deeply (the people who tell you fiction is a waste of time are dumb), observing, practicing, feeling humiliated by rejection from chicks, realizing some chick is saying “ljbf” before she goes off to get railed half an hour later, trying to figure things out, reading pickup / game / red pill blogs (for too long now, though I’ve learned much from these guys, even some of the crazy ones), studying Bayesian statistics, studying statistical thinking more generally, talking to guys. Some of the “how did you figure all this out?” is just an interest in puzzles, of which human social life presents many. A lot of guys are stuck in an overly simplistic mindset, where they think “iff a, then success” when in reality “a” may be helpful, but success is rarely, if ever, monocausal. That overly simplistic mindset is evident in many comments online, many of which are so incomplete as to be effectively wrong. Many aspects of success in social life are not only not monocausal, but they’re a matter of balancing opposites: an idea many Internet users reject.
Most of what we’re told from media sources, whether movies, novels, TV, radio, or social media itself, is, again, incomplete if not outright wrong. Most of what chicks themselves say they’re attracted to is incomplete if not outright wrong, and many chicks feel compelled to say what they think they should like, or what society tells them they should like, rather than what they truly like. Behavior is the real test of any stated belief. To put together a tolerably complete, say at least 70-80%, notion of what’s going on with men, women, players, and success, takes a lot of time and a lot of putting things together. Red Quest is ~540 posts and two books (one free), and the length is not due to windiness or inability to “articulate the point” or whatever else the simple-minded may think. It’s because the real world is complicated and not reducible to a simple set of rules or axioms. Simplifications usually reduce resolution to the point of losing important data. Efficient compression algorithms still discard data. The desire for simplicity is fair, but one must remember that while simple models may be useful, they are also almost always wrong in important dimensions, and many guys mistake the map for the territory. If a guy wants to be good with women, it helps for him to develop the negative capability most guys lack. Not just most guys, but most humans, period.
Also: writing a player blog is key: xbtusd and Red Pill Dad,[1] for example, found me through Red Quest, and they are smart, effective guys who are also somewhat repelled by much of the nonsense bandied online. What you can learn alone will pretty much always be less than what you can learn as part of a small group of smart people pushing in the same direction and sharing ideas. “The individual” is usually too small a grouping to maximize learning, and a large group will be too uncoordinated and various to accomplish a lot… think of all those big, bureaucratic organizations that can’t do anything quickly, if they can do anything at all. The small group is optimal. Finding, or creating, and then curating the right small group is hard. There are many guys who are smart in some ways but crazy, and an even larger number who are dumb or inexperienced. We live in an age when the most important organization type is the startup, which also generally consists of a small group of guys pushing in the same direction. Almost all big important companies today got started in the last 40 years as startups consisting of a few guys who notice a trend a little before everyone else and have the skills and vision to ride & exploit said trend.
Being judicious about the guys you learn from, and who learn from you, is key, because dumb or ineffective or incorrect guys will retard your learning, instead of facilitating it. Writing the player blog is key because that’s how the better guys will judge you. This is a pretty good description of what I try to do, particularly “The seriously great non-fiction writers of the past constantly tread the line between obscure and illuminating.” The Book of Pook does the same, you’ll notice. Most guys can’t tolerate paradox, ambiguity, and uncertainty, which inhibits their abilities to do well with women, who naturally inhabit an ambiguous world and state of mind.
Happy New Year. What are you doing this year? Can you change? Grow? Most people can’t.
[1]Though RPD keeps telling me that I don’t need a space after an ellipsis, and I can sense his annoyance every time he marks that in something I’ve written.
