Buckets Story

Summary

The following is a true story of a man who swallowed the Pill. My best friend from college, Buckets.

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Most of what happens to us in life is by chance

When I first met Buckets as a freshman in college, he was your classic video game introvert. He seldom talked to anybody, walked with his head down to class and back, never left his room unless he had to. As you can imagine, he never talked to girls. Stark contrast from me, a former athlete, gym rat, douche bag frat boy with dreams of Ranger School.

He and I became friends by chance because we lived in the same dorm. During a dorm floor NBA2k tournament we met for the first time in the finals of said competition. He didn’t say much to me, but I could sense the competitive fire in his eyes. I don’t remember who won (just kidding, I got destroyed) but a bond of kindred spirits had been formed.

Considering I lived across the hall from Buckets, we suddenly found ourselves knocking on each other’s door to play video games, head out to eat and talk about life. Our exterior lives were starkly different, but that fire I sensed was equal to my own. I could tell that he was destined for more, he just wanted a push.

That push came one Friday night when we were playing NBA and a good friend of mine texted me about an impromptu party at one of our annex houses. I turned to him and told him we were going out. It was at this point I got hit with his sobering truth.

“I’m a virgin”

Of course, I thought at that time I could get anybody laid (I had just been awarded Wingman of the Year by my fraternity) so I let him know to stick with me and we would fix that. We went out that first night and I learned three distinct things:

1. I had no idea how the game worked for me, let alone for my friend.

2. My advice of “Be Confident” and “Talk about whatever you want with girls” was not particularly helpful.

3. Things that I said versus what Buckets said, regardless of if they were the same words or not, received different reactions.

That last one really hit me hard. Those old standbys have always worked for me. WHAT. THE. FUCK. Buckets decided to leave early. I didn’t blame him, I had failed him, but a new goal had started in my mind. It didn’t exist at the time, but we had just begun our TRP journey together.

“I want to start lifting…”

Buckets knocked on my door the following Monday. I went to the gym at 5 every day in college, and he said to me straight up. “I want to start lifting, can you help me?” Something I know well. I started lifting at 16 because when you’re 6’ tall and weigh 145 lbs you’re easy to tackle and pathetically easy to block. By the time I met Buckets in college I was 195 at a lean 12% body fat.

One of the pieces of advice always parroted around this sub is to go lift. At that time I had only lifted for two reasons: To get better at sports and to prepare for Ranger School. It had never even crossed my mind that girls responded to my size. In fact I still didn’t fully internalize that until I found TRP nearly a year ago. But looking back, this was the spring board of Buckets transformation.

I knew that in this endeavor, I wouldn’t let Buckets down. I asked him what his goal was and he said “deadlift 400 lbs”. I didn’t need to ask anything else. He had set a goal, a lofty one for a man of 5’7”, but a clear and defined goal. In my mind, motivations change and grow but your goal is your goal, and if you had a clear vision of what that is, nothing can stop you. No matter what happened, we went to the gym 5 days a week every week for the rest of college.

Without realizing it we had come up with our first Maxim: You Are Your Goals

Mine was to get to, and pass Ranger School. His was to deadlift 400 lbs. We allowed nothing to get in our way

Confidence is a side effect of comfort

About three months after Buckets started lifting he took a job as a cashier in the campus coffee shop. I was getting him to approach girls in the wild, with limited success because he still lacked the inner confidence to say hi with conviction and without fear. I was pepping him up all I could but he needed something more. I credit this job with his journey to extroversion more than anything else.

I could see it happen all on its own. In the first month after he took this job he had begun saying hi and making small talk with the customers at the coffee shop which was an excellent cross section of the student body. So it wasn’t just hot girls, it was football players, it was foreign exchange students, it was alumni and parents. His confidence to make small talk grew simply because he learned that not only is it ok to talk to strangers, they are more than usually open to talking in general. He also learned that if they don’t want to talk, that’s ok because there is an endless stream of people behind them who will.

After the three months I began to notice that my friend Buckets had become quite the little chatterbox. I didn’t mind, this was the Buckets that I met at the beginning of the year, now everybody was meeting him for the first time. I knew Buckets before he was cool.

After four months, he was a regular social butterfly, and the girls were starting to notice. I’d take him to parties and he would not only hold his own but often times make friends and genuinely enjoy himself, a huge contrast to that fateful Friday night at my fraternity’s annex.

This is the key point. He earned his confidence, and he did it all by himself. When he became self-aware of his progress (He didn’t always believe that he was improving, even when I told him he was) we added to our list of maxims: Everything is Earned

But something was still missing. His body had become visibly larger, he had new and stylish clothes to cover his newfound size, he spoke with confidence and girls were responding positively to him, but he still wasn’t nailing sorostitutes.

The whole school year had passed and Buckets was still a virgin. I guess I had forgotten about it, but he wasn’t defeated. Besides, we were moving into an off campus house the next year that would double as one of my fraternities annexes. “Keep doing you, bud. I’ll see you in the fall”

Monk Mode and time for reflection

I looked back on the year that summer. I had hooked up with 24 girls and Buckets had 0. What am I doing right? Why can’t I teach it? In retrospect “being arrogant as fuck” isn’t advice, and while it’s technically true, leaves a lot open to interpretation. Fuck, this is hard. I chose a different approach. I started to think in terms or how things felt. How did I feel at certain points in conversations and how did I think they felt at those same points. I came away with a few sticking points.

When a girl started to say or do things that I liked, I would give them pleasure. If they said or did things didn’t like, I would apply some pain. I did that with everybody actually. Add in a dose of abundance (didn't call it that at the time but its what it was) and I had started to figure it out.

Now don’t misunderstand me here, I didn’t slap girls like it was the 50s. When I applied pain I would limit attention, give them a subtle check or remember that everybody loves me and move on entirely. When I was rewarding girls for doing things I liked I would take them on dates, do stuff together, and invite them over to hang out with my friends.

Buckets hadn’t figured that out yet. He was still trying very hard to impress girls, and with my unfortunate advice to that point, he had done nothing to take them off the pedestal. Luckily, I had a game plan, and school was back in session.

The Alpha is born

I wasn’t the only one who had done some serious reflection. When we moved in Buckets, who hadn’t stopped lifting over the summer and was looking damn big, had come to a similar conclusion that I did. He told me that he was tired of being walked over and was going to stand up for himself more. I held my tongue on what I had come up with over the summer because I was intrigued. Let’s see what the kid can do.

That night we had our housewarming party and the kid stuck to his word. He was confident in himself, talked about what he wanted and punished girls who disrespected him. He still didn’t get laid but I could tell that the girls were starting to react to him differently. The way a girl would for an Alpha Male.

He had successfully whet their appetites; he just needed a little refinement. So that week we talked at length about our two guiding principles and third maxim: Everything Stems From Pleasure and Pain

Armed with knowledge and a new found respect for himself, we went out the next week and it finally happened for him. A little over a year after I met Buckets he lost his virginity. He didn’t allow that to stop him either. His goal to deadlift 400 lbs never wavered. He never blew off the gym to spend time with a random whore. He never allowed any sorostitute to lock him down. He was the center of his own circle of friends as genuine as I’ve ever seen.

Like a proud parent I watched Buckets grow up before my eyes. Those last two years at college were the best of my life.

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Conclusions

• MAXIM #1: You Are Your Goals

• MAXIM #2: Everything is Earned

• MAXIM #3: Everything Stems From Pleasure and Pain

Buckets is my best friend from college and I am proud to tell his story, but for a different reason than you might think. Because he did it on his own. All I did was give him the push he needed. My effect on his progress was in fact minimal at best. But, what I want readers to realize is that even though he did it on his own, there were a lot of down times, a lot of frustration and yes, even physical tears. He may have figured the game out but I was there to pick him up when he fell and refocus him when he was veering off the tracks. In the end, I felt the pride of what I could only imagine a father feels when watching his son grow up. I can only imagine how Buckets felt.

This might be a long winded way to say TRP theory works but it does. Let Buckets be one of your success stories.

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P.S. - For everyone wondering if Buckets ever pulled 400 from the floor, he did. It took him just over 2 years to do it.

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