Why it's important to Forge Your Frame

Hey guys, I'm a learner and writer about Success and Achievement and thought I'd share with you my thoughts about Frame and why it's important. It's not just useful in social situations, but for your entire life as well, in terms of career, goals, and getting motivated to wake up in the morning and having energy behind all your actions. It's my firm belief that success is 100% important to men, more important than chasing girls or sex. Any accomplishment for a man increases his attractiveness tremendously. It's priority #1 IMO, which is why I chose to write about it.

I hope you guys get value out of this and if you are interested I will post more of my essays on Success. You can also read Law#2, Forge your Frame on my blog, 64Laws if you prefer.

Here's my essay:

Your Frame is your Purpose * A mother protects her babies, even dying for them.* * A rags to riches story: the most unlikely person to succeed rises above challenges and obstacles with persistence and genius, refusing to accept poverty or failure.*

Advertising departments spend billions of dollars a year just to show you a commercial.

The TV Show Game of Thrones captivates a huge audience, who tune in for a new hour-long episode every Sunday night.

Do you see anything in common with these situations?

I do. They all involve Strong Frames.

A FRAME is a deep purpose in life. It is a commitment to that purpose, one you will spend time, money, and energy on, and possibly even give up your life for. It could be a business’s mission, an artist’s vision, a soldier’s sacrifice.

A FRAME is also a state of mind: a confidence in yourself, a faith in a religion, a belief in a cause.

A FRAME can even be a single-minded goal, such as a commercial getting you to think about their product, even for a few seconds, or a gym-goer focusing on finishing his workout, or simply an employee trying to get to work on time.

All of life is a battle between Frames: Strong vs. Strong, Strong vs. Weak, Weak vs. Weak. Some frames are unbreakably strong.

A mother will die for her babies: that’s how unbreakable her frame is. She will break before her Frame does. She has a deep purpose and commitment to the survival of her children. It’s doubtful anyone could pull her out of her Frame, away from that deep, biological purpose, into another less compelling one.

Now compare her frame to yours: your job, your current dreams, your current significant other, your children, your faith.

How strong are your Frames? What are you willing to sacrifice for their survival? Are you willing to give up drinking? TV? Cheating? Drug Addiction? Your free time? Money? Your health? Perhaps even your life?

These are important answers to consider. Because without a conscious life purpose – a strong Frame – you will be pulled away from your mission by weaker Frames in the form of distractions, temptations, diversions, obstacles, and other opportunities. You are easily pulled away from your mission in life by the first sign of trouble. You become weak and ineffectual.

If your Purpose – your Frame – is weak to begin with, all your Actions are weak. How can you infuse your Actions with strength if you don’t believe in what you’re doing? ** Weak Frames make weak people**, because without a strong Frame, they collapse from adversity. In fact, I’d go further and hypothesize that most weak people are not actually weak, but rather, have a weak frame. In other words, they have no strong purpose to believe in, so they seem weak because they don’t truly believe in anything they’re doing.

Our childhood years in school are a weak Frame because it is imposed upon us, an involuntary participation that we never agreed to. No wonder students have a hard time staying focused, dread homework, and in general find any excuse they can to play hooky. But take a student who has a natural interest in a subject, and they will read about it all night, all day, without the threat of homework or grades. That is Strong Frame.

Work, for a lot of unfortunate people, is also a case of their weak Frame losing out to the stronger Frame of the company. How many employees would continue working if the job stopped paying them? Not many. The salary is what incentivizes most employees to stay at jobs they don’t have any particular passion or attachment to. If they had complete freedom of choice, they’d likely do something else.

Consumerism is a soul-less Frame, because it has no deep meaning behind it. It’s empty. Get the latest gadget, buy the latest new car, collect more clothes and shoes and baseball cards and watches… And yet it is still a stronger Frame than many people’s internal Frame, which is quite sad.

Is it any wonder that so many modern people feel aimless and weak? Without purpose in life, our actions are half-hearted and thus ineffectual. And our weak internal Frames are constantly being hijacked by other’s Frames, as we lose awareness of our own.

A commercial or advertisement convinces you to spend money you don’t have on something you don’t really need. (Pulled into their Frame).

Every time a salesman pressures you into buying something you didn’t want (Pulled into their Frame).

When a guy (or girl) pressures another for marriage, sex, gifts, and the other person yields even if they didn’t want to (Pulled into their Frame).

Your parents or significant other push you into a safe, stable, lucrative profession, but you are ambivalent and passionless about it (Pulled into their Frame).

You can probably tell where I’m going with this, but I’ll repeat it again for emphasis:

Weak Frames make Weak People.

Weak Frames yield to Strong Frames.

Weak people live the entirety of their lives in other people’s frames.

If you want to be a successful person in life, your Actions need the power and solidity of conviction. You need to believe strongly in what you’re doing. You need the strength of a deep purpose, which gives you a Strong Frame that won’t collapse under pressure.

Once you learn about Frame, you start seeing it in all successful people, whether they’re artists, entrepreneurs, or prophets.

Jesus had it. He was the Messiah, or he was delusional, or he was a liar. Either way, he possessed one of the strongest Frames ever displayed by a human in history. Do you think Jesus was wishy-washy about who he was, or what he stood for? Did he go around full of self-doubt and second-guessing himself? His Frame pushed him to sacrifice his life for his purpose. Whether you believe in religion or Christianity, you have to admit that his Frame was strong, unbreakable, even, breaking himself on the cross before he would let his Frame break.

Buddha had it. He gave up his comfortable life of wealth behind safe palace walls and went out into the poverty-stricken, dangerous world because his Frame, his purpose, of discovering the truth was so strong.

Artists have it. They see the world with their unique vision, and they risk ridicule, poverty, and often their personal happiness in order to show you their unique vision of world – their frame.

Revolutionaries have it. They believe in the power and righteousness of their vision of society. Whether you love or hate their ideas, you have to respect that they devote their entire lives to doing what they think is right. That’s more than can be said for the majority of us.

Steve Jobs had it. His employees often spoke of his “reality distortion field.” Steve saw the world differently, and either you would bend to his Strong Frame, or you were out. Almost all his employees yielded to his Frame, as they should have: when you meet someone with an unbreakably strong, meaningful Frame, it’s an irresistible attraction to yield to it. You don’t often meet people in this world who have such strong purposes in life, much less have the opportunity to follow them and learn from them.

Tom Cruise has it. In an interview with Neil Strauss (writer of the famous PUA book, The Game), Tom stated that he never relied on the counsel of others. He would think about tough decisions on his own for several days, then once he decided something he would stick to it no matter what. The decision was solely his, from his deep conviction. This is Strong Frame – internally generated, internally motivated.

Our strongest Frames are deep inside us. You may need to draw them out, to discover them by exploring the world and experiencing as much as you can. It could be a long and difficult search, but it is well worth it.

The benefits are clear. No longer do you struggle with dragging yourself into work on Monday or let distractions interrupt you from your work. Your Actions are infused with purpose and strength, which others can sense. Seeing your Strong Frame, your conviction, they get out of your way, or even join your Stronger Frame, believing that you have a deeper, more meaningful, more rewarding purpose that they want to be a part of.

Frame even matters in relationships. Are you willing to walk away from friends or girlfriends and boyfriends who violate your Frame of being treated with respect and dignity? Desperate people have weak, desperate Frame, in which they see themselves as worthless and don’t deserve better treatment. They stick around, stuck in someone else’s unhealthy Frame, putting up with spouses who cheat, lie, abuse, and control them. They let themselves be pulled and pushed by others’ needs and actions, without any regard for what their own Frame tells them. They give up on their deep purpose and values, letting themselves be walked over.

Do you let your critics and doubters shut down your dreams? Do you give up the moment someone laughs at you, or tells you they think you will fail? Your feelings may be hurt, but the truth is, the fault is in you. Or rather, your weak Frame. You give up easily because you don’t really believe in what you’re doing, or in your ability to do it. At the first sign of resistance you crumble, broken into thousands of pieces from a few words of criticism, “You can’t do it”.

Contrast this with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Frame:

I remember that after I was finished with my body building career, I wanted to get into acting. I wanted to be a star in films. Everyone had the same mind that it can’t be done. Just look at your body. You have this huge monstrous body, overly developed, it doesn’t fit into the movies. But you know, I didn’t listen to all this, this was their rules. I was convinced I could do it. And then I got the big break in “Conan the Barbarian.” Trust yourself no matter how or what anyone else thinks.

Arnold holds to his frame (“I was convinced I could do it”) even in the midst of everyone telling him he can’t.

Strong Frames create Successful People.

Weak Frames lead to weak mindset which creates weak people.

Do whatever you can to find your own Strong Frame. Because it’s this world’s closest thing to magic. It turns cowards into giants, skeptics into followers, children into adults.

Maintain your own Frame.

Live YOUR deep purpose with conviction.

Know what you’re about and stick to it.