Finding Purpose & Satisfaction

March 5, 2010

Off to the Dominican for a much-needed vaca tomorrow…

You’re going to see some big ol’ changes coming down the pipe here soon – we want to get broader with the advice we’re giving.  There will be a lot of stuff on interaction skills and game, but also quite a bit on confidence, purpose, etc. – it’s what we’re passionate to engage our clients and readers with, and ultimately, it leads to great change and transformation.  So with that, here’s a very, very quick answer to a reader question… with his permission, of course.

———

Hey Christian,
First off, gotta say I really dig your guy’s approach to all this. You understand many of us follow various dating “gurus” via their mailing lists, and you speak to that. Awesome. Further, you don’t talk like weirdo pick up artists. You talk and come across like regular, down to earth, cool guys. That is exactly the type of person I prefer to be friends with and who I am willing to take advice from.

Ok, enough ego stroking. On to my question.

I understand fundamentally the notion that one must be totally in love and passionate with their own life in order to attract the high quality women who, by nature, share the same quality. I’ve had this quality in the past, in fact most of my adult life, until recently. I have more free time (that I do fill with awesome activites that I enjoy) and a well paying job. But, I can’t seem to recapture that zest for being alive every day, that excitement for things to come and things I enjoy. I’ve lost it along the way. Truth is, I’ve always tended to view life through grey sunglasses when I’m without an awesome woman in my life. How does a guy like me get past this?

Thanks,
C

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Hey C. Thanks for the very kind words… always appreciate hearing some honest thoughts.

It sounds like there are a lot of great things going on in your life. But without knowing too much about your job, it sound like a lot of your life serves yourself.  When I was in my early twenties, I had a good job, nice girlfriend, and spent a lot of time racing my bmw :) but I was definitely missing something.  And I know what you mean about the listlessness of life when you don’t have a cool girl.  The ONLY thing that has mitigated that for me has been making my life so awesome, and so much my own, that having a cool girl in it is more of a magnifier, than it is a transformation.

I think that for guys in our situation, the next step is to find a cause outside of yourself that you can get excited about.  It could be educating kids about how to sail, or raising money for haiti, or volunteering at a hospice (I’ve done that last one and trust me, it’s not easy).    I’m fortunate that my business gives me a mouthpiece to share some of my values with the world and hope that it affects them, but even if you’re not in the exact same situation, the goal is to find something that you can take *ownership* of.  And it doesn’t even have to be humanitarian in nature (although there is no greater joy than giving to others – I really believe that).  There’s a difference between participating/contributing to something, and owning/building it.  I suspect that finding a project or cause that you can really own in heart and in mind will give your life some added dimension, and rather than being a hobby that occupies your time, it will be a part of you that occupies others.  Make sense?

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And I’d like to actually revise my initial statements.  Having a girl in your life who offers you the ability to evolve and yes, maybe even transform a little bit, is very, very healthy.  For more on that, please see Nick’s article entitled The Honeymoon’s Over.

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What If You’re Super-Picky?

January 2, 2010

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Feedback Threshold, Women and Entrepreneurship

December 4, 2009

One of the concepts we discuss on Unbreakable is the feedback threshold.  It’s an important concept in most parts of your life, and I want to give you a few examples of how it plays out in your success in just about everything you do.

The way we define a feedback threshold is thus: it’s a specific amount of feedback that you need and/or can accommodate before you take action in a given direction.

I know that’s kind of broad, let’s get more specific.

If you have a high feedback threshold for positive acceptance, then that means that you need a lot of acceptance before you will feel good about yourself.  If you have a low feedback threshold for positive acceptance, then you will not need much acceptance before you feel good about yourself.

It goes both ways though; we just considered a “positive” piece of feedback.  To flip it around,  if you have a high feedback threshold for negative rejection, that means that you can accept a lot of rejection before you call it a night.  And if you have a low feedback threshold for negative rejection, you may not even get out of the gates and approach a woman.

This can be charted against a please:pain continuum; for those not familiar, people are typically motivated either towards pleasure, or away from pain, and there is usually a stronger tendency for one vs. the other.  Risk-averse people are typically pain-avoiders, and risk-tolerant and risk-courting people are often pleasure seekers.

This all plays itself out at many points in your interactions with others; at some point, we’re going to put together a program called Fire that dives into this.  For now, I’m sure you can start to consider how this principle plays out in your head and in your life.  Conscious recognition of this sticking block is the first step in addressing it, and guys with really bad approach anxiety are often dealing with feedback threshold issues.

But it plays out elsewhere too…

I’ve now started more businesses than I can count on one hand; some have become proper operating entities with employees and payroll and whatnot, others were nothing more than glorified projects.  I’ve had a boss for about 2 of the 14 years I’ve been involved in “business” broadly, and while I have a hard time working for people, the flipside is that I have to be self-motivating… which I’m not, always.

But what happens when good feedback starts rolling in?  Your customers, clients, etc. essentially become your boss.  You can be lazy, unprofessional or carefree (and I’m guilty of having been all of those at points), but once you get the ball rolling, the feedback loop of positive reinforcement keeps rolling and gaining momentum, and all of a sudden, you’re off.  You no longer want to be lazy or unprofessional because not only does it not pay, but you’re actually having fun (which is what’s going on now with this company, btw).

Two examples: years back, I started a project with a friend where the plan was to do hidden mic audio of live interactions.  No one else was doing it at the time, and we thought it would make a good monthly program. Well, we took some time to figure out how we would get up and running.  Both of us were being extremely cautious, neither wanted to spend money to build it, etc.  There was absolutely zero feedback coming in from the outside – we were pre-launch.  Frustrated by our interia after two months of being risk-averse, I finally went in and spent a few hundred dollars on equipment, and lo and behold, we launched the program three weeks later.  That one step pushed everything else into action.

As a second example, we’re currently in the process of revising our live coaching programs.  We’re eliminating bootcamps and moving entirely to a custom coaching model.  I’ve been meaning to allocate time to getting the process right for evaluating clients needs… and everything is in my head, I just need to get it onto paper.  But it’s been on my to-do list for four days… frustrating.  Tonight though, I received an email from someone suggesting something very similar this sort of coaching model, pointing out how it would work for people like him, and encouraging me to think about it.  That one email was feedback enough for me to move it to the top of tomorrow’s agenda.

Anyone who’s been in software sales knows that you can’t just go implement every feature request that one particular customer wants. Lest a reader think I’m advocating some sort of reactivity here, that’s not the case.  Rather, in the live coaching example, it was a vision that was formulated a few weeks ago, something I’ve been meaning to move on for some time, and all of a sudden, the feedback I needed to light a fire under my ass hit me.

This was a small example.  I’m advising a friend who’s starting an internet software company, and he’s been going for about a year now in trying to define his vision, then get others onboard to help execute it.  There have been a couple of misfires and missteps, but he keeps on going, and going, because his self-determination and self-belief (and hopefully a little encouragement by his inner circle) have been enough to drive him forward.

And speaking of vision… since I’m writing this article on December 4, 2009, I think we’ve got to show some respect to Hova, who’s turning 40 today.  A little apropos love from “Heart of the City”:

Look scrapper I got nephews to look after
I’m not looking at you dudes, I’m looking past you
I thought I told you characters I’m not a rapper
Can I live? I told you in ninety-six
that I came to take this shit and I did, handle my biz
I scramble like Randall with his
Cunningham but the only thing running is numbers fam
Jigga held you down six summers; damn, where’s the love?

The broader lesson here, with respect to business/projects/entrepreneurship is this: depending on the size of your vision, you may have to go a long time without getting any positive feedback (and you may have to withstand some negative feedback along the way).  But if you believe in that vision (or, in the case of the fair sex, if you believe in yourself), you’ll push through the negative feedback, and soldier on without needing the validation of positive feedback, until that vision becomes truly manifest.

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What is Confidence?

December 1, 2009

I’ve never taken anything but straw polls on the matter, but ask any woman what she wants in a man, and “confidence” is sure to be one of the top three or four character traits.  So it’s worth spending some time asking ourselves what it is and how to discover it inside of yourself.  Our Unbreakable program really drives into the heart of it, but I think we can do the subject matter some service here without spending 30 pages on it.

Let’s start with a definition.  To me, confidence is a feeling you have that drives bold actions towards things you want.  It is having some faith in yourself that when you speak up, people will listen, and when you go for something, you’ll get it.  It’s trusting yourself, but beyond that, it’s a force that drives action.

When you make the approach, or go for the kiss, or invite her back to yours, it’s because you trust that she’s going to like you and want to go along with it.  And if she doesn’t, confidence is having the faith in your skills to overcome her protestations.  And if she rejects you, confidence is having the feeling that you’re still an awesome guy.

Confidence builds on a lot of things.  Knowing that you have skills gives you confidence.  Knowing that you have more important things in your life – a solid foundation – gives you confidence.  Knowing what you want and being clear about it gives you confidence. So does having a sense of entitlement.

Ahh, and that’s the rub, right there.

Confidence doesn’t actually have to be based on any great soul search – it can merely come from feeling like the world owes you twenty times over, then going out and collecting that debt.  Some people are just born and/or raised that way.

Now, what usually happens in life is that we keep on going after what we want, until a roadblock is thrown in front of us.  If we manage to avoid that roadblock, or blast right through it, we build some confidence. But if it stops us, diverts us, or worst of all – if we crash into it and body parts go flying – we have to have a serious think about both the direction we were headed, and how quickly we could get there.

Let’s consider this in practice.  When a third grade boy goes to hold a girl’s hand and, after she casually slaps him away once, she then accepts his romantic little overture, something clicks inside this little boy’s head and reinforces the notion that he can get away with such behavior.  By fifth grade, he’s planting kisses on the cheeks of any girl he can convince to join him under the jungle gym, and he’s full-on smooching (no tongue, of course) six months later.  Players are made, not born… and this player just happened to get a head start on the rest of us.  He encountered a small roadblock in third grade, drove right through it, and every subsequent time that he’s seen a similar looking roadblock, he knows what to do.

You can probably imagine the flipside of this story.  The boy who got held up by that roadblock convinced himself that women didn’t like him, and continued to tell himself that story well into his early adult years.  Then one day, he realizes that he’s not very confident around women, and finds himself reading this article.

Lack of confidence doesn’t always have such obscure causes, though.  Sometimes we gather a fairly large head of steam, then run into a roadblock sizeable enough to compel us into a Come to Jesus moment.  Again, we can use a story to illustrate…

In the late winter / early spring of 2006, life was humming along nicely for me. I had a great circle of friends, I was the CEO of a promising beverage startup, and was dating a great girl.  But within a three-week period, everything turned around – my company failed to clear a critical regulatory hurdle, leading to a battle with my partner that caused me to lose my stake in the company, and left me nearly six figures in debt.  My girlfriend left me, and took with her big parts of our mutual social circle.  And my best friend stopped hanging out with me… and started spending a lot of time with my now ex-girlfriend.

I’ve had my share of humdingers, but nothing this acute in such short a timeframe.  And it perfectly illustrates the point; I was a cocky mofo in the months leading up to this experience.  But the subsequent months were spent reflecting upon what had happened, and more importantly, what mistakes I’d made that led to such circumstances.  Had I failed to surround myself with the right people?  Had I been careless in managing my business?  Had I seen warning signs and ignored them?

I’m is a bit more confident these days – you can be assured of that – but it comes from knowing myself better and trusting myself more.

One common thread in any story about confidence – whether it be those illustrated above, or those from any other confident person you’ll talk to, is the following: their confidence came from clearing the roadblocks.  That’s always how it is.  You can prepare to clear the roadblocks if you see them ahead, or you can scout for alternate routes, or you can be lucky enough to have great reflexes so that you’re able to adopt on the fly.  But at the end of the day, true confidence comes from getting past them and getting closer to your goals.

The metaphor here should be obvious.  Becoming confident with women ultimately requires that you become successful with women.  There’s no shortcut or instant, Matrix-style brain download that can compete with real experience and real success.  The neural pathways in your brain have a way of wiring themselves through experiences that no amount of cogitating and preparatory thinking can achieve.  In that way, it’s a sort of weird Catch-22.  So how do you get around it?

Of course, there are lots of things that can boost your confidence with women prior to achieving of all-out pimpdom.  Success in any other part of your life has spillover effects into your pursuit of the feminine. Dressing better, making cooler friends, getting in shape, learning a new skill or hobby… those all help, and we’ll be getting into them in a bit.  Even hypnosis CDs and other such self-help programs can contribute.  But if you spend too much time dwelling on the periphery of the issue of confidence with women, without dealing with it directly, you’re just postponing the inevitable.

How to break the logjam? Well, it’s kind of weird… but you just start doing the things you need to do.  You just go do it, and all of a sudden, good stuff starts happening.  You feel better about yourself for going after it.  You stop having those regretful nights of “what if I’d talked to her?” or “what if I’d escalated?”.  Whether you succeed or fail, you know you went for it.  Then you regroup, figure out how to overcome the next roadblock, and go back out there.

You just keep doing.  You get out there and you do some more, until those roadblocks aren’t stopping you anymore.  It’s frustrating sometimes, and depending on how well you learn and how devoted you are, it could take a little bit of time or a lot.  But the confidence from being a man who does, who takes action, is a force to be reckoned with.

And what is action’s opposite?  Analysis, and paralysis.  Your time as a single man is precious and to be enjoyed; waste it at your own peril, and eventual regret.  English poet Andrew Marvell, attempting to seduce a young lady, and having no unlimited nationwide text plan available in the 17th century, put it thusly in rhymed verse:

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Your days on this terra firma are limited, and the longer that you postpone your pursuit of the feminine, the closer you are to that fine and private place.  Action is all that matters.  Repeated, disciplined action and eventual success breeds confidence like nothing else.

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How to Cure Neediness

November 22, 2009

How to Cure Neediness

This one was composed with the help of Christian Hudson and Nick Sparks. You should also be able to see a bit of influence from Sebastian Drake, too.

Dear Asian Rake David,

Quick question: I’ve got this nagging feeling of  ‘neediness’ that I haven’t been able to shake. I think I’ve been too influenced by having had a long-term relationship because my ex-girlfriend and I used to do everything together—watch movies, go on holidays, etc. I’m wondering if you ever experienced the same thing. Any tips on how to resolve this?

Yours, Mitchell

Hey Mitchell,

Yeah, I totally know what you mean. There is good news and bad news for you.

The bad news

In fact, what you are feeling is something that will probably take a long time to go away. For me, I continued to feel this in any slow period of my life. “Slow” as in I wasn’t busy with work AND I was only seeing one or two girls at the time. It took me over two years to learn how to control this feeling.

The good news

This is relatively easy to correct in the moment. But the corrective is more like a palliative. There is a deeper root issue that needs to be addressed in order to deal with this permanently.

For quick fixes, you should do stuff to change your emotional states.

1. Let it all out.

First, have a nice cry and self-pity session to let it all out, but keep it to less than a half hour or so. Do NOT contact any women when you are in this state.

Then, take immediate action.

2. Eliminate the mental garbage from pop media.

I find that throwing out all those pathetic, cheesy, girly, romantic-comedy movies was a significant factor. Especially avoid anything from Korea, lol. Instead, watch manly movies like Fight Club or Entourage.

Also, don’t listen to any songs having to do with love or romance. Yes, that’s the majority of pop songs. Instead, I like to listen to instrumental jazz or some martial classical music. It gets your mind moving in the right direction.

In Unbreakable, Christian and Nick discuss the difference between Jay-Z and Dashboard Confessional.  The latter is a whiny emo band and all of their songs are self-indulgent pity fests about how in love he is with some girl. The former, well how about this line… “Not guilty, he who does not feel me is not real to me, therefore he doesn’t exist so poof…vamoose son of a bitch.”  I always think about drawing conclusions between champs and chumps.

3. Talk it out with a good friend who will challenge you.

You could phone a good guy friend who is more mature than you, and just talk out your feelings of neediness with him. He should challenge you to man the fuck up and to help you realize how irrational you are feeling.

4. Take care of your biochemistry.

Watch what you eat. Do not indulge in sugary or oily foods. That bowl of ice cream or gravy-drenched poutine might make you feel better while you’re eating it, but you will pay emotionally and physically for a lot longer after you’re done.

Instead, fill your body with food that will nourish you and release good neurotransmitters. What you want is the good stuff—dopamine, serotonin, endorphins. Stock up on high protein foods like fish, chicken, eggs, almonds, and dark green veggies. You can also try high carbohydrate foods like whole grain bread and pastas, rice, cereal, and juicy fruits.

Hit the gym HARD. Work out your body. Do something physical. Reconnect with your physicality so that you’re not always in your head. Do some martial arts. Hit the punching bag. Jump in the ring and do some sparring.

As a sidenote, every Asian man (indeed, every man) should master some martial art. I did Kung Fu and Tae Kwon-do as a kid, rising to the level of a junior black belt by the time I hit high school. But I hadn’t done much training since then until I moved to Singapore, where I quickly discovered martial arts gyms on every corner, including some martial arts clubs with full-on boxing rings, Muay Thai rings, MMA cages, and the works. I’ve since gotten a private trainer for Krav Maga, and it’s been awesome for physical conditioning, preparing me for street fighting, and making me feel more balanced and centered emotionally and mentally.

For a good long-term fix, as well as a short-term kick, Nick advises “drop and go compliments”—dropping random compliments, then leaving. The key is walking away without hesitation after you deliver it. You’re not looking for anything back from her. You’re not allowed to even concern yourself with her response. Just drop and go. That way you’re both giving and tempering yourself to turn your back on a woman, a necessary talent in today’s day and age.

But really these are just band-aid solutions.

THE REAL SOLUTION: The real problem is that you are not yet complete by yourself. You are still looking for external things to complete you. In this case, you are looking for the companionship of a woman.

You need to learn to be content with yourself and all by yourself, like you are stranded on a deserted island all by yourself but you know you’ll still be okay. Sure, it’d be great to have around you lots of people who love you. But you see that as a luxury, not a necessity.

Think of Tom Hanks in the movie, Castaway. Could you deal with that situation if that were you? Would you be cool if all your friends and family deserted you, like literally, cut themselves off from you? Then you’d have no one else to turn to but yourself for strength. That’s what you gotta be like to get rid of this neediness feeling permanently. You’ve got to be okay with being on your own. You’ve got to be a real man.

For me, it still comes occasionally. But that’s usually when I’ve watched too many sappy movies, listened to too many sappy songs, pigged out on sugary foods and not worked out for a few days, and have only been hanging out with women.

One key resource is The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida. Find your current purpose in life. Make women and all those other externals secondary. Also, for a macho manifesto of discipline, self-determination, and hustle, check out The 50th Law by 50 Cent and Robert Greene. These will help give you perspective on how to “man up.”

Play on, The Asian Rake

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Speeches from the 21 Convention

September 8, 2009

Gotta love Anthony and his team… free HD hosting of all the videos from the 21 Convention we spoke at not long ago.  Nick talks about college game, and sex, and I talk about some more high-level concepts (i.e. what it is to grow up and be a man), as well as some technique stuff around the half hour mark.  These aren’t short… but there’s some great stuff in there.  Click on either to view…

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Your Sparkling Personality

July 12, 2009

Ever think about what a personality is?  And what really makes up a person with a charismatic personality?  I’ll let you in on the secret here…

Your personality is like a filter that puts a spin on all of the information your present.

So you could say hello.

Or if you were Kanye West you’d say “aye yo”.

Or if you were a surfer you’d say “heyyyy man.”

Of if you were a proper Brit you’d say “Cheerio.”

But its not just the local dialect you speak.  Your personality is *everything* that people feel when they’re talking to you.

So when you hear someone say that Nick Sparks has a “big personality,” it means that they really feel his presence when they’re around him.

And when a guy has “no personality”, it means that there’s nothing really unique that someone feels when they’re talking to him.

A female friend of mine has one of the cutest, most sparkling personalities of anyone I’ve ever met.  She can express more with a smile and a giggle than most people can with words.  And she’s the one who made me realize all of this.

So often when we get into ‘pickup’, we’re searching for the *right* thing to say.  That makes the presumption that we’ve been saying the wrong thing this whole time.

I’d submit that the *wrong thing* is only that which fails to engage a woman.  Guys with ALL DIFFERENT types of personalities and styles of interaction still manage to attract women.

Look at guys like Billy Walsh or Ari Gold on HBO’s Entourage.  Watch Russell Brand from some of the videos you can search for on YouTube.  And check out Nick Sparks’ interviews with cute girls on our website.  All of these guys have unique personalities… charismatic, compelling and attractive personalities.  All quite different, but all interesting.

They break the rules.  They don’t express stuff in plain and simple english or with plain and simple expressions. Think of basic written english as twelve notes on a piano. These guys manage to take those notes and make something interesting with them.

Ari Gold to his wife and a relationship counselor: “You can have [one hour of quality time a week] if you want to live in Agora-f*cking-hills, and go to group therapy, but if you want a Beverly Hills mansion, a country club membership, and nine weeks a year in a Tuscan villa, then I’m gonna need to take a call when it comes in at NOON on a MOTHERf*cking WEDNESDAY.”

Russell Brand, to a flirty female reporter: “I can’t make you c*m from over here!  I’m not that charismatic!”

Nick Sparks, to a girl bent over in front of him: “I’m so at one with the world right now.”
(http://www.thesocialman.com/talks-with-cute-girls-jennifer)

Interestingly, all of those lose half of their charm when you don’t see the delivery from Ari, Russell, and Nick.

So you can really break it down to some simple stuff. Just think: “what in the way I communicate is going to make the world feel compelled by the words I express, and the way I express them?”

It doesn’t have to be the same as anyone else. But you should take inspiration from wherever you find it.

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Ask The Social Man: guilt & religion vs. sex & seduction

April 27, 2009

A doozy of a question today: how to deal with the “guilt” associated with wanting to become better with women, especially if one was raised with a religion that has dim views on the subject?

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Ask The Social Man: what is charisma?

April 7, 2009

Today, we get a funnily-worded question that amounts to “what is charisma?”

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Ask The Social Man: getting out there!

March 23, 2009

Today’s question: “I’m ridiculously shy and unconfident.  How can I get better game? How can I improve my confidence?”

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