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They're so hypnotised by their environment through the media, through television, through people living and creating an ideal that everybody struggles to become that no one can actually become in terms of physical appearance and definitions of beauty and valor that are all illusions that most people surrender and live their lives in mediocracy.
And they may live that life and their soul may never really, their desire may never really rise to the surface, so they may want to be something else.
But if it does rise to the surface, and they asks themselves if there is something more.
Or why am i here? What is the purpose of life? Where am i going? What happens when i die?
They start to ask those questions, they start to flirt and interact with the perception that they
may be having a nervous breakdown. And in reality, what they're doing is
that their old concepts of how they viewed their lives and the world starts
to fall apart.
Great god will come from the skies,
Take away everything
And make everybody feel high.
But if you know what life is worth,
You will look for yours on earth:
And now you see the light,
You stand up for your rights.
In your struggle for self
And the world makes you
King for the day.
Just go to a mirror and look at yourself
And see what
THAT man has to say.
For it isn't your mother or father or wife
Whose judgement you must pass,
The fellow whose verdict counts most in your life,
Is the one staring back from the glass.
Some people may think you're a straight-shooting chum
And call you a wonderful friend,
But the man in the glass says you're only a bum,
If you can't look him straight in the eye.
He's the fellow to please, never mind all the rest
For he is with you clear up to the end,
And you've passed your most dangerous difficult test,
If the man in your glass is your friend.
You may fool the whole world down the pathway of life,
And get pats on your back as you pass,
But your final reward will be heartache and tears,
If you're cheating the man in the glass.
-Dale Wimbrow
-kierkegaard
-Rich
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."
-Christian
-Coach Carter
"Uhhhhhh, about the movie?" I asked, knowing he meant something more but trying to give myself time to think. "No," he responded coolly. "You know what I mean—about you, your life, anything, everything…"
"Uhhhhhh, I know for sure…uhhh…I know for sure I need to think about that question some more, Gene." I was clearly thrown and went home and thought about what he'd asked for two days.
I've since done a lot of thinking about what's certain, what's real, what's true. And Gene Siskel's question has inspired me to ask it of many others. Sometimes people (like me that first time) are caught off guard. But usually—as you'll see here—they rally with thoughtful and profound responses that reveal the essence of who they are.
— Oprah Winfrey
20 things
1. What you put out comes back all the time, no matter what. (This is my creed.)
2. You define your own life. Don't let other people write your script.
3. Whatever someone did to you in the past has no power over the present. Only you give it power.
4. When people show you who they are, believe them the first time. (A lesson from Maya Angelou.)
5. Worrying is wasted time. Use the same energy for doing something about whatever worries you.
6. What you believe has more power than what you dream or wish or hope for. You become what you believe.
7. If the only prayer you ever say is thank you, that will be enough. (From the German theologian and humanist Meister Eckhart.)
8. The happiness you feel is in direct proportion to the love you give.
9. Failure is a signpost to turn you in another direction.
10. If you make a choice that goes against what everyone else thinks, the world will not fall apart.
11. Trust your instincts. Intuition doesn't lie.
12. Love yourself and then learn to extend that love to others in every encounter.
13. Let passion drive your profession.
14. Find a way to get paid for doing what you love. Then every paycheck will be a bonus.
15. Love doesn't hurt. It feels really good.
16. Every day brings a chance to start over.
17. Being a mother is the hardest job on earth. Women everywhere must declare it so.
18. Doubt means don't. Don't move. Don't answer. Don't rush forward.
19. When you don't know what to do, get still. The answer will come.
20. "Trouble don't last always." (A line from a Negro spiritual, which calls to mind another favorite: This, too, shall pass.)
He starts in school, most important thing to him is to be liked by other little boys in school. And so, at this tender age, he begins to follow other little boys his age, who don't know anymore than he knows. and who do not necessarily have any capacity for leadership. And he does this is the first grade, the second and the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth and the seventh, year after year after year he forms himself into a composite average of every other little boys his age. Trying to be like them. Trying to do the only thing that is impossible for a human to do-to be like someone else.
Now let's say he goes all the way through school, usually into military service, and again he is caught in a vice-like grip of conformity and let's say he is 25 and out of school and out of school, what is he going to do? As a rule, he'll go back to his hometown, unless he is married he'll go to his wife's hometown.
But let's say he's single and he goes back to his own hometown and he doesn't know quite what to do and he is standing in a corner and one morning a friend he knew at school comes and say "Hi there charlie what are you doing?" He says "nothing" He says "why don't you come down to work where i work, it's a pretty good place, the pay is regular, we got all kinds of benefits and so on." And so he does. The odds are 95-5 that his first job is taken as a random application, on the job, without thinking about it, the most natural thing for him to do is to see how the other guys are doing their job and begins to do his in the same way.
Assuming that whatever is normal for them is normal for him. No reason for this, he doesn't think about it, he just does. Now stretch it infront of him 50 years or more in the golden age, what's he going to do in these 50 years? Well let's take a close look at it.
We know that he works 40 hours a week as a rule, which leaves him 72 hours a week when he is neither working nor sleeping. 72 discretionary hours each week to do as he pleases. Now, at this point of course he is married and has his little house and his little car, and this is what he does with his 72 hours a week, he'll do what the other fellas are doing with theirs-which is virtually nothing at all.
On a typical day, he'll get his car go back to his house, go to his little kitchen, kisses his wife, and tells her "I'm tired" Maybe even figure out why he says that. The experts believe that he used to hear his father say that back home when he gets tired working and he picked it up and simply repeats it every night. He eats his little meal and goes to the living room, and he turns on his escape box. *Click* Takes 15, 20 seconds to load, and in that period of time feels untolerable but he gets through somehow-maybe by tickling his dog, thumbs through the magazine or something.
Then the screen lights up and there infront of him he sees people with all kinds of funny costumes all killing each other. He sits there for about 5 to 6 hours, 25% of all free time is now spent infront of the tool, nothing wrong with this particularly except that he is watching other people who are earning excellent income in the pursuit of their careers, while he doesn't make a nickel.
And guess the kind of 2 things that you can only get from that kind of schedule is red eyes and a hollow head. Now this is not an indictment of television, i've got a few sets at home too. And i also have a few cars but i don't go around the block for 5-6 hours. If there is someplace i want to go, fine, my car will take me there. If there is a great program, fine, i wanna see it.
But he sits there for 5-6 hours until finally his wife goes there, pats his shoulder and says "Charlie i think you should go to bed, you gotta get up in the morning and go to work" He says " Okay " and he turns off the television and just goes to bed. The next morning he wakes up and he does this all over again. He does this every day, for 40 years. At the end of 40 years he is retired
But it is a terrible tragedy if he lives that way because of a total lack of a decision. If he is living that way simply because, he still doing what he did in the first and second grade, thats going along with the fellas up and down the block, on the unspoken assumption that they know how to live, then there's a real tragedy there-because they've never known how to live, not in all the recorded history of mankind. He never finds out who he is.
He never reaches into the deep depths of his abilities, his talents. He never learns that he can have, just about anything he wants in the world and that he can call his own shots, tell his own fortune-and that is kind of a pity."
"I believe nature's a lot smarter than anybody thinks. During the course of a man's life he develops a lot of pleasures and people he cares about. Then nature takes them away one by one. It's her way of preparing you for death."
Among the advice D'Amato gave Tyson was this oft-cited lesson of the hero and the coward: "The hero and the coward both feel the same thing, but the hero uses his fear, projects it onto his opponent, while the coward runs. It's the same thing, fear, but it's what you do with it that matters."
