The end and the new beginning

When I started this journey two years ago, I just experienced a very personal loss in my life, no, not because a girl dumped me. That loss has left a wound in my life, thought it may never heal but it has continued to serve as a reminder to me, how I must cherish life and to value all those around me. However, I made one critical mistake in my state of grief, I gave up my own identity in trying to change into someone else.

A recent loss reminds me that once again of what is important to me in my life, it's about what I do that defines who I am. This blog was started less as a chronicle of my transformation but more out of frustration in discovering who I am, in developing a specific set of social skills. In the past two years of my journey, I have learned a great deal about myself: who I am, how others are, and more importantly, how we each play a role in two specific spheres, society and the market economy.

In blogging for the past 2 years, I had some insights just from writing and even more from interacting with readers & commentators. Of course, I also developed some lasting friendships. But starting today, I am moving on from this blog, I feel this blog has served its purposes and I might revisit some topics that I've discussed here. My focus in my new blog is more about what I do regularly: examining issues in depth, look beyond the marketing hypes, challenge what we are told, and determine the underlying motive, mechanism, and how we can use that to benefit ourselves.

Once I've finalized the new blog, I will redirect readers & visitors there.

Consistency, not fantasy

Every year, people knowingly make resolutions and few if any of those resolutions stick. Rather than chasing the impossible, we all would be better off in establishing simple habits so that we work gradually toward a final goal.

One of my many goals for last year was to develop a budget and stick to it. I have used Quicken on and off since 2001 and I have never been able to keep track of all my expenses. The first habit I establish was to learn to record all my expenditures. This habit took me nearly 1 year to develop and I have been able to do that consistently by setting aside a specific time in my schedule every week to get caught up on all my receipts.

Once I have established the habit of recording my all my incomes and expenditures, then I was able to see a pattern in where my money was going by grouping items in my record into categories: e.g., rent/mortgage, insurance premiums, utilities, and groceries into essential expenses, and then non-essential expenses such as shopping, movies, dining out, trips, etc. Along the way, one motivation that drove me to keep recording and working on my budget sheet wasn't the reward in how much money I saved but rather learning how to use Excel.

Part of my new job at that time was to process large-scale datasets within Excel and do further analyses inside databases. By combining work with what I do for fun at home, I was able to learn some new skills while saving money at the same time. People in business would call that synergy, I was just being lazy by combining two projects into one.

That's the trick with establishing habits, there must be incremental and immediate reward for habits to stick. Take losing weight for example, this isn't something that can be done overnight and for many people, this is a lifetime of struggles and most fail. The reason they fail is that most of them don't see the immediate and incremental reward. I started my workout regimen with a few buddies, many drop off because they couldn't stick to it, but those remain, we became very good friends in the process. Part of that workout regimen was the social aspect of hanging out with friends so the workout process wasn't tedious.

Back to the budget, after I have tracked my incomes and expenditures for nearly 1 year, it took me another 6 additional months to gradually taper down my non-essential spending to within my budget. Finally, the reward is to see how much I have increased in my savings and the interest I earn on a monthly basis. Another secret to having goals is to maintain a pattern of continuous improvement. Now that I have substantial savings, my next goal is to invest what I've earned into higher yield investment vehicles. That's another reason why people fail to loose weight, imagine that they have lost all that weight, what's next? For almost all of them, if they don't have any idea of what to do next, I'm sure they will revert back and regain all that weight.

As human beings, we improve by making incremental and continuous changes into habits. We establish habits by having consistency and self-discipline. There are tricks we can play with how we perceive ourselves. Instead of striving for lofty fantasies, we are better off taking small steps slowly.

Unnecessary mental gymnastics

Most of you probably know about Steve Pavlina and his blog. From his writing, I suspected that he is aware of the PUA community and not surprisingly, he started blogging about polyamory and his reasons for his participation. He went on and on and on to justify his interest, the real reasons are rather simple.

Let's be honest about our interest in having sex. There's really no need at all to justify our desire for sex, it is genetically programmed into us. And if someone has the opportunities to have as many sex partners as possible, and for many web-celebrities, bloggers included, why not? Why go through the whole Cirque du Soleil mental contortions of logic to present his case?! His desires don't require a rocket scientist or a neurosurgeon to explain. A 13-year-old boy can express them. What is interesting is that a 13-year-old boy probably doesn't realize that with money, Pavlina has acquired the power in his current marriage to exercise his desires. Imagine if he was a wannabe-PUA living with his current wife and 2 kids without his current 6-figure income, do you think she would let him to fulfill his desires?! That's how many celebrities (including but not limited to Hugh Hefner) have been doing for years. With fame and fortune, sex is readily available.

Another more sinister reason is that he is trying to generate traffic to his blog. Like all blogs, experiments and problems generate drama, that emotional discordance causes people to engage in more discussions which naturally will draw in more participants. I remember when I first started this blog, just the fact that I blogged about tidbits on how lame the real seduction community really is was enough to draw in readership. So with this new year, I will continue to blog, with a keener and more skeptical view on what goes on in the world, not just the blogosphere and the community.

The best way to get girls is have fame and fortune, short of that, most guys will end up with other losers and try to seduce each others. With that in mind, I will start blogging about other subjects that I have been pursuing.