Life of opportunities

With few exceptions, most of our lives are more like yachts than powerful speedboats; i.e., we are subjected to the weather and the conditions of the water. There are ways we can exert control over our lives such that we can create opportunities that we can exploit. A sail boat might be at the mercy of the wind, but that doesn't mean it can't travel against the wind, it's all about having the right sails and using them in the correct manner. So having good looks might help us get girls, but there are things we can do to create more opportunities of meeting girls. The surest way have money is by selecting the rich parents, and once again, there are ways we can still be rich and live a comfortable life. I didn't say the road to get there is easy, but there are steps we can take that even out the odds against us.

This blog post isn't going to cover everything, but I want to introduce some avenues for people to explore. Take something simple like meeting girls or even having more friends. The community guys mostly focus on cold approaches. Sure, we can meet new people that way... but it will rarely yield much if any result, unless those "PUAs" really lower their standards. This leads me to suggest people should try having more friends instead. That would mean stop running games and trying to fuck every girl within arm's reach. However, we can still be flirty, fun, and social with everyone; the guy who organizes parties, and that people call to hang out, instead of being the community guy who go on forum to look for wings.

But there is more to being the social hub, we have to have the financial support, which means we have to have jobs or careers that can afford the lifestyle we want. In order for us to do well at work, we have to be prepared and can get the job done, which depends on our ability to be at peace with ourselves so that we can be at ease in most situations. In spite of all the job postings, most employers still hire many of their employees from referrals or people they know, but most job seekers are still looking for jobs through ads! Same can be said about how guys and girls meet. That's why we all must have a network of friends in many different career tracks and at different stages of their lives.

I realize this seems very intuitive, but people who are so hell-bent on reaching their goals often neglect this aspect of their lives. We sometimes stop not just to smell the roses, but to see what other flowers are around. So the first skill to master in creating opportunities is not to look for opportunities, but to build a bigger social circle, to have more friends! I'll continue about befriending people, maintaining friendships, and having good friends around. The goal of having friends is, once again, NOT to look or opportunities, if they arise great, but having friends should be sufficient! Purge any idea you have of trying to exploit people, looking for ways to take advantage of people, this is why many hustlers fail, most guys who are out looking for sex by gaming girls rarely get any.

What am I wondering this Wednesday...

Have you noticed that when people are preoccupied with one particular topic of discussion because they are having problems, failing at it, and probably overly obsessing about it but would not do anything about it?

Take this example, older adults with constipation would talk about their bowel movements obsessively. But people who don't have that problem, taking a dump is a regular ritualistic part of their lives, they rarely ever talk about their regularity. So for guys who constantly talk about getting girls, I wonder if they are also not getting sex... with girls... so to them, it's almost as insurmountable as Mt. Everest to a blind and quadriplegic climber. Just something I wonder...

If you are wondering why I haven't posted lately, I am busy with work... things I do to pay bills. You know, this whole passive income isn't working out, and my bootcamp / workshop won't be ready for awhile. Actually, I've been surrounded with mostly normal, social, and intelligent people. Without douche bags like community guys in my life, I don't have much to complain about.

Don't worry though, I have made some insights about life in general. How to create a life of abundance and opportunities... the methodical, one-day-at-a-time, plan. Stay tuned!

It is what it is...

Some people have read this and wondered why am I not what I appear to be on here. I know there are quite a few people try to psychoanalyze me using my posts here... good luck in figuring me out! The closest analogy I can think of this blog is this...

You know, when you consume an excess amount of veggies, and if you are not regular, may be you take some fiber supplements. So you feel a bit gaseous and have this urge to just let loose. Well, this is what this blog is for me. This is my mental crapper. If you haven't tried colonic, I find blogging as a wonderful relief for the mental constipation that I sometimes feel. So you've been warned! Don't bother turning on the fan so that you can clear the air and get a glimpse of what's happening. Don't bother lighting candles to cover up that smell. On the one hand, the stench drives many away, but on the other, people are inherently curious to see what's up. So here you are.

Once in awhile, you might find a gem or two in my posts. It's like hunting for diamonds in a landfill. If you do find diamonds there, they probably are not the result of spontaneous localized pressure that created diamonds in situ, but someone accidentally discarded them. In other words, my ideas have probably been published elsewhere or that people don't realize that how valuable their ideas really are, at least for me! I don't expect people to get what I post right away or to even understand why I blog in the first place. I blog because I can.

MANY people use blogs as a marketing tool, which I do sometimes when I feel the urge to experiment or to mess with people. Some bloggers use this as a tool to seek validation or to prove something to someone out there in the ether. Some chronicle their lives online, some lie, some fabricate, some exaggerate, more bullshit as far as I'm concerned. There are some bloggers who use this medium to advocate for something. A few try to be helpful, which I did long ago and I think some of my ideas have taken hold or at least helped people kill time. I'm not egotistical enough to think that I can change the world, I just make the best of it.

In the end, I go for a good laugh. You probably won't find what I post here that funny or I would have became a professional comedian. This is also not a good place to keep a tab on me or to stalk me online, it's almost like looking at my shit to figure out what I ate. You better be a professional in forensic. And believe me, eating is not the only activity I do but it sure seems to be if you are a regular reader of my blog! I'm not going to pretend to be someone I'm not, and if you ask people who truly know me, they will tell you that I... I'm just one among six billions. The world is a big & wondrous place with plenty of people.

My focus is rarely on the few winners, not that I want to or can be the champion for the underdog, I believe people should go for what works for many instead of buying into the marketing hype. I can appreciate the nuance and complexity within my reality. It is what it is... for me. Don't worry, I will go back to making fun of closeted gays in the community and delusional dumbfucks who buy into the whole self-improvement & passive income bullshit, I'm juvenile that way.

Valuing diversity

If you are reading this blog, you probably have wondered, why is this lunatic so negative? How does this fool even get up in the morning? How on earth does he manage to get anything done? Why is he so critical? Why can't he be more positive? Why doesn't he praise me more and tell me that I'm a good person and I'm worthy to be alive?! All because I am very special and unique, just like the rest of the 6 billion people on Earth!

Well, I'm not your mommy who coddled you. I don't want to be the daddy you wish you had. I sincerely believe that we have the possibility of doing anything and achieving whatever goals we set for ourselves. All I am pointing out is the realistic probability of accomplishing them. According to the laws of quantum mechanic and what we know of elementary particles, it's possible that we can walk through walls, but the probability of aligning particles just right for one particular person to walk through any one wall is infinitesimally small. Yet, dreamers continue to fantasize. There will always be another get-rich-quick scheme right around the corner. You can get your student loans paid off without having an income. There will be another Nigerian prince who needs to use your bank account to transfer money out of his country. In a few more months, someone will come up with yet another fool-proof method of getting girls. I would be very selfish if I don't tell you about my plan to have a massive passive income from blogging so that I can retire from my real job. And there will be a cure for cancer too!

There are couple of culprits for fueling this delusional thinking in people. The main cause being the feel-good self-esteem building humanist movement that started in the 1970's. This problem is especially prevalent among American kids who grew up in single-mother households; they are brought up to think they are kings and queens of the world without their fathers to rein in their childhood fantasies. Most of them think that they can be anything they want, all because their mothers told them so, but almost everyone of these kids is expecting constant praise to get anything done! So the end result is that we now have grown ups with the Peter Pan syndrome failing to live up their dreams and of course, they blame everyone else for their problems except themselves.

Well, life is tough and it's about time that someone comes along to smack some sense into this whole bullshit self-improvement I-can-be-anything movement. Truth is, I think this movement is a joke and I'm not the only person to see the whole absurdity of it all. This reminds me of a dear Jewish friend of mine who explained to me. According to him, had all Jews been positive and optimistic during World War II, while Hitler and his minions were gassing his people, none would have escaped and continued what's left of their culture. That, my dear readers, is why in difficult times, the genes of people who examine life realistically, critically, and to many, negatively, persist and thrive. In periods of prosperity, the delusional optimists will triumph without any doubt. But when shit hits the fan, just like when this whole housing bubble popped and the hedge funds collapsed, who will come clean up the mess?!

Instead of waiting for disasters, we might as well prepare for them. Better yet, we should call out those hustlers. When something is too good to be true, it probably is. Nearly one year ago, I got into a huge flame war on a forum for calling out two hustlers who claimed to have game; I waited until they started to rip people off. A few months later, another group of hustlers tried. Not even half a year later, another hustler emerged and yet another recently. So instead of asking people to pay for his dinners, or pay him half-price for his expert dating advice, he was asking for people to give him money in unmarked envelope and the latest one, give him gift cards! Wait until the IRS get wind of their "income." At what point do people see these internet forums for being the cesspools of losers and hustlers?!

Putting these entertaining anecdotes aside, the world is a big place and there are many types of people with differing opinions. I'm sure some of those optimists have done some good things and a few have achieved beyond their wildest dreams. But those are miracles, and miracles are exceptions. Just as there are some comatose patients who wake up after decades-long comas, what we don't ever get to see are the tens of thousands who died of bed sores. Just as in almost every lottery drawing, we will get to watch the jubilation of one or a few winners, but we will never find out the millions more who lost. So instead of paying to win that lottery drawing or waiting to wake up from that coma, we can follow many well-known well-trodden traditional paths to success. Better yet, if someone thinks s/he is so special and unique, s/he should go discover his/her very own path to success instead of paying some hustler to learn to do it. Be creative and be original!

Originality & creativity

Most IQ tests measure how many factoids someone knows or at best, some reasoning skills, such as manipulating 3D objects, solving an abstract puzzle, etc. and then, normalizing those results with the overall general population. IQ tests measure skills that serve some useful purposes in life, and many of them are essential for doing well in schools. IQ tests don't really test for the comprehensive intelligence that we all imagine, but rather, they provide some predictive values in how well someone would do in schools.

I, personally, value people who have mastery over facts AND also have the ability to use those facts to apply, to reason, and to create something new. In almost every field I have stumbled into, people tend to just regurgitate the same old bullshit. One, they don't see how to apply the bullshit. Two, they don't even test if that long held dogma is true. Three, assuming that dogma is true, how else and where else can we apply that and just perhaps, expand it. Finally, using our existing knowledge, what can we come up with that's new, it might be evolutionary (similar to previous point) or revolutionary.

This seems to occur mostly in groups of ignorant egotistical people. Someone first dishes out some bullshit, everyone else chimes in and conflates it with other irrelevant bullshit; thus, muddying the issue and making it more difficult for everyone else to understand. An intelligent person with a good grasp of the knowledge base tends to simplify all that is complex and difficult to understand into a clear and concise concept.

I see knowledge workers are no different than professional athletes. Most toil in silence and obscurity and 99% of them never succeed. Of the few that made it out, had their breakthroughs, I am willing to bet that they have created something new. They have mastered not only the existing corpus of knowledge but also have made insights that resolve difficulties that confounded the rest of the 99% of people who attempted.

The positive humanist in me would like to think that we all are creative and can contribute our original thoughts in one form or another. But the realist in me, that is tempered by experience, has learned to accept that most people are like rats in a cage, they keep spinning the wheel and rarely make anything of themselves, despite what they want, wish, claim, declare, and resolve to achieve. It's easy to blame that they are lazy, afraid to try because of fear of failure or success. But the sad truth is that they all lack that something to distinguish themselves among their peers: intelligence for creativity & originality.

Instead of keep fighting, keep beating one's head against the wall, I think people would be much happier if they just accept the world for what it is. They do their best to live within their means and limitations. Not everyone is meant to grow up to dunk that basketball, be that pro-surfer, make millions using his/her blog, have 3somes with midgets, even engage in anal sex, or manage multiple relationships that so many talk about but haven't a clue what that entails. If people would just be who they are, then they will achieve that inner peace, that mindful awakening to who they are and what they are capable of, that's when creativity will come about and hopefully, something original. But probably not!

Desperate people

A friend of mine took a look at this blog and was rather surprised at "the number of ads here for desperate people! " Then this dawned on me why people in the community need all these gambits, tactics, techniques, methods, workshops, and bootcamps. All along, I was journaling my recovery from the whole bullshit. I finally found some peace and happiness after I stopped being near those "community guys." Practically everyone in there are trying to get something from someone. They have this great desire for fame, fortune, and girls, but not willing to work for them. And worst of all, they are constantly comparing this against that... what started as their rankings of girls, and because they don't get girls, they ended up ranking each other in their (in)ability to get girls, just like they are constantly trying to seduce each other, by that, they try to convince how they have skills without demonstrating them.

Nowadays, whenever I go out with friends, we have a good time, we don't game, but we still socialize with people. We have girls in our group of friends. Funny thing is... the true hard-core gamers are ones who wander around in their cock-farm and of course, go home alone. Do I get laid like a rock star? Definitely not! The better question is, am I a rock star? Of course not and nor I want to be! The thing with people is that they need to accept themselves for who they are and make the best within their own limitations. There's nothing to exorcise, no reason to fake it to make it, no new personality to adopt. People can just be who they are.

Sure, I'm not going to get any girl, any where, at any time. But I make friends with people who are good & decent, they have no agenda, we have fun in going out and we have interesting conversations other than gaming! The best part of hanging out with people who don't hustle is that they don't see me as yet another target to make money or to extract some potential sexual favors. If I can sum up the best way to live is to let go of desires of getting anything from people, lower my expectations of people, and suppress our natural tendency to compete. For the Ayn Rand fans, I don't see any of them stepping up to stop our federal government from saving those sore losers.

Just as an experiment, I am changing what I will blog about here, let's see when google will notice and put up a different sort of ads.

Unnecessary pressure

Life - Expectations = Happiness

When we expect nothing from others and minimize our desires, life is so much happier. I'm all for individualism and may be a small but healthy dose of competition to get people to achieve. However, I see so many unhappy people because they constantly striving to get something for whatever reasons.

There's this myth in the whole self-help / improvement about declaring one's goals to his/her peers. This, of course, would set most of these pledgers to fail. There are very few people who rise up to the occasion; in reality, most people buckle under pressure, especially social pressure. I had a similar discussion with a friend about how most so-called seduction gurus, most guys will be disappointed with the fact that most girls who got with these self-proclaimed gurus are fugly! I would even venture to guess that most self-help gurus are not as enlightened and successful as they claimed in their marketing.

There are also some miracle stories about people achieving their dreams that they set out on their vision board (as presented in The Secret). There are also anecdotal testimonies from very few individuals that they have found their perfect partners, as they have written down in the love list, as shown on Oprah. Most people would accept those "miracles" as something that happens regularly, and they don't realize that those are exceptions. Exceptions prove the rule; which means for the usual participant, they would rarely if ever achieve result on par with those "miracles." Let's also not forget that most of those miracle stories are just marketing ploys.

Even if we assume those testimonies as real and true, most of those "winners" have very selective memories. They would recall only incidences or results that coincide with what they set out... or they would only remember what they want to remember. This is why for myself, I see the world for what it is, and I often contradict what many of these self-help / improvement and seduction gurus claimed.

Putting all the probabilistic evidence of success, let's examine what happens when people set unnecessary pressure on achievement. For every pair of parents who has high expectation for their kids, I will show you how disappointed they will be when their kids failed to get into the top-notch college or get arrested for DUI. For every guy who sets out to be the major player, I will show you a hundred more who go home alone to jerk off. Worst yet, they probably don't have any girl, or even guys as friends! Because of their public declarations, imagine how much pressure they experience in performing their miracles in real life and the embarrassment when these guys fail.

So instead of setting pressure for oneself to achieve... something monumental. Set realistic goals, and make sure there is a road map to reach those goals. Sometimes, the problem is the actual goals themselves. Instead of aiming for something external, people should find something that fulfills what's inside. They can search all they want, fuck as many as their so-called "hotbabes" they want, they will never achieve that inner peace. It's always easy to find blame on people or what goes on outside, search for a replacement, it's much more difficult to turn inward, find motivation from within, fill that void inside, and fix what is wrong internally.