This post will hit on a lot of hard truths. Our most popular post has been destroyed with emotional comments from regular people so we are doing an elongated version to flush out the smart from… well… the not so smart. The truth is rarely pleasant and takes a significant amount of emotional stability to accept. This is why 1⁄100 people are good people to know.
Outline:
1) Why the Truth Hurts
2) Why the Truth Will Lead to Happiness
3) Reflect and Change Your Activities… Now
Why The Truth Hurts
We do not like cliche phrases. That said, there are two that stand out. “The truth hurts” and “The truth will set you free”. The truth hurts refers to internal realizations while the truth will set you free refers to acceptance of your external world. The difference between the masses and excellence is the acceptance of the truth regardless of emotion. Reiteration. In order to accept the truth you must apply logic to emotional topics. This is the only way to remain balanced with your decision making. Lets get started:
1) Marriage is a Sham: While we have a humorous version of our take on marriage in the form of a pitchbook, it is still the truth. Marriage is just a way to siphon money from you, by taking advantage of your emotions. Here’s the rub: 1) Purchase an asset that serves no function (wedding ring), 2) go sign away half of your future earnings if anything goes south (divorce), 3) transfer all power to a woman who will still take your money away even if she’s the one cheating on you. Where in the world is the upside?
Simply put, all upside for her and all downside for you. Game recognized. You lost control of your emotions. In addition? You’re going to pay higher taxes to the good old government if you’re in the higher income tax bracket!
Unfortunately, if you say these comments publicly, you’ll be ridiculed as a “monster”. While it’s fun to get a rise out of people once and a while, you’re probably best off with the smile and nod approach (WSPs trademark approach to retards). Finally, if you really met “the woman of your dreams” she should not care about getting the government involved with a ridiculous marriage license. The reality is that most women just want the ceremony so she can obtain attention and jealousy from her friends.
In short: Do not get married… Ever.
2) Average Guys are Worse Than Average Women: If you have ever started a company or at least moved up to a managerial position… You learn this fact quickly. While an average girl may be boring, slightly unattractive and annoying… At least she is not angling to ruin your life. Average guys are the worst.
Average guys get jealous extremely easily and are hyper competitive with nothing to show for it. They will consistently compare themselves to others and believe that they are better than you based on their zero success in life. It is atrocious. The worst part? They even have the audacity to give life advice when they have accomplished nothing at all. Leading more and more people down a path of mediocrity.
In Short: Avoid average men and never return their phone calls.
3) Family Doesn’t Matter: We covered this in the post listed above and it is true. Your family only matters if they are helping you with positive reinforcement. If they are trying to tie up your time with crazy requests and phone calls, you have to stop picking up the phone and stop attending the family “meet ups”.
Standards should be applied equally across the board. You wouldn’t let a friend try to bring you down so why does your family get a free pass? They don’t. You won’t let them if you’re smart.
Funny enough, the previous post railed at this truth the hardest. It does not make sense. If your family is helping you… then absolutely keep in touch with them! A good family member is probably equal to two friends you’ve known for a decade or longer. If your family member is a crack smoking degenerate, it is not your responsibility to fix his life for him. As you get older, you realize that the only time you should give advice is when you’re asked for it (particularly with friends and family). Otherwise keep focusing on building yourself up.
In Short: Just like friends, if a family member isn’t helping you improve… Move on.
4) You Will Waste Time: No matter what, you are going to waste a lot of time. By 25 years old you’re going to look back and realize you wasted thousands of hours on horrible activities: 1) getting too drunk, 2) participating on message boards, 3) sleeping in, 4) dating toxic girls, 5) networking with the wrong people, 6) eating the wrong foods, 7) building the wrong type of company… We could go on and on and on.
Why does this blog exist? To help people avoid big mistakes. Big mistakes being marriage, working a job instead of a career, becoming a boring type A person, trying to start an internet business that only clears $200K a year instead of a scalable product based business, etc. Simply put, even if a guy isn’t very bright but is willing to put in the work, he’s going to break into the top 5% or so by simply avoiding the big mistakes.
**In Short: You’re going to lose thousands of hours… when you realize the mistake you’ll be in pain. Embrace it.
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5) You’ve Been Conned: That’s correct. That comment includes the authors of this blog. Everyone at one time has been conned into believing something that is not true. Our favorite quote of all time (that no one likes!) is the following:
“It is not what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know… that really isn’t so”
It takes a bright person to realize the intensity of this quote and how true it is. To make it even clearer. The longer you go down the wrong path the more painful righting the ship becomes.
Lets say you’ve been married for 10 years thinking she has been a good housewife for the past decade… Then you find out she has been cheating on you for the past 4 years. That pain is going to be significantly greater than breaking up 10 years ago! You believed something was true when it wasn’t. That is real pain.
Closer to home for us… Lets say you believe business person X is trustworthy and you place a large order with them. Unfortunately “something comes up” and the person does not deliver. This costs you many tens of thousands of dollars. While you think it was a mistake that was unavoidable… You do your due diligence and realized he screwed you on purpose to throw a wrench in your business since he was playing on the other side of the fence! That is going to hurt. You have to develop a new relationship over the course of a few years to displace this single dishonest person. You trusted the wrong person. Pain.
In Short: If you’re trying to succeed in life, you’re going to get conned. Remain stable and remember that ignorance is rarely going to cause you meaningful pain… Incorrect certainty will cause you the most pain.
6) You are Not Special: While we do not like hero worshipers, you should have one mentor or ideal person you’re striving to become (similar). You’re not special because many people have lived insane lives over the past 5+ centuries and what you want is going to be similar to someone in the past. Find that person, befriend that person and make your own path with the guiding comments in the background.
Two years ago, life was great. Going out drinking, having fun, traveling and the money was finally coming in. Flew out to see the “mentor” for a game of tennis and a few truth bombs were dropped that forced change immediately. Without butchering the actual advice, here is the crux of it:
1) “If your life is so great, why do you have to go out of your way to meet new girls?”
2) “Why are you building someone else’s dreams? Only do this if it will help you obtain yours.”
3) “Before you decide to retire, take a week off. Do not do anything related to your career or company… Report back”
These three truths will quickly put a 180 on how you think. They are all true.
First, if you are not coming across people you want to meet on a day to day basis (replace women with new connections as well) your life is not where it should be. You need a consistent stream of new contacts so you can improve in every environment. Going out to be entertained is ridiculous when you can go out for both entertainment and improvement. Be honest with what you’re doing. If it is pure entertainment, great, a few hours a week will do. Otherwise… Better start combining.
Second, building a company or your career is great… Just make sure its part of your dream. Is that the direction you want to go in? Are you just burning time out of boredom? Working on a project that is not part of your dream is expensive. You will never get the time back.
Third, retirement is a complete and utter joke. Once you hit your financial independence marker you’re immediately thinking of all the cool stuff you can do now. Travel to a new country, lay up on the beach for several months, take up new hobbies etc. The problem? It’s boring. The type of person who obtains financial independence is an actual winner. Meaning, he/she enjoys improving. Working hard is the fun part of life. <– regular people will NEVER understand that sentence. Once you realize that hard work is the best part of your day, selling that company is not going to make much sense anymore.
In Short: You’re not that unique. Someone out there has a life you’re trying to at least emulate. Befriend them and be open to hearing harsh truths. Oh… and before you sell that company… take a week off first and realize retirement is non-sense.
7) Your Emotions Are Meaningless: If you learn anything from practicing sales it is that people are driven entirely by emotion. Sales is nothing but the transference of a feeling. As soon as you can control your own emotions and feelings, you’re going to realize they do nothing but create bad decisions for you!
The above paragraph sounds like it is written by a bitter person and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Once you’re in control of your emotions you get to choose how you feel on a day to day basis! This is the complete opposite of regular people. Regular people are easily influenced and swayed by how they feel. This is exactly why they listen to motivational nonsense all day long. They just want to feel good. Temporarily. They don’t actually want to take control of their lives and their emotions. That is far too much work.
In Short: Emotions need to be controlled. As long as you are ruled by how you feel, you’ll never gain any momentum.
8) You Shouldn’t Ask Many Questions About the Future: We get a lot of these and they need to end. Now. You should not ask “scenario” type questions unless you are actually in the scenario. You are wasting your time.
Lots of young people do this and we used to do this as well. “What if this happens, then what?”… Who cares. Unless it is actually happening it’s a waste of your time. Go do something that will benefit you today. Asking questions about gold diggers when you’re not even making $500K a year is equivalent to asking about movie contracts when you haven’t even acted in a play before. Here’s the fun part. If you’re smart enough to make $500K+ and you found this blog… You’re going to be smart enough to avoid being skinned by “gold diggers”.
_In Short: Unless you are in situation X, don’t worry about situation X. It is simply mental masturbation.
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9) Doing is Learning: The self improvement community, or whatever you want to call it, focuses a lot on reading. The problem? Reading is nothing compared to doing. For every 2 hours you spend reading you could have learned the same material in 15 minutes by doing. That is the legitimate ratio… 15 minutes of doing gives you as much information as 2 hours of reading.
While smart people read, those same smart people spend at minimum 8x more time doing. Being well read is like watching videos of Michael Jordan shooting a basketball. You can replay the shooting form in your head 1,000x times but if you’ve never picked up a basketball you’re never going to be any good at it. The guy who spent 8 hours a day playing, without watching anything, will beat you every single time.
Being well read is a good excuse made by intellectuals to avoid actual work. They will read and read and give you a lot of Snapple facts. But. They cannot connect the dots so they always seem socially “off”.
In Short: Spend more of your time doing than reading. Reading is great when you have a problem to solve, it is horrible for building a talent base.
10) You Are Not In Control: That’s correct. There are many things that you cannot control. You cannot control the actions of others (IE: your expectations are insane if you believe this). You need to accept this fact.
If someone does something bad to you or something bad happens to you… Ask yourself… Could I actually control this event? 99% of the time the answer is no. If you cannot control it do not worry about it. Many many many people worry, whine and complain about things they cannot control. This is exactly why we do not talk about ridiculous things such as culture, feminism, politics, religion or otherwise. People are going to believe what they are going to believe and you can only control how you interact with the environment. People who complain about these things are not able to understand that they cannot control the actions of other people. It is best to move on.
In Short: Stop worrying and complaining about things you cannot control. The world does not revolve around anyone.
Concluding Remarks: That was a lengthy section. We’re going to give you the bullets in more concise and actionable steps below:
Never, under any circumstances, do you get married
Average guys are much more likely to cause you harm than an average woman who you can ignore
If your family is bringing you down, it is not your job to fix their lives for them
You are going to waste a lot of time. Accept this as a part of learning and life
You will go through painful truth realization phases. Accept this. You will get burned at least once.
You’re not special. Someone has obtained what you’re hoping to obtain.
Emotional decisions don’t work. Take control of them and live a happier life.
Stop asking about the future, ask about improving your current situation. “Scenario Analysis” is primarily done by people who never get into said scenarios.
Doing is learning. You read to solve a problem after doing something fails.
You are not in control of the lives of others. Don’t expect anyone to listen to you. If they want your opinion they will ask for it.
Bonus: For fun. Find what someone complains about and you’ll find what they were never any good at. This is exactly why poor people complain about the rich. They never did the necessary work to make it. Use this to avoid bad advice.
Why the Truth Will Lead to Happiness
The section above primarily covered “the truth hurts”. This section will explain the external version of the truth. That it will set you free. If you are free spiritually, financially and emotionally then you will be fast tracked to extreme levels of happiness (barring good health of course which is always #1).
1) External Happiness: To become happy externally (without faking it) you need to be happy with who you are at this point in time. This is exactly why most people in their 20s are unhappy and “rage against the machine”. Who they want to become seems to be on a different planet compared to who they are today.
Where is the fun in that you ask? Well if you’ve been paying attention you’ll see that *work is fun*. The sooner you accept this as fact… the happier you will become. Think about it. When you’re young and restless and working like a dog 80 hours a week… you are going to be making incredible (non-linear of course) gains. The faster you realize that working hard is the most exciting part of life you’ll realize that your twenties are a great time to be alive.
Most people won’t comprehend the previous paragraph. Most won’t even comprehend it by the time they are 40! (they will make terrible decisions). We suggest you get onto this band wagon as fast as you can. Find something you are good at that is scalable… Get to work.
In Short: Once you realize work is fun… Your twenties become an amazing time to be alive. You will work harder in your 20s than any other point in your life… Which is the most fun part of being alive.
2) Acceptance of the Uncontrollable: The easiest example for a young person is a break up. You’re dating a girl and she either dumps you, cheats on you or leaves you for one reason or another. The day that you accept that you couldn’t do anything to prevent this is the day you’ve finally gained control of your emotions from a relationship standpoint. If you’re still pining away, complaining and trying to “make sense of all of it” crying into your pillow at night… You’re still a teenager mentally.
Once this event happens you need to do two things immediately: 1) spend one day writing down any potential game mistakes you made and 2) drop contact forever. If you cannot do these two things within the first 48 hours you are still ruled entirely by your feelings. This is a womanly trait.
Assuming that you’ve accomplished both tasks, no one should even realize you’ve ended a serious relationship. Your internal self has already processed the information (you cannot control the uncontrollable) and your external self will reflect this and return to a state of happiness within a 24 hour period.
Congratulations. This was a blessing for you. The acceptance of the harsh internal truth has set you free emotionally to maintain your state of happiness.
In Short: Knowing that you cannot control the actions of others… will make your happiness independent of the actions of others.
3) Your Life Your Rules: Now we’re getting to the good stuff. If you accept reality for what it is and not what it should be you are going to live for you. You are not going to live for the acceptance of other people (external). Instead of living for the aspirations of others you are going to live for your own aspirations.
This is going to be different for everyone. For our readership, this means $1M by 30 or so is nothing spectacular. We hope that everyone reading is at least aiming for 5-10x that amount. That said… If you’re happy with significantly less then you’re going to stop reading this blog quickly! You’re going to go and find someone who is living a life that you want and take guidance there. We have no problem with either group we just don’t cater to the latter one.
In Short: You will create your own rules for life in terms of a balance of what will make you happiest. Since it is your life, you won’t have rules that are predicated on aspirations laid out by anyone other than… You.
4) Loss of Media Interest: You’re going to lose interest in mainstream topics. You won’t be interested in the latest movie or reality TV show. You may have one mainstream interest (say Tennis or Golf) but the vast majority of the things you see on TV are going to come across as cheesy and ridiculous.
This will do wonders for your external happiness and freedom. You won’t be able to pay attention to mainstream media! If mainstream media cannot even hold your attention, they are not going to have a shot at dipping into your mind or wallet either.
In Short: You will no longer be swayed by any main stream media ideas. You won’t have the attention span to watch it.
5) True Independence: The last piece, after accepting the truth, is that you will feel true independence. You can lose your career. Your business can go bankrupt. Your girl can ditch you. Your friend can screw you over. You won’t change.
Independence is a popular topic, particularly in the USA. But. How independent are you if your happiness is derived from the actions of others?! The answer is you’re not independent at all. The day you accept all of the truths laid out above and map out your own path is the day that you begin to feel true independence. Your emotions are separate from the noise of your life.
In Short: Your life will be a separate island. You allow people on the island, some decide to stay and sometimes you may have to send them away. But. The island is always yours and stable.
Concluding Remarks: This section is literally one half as long as the internal section… For good reason. Your external being will be a reflection of how you feel internally which is why you must build the inside first. Fixing the big items first (internal painful truths) followed by its positive impact on your external life.
Reflect and Change Your Activities… Now
We are at the tail end of the post. What are you doing incorrectly? What belief are you holding onto that is creating unhappiness for you? Where are you spending your time? Why are you spending your time on those activities? Ask yourself uncomfortable questions to uncover the truth.
We do not know what you are doing for 168 hours per week but we can guarantee that there are time wasting activities in your day to day life:
Are you wasting time on message boards creating content for someone else when you’ve already obtained the crux of the information?
Are you reading all day without actually doing anything?
Are you emotionally unstable? Being rattled by meaningless events like your girlfriend cheating on you?
Are you asking about scenarios in the future that haven’t even occurred. IE: speculating on things that may not even happen… wasting the time of everyone involved?
Is your life in the slow lane because your family members want to spend time with you… Which consists of them hitting you up for money and begging for a job?
Are you watching motivational videos because you don’t actually want to commit to improvement?
What is it that you are actually doing. Why are you doing it. Is it going to get you to where you need to be in a year? 5 years? A decade?
We don’t know. But we do know that if you don’t build your own pyramid, you’re building someone else’s.