Emotions

So you realized something about yourself recently: you realized that life is slipping you by while you sit back afraid to take it by the horns. Well it’s time to turn that new outlook to your advantage!

Where you were once convinced by all the lines and ideologies that told you it was better to numb yourself from the fear of life and its uncertainty, now you know better and feel differently about things. Hidden in this new struggle is strength, and if you know why it exists and where, you might be able to figure out your own struggle a little faster.

And that’s why this article is here: to give you a start on finding strength in that struggle and your newfound connection with fears you never had before.

For the first time in a long time you feel a twang of fear, and you know it matters, and that makes more difference than you know.

What do these men have in common?

• The wealthy investment banker or self-made multimillionaire business owner lounging in the VIP section of the nightclub with bottles of champagne, or skating about town in his brightly colored Lamborghini.

• The sexy Mediterranean man, a silky accent rolling off of his Spanish or Italian or Greek lips, a specific flair about him that makes him seem rich with experience, intrigue, and hints of the romantic.

• The enigmatic artist, a lone writer or fervent painter, who exists outside the system – neither retail worker nor manual laborer nor cubicle desk jockey, but creative, tortured soul consumed by his demons, and by a passion few keep past their first decade of life.

All these men have various different things going for them that trigger an assortment of different attraction triggers in women:

• Conspicuous consumption, in the case of the wealthy man in VIP or a sports car

• The novelty effect, in the case of the sexy Mediterranean man

• Byronic characteristics, in the case of the flawed, creative artist

Yet, there is also something about each man that the majority of men a woman meets lacks.

It is not something he is, so much...

It is something he offers her.

This thing he offers her is an adventure – one of romance, one of excitement, one of the unknown. One that seems to step right out of the romance novels women turn the pages of with ardor when no one is around to watch them (frequently slipping a hand delicately into their panties as they do so).

Adventure is the great equalizer, and it is the reason you will see overweight, balding, non-rich men ending up with women that trim, good-looking, well-off men struggle to get. Not because the former man is better, per se... but because he offered her something the latter may not have even known was important to bother offering.

When I first read about the Law of Least Effort, it was as if everything suddenly made sense. I thought that learning about expending effort would put me leagues ahead of other men, as I knew that I didn’t have to act all crazy and get into these long-winded conversations to get with girls; I could just be like all those cool guys who had women chasing and crawling all over them.

Unfortunately, I took the definition of the Law of Least Effort a bit too literally.

I started expending next to no effort in an attempt to not appear try-hard. However, when you expend hardly any effort, you aren’t going to get any results.

Rather than achieving what I was setting off to do, I became a closed off and virtual unknown to women. I’d go out and see attractive woman, thinking that things would be so much better if I had them chasing me and carrying the conversation all on their own. I thought that by sitting around and doing next to nothing women would flock to me and up my cool factor exponentially.

After all – I was effortless, wasn’t I?

But women rarely approached me. When you’re risk averse and don’t put forward any effort, you won’t gain anything.

It turns out that I was missing one vital point of the Law of Least Effort. You must expend as little effort as possible while still achieving what you’ve set out to do.

I taught myself how to be “cool” as a junior high student many years ago. It was an intuitive process for me at the time, though filled with social experiments and trial and error – and lots of beating up on myself to get it just right.

I’ve spent years trying to figure out a good way to teach all the aspects of being cool. A way to boil it all down to something simple, streamlined, and easily remembered and used by anyone who aspires to “cool”: who wants to be that person that everybody else just looks at and says, “Man, that guy is cool.”

How do you transform someone who “doesn’t get it” – whom others laugh at, make fun of, disrespect, or ignore – into someone they look up to, gravitate toward, and esteem?

To do this, of course, you need good tactics – you need to be able to give them the “what to do”; but more than this, you need the underlying principles: what is it about cool people that just makes them so damn cool?

Well, after years of non-starters on an article about this, I will say that I have successfully boiled “cool” down to four (4) core elements that are eminently doable and absolutely teachable.

Get all four of these right, and you will be – without question – unstoppably, unspeakably, almost unbearably cool.

And the best news is, all any of them takes is a little practice and, yes... a little discipline.

I was doing some reading the other day when I came across the term “trivializing.”

It gets thrown about in popular media, and often is something you learn to somewhat ignore, just because of how often people lament others “trivializing” some XYZ “really big deal” to them, that seems trite or overblown to others.

And yet...

Examine the classic debate between two opposites. Say someone who is pro-renewable energy because he wants to save the planet, and someone else who is pro-fossil fuels because he doesn’t want to be forced to pay top dollar for new, less effective technologies when cheaper alternatives are available.

The first guy accuses the second guy of killing the planet. The second guy feels like the first guy is trivializing his need to not burn a hole in his wallet, and becomes offended, and tells him off. The first guy then feels like the second guy is trivializing his desire to save the planet as an ignoble cause, and fiercely retorts.

This is a case of crossed wires communication-wise of the sort we discussed in “Dale Carnegie’s Most Life-Changing Piece of Advice”, but it goes broader than this, because trivializing comes in many shapes and forms, and it’s hard to detect and harder to combat in nearly all of them.

Who’s fault is it when a relationship fails?

Two words for you: the man’s.

Usually.

Note: a relationship failure is something different than letting a relationship decline and die, or just breaking up with a girl, because you’ve lost interest or other things in your life have taken precedence or she’s let herself go and is no longer meeting your requirements for someone you’ll keep around in a relationship capacity.

In that case, while a female observer would still consider it a “failed relationship”, from the standpoint of the male it probably isn’t (unless it’s a case of her letting herself go... then, maybe it is, if she was what you wanted before that but stopped being it after it). In that case, it’s just a relationship that didn’t work out.

When I say “failed relationship” here, what I’m talking about is a relationship that you really wanted to work out... but it went belly up anyway.

Is it ever the woman’s fault?

Yes, sometimes. Rarely. In the case where the relationship is a female dominated one because the man has yielded to her the role of captain aboard the good ship Relation... in that case, he is following her lead, and the direction the relationship goes is up to her.

Even then though, I’m torn... because most women who lead don’t want to do it, and resent men who make them do it as weak. If I’m the officer of a military unit and I hand over my command to one of my subordinates, who then goes on to lead us right smack into a disaster, am I absolved of all blame, or do I still take some too?

The large majority of the time, across most kinds of relationships, it’s the fault of you, the man – and nearly always, it’s a failure of leadership that causes the relationship to fold.

Infidelity can be one of the most difficult things that can happen to you as a man.

Sometimes you feel it coming but try not to admit it to yourself; other times, it seems to come completely out of left field.

Women are such largely emotional creatures, and if you don’t know how to manage those emotions, you could very well find yourself in a world of hurt.

But what causes infidelity in the first place?

Today I’m going to talk about the root causes of infidelity, share a painfully valuable story from my past, and talk about how to spot infidelity before it happens as well as how to handle it if it does happen to you.