Emotions

Behind the boastful brain and flashy neocortex of humans lies something much more basic, yet not fully understood. Like all other sexual creatures, we are subject to an instinctive, animalistic sexual desire, which guides us through our day-to-day interactions with the opposite sex.

For other creatures, sex is quite simple.

One of our closest extant relatives, the Bonobo, uses sex quite frequently. They do not engage in sexual monogamy, but rather use sex in all manner of social interactions. They use sex as a greeting, for reproduction, and as a method of bond-forming between women inside a group. In short, they have sex, and they have it often.

This is a far cry from the typical human civilization. Questions of maintaining said amount of sexual activity aside, sex just doesn’t come as easily for us humans. We often place value in social status, mating with the correct people, and avoiding mating with those that would take away from our value, rather than add to it.

Even when you throw out any social status issues, sex just doesn’t come as easily for some men. Why is that?

A while back Chase wrote a fantastic piece on confidence called “Does Confidence Equal Success? Actually… No.” What made it a fantastic piece was its flying in the face of the conventional wisdom of people trying to give you advice with women telling you to “Just be confident!”

Now is confidence near the top of the list of things women find extremely attractive in men? Absolutely. But can you feign confidence? Absolutely not. Even if you fool a girl for a minute or two, girls can always sniff out a mere veneer of confidence from a mile away.

And as Chase rightly points out in his post, that’s where most guys go wrong. You can’t just fake confidence. Confidence actually has to come from somewhere – either from past successes or a solid foundation of belief, process, and efficacy in other areas of your life.

So how does one develop confidence? How do you get to be like those guys who can just go up to girls in the middle of a town square and just start joking around with them? How do you become one of those guys who are unfazed by rejection who and maintains a deep belief in themselves? I’ve been re-reading Steven Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” along with some other materials that I have found truly valuable during my own journey.

It is entirely doable. And today I’m going to show you exactly how.

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.