“Mark, why do the partners work so hard?”

Mark: “Because R, the more money people make, the more they spend. People’s lifestyles go up in expenses, and the more they need to work.”

Me: “Why don’t they just retire and save up some money?”

Mark: “That’s a good question. Easy to talk about, hard to do. You’ve seen Gary’s house and his boat. Those toys don’t come cheap!”

At a cool party in San Jose with rockers:

I'm cute but I have no money!

Rocker guy: “So R, do you manage people or code?”

Me: “I do a little bit of both man”

Rocker: “Cool man. I work at the pier”

Me: “San Francisco?”

Rocker: “Yeah Pier 39”

Me: “That’s fucking far man”

Rocker: “Yeah but it’s the only job that’s paying me right now. I get 4 hours of sleep on the train anyway so it’s fine. Pays the bills”

Me: “I hear you”

The white collar ivy-league managers I see every day at work didn’t have the life that I wanted. They were rich in wealth but poor in spirit. The rockers / low income hippies / alternative hipsters had character, style and an overall sense of good joy, but they were ridden in debt and in constant struggle with the system. My vision of success is in the combination of both. The rockstar CEO. I’m not talking about Tony Donovan of Rockstar games (Grand Theft Auto series)or the “celebrity” CEO companies hire to turn things around. I’m talking about the guy that runs his own company and is in control of his life.

In reading Hugh Hefner’s biography, there was a passage during his early 20’s when Hef was standing on top of a bridge, and saying, “There must be a better way”. He subsequently started putting together plans for first issue of Playboy. Hefner was always about high social status, yet against the system in his stance of sexual freedom. His biographer explains his philosophy in one of the most enlightening passages to me, “To Hef, extreme anti-capitalistic sentiments goes against the system. It seeks to destroy the system. That’s an extreme. While Hef does not agree with the current cultural beliefs about sex, he figured out a way to succeed within the current system. Whereas more radical feminists and even hippies proactive rallied against the government, Playboy played a controversial role publically, but a profitable one privately. The Playboy empire was an economic success, and in becoming successful both cultural and economically, Hefner effectively changed the very system he was opposed against by winning the game within the current system.

I would like to see more rockstar CEOs in the world – men in charge of their own destinies and their own lives. Men (and women) living the life they want to live while winning in the capitalistic system. To me, a rockstar CEO has the following qualities:

• He has good business sense and the ability to understand how to run a successful business – from finance to marketing to sales
• He knows when to rely on other people to do the work, and he knows how to recruit others with the skills he needs to achieve the master plan.
• He has a swagger about him and has impeccable style
• He is empathetic to other’s needs, and knows how to motivate based on helping people achieve what they really want, instead of through fair or intimidation
• He inspires
• He’s not a hard core white collar guy but a guy who was stuck with the responsibility of leading a team and making it work
• He’s personable and has a life outside of work
• He’s not afraid to show his admiration for women
• He knows that sometimes, in order to win the game, you have to leave the game.

I’ll leave you with this story from 4-hour work week:

An American businessman took a vacation to a small coastal Mexican village on doctor’s orders. Unable to sleep after an urgent phone call from the office the first morning, he walked out to the pier to clear his head. A small boat with just one fisherman had docked, and inside the boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish.

“How long did it take you to catch them?” the American asked.

“I have enough to support my family and give a few to friends,” the Mexican said as he unloaded them into a basket.

“But… What do you do with the rest of you time?”

The Mexican looked up and smiled, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, Julia, and stroll into the village each evening, where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life, senor.”

The American laughed and stood tall. “Sir, I’m a Harvard MBA and can help you. You should spend more time fishing, and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. In no time, you could buy several boats with the increased haul. Eventually, you would have a fleet of fishing boats.”

He continued, “Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you would sell directly to the consumers, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village, of course, and move to Mexico City, where you could run your expanding enterprise with proper management.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, senor, how long will all this take?”

To which the American replied, “15 to 20 years. 25 tops.”

“But what then, senor?”

The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right, you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions.”

“Millions senor? Then what?

“Then you would retire and move to a small coastal fishing village, where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take a siesta with your wife, and stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play you guitar with your amigos…”

At 26 I already had 6 years of work experience between 4 jobs. The first was in the prestigious management consulting world, thereafter I joined 2 startups, and my current stint is at the world’s leading technology company. Unlike many graduates, I wasn’t subject to one career path or only to a few jobs in the same industry. This gives me a somewhat unique perspective as a young man in this world. At least, my ego likes to think so

Some companies have more checks and balances than others on the path to riches. In a startup, much of your fate is tied to your relationship with the founder and your ability to provide results. Revenue growth with margins is key. The bigger the margins, the happier the founders. In a big company, more politics and management of the system come into play. Performance reviews, team relationships, your ability to document and prove that you are doing a good job. Some companies (like Google) have a lot of checks and balances (fair scoring, reviews from different peers, managers and aligning functions). Others less so. But even with the best checks and balances, the game is played with a strategy for navigating the promotions and career ladders at large corporations. It is the rat race they want you to play. They being The Man. Once you are in the race, going around the circle, your vision becomes clouded and you become focused on the race instead of the big picture. Petty office drama, stupid emails from co-workers on Sunday proving to the team that they were working on the weekend, as if it was a merit badge for wasting time. The rats, having no other vision, like to compete with each other for small pieces of cheese.

As an entrepreneur, I have tried many different strategies. In a startup, you really do have to work effectively and efficiently, and you must have a good relationship with the founder. This requires having a good personality and also being results oriented. Suck up if you have to, but you must have some small genuine feelings of respect for the founders. There is no other way.

As an entrepreneur in a big company, competing with other people leads to dramatic office wars that drain energy and time, and most importantly, drains spirit. It drains your spirit because you are trying to accomplish something big without power, and sometimes this becomes extremely difficult when others also want recognition and power. Does the inter-departmental HR database, at the end of the day, really matter to you? No. It matters that you were recognized for it, and many rats will fight for this petty microscopic recognition. I have personally found that the best way to navigate this is to have a pleasing personality, perform the services required of you, and overall have a sense of peace and avoid conflicts. A pleasing personality goes a LONG way in establishing good will. A person with a pleasing personality can get away with being mediocre at their work because people at least feel good in their presence. There is no replacement for a person with a negative personality. In extreme cases, this person must be extremely hard working in order to balance out his negative traits with even more results and more hours. Even then, he will not be well liked and will create many enemies.

As a member of the “salary-men”, if you play the game right, you can move several dice throws ahead of your competitors with year by year promotions, if you are hard working, good at showing it, AND if you are lucky. Another glitch in the system is the transition from job to job. Each new employer will establish a new hiring rate for your services, and this jump is recommended by many industry leaders as a way to bridge the salary gap between small yearly increases and the big pay most people seek. Another is to seek a high position mentor who will assist you on your quest. He will give you opportunities others will not. However, you must be able to perform the tasks at hand, or his generosity will be short lived. For the gifted, sometimes an opportunity is all he needs. The ultimate glitch in the system is to create your own software. Your own company that you control. More on this below.

Another option is to remain one of the mediocre but pleasing personality workers. After several reviews where you do enough work so they cannot fire you, the managers learn to expect mediocre “do just good enough to not get fired” performance from you. Then, they sort of leave you alone, IF you have a pleasing personality and IF your manager isn’t a person with an ax to grind. Many good looking girls will receive this type of treatment, and older men who have worked their years, thereby earning an unofficial “tenure”.

The one problem with this path for the entrepreneur is that it makes your mind weak, and your behavior begins to mirror your low expectations at work.  The entrepreneur can supplement this with activities outside of work. Investment group meetings, entrepreneurship conferences, going out and networking, and of course picking up girls, honing your social skills during non-work hours. Sometimes, the entrepreneur/PUA will feel like a god in a club at night, and then feel incongruent back in his office space. This is a conflict we struggle with on our journey. You are not alone. Entrepreneurs learn to do the job, hide behind the smoke and mirror, while they are working on their own escape plan to join the new rich and leave the matrix are the ones with the plan against the man.

Really intelligent people vs. Really brave people

One thing I learned is that really intelligent people do not end up being really rich. As a matter of fact, often the opposite is true. They never stray too much into poverty, as the current world lacks PhDs and computer scientists. But, they never become financially free. Ironically, their intelligence is their downfall. Instead of taking the plunge at a smart business investment or opportunity, they spend days working on all of the options of the scenario, when they should have followed their instincts or gut judgement. Other times, the math works out and all the logic adds up, yet they still hesitate. They hesitate not because of a lack of intelligence, but a lack of courage. AKA “Balls”.

People at Google often tell me, “it is too risky”, “I have a family”, “Yeah but I wish I could do that!”. At first I was shocked. How can some of the smartest people I have ever known not be smart enough to master their own lives? Over time, I figured it out. Intelligence does not equal courage. Entrepreneurship requires courage, and a willingness to challenge the system. These intelligent PhDs, doctors, engineers are unwilling to stand up in the face of conflict, they often resist change and risk and are often quite high opinionated in their own reasoning, finding no fault in their “logic”. For this reason, Trump is right. Entrepreneurs can very well compete with high IQ engineers and computer scientists.

The previous founder of my startup, who is also my mentor, never went to college. He had a high school degree. He started his own company and within 4 years, sold it for millions of dollars. He is now retired and after divorcing his wife and has a hot new girlfriend. He lives the good life up in Marin county. It was 4 years of hard work and a lot of gray hairs, he tells me, but it paid off. He is now free.

Matrix Analogy

The way I see it, if you are an employee who depends on the bi-weekly or monthly paychecks, you are part of the matrix/system. It has you. Most people deny it. Worse, they are not even aware of it. They are so conformed to the structure that they cannot fathom life without it. In response to retiring young, a dentist friend of mine replied, “What? Most people working for years on end AW? Well. Just get used to it. That’s Life.”

The agents are managers. They are hired to keep the system in place. There are nice managers, but even so, their prerogative is to keep you working for the man. That’s the goal. The system must be maintained. Revenues must be made. Not for you. Do what’s good for the company.

People ask me all the time if I enjoy my work at Google. “It must be awesome!”, they would say. I would reply, “”I like Google. I don’t like work.”  To be fair, there are your share of Google employees who work for the passion of it. I do believe this. I also believe that there are more of these people in positions of power than any other company I know. But most of these are founders or pre-IPO employees or high profile hires like Vint Cerf and founders of acquired companies, who already own fortunes anyway. They have the option to walk away. But they choose to stay. That’s real choice. Freedom to work, or not to.

Otherwise, most of us are corporate slaves. Management doesn’t buy into this reality, because in doing so, they are disloyal to the man. It stunts their own career growth. Some are good lairs. No lairs in the common sense, but lairs to their unconsciousness and subcommunications. They play the game and rise to a level of comfortable income. Nonetheless, many people increase their spending too, and with higher spending, they continue to rely on work paychecks to survive. I once asked a partner at a consulting firm, “Mark, why do all the senior partners work so hard? They all have families and they are all over 50.”. Mark replied with something I always remembered as a young associate, “Well, my young associate… (I was 20 at the time). People get more money, and their spending also goes up. Life changes. Families get bigger. They buy a bigger car, boat. Problems arise, and so their expenditure goes up. They need more money, and so they keep working.”

Those were wise words from a remarkable partner I learned a lot from. The key to stopping the rat race is to reduce your expenditures and increase your assets. Rich dad Poor dad covers this concept extremely well.

Escape

The truth is, most people are alright being slaves to the system. As a matter of fact, they like it. To me, the biggest risk is the opportunity cost of life worked away in the system. Society requires structure, and structure requires most of the masses to follow the paradigms that are set by the alphas. As such, the few of us who dissent must join forces. As always, the Internet will facilitate this trend in the near future. But, most people just don’t care, even with a free-will based system such as the world wide web. Some will even fight to protect the system. These people lack an inner foundation of self. They therefore struggle, and have, over time, learned to base it off of appreciation and recognition from their work. As such, you need to find your own will power and seek out allies who will join you in you quest to become unplugged from the Matrix.

At a certain point, once you are freed and have more assets than liabilities, cash flow comes in regularly. You can still go back into the Matrix, this time into a job you like. You chose this job. This is true freedom, because you are no longer doing it for the paychecks and lying to yourself that you actually enjoy signing the TPS reports.

Watch Donald Trump’s response to a reporter’s question of “what percentage of the population can be Entrepreneurs”. Trump remarks:

“In a (general) society sample I would say 1-2%. In this room, with the special audience (real estate seminar) I would say 50%”

Why this is discouraging

You’re going to talk to a lot of people who don’t share your views of the world. Most of them, actually. Many of these people are really smart and actually, may have more talent than you! You see them wasting their talent in a dead end job, trying to find meaning for their egos through useless meetings and relentless credits given to those that “work” the hardest. Try not to fall into this pattern of behavior. We have better plans in store. People have meetings because they cannot simply masturbate at work.

Why this is good

When you do find someone who is entrepreneurial, you will feel a connection with them right away. Most often they already have their own business, but just having this friendship will allow ideas to be shared. Also, the 99% of non entrepreneurs in the general population means that 99% of them, with a high percentage them being smarter folks than you, will NOT be competing with you. This means that the world is for the taking, and that that modern capitalistic model favors the bold, not the intelligent.

People always ask our founders how we manage innovation at Google. Newspapers and publications will print quotes and headlines like “top 10 things Google does to foster innovation”. The truth is, put quite simply: we have a very unique culture and DNA, one that has not existed before. To truly understand this, one has to actually live on the Google campus for some time.

One of the fundamental culture differences at Google is the level of trust most of the senior management team has in non-executive teams and employees. Google fails a lot! But we fail quickly. As long as the failure is not fatal (i.e. health related), if you do fail, fail fast. Fail with speed. Then at least you can learn from that mistake, and quickly move on to the next project. In technology and engineering, often times, code testing requires the failures, so that the break in the code chain can be found. In genetics, scientists breed honey bees, hoping for a mutation, which occurs once out of thousands of replications. In finding these mutations, they are able to determine the specific piece of the DNA that is attributing to the defect / positive mutation across generations of genetic replication.

In pickup, we fail a lot. Especially as beginners. Unlike technology, this type of failure is often personal in nature. Unlike Google, this failure is related to an individual, and there’s no product, brand or technology to hide behind. This makes that art of PU that much harder.  At the same time, I think it is important for artists to fail fast, and adapt. As Style would say in his new survivalist mantra, “ensure, adapt, overcome”.

I guess my point is, keep going. Keep DOING. If you feel like there’s a chance for failure, swing anyway. But don’t sit there, waiting for the winds of change to show up. You will miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

1. You start reading more about the subject. You look for role models who have made it Big. Donald Trump (The Art of the Deal). David Ogilvy (On Advertising). Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Stanford thesis on PageRank and how it works). Mark Cuban. Michael Dell. Warren Buffet. My list of heroes for entrepreneurs are two-fold – those in the valley (Tom Perkins, Larry and Sergey, the Twitter founders, my ex-CEO who sold his firm), and those in entertainment (Hugh Hefner, P.Diddy, Chris Angel). Most interesting is the story of Hefner. Borrowing against his furniture for $6000 at the age of 25, he launched the first issue of Playboy with the Marilyn Monroe cover. As his daughter Christie recalls, (Authors @ Google) “my dad never thought Playboy would become as global and as successful as it did. He just wanted to be good enough to not have to ‘get a real job’.”

2. You start visualizing what life is like with the financial foundations of a successful entrepreneur. You start developing discipline about working outside of work, and developing the skill sets to further your enterprise. You start having a board, a “dream board” with images that remind you of the life you want to live.

3. You start becoming more careful about money. You manage money, it doesn’t manage you. Thriftless spending goes, and more prudent spending takes place.

4. You start talking more to other business owners. You start feeling frustrated at employees and the employee mindset. You eventually learn to tune these out, or not talk about this subject with people who are lifetime employees. Their mindset is one of the “sheeple” (Sheep people). You begin to realize that less than 5% of people in this world are entrepreneurs. According to trump, less than 1-2% are real entrepreneurs.

5. Perhaps most importantly, you start believing that a life of freedom from the corporate life is possible, and the journey begins to seek out this freedom.

Paramore, Guns N’ Roses and Nirvana music played in the background as we both worked all day on refining the site designs and identifying the blogs and forums we needed to be on and grow reputations point on. We also learned how to use digg, technorati and stumble upon and the overall philosophy behind their web technologies.

This type of “work” felt different. Although I felt tired from time to time, and had to take a break for dinner, we were pretty on point for most of the 12 hours we were drumming away. A couple of things became clear to me now that I am sitting in front of my computer at 2 in the morning that I want to share with you as you learn from my journey.

1. Having a partner who shares your vision and values is great. You may argue about small things, design issues, maybe an ego clash here and there. But the overarching goal of freedom and independence has more importance than anything else on both of our priority lists. As such, I realized that in order to achieve this goal, we were often aligning together based on interests, while also overlapping on the same business operations values like trust, timing, collaboration, and a passion for the artform of pickup.

2. This doesn’t feel like “work”. The more effort we put into it, the more returns we shall receive. What we receive in rewards (both monetary and emotional) are dictated by the flow of the world and the markets, and not by some pompous manager who is solely concerned about his or her career. It is up to you, the business owner. There is a direct and exponential correlation to effort and reward, that IS within you control, and this feels great. The light at the end of the tunnel is evident, and I am glad I saw a shimmer today as I gazed into the future.

3. This is perhaps a dark side of mine, but my dis-taste for the status-quo as well as the corporate life of servitude propels me to advance, and while there are negative feelings associated with this, I also find positive feelings in recognizing that at my core, I am an individual, a leader. This is who I am, and not someone I had manufactured or grown into. It is time to step up to my shoes as a leader. To really have the power, eventually, 1 year, 2 years, 5 years from now, to say, “Fuck you. You fucked me. Now I declare war on you” and to be able to have the power and resources to follow through with my promise to demolish my enemies.

Sun Tzu said the best wars are won before they have even begun and no lives are lost. I do believe this, and my desire for power is only derived from a necessity to guard against those with power who wishes their wills upon me. When you have no power, and you “stray” and step “out of line”, others with power and authority will make you feel pain, fear, a sense of insecurity. Some even take this opportunity depending on the weakness of your reactions and resources to advance their own interests. Counter-wise: when one has power and occasionally “strays” or “does the wrong thing”, they are politely reminded not to, and sometimes, even gets away with it. No feelings of remorse are forced upon him or her, rather, the feelings of doing something wrong and learning from it purely comes within the control of the person with power of who he chooses to have a relationship with.

4. We really had fun today. There was no drama. No one was thinking about his career – it was just about making the site the best that it could possibly be. No ulterior motives. I hope that one day, when the money starts coming in, that we both remember this passion and the real reasons behind why we started launching these collection of sites and hold true to our values.

A lot of work went into this site as it was content driven: 300+ definitions of the PUA community in an effort to bring clarity to aspiring PUAs out there. I was lucky enough to have a great partner in this endeavor, as my partner Casual has the specific skill sets that I clearly lacked. Mainly, fast web development, SEO optimization and programming chops. This left me to do the writing, design, and strategic structure of the site and the business model around it. This is my sweet spot. “Working” on this, though tiring at times, doesn’t really feel like work. A couple of key lessons I learned during this whole process:

1. Exemplify your passions to your social circles, and those that you need will come to you. An entrepreneur by nature is not someone who knows everything – he is one who is able to bring the required resources together: land, capital, labor and enterprise – to achieve a goal. Some of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world lacked technical skills, but succeeded due to their ability to assimilate the needed resources to achieve a goal. Steve Jobs in an entrepreneur. Barrack Obama. Larry Ellison. Jeff Bezos. Casual and I worked great together on this site, and by focusing on our passions, our workload, though high, felt much easier than it actually was.
2. Just do it – we have been talking about this for months, and in reality, the whole site took us close to 3 months to design and implement. Our investment was less than $300 in domain names and server space. Once things get going, it will become more exciting.
3. Partnership agreements – make sure the legals and business agreements are in place, to protect all parties. Beyond this, however, find a partner that you can be honest with and genuinely trust.
4. Learning new technologies is fun! We really got to specialize on this one. Casual probably learned a ton of Google products using them himself as well as a little from me. Also on SEO optimization on his own merit, and I am sure with the blogging platforms. WordPress rocks! (Sorry blogger). I was able to dive more into HTML, linking, referral programs, AdSense, Google Webmaster Tools, Custom Search Engine, Amazon Associates, and all these cool technologies that are totally useful to future projects as well. In the beginning, you feel like you have a lot to learn, but in taking them one step at a time, it began to become fun once you succeed at one product, then another, and then another.
5. Design – this is where Casual and I perhaps differ on – design and branding. I feel very strongly about this and I do believe that SEO work is important. However, so is a very distinct sense of style and branding. That is not to say that my style or styles are better, but they we should try different color schemas, navigation structures, and logos to find the best mix. I am partially influence by many of Google’s simplistic yet powerful navigation and design paradigms, and I believe we can do this same.
6. Seduction – we thought we knew all the PUA lingo out there, but we were mistaken. There are a lot of words! And so many more will develop in the future. The community is thriving, and the art of seduction, now leveraging the online worldwide platform, will continue to develop.
7. Additional effort = additional reward. This is perhaps the most important mindset of anyone who has ever done anything worthwhile in life. In business, as an employee, your rewards are capped by the system of the business for the “employee”. As an owner, your efforts relate directly to reward. The more you work, the more payoff there is. This is a difficult feeling to describe with words, on a blog. It is the feeling of freedom, of controlling your own freaking life. Of the beginning glimpses of breaking away from a life of corporate servitude.
8. Enjoy the journey – life is fun, and when you start sensing that you are becoming more skilled and more networked so that success is imminent in the future, there are moments of clarity that creep in, despite the workload or hours you are spending getting content to make sense, or the code to work. This is all part of the process.

That is about it for now. I am sure there’s more to come. Thanks for reading and be sure to tell us what you think about your new site here!

An example of the Carousal widget from Amazon Associates featuring landmark seduction community products:

“Well Jim, that’s great that these companies are already great – they had great founders and a foundation for sound processes, but how do normal companies become great in the first place?”

Always up for a challenge, Jim decided to find out the answer to that question. The result in Good to Great details a breed of companies that have, through several transformations, become Great. (Wal-Mart, Boeing, Gillette, to name a few)

His concept of BHAG – Big Hairy Audacious Goals has become management lore in business. The concept applies to pickup artistry also – in that when you set high, ambitious goals, it prompts you to take measure to achieve them.

Towards to end of the book, one of Jim’s students asks him a great question. We hear this question uttered in seduction classes all over the world as well.

“Maybe I’m just not ambitious enough,” he said, “But I don’t really want to build a huge company. Is there something wrong with that?”

Translation: “What if I don’t want to be GREAT? I am happy with just being GOOD or GOOD ENOUGH”

Listen closely now to Jim’s answers. Perhaps you will see a parallel in his answer to the rest of your life:

First: Jim believes “that it is no harder to build something great than to build something good. It might be statistically more rare to reach greatness, but it does not require more suffering than perpetuating mediocrity…. it involves less suffering, less work…the beauty and power of the research findings is that they can radically simplify our lives while increasing our effectiveness. There is great solace in the simple fact of clarity – about what is vital, and what is not.”

His continues:

“Indeed, the point of this entire book is NOT that we should “add” these findings to what we are already doing and make ourselves even more overworked. No, the point is to realize that much of what we’re doing is at best a waste of energy. If we organized the majority of our work time around applying these principles, and pretty much ignored or stopped doing everything else, our lives would be simpler and our results vastly improve.”

A caveat:

“To be clear, I am NOT suggesting that going from good to great is easy, or that every organization will successfully make the shift. By definition, it is not possible for everyone to be above average. But I am asserting that those who strive to turn good into great find the process no more painful or exhausting than those who settle for just letting things wallow along in mind-numbing mediocrity. Yes, turning good into great takes energy, but the building of momentum adds more energy back into the pool than it takes out. Conversely, perpetuating mediocrity is an inherently depressing process and drains much more energy out of the pool than it puts back in.“

2nd and last point:
“But there is a second answer to the question of greatness… the search for meaningful work… The question we should be asking is, ‘What work makes you feel compelled to try to create greatness?’If you have to ask the question, ‘Why should we try to make it great? Isn’t success enough?’ then you’re probably engaged in the wrong line of work.”

“Get involved in something that you care so much about that you want to make it the greatest it can possibly be, not because of what you will get, but just because it can be done.”

His ends succinctly:

“Perhaps, then, you might gain that rare tranquility that comes from knowing that you’ve had a hand in creating something of intrinsic excellence that makes a contribution. Indeed, you might even again that deepest of all satisfactions: knowing that your short time here on this earth has been well spent, and that it mattered.”

Friend calls you up to go out, there’s an event at a bar. Same scene, same girls. You wonder if you should muster up the courage and energy to go out, or decide to stay in and make some progress on that website you have been trying to launch in the past 6 months.

Scenario 2 – you have been doing well at work lately – new job and new promotion. 2% salary raise. Yeh. You decide to go out more this week with your friends. You get a few number closes, but none of them return or pick up when you text/call. You wonder where your game has gone wrong, and after a while decide “fuck it” and focus on some other area in your life. Maybe you’ll muster up the anger or motivation to call up a few PU friends and ask for their advice, but ultimately, the game dynamics go back to you.

You go back to focus on work, but you realize that you are working your ass off for your company and they are making all of the money. The constant ass kissing and power maneuvers at work get to you. You decide to start your own company on the side. You do some research and work, but really have no idea where to start. You write a business plan.

A friend’s birthday comes up – you decide to go. You hit it off with this girl, and decide your game isn’t so bad after all. You go out a few more times over the next 2 weeks – some nights are good, some night are not. A lot of effort is being put into this and the results of lays is not showing.

If the above 5 paragraphs sound remotely familiar, that is because I have experienced it first hand. I have been writing these “Business vs. Love” posts for…. 1 year now!

It took a some simple advice from one group member, a Stanford PhD student at our MasterAlliance meeting to wake up me, “R, maybe there are just excuses? I mean, when I didn’t want to work out, I was throwing out the exact same reasoning as you. These are just excuses that stand in your way. Maybe I am wrong, but think about it.”

He’s right. The truth is, if it came down to it, I would choose love over money. Because love transcends material things, even this life, money is only a tool we use to trade things of perceived value in this world. But achieving both often means going after something the right way. You want to pickup a girl? Focus and learn from each set’s mistake. Don’t over analyze your sets, and focus on your skill set. Film yourself if you have to to see your flaws.

Waiting for that business plan? It is not going to write itself. Stop watching porn and if you are going to blow off your friends, make a commitment to finish 20% of that plan by the time you go to sleep. These are things that are definite and require energy, but the fact is sometimes this pain of exerting energy is better than the pain of mind-numbing and time passing that comes from doing a lot of things that are 1. half assed and 2. not significant anyway.

“With Scarcity comes Clarity” – Sergey said recently in the economic downturn, and this is another sage advice that I am lucky enough to see working at Google.

Matador, on day 1 of bootcamp:
“I was a loner. I didn’t think I needed anybody. I didn’t think I needed any friends. At the same time I had a very strong father, who was very disciplined and who I thought brought me up very well. I went to school, I studied computer science, I went to business school after that… and then I worked for some top tiered consulting firms that were internationally known. So I had a good career. I had my health, wealth fully intact by age 23. My first job was 30k a year and I built myself up. To be fair, I built up in the dot come boom so it was easier, but that’s where I started.

Over time, it got worse and worse, because I did focus on the relationship part of my life, and it started to suck to motivation out of me from even working harder, because what is it all for? Thoughts like that started creeping into my mind.

What did I do this for, dad? I’ve been cheated. Fuck you telling me to stay out of trouble of these years. I didn’t sign up for this! I was miserable. From 16-26 were the dark periods of my life. Not to get too personal, but I was a depressed person. 26, I started stumbling into this thing.

C&F worked a little, but it didn’t work …. I made millions of blunders, I did some stupid shit…

But man, I am going to make statements to you today and I can back it up 100 and fucking 10%. By understanding what I am about to teach you, which you will now get, you will get a night and day difference over these 3 days by believing that in the pure mastery of this WILL make you feel like you have superpowers. Do you guys believe that?

It is going to require CHANGES. It is going to require EVOLVING… I feel… AWARE. That is all I can promise you, a moment of awareness. (To go the rest of the way)