“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…”

God of Style

When I first purchased the godofstyle.com domain one of my goals was to explore my fascination with men’s fashion. Overwhelmingly, this blog has been about the pickup arts and a personal diary of sorts. This section is the start of a new direction.

“Looks don’t matter”

Overwhelmingly, pickup artists or “gurus” will give you the “looks don’t matter” speech, or “it depends” answer when asked if looks are important in seduction. After some time in the seduction community, I find this statement to be slightly misleading, if not totally untrue. In PUA land, there is this idea that looks are only 30-40% of a girl’s decision criteria for a man and the rest of it is based on character and personality. More and more I find this to be untrue in my journey.

I think that looks are very important. If you are good looking, you will attract girls. If you are model good looking, girls will chase you. If you are slightly above average, girls will give less resistance during the seduction process.

The problem with looks is that it is like the “how tall are you” criteria (height) in basketball. Sure, you can be a short guy (Allen Iverson) and still rock the court, but you absolutely have to compensate this by incredible shooting, speed, or endorsement marketability. Likewise, if a guy is taller than you and matches your shooting percentage, he will mostly get drafted over you.

I have met some guys are are “ok” looking in pickup and they get girls. But they get them through social circles or over a longer period of persistence when out on random nights. This is because the characteristics of masculinity and attraction triggers can be conveyed, but this conveyance takes time. Over time, mPUAs, like a master comedian, can make a girl touch her hair (IOI) 10 times in a span of 10 minutes. Like a comic’s routine for laughter, the mPUA knows the girl’s attraction triggers. Fame is an accelerator of this effect, as movie stars already present an attractive image that women know from movies and our mass media culture.

Similarly, newbies staring out have a hard time because one of the fundamental reasons is that they lack to attractive physical appearance of that “attractive masculine male” archetype.  In any pickup bootcamp, depending on the school, there is the average makeup of the group:

• Out of 7-15 students a night
• 1 of them is really cool, and there to learn because he is genuinely curious.
• 2-3 will be rather good looking guys who have some sense of style, but no pickup skills.
• The rest of them will be mediocre to horrible looking guys, desperate to improve their level of game through weekend bootcamps.While I do highly value the instructors at these bootcamps, I have personally never paid for one and I see a bad segment of nerdy guys who continually go to these bootcamps for thousands of dollars and a year later, I see only very marginal improvement to their game.

Ironically this is the market that is more lucrative to the PUA companies, and year after year these are the renewable clients – the guys who don’t get good at a reasonable pace. Sometimes the answer for them is to step away from pickup and realize their value outside of the community and become cool individuals in their own right.

Fashion Modeling

Male fashion models are recruited by agencies for runway fashion (a very specific, glamorous side of the fashion industry) between the ages of 18-25 (14-19 for girls), at least 6 ft tall, size 40 regular suit and a slim 32 inch waist and 34 inch inseam. Usually with very chiseled cheekbones and a distinctive look. Even then, the chances of becoming a highly paid male model is 1 out of 100.

Occasionally I run into very good looking PUAs. Interestingly, most of these guys have other stuff going on in their lives. They have longterm girlfriends and pickup just “happens” for them. It is not a night out to pickup girls, inasmuch a night out with his friends and he happens to hit it off with one of his girlfriends. I think Matt, Beckstar and many on the PUA training staff are European model good looking. And AFC Adam just talks really fast so he cramps lots of content into a short time frame

The good looking effect

As a 6’3 Asian guy I was lucky enough to have carried on good genes from my parents. I don’t think I am model good looking, but many told me that if I were in Asia, I could be doing real modeling work. The reason I am telling you this is because I have some experience in what I am about to tell you, which some may consider unorthodox:

• Good looking guys get more attention from their male peers ever since growing up, and therefore tend to develop healthier egos. In grades chool, female teachers used to treat me differently and the other male kids took notice and started hating on me a bit.
• Good looking guys get more IOIs from girls in general, at a bar or within a social circle. Whenever I attend an all Asian party I know I am one of the coolest guys there, if not the coolest. This is partially also related to how lame most Asian guys are in the US, but that is another topic for another time.
• If you ever gauge your emotions over time in the presence of a good looking girl, you will notice that the more you talk to her, the more you feel like she’s a person rather than a hot body. For girls I think it works similarly but opposite in some ways. The more I gaze into a girl’s eyes over dinner, the more she gives me IOIs. This is because (I think) women get excited at finding a good looking guy who has the personality to back it up. “Not only is this guy good looking, he is also well traveled and comes from a good family. And he’s not acting like a chode!” You are eliciting both her alpha male genes desires as well as a “suitable husband “/”Provider” desires as a woman.

No doubt, looks are not everything. Style can change a person greatly in terms of how other people perceive him. Hairstyle, piercings, tattoos, clothes, accessories, among other things. In today’s world, there are also more serious procedures that can alter the way a person looks. These include muscle building workouts and plastic surgery. I personally consider plastic surgery to be an extreme, but rather amazing and drastic way of enhancing looks for girls, and maybe even some guys. There are tons of research on finding the right doctor, and also how surgery is most effectively when done by the right surgeon and right conditions. (This will be a post topic for the future)

Dawn Yang before and after photos

In this section I want to focus on looks. Style. Genetics. The scientific research related to our perception of “beauty”. I am not going to adhere to conventional mental paradigms of “looks matter” or “looks don’t matter”. We will simply focus on what women (and men) perceive to be beautiful in this world, why, and how to improve ourselves within this system. Looking forward to a fun ride…

In all honesty, I’m no model material. But I’ve always been told I was good looking since I was a little kid. Looking back at family pictures, I would constitute myself a 9/10 as a kid. As I grew older my ears got a little bit bigger, and so did my nose and I would rate myself as a 7/8 out of 10 as an adult. Still pretty good and above average on the population totem poll, but not enough to have girls jump all over me by default.

Below was an entry I found from my diary:

Monday, July 14, 2008

This morning I woke up, and I took a picture in the mirror to record the progression of acne on my face. To my surprise, the new skin that grew from Alexandra’s microdermabrasion looked pretty good. However, I was getting breakouts more on my neck as the acne spread downwards.

As I looked at my pictures, I suddenly felt that I was very ugly. The picture looked ugly to me. I looked ugly to me. And then I started this pattern of thought, criticizing my looks. My un-proportional and big ears, my round nose, my squinty eyes (I’ve always thought my eyes looked good). It made my day pretty awful as I navigated these thoughts. Right now, I just don’t take good pictures. The image I see in the mirror ends up being worse on camera. Also, I do want to change the way I look.

You see where this thread is going, right? It was bad day, and a day where a over-concentration of my physical looks affected my mental state.

As I searched for answers I found some insights from unusual forums. Here is a girl asking the same question on the Yahoo! Answers thread:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071202080317AADz8MB

I found a very interesting and long thread on e Health Forum:

http://ehealthforum.com/health/topic108234.html

As I was reading this thread, something hit me pretty hard. One of the users wrote:

for those of you who think you are ugly, think about all those people who are blind, deaf, missing a limb, living in poverty, or otherwise physically deficient. You owe it to them to make the best of your situation, which is, in most cases, an unhealthy mental perspective of an otherwise beautiful image.

This got me to snap out of it and enjoy the rest of my week. However, the thoughts came back, and it is a constant struggle. I have come to realize that because growing up, a large foundation of my confidence was rooted in social feedback of my good looks, that when this image started cracking and I received negative feedback of it as an adult, that I lost a large part of my confidence. Thus I came to understand that core confidence must be rooted in something that is deeper than just looks alone.

The pickup community doesn’t focus enough on looks. I say this because it is very commercialized and the marketers have an agenda to make people believe that game alone, with bad looks can help you get laid. While I value game wholeheatedly, I have come to the following conclusions. I welcome any challenges and opposing thoughts on this:

1. Tyler Durden says in the Blueprint that a good looking guy will get laid without game. He will get the “gimmes” of girls that have decided that want to get laid. He mentioned that less good looking guys work harder and longer, to get their game streamlined. Oftentimes, it is not their looks per se, but the limiting beliefs that come with their looks that they need to overcome. I agree with all of his points. But in his conclusion of looks, I couldn’t help but wonder: if 2 guys, one being good looking, and the other average, put the same amount of effort into game, wouldn’t the better looking guy, assuming equal levels of game, have more success with women? Wouldn’t the better looking guy have more “potential”? Wouldn’t the better looking guy receive more positive social feedback growing up, and in other areas of life? We have all seem studies of men with higher salaries the taller they get (executive studies) and better looking babies receiving better treatment from their mothers.
2. I give Lovedrop credit in “Revelations” when he says, “Looks are important. But this book is dedicated to the development of game, which lies outside the realm of physical appearance.” I think Lovedrop (AKA Chris) is one of the real artists out there. He’s not as good looking as Mystery or the other MPUAs, and he overcome this by improving both his mannerisms and ultimately his game.
3. We talk a lot about grooming, avatars and style. But I think we are missing the fundamentals here on physical beauty. What makes someone “beautiful”? I have been trying to find the answer for this for a long time. Golden mean. Symmetrical face. Nancy Etcoff does a great job summarizing statistical data in her book Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. I recommend this book for anyone remotely interested in the subject of beauty and how we (humans) perceive beauty.
4. I’ve lived in many countries growing up. I realized that the perceived beauty of a certain race changes greatly by country. In the US, a good looking black, Indian or Asian guy will have to be really good looking, in order pass the “GQ white guy” limit test. What I mean is, usually, the ethnic good looking guys are considered very good looking in their cultures. It is as if the tall white GQ guy gets +1 points automatically, because partially of social programming and also partially of the current state of modeling and Hollywood.
   

   Daniel Henney: one of the few Asian American models in the US. (And he's half white)

5. I think game is important. But we need to look beyond the immediate look enhancing benefits of style. We need to go into lifestyle. Study models. Study the lifestyle of people who have the resources to change their looks. This is why I started this section of the blog. Veneers. Plastic Surgery. Workout sessions and body shaping. Dieting. Eye color manipulation. Hair care (long term), Skin care. Scar removal. Body hair management. Skin tonality. Cosmetic Dentistry. Makeup. Its more than tactics and routines. Its lifestyle. This type of lifestyle requires money and resources, and it requires an elevation from the levels we are at.

In the near future, we will have the option to choose our children’s genes. While this poses ethical concerns, who would NOT want their child to be taller? If parents could pick the eye and hair color of their child, would they do it? Genes that govern intelligence? Strength? Disease immunity? Gattaca is becoming less science fiction than you think and not everybody is going to be like Jude Law. (No spoilers for you here so you’ll need to watch to movie). My point is, game is game. Game is important, and it represents who we ultimately are. But we need start looking at game based on foundations of genetics and looks.