Our unconscious mind is a very powerful force. It influences our behavior, and its reaches are infinite. Our conscious mind is limited, but directs our free will, and power to control our desires. A great study on the unconscious mind and its influence over our business and entrepreneurial success is detailed in The Answer by John Assaraf. This is another topic for another day.

As a kid, I remember playing RPG games like Zelda and King’s Quest. King’s Quest 1-4 (Sierra) has an interesting “type as you go” system whereby the player has to type out the actions of King Graham and its other characters to get through a stage in the game. Frustrating as this was at some points, my grammar improved, especially relating to “action” based descriptions. I also remember getting stumped on specific quests and I can’t figure it out for the life of me. When I go to sleep, I am still thinking about it. Somewhere between the next day or two, a answer floats into my head. It almost as if, my conscious thoughts were plugging away, and over time, these problems were submerged into the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind chews on it, and slowly reveals some potential possibilities for answers. Not all of the answers worked, but I remember in King’s Quest 4, being stuck in the Whale’s mouth and figuring out that Rosella had to tickle the Whale’s uvula was one example where the answer came to me after a lot of thought. I remember when my mom used to say, “Wow. Now if you could only use your mind to study stocks, or some other thing that makes money as much as you study how to play all these computer games!”

Goals
The incubation period concept came from 2 ideas that have becomes a series of actions that have taken place in my life. First, let me explain my 2 main goals and actions:

1. To create foundation for a continuous, structured and focused thought towards a goal. That goal, through several experiences of mine, was to become financially independent. The main driving force for this was freedom. Freedom from the office. Freedom with my time. Freedom from the constant power hierarchies that plague the workplace. It wasn’t good just wishing and thinking about this once in a while. No. It was important for this to become part of my being, a lifestyle.

2. The second one was harder. Essentially, I wanted to stop chasing girls. I wanted girls to chase me. As Stone would say, “I am not a bank robber, I am the fucking bank.” This, I believe, for me, requires a longer incubation period.

Incubation Period
Both of these goals will take time. Just like planting a seed and waiting for it to grow and reap the rewards, an incubation periods needs to occur to turn these goals and ideas into action, and action into a lifestyle. The incubation thus refers to the time devote to these goals. At first, it may mean changing up your lifestyle. Maybe it’ll be lonely for a while, but hasn’t it been lonely anyway? We were just validating ourselves with the presence of other people who didn’t really value us that much in the first place.

So these are my 2 goals. Money and girls. Wow. Deep huh? Maybe Mystery was right about S&R values. But money and girls are just the vehicles to the destination. The real destination is freedom, and options. Freedom to to do what I want to do, and options to spend time connecting with people that I enjoy. Options to see the best of me in other women, and to see why human beings are created in God’s image.

On Finance
The money part, I have always had down. Since I was in elementary school, I swore to myself after seeing dad’s work experience that I would become a businessman. I believed in the free market and its ability to reward those of value, and that government jobs were based on a fixed hierarchy of control and structure. Ironically, though we traveled freely as diplomats, dad’s career was indeed a very structured and linear path. He did well, becoming director of major offices, and has had a long and most importantly honorable career for someone who is a government official. For college, despite urges from many people, I attended a 4 year undergraduate business school, and had one of the best times of my life up to that point. I graduated and went into management consulting, and have had a successful career since 2004 in technology.

There is no doubt in my mind that I have the necessary knowledge and tools to create financial independence, and the momentum was already building up to launch a vehicle that will fulfill both my passion and my financial goals in this arena. This incubation period started over 1 year ago, and has been on my mind for a long time. As luck would have a hand in this, I met Casual, who is an excellent business partner. The way I met him was through a verbal communication of my own goals in life, and then promptly for him to recognize that we can share this social alignment. When you know your direction in life, our frame of that will draw other people on similar paths to reach out to you. Casual’s engineering skills are complimentary to my marketing and sales experience, and surprisingly, we are both really good writers. At least, we both think we are.

On Becoming Attractive
The second goal wasn’t so easy. The truth was, I first had to admit to myself that I was not able to get the quality of girls that I truly desire in my current situation. Blaming it as I would on “not enough time away from work” or “living outside of San Francisco”, these are ultimately excuses and rationalizations. I had to do a very logical and non biased review of myself, including comments from others, friends, people I didn’t know, as well as myself. I’ll selectively share some of these with you in case you’re on the same path:

1. Genetic Looks – PUA land commercialization has us believing that this doesn’t matter. It does. While it is healthy to over estimate your physical attractiveness to a degree, it is also good to be realistic. Post a photo on HotorNot.com. Ask a stranger on the street what she thinks about your style and what you can do to improve. Be honest. Style and avatars can be changed. Genetics are harder. The most important thing here is, to to fully aware of your physical attractiveness relative to the general population, and then add a small increment of confidence on top of that.

Some physical traits ARE changeable, but they take time. Acne.org has a great forum if you have skin problems. Invis-align is a great alternative for braces if your teeth needs work. Plastic surgery is also an option, although I would advise on exploring our inner game reasons first before jumping into this one. These are just a few examples of long term, look improving steps that will permanently improve your physical attractiveness. Do your research, and don’t assume that looks don’t matter just because Gurus are trying to sell a product.

2. Healthy Body – It is not necessary to have a rocking body as a man to pull HBs. In presence of game, inferior looks compared to other males will still get you laid. However, all things equal, a better built guy with the same level of game will just do better than you if you are too skinny/fat or otherwise unfit. No 2 guys have to same game, but this is one area where we know for sure that increases attraction triggers, and takes time to work on. So get to it. Eat right. Exercise. Come up with a plan to achieve your physical goals.

3. Being happy without women – this is probably the hardest one for me to grasp, but also came as the most revealing. As men, can we ever be content without women? Or are we forever slaves to our DNA? The thing is, if we are not happy with our lives without women, chances are, when we do have girls around, these inner game problems will still exist. Badboy said this in Project SF when he visited, “Girls won’t make you happy. They will make you happy temporarily, but once you get used to it, it goes back to the foundations of your own life that makes you, as an individual happy.”

In this sense, a pickup is like a mirror of yourself. The girl is a mirror, reflecting your own idealizations and desires back at you, and that is in essence what seduction is, the idealization of the ideal love projected onto someone else. Hugh Hefner would say as much. Plato would comment, that love is “the complete realization of the unity of souls between two human beings, in which they both perceive God in each other.”

I think as men we need women in our lives. The uncontrollable urge to pursue women is coded into our DNA. So I’m not saying that we should all become monks. Rather, being content and happy, and being “centered” without women, shows a man of real value and a life that is balanced.

I will be honest, the lack of sarging and women in my life these days… it feels like … I’ll quote the vampires from Twilight here, “Eating animal blood… it’s like we are vegetarian. You’re full, but never quite satisfied.”

Doing something with life, and actually making a conscious decision on my priorities and goals, however, feels very good.