Part of this is due to Accutane. 60 mg a day does takes it toll on the body. For the most part, the drug was considered a miracle drug when introduced over 2 decades ago, as the only “cure” for acne breakouts. While there has been no conclusive scientific study that links depression or suicidal thoughts to the drug, many patients have acknowledged a known depression curve when on high doses of Accutane. For me, this feeling just means that if you do nothing or have nothing exciting going on in your life, you will feel a little “blue”. Thus, a normal person with a healthy social life need not worry for the most part.

The medicine, at best, is a slight influence on how I feel. It tends to enhance any negative thoughts that you currently have. Behavior and conscious thought is still personal choice, as we deliberately control and direct them.

One of the challenges I have been dealing with is how I can reach my goals. The barriers seem insurmountable. Too hard. Too many obstacles. Impossible. I wished that I wasn’t so ambitious, and that my dream to build my own playboy mansion and have a shot at becoming really, model good looking was exactly that – a nice dream to which I can hang my hopes and dreams by, and pretend to really care about it when I talk to people that asked. But it is so much more than that. It is becoming a burning desire.

One of the problems, as correctly noted by friend and PUA Serum is that my goals are too high. As such, I go on spurts when I would go out and go “sarging“. When I don’t get the girl I want, or I end up closing a girl that I think is below my standards, I will get really angry/depressed/in denial. See Kubler-Ross model for more details.

After this “wave”, I go back to my normal routine. While I consider myself rather successful being in “normal mode”, this person, this version of AlphaWolf will not get me to where I want to go – building my own version of the Playboy mansion. To achieve this, I must become someone else. In this sense, the lessons in pickup and entrepreneurship are very real. How can you become a sexy worthy guy, if you have never actually BEEN sex worthy?  How do you develop a rich person’s mentality, when you’ve never BEEN rich?

On a deep level and to a large extent in the artist’s exterior, he or she will have to fundamentally change who they are. Being politically correct, people will always say, “become attractive! become confident! But while doing so, remember to retain your best qualities and who you REALLY are!!!”

But the truth is not that simple. I believe that on a very deep level, for a non sex worthy guy (non-natural) to become sex worthy, something in him fundamentally changes. I am starting to understand this now. As you work on this, something clicks. You no longer “value chase” girls. They chase you. You chase them for fun, not becasue you are seeking value. It is an equal exchange. There is no fake it til you make it. No bullshit. No lies. No elaborate tricks. It simply is.

YOU. ARE. A. SEX. WORTHY. GUY.

The truth shall set you free.

A word of wisdom came from an unexpected source: a shy Indian guy at work, who needed a ride home today. He is a stand up guy, but I always thought that he wasn’t very interesting. I asked him for his view on life and our goals, given our workload at the office. He said something really interesting:

“Sometimes you make ‘long term’ goals, but the long term is hard to predict and hard to see. So you have short term goals, and you work to get there within a reasonable amount of time, and short goal after short goal, hopefully that allows you to move towards your longer term goals.”

I still have not figured out how to take this mindset, and create a disciplined lifestyle around it. Too many times, I have said “fuck it” to picking up girls because I cannot take the rejection, and also because my PU skills, while it gets me laid with (let’s be frank) a decent amount of effort, it always feels like I am the one doing the “chasing”. I have seen guys who do not chase. The girls choose them. There are 2 extremes, the rich guys, who get the gold digging girls (these are broad generalizations, I know hang with me).

The other type of guy is just the “sex worthy guy”, as we describe in pickup as a guy who you know, on an exterior and subtle level, understands attraction and can trigger it in woman, and can sexually escalate to a close. The thing PUAs and the community often misses is that this guy has his inner game down. He understands who he is. He has a strange, almost untouchable sense of confidence in himself.  The inner game is the essense of the fire, and the techniques are simply ways to manipulate the flame.

AFC Adam notes in the under 21 convention, that becoming a natural requires 3 things:

1. Confidence in yourself: without confidence, you have no hope

2. Abundance: you need women in your life

3. An ability to sexually escalate

At the end of the day, pickup is pickup. It is a skill set and mindset of picking up girls. It is nothing more, nothing less. The 3 pillars of your life, wealth, health, and love must be in order in order to feel truly happy. This beings me back to my original points:

1. I don’t want to “pickup” girls because I feel like I am not at a point where my inner game and passive value traits are allowing me to be, at a base frequency, the sex worthy guy.

2.  On the same note, while I love working on business and work, doing this 100% of the time does make me depressed, because I know I am not living up to my full potential. And the reason we are running with this was to have more free time and financial resources to pursue our passions in pickup and the arts! Guitar, Martial Arts, Dance, Art.

I will continue to post my conflicts in the personal life section, in hopes that others can benefit from reading about my experience.

“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.”