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.

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.

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.