“Obey no man, but solely the laws (principles).”
My principles. At least, those I strive for.
The way I look at it, we live in this game called Life. In any game, there are certain rules you must play by if you want to win. There are rules you must play by if you do not want to lose. And there are rules to live by if you just want to stay in the game. While this game will hopefully be a fun one to play, it is no doubt the most serious game that you can participate in. Because you are all in. And when you’re out, you’re out.
As such, we should strive to play the greatest game we can with the time we have remaining. To win a game is to know the rules. To play by those rules, and to stick to those rules even when you feel like cheating. Because if you cheat, then you aren’t really playing the game you set out to play. You’re playing someone else’s game, or losing control of the game you are playing.
I’m not sure if this metaphor exactly makes sense. I am trying to avoid speaking of morals and priestly things. I don’t think I’m qualified to be the moral arbiter and moral rule setter of the world.
What I do know is that there are some rules that we should live by, since they will ideally result in a more optimal life. At the very least, adhering to these rules should result in living – as the Stoics would say – the good life.
One could suggest that we can reject these principles to live by and figure out what to do as the moment calls for it. However, I prefer Leonard Peikoff’s line of thought:
“The people who reject principles reject the human method of dealing with complexity. But because they don’t have the animal’s means of coping, they are left helpless. In the end, they have recourse only to raw feeling or gang warfare. This is howler politicians are now deciding the life-and-death issues of our economy and foreign policy. If a man lives by principles, his course of action is in essence predictable; you know what to expect of him. But if a man rejects principles, who knows what he will do next?”
“Principles are not a means to an end. Principles are those things you believe to be fundamentally true. If you can easily set them aside in order to attain a goal, they weren’t principles so much as they were postures. If your moral compass is only something you use to gauge what you can probably get away with, it’s not really a moral compass. It’s more like your shady lawyer and you are someone completely unworthy of trust.” -Jim Mattis
In my metaphorical travels and journeys through the books and articles I’ve read this past decade, I try to pick out tidbits of insights. Some just so happen to be these rules, or principles. In thinking if this is a good principle to adhere to, I ask myself the following question: If I were to have a son, what principles would I want etched into their mind?
Why a son and not a daughter? Because as a male, I am more familiar with the rules I have to play, and therefore wish to stay in my lane. It is not to say these principles are not worth of any soul on earth, only that I know what is true for a person of my sort.
And why a son and not a friend or a parent? From an evolutionary perspective, there is no greater love than that of the love between parent and child. You selflessly want the best for your child in a way you can not for another human. Including yourself. We hide truth from ourselves to live a life of greater convenience. And this is much more difficult when you think in the frame of what is best for your child rather than yourself.
The trick, then, is to lead by example and live by those principles so that your child has someone to emulate as they grow into their own self.
I have kept these principles to single, small blocks of text. Many are quotes, all are taken from men and women much wiser than myself. I attempt to break these small blocks down in a manner in which each rule is digestible and sensible in its own right. Books can be written for many of these principles. But there are many principles to live by, and better to integrate the rule than have an encyclopedia explaining these rules.
The following are the rules of life that I would wish for my child to integrate into their life…
| “To show resentment at a reproach is to acknowledge that one may have deserved it.” -Tacitus |
| “… [avoid] likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertions in time of peace to discharge the debts, which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden, which we ourselves ought to bear.” -George Washington |
| “Act ‘as if’. In everything you do act as if you are already the incredibly confident man you want to be. If you’re not sure what action to take, think to yourself “What would someone with supreme confidence do right now?” and then do that. |
| “No sissy stuff.” Do not exhibit submissive behaviors. Do not submit to submissive influences and interests that could handicap you. You will appear vulnerable. |
| “How would I feel, how would I react, if I were in his shoes?” By becoming interested in the cause, we are less likely to dislike the effect. |
| “I don’t want to” cannot be a factor when considering something you should be doing. |
| “If I allow a man to steal my chickens, I might as well let him rape my daughters.” That’s reflexive honor. Reflexive honor is the signal of the rattlesnake, communicating a reputation for retaliation. “Nemo me impume lacessi.” A man who cannot defend his own space cannot defend women and children. Never allow a man to steal your chickens. |
| “People want to know how much you care before they care how much you know.” In other words, people have to believe that you are able to put their interests above your own. How do you do that? Make it all about them – not you or your company or secret sauce. And how do you do that? Ask better trust-based questions. Instead of saying anything remotely needy, try something that is clearly not in your own self-interest. |
| 3 things that make a man: 1-Protect – Knowing how to go into combat and fight, knowing how to kill, knowing how to not die 2-Provide – Know how to create value and capture value. 3-Procreate – Get married and have kids (that you can protect and provide for) |
| To evaluate how well you are using your time, ask yourself: 40 years from now, how much would I pay to replay this very moment? |
| A bank will lend you money if you prove you don’t need it. Others will give you what you want if you prove you don’t need it. |
| A cadet will neither lie, cheat, steal nor tolerate those who do. |
| A conscious denial of an accepted truth for the sake of one’s ego leaves you vulnerable to the potency of the truth. |
| A desire not to butt into other people’s business is at least 80% of all human wisdom. |
| A gentleman: someone who is never rude except on purpose. |
| A GIFT OF FISH. Kung-yi Hsiu, premier of Lu, was fond of fish. Therefore, people in the whole country conscientiously bought fish, which they presented to him. However, Kung-yi would not accept the presents. Against such a step his younger brother remonstrated with him and said: “You like fish, indeed. Why don’t you accept the present offish? ” In reply, he said: “It is solely because I like fish that I would not accept the fish they gave me. Indeed, if I accept the fish, I will be placed under an obligation to them. Once placed under an obligation to them, I will some time have to bend the law. If I bend the law, I will be dismissed from the premiership. After being dismissed from the premiership, I might not be able to supply myself with fish. On the contrary, if I do not accept the fish from them and am not dismissed the premiership, however fond of fish, I can always supply myself with fish. ” |
| A good man will welcome every experience the looms of fate may weave for them. |
| A good way to think politically: I am, at the federal level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist. |
| A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the measure as I have received and am still receiving. |
| A man – a real man – shoots his own dog himself; he doesn’t hire a proxy who may bungle it. |
| A man should be prepared to be the one responsible for saving the world. Likely, he will never become that man. But it is to be a man to know your responsibility to prepare regardless. |
| A man who does not act on his sexual desires is a man who is needy, lacks vulnerability and is therefore unattractive. |
| A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in anything he is doing is right or wrong – acting the part of a good man or bad. |
| A man who is more concerned with being a good man than being good at being a man makes a very well-behaved slave. |
| A person who is not inwardly prepared for the use of violence against him is always weaker than the person committing the violence. |
| A person’s toothache means more to that person than a famine in China which kills a million people. A boil on one’s neck interests one more than 40 earthquakes in Africa. Think of that next time you start a conversation. |
| A seducer sees all of life as theater, everyone an actor. Most people feel they have constricted roles in life, which makes them unhappy. Seducers, on the other hand, can be anyone and can assume many roles. (The archetype here is the god Zeus, insatiable seducer of young maidens, whose main weapon was the ability to assume the form of whatever person or animal would most appeal to his victim.) Seducers take pleasure in performing and are not weighed down by their identity, or by some need to be themselves, or to be natural. This freedom of theirs, this fluidity in body and spirit, is what makes them attractive. Practice being the seducer. |
| A shit-test is emotionally manipulative behavior, and we are shit-tested constantly – not only by the romantically interesting women in our lives, but by almost everyone we meet. Most people don’t realize what they are doing; they are simply using learned behavior that has often yielded results. So why is this learned behavior so effective? Developed in childhood, our coping strategies tend to be about appeasing others to the detriment of our self-interest. The indoctrination continues as we grow into adults. Our educational system compels us to artificially enforce self-esteem and confidence in others, regardless of merit. Our media deludes us with the chivalry-is-rewarded, true-love-conquers-all, happily-ever-after myth. In short, we are being taught cradle to grave to take ownership of the anxieties of others because that will give us validation and preserve us from harm. The corollary is that if there is a lack of validation or harm befalls us, it is because we did not adequately address those anxieties. Dealing with this shit crushes a man’s spirit, so he will spend a lot of time trying to predict how his own behavior might generate anxiety in others so that he may avoid, deflect or manage it. He pushes his own needs to the back while he attends to others, and isolates himself to reduce the sickening workload. This is the primary ingredient of the Blue Pill. Therefore, I propose that the axiom of the Red Pill is to refuse the “gift” of negative emotion from others, expressed or implied. The guy who tells you your shirt looks stupid. The girl who asks you to buy her a drink. A clingy mother. A verbally abusive father. All trying to move you via negative emotion. All different, yet all the same. It’s not about fighting back – it’s about refusing to engage at all. The first sign you are being given a “gift” is when your interaction with someone is making you feel compelled to do something you don’t want to. When you find yourself in that situation, take a moment and ask yourself, “Is this what I want to do/say?” If not, refuse to comply. Just say no. It is almost certain that other person will increase the pressure. How dare you not do that thing! It is there, right at that moment, when you feel that increased sense of guilt, the need to appease and not rock the boat and make that person happy, that you are feeling the withdrawal symptoms of the Blue Pill. Note it. File it. Embrace it. Make it your companion. Then double down on your refusal to do something contrary to your own desires and self-interest. I am working hard to refuse the “gifts” that are offered to me every single day. If people go away because I don’t take their gifts? Good riddance. Because you know who is happier for the change? I am. And that’s refreshing. |
| A short story: ‘As my grandfather was starting his administrative and hopefully political career, his father summoned him to his deathbed. “My son, I am very disappointed in you. I never hear anything wrong said about you. You have proven yourself incapable of generating envy.”‘ |
| A workout isn’t just a workout; it needs to become Hero Training. |
| Accept every advantage. Exploit every opportunity. Exhaust every resource. Take everything the modern world has to offer and use it to aid your revolt and improve the future prospects of your people. |
| Accept no favor which you could not repay. |
| Act as if you have “seen it all before” and are nothing but amused by the words and actions of others. Act as if you are playing along, but only so far as to cleverly poke fun at the attempts of the other person to get you to qualify them. It means you never take them seriously, like a bratty younger sibling. |
| Act so that you can tell the truth about how you act. |
| Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens. |
| Stand up straight with your shoulders back. |
| Dress like the person you want to be. |
| Do not try to rescue someone who does not want to be rescued, and be very careful about rescuing someone who does. |
| Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you need to know. Listen to them hard enough so that they will share it with you. |
| Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. |
| Altering your personality to improve your lot is not disingenuous. Do not accept the roles society foists on you. Re-create yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention and never bores the audience. Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define it for you. Incorporate dramatic devices into your public gestures and actions. |
| Although we may disguise our timidity as a concern for others, a desire not to hurt or offend them, in fact it is the opposite—we are really self-absorbed, worried about ourselves and how others perceive us. Boldness, on the other hand, is outer-directed, and often makes people feel more at ease, since it is less self-conscious and less repressed. Be bold. |
| Always ask for more than you are worth and you will typically get more than you are worth. By not asking for enough, we project to the world that we do not value ourselves much. |
| Always attack, never explain, never back down. If you’re explaining, you’re losing. |
| Always be willing to walk away. It proves to others that you have endless options, either now or ones that you can create which you would always opt for. |
| Always care about yourself first. You subconsciously do anyway, and you fight it out of guilt. And so does everyone else. In the end, you are disposable. Society doesn’t care about you. |
| Always do more than you talk. And precede talk with action. |
| Find a symbol to represent your cause – the more emotional associations, the better. |
| Always get friendly with the bartender. And tip well. |
| Always presume positive intent with people you know or work with. A good leader is more of a gardener than a chess master. |
| Always respond with humor and wit, never anger and emotion. An angry look on the face is wholly gainst nature. If it be assumed frequently, beauty begins to perish, and in the end is quenched beyond rekindling. Anger is a hot coal that you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else. |
| An element of fear is critical: keeping a man at a proper distance creates respect, so that he doesn’t get close enough to see through you or notice your weaker qualities. Create such fear by suddenly changing your moods, keeping the man off balance, occasionally intimidating him with capricious behavior. |
| An enlightened person has understood something that makes him or her content, and this contentment radiates outward. That is the appearance you want: you do not need anything or anyone, you are fulfilled. People are naturally drawn to those who emit happiness; maybe they can catch it from you. |
| Never look scared or tense; it’s contagious. |
| Anchor around people who will help you build your “nothing is impossible” community. Surround yourself with those who seek what you seek. Spend time with people even more committed to your cause. You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. |
| In any small group of men, if you strip everything else away, the essential core of the honor code comes down to 1) not engaging in behavior that will weaken the group, and 2) having each other’s backs. |
| Anger is as much a mark of weakness as is grief; in both of them men receive a wound, and submit to a defeat. |
| Any momentary triumph you think you have gained through argument is really a Pyrrhic victory: The resentment and ill will you stir up is stronger and lasts longer than any momentary change of opinion. It is much more powerful to get others to agree with you through your actions, without saying a word. Demonstrate, do not explicate. Arguing is something you should do with people who you know and respect, because you want what is best for them and for you, and because their opinion matters to you. Argue within your circle. Fuck everyone else. |
| Anything can be pardoned except utter, ruthless indifference. |
| Arrange to Be Noticed. There is a paradox: You cannot display yourself too brazenly, yet you must also get yourself noticed. In the court of Louis XIV, whoever the king decided to look at rose instantly in the court hierarchy. You stand no chance of rising if the ruler does not notice you in the swamp of courtiers. This task requires much art. It is often initially a matter of being seen, in the literal sense. Pay attention to your physical appearance, then, and find a way to create a distinctive—a subtly distinctive—style and image. |
| As a leader, the moment you lose contact with your people, seeking security in isolation, rebellion is brewing. Never imagine yourself so elevated that you can afford to cut yourself off from even the lowest echelons. |
| As a person of power, you must research and practice endlessly before appearing in public, onstage or anywhere else. Never expose the sweat and labor behind your poise. Some think such exposure will demonstrate their diligence and honesty, but it actually just makes them look weaker—as if anyone who practiced and worked at it could do what they had done, or as if they weren’t really up to the job. Keep your effort and your tricks to yourself and you seem to have the grace and ease of a god. One never sees the source of a god’s power revealed; one only sees its effects. |
| Downplay the failures and ignore the limitations, to make ourselves demand and expect as much as the child. If we believe we are destined for great things, our belief will radiate outward, just as a crown creates an aura around a king. This outward radiance will infect the people around us, who will think we must have reasons to feel so confident. People who wear crowns seem to feel no inner sense of the limits to what they can ask for or what they can accomplish. This too radiates outward. Limits and boundaries disappear. Be overcome by your self-belief. Even while you know you are practicing a kind of deception on yourself, act like a king. You are likely to be treated like one. |
| Ask a lot of questions. People who ask a lot of questions tend to be more liked. |
| Ask someone to do you a small favor, so that they can ask you to do one in the future. |
| Ask yourself, “Is my method for assessing what is right or wrong right or wrong?” |
| Ask yourself, “What is the worst that can possibly happen if I fail?”, rather than responding automatically, blindly, and irrationally. |
| Ask yourself: what remarkably stupid things I doing on a regular basis to absolutely screw up my life? You have to actually know the answer. Simply ask yourself “how should I manifest myself in the world?” and then go do that. Don’t force a solution. Just ask yourself and then do that. |
| Avoid instant gratification. A life devoted to such produces permanent infantilization. |
| Be a source of pleasure. No one wants to hear about your problems and troubles. Listen to your targets’ complaints, but more important, distract them from their problems by giving them pleasure. (Do this often enough and they will fall under your spell.) Being lighthearted and fun is always more charming than being serious and critical. An energetic presence is likewise more charming than lethargy, which hints at boredom, an enormous social taboo; and elegance and style will usually win out over vulgarity, since most people like to associate themselves with whatever they think elevated and cultured. In politics, provide illusion and myth rather than reality. Instead of asking people to sacrifice for the greater good, talk of grand moral issues. |
| Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity. |
| Be aware of the dominance tests others throw at you every day. Never bend to them. Never. |
| Be bold. Make that a foundational behavior. Boldness is key in seduction, any hesitance creates awareness of your intentions before you can enact them. Boldness literally “sweeps the person off their feet” allowing no such insecurity to form within their mind. Boldness gives you presence, it makes you seem more important and special than you inherently are, for all admire the bold. |
| Be careful in displaying your difference too overtly around others in your social or professional circle, particularly before gaining power in that group. Let your work subtly demonstrate your individual spirit, but when it comes to matters of politics, morals, and values, make a show of adhering to the accepted standard of your environment. |
| Be careful to express an opinion that affects only others and not yourself. There is an invisibility of causal chains, where the separation of knowing and doing (within the same person) leads to fragility. If you do not have skin in the game, do not play the game. |
| Be different in ways that are both striking and aesthetic, never vulgar; poke fun at current trends and styles, go in a novel direction, and be supremely uninterested in what anyone else is doing. Most people are insecure; they will wonder what you are up to, and slowly they will come to admire and imitate you, because you express yourself with total confidence. Your style should be subtle though, because you do not want to look like you are trying for attention. The person whose clothes are flagrantly different has little imagination or taste. Dandies show their difference in the little touches that mark their disdain for convention. |
| Be Frugal in Asking Those Above You for Favors. Rather than making yourself the supplicant, it is always better to earn your favors, so that the ruler bestows them willingly. Most important: Do not ask for favors on another person’s behalf, least of all a friend’s. |
| Be grateful in spite of your your suffering. |
| Be irrationally self-confident. |
| “Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.[To Hindu priests complaining to him about the prohibition of Sati religious funeral practice of burning widows alive on her husband’s funeral pyre.]” ― Charles James Napier |
| Be mindful of your appearance to others. |
| Be not angry at the table whatever happens & if you have reason to be so, show it not; put on a cheerful countenance especially if there be strangers, for good humor makes one dish of meat a feast. |
| Be not apt to relate News if you know not the truth thereof. |
| Be not Curious to Know the Affairs of Others neither approach those that Speak in Private. |
| Be not tedious in Discourse, make not many Digressions, nor repeat often the Same manner of Discourse. Do not speak badly of those who are not present. |
| Be on your guard against unnecessary fault-finding. People should not be sharply corrected for bad grammar, provincialisms, or mispronunciations. It is better to suggest the proper expression by tactfully introducing it oneself in say, one’s reply to a question, or into a friendly discussion of the topic itself, or by some other suitable form of reminder. |
| Be precise in your speech. |
| Be selfish. Put yourself first. Respect yourself above others, even at the expense of others sometimes. The whole world will bend the knee and chase after you, trying to win your validation. Because this is how everyone wants to be. They want to be around those who are like that. Everyone is so polite and respectful by default, that you not being so will rub off on them (or at least they hope it does). And if it doesn’t rub off on them, it rubs them funny and makes them want to be around you even more. |
| Be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. |
| Be uncommon among uncommon men. Go further and seek out uncommon men & women. |
| Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow creature similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divine); therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading. Neither can I be angry with my brother or fall foul of him; for he and I were born to work together, like a man’s two hands, feet or eyelids, or the upper and lower rows of his teeth. To obstruct each other is against Nature’s law – and what is irritation or aversion but a form of obstruction |
| Being to advise or reprehend any one, consider whether it ought to be in public or in Private; presently, or at Some other time in what terms to do it & in reproving Show no Sign of Cholar but do it with all Sweetness and Mildness. If you are corrected, take it without argument. If you were wrongly judged, correct it later. |
| Beware of statements that begin with “I think that…” Avoid using whenever possible. |
| Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you. |
| Boldness and hesitation elicit very different psychological responses in their targets: Hesitation puts obstacles in your path, boldness eliminates them. Once you understand this, you will find it essential to overcome your natural timidity and practice the art of audacity. Boldness destroys such gaps. The swiftness of the move and the energy of the action leave others no space to doubt and worry. In seduction, hesitation is fatal—it makes your victim conscious of your intentions. The bold move crowns seduction with triumph: It leaves no time for reflection. |
| Break a rule only if not breaking it violates a higher order rule. Think about everyone in Harry Potter. They constantly broke rules, and for good reason: not doing so violated their higher order rules. |
| Breathe from hips and through the nose. |
| But as a continual, moment-by-moment, day-by-day, sort of second-guessing yourself, or playing Monday-morning quarterback to your past actions – it is defeating. Watch for the self-criticism – pull yourself up short and stop it. |
| By speaking a lie, you are splitting yourself apart. You are separating the person you are not from the person you should be. But you lose the part of yourself that is who you are. |
| Challenge yourself at all times; ask yourself: ‘Am I assuming anything?’ |
| Charmers are consummate manipulators, masking their cleverness by creating a mood of pleasure and comfort. Their method is simple: They deflect attention from themselves and focus it on their target. They understand your spirit, feel your pain, adapt to your moods. In the presence of a Charmer you feel better about yourself. Learn to cast the Charmer’s spell by aiming at people’s primary weaknesses: vanity and self-esteem. |
| Children die every day because millions of us tell ourselves that caring is just as good as doing. It’s an internal mechanism controlled by the lazy part of your brain to keep you from actually doing work. Care less. Do more. |
| Choose not to be harmed – and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed – and you haven’t been. |
| Cleanliness. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation. |
| Commit to Popper’s mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong. This is the alternative to our search for confirmatory instances. Disconfirming instances are far more powerful in establishing truth. Yet we tend to not be aware of this property. |
| Commit to telling the truth. Once you do, you begin “to notice how unusual it is to meet someone who shares this commitment. Honest people are a refuge: You know they mean what they say; you know they will not say one thing to your face and another behind your back; you know they will tell you when they think you have failed – and for this reason their praise cannot be mistaken for mere flattery.” |
| Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. |
| Compared to the stiffs in court, you should be incredibly bold, bore your eyes into others, and have hands quicker than are safe to be around. Nothing should stop you, and carry with you everywhere an air of irresistible novelty. |
| A man is morally free when…he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. Compromising is condoning. |
| Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime? |
| Consider the lives led once by others, long ago, the lives to be led by others after you, the lives led even now, in foreign lands. How many people don’t even know your name. How many will soon have forgotten it. How many offer you praise now – and tomorrow, perhaps, contempt. That to be remembered is worthless. Like fame. Like everything. |
| Courage takes many forms. There is physical courage, there is moral courage. Then there is a still higher type of courage–the courage to brave pain, to live with it, to never let others know of it and to still find joy in life; to wake up in the morning with an enthusiasm for the day ahead. |
| Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment. |
| Do not act shy. Shyness is thinking that EVERYONE IS LOOKING AT YOU. This means you will be less likely speak, less likely get up, and since every time you do you think you walk on a stage and everyone will notice you. You must realize is that you could walk in front of a bus, get hit, and no one would really notice. No one is going to care what you do or who you are. You are not celebrity. You do no have cameras pointing at you. You are not important. You are nothing. |
| Do not argue with your superior. Submit your ideas with humility. |
| Do not avoid the struggle. Avoiding it is an acceptance of defeat and a demonstration of spiritual cowardice. The gauntlet must be run whether you like it or not. |
| Do Not Be the Court Cynic. Express admiration for the good work of others. If you constantly criticize your equals or subordinates some of that criticism will rub off on you, hovering over you like a gray cloud wherever you go. People will groan at each new cynical comment, and you will irritate them. By expressing modest admiration for other people’s achievements, you paradoxically call attention to your own. The ability to express wonder and amazement, and seem like you mean it, is a rare and dying talent, but one still greatly valued. |
| Do not be weak. As a man most people won’t help you for being weak, they don’t sympathise with your weakness, they laugh at you and say “how you could ever let yourself get like that.” As a man, they laugh at you and they enjoy ridiculing your weakness as it makes them feel powerful to know that they’re not at the bottom of the food chain. They indulge in the antithesis between your weakness and their power because it feels good and it reassures their own insecurities. Your weakness is a reminder for other men what not to be, or to allow themselves to become. What not to be is the only useful function that weak men serve to others. |
| Do not become indignant at other people’s conduct. It is as foolish as to be angry with a stone because it rolls into your path. |
| Do not boast. Let others boast of you and for you. Marketing beyond conveying information is insecurity. |
| Do not bother talking about unimportant things. When we blather about trivial things, we ourselves become trivial, for our attention gets taken up with trivialities. You become what you give your attention to. |
| Do not concern yourself with things outside of your power. It won’t do you any good and it’ll probably do you some bad. |
| Do not cross a river if it is on average four feet deep. |
| Do not delay in meeting out justice. |
| Do not do anything for anyone that they can do themselves. You are just stealing from them. |
| Do not engage someone when they publicly challenge you. You are only validating that challenge. |
| Do not hope for other men to harmonize with you. Regard each man as an independent individual, when you endeavor to understand with all his peculiarities, but from whom you desire no further sympathy. In this way you will be able to converse with every man, and thus alone is produced the knowledge of various characters and the dexterity necessary for the conduct of life. |
| Do not laugh too loud or too much at any Public Spectacle. |
| Do not let yourself come off as low value. Low value, for better or for worse, is disgusting to people. We feel revulsion from a socially inept act. |
| Do not make fun of anything important to others. |
| Do not read the news. Reading the news will not make a difference and it will probably make you worse off. |
| Do not reveal to others how hard you work. It will deflate the effect if your work on others. What you do not reveal is all the more powerful and eloquent. Create an air of mystery and power, making sure not to talk about your process, keeping details of your life hidden, and allow others to project onto your their own fantasies |
| Do not show your vulnerabilities to others. A man who is vulnerable is a weak link. He has shown that he is going to break under pressure, or that he is prone to manipulation. This is a sign of a low status man. A man who is likely ot dishonor the group. Dishonoris danger. Be unflappable. |
| Do not speak with resentment. |
| Do not start what you cannot finish. |
| Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. They acquired greatness, became ‘geniuses’ (as we put it), through qualities the lack of which no one who knew what they were would boast of: they all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole. |
| Do not use your compliments as a bargaining tool. Give them unconditionally. When a compliment comes from a man seeking nothing in return, it’s a gift of truth, a piece of his vulnerability and infinitely more powerful as a result. |
| Do not vote in favor of a war unless you have at least one descendant exposed to combat (or yourself). If you do not have skin in such a potentially costly game, you should not participate. |
| Do nothing to others which if done to you would cause you pain. This is the essence of morality. |
| Do the things that you should do if you can do it. If you don’t do those things, bad things will happen because of you. |
| Do what is right. Knowing what is right is relatively useless. |
| Dominance is a desired trait. It doesn’t just mean being in charge though; it means being the one with all the responsibility, the one who has to bear the weight of their problems alone. So that those under them might be free of such a burden. So, take responsibility. Carry a weight while doing so. |
| Don’t be timid. Timidity makes you prey, even the weak will become guileful enough to exploit you if they believe you’re a fool. This is a matter of opportunistic disrespect rather than sadistic hate. |
| Don’t call them the homeless. Call them people without a home. Don’t call them migrants. Call them people who are migrating. It’s about not dehumanizing them. |
| Don’t debate people in the media when you can debate them in the marketplace. |
| Don’t ever put your palm facing up when challenged by anyone. It’s a classic submissive gesture. |
| Don’t follow the people you admire. Follow the people they admire. |
| Don’t get drawn into a debate with an emotionally vested person. It is like throwing pearls in front of swine. For every rationalization you spend 10 minutes disproving, they will make up another one in 10 seconds. Remember, logic has to follow rules that rationalizations can shit all over. You’ll just spend the rest of your life meticulously mopping up other people’s shit – and they have no reason to stop shitting. If someone needs to believe something in order to keep their self image alive, they will. |
| Don’t give away information about yourself easily. Hold your cards close to your chest. At a base level, you may think this is a case of not having the time to relay your life story to someone. But it goes deeper. You value yourself, your characteristics, your life experiences, memories, stories, etc. These things are what you tell people close to you who have enough meaning in your life to have earned the privilege to know you on a personal level. Only people of value with whom you want to associate get this treatment from you. |
| Don’t justify yourself to people who have already decided on their opinion of you. |
| Don’t sacrifice who you could be for who you are. |
| Don’t say things that make you weak.This could mean 95% of what you say. |
| Don’t’ let bullies get away with it. |
| Don’t avoid something frightening just because it stands in your way. |
| Don’t fear a dragon-like opponent, fear a pig-like teammate. |
| Dress like the person you want to be. |
| “Each man must think not only of himself, but think of his buddy fighting alongside him. We don’t want cowards in the army. They should be killed off like flies. If not, they will go back home after the war, goddamn cowards, and breed more cowards. The brave men will breed more brave men. Kill off the goddamn cowards and we’ll have a nation of brave men.” |
| Eat healthy. What you eat affects your children before they are even born. |
| Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt. |
| Emphasize the Visual and the Sensual over the Intellectual. Once people have begun to gather around you, two dangers will present themselves: boredom and skepticism. Boredom will make people go elsewhere ; skepticism will allow them the distance to think rationally about whatever it is you are offering, blowing away the mist you have artfully created and revealing your ideas for what they are. You need to amuse the bored, then, and ward off the cynics. The best way to do this is through theater, or other devices of its kind. Surround yourself with luxury, dazzle your followers with visual splendor, fill their eyes with spectacle. |
| Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored for. |
| The good is mostly in the absence of bad. I.E. via negativa, take things away, consume less, and you will be more free and happy. This is a stoic thought: no comfort; no sunscreen; no sunglasses; no AC; no sweet drinks; no smooth surfaces; no loud music; no elevator; no juice…. |
| Epictetus thinks that in our practice of stoicism, we should be so inconspicuous that others don’t label us stoics – or even label us philosophers. |
| Every man should seek to master himself. A man should be able to decide when and where to indulge his desires as opposed to the desires dragging him to and fro. A man is a king, not a slave. Delaying your gratification builds both your self-confidence—you are in control of your life, not your emotions or circumstances–and your self-discipline. |
| Every single day, work towards taking away from your vices and correcting your own faults. |
| Every smallest stroke of virtue or vice leaves its ever so little scar. |
| Every time you are faced with a decision, close your eyes and visualize what you are trying to spin into reality. Ask yourself, “Will this act help to make this picture of a reality? Pull it out of my mind and into this world?” And only act if that answer is yes. Do not act capriciously or make decisions on a whim. Don’t leave things to chance. Create your dream one aligned decision at a time while holding the ultimate vision in mind. |
| Everyone is wrapped up in their own narcissistic shell. When you try to impose your own ego on them, a wall goes up, resistance is increased. |
| Everything you say and do must be done without ulterior motive. Simply express your thoughts and feelings as they come to you, without inhibition, without shame. |
| Explaining yourself, no matter how rational your explanation is will be perceived as a demonstration of low status. Do not justify yourself, if you find yourself explaining yourself in the midst of an argument or theatrical device, you’re losing and would be far better off just immediately exiting stage instead. |
| Eye contact is the most underrated skill. |
| Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. |
| Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in that grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat. |
| Fear of failure in the mind of a performer is, for an onlooker, already evidence of failure…Actions are dangerous when there is doubt as to their wisdom; it would be safer to do nothing. |
| Feeling good now comes at a cost. |
| Few are drawn to the person whom others avoid or neglect; people gather around those who have already attracted interest. To draw others closer and make them hungry to possess you, you must create an aura of desirability —of being wanted and courted by many. It will become a point of vanity for them to be the preferred object of your attention, to win you away from a crowd of admirers. Build a reputation that precedes you: If many have succumbed to your charms, there must be a reason. |
| Seducers are completely amoral in their approach to life. It is all a game, an arena for play. Knowing that the moralists, the crabbed repressed types who croak about the evils of the seducer, secretly envy their power, they do not concern themselves with other people’s opinions. They do not deal in moral judgments — nothing could be less seductive. |
| Find a mantra to repeat during strenuous times. “They say you will never be a hero. They say you will never be a hero.” “They say you’ll never achieve greatness. They say you’ll never achieve greatness.” Prove the mantra wrong. |
| Find someone with the opposite of your weaknesses, and spend a great deal of time with them. |
| Five year olds are curious about everything. They ask “why” about everything, and “why” to those answers. Be more like a 5 year old. |
| Focus and an inability to procrastinate are the keys to success. |
| Focus on the “what is” before deciding “what to do about it.” It is a common mistake to move in a nanosecond from identifying a tough problem to proposing a solution for it. Strategic thinking requires both diagnosis and design. (And good diagnosis requires good data) |
| For any social encounter to be successful, do what you can to get the other person’s heart racing. |
| For it is so far from how one lives to how one should live that he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation. For a man who wants to make a profession of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many who are not good. |
| For it must be noted, that men must either be caressed or else annihilated; they will revenge themselves for small injuries, but cannot do so for great ones; the injury therefore that we do to a man must be such that we need not fear his vengeance. |
| For the knowledge you have obtained to be converted to power, you must organize it into definite plans of action, and direct it to a definite end. |
| For whatever is wrong right now, ask yourself: is there anything I could be doing, anything, that can get me out of what is currently wrong? |
| Frame is everything. Always be aware of the subconscious balance of who’s frame in which you are operating. Always control the Frame, but resist giving the impression that you are. |
| Gaze not on the marks or blemishes of Others and ask not how they came. What you may Speak in Secret to your Friend deliver not before others. |
| Get over the idea that only children should spend their time in study. Be a student so long as you still have something to learn, and this will mean all your life. |
| Get up the moment the first alarm goes off. Do not wait. The moment the alarm goes off is the first test; it sets the tone for the rest of the day. The test is not a complex one: when the alarm goes off, do you get up out of bed, or do you lie there in comfort and fall back to sleep? If you have the discipline to get out of bed, you win – you pass the test. If you are mentally weak for that moment and you let that weakness keep you in bed, you fail. Though it seems small, that weakness translates to more significant decisions. But if you exercise discipline, that too translates to more substantial elements of your life. |
| Give not Advice without being Asked & when desired do it briefly. If two people disagree, do not take one side or the other. Be flexible in your own opinions and when you don’t care, take the majority opinion. |
| Golden Rule: “Conduct yourself toward your parents as you would have your children conduct themselves toward you.” Or in reverse, and better, “treat one’s children the way one wished to be treated by one’s parents.” |
| Good leaders know that exhaustion is partly state of mind, though, and that the men who succumb to it have on some level decided to put themselves above everyone else. If you’re not prepared to walk for someone you’re certainly not prepared to die for them, and that goes to the heart of whether you should even be in a platoon. |
| Hammurabi’s code— now about 3,800 years old— identifies the need to reestablish a symmetry of fragility, spelled out as follows: If a builder builds a house and the house collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house— the builder shall be put to death. If it causes the death of the son of the owner of the house, a son of that builder shall be put to death. If it causes the death of a slave of the owner of the house— he shall give to the owner of the house a slave of equal value. It looks like they were much more advanced 3,800 years ago than we are today. The entire idea is that the builder knows more, a lot more, than any safety inspector, particularly about what lies hidden in the foundations— making it the best risk management rule ever, as the foundation, with delayed collapse, is the best place to hide risk. Hammurabi and his advisors understood small probabilities. Now, clearly the object here is not to punish retrospectively, but to save lives by providing up-front disincentive in case of harm to others during the fulfillment of one’s profession. |
| Have good manners. All this takes time, but good manners are made up of petty sacrifices. |
| Have I done an unselfish thing? Well then, I have my reward. Keep this thought ever present, and persevere. |
| He asked her: when she had been abducted by Meleagant, had she heard the story of the cart, and how he had disgraced knighthood? Was that why she had treated him so coldly that day? The queen replied, “By delaying for two steps you showed your unwillingness to climb into it. That, to tell the truth, is why I didn’t wish to see you or speak with you.” Interpretation: The opportunity to do your selfless deed often comes upon you suddenly. You have to show your worth in an instant, right there on the spot. It could be a rescue situation, a gift you could make or a favor you could do, a sudden request to drop everything and come to their aid. What matters most is not whether you act rashly, make a mistake, and do something foolish, but that you seem to act on their behalf without thought for yourself or the consequences. At moments like these, hesitation, even for a few seconds, can ruin all the hard work, revealing you as self-absorbed, unchivalrous, and cowardly. This, at any rate, is the moral of Chretien de Troyes’s twelfth-century version of the story of Lancelot. Remember: not only what you do matters, but how you do it. If you are naturally self-absorbed, learn to disguise it. React as spontaneously as possible, exaggerating the effect by seeming flustered, overexcited, even foolish. He who gives promptly, gives twice. |
| He is beholden to a limited number of people — to “us” — and owes no explanation or justification to “them.” Contemplate the absurdity of a Viking explaining to monks why he is “right” to attack their monastery, or Attilla justifying his attacks on the Roman Empire to anyone but the Huns. Power makes its own argument. |
| Heaven is on the other side of that feeling you get when you’re sitting on the couch and you get up and make a triple-decker sandwich. It’s on the other side of that, when you don’t make the sandwich. It’s about sacrifice…. It’s about giving up the things that basically keep you from feeling. I’m always asking, “What am I going to give up next?” Because I want to feel. |
| Here’s a rule for whether or not you should take an opportunity: Will taking that opportunity teach you something that you can use to get other opportunities? |
| Holding a pose that opens up a person’s body and takes up space will alter hormone levels and make the person feel more powerful and more willing to take risks. |
| Honesty is a gift we can give to others. It is also a source of power and an engine of simplicity. Knowing that we will attempt to tell the truth, whatever the circumstances, leaves us with little to prepare for. We can simply be ourselves. |
| Honor based on respect is a superior moral imperative to obedience based on rules and law. |
| Honor is the moral imperative of men; obedience is the moral imperative of boys. |
| How do all of your interesting thoughts and ideas manifest themselves in the world? What do they cause you to do? If your dream girl or guy had a hidden camera that followed you around for a month, would they be impressed with what they saw? Remember, they can’t read your mind — they can only observe. Would they want to be a part of that life? |
| How he would never dismiss a subject until he had looked thoroughly into it and understood it clearly. |
| How much of your time is spent consuming things other people made (TV, music, video games, websites) versus making your own? Only one of those adds to your value as a human being. |
| How much you truly “believe” in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it. |
| How ridiculous not to flee from one’s own wickedness, which is possible, yet endeavour to flee from another’s, which is not. |
| How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived. |
| How to teach others. If you want to teach another person anything, lead them through the field of their own knowledge by asking questions, pointing out analogies to what they know, persuade them that they really know some things they thought that until that point they had not. |
| I certainly think that it is better to be impetuous than cautious, for fortune is a woman, and it is necessary, if you wish to master her, to conquer her by force; and it can be seen that she lets herself be overcome by the bold rather than by those who proceed coldly. And therefore, like a woman, she is always a friend to the young, because they are less cautious, fiercer, and master her with greater audacity. |
| I don’t pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being. |
| I often marvel how it is that though each man loves himself beyond all else, he should yet value his own opinion of himself less than that of others. |
| I shall pass through this life but once. Any good therefore that I can do, let me do it now for I shall never pass this way again. |
| I want to have him feel the determination to put the wrong-doer down, to make the man who does wrong aware that the decent man is not only his superior in decency, but his superior in strength. |
| I will speak ill of no man, and speak all the good I know of everybody. |
| I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated/ To closeness and the bettering of my mind. |
| I’d rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right. |
| Identify everyone with influence and figure out how they are connected to one another. Mingle everywhere, know everyone, and have such a vast network of connections that an enemy here could easily be counterbalanced by an ally there. |
| Identify what you are afraid of and avoiding, and voluntarily confront it. |
| If a man makes a slip, admonish him gently and show him his mistake. If you fail to convince him, blame yourself, or else blame nobody. |
| If a map is too literal and precise, it confuses people. A mapmaker wrote: “As a mapmaker, I learned a long time ago that the key to good mapmaking is precisely the info you choose to leave out.” Take out anything that you can to make as concise of a point as possible. |
| If choosing to ignore enhances your power, it follows that the opposite approach— commitment and engagement—often weakens you. By paying undue attention to a puny enemy, you look puny, and the longer it takes you to crush such an enemy, the larger the enemy seems. |
| If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I’d still swim. And I’d despise the one who gave up. |
| If it entertains you now but will bore you someday, it’s a distraction. Keep looking. |
| If someone is suspicious of your boldness, become bolder to alleviate their anxiety. They will assume that further boldness makes you true to your word. The assumption is that if you were not legitimate, rather than exemplify your claims, you would back down in fear of imminent exposure. Do not show fear, master the metaphorical poker face and double down. The bold are admired because those who are not bold see the freedom and success in boldness and wish to emulate it. The aesthetically bold are seen as role models. |
| If someone points out to you that you are wrong in some way, rather than defend or argue with them say “Yes, I accept your premise that I am incompetent on the matter of X. Now please show an incompetent man what X is.” |
| If someone presents a harmless front but has acted aggressively on several occasions, give the knowledge of that aggression much greater weight than the surface they present. |
| If something is fragile, its risk of breaking makes anything you do to improve it or make it “efficient” inconsequential unless you first reduce that risk of breaking. |
| If there is something good to be done or said, never renounce your right to it. |
| If we feed information and data into our Creative Mechanism to the effect that we ourselves are unworthy, inferior, undeserving, incapable (a negative self-image) this data is processed and acted upon as any other data in giving us the “answer” in the form of objective experience. |
| If we lose the virile, manly qualities, and sink into a nation of mere hucksters, putting gain over national honor, and subordinating everything to mere ease of life, then we shall indeed reach a condition worse than that of the ancient civilizations in the years of their decay. |
| If we really think very highly of a person, we should conceal it from him like a crime. This is not a very gratifying thing to do, but it is right. Why, a dog will not bear being treated too kindly, let alone a man! |
| If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world. Let us therefore boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word; resolute to be both honest and brave, to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods. Above all, let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation, provided we are certain that the strife is justified, for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness. |
| If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be we help them because what they are capable of becoming. |
| If we want to make friends, let’s greet them with animation and enthusiasm. Even when it comes to picking up the phone and saying “Hello” to the strangest stranger or closest friend. |
| If you aim at something difficult and profound, you will find that your life is difficult and profound. |
| If you allow people to feel they possess you to any degree, you lose all power over them. By not committing your affections, they will only try harder to win you over. Stay aloof and you gain the power that comes from their attention and frustrated desire. Play the Virgin Queen: Give them hope but never satisfactions. |
| If you are afraid to speak out against tyranny you are already a slave. |
| If you are at all ignorant of a subject, do not be irresponsible and have a loud and vociferous opinion on subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance. |
| If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment. |
| If you are in a leadership position and intend on leading others into a risky situation, you should be leading others on the front line into the risk. Show others you believe in the mission. Be more like George Washington and less like George W. Bush. |
| If you are not a monster you cannot negotiate. |
| If you are not capable of cruelty, then you are absolutely a victim of anyone who is. |
| If you are wrong, admit it immediately and emphatically. When someone accuses you of something or says that you are wrong….”Mr So-and-so, if what you say is true, I am at fault and there is absolutely no excuse for my blunder. I have been doing drawings for you long enough to know better. I am ashamed of myself.” He started to defend me. “I interrupted him. ‘Any mistake may be costly and they are all irritating.’ I didn’t let him break in. ‘I should have been more careful. Yu give me a lot of work, and you deserve the best; so I am going to do the drawing all over.’ My eagerness to criticize myself took all the fight out of him. He ended up by taking me to lunch; and before we parted he gave me a check and another commission.” |
| If you become angry, defensive, hurt, etc., then the message you’ve sent to a woman or a man is: “You are more powerful than I am. You have the power to affect my emotional state. I don’t decide how I feel. You do. I don’t take charge of my life. I just react to shit. I am an unworthy and weak male specimen. Please refrain from having sex with me and find yourself a real man.” In fact, if you address the issue at all, you’re saying: “You control what is and is not important in our lives. You set my priorities just by talking. You’re my boss.” |
| If you can’t successfully do something, don’t think you can tell others how it should be done. |
| If You Cough, Sneeze, Sigh, or Yawn, do it not Loud but Privately; and Speak not in your Yawning, but put Your handkerchief or Hand before your face and turn aside. |
| If you do not speak your mind, you kill your unborn self. |
| If you have reason to suspect that a person is telling you a lie, look as though you believed every word he said. This will give him courage to go on; he will become more vehement in his assertions, and in the end betray himself. Again, if you perceive that a person is trying to conceal something from you, but with only partial success, look as though you did not believe him. The opposition on your part will provoke him into leading out his reserve of truth and bringing the whole force of it to bear upon your incredulity. |
| If you have time on your side, and know that you and your enemies are at least at equal strength, then deplete their strength by making them come to you. If time is against you -your enemies are weaker, and waiting will only give them a chance to recover – give them no such chance. Strike quickly and they have nowhere to go. |
| If you insist on attacking the bishop, do not be so foolish as to fall for the securities analyst. |
| If you stop yourself from doing the things you know you shouldn’t do, how much better would your life get? |
| If you suffer because of inhibition – you need to deliberately practice disinhibition. You need to practice being less careful, less concerned, less conscientious. You need to practice speaking before you think instead of thinking before you speak – acting without thinking, instead of thinking or “considering carefully” before you act. |
| If you want someone to do you a favor, briefly touch them on the upper arm. Increases likeability, attractiveness. Do at the same time of delivering a compliment or request. |
| If you want someone, something, or an idea to rub off on you, if you want to embody or integrate it, then expose yourself to it. By the law of the mere-exposure effect, the more exposed you are to a product or idea, the more your mind is able to integrate it and become it. |
| If you want to be courageous – truly couragous – practice going past your breaking point. You will eventually learn to not break. |
| If you want to be seen as interesting to others, you have to be interested in others. People are really interested in those who show interest in them and the things that make them who they are. |
| If you want to become a master of any skill or subject, spend your early days observing and imitating Masters as closely as possible. We learn through endless repition and hands-on work, with very little verbal instruction. Spend much of your time on materials and activities that support the final product so that you can learn how to focus deeply on your work and not make mistakes. |
| If you want to know how to make people shun you and laugh at you behind your back and even despise you, here is the recipe: Never listen to anyone for long. Talk incessantly about yourself. If you have an idea while the other person is talking, don’t wait for him or her to finish: bust right in and interrupt in the middle of a sentence. |
| If you want to turn people down, it is best to do so politely and respectfully, even if you feel their request is impudent or their offer ridiculous. Never reject them with an insult until you know them better; you may be dealing with a Genghis Khan. |
| If you want to win in any undertaking, you must be willing to burn your ships and cut all sources of retreat. |
| If you’re going to half-ass something, you’re going to half-ass it twice. |
| If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life. |
| In any functional tribe, every man should be expected to carry his own weight — at the very least. A successful and respected man also helps carry the weight of some others. He doesn’t merely survive, he produces some kind of surplus, some kind of prosperity that can be shared by others within the perimeter of the group. He works to support not only himself, but the women and children and truly infirm or disabled. Every true leader of men I know feels a strong sense of responsibility to those who depend on the surplus he generates, and this sense of responsibility motivates him to work harder, to produce more and thereby increase prosperity and quality of life for his friends, his people, and his family. A good man in any tribe shares the bounty yielded by his strength. |
| In court, honesty is a fool’s game. Never be so self-absorbed as to believe that the master is interested in your criticisms of him, no matter how accurate they are. |
| In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither push nor reproach evaders, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are hereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. |
| In large-scale strategy, when the enemy is agitated and shows an inclination to rush, do not mind in the least. Make a show of complete calmness, and the enemy will be taken by this and will become relaxed. You infect their spirit. You can infect them with a carefree, drunklike spirit, with boredom, or even weakness. |
| In life, you don’t get what you deserve; you get what you negotiate. |
| In matters of taste you can never be too obsequious with your master. Taste is one of the ego’s prickliest parts; never impugn or question the master’s taste—his poetry is sublime, his dress impeccable, and his manner the model for all. |
| In most cases the words immediately following “I would assume” are usually poorly thought out. |
| In negotiations, work towards an outcome where the other side believes they are having their way. To a degree where the other side says “YES. THAT. Let’s do THAT.” |
| In order to be valued, you must offer something of value. |
| In order to quickly develop connections with others, you must have a playful nature. |
| In reading and writing, you cannot lay down rules until you have learnt to obey them. Much more so in life. |
| In seduction, there is absolutely no power in respecting boundaries and limits. |
| “In some ways I feel sorry for the racists and religious fanatics, because they so much miss the point of being human and deserve a sort of pity. But then I harden my heart and decide to hate them all the more because of the misery they inflict, and because of the contemptible excuses they advance for doing so.” -Christopher Hitchens |
| In the company of your betters, be not longer in eating than they are; lay not your arm but only your hand upon the table. |
| In the end, most people are in fact pragmatic – they will rarely act against their own self-interest. Self-interest is the lever that will move people. Once you make them see how you can in some way meet their needs or advance their cause, their resistance to your requests for help will magically fall away. You must train yourself to think your way inside the other person’s mind, to see their needs and interests, to get rid of the screen of your own feelings that obscure the truth. Master this and there will be no limits to what you can accomplish. |
| In the fable, the Monkey grabs the paw of his friend, the Cat, and uses it to fish chestnuts out of the fire, thus getting the nuts he craves, without hurting himself. If there is something unpleasant or unpopular that needs to be done, it is far too risky for you to do the work yourself You need a cat‘s-paw-someone who does the dirty, dangerous work for you. The cat’s-paw grabs what you need, hurts whom you need hurt, and keeps people from noticing that you are the one responsible. Let someone else be the executioner, or the bearer of bad news, while you bring only joy and glad tidings. |
| In the Presence of Others Sing not to yourself with a humming Noise, nor Drum with your Fingers or Feet. |
| In the realm of power, you must ask yourself, what is the point of chasing here and there, trying to solve problems and defeat my enemies, if I never feel in control? Why am I always having to react to events instead of directing them? The answer is simple: Your idea of power is wrong. You have mistaken aggressive action for effective action. And most often the most effective action is to stay back, keep calm, and let others be frustrated by the traps you lay for them, playing for long-term power rather than quick victory. |
| Industry. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions. |
| Initial stages of learning a skill invariably involve tedium. Yet, rather than avoiding this inevitable tedium, you must accept and embrace it. |
| Instead of inadvertently focusing attention on a problem, making it seem worse by publicizing how much concern and anxiety it is causing you, it is often far wiser to play the contemptuous aristocrat, not deigning to acknowledge the problem’s existence. There are several ways to execute this strategy. First there is the sour-grapes approach. If there is something you want but that you realize you cannot have, the worst thing you can do is draw attention to your disappointment by complaining about it. An infinitely more powerful tactic is to act as if it never really interested you in the first place. Second, when you are attacked by an inferior, deflect people’s attention by making it clear that the attack has not even registered. Look away, or answer sweetly, showing how little the attack concerns you. Similarly, when you yourself have committed a blunder, the best response is often to make less of your mistake by treating it lightly. |
| Instead of looking for the approval of others, decide whether or not to give yours. |
| Instead of looking for things that work, get rid of things that don’t work. |
| Intellectualizing is just another form of avoidance (‘I just need to learn and understand more first’). |
| Is this the purpose of my creation, to lie here under the blankets and keep myself warm? |
| It doesn’t matter if you are in the mood to fight or not. If you must fight, fight. Mood’s a thing for cattle or making love. Are you part of a herd of cattle? |
| It is good to be stronger than other men in your group, but it is important that your gang is stronger than another gang. The former prepares the latter. |
| It is hard to make people listen; they are consumed with their own thoughts and desires, and have little time for yours. The trick to making them listen is to say what they want to hear, to fill their ears with whatever is pleasant to them. This is the essence of seductive language. Inflame people’s emotions with loaded phrases, flatter them, comfort their insecurities, envelop them in sweet words and promises, and not only will they listen to you, they will lose their will to resist you. |
| It is much easier to signal self-confidence if you are exceedingly polite and friendly; you can control people without having to offend their sensibilities. |
| It is much more effective to act like a nice guy and be “reasonable” if you prove willing to go beyond just verbiage. You can afford to be compassionate, lax, and courteous if, once in a while, when it is least expected of you, but completely justified, you sue someone, or savage an enemy, just to show that you can walk the walk. |
| It is much more immoral to claim virtue without fully living with its direct consequences. |
| It is never a good idea to loom too high above the crowd – you make an easy target. And there are times when an aristocratic pose is eminently dangerous. |
| It is no use to preach if you do not act decently yourself. |
| It is not overly dramatic to say your destiny can hang on the impression you make to others. |
| It is only when you don’t care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one. |
| It is the fate of princes to be ill spoken of for well-doing. |
| It is unlikely that you have power to significantly influence events in far-flung corners of the world or even down the block, so any emotional investment in political outcomes or the suffering of strangers overseas is a total waste of time, effort and energy that you could be investing in helping and building mutually beneficial relationships with people who you know, like or admire in your local area. Those investments are far more likely to yield a reciprocal return of love, caring, loyalty and even resources than investments in people you will never meet who live in places you will never go to. The same is true even much closer to home. Even if you avoid television and social media and never listen to news on the radio, a simple trip to a grocery or convenience store will probably alert you to some new panic or riot or outrage or tragedy that everyone is supposed to care about one hundred or one thousand miles away. You will be inundated with stimuli designed, like the soundtrack to a movie, to invoke your sympathies or even your outrage. Taking the bait keeps you psychologically enslaved to the Empire of Nothing, to this interminable, desperate mass of interchangeable strangers vying for attention. You can either choose to float invertebrate along the media’s current and care about whoever the subjects of the Empire are caring about today, or choose to anchor your heart and mind to a select people and, like every comic book telepath, learn to tune out the cries of the multitude and focus your vitality on your people. Giving everything to your own people, to your own tribe, means leaving nothing for strangers. You must harden your heart or be at the mercy of the many. This is not hate. This is selective love, and practiced indifference. Your heart is like your eyes. Everything is a blur until you focus. |
| It isn’t what can I do to make the world better? It is, “What can I DO”? |
| It seems that the personal evolutionary process takes place in five distinct steps. If you can do those five things well, you will almost certainly be successful. 1) Have clear goals 2) Identify and don’t tolerate the problems that stand in the way of your achieving those goals 3) Accurately diagnose the problems to get at their root causes 4) Design plans that will get you around them 5) Do what is necessary to push these designs through to results You must do these steps one at a time and in order |
| It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives. |
| It’s better to hold eye contact to the point of discomfort than to avert your gaze prematurely. When you hug, make sure your arms are on the outside of the hugbox. |
| It’s important to cultivate an almost third-person approach to accepting rejection. |
| Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it. |
| Keep your fears to yourself but share your courage with others. |
| Keep your hands out of your pockets. |
| Hand gestures should stay about waist height or slightly below. |
| Keeping one’s distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man. |
| Kill no Vermin as Fleas, lice, ticks in the Sight of Others, if you See any filth or thick Spittle put your foot Dexterously upon it if it be upon the Cloths of your Companions, Put it off privately, and if it be upon your own Cloths return Thanks to him who puts it off. |
| Know how to rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause. |
| Learn the rules as an amateur so that you can break them as a master. |
| Learn to play many roles, to be whatever the moment requires. Adapt your mask to the situation – be protean in the faces you wear. To a liberal be a liberal. To a hawk be a hawk. You cannot be grasped. and what cannot be grasped cannot be consumed. |
| Less strength means it is less likely that you will be able to push someone away who wants to take something from you, and on a strictly physical level, reduced strength means a diminished ability to take what you want from someone else. A person who is too weak simply cannot survive. It is strength that makes all other values possible. |
| Let action and reality teach you what will work rather than your worry, guessing or speculation. Trying out ideas and failing is often much cheaper than gathering tons of research and data as to what will work. |
| Let him that would move the world first move himself. |
| Let people know when you like them. The inhibited personality is as afraid of expressing “good” feelings as bad ones. If he expresses love, he is afraid it will be judged sentimentality; if he expresses friendship he is afraid it will be considered fawning or apple phishing. If he compliments someone he is afraid the other will think him superficial, or suspect an ulterior movie. Totally ignore all these negative feedback signals. Compliment at least three people every day. |
| Let us speak courteously, deal fairly, and keep ourselves armed and ready. |
| Let your Conversation be without Malice or Envy, for ‘is a Sign of a Tractable and Commendable Nature: And in all Causes of Passion admit Reason to Govern. |
| Never break the rules in front of your subordinates. |
| Let your purpose in telling the truth not be to offend; your purpose in telling the truth should be that those you speak with have the information you have, and would want to have if you were in their position. |
| Lies and deceptions destroy peoples’ lives. A partial lie destroys part of your life. |
| Life should be lived as if you were purposefully trying to connect with others so that you could get to know who they are, as all of us thirst for that, for someone to reach out to us and to know us, even if we never say it aloud. |
| Listen for your conversationee’s favorite words and phrases, and then “play them back” for them. |
| Listen to respond, not to reply. |
| Live by the creed that a man who dares waste another hour of time, has not discovered the value of life. |
| Look at “how” things happen, not “what” happened. It allows you to look more at the structure of things – how the parts relate to the whole. |
| Looking in someone’s eyes let’s them know you are alive. |
| Love without sacrifice is theft.” -Procrustes |
| Lure a person deep into your seduction by creating the proper temptation: a glimpse of the pleasures to come. As the serpent tempted Eve with the promise of forbidden knowledge, you must awaken a desire that they cannot control. Find that weakness of theirs, that fantasy that has yet to be realized, and hint that you can lead them toward it. The key is to keep it vague. Stimulate a curiosity stronger than the doubts and anxieties that go with it, and they will follow you. |
| Make a better friend of every man with whom you come in contact. |
| Make a habit of speaking louder than usual. Inhibited people are notoriously soft-spoken. Raise the volume of your voice. This does not mean to shout. |
| Make at least one thing better every single place you go. |
| Make banter a second language to you. It will carry you far socially. |
| Make friends with people who want the best for you. |
| Man is responsible for everything that happens to him and everything that happens to everyone else. |
| Burn old logs. Drink old wine. Read old books. Keep old friends. |
| Men who have lived significant lives are men who never waited: not for money, security, ease, or women. Feel what you want to give most as a gift, to your woman and to the world, and do what you can to give it today. Every moment waited is a moment wasted, and each wasted moment degrades your clarity of purpose. |
| Minimize the variables in your life. My minimizing choice, you simplify your life. By simplifying your life you expand it. Live below your means. You will enjoy a freedom that people busy ugrading their lifestyles can’t fathom. |
| Momentary pain is preferable to consistent suffering. |
| Most men are so thoroughly subjective that nothing really interests them except themselves. They always think of their own case as soon as ever any remark is made, and their whole attention is engrossed and absorbed by the merest chance reference to anything which affects them personally, be it never so remote. |
| Most people are locked in their own worlds, making them stubborn and hard to persuade. The way to lure them out of their shell and set up your seduction is to enter their spirit. Play by their rules, enjoy what they enjoy, adapt yourself to their moods. In doing so you will stroke their deep-rooted narcissism and lower their defenses. Indulge their every mood and whim, giving them nothing to react against or resist. |
| Most people don’t think of “love” or “caring” or “friendship” as limited resources, but they are. “Caring” and “loving” are actions, and like all actions, they require time, effort and energy. Even when caring or loving are only thinking about caring or loving, thinking actively about one person means not thinking about someone or something else. |
| Negotiation is the insidious viper that will eat away at your victory, so give your enemies nothing to negotiate, no hope, no room to maneuver. They are crushed and that is that. |
| Nemo me impune lacessit, or “No one attacks me with impunity.” To protect one’s honor is as defensive as it is offensive—even if attack is pre-emptive, as it often is. People are more likely to leave you alone if they fear harm from you, and if men give way to you because they fear you, you will gain a certain status among men. |
| Never accept low-interest responses. |
| Never acknowledge your weakness to seem sensitive, introspective, or filled with character flaws. Seeking sympathy is disgusting. Being weak on purpose is disgusting. |
| Never allow your will to be shattered. Even more importantly, never allow it to be softened, bent, or guided; it will reduce you to nothing more than a timinid and industrial animal, of which others will be your shepherd. |
| Never appeal to a woman’s sympathies. |
| Never argue. In society, nothing must be discussed; give only results. |
| Never ask the doctor what YOU should do. Ask him what HE would do if he were in your place. |
| Never backpedal from a tease. |
| Never Be the Bearer of Bad News. The king kills the messenger who brings bad news. |
| Never be too proud to fight in instances where another will have to fight in your stead. This is not being humble; it is cowardice. |
| Never dance to impress. Dance to express. |
| Never explain. Never complain. |
| Never focus on failing at a thing. Focus on succeeding at what you are about to do. The idea is that framing the task at hand in a positive manner creates a framework of success. Following a framework of failure is sure to lead to it. |
| Never give orders – give instructions. |
| Never Joke About Appearances or Taste. A lively wit and a humorous disposition are essential qualities for a good courtier, and there are times when vulgarity is appropriate and engaging. But avoid any kind of joke about appearance or taste, two highly sensitive areas, especially with those above you. Do not even try it when you are away from them. You will dig your own grave. |
| Never let them see you bleed. |
| Never listen to a leftist who does not give away his fortune or does not live the exact lifestyle he wants others to follow. |
| Never make light of a friend’s rebuke, even when unreasonable, but do my best to restore myself to his good graces. |
| Never pursue a shortcut. The desire to find shortcuts makes you eminently unsuited for any kind of mastery. |
| Never Self-Deprecate under any circumstance. |
| Never spend so much time on your studies that you neglect your social skills. |
| Never use the word “but.” Replace it with “and.” |
| No art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it. |
| No matter what your probability of being right is, if you raise the probability of being right by 33% means that 1/3 of your bets will switch from losses to wins. That is why it pays to stress-test your thinking, even when you are pretty sure you are right. |
| No one respects a man who is always apologizing and backpedaling. |
| No one respects a man who is always asking for permission. |
| No one respects a man who won’t stand up for himself or fight for his own interests. |
| Nobody deserves to be praised for goodness unless he is strong enough to be bad, for any other goodness is usually merely inertia or lack of will-power. |
| Nobody works out the value of time: men use it lavishly as if it cost nothing… We have to be more careful in preserving what will cease at an unknown point. |
| Nonaction is the minimum necessary action to keep the balance between order and chaos proper. You detach. And you watch. And when it’s time to intervene you intervene minimally without any self-propagandization. |
| Not only should you be carrying out the archetype of the hero, you should be carrying a weight while doing it. |
| Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom. |
| Nothing is worth doing pointlessly. |
| Nothing so conclusively proves a man’s ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself. |
| Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated. |
| Now, the reason a brilliant sovereign and a wise general conquer the enemy whenever they move, and their achievements surpass those of ordinary men, is their foreknowledge of the enemy situation. This “Foreknowledge” cannot be elicited from spirits, nor from gods, nor by analogy with past events, nor by astrological calculations. It must be obtained from men who know the enemy situation – from spies. |
| On giving up: The first step is to simply call your brain on its bluff. When you want to rest during any workout or feel like you don’t have enough mental energy to focus while reading, you HAVE to think something like, “Shut the fuck up brain! You are lying to yourself, and you know it!” Simply acknowledging the illusion that you are totally tapped out can vaporize it. |
| Once you identify a problem, don’t tolerate it. Tolerating a problem has the same consequences as failing to identify it. Whether you tolerate it because you believe it cannot be solved, because you don’t care enough to solve it, or because you can’t muster enough of whatever it takes to solve it, if you don’t have the will to succeed, then your situation is hopeless. You need to develop a fierce intolerance of badness of any kind, regardless of its severity. |
| Once you take a side in a conflict, you are doomed. The powerful will take you over, the weak will wear you down. Any new alliance would lead to an enemy, and as this cycle stirs up more conflict, other forces will be dragged in, until you can no longer extricate yourself. |
| One day you will reach judgment in your life. You will have to ask yourself: Who was I supposed to be? Was I that person? Did I gain my soul to be every bit of person that I am? |
| One might say that the difference between a free man and a slave is that the free man chooses his master. |
| One piece of advice parents always give is that when your 1-3 year old is throwing a shit storm of a tantrum, walk away. Don’t engage them. Engaging them just reinforces their shitty behavior by rewarding it with the attention they’re seeking. Something parents often fail to realize, though, is that this same advice is equally applicable when dealing with adults. |
| Opt for being slapped over indifference or boredom any day. It’s polarizing. And being polarizing is more important than being pleasant. |
| Our anger and annoyance are more detrimental to us than the things themselves which anger or annoy us. |
| Pay attention to what people say when they are speaking. Reflect back to them something they did not know about themselves. |
| Pay attention. |
| Pay no regard to whether you have the strength to go on; go on anyway. |
| People are not interested in you. They are interested in themselves – morning, noon, and after dinner. |
| People who are whiny, who are melancholy and bewail everything, who find pleasure in every opportunity for complaint – a companion who is always upset and bemoans everything is a foe to tranquility. Prevent these people from entering and staying in your life. Eject those already there. |
| People who overweight the first-order consequences of their decisions and ignore the effects of second- and subsequent-order consequences rarely reach their goals. This is because first-order consequences often have opposite desirabilities from second-order consequences, resulting in big mistakes in decision making. For example, the first-order consequences of exercise (pain and time spent) are commonly considered undesirable, while the second-order consequences (better health and more attractive appearances) are desirable. |
| People who rush to the support of others tend to gain little respect in the process, for their help is so easily obtained. |
| People will follow a man on the strength of his conviction irrespective of the validity of his argument. Confidently conveyed rhetoric is persuasive irrespective of its truthfulness, whilst the same cannot be said of a cogent albeit less passionate competing argument. |
| People’s need for validation and recognition, their need to feel important, is the best kind of weakness to exploit. First, it is almost universal; second, exploiting it is so very easy. All you have to do is find ways to make people feel better about their taste, their social standing, their intelligence. |
| Periodically, you should travel in the Stoic style of poverty. |
| Personal lack of vigilance could compromise the safety of everyone else; what happens to you happens to everyone. |
| Play a parental role, be loving, but also sometimes scold and instill some discipline. Children actually love a little discipline— it makes them feel that the adult cares about them. And adult children too will be thrilled if you mix your tenderness with a little toughness and punishment. |
| Practice your chest voice. |
| Practice, even when success looks hopeless. |
| Get the other person to say “Yes, yes” right away. When talking with other people, don’t begin by discussing the things on which you differ. Begin by emphasizing-and keep on emphasizing- the things on which you agree. A “no” is a most difficult handicap to overcome. When you have said “No,” all your pride of personality demands that you remain consistent with yourself. You may later feel that the “No” was ill-advised; nevertheless, there is your precious pride to consider! Once having said a thing, you feel you must stick to it. When someone starts with no, a physical withdrawal or readiness for withdrawal emerges. The whole neuromuscular system sets itself on guard against acceptance. When someone starts with “yes” none of that happens. |
| Let the other person do a great deal of the talking. They know more about their business and problems than you do. So ask them questions. Let them tell you a few things. Even if you disagree with them, do NOT interrupt them. Listen patiently and with an open mind. Be sincere about it. Encourage them to express their ideas fully. |
| Let the other person feel as if the idea was theirs. Don’t you have much more faith in ideas that you discover for yourself than in ideas that are handed to you on a silver platter? If so, isn’t it bad judgment to try to ram your opinions down the throats of other people? Isn’t it wiser to make suggestions – and let the other person think out the conclusion? Ask a person for their ideas. Their opinions. Make them feel that he or she is creating the designs. Then you won’t have to sell them. |
| Dramatize your ideas. Merely stating a truth is not enough. The truth has to be made vivid, interesting, dramatic. You have to use showmanship. The movies do it. Television does it. And you will have to do it if you want attention. |
| Smile. A smile says: “I like you. You make me happy. I am glad to see you.” Not an insincere grin. A real smile. A heartwarming smile that comes from within. Greet everyone you see or meet with a smile, with a ‘Good morning.’ Smile at the cashier when you ask for change. Smile at people who have never seen you smile. |
| Ask questions instead of giving direct orders. Instead of saying “do this” or “do that” try “Do you think this would work?” or “What do you think of this?” Instead of saying “you did this wrong,” try “ Maybe if we were to phrase it this way, it would be better.” Instead of pushing people to do the things you want, try questions. “Is there anything we can do to handle this order?” “Can anyone think of different ways to process it through the shop that will make it possible to take the order?” This will result in more of a “We can do it” attitude. |
| Praise the slightest improvement, and praise every improvement. |
| Remember names. The average person is more interested in his or her own name than in all the other names on earth put together. Thus the importance of remembering everyone’s names and calling it easily. We should be aware of the magic contained in a name and realize that this single item is wholly and completely owned by the person with whom we are dealing…and nobody else. The name sets the individual apart; it makes him or her unique among all others. |
| Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. In a conversation, all you need to do is listen intently. Listen because you are genuinely interested. The other person will feel it. It will make them happy. That kind of listening is one of the highest compliments we can pay anyone. “Few human beings are proof against the implied flattery of rapt attention.” |
| Talk in terms of the other person’s interests. When FDR expected a visitor, he sat up late the night before, reading up on the subject in which he knew his guest was particularly interested. For Roosevelt knew, as all leaders know, that the royal road to a person’s heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures most. |
| The best way to win an argument is to avoid it. Why prove a man he is wrong? Is that going to make him like you? Why not let him save face? He didn’t ask for your opinion. He didn’t want it. Why argue with him? Nine times out of ten, an argument ends with each of the contestants more firmly convinced than ever that he is absolutely right. You can’t win an argument because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it. IF you triumph over the other man and shoot his argument full of holes and prove that he is non compos mentis (not sane in one’s mind), then what? You will feel fine. But what about him? You have made him feel inferior. You have hurt his pride. He will resent your triumph. |
| Procrastination is despair. Action is the antidote to despair. |
| Punishment must be so unusual as to be significant, to deter, to instruct. |
| Purpose. If people believe you have a plan, that you know where you are going, they will follow you instinctively. The direction does not matter: pick a cause, an ideal, a vision and show that you will not sway from your goal. |
| Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient. |
| Put not another bit into your mouth till the former be swallowed. Let not your morsels be too big for the jowls. |
| Put not off your Clothes in the presence of Others, nor go out your Chamber half Dressed. |
| Put team above self. Chastise, and possibly expel, those who don’t. If you want to experience traditional honor in your own life, you’ll need to be willing to subjugate your personal wants beneath the needs of your honor group. By helping others survive and/or thrive, you help yourself do likewise. Those who put self first compromise the goals of the rest of the group |
| Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately. |
| Radiate confidence, not arrogance or disdain. |
| Rather than motivate yourself, your goal should be to clarify the next few steps ahead of you. |
| Refuse to compromise with circumstances you do not like. |
| Research shows that paying attention to positive emotions literally expands your world, while focusing on negative feelings shrinks it. |
| Resentment is also a “way” of making us feel important. Many people get a perverse satisfaction from feeling “wronged.” The victim of injustice, the one who has been unfairly treated, is morally superior to those who caused the injustice. As long as you harbor resentment, it is literally impossible for you to picture yourself as a self-reliant, independent, self-determining person who is “the Captain of his soul, the master of his Fate.” |
| Resilient men take personal responsibility for their actions. They don’t whine and blame others. And yet they do not blame themselves so much that shame and guilt paralyze them from moving forward and trying again. |
| Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve. |
| Respect is derived from power. Be powerful if you want to be loved, or you will never be loved. You will be held in contempt for being weak. Love is based on adoration, adoration is a concentrated amount of respect. |
| Seducers are never self-absorbed. Their gaze is directed outward, not inward. When they meet someone their first move is to get inside that person’s skin, to see the world through their eyes. |
| Seducers see themselves as providers of pleasure. As children we mostly devoted our lives to play and pleasure. Adults often have feelings of being cut off from this paradise, of being weighed down by responsibilities. The seducer knows that people are waiting for pleasure – they never get enough of it from friends and lovers, and they cannot get it by themselves. A person who enters their lives offering adventure and romance cannot be resisted. Pleasure is a feeling of being taken past our limits, of being overwhelmed by another person, by an experience. People are dying to be overwhelmed, to let go of their usual stubbornness. Sometimes their resistance to us is a way of saying. Please seduce me. Seducers know that the possibility of pleasure will make a person follow them, and the experience of it will make someone open up, weak to the touch. They also train themselves to be sensitive to pleasure, knowing that feeling pleasure themselves will make it that much easier for them to infect the people around them. |
| Seek to make thy course regular, that men may know beforehand what they may expect. |
| Self-consciousness is the enemy of interestingness. |
| Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. |
| Show not yourself glad at the Misfortune of another though he were your enemy. |
| Show respect for the other person’s opinions. Never say “You’re wrong”. If you are going to prove anything, don’t let anybody know it. Do it so subtly, so adroitly, that no one will feel that you are doing it. |
| Silence. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation. |
| Since what is forbidden is desired, somehow you must make yourself seem forbidden. The most blatant way to do this is to engage in behavior that gives you a dark and forbidden aura. |
| Sincerity and goodness ought to have their own unmistakable odor, so that one who encounters this becomes straightway aware of it despite himself. A candor affected is a dagger concealed. The feigned friendship of the wolf is the most contemptible of all, and to be shunned beyond everything. A man who is truly good and sincere and well-meaning will show it by his looks, and no one can fail to see it. |
| Sincerity is found in very few men, and is often the cleverest of ruses – one is sincere in order to draw out the confidence and secrets of the other. By pretending to bare your heart out to another person, you make them more likely to reveal their own secrets. Give them a false confession and they will give you a real one. Another trick is to vehemently contradict people you are in conversation with as a way of irritating them, stirring them up so that they lose some of the control over their words. In their emotional reaction they will reveal all kinds of truths about themselves, truths you can later use against them. |
| Sleep not when others Speak, Sit not when others stand, Speak not when you Should hold your Peace, walk not on when others Stop. |
| So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. |
| Socrates’ technique was to make his interlocutor, who started with a thesis, agree to a series of statements, then proceed to show him how the statements he agreed to are inconsistent with the original thesis, thus establishing that he has no clue as to what he was talking about. Socrates used it mostly to show people how lacking in clarity they were in their thoughts, how little they knew about the concepts they used routinely. |
| Something has to be sacrificed in order for the potential of the future to be manifested in the best possible way. There’s always a demand for sacrifice. And the question is, what should be sacrificed? And the answer is: You. It’s you that should be sacrificed. And then the question is, well what part of you? And the answer to that is the part of you that is not worthy. The part that has to be put into the flame and burnt off. And if there’s lots of you that had become corrupt, then most of what passes through the Fire is burnt off. And that’s terribly painful for people. That’s the desert. Imagine that you’re essential personality structure is tyrannical. So you are a rigid ideologue, you’re cast in stone. And you decide to escape from the tyranny. Well where do you end up? You don’t end up in the promised land. You end up in the desert for 40 years, and maybe you die there. It’s no wonder that they are loath to let go. And the more tyrannical they become, the more they restrict their possibility. And sold their souls to the dogma of human beings. The less there is of them that will be left after everything is stripped bare. It’s much easier to take the other route. You had your chance. You squandered it. You realize that you destroy your own ideal. You destroy yourself as an individual. That’s all you have. It’s a continual pit of cyclical despair. It’s part of an eternal struggle in the human psyche, since the beginning of time. |
| Sometimes some insecure cunt will directly challenge you in a social setting (i.e., with an audience). This is a dick move. Their goal is usually to get their feelings validated by an external source. Your goal in this case is to get out of the encounter with your social status and image intact. To do that, DON’T enter an honest and elaborate argument with the idiot (unless you do it so eloquently that the audience is instantly swayed to your side). The insecure cunt would rather escalate, try to draw you into a screaming match, and resort to other dishonest tactics than admit that they are wrong – because to them, admitting they’re wrong is like admitting that their emotional insecurities are real and valid. Instead of debating, which they expect you to do, agree and amplify. This throws them off balance. Make the rationalization hamster choke on its own bullshit. Recognize that this isn’t a real discussion, it’s a power game disguised as a discussion – and play it as such. |
| Speak the truth and see what happens. |
| Speak up, own it, or get out. In an idea meritocracy, openness is a responsibility; you not only have the privilege to speak up and “fight for right” but are obliged to do so. This extends especially to principles. Just like everything else, principles need to be questioned and debated. What you’re not allowed to do is complain and criticize privately – either to others or in your own head. IF you can’t fulfill this obligation, then you must go. Be extremely open. Discuss your issues until you are in sync with each other or until you understand each other’s positions and can determine what should be done. It’s simple – just don’t filter. |
| Spend as little time as possible watching television. |
| Spread incorrect rumors to your competitor / enemy. Once they take the bait and act, spread another rumor directly to them. |
| Stand from the waist up while sitting. It will give you more air while you sit, and therefore more force and conversational power. |
| Stop a minute to contrast your keen interest in your own affairs with your mild concern about anything else. Realize then, that everybody else in the world feels exactly the same way! Then, along with Lincoln and Roosevelt, you will have grasped the only solid foundation for interpersonal relationships; namely, that success in dealing with people depends on a sympathetic grasp of the other person’s viewpoint. By sympathizing with the other person’s point of view, they will sympathize with your point of view. Even if someone is treating you at their worst, you will end up having the satisfaction of controlling your temper, and returning kindness for insult. It is infinitely more fun getting someone to like you than by telling someone to jump off a cliff. |
| Stop investing in the opinions of others. All it does is get in your own way. |
| Strength is the ability to move or stand against external forces. Courage is kinetic. Courage initiates movement, action or fortitude. Courage exercises strength. |
| Strength, courage, mastery, and honor are the virtues that protect the perimeter; they are virtues that save us. These are the virtues that men need to protect their interest, and to go after what they want. They are the virtue of the defender and attacker. |
| Suckers try to win arguments, non-suckers try to win. To put it in other words: it is rather a good thing to lose arguments. For mother nature, opinions and predictions don’t count, placing a stake in the ground to survive does. If you are making a case against someone, opt to take a bet in the markets (stock market, personal bet, Predictit) rather than go back and forth trying to win fake points. |
| Suspend the need to judge everything that crosses your path. Consider and even momentarily entertain viewpoint opposite to your own, seeing how they feel. Observe a person or event for a length of time, deliberately holding yourself back from forming an opinion. Seek out what is unfamiliar from unfamiliar sources. Do anything to break up your normal train of thinking and your sense that you already know the truth. |
| Sympathy for all would be tyranny for thee. |
| Take advantage of as many opportunities as possible to ensure the chances for success aren’t missed. |
| Take on the risk of being publicly wrong; this is the path to building a strong personal brand. |
| Take responsibility for yourself. First we have to figure out What’s yourself? Well, it’s not just you now. It’s the community of you’s that stretch across time. So in order for you to take care of yourself properly now, you have to learn to play an iterative game with yourself that is sustainable and even potentially improvable across time. Not only do you have to play an iterative game with yourself across time, to minimize suffering, to remove the possibility of death and to allow a certain level of happiness. But you have to do that with other people around you. AND across time. So there’s you. And there multiple yous embedded in your family. And the multiplicity of your family embedded inside a culture. And the extension of that culture across time. So in order for you to act properly, all of those things have to be harmoniously balanced at the same time, and that radically reduces the set of potential interpretations. And that’s the antidote to the chaos of the infinite array of potential perceptual worlds. And then there are questions that emerge out of that, like what’s the best way to play that game? But we certainly know that reciprocity, fair play, the spirit of fair play is immensely integral to that. And there’s something about truth that is integral to that as well. |
| Take risks for your opinion. If you don’t, you are nothing. |
| Talk slowly and deliberately, people will respect what you have to say. Don’t ramble out a waterfall. Waiting to speak is almost NEVER a mistake. |
| Talk to people about themselves, and they will listen for hours. |
| Talk too vaguely and you have no credibility. But it is more dangerous to be specific. If you explain in detail the benefits people will gain by following your cult, you will be expected to satisfy them. |
| Talleyrand tactics: During Congress sessions, he would blurt out what seemed to be a secret (something he made up), then watch his listeners’ reactions. He might tell a gathering of diplomats, for instance, that a reliable source had revealed to him that the czar of Russia was planning to arrest his top general for treason. By watching the diplomats’ reactions to this made-up story, he would know which ones were most excited by the weakening of the Russian army – perhaps their governments had designs on Russia? “Monsieur Talleyrand fires a pistol into the air to see who will jump out the window.” |
| The #1 defining trait of a beta is a fear of going after what he desires. He doesn’t pursue what he wants because he doesn’t think he is capable of getting it. He worries about other people’s needs before his own. |
| The 5:1 asymmetric risk/reward rule: Minimize risk and maximize upside by only risking 1 unit for every 5 potential units of gain. The average person risks 1 unit for a gain of 1.1 unit. |
| The aggressive person is rarely in self-control. He cannot see more than a couple of moves ahead, cannot see the consequences of this bold move or that one. Because he is constantly being forced to react to the moves of his ever-growing host of enemies, and to the unforeseen consequences of his own rash actions, his aggressive energy is turned against him. |
| The Aretino strategy is simple: When you are as small and obscure as David was, you must find a Goliath to attack. The larger the target, the more attention you gain. The bolder the attack, the more you stand out from the crowd, and the more admiration you earn. Society is full of those who think daring thoughts but lack the guts to print and publicize them Voice what the public feels—the expression of shared feelings is always powerful. Search out the most prominent target possible and sling your boldest shot. The world will enjoy the spectacle, and will honor the underdog—you, that is— with glory and power. |
| The Arguer does not understand that words are never neutral, and that by arguing with a superior he impugns the intelligence of one more powerful than he. He also has no awareness of the person he is dealing with. Since each man believes that he is right, and words will rarely convince him otherwise, the arguer’s reasoning falls on deaf ears. When cornered, he only argues more, digging his own grave. Once he has made the other person feel insecure and inferior in his beliefs, the eloquence of Socrates could not save the situation. The problem in trying to prove a point or gain a victory through argument is that in the end you can never be certain how it affects the people you’re arguing with: They may appear to agree with you politely, but inside they may resent you. Or perhaps something you said inadvertently even offended them – words have that insidious ability to be interpreted according to the other person’s mood and insecurities. Even the best argument has no solid foundation, for we have all come to distrust the slippery nature of words. And days after agreeing with someone, we often revert to our old opinion out of sheer habit. |
| The basic code of honor: Courage, strength, mastery. To a lesser extent: moral virtues. |
| The biggest trick of all was to play on the repressed sexuality that bubbles under the surface of any group setting. In a group, a longing for social unity, a longing older than civilization, cries out to be awakened. This desire may be subsumed under a unifying cause, but beneath it is a repressed sexuality that the charlatan knows how to exploit and manipulate for his own purposes. |
| The easiest way to raise your value as a man or a woman is to spend a majority of your day engaged in high value activities. |
| The first and best victory is to conquer self. To be conquered by self is, of all things, the most shameful and vile. |
| The first one coming through the door is going to get shot. But someone has to knock the door down. |
| The first psychological requirement of formlessness is to train yourself to take nothing personally. Never show any defensiveness. When you act defensive, you show your emotions, revealing a clear form. Your opponents will realize they have hit a nerve, an Achilles’ heel. And they will hit it again and again. So train yourself to take nothing personally. Never let anyone get your back up. Be like a slippery ball that cannot be held: Let no one know what gets to you, or where your weaknesses lie. Make your face a formless mask and you will infuriate and disorient your scheming colleagues and opponents. |
| The first rule of handling conflict is don’t hang around people who are constantly engaging in conflict. |
| The greatest asset one can possess is the ability to arouse enthusiasm among people. The way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement. “There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a person as criticisms from superiors. I never criticize anyone. I believe in giving a person incentive to work. So I am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything, I am hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise.” |
| The greatest mistake in seduction is being too nice. At first, perhaps, your kindness is charming, but it soon grows monotonous; you are trying too hard to please, and seem insecure. Instead of overwhelming your targets with niceness, try inflicting some pain. Make them feel guilty and insecure. Instigate a breakup— now a rapprochement, a return to your earlier kindness, will turn them weak at the knees. The lower the lows you create, the greater the highs. To heighten the erotic charge, create the excitement of fear. |
| The highest praise that one can give a man is that he is capable of doing harm but chooses not to. |
| The key to keeping the audience on the edge of their seats is letting events unfold slowly, then speeding them up at the right moment, according to a pattern and tempo that you control. Great rulers from Napoleon to Mao Tse-tung have used theatrical timing to surprise and divert their public. Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood the importance of staging political events in a particular order and rhythm. |
| The men who have changed the universe have never gotten there by working on leaders, but rather by moving the masses. Working on leaders is the method of intrigue and only leads to secondary results. Working on the masses, however, is the stroke of genius that changes the faces of the world. |
| The moment people feel they know what to expect from you, your spell on them is broken. You have ceded them power. The only way to lead the seduced along and keep the upper hand is to create suspense, a calculated surprise. Doing something they do not expect from you will give them a delightful sense of spontaneity— they will not be able to foresee what comes next. You are always one step ahead and in control. Give the victim a thrill with a sudden change of direction. |
| The moment we put off the task until tomorrow, we feel relief from the negative emotions. Do not give into this relief. “I’ll do this later” or “I’ll feel more like this tomorrow,” we need to stop and recognize that we are saying this in order to avoid the negative emotions we are feeling right now. THINK: “ If I feel negative emotions when I face the task at hand, THEN I will stay put and not stop, put off a task, or run away.” “I’ll feel more like doing this tomorrow.” We probably won’t. I think we all know this deep down. |
| The more costly, the more virtuous the act- particularly if it costs you your reputation. When integrity conflicts with reputation, go with integrity. |
| The more hard things you do, the more rungs of the ladder you ascend, and the fewer people end up around you. That’s what it means to accomplish something hard. And the more things you accomplish, the greater is the generation of your uniqueness in this world. I see people taking the easy way out, and I say why? |
| The more you tell others about yourself, the more you show others and yourself “I want them to approve of me.” Instead, get others to tell about themselves, so that they are seeking your approval. |
| The most anti-seductive form of language is argument. How many silent enemies do we create by arguing? There is a superior way to get people to listen and be persuaded: humor and a light touch. The nineteenth-century English politician Benjamin Disraeli was a master at this game. In Parliament, to fail to reply to an accusation or slanderous comment was a deadly mistake: silence meant the accuser was right. Yet to respond angrily, to get into an argument, was to look ugly and defensive. Disraeli used a different tactic: he stayed calm. When the time came to reply to an attack, he would slowly make his way to the speaker’s table, pause, then utter a humorous or sarcastic retort. Everyone would laugh. Now that he had warmed people up, he would proceed to refute his enemy, still mixing in amusing comments; or perhaps he would simply move on to another subject, as if he were above it all. |
| The naive man tends to have an inappropriate relation to ecstasy. He longs for each ecstasy at the wrong time or in the wrong place, and ignores he masculine source of it. He wants ecstasy through the feminine. |
| The Narcissus Effect. Gazing at an image in the waters of a pond, the Greek youth Narcissus fell in love with it. And when he found out that the image was his own reflection, and that he therefore could not consummate his love, he despaired and drowned himself. All of us have a similar problem: We are profoundly in love with ourselves, but since this love excludes a love object outside ourselves, it remains continuously unsatisfied and unfulfilled. The Narcissus Effect plays on this universal narcissism: You look deep into the souls of other people; fathom their inmost desires, their values, their tastes, their spirit; and you reflect it back to them, making yourself into a kind of mirror image. Your ability to reflect their psyche gives you great power over them; they may even feel a tinge of love. |
| The one skill to master in all inter-social relations: THE APPROACH. Until you set aside your insecurities and limitations and accept that you need to get this part of your life handle, the fear of rejection will remain a monster that looms in the back of your mind. |
| The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive other of theirs, or to impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own heart, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest. |
| The only man who makes no mistakes is the man who never does anything. |
| The only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it. |
| The only way to do something with confidence and with ease is to do it often. Aristotle: “We are the sum of our habits.” |
| The people are always impressed by the superficial appearance of things…The [prince] should, at fitting times of the year, keep the people occupied and distracted with festivities and spectacles. |
| The person who is the master at being is invited to the play largest possible number of games is also the same person that goes out forthrightly to conquer the unknown before it presents itself as the enemy at the door. They’re the same thing. The person with the most authority is the one who voluntarily accepted suffering as the part of being….Think about it this way: do you like brave people or do you like cowards? And what is the ultimate act of bravery? It’s to come to terms with the fact that you are moral and limited, and to live forthrightly regardless. |
| The psychotherapist Dr. Milton H. Erickson always tried to find symbols and images that would communicate to the patient in ways that words could not. When dealing with a severely troubled patient, he would not question him directly but would talk about something irrelevant, such as driving through the desert in Arizona, where he practiced in the 1950s. In describing this he would eventually come to an appropriate symbol for what he suspected was the man’s problem. If he felt the patient was isolated, say, Dr. Erickson would talk of a single iron-wood tree, and how its isolation left it battered by the winds. Making an emotional connection with the tree as a symbol, the patient would open up more readily to the doctor’s probing. |
| The secret to talking to everyone: simply let them into your inner monologue. |
| The so-called Golden Rule of “Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You” is another example of a moral code that is practical and unifying within a tribe, but invites disaster when applied to those who are not bound to each other, to enemies, or to those whose own moral codes are completely unknown. The Golden Rule works best in smaller, closed systems that share a common culture, while Caveat Emptor, Qui Bono, and “Do Unto Others As They Do Unto You” are far better mottoes for systems involving large, pluralistic groups of strangers. When surrounded by strangers, while it is usually smart to be friendly, polite and easy to get along with to avoid unnecessary conflict and encourage similar behavior in others, adherence to The Golden Rule in matters of import with unknown individuals opens one up for easy exploitation. The Golden Rule is an excellent rule within a tribe and a foolish rule for dealing with the rest of the world. |
| The social arts that make us pleasant to be around can be practiced only by constant exposure and circulation. The more you are in contact with others, the more graceful and at ease you become. Isolation, on the other hand, engenders an awkwardness in your gestures, and leads to further isolation, as people start avoiding you. |
| The Socratic method: keep asking questions. Get the answers to be in the affirmative. Keep asking questions until you have an armful of yeses. Keep asking until finally, almost without realizing it, your opponents found themselves embracing a conclusion they would have bitterly denied a few minutes previously. |
| The Spartans used to seat their guests out of the sun at all public spectacles, and themselves sat where they could. |
| The ultimate power is the power to get people to do as you wish. When you can do this without having to force people or hurt them, when they willingly grant you what you desire, then your power is untouchable. Enmesh yourself in the master’s work so deeply that he is unable to function without you without great difficulty, or would lose valueable time lost in training another to replace you. At this point you can make the master do as you wish. It is the classic case of the man behind the throne, the servant of the king who actually controls the king (Bismarck). |
| The way a man penetrates the world should be the same way he penetrates his woman; not merely for personal gain or pleasure, but to magnify love, openness, and depth. |
| The way to attack anxiety is through incremental, consistent exposure. |
| The way to be indispensable to is to be indispensable. |
| The way to manhood is through the gauntlet, and there is no end to it. Manhood is not a destination but a title to be defended. |
| Honor is found not only in living a life of virtue, but being brave and strong enough to defend that virtue when needed. |
| There are first and second and third order effects. But how about playing that backwards? What were the previous decisions that led me to make this decision? What were the incentives? What data was I presented? Whose analysis was I presented with? |
| There are two kinds of success to be won. In the first place, there is success in doing the thing that can only be done by the exceptional man. Therefore most of us can not achieve this kind of success. It comes only to the man who has very exceptional qualities. The other kind, a very, very high kind, is the ordinary kind of success, the success that comes to the man who does the things which most men could do, but which they do not do; which comes to the man who develops or possesses to a higher degree the qualities that all of us have to a greater or less extent. In the history of the world some of the men who stand high who stand in all but the very highest places are those who have not possessed any wonderful genius in statecraft, war, art, literature in whatever calling; but who have developed within themselves, by long, patient effort, resolutely maintained in spite of repeated failure, the ordinary, everyday, humdrum qualities of courage, of resolution, of proper appreciation of the relative importance of things; of honesty, of truth, of good sense, of unyielding perseverance. We can each one of us develop to a very high degree these qualities; and if we do so develop them, each one of us is sure of a measure of success […]. |
| There is a single reason why 99 out of 100 average business men never become leaders. That is their unwillingness to pay the price of responsibility. By the price of responsibility I mean hard driving, continual work…the courage to make decisions, to stand the gaff…the scourging honesty of never fooling yourself about yourself. You travel the road to leadership heavily laden. While the nine-to-five-o’clock worker takes his ease, you are toiling upward through the night. Laboriously you extend your mental frontiers. Any new effort, the psychologists say, wears a new groove in the brain. And the grooves that lead to the heights are not made between nine and five. They are burned in by midnight oil. |
| There is a vital link between power and theater. You must learn to enlarge your actions through dramatic techniques such as surprise, suspense, the creation of sympathy, and symbolic identification. You must be constantly aware of your audience—of what will please them and what will bore them. You must arrange to place yourself at the center, to command attention, and never to be upstaged at any cost. |
| There is no good reason why we should fear the future, but there is every reason why we should face it seriously, neither hiding from ourselves the gravity of the problems before us nor fearing to approach these problems with the unbending, unflinching purpose to solve them aright. |
| There is no need to abandon kindness, generosity, sympathy, honesty, humility or even The Golden Rule. There is no need to abandon all moral responsibility to others. You can still be a good man, but you can’t be equally good to everyone. And if you do not choose who you will be good for and to, your choices will be made for you by others, for reasons of their own, or they may even end up being more or less arbitrary. |
| There is nothing to be gained by insulting a person unnecessarily. |
| There is one quality which one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it. |
| There is perhaps no greater psychological skill more fundamental than self-control, since all emotion, by their very nature, lead to one or another impulse to act. |
| There is something irreducible about suffering. It speak for itself as an unquestionable reality. Nobody says to a child who is in pain that it is’t going to matter in a million years. The pain triumphs everything. So attempts to alleviate suffering trump everything. |
| There will never be a perfect moment to approach anything in life. The perfect moment is a beta concept. Never wait more than 5 seconds to act when an opportunity is spotted. If the idea to approach eve pops in your head, you MUST DO IT, NO MATTER WHAT. |
| Therefore, it is generally a tactical advantage to appear to be fearsome. That is, it is tactically advantageous to cultivate a reputation for strength, willingness to fight and technical mastery. |
| Therefore, so as not to rob his subjects, to be able to defend himself, not to become poor and contemptible, nor to be forced to become rapacious, a prince should esteem it little to incur a name for meanness, because this is one of those vices which enable him to rule. |
| Therefore, the person who is unable to write letters and notes never becomes a dangerous seducer. |
| Think it, do it: as soon as I become aware of something that needs to be done and can be done (without major disruption), then I do it right away. This frees up working memory, saves on paper and, to an extent, cuts down on guilt (as that process by which things to do come to my conscious awareness is not taken to be under my control). |
| Think me, speak we. Always think of yourself as an individual, it keeps you from being needy and putting the girl up on a pedestal. However speak we, because you are subtly introducing the idea of you two being together and making them more comfortable with whatever choices you decide to take. |
| Think of seduction as a world you enter, a world that is separate and distinct from the real world. The rules are different here; what works in daily life can have the opposite effect in seduction. (Different set of principles / rules for a different game). |
| Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly. |
| Give a gift of some sort to those above you. This is the strategy of those who have a patron: By giving your patron a gift, you are essentially saying that the two of you are equal. It is the old con game of giving so that you can take. |
| Those who are offended easily should be offended more often. |
| Those who attempt great things suffer greatly. |
| Timid souls often yearn to be their opposite – to be Napoleons. Yet they lack the inner strength. You, in essence, can become their Napoleon, pushing them into bold actions that serve your needs while also making them dependent on you. |
| To a large extent we react to petty annoyances, frustrations, and the like with grumpiness, dissatisfaction, resentment and irritability, purely out of habit. We have practiced reacting that way so long, it has become habitual. Practice not reacting. |
| To be a better listener, be the last to speak. Don’t walk into a meeting and say “OK this is what we should do.” It is too late by then and you’ve already taken a side. Don’t give away what you are thinking, but ask questions to get a better idea of what others are thinking. |
| To be an interesting person, you need to say interesting things, and to say interesting things, you need to experience them firsthand. |
| To become a barbarian in this age is to defiantly pitch an identity and stand against an insatiable commercial organism that devours all identities and excretes a formless pudding of monocultural mediocrity. |
| To become a man, you must become stronger, overcome your fears, become more competent and confident in your abilities, and earn the respect and admiration of other men. Otherwise you are still a boy. |
| To change the world, you HAVE to change yourself. The adage “be the change you want to see” is so unbelievably true. Change is hard. It’s very hard. Damn near impossible. How can we ask our friends, our spouses, our customers, our enemies to change unless we can take control of our own destiny? Every day that we put off the change we need for ourselves is a week that our customer will put off change themselves. |
| To change your behavior, change the stories you tell yourself. Stop buying into your own bullshit, stop believing your stories. The resistance is constant. Constantly fight it by acknowledging your stories. |
| To control the opposition, lead it. |
| To deflect envy, Gracian recommends that the powerful display a weakness, a minor social indiscretion, a harmless vice. Give those who envy you something to feed on, distracting them from your more important sins. Remember: It is the reality that matters. You may have to play games with appearances, but in the end you will have what counts: true power. In some Arab countries, a man will avoid arousing envy by doing as Cosimo de Medici did by showing his wealth only on the inside of his house. Apply this wisdom to your own character. |
| To get others to depend on you, develop a talent or skill that others simply cannot replace. |
| To have ultimate victory, you must be ruthless. |
| A coward is the only thing meaner than a liar. |
| To prevent bigotry in your beliefs, consider the alternative to the proposition you hold. |
| To quarrel with circumstances is always a rebellion against nature. |
| To show your frustration is to show that you have lost your power to shape events; it is the helpless action of the child who resorts to a hysterical fit to get his way. The powerful never reveal this kind of weakness. |
| To sit home, read one’s favorite paper, and scoff at the misdeeds of the men who do things is easy, but it is markedly ineffective. It is what evil men count upon the good men’s doing. |
| To succeed in the game of power, you have to master your emotions. But even if you succeed in gaining such self-control, you can never control the temperamental dispositions of those around you. And this presents a great danger. Most people operate in a whirlpool of emotions, constantly reacting, churning up squabbles and conflicts. Your self-control and autonomy, will only bother and infuriate them. They will try to draw you into the whirlpool, begging you to take sides in their endless battles, or to make peace for them. If you succumb to their emotional entreaties, little by little you will find YOUR mind and time occupied by THEIR problems. Do not allow whatever compassion and pity you possess to such you in. You can never win in this game; the conflicts can only multiply. |
| To successfully navigate chaos, you have to always tell the truth and always seek the truth. |
| To what use am I now putting the powers of my soul? Examine yourself on this point at every step, and ask, ‘How stands it with that part of me men call the master-part? Whose soul inhabits me at this moment? A child’s, a lad’s, a woman’s, a tyrant’s, a dumb ox’s, or a wild beast’s?’ |
| To what, then, must we aspire? This, and this alone: the just thought, the unselfish act, the tongue that utters no falsehood, the temper that greets each passing event as something predestined, expected, and emanating from the One source and origin. |
| Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice. |
| Too much respect for other people’s wisdom will make you depreciate your own. Be brutal with the past, especially your own, and have no respect for the philosophies that are foisted on you from outside. |
| Treat time as the most valuable currency. Would you give money away for free or unwillingly or without vigilant thought first? |
| Treat yourself as if you were someone that you are responsible for helping. |
| Trust people to act in their own (perceived) self-interest at all times. You won’t be disappointed. |
| Truth does not become more or less true, whether those who believe it are many or few. And it has never been masses or mobs who shaped destiny but single individuals, visionaries, innovators, who are scorned and isolated by the very masses who reap such benefits. |
| Understand this: In the game of power, the people you associate with are critical. The risk of associating with infectors is that you will waste valuable time and energy trying to free yourself. Through a kind of guilt by association, you will also suffer in the eyes of others. Never underestimate the dangers of infection. |
| Use no Reproachful Language against any one neither Curse nor Revile. Do not be quick to believe bad reports about others. |
| If you are miserly by nature, you will never go beyond a certain limit, only generous souls attain greatness. Associate with the generous, then, in you. If you are gloomy, gravitate to the cheerful. If you are prone to isolation, force yourself to befriend the gregarious. Never associate with those who share your defects – they will reinforce everything that holds you back. Only create associations with positive affinities. Make this a rule of your life. |
| View all problems as challenges. Look upon negativities that arise as opportunities to learn and to grow. |
| Virtue is precisely what you don’t advertise. Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. Virtue must be kept private. This clashes with the virtue merchandising style of today, where the “save the environment”-style message pervades. Virtue merchandisers are hypocrites. |
| Wake up early. It will put you in the mentality that you are working harder than your enemy. |
| Walk slowly and deliberately, people will respect you. Don’t run around like a nervous teenager who’s late for class. |
| We can adjust our behavior in the present to maximize the the probability of success in the future. To best do that, do not hesitate to sacrifice yourself to the future. |
| Were you to live three thousand years, or even thirty thousand, remember that the sole life which a man can lose is that which he is living at the moment; and furthermore, that he can have no other life except the one he loses. This means that the longest life and the shortest amount to the same thing. For the passing minute is every man’s equal possession, but what has once gone by is not ours. Our loss, therefore, is limited to that one fleeting instant, since no one can lose what is already past, nor yet what is still to come — for how can he be deprived of what he does not possess? |
| He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations.That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. We must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty. |
| What does it mean to want something? It means to sacrifice whatever you have to to get the thing you want. Otherwise you don’t really want it. |
| What is it that you could contract for if you were willing to give up everything about you that is weak and unworthy? |
| What is there wrong or surprising, after all, in a boor behaving boorishly? See then if it is not rather yourself you ought to blame, for not foreseeing that he would offend in this way. You, in virtue of your reason, have every means for thinking it probable that he would do so; you forgot this, and now his offence takes you by surprise. When you are indignant with anyone for his perfidy or ingratitude, turn your thoughts first and foremost upon yourself. For the error is clearly your own, if you have put any faith in the good faith of a man of that stamp, or, when you have done him a kindness, if it was not done unreservedly and in the belief that the action would be its own full reward. Once you have done a man a service, what more would you have? Is it not enough to have obeyed the laws of your own nature, without expecting to be paid for it? That is like the eye demanding a reward for seeing, or the feet for walking. |
| What isn’t worth doing 100% is not worth doing at all. |
| What to do in the First 5 Minutes of Meeting Someone 1. Show genuine enthusiasm for meeting (and focus on them exclusively). 2. Offer a compliment. If you notice something about the person you’ve just met that you can compliment them about, do it right away. Or if you know of a recent accomplishment of theirs. If nothing else, ask a question or two that can lead to information you can later compliment them on. 3. Ask questions (at least 2 or 3) that are open-ended. Conversations die or turn into monologues when they aren’t propelled forward by good questions. 4. Find something you share. This makes it easier to connect with someone. Sometimes you have to dig a bit deeper to find it. 5. Say their name before you leave, and commit key facts to memory. Sprinkle their name throughout conversation. Especially when saying hello and goodbye. Key facts are for next time. It’ll help you stand out in their memory, and make them look forward to connecting with you again – because for some reason or other, they find that they just like you. Most people love to talk about themselves and will like anybody who will earnestly listen. So do not be tempted to be that person, natural as it may be. Treat the first five minutes as a quiz, and that at the end of five minutes, you have to write about that person in an essay. This is CHARM: consideration of others. Their feelings, desires; and needs. All above your own. |
| What withdraws, what becomes scarce, suddenly seems to deserve our respect and honor. What stays too long, inundating us with its presence, makes us disdain it. |
| What would it be like if you turned on everything that could be turned on? |
| What you cannot enforce, do not command. |
| When a fight is inevitable, you have to hit first. |
| When a rational conviction has been arrived at, it is necessary to dwell upon it, to follow out its consequences, to search out in oneself whatever beliefs inconsistent with the new conviction might otherwise survive…What I suggest is that a man should make up his mind with emphasis as to what he rationally believes, and should never allow contrary irrational beliefs to pass unchallenged or brain a hold over him, however brief. |
| When a thing needs to be done, concentrate the mind. Do not many of us who fail to achieve big things . . . fail because we lack concentration in the art of concentrating the mind on the thing to be done at the proper time and to the exclusion of everything else? |
| When another speaks, be attentive yourself and disturb not the audience. If any hesitate in his words help him not nor prompt him without desired, interrupt him not, nor answer him till his speech be ended. |
| When anything tempts you to feel bitter, Not “Tis is a misfortune,’ but ‘To bear this worthily is good fortune.’ |
| When considering doing or not doing anything, ask yourself, “When am old and I look back on my life, is this something I will have regretted doing or not doing?” |
| When finding yourself in an angering situation, imagine you are a character in an absurdist play (like The Office). That way, you can’t help but laugh. |
| The Charmer is a type that plays on people’s vanity and insecurity to gain their affection. The best way to summarize this type is to think of Benjamin Disraeli. He said, “Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.”A young lady was taken to dinner one evening by Gladstone and the following evening by Disraeli. Asked what impressions these two celebrated men had made upon her, she replied, “When I left the dining room after sitting next to Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But after sitting next to Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest woman in England.” |
| When in any sticky situation, ask “How would X handle this situation?” X could= a healthy role model you would like to emulate. This creates an intuitive connection as to what you should do. |
| When in Company, put not your Hands to any Part of the Body, not usually Discovered. Be considerate of others. Do not embarrass others. |
| When it is time to ask for a favor or help, you must think first of appearing to people’s self-interest in some way. Apply this to everyone, no matter their self-obsessiveness. |
| When men are inhuman, take care not to feel towards them as they do towards other humans. |
| When men function out of rules and laws, they do the bare minimum they can without being punished. |
| When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome. Unclamp, in a word, your intellectual and practical machinery, and let it run free. |
| When people cannot figure out what you are doing, they are kept in a state of terror – waiting, uncertain, confused. Do not let others figure you out. |
| When something goes wrong, ask: is there anything I have done in the past 6 months that increased the probability that this impasse would manifest itself? |
| My current motivational state does not need to match my intention in order to act. |
| When we consider the source of insults, we will often find that those who insult us can best be described as overgrown children. In other cases, we will find that those insulting us have deeply flawed characteristics. Such people, rather than deserving our anger, deserve our pity. |
| When you are building anything, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same. |
| When you find yourself in a situation where you are asking yourself, “Is this what I want to do/say?” refuse to comply. Just say no. It is almost certain that the other person will increase the pressure. How dare you not do that thing! It is there, right at that moment, when you feel that increased sense of guilt, the need to appease and not rock the boat and make that person happy. Not it. File it. Embrace it. Then double down on your refusal to do something contrary to your own desires and self-interest. |
| When you gossip about another person, listeners unconsciously associate you with the characteristics you are describing, ultimately leading to those characteristics being transferred to you. |
| When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again. |
| When you need encouragement, think of the qualities the people around you have: this one’s energy, that one’s modesty, another’s generosity, and so on. Nothing is as encouraging as when virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us, when we’re practically showered with them. It’s good to keep this in mind. |
| When you see a Crime punished, you may be inwardly Pleased; but always show Pity to the Suffering Offender. Don’t draw attention to yourself. |
| Whenever possible, go with the decision that will make a good story. |
| Whenever you can, swap “Let’s think about it” for “Let’s decide on it.” Commit to making decisions. Don’t wait for the perfect solution. Decide and move forward. |
| While our knowledge of physics was not available to the ancients, human nature was. So everything that holds in social science and psychology has to be Lindy-proof, that is, have an antecedent in the classics; otherwise it will not replicate or not generalize beyond the experiment. |
| While people feel comfortable with other people who are like themselves, it’s also true that people feel comfortable with people who sound like themselves. Try to match the tone, speed, and volume of the person you speak with. But it is important to make it come off as natural. |
| Who are you to skulk through the world, continually afraid of failure? |
| Without honor mediocrity, corruption, and incompetence rule. |
| Work against your desire to corrupt your own character. It may be easier to lie and cheat, and not put forth the effort honesty requires. Always put forth the effort. |
| Would you go into a man’s office with your hand out like a beggar, and beg for a dime for a cup of coffee? Can’t you see that you are doing essentially the same thing, when you go in overly concerned with whether or not someone will approve of you? Can’t you see that you have your hand out – literally begging for his approval and acceptance of you as a person? |
| You can never be sure who you are dealing with. A man who is of little importance and means today can be a person of power tomorrow. We forget a lot in our lives, but we rarely forget an insult. |
| You can tell the size of a man by the things that bother him. |
| You choose to let things bother you. You can just as easily choose not to notice the irritating offender, to consider the matter trivial and unworthy of your interest. That is the powerful move. What you do not react to cannot drag you down in a futile engagement. Your pride is not involved. The best lesson you can teach an irritating gnat is to consign it to oblivion by ignoring it. |
| You forget 1,000 things per day, maybe even more. You are 1 of those 1,000 things to everyone else. Just realize you don’t matter to them. Act accordingly. |
| You have a responsibility to lift the heaviest load you can possibly conceive of. That is the call to adventure. |
| You have an ethical responsibility as a citizen to forthrightly confront tyranny wherever it occurs. |
| You have to be willing to make the sacrifice before you learn something. What you’ll learn is in proportion to what you’re willing to sacrifice. If you really commit to it and increase what you sacrifice, your probability of success will increase. |
| You have to treat yourself as if you were someone you cared for. I mean that technically. Detach yourself from yourself. If I was going to construct a mode of being that was optimal for this person that I happen to be, what would that look like? This is independent of whether you deserve it. That should be what is taken into consideration as well when treating others as you would treat yourself. |
| Charm is the way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question. |
| You must practice and develop your boldness. You will often find uses for it. The best place to begin is often the delicate world of negotiation. In negotiation, bold demands work better than starting off with piecemeal concessions and trying to meet the other person halfway. Set your value high, and then, as Count Lustig did, set it higher. |
| You must see the creation of a persona as a key element in social intelligence, not something evil or demonic. We all wear masks in the social arena, playing different roles to suit the different environments we pass through. By creating a persona that is mysterious, intriguing, and masterful, you are playing to the public, giving them something compelling and pleasurable to witness. You are allowing them to project their fantasies onto you, or directing their attention to other theatrical qualities. |
| You must suffer from one of two pains. The pain of discipline, or the pain of regret. The difference is that one weighs an ounce and the other weighs a ton. |
| You need discipline before creativity. The library is too large to wander through it unaided. |
| You should distrust empathy because empathy is like a drug. It distorts our perspective, causing us to get all worked up about an individual or group. Compare it to a spotlight that illuminates a specific person or group, while plunging everything and everyone else into darkness. |
| You should learn how to generate positive experiences for other people. But How? By creating value for the ingroup rather than taking it. Whenever a beta male enters a social interaction they seek to take value in an effort to make themselves feel better about being such a beta. This manifests in compensating, inventing bullshit grievances, virtue signaling and trying to take sex from women in an effort to feel masculine. Alphas make value by building social groups, creating experiences and pillaging outgroups. The key here is to demonstrate what you can offer, not give it away. Too many guys misinterpret this principle and try to win others over with gifts of attention, jokes, flirting, etc. |
| You should never, You MUST never, seek the approval of others. Only yourself. Decondition any notion otherwise. Otherwise you will attach your identity to these things. You will end up believing that being “good” and doing it “right” is what makes you valuable and compensates for an internalized belief that you are less than. Consider, if you did not care what people thought of you, how would you live your life differently? |
| You shouldn’t know the right people; the right people should know you. |
| You will make more headway in two hours by becoming genuinely interested in someone and their problems than you could make in ten years trying to get him interested in you and your product / problems / solutions. We are interested in others when they are interested in us. |
| You will never be fully in control so long as you live by other’s rules, morals, values, and symbols. |
| Your actions are the best interpretation of your thoughts. |
| Your character will be judged by how you treat people who can do nothing for you. |
| Your emotional commitment to what you are doing will be translated directly into your work. |
| Your job is to be the man that raises others up. That raises the value of everyone in the room just by being there. To be the man that every woman wants to fuck and every man wants to be. |
| Your own entrances and exits should be crafted and planned carefully. |
| Your values have to be hierarchically organized with something absolute at the top, because otherwise they do nothing but war. You have to organize your values hierarchically or else you stay confused. This is true if you’re an individual and it’s true if you’re a state. If you don’t know what the next thing you should do is, then there are fifty things you should do. Then, how are you doing to do any of them. You can’t. You have to prioritize. Something has to be above something else. It has to be arranged in a hierarchy for it not to be chaotic. So there is some principle at the top of the hierarchy. |
| If you take ownership, they will take ownership. |
| The only way to beat a titan is to outmaneuver them. |
| “How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.” The Princess Irulan, Collected Sayings of Muad’Dib |
| “Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson |
| “Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.” -G.K. Chesterton |
| “In matters of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim with the current. Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give up earth itself and all it contains, rather than do an immoral act. And never suppose that in any situation, or under any circumstances, it is best for you to do a dishonorable thing. Whenever you are to do a thing, though it can never be known but to yourself, ask how you would act were all the world looking at you, and act accordingly.” -President Thomas Jefferson |
| “Everything we do matters – whether it’s making smoothies while you save up money or studying for the bar – even after you already achieved the success you sought. Everything is a chance to do and be your best. Only self-absorbed assholes think they are too good for whatever their current station requires.” |
| When action is our priority, vanity falls away. Act. |
| Reject first judgements and the objects that spring out of them. Usually those objections are rooted in fear. |
| Act with a reverse clause, so there is always a way out or another route to get to where you need to go. So that setbacks or problems are always expected and never permanent. Making certain that what impedes us can empower us. |
| Only you can decide how something will affect you. No one else has the right. |
| You are more likely to be rewarded for virtue signaling and punished for being virtuous. Be virtuous anyways. Avoid virtue signaling however you can. |
| If you have to worry about price, you don’t want to be in that business. |
| The sooner you make your first 5,000 mistakes, the sooner you will learn how to correct them. -Some author of a book on drawing. |
| One day you will reach judgment in your life. You will have to ask yourself: Who was I supposed to be? Was I that person? Did I gain my soul to be every bit of person that I am? Think of this often, then act accordingly. |
| One of the most valuable things you can do to improve your decision making is to think through your principles for making decisions, write them out in both words and computer algorithms, back-test them if possible, and use them on a real-time basis to run in parallel with your brain’s decision making |
| Plan your day (an effective one. Not an efficient one). |
| Show respect for the other person’s opinions. Never say “You’re wrong”. If you are going to prove anything, don’t let anybody know it. Do it so subtly, so adroitly, that no one will feel that you are doing it. |
| Verbal fluency, simply put, is the ability to find the right words at the right time or in the right situation. And, it’s a great thing to have in abundance. The more horsepower a car has, the faster it can go 0 to 60. So, just like a car, the more verbally fluent you are, the faster your brain can find the right words to speak. |