The lesson in here is simple: if you lose your childlike zest for life and willingness to jump, you will end up feeling anxious and empty
Men who follow their heart, regardless of the risks, don't end up in therapy
One of the things more people need to accept is you WILL have pain in life, especially if you want to experience great things. There is always a cost to move up to different levels
The question is what that cost is going to be
Most people try to avoid it, but you can't - the universe seeks balance. This is why after receiving great fortune, so many people are blindsided by terrible experiences (health, divorce, financial) that set them back years
The only way to mitigate this is to choose your own pain. To decide "I will sacrifice this" in exchange for the blessing
Tithing is an expression of this, and it's why it's mentioned in the bible. You need to give back for what you get in order to continue to receive
But the phenomenon runs even deeper.
It's well noted in holistic circles that a lot of people get sick because they refused to confront personal problems
They didn't want to face the pain of letting some person or pattern go, and so the cost manifested as cancer. Conversely (and I've seen this SO frequently with clients), when they DO confront some painful issue all sorts of calcified dynamics in their life start to unravel, and their life starts to develop momentum
The bottom line:
It's gonna hurt one way or another. You don't get to avoid the pain in life.
But you DO largely get to choose it.
It can either be short term and on your own terms, it can be chronic and imposed on you
Do not be blinded by ego. Humble yourself, or God will humble you
@creek_outl15992@privateeyeruss Yes, I think it's wise for a right-leaning man to look to convert a left-leaning woman instead of solely looking for other right-leaning women. Women tend to "follow/accept the leader when it comes to politics." It is mostly irrelevant, tbh
Jordan Peterson on how to easily overcome social anxiety:
1. Social anxiety is not shyness. When you walk into a social situation, your brain registers it as a dominance hierarchy that is judging you. A negative judgment means low status. Low status interferes with everything your biology cares about. You are not being irrational. You are being evaluated by something that feels like nature itself, and your nervous system knows it.
2. Telling an anxious person to stop thinking about themselves does not work. You cannot tell someone to stop thinking about something. They get caught in the loop. Stop thinking about a white elephant. white elephant. white elephant. The instruction makes it worse. The only way out is to give the brain something else to do.
3. The actual solution is to look at other people. not glance. Genuinely look. Watch their face. Track what they are thinking. The moment you focus outward, your automatic social mechanisms engage, and the awkwardness dissolves on its own. You cannot be socially calibrated and self-focused at the same time. Attention can only go in one direction.
4. When speaking to a group, never try to address the group. It does not exist as a thing you can talk to. Find one person, look at them directly, and talk to that person. They will reflect the entire room back to you because everyone is entrained to the same social signal. If you can talk to one person, you can talk to anyone.
5. The eye at the top of the pyramid, the thing the Egyptians worshipped as Horus, is attention itself. What you pay attention to determines everything. The most important thing to look at is whatever your instincts flag as slightly wrong or off. That is where the real information is. Your enemies are useful for the same reason. They will tell you things about yourself that nobody else will, and occasionally one of those things will be accurate.
I never really struggled romantically, girlfriends came easily, and eventually I found myself happily married with a big family somewhat despite my own conscious intentions. Looking back, if I had to say how that happened, more than anything else I would attribute it the fact that I genuinely enjoy the company of women. I find their presence enchanting, their conversation engaging, and their various natural foibles merely amusing. In any mixed social situation, I’d mostly rather chat with the women. Their little thoughts and feelings are actually fascinating to me, especially since they are often so different from my own. Their weaknesses and failings don’t enrage me; in many ways they even augment their charm. If I had any advice for a young man trying to figure out the opposite sex, I would say: learn to have fun with them.
@privateeyeruss If it was over a man, I guess the "lucky" guy will have unfettered access to a 13 y/o. Which could lead to some nasty charges soon.
I hate that I typed that, btw. GROSS!
Tony Robbins on how to change someone who doesn't want to change:
1. People only change when they link enough pain to staying the same or enough pleasure to changing. Ideally, both at once. This is not a mindset shift. It happens in the nervous system, not the head. Your head can know exactly what you should do, and your gut will override it every single time.
2. Yes, you can change someone who doesn't want to change. But not by forcing them. You find the leverage that makes them change themselves. Everyone has a point that will get them to follow through. For some people, it is not even the threat of their own life. For others, it is their children. For others, it is spiritual growth. The leverage is different for everyone, but it always exists.
3. The food poisoning example. You used to love a food or a drink. Then one night it came back up with enough intensity and enough aroma that to this day you cannot look at it without feeling repelled. No willpower required. Your brain simply rewired what it links pleasure to. That is the entire mechanism of change in one story.
4. Scrooge did not want to change. He was certain he did not need to change. Three ghosts showed up and did one thing: they made him link unbearable pain to his past, his present, and his future simultaneously. When there is nowhere to escape, change happens in a heartbeat. Robbins calls this the Dickens pattern. Lock pain into all three time zones at once, and there is no exit.
5. People avoid changing by escaping to a different time period. If the present is painful, escape to a good memory from the past. If the past was also painful, invent a better future and escape there. As long as one of those three zones offers relief, the pressure to change dissolves. Removing all three exits and change becomes inevitable.
6. Problem is some people have accidentally linked pain to things they actually need: exercise, intimacy, and hard conversations. The association is wrong, but it runs their life anyway. The job is not to build more willpower. It is to change what you have linked pain and pleasure to in the first place.
This is brutal but it's true
I've never known anyone who was single for a long time who didn't deserve to be
I don't mean because they are bad people
But that when you look closely, their life is a really effective system for remaining alone:
- They don't meet anyone
- They ignore people who express interest
- They reject the people available to them
- They obsess about people who aren't available
- They have insane "standards" for others yet simultaneously never require anything more from themselves
- They're still in love with an ex and haven't admitted this to themselves, or grieved or even tried doing anything about it
- Their lifestyle sets them up to be a complete weirdo (computer all day scrolling ragebait tweets on X, watching porn, etc) and develop insane attitudes + rationalizations that they never challenge
- They spend their time doing "self development" like going to the gym, meditating, recently popular things like looksmaxxing, etc, with the idea of becoming "ready" one day. Yet ready never arrives, and they never actually increase the amount of action they are taking. The things they do is a way to justify not facing fear of rejection
Yet they do all this while claiming they "want love" and saying "I tried their best, it just didn't work!"
But the explanation 99.99% of the time isn't that it's just a brutal world out there and you're a poor little victim condemned to eternal aloneness
It's that something on the list above identified your exact issue
That you're single on purpose, because it's a logical inevitably from the way you live
But right now you're far more committed to lying to yourself to protect your self image than actually doing anything about it
Jordan Peterson explained how you can become dangerously articulate:
1. Articulate does not just mean well spoken. It means differentiated. A joint that is articulated can move with precision and grace. A person who is articulated can move through the world the same way. Vague people are one solid useless mass. Articulate people have range.
2. Peterson calls articulate people the most dangerous people in the world. Not dangerous in a destructive way. Dangerous in the sense that they cannot be ignored, dismissed, or pushed around. The word is the most powerful tool a human being can carry.
3. It does not matter what you do for a living. A plumber who is articulate can negotiate better contracts, manage employees, advertise services, and think through complex problems. Articulation is not a luxury for intellectuals. It is a practical weapon available to everyone.
4. Jocko Willink is one of the most decorated special operations soldiers alive. Peterson uses him as his primary example of why articulation matters even in the most physically demanding environments. Jocko succeeded not just because he was tough. He succeeded because he could communicate clearly with the men under his command, explain situations to his superiors, and make the case for soldiers who deserved promotion. Toughness without articulation leaves half your power on the table.
5. Becoming articulate starts with paying attention to what you say. Peterson uses the image of crossing a swamp on a hidden stone path. You cannot see the path. You feel for it with each step. You test the ground before you commit your weight. That is exactly what you do with words. You feel whether what you are about to say is solid or whether it will make you dissolve.
6. He noticed 40 years ago that most of what he said made him feel weak. Not all of it. About five percent felt solid. The rest was instrumental language. Words used to win arguments, appear smart, gain small victories. That kind of language is hollow and people can feel it. The goal is to increase the percentage of what you say that actually feels true.
7. Stop filling silence with noise. The ums, the likes, the you knows, the ahs. These are not harmless verbal habits. They are signals that your thinking has not caught up with your speaking. Take the time to craft the word. Silence while thinking is not weakness. It is precision.
8. Peterson calls the pause a prayerful pause. When someone asks you a question, instead of immediately answering with what you think you should say, ask yourself what you actually think. Make it a real question. One you genuinely do not know the answer to yet. Then wait. The answer will come. And when you speak it, people will find you immediately interesting because you are saying something real.
9. Joe Rogan is one of the most successful communicators alive and his entire method is the opposite of instrumental language. He is not trying to appear smart. He is not trying to get something from his guests. He just genuinely wants to know more than he knows. That honesty makes every conversation magnetic. People can feel the difference between someone performing and someone actually thinking.
10. Read great writers. Write about the problems that obsess you. Practice saying only what you believe to be true. These are not quick fixes. They are a lifetime practice. But Peterson's promise is direct. If every word you say reflects what you genuinely believe, the path you walk becomes a golden path. Not because it sounds good. Because it is real. And real is the only thing that actually works.
Asteroid mining is not only going to make a lot more trillionaires, it's going to make us all rich.
Just like the Industrial Revolution, the Space Revolution will greatly increase standards of living across humanity... yours, mine, everyone's.
Electric light and indoor plumbing were once luxuries. Now they are so universal that we can have them and still think of ourselves as poor. But preindustrial folk would have thought us wealthy beyond measure. What's coming is another paradigm shift.
You may think this is all theoretical.
You may think asteroid mining is an unproven concept. You're wrong. Because you don't know one critical fact.
We're already asteroid mining.
And we've been doing it since the Bronze Age.
All gold we mine on earth, all the copper for wires, the uranium for reactors, all the iron for nails, everything made of heavy metals that you own, or use, or have ever seen... it's all mined from ancient asteroid strikes.
All the native Earth metals sunk to the core when the whole planet was molten. Past our reach.
Do you think there are precious metals, like gold and silver and platinum? Do you think that even common metals, like iron and tin and copper, cost a lot to extract and refine?
Artificial scarcity.
Every piece of metal you have ever seen was sourced from the tiny percentage of asteroids that once hit Earth.
Leave the gravity well, learn to sail the void, and we can loot all the asteroids that haven't.
Imagine that we built all of civilization picking up our raw materials, grain by grain, with tweezers.
Asteroid mining, true asteroid mining, is a shovel. And no, not a hand tool shovel, I mean the shovel attachment on the front of an industrial digger.
That's why SpaceX has trillion dollar plus valuation. And unless we screw things up on Earth, and sabotage them somehow, that valuation is way too low.
Below here, you'll see a different part of the plan. A little company, running out of a little industrial space in the San Fernando Valley, is building humanity the ultimate shopping bag.
They think Mars is a sideshow, you see.
They want to bag up asteroids, just scoop the little ones right up with a great big robot butterfly net, and bring back to high Earth orbit.
Strip them down there, and build.
If you thought data centers in space are wild, wait until you see factories in space. Wait until everything from toasters to CPUs to machine tools are made in high orbit, or on the moon, and the only bits that ever make it to Earth on the finished products.
In space, minerals are cheap. And power is free. And it doesn't cost much of anything to move goods down a gravity well.
You have no idea what's coming.
Neither does SpaceX or Transastra, for that matter. They've got a hold of the tail of the elephant, and they think the Space Revolution is a rope.
I'm a science fiction author. My job is to see the whole elephant.
It's a big fucking elephant.
Morning routine!
Some of you know I've had the privilege of working for and being around some very famous and Wealthy individuals. Over the next couple of weeks I'll share some of the things I noticed that these men do on a regular basis and share that information with you guys. Maybe it works for you maybe not.
Every single one of these guys Begins the day in one of two ways. Silence and exercise.
Some of these individuals had very specific requirements about what they wanted throughout the day. We'll go over silence first.
Some of these men would start the day out and end the day with no electronics at all. Some of these men didn't even own smartphones. No television no screen time sometimes just a cigar maybe a drink but they wanted silence. The ones who had children would have this quiet time after their children will put to bed by the nannies. In some instances the wives understood that it was time for them to leave. Guys on the security detail understood that when they wanted their quiet time we were to leave them alone unless there was an emergency and even then he expected us to handle it.
Begin your day with silence. Focus and meditate on what you want to accomplish for that day while keeping your short and long term goals in mind. It helps you focus and keeps your mind clean of the Clutter that is splashed at us all day long through these tiny little screens we communicate through so frequently.
Try it for a week or two and I think you'll notice a difference.
People respect you more when they don't see you often. Even parents. Trust me. It's strange how distance rearranges love, how absence restores what closeness erodes. When people are deprived of your presence, they start seeing you clearly again, not through habit but through awareness. Proximity dulls perception. Space sharpens it. That's just how the human mind works.
The amount of respect you command is a direct byproduct of how high functioning you are, for high stress tolerance commands respect where low stress tolerance undermines it.
In simple terms: if you can outwardly handle stress with greater composure than others, you will naturally command more respect than they do. Respect thus accrues not as a conscious decision, but as an instinctive response to your conduct.
People will subconsciously evaluate your competence, placing you into one of two categories: asset or liability. If you are consistently steady under pressure and difficult to unsettle, you are deemed an operational asset, but if you collapse emotionally, offend easily, or routinely punish others for telling hard or sensitive truths, you will flag as a liability.
Respect and authority flows to those who are deemed assets. Would you want a leader with poor stress tolerance who is prone to outbursts, collapse or destabilisation? Of course not. That would unsettle you. You would prefer someone who remains poised under pressure, because you would feel safer with someone with an exceptional capacity to metabolise stress even beyond what is objectively healthy or humane. Leadership as such gravitates to those who are able to bear more than their fair share of stress, not to those who impose their emotional turbulence on to others the very moment they are subjected to it.
You seek someone unnaturally strong, who is capable of carrying not just their own burdens, but likewise yours. But you are neither unique or alone in holding that preference, for it is the underlying mechanism which determines how people intuitively designate leaders. To desire authority over others whilst being a source of emotional turbulence is thus not just naive, but incredibly immature. Authority necessarily then gravitates to those who serve the most stabilising function, because when it is given to the incapable, it results in dysfunction and tyranny.
High functioning individuals inspire trust, because they manage destabilising, urgent, or sensitive information without unravelling. Low functioning individuals erode trust, because they amplify chaos, crumble under pressure, and turn urgent or sensitive matters into liabilities, thereby imposing burdens which others are forced to carry in their place.
This is why if you want a relationship built on full and clear mutual transparency, you must be able to bear the costs of what you ask for. Both sides must be capable of absorbing shocks, disappointments, conflicts, and unpleasant truths without collapsing into hysteria or destructive anarchy. Respect simply is not owed, but earned. You are not entitled to what you have not proven you can endure, for it is the weight you are unable to carry that will define the limits of what others can trust you with.
Your brain basically stopped recording your life around age 25. Everything since then is a blur for a reason.
Neuroscientists measured this so many times they named it: the reminiscence bump. Ask anyone over 60 to recall their strongest memories and almost every answer clusters between ages 15 and 25. The decade where everything was new. First job, first apartment, first real relationship. Your brain encoded each day because nothing had a template yet.
After that window closes, most people enter a repetition loop. Same commute, same office, same weekend rhythm. The brain stops recording repeated experiences as distinct events. A year with 300 novel days leaves 300 memory anchors. A year with 10 leaves 10. Both took 365 days to live. Only one of them will exist when you look back.
This is why people at 50 say "where did the time go." The time went into routine that felt like living but left almost nothing behind.
Your remaining years are fixed. How many your brain bothers to remember is entirely up to you.