This is my contribution to Endorsed Red Pill Weekend. At the risk of this being an annoying self-help guru hippie type post (since we don't want this subreddit to devolve into that), I do think that once in a while it helps to revisit the foundational work. Foundational work which will result in more sex and money (what more do you want in life?).
This post is meant to collection of a whole bunch of disparate topics condensed into a single place. They all relate to male sexual strategy in some way. More detail on each topic can be found in our community's archives. Hopefully it's practical and I'm sure you all have your own foundational shit you want to shout to the world as well. So here it goes. This is what I do:
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PHYSICAL:
Posture: (2 minutes / day) Clinical studies have demonstrated that better posture increases testosterone and lowers cortisol. Do this exercise daily.
Showering: Take cold showers daily. Alternate hot and cold water in the shower a few times. It boosts both your testosterone and your immune system.
Exercise: (60 minutes / day) Lift weights every other day. The days you don't lift weights, go for walks (it's not only for cardio but for your mental health, creativity, confidence, and anxiety). Do this for 12 months, and then come back. Learn about proper form, but don't debate on the pro's and con's of different routines quite yet. Only once you've been consistent for 6-12 months can you start asking questions about optimizing, or go work with /u/gaylubeoil. Get consistent first, optimize later.
Diet: (constant vigilance) Eat a lot more vegetables. Let me repeat that. EAT MORE VEGETABLES. Seriously. No matter how much you're eating now, eat more. Eat enough protein. Don't analyze the proper ratio of certain food items until you're on a consistent schedule. Get consistent first, optimize later. Others might disagree here, but so be it. This is what works for me. The ones who disagree probably already have this foundation down pat, and forget the value of taking the first few steps. This is more for people earlier in their training. There's also some early scientific evidence that meat could be linked to an increased risk of cancer and heart disease, but I'm not a staunch vegan or anything; I am just including it here for others who may wish to do their own research.
MENTAL:
Knowledge: (1 book / week) Reading the right books gives you a tremendous leg up on the competition. I always ask myself: "If I were competing against someone else in my career, and that person has read this book, would I feel intimidated?" I won't go into too much detail on book selection, except to say that Robert Greene's books are mandatory. I enjoy persuasion and strategy books myself, and I think the amount of time it takes to fully internalize Nietszche's books can last me a lifetime. Use services like Summaries.com or KI Book Club to learn more efficiently. /u/illimitableman explicated this better than I ever could, so I'll simply defer to his blog post on this. wallstreetplayboys recommends 100 pages / week. I prefer more, but only if the books seem to have practical value. I have no experience with podcasts (I prefer to read) but I include it here for completeness. You might enjoy Mike Cernovich's podcasts and I always learn things from /u/illacertus's Youtube Channel.
Meditation: (5-20 minutes / day): The book Peak discusses the value of both consistently being outside your comfort zone, and yet doing things extremely gradually so that your brain barely notices that you are actually outside your comfort zone. I applied that principle to meditation. When I used to try to meditate for 20-30 minutes per day, I'd skip days, I'd barely get into a rhythm, and it was a challenge. I now am at 10 minutes and 21 seconds, and every day I only add 1 second to my meditation time. By the end of 2017 I'll be at 15 minutes. This helps me stay consistent, and meditation is a long game anyway. Start at 5 minutes (300 seconds), and simply add 1 second each day. Before you know it, you're both on a regular schedule and picking up speed. Secondly, a trick I do to stay present when I'm not meditating is to say these words to myself (preferably outloud but in your head works): "What am I doing right now? I'm asking msyelf what I'm doing. I'm focusing on the present situation and my concrete senses." You can adapt that mantra to whatever you want. For example, you may want to give yourself some motivational positive self-talk after saying that (e.g. "I'm hunting/grinding.").
Fear Bootstrapping: (2 minutes / day) Write down your fears with your non-dominant hand. It looks like a child wrote it. "I'm scared I won't have the discipline to go to the gym consistently enough to actually have as much sex as I want." This is most important to do when you're feeling especially down about yourself. When you're in a better mood, answer the child-like handwriting with your dominant hand. "Whether or not I was disciplined enough in the past doesn't matter. The past is set in stone and I can always choose to start being more disciplined today. When I weight 190 lbs and have 9% body fat, it's going to be much easier to get sex, so it's worth the difficulty now." Your fears are your own. They may center around fitness, around girls, approach anxiety, money, whatever. This method is one form of self-therapy I developed for myself. It trains your subconscious to see your fears coming from a ridiculously stupid inner-child, and your confident answers coming from a powerful adult man.
Scheming: (10 minutes / day) You're a smart person, right? You have things planned out pretty well? You see how to get to your future financial goals? No matter how smart you are, keeping your plans in your subsconsious hides how sloppy your thinking truly is. Have you fleshed out the details? Do you actually internally believe it will occur? Write it down. Read it over. Rewrite it. Read it over. Repeat. Once you have step Z written down you realize you're at step A today. Have you filled in B through Y? Write down the lifestyle you want, write down the career path you want, whatever. By writing it down, you realize how sloppy your thinking is. Also don't spend too much time on this in one big spurt, only to ignore it for the next few months. Write down a paragraph on week 1. Add another paragraph on week 2. Get consistent with this first, and do it gradually. Before you know it, your confidence grows because (1) you start to internalize that you will actually hit your goals, and (2) you see the next action items more clearly. Do this from the first person perspective (from your own future self's eyes). Keep it simple in a single Word document. Don't try to optimize the method before you become consistent. Get consistent first, optimize later.
Fiction: (as a vice to relax) TV may be pink slime for your brain, but I find certain fiction shows (like Peaky Blinders) wonderful for seeing which personality traits I value and which I don't. Which character do I identify with, and why? (Hint: It's usually the villains). I enjoy TV and fiction books at the end of a busy day. When reading fiction books, in the past I used to visualize the story from the third person perspective. "Gandalf looked at Frodo and the ring." Instead of visualizing this from the third party perspective, as a "floating body" above the scene, I actually make it an exercise to visualize it from the first person perspective. I envision it from Gandalf's or Frodo's eyes. I go back and forth between the two. I practice envisioning details. If this seems useless, I promise you it's not. Many highly successful athletes, authors, and business coaches discuss the value of visualizing your future from the first person perspective using all your senses. When I read, it becomes an actual exercise to practice my visualization skills. It improves my memory, and when I plan out my future, using this skill helps me fill in details.
Sex: (3 approaches / week) Read the top red pill posts weekly, because there are always new gems, but don't spend all your time here. Don't watch porn. If you're single, log your number of approaches / week. After each approach, analyze the good and bad based on your own behavior. Write it down when it's fresh. Then don't harp on it; throw it away after looking it over a week later. Always ask yourself: "Would she have treated someone stronger, richer, more confident, or more aloof this way?" (It used to be called "The Brad Pitt Test" if that term is still floating around the manosphere). Take a good hard look at yourself. You're probably too fat, too scrawny, or care what people think (male and female) too much to be successful with sex. Here's a simple test: are you actually happy with your current amount of sex per month? If not, you're probably mentally or physically weak, and you can change that by working harder using the above advice. It will take a long time, but so what?
Add those all up, and you get: 588 minutes/week, 1 book/week, and 3 approaches/week. It really isn't that much time for foundational work (the majority of which is allocated for exercise), compared to the 7000 minutes/week you're awake. And the results are tremendously exponential for your fitness, finance, and sex. If you're consistent.
This is what works for me. Adapt it to your life.
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@deeperthrill www.deepthrill.com
We are the ultimate rationalists. We don't care precisely what psychological studies say about certain topics in controlled conditions. We use that information, sure, but what we really hold credence to it unless it benefits our own experiences.
"Isn't that anecdotal? Is it statistically valid?"
Sure, I guess. Does it matter, rationally? What I do know for sure is that prior to consuming red pill knowledge, I had a certain success rate, and after absorbing red pill knowledge, I had a certain success rate. And I know how that success rate changed, for many of my goals.
We define endless theories galore about the why behind women's shit test (I have contributed a few myself), but at the end of the day, we rationally observe.
We see which guys are with the girls we crave. We notice their behavior, their mannerisms We might generalize, but that simply comes from noticing patterns amongst successful (compared to unsuccessful) men.
We notice which guys actually, in reality, have the highest success rates with sex, and which have the most loyal relationships. Whatever modern psychologists may say (they are just following along other professors' theories), we observe and find trends. We look at the pieces of their lives, their personalities and their external successes, and we observe how women respond to those components.
While we may try to understand the evolutionary mechanism behind shit tests, the red pill started with men observing that when a women pouts her face and turns coldly away from you, the men who responded in a certain way achieved better results. We notice that the guy who tries to console her actually yields a worse success rate cumulatively compared to the guy who has amused mastery in such a situation.
We observe which relationships we aspire to have, for those men looking for one. We observe which men have the most efficient success with hookups, for those men who enjoy the freedom of spinning plates.
That's key. We are results driven.
When we debate endlessly about "NAWALT/AWALT" ad nauseum, we are not trying to appease detractors and make sure that "don't worry, we still value the individual!".
Rather, what we are trying to do is to find nuance to increase our own odds of success.
I am inherently selfish.
You could say that we are our own scientific method, testing our blue-pill versus red-pill mentalities in our own lives.
We have noticed certain behaviors in ourselves which make us feel better and achieve our goals more often. If that knowledge which works for me is not generalization to every other guy, I'll try to learn from it and share what I think, but I don't care. For my own life, with the datapoints of pre-red-pill to red-pill, I have enough to validate the fact that this knowledge has benefited me (even to some statistical significance I might add, for the scientifically-minded).
We are comparing our way of interacting with the rest, the "blue pillers" as we call them. And we collectively have shown ourselves results. I know I sure have.
If somebody finds that they don't want that knowledge, if they fear such knowledge, or think it's immoral; if they believe they want to go through life with a different type of relationship to the girl or to their own feeble emotions, god speed. The scientific method did not work for you. You found no evidence that it increased your odds of success. Or you were unwilling to actually go out and try (i.e. seriously lift).
Yet in the hypothetical case of a man who followed all the red-pill tenets (seriously lift, eat well, sleep well, employed amused mastery, actively initiated dread game, demolished shit tests, understand how their actions connect to their evolutionary drives, et cetera) and actually used all the knowledge as his fingertips, and still had trouble with women, I'd love to hear from you and learn from you.
But we are ultimately aiming to rationally determine the optimal path towards our goals.
We are moral relativists and factual absolutists (one of my favorite posts).
I for one have experienced much more joy and success in my own life, and I instinctively know it's because of how I handle situations after swallowing the red pill.
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