• "There is nothing I can say to you that will magically make you not a bitch."
• "Don't talk to me like a bitch."
• "I don't have time to waste on people who don't have the courage to try."
• "Just because someone has the hardware doesn't mean they aren't a coward."

For years, I've been saying that the difference between success and failure isn't character, but appropriate knowledge. Tends to make dudes mad if they didn't understand the whole "red pill" metaphor... because there's a lot of dudes out there who think the difference between success and failure is some sort of white-knuckled macho.

But for a long time, there was a question I simply couldn't answer.

What's "courage"?

What is the difference between the guys who find their anger, start lifting, and stop being so nice, and the ones who spend the rest of their lives bathing in online self-pity about how their jawbone isn't ideal?

The only answer we ever had for that question was "no courage", "no willpower", "not resilient enough"... as if life were a Japanese video game with quirky characters dressed as schoolgirls, defined by a series of health bars. You could label them "Courage", "Willpower", and "Resilience", or you could label them "Money", 'Bounciness", and "String Cheese". Doesn't matter. You've just created a theoretical construct that can't be observed or measured, and tried to explain something you can observe in terms of it.

That's dumb.

But I did it myself. We all did. We talked about "building willpower", and having "courage", and "giving less fucks". We wrote any number of drill instructor rants. I wrote one called "Don't talk to me like a bitch", and while it was well-received, I thought it was... stupid.

I was telling you to be brave. But I wasn't telling you how to be brave. I didn't know how to teach courage, because you can't "teach" a health bar. You can only teach knowledge.

We were trying to "motivate" you like a mediocre high school football coach, yelling at a 16 year old boy to "try harder" and "show more hustle", because he doesn't know how to spot what the kid is doing wrong with his elbow position when he throws.

So I finally managed to ask the question, how can we describe courage, not as an emotional "health bar", but in terms of what the actual brain does... store information?

So I talked with winners and with losers. I talked to incels. I talked to commies who want "society" to become an incubator that caters to their every infantile need. I re-read Seligman, and Rogers, and Maslow, and even some Thiel. And something dawned on me.

Courage is a cognitive skill and it can be taught and learned.

It has nothing to do with "Willpower", which is just another health bar. It is instead made of things that you know.

So what is this skill?

To answer that question, mentally separate all the obstacles you face into three types...

• The trivial... that which you can solve by applying the resources you already have in a way you already understand.
  
• The tractable... that which you can solve, but must act in new ways, acquire new knowledge, and expend significant effort to overcome.
• The intractable ... that which is literally impossible, or which you cannot acquire the skills and resources to solve with any reasonable effort.

You can also think of them as the easy, the hard, and the impossible.

"Courage" is the cognitive ability to accurately sort problems into one of these three categories.

When you believe something to be trivial, you apply what you already know and can do, and expect to succeed quickly. When you believe something to be intractable, you do not apply any effort at all to it, but find other problems to solve instead. When you believe something to be tractable but hard, you work at it over time, seek to gain new knowledge about it, and tolerate setbacks while still expecting to eventually succeed.

When someone experiences a "failure of courage" that prevents them from doing something they could otherwise do, it is because they mistake the tractable for the intractable. Habitual cowards are those who make this mistake so often that they don't believe in the existence of tractable problems... they assume that anything which isn't easy is impossible.

This is why we tell you to lift heavy weights. Not because it increases your "willpower", because willpower cannot be measured, and therefore doesn't exist. Not because it gets you used to suffering or doing something that hurts... people with self-harm scars do plenty of that and it hasn't made them courageous.

No, lifting helps you because it teaches you to believe in the existence of hard, but tractable, problems, and shows you what one looks like. When you start to lift, assuming you do it correctly, you see a small amount of progress very soon, which has a clear numerical measurement. But it takes many months and years of sustained effort to produce dramatic results. Thus you are clearly shown, right away, that the task is neither easy, nor impossible. The only thing that remains for it to be is "hard".

When we believe in the existence of tractable problems, and we believe that a particular problem is tractable, we will work on it. No special character, or motivation, or discipline, or other nebulously defined thing, is needed. We will simply work because we believe our work will be rewarded. Some people call this subjective experience "hope".

Now that we understand what courage is, I can systematically teach you to be brave.

• First, you must seek out experiences that convince you of the existence of all three categories.
• Second, you must learn to recognize the distinguishing features of a tractable problem.
• Third, you must find tractable problems that you want to invest your effort in solving, work on them, and observe the results, then continue to do this over and over again until you die of old age.

This is fairly obvious in hindsight. You learn to believe that some things are hard, but doable. You learn what those things look like so you don't waste time trying the impossible, or miss opportunities by not trying. And you increase your own belief in your ability to do this by doing it over and over until you die.

When you find yourself unmotivated, undisciplined, afraid, unwilling to proceed, trapped by despair... recognize that this is just belief that something is intractable. Then act to break that belief.

• Break the task into smaller subtasks, and think about those instead.
• Set a more modest goal, and achieve that first.
• Find and solve other tractable problems
• Watch others succeed at the task.
• Spend time around those who are much worse at the task than you. Then around those who are much better. Keep going back and forth between the two.
• Learn about the task from those who are good at it.
• Surround yourself with others who believe in the tractable and work on tractable problems.
• Surround yourself with those who believe in your abilities, and encourage you.

What's important is not to achieve great victories, but to move the needle. Belief in your ability to achieve the hard is like the strength you gain from lifting... you get it a little at a time.

You don't have to go to a wedding, meet two bridesmaids, and pull a same-night threesome, like HumanSockPuppet did. Talk to that cute cashier at the university bookstore. Then see if you can get her to smile. You don't have to deadlift 550 to have permission to be in the gym. Just go and lift something.

The space between you and what you want is always composed, not of willpower or character or special personality traits, but knowing what to do. And if you can read, and listen, and observe, you can learn what to do.

Lack of courage is not a failure of character, it is simply a lack of belief, and of hope. It is a lack of the experiences what would give you those things. You can seek out and have those experiences. And feeling afraid or unmotivated or stuck is not the absence of some essential "character trait" that condemns you to be stuck forever. It is instead a sign that you need to train more confidence before you will be able to believe that the problem is not impossible, only hard. When you reach that point, you will try. And you will work.

Belief in the tractable, like strength, can be trained by doing. And you do not train strength by straining at things you cannot lift... you do it by lifting the heaviest thing you can until you can lift a heavier thing.

Becoming brave means believing in tractable problems. And acquiring that skill is, in itself, a tractable problem. Approach it like you would a barbell.... you load the appropriate amount of weight for you, and you keep going.

Tip Whisper for their post.