Those who are scared of airplanes, live in a world so small
Those who read the health news, hope never to fall,
Those who don’t eat red meat, pray they become like rust
Those who exercise their heart, can’t imagine themselves as dust.

Those who can’t find pleasure today, will not find it tomorrow
Those who ignore their dreams, always need clocks to borrow,
Those who think an eternity will help, are not using time smart
Those who want to become old, let fear tear them apart.

Those who are scared of risks, can’t face their own gaze
Those who wait for New Year’s to change, will never change their ways,
Those who blame others for bad luck, will always face a wall
Those who are afraid to make the leap, will be out-leaped by all.

Those with the most banal of lives, always want to keep it going
Those who place their life over living, have lives not worth knowing,
Those who dread the common end, won’t be ready when they succumb
Those who live for today, care not if tomorrow comes.

One problem that Western men have today is a lack of masculine role models. Men don’t know how to be a man because there are so few great men to look up to. Today’s man is thrown into a gender equal, androgynous world where displays of masculinity are labeled creepy or misogynistic. Their environment dooms them before puberty to be weak men who grovel before unattractive women that end up becoming more masculine than them.

I believe there are three main components to being a great man, that when possessed even in small quantities, will lead to a rewarding life. Here they are:

1. Game. This is the ability and know-how to interact with women in a way that leads to sex. For most men, it will involve studying game theory and approaching a large sample size of women.

2. Lifestyle. This is all the value you build as a man, helping you work less to get more of what you want. With women, it makes you an interesting, desirable man before you even spit your opening line. A good lifestyle, which will involve some type of career, also stimulates your brain with valuable experiences and learning.

3. Testosterone Management. This is the fuel that feeds the fire. Without testosterone, you will be less motivated and productive in your game and lifestyle efforts.

Note that all three must be present to some degree to put you on the road to greatness. Game only would make you an approach monkey. Lifestyle only would make you a mere interesting beta who spends a bit too much time in the friends zone. Testosterone only and you’re the meathead who has to get drunk just to do a basic approach. When you’ve gained competency in all three components, you’re a man who has women, money, an interesting life, a fruitful social and professional network, and respect from your fellow man. You have it all.

The model I’ve presented to you is dependent on factors that make up Western society today. Sixty years ago, the model would look something like this:

Your father was a great man in his time, but for today’s woman he would have almost no value. He would have trouble just getting laid.

Now let’s predict the model for sixty years into the future:

We’re already experiencing some degree of it today. You’ll have to put in obscene amounts of work and be a masculine caricature to get basic sex. Competition will be insane. This is the inevitable result of worsening demographics, giving women choice, and eliminating gender roles.

The requirements for being a great man in Eastern Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia would be a combination of the first two charts, meaning that merely having a stable job will help you much more than in America, where you have to be the most interesting man in the world with tight game to bang a 7. In Eastern Europe all I need to be is a chatty dude with balls who doesn’t live with his parents, though of course this will change in time.

The path you end up taking will partly depend on your source of income. If you’re anchored to America, you must work on game, lifestyle, and testosterone management full-time to get reasonable sex, but I believe it’s far easier to fly to another country where the bar is lower in order to gain the favor of attractive women. As you can see, being a great man is quite relative, and chances are you’re reading this from a country where women demand the most out of any female in the world. Soon, their demands will outstrip what the human male is even capable of.

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I went to Iceland in the middle of winter. I was immediately struck by the isolation—the city was dead and I had no one to talk to compared to my time in South America when I always had a buddy around. I used to go out solo dolo only occasionally but now I was doing it exclusively. I began to develop strategies to get laid at night without having to use any wingmen.

As my European trip progressed, I decided that rolling solo was the way to go. The proof was in the girls I was banging, often within an hour or two, from all types of clubs. I discovered that there is anxiety in standing alone at the club, and you relieve that anxiety by doing approaches (when you’re with a friend, you have a comfortable home base that actually makes you approach less). My results indisputably showed that I simply got laid much more when rolling solo. Soon, my social life soon consisted almost entirely of banging random girls with little male friendship.

My social skills remained high, because of all the game I was running, but my ability to be a friend declined and I was losing the ability to wing. I became more impatient and insular. I just wanted to get my dick wet as quickly as possible. I didn’t need friendship anymore—I transcended friendship. Not having friends freed up a lot of time: I published 9 books in less than two years, the most productive period of my life. My income rose and I was getting laid. I felt successful.

Inevitably my interest in notches declined. Not that I was becoming less horny, but I was reluctant to put in work to get something I’ve experienced so many times before. I had expected this, and decided that when it would happen, I’d double down on writing with a goal to earn more, even though I was making enough for my needs.

I launched Return Of Kings, which takes quite a bit of time. I was also working on three simultaneous books. I was excited that my productivity was going even higher. I was going to build an empire! Chasing girls too hard was a waste of time, just like friendship was. I had started developing symptoms of carpal tunnel in my right wrist. Instead of taking a step back and thinking about what was happening, I bought an ergonomic mouse so I could work even more.

When I moved to Lublin, I banged two girls in my first month and put them in rotation, not so much because I was in love with them, but because I didn’t want to have to go out much. My first trip to Poland had me going out four or more times a week. Now it was once. I was getting laid at least once a week and making cash. Life was great.

I released Bang Ukraine in January and the launch was my biggest yet. My entire life was going according to plan. At the end of that month I did my usual accounting and was pleased at all the sales I made. It was time to blow a couple hundred and celebrate.

I went through my phone. There was only one male friend in it, but he was in Warsaw, three hours away. All my friends were in random European, American, or South American cities. No problem—I got the two girls to hang with. I texted both. One was sick and the other didn’t reply. No problem—I’ll go to the club and find a new girl to celebrate with. I’ll get some new pussy.

In the first club I got hit with four blowouts in a row. Rustiness alone couldn’t explain that result so I went to another club that was packed with girls. It barely got better. I got out-gamed by teams of guys who could occupy cockblockers when I couldn’t. I used to love rolling solo because it was easy to get laid, but now I wished I had a wing.

Even if I did succeed that night and get laid, which I didn’t, I wondered who would I share the story with. If a man bangs a pretty girl in an Eastern European shithole and has no one to tell, did the bang make a sound?

I thought back to my previous decade of game and how the reward of it wasn’t necessarily in the sex act but in the bonding with men who were either there to witness it or help me. I got more satisfaction banging an average girl with a friend working by my side than banging a hottie alone with nothing but raw effort. I won’t deny that I have a strong biological desire to get laid, but that desire alone doesn’t justify the amount of work I’ve put into game. It was the male camaraderie that made it worth pursuing more than I would have.

I went home that night and logged onto the forum. Lots of activity, like usual. I checked my blog and there were many new comments to sift through. I had several new emails and Twitter replies. Usually this would provide me with some social validation, but not tonight. It felt abstract, almost fake. The money I made the previous month was abstract, too. It was just numbers on a screen that I couldn’t even spend because I had no one to spend it with. I might as well be living my life on the internet in the form of page views, comments, forum posts, and book sales.

I turned off my computer. I thought back to Brazil, when I lived in a favela. I was broke but chased more girls with my Danish roommate than while in Lublin, where I made a far more superior income. I remember how I told myself that I wanted to live in a nice apartment within a city of beautiful women and not have to take buses at night. I accomplished that task, but I was less content than I thought I would be.

I imagined how things would be in ten years if I continued. I would have a lot of money, probably. I would publish 30 books and get 10 million page views a month. But I saw myself alone, in a remote castle in some strange part of the world, with no social interaction besides a rotating door of women who I didn’t care much for and internet friends who would give me e-props via funny reaction gifs. It’s possible to have women, friendship, and money, but it seemed like I was running the common American program of just trying to stack paper because I didn’t know what else to do.

I went to bed that night satisfied. I was satisfied because I caught myself before it was too late to make a change. I knew that my priority wasn’t to make more money. My income was already sufficient. It wasn’t to mindlessly bang more girls in some shithole city, either. It was something that I used to have in the past, but gradually lost. I wanted to get it back, yet at the same time I knew that it wouldn’t be easy to turn back the clock to a time when I had different habits and needs. I wasn’t sure if it was worth fighting a wave that was taking me in a new direction.

The biggest problem I see in men is that they needlessly limit themselves with arbitrary constraints, waiting for someone with courage to attempt what they want to see if the coast is clear or if it “works” or not. You have a lot of men who sit on their ass, waiting for proof of concept, scared to task a risk without a guarantee of a big reward.

“You can’t make money self-publishing. It’s for amateur writers only.”

While one man spends five years getting rejected by agents and publishers, wasting money attending writing conferences, another man breaks the rules by producing books on his own, getting them on top-selling lists on Amazon. One sought to be approved by the gatekeepers while the other took the plunge on his own dime.

“It’s too hard to live abroad. I will continue living in this expensive American city and hopefully travel when I retire early at 45.”

While one man wastes the prime of his life in a job he hates for a future that may never come, another man is making a fraction of his income in internet marketing or English teaching, but still able to travel modestly, have extra time for leisure, and sleep with women who weigh less than himself.

“Game doesn’t work. Only rich guys who are good looking get to experience sex with attractive women. No one is really having sex anymore.”

While one man masturbates on game denialist forums, another man who is short and average-looking with minimal means is approaching girls in the coffee shop, the mall, and the bar to get a varied sex life than men of a generation before him did not.

You can’t approach a girl in a women’s store. You can’t borrow a friend’s dog to use as a prop to approach women. You’re too young to make a lot of money or travel. You’re not experienced enough to start an authority blog. One man lets these doubts prevent him from action while another man uses them to challenge himself into being successful.

No one is giving you homework. No one is forcing you to create something, do approaches, or take risks. No one will punish you if you decide to do nothing, or simply do just enough to have an average existence where you vicariously live through men who are no more skilled or intelligent than you are.

At the same time, no one is telling you what you can’t do. There are some laws that can limit how to make money, but it can’t stop you from going to places where laws either don’t exist or can be lubricated with bribery. Even if you want to start a cocaine empire, there are places in the world where you can apply your intellect and balls to get away with it. The only limitation is what you imagine.

Man has never lived in a time where there are so many countries that give him more freedom of behavior than at any other time in the world. Right now you can start an internet business without need for a permit. You can approach 100 women and get laid, today, not tomorrow, not next year, but right now. Even in the police states of American and England, you’ve never had more mobility and more information to create your own lifestyle, as if you were at an all-you-can-eat buffet. A spoon of sex with Latinas combined with a hunk of internet money and a dash of waking up at noon. Don’t forget the dessert of having big muscles. Whatever you dream can be yours, and all it requires is for you to take the risk and work at it.

It pains me to see men apply self-imposed limits on their own behavior, limits that even their own governments haven’t placed. Instead of breaking the rules in an era where rule breaking is greatly rewarded, they’ve voluntarily walked into a jail of their own making to be shackled and constrained.

I spit on your decision to protect yourself from failure. I spit on your imaginary limitations. Let the market decide if your risk is worth value. Let a woman decide upon your approach if you’re worth having intimacy with her. All you should think about is how to get what you want and how to begin working. Take the risk and begin to work. Break the rules that your mind tries to set upon you and then reap the rewards.

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Chasing happiness works, until it no longer does. I’ve written a lot about how you should make changes to your lifestyle based on how happy the change would make you (as you envision it), but I wonder if I’ve instructed you to chase a rainbow, because once you change perspective from your current location on the way to your perceived happy end, not only does your existing happiness level change, but also the happiness you would now receive from your end goal. Chasing happiness, it turns out, is the same as trying to put a strangle hold on a T-1000 terminator, or trying to keep a beanbag chair in a fixed position. It is forever changing shape, and the harder you squeeze, the more it shifts within your grasp.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t set goals and achieve, but trying to catch an emotion and then hold that emotion in a capsule as if frozen in time is an impossible task. When you account for the adaption to your happiness level, whatever you do catch will escape from you not long after you grab it.

Let me give you a contrary indicator why chasing happiness is a poor idea: American women are obsessed with it. Everything in their life, which may include trampling on your happiness, is done so they are happy at all times. To them, happiness should be a permanent condition that never wanes. The doors of happiness should have steel locks. You want to have the same goal as these women, where surveys consistently show they are less happy than a generation ago? I’m starting to believe the mere goal of chasing happiness is a guarantee of unhappiness, especially when your prediction of what you think will make you happy oftentimes doesn’t match the result, as I’ve learned in life.

So what do you do? What can guide you in life to help you make the right decisions on what direction to take? I ask myself two questions:

1. What type of man do I want to be?

Regardless of how happy I’ll be when I get to a destination, I need to be able to look in the mirror and feel dignity, pride, and accomplishment, that regardless if I’m going through a tough time or an easy time, I am who I want to be and can live or die as is.

I want to be an intelligent man, a cultured man, a man who sleeps with beautiful women, and a man who helps his fellow man. I can’t tell you for certain that being an intelligent man will make me happy, but that’s what I want to see when I look in the mirror. Every day through my work, my studies, my leisure, and my actions, I become the man who I want to be.

2. What experience do I want to have first?

Life often throws two options at you that seem to have equal payoffs. Even when you do a cost-benefit analysis, you still can’t identify the superior option. When this happens, simply ask yourself which experience you rather have. You will then pick the option that may give less obvious and immediate happiness, but one which will make you look forward to each day, ready to give your best.

I’m often faced with many options on which country to hit next, made more difficult with the online noise of stories and data sheets. The benefits and weaknesses of one country over another seem to cancel themselves out perfectly. So how do I pick? I pick the country that, if I were to die soon, I would want to experience first before my end arrives. It may not make me happy, and it probably isn’t the easier option, but I’ll more eager to wake every day when I’m there.

I will not fault you if your life strategy is chasing happiness. It’s better than chasing pain or having no strategy at all. But as a man who has been chasing happiness for most of his adult life, I can assure you that there will be no treasure at the end of your rainbow, no matter how many continents you explore and how much pussy you slay. Look at your reflection instead. Study it and ask yourself what type of man you want to see staring back at you. Ask yourself which experiences are urgent for you to have in case of a premature death. These two questions will guide you and make you the best man you can be.

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Except for start-ups in Silicon Valley that let you use scooters indoors, it has come to be common wisdom that corporations are horrible places to work. It shouldn’t be like this. A regular salary with benefits in an environment that puts you in constant touch with other humans shouldn’t cause misery, but in reality corporate work is one of the most soul-destroying activities you can do. Why?

1. It makes you helpless. The knowledge that you can be laid off, transferred, or snubbed at any time makes you feel like you have no say in your destiny. You’re at the mercy of the invisible bureaucracy, of layers of people who have control over your livelihood and the final say on your future.

2. It makes you fake. When a stripper goes to work, and has to give lap dances to fat men for money, she puts on a smile and pretends that she’s enjoying it. You do the same when you have to work in a corporation. You put on a fake smile and adopt a shielding personality to deal with people you would never choose to deal with in your spare time. This levies a significant blow to your self-identity.

3. You have to deal with Human Resources. Promiscuous women who graduated with a bogus degree now got you by the balls. Assuming you get through their dating interview process, you still have to comply with their rules and regulations, and you must be cheerful when they pimp slap you for stepping out of line or suffer one of their 90-day probations where you have to supplicate to their whims. You have to be alpha with your work but beta and subservient to the HR gals and all your other insufferable coworkers. Otherwise you’ll be written up and punished like you were in elementary school.

4. It makes you do things you hate. Your day-to-day tasks involve doing what makes the corporation money, not what you want to do with your life. The odds that a corporate position perfectly matches your passions are just about zero. Enjoy all the meetings, the Kaizen training, the diversity seminar, and the writing of TPS reports.

5. You receive low pay. You’ll never make as much as you bring in. Once Uncle Sam takes his cut, and you account for commuting,  you’ll always be selling yourself short. When your yearly review comes, you have to beg like a dog for a 4% raise that barely keeps up with inflation by telling your master all the wonderful things you did in the past year that made the company money. It’s humiliating.

The answer to this sad existence is to start your own business. It’s a tough challenge that will take time until you start bringing in income, but you’ll work on your own terms, control your destiny, be able to choose your customers, and not have to work with ditzy women who have power over you. Most importantly, you’ll be able to follow your passion. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Projects are long and often require effort from a number of disciplines. They take research, planning, an execution for time periods that are usually longer than a year (e.g., writing a book, starting a business). While projects should be a part of any man’s life, how about the smaller goals that can be completed in a couple months or even weeks? These goals are campaigns. They are short projects that require heightened focus and singular effort. Here are some examples:

1. You’re traveling through the Baltics for one month and want to get all three flags. During that month you stop working and focus only on getting laid at all costs.

2. You want to increase your bench press by 50 pounds in eight weeks. You hit the bench three times a week and make it the first exercise in your routine.

3. It’s summer and you want to learn how to barbecue. Every night after work you fire up the grill, causing you to miss your favorite happy hours.

4. You want to bang a Colombian girl but only possess basic high school Spanish. For two months you study Spanish four hours per day before visiting Bogota for ten days.

5. You want to study the Ancients. You buy The Landmark Herodotus, The Landmark Thucydides, Anabasis, and other historical works to slam them for three hours a day for six weeks.

6. You want to get a coffee shop bang. You hit coffee shops before work, during your lunch break, and after work, making a concerted effort to approach one girl each session. This requires you to wake up earlier and put aside other routines.

7. You want to start an internet business but you don’t know the first thing about programming. You purchase three or four HTML/CSS books and learn enough in one month that you can complete your first landing page.

Campaigns cause you put everything else on the backburner in order to make a herculean effort into one singular goal. Your life temporarily becomes about this goal and nothing else. This surge is unsustainable due to its intensity, but the fact that it can be accomplished relatively quickly gives you the motivation to endure.

Two months should be the maximum for any campaign, and if you think it will take much longer than that then you’re looking at a project that should require low-level daily effort instead of maximum daily effort. Campaigns are so consuming that other parts of your life will degrade until it’s over. You know it’s a good campaign when your friends and family discourage you from attempting it, saying that you should “take it easy” and not push yourself “so hard.”

At the end of your campaign, you’ll have accomplished a significant task or learned a new skill, all in a short period of time. You’ll also notice something else—you now have a boatload of free time freed from campaigning. At first you’ll be overjoyed with this prospect because you can go back to your old routine, but when you return to these base activities, something simply doesn’t feel right. You feel like you’re wasting your time, like you’re not moving forward.

Campaigning is a natural state for men. Several hundred years ago, men would alternate between sessions of farming and war. An Athenian would plant seeds in his farm, sail off to war, then come back to reap the harvest. Only since the Industrial Revolution and the division of labor have men been reduced to a cog that does the same task every day in the same environment with the same people. Campaigns are a great way to break free from the monotony of modern life, to open your world view in the time it takes to reap a harvest.

I urge you to take on a new goal that you can accomplish within two months from 2-4 hours of daily effort. Put all the inconsequential time sinks into the background. Once your campaign is complete, pat yourself on the back and take a well-deserved break. Feel the boredom gradually crawl back into your skin as each day not campaigning makes you feel increasingly empty. This is when you know it’s time to take on another campaign.

Beginning in your 30s, you’ll look back on your life and not recall the day-to-dry drudgery you’ve had to endure or the fools you’ve had to suffer, but all the great campaigns you’ve completed. As much as modern society would like to convince you otherwise, a life of campaigns—of taking on new goals and adventures—is the most natural state for man.

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A farmer had only one horse. One day, his horse ran away.

All the neighbors came by saying, “I’m so sorry. This is such bad news. You must be so upset.” The man just said, “We’ll see.”

A few days later, his horse came back with twenty wild horses. The man and his son corraled all 21 horses.

All the neighbors came by saying, “Congratulations! This is such good news. You must be so happy!” The man just said, “We’ll see.”

One of the wild horses kicked the man’s only son, breaking both his legs.

All the neighbors came by saying, “I’m so sorry. This is such bad news. You must be so upset.” The man just said, “We’ll see.”

The country went to war, and every able-bodied young man was drafted to fight. The war was terrible and killed every young man, but the farmer’s son was spared, since his broken legs prevented him from being drafted.

All the neighbors came by saying, “Congratulations! This is such good news. You must be so happy!” The man just said, “We’ll see.”

The above proverb comes in many forms, all showing how the first interpretation of events that happen to you is usually the emotional one. There is good in bad and bad in good, and both can be acted upon in a way to give balance. Otherwise life will toss you around like a doll as you hurry to categorize every event as “good” or “bad.”

The ancient Greeks believed that once you prepared for battle with the best troops and arms you could muster, the actual result would be based on fortune. If they lost many battles in a row, they’d actually use that as a reason to fight again, for fortune would surely not deal so many continuous defeats. While they did take superstition a bit far when cancelling an attack due to a solar eclipse or a strong storm, I believe their approach to life’s randomness was the correct one. They hoped for victory; they planned and trained for it, but the moment the first arrow flew, they understood that little more could be done.

Today, we try to eliminate the effects of fortune. We over-plan, over-estimate, and over-expect in the belief that it will guarantee a result. Then what happens when fortune plays its hand out of our favor? We fall like a house of cards…

• “Why is this happening to me?”
• “I didn’t do anything to deserve this.”
• “It’s too hard.”
• “I give up!”
• “Life isn’t fair.” (Sent from my iPhone)

If things didn’t go your way then it is “bad” and if things went fine then it is “good.” Modern humans, with all their superior technology and knowledge, have conditioned themselves to behave like laboratory rats, hitting a lever in the hopes of receiving a drop of morphine instead of an electric shock. Every day they hit the lever expecting a positive result, but when they don’t get that result they believe that life dealt them and only them a bad hand, no matter how many billions of people have a far lesser station.

Instead of being slaves to the result, we should let the god of probability determine our fate after preparing the best we could. While some emotion helps you stay invested in your goals, events are neither good or bad. When you act to the best of your ability, over the course of a lifetime, you’ll steadily be driven towards your desired result. The goal is not to be a master of your environment, but to be a master of how you let your mind interpret your environment.

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