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Inner Game Bible
Inner Game Bible
Disclaimer #1:
You may see what you think is a car in the distance, only to realize
a split second later that it was flash of light. You may start to suspect
that the world works based on certain principles, only to find that the
religion your family subscribes to forcefully claims that the world is
guided by different set of principles, only to later discover that both
you and your family were dead wrong and yet a third set of principles
is more accurate. This haunting sense of uncertainty in a world with
life and death consequences is what gives people so much existential
dread. It is easy to be anxious when your best guesses are routinely
proven wrong and routinely accompanied by pain. Many of our social
silos spring directly from either the desire to quell this uncertainty, or to
capitalize on its exploitation. Religions gain followers by selling absolutes
from an omnipotent being (What could be more comforting than that?).
Politicians win races by promoting their own certainty and promising
future stability. Even sports teams allow individuals to forget their own
fragility by identifying with something stronger and more meaningful than
themselves. The uncertainty that accompanies the navigation of the outer
world is made more confusing by the instability of our inner world. Our
thoughts, emotions, belief structures, and memories are constantly in flux,
making even previously encountered situations seem novel and unique.
I see many guys become confused by tidbits of inner game advice that
often contradict each other. Eckhart Tolle seminars don’t exactly align
with Tony Robbins conferences. Here, we are going to work on each piece
separately, defining precisely when and where that piece is useful. “A place
for everything and everything in its place.” While each of these pieces is
useful on its own, they are exponentially useful when we combine them
and are able to shift between them at will. Music gets its beauty from the
variation and combination of its chords and notes. But before you can
perform a whole piece, you need to know how to play the individual notes
perfectly.
Human psychology:
In order to change and perfect your inner state, you first need to
understand it. This is much harder than it seems. Most people believe
they have high levels of self-awareness, but studies show that the average
person’s self-awareness is poor. If you want to test this, go ask one of your
best friends what their biggest blind spot is. They will likely get it dead
wrong, and you’ll know this because we can all see what others’ blind
spots are, but not our own. Self-awareness is one of the most important
skills to build if you want to be successful. Self-awareness is different than
self-consciousness, which is more about a heightened pre-occupation with
oneself through shame and guilt than true self-knowledge.
Selfishness:
The first thing that you need to understand is just how self-involved
the average person is (self-consciousness, not self-awareness). This is not
a value judgement on people, but rather a reflection on how our minds
work. Practically everyone’s thoughts are primarily about themselves 99%
of the time, and for good reason. People who are relentlessly thinking
about their own survival will survive more often. People who relentlessly
think about how to get the best mate, the best resources, and the best
outcomes for themselves will consistently attract the best mate. Many of
these thoughts are subconscious, while our conscious thoughts involve
more socially acceptable content. After even a few generations, those
with the most surviving offspring will logically be those who put their
own needs first. This is not contradictory with the incredible amount of
sociability and cooperation seen in the average person. Rather, the person
who is best able to navigate social situations, and get others on their side,
will also be the person best serving to their own selfish interests in the
long run. A man with a hundred trusted friends is going to have a better
life than a liar or a thief. Examine your own thoughts for a day, were they
mostly about yourself or others? Did you think about what you wanted for
lunch, or what the homeless guy down the street wanted for lunch? Don’t
fall into the trap of thinking that this inherent selfishness means people
are evil, or the trap of thinking that this must mean selfishness is a virtue.
It’s simply a statement of how our minds work in order to increase our
probabilities of survival and reproduction. When interacting with others,
and when examining yourself, understand that each person’s priorities will
primarily be centered around themselves in some way, shape, or form.
Incentives:
The next step is to understand which parts of our belief systems are
going to be objective and which are not. Philosopher René Descartes was
known for locking himself away to examine and question his core beliefs to
understand his own belief system:
Appreciation:
Validation:
Other structures:
There will inevitably be other parts of your belief structure that you
find needs changing. Remember that the process is always the same:
1. Determine what parts of your belief are facts, which parts are
deductions, and which parts are interpretations.
2. Take control of the interpretations, be careful what facts you
selectively focus on, and make sure your deductions follow sturdy logic.
3. Become aware when those belief structures present themselves and
when you need to consciously make alterations.
4. Repeat whenever these faulty interpretations arise.
Chapter 3: Confidence and Self Esteem:
Now that you are taking conscious control over your belief
structure, you’re in a position to start building real confidence and self-
esteem. Real self-esteem does not come from the validation exercises
your elementary school teacher put you through. It is not a superficial
project, nor something you can attain through mental trickery. It is a real,
tangible measure of who you are. There are those who get confidence
through stupidity and unawareness, but this opens them up to making
mistakes that may ruin their life. There are also those who gain confidence
through being at the top of a hierarchy. If this confidence is earned and
can be felt in all contexts, then its real. However if it is solely based on
condition and circumstance, then it will disappear as soon as you are put
into one of the many other hierarchies in our society. Real self-esteem
has four parts: competence, integrity, management of insecurities, and
exploration.
Competence:
I can already hear the objections: “But Derek, what if I’m not good at those
things? Give me the magic pill so I can be confident right now without
having to do anything!” Sorry, but no. Real confidence is rare because
real competence is rare. This does not mean it is unchangeable. To the
contrary, competence is something that can be very consistently gained
over time. However, the problem is most people don’t become competent
for the same reason most people never improve in any area of their life:
it takes concerted effort and strategic thought to become more effective
life’s main tasks.
Specialization:
Those who are the best in the world at their chosen specialty almost
universally have focused on that skill to the exclusion of everything else.
Though being singularly focused is not necessarily the best life strategy
for happiness, the concept holds true. If you want to be the best in the
world, pick one thing. If you want to be exceptional, pick two things. If
you want to be very good, pick three things. If you want to ensure you
suck at everything, pick ten things. Ideally, you pick 2-3 things in life that
you want to be very, very good at and limit other non-essential hobbies.
It also helps to pick things that will increase life’s core competences, like
resourcefulness or social dynamics.
Consistency:
It’s been said that successful people do the same productive things
that non-successful people do, but successful people do them consistently.
The power of consistency, which we’ll define as ‘working on something
every day or week for long periods of time’, cannot be overstated. This
comes from the compounding effects of habits on your body, neural
pathways, or outside project. Exercising once a month has almost no net
effect on your life. Exercising once a week has a minimal effect. Exercising
6 times a week has effects hundreds of times greater than the previous
two examples. Progress is not additive, but exponential when based on the
number of days you practice a habit in a row.
People often become confused as to why hard work alone does not
directly translate into competence, wealth, or success. This is because
hard work without consistent adjustment to the actions you are taking
is almost never fruitful. Image you work 80 hours a week as an fast food
worker. Will you get wealthy? Probably not unless you find a strategy
that doesn’t translate hours into minimum wage. Likewise, a competent
person needs to be constantly trying to perform more effective action.
This means careful thought on how to improve, how to solve sticking
points, and where to go next. “What could I have done differently?” “How
can we make it bigger? Better? Faster? More?” Ideally, you should work on
one growth area or sticking point at a time, keep working until it becomes
habit, and then move on to the next point of improvement.
Mentorship:
Organization:
What is maturity?
2. The Ability to Provide for Others: Once you are truly comfortable
being alone, you can begin to give to others. The men we most admire
in pop culture, history, and our own lives are those that others
can rely on. As boys and teenagers, there is not much we can do
for others, and instead we are always looking for what others can
do for us. As you grow older, you begin to realize that the human
condition and human suffering extend beyond just yourself. Even if
this emotional milestone is not met, most successful men realize on
a pragmatic level that they have to be of value to others if they want
to reach high levels of success. How you handle this is what really
typifies true maturity. By this I mean, do you have others lean on you
because you are truly strong enough to bear that burden? Or are you
doing it as a weasely backdoor way to get more validation? Or to not
achieve your own potential?
3. The Ability to Create: Once you can both be alone without crisis
and also take on pressure and burden from others, you can then
start taking an active role in creating things in the outside world.
This can range from traditional creative pursuits like a new form of
art and music, to creating a business, to even creating a community
for others. When transitioning into a part of their lives where
others can lean on them, men realize the value of being of use to
individuals. When you start to create, you realize the value of being
of use to large groups of people all at once. People gravitate towards
communities, music, art, and businesses that have strong missions
because it allows them to transcend the human limitations we
talked about earlier. When you identify with community or mission,
you are no longer just yourself. Your sense of ego and identity now
includes an entity much greater than yourself, with ideals and aims
greater than those you could achieve alone (keeping in mind the
pitfalls of groupthink by remembering to not sacrifice your personal
values or identify completely with that entity). Similarly, a piece of
art, music, or literature allows you to transcend those limitations,
however briefly, by being absorbed into the new world that the
piece creates. Creation also has more tangible rewards for others,
such as employment, education, or a product that solves a common
problems. Creation is an important stage of growth because it
requires extended thought outside of yourself. You cannot create a
business without at least having some sense of what other people
want. You can’t create a community without a very strong sense
of how other people function. Those who do not pass through this
stage often take the role of full time critic instead. Since they lack
either the competence, patience, or energy to create something
outside themselves, they instead spend a life judging and critiquing
the creations of others. As a temporary role, the critique can be very
useful. For instance, many corrupt organizations were taken down
by savvy journalists. However, as a permanent role, being a critic
without creation is a trap. Without actually taking some part in the
creation of society at large, it is hard to grow up. There are simply too
many life lessons that are missed out on when you never attempt to
make something on your own and see how it fairs in the real world.
4. The Ability to Lead Others: This stage of growth is often the
hardest to get to because it involves a high degree of social
intelligence and competence. Not only do you have to get people to
trust you, but once they do start following you, you have to lead them
to a place that’s actually worthwhile. Like the social critic, there are
many people that enjoy testing the leader, but not many people that
would make good leaders in their stead. Leading requires you to play
a real time game in which everyone’s motivations and actions are
considered. This is not something you can do consistently without
thought that extends widely beyond yourself. Although there have
been many morally corrupt leaders, there are very few of these weak
leaders that last very long. In practice, this does not mean you need
to raise an army. Rather, it means you need to build your competency
to a point where you are comfortable making quick decisions for a
group, and those around you trust you enough to follow your lead.
A good leader is also willing to follow others when it makes sense. If
you become that guy that insists on always being the leader, you’ve
missed the point. Having the ability to lead a group, while not having
the sensitive ego, is the true sign of competency and maturity.
When Buzz Aldrin was asked what his crew would have done
had a technical malfunction made it impossible to get back to earth, he
responded that they would “continue trying to fix the problem until the
lack of oxygen caused us to go to sleep”. That’s a pretty calm reaction
to being left on a cold distant rock to die, but that’s exactly the type of
mentality that astronauts are trained to have. As I’ve mentioned before,
the future is often conceptualized as a smooth path in which you will have
less hiccups and more will power. In reality, the future will likely be just
as complicated as it is now, if not more so. This means there will be an
unlimited amount of roadblocks and unexpected problems. Your ability to
navigate these problems depends on your ability to handle suffering and
your self-discipline.
Happiness:
Emotional Resilience:
»» Decide how much time per day you want to spend feeling this
emotion.
»» Mark this time in your calendar
»» Resolve that you will spend ONLY this time in your day to feel this
emotion, so that you can focus on moving forward with your life.
»» After you’ve made this decision, resolve to lock yourself in a
closed space for that much time per day to do nothing else but
feel that emotion (no phones, no social media, no books, etc. etc.
No distractions). This is time dedicated SOLELY to feeling this
emotion. Even checking your phone for an important update will
ruin the exercise.
»» At the end of the time allotted, ask yourself: “What else could I
have accomplished with my time instead of doing this?”
»» Continue to do this daily until the emotion goes away.
»» Repeat the exercise whenever the emotion or any other negative
emotion arises.
This exercise works best if you don’t have time to do it. I could just tell you,
“Stop feeling being a little bitch and start being useful,” but the brain needs
to experience the disutility of feeling this emotion in full effect to realize
that it is not useful. There have been times in my life when I felt some
seriously negative emotions (and for good reason!). This exercise has
worked for me every time.
It’s estimated that 95% of your thoughts are the same day to day.
This can be a terrifying statistic for someone who wants to change. What’s
more, your thoughts and emotions are deeply intertwined in a feedback
loop. What you think sends signals to your body to prepare it for the
situation at hand. These can be acute signals based on how you perceive
an immediate situation, or chronic signals based on your beliefs about the
world. This is a very tangible effect: your thoughts about a given social
situation can cause your sympathetic nervous system to activate, flooding
your body with epinephrine and cortisol. Your thoughts about how the
world works can cause this system (as well as many other hormonal
systems) to be turned on more often, or even permanently in the case
of PTSD. On a visceral level, we feel the content of our thoughts in our
body on a moment to moment basis. When you feel or think something,
the neuropathways that fire are strengthened, and you are more apt to
feel or think that way again. Most people have feelings that they have
experienced before pop up periodically throughout the day, or in the
background as a base emotion. These emotions then make you more liable
to have thoughts pop up that you associate with these emotions (feeling
angry for no reason and then finding a reason to be angry). All this creates
a thought emotion loop: thoughts that cause emotions, and emotions
that cause thoughts. This can create upward spirals or downward spirals,
depending on the structure of the thought emotion loop.
There are several reliable ways to break this loop from the thought
pathway. The first is to change your beliefs about the world, which was
covered earlier (this is deeply entwined with creating more certainty in
your life, which was also covered earlier). The other methods are adding
nuance, reframing, and automatic thought stopping.
Reframing is the act of judging a situation in a new context. This was
originally named by Aaron Beck, the father of cognitive behavioral therapy
and expanded upon by Richard Bandler, one of the fathers of NLP. There
is an old Taoist story that illustrates reframing perfectly: A farmer’s horse
runs away, and his neighbors give him their sympathies. He says, “We’ll
see…” The next day the horse comes back with three other horses, and
his neighbors tell him what good luck he has. He says, “We’ll see…” The
next day the farmer’s son breaks his legs taming one of the new horses,
and again his neighbors give their sympathies. He says, “We’ll see…” The
day after that a military official comes to town to recruit all the young
men to war, and does not draft the son because of his injury, and again the
neighbors say that it was good luck all along. Again, he says, “We’ll see…”
One of the most important things you can do manage the thought-
emotion loop from the side of emotions is to change your environment.
One aspect is to be wary of the music you listen to. I don’t like to listen to
music at all, except when it’s inside of the club. Does it reflect the emotions
you’re feeling? If so, change your music choices accordingly. Another
aspect is the people you surround yourself with. If you surround yourself
with pessimistic people, you might find that you have become pessimistic.
This is another crucial reason why people need surround themselves with
other people pursuing their same or similar goals, especially coaches who
have succeeded in achieving those same goals, since they have taken on
the worldviews, mindsets, and emotions required for success in those
fields. You can’t become a successful artist when you’re spending time
around operations managers; you can’t become a successful entrepreneur
if your peers are Tibetan monks. While books and manuals are useful,
nothing beats being around these people in real life. Overall, your
environment changes the inputs to your brain, and a change of input helps
you better assess these cognitive distortions.
You should not feel guilty or shameful for having these cognitive
distortions. At some point in our evolutionary development, they
mattered a good deal! When humans had a lesser understanding of
their own existence in a world filled with danger around every corner,
these distortions served as quick short-cuts to save their lives. Always
being right and excessively blaming successfully averted danger from
themselves to others. Jumping to conclusions helped humans make faster
decisions in the world to protect themselves when danger was imminent.
If Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection is correct, then the people who
didn’t have these cognitive distortions simply could not survive in the
old world and as a result were killed and ended the genetic lineage
responsible for less distorted behavior. This is the case with most human
qualities. Evolutionary biologists argue that the human face is shaped the
way that it is to best handle a punch. Heuristics and biases help make fast,
good enough, energetically inexpensive decisions. Each of the 7 Deadly
Sins were once behaviors that helped with survival. Gluttony because
food was scarce, Lust to propagate the species, Greed to survive longest,
Sloth to conserve energy, etc. etc. Even upon the introduction of these
sins thousands of years ago, Catholic chodes still struggle with them
now! In the modern world, cognitive distortions are less than useful since
they prevent you from achieving your self-defined goals. Use the above
processes to rebuild your thought emotion loops, improving your mental
toughness.
Positive Happiness:
Appreciation:
Contentment:
After you’ve stopped fighting the facts of everyday life, you can start
to turn that acceptance inwards. When you feel the cravings or random
emotions that we talked about, you can choose to not take those seriously
either. This is mindfulness. Mindfulness is the act of becoming more aware
of your silly thoughts and emotions so that they have less power over
you. When you’re a kid and you lose a toy or get into a fight, you think
you’re going to be upset forever. You have no perspective on the emotion
you’re feeling. As you grow older and things don’t go your way, you still
get upset, but part of you knows that the situation isn’t life altering and
the emotion will fade with time. Mindfulness takes that process to its
logical conclusion. You feel the emotions fully, but choose not to engage
in them or identify with them. This doesn’t take years of meditating in
a cave with your thumb up your ass. All it takes is building the habit of
labeling emotions and thoughts as they come up. As I said earlier, 95% of
your daily thoughts are repeats. If you can begin to label your thoughts
and emotions as they happen in categories, you’ll see that the same 15
or so categories of thoughts and emotions arise over and over. The act of
labeling them creates distance, because it’s no longer you being angry, it’s
you experiencing anger. The power is stripped from the constant cravings
and wild emotions.
Meaning:
Most people attempt to design their life to get the most amount
of rewards with the least amount of work. In this quest, they choose
easy jobs over hard ones, short academic careers over long ones, and
modest goals over large ones. Since the good jobs are taken by the few
with ambition and work ethic, most people are assigned jobs with little
to no upside besides a paycheck. They spend the next 30 years saving for
retirement – that golden era when they can finally do all the nothing they
want. What happens after they retire? Statistically, within ten years they
die.
People with no sense of purpose lead bleak and short lives. Victor
Frankl, a psychiatrist who spent several years in a Nazi concentration
camp, noticed this when accounting for which prisoners survived. Those
with a sense of meaning, an overarching purpose beyond day to day
survival, frequently outlived the others. Since then, meaning has emerged
as an indispensable ingredient in the psychological recipe for happiness.
Study after study has shown meaning and purpose as a life extender
and happiness enhancer. Much unhappiness comes from a constant
preoccupation with petty self-involved problems. In general, focusing
on something outside yourself, preferably something big, gives you a
reprieve from such thoughts. It also gives you something that needs to be
accomplished besides your own survival. Ironically, someone who focuses
on the survival of others is more likely to survive longer themselves, all
other things being equal.
You don’t have to decide right now what the meaning is of each
level of your life. A search for meaning is enough. Overtime, the different
answers will come to you. Some answers may be good for a particular
period of your life but will evolve and change over time. Simply knowing
how essential this aspect of happiness is is often sufficient for it to start
appearing in your life.
You may have notice that there is little about interacting with
women in this guide. This is purposeful. A robust inner life should be built
simultaneously with your ability to socialize and meet beautiful women.
However it should also be largely separate from it. Many men get into
pick-up to such a deep extent that the responses of women become their
guiding north star. There are many ways to live your life wrong, but this
way is one of the worst. A healthy psychology is not only separate from
attracting women, it supersedes it. Your morals, your beliefs, and your
life’s purpose has to take precedence over what one, or all, women you are
attracted to think. Oddly enough, when you put this first, your interactions
will get better automatically. Don’t take this as an excuse for less action,
use it as fuel for more. If life is no longer based around the whims of
others, then approaching becomes an easy afterthought. Live your life
with real internal character and integrity. The rest will follow.
Now that you have some of the tools to be mentally tough, through
effective application of Stoic principles, the practice of discipline, and the
deep work on happiness. Let’s take a look at how some of these practices
are applied in real life.
And look how easy it is to create such a belief: suppose you have a
group of people who live in harmony. Suppose one of those people were to
get angry and demand that we all get free chocolate! “We get free water,
and it costs money for people to clean the water, and if it costs money for
people to make chocolate, then we should get free chocolate!” The group
members seem to like this, because the argument makes sense, however
this is Belief Bias in action, which is the effect where someone’s evaluation
of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of
a conclusion (of course chocolate should be free since water is free!).
There are a few group members that are not so convinced, they see
right through this individual, however the individual creates enough
social pressure on the naysayers that they feel compelled to reduce the
anxiety they experience by just conforming with the individual and going
along with it (groupthink). This is compounded by the other members
following in suit (bandwagon effect). Now you have what seems to be
an autonomous entity (the group) which is making decisions on its own,
propagating the message that chocolate should be free for all who want it!
Ridiculous? Absolutely. Does it happen in real life? Just look around. You
can identify the people who have fallen victim to groupthink by the degree
in which they all talk about the same information (this is called the Shared
Information effect, where members of the group tend to talk about things
in which the ingroup members are already familiar). Freedom! Equality!
Fairness! Sound familiar?
How does this apply to game? Understand this. When you go out
into a bar or nightclub, it is supposed to be difficult because there are
mechanisms like the ones above (and many more) that intentionally make
it difficult to quickly convey your personality to the affection of another
individual. You see that everyone else is having fun, people are dancing,
and people that are talking to each other already seem to know each
other. You may be compelled to stand alone until you are welcomed into
a group, stand really close to your wing, form a chode crystal with your
buddies, but these are the forces of groupthink in action. Understand
that these forces affect everybody, including yourself, but the difference
between you and everyone else is that you accept these forces, and walk
forward in the face of them to live the life you intend to live for yourself
according to your answers to the 3 Sacred Questions. Follow this process:
There is no reality where you make these forces go away. You understand
that they are there for you, for me, and for anyone else you might
encounter. This goes back to the Stoic philosophy that we talked about
earlier, about suffering well. The suffering in game arises from going
up against the face of social pressures that create groups with strong
boundaries. With this knowledge in mind, how do you expect to quickly cut
through the noise and make yourself known and compelling to the woman
you desire in the social situation in front of you? In order to accomplish
this, it is important to understand the concept of adaptation.
Adaptation in Game:
If you constantly lift a heavy weight, and struggle to do so for some time,
your reward for that behavior is that your body adapts to the weight,
and then it becomes easier to do so later on. If you constantly read
dense literature to master a subject you care about, and struggle to do
so for some time, your reward for that behavior is expertise at digesting,
philosophizing, and executing on the content. So, tell me this, if you go
approach lots of women, and struggle to do so for some time, what is
the result? That’s right… MORE SEX! If you go into an interaction, she
tells you goodnight, and you didn’t make the sex happen, does that mean
that you are bad with women and that you should stop? Maybe it means
you’re bad with women, maybe it means that her boyfriend just broke up
with her and she’s not in the mood (or a litany of other arbitrary reasons),
but it certainly does NOT mean that you should stop! It means that you
have just begun. Adaptation doesn’t stop when you enter the nightclub,
and if you think that it does, or that there is something fundamentally
wrong with you, then you need to revisit the earlier chapters to properly
build your belief structure more based in reality, actively work on your
confidence, and develop your mental toughness. The exercises in the
above chapter for mental toughness are not for you to masturbate over
into a Kleenex with your bulk lube from Alibaba, they are meant to assist
you when you are taking right action. With all this in mind, how do you
adapt in game? You do it through disciplined confrontation of social
pressure.
Social Pressure:
Meditation
I’ve never been a fan of meditation, I always felt I was already always
calm and could do something more useful with my time, but my friends
have recommended that it does have value and helps keep them more
focused in chaotic situations.
Writing
Core mindsets
Here are some of my core mindsets that helped me take action when
I needed to do it, whether I felt like it or not:
Champ or chump?
In other words, is the behavior I’m currently engaging in a champion
behavior that will lead to champion outcomes and a champion life? Or,
is this a chump behavior that every other chode is doing to lead to some
mediocre outcome.
Those who have already know this was a life changing event, that left you
with tremendously more guidance, certainty, and sense of purpose in
every area of your life.
Very best!
~D