Establishing Clear-Cut, Inviolable Personal Standards For Yourself

Kickass Anthony Robbins vid up on here --> dude is totally dominating the stage and fully in state... Wow.

Anyway, Tony is talking about your model of the world and how it translates into all your behaviours -- and on that note, I'm going to post an article here that I think is important, but that also might offend a few people.

As your parents probably told you growing up, there's a few topics that people will tend to have emotional disagreements towards... 1) Religion, 2) Sex, 3) Politics, and 4) Money.

That being the case, if anyone takes offense to it, just take it as one of my own wacky personal beliefs that you don't necessarily have to take on board.

At the same time, if you think it's something you need to hear (which for some of you it will be) then, like...... print it and paste it to your wall or something.

OK, here goes........

So today there was a post on RSD Nation about a predicament that a well-known member has found himself in.

Here it is.......:

"This post is not so much related to game as it is to life. The past several months have been kind of hard on me, and I am in a situation that can be considered "rock bottom" right now. It wasn't all that long ago that I had a great stable job, a longterm girlfriend, a nice car and I lived in the city. Everything was hunkie dorie. I had a college degree and success was just around the corner.

The past year however things have gotten really bad in my life. I had some money issues and had to move back to my hometown after I broke up with my girlfriend, and there is no job potential here. I also have lost the ability to drive because of a stupid mistake that I made. The only thing that has really driven me is that I have been working on bettering myself and my inner game, and learning how to game girls. Right now as it stands I am stuck in a dead end town, with no potential and no wheels.

A part of me wants to find a way out, sell my car, and take off to parts unknown to start a new life. This is something I have never done before though and it is kind of intimidating because I would be going some place with no wheels and no job. All my life I have lived in the Northeast and to go south or west would be quite a risk. The alternative though is to stay in a dead end town, with a limited amount of targets, and no jobs.

I feel like if I stay here I will just be giving up, there would be little chance to save up money, and it may be a couple years before I can truely get my life going again. If I take off somewhere else though, somewhere with public transportation, job potential, and targets ... I will be taking a huge risk. At least here I have friends and family to help me to get through this.

Anyways I know this is some really personal shit I am throwing out there, but I am hoping there are some guys on here that have gone through a rock bottom period, or who would be able to offer some of their perspective and help me to understand the relevance of this decision. How can I make the best of this situation?"

Alright, so for some reason I found myself having somewhat of an emotional response to this.

It reminded me a great deal of the situation that I personally came from, and how important it is to me to always find a way to rise above it.

So here is my response, which I originally wrote up for the forum but decided to post to the wider audience up on here......

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The challenge with certain small towns is that although it's cheaper to live, there is also oftentimes very little in terms of earning potential.

Canada, for example, has much much cheaper rents and whatnot however the earning potential is 10-100X less than it is in the United States. In Canada if you make $250,000 a year you're considered to be a very wealthy man or even a "rich prick". In a major city in the US if you making that you're, like............. keeping up with the Jones's.

Anyway, you may want to consider places like NYC or Honolulu where it's unnecessary to own a vehicle. Both have phenomenal public transportation systems, as opposed to places like Los Angeles where public transpo is virtually impossible.

I don't own a car and I have absolutely no plans of owning one any time soon -- and that's because I almost always choose to put the extra $1000 in gas/insurance/repairs/payments towards the rent to live centrally in cities where they aren't required.

If I were you, I would personally save enough to barely scape by for ONE month. Then I'd print of several thousand resumes (I'd actually start with a few hundred and modify them based on feedback) -- and approach employer after employer for about 13 hours a day until I got a semi-decent job, even as a waiter or a bartender.

Once I'd secured even a semi-decent job I'd keep applying and applying in every spare moment I had until I got a better one.

Of course, if you have no trackrecord of being self-motivated and working that hard in the past then there is very little reason to believe that you'll do so in the future. You'll probably wind up doing like 3-5 hours of applying for jobs per day and rationalize that it was a lot of work, however you'll soon run out of money and be left in a foreign city totally screwed.

That being the case, you may want to start with smaller, more realistic goals such as going to the gym 5 times a week and lifting weights, etc etc... Then once you've cultivated the habits of creating a goal and sticking to it, you can upgrade your goals to something more on the "wild side".

I've personally been broke without food numerous times growing up, so I have a hardcore hustler's spirit and to me the situation you're in sounds like child's play. Every time I think of being broke and hungry again I feel this massive panic in my chest and feel like throwing up, and then I start working like a fucking madman.

Your situation, to me, is like a nightmare I've been in myself multiple times. Stuck in a circular rut where you live in a small town in which you can't make money, however with no means of getting out because it TAKES money to MAKE money -- and to get to the place where you could MAKE money you'd need to somehow FIND money in order to get there.

Ugghhhh......

Still, I've been there many times and throw me into your shoes and I'd be back on my feet in under 90 days.... Seriously.

How would I do it?? I'd think fucking Big, and I wouldn't entertain a SINGLE thought that isn't productive at all whatsoever. The only thing I'd think of is HOW DO I DO IT and to KEEP FUCKING MOVING.

I've done this my whole life. It's the only way I personally know of to get anything done.

Imagine waking up in Kandahar Afganistan and finding out that you've been transplanted to a mud-hut village with filthy water and disease and despair.

You'd do *anything*, like literally whatever it takes, to get yourself back to America. It'd be like a horror movie where the guy is trying to get out of Hell and back to his family.

THAT is what going back to living in a no-opportunity/no-employment town with zero possibility of escaping is like to me. The things I'd do (and have done in the past) to get out of it are literally that extreme.

The challenge is that even if you're "depressed" or "sad" about it, you'll still stay there because it's more difficult to motivate/discipline yourself than it is to maintain at a semi-crappy state.

For me though, I wouldn't be "depressed" about being back in that situation.... I'd be vomiting and freaking out like I was in a pool of acid burning off my skin.

Sure, if there were no other possibility then I'd accept it. I could meditate and resign myself to find happiness in my own mind --> self-generating like I do when I'm on a 40 hour airplane flight or pushing through difficult challenges with my work.

But to me it's about PERSONAL STANDARDS, and one of my personal standards is not going back to that type of situation.

I will never, ever be without food again -- no matter what.

I will never, ever be stuck in a bad situation for more than 90 days -- no matter what.

It's like how guys will often ask me "How did you find the motivation to go out all those nights??"

The thing is, not having a hot girlfriend in my twenties and thirties is totally unacceptable to me.

It's so unacceptable that to fix it I'd do literally anything. I didn't have to "motivate" myself to go out anymore than you'd have to motivate yourself to jump out of a nazi gas chamber.

Mediocrity just isn't acceptable with all the opportunity in the world right now. I've been in mediocre situations and to go back to them would be like going back to the third grade and sitting there for a whole year PRETENDING to be stimulated by what's being taught.

It's just not something I would accept under any circumstances.

That being the case, my brain would go into "emergency mode" and you'd find me in a better situation within 90 days.

The thing is, you can read this now and get all motivated and pumped up like "Yeaaah I'm going to get out of here!!"

But as soon as you turn off the forum and a few hours pass, if you haven't maintained that level of emotional-leverage then your brain is going to find all sorts of rationalizations like "It's really not that bad here.... That Tyler guy is way too extreme.... He's just dealing with emotional issues and he can't find the beauty in the simplicity of a more straightforward existence like mine..."

The thing is, I COULD find happiness in mediocrity if there was a reason to, and if I had to live in Afganistan I'd do that do too. The fact is that I DON'T have a reason to, and that being the case, my personal standards for myself are that I treat myself as a "first class citizen" and I've got to treat my own life with the respect to do the things I truly care about while I'm at an age where I can appreciate them.

Hope that stirs up some thoughts.


Tyler