The latest issue of Interesting Times Magazine just came out.

http://interestingtimesmagazine.com/download.html

In it, you can read my review of The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss.

http://interestingtimesmagazine.com/download.html

Enjoy the lifestyle you deserve!

Malcolm Gladwell is the writer of ‘Tipping Point’ and ‘Blink’. His latest book, ‘Outliers’, looks at the story of success – why some people are more successful than others. An outlier here is an exceptional person who stands outside the usual range of human achievement. They don’t fit the norm, for example due to their intelligence, creativity, money-making success and so on.

Gladwell acknowledges the part genetics plays in these successes. Some people are born smart and can program computers relatively easily; others are born tall and athletic and do well at basketball. But not every able person rises to become a Bill Gates or Michael Jordan. 

In answering why such people become successful, Gladwell looks beyond genetic inheritance,  and looks at other factors such as when they were born, their upbringing, their family background and other chance occurrences that made it possible for their natural talent to be recognized and nurtured.

In discussing The Beatles, he recognizes that they were gifted songwriters and good musicians but also emphasizes their thousands of hours playing live in Hamburg which helped shape them into the top band they later became. In a number of other fields e.g. law, business and sport Gladwell discusses how very successful people share similar family backgrounds, upbringings and formative experiences. It is these, alongside the natural talent many outliers have, that make the difference.

Gladwell reminds us that it’s common for us to put Mozart’s, Jobs’s and Lennon’s success down to their innate natural brilliance while the external factors that allow these natural talents to be noticed and to flourish are overlooked. He mentions, for instance, how putting in around 10,000 hours of practice in one’s field is generally needed to reach the pinnacle of one’s potential.

‘Outliers’, is a very interesting book and worth a look. It reminds me of Freakomonics, but for the subject of personal achievement. Some of the information was new to me e.g. the role of birthdays in sporting success, while other information I had heard before having read the original studies he draws upon e.g. the northern/southern USA difference in protecting one’s honour when provoked.

Relating this to sarging and influence, I see a correlation in many areas.

Once you get have a certain level of social skill, being naturally super-smooth does not always convert into lays. I know plenty of high achieving, confident people at work who can communicate well and know what they are about but who are not turning that into solid game sexcess because they lack the sarging field experience. They haven’t put the hours in and while they might do ok, they are not reaching their potential because they are not in the field enough, talking to people in the necessary context.

Similarly, in terms of family background there are people who’ve had a head start. These people have grown up in a social environment, have lived in a large extended family and grew up always meeting people, talking with them and learning to build rapport naturally. I think about my large extended family in rural Ireland and the benefits it gave me in seeing how people interacted socially, which was quite different from urban England.

I wonder also, if being born say in 1995 would be more of a disadvantage to someone born, say, in 1975 because of the increased social isolation in some cultures in more modern times. When I was growing up in the 1980s, there was no internet and you had to go out there and find things yourself, ask people for information and generally interact a lot more in person than you do nowadays. People born in the 1990s grew up with the internet at their fingertips and were more likely to chat online whereas previously they would be forced to interact in person. They had more information, sure, but information about sarging only takes you so far.

There are a lot of stimulating ideas in ‘Outliers’. I especially liked the list of the 75 richest people in history – who’d have guessed Henry Ford was richer than Queen Cleopatra?  Gladwell’s book is a recommended read.

Deborahass1

Originally uploaded by stevie_pua

I want to say thank you to Deborah the Dancer for volunteering her ass for this test of my Flickr account. Cheers Debs. Stevie.

I’m struck between how a balance of cockiness and an ability to tone it down (in that sequence) empowers a sarger running solid game. Going through my mind a lot recently, for some reason, has been the idea that ‘If YOU don’t believe in yourself, then no one else will!’

Would you ever believe in the personal power of someone else if they appeared to totally lack that belief themselves? I wouldn’t. Start acting as if you believe in yourself!

A number of years back, I was sarging a girl with a great body and a reasonable face. It was her body that drew me in, I admit.

I knew her brother from our school days. She and I were waiting for the train home after an evening out. I was quite confident then, but less so than now. Even then, though, I picked up on her low self-esteem. I remember wondering at the time how a girl with a body like that could lack self-esteem. But she did.

She was so worried about her hair, how people would see her and whether she would fit into the ‘scene’, whatever that was. As she was recounting her fears-about-nothing, I was trying to look at my own reflection in a glass pane in the station – trying to figure out if I looked good enough for this chick.

Then one of those rare moments of absolute clarity hit me (regular clarify is commonplace). This chick, and chicks like her, are so obsessed with how they look that they have almost no interest in how other people look. My target was so interested in her own appearance as a source of attraction power that she spent no time thinking about how the guys looked. It was all about her. I’d been worrying about very little. After this realisation, I noticed it very often.

So, from then on I looked after myself and how I looked but I didn’t obsess about it as I’d done up to that point. I ate well, worked out and bought new clothes every now and then but I’d realised something from observing how this chick and others like her, thought.

They were, on the one hand, so interested in boosting their own appearance and yet also so insecure that they had no time or interest in judging how other people looked. Secondly, I saw that how these PUA guys LOOKED was of less import to the chicks than how the guys ACTED and that drew me onto analysing PUA beliefs, behaviours, personality conveyance, body language and frame control which seemed, and continue to seem, far more powerful than any physical look.

It’s all worth bearing in mind when you hit the field.

SteviePUA