The Crowd's Rules

Hey All - I'm back!

Since childhood, we are conditioned to follow a crowd.  Go where the crowd goes, don't go where it doesn't.  Don't stand out.  Don't think differently.    Don't do what the crowd doesn't want you to do.  Don't be who the crowd doesn't want you to be.  Don't break the rules. 

Don't be fresh.  Don't speak out of turn.  Don't be different.

In adulthood, matters are different.  Once you've completed, or withdrawn from, an undergraduate curriculum, you no longer have to answer to anyone.  It's your life now, and its direction is yours and yours alone.

However, some people would rather you not be that way.  Sometimes there are unwritten rules that people apply to themselves, and then mistakenly apply to you.  There are standards that people impose on themselves, with the assumption that everyone else should follow them too.

With all due respect, they're wrong.

When we're younger, there are reasons to follow rules that are imposed on us, even if we do not agree with them.  Reason being, we're young.  We don't know everything.  We're underdeveloped.  We need to grow, we need to learn, and we need to mature.  Until we're able to do them, the rules stay.

But once we have grown, learned, and matured, those same rules can only hold us back.  They infantilize us when we need to be adults.  They cause us to stagnate and plateau.  They restrict us to the painless demise of a comfort zone.  They erode away at our individual identity until we're just faceless drones like everyone else.

Beta males sometimes live lives that are based on following the rules to the letter of the law.  While this usually makes for a childhood and adolescence that is risk-free, commendable, and respected by elder generations, it can also sow the seeds for an adulthood that is uneventful, bland, dull, predictable, and tragically anonymous.  It sets you up for a life experience that merely involves changing one set of rules for another, and never actually making your own rules.

When you become Bold and Bulletproof, that won't happen.  When you embrace your own strength and arm yourself against criticism, rejection, and disrespect, you can, and will, make your own rules.  When you live by the Four Pillars, those rules won't keep you pinned down or rendered useless. 

DISCLAIMER:  This does NOT mean you break the law, or make a spectacle of yourself at a government office or courthouse.  It DOES mean that you don't pretend that someone else's rules were delivered from Mount Sinai to your doorstep on stone tablets, and that you don't spend your whole life limited from reaching your full potential because of rules that were once imposed on you in childhood.  We're not robots.  We're not servants.  We're not meant to be sidekicks, wing men, or nobodies.

To be a leader, one must first be a follower.  But we eventually must stop being followers.

I EXIST.  I MATTER.  I BELONG.  I DESERVE.

I AM BOLD.  I AM BULLETPROOF.  I AM ME.
 

Boldness

Hey All!  It's about that time again.

When I started taking this little enterprise in its current direction, I heard a small, but tolerable, amount of criticism.

"Beta males, David?  You're putting your audience down by definition!  You're saying that they're all second-rate, and you're reminding them that the alpha males get all the women, while they'll be left with nobody!"

Au contraire.  The point is unfortunately missed.  This blog is about the advancement of beta males, among other things.

I am not telling my audience that they need to stop being themselves and start being someone completely different.  That's like telling the introverted kid in high school that he has to dress differently, speak differently, and act completely unnaturally in order to get more people to like him -- that's ridiculous.

The first step to this advancement, if it's not obvious enough already, is for a beta male to replace his self-doubt with confidence as his first layer of armor.  From the inside outward, he must know that he is a good man just the way he is.  He must know that he is capable and confident.  He must know the right questions to ask to gain the knowledge he seeks.

He should never seek to change who he is, substitute his values, or try to emulate someone who has a completely different make up than his.  Instead, he should believe that he has every right to his thoughts, his words, and his choices.

He should not feel crippled, defective, or mortally wounded by his mistakes.  He should never feel that his shortcomings define him.  And he should never think that anyone else's opinion of him can save or damn his very soul.

To put it short, he should be bold.  Not tough, not badass, not cocky, and not full of himself.  Bold.

Even if he feels afraid or nervous, he still feels confident.  Even if he faces criticism or insults, he minimizes them as others' opinions, and not his own.  Even if he loses or fails, he knows that dwelling on the losses or failures to often will immobilize him, and he keeps moving instead.

Pretty simple really.  Shame on me for not spelling out earlier, but I've done it now instead.

So let's be Bold -- starting tomorrow!

I EXIST.  I MATTER.  I BELONG.  I DESERVE.

I AM BULLETPROOF.  I AM BOLD.  I AM BETA.