LIFE UNCIVILIZED

Dating And Life Advice For Men

Archives for April 2018

Are Movies Really Harmless Fun?

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Avengers: Infinity War

THERE WAS A TIME when I would have gone batshit insane for Avengers: Infinity War. But sat in the theatre, I couldn’t help but feel something wasn’t quite right.

For the most part, what I was watching was a well-made movie. It was reasonably exciting, it had consequences, the characters (or more importantly, the villain) were interesting. For sheer entertainment, you could do much worse.

The problem, however, was that it was a worthless piece of shit.

This, on its own, wouldn’t overly bother me, but this movie was an event. It was part of something that’s been 10 years in the making. Something that’s important to a hell of a lot of people. And around all of this – outside of everything that’s been happening at Marvel – the world’s relationship with fiction has changed drastically as well.

But nobody’s seemed to question it.*

DESPITE WHAT YOU THINK, STORIES AREN’T JUST STORIES

When I was younger, I spent years collecting comic books and reading fantastical stories, and from that time, I learned this:

Power fantasies, as enjoyable as they are, teach us nothing about life, but a few things about ourselves.

And not much of it is good.

We are now, as a society, spending more time-consuming media than ever before. The average person spends 24 hours (read: an entire day) watching television per week. We’re more addicted to our phones than ever. And storytelling has never been in higher demand.

It’s way past time we started looking into the worth of stories.

But before I start ripping into our childhoods, I need to clear up the basics.

WHAT IS A POWER FANTASY

The first thing I’m going to have to do is define what a power fantasy is. Let’s start with this:

A wish-fulfillment fantasy for someone who feels powerless.

I.e. Dorky, weakling Peter Parker gets bitten by a radioactive spider and becomes Spider-Man. He becomes super strong, brave and, you guessed it, starts getting sexual attention from hot girls.

Save it for the bedroom.

But to take an even more specific look:

A wish fulfillment fantasy of being more capable of getting our animal needs for sex and/or social dominance met.

Think about Batman, Superman, James Bond, Spider-Man, Harry Potter, Conan, Katniss Everdeen, Thanos, whoever. When you really look at them; they’re all fantasies of being important, powerful and wanted. Even if they try hard not to appear that way, that’s always what they are. They’re fantasies of not being irrelevant. They’re fantasies about being a better you.

But it’s not always that easy to tell.

WHAT IS INFINITY WAR REALLY ABOUT?

Stories these days – whether they’re books, television or movies – often get referred to as ‘gritty’, ‘dark’, ‘mature’ or any kind of word that is used as, what the writer intends to be, another way of saying ‘intelligent’ and ‘suitable for adults.’

But if we really look at them – are they?

Take these examples:

Breaking Bad tells the story of an average guy gaining power and notoriety through violence, cunning, and dominance of his opposition. A guy who starts out as some unsuccessful missed the boat loser, who ends up being “the man who knocks.” It’s not really a far cry from a little boy saying a magic word and turning into a fully grown, super powerful man. The fantasy of attaining a previously unattainable masculinity is identical.*

Mad Men attempts to show us the moral failings of Don Draper, but as with films like Wolf of Wall Street and Scarface, glamorises the sexual and violent power so much, that the moral warning is drowned and the main character ends up becoming an icon for the exact opposite of what the story was trying to illustrate.*

The Dark Knight attempts to tell us that you can’t blame the world for your actions. You always have a choice. And there is always a right choice that you are responsible for. But coats this lesson in a violent fantasy that resembles nothing in anyone’s lives.

We like the Joker not because we see ourselves in his destroyed logic, but because he doesn’t care what society thinks of him, is fearless, and he is more dangerous than anyone else. We like this because when we care what others think, and feel threatened by them, this is how we’d like to be.

We like Batman not because we see ourselves in him, but because he has the strength of character to exert his identity on a threatening world, and he is more dangerous than anyone else. Batman, like any superhero, is a fantasy of being a better, stronger, more individuated person. When we feel weak, this is how we’d like to be.

In the case of Avengers: Infinity War, it’s no different. It just does it through it’s Marty Stu villain Thanos. But, to be honest, any of the above applies to pretty much any and every character in the entire movie. Although, unlike in the case of The Dark Knight, Mad Men, or Breaking Bad, the character’s don’t actually learn anything. They leave the story almost exactly the same intellectually and emotionally as they started. So it’s almost worse.

But again, the message isn’t the real reason why we like these stories. We like them because of how they make us feel about who we’d like to be; strong, special, and someone who matters.

That’s the drug we’re all hooked on. Feeling like anyone other than ourselves.

THE VALUE OF A FANTASY

When we’re confronted by moral issues like ‘making the right choice’ this will exist within the texture of our day to day lives. It doesn’t happen in large and exciting, and morally black and white ways.

It happens when we’re bored in our relationship and want to have sex with a coworker. It happens when our family member needs help, but we’re enjoying our life too much to care. It happens when we have little money but keep gambling. It happens when we pass someone on the street, who, for whatever reason, might need our help. It can happen with our parents, it can happen with our friends, it can happen with anyone.

It’s rarely ever exciting, but’s always occurring. In fact, that’s why it’s boring. Because it’s always happening, we just don’t notice it because we’re too distracted.

The problems we face in our lives are extraordinarily complex. When confronted by what we should do, and what we want to do, there are dozens of factors competing within our minds to encourage us to make a decision one way or the other.

We might feel lonely, bitter, resentful, lack self-discipline, lack empathy, be under huge stress, live in a fantasy land, get lost in narcissism – whatever. The problems we face occur in multifaceted ways that are enormously difficult to spot.

This is how bad decisions happen. They creep up on us.

The central issue with power fantasies is that they’re always a fantasy of how we’d like to be and how we’d like our lives to be – ones where we’re important and dominant – and thus any exploration of issues actually faced in our lives will have little bearing on how those issues actually occur. And, worse still, due to the almost constant nature of power fantasies being about dominance over others through violence or sexuality – they actually often appeal to our lowest, most basic instincts.

Sure, Walter White and Batman may struggle with moral choices we can relate to, but just look at how cool it is to dominate people through cunning and violence. The Joker might be an example of someone who has become morally destroyed, but look how cool it is to not give a shit what anyone thinks – even the mob fears this guy!

Power fantasies, by their nature, are not capable of being anything more.*

REPLACE THE FANTASY WITH A MIRROR

In the short novel Hadji Murad, Leo Tolstoy tells the story of an important Avar rebel who breaks ties with the Chechen Leader Shamil and joins the Russians in order to save his family. Hadji Murad is a fearless warrior, who captures the awe and interest of all around him, and uses his strength and cunning to navigate a world that seems hellbent on his destruction. On the surface, its the kind of story we’ve seen a thousand times before, and the kind of story that I’ve spent this article shitting all over.

Yet, in it’s telling, the story is nothing like that.

Instead of telling the story of a man who we’d like to be, Tolstoy explores the various elements that go into making a man that way, and how human society engineers situations from which no ‘hero’ can escape. He examines the causal relationship between a disciplined, principled life and admirable moral character. He examines the relationship between fearlessness and it’s birthplace in shame. He examines how society, when structured in a way that those whose spiritual and moral character is weak can rise above others, often causes acts of incredible cruelty, despite the petty weakness of those in power. Tolstoy, instead of giving us a fantasy, gives us a reality. A reality we can recognize, identify, and learn from.

And why wouldn’t he? The story was true, and he was witness to a lot of it.

This is what makes the story so worthwhile; it’s edifying. By contrasting Hadji Murad’s disciplined life with the sexually unscrupulous, vain lives of Shamil and the Russian Tsar, Tolstoy seeks to show us where heroic character comes from in the human soul. By contrasting the Russain soldier’s romantic ideas of courage and glory with Hadji Murad’s admission that his fearlessness is born from his own shame over a past act of cowardice, we see where true courage exists in the human heart.

It’s a story that looks at a hero, and the nature of good and evil, and shows us how these things appear in real life.

In other words, what they look like within ourselves.

Where a power fantasy can only ever be a worthless fantasy, realistic fiction is a mirror through which we can see both ourselves as we are, and as we might be, and teaches us lessons on how we might navigate the world and the problems that can and will confront us in our lives.

STORIES ARE NOT MADE EQUAL

It may seem extreme to tie what would seem like harmless storytelling fantasy to everyday human psychology, but our tastes in fiction reflect the tastes of our own thinking. And, in this opinion, I’m not alone.

Don Quixote, one of the greatest novels of all time, speaks about exactly this. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert’s novel that explores the downfall of a married woman speaks about exactly this. Countless stories have been written which explore the relationship between fantasy, and it’s negative relationship with the way we understand our lives.

Our desire to have a reality other than the one we experience is a basic human need, but accepting and managing the responsibility of that reality is also a need. A far, far more important one.

Now, this article might seem like an attack on any kind of fiction that isn’t literary fiction, but it’s not. What this is is an attack on the value of certain kind of stories to our lives, a value which is a made all the more important by the sheer volume at which we’re consuming them.

And the value of these kinds of stories is this: They’re entertaining.

Nothing more.

Some entertainment is crafted to a higher quality than others (for example, The Dark Knight compared to say Batman & Robin), but it’s still just entertainment. Entertainment that, like or not, is encouraging worthless thoughts, and worthless fantasies, that aside from the assuagement of boredom, really offer nothing to our lives.

Because the truth is, fiction is always teaching us something. And not all the lessons are made equal. When we engage with a story, our minds are engaging with ideas of how we ought to live. Every story, in some way or another, deals with this principle. But through the pollution of their own message, power fantasies rob the merit from their message and instead replace it with toxic fantasies of dominance and power – fantasies that have no bearing on what your actual life experiences will be.

And in doing so, they replace the lesson on how you ought to live, with a fantasy of someone else you’d like to be.

In this instance, a gigantic, purple Homer Simpson, who’s so tough not even the combined might of Disney/Marvel’s product range can stop him.

 

 

*If you want the Too Long Didn’t Read it’s this: switch the crap off and watch some Ozu or read some Tolstoy.

*Note that the entire scene where he explains that he is “the one who knocks” is essentially just a guy whose wife thinks little of his masculinity trying to show her what a tough guy he is, and that he’s not a loser. In many ways, that’s the heart of the entire show and the entire fantasy. For more on this, watch the first Die Hard – where a working-class man wins back the waning love of his successful wife by violently saving her from criminals.

*This may actually just be a flaw with the visual medium in general. It inherently shows things from the outside, and thus inherently glamorizes it through framing, excitement etc. I.e war in movies is always, despite intentions, exciting; or, Jordan Belfort might be destroying his life through sex and drugs, but goddamn if that girl isn’t hot. The effect of the medium is usually the opposite of the intention.

*I actually used to call this stuff “Cuck Fiction” as by constantly fantasizing about being someone else, you’re essentially cuckolding yourself in your own head. But, as the alt-right, neo-nazis, or whoever it was co-opted that phrase, it now doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

How To Text Women – Stop Overthinking It And Do This Instead

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A FEW MONTHS AGO, I changed my entire approach to texting women.

I was out in a bar when I saw a woman in a red dress. She was sat with her friend, talking about something, far away from everyone else. She was well dressed, self-assured, seemed happy enough as she was, and she was beautiful; the kind of girl that always makes me nervous.

Without thinking, I went over and sat next to her. I said something, it was well recieved, and we started talking. Within a few seconds, it was obvious – there was chemistry.

Now, I’d like to tell you that the beautiful woman in red and I hooked up. I’d like to tell you that we went back to mine, did the hunka-chunka and discovered some kind of weird coincidences in our lives that meant we were destined to meet, fall in love and have 2.5 kids and a cocker spaniel. Hell, I’d like to tell you that it even ended well.

But it didn’t.

We had a lot of chemistry, we took each other’s numbers, and then she had to leave with her friend.

I’ve been in a lot of bars, and a lot of clubs, and I’ve sucked up my anxiety a hell of a lot of times and ended up approaching, and having chemistry with a decent amount of women. So this sort of thing is not really out of the ordinary. It’s just one of those things that’s part and parcel of the experience. Sometimes something gets in the way.

So I got texting her. And, at first, it was pretty fun. We both said we’d meet up. We were both flirty. It was going well.

Until it just kind of stopped.

Over the course of next few days, it was clear we couldn’t find that chemistry again. We traded a few messages, but it just wasn’t there. Eventually, as these things always go – it fizzled out.

And we never spoke again.

I never got over it.

HOW TO TEXT WOMEN

Ever since I’ve had a phone, I’ve never enjoyed texting women.

It was for a combination of reasons, really. I’ve never wanted to speak to anyone at all hours of a day – I’d always get bored of the conversation, not really want to respond, and just really lose interest in the person I’d be speaking to. And that boredom found its way through to them. It doesn’t matter who it was; friends, family, girls. It was always the same.

We’d mutually just kinda go ‘meh’ and move on.

On top of this, I felt texting them was something that I had to do, that I had to come up with something to say in order to ‘keep the conversation going’, despite the fact that I didn’t want to, and when I was bored, most of my responses blew harder than a balloon clown.

So I started trying ‘something new.’

A ‘something new’ that made all my problems disappear, my results increase, and above all taught me this:

Texting women is a terrible way to build any kind of relationship. In fact, it’s pretty much the best way to sink your chances at something between the two of you.

Yes, if you’ve come here to learn how to text women, I’m going to explain the fundamental technique you need to understand. For those of you who read at the speed of light, it’s in the part subtitled ‘how you should text a girl.’

For the rest of you, who want the complete experience, I’m going to explain why you almost never should.

Let’s begin.

1)  WHY THINKING THIS WAY IS A REALLY BAD IDEA

If I was a scumbag and threw together some article that has dozens of identical versions of itself plastered all over the internet, I’d probably give it a title like this:

“How To Text Women So That They’ll Like You”

But that title and the basic through-thought of everyone asking this question is pretty much the core reason I can’t stand the prevalence of texting in dating. Because what that title is really doing is communicating with the insecurity in your head. The insecurity that asks:

How do I not get rejected? How do I make myself likable? How do I make myself worthy enough to ‘win’ her affection?

Feel gross yet?

You should.

You want to learn ‘how to text a girl’ because you want to learn how to win her. And you want to win her because you’re needy and lack self-worth.

Is that really the software you want to be using? Or is there an alternative?

2) HOW YOU SHOULD TEXT A GIRL

Let’s start with an FAQ (or is it a FAQ?):

When should I text her?

Whenever you actually want to, but not when you feel you need to.

Should I use emojis?

Whenever you actually want to, but not when you feel you need to.

What are some funny things to text a girl?

What do you find funny? Send that.

What do I say to a woman as an opener?

Whatever you want to.

How do I text a woman to keep her interested?

By the end of the article, it should be pretty clear.

How do you ask a woman out over text?

You ask.

What do I text if I have nothing to say?

If you have nothing to say, why say anything?

Should I only use lower case to seem indifferent and aloof? (this is actual, 100% real advice I’ve seen given out)

No. If you genuinely feel indifferent and aloof that’ll come out naturally. Although, frankly, feeling passionate towards a girl isn’t a bad thing.

Should I wait three days to text back?

I dunno, are you in hospital? What reason would you have to not text for three days? Do you not want to text for three days? Why not 10 days? Why not 10 minutes? Who cares. What do you actually want to do?

Are you seeing a pattern here?

What is it you actually want to do and what is it you feel you need to do?

Because if you want to speak to her, speak to her.

But if you feel you need to speak to her – why? Is it because you’re worried she’s not ‘hooked’ on you? That you’re unlikeable so you have to “keep her interested”? Is it that she might be talking to another guy?

In other words, do you feel you need to speak to her because you’re needy and insecure.

Again, is that the software you want to be using?

This is one the fundamental problems in male / female dynamics. On both sides. As an individual, you have to learn to distinguish between desire (wanting) and neediness (feeling like you have to). You have to learn to ask yourself what kind of relationship it is that you want, and what kind of person it is that you want to have a relationship with.

If you just desperately want someone, anyone to sleep with you, regardless of how they treat you or how much you don’t actually get on with them, then text as much as you feel you have to. Maybe you’ll get lucky, but, to be honest, I’m not the right guy to help you.

But if you care about distinguishing when you actually want to do something, and feeling like you have to, you’ll quickly notice that all the questions you have about texting fall away. And instead, they’re replaced with organic desire and organic connection.

The questions outlined at the start of this section are asked because of a desire to win someone. Instead, I recommend you ask yourself this:

“What do I want?’

3) WHY TEXTING SUCKS

Texting limits you to words, emojis, and if you’re really cool, gifs.

I’m assuming that if you’re texting a girl you’re doing so with the intention of building something more than friendship with her – connection on an emotional level and/or sexual level. And if that’s your goal, why would you use a tool that limits you to the barebones of conversation?

An example:

‘Fuck off.’

How does that read? Offensive? Sarcastic? Aggressive? Upset but also slightly aroused? Now imagine I put an emoji next to it. Let’s say the angry face. Does it now read angry? Or could it be sarcastic? Do you know? Or is it just really easy to misconstrue?

Now, say ‘fuck off’ to yourself in an angry voice. Then say it in a sad voice. Now a happy one.  Now a flirty one. Hell, say anything in those ways: your own name, the sentence ‘nuclear annihilation is imminent’ or simply the number 7.

Your voice and feeling change the meaning of whatever you’re saying. The feeling through which you say things is what other people communicate with.

Yes.

People largely don’t communicate in words, they communicate in emotions. Women especially do this. And in relationships of any kind or length – emotions are everything. Choose a medium of communication that facilitates them.

In fact, in studies of communication, researchers have found that it generally holds that in most situations 55% of communication is body language, 38% is the tone of voice, 7% is the actual words spoken.

7%.

Does that really sound like much to work with? Or does it sound like you’re limiting connection?

4) THE SOLUTION TO ALL YOUR PROBLEMS

Pick up the phone and call her.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want to be sending messages all day. That’s not really my jam. I also don’t want to be obsessing over whether she likes me or not. I’d rather just do what I genuinely want to do.

Sometimes that’ll be talking to her, sometimes that won’t.

But if I do talk to her, I want it to be worthwhile – in other words, face to face, or on the phone. I want to be able to play around with tonality, intonation, pausing, the energy that mutually bounces between the two of you. Y’know, the fun stuff. I want to get attracted to her voice. I want her to laugh. I want to engage with someone.

Now, I totally get that some people, perhaps even you, find phone calls awkward. But if your intention is to meet them face to face, doesn’t it seem a little odd to be avoiding speaking to them? And if you’re thinking – “well I wouldn’t know what to say.” Ask yourself, do you really struggle to speak to people you know? Is it really that much different speaking to someone new, or is it just in your head?

These days, everyone spends all day texting, but rarely ever speaking, and almost never connecting. Queue another article on technology making us more lonely.

But the main reason you should call is this:

It’s fundamentally more attractive.

It requires more confidence, it requires more authenticity, it requires more challenge to your comfort zone; it requires more you.

And requiring more you of yourself is what develops your self.

So call.

For everything else – logistics, what time to meet, or anything that doesn’t require an actual call / is a gif of some cat – there’s texting.

Just don’t forget the aubergine emoji.

 

 

 

Photo by ian dooley on Unsplash

How To Build Strong Character – The No Bullshit Way

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WHEN IT COMES TO MY CHARACTER, I’m lazy. If money wasn’t an issue, I’d spend most of my life thinking, reading, or wasting time with my friends. As much as I have things I want to achieve that require work, I don’t actually enjoy working. I don’t enjoy the thought of writing, I just enjoy the things that enter my head; I definitely don’t enjoy blogging (or anything internet related), and I sure-as-shit don’t enjoy sitting in a room alone giving myself headaches. Most of the time, it’s something I don’t want to do. I get bored and can’t be bothered. And hell, why should I bother?

For most of my life, that’s what’s going to hold me back. I’m lazy.

In some ways, laziness has been a benefit for me. It’s made me think outside the box and choose a unique lifestyle for myself. But as far as personal development is concerned, it’s always there trying to hold me back. It’s just part of my character.

And that’s the problem.

It’s part of my character.

Personal development is really a single problem. We have an idea of a life we want to live and personal development is the act of bringing that life into being.

But if it’s so simple, why do so many people fail?

When we look at personal development we see it as actions we need to take in the present that will affect outcomes in the future. Build better habits, exercise more, get a better social life. But rarely do we account for two fundamental problems:

  1. The reason we want a different life is that the one we have right now is unfulfilling.
  2. The reason we have an unfulfilling life is we have, over the course of our life, built a person who is incapable of getting the life we want.

Therefore, immediately, we are hit with a roadblock to any progress. The person we’ve built over the course of our life just isn’t up to the task of changing our lives. When it comes to having the life we want, we just aren’t the kind of person who can have it.

The bad news is that, if you’re trying to build a new life and failing, it’s probably because you suck. The good news is, you can build someone new.

People usually see personal development as a set of habits that they need to engage with in order to be successful. An example of this would be an entrepreneur learning that he needs to work 70 hour work weeks in order to get started.

Sounds simple, right?

But when he’s used to spending most of the day in his underpants, waking up at 2 in the afternoon and has a chronic fear of failure – any attempt to pursue this 70 hour work week is going to be met with failure, or eventual burnout and then failure.

The problem isn’t due to his habits, it’s due to his character. Before we get to the habit, we have to deal with the person pursuing the habit.

HOW TO BUILD CHARACTER THAT DOESN’T SUCK

Strong character is becoming increasingly rare. In the age of limited attention, instant gratification and soaring rates of anxiety, we are no longer exposing ourselves to lives that encourage the development of strong character; in fact, we’re often doing the exact opposite – we’re making our character weaker.

Now, before I go on, let me set a definition of character:*

Especially related to achievement, character is the quality on which you can rely on to do what needs to be done. Character is what determines how you respond to your emotions (such as fear) and it is how you respond to challenge (such as the stresses of effort).

Feel some kind of talent inside you? Character is what builds that.

Tempted to take a day off because you’re not feeling it? Character is what prevents that.

Feel afraid and not sure you can act? Character is what makes sure you do, despite that fear.

Character is what lies beneath all the efforts you make to change and propel your life forward. Character is what determines the longevity, direction, and speed of that change and propulsion.

As you can imagine, weak character is going to make life difficult and strong character is going to make life easier.

When we have weak character, our ability to drive our lives towards ones which require great effort and success is greatly diminished. Our efforts to reshape our habits will begin to peter out, our attempts at challenging projects will be crippled by procrastination, and what we perceive to be aiming high, will, in fact, be aiming low due to our unconscious fear of failure.

So if character is the problem, how do we build it?

You’ve been consciously / unconsciously building your character since you were a kid.

In my experience, character is built by:

  1. Taking responsibility for our problems.
  2. Taking on tasks that require a large amount of effort.
  3. Taking on tasks that require the confrontation of fear.

The more we engage with the above, the more we express and confront our character. By this I mean, we develop our character through expression (whether that be in confrontation, creatively, romantically, and so on) and through being confronted by, what Richard Brooks calls our central flaw (i.e aggression, supplication, laziness, lack of self-worth).

In essence, character is built by confronting life, and in doing so, developing and confronting ourselves.

This is why strong character is a rare quality; nobody does much of the above, and they, like you until now, have failed to pay attention to the person they’ve been building and are continuing to build. Their character until now has been something that has not been consciously cultivated. Instead, it has been built on its own accord, to an end result that may or may not be wanted.

I’d wager that’s the case for you. It sure as hell is for me, and everyone else I’ve met.

Now, the method for developing character is simple, but the process has a slight hiccup:

It is extremely difficult and takes years.

Unfortunately, this means two things:

  1. There is no better time than today.
  2. It’s going to require sacrifice.

CHARACTER IS SACRIFICE

Building someone new comes at the expense of the person you were; often, the sacrifice of the person you were. This, in plain terms, can mean a few things:

Leaving your job because it’s unfulfilling and takes all your time; moving to a new city to start afresh; going to sleep earlier; waking up earlier; stopping drinking; leaving your toxic relationship; quitting masturbating; cutting contact with a bad friend.

In essence, this element is simple – you remove from your life whatever element is going to get in the way of you building stronger character, and through that stronger character, developing the habits to achieve the life you want to live.

This is where most people go wrong. They see personal development as an act of adding things to their lives. They want to add better habits, more confidence, more hours worked; but in actual fact, the solution is often the reverse.

You strip away, simplify, and sacrifice. You leave yourself with less, and get really good at what’s left. Instead of adding elements, you focus on what you can remove.

As our lives go on, they often fill with clutter that fills up our time and drains our emotional resources. It is this clutter that is both the product of our drained emotional resources and time and the cause of it. It’s a cycle feeds on itself and continues.

This is why sacrifice is so important. Arguably the most important step.

You cannot have the life you want by continuing to live the life you don’t.

Let me say that again, as it’s the heart of this article:

You cannot have the life you want by continuing to live the life you don’t.

You have to make sacrifices. You have to say no to everything that isn’t essential or helpful, and strip down so you’re left with two things:

  1. The essential elements you need, which you will now get better at, thus developing better character.
  2. Free time which you can now use to develop better character.

CHARACTER IS HONESTY AND COURAGE

The most important trait you can develop when it comes to building character is brutal self-honesty. The second is courage.

Brutally self-honesty shows you what needs to be done and courage is what have you actually do it. Brutal self-honesty shows you where you’re holding yourself back and courage is what has you confront that flaw.

There are countless things that anyone could recommend to build character – boxing, novel writing, entrepreneurship – but in many ways, the actual challenge itself is irrelevant. The challenge is naturally arrived upon when you mix and develop those two traits of honesty and courage. You figure out where you need to be confronted, and you do it.

Now, you might be thinking: I’m not that honest with myself and I’m not that brave.

No problem.

 Both of these traits are ones that grow and develop through expression and wither through repression. The more you engage with them, the stronger they get. You might be the most cowardly guy in the world, but the more you engage with small acts of courage, the more you’ll get comfortable with the big ones. Likewise, you could be unaware of your own behavior, but simply sitting down and asking yourself why (and continuing to do so) would open up new realms of insight into your own motivations and your own flaws.

Each trait develops the more you consciously choose to express it.

And if it’s that simple, then building character is an act of conscious will. Building character, like developing courage and self-honesty, is something we willfully and consciously engage with. It is an act of presence, and engagement between ourselves and the world. We decide to build character, so we decide to be more honest, and we decide to be more courageous.

At the start of this article, I wrote about myself being lazy. I said that laziness was part of my character. And it is. It’s something I deal with every day. Through being honest with myself, I’ve come to learn where it comes from – fear of failure, lack of self-worth – and through courage I’ve learned to suck it up and get working anyway, eventually leading myself to big decisions that radically altered the trajectory of my life; like quitting my comfy job, traveling the world and working for myself, despite being scared and not having the slightest idea what I’m doing.

MAKE YOUR CHARACTER CONSCIOUS

Character is often described as the reaction to circumstances. People, myself included, often say that unforeseen events, like trauma, reveal who a person actually is. In my experience, this is half true. What actually happens is that you’re confronted with the character that was already there, you’d just failed to see it until now. Sometimes this is good, sometimes this is bad.

But neither is permanent.

When we decide to make our character conscious, we are taking more control over the individual that reacts to circumstance. And in terms of our future, we are cultivating the kind of individual who is capable of dealing with the problems confronted by the life we wish to have.

To return to the entrepreneur example, this would be developing the kind of character that is autonomous, self-motivating, self-supervising and thus capable of managing their own work ethic. But if you were trying to improve your dating life, this would be developing the kind of character that enjoyed life and was comfortable with rejection and sexual expression.

Whatever your personal development is being directed towards, it is your character that is the foundation on which your results will be built, on which your habits will be built, so it is the character that you should focus most of your effort on building.

Because once you’ve built it, everything else will take care of itself.

 

*I chose this definition of character as it is one that defines how strong character specifically relates to achievement and thus personal development. However, character also encompasses much more, like empathy, bravery, generosity, and every other trait you can imagine. I plan to write about this in future, but none of this was particularly relevant to what I was writing now.

 

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash