Lanz von Liebenfels – Garden of thoughts

 SD:  Hi Athol and Jen, it’s Thanksgiving Day and I’m taking a break from the family and working on my computer. Checked MMSL blog and see no entries since October. Just wondering if you guys are doing okay?

I’ve bought all 3 books. Athol’s advice is great and I appreciate all the work you’ve put into MMSL. Hope all is well. Just checking since no new posts for a month. New content is not the (only) point — just wanted to make sure one of my favorite bloggers is doing ok. And will be posting again when ready

Athol:  Hiya, it’s been a busy month. I am alive!

Firstly, the easy one, Jennifer and I just celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary. We went to Florida and essentially did a repeat of our honeymoon, namely visiting Universal Studios and Disney World. It was a great time and we did two days at Universal and two days jumping around the Disney parks.

If you go to Universal, it’s completely worth it to stay in the on-site hotels. The benefit of walking distance to the parks, early access to the parks and the free upgrade to your tickets to the Express Pass completely rocks. We caught some lower traffic days but were completely exhausted from riding rides rather than standing in line. Both the major Harry Potter rides are exceptionally well done.

Disney World… I guess I’ll just assume you’ve heard of it. Stayed at Animal Kingdom Lodge and it’s all giraffes and zebras in the back yard of the hotel. Nice. The major change from last time we were there was the advent of the Magic Bands – your all purpose park tickets, credit card and Fast Passes – in the form of a handy little electronic wrist bracelet. I’m told they can track down lost kids who wear them too, so there’s probably some kind of GPS thing in there as well. It’s the sort of thing that if you really think about it, this is the way the entire country will be in about 15-20 years and it smacks of population control and Big Brother. But holy crap the lines move so much faster to get into the parks and for some reason the white swirly light thingy turning green just makes me happy.

So fun, fun, fun, fun…. and came back home and immediately got a low level pneumonia that I’ve fought off heroically for the last two weeks. I knew I was getting sick before we left for Florida, but at that point the money is already spent, you aren’t getting it back and all complaining can do is make everyone else enjoy themselves less. So just grin and bear it while away and come home and crash.

Thanksgiving was remarkably low key this year in that we didn’t host it. We just got to eat the food, though for some unclear reason there is now more food in our fridge than we took to Thanksgiving. Which I suppose defines it as a good Thanksgiving.

Writing the blog is complicated these days.

One issue is time, I’ve been in a situation where I can only reasonably do two of the three potential things of, (1) coaching, (2) the forum, and (3) new content creation. I’ve been slowly extracting myself from the day to day of the forum, and the coaching is going well and I’ve finally got it down to a solid three days a week of calls, rather than spread all through the week.

Just doing the coaching itself is teaching me a lot more fine tuning of my overall approach. I’ve posted less, but some of the posts are my most important ones. The Leadership Moments one is crucial for example. It’s also a case of seeing a ton of people working through the process step by step and seeing where the common stumbling blocks are. I’ve not so much been wrong in the past, but there are unquestionably ways the emphasis on certain things can be better defined and some things are just quicker to apply now.

I’m also seeing how much of a jack-of-all-trades I was trying to make MMSL. It’s Sexy Moves, it’s for men, it’s for couples, it’s affair busting, it’s about adding basic Alpha when you have too much Beta, it’s Nice Guys, it’s dealing with toxic spouses, it’s about personal energy, it’s anything and everything. Plus everything was essentially on the blog in some form and it’s hard to sell something as a book when you also have it on your blog for free. #Facepalm. Thus new content, actually has to be somehow new.

I’m seeing more and more how each thing can be sliced off and defined as it’s own topic and really the only long-term solution is simply more coherent content. So… defined audience + defined problem + defined solution = defined product topic and therefore long term success.

If there’s a problem in the marriage right now, it’s Jennifer going crazy that I’m spending all this time thinking rather than producing *anything* of the next layer of content that I could create.

So, um… working on my marriage lol.

Jennifer:  Happy Anniversary to us! Wow, 20 is a strangely impressive number. And yes, I do go crazy with Athol endlessly thinking about the many permutations of producing huge amounts of content and what should come first…and…and…and. But the end product is always so impressive that I find it hard to truly be angry.  (And as a completely unrelated side note, the place holder note for this section for me to write a little something said “Jennifer: something something dark side”. Thought you all would get as much of a kick out of that as I did.)

Forum Question: Can a comedian with a self deprecating sense of humor be an Alpha Male? I remember hearing that John F Kennedy had a self deprecating sense of humor and he was an Alpha Male. I have always had a self deprecating sense of humor and wonder if I should alter it. 

I think you have to separate the comedy from the comedian when you’re thinking of whether it’s Alpha or not.

Being a comedian… especially a professional one… is unquestionably Alpha in that anyone with the balls to stand on stage with nothing but a microphone, and entertain a crowd of people for an hour, is very much walking a tightrope of victory or failure. A big part of it is not caring what the audience thinks, and how they might be offended et al. That’s Alpha.

The caveat to that being you actually have to be good at it and pull it off to be Alpha. If it goes well, it’s amazing. If it goes poorly, you reek of the most awkward social failure.

It’s also Alpha to a decent percentage of women to have a high intelligence, and the average IQ for a professional comedian is in the 140 range. Connecting different nuggets of information into something funny requires a high IQ. Almost everyone is smart enough to get the joke, but the creation of the joke requires a moment of very high IQ.

The comedian, or perhaps more correctly the comic persona, can be more or less attractive, based on what vein of humor the comedian is attempting to mine. Usually comedy is based on some sort of social disconnect, vulnerability, fear or frustration. Less common professionally is wordplay, because after an hour of wordplay humor, it’s no longer punny.

Self-deprecating humor is a variety of using personal vulnerability as a power source. As such it tends to reduce your attractiveness. However it’s possible to use the observation of that same vulnerability, and the under lying social disconnect creating it, and do it from a stronger frame of attractiveness.

It’s the difference between making a joke about you being some variety of loser, and you making a joke explaining how losing happens. You essentially frame yourself as a winner by default.

As a rough example of this, Louis CK is unquestionably at the top tier of the comedy world, but a fair bit of his material is centered on being unattractive and failing with women. Someone like the late Patrice O’Neal mined a lot of humor out of explaining male-female social dynamics. The average guy in the street is probably going to be a lot better off doing Patrice-like humor than Louis CK-like humor.

Oh and in terms of Presidential humor, well again, you already have massive social proof in that you’re the President of the United States.

And drones. I’m pretty sure having the ability to unleash attack drones makes you funny.

I’m a big believer that your overall approach to your relationship needs to be as positive as it can be.

Have a quick watch of John Gottman…

So what does that mean in terms of practical application?

Well, sometimes the best thing you can do is just knock off the pointless fighting for no reason. Stop the snarky one-liners. Stop the eye-rolling. Stop the passive-aggressive ignoring. Stop the nagging. Stop the whining. Stop slamming the doors. Stop assuming disrespect. Stop trying to find a negative motivation behind what they are doing.

I’ve seen so many misapplied attempts to be Alpha just coming across as a contemptuous asshole, that I’ve started wondering if some guys are actively trying to tailspin the relationship into the ground. Should you stand up for positive boundaries and not be taken advantage of? Sure you should, but that’s not being an asshole, that’s being a functional adult.

In all seriousness, I see the greatest and fastest gains in relationships, when people just stop doing the things that are negative. You don’t even have to do anything new, just stop the endless Displays of Low Value and Negative Energy.

Or put another way, if the five-to-one ratio of positive-to-negative is correct, maybe you have to start thinking of it more like five date nights being equal to one fight night.

If you had to try and change your relationship to fall into line with a five-to-one ration of positive-to-negative, what would you have to change?