600k opportunity passed

I spotted an opportunity to build and sell a product on Kickstarter about a year ago.  I lacked the resources in manpower and financing to get it built.  This month another team launched their version on Kickstarter and have earned over 600k from their campaign so far.

That’s good news and bad news.  It means I’m on the right track with re-investing every penny I earn and skating a razor thin line between being in the black and the red each month.

It also means the market for that item is large enough to allow competition.

It feels as if I’m trying to get to critical mass by adding one gram of uranium per day.  You need between 15 and 600 kilos of uranium, depending on the grade and if you use a reflector, to get a self sustaining nuclear chain reaction.  I KNOW that I’ll get there, as long as I can keep adding resources and don’t go bankrupt first.  And once there I’ll have extra resources to buy more resources to receive more resources and so on.

I could have saved many hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years, had I worked diligently alone.

Instead I want to earn more than that in one month, on just one of my many projects.  And then use that as the stepping stone to greater things.  I have the plans, I have the vision.  I don’t have the people, the time, or the finances.  Until kaboom day.

Time for a wig, eye-lift, facial fat injections and lifts.

The wig is on the way.  I’ll shave my head and wear it permanently.  Wigs today are undetectable, and worn 24 hours a day, including in the shower.  It’s removed to wash the scalp every few weeks, and might need replacing after 7 months.  My hair now is in bad condition – very receded hairline, big bald spot on the back, gray and thin on the sides.

Next month I will get upper and lower eye surgery.  This will help with heavy dark bags under the eyes, and the drooping eyelid skin, as well as tighten up the skin.

I’ve looked into facial fillers, and decided on stem cell augmented fat transfer.  They take your own fat, treat it, and inject it into your face.  This lasts longer than most synthetic fillers and it’s said that the procedure also tends to cause the skin itself to look better.  As we get older the face not only droops and wrinkles, but it loses fat.  I used to be chided for my baby face chipmunk cheeks in my teens, and now I’m all gaunt and have silly putty skin.

I’ve ordered shoe insert lifts, as well as two pairs of platform shoes – one a casual shoe style and the other a fisherman’s sandle.  My footwear will add over two inches of height above regular shoes, bringing me up to at least 5’10 (actually 5’11 in shoes, but everybody gets an inch in shoes).  I’ll even have the option to be 6 feet tall in shoes, without the platforms being noticeable.

I do home teeth whitening, and will do it professionally.  I may also get ceramic dental veneers.

I’ve experimented with make-up.  It makes a big difference and is basically undetectable.  Could be useful on occasion, especially for photo shoots.

Late this year or early next I plan to also get eyebrow hair transplants.  I may get an upper and even a lower face lift.

Right now I’m dieting; eating a high protein meal once a day, to get rid of a protruding belly.  I was starting to look pregnant.  On gym days I don’t eat until after the workout.

My business plans are moving forward, and soon I will start to hire and interact with models, as well as the prettiest of the general public.  I’m working on improving status, as well as access.

I will not go gently into the night, and at fifty it’s starting to get mighty dark.  I’ve never been a looker and always had a tough time competing against taller and more attractive men, but as time goes on more and more girls consider themselves well out of my league.

I have some leads on my phone that I don’t want to meet until I look much better than I do now.  I should have much better odds in about two months.

How an ugly 50 year old man can out compete surfers

1. Opulence.  Women (and men) are fascinated by shiny objects.  If you have vaulted ceilings and and an indoor swimming pool and a classic motorcycle, people will ring your doorbell out of curiosity.
2. Don’t be a block of wood.  Most humans are a block of wood.  If you practice mediation and yoga and chi-kung and learn music and read and explore every other avenue to wake up and expand your awareness of your self, then you can become a story teller.  You can engage people and be the TV set.  Be the leader of their awareness.  You can earn the right to engage and explore other people.  Don’t be a block of wood.  Use your mind to discover your own mind.  Use your body to discover your own body.  That’s the beginning of seduction.

People have a set middle ground of horniness, and it varies in a bell curve.

Facts can be interpreted sure, but that does not mean that we are all entitled to our own facts.  Unless you believe that reality is opinion based and we are all entitled to our opinion of what could be a working rocket ship that will make it to the moon and bring back survivors.

The interesting facts are that lately I’ve been quite ill, with some sort of flu-ish thing.  As my energy decreased, naturally so did my libido.  I got a bit better, and then my current favorite sent me a message with pics of a threesome lover she had picked out for us.  That night I was supercharged with romantic love for her.  Not because I wanted to fuck the hot other girl so much as because she did that for me.

A cat who offers a dead rat on the doorstep is a devoted cat.  A girl who offers up pussy even though it hurts her is… what can you say?!  I was filled with emotion.  If you need words they could be love and lust.  I could not fuck her enough or kiss her enough, and Daddy loved her more than words or cock could ever say.

This was the second offering, so it was even more potent.

But I made the mistake of coming in her in the heat of it, and this lowered my energy, and that sank my immune system, and I quickly got very sick again.

I was so low energy during my sickness that I did not want her to speak one word to me.  She asked if I was angry at her and I politely explained that I was low battery and cranky, the same way she gets if she is hungry or lacks sleep.  I needed quiet time.  Don’t talk.

I slept at first 20 hours in a day, and later just ignored her.  When she tried to kiss me I just had to push her face away.

You should see the point by now:

The more energy I have, the more interested I am in the girl.

N20 would try to dangle her ass in front of me when I was sick, and I didn’t even try to pretend to look.  Leave me alone.  Later I did my best to be polite and glance.  Later I looked but was soft.  Usually her ass makes my eyes and body hungry and she dangles it and loves thrilling me.

This is the reason for this post:

My last post was about grief and about how I personally deal with it.  In the comments it came up that people have individual approaches.

I believe that the insight in this post is that peoples individual approaches to women is heavily influenced by how much battery power and libido and charge and emotional energy they carry around with them.

Only a low energy man can say that any man COULD MGTOW.  It’s his experience that this is possible for HIM, and so he assumes it’s must be possible for all.

Only a medium to low affect man could assume that grief could or should not affect other men.  Low affect men believe that “If only other men had the correct words in their heads, emotions would not move them”.

Words can affect emotions, and the internal narrative is a powerful thing.

But let’s not give onto Caesar what is not Caesar’s due.

Emotions have their own rules.

You can take a placebo, and have it be explained later that it was a placebo, and that same placebo will still work.  The narrative will have no effect on the part of the brain that believes in the placebo.

Narrative therefore does not create the placebo affect.

Placebo can kill pain.

Narrative therefore does not affect pain directly.

Men who think that narrative creates reality are so inside their own words that they mistakenly believe that consciousness is composed of words.  The brain is a bunch of different things – the word parts are relatively minor.  But for some it appears to be all that is.

If you sing a song you can change your emotions.  If you tell yourself some stories emotions will change.  You can fiddle with dials on an AM radio and that won’t dial you into shortwave.  You can’t get to shortwave from an AM radio, any more than you can move dust with your mind.  Shortwave is so close to AM – just a few frequencies away, but it’s far away enough.  Emotions and narrative are far away enough.  It’s different parts of the brain.  Just because they two parts talk to each other don’t assume that one controls the other.  The tuner does not control the broadcast any more than the broadcast controls the tuner.

And of course there is interaction between conscious and unconscious processes, but see the point.  You don’t and can’t create and fully control your own mind; it also happens TO you.  You get to participate.  Gently.

People see that words modulate emotions and they mistakenly believe that words CREATE emotions.  If that works for them (and I have my doubts) then cool.  For high affect people it doesn’t.  People vary.

Emotions can be a distinct brain processing function.  Your words can be fine, and you can still grieve.  That’s actually called healthy and normal.  It’s actually called healthy and normal to not fight it, and to just go through it, and to just accept feeling like shit for a while.

Even the Buddha said that.  We ALL just feel like shit sometimes.  Buddha said that.  He called it the four noble truths.  Which boils down to sometimes you are just going to feel like shit, and there is NOTHING you can do about it, so get over it, and get through it the best you can.

Libido and affect and a great many other things vary.  We are not homogeneous.

High affect and high libido personalities can’t get advice from low affect or low libido personalities.  And vice versa.  Unless it is to chop off your balls or grow some.

What I see as the most effective way to deal with emotions is to life craft.  Have real friends who back you up.  Have real backup financial plans.  Have women who love you.  Everything you can think of that is relative and that you can lose and that can seriously hurt you if you don’t have it, try to have it.

Be in the world, and try to win at actual life.  As if it’s not a dress rehearsal or a video game.  As if it mattered.

Hurt when you should hurt, and rejoice when you should rejoice.  And actually win at actual life.

Loss out-ranks gain emotionally, and now what?

Well, I earned a surprise 9.5 grand last night with a big sale.  That wipes out the loss of the 3 laptops and 4k worth of lost account info.

I’ve got another 10k coming in this month from some deal, and double that in October.  And my steady income is slowly increasing at a rate well past my steadily increasing expenses.  And new income streams will, eventually, also come online.

They say that you feel losses more than gains, so even earning the 9.5 k which is twice as much as recently lost doesn’t quite calculate as a cancelling out of the loss; “But I would have had even more if I hadn’t lost!”

Long term stress raises cortisol, which kills neuron in the hippopotimous-campus and within that the amygdala, which causes emotional disregulation and eventually depression.

Depression can be a neurological condition, which can mean that you can’t muster the will power required to get yourself out of it.

Antidepressants work negligably better than placebos, which means that a placebo effect can be incredibly strong regarding depression.  This does not mean that we therefore have conscious free will over depression.  It means that we have unconscious something over something.  That’s completely different.

My strategy for sadness, grief, and depression has usually been to do drugs and alcohol through the worst of it, maintain lifestyle crafting, and to wait for it to go away.

Lately I’ve been having stubborn grief and depression.  It’s not going away.  Sometimes it’s just too painful so I reach for relief.  Booze probably also shrinks the hippopotimus and for me is addictive, so could be short term relief and a long term problem.  Valium can be related to depression and loss of acumen.  Dopamine agonists and opioid receptor agonists are quick to cull the receptors, so they also borrow against future contentment.

But when you actually hurt, you don’t want to hurt.  Normally it’s fine to medicate temporarily.  Hurt subsides.

I guess I’m still waiting for a clarity of vision.  It’s one thing to grieve and have a positive forward looking plan.  It’s another to lose your vision and not know what to do next to fix it.

I’ve had interns out here a number of times, and each time things seemed to go well in important ways.  Socially things often went quite well.  This last time I had some high financial hopes, and extended some of my business visions into a new promising direction.

I was already living in my future; working towards a future that I could see so clearly that I was living inside of it.

The loss of that future, plus the social loss has left me not only caught off-guard for how to re-envision my plans, but left my emotional system, which is semi-autonomous to other mental systems, reeling.  Having interns leave before has never hit me quite this hard for so long.

I’m using this post as a journal, in the hopes that merely writing will help tease out clarity from the jumble of experience.

Yesterday in my dream state I focused on simply feeling my heart.  Just maintaining attention there, rigidly, during the sleep state.  It was not insightful, but I just wanted to be present in my body, in the part that seemed most salient to my experience lately – my emotions.

This morning I seemed to have some glimmer of clarity in my morning dreams, but still woke up to pain and sadness.  Physical pain that hurt enough for me to want it to go away quickly.  Not some trivial mild mood, but OUCH that HURTS!

The glimmer of clarity related to the emotional loss of comraderie with westerners.  It’s cool to hang out with Indonesian girls who love me and my body parts devotedly, but it’s a very different social interaction to hang out with buddies who are from the same culture who get each others jokes.  It’s a different category of sympatico.  And when that is woven in seamlessly with business aims, the tapestry is more valuable still.  Fine high caliber friends collaborating on business is silk and gold-thread embroidery as compared to the cheese cloth that is bar buddies.

But I’ve been burnt quite a number of times.  Interns one day are all enthused and cooperative, and literally the next day tell me that they are leaving with no notice.  I don’t get a hand off of work done.  I don’t get correspondence after that.  Everything’s roses and butterflies until they go ghost.

In the West you expect a minimum of two weeks notice.  That has never happened out here.  Apparently there are no rules out here.

The most recent guy to come out, Mat, wanted to do a careful background check before he started working here so I encouraged him to contact as many of the previous interns as he could.  I gave him all the contacts that I had.

Months later after he had decided to leave I asked him if he knew how the previous interns had fared in their life, after leaving.

They were all capable guys.  But I had to wonder if their decision to leave my enterprises led to improvements in any areas of their lives.  Social, economic, or any other measure of improvement.

I got vague answers from Mat, so I really don’t know, but if I had to force an impression out of the vagueness I’d guess that people’s lives overall did not improve, and most likely declined after leaving our group and our group efforts.

One thing Mat had heard from the interns is that I’d shown them “how easy it is to start a business”.  This seems to have inspired people to go it on their own.

One thing I’ve heard from another entrepreneur is how mistaken this impression usually is.

It’s not easy to be self employed.  You must expect a 90% failure rate.  And you have to be able to support yourself and put in the time and effort through those periods.  And then the successes you do get might not be in as large a project as you can do if you are in a group.   Individuals simply can not do large tasks.  That takes large, well coordinated groups.

But that’s not something that a want-to-be self employed entrepreneur wants or cares to hear.  He doesn’t care.  He wants 100 percent of something that is his, instead of 20% of something that is someone elses, and the bottom line is not financial.  It’s emotional.  As Daffy Duck always said “Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine mine mine mine mine mine mine!”

So I’m of the impression that of the interns who left to go find their own “Mine!” that they didn’t forge successful companies.  I’m of the impression that we would have done much better as a group.

It just takes so damn long.  To someone in his twenties, even six months is a long time.  One year seems like forever.  Two or three?  That’s starting to be a big fraction of their adult lives.

To a guy like me who has cycled through many businesses over decades, two years is just the beginning for one business.  You can’t expect much of anything before that.  Business takes lots of effort, and lots of time.  And lots of people collaborating their time and effort.  Continuously.  There are no quick fix get rich schemes to go after.  That’s almost never what business is about.

Somehow I’m going to have to get back to having westerners collaborating on my businesses.  Especially I need writers and perhaps also people to help with video production.

I have no idea how I’m going to even approach that problem.  No idea.  I can’t make the same old mistakes.

Nobody loves you when you’re down and out

Decades ago I took my imported Javanese girlfriend and two other people on a road trip to Padre Island to sell my Jewelry on spring break.

I hung out there for a few days before splitting up the team and heading off to Florida with my girl to also try selling our stuff on the beaches and at a Harley Davidson raley.

Sales were dismal in both locations and that had a profound effect on my business.  My girlfriend kept playing Eric Clapton’s “Nobody loves you when you are down and out” song over and over on the car stereo, and started to treat me like shit.

I learned a valuable lesson that month.  Don’t show weakness.

I’m rewatching the HBO drama series Boss.  I’ve recommended it before.  In the first episode the Boss, the Mayor of Chicago, is asked by a top aid if he is feeling ok.

“How long have you been working for me?”

“Eight years, sir.”

“Eight years.  Don’t ever ask me that question again.”

He was not feeling ok.  He’d been diagnosed with Lewi Bodies, a type of progressive dementia.  As a seasoned career polititian at the top of his game he knew enough to not show weakness.

I’ve recently had to relearn this lesson.

A few months ago I had troubles with one of my girls.  She’d been causing tons of drama and that’s just the start of it.  I stopped fucking her or giving her money for a while as punishment, but then needed her help to replace an ATM card.  She came over and I got drunk and ripped into her about how bad her behaviour was, and I woke up the next morning to her gone, along with the ATM and 2 grand of my money.  That hit me hard during a time that I was having a temporary cash flow crunch.

Later I went to Bali and had three laptops stolen.  I’d neglected to backup my files and lost some info worth another 4 grand or so.  The laptops must have cost me at least 2 grand.

That loss was also depressing.

When you have a girl, or a crew, the tendency and first instinct is to share the stress.  To commisserate.

Gong.  Buzz.  Fail.  Wrong choice.

A leader has to suck it up and shut his pie hole.  Everything is fine, until it is better than fine.  That’s his job.  To maintain confidence.

I like to watch movies and documentaries and histories and biographies with an eye on learning lessons.  Some people don’t think it’s possible to learn lessons from fictional dramas, but I disagree.  Writers of fiction need to distill the essense of the human condition, and this distillation can be more valuable than raw data.  We get people’s take on how we relate.  Boss is full of real life valuable info, even it is entirely fictional.

In the biographies I watch I always see personal development.  Leaders or writers or artists are not born great.  It takes time and effort and dilligence.  And they are always flawed characters.  Always.  People tend to specialize in what they are good at, and nobody is great at everything.

I stumbled upon being some sort of leader through learning dominance with girls, and through developing my business to include staff.  Through trial and failure I’ve had to learn from my mistakes.  Now it’s come to pass that I have to take this issue seriously.  I need to study how to lead, and get good at it.

The girl that I’ve been fucking regularly the longest met me last night.  We’ve been seeing each other for six years, 2.5 of that living together.  All her family keeps trying to hook her up with new guys.  The admonish her harshly to never see me again.  After all I refuse to marry her and I won’t stop seeing my other girlfriends!  And she was working at a job where she got hit on 50 times a day by locals and tourists, but she came back from her home town the day I did to meet me back in Java.  She’s still in love with me and can’t leave me.  She can’t.

And yet our sex life lately is horribly hit or miss.  It used to be spectacular.  So last night I told her that I couldn’t fuck her anymore – she just wasn’t wet enough, and it was too often.  She had to admit that our sex was nothing like it used to be.  I told her that it was my fault.  She’s different than other girls – her pussy only gets activated after her heart is, and it’s always horribly heartbreaking for her that I see other girls.  So she can’t really give her heart to me fully.

And yet she can’t give her heart to anyone else.  She’s still, after all these years, totally stuck on me.

This morning she climbed on top of me, and then I flipped her on her back.  Somethings wrong with her vaginal lining and sex lately seems to always be painful for her.  Is it an infection?  Is she just not wet enough?  I don’t know.  But damn it I need to fuck her HARD.  Even if it hurts her.  At one point I grabbed her by the hair, pulled, and demanded “say I love you Daddy”.  She barely complied.  “Say it again!”  Again and again I demanded it and as she said it she came and came.  It’s kind of a conditioned response by now, as whenever she comes the word Daddy gets mentioned in one way or another.

So I told her again the same as I told her last night.  Chose chicken or fish from the menu.  Either love me 100 percent, give your full body mind and soul to me, or just don’t love me at all.  None of this wishy washy fifty percent bullshit.  If you want me at all then I will love you in my way.  That means I will tell you do this, do this, do this, and you must do exactly what I say.  I will fuck you whenever I want.  You will belong to me and do what I say.

She agreed.

It’s the only way she can be happy.

She needs a dominant leader, and I’m not doing my job with her unless I give her that.  She can’t enjoy sex unless she’s properly owned.  Nobody else seems to be able to own her in the way she needs, so it’s on me.

The story with her is related to not showing weakness.  It’s related to how a person learns his trade, slowly, over years.

Sometimes I see an actor in his earlier movies and can see how he used to hardly be able to act.  The same people later in their careers can be incredibly good.

Leadership is just one more thing to learn.  Like charisma.  It takes time, and you have to focus on the craft of it.

What I had to learn again these last few months is this:

Never show your weakness.  Don’t confide in any friends or any lovers.  Don’t share the stress.

Male team members and conflict

I was watching a documentary on The Who again last night.  This time around I noticed how the band members related to each other over the years, despite intense and sometimes physical conflicts.

Some of the band members had gigantic substance abuse problems.  This was bound to at times exacerbate conflicts; I know that when I drink too much I can say some stupid things that cause me no end of trouble.  Some of these guys added coke and heroin and speed and lsd and everything else they could to the mix, at life threatening and even eventually mortal doses.

And yet when the basist, John Entwistle, had extravagantly blown through all his money, the bandmates got together for another tour.  Just to help him out.  Pete Townsend put it succintly “Where would I be without him?”

At the end of the documentary, Roger Daltry says of his relationship to Pete, “No matter where we are in our relationship ups and downs, what matters most is that once we are on stage we collaborate beautifully and make thousands of people happy”.

Throughout the documentary Pete mentioned several times that his personality could not have been more different than any of the other band mates.  He hinted at friction and possibly even dislike.  But he also talked about how dearly he loved them, and how they were there for each other, no matter what.  And the ones who died he missed them horribly.

Guys work best together when they are collaborating on something.  Guys can bond and have each others backs.  There will be petty squabbles, and sometimes even gigantic blow ups.  Differences of opinion or even just plain stress can lead guys to come to physical blows.

But when you are in a team, you get bonded, and you don’t sweat the small stuff.  The point is you’ve got each others backs.  The point is your collaboration.

Being visionary is emotional

Studies have been done that show that emotions play a crucial role in our decision making process.  The studies don’t show that emotions get in the way of rational thinking, but that rational thinking is not possible and can’t happen without emotions.

I was watching a documentary on brain studies last night that explained that, so don’t have a handy link to back up the info.

People have different thinking styles and personality styles. Who and how I am is profoundly visionary.  What I am is to the core visionary.  In every possible way I try to build up visions for what the world is, and then create new realities of what the world could be.

On the last day that I saw Mat I offered him some shrooms, in the hope that a shared trip would be a way to bond.  During that trip I tried to explain the core fundamental cares in my life.  I talked about how I get immense pleasure from bonding with and controlling my girls.  I mentioned chi-kung and my music.  And then I tried to talk about how I am a visionary, and that this way of thinking and being is different from how most other people live and organize their lives.

I don’t think the shrooms helped us to bond that day, and as usual I talked too much and was a poor listener.  The rest of the day my stomach hurt a lot and all the shrooms seemed to do was to give me a mild case of the Alzheimers.  During that beach walk I doubt I was able to express what I dearly wanted to express.

As a businessman I must create an intricate vision.  This is no small thing.  Most people are constitutionally incapable of holding so many pieces of information in their minds at once.  Thinking is not only fundamentally an emotional event, it’s also fundamentally creative.  You create associations between ideas and images and words and abstractions that had never yet been associated.

So as a businessman I MUST and do get intensely emotionally involved with my business, and my vision.  My business is HUGELY important to me.  It is not only what I do, but who I am.

I am not on the sidelines having an out of body experience when I fuck my girls.  I am embodied, and I am.  I AM fucking that girl.

I AM.

There is no separation between me and the fucking.

There is no separation between me and the life that I create around myself.

I AM my businesses.

I AM a visionary, and I do create my world, to the maximum that is possible.  I can’t re-write physics, but within whatever limits I must work with, I will have maximum impact on this world.

Some people occasionally say things like “don’t worry about it”.  That’s a fundamentally ignorant stance.  That’s like telling someone who’s father just died not to grieve.  People grieve, and there is no way around it.

A businessman is invested emotionally in his business.  It is not a hobby. It’s his life.  It’s his being – who and how and what he is.

*****

So I’ve been borderline depressed lately.  Several of my plans rely on a good western writer, and I don’t have one anymore, so that throws my business affairs into disarray.  Financially I’m doing fine, and this will give me a chance to regroup and come back better prepared and stronger, however my plan of attack at this point was to bring all resources to attack at once, with exact just in time timing.  The tech market changes fast, and I don’t feel that I have the luxury of patience; I must act immediately in all things.  Even when that means stretching my resources up to and past their limit, relying on future earnings to hire people now.  It’s working by the way.  Some new staff out earned their salaries by an order of magnitude, and that’s not counting all the projects that are still under R&D but are close to fruition.

As I haven’t reconfigured my business vision, I’m still emotionally discombobulated.  Depressed would be an accurate word.  A buddy from Jakarta saw my post and gave me a ring, which was quite thoughtful.  Little touches like that can make a difference.  And my girls have been an immense comfort.

I have been seeing a new one these last few days.  I spent a few days online and after contacting hundreds of girls managed to get one date.  I had to fly her out from across the country, but she’s been a great sport.  Fucking her up the ass and calling her a bitch and whore while she comes and comes on my cock is a great mood lifter.  “Good bitch!”  God I love a woman who knows how to fuck.  None of this “don’t insult me” nonsense.

She tries to call me honey, but corrects herself and calls me Daddy more often.

Life can be so simple that way.  Just meet, and 30 minutes later be naked, and 30 minutes later again be fucking.  Immediately fall into the boyfriend girlfriend routine.  Teach her to be submissive.  Treat like a queen sometimes and a little whore slut at others.  Simple.  Like putting on a glove for the first time – of course it fits.  Why wouldn’t it?

She wants my babies.  I wouldn’t mind, really.  Babies are cheap enough out here.  I’m starting to think about just haphazardly knocking up lots of girls.

She’s 26 and has a great body.  For a 26 year old.  I’ve been spoiled by dating teenagers.  I’m going to keep looking for new teenagers.  God I love teenagers.

We don’t belong to each other anymore.

I am fifty years old, and apparently this means that I am from another culture.

Most men are aware that the social bonds and contracts of the past no longer apply.  We talk a lot about hook up culture, divorce rates, serial monogamy, single motherhood, feminism,  women who value their independence, and so on.

But we don’t talk much about how the corporate man has changed.

It used to be common for a job to last a lifetime.  People were loyal to their companies, and the companies were loyal to them.  That was a thing.

Long ago and in many cultures it was common to learn a trade during a long apprenticeship.  Instead of borrowing money and paying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in University fees, a person became basically an indentured servant for a period of several years.  Sometimes contracts were signed to that effect.  The apprenticeship was done under a literal “master”.  Not merely a master of his trade, but a master of his pupils.

Nowadays people think nothing of leaving one job for another.  We think nothing of leaving one mate for another.  We don’t bond to our locations, tribe, or family in the same way.

It used to be the case that in order to be taken seriously for high corporate positions you had to be married.  I always thought that was old fashioned and silly, but now I’m starting to understand the logic.

The ability to bond and to have loyalty used to be seen as essential.

This is probably going to come off as weird, but I’m going to try to explain how I view myself, and what my world is to me.  What my place in the world is.

In ancient times we lived in small tribes and one main elder was looked on as the leader.

I’ve created my life such that I am that leader.  I run some small businesses, and have 18 employees, so modern life still supports that type of structure, but it’s much more than that.

It is impossible to overstate the importance in my life of bonding to people, and of having control over them.  This gets most extreme with my girls.  We get intensely intimate, and deeply in love.  The sex can be extra-ordinarily ecstatic and also romantic.  Me and my girls bond intensely, and maintain very strong emotional bonds.

On top of the romance I’m dominant and paternal.  Not overbearing, but just a good Daddy.  I give commands exactly like a good Daddy would to a good Daughter, and I expect them to be carried out.  And they are carried out, with cheerful devotion.

My current number one girl symbolises that relationship by wearing a dog collar.  She’ll also suck my cock in public on command, or fuck me wherever I tell her, be it in a restaurant toilet or a taxi.

Sooner or later with all girls I move the relationship towards one of dominant and submissive.  Sometimes it might start with role play in bed, but eventually it turns into me taking control over her entire life.  She belongs to me physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and in all possible ways I own her.

This is a gigantic part of my life, and has been for what feels like forever.

So I am accustomed to talking on the role of leader, with my girls, and with my business.

Nowadays that type of role is more and more looked on as out of date.  Perhaps even wrong.  People are less inclined to take that role of elder in charge seriously.

Children leave the nest and move off to college, switching between cities and jobs and girls and rarely considering a sense of place.  We don’t belong to each other anymore.  We don’t belong to a person anymore.

It has to sound odd in peoples ears when I put my finger on it so bluntly, but I see myself as someone to whom people belong.  My girls belong to me.  My employees belong to me, and I am responsible for them and for their families.  I see myself as a tribal leader.  It’s not just some imagination or ego trip thing, there are real psychological archetypes that we naturally fall into.  It seems to be going out of fashion to have a close lifetime relationship with a real biological Daddy, but that archetype is innate to us, and it’s been argued that we all deeply need a Daddy.

My girls call me Daddy, and I am Daddy.  That’s not an affectation.  I am Daddy.

When a girl leaves me I physically hurt, especially in my heart.  When guys leave me it’s often the same.  I get deeply sad, and my heart physically hurts.  People who belonged to me, who I was bonded with, who were a close part of my life and my actual self are ripped out from my being and gone.  I become much less than I was before.  I become amputated.  It can hurt quite a lot.  Physically.

I’m starting to wonder if I should associate with people who don’t value belonging.  Many of the interns that came out here had never been in a serious love relationship with any girl.  In the manosphere in general I suspect that many are constitutionally unable to bond with girls.  The different styles of relationships have been studied as attachment styles.

• secure
• anxious–preoccupied
• dismissive–avoidant
• fearful–avoidant

It never occurred to me before that attachment styles could affect my business.  But seeing how I view myself as a leader who bonds intimately with his charges, I’m going to have to pay more attention to that.

Fuck you, pay for your own school.

A guy sent me an introductory email about being interested in being an intern/business partner.

His email was well worded, and I’m proud to have noticed that his few paragraphs spoke of an off the chart level of language fluency.

I encouraged him to study persuasion and copywriting, and I gave him opportunities to profit share in my various businesses.

He flew out here, and spent several months learning what and how I do business.  I had no filters and let him learn trade secrets that can’t be taught in any University.

He could easily get girls but as a bonus my girlfriend gave him a cute one who shared his bed as often as he would allow..  On his whim I took him out to Bali to meet Jake of http://www.cedonulli.com.

Airfare for both of us and gym fees and apartment for him, for a few hours to meet Jake.  Jake disappeared the next day with no word to me.  He deigned a message to Mat that he was in Ubud before going total radio silence.

Jake by the way has impressive acumen, although frequent LSD use has left him believing that we fundamentally create our own reality.  And he was a dick to disappear and not answer messages.  Impressive weird dick.

As he had no background in copywriting or internet sales, Mat had to spend a lot of his time in study.

I would frequently ask for his output, but he would reply that he was shy to show me an unfinished product.

A few days ago I again asked for his output, and he reluctantly emailed me one page of good work.

Then he told me that he was leaving me to work for another company.

I did my best to find out his motivations.  He hid his cards and dissimulated.  He said that he wants to hang out with a crowd of younger guys.  He took an offhand remark about money I could easily retrieve as an opportunity to imply that he didn’t trust my financial decisions.  He said that he wanted to live in Bali.  He said that he wanted to save money.  I offered to double his expenses and to get a crowd of cool guys out here once again and to give him exorbitant profit sharing, but it was like talking to a deaf person.  I could not motivate him because he hid his motivations.  I tried my best to get inside his head so that I could persuade him but it took me three days to finally hit upon what was going on.  He wants to work part time for some established company and network with all the guys so that he can spend his free time starting his own businesses.

None of this 20% of what you earn for me nonsense.  He’s learned enough now to strike out on his own.

Ok.

So here it is, officially.

Fuck you all potential interns.  Go take a dildo and insert it up your very polite asses.

If you don’t already know how to copy-write, and can’t work on contract for output, then go ahead and fuck off.

I will never believe that you have any intention at reciprocation for traning.

Go ahead and pay your tuition at your insanely over priced schools.  Go ahead and prove yourself with previous work.  I’ll pay per contract.

If you have not already arrived, then don’t knock on this door.

Fuck off all people who need a leg up in life.

Good-bye my friend alcohol, you wonderful bastard.

A few months ago I came to Bali. After V left to travel around Australia and New Zealand, I had no girls here, and so often went hunting. I drank a lot of beer and booze to lubricate the motions of hunting for new girls.

On coming back to Java, I kept up the habit of drinking. It was fun and made me feel good, most of the time. As I had not been drinking regularly for years, I had to re-learn the perils of drinking all over again. Don’t drink too much or the next day I’d be too low energy to be productive during work. If binge drinking, watch my mouth because I say things that can go against my interest.

By the time we came back to Bali, I’d been drinking not only every day, but during the day. I’d learned to keep just a moderate buzz, and wake up sober with no hangover. Mad men style drinking. The kind of drinking Churchill used to do.

If you don’t drink often, drinking a bit makes you feel warm and happy. If you drink all the time, you need a drink just to begin to feel normal.

This was mostly working fine – it was fun, and socially lubricating. The problem was I started saying silly things at times. My ability to concentrate and motivation to work suffered.

After a few issues of fucking things up socially, I decided it’s best to stop.  The first day was a bit rough, and there were still strong cravings on the second.  But thanks to other satisfactions, now on the third day I’m feeling mostly good again, even without my lover booze.  I’m moving back into what I used to do to increase mood, and to feel warm and happy. I’m using romance with my girls, and chi-kung, and keeping focused on business for a long term positive future. All three work together. And at times again I get a pretty good buzz that way.  I plan to put a bit more attention into meditation and chi-kung, for a while at least.  Get all balanced and re-learn how to consciously create warmth and bliss, using my girls as amplifiers.

As I have had times in the past of drinking regularly too much, I’ll have to simply stop now. It was fun to spend a few months dipping into functional alcoholism. I did it just long enough to relearn why that’s not a good lifestyle.

What did I say last night?

In the earliest stages of drinking I get more engaged and animated.  I mix into being more social.

Then I start to become more and too honest.  Totally unfiltered.  Invariably I overestimate my wit and my sense of good judgement fails.

The next morning I’ll read text messages that I sent, and remember things that I said.  “Are you a prostitute” is not worded as craftily as “do you have people who support you with money?”

Last night I was flirting for the 4th time with some massage girls on Poppies 1.  We’d had fun jabbering before.  This time some local boy was sitting down, and in the local language kept saying that I was drunk.  Which I kinda was, but I wasn’t seeing double or slurring my words.  Then he kept asking me if I was OK.

So I stared him down and asked him 20 times if he was ok.  Are you ok?  Are you ok?  Are you ok?

Twenty times.

Hard eye contact, with only the punctuation between sentences acting as any let up from the barrage.  The silent eye contact may have been worse for him.

This did not win over the massage girls, and I had to walk away humbly with gentle good bys after that.  The fifteen year old declined to massage me.

The next morning I had to question my actions.  Did I lose face?  Was my judgement totally impaired, and was I a public idiot?

Later I had a drink.  Then the persona who was me last night became who I was again.  No, my judgement was fine.  Fuck those massage girls – they were not going to fuck me anyway.  That cock blocking no-nothing do-nothing idiot was trying to step on me, and needed to be stepped on harder.  I did the right thing.  He tried to publicly humiliate me in front of girls for drinking, so I publicly humiliated him in front of girls for being sober and Indonesian.  That’s what the passive aggressive wimp gets for trying to whip it out behind my back.  Publicly dick slapped on his stunned face.  “Are you ok?”

Drinking often makes people belligerent.  There would have been nothing to handle if I had been sober, and if there were I’d have handled it more tactfully.  My sober self might question, but my drunken self has no regrets.

Lately my Crohn’s disease is in an unusually long remission, and this has allowed me to overindulge in regular drinking.  I tried binge drinking for a while, then eased back into maintaining a mild buzz.  If I combine Ritalin with drinking it’s amazing.  I get all the social dis-inhibition but yet get to stay sharp.

It’s an incredible combination.

Not as good as being sober and meditating and in love and getting regular sex and having no job stress, but as far as chemicals go, it’s nice.

I’ve long known that booze brings out alternate personalities.  And that it can degrade the brain leading to mood problems.  Unfortunately, it feels good.  And so is addictive.  For roughly 6 years it was not an option to drink, because of my stomach.  Now the short term often tells me me to live for today.

A few days ago I met the mother and twenty-two year old son of and with my Chinese lover in in their one room apartment in Bali, in order to be grilled about my intentions.  I was drunk and on Ritalin, which was the only reason I agreed to show up.  I was unusually suave.  Even though I was honest that I had no plans to marry the girl, they were won over.  The booze and Ritalin boosted (or rather disinhibted) my social skills and comfort, and it was a good time, even though at the end it felt like I’d been in a boxing ring.

They had no idea that I’d been drinking.

For extroverts, you may never empathize.  Introverts are attuned to being socially lubricated.  Being social without being stupid drunk is a great feeing.  Ritalin and booze.

Meanwhile I’m learning at what stage of drinking I can still text.  A little drinking helps with connecting and being creative.  Too much and I’m too dis-inhibited – “I would fuck you if you were not so fat”.   A bit more and I feel great but can’t accomplish much.  I’m learning how to wake up with no hangover.  Most likely I’ll have to just go back to giving up the bottle totally, but for now at least I’m rediscovering how to harness the power of the booze.

Aside: the strangest thing.  N20, who used to be incredibly obtuse and annoying, is actually growing up.  We’re in a renewed romantic phase, and she even brought an attractive young new girl into my bed for a threesome as an offering.  A girl who could see us whenever we ask.  N is still jealous and insecure, and the along with the 2 other main girls there are literal death threats all around, but N did that for me.  That was truly touching, and that put her into a new category for me.  She’s my bottom bitch.  I’ve had other girls offer that, but N was the first to follow through, from planning to execution.  The sex itself wasn’t above average, but just having them both there and switching condom-less back and forth between the two was heaven on earth.  I’d never have guessed that I’d actually fall in love with N, but she pulled it off with that manoeuvre.

I’m sure I’ll always prefer private romantic sex, but it feels like a king to feel like a king.

When you feel unmotivated, stuck, an empty shell going through motions

joelsuf said: Yeah I’ve had experience with antidepressants, but it was not good. In the 7 or so months that I took them, I pretty much felt like a shell. My motivation was at an all time low. I also have a high tolerance to medications like that as well. The life crafting thing is a very good suggestion. I just feel trapped at the moment I suppose and just going through motions. Its been this way for awhile now. I get spikes of good emotions but my happiness is overall really low. I feel like loss might have something to do with it. I’ve endured 4 deaths in the family from 2006-2008 and I don’t think I’ve ever recovered lol. Thoughts?

There are quite a wide variety of antidepressant options. Have you heard of Tianeptine? Some people also mix together a highly customized brew, that takes a long time to master. Others get vagus nerve stimulating implants, or even brain stimulating implants.

You might consider spending a few months on forums where people talk about their antidepressant and mood elevating cocktails. There is no one size fits all solution. You can’t just say, oh ya, I already tried Prozac, and then throw your hands up in the air. Brain chemistry is highly customized.

There may not be a chemical solution for elevating your mood, long term.

But then again, there may be.

And even if there is, you’ll want to support all aspects of happiness in all possible ways. Life crafting is of course essential, however it can be next to impossible to life craft when depressed, because the motivation is too low. So you need to do everything that you can, all at once. Slowly your semi-submerged boat will start to float. Eventually you’ll be cruising it around.

A good website about lifecrafting is http://revolutionarylifestyledesign.com/

Meditation and body centered mediations are mentioned by All-Good-Scottsmen (Every good life crafter will talk about the importance of meditation or chi-kung or yoga or similar). They are often considered corner stones of life crafting.

Another corner stone is having a purpose or medium to long term goal.

Another is of course fitness. Weightlifting is a must. Punching something is good.

Another corner stone is a sex life and/or female bonded intimacy life.

Another corner stone is long term financial advancement. It’s preferable if this is also your passionate mission.

Another corner stone is your location, and we might also just lump in your environment including friends and social activities and nature walks or nights on the town or bowling or whatever. Your environment and activities and general social life.

Update: A few more ideas:

• A lot of men find that limiting ejaculation elevates energy and mood
• Playing a musical instrument is an excellent way to work through moods.  I enjoy minor keys, somber and dark musical phrases, ballads, and other moody shit.  All of that is in me and it comes out of me.  And then it usually tends to shift into more playful and joyful music after a while of playing.  If you don’t know how to play anything it doesn’t matter.  Just try out a few instruments and focus on doing what you personally are motivated and enjoy doing.  Then focus on one or two or your favorite instruments.  It will take years plus years, and every day you’ll get remarkably better at it.  You’ll like it.  You’ll see.  Your self esteem will naturally improve as your skill becomes more impressive, which is cool – it’s fine to own some pride.  But of course pride isn’t the only benefit of playing music; you refine not only your ability to create and express, but deepen your feelings and understanding of what can possibly be expressed.  Music is cool.  Even when you suck at it, it’s still cool.
• Moderate your diet.  Don’t be fat.  This takes willpower, which you have to expect to be low when your are depressed.  It’s easy to want to drink or eat your way out of bad feelings.  When the allies were fighting Germany in World War Two, there were battles on multiple fronts, and in multiple areas of technology.  Battling depression is similar.  Each single battle matters, and each single battle is part of a larger picture.  Diet and drinking are as important as aviation technology.  Maybe even as important as communications code breaking.
• Express yourself.  If you like writing, then blog.  Otherwise, sing spontaneous songs to yourself, or pray out loud.  Hear your own stories, and tell your own stories.  This has to be out loud or written down; it’s not enough to think.  If it’s out loud it’s preferable if you sing instead of talk.  It’s not hard to put your own words to any song.  Do it in the shower at minimum.
• It’s not easy to get out of boring jobs, or to get away from boring or negative friends, or to leave a city that has a drab grey sky and unfriendly weather.  If you can start a location independent business, or work at seasonal jobs, you’ll be able to spend time in new places.  The shift to new locations is a huge fish slap to the face of perspective.  Routine can be a great ally and asset, but when we are in a funk, it’s what we want to break out of.  So work towards giving yourself the option to travel.
• Consider joining some communities.  I’m an atheist, but that doesn’t mean that prayer communities are not helpful.  Buddhist communities are full of atheists, and can fulfil all the same spiritual needs and many more as theist communities.  There are yoga or reiki or poetry writing or chi-kung classes being taught in most mid to large sized cities.  There are all sorts of continuing education classes that get people together into the same room, engaging on stuff that makes them feel like a group.  Some groups claim to be saviours, and of course you’ll always be best off disillusioning yourself from that belief from the beginning.  Neither Amway nor Tim Ferris nor God is going to save anybody.  It’s just nice to be active in a group.
• Depression and stress go hand in hand. Be careful to lower your cortisol levels.  Even if it means using anti anxiety medications if you truly need them.  Research your options and be careful of addiction; benzos can be helpful, but are dangerous too.  Deeper research will reveal better options, if stress is an issue for you.  Of course lifestyle crafting must be your primary end goal, as always, but don’t rule out short term medical options to help move you forward.
• Self acceptance and self love can be consciously cultivated, through training techniques.  Buddhists own that tech, and call it Maitri.  You can learn loving kindness meditations.  These will help you to relate to yourself and to other people.  Some say that just sitting still doing nothing (mindfully within a disciplined meditation technique) also cultivates loving kindness, because you can’t run away from yourself, and so have no choice but to eventually just make friends with all the hidden corners that keep getting exposed.  This doesn’t work if you just ruminate.  You have to also let go of thoughts and learn to be mindful, attentive, and loose.
• A lot of people find being in nature to be therapeutic.  As is exercise, as is being among friends or in an engaging group.  You might be able to join in on or organize regular outings in your area.  A lot of cities have organized mountain walks or similar activities that anyone can join.  Or you can get away by yourself.  You can make it your job to put activities on your calendar, put alarms on the activities, and get up and go do the activities when the alarm sounds.  Even in the middle of depression, it’s an improvement to be moving through motions than not moving through motions.  All the little motions are cumulative and shift things.
• Meet a girl.  Even if you have to travel far.  Getting laid and feeling affection for and receiving affection from someone is a huge lever on emotions.  It can make us higher than any drug, or hurt as much as a dentist drill.  Sex and relationships are enormously powerful life crafting tools.  My blog is largely about relationships, so you already know how important they are to me.  Of course this aspect of life crafting is a craft, and a very difficult craft.  You’ll go through all sorts of pains and pleasures, and the ups and downs never stop.  My opinion is that this is fundamental and necessary to optimizing happiness; I don’t believe that MGTOW is a realistic option for a good enough level of life satisfaction.
• There are a few drugs that have been shown to give immediate improvement to depression.  One is ketamine.  Psilocybin (shrooms) and ayahuasca can also have long term effects.  Research how to optimize your trips.  Take them seriously as spiritual journeys.  You can prepare for them through regular meditation before the fact, and being careful with the setting and company.  Don’t just hang out with friends who bro-scream in wonder at the hallucinations in the bushes, and ramble off unedited stream of consciousness incontinent-mind-noise.  That’s not a trip; that’s standing still.  “Oh wow man!” is not what you are after.  Hallucinogens are not merely a new fun channel on the TV set.   They can help you to learn about and become more aware of and integrated with your own mind.  So don’t reach for the popcorn and treat them like an action movie.  Do them very rarely and give reverence to the act.  Consider hallucinogens the same way you would consider a lucid dream; a chance to physically see how you embody your own mind.  Some of your insights from shrooms will be useless and even wrong and distracting, so don’t take them too seriously.  The shift in perspective itself is the thing.  Just step outside for a bit, to know that there is an outside.
• Dress well even when you are alone.   Dress pants in the house are better than sweatpants.  Keep your house tidy and tend to plants and purchase and arrange fresh flowers regularly.  When you are most depressed, vacuum and clean.  Your house is the outside of your mind.  Everybody wants a nice view from the inside.  You are your own house-guest.  Treat yourself like one.
• Decide on actionable goals and make them your missions.  Social goals are fundamental, as are others mentioned or specific to you.  Your goals can be lofty or mundane, as long as the first steps are just outside your current reach, yet reachable with time and effort.  Take the time that it takes to know what you want.  Then take the action that it takes to get what you want.  Then start again, because by then you’ll be a new person and will have new options.  Always be striving.  Learn that striving is not something that comes before reward; striving is it’s own reward.  That might take decades to learn.  But learn it.  If you do nothing else, at least be patient and diligent enough to learn that one thing.  Discover for yourself that goal seeking itself is pleasurable.  Then use all your wits to choose life enhancing goals.  Then you will be more and more enjoying the process, while reaching.  With all the usual ups and downs.

Developmental psych as explanation for common manosphere cartoons

I always like to see my “original insights” clearly explained by other people, well before I’ve written them out.  It confirms my idea that basic human nature is cross-cultural.  Most anything you can notice about how people work today, somebody else noticed 50, 100, or 2000 years ago.

Althought that’s not quite right.  Daniel Dennet attributes the Flynn effect of constantly increasing IQ to memes.  Memes are ideas that are culturally exchanged that act as “intuition pumps” and the software with which we think.

According to Dennet, it would take a genius such as Da Vinci to think up concepts that in his time were novel, whereas today his brightest ideas would already be known young children.

One very powerful meme that has yet to be broadly assimilated is the idea of developmental-psychology.  The idea that humans progress through stages of clearly distinct types thought organization.  There are several overlapping versions of what these stages are, proposed by many different researchers, however there is wide agreement on the nature of the lower stages, at least.  And all theorists agree that not all adults reach the same final stage of maturity.  Most people, in fact, are still childish.  The interested reader can google his way to enlightenment on the subject.

Unfortunately, people at lower levels of thought organization are not able to conceptualize the higher levels.  This can make communication quite impossible.  You can’t reason with the unreasonable, and there are several levels of reason – each out of reach of the level below.

Hat tip do DA for these links, 1 2 3, from which I took the following quotes:

here’s the way it works:
* there are alpha traits, and there are beta traits. a beta trait is NOT just the inverse of an alpha trait.
note the final sentence above: yes, kids, that’s right, alpha and beta are actually two separate concepts. in the context of a long-term relationship, as we will soon see, it’s quite possible for a man to be both an alpha and a beta. (most PUA sites are justified in ignoring this distinction, since alpha and beta traits become mutually exclusive if the timeframe is short enough.)
* there are no binaries. each trait lies on a continuum.
this one is a mindfuck for lots and lots and lots and lots of people.
in particular, most people think of these things in terms of binaries — one/zero, on/off, etc. — because binaries are soft, warm, fuzzy, and easy to understand. this is the reason why children’s literature never develops characters beyond good guys and bad guys, and it’s also the reason why kids are taught the words hot and cold before learning more finely differentiated terms, such as tepid, warm, cool, and frigid.
note, however, the terms “children’s literature” and “kids” in the above sentence. these terms are not an accident; they are there because, when it comes to human personality traits, binary thinking is juvenile thinking.

* alpha and beta are not opposites, nor are they negative spaces, like yin and yang. they are entirely separate clusters of behavioral traits. (in extremely compressed timeframes they can take on some aspects of opposition, which is why the PUA community is so obsessed with contrasting them, but in longer timeframes it’s ridiculous to continue the charade of contrast.)

The rest of his posts talks about different aspects of behavior, on a sliding scale from uber-wimp to sociopathic-monster-alpha.  I don’t agree with the details of his scales, but the overall concept is sound; if all your sliders are set to the same number, you have congruence.  If you are only sexually aggressive but try hard to fit in and not rock the boat in social situations, for instance, that’s incongruent, and your girl won’t take you seriously.  Her alarm bells will go off and she won’t believe that you are “just being yourself”.

Then his last post talks about balancing alpha traits with beta traits, in a 3/5ths ratio, plus calibrating how much alpha to use based on the drama requirements of the girl.  Similar to what I’ve been saying for years also; the more dominant you are the more you can afford to be romantic.

My hope is that over the coming centuries, better cultural memes will move the average center of psych development for all populations.  Just as with the Flynn effect, we’ll get a developmental-psych effect.

Meme wars make a difference for that.  Memes are important; ideas are important; the truth and HOW we think is important.

 

 

 

 

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Diversify and have backup plans

If you have more than one girl in your life who you can invite for a sleepover, when things inevitably go south with one, you’ll avoid loneliness, sexual starvation, and will be less likely to become pussy whipped.

If you have more than one business, when some take a dive or have cash flow problems, the others can take up the slack.

I even like to have more than one place set up to live, work and sleep.  Just in case some girl or unforeseen situation is causing a dramatic threat, I can bug out to one of my other locations.

Three years ago I had several thriving online e-commerce websites, selling the same product.  But as a serial entrepreneur, I know to never trust any one business; markets change.  And I hate it that Google has so much power over my income – a change in rankings can break me.  I sought to diversify.  I had dozens of great ideas, pursued several, and one of them took solid root.

With two income streams I had more confidence to invest in other businesses, which require more staff and long periods of R&D.  The new businesses are further diversification, but there is quite a lot of investment involved, and there is always an element of risk.

Last year my older business did temporarily falter.  If it weren’t for the newer 2nd business, I’d have had trouble making payroll.

I always have the option to just lay off staff and limit expenses, so my rent and food is never a worry.  But momentum is valuable, and losing momentum can be far worse than losing money.  The diversification allowed my momentum to continue.

A little over a year ago I started a third business.  I got into property development.  I’m building 5 bungalows on a plot of land that I leased for 10 years.  The risk/reward profile looked good to me.  I borrowed the money at a gigantic percentage with no security to lease the land, and used my own money to develop it.  I’ve paid a lot in interest so far, but have managed to use my excess cash flow to complete the first of the five bungalows.   Two others are partly complete.

Meanwhile my long term R&D projects have been inspiring greater confidence, and so I pushed the pedal to the metal and maxed out my expenditures against cash flow.  That’s a high risk move.  But it’s a move I was in a better position to take, as more and more new projects were approaching becoming profitable.

I have a chicken and egg situation with all of my businesses.  In order to increase revenue from the existing ones, I need to hire more marketing staff than I have the money to pay for.  In order to complete my R&D for product development, and then effectively market, I need to hire more staff than I have the money to pay for.

So I gambled that if I bought some eggs, I’d get some chickens in time to pay for eggs net 60 days.  I hired some new marketing staff, on faith.

It was a good gamble.  They increased sales well above their expenses.  The momentum has increased, and now I’m in a position to double down and further expand the marketing department.  Last week I discovered a great new hire who in his first few days has shown tremendous promise to increase sales in several of my businesses.  This is giving me confidence to keep the pedal to the metal and hire more much needed engineers.

Last month I dumped money into finishing up the first bungalow.  At the same time the oldest business had cash flow issues.  This led to me having to dip into savings to make payroll and some other expenses.  That’s not sustainable, and is scary and dangerous.  My income remains solid, but now expenses are large, with 19 staff and plenty of regular expenses for R&D materials and bungalow construction.

But now we have increased momentum.  The kinetic energy that we’ve built up is more valuable than money.  And it feeds on money.

It seems my instincts for risk vs reward were finely tuned.  I felt in my skin that it was important to push the pedal to the metal.  I knew that I’d have to tough out a period of having nightmares about finances.  Income will increase fast, I knew.  I was right.  Other projects will come online fast enough, I thought.

I haven’t had to touch my savings in two years.  This month I had to dig into them.  But my instincts were right, and we are not over stretched.  Yesterday we pre-sold an unfinshed bungalow, using the finished bungalow as the show-piece.  We have an agreement for 25 percent down now, plus 25% when the bungalow is 50% completed (it’s 25% completed now), and the remainder when the compound is complete.  This 25 % down is enough to
1) replenish all the savings I dipped into
2) pay off the construction workers back salary
3) complete the bungalow to 70%
4) give a little cash flow buffer.

So now the property development business is no longer a drain on my cash flow, and is a self supporting new business, with huge growth potential.  The construction project has done very well, and we will duplicate our efforts and build several compounds.  It’s a good solid business, and a great diversification.

Within three months we should get a large cash infusion, as one of our first in-house developed products hits the market.  That will enable me to fund as many engineers as I can find, and to develop the best marketing team that I can.

This has been a story of risk vs reward.  Some people might read that I took an embarassingly large amount of risks.  Some people might view it that my instincts were finely honed, and I took my sportscar at maximum speed around the corner until the doors were scratching the guard rails.  Dipping into my savings is not something that I’m proud of this month, but a few years down the line, I will be.  A few years from now, I’ll look back and know that I could not have gotten the chickens without gambling that the eggs would pay off in time.

New bungalows should sell in the medium term.  Two or three other income streams will be coming on line within six months, and a few more within a year.  Google will no longer own my ass.  I’ll be in a position where businesses have synergy, and I’ll have ample income redundancy.

It’s been a scary ride.  In hindsight, every move was the right one.  But you never know that when you make decisions.