In Napoleon Hill’s famous book ‘Think and Grow Rich,’ he devotes an entire chapter to the transmutation of sexual energy, whereby one takes their powerful sexual urges and impulses and transforms them into the pursuit of a goal. Or, as he puts it, the creation of ‘riches.’ But many readers complained that, at least in the book, he failed to explain exactly HOW to do this.
What’s interesting, though, is that that book was published in 1937. Hill was merely illustrating that the richest and most successful men of the time had found a way to turn their sex drive into a powerful, productive force that assisted in the achievement of their dreams and goals. He also mentioned that it does not mean ‘celibacy,’ or ‘repression of natural instincts.’ But he wasn’t exposed to an entire generation of social media, women publicly sexualizing themselves for money and attention, and internet porn. Even if he had been, though, the message would still be the same; in order to transmute sexual energy into something productive, one must have a vision.
For those who are motivated by a combination of love and sex when they’re young, or get married early in life and have a family, the vision starts to emerge on it’s own. Many things have been created or invented because passionate men (often with a strong sex drive) wanted to cement themselves in the universe and make themselves more appealing to women, or even to a particular woman. It’s possible that Bill Gates, who spent all day and night sitting in a computer lab learning to program and experimenting with his own code, had a crush on someone. While all the other teenage kids and college students were out having fun, he might have been (subconsciously) thinking, ‘she thinks I’m a geek now, but wait until I launch Microsoft Windows.’
But the formation of a vision is, at the very least, complicated. What does one choose to pursue? Animals are blessed with smaller, less sophisticated brains that are for the most part uncapable of making plans or choices related to the future. They react predominantly on instinct, which means that when they’re hungry, they hunt or search for food, when they feel threatened by a dangerous predator, they fight or run away, and when they’re horny, they try to find a member of the opposite sex to mate with. Pretty simple. But as a human being, capable of so much more than that, what to do with our life, and even just our Sunday afternoon, isn’t so obvious.
Phone games and hamburgers, Red Pill, or David Goggins?
By the time you reach about 30, it starts to become pretty clear that life is more than a hedonistic, pleasure-seeking cruise. This isn’t so plain to see when you’re young. I was lucky to have stumbled on a nasty, time consuming (and not so relaxing) hobby called golf at the age of 11. My first membership was $90. Ninety bucks for almost unlimited playing privledges at a nine-hole, municipal course, and it’s all I ever wanted to do all day, everyday. It’s probably what turned me into a bit of an anti-social, introverted kid, but at the very least, it kept me out of trouble. My dad used to drop me off there in the morning on his way to work, and usually had to drag me off the course when he was done.
But for those who fail to find a hobby or leisure activity to devote their time to, it’s easy to be lured into more expedient and novel forms of entertainment. In the 90’s, this typically meant drugs and alcohol, going to parties, and chasing girls. (None of these are necessarily bad, and they probably have their proper place in a young man’s life. But if they are overdone, they eventually have to be UNDONE). Now, kids naturally gravitate towards social media and games, food, and porn. All of these are things you have easy access to simply with the touch of a button on your phone. It’s amazing that you can have a hamburger and fries sitting right in front of you in 15 minutes or less, and you didn’t even have to go anywhere. And ‘social’ media often tends to be not so social at all, since so much of it is an attention seeking post, and at best a conversation using your eyes and thumbs rather than your mouth and ears, usually while sitting in a room by yourself. At least the unhealthy behaviors kids took part in in generations past were largely done with other people.
So what is a more productive alternative? Let’s take a look at the ‘Red Pill.’
Every living organism in the animal kingdom has two primary goals; 1) to survive, and 2) to reproduce. The latter often takes precedence over the former. Many different kinds of male insects are willing to sacrifice their own lives at the chance of courting a female (or they at least seem willing to risk it). Many female spiders, who are much larger than the males, devour their mates after copulation, and a male praying mantis is typically decapitated by the female while attemping to mate (but continues to finish the job even without its head). For these males, its apparent that it’s top priority in life is to mate with a female, and everything else is secondary.
Most of the ‘red-pillers’ you are familiar with have an appreciation for the evolution of our species. Some of them can even regurgitate a multitude of scientific facts and findings about human history, such that they almost seem on par with the evolutionists who carried out the research themselves. This is particularly the case when talking about the details of male-female attraction, and they can tell you every little detail about what men are looking for in a woman, and what women are looking for in men. Beyond just being interesting, it’s probably important that both sexes have an intimate awareness of what the opposite gender desires in a mate, since the topic seems to be left out and even avoided during our formative years of education. Talk to an honest, knowledgeable red-piller, and you should get nothing but facts; what do women like? What do men like? What are they looking for in a long-term mate? What are they looking for in a short-term mate? What turns them on? And what turns them off?
The red-pill seeks to help you maximize your ‘sexual market value,’ giving you a chance to expand your dating options, and increase the odds of finding a desireable mate, regardless of whether you are pursuing something long-term or short-term.
So what does this mean exactly?
It means that, if nothing else, you have a few guidelines for how to live your life and make decisions, with the onus on what will increase your ‘value’ as a man (or a woman). Do girls like guys who wear black shoes or brown ones? Oh, they like men in brown shoes? Then I guess I’ll buy the brown ones. Do chicks dig dudes who are clean shaven, or have a beard? Generally speaking, they prefer a beard or at least some stubble. Then I guess I’ll grow a beard (eventhough I don’t want to). Do they prefer a man who makes $50,000/year, or $100,000/year. Everywhere on earth, from the beginning of time, they have always wanted a man who makes more. Okay. Then I guess I’ll work more or find a new job with a higher salary. Lastly, when I buy a new motorcycle, should I buy a Kawasaki Ninja 650, because I love whipping through winding roads along the coast (which feels like something you’d only be able to experience in heaven, or at best a video game), or do I buy some kind of Harley Cruiser, that has a more comfortable backseat, so girls can actually go for a ride on my bike?
Drawbacks of Red-pill (and red-pill content creaters who are trying to ‘coach’ you)
If I were a non-human mammal, such as a tiger or a grizzly bear, and my only two purposes in life were to survive and attract mates, then by all means, it would make sense for me to go with the brown shoes, the beard, work more, and buy the Harley. But there is a third component to life that relates to being human, something much more individualistic.
During our early years of life, sometimes as young as three years old, humans are naturally drawn to certain things, and can even become totally consumed by them. They could be objects, devices, computers, activities, sports, instruments, cars, planes, architecture, or lego. (Women are often more interested in people). This plays a role in what we’d like to do with our life, and usually provides some early cues as to the direction we should take. One of my favorite authors, Robert Greene, describes the ongoing process of finding your life’s task in his book ‘Mastery.’ Failing to pick up on or ignoring these early clues can leave you aimless in life with no direction and nothing to strive for (even long after you are wealthy with a big house, a big boat, and a big wife). And it often results in choosing a path for the wrong reasons; What will make my parents proud? What do I have to do to feel financially secure, or buy a house? How can I earn the respect of my friends (and/or enemies)? And, in the case of red-pill ideology, how can I be more successful with women?
Consider the case of a young Chinese boy (let’s call him Chang), naturally mesmerized by the game of ping pong (I promise this is the last time I will talk about ping pong). Perhaps inspired by a gold-medal winning countrymen, he finds himself playing for a few hours a day, and by the time he reaches age 7 or 8, is totally hooked. As Chang plays more and more and continues to improve, he becomes even more motivated, and, without thinking about it, is regulary playing and practicing for 5 or 6 hours per day. It totally consumes him, and as he goes on making gradual progress in his skill development, competing with siblings and classroom rivals, he decides to dedicate his entire life to ping pong. By his teenage years, it’s all he can think about.
Meanwhile, his friends are also starting to take on different identities. A few of them have some productive hobbies and interests of their own, while others are pulled towards drugs, sex, and alcohol. One guy even has a girlfriend. This might make Chang feel jealous, but not nearly enough to sacrifice some of his time playing ping pong to go out and find a girl of his own. But lets say it does. Consider for a moment, he tries to split the difference. He doesn’t stop playing ping pong, but he decides to embrace a few red pill ideas to make himself more attractive to the opposite sex.
So what is ‘attractive,’ at least from a physical standpoint? Do girls like big dudes, skinny dudes, stocky guys, or muscular guys? Generally, although it’s not at the top of their list of what they desire in a mate, most women prefer the V-shaped body of an olympic swimmer or basketball player. As a skinny kid who plays ping pong, to achieve this look Chang would have to lift weights to increase the width of his shoulders and the size of his upper back. Neither of these two characteristics are beneficial to the game of ping pong. Plus, if he were truly dedicated to the game, his time in the gym would be taking away from his time practicing. And even if he did achieve the desired V-shaped look, he still has so much more to do to make himself ‘successful’ with women. By trying to split the difference, he comes up short in both departments.
Although Chang already only had a 0.00001% chance of winning a ping pong gold medal, his chances become literally 0% when he tries to find a balance between his dreams and a more normal life. What’s worse, though, is that the second he stopped practicing with so much intensity, he KNOWS his odds are zero. A few years go by, and regardless of whether he was able to turn himself into a sexual dynamo or not, he wakes up one morning and says, “But what about ping pong?”
Despite the fact that many of the red-pill creators and advocates could potentially provide some much needed coaching and mentorship to certain individuals (I am more than happy to acknowledge this), even some of the richest and most successful among them appear to have become slaves to a woman’s evolutionary inherited desires. When pressed on this issue, these men will often say things like, “hate only comes from below.” No. It’s just that there doesn’t seem to be any room for ping pong. And most of you who are telling Chang to hit the weight room are nowhere to be found when he is left there scratching his head.
A Life of Virtue
So does this mean that everyone should ignore the red pill and focus on ping pong? Not at all. It means that they have to find out what drives them. But this is easier said than done.
At some time in your life (again, probably when you were quite young), you looked up to someone you admired. That person could have been a parent, an older brother, an athlete, a musician, a teacher, or just some guy you saw playing ping pong. What was it about that person that you admired? What values did they possess that made you think, ‘I wish I were like him.’ You will probably find that you share some of those values yourself. Or, more specifically, you like yourself when you are demonstrating those values, and you don’t when you’re not.
If you can find an avenue, an environment, a community, or a course of action to signal those values (to yourself. Don’t take a video of yourself with your selfie stick at the grocery store offering to pay for someone’s groceries so that you can put it on Instagram), you should be able to find yourself moving in the right direction. You don’t have to discipline yourself to get into freezing cold water for 10 minutes, or be like David Goggins and turn yourself into the biggest bad-ass on earth, but it’s the right idea. You’re pathway to channel some of those virtues might come in the form of a job, a hobby, or a new skill. You’ll probably find that some of them cross paths with red-pill content (like the muscular upper-body, as long as you don’t play ping pong), and some of them don’t.
The answer, then, to the question of how to be driven, not by food, sex, pleasure, or society, is to have a vision of the person you are supposed to be, and to regularly signal to yourself that that is in fact the man you are through your own virtuous behavior. Unless you are trying to practice celibacy and live as a monk in a buddhist monastery, it’s not necessary to transmute sexual energy by sitting in the chakra position and meditating until your would-be sperm goes up through your spine and into your brain (but you can certainly experiment with it, and might find it to be a useful practice). And so long as the vision you have for yourself encompasses a healthy mind and body, you won’t have to worry about resisting the urge to order Uber-eats at 11pm, either.
Go out and do what makes you like yourself. It’s okay to start small and work you’re way up. You might end up trying many different things, and you might fail a hundred times. But you’ll never get too far off track.