How to start taking action, Part 1: hardness, habits, and hangups.

Why people don't take action even though they want to.

One of the more perplexing questions in the realm of dating and mating is why guys don’t make more of an effort to improve their prospects with women. Zoom out: why do people get stuck and what motivates them to get unstuck? It’s something teachers, employers, mentors, and coaches are confronted with in perpetuity. Lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. 

“Laziness” is the simple answer, especially if the juice isn’t worth the squeeze (perceived or actual). Ask any salesman who’s had his commission payout restructured so that he earns less than he used to, or where the quota is impossible to meet. Cold calls suddenly feel impossible. People respond to reward structures and gradients.  If a student’s hard work doesn’t translate into a better grade, or if her parents don’t care about grades, what’s the point of working hard when she could spend her time doing other more fun or interesting things—like OnlyFans?

When a task is simply too hard—again, doesn’t matter if it’s perceived or actual—people will often not try at all, or only feign to try, so that the powers at be will be assuaged. To go back to our salesman example, if it takes 100 cold calls or emails for every new customer and that rate isn’t going to allow him to meet his quota or earn commission, he won’t make the calls, or at least not as many.

Laziness, understandable or not, can also be a product of not understanding or having experience overcoming difficulties in life. We see so much sloth, obesity, and poverty in modern society, because, while there are structural reasons such as the lack of affordable housing and the prevalence and widespread availability of sugary foods, surviving and being entertained isn’t hard. Couple that with the fact I can now stream every movie or TV series on demand that’s ever been created, play video games that are truly amazing, fully immersive and engaging experiences, or use my phone to scroll through an unlimited amount of content on social media, and it’s easy for people to avoid doing hard things. Rigor and expectations have been driven out of public education, and we see this not just in public schools, but even in some of our most prestigious private universities. 

Whatever the reason, if you don’t have enough practice doing hard things, overcoming difficulty, putting effort into work that doesn’t yield an immediate payout, it’s damn near impossible to gain traction when trying to make a change, or achieve a goal. I used to have clients take cold showers or run stairs or go to a hot yoga class (scenery is usually pretty good at these too btw)—not because they necessarily had a relationship to getting better with women, but because these things are all hard, and if you can convince yourself to do them and see that it’s not terrible, you can start to convince yourself to do other, harder things.

For a lot of people, the two forms of laziness dovetail: they perceive the change as being too hard AND they don’t like or aren’t used to doing hard things. This is especially toxic, because one feeds upon the other. The threshold for doing something difficult is lower because he doesn’t like doing hard things, and therefore he doesn’t even attempt to do the hard thing, not knowing that if he did, he’d find it wasn’t as hard as he first thought.

Another common reason people don’t make the changes they want is because they’re comfortable as is—I’m a big fan of the Psychacks podcast. In his short talk on The Trap of a Good Enough Life, he points out that in his experience as a counselor, the people most likely to change are those who are experiencing significant discomfort with regard to how they are living (this is one reason why immigrant contribute disproportionately to American dynamism, and why their children disproportionately succeed at entrepreneurship and startups).

However, if things are mostly OK—not great, but also not bad—the value proposition isn’t high enough to motivate action. Many if not most people are in this situation (in some ways I am myself!)...good enough job, decent sex life and/or relationships, some level of entertainment and meaning—they could make more money, have more rewarding relationships, enjoy hotter, more consistent sex, pursue a more purposeful existence, but all of the above would take a lot of work and risks loss. For example, if a married dude in his 40s suddenly decides he’s going to lose a ton of weight, build muscle, get in fantastic shape, and start a new business, those changes are going to put him at a crossroads: if he succeeds, does he leave his frumpy wife for hotter, younger women? If not, what’s the impetus for taking action, working hard, and taking so much risk if it doesn’t make his life materially better. Or, suppose he fails, causing him to lose a fair amount of his savings? Now, his wife might divorce him and take half of what’s left. When there’s a choice between safety and greatness, most people will choose safety, and while it’s easy to treat this choice with disdain, it’s important to remember that not everyone can be great, and “good enough” is sometimes prudent.

Many people aren’t able to take action due to a fear of failure or rejection. This is probably the leading reason why men don’t get better with women: they’re afraid and don’t want to experience rejection, whether talking to a girl they don’t know, or making a move on a date. “What if she rejects me?!” they say, as if rejection is some sort of permanent condition or state from which one can never recover, when in reality, getting rejected by a girl is transitory. In my experience, it’s actually been the opposite: rejection is exhilarating and validating. 

Like, sure, I’d rather she say yes. But when you hear “no,” you walk away knowing that you have the balls to talk to a girl you’re attracted to, that there’s no real consequences for that rejection, and you can easily do it again. Similarly, if you escalate on a date and the girl rebuffs your advances, the net result is that she respects you more, not less. Doesn’t mean she ever sleeps with you, but she knows you’re a man who’s willing to go for what he wants, which is a key point of separation. Women want guys who will take that risk, who will make the move, who will make things happen. Guys who can’t force her to do it, and she doesn’t want to: men give, women receive. The fear of rejection or failure is often the root cause of why you get rejected and fail. No, not every girl will say yes—in fact, most will say no. But the ability to take that risk is the difference between top guys and the rest. Why would a woman want to date a guy who is too much of a pussy to ask her out on a date? The answer is that she wouldn’t.

Habits are very, very hard to break out of and change. James Clear’s Atomic Habits is one of the better books  on how to change, but it’s not a silver bullet to getting anything done if you can’t also get past whatever reason above your habits are associated with. As for the habits themselves, the thesis Clear puts forth is that you have to replace the bad habits with good ones, and that this happens incrementally, one day at a time (we’ll come to the how of this in Part Two).

The first step to making a change then, is to understand the mental barriers that are preventing change. Is it laziness for the reason that the task is perceived to be too hard, or the fact that you simply don’t like doing hard things…both? Are you too comfortable—is life good enough? Or, are your habits preventing you from taking action? It’s very hard to change if one’s life includes playing video games or scrolling on the phone for four plus hours a day, or any regular use of alcohol, pot, or other drugs, for example. For most people who are struggling to change, it’s likely some combination of all three.

There are other reasons people don’t take action not listed here, but these are the primary ones I’ve seen in my experience as a coach and a teacher—if there are other important ones, please leave a comment below.

Part two is here.