Creating a Personal Mission




The most important thing in a man’s life is his mission. Without your mission, you are nothing.
You are your mission. Period.

When I say mission, I don’t mean your job. Your mission is building an incredible life – good friends, good relationships, spiritual, mental and physical health, fun hobbies, challenges, leisure, intellectual growth, and fun. The idea that a man’s mission is only his job is a modern invention designed to turn people into drones who sacrifice their entire lives for their jobs. By the same token, your job is a critical part of your mission. Just as the idea that a man’s mission is just his job is harmful, there is an equally harmful idea that you are a “slave” to the system if you dedicate yourself to a career and work a 9 to 5 job. A career is often the best way to challenge yourself, and you can live a beautiful and fulfilling life working a 9 to 5, so long as you are not doing it just to make society happy or feed your addictions.

The purpose of life

Since writing was invented, philosophers have tried to figure out what the highest pleasure in life is. Some said honor. Some said physical pleasure. Some said spiritual enlightenment. Some said knowledge.

They are all wrong. The highest pleasure in life for a man or a woman is to follow their mission because following your mission includes within it all of the other pleasures. When I pursue my mission, I learn things, I gain honor, I have fun, and I feel spiritually at peace. Any of those pleasures by themselves are useless. What good is knowledge if you are not doing anything with it? What good is spiritual enlightenment if you’re sitting on top of a mountain by yourself thinking about nothing? What good are physical pleasures if you live like an animal and die of a heart attack at 45?

Having fun and getting love are necessary parts of a man’s life. Men evolved to have love in life, and without love and fun, we will not pursue the other parts of our mission as successfully. To borrow a Nietzschean phrase, it has only been “life-denying” ideologies that have tried to paint love and fun as somehow bad things. No human emotion is inherently bad by itself - emotions only become bad when they become divorced from the mission as a whole and become the sole focus of one’s life.

What should my mission be?

Nobody can tell what your mission should be. Not me, not your parents, not your girlfriend, and not society. Reality and you are too complex for anybody to tell you what to do with your life. That said, it is smart to look up to successful and intelligent people to help figure out what to do. And here are my opinions as to what your mission should entail.

  • Challenges. Humans are attracted to transcendence, which I define that which just lies outside our grasp, just outside our knowledge, just outside our abilities. We evolved to seek challenges and overcome them, not to do the same thing over and over again.


  • Relationships. You need a strong and reliable network of friends and ideally, family and female relationships as well. Humans evolved to be social animals, not to be heartless hermits.


  • Creativity. Humans evolved to create. Period.


  • Helping People. Some of you may disagree, but I believe that humans evolved to help each other.


  • Physical and mental health. This one is obvious.

Aside from these broad strokes, it’s up to you to figure out your mission. The world is too complex and fluid for you to buy into rigid ideas that you should have this job or that job, or impress this or that person, or focus on this or that goal. All of society’s structures are built on sand and could be rendered irrelevant tomorrow. There are men that dedicated their entire lives to a job, only to have job eliminated by an app written by a 17-year old. There were men in the 80s that dedicated their entire lives to being awesome at heavy metal, only to see heavy metal be replaced by EDM. There are men and women who dedicated their entire lives to being a CEO, or a Congressman, or a whatever, and then realized that they were miserable when they actually took that job.

You must be flexible and fluid to constantly readjust your mission based on the realities of the world around you. If you base your entire life’s mission on a job, or achieving some goal, or a woman, what are you going to do when that job or goal or woman is no longer there? Kill yourself?

I know a guy whose dream, ever since he was 8 years old, was to play Major League Baseball and win the World Series. And guess what – he did! He won a World Series in the 90s. But because that was his life’s mission, he had no idea what to do after he retired from baseball. Now he is in his 40s, he lives in a one bedroom apartment, he works a  job, and spends all his time creeping on girls at nightclubs. The highlight of his year is a sports convention where people pay him a little money to sign their memorabilia.

He never readjusted his mission.

Society told him that winning a World Series was a worthy goal for a man. Society lied. Winning a World Series is awesome, but it’s not everything. You need a complete, well-balanced life.

And here is the most important part of following your mission: the joy is in the pursuit, not the results. Because really, you can’t control the results. You can be robbed tomorrow and lose everything you have. Your company might go out of business because of something that is totally not your fault. You can make $100 million and be sad because some other guy made a billion dollars. Your wife might turn out to be a cheater or die in a car accident. If you base your happiness on your results, you will always be unhappy. But if you base your happiness on the pursuit, nothing can faze you, because as long as you are alive, you can wake up tomorrow and fight the battle again. If you ask super-successful men what they most long for, many of them say that they secretly wish they could lose everything so they could start from the beginning because they love the process.

When you look at your entire life as your mission, every moment has meaning in the overall context of your life so overcoming every challenge is exhilarating. Cleaning your room is no longer a boring chore; it’s part of your mission and is just as important as pitching in Game 7 of the World Series because you need to have a clean room to be able to focus on baseball. Every bad thing that happens to you is just another challenge to overcome and an opportunity to learn and become an even stronger version of yourself.

What’s the point of this article?

You may ask: “You say that the most important thing in a man’s life is his mission. But if his entire life is his mission, aren’t you saying a tautology – a man’s life is his life?” I am. But I wrote this article to change your mindset. You will be much more successful if you see your life as your mission rather than as a series of unconnected events. You will also be more successful if you cut out distractions, addictions, and people that are not contributing to your mission.

How to pursue your mission

I can’t tell you how to succeed at your mission. But I can give some tips.

Reduce your needs and wants as much as possible. The more addictions, mental baggage, and bad people in your life you have, the less freedom and mobility you have. If you can live in a one bedroom apartment and eat beans (and I guarantee you can), you can pursue your business or passion. But if you are dependent on having money, having a certain girlfriend, etc…, you limit your options.

You need faith. Focused, sustained, intelligent effort always pays off. The problem is that many people give up when things get tough. If I walk into a McDonald’s I am usually sure that I will get shitty customer service because the workers there hate their jobs. Working at McDonald’s is considered one of the lowest jobs in our society, and most of the people there hate their job, hate their life, and see no hope for the future. They suck at their jobs because they have no faith that working hard at McDonald’s will get them anywhere and they have no faith that there is a plan B they can pursue that gets them where they want to be. Nobody cares about being the best fast food employee, so they don’t do a good job.

If they had faith, however, they would see working at McDonald’s as part of their mission so they would figure out a way to move onto something better. They would either do a great job at McDonald’s and move up in the company, do something on the side, or leverage the people they met at McDonald’s to find something better. Either way, they would have hope that working hard would get them to somewhere better.
Stop thinking about what other people think The biggest obstacle to most men pursuing their mission is their obsession with what others think and their fear of others. This “other” may be specific people (their parents, their girlfriend, their friends) or it can be a more generalized fear (God, society, the cosmic alpha male, or the magical “them”).

Girls and your mission

Guys never sound dumber than when they pontificate on what women are attracted to in a man. They will say things like “women just want money, man” or “women just want a@sholes” or “women just want celebrities.” All of those theories are wrong because they only show one side of the story.

Women want a man that is pursuing a mission because, as I pointed out earlier, a man on a mission enjoys ALL of life’s other pleasures as well. Women don’t JUST want a guy with a fun life, or a guy with money, or a guy that gets other girls … they want a guy that has ALL OF THAT. They settle for guys that get only some of those things because they just can’t find better.

You may ask: why do women want a man on a mission? Why don’t they just go on their own mission? Well, women do follow their own mission, but men have an advantage in pursuing their mission.

Men, because they have a conquering instinct and a desire to be the alpha male, have an easier time not caring what other people think.

As I’ve written elsewhere, one of the biggest, if the not the biggest, source of anxiety for both men and women alike, is fear of the alpha male. Humans evolved to obey the alpha male, and evolution enforces this obedience by subconsciously making us feel anxiety whenever we do something that we think may upset or offend the alpha male. This is a primal emotion, and we may not even know that we are feeling “afraid of the alpha male” when we feel anxiety, but that’s what the underlying mechanism is. Similarly, scientists have theorized that at least some forms of depression are an emotional reaction we feel after we feel like the tribe has rejected us. Some scientists have even theorized that depression is designed to make us feel listless and paralyzed after we are “defeated” by the alpha male so we don’t keep endlessly fighting (imagine a drunk guy who keeps trying to fight after he gets his ass kicked – evolution is trying to prevent that).

Because of this fear of the alpha male, human beings aren’t wired for greatness. We are wired to be anxious, afraid of confrontation, submissive, conformist, lazy, addicted to pleasure, focused on petty things, and adverse to change. I call these emotions the “despairing emotions.” Furthermore, the fear of the alpha male congeals in people’s minds as a general fear of society and reality in general. We don’t know why we feel a generalized anxiety at everything, but the source of that anxiety is subconsciously a fear of an unknown alpha male (who manifests himself as reality itself) that is fighting against us.

Out of our many emotions, men have one emotion that can fight this fear of the alpha male: the conquering instinct. Men have a powerful compulsion to conquer other men and BE the alpha male. Like any human emotion, it is hard to describe this emotion in a name or to filter it out from all the other emotions that motivate us, but here is my best attempt: men have a desire to compete, win, and subjugate other men. It is most likely linked to testosterone. On the flipside, men evolved to become submissive and give up on being the alpha male once they have been subjugated to preserve the integrity of the tribe.

Women, for evolutionary reasons, do not have this conquering emotion (or at least, as much of it). To be sure, they want to be successful, powerful, rich, important and all the other things men want. But whenever they try to confront an alpha male, they become overwhelmed by anxiety and paralyzed. This is not their fault, it’s a natural biological reaction.

Women can work manage this anxiety by being given a fixed set of tasks and “encouragement” (usually from a man) that they can accomplish these tasks. If a man tries to induce anxiety in a woman the woman can work through it because she knows what she has to do and she has the confidence that she can accomplish her task.

When we think of a guy like Mark Zuckerberg starting Facebook, we think of a guy working very hard and being very smart. But starting a company liked Facebook also requires a lot of “alpha male” emotions, because the founder must have the emotional fortitude to venture into uncertainty and withstand society and other men trying to emotionally intimidate him. In 2006, only two years after Facebook was started, Yahoo offered to buy Facebook for a billion dollars. But Zuckerberg had a broader mission: he wanted to change the world, and he believed he could make Facebook much more valuable than a billion dollars. As you can imagine, almost every person in his life, including most of the Facebook management and investors, wanted Zuckerberg to sell, and many of them turned on him when he said no. Most of the Facebook management left within a year, and Zuckerberg probably received a lot of angry calls and messages. Now Facebook makes $10 billion a year and Zuckerberg is worth $60 billion.

Think about the Zuckerberg story. Most men and women in his position would have sold Facebook. Even though he had built an incredible company in two years, most people would have given into their despairing emotions (here, the desire to retire on a billion dollars) and would have been too afraid to change the world. But Zuckerberg, even though he looks and acts like a nerd, was the alpha male.

THAT is what attracts women.

What’s interesting is that women are not necessarily interested in the money per se, or even the knowledge that the man is pursuing his mission. Instead, they are attracted to the emotional state of a man on a mission. Just being around a man on a mission turns them on. This is why women are attracted to athletes, celebrities, and even lower-level guys like DJs and club promoters. Those guys are DOING SOMETHING rather than standing there drooling at them. A lot of men bust their a@s on their mission during the day, and go out and become submissive and supplicating to women at night, and get rejected. Knowing that you need to keep your “mission” emotional state even when interacting women is one of those weird hacks of knowing game. You may ask “how can I pretend I am pursuing my mission when I am at a bar trying to enjoy a few drinks?”

Well, it’s an irrational quirk of human psychology, but you must have the mental state and emotions of a man on a mission, even though you are technically relaxing in a festive atmosphere. I use the “cheese pizza” method: I focus on something I am passionate about (my business, jiu-jitsu, cheese pizza) and I focus my thoughts and emotions on that thing rather than the girl. The girl can FEEL that my true heart and soul is not fixated on her, and she likes that.

Women do not have the conquering emotion like men do, but they still want to feel the joy of conquering, so they need to experience it vicariously through a man. The same way men watch sports and subconsciously fantasize about being the athletes, women subconsciously want to watch you conquer your enemies. This is why you must FEEL like you are pursuing your mission when you are with a women – she is attracted to that feeling. It’s a weird thing, but when women are attracted to “alpha” guys.

When hanging out with a woman, you must make her feel like you are confidently, joyfully, and resiliently pursuing your life’s mission, your life is fun and interesting, and that you will let her join your fun and interesting life if she emotionally invests in you and behaves properly.

All of these concepts are connected. If you are not joyful, she will assume your life is not fun and interesting. If you can be distracted from your mission or be perturbed, she will either think your life isn’t that fun and interesting, or that she shouldn’t join because it can be interrupted at any time. If you let her join without her emotionally investing, she will assume that there is nothing special about your life.

Resilience is the ability to confidently pursue your goals and not let anything or anybody perturb you. Women are attracted to resilience because they naturally want a protector, and a protector’s commitment is only credible if he cannot be distracted from his mission, whatever the mission is is. If a protector becomes emotional, distracted, or submissive, he can no longer be trusted to protect. If you shoot a bullet at Superman and he flinches for even a moment you will think “oh shit, maybe he isn’t bulletproof.”

Women want men to see if they can be perturbed or distracted from their mission. If she raises doubts about you, and you become a blathering, submissive, supplicating, idiot, then she knows that you will sell Facebook for a billion dollars when you could have waited for it to become worth $50 billion. In other words, she knows that if SHE can perturb you, anybody can.

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