@Rain,
Hard to say. Maybe it's early childhood experiences. Maybe it's genetic. Who knows.
My parents definitely stuck to the "build your child's confidence up in a healthy, realistic, encouraging way" formula. Then by the time I was in school my teachers all thought I was great. I didn't have a teacher who disliked me until third grade. Third grade kind of messed me up, but I recovered.
Has anything ever challenged this belief?
Yeah, of course.
I was suicidal as a teenager.
I had zero social skills. No friends, no girls. I had to watch everyone in high school and college living the good life while I sat on the sidelines.
Then once I started in pickup, my results were at first painfully poor, then painfully average.
All throughout that you have to say to yourself, "Maybe I am just not as awesome as I think I am. The whole rest of the world sure doesn't seem to think so."
I got very into reading HP Lovecraft fiction, which gives you a cosmic view of life... the entirety of mankind is an infinitesimal speck in a vast, infinite, uncaring cosmos. Obviously any single man is a mere speck among specks.
I would say ultimately I arrived at a few different kinds of awarenesses:
- Every man is important and unique in his own life and to the people who care about him / he can get to care about him
- Every man is also pretty average, ordinary, and ignored by most of the people most of the time
- Every man who has ever lived is completely insignificant in the cosmic sense of things... the whole of the material universe
But each one of those awarenesses is rather liberating:
- You're the most important guy in the world, because either this person you're talking to is going to realize it and become part of your life, or she isn't, in which case she isn't ever even going to factor into your life (so her opinion may as well not even exist)
- You're also a pretty ordinary, average guy, which takes a lot of the pressure off... you can screw up, make mistakes, and it's all okay, because you're not really any different from anyone else
- Also, while things matter at the micro scale, at the macro, universal scale, none of this stuff we're doing matters, so you can try things, be bold, and even reach for outlandish goals, which don't seem outlandish at all viewed from a cosmic scale, because even the biggest goals at the micro level still look tiny from a macro view
You can hold all these views simultaneously -- that you are supremely important, average, and not important at all -- without dissonance, and use each of them where appropriate.
I believe this is simply the most rational, realistic way to look at life.
Does this belief work for women? If a fat chick believed she was the most high value woman in the world would she get the most high value man in the world and/or a man who believes himself to be the most high value man?
I didn't say believing you are the highest value individual gets you the highest value mate.
No matter how hot and awesome your chick is, you can probably meet another who is at least a little bit hotter and a little more awesome.
But yes, I think it'd work for that fat girl, provided she is genuinely self-improving.
I have improved myself a lot over the years, driven by this belief that I am a pretty high value guy. If I realize I am not high value in some way, it generally becomes important for me to remedy that. e.g., for a while in my early 20s I was blind to how fat I was until my best friend and my girlfriend each started ridiculing me for my fat belly, and it clicked for me. So I slimmed way down and put on more muscle than I ever had.
Or, I was a few years into pickup, and going out with a wingman, but when we'd go out with his party friends I didn't get along with them at all, and my wing said, "You know, you're pretty cool one-on-one, and you're pretty good with girls, but you're really not good in groups of people, are you?" and that set a fire under me to do as much socializing with as many varied groups of people as possible to get myself good at that so I wouldn't have this hole in my personality where I sucked in large groups of people.
If you've got a fat chick who believes she's high value, sooner or later she is either going to have to face the fact that if she really wants other people to view her as high value, she is going to need to slim down... or else she is going to have to slip into denial, in which case she will know in the back of her head that she may be a valuable person, but she is not by any means presenting herself in the most valuable way.
If you have a look at
this post by ElderPrice
What would you say to people in
@ElderPrice position, since he doesn't have this belief for decades since a young age like yourself and he has evidence to the contrary?
I spent years talking to myself about how women don't want me, they always reject me, every girl I ask out says no, most of the time women just ignore me, and so on and so forth.
I also went through a period early on where I was going out for a bunch of months, going hard, doing 20-50 approaches a week and getting nothing from it, because I was starting from zero and I had no wingman and no mentors around me to work with, I was just doing it on my own from scratch, and I was not getting anywhere. It was tremendously frustrating; I even had some mini-breakdowns.
The only thing I can say there is the same thing I had to go through: you need to keep taking your swings at it until you catch a lucky break.
Once you catch that first lucky break, and hook up with a girl despite feeling like "this will never work", now it's worked once.
Then you go out and keep doing it some more until you catch another lucky break. Then you get another one. Then you get a girl who is attractive enough that you find yourself saying, "Wow. I can't believe I got that girl. Wow!" and at that point you have begun to make it work.
Then you go through the desert where you are laying a bunch of more average chicks, wondering if that one really hot girl was a fluke, until you lay another really hot girl. Then some more average chicks, then another really hot girl again. Then more really hot girls.
Then you go through the desert where you are laying hot girls, but they aren't really girlfriend caliber girls, until you start getting more girlfriend caliber girls.
At that point you're hitting absolute abundance, and basically all your worries with women or confidence issues with them are gone for good, assuming you are able to hold onto the women you want.
If you aren't able to hold onto them, and you are losing women in relationships, then you have another hurdle to overcome, which is the long-term retention problem.
There's no shortcut to these mentalities. You need to get the results first; the mentalities will follow after.
That said, you can still have some ego driving it; the healthiest mentality to have IMO is, "Well, women may not want me, but I'm going to keep doing it anyway, because sooner or later I am going to figure out how TO make women want me, if I can learn girls well enough."
For me it has always been about "learning women." It is not even really about me "getting good."
Think of it like this: if you knew everything about a woman... every like of hers, no matter how small... every dislike... every passion she has... every dream... every thought she's ever had... could you seduce her? Probably, right?
The better you can get to know women, the more reliably you can seduce them.
For me it always was and has always been a process of getting to know women. Learning seduction, if you ask me, is more or less just a process of figuring out where your blanks are with women, then talking to them in ways that helps you fill in those blanks, so you can start getting the girl.
Chase
