An Omega attempts to adjust his mentality through observation of higher-status men:
One thing I have tried to fathom about the very high-status mentality is their decisiveness. They generally seem to know what they want and pursure it as they see fit without asking for permission from anyone else. This trait seems to be a key ingredient in the confidence they exude. Staying true to your mission no matter what happens is known by the manosphere and redpill community as holding your frame. High status men are masters at this. Know what you want and hold firm.
Decisiveness is derived from three sources:
Self-confidence from past successes
Indifference to the invalid opinions of others
Vision of what the successful attainment of the objective looks like
Self-confidence
The past successes from which self-confidence is derived do not have to be related to the current subject at hand. Whether a man is deciding whether to ask a girl out, propose marriage, quit his job, or start a new business venture, there is no end to the number of possibilities that could go wrong. Gammas, in particular, believe that their ability to predict catastrophe makes them smarter, which is both true to a limited extent and irrelevant; every game designer has, by definition, the ability to foresee every possible pathway for the player both good and bad.
It’s not the possibilities that matter, but the probabilities. The fact that there are many potential pathways to a negative outcome don’t matter, what matters is their probability versus the probability of the various positive outcomes. The decisive man understands that there is a risk of failure, but he balances that understanding with the knowledge that he has had both successes and failures before, which gives him the ability to quickly ascertain if success or failure are more likely.
The reason self-confidence is so difficult to fake is that the individual who lacks it doesn’t even know what it is. He only knows what it looks like from the outside, which is why, sooner or later, his ersatz self-confidence will inevitably be observed to be fraudulent by others.
This is why aiming for, achieving, and building on the small wins is vital. It would probably astonish many low-status men to know how small the character-defining victories of the average high-status man were; the key thing was that those little victories were won when the man was in his formative years and they formed an indelible impression upon his psyche.
Indifference
Like self-confidence, indifference is very difficult to convincingly fake, particularly by those men who are more sensitive than the norm. But let me share one example of why indifference to the opinions of others is absolutely necessary for any success, even small victories.
When I first suggested producing leatherbound editions of our books, every single person involved on the team thought it was a stupid idea. Some of them will freely admit that they actually thought it was a crazy idea borne out of a narcissistic desire to see my own books bound in leather. None of them believed there would be a market for it.
I completely ignored every single point raised by every single one of them. Not because they are stupid - this was an unusual case where MPAI did not apply - but because I knew they were perfectly and profoundly ignorant on the subject. Every single one of them was looking at it only from their own perspective, and all of them were too young to remember when Franklin Library regularly sold out print runs of 3,000 or more leather books.
I knew the market existed. They did not. So, their opinions were both irrelevant and invalid. Therefore, I cared no more what they thought about it than NASA cared what I thought about the Mars rover. Never allow the opinions of either the ignorant or the idiotic to factor into your thinking in any way, shape, or form, and you will inevitably become more decisive because you are not allowing the uninformed negativity of others to erroneously influence your analysis.
Vision
Most people approach a project by thinking more about themselves and what the potential effects a successful project will have on them than they do on the actual objective itself. This accomplishes absolutely nothing. The more clear your picture of what success entails, the more objectively quantifiable your definition of success, the more attainable it becomes.
The loser dreams of the crowd cheering for him after he scores the winning goal in the big game. He dreams of consequences experienced, not accomplishments achieved. The winner dreams of what the position of the defense is, what the right moment to break looks like, what his first touch will be, and how he will shoot the ball to get it past the keeper.
The more focused your vision, the more decisive you will be about taking action when the moment presents itself.
Now, I know that low-status men are always eager to explain why they can’t do one thing or another. It’s difficult, they’re scared, they’re too this, that, or the other thing. That all may be true, but I don’t care. Nobody cares. And they shouldn’t care either, because neither justification nor understanding is action. There are a million ways to fail, there are ten million reasons not to even try, but the fact is that there is only ever one pathway to success and that is moving forward, even if moving forward happens to mean making a tactical retreat, a fighting withdrawal, or even giving up.
As my grandfather, who fought on Guadacanal, Tarawa, and Saipan, a bona fide war hero eulogized as the Marine’s Marine by no less than the Commandant of the Marine Corps himself, once advised me: “When you’re lying on the beach with people shooting at you and everyone is looking at you wanting to know what to do, give an order, any order.”
This suspiciously like advice derived from his personal experience, so I asked him what order he had given in those circumstances. He laughed and said: “We had no cover, there was nowhere to hide, and it didn’t seem like a good idea to just lay there waiting to get shot, so I jumped up and shouted ‘Follow me!’”
Which, as it happens, is the motto of his division, the 2MARDIV. He also said that while the biggest surprise of his life was reaching cover alive, the second biggest was when he turned around and saw 200 men right behind him.
Don’t be afraid to be decisive. Yes, you might fail, but if you don’t move forward, you will fail.
Semper Fi
Re: your grandfather - YUUUUUUUTTTT!!!