Sometimes people get the impression that guys like me live some kind of charmed life and are good at everything. They think that they couldn’t do anything like I have because I’m perfect at everything and they’re “normal” guys so they could never develop anything even remotely close to Alpha 2.0.
I’m serious. There are guys who think this. You should see my email.
Today I’m going to help you guys out. I’m going to lay out every major mistake I’ve ever made in my life. I can’t list every mistake, because there would be way too many to list, but I can give you the big, giant, horrible ones… the ones that really screwed things up for me.
They are listed in no particular order. This should be fun! Here we go!
1. I got a girlfriend way too soon in life and got married way too soon.
Most of you who know my story know this already. When I was a young, dumb, inexperienced beta male at age 25, I married an older single mother. This one decision caused the following long-term problems in my life:
A. The marriage set me back financially at least ten years even without the divorce. Read this.
B. Being married almost put my business under. Read this.
C. The relationship and subsequent marriage caused me to gain over 50 pounds, some of which I’m still struggling to lose 20+ years later.
D. Being married caused a decent amount of regular drama and stress in my life that lasted almost a decade.
E. Being married murdered my sex life. Before getting married I was having sex on regular basis with FBs and it was good sex. Once I was married for about a year that dropped in frequency and stayed low until the divorce nine years later.
F. I got divorced, which cost me a decent amount of money in alimony and legal bills. It wasn’t horrible and I didn’t get “divorce raped.” Some people seem to think I did, and I didn’t. I was able to survive it financially and we didn’t have any sort of custody battle. But it was still a massive disruption in my life that lasted several years and cost me a lot of money for no reason.
G. It set back my pick-up and dating skills by at least ten years. I would have been far more skilled with women by age 35 had I never gotten married. Today I’m fine, but as many of you know, it took me several years of hard work to get my woman skills up. That would have been much less of an issue if I had stayed unmarried throughout my twenties and thirties.
2. I had children way too soon in life.
I love my kids. They’re a source of great pride and joy for me. But I could have had them later in life and should have. I’m a man, which means I can have kids pretty much whenever the hell I want. I made the utterly ridiculous and unforgivable mistake of having my kids in my mid-twenties when I was not much older than a kid myself. It caused the following problems:
A. It set me back financially at least five years (and yes, this is on top of the ten years the marriage set me back). Read this.
B. It made my marriage far worse. By far, the number one source of big arguments I had with my first wife during my first marriage were directly caused by the fact that we had children. Most married couples with kids will tell you the same thing. It was brutal. The marriage would have been far better if there were no kids. (It still wouldn’t have worked because it was monogamous, but it would have been much, much better.)
C. I made errors in raising my kids back then because I was far too young to be a proper dad. Guys in their twenties should not be dads!
3. I stupidly waited until my early twenties to lose my virginity.
Some guys seem to think that waiting a longer time to lose your virginity makes you a better man, or a more moral man, or a safer man, or a more focused man. All wrong. It’s all bullshit right-wing Societal Programming.
Likely the biggest source of angst and inner pain during my teenage years and early twenties was due to the fact that I wasn’t having any sex. Man, it hurt, and on multiple levels.
It was very good that I didn’t have a girlfriend during that time. That was something I did right. But I should have been having sex with an FB or two on a regular basis. I would have been happier, less stressed, more confident, had better self-esteem, and yes, more focused at my work and a more effective man overall.
I still remember how much better I felt overall once I started having sex on a regular basis (at least before I got married!). It was a world of difference. Losing my virginity in my teenage years would have had a huge and positive effect on my entire twenties, and perhaps my thirties as well. What a monumental mistake.
4. I didn’t spend any time abroad during my twenties.
I still regret this a little to this day. During my early and mid-twenties, I was very excited about traveling abroad and even perhaps living abroad for a year or two before returning to the USA. I read a lot of books about it and got very excited. Back then I was looking at doing this with Japan (it was the early 90s and Japan had not entered their zombie economy yet).
Alas, I didn’t go anywhere because I was scared. It would be almost 15 years later before I started regularly traveling to other countries. Way, way too long.
Had I lived abroad for a year or two way back in my early twenties, regardless of what country it was, it would have had a massive positive effect on the rest of my life going forward.
5. I chose to follow a “selling hours for dollars” model for my first business.
I’m very proud of my first business, my little computer consulting practice way back in the mid-90s. It was my first business success. I got to a six-figure income in 1990s dollars by the age of 27 because of that business. I did a lot right with it.
However, I made the massive and common error of getting into a business where I traded dollars for hours, rather than leveraging my time by decoupling what I sold to the hours I actually put in. I sold per-hour consulting services. This was fine, and made me some good money, but it also put me in the position where the only way I could feasibly increase my income was to put in more hours. That is pretty much the stupidest business model you could come up with, regardless of how much money you make.
I should have sold flat-fee services, retainer services, information, and/or products instead of per-hour services. I could have been a millionaire much sooner in life, and with a lot less stress and pain.
6. I waited too long to lose weight.
Younger men can get fat, get drunk a lot, eat like shit, do drugs to a degree, and pretty much fuck up their bodies without having it damage too much of the rest of their life. Once you hit age 35, you can’t do that anymore, and certainly not past 40.
I wanted to address my weight when I was in my early 30s, but I didn’t, at least not completely. While I have never again weighed what I weighed back then (which was a lot), I should have gotten down to my ideal weight at or around age 35. I was too focused on other areas of my life to make that happen, which is not an excuse.
Now I have to focus very hard on getting my body fat down at age 47. Not fun. It would have been much easier 17 years ago.
7. I charged way too low for my products and services for way too long.
Throughout most of my business career, in all of my businesses, I got stuck in the trap many entrepreneurs do of underestimating A) how valuable my products, information, and services really were and B) how much money my customer base was willing to spend.
I’ve lost millions of dollars over the past 20 years or so by charging too low for the things I’ve sold in my businesses. Even now I still don’t do this as well as I should (though I’m much better at it today). I could have made much more money on far less work hours had I figured this out and/or had the balls to actually raise my prices 25 years ago.
So, none of us are perfect. I’ve done a lot of dumb shit throughout my life. The above seven items aren’t even one percent of all the mistakes I’ve made. I just kept going despite my mistakes.
No one needs to be perfect to be happy.
Want over 35 hours of how-to podcasts on how to improve your woman life and financial life? Want to be able to coach with me twice a month? Want access to hours of technique-based video and audio? The SMIC Program is a monthly podcast and coaching program where you get access to massive amounts of exclusive, members-only Alpha 2.0 content as soon as you sign up, and you can cancel whenever you want. Click here for the details.
Thanks Caleb to share your mistakes, take a lot of courage.
Thanks for sharing man. It’s always tough to admit mistakes but hopefully putting it out there can help the currently young guys. I’m 41 now and made plenty of mistakes in life as a younger guy as well. Lots of trial and error to get to where I am now.
You’ve said it on this blog before but these young guys under 30 should definitely not get serious with women. You can date, get laid and all that fun stuff but don’t get too serious with any of them. I’m always baffled by these guys in their 20’s getting married before they’ve even reached their full potential. They get strong armed by the girlfriend to put a ring on it and cave-sad to see.
This is my struggle right now in a consulting business because the agents or clients insist on some stupid schemes like timesheets instead of just agreeing on a flat fee. To make it worse they refuse to pay upfront and have some things in a contract like if the hours are not approved or the agency who finds me the client doesn’t get paid they dont need to pay me anything! And on top of that I am liable to pay stuff if anything goes wrong with anything. Basically they are making me into they’re bank and insurance company also. This would have been my first big paying client but I felt it was way too risky to accept so I declined. Obviously these kinds of contracts are to be avoided but how do you negotiate to get them to pay upfront / ditch timesheets etc?
How do you know they would have sold the same amount if prices were higher? Perhaps the sales would be much lower? I think you cannot know until you test that and just because you can charge more now when you have experience and reputation and large following doesn’t mean you could have charged those prices when you were a nobody. So who knows, maybe you didn’t lose anything. Anyway saying you lost money by not charging more is like saying you lost money by not investing into something that ended up going up a lot.
Reasons:
1. Beta males
2. Societal Programming
3. Oneitis
4. Religion
…all of which are more powerful than logic or reason.
Flat fee is fine. Timesheets, no.
Refuse that business. I have.
Balls. “This is the way I do business. If that doesn’t work for you, I completely understand, and I will help you find a consultant who is a better fit for you.”
1. I jacked them way up as experiments and net sales usually went up (or at least stayed the same).
2. I noticed other companies/people in the same market charging much more than I was and doing just fine.
3. My overall business knowledge looking back with new eyes.
7. I think that is part of the evolution, not a mistake. Maybe your work was not good/efficient as it is now, didnt know back then how much your competitors charged, or simply didnt have all the knowledge you have now.
Because of societal programming (which includes your parental advice) EVERYONE starts out as a Beta. Trying to please girls, walking on shells with people, marrying young, etc.
Question is: What do you do when you wake up.
Some don’t wake up until they are 50 or 60. Doesn’t matter when you wake up (as in taking the redpill, IMO)
It is never too late to change.
Some mistakes I made from 18-23:
– Letting my parents convince me to go to college for a CS degree instead of learning business skills. Put myself $25k in debt without acquiring any business skills. That said, I now work a $65k job at 23 and am looking to job hop around for a little bit to increase my income and gain some experience while I transition into being an Alpha 2.0 consultant. I’m also making my parents pay for my schooling since they made me do something I didn’t want to.
– Getting an off-campus apartment because I felt like I was missing out on the college experience. Doing this doubled my debt to $50k. Thankfully I paid $25k off in just one year. My goal is to be debt-free by the day I turn 25
I’m so happy I found this blog, it will save me a lifetime of pain.
I told them that is not possible (obviously) and offered a lot of other ways to work together and they rejected all of them and did not offer any compromise, makes them sound pretty dodgy (agency).
I know you advice to ask to be paid upfront but most clients I came across refuse to work that way. Would you say its fine if there are some strong guarantees that you need to get paid no matter what? I find this negotiation very difficult because they seem very rigid with this and act like they’ve never heard of someone wanting upfront payment and that it makes me sound dodgy.
So what if I cant find a client who wants to work with me the way that I want?
At the expense of sounding like an incel, a lot of dudes feel like they don’t have a choice in when they have sex for the first time. A lot of them feel trapped like they need to “wait” to see if a chick wants to get with them since they are that afraid of chicks. That’s how I thought back in my teens and early 20s, anyways. I legit felt like I wasn’t “allowed” to try to have sex with chicks or even get them out on dates back then. I mean I laugh now since its about as silly as being afraid of your own shadow, but with more and more indirectly telling young men that only chicks should be the ones sexually escalating, its a thing.
This is where I get into trouble with the “red pill” people since they are slowly turning into the same groups they supposedly despise but from a different angle. (I really hate that reference, the Matrix was a meh movie franchise at best, can we get a better reference, please?).
I say once you realize that being a good little beta (or an asshole of an alpha 1) won’t make you happy in the long term, you really need to systematically learn the art of being alone. Gotta learn how to spend whole weeks hanging out with one person, yourself. Very few people I know can do this, and yet I thrive on being alone and in many cases, prefer it. I know its going to pay off eventually.
It is so easy to be like “ZOMG we need to save ALL MEN from (women’s lib/progressive shit/whatever)!!! Rah rah rah!!” and jump on the activist bandwagon, but to me that’s not effective at all. Learning good strategies from pretty much everything around you is the way to be.
Sadly, I don’t think you can grow as a person, without making lots of mistakes, even though we get told to learn from them and the list of ones I’ve made, would be 3 times longer than BD’s one.
Where I differ to BD, is even from a young age, I never believed in legalised marriage, so I never married and have no kids, but I’d like to have them, although not yet.
I literally wasted 30 years of my life doing nothing.
I’ve barely travelled overseas and it’s a huge regret.
I refuse to pay for sex, so was a virgin just a few days before turning 50 in 2014 and I had sex with a girl who was 23 at the time and who wasn’t sexually experienced herself. So in my teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, I never had sex. Try living with that.
I’ve had sex since, but not very much, as I’ve had to contend with PE & ED in the last 3 years and am not interested in using drugs and meds, but I’m currently getting coaching from a guy in the US (who BD should interview on his podcast), who overcame both, using only natural methods.
If only the internet and BD’s blog existed when I was 17-30, but it didn’t. I didn’t get the internet till I was 30 in 1995 as I’m 54 now and I only started reading BD in about 2015 I think.
@Greg, better late than never!
I remember my brilliant, sharp tongued godmother, an old hippie who became a very, very successful entrepreneur, reviewing my life performance and telling me frankly that I seemed to have lived my entire life ten years behind my biological age, at least in terms of achievement.
Then she looked at me and said, Not to worry, you’ll just have to try to live ten years longer than everyone else.
Go for it!
I would like to say my marriage was a massive mistake but it has taught me a lot of lessons in life and have given me 2 beautiful children. It has also woken me up and I will not take anything for granted ever again. I am 41. Life is there to be lived.
I have been divorced for 11 months now and have been with 23 different woman – mainly due to the help of this blog.
I have actually gone off Tinder for the time being as I have too many interested woman presently and am struggling to get to everything else that is important.
I have been lucky in that I do endurance sports so my weigh etc have in general been under control. The only major mistake I made was to stay married for 8 years – should have called it way earlier.
Some advice – always take it easy and the outcome independence is more than just a tool to get woman to like you. Practice this and mindfulness and it will actually improve your overall quality of life.
Its never too late to change yourself / way you live
Peace
Thanks for sharing Caleb. I will never regret that I started my consulting business and became self employed at the age of 22 or 23 years.
I used to work somewhere around 8 or 9 months a year and spend the rest of the time travelling abroad. Didn’t get married (though I could have – I was in love with a regular girlfriend).
It was a false fenced relationship. In other words it was a conventional Sex 2.0 fenced relationship where exclusivity is either promised or assumed and I basically cheated a lot.
That is my main regret, that I bothered with trying to do conventional mono / Sex 2.0 / exclusive relationships.
I was kid who didn’t know any better.
Am much happier now with multiple long term girlfriends with no cheating, lying or drama. Unfenced and Sex 3.0
Am currently setting up multiple bases around the world to divide my time between which working location free from my laptop.
Life is good.
If I ever have a son someday, when he turns 15, if he is not having any sex by that time, I’ll gladly take him with me and get the best pro(s) available to take care of his masculine needs. And I’ll likely do it 3-4 times in a row untill he physically gets the hang of it, or at least gets comfortable with the basics.
God forbid if he goes through what I had to and stay virgin until his early 20s, suffering in silence and having to constantly lie to be a part of any male group. Nobody deserves that!
Then something is wrong, either with your approach, your industry, or the types of companies you’re working with.
And remember, I don’t ask for all of it upfront. 50%. Sometimes I’ll settle for 25%.
“Fine?” I guess. Ideal? No.
I would figure out what’s wrong and fix it instead of settling.
You can. Change your approach, offering, industry, or niche.
You could have had those 2 children without getting married. So many men forget this.
Well done.
Sure, but only if he wants. Don’t force it.
Of course!!! I’d never force anything upon him. I just wish my dad came with a similar proposition when I was that young and horny as a monkey…
Yeah, I think its the fact I decided for some reason to work with large corporates they are extremely rigid with they’re way of working and are not motivated by discounts offered in exchange for doing things my way. I think I need to refocus on small and mid sized companies but I struggle with how to find them so I thought of using agencies but sometimes the agencies are like working for a corporate.
Shit, I agree!
To get me a professional? I could have done that myself if I really wanted that. But I would have loved if my parents arranged a normal girl for me.
@AlphaOmega
I highly recommend you read the book Winning Through Intimidation.
@joelsuf
Amen. Never got the hype around the first movie, and the other two are objectively bad.
Also, saving all men/saving society is a fool’s game, indeed. You can only help those who want to be helped.
Two kinds of societal programming got me when I was young.
— You can only date one woman at a time. I wasn’t married but I wasted years on shitty women, while passing on some good ones. Just because I already had a girlfriend. Dumb.
— Women don’t like sex, they only do it to please us. Women had to literally jump me, or tell me straight out they liked sex. Because they knew men believed this bullshit, and they were horny and frustrated.
The biggest help I’ve gotten from this blog is the idea of categorizing women instead of screening them. Now I don’t judge them or worry about differences in our opinions or backgrounds. As long as she’s nice and fun, she can at least be a FB. And if you have more than one, you will never have oneitis. No oneitis, no beta behavior that pushes them away.
It’s funny because I recall getting through similar traps and yet when I was a teenager I didn’t have these ideas at all and both believed and saw that it was the opposite. It’s interesting because I wonder if others had a similar process and why this happens?
You missed the point.
To have a more experience man – one that you trust – by your side helps to alleviate the anxiety, and to have a pro being your first woman takes the pressure off of you to “perform”, specially when you are getting laid for the first time at a very young age.
Once the pressure and anxiety are out of the picture, then you can start to enjoy regular sex like a grown man.
Societal Programming. We all share it.
It goes a little beyond a fool’s game. To me it is immoral, like all activism is. It’s an irrevocable crime against the individual. At least currently it is. Maybe back in the day it was somewhat necessary but even that is debatable.
Wat. If a truly efficient and feasible way of helping people all at once existed, not acting on it would be the most despicable negligence ever.
Now given that none seems to exist, it’s a question of the direction in which one focuses one’s limited resources, and tradeoffs of some kind are unavoidable.
Really now? SJdubs think that giving dudes the death penalty for just checking a chick out and making it legal for nonwhites to murder whites is “an efficient and feasible way of helping people all at once.”
Tradcons think that making sure that chicks and nonwhites have no rights at all is “an efficient and feasible way of helping people all at once.”
Helping people on a large scale makes a person a slave to ideals, which are very VERY imperfect. Jussayin.
It should go without saying, but that someone thinks that X is a Y in no way proves that X is a Y.
Nope. We all have our tests, trials, and hardships. Sometimes they can even be sized according to our own “size”, and it’s not rare to have the impression that billionaires, geniuses, celebrities, have to face up against challenges harder than average.
I wanna argue today. Here goes.
Nothing Caleb listed is a mistake. What they are is bad choices.
Mistakes are errors you made unconsciously. Everything on that list (and I made a lot of those myself) was a decision. And every one of those I made I was convinced that I was making the right decision. And that’s the thing about life. You don’t know what you don’t know.
When you know better, do better.
The whole “unconscious error” thing isn’t even an excuse after 25, or even after 16 in most cases. So in many ways I agree with you. What many call “mistakes” are really “stupid decisions” like 85% of the time.
For example, I thought that following my high school crush around like a lost puppy was an effective way of making her my gf, even though I knew that it was a bad idea cuz I never did that around any other girls I liked.
So therefore that wasn’t a mistake. It was a stupid decision.
But here’s the thing: After a certain age, there is no such thing as an unconscious error. You already have enough life experience when it comes to chicks and vocation that there shouldn’t be anything unconscious about the choices you make in those areas. Especially in this day and age where we are surrounded by opinions and information about both.
I don’t want to turn this into a Ministry of Truth vocabulary argument, but it’s 2019, and here we are.
Yeah there is. We are humans, not robots. Mistakes happen all the time. Stuff gets misplaced, people make calculation errors, you miss your exit on the road or forget to take the trash out on trash day. In the case of forgetfulness, those mistakes get worse as you get older.
And your claim is also false that people should know better because the information is out there. This ignores the power of social programming and it’s effects of decades of indoctrination. Personally, I made a choice to get married at 28.
Was it a mistake (like forgetting to lock my car)? No.
Was it an error (like my checkbook didn’t balance)? No.
Did I have any idea that it would grenade 20 years down the road? While always possible, statistically speaking when I got married that almost never happened if you made it that far, so no.
In retrospect was it an optimal decision? ABSOLUTELY NOT. Then why did I do it?
Because I legit thought I was doing the right thing!
We are far too hard on ourselves for informed decisions that turn out in ways we don’t like. But the world doesn’t work that way. Certainly you need to take personal responsibility for yourself, but you can’t hold yourself responsible for things that you don’t know, or can’t know any other way, or if things change.
I think everything Caleb listed fits into that category. I further submit you can’t really “get it” until you have been through it.
If I were to do those things again, knowing what I know now, I should have my head examined. But do I place blame on myself for doing what I thought was the right thing back then? Absolutely not. I just didn’t know any better.
Anyway.
Just curious. What were the arguments, pro and con, that you had access to at the time?
It seems to me it’s too easy to get complacent with this line of reasoning. “Am I well protected?” “Well, I know of a certain number of probable threats, and I’ve taken effective measures against all of them.” “Do other threats exist that I don’t know of?” “Maybe.” “Should I invest effort into finding out?” “Nah, I’m good. Can’t hold myself responsible.”
Plus, there are measures that do well against threats of unknown nature. Diversification is the most obvious example.
This I utterly reject. If I can’t “get it” from others’ experience, but only from my own, I must work to master the skill of not repeating others’ errors. That’s a key skill.
I would say there are two kinds of blame, the “bad blame” and the “good blame”. To lose sleep over bad decisions, whether it was obvious at the time, or not, would lead me nowhere. But on the other hand, to identify that some of my decisions led to an unfavorable outcome, and that the power to improve the outcomes by better decision-making lies with me, that’s something. I believe it’s the latter BD has in mind when he says, as he does often, that everything in his life is his fault.
About number 4, do you think it’s a good idea to look for a master degree scholarship, just for the sake of living abroad? I don’t really want to pursue formal education anymore, but that would be the only way, I believe, I could afford living abroad in my twenties.
I got married when I was 37 and although my wife was ok with me getting girls on the side, I wasn’t happy in the marriage. I got a peaceful divorce with spending roughly $1,000. I still feel bad that I wasted two years of my prime time in a de facto monogamous marriage. Now I’m back to the game again and recently banged this cute black chick! She wanted us to date so I dumped her. I then told her after two months we can see each other if we just take things slow! Anyhow, I don’t think I’ll ever want to be traditionally married. My only concern is having children before I’m “too old”.