This is one of the most important articles I have ever written and probably ever will — and if you know my content, you know I don’t engage in that kind of hyperbole. I’m very serious about this, and if you understand and acknowledge what I’m about to show you, this will change your life. It changed mine.
The chart I’m about to describe is all of you — your whole human-machine, human-animal, everything you are. You have four pieces to who you are, and these four pieces are aligned in a very specific order. If you understand how these different quadrants interact, you’re going to understand why you don’t have the results in your life that you want. My guess is there are things in your life you don’t have yet, and I’m about to show you why.
The first quadrant is where you are static, meaning unchanging. These are things about you that you cannot change like your age, race, skin tone (which is different from race), height, biological sex (which is different from gender), and a few other things.
These are things you can mitigate or work around, but cannot change. They provide advantages and disadvantages, depending on where you are. For example, if you’re 18 years old, that’s a disadvantage in many respects, likewise if you’re 75. I’m 48 years old, so I’m in a grey area. There are some good and bad things about being 48. If you’re 27 years old, you might have some physical advantages over me that I can’t control, but I might have some financial and/or confidence advantages that you don’t have.
The second quadrant is your abilities. These are the good things about you, your advantages. There are basically three aspects of this: your skills (things you’ve learned), your talents (things you’re naturally good at), and your interests (things you like).
The next quadrant is your motivation. If you want to change your current condition, motivation is how badly you want that on a scale from 1 to 10. If you have a low level of motivation, you are what we call “comfortable.”
“Comfortable” does not mean happy; it means you’re comfortable. “Eh, it’s fine.” No big deal.
If you have negative motivation, you are likely depressed, and you might need to see a therapist.
The last quadrant is your emotions — all of your emotional makeup in both your conscious and subconscious mind dating back to when you were born. This is your Societal Programming, from your biological wiring, parents, experiences, culture, religion, and everything else. I talk about Societal Programming a lot in The Unchained Man.
If you have an area of your life where you don’t have the results you want, especially an area where you’ve struggled — the problem, and the most important area to focus on, is the Emotions quadrant. People, especially men, think the problem is in the Static quadrant when in fact, it’s really with emotions.
You want to visualize a river, a flow of water of some kind. The river starts in the Emotions quadrant and flows into Motivation. Emotions empower motivation. Then, the river flows into the Abilities quadrant, and your motivation moves you to improve or utilize your skills, talents, and interests. Lastly, the river flows into the Static quadrant to mitigate the things you cannot change.
Each quadrant comes with its own objective.
In terms of your static areas, your job is to mitigate. You can’t fix any of these things, but you can minimize the damage they do.
On abilities, your job is to increase these.
Likewise with motivation — increase it!
On emotions, you want to FIX them — because they’re fucked up!
If you have something in your life you’ve wanted badly for a long time and you haven’t taken action on it — or you’ve taken action and you’ve failed — the problem isn’t in the Static, Abilities, or even Motivation quadrants. The problem is with emotions. Your emotions are screwed up.
Guys will try to assume the problem is with their static issues. I personally know several guys who are Asian who live in the United States and get laid a lot with super hot chicks, including white girls. I get emails from guys who say things like “Hey Caleb, I’m Asian, so I guess I have to move out of the United States to get laid, right? Because no white girl would ever fuck an Asian guy.” (Yeah, I’m serious.)
He thinks the problem is in the Static quadrant, but he’s wrong. It’s with emotions; his emotions are so fucked up they are changing the way in which he views the objective world.
I’ll give you the opposite scenario. I’ve got guys who actually write to me and say things like “Hey Caleb, I’m a white guy and I really want to fuck an Asian girl, so I guess I gotta pay a hooker, right? Because Asian girls don’t hook up with white guys.” (Again, I’m serious.)
Again, he thinks the problem is with his race in the Static quadrant. It’s not; it’s with his emotions.
Now, does that mean the problem he’s mentioned doesn’t exist? Does that mean it’s just as easy for a black or Asian guy to hook up with a white girl as it is for a white guy? No, it’s not just as easy, but that’s not the showstopper problem. The showstopper problem is in the emotions quadrant.
There are guys on the internet who are completely focused on things like SMV. Again, I personally know guys in the pick-up artist world who are not good-looking, do not have ripped muscles, and have no money who have sex with numerous hot girls. So the guys on the internet saying they need to buy a Lamborghini or get six-pack abs to get laid think the problem is with ability, motivation, or sometimes static issues. All wrong.
It all starts with emotions. There is a dam situated between the Emotions quadrant and the Motivation quadrant. And you might think that if you’re really motivated to do something, you’ll take action on it, but that’s not correct. You can be very motivated on something and still take no action because your emotions aren’t allowing the energy to go from emotions to motivation.
Other guys think success is all about skills and abilities. They want to start a business, but they think they “have no skills” or “don’t know anything.” Not only is this wrong, but it’s irrelevant. Do you think I had a lot of skills when I was 18 years old, living alone and barely able to pay my bills?
Motivation: Do you think I said, “I’m going to learn a bunch of skills and then get motivated?” Fuck no! That’s not how it works!
I grew up in an environment that was very financially strapped, and I fucking hated it. So I had the emotions that drove the motivation. I said, “I want to make a lot of money, and I want to do it fast. I want it now, in my twenties.”
The reason this worked for me is that I had enough emotional congruence to get me to the point where my emotions allowed me to take action on the motivation. Again, it starts with emotions, moves to motivation, then to abilities, and maybe ends up in static.
The thing that is stopping you from taking the action to get the results you want in your life is not in the Static quadrant. For example, if you’re from India, the problem isn’t your race. The reason you’re having problems with women is because your parents and your culture fucked you up when you were a small child regarding women, dating, and sex. It’s not that you’re the wrong race; the problem is in the Emotional quadrant, not Static.
How did I go from being a divorced beta male dad in 2007 to a guru-level dating expert within two years? Did I do that because I was really good at dating women when I got divorced? I didn’t know shit about women or dating; I was a fucking embarrassment!
Is it because I was really good-looking? No. I’m not bad but I’m not good-looking. So it wasn’t the Static quadrant.
Was it because I was really motivated? Yes — however, what would have happened if I was motivated without the emotion supporting me? I knew monogamy and/or having sex with average-looking women was not going to make me happy long term. I had to figure out how to make non-monogamy work and how to date multiple hot women at the same time and have them stay with me even though they knew I was dating other women. So that was my motivation, and I had a lot of it, yes.
But! Let’s say my emotions were not congruent with that motivation, that I was just as motivated, except that my emotions said well, my religion won’t allow it! I’d have a problem, wouldn’t I?
What if I was an angry, needy Alpha Male 1.0 who wanted to have sex with all these women, but only wanted them to have sex with me? And I’m going to make sure they do that by arguing and fighting with them and causing conflict, pain, and chaos for the rest of my life? (Sound familiar?) What if my emotions said that?
So it wasn’t just that I had the motivation. It’s that my emotions were congruent with the motivation so I had enough fuel to take action on the skill set.
One of the reasons I’ve had so much trouble losing body fat is not because I’m not motivated. I’m extremely motivated and on multiple levels. The problem is I have this little voice in the back of my mind that says “Hey, I have sex with super hot chicks every week, I make tons of money, I live a fantastic life, I’m not ugly, and I’m really healthy. Why bother losing weight?”
That voice is completely and objectively wrong, but it’s there regardless of my motivation. So if you have a problem in your life that you need to fix, you need to forget about static conditions, ability, and motivation, and focus on emotion. Dig into your head and figure out what is wrong with your emotions. Static issues are important factors, yes, but they’re not the showstopper. For every man who has an excuse (I’m too skinny, I’m too short, I’m not the right race, I don’t make a lot of money, etc, etc), I can show you a man who has those same problems and who already has what you want.
How to dig into your emotions and fix them is a very big topic. I have a lot of information on that in The Unchained Man and my other content. Frankly, if you are totally obsessed with your static excuses, you may need to see a therapist. There’s a percentage of you who do because your emotions aren’t right. It won’t matter how motivated or skilled you are; you have to get your emotions right.
A lot of you reading are resisting this right now. You still think your skin tone, age, height, or other static issue is the problem. Wrong! You want to believe the problem is static because that gives you an out. It’s harder for you to say “Okay, the reason I think that is because there’s something wrong upstairs and I need to figure out how to resolve that.”
It may not be easy. I had to go through this in my early thirties. I had to re-evaluate my entire life. My abilities and motivation were okay but my emotions were all wrong. Once you figure this out it’s like opening the floodgates. You’ll have all this energy in the Motivation, Abilities, and Static quadrants. It’s awesome, but you have to take care of emotions first.
Stop focusing on the static things about yourself you can’t change. Figure out your emotions, and everything else gets much easier.
*How* does one change one’s emotion in such a way that now he can act on his motivations ?
Read this book and do what it says.
Seems like you made a great decision. I really enjoy watching/listening to the clip (while eating), then reading it later on your blog. That improves comprehension, spark ideas and there are enough minor differences between the video and the transcript that make the blog post still somewhat fresh and interesting to read.
What’s the most useful thing you did to fix your emotional problem in losing fat? You mentioned earlier that you use an app/method that focus on the emotional part of the diet, how is that different from everyday self-affirmation (that you already did for ages)?
I recognize the need to control the emotions quadrant since this is what determines on daily or possibly weekly basis whether I stick to my schedule and goals but what about the motivation? Last year I tried to set up consultancy business and did not get so far perhaps mainly because the motivation was not so strong. Does it mean I did not really want to have a company and therefore shouldn’t or should I have tried to set up something different? Or perhaps work on the motivation but then how exactly?
‘I personally know guys in the pick-up artist world who are not good-looking, do not have ripped muscles, and have no money who have sex with numerous hot girls.’ – Yeah and we’ve personally seen a lot of those guys being exposed as liars. Just put the blame on the student so he will continue buying coachings
I’ve been following you for a few years on this site after my second divorce. Your Alpha 2.0 lifestyle totally changed my life with females and my understanding of how they think. I have the ability to work remotely, I have had a successful business for 14 years, and make well over your suggested 75K minimum for happiness and independence. Because of all the helpful insight I’ve gained from reading your posts I want to take this opportunity to try and help you and maybe some of your other readers. You have mentioned on a number of occasions and different posts about your weight and that is the area you seem to struggle with. I am in my early 40’s and was under the impression my occasional unhealthy eating choices and “slower metabolism” as I am getting older was the reason for my “Dad Bod”, even though I ate mostly healthy choices and exercised with weights 2-3 times most weeks. During Covid quarantine, my 75 year old father began sending me online videos and introduced me to intermittent fasting. Eating only during a 6 hour time frame most days. and 1 time a week only eating lunch and not eating again till lunch the next day. This jump started my fat burning off my body and since early Spring of this year till now I’ve gone from 225 lbs, down to 185 lbs. dropped at least 4 pants sizes. If someone makes the excuse they prefer to maintain their fat body because they don’t want to have to buy more clothes, you clearly have to fix your emotions or make more money!
After getting down to my goal look, I am back to eating pretty much what I want , just keeping it between the 6 hour window most days and I am maintaining that weight by eating mainly healthy choices. I don’t drink soft drinks or diet soft drinks and order my iced tea without sweetner. I really reduced my sugar and carb intake, although I still eat pizza and pasta on occasion along with dessert and I also drink beer. Hope this may help you or anyone else that may be struggling to lose weight. the results can happen a lot faster than you have been led to believe and you don’t have to run miles everyday to lose weight and fat. I never run! Do more research on intermittent fasting and controlling your insulin in order to lose the weight you want. Thank you so much for all the information you have put on this blog, it has been a eye opening experience for me.
Cool. And yes, it was always the right decision. The world is moving to video, period.
I’m not done losing my fat. Not even close. But there were two or three of those. The biggest one that comes to mind is learning how to eat, which I was never taught how to do. (I know that sounds strange to those men with ectomorphic bodies / higher metabolisms but men who weren’t born with those things need to be taught how to eat correctly.)
Many other techniques besides self talk. Self talk wasn’t enough for me.
Motivation is also important. You need motivation. If your emotions are right but your motivation is low, you won’t act. I’m just saying it starts with emotions. Motivation and emotions – you need both.
You’re talking about PUA gurus who sell shit on the internet and I’m talking about guys I know in real life who just bang girls and have never sold a thing in their lives (because they’re poor and have zero business or technical skills).
But sure man, keep on making incorrect assumptions so you can keep up with your angry bullshit excuses so you don’t have to take any responsibility for yourself. How’s that working out for you?
Love it!
I’ve been doing intermittent fasting for over 3 years. Please read the list of things I’ve tried here before suggesting a new weight loss technique.
My issue is 100% psychological and won’t be fixed by trying out some other weight loss method. I’ve already done almost all of them.
I would like to add my take on losing weight. Its simple, yet difficult. how do you do it? You simply fast. You fast for say 3 days at a time. If you can handle it, fast for 7 days. Even better. Be strong, be disciplined.
Many people would say that fasting is not good for you. Not correct. Numerous books put out by reputable doctors attest to the fact that fasting is safe for healthy people and it is actually good for you.
Your body has adapted to fasting over millennia of evolution. our ancestors didn’t always eat regularly and fasting is built into our genome.
My logic is this: Dieting means suffering, there is no one out there who will convince me of otherwise. too many losers try and eat their way into losing weight. In doing so they suffer longer. Eating small meals is just as suffering as eating no meals.
There are two reasons eating low cal is harmful
eating causes the secretion of insulin which protects fat, especially belly fat (insulin is secreted from pancreas in the belly and is in highest concentrations in the belly). Not eating anything for days has the amazing ability to stop all insulin production and belly fat comes off like any fat reserves on the body. Quicker and easier than eating.
Eating small low cal meals regularly is delaying your weight loss, and prolonging your suffering. just quit eating and get it over with.
So if you are going to diet do it right, fast for 3 days, eat one meal then fast for another 3 days. and keep it up. its hard, but it works and gets you maximum weight loss. You can exercise or not, you can just rest, the act of being alive should be shedding about a pound or so per day, simply by fasting.
Could use some input on this:
I’m a recovering “niceguy”. Discovering No More Mr Nice Guy and this very blog has changed my life. It’s been about a 7 year journey so far and my sex life its better than its ever been. Was married for almost 20 years to a woman I was barely attracted to. That ended and a very inexperienced “me” learned some pretty tough lessons on the dating front. (sound familiar, BD?) No more Captain Save a Ho for me and the difference has been astounding. That part of my life is in really great shape right now so am concentrating on other things.
Where I am struggling is the Job part. Been in IT for a long time, have about 20 years under my belt. And I hate it. Scratch that, I DESPISE it. Love technology, hate the type of people/work hours/red tape/politics and being a corporate slave. And the past few years have been terrible – I keep getting kicked out the door for “Financial” reasons. I lost my job in March right before all the fun started, found something that I thought was going to be a good fit and 4 months later – same fucking thing. Im jobless again.
So this particular crossroads is where I am at. Sure I could find another corporate whore job, and either get kicked out again or end up doing the exact opposite of what we are trying to accomplish here. No thanks. Im tired of that game, obviously I need to do something different and I took a gamble and bought the Maximum Freedom course right before the sale ended. Am about half way through it so I dont know where that is going to lead but so far looks promising.
Thing is, I dont even know where to go from here. Sure I would like to be Caleb Jr and have multiple income streams, own a home on a mountain, work less than 40 hrs a week and all that. I know nothing at all about owning a business. I dont even know what business I could possibly start.
Anyone else in this particular boat? My emotions are in good shape (other than the stress of being jobless) and I am motivated enough to know that I need to make a change. My abilities can always improve but with my track record in the IT field I am not even sure I want to keep going down that road. So…start over. Im 53. It could be done, but again – I wouldn’t even know what to start over with. Everyone I talk to has all the answers; just do something different! Which is reasonable enough I guess, but when I stop and think about what else I could do for a living – nothing comes to mind. Not a damn thing, just vague “IT type stuff” and I doubt that is enough of a mission statement to get a lemonade stand off the ground let alone a part of this multi stream income I should be shooting for.
Is there also a course on business ideas or are we on our own for that part?
My business course helps with that but honestly if you have literally no idea what you want to do with your life I would figure that out first. You’ve got Max Freedom so you have a blueprint to do that. And at age 53, I would hurry up with it.
Maybe I am missing something but being in IT at least to me is one of the easiest possible things to do independently. There is absolutely no reason why you need to be in an office and thus location dependent or why you have to be employed traditionally if you are doing IT especially if you are very good and experienced.
@Caleb What will happen to the membership-only Extended Audio Contents (of every article) when you merge the 2 blogs, will the existed audio contents still there? Is NOW a good time to subscribe? It’s cheap but I don’t find it adds much value to the posts so I didn’t subscribe, but if they will be gone for good then I will do it now to listen to all of them.
You seem to have tons of experience in IT. Not sure what Max Free packet you’ve bought but if it doesn’t help and in case you think going consulting is an interesting idea, I would suggest Caleb’s Consulting Course (make sure you get the But I’m Not Good At Anything Bonus, it helps tremendously in finding the niche/industry for your business).
You can also listen to his #2 Coaching Call clip on Youtube for an idea on how consulting and finding your niche work in general, it’s free and also very good.
Great comments, thanks everyone. I started this thread:
https://alpha20community.com/index.php?threads/re-the-one-thing-keeping-you-from-what-you-want.143/
To hopefully continue this conversation, trying to keep up in a comments section is a PITA.
BD I hope this is ok –
I haven’t decided yet. I may just remove them, or leave them, or repurpose them, or hide the old ones but only publish the new ones. Really not sure yet. When the new blog goes online we will no longer offer the $3 subscription service and anyone who is currently using that service will be canceled, since it wouldn’t be fair to charge them for something we will start giving away for free in video format. (That doesn’t address the extended audio content though… that’s why I haven’t decided on that yet.)
Dude that’s the kind of thing I want people to do.
Hi,
Your article reminded me of this speech. Alan Watkins – “Being Brilliant Every Single Day” – he talks about heart rate variability, and how to induce better cardiac coherence through breathing technique.
He consults leaders and organizations. At 44 min Alan briefly discussed how people’s emotions are screwed up, they can’t control their own emotions and let them be determined by things on the outside, reminded me of your writings.
BD do you use any personal health trackers (FitBit, Apple watch, WHOOP, EliteHRV or other)?
BD when are you going to do a video to answer AMA questions?
People like you who post such replies and BD’s move to video makes me think if the audience is mostly composed of people who have way too much time on their hand and are rather idle with their time.
Honestly, who has time to watch all these videos. Especially 44 mins…
Nice thing about articles is that I can skim and skip over it, re read and so on. Videos take way too much time and its very tricky to get into that in loud environments / at work / on the go and so on which articles are easy to do so I can handle them while I am on the go or between other things.
My feeling is that this audience who watches all these videos is people who sit at home all day with absolutely nothing to do.
Short to the point videos can be nice though, I sometimes like to watch Nomad Capitalist videos during lunch. BD’s short videos are ok and a little bit more in that direction.
I just started using a Fitbit last week. I’ll do a video about it soon.
It goes up here Tuesday. The video is 3.5 hours long. 🙂
I used to think exactly like you, but I was wrong. Just like finding time to read non-fiction and novels, if you believe it’s a beneficial activity, you will make a habit and time for it no matter how busy you are.
Nowadays, I watch clips at lunch and listen to them (you don’t always need to watch) while cooking and doing dishes. This usually takes about 30 mins in total, so 30 mins of video content every single day for me while still being productive as hell, that’s huge! If something is more than 30 mins, I just watch a part of it, pause, bookmark, then continue the following days, no problem at all.
It’s the same with classic novels. I knew for a long time reading them will be very beneficial for my writing and creative imagination skills but struggled to find time for it since it’s less important than working on Alpha 2.0’s SLAs. Nowadays I listen to them via audiobook at dinner, again about 30 mins at a time. I just plowed through both The Call of the Wild and White Fang (Jack London) in less than 2 weeks with no hit in daily productivity. Awesome!
If something is important to you, your mind will find a way (unless you’re a lazy bum).
I somehow doubt most of the audience watches if like that. You are probably in less than 1%.
Students, unemloyed, single mothers, retired – they all consume videos like this but will probably not take actions on it.
They will purchase courses though in many cases without taking action. But I think BD says this openly that only small percentage of his readers or now watchers ever take action.
Good article.
I’m far from perfect but since I’m your age and I’m highly motivated to take care of my body at extreme levels, I thought I’d take a crack at increasing your dedication towards achieving the strongest fittest body you can achieve.
In a nutshell, we become what we think about.
You’ve mastered all those other areas. You’ve even helped me and thousands of other men master areas of their lives.
You need to keep trying to figure out the specific self talk (for you personally) that causes a spark. Once you notice the thoughts that ignite a tiny bit of interest, fan those thoughts. As Uncle G would say “Feed the Beast”.
We all know you live for long term happiness and base your life decisions and actions on that concept. I tune into your messages about that (re-reading the Unchained Man, listen to it in my car etc) often to feed the beast in me that needs to become it and maintain that mindset. As well as other philosophy’s that support that concept, such as stoicism, Aristotle Etc.
I also listen to books on audio about super health such as “Superhuman” by Dave Asprey, “Plant Paradox” – Dr. Gundry, watch YouTube videos on super health, body building, I watch UFC fights etc.
Find a message that causes a spark in that area then immerse yourself in it and take action and point your systems at it.
Here are some of the things that cause sparks for me personally in regards to fitness.
1. The way I feel INDESTRUCTIBLE after sticking to my heavyweight lifting program for about 8 weeks straight.
2. The fact that I (in my late 40’s) can still physically do anything I could ever do. I’ve always trained in martial arts and I still practice Jiu Jitsu and tap out younger guys all the time. I can lift as much weight as I ever could and I’m always trying to lift more.
3. I like to think about how technology it’s going to be able to reverse aging someday and I want to have my body running perfect all the way up to that point.
4. I look at guys older than me that are super fit, like 80 year old body builders on YouTube etc. Then I look at the average guy my age who looks weak, fat and has physically given up and I know its just a simple choice.. one way or the other.
One last thing, part of it is (as you know) we only have so much time.
You don’t even want to know how many hours I put in every day for fitness and reading about nutrition and making all of my own food Etc. It’s pretty much like a part-time job.
So I hope you find some ideas that show signs of sparks for igniting your drive in that area and I hope you fan them!
Hope this helped.
Thanks again for making my life better Caleb!
Oh, and one more thing.
Don’t shoot for a goal of losing weight and being in shape.
That doesn’t sound very motivating to me personally.
Become fucking Packed and Ripped!!
Build your body into something that makes you feel like you could walk right through a brick wall.
That’s honestly how I feel and I love that shit! Haha
Hey Caleb. Have you read Mark Manson’s “The Subtle Art of not Giving a Fuck”? If you have, what did you think of it?
Yes. It was fine (outcome independence is always good). He just writes with a very different writing style than I do (he’s much more verbose, emotional, etc).
********THIS. So, if you are a woman and very emotional and motivated however your emotions work for you for like three days and then you hit a slump and are less motivated for a day or two, how would you fix that rollercoaster? I.e. would you ride the “high” times and accept the lows or would you try to even out productivity?
Also, regarding that “inner voice” other than therapy what are some concrete tools to move the unconscious into the conscious? Is spirituality a tool? Do you have to follow some guru to India or is it this something you can fix yourself given enough awareness?
A strong component of that can’t be fixed, because you’re a woman. I’ve talked about that before. (Welcome to being a chick. The good news is that you get a lot of free stuff from the opposite sex that we men do not.) On the slump days, just set your daily goals a little lower.
The same answer I’m giving everyone else who asks that question: read my book.
It can be, but I am not an expert in that area.
What do you think my answer is?
@Jay just finished watching it, great clip mate, a very nice addition to the concept Caleb talking about here, especially on an everyday basis.
A very good article. I really like the part on the emotions quadrant flowing into the motivation, then skills, then static analogy. It would be great if you do draw a diagram or flowchart of that river flowing down the quadrant analogy.
But BD, you have also said that we have some degree of control. So, yes if she is feeling low on say 3 days, she can use tools and make it to 1 day. Also, the intensity of lowness can be reduced, like, if earlier she used to feel very low, but after therapy or some other tools, she can gain massive control over her state and feel less low than what she used to feel earlier.
Same is the case when you said that you are an introvert, but in comparison to your earlier version, now you have massive control over your introvert behavior. You have gone to become a public speaker, which most the of extroverts are not comfortable with!