I caught something on television recently that I can't get out of my head, partially because it's offensive to me and partially because there is a lesson in it for all of you. And it's not one that is easy to teach, so I'm going to ask you to bear with me.
First of all, some of the examples I'm going to have to use have potential political implications, and we're not here to discuss politics. There could also be controversy over whether what I'm about to show you is coincidental, accidental, or deliberate.
For the purpose of this exercise, I'm going to ask you to ignore all of that and look strictly at the mechanics and psychology of what is really happening so that you can learn this universal process and not only protect yourself from its dark side, but use it to better yourself. So turn off the emotions, political bias, conspiracy theory machine, etc., put on your thinking cap and hang with me for a minute while I set up the lesson, because you need to be cold and ruthlessly logical to get through it with maximum benefit.
Sometimes it's late in the day before I find inspiration for the content of this newsletter; I prefer to do it as the very first thing after in the morning after responding to whatever reader e-mails are in my Inbox when I first sit down at my computer, but the world doesn't always work the way I want it to. Sometimes I can receive as many as 600 e-mails from readers in a day and not be able to use anything out of them for a newsletter, either because of the appropriateness of the content or not being able to obtain permission to reprint their letter in time (I'm a stickler for reader privacy).
When that happens and I end up not being able to process a newsletter until late evening, my wife likes to watch some flavor of the CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) series on television while I work, and I hear it in the background but pretty much ignore it. A few nights ago I heard something that caught my attention.
The investigative team was standing in a metal building with about a hundred bullet holes scattered all over the walls, and one of the guys had looked it over and was reporting to his colleagues that it was a 9 mm, and then tagged onto the end of the sentence, "probably semi-automatic."
For those of you who don't know much about firearms, that means that you pull the trigger, one shot is fired, and the next round is chambered and the weapon cocked and ready to fire, but it does not fire until the trigger is released and pulled again. A firearm that will keep rapidly shooting round after round for as long as you hold the trigger pulled is fully automatic, also called a "sub-machine gun" if it uses pistol ammunition, or simply "machine gun" if it fires rifle ammunition, and fully automatic is what the scene looked like and what was being implied. Semi-automatic rifle fire has no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever. You can't tell it from pump, lever-action, bolt-action, break-breech, revolver, pepper box, or any other form of rifle or pistol fire, because there is no spray of bullets.
A few minutes later in the show, they had finally figured out how all the bullet holes were put in the wall. Some boys had held up a very long bamboo cane, about 30 feet tall, run the cane through the trigger guard of a fully automatic sub-machine pistol and pulled the trigger back with a wire tie just before giving it a spin and letting it spiral its way down the cane pole constantly firing. Yes, stupid, and one of the kids got shot through the chest. It would also be quite impossible with a SEMI-automatic weapon, because the trigger has to be released and pressed again to fire multiple rounds.
Incidentally, is anyone at this point wondering where the hundred-plus bullet holes came from when a single magazine, holding no more than 30 rounds, was in the weapon? Sometimes I'm more amused by the continuity and other errors in TV and movies than I am the script and acting.
Getting back to the lesson, here's the important part: For everyone who didn't know the difference between a "semi-automatic" and "fully automatic" firearm, they thought that the fully automatic sub-machine pistol shown spraying bullets all over the building was semi-automatic because that's what they heard. Not true, and extremely misleading.
A semi-automatic pistol is simply the pistol that most police officers and military personnel carry in their holsters (and those I've asked about their preference for semi-automatics over the old-style revolver said they preferred the extra ammunition capacity, not its ability to fire faster), because the CSI officer erroneously said that's what it was. And now those who don't know any better will hear the mention of "semi-automatic weapons" on the news and think it's a special menace to be feared and actively combated and that anyone who owns one must be a criminally-insane gangster.
Intentional or not, that is what's called "disinformation." Someone shows you something that is incorrect or misleads you to assume something incorrect and you have a tendency to accept it as correct because of the source, or because you see it a lot, and the message, although wrong, is consistent.
A lie or error told often enough becomes the perceived truth, or more accurately, the "believed" truth, but NOT the truth. Political and religious leaders have capitalized on that fact for millennia. The Earth is at the center of the universe and it's flat and you'll sail off the edge of it if you go too far in any direction and then be swallowed by a many-headed monster. Bleeding someone with leeches will cure any ailment. Governments love and serve their people faithfully, selflessly, and flawlessly.
And women want nice guys. Remember?
Yes, that lie has been told for decades. Look at what you see on television today. Stunningly beautiful women running around with hopeless wusses and acting like they're "Studly Do-Right," totally ignoring the fact that the guys are dressed sloppily, don't project an ounce of intelligence, sense of humor, social skills, leadership skills, or most importantly, self-respect. They're not even masculine; they're nerdy girly-men, the kind most girls would like to take shopping, not take on any sort of romantic interlude, adventure, or sexual escapade.
Back to our lesson. Men are consistently shown on television and in movies as being sub-average, bumbling jackasses who can't make a decision to save their life, and yet they still get the girl at the end of the show, and to beat it all, they cry for joy and thank her for the privilege of being seen with her. (I'm so sick of those commercials for Sonic restaurants making men look like idiots that I joined John Alanis long ago in boycotting Sonic, and wrote them a letter telling them so.)
When you see that all the time, there's something that happens in your subconscious mind that tells you that you should be acting as those guys do. They have what you want, and if you do what they do, you'll have what they have. But your subconscious mind doesn't know that it's only television fantasy; it can't discriminate like that. Visual images of things that are entirely fantasy and starkly contrary to the nature of the universe may trigger conscious protest, but they are still accepted by the subconscious mind if you are exposed enough. It's the first rule of propaganda: The lie told often enough becomes "the truth"
- accepted as truth by those who don't know or seek the facts, but not really true.
However! Awareness can override this negative programming, and better still, you can use this same principle to lift yourself up! Instead of watching wusses give all men a bad name on television, hang out with successful friends who are happy with their lives and have the alpha male tendencies that women enjoy! Since your environment can program you, let it program you for success instead of failure!
But that means doing something really smart: You have to acknowledge your betters as potential mentors and positive influences instead of envying their success and resenting them. Can you handle that? Can you handle hanging around with one or more guys who have a strong personality that women love and are successful at what they pursue?
No, they don't have to be "filthy stinking rich" to be successful. Wealth-building is a skill like any other and comes with a lot of stress, particularly the stress of protecting earned wealth, and aggressively building wealth is not every man's goal or even a priority. Some men prefer to succeed at fishing, hunting, wood or metal working, rebuilding cars, throwing darts, collecting stamps - you name it. But a man who succeeds at one thing will generally succeed at many things, because he has the formula - and he can demonstrate it to you simply by you being around him.
This isn't rocket science, Gentlemen. Not by a long shot. Do you recall hearing an axiom called "Occam's Razor"? "The simplest explanation is most often the correct one." By the same token, the simplest paths to success are most often the best. And what can be simpler than exposing yourself to people who are what you want to be and just letting it all soak in?
If you hear hooves beating behind you, do you think "horse" or "zebra"? There's a reason clich'es become clich'es: they're so universally true and therefore so frequently quoted that people get tired of hearing them. At least in most cases.
Some would have you believe that you can never understand what a woman says or what she really wants. I believed it for a long time, as did many who came before you, until it came down to a do-or-die situation and I had to learn. How do you think I learned? Did I go to Tibet and ask the Dali Lama, or to Rome to ask the Pope? Did I consult ancient mystical texts like the Bible, Qur'an, or Cabbala? Did I seek the counsel of alien races? Or contact the dead through a crystal ball? Did I ask all my buddies who were as unhappy and stressed out as I was? Hardly. I did something utterly bizarre...
I asked a group of women!
I had to learn to speak "girly-ese" (some of my readers are calling it "feminese" and I rather like that one, too) before I could make sense of a lot of what they wanted to tell me, but believe me, they wanted me and every man alive to know. All this time that we've been shaking our heads in frustration because we can't understand them, they've been angry and frustrated because they didn't know we didn't understand and thought we were choosing to ignore them. Imagine that!
In the end, they are neither complex, weak nor stupid. They're just enough like us to make us think that they're entirely like us and therefore just different enough to drive us crazy sometimes, but they are simple (not quite so simple as us, but still simple), strong, smart, and one hell of a lot of fun to be around once you tune in and gain their trust - they're mostly emotionally driven, and want more than anything to feel safe in feeling anything for you, lest their emotions be used against them as they have many times in the past, like when date after date said, "I'll call you tomorrow," or "Sure, I'll still respect you in the morning." If you don't believe me, just ask them. There are several on our forum, http://forum.makingherhappy.com/ who love to answer questions like that. Join us and learn!
What you need to know is how we're alike and how we're different, and in plain language, not an encyclopedia full of psycho-babble. You need to learn to speak girly-ese, which sounds a whole lot like whatever language you speak, but the protocols are different. You need to know things about a woman's emotional make-up, like the fact that being bored is as detrimental to her health and ability to think rationally and make good choices as being terrified is to you. And you need to know how to flip her switches and ignite that spark that will never let her feel bored again and make her fight - indeed, to kick the crap out of a running saw mill if necessary - to protect her relationship with you.
If you're interested, go to http://www.makingherhappy.com/ and download your copy of "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" -- it's ALL in there, just as I described, in plain language that a child could understand (and a few smart-ass remarks just to keep you entertained as well!). And if you're not interested? Well, I hear you can get used to being in the dog house, getting yelled at all the time, and even getting divorced and losing everything you have in the process, but that's one challenge I'd just as soon skip.
In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham "Being a man is something to which one should aspire, not something for which he should apologize." --David Cunningham
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