Boldness tip two: Courage
If you want to be bold then you also have to be courageous. Courage is the ability to move in spite of fear. Sometimes there is fear in the presence of scary things and it’s natural to be afraid. Fear is a part of the human experience, after all, but we do need to learn how to move past that fear. The ruthless man must learn to act in spite of his own fear, refusing to allow it to have power over him. So how do we build up our courage? Let’s take a look at a few sure shot ways to do so.
Courage tip one: Do the Hard Things
If you want to develop a strong sense of courage then you’re going to have to develop a mindset of being willing to involve yourself in the hard things. A lot of times especially in our comfort driven society, difficulty can be looked at as the enemy. This creates a paradox, because if you look at difficulty as the enemy then how can you do difficult things? Why would you ever willingly involve yourself with something that involves your enemy? Yet, if you’d learn to change your mind and stop perceiving difficulty as the enemy, instead, if you started focusing on learning how to embrace difficulty you will naturally raise your ability to move in spite of fear.
By learning to do the hard things you are going to improve your natural ability to work in spite of your own fear. What do I mean by doing the hard things? Well, the hard things in life can be things such as pushing yourself physically, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, having hard conversations with people, doing anything that doesn’t come easily or naturally. This can be tough when it comes to comfort because our natural desire as humans, especially in this society, is to be comfortable. Sometimes in order to be courageous you’re going to need to choose to be uncomfortable. But if all you’re focused on is your own comfort then you’re going to never have the strength to get things done because you are afraid. By adopting a mindset of refusing to accept comfort and instead choosing to fight onward and do the uncomfortable things, you are creating a mindset of a vigorous nature.
The best way to grow in courage is to embrace the hard things. Take cold showers, take the stairs, be willing to look at the uncomfortable things in your life as challenges to overcome instead of as obstacles to avoid. There are so many people in this world who do not want to deal with any form of hardship, there are entire industries built around the avoidance of hardship. We’re told that you deserve a break, we’re told you deserve a vacation, we’re told to kick back and relax and never do anything hard and what does that breed within us? It breeds weakness, it breeds cowardice, fear and loathing. If you want to be as strong as you possibly can, if you want to be courageous, then you’re going to have to develop a mindset of doing the hard things. Don’t let yourself get stuck in thinking that comfort is the best thing for you. Being strong is the best thing for you
Courage Tip Two: Ignore the Feelings
Courage often appears when there is fear. In fact, the best definition of courage is that it isn’t an absence of fear, but rather the ability to press on in spite of fear. Many times, there are parts of a person’s life when they are forced to encounter something that causes them to react in fear. This fear can be powerful and compelling, it can inspire someone to react out of sheer terror and in that moment, their emotions will overwhelm them.
Emotions can be a tricky subject, especially when you are trying to cultivate an air of ruthlessness in your life. Many people, especially those who like to pose, might consider themselves to not have feelings and to work very hard to hide the fact that they feel things like sorrow, despair and even disappointment. These people end up suppressing natural human feelings and in the process of doing so, cut off a very important part of themselves.
If you want to learn how to be courageous, the solution isn’t to cut off yourself from your own humanity. Rather, it is to learn how to act in spite of your feelings. If you are experiencing a deep emotional influx of energy, energy that causes you feel nervous or uncomfortable, you might not be able to act the way that you want. You must be able to learn how to overcome those feelings.
The first step to learning how to overcome your fear is acknowledging the reality of the fear. Fear is a real thing and you are not doing anyone any favors by trying to pretend that you don’t feel it. Instead of refusing to feel your fear, you have the option and ability to step up and acknowledge the fear. By acknowledging that you are indeed afraid, it will lessen the intensity of your feelings. Those feelings will only work against you if you try to fight them. There’s nothing wrong with them, despite how we feel. Remember, we have a natural hatred for discomfort, so when we begin to feel fear, we also begin to feel uncomfortable. In the process of feeling uncomfortable, we rebel against the way that we feel and try to avoid or suppress those feelings. This causes them to become only more and more intense.
By learning to acknowledge the feelings and give yourself permission to experience them, you can develop a greater sense of control over those feelings. You reduce their strength and power, you remove their intensity and as a result, you become stronger and more in control. This sense of control then gives you the ability to move in spite of your feelings.
After you’ve acknowledge the fear and it lessens in intensity, you will then discover that you have a greater sense of self control. The stronger the emotions, the harder it is to have the courage to do the things that you want to do. Consequently, once you reduce the severity of your emotions by acknowledging them and feeling them fully, you will discover that you have a far greater chance of overcoming your fear, which is really the next step in building courage.
You build courage by working to overcome your fears. You build courage, quite honestly, by doing. It might seem paradoxical at first, but consider it. The greatest thing that fear does, in the moment, is prevent you from acting the way you want. If you need to talk to someone important in order to get a raise, fear will stop you from picking up the phone and acting. If you’re trying to handle a serious conflict in the workplace, fear will be the thing that will stop you from being able to talk to those individuals. There is no magical manual to overcoming fear other than one thing: you must act! We can overcome our fears by acting, by doing. Don’t fall into the trap of believing that in order to overcome your fears you must spend time doing sufficient research, instead you need to just get up and act.
Acting is hard, but that is part of being bold. A ruthless, bold and courageous man acts, despite how he feels at the moment. If you feel worried or afraid, go ahead and act anyway. Don’t let yourself fall prey to inaction due to your fear. It is far better for you to say “no more!” to your fear and act than it is to wait for the perfect plan. The longer you wait, the harder it can be. Become bold by making the tough choice to act in spite of adversity. It’ll make you stronger in the long run.
Boldness Tip 3: Opportunism
If you want to achieve greatness in your life, then you’re going to need to be able to spot opportunity when it opens up in front of you. Not only do you need to be able to see opportunity, you’ll need to be able to act quickly to act upon the opportunities as well.
Many times, we have tremendous opportunities laid out before us. They might not be very obvious to us, such as an investment plan or a new job, or they could be extremely obvious such as a job offer or someone asking you to join a partnership with them. Regardless of the types of opportunity that we could potentially face in our lives, one fact remains: if we don’t take an opportunity, it will vanish forever.
What separates the ruthless from the weak is the ability to identify opportunities and then take them as they come up. Hesitation or delay could potentially ruin our chances at success or victory. A ruthless individual figures out the details after he has seized the opportunity, not before. Fortune favors the bold, as the saying goes, and if you delay too much, you could miss out on something very valuable. The ruthless man would rather fail spectacularly than risk a great opportunity to pass him by.
So, there we have it. With those three factors combined togethe
r, you will become a much bolder and stronger person. This will allow you to be as ruthless as you like because with boldness you can actually get what you want in your life. You won’t have to worry about other people interfering with the things that you desire to do. You can instead be as free as you want and that freedom will open the door to achieving great things in your life.
Chapter 5: How to Get What You Really Want
Now that we’ve built a sufficient base, we’ve learned how pragmatism can be of extreme value in our lives and we’ve learned how to be bold. We must now turn our attention to how to put all of this into practice. We must put time and energy into learning how to get what you actually want out of life.
Many people are looking and waiting for permission to get what they want. They mill about, waiting and constantly asking themselves when it will be their time. They create a world, an imagined future where they are granted the thing that they really want through some sort of wish fulfillment. It’s why millions of people play the lottery. Those people all want something, but they would rather live in a fantasy world where it just happens magically. In their imaginations they receive the rewards of hard work and years of labor in a single instance. This can be fun to fantasize about, but it’s a terrible way to actually get anything important accomplished.
We must abandon a few things if you want to get the things that you really want out of your life. We must reject and surrender the concept of our “rights” and entitlements, we must get rid of all of the idealist ways in our minds and instead think only in the terms of the real. Then we must decide upon what we want and then we must give ourselves permission to go after what it is that we want.
This is no easy, task. We have lived in a slave society where we have been told what to want, time and time again. The corporate goon tells us that we want something new and expensive. The boss tells us we want to keep our job. The significant other tells us we want them. These desires and wants aren’t actually created by us, however. They are invented by other people and then fostered upon us.
There is nothing wrong with wanting money, a nice house, a good job, or a relationship. But there is something wrong when we are working so hard for the things that we don’t actually want. We must make the choice to find freedom in our own goals and desires.
Chances are there is something that you actually want, deep down inside. It’s not something that somebody put on you, it’s not something that other people have demanded you become. You most likely have something that is deep inside of you that leads you to dream big about the future. But there’s a problem. This dream doesn’t align with what those around us want us to become. Maybe you want to become a dancer, but the “real money is in programming,” maybe you want to run your own business but you are too afraid of the outside world. Maybe you just want to have a happy life, but other people are consistently preventing you from achieving that.
If you’re waiting for someone to give you permission to go for the things that you want, if you’re in the process of waiting for the perfect opportunity to actually follow your own goals and dreams, guess what? That time will never come. Other people will never treat you as well as you will treat yourself. Even those who have the best intentions for you can’t plan and advise you in your life. You don’t need to wait for permission to do the things that you want to do. Rather, the only permission you actually need is your own.
But that’s a problem! It’s hard to give yourself permission to actually go after your dreams because we live in a society where we are often answering to other people. This compliance based society creates an environment that discourages independent thinking. The education system is based around creating dull minded, compliant workers who are capable of putting long hours in a factory, not inspiring someone to be the best that they can be. If you have been accustomed to following other people’s direction your whole life, the idea of striking out on your own can be downright terrifying.
Of course, this isn’t acceptable for the ruthless individual. The ruthless individual, by nature, is striking out alone in their own world. They are doing the thing that they really want to do and they don’t give a damn about anyone else’s opinion about it. We see it all the time, the brilliant businessman, the genius inventor, the trailblazing explorer, all of these people were able to do these great feats because they weren’t hanging around waiting for permission. Instead, they gave themselves permission to do what they wanted to do. They weren’t waiting for their boss to clear their ideas, they didn’t wait for someone to write them a blank check, they instead were more focused on making the leap of faith in their pursuit of their dreams.
You can be the same type of person, if you want. You can make the hard choice to step away from the system, you can pry yourself out of the corporate machine that has taken so many bright and brilliant people and forced them to become just a mindless drone. It’s not easy, but then again, the ruthless individual isn’t concerned with easy, he’s concerned with achieving great things in his life.
What drives you? What drives you in your day to day operations? Are you just hoping to get to that weekend? Are you barely present in your current life? Do you hate the life that you are in, but you can’t figure out how to escape? As mentioned before, if you are in a tough spot in your life, then at the end of the day, you are ultimately responsible for whether or not you stay there. You have the right to leave at any time, but most people don’t take that right. Most of our lives are just prisons with the doors locked on the inside. And then when we see that fabled individual escape from time to time, when we see someone navigate through life with shrewdness and cunning, we become vengeful and envious. We call them names; we point at them as being without any sense of morals and we make the argument that “they are what’s wrong with the system.” At the end of the day though, if there are exploits in the system, then a pragmatist wouldn’t despise them. The pragmatist would take advantage of them.
Stop envying and fussing about other people’s success. How many times do you hear the public decry the millionaires and billionaires on Wall Street? How many times do we hear the fuss about crooked politicians who are only interested in their own gain? The reality is that there will always be people who are able to navigate through the system and take advantage of it for their own gain. Now, we’re not advocating illegal activity, we’re not saying that in order to get ahead that you must do unethical or immoral actions, but we are advocating for taking advantage of the systems that are in place.
Getting what you actually want out of life takes courage, strength and risk. It requires a specific kind of focus, a focus that many people would consider to be single-minded devotion and ruthless. Once again I will repeat, there is no one in this world who’s going to care about you as much as you care about yourself. This is just the nature of things. This isn’t an excuse to be selfish, it’s not an excuse for you to do wrong things to people. But what I am saying is that if you do not have an appropriate level of self-concern, then you are not going to be able to make a change in the world regardless of your intentions.
What is self-concern? And how is it different from selfishness? When you think about it, self-concern is primarily focused on taking care of yourself first. Imagine how airlines work during emergencies. One of the instructions they give you on an airline is that you are required to put on your oxygen mask in case of an emergency. If a parent has two children and the oxygen masks drop, the instructions from the airline is for the parent to put their oxygen mask on first before they assist their children with putting their oxygen masks on. Why is that? Well because if the oxygen levels were to drop, then the parent would be knocked out and both of the children would die. But once the child’s parent has the ability to operate without fear of suffocation, they are then able to help both children out. This is the perfect picture of what self-concern is.
Self-concern isn’t about taking from others it’s just about taking care of yourself first. Many times, we live in a society where sacri
fice is regarded as the best possible thing but we see over sacrifice happen in a lot of lives. Those who sacrifice constantly find themselves angry and frustrated with their sacrifice. They aren’t acting out of self-concern when they do sacrifice, they are acting out of obligation. Obligation, as noted before, is one of the most dangerous and deadly parts of life that forces people to do things they don’t want to do. It creates tension, a tension that shouldn’t be needed. It strains relationships and harms people’s ability to actually be happy. Don’t fall for the trap of thinking that just because you are doing kind things for people that you are being unselfish.
There are a great deal of people in the world who are doing good things for others out of a selfish heart. Helping out other people can provide a sense of self-worth, belonging and pleasure. In fact, there are a great many people in this world who would much rather do the kind thing and the nice thing, instead of the mean thing, because they would rather feel better about themselves than actually handle the truth. Don’t be mistaken there is nothing wrong with doing good for other people, provided that your intentions are right. But if your intentions are not correct, well then you’re in trouble. Don’t make the mistake, of thinking that unselfishness and selfishness are the result of actions. The truth is this selfishness is an intention. Someone who volunteers and works in the soup kitchen 24/7 can be just as selfish as someone who robs a bank. But since the actions look better than the intentions, we make assumptions that the person who spends all the time in the soup kitchen is a very kind and nice soul.
The Art of Being Ruthless Page 6