One of the most important factors in improving your lifestyle, creating a better dating life, and having a masculine lifestyle, is who you choose to surround yourself with.
Who you allow to influence your thinking dictates how you experience the world. You absorb the mental models and worldviews of the people in your ecosystems, and those beliefs can make or break you.
The result: if there’s something you want to achieve, you need to be around people who are already doing it.
If you want to get into the banking game or the hedge fund game, you don’t need to hang out with artists, you need to hang out with fund managers and bankers and great minds. You need an ecosystem of competition and trading ideas and perspective on how to understand the market from an economic view, et cetera.
If you want to get in the startup game and develop a technology company, you need to be in San Francisco, where you can be around that ecosystem of programmers, coders, integration specialists and designers, and see who has what new startup and who’s thinking about what.
If you want to get in the film game, you want exposure; you need to be in L.A. The same principle applies in any social environment, so how can you apply this concept to your dating and social life?
Everything in life you want to achieve is easier when you have a team behind your back. Having a sense of camaraderie with other men who support your goals makes the inevitable setbacks easier to stomach. It makes the victories come quicker and last longer.
When you’re spending too much time by yourself or hanging out with geeks who have no girls in their lives, your ecosystem is holding you back. You need to build an ecosystem of guys who are constantly getting out there, having fun and meeting people, and enjoying life, like the guys in the Leverage Program.
When I look at my friends who have aren’t happy with their dating lives, there are some common themes. None of their friends or their fathers are masculine. They didn’t develop the sense of competition, assertiveness, and cooperation that comes from playing organized team sports.
Part of what makes the Leverage Program so successful is the team mentality all the guys have. Building an ecosystem like this in your own life is crucial, and you need a group of people who have your back.
You’ll meet girls through them, you’ll absorb their habits, you’ll get actionable feedback, and you’ll develop a social identity and support system full of guys who have your back. You’ll learn the subtle patterns of speech and dress that cool guys who “get it” display.
You’ll meet women through their social circles. This is how some guys seem to put in no effort yet still meet the hottest women: it’s because they really are putting in no effort! It happens through the social circles they’ve built.
Your ecosystem forms your foundation in life. Don’t separate your social network of friends from the women you want to hook up with and date. Your dating life should be a natural extension of your social life.
The end game is connecting with human beings. That’s what all this is about: building your confidence, learning social protocol, connecting with women, connecting with human beings, leveraging your resources to acquire more resources to acquire superior companionship over the course of your life.
The takeaway: accept that it’s going to require time to build a better ecosystem. You HAVE to be around people who are achieving the goals you wish to achieve.
