Evolution (tyler durden)

Subject: Evolution

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A lot of people ask me why I've never put out products through RSD aside from the live programs. I guess it's an obvious question because I write and produce new ideas very quickly, and I could probably pump stuff out pretty quickly.

For me the big reason I've had an instinct not to is because I'm always evolving at such a rapid rate, and I guess that having a product out would make me feel like I have to be consistent to a viewpoint that I might have moved past. I think it's really important to take a few years to really think about what you believe. Everyone is so quick to put out a product these days, guys even brag to me about how they outsource it or create it in an afternoon. To me that's like forgetting why you got involved with this in the first place.

Going back to live in Kingston for a year I had so many different focuses in terms of how I was re-wiring the way I act and think, that coming back to Los Angeles it was crazy to see how my friends were surprised by the changes. All of my close friends have been very accepting which has been great. But it sucks when certain guys fall off the rotation, so to speak, because the change in status or beliefs throws a monkey wrench into the gears.

To me that's always been one of the toughest aspects about constantly evolving and improving -- some people don't want to accept the changes. When you change, there will always be a few people for whom it's more important to hold onto their first impression of you than it is to remain friends.

In any social group there are all sorts of underlying dynamics, especially revolving around hierarchies and belief systems.

Friends are always establishing and re-establishing their shared beliefs systems in their conversations, and when you move away from that it can break the bond in certain ways.

If you were a negative person and then you become a more positive person, oftentimes people will have a hard time believing that you've made that change. If you were a shit-disturber or a guy who created a lot of conflict then if you change that most people will still think of you as out to cause shit.

There are also the hierarchical aspects of a group, and when one guy moves ahead it can really mess things up.

Way back in the day if someone from RSD started to show signs of having better game than me I'd sometimes get competitive and make sure that I learned what they were doing and got ahead of them. Over time I realized that I was doing exactly what my mentors had done to me and that it was coming from a place of insecurity and feeling like my role was going to be replaced.

It's funny because in the last few years I do just the opposite, and if I'm out with my friends I'll even hold back and let them take on the more alpha role so that they can see what it feels like and I can help them to cultivate that part of who they are.

I think one of the toughest things for me being a figurehead of an organization is that it's hard to make real friends who view me as just another guy and not someone to take value from. It used to bother me a lot how guys would learn from me and we'd become good friends, but then as they evolved they'd stop being friends with me because on a deeper level they needed to reject and move past the philosophies they'd learned in order to evolve. That's a big thing with evolving -- learning new ideas and then moving past them.

Friends come and go, and it happens for a variety of reasons. I think for me though, one of the reasons I lost friends in the past was that guys who I thought viewed me as an equal probably took everything that I had to say very literally and allowed me to dictate their reality to them. So in order for them to evolve past that they had to reject ME as a part of the ideas that they learned because they'd tied the two together so powerfully in their minds. Even if I reinforced over and over that I'm just another guy with a set of ideas -- some good and some not -- I think there's something in the way that I communicate that makes it hard for people to process that.

A lot of the gurus you see will tend to surround themselves with guys who will reinforce the hierarchies and belief systems that they espouse, but I've learned that that's a bad idea. Personally I don't feel a strong level of trust for anyone who views me as being above them, because when they eventually realize that that was something that they created in their own minds there's no way to predict how they'll respond. If you read things like workshop reviews you'll see guys who will be so in love with a workshop to the point of going overboard, and those are always the exact same guys who become the vocal haters a year later.

When I first experienced this it was painful because these were guys who I viewed as friends and equals, and I'd never had the experience of someone I was friends with just randomly not wanting to be friends any more. Over time I moved more towards hanging out with guys who realize I'm just as big of a dork as they are, or my old friends from back home who I met before I got involved in all of this. I remember seeing guys like Snoop or LL Cool J (both who are far more experienced guys than I am) who married their high school sweet hearts and thinking "Wow those guys could have any woman and they're picking these less than stellar girls." But as I've progressed I've started to see a few signs of why they do that kind of thing, and it really makes sense.

In the past year my main areas of focus were to really humble myself, be more positive, and also never to care about what people think. After the book The Game came out I was really forced to stop trying to control or care what people think about me, because I think it got to a point where there was really nothing I could do about it. That was a very empowering thing for me, because it freed up a lot of my thinking to focus on other things.

When someone doesn't like you and decides to do something bad-intentioned to you, it's going to do one of two things: fuck you up and make you feel like a victim, or make you really, really strong. I had to make a decision about what the experience was going to mean to me. Was I going to be pissed off, or was I going to use it as something to force me to learn more about who I am and to become a more positive, grounded, and mature person.

Really it comes down to hitting rock bottom. It's like when you're afraid to approach a woman because you're hanging on to all of your blindspots and rationalizations, and when you finally get out there and get rejected twenty times you realize that it didn't matter and it was all in your head. The book was kind of like that for me but on a more global scale. I had to build a lot of security in myself that the way I came across to people would be judged by my general vibe and that they'd make their own decisions based on who I was on a deeper level.

I also had to focus on being positive and not being angry, because I learned quickly that feeling victimized or being angry only hurts you more than it hurts anybody else. I grew up not taking shit from anybody, and making sure that people knew that if they fucked with me that it would definitely not be worth their time. It was a hard paradigm to break out of but the way I did it was with full faith that despite that people who cause me trouble I know that in ten years I'll be so far ahead of them that none of it will matter.

For me that comes down to having complete faith in your ability to offer value to people and to know that you're not replacable. That's what a lot of the bickering you see in the community is rooted in, at least in my opinion -- guys who are paranoid that other gurus will come along and offer a perspective that's better than theirs, and so they'll somehow become obsolete. But really if you have that perspective then you're not going to keep growing because you're too focused on preserving what you've got instead of building and improving it.

I always think about how life is so short. There's so much I want to build and improve. My only disappointment in life is that I don't have more time to do the things I want to do. There are so many good books I want to read and places I want to go and fun I want to have. There are all these qualities I want to cultivate in myself and it comes down to deciding which I really want to focus on and which I care about the most.

They say that death is what gives a context to life, and I've thought about that and kind of gone back and forth on it. On one side you could say that you could still appreciate everything without death as a possibility, but I think that for me death gives me the ultimate context to make sure that I don't waste my time or fail to appreciate what I have. Maybe I'll change my mind on that, I don't know. I do know that the only way you won't fear death is by living a life that gives you real satisfaction and that at twentysix I think I probably fear death far less than most people twice my age.

Fear of dying young is really not an issue for me. I look at how most people live their lives and I truly believe that they are dead already. I could never imagine living like that, and this is something that goes even deeper than quality over quality. To me this is like a deep fundamental quality of the very DEFINITION of LIFE. To me living in a way that isn't real is the same thing as dying. There's no separation of the two concepts in my mind, so I guess fear isn't really something that I feel the same way that most people do. My only real fear is wasting my life.

Anyway, I'm on a tangent here, but I was hoping to shed some light on some of what I've been through and some of the ways that I've interpreted things in order to keep myself moving forward. I suppose everyone has different needs and I've never really been sure where my needs came from. Are they more real than the needs of other people, I don't know. For whatever reason the potentials that I want to build are just a part of who I am and I want to see that vision become a reality.

-TD
RSD (c) 2006
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