Last weekend I’ve had a very interesting conversation with a long-time reader of my blog and books. (Thanks again, N.!) We were not talking about pick-up, but instead mostly about trading. To summarize his view on psychological aspects, my interlocutor made the statement that trading is essentially a mirror of one’s personality. Well, books have been written on that topic. There is an even deeper insight to be gained from that statement, though: more or less everything you do is a reflection of your personality.

I don’t think that your personality is necessarily fixed, albeit there is most certainly a wide spectrum among people. Plenty of guys are literally trapped in their personality, with little hope to make a profound change. (Look up concepts like “learned helplessness” or “victim mentality”.). For such individuals to improve their lot in life, arguably professional intervention is needed, which at the very least amounts to cognitive-behavioral therapy. Others are much more fortunate and may even have been shaping their personality actively. Anybody who ever took a leadership role or attempted to improve his public speaking ability is familiar with that. No matter where you may be now, at one point you were a rank beginner.

Assuming that mentally inflexible people are stuck in their personality, it is easy to see why so many people just never really learn anything. Take pick-up as an example. In that regard, my audience is largely self-selected. Gullible idiots who believe in routines and that looks don’t matter consider me a “game denialist”. Yet, the personality type of the kind of guy who never really improves with girls is one I have encountered so many times in a lot of other fields as well. In short, I think their unifying characteristics is blind faith in authority and an almost absolute lack of independent thought. While we laugh at nerds who fail at picking up women with their “routines” and whatnot, the problem is quite different. It’s not so much that those people are necessarily idiots. Some may even be highly intelligent. They may simply never have learnt to question authority. Of course, there is also an element of stupidity, which becomes evident when people are unable to generalize, or realize that some people’s circumstances do not apply to them and never will.

This leads to the question whether such people can even be helped. Arguably, there is a good reason why there are so many gullible idiots in the world. They make great consumers, and they readily vote for the Left. To them, risk, and taking responsibility, are deeply unpalatable thoughts. As a consequence, they end up being deeply unoriginal thinkers, and they find a place anywhere on the bell curve — Paul Krugman is a great example in that regard, by the way. Your average HR drone would see herself in that description, too, were she not convinced that her mainstream tastes and opinions are original, if not subversive.

You won’t progress much in life on your own if all you are good at is licking someone’s balls and regurgitating nonsense. This only works until the gravy train keeps running. Exceptions don’t count, as I am referring to the expected value instead. Some people will get through life rather comfortably like that, but hardly all. That was something I recently had to think about when I was talking to a woman in an “Ethnic Studies” program (don’t ask). She is about to graduate, and together with her class mates, she is now scrambling to find any kind of job; even an unpaid internship would do. Interestingly enough, some of her peers got an internship at the United Nations. The catch is that it’s unpaid, and funding six months of living expenses in New York City or Geneva, Switzerland, isn’t something that’s easy to do for most. This leads to the question whether someone who is able of independent thought would ever put himself or herself in such an unfortunate position that the only option, besides marrying well, is to gamble on an internship that may, via further internship, somehow lead to a stable income in two decades.

To wrap it all up, I think a very good argument can be made that your position in life directly follows from certain personality traits. With a long cultivated victim complex, you would probably think that the world is against you, but it nonetheless owes you handouts, be it in the form of a cushy government job, or welfare and Obama phones. You’ll likely also fall for empty promises — in all regards: money, education, careers, pickup, relationships, health, dieting, and so on, and so forth. On the other hand, how would someone who feels very comfortable in his own skin and with his skills do? Would he (or she) be likely to end up in a similar situation? Or would he first start by asking himself whether something sounds right? While you’re thinking about that, also think about why you can’t fake confidence.