242: Neil Strauss: The Uncomfortable Truth About Relationships

Neil Strauss is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Game, Rules of the Game, Emergency, and Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead and The Truth, An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships

He is also the co-author of three other New York Times bestsellers – Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, Mötley Crüe’s The Dirt and Marilyn Manson’s The Long Hard Road out of Hell. A writer for Rolling Stone, Strauss lives in Los Angeles.

Favorite Quote

“The underlying cause of most unfulfilled lives, is simply that we are too close to ourselves to see clearly enough to get out of our own way”~Neil Strauss

Key Points

1. Understand how to Gauge Feedback

Life will often give you feedback about how you are doing across various areas. You may find yourself repeating the same patterns, getting into the same type of relationships, or making the same mistakes. Whatever the case, if you want to make a change you have to gauge feedback.

You have to look at the patterns in your life and discover what lesson they are trying to teach you. What does it say about you and your life that you are constantly dating the same type of girl and falling into the traps of “project dating”? What can you learn from the fact that you are constantly losing jobs after a few months?

Take a cold hard, honest look at your life and look at what the feedback is telling you and then change accordingly.

2. Your Level of Self Esteem will Equal the Level of Your Relationships

Have you ever heard the phrase opposites attract?

Well that’s bull shit. Like attracts like, and if you are finding yourself getting into relationships with women where you are both in an unhealthy emotional relationship, odds are, your own self esteem is lacking.

If you want to attract better women, first become better yourself and change what you accept from others and from yourself. If you have low self esteem you will never be able to attract a woman with high self esteem, and if you have high self esteem, you will never get sucked into a toxic relationships with a woman who has low self esteem.

3. Finding Your Passion is Simple

If you want to find your purpose, and passion, do stuff you love.

That’s it. If you love doing something, then keep doing it, don’t worry about whether it’s your real purpose or whether you should change careers to follow the money, simply do things that you love doing and you will never fail.

Influential Books

1. Ulysses by James Joyce

2. Ask the Dust by John Fante

Connect with Neil Strauss

neilstrauss.com

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