Gendernomics- Building Value Page 6

  You must own your past, without letting it dictate your future.

  You must be present in the now, without losing sight of your future.

  You must keep an eye on the future without forgetting your past.

  We cannot change the past, but we can make decisions and undertake actions in the present to change our future. If we elect to do so, we must at some point accept and integrate the different versions of ourselves into a congruent whole in order to realize the maximum benefits of the journey that we undertook. The woman you're hitting on now, doesn't know who you were 10 minutes ago, let alone 10 years ago. The fact of the matter is, she doesn't even care. Women do not look a gift-alpha in the mouth, especially not one who is unaware of his own value.

  Vision and Mission

  Your vision is the ideal state that you want to be in when it comes to your life. My personal vision is “I want to be the most complete man I can be”, this seems rather undefined, and open, but this is by design, your vision should not be very concrete, because ideally it should be able to last for the remainder of your life.

  The mission is your highest-level objective and should be more concrete than your vision, while building on the statement made in your vision. In my case, my mission is “To be the most fulfilled man I can be, physically, psychologically, intellectually, sexually and professionally”. This covers the major areas that I find to be very important in life, yours may differ. Within each of those listed areas, there are many sub-areas, for instance, the physical includes not only health and being in shape, but grooming, style, and a few other things.

  A common problem with mission statements is that they lack clarity, thus become too easy to interpret any way you like, in which case the mission will not do the job it’s supposed to do, namely, to limit the scope of your strategy and activities. Conversely, overly detailed and long mission statements can be hard to understand and leave too little room to adapt. This means that you perhaps miss out on important factors in the environmental analysis or strategy.

  As an example, take the following 2 mission statements for a railroad company focusing on freight transport:

  A) “To be the industry leader for low-cost transportation of goods and cargo, nationally and internationally”

  B) “To be the industry leader for low-cost railroad transportation of dangerous goods and cargo nationally and internationally”

  Both of these have a problem, the problem with A) is that it doesn’t limit scope at all in terms of which goods and which cargo, nor does it limit the means of transport. This could lead the company to expanding into trucking or air-freight. However, this lack of limitation does mean that the company is likely to include other means of transportation in their competitor analysis and environmental analysis.

  The problem with B) is that it limits scope too much, to only railroad transportation and only for dangerous goods. While it can be highly beneficial to specialize within a niche, if that niche becomes very limited, that can leave much growth on the table. Secondly, the very narrow focus of statement B), means that they may exclude other forms of transportation such as trucking from their competitors, which can lead to ruin down the line.

  When I take my vision and my mission together, they tell me something about which areas in which I need to focus my effort. A major step, and perhaps the most important role filled by your vision and mission is a filter for whether you should do something or not. It’s very easy to get side-tracked with things that are fun in the moment but do not contribute to the overall vision you have for your life. This is very common in business as well, with companies straying from their core business into side-ventures that management have a passion for, but that distract away from what keeps the lights on.

  These two statements are the foundation for the remaining work in this section of the book, so spending some time on them will be very useful. The most important thing the vision and mission do is to avoid confused purpose, a lot of people have a bias towards action and would rather be doing something rather than nothing, even when that something is detrimental to them. Be that the guy who starts lifting weights without a decent program, just walks around the gym doing random exercises with bad form, or the guy who decides to start fixing his personal finances without doing a total status check on his monthly expenses.

  Defining a useful mission will enable effective planning and ensure that activities lead to progress, not spinning your wheels or even regressing. For this reason asking the right questions when you try to define your mission can be a very useful tool, here are some suggested questions to ask yourself when you are trying to define your mission:

  - What is my purpose in life?

  - Where do I want to be a year from now, two years from now and three years from now?

  - What kind of life would I like myself to have in the future?

  - What is the ultimate role I would like to play in my life?

  - If I do not change things, what parts of my life will I be unhappy about in the future?

  I do recommend that when you write out your mission statement that you pay attention to word use, this doesn’t require as much focus as when one is writing a corporate mission statement, because you don’t have to ensure that everyone has the same understanding of it. However it is well worth it to spend some time to ensure that you do not give yourself an “easy out”. In my personal mission statement

  “To be the most fulfilled man I can be, physically, psychologically, intellectually, sexually and professionally”

  The key terms are “fulfilled” and “can be” in this case the definition of fulfilled I use “to satisfy” and the understanding of “can be” is read as “if I perform to the best of my abilities and capabilities”. I also defined key areas of focus, which ensures that the scope of my mission is limited yet gives some room for adjustment. I could have added detailed goals for each area, however in doing so I would have to change my mission if I want to change the goal.

  Out of all the things in the process, your mission statement should last the longest and require the least change. Strategies can be updated every few years, internal and external analysis every year or perhaps even six months.

  The mission also forms the foundation for the analysis we are doing in the next chapter, as it tells us something about which areas that we need to analyze, how precise we must be and how to interpret our findings.

  It is well worth it to spend some time developing your vision and mission, because bad vision and mission statements can often harm your progress quite extensively. Furthermore, you will at times doubt the work you are putting in, ponder if it is all worth it and question the work you are doing, being able to go back to well thought out mission and vision statements will help quiet your doubts.

  Internal and External Analysis

  The idea of a GAP analysis is pretty simple, you wrote down your vision and mission in the last chapter, now you need to figure out the distance between where you are now and where you want to be.

  When I conduct the analysis part of a project, I always start by mapping the internal state of the company and how it fits with the company vision and mission. This is to give an idea of the total workload required, how much must change, how congruent the structure and capabilities are with the vision and mission,

  In your case, when you sit down to do this analysis, you have to be brutally honest with yourself. If you choose to lie to yourself about how well you are doing within an area, it hurts nobody but yourself. It’s like the guy who does team bench-pressing with his buddies in the gym, doing 1 quarter rep with 415. Your ego is the biggest enemy during all this work, and I had a major issue with that myself.

  Take out your notebook, sit down and write the areas in which you want to improve, then write a few sentences about each area to sum up your present achievement in that area. When I started working on my style about a year ago, I wrote the sentence “I wear the same clothes for everything, everything I own is navy, white, black o
r grey and nothing seems to fit right”. This gave me a starting point for what areas I should work on; get some more color into my wardrobe and figure out how things are supposed to fit me properly.

  The second set of factors that you should seek to identify during this analysis is your own capabilities to do something about it, what are the core competencies that enable to you fix the problem once you have identified it? In my case, I’m very good at learning new things and doing research, I’m also hard-working and disciplined, so once I identify an area that needs to be fixed, I can find a solution and implement it.

  When you do this gap analysis be honest with yourself about what the problem is, and what your chances are of solving it. I didn’t start out disciplined or hard-working, those were traits I had to build within myself to be able to solve the problems that I wanted to fix. This is similar to how if a business wants to become a modern producer of whatever it is they make, it may require changing the structure of the company, setting up new departments, investing in new infrastructure and various other “pre-work” before they can actually do what their mission says.

  The reason for a GAP analysis is to develop a better understanding of where you are now and where you want to be once you conclude the first phase of your self improvement project. None of us are ever finished products, the only thing we can hope for is to improve a little bit every day, until we have changed ourselves from an undesired state to a desired state.

  Example GAP Analysis

  Some time ago I started becoming more interested in style, I had gotten myself into good shape and I was roughly the size I’m planning to remain, so I wanted to pimp my wardrobe. This is part of my mission and vision for the physical aspect, so I started conducting the analysis. At the beginning I went through my wardrobe and found that like many men, it was very pragmatic.

  I had my work clothes, mostly suits and business casual clothing that are the typical things you wear to work every day in a professional environment. I also had my leisure clothes that were 4 pairs of jeans, all the same cut, wash and texture. I had a lot of T-shirts with various logos or branding on them, a few shirts and some sweaters, pretty much all the same color, material and texture.

  This is fairly typical for men, pragmatic clothing, find one thing that fits and buy 8 of it. My shoe collection was also pretty sad, 1 pair of oxfords, black and a pair of sneakers, also black. Thus, the gap between where I was, and where I wanted to be was quite clear.

  External Analysis

  The external analysis is not a GAP analysis in the traditional sense, but it is an exhaustive analysis of your environment. This is an analysis of those factors that influence your ability to progress in your self-improvement. When conducting this exercise with a company, the focus is often on a methodology such as Porter’s 5 forces or a PESTLE analysis similar to the one I conducted in the first Gendernomics.

  The desired outcome of the analysis is to develop knowledge about competitors, customers, the regulatory and legal framework that the business operates within, the value chain of the business such as supplier dependencies or logistics limitations and many others.

  A lot of these are directly transferrable to improving your market value or sexual market value. You have to learn about your competition, demographics for your area as the number of women also on the market is a significant factor in success, you need to know if cat-calling has been made a crime, figure out the best areas to do your preferred style of game, and the logistics of getting a girl from the meeting point to your place or her place.

  My recommendation is to make a spreadsheet or just a list on paper of all the factors that can negatively or positively influence your success. Major points would be the social realm, are you in a conservative or liberal area, what are the opportunities to meet women in your local area, is it a more sexually liberal area or a sexually conservative area. Infrastructure should be covered; do you have access to those things you need to put a plan into action? If you need to start working out, is there a decent gym that is convenient and practical, if you decide to go out and meet women at bars or clubs, can you get decent logistics back to your place?

  Demographics are important, is there enough women in your local area to where you can realistically get a solid pipeline going with leads, without them easily finding out about each other, a simple rule of thumb, could you go on 100 first dates in a year and barely scratch the surface of available women?

  How bad is the male to female ratio in the area? If you live in a town next to a military base, your town will be crawling with men in uniform on the regular on the other hand if you live in a college town where there is a large female-only college, that means you have a major market to tap.

  In business, I would refer to this as value chain analysis done from a market-first perspective. You begin by establishing the market you want to tap, learning what you can about it, and then tailor your product offering and logistics towards maximizing your market share in that market in the most efficient manner possible.

  Example:

  Vision is to live a life of a hedonistic playboy. Mission is “To maximize my sensory pleasure as related to sex, food and alcohol”. After conducting the gap analysis, we’ve established that you currently have 0 plates, and no prospects in your pipeline.

  Before we start conducting the analysis, we break down the ideal environment for a hedonistic playboy lifestyle. I recommend using a table in excel or a similar tool for this and creating a matrix.

  First, we begin by defining the market women, age 18 – 24, slim, well-educated and feminine. We also need to look at what the demographics is in the area, and we find that only 3% out of a 50.000 person population in your town are women ages 18 – 24. This comes out to 1500 women, not bad really but 28% of the population are men ages 18 – 35, this comes out to 10000 men, so the market has intense competition where men drastically outnumber women.

  Then we look at secondary factors, you want to maximize your access to new experiences in cuisine, the town has 40 restaurants, but they are all major chain restaurants, and the nearest place with a Michelin star is 10 hours by car. Plus, the town is in a dry county, so there is no alcohol sales at all.

  This is perhaps a worst case scenario situation for the person who wants to maximize his sensory pleasures as related to food, alcohol and sex, few women, few good restaurants and no booze. Based on this external analysis, there is a major gap between the ideal environment and the present environment.

  This analysis is much smaller than what a man would commonly create, but the mission and vision are narrow for this example. Here we find that on all 3 counts the present environment is not conductive to the vision or mission.

  There is just very little chance of being able to accomplish the lifestyle that the man desires, within his present environment, thus we can conclude that in order to achieve his mission, he has to change his environment. This is the old adage “selling sand in the Sahara” again, if the market is not there and the infrastructure is not there one can either change the environment or adapt to the environment.

  Suggest tools and techniques:

  - GAP analysis

  - PESTLE

  - SWOT

  Barriers and Enablers

  Both the internal and external analysis in the preceding chapter serves to give you a clear view to the barriers that are likely to hinder your progression and the enablers that will help you progress along. Both barriers and enablers can be external or internal, they can also be permanent or transient.

  I define a barrier as “Anything internal or external that has a probability of impeding your progress towards your desired objective(s)”. In a business this could be that you’re the smallest company operating in a market where returns to scale are very beneficial, or it could be that you run a big mastodon of a company in a sector that requires quick action in the market. A barrier to improving your physique could be that you spend a lot of time travelling for work, so it becomes difficult to co
ntrol your diet and to get to the gym regularly.

  Enablers on the other hand are those things that give you an advantage and helps you with your goal. I defined them as “Any particular thing, internal or external that has a high probability of facilitating or even expediting your progress towards your goal”. The reason that you want to be aware of your enablers is that used correctly they can bring great value to your endeavor, however if neglected, they may even end up being a barrier.

  Something can also be both a barrier and an enabler as they are often context dependent. For instance, those of you who follow me on twitter will know that I travel extensively for my job, this is an enabler in that it allows me to practice game in many places, and it means I’m well-traveled which gives me a lot of stories about different places. However, it also a barrier in that it means that I don’t stay in one place for long, and I have a stacked schedule most weeks, so it leaves me little time to run game, and forces me to escalate fast.

  The particular barriers that you struggle with will often be unique to you, but they may also be context dependent. Being a foreigner may be positive in some cultures where you are perceived as exotic, and a good prospect for a fling that none of her friends will find out about. However, in other cultures women may be wary of foreigners, if not downright hostile.

  The same thing is true of enablers, something which works to your advantage in one context can be quite detrimental in other contexts. Being a naturally high-energy, extroverted, loud and boisterous man will work to your advantage when you are running club game, but it will most likely be somewhat of a detriment when doing day game unless you are able to dial it down a bit.