"First people Ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they'll fight you, and you win." How true is this?

DaVinciMatrixStyle

Space Monkey
space monkey
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Oct 26, 2020
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194
I'm just wondering if anyone's experienced this on your way to your self-improvement. I see this quote a lot and questioning how true this is.
 

Chase

Chieftan
Staff member
tribal-elder
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Oct 9, 2012
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5,480
@DaVinciMatrixStyle,

I'm just wondering if anyone's experienced this on your way to your self-improvement. I see this quote a lot and questioning how true this is.

I think it's roughly true, at least with the things I've endeavored to succeed at.

It is also rather neatly summed up in the graph I made in the sprezzatura article -- note the four quadrants:

effort-and-investment.jpg


  1. Unknown: ignore you
  2. Jester: laugh at you
  3. Peasant: fight you
  4. King: you win

From my own experiences...

Rap:

  • Obviously at first nobody knew who I was or cared

  • So then I put a website up and it started getting traffic. I was terrible then, tryhard, couldn't rhyme on beat, and I got mercilessly mocked. That was my first exposure to Internet hate and it was like a tsunami. I'm used to it now but back then it almost crushed me. I nearly took my site down

  • Then it shifted over to active discouragement, mainly from authority figures in my life, telling me I didn't need to be involved in this, or shouldn't be

  • Then eventually I got good, people in authority accepted it, people would hear my tracks and call it fire, people I performed in front of would go absolutely nuts, girls would hear me flow and get super interested, and everyone would talk about how they were going to hear me on the radio. I "won" (and then at that point just totally lost interest in it)

Pickup:

  • I'd go out and people would completely ignore me

  • So I started wearing outlandish peacocking clothes, saying all these ridiculous things I learned from pickup sites, and it definitely got reactions, but it also got me mocked, tooled, and feeling like an utter fool

  • Then it reached the point where I was good enough to start getting some results with women, but guys started to see me as a threat and I had to deal with much more aggressive guys in clubs, women would sometimes shift into these adversarial pickups with me, I was dealing with women I was dating trying to actively discourage me from picking up, wingmen were telling me I should change my approach, or that my relationship structures would never work with any girls other than the ones I happened to be dating, etc. Felt like I was constantly fighting uphill battles against everyone to get my results

  • Eventually pickup became a smooth process. Even if a woman is feisty, she's just being cute and silly and it does not get combative. Men are easily disarmed and typically view me as a cool guy and potential ally rather than a threat. Wingmen accept I know what I'm talking about and even if our styles are different, they both work. Women in relationships aren't trying to change or dissuade me from things much, because I present them in more calibrated ways, and I also come across as a guy who is certain about who he is and what he wants and not one to be dissuaded

Business:

  • I had very little business success in the very beginning. Some of my businesses never made a sale. Others made very minimal sales. Girls Chase included

  • Once I was more into it, people considered the stuff I was doing unserious. The businesses I was running were never going to work. I got plenty of mockery in the Girls Chase comments and via email early on, from angry feminists ad hominem'ing me and telling me how ridiculous the site was and that it would "never work" on them, or male feminists telling me this stuff was immoral and wrong and you should only ever treat women with gentlemanly respect and deference. Friends would talk ask me "how's the blog?" in a sort of jokey way ("lol, that business?"). One of the big pickup businesses I tried to network with dismissed us as not relevant to them; that became a sort of driving motivator to me for a good while, just to prove them wrong (we ultimately dwarfed them in traffic, and they're effectively out of business now, so I'd say we pulled that off. Although I'm chill with the guy who ran that biz now, and he's actually not a bad guy)

  • Then once we were established I faced years of dissuasion from every corner. Business friends were telling me I was in a dying niche and would do so much better running any other kind of business; they were also telling me the various things I was doing to try to make the business succeed were dead ends and that I should do what they were doing. People would come on Girls Chase and rather than mock now they would say that we shouldn't be teaching this stuff, or that we were misleading men and should either be pushing a.) more feminist dating strategies or b.) more manosphere red pill dating strategies (depended on who was lecturing us). Our search traffic dropped and for a while the business struggled to survive

  • Then eventually we had some breakthrough years, revenues went way up, traffic went way up, and we were established as a known, major player in the space. We were in the top 10 companies in our niche in revenue, #1 in traffic, and had become very well known across the web

So yeah, IMO, this is definitely a thing you will face.

Again, largely tied to the sprezzatura chart. You have to plunge yourself into that Jester phase, where you are trying a lot of stuff and failing a lot, and people mock you for being ineffective (ineffectiveness is something that strikes people as funny: "Look at that skinny guy lifting weights in the gym, har har!" "Look at that guy trying to start a business but he doesn't even know how to set up a web store, LOL!").

Then once you start getting results it shifts over to people trying to dissuade you for various reasons.

Then eventually you carve out an established, successful niche for you. You don't look silly anymore (well, to most people, but there are always some), and no one's trying to fight you or dissuade you anymore (or at least, most aren't; here too, there are always some). And it's hard to ignore you (though again, there are always some who will).

Chase
 

DarkKnight

Cro-Magnon Man
Cro-Magnon Man
Joined
Oct 18, 2018
Messages
1,576
Oh man... the above what Chase is writing is so familiar, so very relatable.
 
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