You Don’t Want Success - You're Just Tired And Scared | Owen Cook

Here's what you do if you want to get ahead. Success is about focusing on what you want, not on what you don't want. Nobody owes me shit. No one owes you anything. Wherever I am on my journey, I'm loving it, okay? I love the journey.

He's the co-founder and executive producer for Real Social Dynamics. He's been the creative mastermind and main speaker at hundreds of RSD seminars worldwide. The foundational principles of Real Social Dynamics comes from analyzing male and female interactions. He's Owen Cook, or RSD Tyler, and here's my take on his top 10 rules for success. Rule number 3 is my personal favorite, and make sure to stick around all the way to the end for some special bonus clips. And as always, if he's saying something that's really impactful to you, please leave it in the comments below and put quotes around it so other people can be inspired as well.

Enjoy! Here's what you do if you want to get ahead. Completely cut out everything, okay? Everything that doesn't support you. Any type of food that doesn't support you, don't eat it. Every type of influence like television or bullshit on the internet, don't look at it, okay? It's like Medusa, it will turn you to fucking stone. Don't look at it. When I see people looking at this shit, I'm just like, you're out. You're outta your fucking mind. You're crazy, okay? Don't look at it. That's basically for failures, okay? TV is like, TV, gossip, time wasting is the consolation prize for being a failure. If you're a failure, you just get to sit there and go like, "Ugh, American Idol, man, who's gonna fucking win? Hey, Susie said this at the office today." Okay, when I hear this shit, it's like I'm hearing Charlie Brown. I'm just like, what are you, like, it's like I'm looking at a crazy person. Like, what the fuck are you doing, okay? Pretty much then what you do is you limit your emotions down to only the ones that will help you, okay? So if you have an emotion that doesn't help you, you just get rid of it. It's gone. Success is about focusing on what you want, not on what you don't want. Do you guys notice how most of your friends or people you know who are failures perpetually focus on what they don't want? You guys ever seen that? Do you guys ever read comments online, maybe in my videos or say RC Nation, where people are always focused on their looks? And no matter how many videos they see of me and Jeff pimpin' it, they can't, they don't get it that their looks are not an excuse. You guys ever seen that? Because they're focused on what they don't want, right? They're focused on what they don't want. When they go to approach a girl, they're not thinking of having hot sex with her or how it'd be fun even. They're just thinking about not getting rejected and how much it hurts and how much they can't take it. They can't take the pain. They can't take the embarrassment. They can't take the discipline it takes to actually put themselves out there. They can't take it. And so, you know, they focus on what they don't want. Well, success is about focusing on what you want and not focusing on what you don't want. Success is about punching through the fucking wall, not punching at the wall. You want to think of your journey like— it's almost like you see that light at the end of the tunnel, but you also want to think of it like a narrow road. You want to think of success as a narrow road. So you are walking that line of success. But you have a more focused set of behaviors than most people, and you're constantly course correcting. So you're learning from where you fucked up, and you're taking the lesson, and then course correcting again, and again, and again, and again. Martin Luther King tried to commit suicide twice. You guys see what I'm saying here? JFK went through periods of deep illness, deeply, deeply ill where people thought he would die. These types of things, right? Winston Churchill went through deep, deep depressions. So you can become one of those people. It doesn't mean you're gonna become one of them, because that's, I mean, those guys are in their own fucking universe, but you know, you can become somebody of great power if you've gone through that, because you've been hardened. Do you guys see what I mean here? If you've been through that kind of bullshit, then if you've conditioned yourself to pull yourself out of something like that, if the world gets all fucked up, while all the other people, they're used to happiness, they're like, whoa, happy, and they're like, my happy world's falling apart. My happy world is falling apart. Shit gets all fucked up, you're just like, it's all good, baby. Yeah, yeah, you know? You don't care because you're adjusted to it. So you've taken conscious control. Do you guys see what I mean? Okay, so there's benefits. Being a hard case newbie means that you can be better than any of the guys that had it easily. It'll be harder to get, but you can excel to a higher level than all the people that were naturally good, if you choose to. But for you, it will be a life of commitment. In the same way that a guy that wants to get kind of big in the gym, if he's gonna be big in the gym and he's a hard gainer, little skinny dude, he's gonna have a higher commitment level to get to that level. You're gonna have a higher commitment level. You're not gonna get to average as easily. And sometimes even striving to stay at average won't work for you because you slip back. So you have to really commit. You have to take your foot off the throttle. Parking brake, man. You have to burn the boats, as they say, and just go for it. As a hard case newbie, if you do that, you can slowly build those willpower muscles, slowly reacclimate your body to positivity, build up friends, build up abundance, build an amazing situation for yourself. You do amazing, amazing things. Another thing that you can do is never, ever complain. When I see people complaining, I'm just like, what are you doing? Like, your life is so short. Are you really gonna sit here complaining? Let me put this in perspective, okay? I'm 34, okay? I'm 34 now. Now, in my 20s, I didn't know that many people that died, okay? As you start to hit 30, people start to die, okay? I had a friend that died last week, okay? People are just gonna start dying, okay? I've also almost died myself a couple times. Who here in this room has almost died before? Put your hands up. Look at that. Look at that fucking crowd. Now, if that many people have almost died, let me be a little morbid and freak you out here. How many people here weren't here to put their hands up? There's probably like little ghosts of people like, I actually did die, like right in this fucking crowd right now. That is going to be you, okay? You are gonna be dead soon enough. So don't waste your fucking time complaining, okay? Don't waste your time complaining. It is a terrible, terrible idea, all right? So basically what you wanna do is like never be negative, never complain. I consider myself to be a walking, breathing example of the sort of things that people talk about in books like Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich, The Secret, any of those books where somebody has a vision of where they want to get to and they walk that path. The reason that this works for me is that I have my internal compass lined up so strongly at what I want that every part of me is moving in that direction. Every single part of me. So say that I go out to a nightclub. And I see some guy there who's got girls all around him. He looks, you know, he's pimp, he's looking cool. I'm seeing that and I'm looking at it, and you know what? Who knows what his success is? I don't really know, but there might be something about him, the way he carries himself, the energy that he has. I look at that and I think, I want to be moving towards that. I'm meeting other people that are good with women, and I'm thinking, I want to be moving towards that. And I'm moving towards it, always. It's slow, doesn't happen overnight. Very slow process. But the years go by, and you get there. And you really get there. It's like the coolest thing I could imagine, that you could have a vision, and you could realize it, just through lining up your internal compass, and walking the path as it unfolds itself. To you. The rich get rich, the poor get poor. When I go out to the club in Hollywood, people go, "Oh shit, Owen, dude, I love your shit. Hey bro, come in with our table," and let me in because I'm the pickup artist who made it, right? Meanwhile, the guy that wants to go in and learn, no one wants to let him in. They just shush him away like that. No one wants to help the hard case. No one's gonna help you. Nobody owes you shit, okay? 'Cause you guys remember, the first thing I said was that I knew I sucked, I was willing to take my time and make slow progress, but the other thing is I said nobody owes me shit. No one owes you anything. You have to get control of what you have going on, okay? Because people are attracted to abundance and are repulsed by, repelled and repulsed by scarcity, right? So when you're someone with no friends, no happiness, you have a scarcity of friends, a scarcity of happiness, people feel a repulsion towards that, or repulsion away from that. When you got shitloads of friends and shitload of happiness, everyone wants to be your friend all of a sudden. You're in a downward spiral or upward spiral. The Hard Case Newbie, he's in the downward spiral. He has to recognize he's in the downward spiral. Take action to cut it off, and be willing to admit that to get back on his feet is gonna take a long fucking time. It's like a poor country in Africa, for example, that has civil strife, people are cutting each other's fucking arms off for fucking diamonds and shit, and you know, little warlords fighting each other and child soldiers and shit. To put that country back together is gonna be difficult, but probably it's gonna get, a country that's fucked up is gonna get more poor, more ravaged, more desolate, whereas a country that has an abundance of resources is probably gonna get more and more and more and more and more because it's not upwards cycle. So if you're in that downward cycle, you have to, you have to look at what's causing the cycle, all the different elements that are causing it. Look at that shit and say, what can I do now? I have always believed that success is a challenge to attain and it is fleeting once you have attained it. Success is challenging to get, fleeting once you've attained it. I think you should never take it for granted, never. Should you take success for granted? Mediocrity is the norm. I really, really believe that. And if you guys look at how I run RSD, I mean, don't listen to my words. Look at my behavior. Every fucking week I've got my new content up. Every week I've got the new stuff I'm focused on. I've got new projects on the go. I'm banging it out. I view it like a privilege that I get to teach pickup as a career. That's a fucking privilege. Now, most of you guys probably think my life is like a joke because you guys think that I'm like picking up Hoes, teaching it, bragging about it online. That's probably what it looks like, right? I get it, I would think that too. And that's a small element of it, that's the best part. But no, I work my fucking ass off at this shit. A lot of people say, why do you still go out 4 to, you know, usually 7 nights a week after 11 years? Why do you guys think I go out 7 nights a week after 11 years? To be good at what you do. 'Cause I appreciate that I'm in the position I'm in. You know, I say it's a privilege. It's a fucking privilege. This is not some entitled shit. That's a privilege to be in that position. I've got a big audience here to listen to what I have to say about life, success with women, success. That's a fucking privilege. So I take that very seriously. And I think that success is something that is earned and re-earned. I think that in life, You're climbing up that mountain and you want to take breaks strategically, but people think that you can climb up a mountain and just kind of stay there. Not really. I view it like it's like a muddy mountain. You climb up and you stay there, you start to slide down. And there's a number of reasons why that happens. I'll talk about them today. Does that mean you should never take a break? Fuck no. I'm going to take a little time off when I do my Miami events this year. I'm gonna sit there eating fucking sushi in South Beach and fucking stare at my belly button, and I'm just gonna be great, okay? And I've gotta, I'm looking forward to going out to the islands in Hawaii this summer, and that's a long ways off, but when I'm suffering hard with the workload, that's something I can look forward to, and I'm gonna sit beside a fucking waterfall, and I'm gonna sit there convulsing while my body flushes the year's worth of cortisol out of it. That's basically what I do. Cool, you know, of course I believe in taking a break. I think you should spend time with friends and take breaks, but I also believe that success is something that has to be earned and re-earned. The world is a dynamic place. The world is changing. If you're not changing along with it, you're probably being left behind. It's so crazy how, like, as an entrepreneur or somebody even who in their career wants to be at a high level, you have to, like, boundary off of so many behaviors and influences that other people would let in. So essentially somebody at a high level, they've just made the choice to say, hey, if there's somebody who's like overly dramatic or disruptive in my life, maybe I have to let them go. Right. It's like super sad, you know. And you know, if there's like foods that are depleting me or habits that are depleting me or things that are making me late or not on point or not have my life together, I have to let those go. Essentially, so a lot of it is like creating those boundaries. And what's funny then is people who are maybe not quite at that level, they wish they could hang out with people at that level. But they don't realize is like, it's not that that person's at like a so-called higher level than you, they just have stronger boundaries. And if somebody with less boundaries is coming into that circle, it's like, hey, we'd love to have you here, but just work on your boundaries a little bit. You know, we'd love to have you here, right? So that's, it's like people think that like other people are holding them down, but really actually a lot of time I think they kind of feel bad for them and hope they can do better. You know, everybody who's at the top is hoping to see other people people come up so there can be more cool people to kick it with. I actually chose to end off this video pointing up at the very tall Rockefeller Center to make the point about how when you start to develop yourself, it can oftentimes make you feel even more insecure. Alright, so a lot of time I'll bring a friend of mine to the gym, and let's say it's a girl, bring out to the gym, and she already feels really hot about herself, but as she goes to the gym, she begins to see her weak spots. She begins to actually realize how far she has to go. And paradoxically, the very act of actually improving herself makes her feel even more insecure. Um, you'll see the same thing when guys actually try to get a little bit of money going, or let's say that they try to learn to be good with girls, right? Let's say you actually thought your money was okay, and then you start improving your cash situation. All of a sudden you realize, damn, if I want to get a good business going, I want to get my career going with some good momentum, I have a lot further to go than I realized. Likewise, as far as girls go, most guys actually walk around thinking like, You know, they could win any fight, they could pick up any girl. When you actually go and try to do it and you realize how much you suck, it winds up making you feel even more insecure. So just remember that the fact that you are trying to improve yourself, it's a paradox between self-improvement and self-acceptance because the very act of improving yourself sometimes can make you feel a little bit bad. Uh, what's the frame that I come from then? How do I do all the self-improvement stuff and not feel terrible? Um, well, what I do is I come from a basic frame. And the basic frame is, I'm already awesome, and I'm just enjoying my journey of becoming even more awesome. So I remember back when I was first teaching boot camps, one of the first ones I ever taught was here in New York City. I didn't really have a lot of students, we didn't charge a lot of money, and I probably wasn't the best teacher, so you might not wanna have been at that boot camp. But the point being was, I was teaching boot camp in a Starbucks. You know, I'd sneak into like, you know, an HIV clinic and say that I had HIV, or we'd break into a store school building and do it on milk crates. I'd be doing seminars in those environments. And if you would have asked me if I thought what I was doing was cool, I'd say, yeah, it's cool. Right now I might teach like, you know, a 400 or 500 person seminar at a hotel. You ask me if I think it's cool, I say I think it's fucking cool. Someday I could be teaching a 5,000 person audience in a big auditorium somewhere, like some kind of, you know, convention center. And if you ask me if I think it's cool, I think that's cool. And if I was running the whole damn planet, I think that's cool. That's cool too. Wherever I am on my journey, I'm loving it, okay? I love the journey because as far as I'm concerned, the golden era is now. The golden era is the present moment. And wherever I am, right, like if you're asking me now, like, oh dude, did it suck when you taught the programs back at Starbucks? Fuck no, it was awesome. I was already awesome and enjoying my journey to become even more awesome, right? Someday if I'm teaching 5,000 people, you say, oh, teaching 500 people, Oh, was that too small of a crowd for you? I'd say no, I was just enjoying my journey. I was awesome, just enjoying being on the path to becoming even more awesome. And understand that culture is brainwashing you all the time to desire completion. And this could be a 10-hour seminar on this one topic, how literally how society brainwashes you to think that there will be completion. Yeah, it's like, you know, there's no one trying to control you, but just The way that society works out, again, it's trying to be like, you know, like the classic example that you'll hear like in Zen or stuff like that is that, you know, like, you know, you finish kindergarten, you go to grade school, finish grade school, go to junior high, finish junior high, go to high school, theoretically go to college, get a job, get promoted, retire, and then the end is you die. And yeah, there is no completion because you have to understand, in the world, sort of like a simple way of putting it, very simple, overly simple, there's like the wolves and the sheep. Okay, again, it's a very overly simple way of putting it. And the sheep, again, in one way of looking at it among a million different ways you could, are the people who think there's gonna be completion. And they are given a script by the wolves who then eat them. Okay, that's sort of the gist of it. The reason why— there's many different reasons why we all want to be told what to do. But a lot of it could come down to that human beings are— we have hierarchy, we respond to hierarchy, we come from tribes. So there's many different reasons that we all wish that we could be told what to do. Okay, but I'm going to focus on one reason here in particular. What I'm going to say to you, we're going to put the microscope on this one particular reason. The reason why I think that we all wish that we could be told what to do is because we're We're all tired and we're all scared. Okay, I'm gonna say it again. We're all tired and we're all scared. And because we're tired and scared, we just wish somebody would tell us it's gonna be okay and give— and just give us a fucking direction. Just please give me a fucking direction. Deceived. And you got to realize that there is no completion. There's no fucking completion here. And the world is always changing. Life is always moving. From out of— out of disorder comes order. Out of order comes disorder. Societies thrive and implode. Relationships go awesome for a while and dissolve. Friendships are tight and end. Relationships between men and women are hot and passionate and potentially end. Or if you follow certain rules you can make them last longer, and certainly you do have a degree of control. And that is why if you can help learn business, you should actually learn how good business works. If you learn pickup and relationship, you should learn how that works. And you can definitely stretch things out and create a robust structure, not a fragile structure that's always falling apart. When you're in a state of mind where you have complete self-trust to respond to any situation or to make decisions, to be a decision maker, in the face of vagueness, ambiguity, to be a wolf, that is a higher level of consciousness. That's like a different vibrational frequency, as new agey people will call it. You're more awake, and the reward is the state of mind and the person who you become. Realize that the wolves of the world simply embrace the ambiguity. Be the wolf, not the sheep. Realize that there are never is a completion.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I made this video because Sam Mack asked me to. So if there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile next, leave in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know which of the top 10 rules had the biggest impact on you and why. What did you learn from this that you're going to apply to your life or to your business? Please leave in the comments and I'm going to join in the discussion. And finally, I want to give a quick shout out to Antoine Clermont Renaud, thank you so much, Antoine, for picking up a copy of my book and sending that amazing tweet. I really, really, really appreciate it. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon.

If you look in the mirror right after a killer night, or if you look in the mirror right after an amazing meditation session, what you'll find is you really like the way you look. It's almost like your face relaxes and you have this kind of look in your eyes that just makes you attractive. Meanwhile, if you're kind of, you know, insecure, it's like it just looks so different in the mirror. And that's because, uh, perception yourself is so subjective. It's incredible. The most beautiful person can feel ugly. The ugliest person can feel beautiful. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't, you know, go to the gym. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't dress well, but rather you must manage your self-image. Um, in my experience, the guys that are most tortured are always the guys that are almost the societal standard, right? So it's like, it's that guy who's like 5'8", 5'9", who's so tortured that he's not 6 feet because he almost made it. And every time he looks in the mirror, he's like, like that, right? Trying to imagine that he looks a certain way, right? And those guys get tortured. Conversely, a guy who's like, like say 5'5", like I got buddies that are like 5'5", 5'4", even 5'2". Those guys oftentimes are the the most comfortable dudes with themselves that you've ever seen. And the reason why is because they're in non-resistance. There's no possibility of lying to themselves that they're 6 feet, sitting there in the mirror going, like that is not gonna do anything for them, so they just let go, accept themselves, have fun, have successes, build on it, and love life. If you can't change your thinking patterns and your thinking patterns are all fucked up, rise above consciousness, as Eckhart Tolle would say. Become present to the moment. You don't even need to change your thinking patterns if you're present to the moment. There's a major reason why Eckhart Tolle is the most profound influence in my life. For me to change my thinking patterns is so difficult, it is so hard. The only way that I can fix it is to go above thought. Do you guys see what I'm saying here? It's that fucked up. See, for a lot of you guys who have a more positive thinking pattern autopilot, it's actually harder for you to become present, 'cause you like your thoughts, but then when they become negative, it's harder to deal with because you're used to your thoughts and you're attached to them. For somebody like me, it's very easy to be present. Can you guys guess why? What happens when I stop being present? Feel bad. Say I'm up here, nice and present, and then I go back down into the thought. Waaah! What the fuck? Like that, right? It's like, say that you got hit in a bunch of car accidents and your spine's all fucked up, but if you maintain perfect posture, you'll be good. You'll actually have better posture than someone who has average posture or even good posture. 'Cause the accent forced you to have perfect posture. So if you're a hard case newbie, the hope for you is that you can actually become better than the guy that has it average. Anthony Robbins says the enemy of the best is the good. So if you use the leverage that your situation is so fucked up and so lame, and you use that as leverage, you'll wind up better than most guys. People can look at me and it almost pisses them off. That's like, that guy gets results, I'm pissed. Right, and it kind of pissed them off, and then they got to deny it to themselves and stuff. You know, yeah, they can even see videos of it online. They're like, that's an actress, it can't be. He's uglier than me and he's got a girl? Actress, right? No dude, you just didn't go out. I did and you didn't. I've actually thought sometimes of creating a video called What I Did While You Didn't Do It, or What I Was Doing While You Were, no, no, I was thinking of calling it What I Was Doing While You Were Doing What You Were Doing. And I was gonna like enact the whole thing. So I'd show like what you were doing, like watching TV, blah, like this, what I was doing, like me just kinda hustling through my life, going through my boring little menial repetitive tasks that I do every fucking day that improve me 0.000001% and that add up over time. I really think I should make a video of myself just going through my day and just show me doing it every fucking day so people can see the menial, slow, boring nature of progress. Because for every public victory you have, you have a private victory. You know, for every kick-ass video I put up online, there's those hundreds of hours that I spent at home looking at my video footage, looking at other speakers, comparing it, contrasting it, and learning how to be a better speaker. For every hot seat video that you see of me where I do some epic shit that blows your mind, there's all that time that I spent going out and doing menial little bullshit approaches again and again and again, and then going home and looking at what I did and how I could improve it, and on and on. For every kick-ass, freaking-out boot camp student that I have that love the program, there's those fucking 50 weekends a year that I went out and taught, learned every little nuance of the fucking thing again and again and again for a decade. So, you know, that's kinda like what success is like. I hope that I, you know, I provide an example of a guy who is untalented, funny looking and shouldn't be able to do it and is stunting on all your fucking faces. And, you know, that you can see that and say, oh shit, if that little dweeb can do it, I can do it.