I’m sorry but I just realized. I have made a mistake.
I am writing all these articles for quite some time now, but I have never given a proper introduction of myself to you in order to get to know me better.
So as my first post of this year, I would like to tell you a few things about me, that will help us connect better.
I promise, it won’t be long, and I’ll try to make it as interesting as possible (I know quite a few marketing tricks you know).
My name is Roberto Zanon, I was born in 1981, in Athens, Greece. I still live there and I have a younger sister and my mother. My dad died in a bike accident when I was 18 years old.
By the time of this writing I am not a millionaire (yet), but I am able to support a nice lifestyle doing the things I like, from wherever I like.
It would be a lie to tell you that I have achieved financial independence, but, at least, I can work from the comfort of my home and cover my expenses without having to deal with a lousy boss day in and day out.
I am not living the big life which I intend to, but I am quite happy with my lifestyle up to now. I try to improve myself day by day, little by little. My end-game plan is to be financially free before I get 40.
A general overview
During my school years, I was not the most popular kid in my class. I wasn’t a nerd either. Just an introvert, average guy who was not that popular. I had a few friends I was hanging around with, and I had minimal interaction with girls (don’t ask me why).
The same pattern held true for the rest of my high-school and post-graduate studies.
Although I considered myself to be a smart guy, my social performance was inadequate at best.
For the most of my life, I sucked in every pillar of life (a big time).
I was chubby, with very few friends (and even fewer girlfriends) and don’t even get me started on my orientation about wealth.
After finishing my master’s degree in the UK (on wireless systems), I came back to Greece to find my first job. And so I did.
Although not much of a job, (I was a presales engineer) it gave me a pretty accurate understanding of what a corporate environment is and helped me pay my bills.
Having no other influences at that time, I considered this a “normal” way of doing things.
After a couple of years, this first company failed and I had to find a new job. Although I found a new job quickly, something inside me was telling me that something wasn’t right.
I remained for a few months in this company and after my contract was over, I decided to leave for somewhere else.
Same position different company. I didn’t like that either. That was the point where I hit my highest anti-social moment in my life. I had absolutely zero interest for the job or the people around me.
Although I was “politically correct” with my duties, I wasn’t talking almost to anyone, and when I was talking I tried to keep that to minimum. I was performing just the bare minimum when it came to the job and way below the minimum when it came to socializing with my colleagues.
I didn’t like them, and they didn’t like me. I guess this is not the way things work in companies, so after a few months, they fired me, making a big favor to both of us.
My last ever day job was on a call center as a call agent. I was making cold calls to potential customers selling telephone subscriptions.
Intelligence and knowledge wise I was way overqualified and that was obvious right away. After a few weeks I was given the department manager position and they promised they would give me another promotion very soon.
Once again, something inside me didn’t feel quite right. My subconscious did know better I guess. Not sure how to explain this innate repulsion about my day job. I didn’t really know where it came from, but I did know it was 100% real.
So after a few months, I quit this job as well, starting my first company.
Milestone 1: let’s get fit
Almost in parallel, I realized that if I ever wanted to have any success with girls I had to lose these extra pounds and become more athletic.
And boy did I deliver. I lost about 30 pounds and I gained some nice sexual experiences along the way.
Losing those pounds, changed me in two fundamental ways.
First and foremost I felt capable of doing something for the first time in my life. It might not be that clear to some of you, but losing weight (while your body tends to gain weight very easily) ain’t an easy task. I was raised as a chubby kid and so my body “liked” that state – it still does actually, but I say “no” to it very often.
I was 100% in control of my emotions as long as my eating was concerned. I was on a very strict diet and was spending many hours in the gym six days a week.
That was my first a-h-a moment. I realized that nothing is impossible if you set your mind on it. I learned to be self-disciplined which I still consider to be one of the most important skills when it comes to success.
Health was now a vital part of my life, and although I had no success on the wealth front, I started very slowly to gain some momentum.
Milestone 2: average people cry (a lot)
No matter how cheesy this might sound, my second milestone was a girl. Or rather, the break up with her.
Having improved my image (reproduction value) considerably, I was having a greater success with girls. I was getting laid with more and better girls and I liked it.
And then I met her. She was smoking hot, young, funny and full of energy. I was dying for her and she liked me as well. Although I have to admit it, she didn’t like me as much as I did.
My relationship with her was like a dream. At that time, I was thinking she was perfect and I wouldn’t want to change a thing.
Being an average beta myself (only with a six-pack), eventually she dumped me, dropping me dead.
I was devastated for over six months, and I can actually say that this period was by far the worst of my life, from a psychological point of view.
Making the usual retrospection, I now laugh with my reaction and I keep thinking what an idiot I was. But at the time, she meant the world to me, and losing her was the absolutely worst thing that could happen to me.
Today, if I had the chance to tell her something, I would thank her for doing so. It might be hurtful but she taught me the hard way, that in life, you have to be someone of value to gain things.
Nobody is going to offer you stuff for free. You either deserve it or not. And I was clearly not “deserving” her at that point.
Of course this realization, took place quite a few years later and only after I have found my “source of enlightenment” – at least up to now.
Milestone 3: enlightenment
Someday, a few years later, a very good friend of mine has found a forum about *game* in my city. We thought it was quite interesting and decided to give it a go. It turned out it was a quite helpful community of people who had self-improvement as their main goal.
What begun as a *game*, it turned out to be a race to self-improvement and development.
Very fast, I became obsessed with the whole idea of becoming a better man. I became obsessed to improve every aspect of my life I could.
This might sound simple, but trust me it is not. For someone like me that had been swallowing the blue pill of social conditioning for many many years, hearing all these new ideas wasn’t easy to accept.
I was now taught that almost everything I was doing up till then was “wrong”. Health, wealth and relationships.
I was told that every positive outcome I had up to this point was by chance, and if I wanted to improve my results in all sectors, I had to do something about it.
If I wanted to be in a good condition and healthy praying to God wasn’t enough. I had to understand how the human body works, and what is beneficial for my health. I had to learn what to eat, how to exercise properly, how to sleep well, and how to reduce my stress levels.
If I wanted to have more success with both men and women, I had to understand how humans “work” from an evolutionary point of view and then implement all this knowledge in order to improve my social interactions with them.
If I ever wanted to make lots of money, formal education and linear way of thinking wouldn’t cut it. I had to study how successful people had done it. I had to work not only harder but smarter as well.
Luckily, my mentor, Iraklis Kiriakakis, has a very powerful style to captivate your interest. He made every story, narration and explanation quite intriguing. That made my interest grow big and made me thirsty for knowledge.
Together with him, this community includes many more guys who possess a variety of skills. In this community, I was finally able to interact with people who had a higher vision about their lives and they wouldn’t settle for a plain, average one.
I started to read as much as I could on human nature, evolutionary biology, social skills, health, business, finance and even game.
When I was learning something I was implementing it and observed the results. I was trying to get feedback and I was fortunate enough to have people in my social circle capable of offering such feedback to me.
I was going out way more often, interacting with numerous people and refining my methods as much as I could.
As time passes you realize that this is a never ending process. No matter how much of an improvement you think you have done, there is always room for more.
The more you improve yourself the more eager you become to learn and try new stuff. Every time I learn something about a social skill, I want to test it and get feedback. If I see it works, I adopt it and make it part of my belief system. If the results are not what I expected I try to think what I could have done better or ditch it.
*A tip here is that very rarely you need to ditch something you have read in such a book altogether. Most of the times you need to improve your method of implementation.
Since then, I have read dozens of books, hundreds of articles and I have spent countless hours with like-minded people talking about issues that can help us improve even further.
Unfortunately I have lost many years doing nothing important. On the other hand, it makes me feel nice that I have found my way even at this stage of my life. Actually most of the people never find it, so I cannot really complain.
Once you take the red pill, there is no turning back.
This is where I am at the moment. This is what I do for a living. I try to become a better man.
