TODAY I WAS A SUCCESS
wake up at 6:30
eat breakfast
dynamic stretching
meditate 10 mins
head to the gym immediately after (new activity)
みんな、あけおめ！！！
今年もよろしくお願いします
happy new year from japan!!!!!!!!!!!!!
i said it to the convenience store worker this morning and he gave me a fistbump and engaged me in brief small talk. even if you have no one to say it to at home, make sure to say it to someone irl!!!
i had a lot of trouble falling asleep last night actually. after a few rounds of the short meditations i started coughing, which broke my pre-sleep lull.
i remember going down retarded thought patterns that usually would have sprung me out of bed and had my crazy ass walking around otherwise silent japanese neighborhoods rambling in english to my phone past midnight.
i just decided to do a 10 minute meditation (not the one i did this morning), which was VERY HARD. i had to physically move my arms up and down to the breaths to focus on the breathing and away from the thoughts. it was the mental/focus equivalent of struggling on a rep at the gym.
what's hilarious is that i had another thought pop up a bit later during that meditation realizing that i completely forgot what the thought pattern that had me in agony just minutes prior.
wait, i can literally just force the thoughts to go away????????????????????????????????????? this is possible????????????????????????????????????????????
yeah, the general idea with meditating is that you are focused on some menial task (like breathing in and out), and eventually you will lose focus.
but the moment you realize you lost focus, you shift the focus back on the menial task.
i tried something similar while i was walking outside this morning, focusing on my left right left right left right footsteps. this was a bit harder but after around 3-4 weeks, i'm starting to slowly see the benefits of meditation and how it can not only improve focus, but reduce anxiety. i will definitely be talking about it more in future logs
the gym opens at 9 on holidays but i have the cheap pass which would have me paying extra fees to use it on sundays/holidays anyway. and walking over to the gym today was more of a routine-building exercise.
that being said, i kind of would rather be outside in the late morning/early afternoon when it's slightly warmer and there are more people who are NOT rushing to work (although there was no one today since it's new years day lol)
i will post an update tonight for my new activity but i think i want to make it something like 15-30 minutes of focused
"watching weather news live in japanese".
focused because i usually just watch funny clips from this, which is fine and all for fun, but usually the clips are so short and the title explains what's going to be funny + people put in japanese subtitles so they're way too easy. without the subs, i can usually decently understand what's happening but miss out on small details. but i'm also used to the cute weather girl voices already and it's good light-level listening comprehension, and good for working on my concentration/focus in general.
okay brown shogun, i came to your fucking log to see you bang anime girls in japan. Toast doesn't even post anymore so ur the only japan guy now. but all u do is whine about random mental nonsense and trying to speak their dumbass language and there's hardly anything about GETTING LAID HERE???????????????? asians are EASY MODE bro they love americans!!!!!!! if i went to japan i would get like 15 lays in a month with ENGLISH!!!!!!!!!!
tl;dr good for u.
but i have to start over
when i joined the forums i was in a state of super-motivation and top mental health.
i had finally figured out how to control my life and follow a routine. that allowed me to very quickly start approaching girls, sans AA program, and even in pretty dicey situations early on, and i had easily added "going out and approaching" as a habit.
partially it was social unawareness and naivety, but the other half was already believing i was awesome. and at that point, i genuinely did believe that— in my eyes, i had basically "conquered" everything else in my life up until that point:
i had an above average salary in a field i was good at, i thought i was pretty above average in fitness despite being skinny (i was around 135-140lbs/61-63kg with visible abs, biked multiple times a week for 15-20 miles through the mountains, could do ~15 pullups and ~65 pushups, and tracked even micronutrients in my diet). additionally, i had ended a nearly 8 year "cold war"/silent period with my mom and was calling her once a week. so i finally felt i was "ready" to handle directly tackling my dating life.
my initial goals weren't shooting for the stars yet, i mainly just wanted a cute girlfriend to complement my ultra-baller master bedroom with a fireplace, fake plant decorations, and jacuzzi in the mountain house i lived in at the time.
and honestly, if i genuinely focused on that, i think i could have gotten it. i was already making inroads into making friend circles in my city (it was small, and if you made at least 5 friends, you basically had connections to everyone else in the town).
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except i learned way more was possible.
and then i realized what the fuck am i doing in a struggling post-industrial town in the south
that's when my world blew open. you guys saw me move all over the USA between fall 2021-2022, approaching in so many different cities, and going on dates, catching up on experiences i was probably supposed to have like 8-10 years prior.
but through my own experiences, and what seasoned veterans told me, i had slowly begun to realize i actually wasn't at the stage of "oh u just need to go talk to more girls lol".
for one, nobody cares how many fucking pullups you can do (even if you
used to be able to do 26) nor how good your endurance cardio is. they want you to be fucking jacked and be able to kick ass.
and girls want to feel good around you. it's
not about fast pulling and escalating like a robot, "u gotta have good vibes bro. u just gotta chill bro."
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"im not ready...something's weird about ur energy but i cant quite place it..."
that's probably where a bunch of pent up anger built up from. i thought my life experience was actually kind of standard, but turns out it wasn't. i was massively undersocialized and unaware of what people were interested in talking about.
and the very notion of conversation not being "let's exchange information", but rather "i want to feel good" (or more specifically "making the other person feel good") was alien to me.
and even though you could say i was obviously more fit than the average bumbling fat football fan drinking beer and eating hot dogs, it didn't matter because
1. i was way shorter than average, so being skinny
just makes me look like a kid, regardless of how ripped or fit i am
2. i thought it was somehow a big deal to be above average fitness given that i actually started at a fucking zero (pre-forums, before 2019) (couldn't do a single pullup, over 10 minute mile time, never stepped foot in a gym, etc etc). but no one cares about the journey, they only care about the results, and mine weren't enough nor relevant for dating/social purposes
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i was actually around ~130lbs in this pic i believe
but having a lifetime habit of just stuffing it away and suppressing bad emotions, i mostly ignored it. and by the time i had realized most of the things i needed to realize in order to have a successful dating life, i was no longer in my baller mountain house living a solid routine, approaching everyday. i was living an erratic and passive lifestyle. i was completely unaware of how much my mental health had tanked.
i was unwillingly going out late multiple nights a week to broadway, sleeping at random hours (or sometimes not even sleeping) and i couldn't even concentrate on the simple task of doing even 1 hour of work a day, let alone a "full" 4 hours a day (which was plenty a year prior).
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i had increasing awareness of what i had to do to become elite, and made structured plans for what needed to be accomplished. but i couldn't focus on them at all and stay consistent.
i would do short bursts of hustle and impulsive actions, only to lose focus when i didn't get the results i wanted, and i was purely relying on my own motivation.
even my decision to come to japan was one of those actions.
i hadn't even realized the importance of general discipline over motivation earlier this year. motivation is magical and you feel good for just taking action but it randomly wanes out. i think i very well could have gotten better results in nashville had i understood exactly what discipline and habits were. sure, there were many surface level things i was doing wrong in the first place, but they were definitely fixable and even i foresaw a path to success in america.
but i didn't have the discipline to do it. any intermittent failure i had made me lose motivation and i stopped taking action.
hell i couldn't even concentrate on doing 1 hour of fucking work
washing windows for my last month in nashville was a good brain cleanser before coming to japan. but even that didn't truly teach me discipline because i was only able to consistently wake up early and finish window jobs because i had troy (my "boss") and the client over my head. plus, i didn't do it long enough to reap long-term real benefits of BLUE-COLLAR HARD LABOR work.
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which brings me to the present. i'm in nearly the exact place i want to be (ok i would actually prefer being in a second-tier japanese city like nagoya or fukuoka, but i came to tokyo since my lang school will end up being here.....altho in retrospect i should have just gone to nagoya or fukuoka for this trip lol!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i dont know why i thought that mattered).
after my initial honeymoon period of "zomg im in japan again" and settling into my current place,
now i had to figure out what was stopping me from getting all of these cute japanese girls!!!!!!!!! that i came here for.
because at some point between august 2021 and now, i had lost the meaning of basic routines and discipline and was relying purely on erratic motivation. and my motivation was all gone from my red shirt year, realizing what i was faced with to get the life i wanted.
16 months ago, reading people's lay reports was fucking nuts to me and it was enough to get me out there even with no results of my own. and actually meeting people and getting guidance from them was even crazier, having seen in person what was possible. of course i can't forget my own experiences i had, which were largely a bunch of firsts or otherwise things i hadn't experienced in years/had less than 2-3 of.
but i had traded this "novely factor" and near-childlike innocence/"ignorance is bliss" motivation for a more sullen and boring dose of reality. with the dose of reality, now i knew what was necessary to get what i wanted.
but i became too jaded to simply be motivated to push forward and continue.
"oh great, yeah that guy got laid again lol"
"oh, so i'm just gonna do all this crap and get maybe one date and then maybe some pull and a makeout. and then even if i get the lay in some magical unicorn universe i'm going to bust in like 5 seconds. and i dont even have enough abundance to be able to iterate quickly enough to actually improve on these"
other than going to the gym and bulking, i spent all of my time in my little tiny room in this sharehouse wasting my time on the internet. obviously that didn't make me feel better. i tried various surface-level tactics like getting rid of my computer, limiting screen time, and otherwise restricting usage, without diagnosing and addressing the root causes of why i would have to do such things in the first place.
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feat. Toast. went from idolizing him and following his cold approach log to literally meeting the guy in the country we both set our sights on. also i dont smoke now lol
recognizing that my lack of ability to just stfu and execute sans "motivation" was going to be the end of me, in true colgate fashion, i erratically started
this new log, hoping the answer would reveal itself to me over time. i needed a clean slate to figure out what tf is happening.
but this time, the mental state i was in, and even now, is far behind the one i had when i first joined the forums, and probably the state i've been known to be in. i wasn't even aware of it when i made this log.
the only person from here who had any prolonged exposure to me in this state was september when he visited nashville in november. in roughly his own words "this place is like a shell of what it used to be". i don't count lacroix or Troy in this because being my roommates, any changes in mental state i had would have been too gradual for them to even notice (or maybe they did, i don't know, but they didn't explicitly bring it up like september did, since he only knew me from my logs and group chat energy).
essentially, not only do have to do all the x y z a b c things to "play in the dating market", i have to go back even further and become someone who can even do said x y z a b c things.
because most of them aren't just fun things with instant feedback mechanisms. they're mostly "do this thing and then you will basically feel zero immediate benefits or get any feedback at all but over time if you keep doing them you'll notice very subtle changes that will exponentiate over time". they all require consistency over many months, even years, and deep focus. otherwise i'll just be repeatedly "working on x for 1.5 months and then randomly falling out".
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guys, really. i don't smoke now
after getting a brief rundown of the whole deal with "neural pathways" from MakingAComeback over a whatsapp call, and this message:
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i finally realized what tf "discipline" is: it's when you can just "do" things regardless of your motivation and how you feel about them.
and how can you achieve that?
this is what confounded me forever up until now. after all, i only do things i want to do. but that doesn't really help me. i can make todo lists and plans all day.
and if i just follow "what makes me feel good", that obviously doesn't help either because the easiest way for me to "feel good" is excessive internet usage. might as well start vaping again. hell just start shooting up some heroin. wait, but now that's completely pointless. what's the point of keeping this sack of flesh and bones alive? might as well die.
of course that's quite the extreme extrapolation. in reality it's easy and convenient to stay digitally addicted. and anytime i realize that i have to put more than an iota of effort into doing something, i'm like oh wait but there was this other thing i was supposed to be doing instead of this. and then i get neither thing done. nor the rest of the items to do.
i'm going to talk more about meditation in future posts, but let's just say that it's essentially "focus training". it gives you the mental ability to focus, straight up. but like the gym, you have to train it for many months, probably even years. i'm at the equivalent of going from squatting the barbell to like 75lbs regarding focus.
and regarding the todo lists, it's mainly a mechanism for building a solid routine and habits in the first place. "building discipline".
it's kind of meta but i literally have to train myself to be able to follow a todo list.
colgate said:
TOMORROW I WILL BE A SUCCESS
I DON'T CARE IF ANYONE THINKS THIS LIST OF THINGS IS RETARDED SIMPLE
I WILL
() do dynamic stretches
() meditate 10 minutes
() eat breakfast
IF I CAN'T EVEN DO THIS, THEN THE NEXT DAY WILL BE EVEN SIMPLER
IF I CAN DO THIS, THEN I WILL MAKE THE NEXT DAY INCREMENTALLY MORE CHALLENGING
I WILL STARVE THE NEURAL PATHWAYS OF CONSTANT DIGITAL SELF-MEDICATION
I WILL CHOKE SLAM TECHNOLOGY INTO THE BED INSTEAD OF LETTING IT FUCK ME IN THE ASS
MY NEW NEURAL PATHWAY WILL BE literally doing what i set out to be doing in the first place omfg
TOMORROW I WILL BE A SUCCESS
that's why i started so retardedly simple!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! if i couldn't even do that, i was also prepared to make it as simple as literally
TOMORROW I WILL BE A SUCCESS
I WILL
() make my bed
slowly and incrementally, i am going to introduce new activities into the list, pertinent to my self-improvement/dating/goals/etc.
when i started approaching, i started with going out and approaching
one girl too.
but as i said, i have recognized i'm starting way below where i used to be (i even pondered straight up making a new KYIL account to detach myself from the history of this one some weeks ago).
my ultimate goal with this is to be able to execute actions as consistently and as disciplined as MakingAComeback does.
that will allow me to truly work on what needs to be worked on over a long period of time.
so if you're wondering why my goal says "japanese lay" but i'm over here talking about how meditating for 10 minutes is a fucking success, now you know.
MEN AT WORK
anyway the general timeline for the next 15 months is basically:
now - mid feb:
build up discipline here in japan, putting in relevant actions into my routine
mid feb - mid mar:
go back to america to move out my stuff and get student visa whenever that arrives. this period is way longer than i'd like it to be but i'm limited by how quickly the student visa will arrive sooo
mid mar 2023 - mar 2024:
come back to japan, lang school for a whole year
really dislike that this new grind is going to get interrupted, but once i'm back in japan and settled in whatever apartment i will have then, i will have learned the lessons i need to regarding IRON WILL AND DISCIPLINE
KING OF THE RETARDS 
FUCK! I'M A VIRGIN! TIME TO HUSTLE! 
).