CHAPTER 10: GREAT EXPECTATIONS—WHY IT IS YOUR DUTY TO BECOME A RICH AND POWERFUL MAN
“He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.” – Socrates
I had the pleasure of going out to dinner with a good friend of mine one night in Ottawa, Canada. My friend was a fantastic public speaker and ran a successful coaching and corporate training practice. My friend is one of the best public speakers I have ever seen, a very manly quality indeed.
In the ancient world, all men were judged on their masculinity by their ability to speak to a group of other men and their oration ability. Today we are no different. Men who speak to groups of other people are some of the highest paid people in the world.
My friend was struggling with the conflict that many men feel between putting more time in at work and spending more time with his kids and family. He had reached a degree of success and a high income, I didn’t ask him what his income was, it didn’t really matter. He felt as though he had to be around for his kids.
He loved his kids and wanted to be a good father. His assumption was that he had to be around the house all day to “be there” for his kids.
On the other hand, he told me that if he “pushed it” this year, he could make a million dollars. But he was struggling with the idea of sacrifice between a million dollars in the bank at the end of the year and his time away from his children—a noble dilemma.
I listened to his dilemma and then looked at him straight in the eye over a fancy upscale dinner and said, “You have to make the million dollars. You must.”
To me the answer was clear: and let me explain my logic.
I am not a father at the time of writing, but I do know the role that a father plays in a household. I got to learn first-hand about what a father is NOT from my own parents and my own parents’ divorce.
My own father failed to provide money and income for our family in the way that my mother wanted. This forced my mother into the masculine role of being the breadwinner in the home; it reversed the feminine and masculine energy in the relationship, depolarized the sexual attraction, and made my mother lose respect for my father as a man.
I got to watch my father struggle with his “business”—and I use that term loosely because he earned the same amount of money from his business for 16 years straight. His company had debt that my mother had to support and cosign for. This scared her and her middle-class conditioning—the middle class hates debt.
She was making $80,000 a year when she told him she wanted a divorce. He was lucky if he was bringing home $30,000. The same amount of money he had made since 1985 when he had a corporate job before I was born, except this was 2005. $30,000 over a 20-year time span was worth less than in 1985.
This displacement of power, especially economic power, and the reversal of the masculine and feminine polarity pissed my mother off. It violated her as a woman and violated my father as a man; he couldn’t play his role.
“Let me tell you something. There is no nobility in poverty. I have been a rich man and I have been a poor man. And I choose rich every fucking time. Because at least as a rich man, when I have to face my problems, I show up in the back of a limo, wearing a $2,000 suit and a $40,000 gold fucking watch! And if anyone here thinks I’m superficial or materialistic, go get a job at fucking McDonald’s, ’cause that’s where you fucking belong! But before you depart this room full of winners, I want you to take a good look at the person next to you. Go on. Because sometime in the not-so-distant future, you’re gonna be pulling up at a red light, in your beat-up old fucking Pinto, and that person’s gonna be pulling up right alongside you in their brand new Porsche. With their beautiful wife by their side, who’s got big voluptuous tits. And who’re you gonna be sitting next to? Some disgusting wildebeest with three days of razor-stubble, in a sleeveless muumuu, crammed in next to you in a carload full of groceries from the fucking Price Club. That’s who you’re gonna be sitting next to! So you listen to me and you listen well. Are you behind on you credit card bills? Good, pick up the phone and start dialing! Is your landlord ready to evict you? Good! Pick up the phone and start dialing! Does your girlfriend think you’re fucking worthless loser? Good! Pick up the phone and start dialing! I want you to deal with your problems by becoming rich!”
Jordan Belfort played by Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street
Back to my friend and his million-dollar dilemma. “So,” I said to him, “if you have the opportunity make a million dollars this year, you must do it. You might not always have the opportunity in your life to make that kind of money! If your business is relevant right now and you have the chance, then take it! Most men don’t get that kind of opportunity ever in their lives. Make as much money as you can in the fastest way possible. Sacrifice a few years of your life to live in ways people won’t, to live the rest of your life in ways that people can’t. Your kids, your little girls will look back on their father and thank you later in life for your sacrifices and your duty that you carried out so they can live comfortably. It doesn’t have to be forever, but if you have the opportunity, you must seize it!”
The reason a lot of people do not recognize opportunity is because it usually goes around wearing overalls looking like hard work.
Thomas A. Edison
The fact of reality is, making $1,000,000 a year in speaking, coaching, and consulting is still not easy or guaranteed. I know because I have built my own company to that point and beyond. It’s a struggle, it’s difficult, it’s scary, it challenges you and leaves you on the edge of survival. It’s something most people don’t have the balls to do because running a business is like riding a lion:
“Being an entrepreneur is like watching a man ride a lion. People look at him and think, This guy’s really got it together! He’s brave!” says CEO Toby Thomas. “And the man riding the lion is thinking, How the hell did I get on a lion, and how do I keep from getting eaten?”
The truth of the matter is that my friend may or may not actually be able to make $1,000,000 in a year. It’s a lot harder than it looks, and it takes tremendous effort. My work ethic to reach income levels like that and beyond has taken me working “two days” for every working day for 5 days a week for 10 years to achieve that level of income. I have always had at least two to four jobs, even when I was broke. I always had side hustles or other endeavors or businesses to earn money. I learned the immigrant hustle from my immigrant father.
However, I will take my friend’s statement at face value. Let’s assume he can make his $1,000,000 in a year. If he can do it, he must try. He must ride the lion and be the man who can seize everything that he and his family might want. Even if he only gets half, he’s still a major success, even at a quarter of a million dollars, he’s a top 1% income earner in Canada, even at half of a quarter ($125,000) he’s above the top 1% income for his age.
Shoot for the moon and you might end up among the stars.
I believe success is your duty. Economic success is your duty. I also believe that a man should strive to become as rich and powerful as possible so that he can protect himself, his family, his wife, his children, and his tribe.
As $100,000,000-man Grant Cardone says: Success is my duty and my responsibility. Cardone has disclosed on several occasions that his new goal is to be a billionaire, essentially 10x’ing what he claims to be his current net worth of around $100,000,000. The person who suggested that he become a billionaire was his wife. Now, what are you going to do with a billion dollars? The answer is probably nothing, but making a million or a billion is not about the money, it’s about the achievement, it’s about hitting your potential, finding meaning and purpose in your work and working as hard as you can to reach your goals and your potential. Your women, your children, your tribe, will appreciate your success and you will be able to give your family the things that only a rich and powerful man can afford.
“Don’t be A little bitch.”
—Grant Cardone
I find it interesting that Cardone’s wife, actress Elena Lyons—now Elena Cardone—was the one who saw her husband’s potential and said to him “Why aren’t you a billionaire yet?”
In Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, Hill talks about the importance of the right woman for a man, and specifically a man’s wife when well matched and married can be the source of his power and his genius. Women have an amazing intuition about men, and they can see potential and intuit all sorts of distinctions that men cannot see. Such is the divine feminine power of being a woman; men lack such intuition or life-giving sexual power.
If Cardone were a bachelor, or without such a great woman, maybe he would be lazing around on the golf course, slacking off and squandering hitting his potential. Cardone admits that he reached a point of comfort before meeting his wife, and he was slowing down and playing too much golf.
Comfort is a killer to success and your ultimate potential.
A woman always wants to see her man hit his potential and become the best version of himself. The pursuit of greatness in a man’s work is manly, and women love to see their man push for greatness—it’s a turn-on for them. All women love ambition in a man, especially the man they choose.
Cardone also has two young little girls, Sabrina and Scarlet Cardone. These little girls are young, under 10, and in Grant’s books he mentions that he only spends one to two hours a day of quality time with his kids, and that’s all they want. I think Cardone is right in this statement.
Do your kids actually want to see their father all the time? Do they want their dad for more than an hour a day? Probably not. Kids have their own things to do; they don’t want to hang out with dad for more than an hour to two of quality time per day. This makes great sense, when I was a kid I wanted my father’s support, but I wasn’t attached to him every hour of every day. In fact I wanted him to go away and leave me to whatever I was doing most of the time.
There is an effeminate, unmanly idea that you must be home all day all the time to dote on your kids and essentially be a stay-at-home husband. This is backwards; my father did it, and it pissed my mother off because he wasn’t filling his purpose and reaching his potential. When my father cried and begged my mother on his knees like a dog for a second chance in the family, my mother laughed and ejected him from her life. She was done with him, he wasn’t filling his role as a man and instead of him, she chose nothing, she chose to be single and have a dog instead. Tony Robbins says that if you want love and connection but can’t communicate well enough for humans, get a dog instead.
Women are ruthless with a man who doesn’t hit his potential. They appear to be the softer and nicer of the sexes, but make no mistake, women are ruthless with a man who is not producing. Female power and sexual power is like money. The second there is weakness or neediness in a man, the money is gone, the power is gone, and so are the women. This is a cruel fact of life, and some women may disagree with my statement here.
“Only women, children and dogs are loved unconditionally. A man is only loved under the condition that he provides something.” Chris Rock, Comedian.
But ask yourself: all things being equal, would your woman prefer you to be rich or poor?
All things being equal. I’m sure she would pick rich every time and you hitting your potential every time!
Women have great expectations for their men and want a man to fill his purpose and become the best version of himself.
They are generally not attracted to a stay-at-home dad; nobody really wants a stay-at-home dad—men or women alike. Stay-at-home dads are avoiding their potential and can appear to be untrustworthy because they have forsaken their purpose and their work and have slipped into feminine energy and the feminine purpose of family and the home. This is confusing to both men and women. No offense to you if you are a stay-at-home dad, but it is a strange gender reversal that is not really respected by men or women and I will just say that it will lead to problems down the road at some point when the biology of your woman catches up to her and says, “What the fuck?! Why is he just hanging out at home all day? This is not a turn on.”
Men throughout history have been absent from the home on long work adventures. If you were a Roman soldier, you would campaign in war for 5 or 10 years at a time, and when you came home from war your kids would be grown up. The Roman soldiers weren’t at home being stay-at-home dads, they were out defending the empire and the women took care of the house alone for years.
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens illustrates a young man’s desire in the 1800s to be rich and powerful. In Great Expectations, Pip is the poor stepson of a blacksmith named Joe. His sister, Mrs. Joe, is cruel to both Pip and Joe. Pip is the protagonist in the classic Dickens novel (and the novel is damn long because Dickens was paid per word by his publisher). Pip is set up to meet and fall in love with the beautiful Estella by a rich and evil old woman named Miss Havisham. Miss Havisham was not born evil or twisted, but rather she was destined to marry a man and on her wedding day, her groom didn’t show up to the wedding, and she was left alone in her wedding dress, with her wedding cake and a broken heart. She was so heartbroken that she stopped all the clocks in her house at the moment she was supposed to get married. Because her heart was broken, she made it her mission to destroy the hearts of men. Enter Estella, her gorgeous young stepdaughter. Estella is an angelic young girl, selected by Miss Havisham to be her weapon against the hearts of men as she raises the beautiful young upper-class Estella to become a maneater.
maneater as per Urban Dictionary:
An irresistible woman who chews and spits out men after using them for some sort of gain — be it sexual, financial or psychological.
When Pip first lays eyes on Estella in Miss Havisham’s garden, he falls madly in love with her, but he realizes the only way he will ever become a man in her league is to become a rich and powerful gentleman. He realizes that he cannot have the upper-class Estella when he is just the lower-class son of a blacksmith. Pip makes it his mission to become a gentleman to win the girl.
The opening of the book has Pip wandering the local graveyard visiting his parents’ graves, and he stumbles upon an escaped convict hiding amongst the tombstones. The convict threatens Pip and demands “wittles,” which are little morsels of food, and a file to break his chains. Pip as a young boy is terrified and goes to Joe’s blacksmith shop to find a file and food for the convict.
When Pip returns to the graveyard, he is ambushed by a second convict before he finds the original convict. Pip hands the food over to the beast of a man and mentions the second convict. This disturbs the first convict, but he devours the food mercilessly, cuts his chains, and escapes.
Four years into his apprenticeship, a mysterious benefactor allows Pip to escape is vocation as a blacksmith and move to London to realize his dream of becoming a gentleman. As a young man, Pip believes his benefactor is Miss Havisham, Estella’s adopted mother, and he believes that she is benefiting him to make him desirable for her daughter. After moving to London, Pip’s benefactor remains unnamed and Pip is unwise to spend his gifted money before he comes of age at 21. His legal guardian, a lawyer named Mr. Jaggers, points out the difficulties that Pip is creating for himself, but leaves Pip to navigate his own life.
At age 23 Pip’s benefactor appears in person and it is the convict he met in the graveyard as a boy. He learns the convict’s name is Abel Magwitch and this shatters Pip’s hope that he is meant for Estella and Pip feels disgust as he knows nothing about what type of criminal this man is. Despite his feelings of disgust and disappointment, Pip’s sense of duty that compels Pip to help Magwitch is a sign of his inner goodness, just as he had at the age of seven in the graveyard. After Magwitch dies, the Crown confiscates his fortune and Pip at 23 learns that having material possessions like good clothes, well spoken English and a generous allowance does not make him a gentleman.
Pip falls ill for several weeks and his old mentor Joe the blacksmith comes to care for him until he strong enough to walk. After Joe leaves, Pip goes home to find Biddy, the good and virtuous girl he should have married is now married to Joe instead. Without any money or any skills or profession, Pip is struggling to find his place in the world. Herbert Pocket, Pip’s friend, suggests that Pip get a job at the firm where he works in an office in Cairo. Pip gets a job as a clerk, Herbert marries his fiancée Clara and Pip lives with them as the third wheel. There is Irony in this reversal because Pip used his financial gift at 21 of 500 pounds to get Herbert a job with the new firm. Now that Pip has lost his funds, he asked Miss Havisham to pay the money owed and she does. Joe, in a very manly way, ends up paying for the rest of Pip’s debt and money that he is unable to pay.
Eleven years later, Pip comes home to England to find Joe, Biddy and their new children. He walks the land and finds Estella, both of changed from their experiences in life. After they reconcile, they hold hands and Pip sees nothing that can part them again.
True power, true riches—the things that Pip desires to win Estella—are fake. Pip is a fake, and he realizes that fine words and fine clothes do not make him a gentleman.
“True power is earned, not inherited”—Gene Simmons
Ironically, Joe the blacksmith is the real man in the story of Great Expectations. He is neither rich nor powerful in a big way, but he is rich and powerful relative to his potential in spirit, character, integrity, hard work, real cash in the bank, taking care of his women, his family, and his children. He proves that rich and powerful starts with a man’s character, not his bank account.
Joe is the master of his domain, the king of his domain. That is what a man must be. He may not be the most rich or powerful in the world, but he has control and power over his domain, he is the king of his own house, no matter how large or small.
Pip was living a lie. His wealth was a lie, his status was a lie, and the man who was his benefactor was a convict financing him on stolen money. Contrary to popular belief, the clothes can never make the man. The man, the power, and the wealth are only a derivative from the virtues within a man’s spirit.
Pip’s spirit is rotten and thus, he gets a rotten result. Joe’s spirit is strong and virtuous, and he ends up with the young virtuous girl that Pip should have married, a happy family, and money to bail Pip out of his debts. Strength that is earned from real struggle, real hustling, real grinding, and real value is lasting and infinite as long as your character is good. A man who has no substance, or a man who utters words that are baseless in reality is a liar and to be a liar is to be unmanly.
Women can lie. Feminine energy is chaotic like a stormy ocean, and a man may not always get truth from his feminine woman. For example, a woman who says, “I’m fine” is never “fine.” Fine in the female language means explicitly “not fine.” The words do not match the actions, emotions, and feelings and this is okay in the world of feminine energy.
Welcome to feminine energy; feminine energy can lie. But for a man to lie is unmanly. Masculine energy, unlike feminine energy, is focused in a linear direction; it’s direct and a man who lies to his tribe threatens the survival of the group. A woman’s lies, especially lies made to other women, do not traditionally threaten the survival of the group. Her lies are often frivolous and fun. This is feminine and acceptable to the tribe because these lies are nonthreatening and usually trivial. The difference between masculine and feminine energy is what allows women to lie acceptably, but men cannot lie without violating their masculine energy.
Pip was a liar. His wealth was a lie, his status was a lie, and he was not powerful or manly or the master of his domain.
People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.
―Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
It is your duty to reach your potential as a man, and you should strive to be the master of your domain and be as rich and powerful as possible. If you can make a million or a billion dollars—do it! Seize the opportunity right now; not every man has the chance or the ability to pull off such a feat for himself and his family.
It is your duty to reach your potential in power and money, whatever that potential may be. Everyone loves a man who strives to be better today than he was yesterday. But most importantly, your wealth, power, and ability to be the master of your domain must come from your own inner strength and your own inner virtue. Lying is unmanly, threatening to the tribe, and violates your masculine energy. Be virtuous and good in your pursuit of your potential, riches and power, for:
“A tiger can smile A snake will say it loves you Lies make us evil” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
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