From the desk of James Steele II
“Epic Badassery at The 21 Convention London”
All in all I spoke three times over the four days of the event covering the topics of Objectivism, CLBP and exercises role in tackling it, as well as taking part in a Q&A session with Anthony covering as best I could the attendees questions on any aspects of exercise and nutrition. All will be available at some point on DVD, The 21 Convention website and Youtube channel, and itunes.When there here I’ll post them up and I look forward to any and all feedback or questions anyone has, just contact me through the blog comments.
In a nutshell the event was awesome.
I thoroughly enjoyed it and it exceeded my own expectations. Anthony, whom I had met once before when he visited me in Southampton, put on a fantastic event and should be immensely proud of creating his dream in physical reality. I learnt a great deal from the other speakers at the event and will briefly cover the most interesting points that I noted in the talks I attended. But I want to now just take the time to thank the attendees as well because they are the fuel that makes the event a possibility in reality. Meeting with them all and discussing their interests and ambitions, seeing the drive they all had was almost tangible. All of them where there to improve their own lives in one way or another, to create their ideals in reality, to choose life as a goal and achieve it. Thank you everyone.
My Notes….
Throughout the event I took notes during most speakers talks (The only one’s I didn’t that I attended was Brad Bransons because I had put my pen down somewhere and couldn’t find it, doh, and Sasha’s mainly because the content was so funny I forgot to make any). I attended all the talks except for Marcus Oakey’s, James Marshall’s, Vince Kelvin’s, Steve Mayeda’s second talk and DJ Fuji’s, all of which however I will be catching up with when the videos are available as after seeing the quality from other speakers I don’t want to find I am missing out on anything.
Anthony ‘Dream’ Johnson – Event Architect and founder of The 21 Convention
What is The 21 Convention?
Sleep deprived yet ready as hell to deliver the best 21 Convention yet Anthony took to the stage and set about answering the question above. This years event had a perhaps strange (to the uninformed and unwilling to find out) array of topics. Anthony first highlighted what The 21 Convention isn’t and then took the keywords from the banner on the website and used them to formulate his ideal vision of what The 21 Convention is.
His answer to sum up:
A panorama event for life on earth as a man
The perfect lead onto my talk on Objectivism.
One of the most interesting points from Anthony’s talk was his explanation of the Ideal-Perfection Dichotomy.
He identified that an Ideal is the best possible in physical reality and implied continual growth to achieve that goal.
He identified Perfection as a platonic (my choice of word) concept which doesn’t exist in reality. A state of perfection implies no growth is left, no more forward driven process of improving yourself, achieving life. In essence, perfection=death, perfection is counter to life and it’s achievement.
It reminds me of something I said years ago to a friend of mine.
“When you don’t believe in perfection, there can only be progression.”
I would just add that progression has to be a conscious choice, the choice to achieve life.
Brad Branson
Ok so I didn’t take notes but I found the fundamentals of Brad’s talk interesting. With reference to the value men place on women, Brad highlighted that most men view women as being more valuable than themselves. To me this is absurd. If a man doesn’t hold his life as his highest value he cannot value anything else. Brad pointed out that alot of PUA’s attempt to ‘recalibrate’ (I think that’s the word he used) this women/men value difference by devaluing the women. Instead Brad spoke about how you should instead value yourself higher and in turn you’ll express that through your actions and body language. You’ll come across as a person who values himself highly and in turn you’ll attract the women whom express the virtues you desire.
Steve Keychain
Steve’s talk was very much in tune with what both Anthony, myself and Brad had fundamentally highlighted – Valuing your life and pursuing it’s achievement. Steve talked about purpose, your purpose as life and how you should always aim to improve it’s quality.
In addition I picked up an interesting theory from Steve’s talk.
Noel Burch’s four stages of competence.
Interestingly this was very much in tune with Objectivist epistemology on a simplified scale.
In essence,
Unconscious competence – You cannot know what you don’t know.
Conscious incompetence – You are aware of the existence of something but are yet to understand it’s identity.
Conscious competence – You have knowledge of something but it takes a
great deal of conscious awareness to maintain and act upon.Unconscious awareness – I saw this as synonymous with Rand’s abstraction from abstractions. The integration of conceptual knowledge into further concepts in order to make retrieval of such knowledge more efficient.
Conceptual competence being the last stage in knowledge obtainment – The retaining of characteristics with the omission of specific measurements.
Steve also spoke about fundamentals alot which was a message I wanted to stress in my own talk.
Dharam
After my second talk was Dharam. He covered a number of topics which the audience wanted to learn about with regards to pick up. One thing covered was ‘wingmanship’ which I found particularly interesting not being that familiar with the pick up community. Both myself and my friend Sean Toomer who both have long term monogamous girlfriends could see the value in applying this with some of our single friends.
Some other things Dharam mentioned I noted down as I found them both interesting and inspiring.
He spoke about courage and fear, correctly defining courage as being action in spite of the presence of fear, not the absence of it. He noted that fear was a natural response to a variety of situations and that to acknowledge it and act accordingly was what constituted courage.
He also commented on enjoying the process as much as the outcome in your pursuits. This is one of the most important things I think for a healthy psychological state. If you choose life and achieving it’s proper state, happiness, then finding happiness in the pursuit of happiness serves to perpetuate and augment the state of happiness you seek.
Dharam finished with making everyone more aware that the pain of a regret is always worse than the pain of rejection. Choose to act to achieve your goals, to acheive life. Don’t regret not trying.
Matthew Hussey
Matt’s talk on the fundamentals of entrepreneurship was the epitome of how to productively create your own happiness, life and be the ideal individual you can possibly be. To me an entrepreneur is the utmost personification of individualism.
To quote Matt:
“You’re the best asset you’ll ever have”
The man who lives his own life by his own means and not through others.
A few key points from Matt’s talk.
Matt talked about there being no place for arrogance in business. I wanted to ask Matt whether he thought a dichotomy existed between arrogance and confidence and whether he could elaborate, but I didn’t get the chance. I think all too often people get arrogant in their pursuits and attempt to dismiss reality. The confident man instead lives in constant awareness of reality and instead is confident because of the knowledge he has regarding it.
Another thing was the phrase ‘Just Start’ – Reminding me of the ‘Just do it’ speech by Art Williams. Matt said sometimes you need to just get on with things even when you’re not ready to. Perfectionism is often cowardice in disguise. This rings with Anthony’s refutation of the concept of perfect. In application this can be difficult even from an Objectivist perspective. Sometime you have to act in the face of incomplete knowledge. Perhaps the only knowledge you have is the probability of an outcome. However action for the rational individual always occurs in the context of some knowledge, and the belief of the success of the action can only be determined by it (not as philosopher William James would like to propose as ‘the will to believe’ – I’ve got a blog post in the works dismissing this concept). Therefore even though you may not have complete knowledge you are aware that there may be unintended consequences of acting as such and have the balls to try it anyway even if only to learn.
Moving nicely on from this Matt explained that due to this entrepreneurs should prepare for a high failure rate. To combat this he suggested pursuing several, associated opportunities in order to discover which one will succeed. At the end of the talk I managed to ask Matt whether he though a J-curve phenomenon existed with regards to this i.e. the likely hood of failure was necessarily high when only one opportunity was pursued – increasing the number of opportunities decreased that likely hood of ultimate failure – but increasing it too high (spreading yourself too thin) would serve to further increase the chance of failure. Matt’s answer clarified this by suggesting the opportunities you pursue be varied but only within the scope of your interests and time. Choosing numerous opportunities so far away from each other both conceptually, geographically or whatever would likely spell failure on both parts.
Other points included avoidance activity, selling yourself, questioning AND speaking with authority, and real modelling. I’ll not go into detail on these as you’ll have to wait to see his talk when it comes out.
Steve Mayeda
Dj Fuji was ill when he was due to speak and so his talk was re-arranged and Steve ‘El Topo’ Mayeda stepped in off the cuff and did an outstanding talk on the process of selling on an emotional level.
For me this was fascinating. All too often I fail to acknowledge that not everyone I deal with is entirely rationally minded and so wont just buy a product or service because it’s the best, what they want etc. Sometimes the best way to get the result I want it to act upon the reality that alot of people hold their emotions as their standards of value. So for me Steve’s talk added a very valuable tool to my repertoire.
He went through the process of identifying the following:
What does the client want?
Why do they want it?
What would their life look like if they had that?
Letting them know you can do that for them.
This initial process creates a ‘no-brainer’ scenario for the client before you have even gone into the specifics of the product or service you are offering.
Frederick & Yoram
The tag team presentation of Frederick & Yoram was as far as I am aware new to the convention and an interesting format. Both focused on highlighting the pitfalls they encountered during their time in the PUA community and made some very important fundamental points.
One of the points I found important was their discussion of how society generates ‘concepts’(which perhaps are more appropriately termed anti-concepts as ‘society’ has no mind, there is no collective mind and therefore no collective concepts in the sense of how they are formed) such as the ‘inappropriateness’ of men projecting the fact of reality that the women they experience invoke an aroused state. This was an important general point as it pertains to a number of different societal constructs including the meta-ethical constructs determined through normative ethics.
Jared ‘Psych’ Laurence
I was looking forward to Jared’s talk alot. Anthony had told me that he was also a PhD candidate in the area of psychology and so was looking forward to the scientific approach to the psychology of ‘game.’ Jared spoke with a focus upon arousal and sexual escalation, in essence how to understand the psychology of escalating arousal and also how to apply it.
The scientific approach was obvious when Jared starting talking about generating assumptions based upon your current knowledge with a woman and then through action attempt to find out whether your proved right or wrong. Hypothesis generation and experimentation?? I think so. Jared discussed how classical and operant conditioning theories were applicable to the area as well before discussing actual methods of applying the theoretical approaches in practice.
Andy Yosha
Aka. The Duke Nukem of Daygame (dubbed by Anthony). I enjoyed Andy’s talk alot, partly because of the geeky command and conquer analogy used (I’m a huge geek aswell), but also because the fundamental idea’s he discussed didn’t just apply to daygame. As with alot of the talks the ideas were applicable to a lot of different social dynamics.
Anyway what stuck out to me from Andy’s talk was his discussion fear and both state-dependent and state-independent beliefs.
In essence the command and conquer reference was with regard to the fear felt in unfamiliar situations or environments. Through a process of repetition and practice we can condition ourselves to either associate a different emotional perception with the situation, or we can acknowledge it and act in spite of it courageously. However, removal from that situation for a period of time results in a deconditioning of that previously conditioned response. Fear is natural and never goes away completely.
The state-dependent and independent beliefs appeared to me to be synonymous with my thoughts on rationalisation and rationality (which are two entirely different things).
State-dependent beliefs are influenced by our emotional state in so much as our emotions are taken as the standard of value and thus of decision making. The process is a rationalisation of that ‘belief’/emotion, choosing the most appropriate ‘explanation’ for it.
State-independent beliefs are influenced by our emotional state sure, but, in the same light as Dharam explained what courage was, they are formulated and held with the emotions being input information into the decision making process. We can choose to either act upon them or against them based upon the sum of all other perceptual and conceptual knowledge we have about the situation. This is rationality.
Wrapping up
To wrap up I’m just going to reiterate that I had a blast at the event and would urge anyone who can attend to do so whether in Orlando or an event next year. If I had the time and money I’d be out to Orlando in a flash.
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Original review can be found here.
