approach everything in life from a position of strength

we have two pool tables at home.

“duhbid, why don’t you ever play pool? you literally have two pool tables at home”

i do use them.

i use them as tables.

i’ll put my laptop on one and write.

and there are two reasons for that.

THE FIRST ONE. its the prestige.

i grew up around pool. everyone played pool. my family loves pool. the people around me loved pool.

i grew up poor, in the suburbs, surrounded by people who played pool all the time.

so there’s something fucking hilarious about having two pool tables in my house and barely using them for their intended purpose.

you know what makes it even better?

some guy’s dream is to have a pool table in his house.

i have two.

and i’m sitting here using one as a fucking desk while i work on my laptop.

your dream life is my furniture. fuck off.

the ultimate flex.

2ND ONE.

the second reason is much more important. the pool table is a symbol of comparative advantage.

i don’t do anything i’m weak at.

if i don’t have an advantage, i don’t do it.

it doesn’t make sense.

why the fuck would i do something i’m not good at?

that is one of the most idiotic things you can do with your life

spending your limited time trying to become good at something you have no particular ability for.

an axe is for cutting wood.

a hammer is for driving nails.

imagine a fish who spent his whole life dreaming of becoming a “tree-climbing champion”

it can spend twenty years studying trees.

twenty years training.

it will still be a fucking fish.

meanwhile, another fish can spend those same twenty years becoming the greatest swimmer in the ocean.

why would i take a perfectly finite resource, my time, and spend it developing a skill in which i have no particular advantage?

everything i do in my life, i do because i'm built for it.

i have an advantage.

an unfair advantage.

i write because my number one strength is critical thinking.

i can sit with an idea, dissect it, question it, connect it to other ideas, and eventually articulate what i see.

so why the fuck would i spend my life trying to become something i’m not?

i should write.

and i should become fucking incredible at writing.

THE GOAT OF WRITING.

and i think thats how you build confidence.

i know i’m good at things.

i’ve experienced it.

i’ve watched myself solve problems.

i’ve watched myself do things that other people couldn’t do.

and when you have that kind of confidence, you’re able to make the brave choice.

it gives you a high degree of confidence that allows you to make the brave choice.

and confidence touches everything.

and i’ve said this a thousand times, but i’ll say it again.

becoming absolutely competent at one thing, the thing you have a god-given ability for and are simultaneously obsessed with, is the key to success in every aspect of your life.

that’s what the pool table represents to me.

it's a symbol and a reminder that,

i need to approach everything in life from a position of strength.

if i can’t approach something from a position of strength, i don’t fucking do it.

if i don’t have an advantage, i don’t enter the battle.

i find where i’m strong. where i have an unfair advantage.

and i fucking attack from there.

thats the key to endless winning.

but duhbid, shouldn’t i work on my weaknesses?

but wait.

shouldn’t you work on the things you’re bad at?

isn’t that what personal development is supposed to be?

find your weaknesses.

attack them.

fix them.

there are things you absolutely need to become competent at.

but there’s a difference between fixing a weakness and building your life around one.

because there’s a psychological cost to constantly doing things you’re terrible at.

constant incompetence can fuck with your perception of yourself.

if you don’t know how to manage your money, take care of your body, communicate with people, or handle basic responsibilities, obviously you need to fix that shit.

doing something you’re terrible at every fucking day will demoralize you.

imagine having a job you’re terrible at.

you wake up every morning knowing you’re going to spend the next eight hours doing something that other people seem to understand more easily than you do.

you struggle with the work.

you make mistakes.

someone corrects you.

you watch someone else do the same thing twice as fast.

you go home feeling like you’re incompetent.

then you wake up the next morning and do it again.

after enough time, something starts happening.

the problem stops being “im bad at this particular thing”

it becomes “maybe im just bad”

thats where it gets dangerous.

because your brain doesn’t neatly separate every experience into isolated categories.

if you spend years experiencing yourself as incompetent, eventually you can start generalizing that experience.

maybe im not smart, capable, or disciplined.

maybe everyone else is just better than me.

and once you start believing that, you behave differently.

you hesitate, stop volunteering, and stop taking risks, or whatever you need to be moralized.

you avoid situations where you might look stupid, and become afraid of being judged because you’ve already judged yourself.

and then the whole fucking thing becomes self-reinforcing.

you don’t trust yourself, so you don’t attempt difficult things.

because you don’t attempt difficult things, you don’t develop competence.

because you don’t develop competence, you continue experiencing yourself as someone who can’t handle difficult things.

thats how you can slowly demoralize yourself.

its like being told that the sky is red.

someone tells you, “the sky is red”

every fucking day. FOR TEN YEARS STRAIGHT.

eventually, you might start believing them.

you walk outside and see blue, but you’ve been told “red” so many times that you’ve accepted the wrong conclusion.

thats what repeated experience can do to your self-perception.

if your daily life constantly gives you evidence that you’re weak, incompetent, powerless, dependent, and incapable of influencing your circumstances, eventually you can start treating those things as facts about who you are.

and once that happens, it doesn’t matter how many motivational videos you watch.

because competence creates a completely different psychological loop.

you get good at something, so you trust yourself a little more.

because you trust yourself more, you become willing to take on something harder.

you take on something harder, you get better, and now you’ve got even more evidence that you can handle difficult shit.

thats how confidence compounds.

and thats why i’m skeptical of the advice to simply “work on your weaknesses”

some weaknesses absolutely need to be fixed.

but you shouldn’t build your entire identity around fixing everything you’re bad at.

get yourself to a functional level.

then ask whether that weakness actually deserves another five years of your life.

you need basic competence across your life.

be competent everywhere. become exceptional somewhere.

you need to fix weaknesses that genuinely threaten your life.

but once something is at the level where it no longer holds you back?

stop obsessing over it.

go back to your strengths.

thats where the fucking compounding happens.

how to approach everything in life from a position of strength

1. identify your advantage and concentrate your points there.

i want you to look at your whole life and examine every domain of it.

your career, your business, your finances, the way you spend your time, the things you spend your attention on.

ask yourself: where am i strong? where do i have a god-given talent? where am i naturally good?

let me give you a specific example from my own life.

my absolute greatest advantage is critical thinking and ARTICULATING IT TO OTHER PEOPLE in a way they can digest.

so i don’t try to be a graphic designer.

i don’t try to learn how to code.

i don't try to be a fucking tiktok influencer.

nor a finger-skateboarder champion.

i write.

i sit at my laptop, i write my newsletter, and i put every single drop of my ambition into mastering this one exact craft.

if an opportunity comes up that requires me to be a meticulous project manager or a charismatic networker, i pass.

because every hour i spend doing something i’m mediocre at is an hour i’m not doing the one thing god built me to do.

your life is basically an allocation problem.

you have a limited amount of time, energy and attention.

you can’t put all of your points into everything.

so where are you going to put them?

are you going to spread them evenly across everything?

or are you going to find the areas where you’re naturally fucking talented and put everything you have into becoming exceptional there?

find where you have an unfair advantage, and attack from there.

2. always maintain the leverage to walk away.

approaching life from a position of strength also dictates how you deal with other people.

you must always be willing to leave.

if your woman doesn’t do what you say, you leave.

because if you have no authority in your own relationship, you’re operating from a position of weakness.

as a hypermasculine man, your world needs to bend to your will.

you have to be able to make things happen.

you have to be able to say, this is where we’re going, and have your woman trust you enough to follow.

if she doesn’t believe in you, she won’t obey you.

and if she fundamentally refuses to obey your leadership, then why the fuck are you staying?

go your separate ways.

you don’t spend your life trying to convince someone to follow you.

you find a woman who believes in the man you’re trying to become, who trusts your judgment, and who willingly accepts your leadership.

if thats not the relationship she wants, then that’s fine.

leave.

the point is that you have to be willing to walk away.

you can’t be so needy for a relationship that you’ll accept anything just to keep it.

you can’t be so afraid of losing a woman that you’ll slowly surrender everything you believe in just to prevent her from leaving.

if you can’t walk away, you don’t have strength in the situation.

the exact same principle applies in business.

you should always be prepared to walk away.

from a business deal

because the moment you become completely dependent on the other party saying yes, you’ve surrendered your power.

if you desperately need the deal, you’re going to accept whatever the other person gives you.

you need enough competence, enough resources, enough money, and enough independence that you can walk away from the table without your entire world collapsing.

you tell your woman what you expect.

you tell your business partner what your terms are.

and if they refuse?

fine. walk.

thats the entire fucking point of approaching life from a position of strength.

you want to build a life where you have total autonomy.

you want to become competent enough that you don’t have to beg, and independent enough that you can say no.

3. outsource, automate, or ignore the rest.

if you’re bad at it, just outsource it. im bad at cooking, so i dont cook. i command someone to do it for me.

you don’t have to become the best accountant, mechanic, designer, lawyer, and salesperson simultaneously.

you need to know which things deserve your attention.

everything else gets delegated, automated, outsourced, or reduced to the minimum level of competence necessary.

imagine if you just did the things you’re world-level at.

imagine if you only did the things you’re fucking fantastic at.

picking one thing. just one.

and deciding: i will spend the next 10 years of my life becoming the GOAT at this thing.

and then look at what actually happens.

you sit at your laptop for two hours, write a single piece of text, and generate more money than someone else makes in five years of grinding at a job they hate.

you walk into a room, quote a price that makes them sick to their stomach, and they pay it anyway because you're literally the only person on earth who can solve their problem.

people fly across the world just to sit in a room with you for an hour.

you look at a complex system that is failing, point at one exact flaw that nobody else saw, fix it in five minutes, and walk away with equity.

you have total control over your time because you cannot be replaced.

no one else has spent the 10,000 hours of focus that you spent sharpening this one specific blade.

you're operating from a position of absolute "fuck you"

you wake up on a sunday, walk past the two pool tables in your living room, set your laptop down on one of them, and do three hours of deep work that completely shifts the culture of your industry.

you don't play pool. you don't need to. fuck all the pool players. you're busy being a monster at the one thing you actually have an unfair advantage in.

imagine how your life would look.