“My name is Jordan Belfort.
“The year I turned 26, I made 49 million dollars. Which really PISSED ME OFF, because it was just three mil shy of a million a week.”
– Leonardo DiCaprio, “The Wolf of Wall Street”
At the most pared-down psychological level, being a man is about TWO things:
- Hiding emotions/being seen as ‘tough’
- Making money.
These two primary drives are SO important that I literally want you to tattoo those two words onto your memory right now:
TOUGH and MONEY.
Understand these 2 basic driving facts about men, and you will ALREADY have given yourself a massive advantage over 99.8% of other women. In fact, whether you’re single or coupled, understanding these 2 fundamental facts will MASSIVELY increase your insight into the male mind and allow you to get the love you want, need, and DESERVE.
Right there, you’ve got the essence of the male psyche – and it drives literally EVERYTHING we do, from the kind of job we get, to when we want to have kids, to the type and number of women we sleep with.
Here’s What It’s Like to be Born a Guy
Still in Mom’s tummy: your Mom gets an amniocentesis test done and is told, “it’s a boy!” Your parents immediately start thinking about you differently than if you’d been a girl: Mom gets out the rollers and brushes and paints the nursery blue, and Dad breaks out the cigars and starts making plans for you to take over the family business when you grow up.
Born: Mom wraps you in one of those blue fluffy blankets and takes you home to the blue-painted nursery. Your grandparents descend on you with ‘boy-baby’ gifts: a camo-painted crib, a pair of tiny baby basketball boots. Dad hangs up a mobile with alpha-predator animals on it like sharks, tigers, and bears (if you were a girl, you’d get the ‘pretty’ animals like butterflies and hummingbirds.)
On your first birthday: You get a trike colored like a racing car, pajamas printed with all kinds of trucks and a toy bear dressed like a firefighter. You have already started to get comfortable with the ideas of toughness, violence, competition, and being strong.
Kindergarten: you fall out of a tree and start crying. All your friends gather round and laugh at you. The gym teacher hauls you aside, puts a Band-Aid (with a tough superhero on it) on your cut and quietly tells you to ‘man up, son – crying’s for girls.’ You snort back the tears; your friends stop laughing. Holy crap, the teacher was right! Lesson learned: tears are for wimps. If you get hurt, shove it all down inside and hide it, otherwise people will LAUGH AT YOU.
Grade school: you get beaten up for the first time. You come home sniffling. Your dad takes you outside and tells you to ‘quit crying and make him proud.’ Then he teaches you how to fight back. Next thing you know you’re in boxing class getting taught how to ram somebody’s nasal bone through the back of their skull.
Middle school: you get beaten up – again. This time, though, you’ve learned your lesson: you ‘take it like a man’ without a single public tear (although in the bathroom afterwards, you do sniffle some – once you’ve locked yourself safely in a stall where nobody can see you.) The lesson of acting tough and never showing emotion is already beginning to harden like an evil carapace around your heart.
Age 15: you get your first job and you get your first PAYCHECK. Mom bakes you a cake and your Dad slaps you on the back and tells you that now you’re the ‘man of the house’. You’re confused at first because you can’t see how bagging groceries at Costco for eight hours a week is so great. Your friends are weirdly jealous: they still have to ask Mom for pocket-money. When you hear them complaining about it, you discover that ‘winning’ over other guys feels freaking amazing.
Age 16: one weekend, you use some of your hard-earned Costco money to take a girl to the movies. When you pull out a fistful of cash to pay for her popcorn and Diet Coke, she blushes, and smiles at you, and asks if you can get her some candy to go with the popcorn. Nervously you feel in your pockets for extra change … and when you realize you have enough, and buy her what she wants, she kisses you on the cheek and makes a big fuss over you, and you feel warm and proud and strong and masculine … and it’s addictive. You start to figure out that it’s not the JOB that’s important, it’s the MONEY YOU MAKE FROM IT that’s the big deal here. Lesson learned: MONEY equals MANHOOD. The more money you make, the better it feels.
Senior year high school: You try out for the football team … and because of all the boxing lessons and backyard play-tussles with Dad, you get accepted. Before you know it, you’re hanging out with cheerleaders on the weekends, and girls come and hang around after school watching you practice. Guys want to be your friend and hot girls smile at you in the corridors. You start to realize that competition and status and being ‘better’ and ‘tougher’ than other guys means guys want to be like you and girls want to be WITH you.
The details can vary a touch from guy to guy, but I guarantee you the outcome is the same.
Here are the lessons the average Western dude has drummed into him literally from the moment he’s wrapped in his first (blue, duhh) blanket:
- Real men don’t show emotion (unless it’s anger)
- Displaying ANY kind of vulnerability will get you laughed at or beaten up
- Winning is the most important thing
- Competing with other guys to be the best is vital
- Masculinity is inextricably tied to financial success
- STOP CRYING. Being vulnerable and showing your feelings is for wimps
- Make money to prove yourself, get status, get friends, and get WOMEN
I know it sounds sexist as hell (and it is), but it’s also THE TRUTH. And fair or not (spoiler alert: it’s not), this is the REALITY for the vast majority of men – whether they know it or not.)
Okay, so now you know that guys have a constant drive to make money, provide for the people they care about, and WIN over other men …
… but have you ever wondered WHY they have that drive in the first place??
The Primal Provider Drive:
Why most guys constantly feel like they’re failing as men
A man and his small family crouch, hungry and cold, in a cave. The fire at the mouth of the cave flickers in the wind, sending gusts of thick black smoke back to where the three small children huddle under furs, watched over by their hollow-eyed, rawboned mother.
The man of the family is poised at the mouth of the cave, staring out into the night.
The knuckles of his massive hands clench white around the haft of his spear. Night-time is when the big predators come out … and every noise from the vast grassy expanse outside could spell the end for him and his small family.
His muscles are drawn tight with tension. He barely even dares to blink. He’s waiting, always waiting, for the end to come … and readying himself to fight to the death to protect what’s his.
On the outside, he appears calm, motionless, ready.
But on the inside, what he’s concealing is FEAR.
It never leaves him: a black, pervasive dread of what might come from the dark for him and his family.
They depend on him for their lives: for food, for protection against rival clans, for bare-knuckled, gritted-teeth combat against the hungry predators that stalk the blackness outside.
If his family is to survive, they need to BELIEVE in him. If they’re to survive, he must fight the fear alone.
He knows he can never, EVER let them see how afraid he really is.
… Okay, okay, I know the whole ‘caveman thing’ has been done to death … but cliché or no cliché, the thing is, it’s TRUE.
Since the dawn of humankind, MEN have been the PROVIDERS and the PROTECTORS.
And even though we don’t live in caves anymore – and most of us don’t have a single apex predator to fight – the INSTINCT remains hardwired into our DNA:
Men are PROVIDERS.
That means we are driven by nature and culture to compete, to succeed, to gain status, and to earn enough money to PROVIDE. And yes, we know that women are increasingly becoming primary providers as well, but that doesn’t change our internal programming. It may even make things feel worse.
So, here’s how it works:
At the primal, cellular level, men are PROVIDERS. That is WHO WE ARE.
And until we have proved that we can SUCCEED as providers – to ourselves, our friends, our peers, our colleagues, our parents, our mean older brothers, and to YOU – we will feel uncertain, anxious, empty, and … well, kind of PATHETIC.
Even if you personally make more than enough money to pay the bills and give your family a great life, he’ll feel the burden of this provider instinct anyway – it’s THAT hardwired into the male psyche.I’ll say it again: men are trained to believe they are the PROVIDERS. And this has more to do with how (and when) we LOVE than most women could ever imagine.
To prove my point, I recently performed an incredibly unscientific survey where I got about twenty of my male colleagues and friends together, got them all juuuust drunk enough,
to be honest, and then told them to go around the room and yell out the earliest lessons they learned, as young boys, about what it means to ‘be a man’.
Here are some of the responses I got:
- “Get a good job, get a lot of women, and then you’re a man”
- “A real man does everything to the extreme.”
- “Everything in our house was centered around money. Money, money, money.”
- “Be the best, no matter what it takes.”
- “If you’ve gotta take down the other guy to get what you want, then take him down.”
- “Go for the triple, not just the double.”
- “Being a man means controlling your circumstances and other people.”
- “Make money and get laid.”
So … does anyone else see a PATTERN developing here?
Yup: Men are PROVIDERS.
That is the way we are wired.
And that means we equate MONEY (“providing”) with MASCULINITY (“being a man”).
And that has HUGE ramifications for YOU.
Every single guy (in Western culture) is raised to believe and embody the fact that if you can’t provide a roof over your head, food on the table, gas in the car and shoes for the kids, then you’re no man at all.
Translation: if a guy hasn’t attained some measure of financial success in his life then he will feel like only half a man.
And when he feels like only half a man, he can’t give you ALL of his HEART.
In plain English: until he’s fulfilled his Primal Provider Drive and achieved financial independence, he won’t be ABLE to love himself … which means he can’t love YOU, either.
IMPORTANT NOTE: financial success does NOT mean ‘getting super rich’.
It’s actually much simpler than that (whew): in a masculine sense, ‘financial success’ simply means that he is SOLVENT – he can pay his own way, he can put a roof over his own head, and he’s bringing in enough cash to put food on the table, gas in the car, and take YOU out for nice meals and the odd vacation.
This stuff runs a LOT deeper than you probably think it does
A lot of women have a hard time understanding just how potent this primal driving force is to a man. And look, I totally get that – I mean, we’ve all HEARD that ‘men are providers’.
But what most women struggle to comprehend is that this stuff isn’t just a mild preference for guys.
It’s a burdensome DRIVE that MUST be fulfilled – like hunger, thirst, or the need for sleep – and that same drive won’t let us rest until we fulfill it completely.
Oh, and in case you were wondering … whatever amount you earn (or don’t earn) is irrelevant and beside the point to most men. Even if you personally earn a million bucks a year plus stocks, he still feels that providing is his RESPONSIBILITY and his DUTY.
The plain ugly truth is that we need to make money (be able to ‘provide’) in order to feel like we’re succeeding as men.
And if we don’t ‘feel like a man’, then EVERYTHING ELSE (including love) becomes IRRELEVANT to us.
This might sound startlingly shallow, but it really is the way guys feel.
Remember, we care about WINNING, COMPETITION, and STATUS – which is why ‘measuring up’ to the expectations of our parents, our friends, our colleagues, and our SELVES is the number-one yardstick we use to decide whether we’re ‘men’ or not.
And guess what?
If we don’t FEEL like we measure up as men, well, that’s when we get into all sorts of nasty stuff like…
- drinking too much
- abusing recreational drugs
- spending way too much time on the Xbox, smoking pot and eating pizza
- sleeping with a butt-ton of random women
- lying to our girlfriends
- buying stuff we can’t afford
- gambling next month’s paycheck
- getting into dumb fights.
Remember, we are PROVIDERS.
This is who we are.
The burden of providing is a HEAVY one to a guy
After more than a decade of coaching, calling, emailing, and meeting with tens of thousands of men and women, I still struggle to make it clear to my female clients just how deep this primal provider drive goes in the masculine mind.
Over dinner last night, I decided to ask my amazing wife about the ‘female equivalent’ of the male obsession with earning and providing; and she told me the closest ‘female equivalent’ is probably (as she puts it) ‘the relentless anxiety most women feel about their bodies.’
“It doesn’t matter how old we are, how young we are, how pretty we might’ve felt yesterday, or even what our friends and parents say to reassure us,” she said. “To every single woman I know, we don’t just ‘want’ to look good and have a hot body; we feel like we NEED to.”
For the record, my wife is a tall, athletic ex-model 35 year old who constantly gets attention from random people on the street for the way she looks – as in, strangers come up to her in the street to tell her how pretty she is (yesterday afternoon, for example, she took the dog out for a walk in sloppy shorts, no makeup, and her gross old baggy dog-walking T-shirt, and the garbage man leaned out of his truck and asked her for a date. So, when I say she gets a lot of attention, I mean she gets A LOT of attention.)
But, when I asked her if SHE feels insecure and worried about HER body and HER looks, she literally laughed in my face and said, “Have you even been listening to me? Of COURSE I freak out about my body. Even if I feel like I’m in shape and pretty happy with how I look right now, that little voice in my head is still worrying about tomorrow, and next year, and what about TEN years from now … it’s a constant battle. And every woman I know feels the same way.”
The moral of the story? For most men, the Primal Drive to provide isn’t just a desire, it’s a DUTY. And it runs so deep that almost NOTHING can take that burden away from a guy, even for a single second.
KEY POINTS: Things to Remember So Far
- Our culture puts a huge amount of pressure on men to be TOUGH, to WIN, to COMPETE, and to PROVIDE
- We are primed to seek PRESTIGE (mostly from other guys) …
- … which we do by earning money and competing with other guys to gain self-respect and social status
- Winning, competing, and earning money (ding ding ding!) are the KEY status symbols that men seek out in order to fulfill our primal provider drive
- We don’t need to get ‘rich’, but it is way easier for us to think about love when our finances are stable
- If we don’t get enough ‘wins’ and/or don’t feel like we can provide properly, we feel like FAILURES and shut down emotionally
- Men who have NOT fulfilled their Primal Provider Drive typically make terrible boyfriends/husbands because we’re too ashamed of ourselves to love you right
Keep reading to find out why men would rather crawl over broken glass than talk about all this masculine shame and pain with you … and how to use the “Master Male Emotion” to get him to finally open up!
