Helping you win in life, so you can give back to the world
Mission: our mission is to advance humanity by empowering the best individuals to advance and win -for themselves, and for all-
Vision: to provide good and driven men with the mindsets, attitudes, and skills to advance in life, achieve goals, and feel great about themselves
Values: truth, life effectiveness, personal growth (truth, for real-world results, to soar higher)
1. Truth
We seek, commit, and share what’s true -whether we like it or not-.
We see truth as a necessary precondition in the service of both our mission and our second value of delivering practical results for our students.
Such as, to be truly effective in the real world, you must start from the reality of that world.
we embrace reality even when it shows that our other values and ideals of win-win and adding value are a handicap.
We base our investigation of reality around the 3 pillars of knowledge (and sub-pillars):
- Science, both in the available literature, and in the scientific method approach to testing and assessing our own strategies and techniques
- Experience, both first-hand and observational (including real-life observations, and customers and coachees feedback on what approaches worked best for them)
- Critical thinking, connecting the dots between the two, and constantly improving and fine-tuning based on the new data and information we gather
2. Life Effectiveness
Our work is biased towards what’s useful and practical to achieve goals in real-life.
Obviously, everyone will have different goals.
But don’t let the over-relativism fool you.
First, most people want the same things we focus on here -confidence, attraction, respect, status, fulfillment, etc. etc.-.
Second, no matter how different the goals may look, the foundational mindsets and skills to achieve are often all the same.
“Starting from reality” means that we study, review, and make sense of different theories and research literature. But our added value is to turn theories, data, and descriptions of reality into practical applications to affect change in that reality.
In order, we help our community acquire empowering:
- Attitudes
- Mindsets & beliefs that are most likely to facilitate personal advancement
- Thinking patterns
- Behavior
- Practical strategies
- Techniques
3. Personal Growth
Our goal is to make people both effective, and great people to be around.
These two overlap but aren’t always exactly the same.
We help with both:
- Personal effectiveness, with the skills and ability to achieve life-relevant goals.
- Social life, gaining more status, respect, and more and better friends
- Work advancement through more and better work relationships, alliances, career strategies, better negotiation, etc.
- Dating & relationships, getting more and/or better dates and mates, and better relationships
- Character, developing high-quality men who would make for great friends, colleagues, employees, business partners, husbands or boyfriends, leaders, or whatever role they hold in society.
- Straight
- Pull people up and avoid gratuitous and nasty power moves
- Win-win
From a business perspective, we want to serve men who want good character for themselves and for the people around them.
We maintain the right to exclude from the community and/or from our products men who don’t align with our values.
Business Values
- Content quality first.
We focus on making the best-in-class products that change lives and that we would have loved for our own self-development.
Content-first is in our DNA. 6+ years into the business we never hired an SEO firm, never even thought of running ads, and never hired any marketing expert. We always focused on product. - Product quality to help turn information into results is a top priority. To help as many men make the most out of the content the delivery (product) of the information must be as effective as possible to turn information into results.
Because no matter the quality of the content, it’s still useless unless it’s presented in a way that is easy to understand, natural to internalize, and engaging enough to stick with for as long as necessary. - We’re a mission-based business to help good men win and help humanity do better with more good men winning and leading.
Just like most other human beings, we also want to increase revenues and we embrace that. But we put our mission and values first (which often also helps the bottom line in the long-run).
We believe we best serve our mission with a content-quality first and a focus on product quality.
Customer Service Values
- We’re here to add value and improve our customers’ lives.
The way we see it, we don’t provide products, we provide value. Our goal is not to sell a product, but to make our customers better off.- We only have the right to ask for money if we deliver value. We see ourselves as value givers, and that’s our goal towards each one of our customers. Only once we give value we have the right to demand payment in exchange.
- We love our customers. Customers are in many way similar to us, wanting to improve and be better. They help us advance our mission as they empower themselves, and they allow us to keep working on our mission.
We are grateful for the work they do on themselves, and honored for their trust.
We show that love with: - We take fast action whenever a customer has any issue
- We strive to wow, not to just to “offer support”. If we fail in any way, we own it and strive to make up for it
- We always offer respect and win-win an demand the same back. As much as we love our customers, we love ourselves as well.
For the very few not-so-good folks who may want to join our programs, we’re not the type of business where “the customers is always right (even when he’s blatantly trying to manipulate or cheat)”.
We also demand basic decency towards our team. We will deal with any lose-win attempt accordingly, and we reserve the right to remove access from our programs.
More About TPM
The Power Moves is the #1 resource on power and self-empowerment on the web.
This website pioneered power dynamics as a novel approach to self-development, social skills, (social) success, and goal-achievements.
And today, it keeps on researching, teaching, and expanding the field of power and social strategies.
ThePowerMoves.com helps you acquire power, status, mates, and success with people and through people.
This website is one of the highest traffic social skills websites in the world and, at the time of writing, the highest-traffic dating website for men*.
Information delivery: simple, practical, & with real-life examples
This website seeks to be eminently practical.
We believe that information is great, and we love learning.
But if you can’t make that wisdom easy to access, understand, and apply in real-life… Then it remains at the level of mental masturbation -mental masturbation is OK just as masturbation is OK, but the “real thing” is just better :)-.
So this website presents information in a manner that is easy to understand, digest, internalize and apply.
This is why this website uses so many pictures, charts, and embedded videos: it’s to provide concrete examples for effective, real-life learning.
In the words of Scott Young:
“People only learn abstractions through concrete examples”
Scott Young, author of “Ultralearning“
History
ThePowerMoves.com launched in 2017.
Going from zero to a minimum survival income was bound to be hard work with uncertain results.
But it didn’t feel like a big decision.
It just felt like the most normal thing to do.
Corporate environments weren’t the best fit for Lucio’s temperament.
He loved observing and learning about office politics, social climbing, and games people play.
But he didn’t exactly love being in the middle of them -he was all too aware of the small-pond syndrome, and wanted none of that-.
Lucio’s approach was a scientist’s approach: he loved observing, studying, and field-testing.
But… Without getting too “personal” about it.
He knew that to truly learn, you also need to be part of the game. That, he did. He played the game. But he did not want to become the game.
A few things of the workplace life troubled him.
The last straw might have been a(nother) colleague being bullied and manipulated out of her rights just a few days prior.
But he knew the issue was larger. It wasn’t a single person. It was the spirit of generations of nameless men and women robbed of their rights -and of a real chance in life-.
Sometimes victims of abuse of power, bullying, and greed. But ultimately, Lucio believed, victims of ignorance.
But that’s also the beauty and opportunity of it.
The great news about ignorance, is that you can change it.
Maybe with a hint of hubris, Lucio thought he could help change that.
By the time Lucio decided he had had enough with corporations, he had worked enough on the other areas of socialization and self-empowerment that he could put together several pieces of the life puzzle.
And power dynamics, he thought, was the most crucial -and missing- piece of the self-empowerment puzzle.
But there was little around to properly teach power dynamics.
While learning and studying, Lucio had looked hard for answers that, in hindsight, were all related to power and social power dynamics. But he couldn’t find any resource for that.
And he had to find those answers on his own.
That was a common issue for all the many others who needed that kind of information. Plus, many other people were too “good” to even find those answers on their own.
And those who were naturally equipped with a high “power quotient” or naturally Machiavellian weren’t exactly going to share it -they were using it, and not always for value-adding purposes-.
Putting all those answers together, and delivering them in a simple, easy-to-apply format, was going to improve a lot of people’s lives, he thought.
It was also going to make a lot of people’s lives easier -and a lot of assholes’ lives harder, Lucio enjoying both sides of the coin-.
But who was going to do it?
Lucio felt he could have done it. And he thought he was well-suited for the challenge.
As an introvert and highly sensitive person, Lucio had a natural knack for sensing -“feeling”, as we later called it- the power dynamics that many others were missing.
And it also came in handy that Lucio wasn’t born with great social skills. That meant he had to consciously learn them, engineering social effectiveness one piece at a time. And that made it easier for him to help others along the path that he himself had to walk: he had to walk that exact same path, after all.
Creating a place to help people along that path, helping them to learn power dynamics, was going to allow those people to take a stand in life, and come into their own.
That was going to be his call.
The business opportunity well blended with a certain sense of duty and responsibility. It’s the sense of duty that if you can fix, help, or build something good, you must.
And the business opportunity made that call financially viable.
That’s how ThePowerMoves.com was born.
Robin Hood Spirit
The Power Moves Launch
In May 2017, ThePowerMoves.com launched.
In the beginning, it was a few articles on how to deal with assholes.
Writing articles took a looong time. Lucio started the website with no idea on, well, anything about how to start a website.
Soon from inception, there were lots of courses and book and reviews.
One of the core beliefs behind ThePowerMoves was that time is limited, and we can’t waste time on mediocre or poor information. The Power Moves was going to help people go straight for the highest-quality information.
That also perfectly meshed with Lucio’s personality. Since he was a kid he had the drive and hunger to make sense of the world, while having little patience for BS and un-tested, un-proven speculation.
Now it was time to turn that approach not just to learn from others and review others, but to develop the new field of power dynamics, and the novel approach to social skills and strategies.
Lucio dedicated himself 100% to ThePowerMoves when he finally dropped his last job as a freelance real estate agent in December 2017.
The website grew very quickly.
It was 2.000 users a month in December of 2017.
It more than doubled in January 2018 and more than doubled again in February 2018 to reach 8.000 visitors/month.
The formula of depth and quality of content delivered simply and with real-life examples worked well.
People loved it and reported concrete, significant improvements in their lives.
By the end of 2018, the site had moved past the 100.000 visitors a month.
ThePowerMoves: Featured In
At the time of writing, March 2019, ThePowerMoves.com still hasn’t celebrated its second year in business and Lucio hasn’t focused much on marketing so far.
So he likes to think that it was the quality of the content and information that led him to be quoted as a subject matter expert on people, psychology and social dynamics, on the following websites:
- BBC (on the psychology of travelers)
- Psychology Today (on the psychology of unfaithfulness in committed relationships)
- Glassdoor (on “unconventional ways” to land a job, ie.: social power moves)
- Business Insider (on cheating and dating)
- Forbes (on the dynamics of G+ groups and communities any personal experience with G+)
- Yahoo (on passive aggression)
- Inc (on social engineering)
- NBC (on social skills and effective network-building)
- Market Watch (the psychology of self-talk and controlling one’s own perceptions and emotions)
- ResearchGate (a scientific research publication linking to some of my reviews)
- Countless mentions on Reddit, Quora, forums and universities’ private groups
Plus many more. And still counting.
About The Founder
Note:
We changed this section’s title from “author” to “founder” because today the development is, in good part, community-based.
Lucio Buffalmano is a sociologist and a member of APA (American Psychological Association).
Edit: he didn’t renew the membership in 2022
He obtained his master’s degree from La Sapienza -department of communication and social research- in 2011 with a thesis on the socio-psychological roots of the financial crisis.
To Lucio, the sweetest aspect of personal power is freedom.
The freedom to live life the way he wants, doing what he loves doing, whenever he feels like doing it.
It starts from the morning, waking up with no alarm telling him when he should wake up.
And then researching voraciously, living life to expand his knowledge with real-world experience, and then sharing that wisdom in the most effective way possible.
ThePowerMoves.com is where Lucio shares that condensed knowledge.
And Power University is the website’s course curated to be the quickest, most effective way to turn that knowledge into ready-to-apply social (and life) strategies.
* According to Similarweb, which lists “competitors” as dating websites, and picking the highest-ranking websites in that competitors’ list, TPM comes out #1.
We don’t make much of it though. First of all, we don’t see ourselves as just a dating or relationship website. Plus, these rankings change, sometimes quite randomly and, albeit it does say “something”, I don’t consider the number of visits as the best indicator of quality.