If you think about it, it’s crazy:

The eagle is our logo.
We often talk about “eagle” and “eagle behavior” as an ideal to move towards, and yet…

Close to 6 years in, and… There is still no article dedicated to what an eagle is, and how you become one.

Weird, no?
One would think that explaining this eagle allegory should be the first article.

So… Why not?

Well, the reason goes at the core of what we stand for.

So stick with us for just a tad longer and we’ll oblige to explain…*

We see our work as timeless wisdom and help that any future human may benefit from, wherever in the universe they may be

INTRO

Almost all our published “cornerstone articles”, foundational concepts, and most important articles came late.

For example:

• Machiavellianism, manipulation and dark psychology after 4+ years of the website’s existence albeit they’re crucial topics for us
• Alpha male after 5+ years albeit it’s one of the most important status games for men and despite it would help our sales since it targets a highly relevant demographic and taps into the vast red pill interest
• Naive self-help after 5+ years, albeit this website was in large motivated by the naivete of most self-help (and albeit we railed against it for years it in our reviews)

Many more foundational articles only arrived years after TPM first started.
And many more have yet to be published, including:

• Glass ceiling concept, even more important for self-development than the already published naive self-help article
• How to read people, a crucial skill for what we teach here, for our mission, and in general for a happy and successful life
• Enlightened narcissism, as part of our “enlightened series” of walking the optimum line between extremes and using the positive from what’s considered negative
• …

… And the already mentioned “how to be an eagle” of course.

So yeah, the great news is: we’re not turning into a content mill rehashing already beaten horses any time soon.
There is still so much golden in store for you :).

But… Why wait to publish it?

How this post started: “who is a high-quality person?”, asked Maxim

This post started thanks to Maxim.

Maxim’s asked this question in the forum:

i’m not finding a clear and definitive article on this site (or, at least, a specific clear-cut post on this forum), that’s really clarifying the difference between a High-Value Person Vs. a High-Quality Person…The terms are often thrown around almost interchangeably (even in relevant articles here on the site, i believe), and i understand that there’s often an overlap between then…it’s a bit confusing… Are there definite, short and/or simple to remember distinctions between the 2 terms? Simple and rememberbale seperate definition?

Quote from Maxim Levinsky on April 23, 2023, 9:10 am

GREAT observation.

High-value VS high-quality is a very important concept for us because our ultimate mission is to develop high-quality people, not “just” high value.

And still, there is no definitive article on “high quality” and no clear distinction between high value and high-quality which, indeed, have been used interchangeably (a small mistake, albeit often you cannot know if someone is high quality rather than just high value without knowing them well enough). 

Why not?
Are we being sloppy or lazy?

No -hopefully not, at least-.

This is because of a specific approach TPM has taken towards developing the core of its teachings, and clarifying its mission and philosophy).

Let’s see why:

Timelessness

The shortest answer to why we take our time to flesh out and publish our most foundational concepts is that we’re here to develop timeless wisdom.

All our approach around content development stems from our timeless vision of our work and mission.

1. Timeless gold requires thought & development over time (hatching vs rehashing)

Why waiting?

Why withhold so much gold that we could share, and even profit from?

Because we’re not withholding or waiting.
We are hatching the new golden eggs.

Developing groundbreaking concepts and “beyond anything that’s already available” content takes time.
Even to “just” explain something better than it’s ever been done before takes time.

For example, there is a thousand guide on “how to read people”.
But since that’s such a core skill for us when we’ll publish ours we want it to be more useful, more practical, more empowering and more life-changing than anything you could get anywhere else…

In the meanwhile, we’re hatching

When we or I…

• Collect and discuss “reading people” case studies in the forum we are hatching that new article.
• Read books or research that mention some important insights and take notes, I’m hatching.
• Observe in real life and either get it right or wrong and take note, I’m hatching.
• Inquire about other people’s experiences, I’m hatching.

So when I’ll finally sit down and write that article, I’ll be able to leverage a copious amount of high-quality notes, science, and wisdom not just from me, but from a community of smart folks.
Plus, that work will also refine my own personal acuity in reading people, and make me even more capable to make the most out of that hatched material.

Since nobody I know of does this type of work, once it’ll be ready, it will almost naturally be more and better than anything available.
And then, as usual, the corresponding Power University lesson will be yet even better than the free article.

2. Timeless content doesn’t care about years (“passing the baton” mindset)

When millennia are the yardstick, years become insignificant (and quality is king)

TPM plans to stay for the long haul.

More than that, here are levels to “long haul”.

And the level TPM aims for long outlasts technology and lives.

TPM and Power University will outlast its founders and early community.
Maybe they will even do so in their current form of learning through a device.

Eventually though, websites will also become obsolete.
People will learn with holograms or something like that.

They may look different. But as long as they’re self-interested, negotiating different interests or semi-humans, power dynamics will always matter and apply

However, the great quality or even timeless content of what they learn will stay for millennia -or even longer, until we either go extinct, or until we become an even better species-.

When you think in those terms, quality reigns supreme, not time -as a matter of fact, we see quantity without quality as unethical since it only adds to the noise, and takes people time without giving value back-.
A few years more or less become insignificant.

Faced with timelessness the only thing for you to do is to pass a good baton

Personally, I don’t think it has to be me who finishes the “power dynamics building” -and I don’t even think that would be possible-.

I see my role as simply laying out a part of the foundation and making sure it’s simple and captivating enough that some others will be interested in moving forward.
As long as there will be some great person to take over the baton, I’ve done my part.

And since this is not just a business, but also a service to humanity, long term, Power University should become free.
Of course, we should know at TPM that people (rightfully) also seek personal returns and what’s in it for them.
So the challenge for TPM then would be to find other ways to monetize and/or incentivize great minds to contribute.

I don’t need to finish the race for the acclaim.
I only need to go just far enough to pass the baton.

Lucio Buffalmano

3. Timeless content must be built on top of many and high-quality pillars (ground-up VS top-bottom)

Success is built over great foundations.

Great strategies, actions, and final success are founded on correct foundations.

The foundations include concepts, constructs, general principles, and general theories.
All else, including the mindsets, strategies, and techniques, descend from those foundations.

As someone said, you measure the correctness of a principle based on how well it allows you to predict and achieve results in the real world.

It means that our strategies and approaches can lead to success if and only if our foundations are correct.

However, you don’t start from the high-level going downward because that’s the equivalent of shooting in the dark.
To build the foundations, you go the other way around: you START from the lower level examples, case studies, power moves, manipulation attempts and responses, etc., etc..

This is why our foundational articles come late: it’s precisely because they’re both more important that they need more time.

Foundations, as opposed to lower-level techniques and specific situations:

• Need time to think it through: it’s a lot easier to think about how to properly solve a case study or best address a specific situation. But it takes a lot longer to develop the larger concept or “general rule”.
• Need “pillars” of case studies and examples: Think of those specifics as “single pillars”. It’s only once you have a lot of those pillars you can better build the larger “law” or general theory -the pillars are what the skyscraper theory stands on-. This is for 2 reasons:
  • To understand it yourself, since a big chunk of understanding something goes from specific to general
  • To explain it in a way that’s useful, practical, and easy to internalize, by providing clear examples. We don’t do philosophy here, we teach practical stuff, so even our concepts need to be well backed up by real-life case studies and examples
  • To prove it empirically, since the more positive case studies you have the more the general principle is proven and tested
• Need more references and studies. To both have enough authority on a topic as well as to make sure you truly understand it from all angles, you need to also look at the research literature on top of your life experience and other people’s experience

This is exactly how the scientific method advances theories.

You got general theories, that are based on programs, which in turn are based on lots of individual studies.

So for example, a general theory that says that humans are reciprocal may hinge on different programs, one of which may seek to investigate people’s tendency to give back value whenever they receive value, which in turn may be based on countless studies of giving, with different subjects, and in different situations.

3.2. Our pillars are power moves. The building is TPM & Power University. The timeless result is an eagles’-hatching nest

Since we’re here to produce timeless wisdom, we follow the more effective ground-up approach.

For example, we started publishing articles such “what to do when someone makes you wait“, “negotiating refunds“, lists of “games men play“, “games women play“, etc.).

Only much later we started addressing more general principles, definitions, and concepts such as:

• Power dynamics
• Power protecting *”we’ll oblige to explain” at the beginning of this article was a power protection move to avoid a teacher frame of “we’ll explain” as in “let us lecture you”
• Foundations of dating power dynamics

The ground-up is better because, as it’s the case for scientific progress, sometimes you not only have little idea of a higher-level concept, but sometimes you have no idea until you’ve stumbled upon enough real-life consequences that derive from that higher-level, more abstract concept.

For example, this was the case for “social scalping” which combines all the games and power moves around social exchanges:

I had never grasped that (some) humans engage in 4 main categories of social manipulation in order to get more and give less. This trend of higher-level commonalities only became apparent once we started analyzing many different daily games and power moves

Example: high-value articles

So, back to Maxim’s question.

As an example the early articles on high-value/low-value and compare them to some more recent articles.

The low-value/high-value are quite foundational to self-development, successful socialization, and what we generally teach here.

They were early articles here and helped spark a change in self-development.
Since then the terms high-value/low-value are a lot more popular and hundreds of similar articles sprung up.

However, albeit having those articles drove lots of traffic here, they are NOT of timeless quality because:

• I had spent little time truly thinking it through, there was little community input, and that’s why there was no distinction between high-value and high quality
• Fewer resources/studies to back them up 
• Fewer “pillars” as in
  • Fewer examples and case studies because we didn’t have them yet and I had spent no time noting down videos and real-life examples as I often do for more thought-out articles/lessons
  • Fewer link outs to articles/forum threads to expand on the sub-concepts, because we didn’t have them

When I’ll finally get around to rewriting those articles, they’ll immediately become 10x better because there will be more reflection, more studies/resources, more examples/case studies, and more articles/forum threads to flesh out some sub-concepts.  

Compare: too early article (“high value”) VS timely (“Machiavellianism”) 

Machiavelli probably took his time to write The Prince. But he produced at least a pillar for timeless wisdom, and more to come on top

For contrast, compare articles with equally important concepts:

• Early: High value men / low value men and high value women / low value women

• Timely: Machiavellianism and alpha male

The latter 2 were solid articles “out of the box”.
Besides the less important fact that I had more experience writing, it’s not because I was more “inspired” or anything, but because many of the pillars to sustain them had already grown in number and quality.

So once I finally wrote them, they could draw from all those pillars of personal reflection, examples, case studies, resources, etc. Etc.

High quality = eagle (and it will take more time to properly flesh that out)

Now to briefly answer Maxim’s question:

The difference is that one can be high-value and an asshole.

High quality instead adds an element of ethics, including ethical expressions such as “wanting and preferring win-win”, “generally uplifting people instead of pushing them down or social climbing on them”, “having supportive relationships instead of abusive and toxic ones“, etc., etc. 

You may NEED the high-value person or want because of what he can do for you (even if that may only mean making you feel good or pulling you a higher-up for simply talking to you).
The high-quality person, you want not only for what he may do for you but simply because he’s a great person -and you may likely also look up to him-.

High quality is basically an eagle.
However, that’s a particularly difficult foundation to tackle.

There is a lot of grey areas to properly define and explain that to the point one can make a definitive article/lesson, it may make some more time.

Example: to lie or not to lie?

For example, take “telling the truth” as a value.

You can’t just say “an eagle doesn’t lie” because then that eagle would be a naive and ineffective person -or, as it’s more often the case, a hypocrite-.

And you can’t just say “an eagle lies freely” because that would not only be quite immoral and very closely resemble a manipulative value-taker, but it would also handicap all his close relationships and most likely make him less effective -and less able to enjoy life-.

So, since we’re here to provide timeless wisdom… We need to think about how to come up with a good general principle, and a set of lower-level rules that would make that eagle both life effective, and also generally a trustworthy and great person to be with.

Now do the same for many different traits, behaviors, and strategies in a way that what you say is both true, effective, and easy to comprehend and apply and you’ll realize that, well…

That does take some time :).

SUMMARY

In sum, we take our time to develop our framework of the most foundational principles and approaches because:

1. Top quality and new wisdom require time. Fast execution means lower quality and quality is paramount to us since…
2. We work on a timeless mission with the goal of improving humanity. We play for the long term
3. Foundational concepts and principles must always ensue from the successful application of their consequences