Let’s go back to grade school. Remember in grade school there was the active alpha male.

Usually was an athlete. Maybe a great basketball player.

When I was growing up in second grade, I moved to Scarsdale, New York from Riverdale.

I remember my first day. I was in the hallway, at my locker.

Talking to a guy. Trying to make friends.

All of sudden, a tall boy walked passed us. He looked at me and he said ‘that’s John Rivelli’.

I’m like “Who’s John Rivelli? He’s tall”.

The guy looked at me, and said ‘he’s the most popular kid’.

I said “why”? They guy looked at me and didn’t have an answer, but then he said, ‘we all just follow him’.

Highschool HierarchySo, from second to eighth grade the Hierarchy was this. There was everyone else, then there was the power of John Rivelli. John Rivelli was actually really nice guy. Quiet, normal, he just happen to be able to play sports better than anybody else. So we all followed him. Not sure exactly why. But that’s what we do in life. There’s a hierarchy. There’s a hierarchy in life, we tend to follow what we perceive to be a leader. And this mentality starts in grade school.

Come high school, the world got a little bigger and there were more people to follow. There were the cool kids from 4 other feeder schools.

So the hierarchy got bigger. The popular crowd got bigger. But again everybody always wanted to be part of that crowd.

You wanted to be seen at the parties.

That way by hanging out with the popular kids, you were able to do that. You were able to be part of the hierarchy. When you’re part of the hierarchy, you are able to attract the hierarchy girl.

Then what do we do, we go to college and immediately we try to become or find the popular people to latch on to. Or if we were once the popular person, we try to recreate that scene all over again. Because you enjoy having minions follow you.

But then something happens, we become adults. And as an adult the process starts all over again. This time we’re building drive ways and houses and trying to out ‘alpha male’ each other.

We come home with a brand new Mercedes, we want to show the other members of the hierarchy that we’ve arrived. We where fancy watches, we do things to impress other people. We’re caught up in the whole thing. Hopefully, eventually, we realize it means absolutely nothing.

Every day in my in box I look at e-mails. And guys always want to be validated. They want to be validated by the amount of women they have slept with. To become an elite member of the hierarchy, they’ve never been before.

To be the big kid at school, the best athlete, the cool kid on the block.

What if you’ve slept with 10 women this week? Are you doing it because you truly love women? Or are you just doing it because you need the validation?

Maybe you never had the validation before, so you think by being validated you’ll finally be on top of the hierarchy. You’re going to be the popular kid.

When you read this now, doesn’t it sound superficial?

Do any of us really ever want to go back to grammar school again? It was terrible at times.

I remember teasing the geeks to make myself more popular or more cool, abusing them mentally and pushing them around physically. Why? Because it made me seem like a much cooler person, but what was I doing to those poor guys? I was humiliating them.

And I was humiliating them so then I could gain in the hierarchy.

I remember in sixth grade, Kim Hardeles, by far the ugliest girl in sixth grade, had a crush on me. Poor Kim, because I used her to validate myself in the hierarchy. I would make fun of her on the bus until she cried. Why? Because I felt insulted that a low level, non-popular girl actually had a crush on me, and the one that I liked didn’t like me at all. So in turn, I used that for my own benefit, for my own growth, abusing her made me look cooler.

Isn’t that what we just do as adults at times?

How many times have you slept a woman knowing that you do not want to be with her, yet you did it so you’re able to tell a story to your hierarchy and sound cool. How many of you have done that?

We’ve all done that in our lives, and all we’re doing is trying to validate ourselves on such a superficial level.

Sure, I’ve been there. The story is so much fun to tell. It’s great to be able to tell your friends about this girl that you met at a bar one night and were able to seduce her with your magic words and be able to turn her on, and it’s great to see a friend’s eyes look at you like you’ve just scored the winning touchdown in the high school football game.

And your friends are held captive by every word, and for that very moment in time, you are the hierarchy, you are the king, you are the leader, you are John Rivelli.

It’s amazing in life how superficial a lot of things we do to be validated based on our old way of thinking. A lot of us are still stuck at 10 trying to be most popular person out there.

Start thinking about how life should be. Start thinking about validating yourself from a point of self-love.

Start becoming that strong man who doesn’t need validation and start connecting deeply with everybody and you’ll see a more fulfilled, amazing life. Otherwise, you’re just going to be a gigantic high school or grammar school kid throughout our entire life, seeking validation from people who are just seeking validation as well. Sounds superficial to me and not very enlightening.