Post: #1

I'm not sure if this topic has been discussed before but it's something that I feel a lot of forum members, especially the older ones, could give insight on. I recently came to the conclusion that your innate ability to socialize with members of the same or opposite sex is dependent on the personality traits that you inherited from your parents. Of course, your nurturing matters too, but I believe nativism is as equally important in determine your "social success."

As an example, I'll use my father(divorced). My dad is 54 and he still beds a lot of women, despite having no formal knowledge of game. According to my mom, he's always been this way, even before they officially started dating. He's extremely social, narcissistic and cunning, often seducing women into buying him materials—he's pretty much your quintessential Dark Triad. He's not by any means a bad person but he just puts himself first and that has pretty much attributed to his overall success in life.

In juxtaposition, I've pretty much inherited most of my dad's personality traits—I'm angered easily by things, but less so than him, I was social even before swallowing the red pill, I've always had some success with women(I subconsciously used game, but I wasn't consciously aware of it as I am now), and I'll often go out my way—whether through manipulation or lying—to get what I want.

I did some research and found that genes play a greater role in key personality traits like social skills and learning ability than the way we are raised by our parents.

"Researchers from Edinburgh University studied more than 800 sets of identical and non-identical twins to learn whether genetics or upbringing has a greater effect on how successful people are in life.

Twins are useful in such studies because almost all twins share the same home environment as each other, but only identical twins share exactly the same genetics.

Participants were asked a series of questions about how they perceive themselves and others, such as "are you influenced by people with strong opinions?"

By applying their answers to a well-established scale of psychological scale, researchers could assess and categorise different personality traits for each person.

Writing in the Journal of Personality, the researchers found that identical twins were twice as likely as non-identical twins to share the same personality traits, suggesting that their DNA was having the greatest impact.

Genetics were most influential on people's sense of self-control and also affected their social and learning abilities and their sense of purpose."

Makes sense. I'm pretty much the splitting image of my dad, but I've developed(through nurturing) traits by observing others as well, like we all have. However, recent studies show that the latter is more prominent than the former(nature), so I'm still a little confused because my experience has been exactly the opposite.

Which do you think has affected your social success, your upbringing(nurture) or genetics(nature)?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/scien...shows.html

Post: #2

(06-25-2014 05:16 AM)game_ethic Wrote:  Which do you think has affected your social success, your upbringing(nurture) or genetics(nature)?

I find the nature/nuture debate to be destructive when you're talking about self improvement.

WIA

Post: #3

(06-25-2014 01:14 PM)WestIndianArchie Wrote:  

(06-25-2014 05:16 AM)game_ethic Wrote:  Which do you think has affected your social success, your upbringing(nurture) or genetics(nature)?

I find the nature/nuture debate to be destructive when you're talking about self improvement.

WIA

I agree with WIA... But to be a little more specific, we need to be aware of what we can control and what we cannot. So we develop a plan with the items that we can control, and we work on those items one by one in order to, hopefully, get a pretty good handle on setting achievable goals for ourselves.

In that regard, other guys are NOT setting our goals, but instead we are setting goals for ourselves.. and goals that are achievable... whether it is physical fitness, appearance, energy, charisma, stamina, approaching girls, self-education and/or finances.

Hopefully, these change over the years, but sometimes we will need to come back to revisiting some issues, and sometimes genetics will play some role in defining what is realistic for us, within our abilities. Sometimes, we may also attribute some aspect as genetic or within our stars, and really it is NOT as much within our genetics as we had thought...