Based of my experience as 17 year old I will create Guides on how to incorporate TRP in your life as a sub-18. The topics I will touch on are School, books, looks, fitness and nutrition, free-time activities, sleep and attitude. The Guides may improve in quality over the course of the Guides.

Connections

In my last Guide I talked about using your time efficiently to smash your competition. But developing successful habits and a successful mindset is just as important as your social circle or your so called connections.

Let's say you are developing constructive habits and your life goes really well, with you being successful in many aspects like for example school, gym, and your part-time job where you save up a lot of money. Everything seems perfect until you notice that you started something what's called a "monk-mode", which is basically you shutting off everything that isn't part of your mission.

While the monk-mode brings many positive aspects like higher productivity, determination to complete your mission and a really nice ego-boost you're missing out on a key-aspect of successful people:

The key aspect of a truly successful person are his connections

"But why? Can't I be successful without having any connections? Isn't the lone-wolf approach really good until I hit the college where I can find specialized people to help me?"

Well, yes and no. It's true that you can be successful without connections and that in college it's way easier to find many people at once which you can connect with because they don't know you and your past. (Assuming your high-school reputation is shitty, but more on that in the 4th part: Friends)

But the key to being successful lies in the simplicity and the effiency of oneself, remember the sentence from the first Guide? "Work Smart not hard", yea well it goes for pretty much anything. Connections make things a ton easier since they're basically enhancements of your own self. Let me explain that with a story of myself:

My bike broke some months ago and I didn't have time to repair it, so one night when we went clubbing, I asked a friend of mine of which I knew was good with bikes if he could repair it. He did it and you didn't hear the best part yet: He didn't charge 1 Penny for it, he just said "you can pay me the favour by teaching me maths or some shit, you know".

Favour for Favour, I'm his connection, he's my connection and that means that everything he's capable of becomes a part of me and the other way round, to put it simply:

The abilites your connections acquired in the run of their lives become yours for free to use, if you return the favour one day therefore the more connections you have the greater you become as a person and the more you can achieve.

The amount of connections you establish is directly influencing the money you spend on handwork. It reduces it by a incredible margin if you have a lot of connections, that's why you should really try to connect with people every time you're given the choice, starting today.

• Connecting

Connecting here, connecting there but what does it really mean? Well, it's simple:

Remember the time in pre-school / elementary school when you met your first real friend? Remember what you did? If not, tell me if this sounds familiar to you:

"I love formula 1"

"really? I do, too"

"I have hot wheels at my home, wanna come over today afternoon and play with them?"

"yes sure, I'll bring mine too!"

Voila, you have a new friend, now let's analyze that conversation and transfer it to your current age:

First you start by having a mutual interest, since nothing sparks a conversation more than mutual interest, it can be gym, travelling, gaming, running, biking, skateboarding etc. you get the point. (That's the reason why you should also try to pick up some hobbys, so you have mutual interests with nearly anyone you meet, but more on the hobby topic later.)

Since you established a mutual interest and therefore sparked the interest of the other person in you, you can now continue to talk about it, and maybe change the topics to something else (if you're good at connecting you can drive the topic to another one effortlessly and you can control where the conversation is going), while talking try to throw in some sincere compliments, in the case of the elementary school it would be "wow, your hot wheel collection is big", at our age it would be something that really impressed you.

Then when you built enough rapport with the person, ask him or her to do something with you, it could be some interest you both share or something you both wanted to do.

The key to being successful at it is trough being interested in the other person that doesn't mean artificial interest to connect with people on a functional basis but rather really be interest in the other person and try to think of him / her as your new friend.

A great book on this topic is "How to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie - I'll do a whole section on books though so don't worry.

With all this in mind, try to be social, don't sit in your room going full monk-mode 24/7 try to have some outside activities and have fun at it, always wanted to try ice-skating? Hit up some pals if you got some and try it out, you don't like it? Try something else until you find something you like and always keep in mind to talk to people which seem interesting.

Also a comment from my last guide reminded me of something I forgot to include in all of my posts to this point:

Don't forget to have fun, you're young and work has a huge effect but having fun and experiencing things firsthand makes you interesting! So try all the things you wanted to do, but dont forget Work then Pleasure.

This was the topic Connections, if you have questions feel free to drop a pm, I'll prolly add more stuff to this Guide. Also feel free to comment on my writing style and formatting, it will help me improve it in a way that I can incorporate it in future posts. If you're interested in a blog let me know, if there's enough interest i'll prolly start one.