A Self-Improvement Challenge For ROK Readers

For a long time, there has been a sentiment in ROK article comment sections that goes something like this:

I liked this site better when there was more self-improvement articles, and less bashing of feminists / fat shaming / political commentary / book reviews / etc.

This type of thinking gets a lot of up votes.  Here’s links – to a few – examples.  Notice that these comments tend not to be supported by ROK contributors (props to Libertas for contributing following his criticism).  This is not a coincidence.

Here’s a self-improvement challenge for all the readers who have ever upvoted such a comment. Set aside a solid 3 hours.  Tips for completing it is as follows…

The Challenge

Write a positive, self-improvement oriented article and submit it to ROK to help your fellow man.

Requirements For Successful Completion

1.  No mention of feminism, race, fat people, religion, politics, or current affairs.  No use of sarcasm, irony or parody.

2.  Have the post accepted by ROK editor (Roosh).  This is the invisible gauntlet that slips by the average reader, and can be deceptively difficult for the inexperienced.

3.  Don’t get blasted by a comment with at least 10 upvotes for any of the following:

• Rehashing something everyone already knows
• Rehashing articles / plagiarising what other authors (whether ROK or not) have already written.  Note:  “Things I’ve learnt from ROK” is already taken, so you’ll have to write something else.
• Being boring
• Or lame
• Lacking a clear point
• Making grammar mistakes
• Disagreeing with the prevailing ROK commenter paradigm
• Sounding like you’re taking it a bit too far, immature, or some kind of child-beating maniac
• Making stuff up, or making stuff up, or making stuff up
• Hypocrisy, or hypocrisy, or hypocrisy
• Any other overt and relatively valid criticism

The Reward

The challenge itself is the reward, insofar as producing such an article requires strenuous effort at your own self-improvement, in order to have anything worthwhile to share.  In addition, you give back to a site that presumably you enjoy reading, and hope will continue to produce quality content.

Other reimbursement: the glow of knowing you helped your fellow man and maybe a Twitter follower or two if that’s your style.  As a side effect, you will gain enormous appreciation for the work of all of the other contributors.

Hardcore Mode

If you breeze through this with no problems, take it up a notch.  Repeat at least five times – easier said than done.  Here’s me practicing what I preach.

• How To Get Everything You Want
• Jealousy Should Prompt Learning
• The One Thing That Makes A Man
• How Many Failures Before You Give Up
• 3 Reasons To Write A Journal

Tips For Completion

• You can’t fake it.  If you actually are not improving your life, and your words are not born from experience, you will have a hard time finding something to write about, let alone expressing it properly.
• Read through the ROK archives (there is also a search bar on the sidebar).  There’s already a lot of gold in there, and it’s likely your first good idea has already been published.  So has your second.  And possibly your third.
• Think very very carefully about the wording of your post.  You will probably have to rewrite it several times, in order to remove as much ambiguity and potential for misinterpretation as possible.  You still might miss a corner case or troll jab from one of the millions of angles readers will do their best to misinterpret your meaning from.

Best of luck.  Hopefully there is an influx of original, enlightening, commenter lauded self-improvement based articles to ROK in 2014.  If each “moar self-improvement” upvoter wrote one such article, surely noone would have complaints about the quantity of such content.  A rising tide lifts all boats.

Concluding Remarks

Criticism is of course very valuable, and one of the problems with modern society is there is not enough of it.  The standards the commenters hold articles here to are very high, and that is a good thing. It is however overboard to expect that a free service powered largely by reader contribution doesn’t satisfy precisely an audience that demands more than it provides.

Ask not why Return Of Kings isn’t writing self-improvement articles, ask instead why you aren’t writing self-improvement articles for Return Of Kings.

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