Nice guys

I said that I'd write more blog posts this year, and even now, just a couple of weeks after I said it, it feels like I'm falling behind again.

Blogging, or the art of transferring information from your imagination to the web, takes effort. Simple as it may sound, sometimes it gets hard to conjure up more stuff to write about.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the whole 'nice guy' thing. I've always seen myself as a nice guy; I've always wanted to be a nice guy. Nice guys are nice, right? Actually, if you think about it – they're not. Nice guys seem nice, but deep down, they often tend to be looking for approval; they're defined by what others think of them. If you think I'm cool, I'm cool. If you don't think I'm cool; hang on, I'll do something nice for you.

To all the nice guys out there, what do you really achieve, apart from wasting your time and feeling crap if someone doesn't like you? If someone doesn't like you, they can happily go and screw themselves. 'Nice guys', waste so much time trying to gain approval from others, that they never really gain their own approval. They allow others to walk over them, they are afraid of offending anyone, and they are afraid to fight for what they want. In that sense, niceness is weakness. Fighting in itself isn't a bad thing – fleeing without good reason is.

Do good unto others as much as you like, but remember, unless you do good unto yourself as well, happiness will never really be within your grasp. You end up wondering why bad things happen to you, yet you continually allow bad things to happen to you by refusing to stand up and fight.

Life is about you being happy with who you are – not about Jack and Jill being happy with who you are.

What this world needs more of, in my opinion, are nice men. Think about your childhood heroes (for guys) or the men you dreamt about when you were little (for girls). James Bond is a really tough guy, yet, he's still a good guy. The white knight that every little girl dreams about doesn't walk up to the big nasty dragon and politely ask him to leave; he takes a sword and slays the crap out of that dirty lizard!

We can see that being good is not about submitting to everyone and being the general, all-around, friendly neigborhood nice guy; it's about being strong and applying that strength in the correct manner. When it comes to the fairer sex, nice guys suffer – a lot. Here's what I think; you're there for her, you talk to her, you go shopping with her – you're being an awesome friend, congrats! Oh, and by the way, your chance of getting anywhere with her just walked out the door; if you're quick, you might still be able to wave to it when it walks past the window. By no means do I say that a guy should not be a very dear friend to his girlfriend, he should be, but that comes with time.

Let's look at the word that a lot of nice guys want to be, and where they believe they're headed – 'boyfriend'. First, we have 'boy', then we have 'friend'. Thus, is you do the friend thing first, chances are, you've got nowhere left to go – you start at the last syllable. However, if you start out by being a boy, well, then you're still in a position to make progress. Here's what boys do – they catch frogs, they throw punches at each other, they like fast cars and they do all kinds of things that are generally not seen as being 'nice' and 'safe'.

To finish, I'd like to say this – boys, we were all made as boys – we've all got strength somewhere inside of us. We're the guys who were made to defend kingdoms; we were made to be strong. Now, stop being nice guys and start being good men!