November 22nd was the 50th anniversary of the death of President John F. Kennedy. The news was full of conspiracy theory rehash, pictures of Lee Harvey Oswald on the perp walk, and news stories from Dealey Plaza in Dallas. There is so much more to President Kennedy than his assassination, however. JFK was the epitome alpha male, and his life is a great instruction for many reasons.
Here are some of the lessons that studying this dead president has taught me:
1. Stop complaining
JFK was sick so often when he was younger that his brother Robert joked that mosquitoes would die from drinking JFK’s blood. From his colitis, a nasty intestinal problem, to nagging and debilitating back pain, the youthful and vigorous pictures and movies of JFK were a manufactured veneer. Behind the scenes, JFK needed back injections and surgeries (one of which nearly killed him) just to deal with the pain.
Through it all, JFK rarely complained to anyone, and certainly didn’t let on to the outside world that much of his life off camera had been spent in hospital beds and under a doctor’s care. Kennedy would deal with it through recuperation in Florida, reading, and frequent sex with many attractive women that were not his wife.
JFK also had to deal with deaths of beloved siblings. His older brother Joe, Jr. was killed during World War II in an aircraft explosion and his younger sister Kathleen was killed in 1948 in a plane crash. JFK wouldn’t complain, and would just press on.
2. Look good
In this day and age of untucked dress shirts and an epidemic of jeans, looking better than most men around you is just so darn easy. JFK would cringe today if he looked out on the obese, dingy clothed masses.
Google “JFK pictures” and here’s what you will see: suits and sport coats, slender ties, and a white dress shirt. He almost always wore that white dress shirt. Whatever he wore fit him well.
I wear a crisp white dress shirt frequently, and always when wearing a tie. It requires no complicated decision matrix to match tie to shirt colors. I wear sport coats often, never jeans, and occasionally don a slender tie with my white dress shirt. I get nods of respect everywhere I go, just due to the way I am dressed.
3. Become a faster reader
JFK studied speed reading, and consumed multiple newspapers per day. He enjoyed many genres of books and would constantly be recommending something he had read and enjoyed to others.
In the case of Guns of August, which was a book detailing mistakes leading to World War I, JFK had copies sent to his military officers all over the world.
To become a faster reader, I have learned to speed read. The best speed reading technique I have tried is what I call the “grouping” speed reading method. Instead of reading letter by letter, or word by word, learn to group words together, so that your eye moves just a few rapid times per line. This method takes some practice, but it has sped my reading ability by leaps and bounds.
4. Be in a hurry
JFK had a keen awareness of his own mortality. This forced him to live his life as if in fast forward. He was a U.S. Congressman at age 29, Senator at age 35, and President at age 43. Yes, JFK had a wealthy dad to bankroll his campaigns, but the energy needed to campaign for even a local U.S. House seat is tremendous.
A flurry of activity surrounded the man, rendering him irresistible to both men trying to gain his favor and charmed women willing to give him a notch. I apply this “be in a hurry” tactic to my business ventures. Latest business idea of mine doesn’t take hold? Abandon it, and on to the next one without looking back.
5. Question the experts
Kennedy started out his presidency with the Bay of Pigs, a military and intelligence disaster. He had assumed that the “wise old men” in the CIA and military were expertly advising him, and he was burned badly in the fiasco.
As a result, JFK gathered opinions from a variety of sources following Bay of Pigs, even going around the military chain of command occasionally to get first hand accounts of events. My own proudest bucking of the experts and conventional wisdom was deciding to eat the paleolithic diet. I have never felt and looked better.
While the rest of the world has recently focused on JFK’s death, remember instead the valuable life lessons that he left for men of vigor.
Read More: Lessons From The Life Of Casanova
Final life lessons: mob broads dig convertibles, YOLO
I agree with most of what you said but I wear jeans most of the time but I do wear a sports coat and nice shoes etc.
I like this piece , but I have to say while hurrying in business can be good, hurrying in game never is.
Hurrying doesn’t mean rushing through something, it means using as many hours in the day as possible to accomplish a single goal. If you spend 4 hours a day gaming chicks you’re going to be a master really fast, but if you rush through an hour a day you’ll suck monkey balls.
The last one #5, later he talked to Ike Eisenhower and was asked if he had asked all the people involved their opinion. He replied in the negative, and Ike told him that was the flaw. He didn’t seek out contrarian views.
#6 Bang teenage interns when available
7. Build your family’s fortune by marrying a rich socialite.
Agreed, you can always bang hot chicks on the side, marry rich, bang hot, its not like married people have sex anyways so if she is not hot it won’t really matter.
Erm, Jacqualine Bovier was broke. He father was a broke alcoholic divorced from the mother who then married Achincloss a wealthy man and Jackie was brought up as his stepdaughter with her sister. Joe Kennedy wanted JFK to marry her because she was a Catholic and also because he thought she’d keep his dopey son on the straight and narrow.
He would “just press on.” Always good advice. Never let anything stop you.
As emulated by Bill Clinton… “Hey, miss, how’d ya like a position on ma staff? Heheh!”
paleotards….dropping in everywhere….
#6 get shit grades and let your dad bribe connections at Harvard: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/11/20/jfks-harvard-application-with-essay-and-other-school-records/
his daddy was so rich and powerful, have you seen his joke of an entrance essay. I wood like to bee a harvard man like my daddy. The lesson is to be born rich
He banged Marilyn Monroe….
And I banged Lindsay Lohan. You think that this takes some great talent? These are actresses lol
I respect JFK so much. If only all our politicians were like him.
Clinton is just like him, right down to the cigar lol Obama is too with the exception of the sex part but that’s only because he has ED and is on the downlow like 1/2 of all black men.
Bisexuality is so common in Africa and American blacks that they don’t even consider it anything. They think that because they may have wives or gf’s that they are perfectly normal when in reality they are homosexuals. And btw, I have proved what causes homosexuality and why it is more common among primitive peoples. I’m a medical doctor and it will be published in the Lancet this next March. Read it.
Whoa….prepare for a shitstorm…
6. Be idealist so you can get killed without much pain and also get shitloads of attention worldwide!
JFK was shot down like a dog because he was a dog, a lecherous and corrupt shitheel like every other male in his family of drunkards and addicts. A disgraceful son of a bitch is all any Kennedy has ever been and if you emulate them that is all you will ever be.
He wanted to inspect Dimona and he got to inspect the meplat of a 6.5mm Carcano instead. Thank you Israelis, Mafia, Freemasons, CIA or whoever it was that he finally pissed off enough to do the deed. If you hadn’t killed the bastard my father might have never come home from Vietnam and I wouldn’t be here to troll this drivel.
Hero worship is for simpletons. When the President gets shot in the head in public, there is generally a reason for that. Lincoln was also a huge asshole who they like to say was a great man.
JFK was going to withdraw from Vietnam after his re-election. That means that the 50 000+ names on the Arlington wall wouldn’t haven there had Vietnam never happened. Think about it….
JFK was a stumblebum. The only reason he was elected was that the stupid American females voted for him over Nixon (sound familiar?) and that Mayor Daley fixed the Chicago vote (sound familiar?) The election was a dead heat. His father was a bootlegger and crook on the stock exchange and made a lot of money. After the market crashed in ’29 he got FDR in ’33 to name him head of the new SEC to oversee the market which is like getting the fox to watch the chicken coop.
JFK was running against a guy named Russo in his first attempt at Congress. His father found another guy named Russo and got him on the ballot to confuse people and take votes away from the real candidate Russo lol
JFK was on methamphetamines and if that wasn’t bad enough he also took steroids given to him by Dr Max Jacobson, the original Dr Feelgood.
If he didn’t get assassinated he would have been a complete loser as President. Khrushchev thought he was a silly little boy just as Putin today thinks Obama is a moron and pussy. Nixon at least had the respect of world leaders.
Of course all of the stupid females and feminists go gaga and get gina tingles over JFK but his image was really manufactured by his father and the dopey liberal press. In reality he was just another punk like Clinton and if his father had no money this guy wouldn’t get any higher than being a bartender or accountant.
And btw, he lost his virginity in a Haarlem whorehouse and would hit on employees when he was president. That’s pretty Beta in my opinion.
and yet, his name will be remembered for decades to come, and you? It’s easy to criticize a great man, long after he’s dead. JFK lived a life 90% of the human species will never even sniff.
I think that I know a great deal more about all of this than you pipsqueaks who weren’t even born when JFK was alive. The Kennedys were always considered nouveau riche trash by the rest of us old liners.And btw, you don’t take amphetamines and steroids for pain.
#haterade
JFK’s back pain and later drug additions came about because he had the bad sense to have his PT boat T-boned by a Japanese destroyer. Those things weren’t especially quiet, and his boat was idling; SOMEBODY should have heard it coming even in the fog.
But give the man some credit; he was a Life Member of the NRA, and Oswald was not only a communist but a member of the ACLU.
You’re an idiot. Khrushchev went on to having a high respect for Kennedy because Kennedy managed to push back the military and CIA who wanted Kennedy to go to war. Both leaders had secret communications and were able to pass and sign the FIRST nuclear test ban treaty. Kennedy was in favour of tax cuts…like the Bushes and Reagan. Kennedy was also far more conservative than most of the liberal Democrats of his day. Richard Nixon wrote in his memoir that he felt Kennedy was FAR MORE RIGHT WING than Nixon was on foreign policy. Kennedy told his close friends, including our Canadian prime minister Lester B. Pearson that he was going to pull out of Vietnam after he’d get re-elected. Lyndon Johnson reversed that policy .. TWO DAYS after Kennedy was buried. Enough said.
You just have to like a guy like JFK who when he was in his forties told a buddy,
“You are only as old as the girl you slept with last night.”
You are only as alive as the nice man waving from the grassy knoll.
#6 get on your hands and knees and beg people to like you. The only thing a politician can do for me is lick the bottom of my boot.
That’s not how democracy works.
He didn’t get no Marilyn Monroes because he was a douchey red-pill popping loser tho. Just sayin’.
I must be one of the select few that doesn’t like to take life advice from politicians. Even the good ones are still snakes.
Another lesson from JFK’s life is to have lots of pussy available and bang it as often as you like. Amazing how JFK, with all his health problems, had such a huge appetite for sex. I wonder if in his case all those cortizone shots increased his sex drive.
Another lesson from JFK is that you don’t want to waste your time with women that work too much. All you women that are lawyers, doctors, professors, stock analysts – take your pick – you are all useless. A woman that has spent too much time studying arcane subjects has spent too little time learning how to take care of a man, a home, a family, and kids. Oh, you might be able to take care of a dog (you have one, don’t you?), but not any of the aforementioned vastly more important human elements.
All the woman JFK shagged were women mostly focused on their good looks. Even Jackie was pretty much of a bimbo and, as she later proved, a gold digger. At least she could bare children and more or less raise them.
I don’t understand the worship of a man so flawed and dishonest.
Must be a Northeast thing.
I agree with you, but if you had to chose between Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Clinton, and Bush, which one of these men would you choose? Kennedy!!!
Reagan
6. Get addicted to amphetamines and barbiturates. Your corticosteroids can only do so much for your Addison’s disease. Take these pills to help you get up and GO in the morning and these to help you sleep at night. Sure, you’ll get depressed and give some poor Cuban bastards up to die at the Bay of Pigs when you’re on a downer, but the press will do their best to make you look good anyway. What a load of crap.
“To become a faster reader, I have learned to speed read. The best speed reading technique I have tried is what I call the “grouping” speed reading method. Instead of reading letter by letter, or word by word, learn to group words together, so that your eye moves just a few rapid times per line. This method takes some practice, but it has sped my reading ability by leaps and bounds.”
yes. I found that if you get a book and you bend it a certain way and hold it up to your nose you can read it myopically faster.
“2. Look good”
Especially, “Have Hair”.
Since 1960, when has the presidential candidate who had more hair and who looked better ever lost? (Bush Senior didn’t have as much care as Michael Dukakis but his WASP patrician looks were easier on the eyes than the nebbishy Dukakis).
American men and women of the 1950s became obsessed with sex. That’s all presidential elections have been about since: subliminal sex messages.
The idiot JFK got us into Vietnam resulting in 50K dead Americans and a 500K dead Vietnamese. He was no hero. And you can blame the “wise old men” at the CIA all you want, but the blame for the Bay of Pig fiasco is on JFK. What happened to the “Buck stops here”?
JFK didn’t get you into Vietnam, Truman did. JFK was going to pull out of Vietnam after his re-election. Make sure you CHECK THE FACTS buddy.
I doubt that any of you who are hypercritical of Kennedy come from an upper-class background. It’s not just about money–it’s also attitude, social savvy and of course “connections”. The upper class is different, and to apply middle-class standards of propriety as a framework for judgment is to miss the point entirely.
No one ever escapes the class they were born into, despite the rise or fall of their fortunes. Upper, middle, and lower class people have distinctive personality traits that are deeply ingrained during childhood. Oddly enough, the upper and lower classes have more in common with each other than either does with the middle class.
Paul Fussell’s book, Class, is essential reading. Ironically, Fussell intended the book as humor, but middle class booksellers classified it as Self-Help. Point well made.
If money and “looks” were all it took to become president, Mitt Romney would have beaten Mr. Soetoro.
On 1992 demographics he would have.
I’m no fan of Kennedy, but this piece wasn’t bad. I can’t give a pass to point 2 though. It was the late 50s-early 60s. EVERYBODY wore a white dress shirt, skinny tie and suit. In and of itself his fashion sense was completely unremarkable. Well, he is credited with making “going hat-less” a mainstream thing for men.
Unfortunately for that claim – anybody who wasn’t a herb had been going hat-less since the late 40s. If you include well known celebrities and TV characters, hat-less “hip” men were already part of the social conscious by the time he “forgot” his hat on the podium.
As a centre-right conservative, I find it laughable that people in this day and age would still tramp on John F. Kennedy and not acknowledge the ACTUAL facts of his Presidency, so allow me to tell you some of them.
Let’s start with the Soviet Union: Khrushchev went on to having a high respect for Kennedy because Kennedy managed to push back the military and CIA who wanted Kennedy to go to war. Both leaders had secret dialogues and were able to pass and sign the FIRST nuclear test ban treaty.
Kennedy was in favour of tax cuts…like the Bushes and Reagan. In fact, Kennedy once famously told a liberal economist to “shut the fuck up” because that economist was opposed to Kennedy’s tax-cutting proposals.
Ronald Reagan always made these liberals rip their hair off whenever he made references to Kennedy in defence of his OWN tax-cutting proposals.
Kennedy was also far more conservative than most of the liberal Democrats of his day. Richard Nixon wrote in his memoir that he felt Kennedy was FAR MORE RIGHT WING than Nixon was on foreign policy.
Kennedy was also sceptical of the Civil Rights movement as well. He RELUCTANTLY allowed the 1963 march to happen and only on his and Bobby’s terms.
Kennedy told his close friends, including our Canadian prime minister Lester B. Pearson, he was going to pull out of Vietnam after he’d get re-elected.
The dirt bag Texan and warmonger Lyndon Johnson reversed that policy .. TWO DAYS after Kennedy was buried. Enough said.
these comments never suprise me on how stupid they can get. if you dont like JFK then why are you even reading this? people always be trolling haha
Khrushchev once said West Berlin was the West’s testicles. Every time he wanted to make the West scream, he would squeeze Berlin. Well, after the Cuban Missile Crisis and after building the Wall, he couldn’t get the Allies out of Berlin, it is safe to say, the West teabagged Khrushchev right in his bald noggin.