(Warning: Spoilers ahead. :)

Fiction often pays truth a visit. Great stories expand your reality, encourage you to think about the world in new ways, and even provide inspiring role models. Whether you draw your inspiration from real-life strangers or imaginary icons, it all comes down listening to the voices that improve your results.

Rhett Butler is, in my opinion, a solid act to follow. The handsome hero of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, he is a great example of a guy who lives authentically. He is so charming, charismatic, and persuasive that investing an entire afternoon watching this movie seems almost necessary.

Rhett Butler can teach you a lot about being a challenge instead of being desperate, validating yourself instead of calculating your worth by other people’s measure, and drawing your strength, energy, and conviction from your own choices, instead of being dragged down by energy vampires.

Being a Challenge

Scarlett: Cathleen, Who’s that?
Cathleen Calvert: Who?
Scarlett: That man looking at us and smiling? The nasty dark one?
Cathleen Calvert: My dear don’t you know? That’s Rhett Butler! He’s from Charleston, he has the most terrible reputation!
Scarlett: He looks as if he knows what I look like without my shimmy.

Almost every guy around her is clambering for Scarlett O’Hara’s attention, but Rhett Butler is his own force of nature. The most important thing to him about Scarlett is not that she’s beautiful but that he’s interested. Instead of trying to get a reaction out of her, he operates with caveman-like directness, and that is exactly what Scarlett finds attractive. As the quote above shows, Scarlett is almost intimidated by his presence.

While Scarlett is extremely selfish and stubborn, the type of girl who always gets what she wants, and can have any guy in the South and knows it, Rhett leads their relationship from day one. The more he takes the reins, the more she not only obliges, but is actually magnetized by his manliness and feels secure in his presence.

Scarlett: But really Rhett, I can’t go on accepting these gifts although you are AWFULLY kind.
Rhett Butler: I’m not kind, I’m just tempting you.
Scarlett: Well if you think I’ll marry you just to pay for the bonnet I won’t.
Rhett Butler: Don’t flatter yourself. I’m not a marrying man.

Scarlett has a way of controlling everyone she meets, but Rhett doesn’t take the bait. While other men in her circle of influence trip over themselves trying to get her attention, Rhett is realistic. Though he’s no doubt taken by her beauty, he doesn’t get addicted to it.

The key to “being a challenge” with women is to not seek your happiness in relationships. When you treat women as a nice-to-have rather than a need-to-have, you learn to respect yourself instead of relying on respect from others, and focus on your mission instead of being driven by your crotch.

Self-Approval

Scarlett: But you are a blockade runner.
Rhett Butler: For profit, and profit only.
Scarlett: Are you tryin’ to tell me you don’t believe in the cause?
Rhett Butler: I believe in Rhett Butler, he’s the only cause I know.

Rhett Butler’s views about the South’s slim chances in the war are very unpopular. In announcing them he is even challenged to a fight. He was kicked out of West Point. His love interest (Scarlett) gets married first to one guy, then another, while she is in love with yet a third.

And he doesn’t give a shit.

Being authentic is sometimes inconvenient, but taking risks is the only way to live. Rhett is hardly held in high esteem among his peers but, as he says, “With enough courage, you can do without a reputation.”

Amidst all the chaos and famine of the post-war South, Rhett seems like the only guy who isn’t down and depressed all the time. He chooses to see the positive in every situation, and focuses on taking action rather than wallowing in self-pity. He never complains, never feels sorry for himself, and never relies on other people to sort his problems out. It is only when his daughter dies in a horse riding accident that he finally breaks down.

Funding yourself with your own approval starts by realizing that you are not your mind. You don’t have to feed your ego to reinforce your identity. You need only decide how you wish to experience the world and go do that. See also my article on How to Not Care What Other People Think.

Butler the Energy Vampire Slayer

Scarlett: Rhett, Rhett… Rhett, if you go, where shall I go? What shall I do?
Rhett Butler: Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

Scarlett O’Hara is one of fiction’s most famous energy vampires. She brings a tornado of drama with her everywhere she goes. She’s in love with a married man who can’t quite love her back. She steals her own sister’s beau and marries him. And in the aftermath of the Civil War, the means by which she seeks her own advancement become only more treacherous.

But the one man she never manages to crack is Rhett. While Scarlett seduced him, she could never control him, and thus couldn’t manipulate him. Scarlett and Rhett never argued. Rhett would just state what was going to happen and act upon it, rather than getting into verbal lashings that would only fuel a winless War of the Roses.

While the world is full of Poor Me’s and wholesale victim mentality, you are ultimately responsible for the way you think, act, and respond to an energy vampire.

Fiction is “just fiction”, but film and literature are full of fascinating personages. Rhett Butler is a “Man’s Man”, and while his image is obviously exaggerated, there are interesting lessons to be learned from his example. In a world where Scarlett O’Hara seeks and gets everyone’s attention, she can never quite pin down Rhett. While others trip over themselves to please her, Rhett lives to please himself. And while he isn’t always well-liked by others, he enjoys the riches of self-approval.