Your spam blocker let me write the only word I want to: Respect.

All i want to say is great post man… keep them coming

fwiw, you are going in completely the right direction with these posts. now I need to find a way to get a couple years worth of crappy “pua” ideas out of my head.

-an ex pua wannabe

I totally get what you’re saying, though I think it’s possible to go astray with this kind of attitude.

I think when guys get really good at something, they internalize so many skills and fundamentals that they forget all the little things they did benefit from knowing as beginners themselves.

At some point it seems really common for them to reach this place of being really vague and going, “Forget all that crap, X is so simple. All you have to do is follow this one principle and figure it out for yourself!!!!!”

But newbies sometimes need specific advice and stuff spelled out for them. It would be like someone saying, “Oh football is easy, you just have to play and try out different strategies. It’ll all come in time!!!!” Actually a beginner would need to be shown specific plays and drills and exercises and all that.

Still, I get what you’re saying about not over complicating things, and learning from firsthand experience, and just experimenting and figuring things out for yourself and not caring how anyone interaction goes.

Oh, also, what if a guy was starting in such a bad place that he just didn’t have the ‘tools’ to start figuring things out on his own. Like he has really bad social skills, super bad anxiety, lots of mental baggage, etc.

You know, the proverbial guy who goes “I’ve been in this community for five years, and I’ve approached 2000 girls and I’m still where I started”

Still needs the same approach, or to get the more basic stuff handled first, or hire a coach?

Oh trust me, this is not an “inner game is the only game” type of post. I fucking hate that approach and always have.

You raise good points. And at this point, I’ve dealt with dozens of guys in each boat:

1) Guys with weak social skills. You give them the very fundamentals… decent body language, an opener, a couple conversational strategies, and then you just have them do it over and over and over and over. You help him calibrate his actions AFTER they’re done. Calibration (the second necessary component) can only be taught AFTER something has been done, not before.

2) Guys who have done 2,000 sets with no results. They’re obviously doing something very wrong. The guys usually fall into a different category, in that they think they need to do X, Y and Z when they don’t have to. More often than not, they’re over-gaming.

The other common situation with these guys is they have a fundamental lifestyle issue or emotional issue that they are blind to or simply not dealing with. My advice to these guys is often to leave the community and get their shit figured out. Then start opening sets on their own time once they feel like they’ve gotten stuff straightened out.

–

As for the football analogy, it doesn’t work. In fact, I may do a post about all of the shitty analogies that Pick up is compared to.

Again, it’s coming from a mind-set that pick up is studied and mastered and then implemented. And this type of thinking is just going to lead you to a lot of awkward nights out with a lot more worrying than you need.

If you want a sports analogy, here’s the most apt one I can think of: downhill skiing. There’s a basic technique, you make sure to hit the turns when they come, but you just fucking go. You go and you don’t stop. And the only way to get good at it is to go down the hill over and over and over and over again. You never master the hill. You can never beat the hill. You can never perfect how you go down the hill. All that changes is the amount of effort it takes for you to get to the bottom.

Great post, will be intently listening to your future thoughts

@Kevin, Entropy stated in the blog that for guys starting out, they STILL need to learn calibration (PUA fundamentals). For the guys who did 2000 sets and still nothing… They got through approach anxiety, but did they work on getting through other anxieties? Were they content on just approaching and getting #’s?

I’ll add this as well:

I’ve noticed that a lot of guys who have been around for a while have been reluctant to agree with this kind of thinking.

Well, I can say that my coaching recently has reflected this new approach, and the results have been head and shoulders above what I used to get out of guys. In some cases, guys have gotten results so rapidly that they’ve actually said to me, “I’m kind of disappointed, I didn’t realize it was this simple.”

My mantra recently has been this: The community will tell you that pick up is complicated, but easy once it is understood. The truth is that pick up is very simple, but hard and must be practiced.

This shit’s not rocket science. It’s just hard to do because you’re fighting against a lifetime of emotional baggage every step of the way.

Yeah, I actually agree that the hard part in pick up is not in all the techniques or whatnot. If you get out there enough you’ll figure that out on your own and find your style.

It seems where the average guy goes wrong is in actually being able to do that learning process.

-They get approach anxiety
-They get lazy and don’t go out often enough, or they’ll go out for three months, then get tired of it
-They get side tracked by overly complicated theories and processes
-They go into “I must read for six months first” mode
-They flit from one method to the next and don’t stick with anything long enough to figure out how to make it work for them.

Thinking of myself, when I was actually getting out there fairly often, things came together for me quickly enough. But I tons of time by just being too scared or unmotivated to do that for months at a stretch.

I agree 100%

-They get approach anxiety <– (Anxiety)
-They get lazy and don’t go out often enough, or they’ll go out for three months, then get tired of it <– (Anxiety)
-They get side tracked by overly complicated theories and processes <– (Anxiety)
-They go into “I must read for six months first” mode <– (Anxiety)
-They flit from one method to the next and don’t stick with anything long enough to figure out how to make it work for them. <– (Anxiety)

I’m reaching the conclusion that this whole community thing is really nothing more than a long, complicated means to get men to 1) stop being afraid of their sexuality with women, and 2) stop being afraid to be men.

The increased social skills and emotional awareness are nice side-benefits.

Yeah, or if not anxiety, just not having the discipline to stick with something that will be rewarding in the end, but means putting in the work and hours, and getting discouraged at times.

Kind of how a lot of people can’t stay on their exercise plans.

Great post. I recently read the business book “The Pursuit of Excellence” which makes the point that companies are successful overall not because they come up with some fancy new technique, but because they can do the fundamentals of their business extremely well. They also said that 1) MBA students never believe it is that simple, but 2) experienced business people cheer when they hear it. The authors also said that they question whether the business people should be cheering, because it is harder to work on fundamentals every day for years on end than to have one brilliant idea. This seems like a pretty applicable concept.

Excellent post! Like I’ve told you (and others when they’ve listened) before, two of the most powerful, useful, eye-opening, and reality changing pieces of information that I heard and acted upon when starting this (at your bootcamp) was that calibration is everything, the rest is just recommendation AND pickup is non-linear.

All my success is based on believing and acting upon this. I tried a shitload of things and found out what works for me.

I still use “strawberry fields” every so often…lol

So, what’s the best way to overcome anxiety?

Greaaaat, I love the way you write. Great blog.

“After five years, and over 400 posts, I feel like I’m just now beginning to share what I’m capable of teaching.”
Wow!

Hmm … intriguing …

I agree with you 100% that most guys need to just get out there and do it over and over again. And most will procrastinate, same as people do with coaching programs, workout programs, etc.

This is why the phrases “I choose” and “I commit” are so powerful …

Though I’d throw in there some very important inner game methods that DO work … and one in particular that comes to mind is how guys process their life experiences …

Most guys in the community are stuck in perpetual “downward spirals” … caused by the way they process events … so those guys could go out and do 2000 sets and it won’t help them at all, in fact it’ll probably make things worse as their inner belief system gets more and more damaged.

Whereas there is systematic way to process events to get people into upward spirals instead …

Though I feel certain if I heard more about your approach, I’d probably agree with it, and I suspect you’d find a lot of value in mine. Outer and inner game must go hand in hand in a way that has not yet reached its full potential in this community … not even close …

“This shit’s not rocket science. It’s just hard to do because you’re fighting against a lifetime of emotional baggage every step of the way.”

Tell me about it…..

Your words have changed me.

What you’re saying, whether you realize it or not, is that most aspiring PUAs need good psychotherapy to get over their hangups.

This is true.

Most people either don’t understand or don’t want to admit just how much our early childhood years affect our development into adulthood. Freud was wrong about a lot of things, but he got that much right. Research coming from modern neuroscience (check out the work of Allan Schore and Dan Siegel) is now beginning to show how our brains are quite _literally_ shaped by the environment we grew up in.

Growing up in a less than nurturing environment — which unfortunately seems to be a common trend in the pickup community — can cause the amygdala to enlarge as it develops, as well as stimulate the production of a perpetually high level of cortisol. A brain which develops under constant stress and/or trauma (trauma doesn’t have to be physical or sexual, by the way, nor does it have to be particularly intense for it to affect brain development) plays a significant role in the body’s physiological and neurological response to fear, shame, and other forms of anxiety. We become hypersensitive to these feelings, and when they strike, the parts of our brain below conscious control (such as the amygdala) override the prefrontal cortex. This results in the fight-or-flight reaction that can be totally paralyzing.

You talk about “just doing it” as the antidote to fear. That’s a great idea, but it doesn’t help the man whose brain and body literally shut down when these unconscious neurological commands are issued. However, I do believe that once this initial hump is overcome, that once the man finally approaches a girl (or whatever the fear is), and the brain realizes such an act doesn’t mean instant annihilation, then at that point real behavioral change can start to occur.

A good therapist, especially a self-aware male who understands how to exploit the mind-body connection, can be particularly effective in helping men find a way around their mental and emotional programming. One 90 minute psychotherapy session with a very talented therapist did more to help me than YEARS of learning pickup material.

If I had known all of this back in 2001 when I first found the seduction community, I would have bypassed all the gurus and gone straight to the psychotherapy section of the yellow pages. Good therapists are hard to find, but looking back, good psychotherapy is what I needed — not good pickup skills.

The technical skills, which you refer to as calibration skills, are fairly easy to learn and, if the individual is socially adroit, won’t take much time to master.