Recently I’ve been sensing a lot of outcome-focus in chats and from people in real life. I think it’s very important to shift the focus from results and to the path, or progress. I first wrote most of this post back in February 2014, and recently reread it and it still rings true. I think its important that people don’t only see my flashy pulls and quantity, but also understand the deeper spiritual purpose and attitude behind everything. A large part of my success, and anyone’s success at pickup is long-term focus and right mindset. WRONG mindset is trying to chase better percentages, more lays for the sake of getting notches, getting angry at girls when they don’t put out, etc. RIGHT mindset is focused on your own path and progress. So here goes:
Don’t get the girl, walk the path
What’s the difference? The girl fades (in beauty, in time, in everything). The path (and your progress) is permanent. Each individual girl, or “lay” is not your goal. Your goal is your own progress and a greater understanding of yourself and the world around you.
1. The game gives you what you need when you need it, not what you want when you want it.
This is pretty critical, and great to keep in mind when you’re getting a string of rejections, or a dry patch. You may feel like you’ve put in enough work to get results by now, or more consistently. But life would be too easy if you got what you wanted when you wanted it. Everything happens for a reason. I’m not a religious man, but Game is like God, fate, and karma wrapped up in one. If you make the conscious effort to better yourself through action, reflection, and perseverance, you WILL get better. Along the way of course, you may wonder why it teaches you in the way it does, but have faith in the process, have faith in the way the Game is teaching you. Keep this in mind when you think you’re on a hot streak, and that one girl you “really actually” like and had a “connection” with suddenly stops messaging you and blocks you on LINE. Keep this in mind when you are 99% of the way through a pull, the girl has her pants down in your bed, and she gets a phone call from her boyfriend, they have an angry discussion, and at the eleventh hour you’re left with your dick in your hands. Keep this in mind when you want to say “fuck it, I don’t need this game shit. I don’t need women. I’m happy with the level I’m at.” You can always improve, and the pain you’re feeling now is good. Pain is just weakness leaving the body. Game has a magical way of teaching you exactly what you need to know when you need to know it, and that often is painful or not what you want to hear.
2. Accept that you will have expansion and consolidation stages, and they are both equally important to your development. Similarly, you will have hot streaks and cold streaks.
There are actually two separate but related phenomena here.
One is your conscious choices, which I call here expansion and consolidation. Some periods you’ll be going out an absurd amount, cracking onto every set in the club, going nonstop, hitting the streets for hours until your legs feel like they’ll fall off, and getting loads of reference experiences. Other periods you’ll be happy with the regular(s) you have, and you’ll still be approaching but with much less vigor and frequency. In this phase, you’ll be consolidating your knowledge and getting back to basics. Much like how sleep cements the memories for the day, the consolidation phase cements the lessons from the reference experiences you gathered in your expansion phase. Also, you can tone down some of the otherwise insane behavior that you’ve probably acquired during your expansion phase, rest up, and eat lots of vegetables instead of booze, chain-smoking, and pounding red bulls. The VERY IMPORTANT caveat to the consolidation phase is that it is NOT to be confused with becoming comfortable, complacent, or choosing not to take action. In fact, when you notice any of these things happening, it’s time to get out of the consolidation phase, and kick back into another expansion phase.
The second phenomenon is streaks (which is random, not a choice). You will have streaks (and keep in mind, this could be in either phase) where everything you say is gold, girls pull easy, and the Game is great to you. Then, you’ll have cold streaks where no matter how much you try to pump your state and put out seemingly your best game, you’ll get blown out, flaked on, drinks spilled on you, girlfriends cockblocking you, etc. The important thing to keep in mind is that this is natural, it’s important, and like all things, it will end. The difference between winners and losers is that during the hot streak, winners know this isn’t their new baseline. During the cold streak, winners know this won’t last. Both hot streaks and cold streaks, provided that you accurately reflect on each, slowly and gradually increase your baseline “Game level”, and are good for you. Similarly, rejections, bad nights, and cold streaks are, like vegetables, not always the most delicious, but good for you and necessary for your growth (But actually I freakin’ love veggies.. well.. and rejection too haha)
3. Successful with women is something you “are” not something you “do”.
What this means is that at the beginning, you are likely working on rewiring all the previous socially-conditioned responses and anti-approach heuristics out of your brain. To do this, you often need to create rules for yourself, fall back on techniques, etc. Examples of good techniques or rules for newbies are things like the 3-second approach rule (approach within 3 seconds of seeing the girl), the head-turn approach rule (if she looks good enough to make you turn your head, she’s good enough to say ‘Hi’ to), not buying girls drinks, always leading, always going for the bounce/kiss/number-close, etc. They are good because at the beginning, yes you do need to “do” these kinds of things, consciously, in order to get better. But basically what you’re doing here is hacking your brain to believe that you are high-status, the prize, the leader, and a man who takes action. Once you “hack” your brain enough, and you start to really internalize these inner behaviors and thought patterns, the outer rules or techniques become less and less helpful for you, and often end up messing you up.
If you get into a comfortable zone, or a “routine” of game, then game will always be something you “do” rather than something you “are”. This is why we go out in different venues, different situations, different mental states, in different clothes, etc. This is SO important to getting better fast. If you always go out wearing cologne, try going out without cologne. If you always drink, try staying sober. If you always go to Roppongi, try Shibuya. If you always approach lone girls or 2-sets of girls, try approaching 8-sets of girls, or mixed sets with lots of guys in it. Go out with scruff on your face and smelling rank, and then draw attention to it. Go up to a hot girl and be like, “I haven’t shaved and I smell like balls. What’s your name?” See how this works. You might be surprised. The more you push yourself out of your comfort zone and try new things the faster your progress will be.
If you’re trying to design a tank, you want to put it through the most rigorous of tests. You’d shoot it from the top, the side, the front, the back, you’d run it over landmines, you’d torch it with a flamethrower, throw molotov cocktails at it, drive it over muddy, wet, bumpy, jagged, rough terrain, you’d drop really heavy things on top of it, dunk it in acid, and you’d basically throw everything you could think of at it. And then, when you developed it to the degree that it comes out of all those tests victorious, then and only then you’d know you had a resilient tank. If you are opposed to trying new things and focusing only on what’s effective is the equivalent of designing a tank with massively thick armor on the front and paper-thin armor on every other side, then only shooting it in the front. When it doesn’t get damaged, you claim success, but actually that would be a pretty horrible tank.
I know guys who have a very set routine. They say exactly the same things, have the same venues for D2s, have the exact same bounce patterns, order the same things, escalate in exactly the same way, and get pretty good results with it, so they’re happy and content. But is that “walking the path”? NO. In the end what are they left with? They don’t have a skillset, they have a technique. This is where you don’t want to be. You don’t want to have to rely on alcohol, on wingmen, on your looks, on your money, on any particular phrase or joke, on anything except yourself and your ability to communicate with women. The more you push yourself to try new things and get out of your routine, the faster and better you will get. This is very important. At a certain level, if you cling to the rules and techniques which got you halfway there (to competence), you’re actually hindering your progress.
The path of progress in nearly and discipline or skill goes a little something like this:
Stage 1 —- Unconscious incompetence
Stage 2 —- Conscious incompetence
Stage 3 —- Conscious Competence
Stage 4 —- Unconscious competence
At stage 1 you suck and you don’t really know that you suck. Call it “blissful ignorance”.You think it’s normal for people to not be getting laid that much or have only say, 10 lifetime partners. Stage 2, you suck and you realize that you suck (yay, this is the beginning of improvement). Stage 3, you are getting better, but you still have to focus a lot on the routine / process to perform effectively. Stage 4, you don’t need to “do” anything or think about anything, everything becomes automatic.
The rules and techniques can help you move from stage 2 to stage 3, but they’ll hold you back once you’re on your way to stage 4.
4. In order to master any piece of wisdom, you must find the point at which it fails.
If you have a rule, for example, “Don’t buy girls drinks” or “Don’t meet a girl for a date with her friend”, generally they’re good rules, or at least have some sort of basis. But for each rule or piece of pickup wisdom, there’s a place where that rule FAILS. Once you’ve followed the rule enough times, you have to start looking for the place where it fails. When does not buying a girl a drink actually hurt your set, and possibly prevent you from otherwise banging the girl. When does not meeting a girl and her friend actually mean a missed opportunity, as opposed to a good conservation of energy.
5. Being bold gets you farther and faster than walking on eggshells.
Go for the pull faster. Say that crude and obnoxious remark that’s on your mind. Try to make out with her in front of her friends. Even if, especially if, it won’t work. Why? Its PART OF THE PATH.
Imagine it’s pitch black and you’re trying to walk across a room. There’s a path that zig-zags in an unfamiliar way to the door, and around the path there are small spiky objects that cause pain when stepped on. There are two strategies which you can use to find the path and get to the door.
Walk fast with big steps, causing probably a lot of pain and get to the door very quickly.
Walk very very slowly, trying to insure you don’t step on even a single spike, and make it to the door in 10x the time.
How does this apply to game? If you treat each interaction like it’s yours to lose, you might end up getting some small success after many hundreds of approaches. But if you treat each interaction hard and fast, overstepping the boundaries, offending girls, escalating too soon, etc, you will get better MUCH quicker, and then you will know where the path is, and how to walk it so that next time you don’t escalate too soon, or you offend the girl, but you reign it back in and stick in set, and pull the girl as opposed to blowing yourself out.
This is called calibration, and it works much better if you dive head-first into it. Imagine trying to determine someone’s weight by putting grains of sand individually on the other side of the scale. Eventually, you’d get there, but it takes forever. It would be much faster to add and subtract 20kilo bags, then 5kilo bags, then .5 kilo bags, etc etc.
6. You are not a special snowflake, but you are awesome!
“What?!” you say, “I thought this was supposed to be inspiring and positive?” Well, yes. So why would I say you’re not a special snowflake? For two reasons:
- You can do anything that any of the guys you look up to can do, whether its RSD Tyler,Kobe Bryant, or Bill Gates. All it requires is a lot of hustle, blood, sweat, and tears, reflection, growth, expansion, contraction, work ethic, change, and of course, ACTION. What this means is when you read a report of insta-bounces or club toilet bangs, or stealing girls from other guys in the club, don’t think “I could never do that.” Instead think “What behaviors, what mentality, what steps do I need to take before I can be on that level?” And the answer, of course, is to commit to the path!
- A dose of humility. When you find out that the girl you’ve been dating bangs another guy, or had sex before you, or banged foreigners before you, or has taken it in the ass before, and it shatters your bullshit idea of her as some chaste angel, realize that you are not special. Girls like to have sex, and chances are, she’s had a lot of it, with many guys. The hotter the girl is, the more she’s probably had, with more partners than you might care to imagine. So nip this in the bud. Stop thinking of her as some girl who only loves your cock, or only wants to bang you. Then, you can switch this around and realize that you can do your own thing as well, of course provided you’re managing expectations well. However, you ARE awesome, because you DID bang her, and while maybe she’s slept with 20, 40, 100 guys, she’s turned down thousands of times that number every year of her life.
7. Cultivate a sick pleasure in the pain
Rejection can hurt. Especially if you’re invested. The difference between the winners and losers on the path of the game is how they deal with it. Do you call it quits, or do you put yourself back on the line and keep going in the face of opposition? The warrior on the path enjoys the pain of rejection, the pain of the cold ice-out, because he knows it means he still has work to do. And the beauty of the path is not as much in the results, as it is in the walking of the path itself, pain and all, through storms and cold and heat. When you open yourself up to the pain, and persevere through it, you open yourself up to learning the lessons of the Game, which as we saw in #1 often work in mysterious ways.
8. Strive for mastery (and self-actualization), not results
The Hierarchy of Needs shows us that Game is the progression from the Love/Belonging level to the self-actualization level. This is what we call “the path”. Thinking about it on this hierarchy illustrates how your goals and values change as you meet each level. First, most guys come from sexual scarcity. They simply want to get laid, which is totally understandable. Then, after achieving this first goal, they want to be respected by their friends, women, and themselves. They want self-esteem and a feeling of accomplishment. Finally, at the last stage, they have supreme lack of prejudice, feel open and free to do whatever they like in the realm of women. By this point usually men seek deep, meaningful connections. Rather than most guys who simply end up dating the nearest woman who will allow them to have sex with her, at the “self-actualization” level, guys choose from a wide variety of women, one of a few women who share deep value-level affinity. They explore new depths of trust and mutual love. However, at this stage it’s also the absolute easiest to pull large quantities and quality with more ease than ever before – almost as if walking through one’s day and collecting groceries or going to the post office, a man at this stage can find and bring home a new sex partner.
Ultimately, sex is a temporary pleasure. It’s not happiness. The pleasure fades, quite quickly really. And then, when it fades, what’s left? The same thing as was there before, and during: YOU. If you identify and seek the results, you’re worshiping false idols, you’re getting caught up in the Maya, the illusion, instead of the true reality.
All of this comes down to the fact that you should strive for mastery. One of the greatest fulfillments in life is to feel mastery over something, and there are very few paths to walk which provide such excellent feedback and is as “deep” as Game. There are guys who are “hobbyists” who are in the game to get a couple dates, or find a girlfriend or a wife relatively soon. Then there are disciples, who walk the path not for some tangible result, but because the process itself will change them for the better, and allow them to gain mastery over something in life (It will NOT, mind you, give you powers to bang every girl). So, if you want to walk the good path, which you definitely should, prepare yourself for hardship, rejection, highs, lows, slaps in the face, insults, sex, and glory. Prepare to lose a LOT of mental baggage and bad beliefs along the way. Prepare to get chewed up and spit out, and come out better for it. Remember that the battle is not fought in front of the girl. By the time you’ve approached, you’ve already won. The battle is fought when you’re deciding whether or not to go out from the warm womb of Youtube, porn, and delivery pizza in your house. The battle is fought when you’re seeing that 10 standing at the bar surrounded by friends, and you decide whether to approach or make up excuses. The battle is fought against comfort and inaction, not against girls or sets. When you take action, you always win!
9. Each girl is not a stepping stone
The key caveat in thinking of progress is not putting your ego on the line in each approach and running “easy” sets or half-assing it. This happens to a lot of intermediate level guys, and they get frustrated because although their game is better, they get less results. They can sometimes start to view women as objects, holders of sex, or even just mere stepping stones along the path to their own self-mastery. The antidote to this kind of thinking is to always remember that whatever girl you are talking to has her own values, beliefs, and goals in life. You are responsible for interacting honestly with her and conveying your true self to her. And she is definitely not a stepping stone.
If you ever feel yourself getting angry that a girl didn’t put out, or feeling so entitled that you yell at girls or get negatively heated, you know it’s time to take a step back and re-evaluate. No girl owes you anything. They are free beings, and you shouldn’t get mad at them for not wanting to go with you or your plans. It just means back to the grind. You can’t “win em all”.
So once again, the principles to follow on the path to mastery in Game:
1. The game gives you what you need when you need it, not what you want when you want it.
2. Accept that you will have expansion and consolidation stages, and they are both equally important to your development. Similarly, you will have hot streaks and cold streaks.
3. Successful with women is something you “are” not something you “do”.
4. In order to master any piece of wisdom, you must find the point at which it fails.
5. Being bold gets you farther and faster than walking on eggshells.
6. You are not a special snowflake, but you are awesome!
7. Cultivate a sick pleasure in the pain
8. Strive for mastery, not results
9. Each girl is not a stepping stone
Hope you guy have enjoyed this, and I hope to see lots of guys walking the path!
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