How Important is Momentum in the Venue?
August 25, 2007
My first outing to the mega-clubs in Beijing during my most recent stint was supposed to be purely for reconnaissance. I wanted to scope out the dozens of clubs in the club district to find the target-rich environments and to just see what the social dynamics were like there. I wasn’t planning to do any real approaches or anything. It was purely for research.
But I was also thinking that I would at least chat up some friendly and hot looking strangers once I had a feel for the places. That, however, did not happen. Guess why?
I had spent about two hours going into about a dozen different clubs, walking 3-4 city blocks in dusty Beijing, over-dressed on a really warm night, and I hadn’t talked to a soul. How hard was it to cold approach a group of hotties then?
Well, I did open a few groups. But they were all Western girls and guys, so it was easy. We had something in common.
But I had the hardest time even doing a simple opener to the group of two northern Chinese girls sitting directly to my right at the bar. Granted, it was the biggest and loudest club there. And granted, the boyfriends showed up 5 minutes later and acted very protective of them. But still. I was really disappointed in myself that night.
Then I read a post by My Birthday Pony. I can’t be bothered to find it right now. But basically, he talked about how he too had encountered a similar issue.
Negative Momentum. It’s a killer. We as social beings, especially us introverts, have a natural tendency toward negative momentum. If we do nothing, or if we act our normal introverted selves, we generate negative momentum.
Here’s the antidote: Positive Momentum. Duh. I was reminded of how this works the night after my scouting night. I was determined to overcome my approach anxiety.
Guess what? It was a million times easier the second night. Why? Because I generated positive momentum right from the start. This is particularly important if you’re going solo because you don’t have buddies you can chat with to get your social juices flowing.
If you are going solo, as soon as you walk into the venue, I don’t care if you’re about to piss your pants, or your throat is parched dry, or your hands are shaking from the cold outside, or whatever, you must approach the FIRST friendly group you see. Even if all you do is talk to them for a few minutes, which is what I usually do, that will be enough to start the positive momentum.
[Edit:] Even better is to start building your momentum before you even step foot in the venue. Flirt with your waitress at lunch and dinner. Flirt with the barrista at Starbucks when you get your morning coffee. Talk to the people in the elevator. Talk to the doorman or the cab driver. Talk to the guys and girls in the line outside the door. Talk to the bouncer.
Every minute that accumulates between the time you leave your home to the time you actually finally have a conversation with someone will result in generating negative momentum.
I used to take my sweet time at the start of the night. I’d go to the bathroom to check my hair. Then I’d saunter over to the bar and order a drink. Then I’d sit and wait for the drink to arrive. Then I’d sip the drink. And only then would I consider opening a group for warm up.
I was able to get away with this because I had fun wings who I could chat with and get into a social mood with.
But when you are going solo, and if you are an introvert like me, you cannot afford to take your time like this when you enter the venue. Open the first friendly group you see and get to know them. Warm up right off the top.
Happy playin’!
David Wygant on why Day Game is Much Better than Club Game
August 23, 2007
I picked up Wygant’s David D. interview from Brian H. (thanks, dude), who has since gone on to become one of Wygan’ts mentees. I haven’t even finished the 2 CD interview yet, but damn, David Wygant is a breath of fresh air. He was the “inspiration” and consultant for the movie Hitch. I had checked out his website and blog before and was a little impressed, but I couldn’t tell if he was bringing anything new to the table other than the fact that he also offers programs and products for women and for teens. His free podcasts are too short and his copywriting looks the same as everybody else’s.
But this interview was great, and I feel like I have a much better handle on what he teaches. Apparently, Wygant offers $10,000 90-day one-on-one programs. He got started when he was casually helping some of his millionaire entrepreneur friends meet girls at the Coffee Bean and Whole Foods.
What I really like about his approach is not just that it’s clean morally, but that it is super time-efficient. He basically gets his clients to chart out their daily schedules–where they go during the day, what they do, etc. And he builds a “routine stack” (he doesn’t call it that, but that’s what it is) around that. He also takes the “natural game” approach and helps them craft stories and other “material” (again, he doesn’t call it that, but that’s what it is) around their own current strengths and identity, which was the most valuable thing that Sebastian at theApproach did for me.
Let’s face it. I was never really a dance-clubbing kind of guy (bars are a different story though). I used to feel awkward dancing in clubs. But almost everyone in the community makes clubs out to be the end all and be all of our sarging existence. They say the hottest girls are all there, dolled up, and in one place at the same time.
But what Wygant says is that the same girl, who in the club has a super high bitch shield with tons of attitude, is also the sweetest girl in the cafe the next afternoon. I know this is true because I’ve experienced it myself. I’ve also experienced too many times the surprise upon seeing a girl in daylight on the day 2 and wondering if it was the same hottie you opened in the club. Approaching during the day means that you get a more accurate picture of what she looks like and what her true personality is like.
The knock against day game in the community is that there isn’t a high enough concentration of talent in one place at one time. But what I’ve noticed is that the concentration around trendy shopping areas in the late afternoons and early evenings on weekends is higher than in most clubs on a Saturday night.
By god, I don’t know how much longer I can keep enjoying loud, mega-dance clubs.
For one thing, it’s killing my sleep schedule. I have no idea how you guys with day jobs can keep this up. When I sleep at 4 am for three nights in a row, it throws off my sleep schedule for the rest of the week. And just when I’m starting to finally fall asleep at 1am instead of 4am, it’s Thursday night again.
On top of that, I can’t help feeling like girls get really ditzy in clubs. The same girls who you could have a really deep conversation with at a cafe talk like ADD teenagers in the loud, mega-dance clubs. I feel like I’m so old now, as if I can’t communicate with these girls because my tastes in music, food, drink, culture, etc., are years older than them. In fact, I think it’s safe to say my tastes in these areas are also much older than my own age group.
So when David Wygant says that he has millionaire clients who also don’t feel comfortable in clubs and don’t want to have to go back to them, and instead, find places they are ALREADY going to and activities that they are ALREADY doing and crafts a schedule to meet women around that, I’m very interested
In my old days, I LOVED going to pubs, shooting pool, and talking about philosophy with my buddies over craft beer and wings.
I have changed a little bit. I still like pubs. I still like beer. I still like philosophy. I still suck at pool. But now I enjoy gin martinis and single malt scotches. I enjoy talking to new people in bars. Thanks to JCH’s tutelage, I enjoy the sophisticated atmosphere of certain martini and tapas bar-lounges. I feel like I fit in there. They’re the kind of places you might find my archetypes on their down time.
But mega-dance clubs? I’m in my early 30s now, and all my ex-girlfriends from my AFC days used to tell me that I have the tastes of an old man (jazz, Belgian beer, philosophy, old books, and I use pine wood shoe horns for my leather shoes–that was the clincher, haha). I don’t want to be “that old guy” in the clubs. You know the kind I’m talking about.
My day game in Asia is pretty good, if I may say so myself. But I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t been approaching it as systematically as I have bar-club game. So here’s to a mid-year’s resolution!
Cheers!
The Game is out in Chinese
August 23, 2007
I stumbled onto a site that has the first six main chapters of The Game in Chinese, which was just published in May, 2007.
http://www.douban.com/review/1160041/
So far there hasn’t been much of a reaction in the press. I think the Chinese probably consider this to be a purely American phenomenon and inapplicable to the Chinese context. The Chinese are fiercely nationalistic in this way.
Feel free to add any further info you have on this.
Guys who focus on their level of pickup mastery may be sacrificing their happiness
August 19, 2007
Niels Hoven has just posted a short and super insightful blog entry on the whole pickup levels of mastery thing. I couldn’t have said it any better, especially this part:
“Put a guy in front of me. I don’t care how hot the girls he’s shagging are. I don’t care how comfortable he is in bars. I don’t even care if he can cold approach. If he has everything he wants and is happy with his life, then he’s achieved mastery.”
This is also along the lines of Neil Strauss’s conclusion to The Game, where he says that the only way to win the game is to leave the game.
No wonder I thought Hong Kong had great air
August 9, 2007
Just wandered onto this short report on HK’s cleaner air this year. Everyone kept telling me that HK was super polluted, but every day I was there, the air was as clean that in any big city in America I’ve ever been to.
http://hkorbust.blogspot.com/2007/07/where-did-hong-kongs-smog-go.html
Incidentally, while surfing on random China blogs, I discovered that a lot of English bloggers have been complaining that their blogs have been blocked. Some of them have moved their blogs several times in the past few months. Apparently, blogspot gets blocked and unblocked a few times a month. There are unblock sites, but apparently they aren’t perfect. Well, I’ll have to see what’s up once I get back there. I might have to purchase a domain name or something.
Simple Method for Discovering Your Purpose
August 7, 2007
Applying Stephen Covey’s principle of “Begin with the end in mind” to Ferriss’s book, I found these great, pithy questions near the end of his book that helped me focus on what I want to devote most of my time to in the next few years. Maybe they can help you, too:
From Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek, p. 289.
1. What are you good at?
2. What could you be the best at?
3. What makes you happy?
4. What excites you?
5. What makes you feel accomplished and good about yourself?
6. What are you most proud of having accomplished in your life? Can you repeat this or further develop it?
7. What do you enjoy sharing or experiencing with other people?
Oddly, my answers to most of these questions were a combination of a) doing philosophy and learning about East Asia, b) meeting and attracting beautiful and intelligent women, and c) having mind-blowing, multi-orgasmic sex 
My life over the next few years will be characterized by an abundance of these activities. Heh heh.
Know What You Want: "Do not go Past the Mark you Aimed for; In Victory, Learn when to Stop"
August 3, 2007
A few weeks ago, I finally got to see the DVD of “Devil Wears Prada.” Now, don’t ask me why I was so obsessed over finally getting to see it. Maybe it was because I had rented it in the US, but didn’t have the time to see it before the due date came up and I didn’t want to pay the fine so had to return it unwatched. Or maybe it was because in China, I tried to buy a bootlegged version of it twice, and both times, I found that it was dubbed in Russian! At least I got a refund on my $1 purchase. LOL. Btw, this illustrates the power of compliance and the Investment-Value connection.
So finally, a few weeks after returning to North America, I successfully rented the damn movie. Why did I want to see it in the first place? I think I read a review a long time ago that talked about the beautifully wielded power of Meryl Streep’s character, Miranda Priestly. And back then, I was into studying the acquisition and application of power. But by the time I finally got to watch the thing, I had forgotten all about that. Streep, btw, does an amazing job. Her character never raises her voice, yet commands a powerful tonality, pauses often, and speaks and moves slowly to emphasize her points, just like Sebastian originally taught. And she makes it all seem effortless.
This post is a follow-up of my earlier post on being unselfconscious.
I was really moved by this movie. That’s weird because it’s a chick-flick. And there were some really pathetic melodramatic moments and lots of moralistic undertones.
But at a certain level, I was able to relate quite closely to Anne Hathaway’s character. She was supposed to look like the girl-next-door with little fashion sense but highly educated and motivated. Sort of like me a couple of years ago, except I’m a guy.
While working as the assistant to the chief editor of a top fashion magazine, she learns the ropes of fashion. She learns what goes with what, who all the designers are, and the names of the several dozen shades of blue. By the middle of the movie, she turns into one of the most elegantly dressed and coiffed girls on the screen. And near the end of the movie, she hooks up with the “hot, young, fashion guy.”
Admittedly, the movie’s basic story is very parochial, along the lines of the over-done innocent hero/heroine corrupted by greed/ambition/worldly pleasures but escapes from complete damnation at the last moment and is redeemed to goodness-type of plot. One of the best versions of this is the Michael Douglas–Charlie Sheen “Wall Street.” I also really enjoyed Lucas’s portrayal of the fall of Anakin Skywalker in the third Star Wars movie (but that would be too geeky to mention).
“The Devil Wears Prada,” though, hit home more because the content was so much closer to the journey of the PUA. The world of fashion, beauty, seduction, first class travel and hotels. Make yourself more attractive to others, especially the opposite sex. Change the outside, and you’ll change the inside, which will assure permanent change on the outside. Fake it until you make it.
And here’s the lesson: Hathaway’s character originally took the job with “The Devil” because she thought it would further her journalism career. She originally felt that a stint at a fashion magazine was beneath her and what she really wanted to do was get into serious journalism. At each step in her transformation, she had to make sacrifices, including her friends and boyfriend (who was totally lame, btw). Each time, she assuaged her guilt with the excuse that, “I had no choice.”
Only at the end, when Streep’s character told her how much she reminded her of herself when she was younger and that Hathaway’s character did indeed have a choice–she chose to get ahead–it was only then that Hathaway’s character finally saw how far into the dark side she had gone and how many compromises she had made.
In learning the dating arts, we can sometimes get too lost in the process of improving our skills with women. Some of us first started because we were lonely, depressed, and just wanted a beautiful girlfriend. Some of us just wanted to have sex with hot girls. Some of us just wanted to learn how to talk to girls without stuttering. And then, after months and months of practice, we got our first major success. And then a few weeks later, another success. And another, and another. And little by little, we had surpassed our original goals without even knowing it. And then, there we are, years later, having f*cked 200 girls and currently seeing three MLTRs, yet we are still … unhappy.
Why? Because we keep setting the bar higher and higher. And we’re never content until we reach the next goal, and even before we reach that one, we’ve already set a new one, much higher than the last. And we never stop to ask, “Is this enough?” Or, “Is it worth it?”
Every so often, we need to stop to assess where we’ve gone and whether or how we’d like to proceed. We should look up to survey the forest, so we won’t lose it for the trees.
As Christian Hudson has repeatedly asked me, “How far are you going to go with this?” Once in a while, we should be self-conscious, stop, and ask ourselves, “Is this what I really want?” Or, in Robert Greene’s words, “Do not go past the mark you aimed for; In victory, learn when to stop.”
When I started on this journey, I really didn’t know what I wanted, except to be able to attract girls more easily, at least as well as the average cool guy. I’m pretty confident now that I’m currently above average in this department. Should I stop? Or should I try to be like Sebastian and pull 6 girls in 5 days? Or should I try to compete with the other masters? I’ve got a long list of sticking points. Should I continue until I’ve taken care of each one? But every master says he has a long list of sticking points, too. Will it ever end?
Now that I’m in Asia-based lifestyle consulting, I’m having to confront these issues head-on. Is this actually what I really want? Or after I’ve purposely lost myself in the process and become unselfconscious in attaining mastery, and months or years down the road turn to survey the path I’ve left behind, will I regret the sacrifices I’ve had to make?
I think this kind of doubt is quite natural, healthy even. As David Deida has said, “Be willing to change everything in your life… He must be capable of not knowing what to do with his life, entering a period of unknowingness and waiting for a vision or a new form of purpose to emerge. These cycles of strong specific action followed by periods of not knowing what the hell is going on are natural for a man who is shedding layers of karma in his relaxation into truth.” There are going to be periods of intense, strong success from unselfconscious living. But every once in a while, you should stop to reassess where you’ve gone and where you’re going.
When you aren’t sure what your goals are, it’s not necessary to stop what you’re doing. You don’t need to sit around waiting for inspiration. Learn by trial and error what your new goals should be. Just remember to keep yourself constantly open to realizing your new purposes.
Why I am NOT a PUA
August 3, 2007
Hey guys,
I thought I’d take a break and start in on some of the articles I’ve been putting off. One of them references a Sean Newman blog post, but I forgot which one, so I’m searching his blog at the moment.
In the meantime, I stumbled onto a blog entry of his that was written right around the same time I posted my entry on Ethics and the FRs by that guy from that other forum. Again, uncanny. Here it is: http://seanmessenger.com/2007_07_15_archive.html
It’s the first entry, dated July 21.
[EDIT: It’s been brought to my attention that Sean’s changed his blog so this link doesn’t point to the right place anymore. Maybe it will in the future. I’m too lazy and busy to search for the original post right now.)
Sean wanted to ram the guy’s head into a brick wall. I wanted to take a baseball bat to the poster’s head. Pretty close.
Asian Models
August 2, 2007
Hey guys,
In case some of you Asian guys still aren’t into Asian girls b/c you think they resemble your sister, or you have issues forcing you to prove to yourself that you are a real man in Western society by getting a white girl, then check out the following site. http://female.thedailymodel.com
and maybe you’ll change your mind.
And of the Western-based Asian SHBs, here are my two favorites:
Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model Aline Nakashima
Victoria Secret Model Jarah Mariano
This is also good for visualization exercises. No, not that kind of visualization I mean, you should be able to see yourself effortlessly attracting SHBs like this. To do these visualization exercises properly, you need to have specific images in mind, which requires seeing specific individuals that you can picture yourself with. Accompanying affirmations would be that you deserve a girl like that and that you are able to attract and hold a girl like that. Keep saying it to yourself until it’s ingrained in your psyche.
Feedback welcome!
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