Outcome-Independence and How to Have Fun!
May 24, 2008
In response to helpful comments and a couple of emails on my article on why I hate the word, ’sarging,’ I wish to clarify something. I am criticizing the word ’sarging,’ but not the act itself of purposely flirting with women you don’t yet know.
Yes, you need discipline to get really good at anything. If you’ve listened to my interview with Christian Hudson (www.thesocialman.com/asianrakeintv.mp3), you know that I apply a LOT of discipline and perseverance to getting good with women, especially in connection with visualizations and affirmations, as well as with going out on a consistent basis.
Until you’ve developed the habit of going out on weekends on a regular basis, you will always need that initial push to leave the comfort of your home and go to a place that is conducive to meeting hot women. But this push will only be necessary until you’ve developed the habit, which for me, was about 3-4 months of consistently going out for at least two nights a week. For daytime, decide how much you want and can devote to this and work this into your weekly schedule.
I still clearly remember having Christian remind me over the phone when I was first starting out, “Dude, it’s Friday night. Get out there!” Not too long thereafter, this changed to, “Dude, it’s Thursday night. Get out there!” I no longer needed the push to go out on Fridays and Saturdays. I had already scheduled it into my weekly routine.
In my first couple of months, I even had to do community service for running a red light (I pleaded for community service rather than paying a fine, the cheap grad student that I was) for 4 hours every Friday and Saturday until midnight. I was pretty exhausted on those nights. But guess what? I stuck with my routine and still put in at least an hour, and sometimes two, every one of those nights. And I have the Field Reports to prove it! I even wrote pages of analysis after having spent just one hour in the field… and then I often emailed them to Christian for feedback, LOL. It would have been easy to just use the community service work as an excuse for not going out, but I didn’t. And that took determination. But once it became a habit, I actually really missed going out.
(Sidenote: The next major reason guys aren’t progressing as fast as they could, besides having the wrong mental focus in-field, is that they aren’t reflecting and learning enough from every single interaction. I made interaction-by-interaction adjustments to my style. Just one hour in the field usually produced at least three interactions full of lessons.)
It’s a lot like going out to the gym and doing regular workouts. When you first start out, it takes discipline to hit the weights. You have to push yourself to go. But once you work it into your schedule and start seeing progress, you begin to look forward to your workout. I hit the gym three times a week and have a pretty rigorous workout with a trainer. I often travel for weeks at a time, so it interrupts my progress, but whenever I miss a workout, even on vacation, I feel it in my muscles. I can feel myself getting flabby and slow. I can feel my muscles atrophying. And I can’t wait to get back to the gym. Actually, a major factor in my hotel choices these days, right after price and location, is the quality of the fitness center.
Well then, Asian Rake, it sounds like you do think we need a “clocking in” mentality when we’re first starting out, even though later on, it becomes a habit that we look forward to.
Here’s my answer: This “clocking in” mentality is fine for getting yourself TO the venue. But once you’re there, drop that right away. You should not be thinking of this as “work” while you’re IN the venue.
When you’re IN the venue, you should be having fun.
If you are thinking, “Oh fuck, I’ve been standing around talking to my friends for an hour now and haven’t done a single approach yet. I better get out there and get to work. I better clock in and make a dent on my thousand approaches. Okay, let’s see… (scanning the room) where are the targets? …,” then you have already tainted your approach. You’re already fighting an uphill battle. If you carry this mentality into an interaction, you WILL be sucking value rather than giving it.
The fatal mistake here was that you weren’t having fun in the first place.
What to do instead?
As my good friend Sebastian likes to drill into people:
1. Have fun!
2. Make other people have fun.
3. Then see if that hot girl really meets your standards.
4. And remember to manage the logistics.
That’s really all that should be going on when you’re in-field.
Notice that this post is only about the first step: Have fun!
See my other posts, like Believability, How to Project a Sexual Vibe, and other posts in my Top Posts widget in the sidebar for more on the other steps.
So the question is, how do you have fun in a club?
I will tell you a secret to getting on the “first-class seat in the express flight” to elite game:
If you do not yet enjoy clubbing, then it will be very hard for you to meet and attract women in a club.
If you do not yet enjoy shopping malls, then it will be very hard to for you to meet and attract women in a shopping mall.
If you do not yet enjoy cafes and bookstores, then it will be very hard for you to meet and attract women in cafes and bookstores.
If you do not yet enjoy bars, then it will be very hard for you to meet and attract women in bars.
So, what lesson can we derive from this?
Learn to enjoy the environment of the venue for it’s own sake, not just as a place to meet women. Otherwise, you will very likely not be having fun, and hence, you will not be projecting a good vibe, and hence, all your sub-communications will be off, and hence, you will be severely tainting every interaction you start there.
One of the first things I learned from Christian Hudson was how to have fun in bars and clubs. I naturally enjoy bars so that was easier. But how to have fun in very loud clubs with music that I didn’t (and still don’t) particularly care for and with nowhere to sit unless you’ve purchased a table with very expensive bottle service? Well, that took a little longer to figure out. But once I did, my game in clubs skyrocketed.
People have different ways of having fun in clubs, bars, cafes, bookstores, shopping malls, heck, even supermarkets. So I’m not going to tell you how to have fun. That’s something you have to figure out for yourself. Plus, you can read more detail on this in an earlier post on Being Unselfconscious. I can, though, tell you how I have fun in the bar and club environment, since that’s the one that is most foreign to most guys starting out.
To be truly outcome-independent in a bar or club, you must be completely content with yourself and enjoying your time without having to chat up a single cute girl.
Whoa! What are you saying, Asian Rake? Are you saying that I should go to a club and not talk to a single girl? Not do a single approach??? How the hell am I going to amass my thousand approaches like this?
If you are not yet able to have fun in a bar or club all by yourself and not purposely “cold approaching” a single “set,” then … YES. The first order of business for you is to learn to enjoy yourself in the venue for its own sake.
A big turning point for me was learning how to sit at a bar by myself, not talking to a single “set,” simply soaking in the ambience, savoring my martini, and chilling out. Sure, I talked to people. I talked to the bartender. I talked to the nice couple next to me. I talked to the older women on the other side who were enjoying a night out of wine tasting. But I never considered any of these interactions to be “sets.”
Then, I learned to have fun on my own in a loud dance club. I learned that I can stand at the bar with a drink, soaking in the ambience with a smile on my face, staring into space, letting myself fall into trance with the beats … all by myself. Sure, I talked to people, very briefly of course, as it was a loud club. I talked to the bartender. I clinked glasses with the group next to me. When the alpha male there saw I was alone, he invited me into their group and poured me a drink. Then a group of three girls started eyeing me, I walked over and clinked glasses with them. Then, one of them started asking me the buying questions (where are you from, etc.). There were nights when I sat at the bar of a big club all by myself, just chilling, and three separate women practically propositioned me for sex (and they weren’t pay-for-play, which is a major issue in Asia; I made sure to suss that out). I haven’t bothered to write reports on these because other than having a long backlog of LRs to write, with these in particular, nothing of any consequence can be conveyed in words. It was all the vibe, conveying passive value, good body language, and managing logistics.
Last night, I sat at the bar of a huge dance club all by myself. I was just sitting there, enjoying the ambience and staring into space. It was 4am. A guy sat next to me, chatting to a girl on the other side of him. She was wearing a tight dress that showed off her long legs. She had silky long black hair that framed a perfect doll-like face. She looked over at me. We locked eyes. She was talking to the guy while looking at me. The guy had his back to me and kept talking to her. He looked like a wuss. I walked over to her other side and planted myself at the bar. I said, “Hey,” and smiled. Turns out the wuss was her boyfriend but they’d only been going out for a month. He looked scared and came over, trying to AMOG. Pathetic attempt. I kinda felt sorry for him. This girl was way out of his league. She asked for my number. And then they left. On my way home at 5 in the morning, the sun was rising in Beijing. And she phoned me…
You see, all this started because I was having fun all by myself. My energy was all coming from within. I didn’t need anybody to make me happy. I was perfectly happy just chilling out with my drink. I wasn’t seeking anything. I was just … being. This is what it means to have a vibe that offers value. You are the party.
My fun these days when I go out is not dependent on any girl’s reaction. It’s dependent on me and me alone. I remind myself, “If I don’t meet a single hot girl tonight, I’m still going to have fun because my purpose tonight is not to meet girls; it’s to have fun!”
Go out there and have fun tonight!
Happy playin’, The Asian Rake.
Why I hate the word, ‘Sarging,’ and How “The Game” F-cked Us Up
May 22, 2008
I had the pleasure of hanging out with Natural-MD and Wing-S this weekend. I haven’t hung with them in a while because they live on the other side of town and have been busy with relatives and other visitors on the weekends. And now Natural-MD actually has a real girlfriend, you know, the ‘exclusive’ kind.
We had some drinks, played pool, and flirted with a few girls as we went about having fun. I was reminded of the pure pleasure of going out and spending time with guys just for the sake of it… And how it got me my first six out of seven girls when I returned to Beijing last September.
Natural-MD pulled out his usual arsenal of gay jokes, telling me repeatedly that my ass is too loose from the last time he and his friends pulverized it and reminding me that he was built like a horse while mine was well, too small for much good. LOL.
A lesser man might be offended. But this was all about getting out of your fucking head and stopping that voice in your mind that questions and challenges everything and that ego that always wants the “truth.”
This is real AMOGing. Haha. Only real men can take it.
God, how many burly British rubgy jocks and oversized American footballers have I taken out and completely eliminated through the gay jokes I learned from Natural-MD! I also heard Stephane talk about this on his David D interview. I should give this tech a name: Gay-AMOGing! LOL. Awesome.
The thing with Natural-MD and most other naturals is that a lot of them can’t take their own shit thrown back at them. So I dialed it down because I wanted Natural-MD in the right mood. I wanted him bull-shitting and ‘in the zone.’ He’s unstoppable when he hits that sweet spot. No, not that spot. lol.
We’re just shooting the shit. We’re loud, dominant, out of our heads, fucking with each other (lol), and most importantly HAVING FUN.
Is this ’sarging’? I don’t know. But it gets me a whole lot more hot women than going out with guys who are ’sarging.’
I can often pick out these ’sargers’ before I even meet them. Their eyes dart too and fro, looking for their next target. They look restless, as if they feel like they should be doing something more productive than having fun. They want to “get to work.” They suck energy from the room. You get the feeling when they talk to you that they want something from you, desperately. They take value from you, even when they’re smiling. You get the feeling they’re using you for something rather than just enjoying the moment. Of course, the more they do this, the worse it gets. They go spiraling down. I try not to get caught in their backwash.
The true masters, like Sebastian Drake, Tyler Durden (Owen), and many other community gurus have been preaching this for years, yet it’s as quickly forgotten by most community guys as that last drunk girl’s name.
The first and foremost thing you should do when you’re “out to meet girls” is: HAVE FUN. Read my post on Being Unselfconscious for more on this.
Many ‘community’ guys and lair members contact and try to meet up with me to go ’sarging,’ as they call it in their emails and phone calls. I have nothing against them personally. I’m an active, contributing member of the local lairs, and I fully support helping guys grow in their quest to become better with women.
However, an immediate red flag and complete turn-off is when guys try to gain rapport with me by using PUA terms like ‘negs,’ AA (approach anxiety, not alcoholics anonymous, though the second kind of AA might help you with the first, lol), A2, DHV, and worst of all, ’sarging.’ I heard this was first used by Ross Jeffries in connection with his cat or something similarly creepy
[EDIT: Notice that I am criticizing the word or term, 'sarging.' I'm not criticizing the actual activity of meeting and attracting women, which some guys annoyingly refer to by this creepy RJ term, 'sarging.' See my next post for more clarification.]
When you call the activity of going out to meet girls ’sarging,’ you set it apart from what you do in the rest of your life. Rather than thinking about meeting and attracting girls as just a part of their everyday lives and an expression of their natural and ideal personalities, they instead isolate it to some clearly demarcated and now anxiety-ridden time and place.
Stop acting as if chatting up that cute girl in the bar is something special or out of the norm. You’re just being social!
Realize that you are a MAN who goes after what he wants. If you are a man like that, then you will naturally approach that breathtakingly beautiful girl across the room and tell her that you saw her standing there and that you just had to meet her, and then you stand back and wait to see if she meets the rest of your standards.
A lot of what was taught in the earlier days of the community, the period featured by Neil Strauss in his The Game, was created to protect fragile egos. And instead of fixing the ego problem, guys try to go Neil’s route, which was the much more difficult and arduous one, and they get on the four-year gravy train through hell and back.
They do it the hard way, rather than take the first-class seat on the express flight. Wayne Elise (aka., Juggler) hints at this at the end of his chapter when he writes, “I wanted to tell him that the answer he was seeking lay elsewhere.”
Stop trying to protect your ego. Grow up. Don’t hide behind the term, ’sarging,’ or pretend it’s just an arcade game.
Instead, go out and HAVE FUN. And while you’ve got that big, crazy smile on your face from laughing at the hysterically funny thing your friend just said, turn to that cute girl next to you and say, “How’s your girl’s night out going?”
Now don’t get me wrong. Neil’s book is a phenomenal read. I was entirely riveted by it. It inspired me to improve myself in that area of my life. I learned a lot about the personalities of Tom Cruise, himself, Mystery, Ross Jeffries, Tyler Durden (for better or for worse), and many other heroes in the community at the time. And I absolutely love Neil’s sense of fashion and ’style.’ I think he is as good of a pickup artist as his admirers think he is. But there are a few aspects of the book that had a really deleterious effect on the next generation in the community.
One of these is that The Game glorifies going out to meet women apart from having fun with friends. It’s like he and Mystery are ‘clocking in’ each time they enter a club. It’s like work for them. They don’t make it sound fun at all. They go out, armed with their weapons and club kit, ready to do war. He makes it sound like some kind of milestone when he ditches his normal friends in order to clock in time at the club. Granted, I’ve written myself about avoiding people who are negative influences in your life.
But finding positive influences and true friends who are happy to contribute to your self-development and to meeting your goals is something you should be doing regardless of whether you want to get better with women. That’s the right message.
The wrong message is that going out to meet women, or worse, ’sarging,’ is something special that you are doing.
Not ’sarging.’ No, not ’sarging.’ Don’t ever use that word around me.
As my good friend Sebastian likes to drill into people:
1. Have fun!
2. Make other people have fun.
3. And then see if that hot girl really meets your standards.
Happy playin’, The Asian Rake.
3 Minutes of Noise: A Country in Mourning
May 20, 2008
Been out of touch for a while, as you can see. My Macbook crashed a few days ago, and it has spent a few lonely days in the Apple tech shop. I was computer-less, but luckily, the techie helped me retrieve my hard-drive, most of which I backed up to an external drive.
Far bigger news are the earthquakes in China, the aftershocks of which still threaten China’s interior.
Yes, I felt it too, even way out here in Beijing, a good three-hour flight from Wenchuan, Sichuan. Thanks, btw, to those of you who wrote in to ask 
I had just finished lunch with my girl in my apartment. We were in a high-rise condo building. I was sitting on my couch and then the room started to shake. I said, “Whoa, I think I ate too much. I’m really dizzy.”
My girl said, “Uh, no. It’s an earthquake. I feel it too.”
We looked up and noticed that the chandelier was swinging back and forth. We evacuated the building with all the other office people and residents. And we stood outside for about a half hour before heading back in. I got texts saying there would be more serious tremors later in the evening, but fortunately, they proved false.
I heard people talking about a huge earthquake in Sichuan that afternoon. But I was busy with my thesis and my other work.
And there is always bad news going on. Like what struck Myanmar just before this. There are always people dying from some tragic accident or natural disaster somewhere in the world. Cold and callous, I know. But I’m just being honest.
And then the photos and news reports started pouring in. I don’t usually watch TV, especially in China. But you couldn’t escape the coverage here. It’s everywhere.
It’s strange and surreal, watching small groups of models crying over their laptops while viewing very graphic photos of the earthquake victims. These are the kind of photos that you can’t find using search engines in English. There are pages and pages of photos, including shots of dozens of school-children lying face down in sewer water, of bloodied arms and mangled legs protruding from broken slabs of concrete and metal, of dead infants lying in the lifeless arms of nurses and doctors who couldn’t be saved in time from their collapsing hospital building. These generate tons of sympathy … and charity. At least it did from me.
My home bar here in Beijing hosted an open bar on Sunday night asking only for donations to the Red Cross at the door. That’s right. Free drinks all night long. And they didn’t skimp on the drink menu. Everything but bottles was available. It made me proud to call them my home bar despite their lackluster crowd the past few weekends.
That was Sunday. It still seemed so far removed from my reality. The way fucking models seemed out of my reality just a couple of years ago. I didn’t even give it a second thought. Donate? Sure, if I’ll get some free booze in return.
And then there was yesterday at 2:28 pm. It was exactly one week from the earthquake. Apparently, there was to be a country-wide 3 minutes of silence. I didn’t know. I was living in my protected bubble of comfy, semi-luxurious expat life. I was taking the elevator up to my apartment at around 2:20pm that day and noticed lots of people taking the elevators down and rushing outside. I saw a sign taped next to the elevator door announcing the 3 minutes of silence.
I’ve observed minutes of silence before, many times in fact, in Canada and the US. Those were always real times of silence. Everybody stands up, bows their heads, and is eerily quiet.
I thought it would be like that. I figured I might as well stay in my apartment and be silent alone.
And then 2:28 hit. You couldn’t miss it.
The city’s outdoor sirens went off. I didn’t even know there were sirens. I was way up in a high floor apartment with my windows closed and facing a quiet courtyard below. And all I could hear were the sirens and the noise.
It seemed like every single car on the road (and mind you, this is Beijing, so that’s a fucking lot of cars) was honking its horns non-stop. It wasn’t beep, beep, beep. It was one long blast for three full minutes.
I looked out the window and saw that every car in my downtown intersection had stopped. And every person had stopped moving. They were just standing still. Many were gathered in circles. Some were hugging. Some were holding hands. All heads were bowed.
It felt like a twilight zone.
It was three full minutes of sheer noise. One long, wailing, horrific, sorrowful sheet of sound.
Such was much more fitting for the kind of disaster that hit. Better than pure silence. Three minutes of terror. Just three minutes for us.
Estimates are nearing 70,000 victims and rising.
Life is more than than the petty world of fuck-closes, kiss-closes, rapid escalations, one-night stands, same-night lays, lay reports and field reports, and Asian guys getting white girls. Come out from the dark side of pickup. Stop using people for your own ego-validation. I’ve been just as guilty of this as anyone, so I’m equally talking to myself.
Death may require your life today. Carpe diem that shit.
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