The Motivation to Maintain Effort at Pick-up

OK so I’ve been away for a while, partly as I was on holiday in Cyprus for a few days and got a bit of a tan. Man, I LOVE the Mediterranean! One of my major goals in live is to own a house on a beach somewhere on the Mediterranean. Hopefully Spain but I’ll look more into that once I’m closer to being able to afford it!

Anyway in my readings I came across this quote from Tyler that I found useful and have since found that others have too, so I thought I would post it here as a reminder to myself.

"Now the big thing when you start something new is that progress is going to be non-existent at first and will go up in a j-curve if you can make it through the initial pain. Most people quit because starting something is REALLY hard and usually feels directionless for a long time. The guys who make it through that initial part will eventually get to a level where progress is really fast and noticeable, and for them it will become a hobby and fun. But at first it is purely banging your head against the wall to make the most minuscule advancements. Not fun."

The full text that this comes from can be found here. I'm sarging again for the first time in a while tonight, so I will write up a report soon afterwards.

The Bumpy Road of Sarging

So after going out a bunch of times this week nothing much spectacular has happened. And though there have been no great successes there is always a chance of this happening as you can’t expect development of a skill with this number of variables to happen in a straight line. And this was a dip, a quiet week.

And there are some reasons for that, as touched on in my Euro 2008 post. And there are other reasons, like finding the motivation to open when there aren’t that many girls and they’re not that hot, or the situation is awkward or whatever. I think I do need to force myself to open more frequently. And then remember the high energy factor, and to have fun.

But despite that here are a few notes from events that happened on Friday and Saturday.

Friday: Winging in Central London

Although you can never precisely judge these things I find it’s best when you’re sarging with around three people. Larger groups just tend to be too large, and there’s a risk that you’ll end up all standing in the same area, looking around wistfully, looking like a sausage farm. This happened a couple of times on Friday, and we solved it by just splitting into smaller groups. Maybe I need to think about how many people I invite on a night out!

Przemec pointed out two hot girls dancing and kinda forced me into opening with him! As we were in a noisy club, I didn’t think the hair opener would work, so I used the “natural” approach of just going up there and saying the first thing that came into my head. I walked directly up to them and… nothing came to mind! I semi-bailed at the last minute and stood next to them dancing but looking away. One of the girls then started taking photos of the other, and I instantly thought of an opener, “Hey! No paparazzi!” and soon I was into an interview-type conversation with one of the girls.

Turns out they were from Hungary, so we talked a bit about that. While this was going on, two guys came and started dancing with the girls trying to impress them with sexy man-dancing. But I stuck in there with my conversation for as long as I could. After a few minutes I ran out of things to say and bailed. But at least I opened and ignored the distracting guys for a short while at least.

Later I was on the dancefloor and this small but pretty girl gave me some very direct eye contact which I held. And after she broke she looked back at me for a bit more! I left it for a bit and then Jake challenged me to approach, so I did. As I came towards her she held out her hands and placed them on my face. Strangely, looking back on it now, I completely ignored this! God knows why! I must have compartmentalised it in my head, thinking that a natural wouldn’t let something like this affect him, so I didn’t. So I started chatting to her but after a short while she told me she was married. “Don’t tell me about your problems!” I joked, as I’d read that was a so-called boyfriend destroyer somewhere. She laughed at least, but I left it at that.

Later I observed and worked out who her husband was. After checking I was right I mentioned that his wife was very friendly. From where he was standing he would have seen her place her hands on my face, which seems a very friendly thing to do to a stranger when you’re husband’s five feet away. I asked him if he was OK with her behaviour. “I guess I am,” he said. Pussy whipped, anyone?

Saturday: Barbeque at the Kiwi house on our road (and a quick recap of my drug history)

Not much to mention here apart from general socialising. Two events to report. I was chatting with a few average girls and getting them interested and enjoying themselves. There was one 7.5 girl that I chatted with a bit, but saw that she was already on the coke, and I don’t mean the drink.

Now back in the day I used to take coke every weekend and sometime more often, for about a year. It originally made me high energy and allowed me to stay out late. But after a while I became dependent on it. I was going out loads, consuming large amounts of alcohol, other drugs. I would snort a line and a few seconds later I would vomit. It started to simply make me anxious. I was becoming more and more depressed. I became an insomniac. Imagine how you would feel with only one hour’s sleep a night, for about three or four weeks. I was messing up at work.

So I went to the doctor, started taking anti-depressants, and quit the drugs. I also started using Holosync, which helped even more than the anti-depressants. I turned my life back around.

So this party was the first time I had been around a lot of people taking coke and noticing the effects. I immediately felt two pangs. One is the fucked-up drug addict paranoia of “Why haven’t they offered me any drugs? I want some drugs. I want to ask those people for some drugs. But they’re not being friendly towards me. Am I not popular or sociable enough?” A lot of shitty old thinking basically. I got over that after about a second and a half. The other thought was that these people are fucked on coke and aren’t going to be easy to connect with. As when you’re on different drugs, you’re in different head spaces, and when you’re straight it’s questionable as to whether you want to join them. So I didn’t waste my time with this girl, maybe another time I would have experimented with see what it was like, but not tonight.

So I was talking to an average girl when the 7.5 girl walked past and spilled her drink on my arm. She wiped it off and apologised, I thought nothing of it. However when she left the girl I was talking to said that she did that because she fancied me. And I guess that spilling the drink meant that she touched me etc. I have no idea if that was true though, as I couldn’t see her when she spilled the drink. Maybe the average girl was jealous. Whatever, I’m definitely analysing this too much!

Finally towards the end of the party there were a few people sitting around talking, most of them fucked on coke and semi-comatose or wired. There was one hot 8.5 girl who was enjoying the sound of her own voice, and becoming a bit tiresome. I had just agreed to get some rizlas for a mate from my house when this girl said “Anyone want to hear me sing?” Not giving too much of a shit about her attention seeking, I sarcastically said “Yes” as I walked out the door. As I got to the front door of the house, she suddenly appeared behind me, saying “Why did you say Yes if you were leaving?” so I replied “I was only playing with you!” and I playfully touched her chin.

This completely blew her mind and about three seconds later she replied “Yeah I was playing too!” SO I said “Cool” and walked out. Thinking back on this now I should have pinned her to the wall and kissed her, then lead her home and blown her brains with a god-like multi-orgasmic marathon sex session. Funny how you learn things after the event isn’t it?

Anyway after I came back she was still being a nuisance and shortly afterwards I called it a night. As my mate and I were leaving she was still trying to convince to stay and listen to her singing. And it’s only now that I’m bashing my head against my keyboard and realising that she was into me. She was being needy and wanting me to give her attention (which of course turned me off) when I now know that I could have had her riding me until I was sore and spent. All because I don’t like coke. There’s a lesson there.

Please leave a comment!

Was Rudyard Kipling a Pick-Up Artist?

Everyone knows Kipling's famous poem "If..." and while there are perhaps a couple of lines that I disagree with, there are others that are core for both pick-up and life in general. In fact some of them speak along Zen / metaphysical lines.

Lines I like:

“If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,”
So important with regards to self belief and self esteem

“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;”
A core metaphysical idea, though to deny the truth of a reaction is somehow disingenuous, but shouldn’t also be all-consuming. There’s a point in between…

“If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,”
This is what I call “working through the crap period”…

“If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,”
This speaks to me as an ideal of being the guy who gets on with everyone I guess, a social master in a way.

Lines I don’t like:

“And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:”
This sounds a bit like “don’t get ideas above your station” which I don’t agree with, otherwise there’d be no development or progression.

Anyway, the poem’s inspired loads of people, and I’m sure it will continue to. You'll be a man, my son!

Euro 2008 is destroying my game!

So I went out for a couple of nights this week, and I have to say I’m still having trouble finding the good venues to go out in mid-week. The whole of London seems dead! There must be enough people out there somewhere with more money than jobs or something to party away the evenings of mid-week!

Having said that, there could be a major reason why places are pretty dead at this time of year. Euro 2008. It’s keeping guys in the pub and the girls at home. Maybe, maybe not – I don’t know. But for some reason everywhere seems dead in the early evenings…

Having said that (part 2…) it does seem that some venues get busy later, and that the 7.30-10.30 period is the hardest to find sets to open.

Last night we were checking out the Roadhouse again and also The Gardening Club for the first time. Roadhouse wasn’t as busy as last week so we went to Gardening Club. That wasn’t busy either, though I did notice that they had an ultra-eclectic music policy; everything from Soft Cell’s Tainted Love through Radiohead’s Just to that American Boy song.

However after a while there we went back to Roadhouse, and as we left a few girls came in. When we got to Roadhouse is was busier but over the next hour or so it got truly busy. This then is the sweet spot, about 10.30 until midnight if not later. I’m pretty sure Gardening Club would have been busier later as well, and we could have had a good night there. I think I need to adjust my expectations and go out / stay out later.

It was just as well it filled up as until then I was thinking the night was going to be like that other Thursday a few weeks ago where I couldn’t find the will to open, and I was generally having a shit time (see the Out of Routine post). I had been for a hardcore run earlier and worn myself out, so was down on energy a bit. Then the lack of sets and my growing hunger distracted me even more.

However a good burger sorted one of those problems out, and soon the place began to fill up. We hit the dance floor and opened a few sets. As they were warm ups they didn’t go too far, but at least unlike that other Thursday I’d worked through the crap period and my thoughts of quitting early, and opened some sets.

There was a point when I was on the dancefloor when I noticed I was feeling a bit insecure. During a toilet break I realised that this was because I was trying to gain reactions off people and wasn’t truly enjoying myself. As soon as I switched my perspective I started to enjoy myself a lot better and ironically get better reactions off people.

The only other thing to mention of the night was that I’m having grave doubts about Jordan’s dancing ability – it seems to be getting condescending laughs or “who is this freak?” looks from both girls and guys. I’ve challenged him to game without dancing which I think will really make him grow as a PUA. The good thing about that though is that he really doesn’t care and just ignores the negative aspects of other people’s reactions. So when people start interacting with him thinking he’s a freak he doesn’t care and just enjoys himself. And who’s to say he’s wrong? There’s probably an opener in there somewhere that I can use anyway!

Please leave a comment!

Great PUA Blogs from RSD’s Best Instructor

Ever since The Gamewhen Tyler became Neil Strauss’s whipping boy, RSD has had a bit of a bad rep. Despite that it seems now that Tyler has realised his mistakes and is making up for it. In the Blueprint Decoded DVDs he even admits that he was a “maniac” and a “social robot” back in the day.

RSD is now concentrating on “natural game” i.e. where your skills come from a point somewhere inside you – your “core confidence” – and as a result is promoting one of their instructors, Tim, to spread the message.

I’ve always been a bit sceptical about natural game as for me it is essentially routine-based game that has been successfully internalised through good results. Having said that, it is possible to learn routine-based game and not internalise it (which is where Tyler went wrong), so that is something to be aware of.

Either way, to help promote Tim and spread the natural message, RSD have set up two blogs from Tim, a normal one and a video blog.

Having seen them and read the posts it’s clear that Tim is one of the face-value, down to earth type of people that don’t have any insecurities getting in their way (they are “clear” as Jack Canfield would put it) and he has some inspirational things to say.

Whether this means you can ditch the routines and start picking up the hot chicks today I’m yet to find out, but we’ll see.

My objectives for pick-up over the next two months

So Scottish Greg and I have put together our SMART objectives for pick-up, after he was influenced to do it from his review at work. The acronym SMART in SMART objectives stands for:

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Timed

So to go back to my current challenges from my original post:

• Number close more frequently
  
• Find and open hotter girls
  
• Seductive conversation
  
• Kiss close
  
• Flying solo

Here are my SMART objectives, valid until 31 July 2008.

• By the end of June I will have number closed 5 times
  
• By the end of July I will have number closed 15 times, 5 times with girls who are 7 or above
  
• By the end of July I will have been to ten new venues for sarging, and have put together a list of venues for each day of the week that has the hottest girls
  
• By the end of July I will have opened ten girls hotter than a 7.
  
• By the end of June I will have researched and implemented how to turn my conversation seductive, and used it five times.
  
• By the end of July I will have kiss closed ten girls.
  
• By the end of June I will have gone sarging solo twice.
  
• By the end of July I will have gone sarging solo five times.

I’ll be updating you all on how well I meet them on this blog!

Trouble in the Message Centre

So a while ago I bought into a programme run by Simpleology that was called “The Guide to Blogging for Fun and Profit.” I had ignored it as I wasn’t writing a blog just then, but now that I am I thought I would revise it.

Four lessons in and I was waiting for it to tell me something I didn’t know. The fifth lesson however did.

It covered how to write effectively on blogs. Obviously there are no hard and fast rules but some things can help depending on your aims. Anyway for your benefit here is what I learned:
1. Know your audience (this should be easy)
2. Provide value
3. Keep it short and simple (probably haven’t been doing this much!)
4. Make the titles interesting
5. Use keywords
6. Use links
7. Be entertaining
8. Value the comments (go ahead, you know you want to!)
9. Post regularly

For all 17 of you that have regularly been reading this blog, you may have been wondering what was going on with the titles. Well there has been a connecting theme, if anyone can guess what it is I will give them a prize! But from now onwards I’m going to have to revert to a more standard approach if this is going to help anyone.

So there will be a bit of a change in my posts after this one. Keep a look out!

Rise to the Challenge

So now that I’ve been doing this for a few weeks I’ve noticed my challenges have now changed and developed. My initial concern was to open regularly and get that sorted. I believe that has now happened, both with my “hair” opener, but also with the opener challenge that I shared with Jake. Plus Scottish Greg and I developed our new “guy’s plunging v-neck” opener which is a classic though mainly only suitable for use in Shoreditch or other places where people are tragically fashionable.

I’ve also been able to cover off my second challenge, which was to open and then continue further than the opener, i.e. to engage in a conversation with a girl for more than say three minutes.

I was out in the pays touristiques of Leicester Square, Trafalgar Square and Covent Garden today with Andre, and we opened a bunch of sets, mainly tourists but hey, and they all went well. Looks like day / street game is going well. Andre was kind enough to say that I had good conversational skills and made me realise that I have that part down now as well.

And in a funny way I always knew I did. I am now old enough to have had some interesting life experiences and therefore a bunch of things to talk about. Becoming more aware of what these are and then using them in this context is something that has really strengthened over these last few weeks.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that before I go out, I get totally enveloped with the Fear. It’s like a really heavy weight of foreboding and dread that kind of sits over me. Which is really strange as I don’t tend to experience it at all when I’m talking to girls. It’s like my approach anxiety has moved back in time from just before the initial approach to about an hour earlier, and increased in mass! Very strange. But I’ve managed to ignore it and so far it’s never been proved right apart from once, so hopefully it will decrease over time!

I’ve also noticed that sometimes when I’m in the field, my motivation to open decreases. Partly because I know that I can open easily now, and partly because there aren’t that many truly hot girls around, so I don’t have the desire to. This will be less of a problem when I find the better venues to go out to, but it’s something I need to focus on.

So now that I’ve covered my first two challenges, there are a couple more that I need to move on to. After the opener and the initial conversation I need to focus on number closing more frequently. I also need to kiss close on the first meet, which is something I’ve only done a handful of times in the past and not yet done since focussing on this again properly. I also need to try flying solo – going out and sarging on my own. That’s still sounds like a scary idea to me! And one other thing that Andre reminded me of was to make my conversation more seductive after a while, to escalate things further. So with the easiest first, my current challenges are:

• Number close more frequently
  
• Find and open hotter girls
  
• Seductive conversation
  
• Kiss close
  
• Flying solo

And the accompanying affirmations: I frequently and consistently number close. I always successfully open the hottest girls I see. I smoothly and easily make my conversations more and more seductive. I easily kiss girls when I first meet them. I happily go out on my own to meet new women and end up having sex with them. Powerful stuff!

In other news I’m off to Cyprus for a few days next week for some sun! Nice.

Everything You Know Is Wrong

So, a couple of nights of sarging. On Thursday met up with new guy Andre who is the coolest Tamil Sri Lankan I’ve met (out of a total of two!) and definitely has the whole confident body language thing down. He’s also probably the person with the most experience that I’ve met so far, and is keen to teach which is gold and something worthy of admiration. I also meet up with Przemec who is a crazy Polish dude who looks like my ex-MD, and his flatmate Kirk. Trev also joins us. We spend a bit of time walking around the centre of town looking for places to go without much luck, and open a few people on the streets to warm up as we go.

As ever the problem is finding somewhere to go on a Thursday. Eventually we end up at the Roadhouse in Covent Garden which is fairly busy and a good place to hang. We open a few sets and get in the flow. I open a table of four Brazilian girls and end up having a good chat with one of them about the differences between London and Rio de Janeiro. This is great because I’m not just doing the opener and then ejecting.

I feel now that after a couple of warm ups I can open very easily, with pretty much any subject (though my trusty hair opener is one I often rely on). The Brazilians were in the middle of a big conversation but I confidently and commandingly went up to the table and in a loud voice I asked my question. They were immediately focussed on me and didn’t go back to their conversation until I had focussed on the one girl. Even when I left they actually asked me what I was going to do with my hair - they really wanted to know!

So my target after that has been to carry on the conversation, and Thursday was the first time in a while that this has happened really well. Once I had exhausted the cultural differences thread I ejected, about 15 minutes later. Przemec asked me why I left, when it seemed I was doing pretty well. It was a good question and in retrospect I could have easily gone for a number.

After that the band started playing and we joined the crowd and partied along to the band. I hung out with a couple of groups of girls and just had a laugh with them, including one girl who kept on backing her ass into me! I teased her that she couldn’t keep away from me and thought my ass was hot! Good times.

Friday was with Greg who had a great new haircut, Canadian Liam, crazy Jordan looking good in a Justin Timberlake hat, and Peter and Scottish Greg (or Greig) who I hadn’t met before. Jordan was sucked away by his addiction to the dancefloor at On Anon, and despite our best intentions to draw him away he chose his own adventure. We hit up Jrink again which wasn’t as busy as last time but still had a few cool girls in there.

I noticed a short but perky Aussie girl standing next to us that I opened with “Are you here for the birthday party?” as there seems to be a lot of birthday parties at this venue. She wasn’t so we just chatted about random stuff. I asked her which part of Australia she was from, and she said, “How did you know I was Australian?” This was hilarious as she had an Australian accent and had the classic Australian girl’s face where the eyes are a bit too close together (don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, or is it just me? Nicole Kidman has this a bit!) Anyway it turns out she’s been in London for 9 years and thought she had lost her accent, and both her parents are Italian so there’s no reason why she should look Australian. Bizarre!

But she was very open and friendly, and we teased a joked around for a good while. She was originally from Adelaide so I teased her about that (“The most interesting city in Australia!” – gold!) and we had a good time. I was coming close to running out of things to say, so I laid out my Classic Number Close™: “What’s your number?” and she put it in my phone. Ding ding ding! This is the first time I've had a number close since starting to do the game concertedly. So a gold star for me. As 60 says - always go for the number close!

To be honest I’m not sure if she’s worth a day two but I’ll give it a shot for practice anyway. I’ll call her on Sunday and hopefully the number will work. Also later that night I saw her dancing with another guy so who knows! Still worth the practice though I think.

We then went to Zebranos on Frith Street which was as shit as On Anon (in my eyes). Fat Asian girls drinking champagne – no thanks. Apparently it was better last week but these things happen I guess. After a while there everyone except Greig quit, while new guy Ryan arrived, starting off his night at 11.30! We were hawked into a shit bar (Bar Soho on Frith Street) – lesson learned there I fear – and then on to Leicester Square which isn’t my favourite place at the best of times. We ended up at some random bar which was a bit quiter and had a few drinks, and shared our stories of the dirtier end of sexual experience which was a good laugh. Though both the guys had more experience that me which is something that can get me down if I don’t keep my emotions in check, and constantly remind myself that I can only judge myself on my own development, which is doing pretty well all things considered.

After a fair chin wag I was starting to feel hungry and tired and we all called it a night. When I got home I suddenly had a rash urge to write down the following drunken ramblings in my notebook, here in it's unadulterated glory to be taken at face value:

“All my self conceptions are shattering.

“How many times have I been out with new guys and they’ve told me – “You know, I like all these guys but you’re the cool one, “ or “You’re really sociable,” or whatever.

“You [sic] have all this bullshit that’s been built up over the years and time and time again what I once considered to be hard wired parts of my personality or rather life, are actually illusions! It blows my mind. Everything is up for grabs now. I feel like I’m starting to turn a corner.”

Battle

“Do you guys actually like each other?”

It was a question I wanted to know the answer to, as all I’d seen is these two mates rip the shit out of each other for the last half an hour. You see, here was I fresh out of school, meeting new people at university, but I was still to some extent the socially inept, shy, introverted person I’d been for most of my life. And I didn’t understand what was going on. Here were two new friends of mine, who professed to being friends with each other and even shared a room, but all they did was insult each other. And not just insult. Really insult. The kinds of insults that would make anyone that subscribes to the “politically correct” ideas of communication have a heart attack. I mean, no topic was out of bounds. In particular race (one guy was Indian) and nationality (the other was half French, poor thing).

It was a moment of realisation. Teasing had for me been a negative experience. It was a way of putting someone else down and making yourself feel superior in the tribal laws of the school playground. But here they were teasing each other, and although they were putting each other down, that wasn’t the main point. The point was that it was a challenge, a social battle. It was really about seeing how far you had to go to really get a reaction. If they were upset at the first insult, it wouldn’t have gone any further, but because they were aware enough to know that it wasn’t meant heartlessly, it was then fun to see how far they could take it.

They weren’t taking it personally.

So why am I bringing this up now? Well obviously teasing is a key factor in flirting with women, and I’ve started to notice that I’m doing it more and more, and sooner after first meeting people as I get better at flirting. As I was saying to Trev the other day, I’m being generally more “cocky and funny” with people in general nowadays. I was at two barbeques on Saturday (I was “barbecurious” as someone put it). The first one was with the girl I used to sit next to at work, who I always used to banter with. So there was a bit of banter there, and with some of the other guests.

Then I went to the other barbeque, and there were a bunch of Kiwis that were up for some banter as well. They were really good, really pushing the boundaries. But they didn’t know who they were messing with, haha! It’s funny, because the less you care, and the more inventive you are with your responses, the further you can go. What I also find is that you have to gauge the point at which someone will not be able to respond – at which you take it too far for them. It’s important because if you’re not sensitive to this you’ll end up looking like a heartless dick. If you reach this point, a simple “only joking” and a pat on the back usually resolves it.

There was one girl who was very good at this, and she had a cynical, “I’m superior” vibe about her. Well, someone had to deal with that, right? Funny thing was, I didn’t say anything bad, just that she hadn’t had anyone beat her, so when I kept coming back with stuff, she eventually stopped, and became quite shy. I patted her on the back and made sure she was OK.

Another interesting part was that there was one hot girl there, actually my flatmate, who was getting teased by all the guys. We were all winding her up and stuff, and then halfway through she goes “Why are you all picking on me?” in a fake-upset kind of tone (trying to use her good looks to get some sympathy – an unconscious dominance test of sorts). To which I replied “You love it really!” – and she admitted that she did! She was being the centre of attention.

There’s a lesson in that for us all.