I am sitting in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; a nine foot surfboard lies beneath me, bow raised and pointing out to sea as I scan the horizon.
I am alone.
Surfing isn’t about riding waves. It’s about moments like this; being aware, feeling the ocean move beneath you, and waiting for the next big set to roll in from some distant storm in the pacific.
The north shore of Oahu feels like it’s in a different country than Honolulu. From the town of Halewa in the west, a road rolls north along the coast for some sixty miles. On that entire stretch, a single Starbucks is the only reminder that this is still America in the 21st century.
But that’s all behind me. Now, my attention is on predicting the waves, feeling where they will break, and where I need to be to catch them at the right speed, at the right moment. When the right wave comes, I will lean back, spin my board around and paddle towards the break. If I’m too fast, I’ll fall over the lip and be swamped. Too slow and I’ll never catch the wave. If I’m too far forward, the wave will crash over my head, too far back and it will pass underneath me without moving me, an opportunity wasted.
My feet dangle in the water, kicking slowly to keep me upright, and connecting me with the flows and currents of the ocean. I feel a current pulling me along the beach to the left, the force of the waves pulling me first into them, and then back towards the shore. I note this, and adjust my position accordingly.
Beneath me, a volcanic reef is the reason why I have chosen this place. The waves roll for thousands of miles, across the ocean, but their power hidden deep beneath the surface of the water. When they reach this place, angle of the reef redirects their energy, forcing it upward, breaking the surface and causing the waves to curl at this exact point.
I have no power over the ocean. I do not even comprehend the forces that created the waves that I ride, or that created the reef below me. I can only sit and wait for these forces beyond my control to come together here, beneath me.
Surfing dispels your illusions of control over things. You have no control over the oceans, no control over the waves. All you have control over is yourself, and the tiny little board beneath you. With that, and an understanding of the forces that surround you, you can ride the waves, and have them carry you effortlessly. If you ignore the forces that surround you, you will be swept away or pulled under.
Kind of like life, I think.
And so I sit on my board, my feet in the ocean, and scan the horizon as I wait for the next big set to roll in from some distant storm in the pacific.
When I first started getting good with women, and learned how to approach and build attraction, one of the first problems I had was “flaking”. I would have women who seemed to REALLY like me; they would laugh at all my jokes, flirt and touch me, but when I got their number and called them later, all of a sudden the chemistry was gone.
It was like I was trying to sell them a magazine subscription or something.
If you’ve ever gotten a phone number from a woman that has gone cold, you know what I’m talking about – but it doesn’t have to be that way. I spent months and months getting my phone game down, and now I teach what I learnt to my Bootcamp students. But now there’s a shortcut, one of my former students, (now a Lovesystems Instructor) Braddock, has just written a BEHEMOTH 164 page book on phone game. This is the complete, definitive, book on phone game.
Seriously, I think Braddock may have accumulated ALL THE PHONE GAME KNOWLEDGE IN THE UNIVERSE into this book. Right now I’m 20 pages in, and it’s brilliant. This is a complete and comprehensive systems for the entire process between getting the number and the date. If you have EVER had a phone number that died, and you don’t know why, this is definately the book for you, and at 164 pages, you can be sure that your questions will be answered.
Savoy just posted this in his blog, and I thought I would repost it. Apparently Braddock and him are doing a free conference call on phone game.
Hey guys big news:
One week from today - Thursday, January 14th - Love Systems master Braddock and I will be hosting a free conference call and Q&A on Phone and Text Game. 6pm PST.
We’ve leased 500 lines for the event. We did one of these in Decemberand ended up going up to 650 lines and they were all reserved in advance. So if you want to be on the call, reserve your spot (and submit your questions if any) at this link:
Why phone and text game? Partly because it’s an area where we’re making a ton of breakthroughs — people who were on December’s call can attest to that and Braddock and I will share some more of our secrets next Thursday. And partly because it’s still kind of a misunderstood area of game.
A lot of people think of phone game as something that happens a day or two after you meet a girl and involves calling her and asking her on a date.
Good phone game actually begins when you are still talking to the girl. I’m not talking about the right and wrong ways to get a woman’s phone number here – though that’s important too – but about warming up the connection so that it’s natural for you to continue texting and then calling each other after you’ve met. It’s also a great tool for “same night lays” – we’ll talk about this too.
Anyway, I could go on forever but I’ll save it for next Thursday. See you there!
In January, the Toronto wind stings the skin and makes your lips crack. The only thing to do is wrap yourself up in a warm jacket, pull your toque over your ears, and run (slowly, so as not to slip), down the street to your local pub where your fellow pale and frostbitten Canadians are warming themselves with boozy egg nog and whiskey.
The door catches the wind and flies open as I walk in. Cold air blows over the occupants of the bar, who are cheery and stoic despite the misery outside.
I smile secretly inside, knowing I’m going to be in Honolulu* soon, I love my job. I get a little bit drunk with some friends and mention my upcoming trip.
“For work? What do you do?” says a brunette with big green eyes that my buddy has been chatting with all night.
“Chris is a dating coach” my buddy answers. I smile…. I know exactly what she’s going to say next, becauseI always get the same response.
“Do you hire women? I would make a great dating coach”.
It’s cute that they literally say the same thing every time, but it’s also kind of troubling. The fact is, most women give terrible dating advice, and they don’t even realize it.
Why do women give bad dating advice?
Straight women certainly know what they like – but they don’t know where it comes from. They have no perspective on what goes into the things they percieve as smoothness, confidence and style. They only know it when they see it.
One good analogy is: getting dating advice from women is like taking cooking lessons from a restaurant critic.
Restaurant critics understand food, they know what they like, and they may even know a little bit about what went into preparing the food they ate, but in the end, their experience as a critic doesn’t make them qualified to teach you how to grill a steak or make a soufflé.
After all, who would you rather learn cooking from: Jamie Oliver? Or some person who writes for the New York Times and ate at Jamie Oliver’s restaurant a few times and also ate at a lot of crappy restaurants and can explain the difference?
In some ways, a good food critic probably knows more about food than most chefs, and women often have a deep understanding of relationships and dating, but not from a perspective that is useful for the average guy looking to improve his game.
Let’s take this thought experiment further, and compare the advice that women often give, with the kind of advice a food critic would give on cooking.
“Just be confident. But don’t be too confident”
“Don’t over cook the food, but don’t undercook it either”.
“You should cut your hair and wear some xxx designer, women love that”
“Indian food is the best, cook that and you can’t go wrong”.
“I love it when a guy does nice things for me, like buy me flowers”
“The pickles on a hamburger are the best part!”
Now, you’ll notice that none of these statements are untrue. But they’re useless to someone who is looking for help on making a good meal, and quite a few of them are really misleading if taken too seriously.
Now, I don’t mean to say that women can’t teach pickup, or provide good advice to men. In fact, I have a few female friends who I bring out on bootcamps and who are really helpful with guys. But maybe 1 in 10 women I’ve met have the intuition and awareness to give good, useful advice in field, and only after they’ve read a fair bit of game – giving them an idea of what goes on in “the kitchen”. Simply being a woman does not by itself give one any special insight into dating – if anything, it makes it harder to get the required experience that men need.
So what should you take from this? Treat all advice from your female friends with a grain of salt. When a woman is giving you advice from the female perspective, when she’s telling you how a woman reads or experiences a particular situation, you can often rely on that information. But when her advice starts getting “in the kitchen”, you need to recognize that she probably knows less about what she’s talking about than you do.
Anyway, if you came here looking for some dating advice you can really use, I suggest you check out my post on how to pick up women for beginners.
* If you’re interested in coming to the Honolulu program, go to www.lovesystems.com – there are two seats left as I write this.
Well, this came as quite a surprise, but the Economist just published an article mentioning Lovesystems, entitled “Dating in the Downturn“. All in all, it takes a pretty businesslike approach to the topic, comparing Lovesystems to eHarmony and Match.com, but noting:
…online giants are missing a trick that the underground pick-up industry learned long ago. “You can meet the best people in the world and still screw it up because you don’t know how to date,” he says. “People need help, guidance, style counselling…feedback when a date goes wrong.”
Some are moving in this direction, though as yet they offer nothing like Love Systems’ face-to-face tuition.
All in all, it’s nice to see that even the Economist is paying attention to the stuff that Lovesystems is doing, and helping to bring awareness of the dating industry to the masses. Love and affection are the only human needs that capitalism hasn’t really figured out how to provide efficiently (and/or legally) – and Lovesystems is the leading company trying to address those needs. And despite the downturn, people are signing up for our seminars more than ever before.
Mostly, I think this is because people’s priorities change in a downturn. A recession forces a lot of people to think hard about what really makes them happy, what they really want. Big screen TV’s, fancy cars and fancy condos are out. Dinner parties, trips to the park and playing sports with your friends are in. People realize that strong relationships with people you care about come free, and make you happier than all the material goods you can accumulate. Love, dating and relationships suddenly become a priority, and Lovesystems are one of the few companies that can really help men with this.
The other reason is credibility. Pretty much every guy wishes he had better game. As they say, you can never be too rich, to healthy or too attractive, and we really do teach guys how to be more attractive. The main barrier most men have to signing up for out programs is simply believing that our system works – once they realize it works, they want to sign up for a program.
And as time goes by, the evidence that Lovesystems really works as advertised keeps growing. Whether it’s Cajun’s success on Keys to the VIP, or all the Lovesystems reviews that have been piling up over the years, or the fact that we offer a money-back guarantee that very rarely gets taken advantage of, our credibility is growing every day. And that, I think, is why men keep choosing to sign up for our bootcamps every week.
It’s a good business to be in…. and it’s nice to see that the Economist is taking note.
Future and I did a free talk in Atlanta this weekend, and we asked the guys at the Atlanta lair what they wanted to hear about. Pretty much everyone in the room answered: talk about opening mixed groups.
And I understand why. Going out in Atlanta, it seems like the majority of good looking women are hanging around with guys. Sometimes it’s a boyfriend, but more likely it’s not. If you want to pick up in the South, or in small towns or in college towns, mixed sets are going to be your bread and butter.
One of the best things about mixed sets is that the girls in these groups rarely get talked to all night because most guys in the bar are to scared to open them. These are some of the best sets in the room if you know how to handle it. Anyway, Braddock comes from some hicky Southern town, and that makes him pretty much an expert on this subject. He just wrote a post about it, so I’ll defer to him here.
In other news, this weekend was amazing. Atlanta girls are a bit uptight, (and they’re often in mixed sets) but they’re classy. Future picked up the only Asian girl I have ever seen in Buckhead. I spent as much time as I could this weekend with a beautiful sweet Emory grad student who speaks French with an adorable Southern accent. We changed the way our students think of sex, relationships, and possibility. We gorged on BBQ pork. I explained (and defended) the Canadian heathcare system a dozen times. Now I am exhausted and I return to Vancouver to rest. I will be back.
If you’re going out regularly, you should by now have started to uncover some of your sticking points – places where you’re not quite sure of where you’re going wrong, or issues you’re finding it a challenge to address.
This is actually a GREAT thing! It means you’re learning! But obviously, you also want to overcome these. Here’s an absolutely fantastic exercise for identifying and overcoming sticking points .
Take a blank piece of paper. At the top, write “I see this beautiful girl in a bar”. At the bottom, write “We start having sex”.
Then: in as much detail as possible, fill in the gaps. What did you say to open her? How did you transition? What do you do and say to get her emotional, show high value, and escalate? How do you isolate her? How do you bounce her back to your place? Deal with LMR?
Almost certainly, you’ll get to a point where you’re not entirely sure what to write. Congratulations! You’ve found your current sticking point.
So: what COULD you do in this situation? Start to brain-storm some ideas. Search Tenmagnet’s blog. Search The Attraction Forums. Check Magic Bullets. IF you’re a member, consider posting a question to The Lovesystems Lounge about this.
You don’t need to work out the best thing to say – you’re not looking for lines to memorize, and you’re not looking for some kind of magical routine – it’ll never go down the way you’ve planned it anyway. You’re looking for an understanding of a plausible next step. Don’t accept answers like “Then you be an alpha male and she fucks you” – not good enough. Ask for specific sample dialogue. Don’t try and replicate those, don’t try and parrot that off, but use them to get an understanding of what and why happens next.
I first used this exercise to address issues I was having extracting girls from clubs, and getting them back to my place. I got to “We’re making out in the club” and I really wasn’t sure what to do next.
I asked a bunch of guys for advice – and a natural friend of mine told me “Last time, I told the girl I’d make her a cocktail back at mine”. Not being the smartest tool in the box, I used this as the excuse I’d always needed to spend a great deal of money on cocktail-making equipment!
First time I found myself in this situation again, I said to the girl “So, you want to come back to mine for a cocktail?”. She said “No!” Oooops. But I asked for more advice, got some specific suggestions on making the bounce home easier, and soon got it sorted – and started having a lot of one-night stands on the basis of it.
The point here is: you’ll be very lucky if you get it right first time – but a plausible idea of how to go about it is absolutely crucial.
Here’s a recap of the key points of this exercise:
Write a personal, detailed, and fictional descriptions of how you went from seeing a girl to closing her to help you get the process straight in your head, and identify your weak points
Ask for advice any time you find yourself having trouble writing plausible dialogue or action sequences
The point isn’t to prescript the interaction, the point is to identify your sticking points in getting from A to B – it won’t ever go down the way you planned anyway
There’s an excellent section in Magic Bullets about getting girls home – if you don’t own it yet, it’s a great resource. I’m also a big fan of the interview Braddock, Rokker and Mr M did on just this – you can grab the over coming sticking points interview here.
Here’s the most important part: do this exercise NOW. It’s super useful, but you can only get over your sticking points if you do it properly!
At the Lovesystems office, we have a little wall where we put all of the weirdest mail that we’ve gotten. A lot of these messages are people flaming us, or crazy fans. We even have a few unsolicited emails from women who want Lovesystems instructors to come to their cities and pick them up.
But the funniest one by far is one sent to us back when we were The Mystery Method. Some guy had tattooed a drawing of Mystery riding a tricycle on his forearm. He was wearing a magicians hat and big goggles, and was tooting a horn on the tricycle that had the words “Neg! Neg!” coming out of it.
I almost spat my coffee all over the wall when I saw it.
Anyway, I really like Dan Savage’s column, and it turns out he gets a lot of weird mail too. This story is hilarious.
Just added two more seats to Honolulu! It should be showing on the website on Monday. Give yourself the gift of game in Hawaii!07:58:13 PM January 02, 2010from TweetDeck
