Love and Pick-up: Do they go together?
July 29, 2007
Why is it that I increasingly find my own thoughts repeated more eloquently in Sean Newman’s blog? http://seanmessenger.com/2007/07/pickup-teaches-you-to-fear-love.html
Happy Sunday, guys!
Now what?
July 26, 2007
Holy frick! This is probably the best post I’ve ever read on a PUA blog. Worth repeated reads:
http://realsocialdynamics.blogspot.com/2007/07/upcoming-article-ii.html
Being Unselfconscious: "To find something, stop looking for it"
July 21, 2007
One of our guys just posted an FR+++ of a virgin 17 yo. in Boston. This was after several weeks of going out regularly but not being able to close it out all the way. I gave him a little advice that I think paid off for him. And that got me thinking a bit deeper about that particular sticking point.
An apparent paradox lies at the heart of current pickup methods. On the one hand, we’re told to persist; try harder; dig three feet farther and you’ll hit gold (Hill); do 1000 more approaches. On the other hand, we’re told NOT to try so hard; come from a frame of abundance; we do not need her. If you put these together, you’d get “try really hard not to try.” This is not an unsolvable paradox, however. It’s a riddle, but there’s a trick to it. And the Buddhists and Daoists discovered it long before we did.
Often, people in the community deal with this by teaching, “Be process-oriented.” Focus on the process, not the goal. This is a good point. A great example of this might be what theApproach teaches. We’re told to focus not on the mechanics of VAC (or if you’re doing MM, the ACS1-3 structure), but on the process of “charging the venue”: having fun, being social, making connections, and screening people. That’s because this is the process that will lead to the goal of getting the girl.
But VAC is itself a process. Constantly monitoring your levels of value, attainability, and compliance is also an activity with a process. Clearly, it would mess you up if you were doing this.
Similarly, wouldn’t you also mess things up if you were constantly monitoring yourself in the process of charging the venue? You’d be continually asking yourself, “Am I having fun now? Am I being social?” etc., and of course, that would tank your game. When you are having fun, you cannot be self-conscious about having fun, or you would not really be having fun. When you are having fun, you are not thinking, “Am I having fun now? Why, yes, I am.” When you’re having fun, you are … having fun! Thinking about whether you’re having fun is not itself fun. So if you’re indeed having fun, you cannot be thinking about whether you’re having fun. Wow, that was fun to write.
This is all to say that what is important is not whether you’re process oriented, but whether you’re SELF-CONSCIOUS. The key is not to focus on having fun, but to be UNSELFCONSCIOUS while having fun. Lose yourself in the process, but don’t focus on the process itself. The key is to LOSE YOURSELF in it.
The problem is: How do you become unselfconscious?
Here’s the answer: Focus on something else.
Figure out what you do when you have fun, and focus on that instead, then before you know it, you’ll be having fun. For example, if you like to play pool in bars, play pool. And focus on playing pool, not on “having fun.” Before you know it, you’ll be having fun without even being conscious of it (as in, you shouldn’t be stopping and asking yourself, “Okay, am I having fun playing pool now?”)
Admittedly, this is easier said than done. But Sebastian did something like this for us when I trained with him in Boston. When we got into the venue, the first thing we did was get comfortable and relax, taking the focus off of the process and the goal, and onto whatever fun thing it was we were doing, which in our case, was just having a good conversation. From there, the energy flowed into talking to new people around us.
Okay, those are small examples. Here’s a biggy. Sometimes, you hit a wall in pickup. You’ve been going out for weeks and weeks, and you’ve gotten lots of day 2s, but it always falls apart in the end. You tell yourself to keep trying. This is good. After all, not only does Napoleon Hill say to persist b/c you could be three feet from gold, but he also says that once the money comes in, it’ll come in like a flood, and you’ll wonder where all the money has been this whole time.
But what is the thing in which you persist? It’s going to have to be something other than the goal and other than the process itself. In the case of pickup, what most guys really need to spend most of their time on is in improving their lives, making themselves more well-rounded, more socialized, more accomplished, more passionate, doing the kind of things they’ve always wanted to do but have been putting off all this time. And then, next thing you know, even before the guy has achieved all of those things, and maybe just when he’s changed his mindset to focusing on these other things instead, he finds the girl of his dreams, and she falls for him.
In this way, the “natural” seducer is unselfconscious (at least the vast majority of the time). He’s just being himself, living his life the way he wants to, and has goals that are more important to him than getting that hot girl. I’m not writing this to boast b/c I sure haven’t completely reached this point myself, but I’m getting there, and I have a good idea now of where it will lead.
Some of you guys are there already (or pretty damn close), so you can correct me if I’m wrong. Please do, actually 
Exactly 3 days before Adventure posted his LR, he also posted an entry about “feeling good doing your own thing” in which he described how good it felt to take on the attitude of being non-needy, which really means that you are happy with yourself even if you never find a girlfriend again. With a little tweaking (like remembering that you still want to put your personality out there) of that mindset, he managed to get a girl just by being his non-needy self: “I did not do anything much other than the usual be confident, ballsy, kino (just as much as she kinoed me), and tease her every so often.” Adventure, I don’t know if you’re aware of this yet, but I really do think that your inner game has advanced, and it’s correcting your subcommunications. From your perspective, you weren’t doing anything different, and from an outer game point of view, maybe you weren’t, but your adjustments in your inner game from your desperate self to your non-needy self would affect your sub-communications so that even if you were to say or do the same things, you’d come across differently in a subtle but crucial way.
You can see this principle of being unselfconscious in Dolly’s highly entertaining and PUA-friendly blog on which the likes of Asian Playboy and Daniel Rose have left extensive comments. Read her “Discovery” post from June 20 in which she finally finds a guy who treats her right and makes her truly happy:
“As much as I have resisted and fought and raged against the idea, it all comes back to that Buddhist koan: to find something stop looking for it.
I stopped looking, put blinders on even, and one night I glanced up and found the man of my dreams sitting next to me.”
The Zen Buddhists talk about it in terms of finding wisdom. The Daoists talk about it in terms of finding happiness. The Confucians talk about it in terms of finding the Way. But it applies just as well to love, sex, and romance.
However, there is a danger to being completely unselfconscious. I hope to post on this in the coming days.
[Edit: Here it is. Know What You Want.]
Wow, that’s a long post. Now, back to work.
Your thoughts?
On being a lover who is "Ethical"
July 17, 2007
I call myself an “ethical” lover for important reasons.
1) Practical: If my employer were ever to discover my blog and match it to my identity, I’d want them to know that I wasn’t doing anything illegal or sleazy or immoral. In fact, if anything, I am doing all this seduction stuff for the very reason that I love women and want what’s best for them. It just so happens that *I* am what’s best for them 
So in a way, this is to help me cover my employed ass.
2) I really am uncomfortable with guys who try to use PUA techniques to take advantage of women. Maybe it’s my religious upbringing or maybe it’s b/c I have sisters, but I hate guys who exploit women. In my personal coaching, I ask potential clients to write me a short note about their background and what they hope to get out of their coaching, and I require this before I consent to take them on as clients. Hopefully, this will never be my main source of income, so that I can be flexible like this. I noticed Brad P. has a disclaimer on his website saying that he will not coach men with a history of abusing women or some such, and then he provides links to various therapy sites. Respect.
3) The kind of “game” that appeals to me and that I wish to practice is one driven by my moral conscience. This kind of conscience has been in place since the community had its beginnings with Ross Jeffries, who coined the phrase, “Leave her better than you found her.” I believe Style in his book tried to follow this. Juggler has also said that he only teaches methods that he would be comfortable seeing used on his mom or sister. I, too, want only to do things that are best for my women. This has not always been the case, and I am still dealing with the repercussions of this with one special girl in particular.
Lately, there has been another guy, Kimjongill, on this other forum who has flipped some “unethical” switches in me. If you’re not on this forum, all you need to know is that he often says negative things about people in general and has posted clandestine photos of half-naked targets in his “empty bragging” FRs.
Would I want to see half-naked photos of my sisters posted w/o their consent (and in one case, probably taken w/o their knowledge) for the guy who picked her up that day to show off to his friends? Hell, no! In fact, I would have a mind to take a baseball bat to that guy’s head. Okay, too much aggression, there.
I would, however, be very comfortable knowing that one of you had swept her off her feet that day, shown her a marvelous time, and then made her night in bed (okay, actually, that last part I don’t want to think about). And I would furthermore like to know that that guy who swept her off her feet had the class to keep the naughty details to himself, or if he does tell it to other guys for their educational benefit, he keeps all the identifying details anonymous. This would of course mean that he would not post any half-nude photos of my sister on some blog or forum. I make it a policy only to post photos of girls with their consent or photos that they already have up on some public setting, like facebook or myspace.
Zan said one of the characteristics of a natural is that he never kisses and tells:
“He feels no need to validate himself to other men by bragging about his exploits. He never kisses and tells. Ever. His encounters with women are never about bolstering his own self-esteem or adding another notch to his bedpost. It is all about respect.”
http://www.enlightenedseduction.com/articles.htm
Here, here.
Realism and Goal-setting
July 15, 2007
Last week, I met a good college friend here in Toronto for burritos and a couple of pints of beer, always a good combination. He’s my age, with a wife and a little girl. He’s also a pastor of a mainline Protestant church in a Toronto suburb. Just to give you some background, he’s a bright guy with amazing people skills. He’s great at talking to strangers and making them laugh. But he was raised in a blue-collar family, was the only one in his family to finish college, and really admires and respects education and learning, so this combination conspires to make him very insecure about his intellectual abilities. And he acts all shy and diffident around intellectual types, just the sort of people I hung around a lot during my Toronto days. He’s a pretty bright guy himself, but he’s got major, shall we say, inner game issues when it comes to getting ahead in the world. He even dropped out of college in his junior year because the Holy Spirit told him to, though I think it was really because he was on the verge of failing the same statistics course for the third time. Apparently, a year later, the Holy Spirit was okay with him going back to school, and he finished his degree.
So over some beers, I started to tell him about my new idea for doubling my income. It was based on the strategies I read in Timothy Ferris’s “4-Hour Workweek.” This is another amazing book recommended to me by Christian Hudson:
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/
If you haven’t read it yet, get it. It’s a New York Times bestseller already. I bought an ebook version of it to take with me to Asia.
I started telling him that after using Ferris’s dreamline exercises, I discovered that I only need $4,500 a month to live my dream lifestyle in Shanghai. An equivalent lifestyle would cost me $10,500 a month in Toronto or even more in NYC. My friend cut me off asking, “But is that realistic?” It took me several heartbeats to figure out what he meant.
“Do you mean, is that realistic for Shanghai?” I asked.
“Yeah, can you get a job that pays that much in Shanghai?” he continued.
For some reason, I got really angry inside, though I tried really really hard not to show it. It was a strange feeling. Looking back, I think I got mad b/c he was reflecting back to myself my old middle-class attitudes and thinking, and I wasn’t far enough removed yet from my old way of thinking, and it scared me. I’ve been doing a lot of Napolean Hill-style affirmations and visualizations, as well as NLP techniques for auto-suggestion. I think I was afraid that I’d fall back again and all that work would be for naught if I started thinking in that old vein again.
You see, when you start to think big and dream about your future goals, the one question you should not ask is, “Is it realistic?” Instead, far better questions would be, “Do I really want this?” or “What would it take to reach that goal?”
No offense to him, but I can see now why he’s miserable in a dead-end job, in a passionless marriage, and stuck in boring suburbia. The only thing keeping him happy is his super cute little girl. I really wanted to help him, but you have to WANT to be helped before you can actually be helped.
When is it important to ask the, “Is it realistic?” question? I think the realism question can be fruitfully asked after you’ve considered the, “How can I reach that goal?” question, which itself comes after the dreaming and goal-setting.
Realism is important when you are considering how much you are willing to sacrifice to meet that goal. As well, you need to use some common sense, like if your goal is to learn to fly by flapping your arms, realism should kick in. But hey, who knows? Maybe one day somebody will develop a way to fly using our arms!
The problem with my friend was that making money for him was always associated with having a boss or having a “job.” This shows little imagination or creativity. Thinking big doesn’t come naturally to people anymore. One of the most important lessons the community has taught me is that you can become the master of your own reality. Or as Bruce Lee said, “As you think, so shall you become.”
First Ever Post
July 14, 2007
Hey guys,
Welcome to this blog that I’ve been meaning to start for some time now.
I’m starting this blog tonight because my head is bursting with thoughts that I absolutely need to express. I was going to continue writing a diary on my computer, but I thought a blog would be better b/c I could then get your feedback whenever you decide to drop in and look around.
And I value your opinions and advice on this. So please post or comment with full assurance that I will read your writing and am very grateful for your feedback. I’m going to try to post at least once a week. So check back often.
Let the adventures begin!
Got It!
July 1, 2007
Cool, your email address is confirmed. Looking forward to communicating more with you.
In the meantime, make sure that you learn about my Dating 101 Audio Course… it is the fastest, easiest way to improve your own game, social skills, and the women in your life.
Happy playin’
The Asian Rake
Subscription Confirmation
July 1, 2007
Thanks man, got your subscription. There is a confirmation email waiting for you. Please go ahead and check for it; you’ll be taken right back to my site once you are confirmed.
Happy Playin’
The Asian Rake
