Pickup Isn’t Pretty

There’s a major misconception that pickup artists are able to work some wizardry to get any woman, or at least a high percentage of women, into bed. This simply isn’t true, as this skewed view is due to people only really seeing the front-end, i.e. the results. They see the YouTube infields and media representations of bad-boy protagonists that seem to effortlessly get any woman they want. What people don’t see is the crippling amount of work we put in, and the soul-crushing amounts of rejections we wade through on our way to the prize. See, people like to believe that pickup is a skillset that makes you invincible with women, when really pickup is the intersection of skills, experience, and action. (With emphasis on action).

Last week I went to an L.A. nightclub with one of my college friends, and ran the typical nightgame routine. The first set I opened was a set of two Korean girls from UCLA on the dancefloor– the girl I opened was semi-receptive, and my friend engaged her friend. While the girl I opened was somewhat receptive, I decided against standing my ground and persisting with her because I know from numerous previous experiences that this set would not give the compliance that I was looking for. So I let it go. After doing hundreds of cold-approach opens, you develop a keen sense of a woman’s response and become able to quite accurately infer her level of interest within the first few seconds of opening. This is something that critics of pickup will never experience or understand, because they just haven’t had the experience to be able to have this heuristic. So while on the surface it may seem that I open and just bail, in reality it’s because I was saving time that could easily have been spent on some other more receptive chick. This brings me to an important point on the definition of pickup:

Pickup is TWO THINGS:

• Finding girls who are into you.
• Leading the interaction through calibrated steps.

Over the next hour I opened a few single sets, all leading to blowouts, which my friend saw and called me out on. At the end of the night, he essentially said my game sucked and that I wasn’t setting the right vibe, which he said was why I was getting blown out. Very obviously I took significant offense to this and lashed out in defense of the techniques that I had put years into learning. I carefully attempted to explain to him the importance of volume, to no avail– he was of the mindset that volume is unnecessary when you can just “have a good vibe” and have girls gravitate towards you. Perhaps this worked for him, and perhaps he was satisfied with his sex life, dating life, and quality of women in his life, making it unnecessary for him to learn cold-approach pickup. Though I believe that it is also likely that he, like most other men, has such an idealistic view of meeting women that he will never wake up and accept the reality of what it actually takes to get laid consistently. Which is fine. Maybe these guys just don’t want it enough. Maybe it isn’t as important to them. And that’s OK. As long as they know that if you keep doing what you’ve always been doing, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always gotten. Which brings me to this conclusion: critics of pickup usually don’t get laid, and convincing them that pickup works is pointless.

Skills Plateau; Volume Doesn’t

While I do agree that having the skills to create a good vibe is important, skills don’t matter if you don’t deliver them– hence the importance of volume. Most guys are loss-adverse and fixated on having a good ratio, and use this as one of many excuses for not approaching. After all, why would you approach a bunch of random chicks and stack up an ego-deflating amount of rejections when you could just fine-tune your “vibe” until you can just have chicks gravitate towards you? It makes perfect sense. But the issue with this approach is that the investment into your skills/technique is not linearly related to your results with women. It is asymptotic: in your first few years dedicated towards improving your pickup skills, you improve drastically, but in these first few years you have already learned most of the essential skills and reaped the most improvement in your game you can possibly get. After this, now what? What gives you the biggest return on investment with women? As much as people refuse to accept this, the answer is volume. Maybe the part that haters don’t understand is that in pickup, action always beats theory.