Confidence

You’ve probably been brought up to think that leaning on posts, putting your feet up, leaning back on chairs, and slouching a little bit is the key to looking good in the classroom, but if we are being honest here, no one cares, and these little tweaks are not really going to have any impact on girls noticing you.

What gets girls noticing you is never as simple as showing you don’t care, mostly because it doesn’t stand out to them as different from the other guys they see daily doing the same things. And none of those men lay themselves back so well that girls rush to them and instantly start talking with them, so it begs the question: why are you really acting that way, and is this method attractive?

In all likelihood you are choosing the easiest path, a path you haven’t really thought about very much, a path that relies on some mysterious undercurrent to be at play that will bring you luck and a girl. But we have to not only ask “Is this pragmatic?”, we also have to ask “Is the way I’m handling this attractive?”.

I used to think the old phrasing was a fairly straightforward affair. Moths, and flames... one remains in place, bright and beckoning, while the other flutters toward it with abandon, desperate to bask in the light of its warmth and radiance.

“Be the flame, not the moth,” advised Casanova... and it would seem to be simple enough advice.

Yet, one of the things that you learn you must be as you drive ever deeper into seduction is nuanced, not straightforward.

Complex, not simple.

A woman does not fancy a man who is too easily understood. Nor is being that man quite nearly as interesting.

And I realized, while thinking some things over one night working in a room, watching a number of large brown moths fluttering frantically and futilely at my window screen to enter the room and reach the light, and a number of smaller insects that had dropped, burned and singed onto my bed cover, after having attained the object that called to them so alluringly from the ceiling above, that this turn of the phrase was one that, like the men and women it describes, has a bit more nuance to it than it seems at first.

When I first read about the Law of Least Effort, it was as if everything suddenly made sense. I thought that learning about expending effort would put me leagues ahead of other men, as I knew that I didn’t have to act all crazy and get into these long-winded conversations to get with girls; I could just be like all those cool guys who had women chasing and crawling all over them.

Unfortunately, I took the definition of the Law of Least Effort a bit too literally.

I started expending next to no effort in an attempt to not appear try-hard. However, when you expend hardly any effort, you aren’t going to get any results.

Rather than achieving what I was setting off to do, I became a closed off and virtual unknown to women. I’d go out and see attractive woman, thinking that things would be so much better if I had them chasing me and carrying the conversation all on their own. I thought that by sitting around and doing next to nothing women would flock to me and up my cool factor exponentially.

After all – I was effortless, wasn’t I?

But women rarely approached me. When you’re risk averse and don’t put forward any effort, you won’t gain anything.

It turns out that I was missing one vital point of the Law of Least Effort. You must expend as little effort as possible while still achieving what you’ve set out to do.

I taught myself how to be “cool” as a junior high student many years ago. It was an intuitive process for me at the time, though filled with social experiments and trial and error – and lots of beating up on myself to get it just right.

I’ve spent years trying to figure out a good way to teach all the aspects of being cool. A way to boil it all down to something simple, streamlined, and easily remembered and used by anyone who aspires to “cool”: who wants to be that person that everybody else just looks at and says, “Man, that guy is cool.”

How do you transform someone who “doesn’t get it” – whom others laugh at, make fun of, disrespect, or ignore – into someone they look up to, gravitate toward, and esteem?

To do this, of course, you need good tactics – you need to be able to give them the “what to do”; but more than this, you need the underlying principles: what is it about cool people that just makes them so damn cool?

Well, after years of non-starters on an article about this, I will say that I have successfully boiled “cool” down to four (4) core elements that are eminently doable and absolutely teachable.

Get all four of these right, and you will be – without question – unstoppably, unspeakably, almost unbearably cool.

And the best news is, all any of them takes is a little practice and, yes... a little discipline.

A while back I wrote a post on connecting with people. There, I touched on why vulnerability works to connect people from a psychological standpoint and laid the foundation for why it works on women.

But I wanted to expand on why exactly vulnerability makes you more attractive to women.

You see, vulnerability must be used correctly. It isn’t a prescription or excuse to start spilling your guts. So today I’m going to talk about how to use vulnerability effectively and what frames you must maintain in order to maximize your attractiveness to the fairer sex.

There are a lot of expectations and fears clashing with each other when you reach college, and it is easy to get lost in what just comes easiest socially, romantically, and sexually.

But what is the approach you must take to open your mind and achieve some great results and memories while there?

The most common approach to socializing, fraternizing, and dating in college is a “build it and they will come” philosophy, or “let us wait and see”, because we expect things to magically change and don’t want to rely on who we are because “like always” there is a greater risk involved in taking initiative due to the perceived separation it creates from you (the action taker) and others (the majority of people doing what the majority does, following the same wait and see approach).

And if you are separate from the people around you, “how can you capitalize on the social abundance that is talked about?” you wonder.

Talking effectively is about more than just knowing how to talk: it is about knowing why to talk.

Never simply waste your effort being a blabber mouth; have a direction, a purpose, and, if nothing else, be conducive to the atmosphere you are looking to build by acting in line with it.

Leading a conversation is essential for helping people lose their anxieties and feel comfortable around you. To achieve that task you have to step up to the plate and avoid the trap of being dependent on others to do all the lifting. You then need to guide the conversation topics in a way that reflects what direction you are thinking of moving in.