Fundamentals

Commenting on my article about 12 common unsexy nice guy traits, a reader named Colin writes:

“Your article stings and hurts [f]or one reason...which is #8 on this list [don't have any interests or passions]. That's me. That's the reason I'm a mid-30s virgin and am too scared to try any relationships with women. I have a well paying job, own my house, have good relationships with my parents, and behave the way in my "nice guy" mind an attractive guy should be. But I have no passion. I hate and avoid competitive things, because I feel so bad about myself when I fail. I never played sports as a kid for that reason. I'm sort of a wuss, really. #8 is KILLING me. Girls I like have passions. Guys they are with have passions. Why should they like a wuss like me who avoids passionate things? At least it makes sense to me. I even have a girls number and I'm too afraid to call her for fear of exposing my wuss, passionless self. That and the fact that I don't socialize with any friends...don't really have any at that. I realized long ago I had no hobbies other than masturbating, and so I started taking up guitar. But even that's wuss because that's not competitive. At least not the way I play. I'm lost and I don't know how to get around this, no matter what I read. I need specific help.”

We've had a lot of guys ask the "How to be passionate?" question over the years. Most of the advice out there is ephemeral - you've got to search for what you're passionate about! they tell you. Makes for a nice sound bite, and while it is true, it is also pretty useless, as far as advice goes.

We're going to nail it down for you today, and give you some practical tips you can use to immediately get the 'passion' area of your life handled.

Because, well, everything's better with passion. Until you reach the point where everything's better with Zen... however, that's a discussion for another day.

Today, let's put the magnifying glass on passion, and see how to add it into your life even when it seems like it isn't there.

To be able to lead – whether men, women, or both – you must be certain. And to be certain, you must have three (3) elements in place.

Two candidates are about to give their speeches for president of the Interfraternity Council. The IFC is the board that governs all the fraternities on campus. It controls how and when rush proceeds (the process by which fraternities and sororities recruit members) and deals with disciplinary action.

It's not that important of a position, since at this school, they're quite liberal with control, but it's still a position. And men, well, they like titles. It makes them feel important. They respect them. Women? They yearn for men with position. It gets them wet.

So these two men want it.

The first candidate is the former vice president and has been given the opportunity to speak first.

“Hey guys! As you know, I was vice president for the past year and hopefully have lived up to the duties given to that position. As you saw, I tried to reestablish the philanthropic duties of vice president and actually held a fundraiser, something no vice president in recent memory has done. Also, I oversaw a judicial board hearing and carried it out quickly and efficiently, another duty of vice president that hasn’t been fulfilled in recent years. I’ve seen how the executive board works. I’ve worked with the president closely, helped him facilitate almost every duty of the council, seen how all the paperwork gets dealt with, and have even met with administrators in an effort to better understand what the school wants from us.

I hope that you’ve noticed my hard work and dedication and will do me the honor of voting me in as president of the council. Thank you very much!”

Your body positioning says a lot about you… and it even tells the people who see you and talk to you how to feel about you. Here’s how to position yourself in nightclubs.

Hey guys, I wanted to cover a part of the seduction process that has not been thoroughly explained and is crucial for having good results when picking up girls at bars and clubs. This article is meant for those of you who practice night game.

Alek Rolstad and I were talking the other day, and we slipped onto the topic of positioning. We were amazed how much we used it but didn’t discuss it. We have actually been using a lot of deliberate techniques we never talked about.

After a while of doing seduction, some learned tools become ingrained and you stop reflecting on them. What I’m about to cover I learned from thousands of interactions. Over the years, I have been adjusting my methods of positioning, and I will now share some simple tips about when and why to position yourself in certain ways in clubs to reach the maximal result – the pull.

It’s sexy to part your lips. Some of Hollywood’s most alluring leading men have used parted lips. If it works for them, it can work for you too.

Just wanted to do something simple and basic today, after my latest stretch of hard/advanced and gargantuan posts. So today we’ll talk about parted lips.

Parted lips do three things for you:

1. They make you look sexy
2. They make you look dumb
3. They make you look physical

This fits in nicely with Hector’s series on smart men vs. dumb men.

In this article, we’ll talk about when to part your lips and what uses this has.

When you set out to form new habits and self-improve, a big part of this is how to remember to make these adjustments in the first place.

Reader Kalyan writes in with a question about learning fundamentals:

“hey, i just noticed that your website lacks a very important article (or maybe i dont know of it. if thats the case please send me link(s)). i know fundamentals are important. and everyone knows eye contact is important for example.. but i find it very hard to consistently remember to consciously focus on eye contact... i feel because of that, mastering individual fundamentals like that is much slower. so, an article about how to learn or focus on fundamentals would be helpful. i know its a good idea to work on one aspect at a time, but how could you actually remember to work on even one thing when youre out and talking to women?”

It’s an interesting question, and in fact is one more concerned with mindfulness – the act of attunement to what is occurring both around you and within your head in the present moment – than the pure raw process of learning fundamentals.

The process of learning fundamentals themselves is straightforward:

1. Pick a fundamental to work on, be that eye contact, posture, vocal intonation, or another

2. Decide what to alter or improve in this fundamental

3. Make that alteration/improvement over and over across the next 30-90 days

4. Every time you notice yourself not doing it the way you want to do it, correct yourself

5. After 1-3 months (and many hundreds of internal reminders) have passed, it’s now automatic

This process can transform you into a man with impeccable, powerful body language, mannerisms, and behavior in a relatively short time (six months to a year for really complete change; though you’ll start to see the effects of this exercise as soon as you begin work on it).

Yet you must remember to remind yourself to adopt these better fundamentals to change them.

What if you can simply never remember to do it?

This guide lays out the major stages and steps to focus on for anyone new to picking up girls and dating women. Use it to get up and running fast.

Most of the boot camps I’ve held in my career as a dating coach have been with guys who were fairly weathered in their journey to success with women. But last week I found myself coaching a fresh-to-the-game kind of guy. Going out with me was among the first times he had ever gone out to approach women. But I was so used to dealing with guys who had at least some inkling of what success with women meant that I found myself utterly at a loss for words when it came to coaching someone this new.

That experience inspired me to write this article, in which I seek to not only give better advice to my student, but to provide something for anyone who is looking to make seduction a part of their lives. It’s something to help you avoid some of the pitfalls that made people like myself stumble back when we were new to learned success with women.

Want to make the women you gaze at find your glance irresistible? A simple dash of fractionation added to your eye contact is all it takes.

Hey, guys. I have shared a lot of practical techniques lately in addition to different strategies and tactics. My latest technical contributions have mostly been verbal gambits. Today, I decided to share some nonverbal techniques.

Personally, I find both verbal and nonverbal techniques to be equally powerful; they just have different uses. Here are a couple posts I have written about verbal vs. nonverbal game.

• Verbal vs. Nonverbal Approaches to Getting Girls

• Deciding When to Use Physical vs. Verbal Game

I think it all comes down to:

• Who you are – some people prefer one form to the other

• Context – some contexts are better for verbals; others are made for nonverbals

• What pros and cons you want to live with

• What kind of frame and vibe you want the seduction to follow – how you proceed will affect the pace, vibe, and frame

Anyway, without further ado, I am about to share a very simple yet powerful seduction technique that you can use:

• In clubs
• In bars
• During day game
• At parties
• And even on dates (if calibrated right)

Oh that’s quite interesting, isn’t it? This technique doesn’t require much brain power, either. This is a post that suits readers of all levels, particularly intermediate guys. Beginners can also give this a shot.

I will start off by sharing the technique, then I’ll explain the mechanism behind it.

Your game and your mindsets (inner game) are important. But the only thing women see and experience firsthand is your fundamentals.

This is one of my axioms of game. I consider it true on a biblical level.

Game is fundamentals.

Traditionally, we think of fundamentals as that which attracts bitties.

Your face. Your fashion. Your muscles. Your walk. Your voice.

These get your foot in the door. She’s interested enough to give you a hint that she wants to talk, be it a smile or a prolonged stare, and she’ll give you a good shot once you approach.

Afterwards, you spit game and try to amplify the already established attraction into arousal and lead her to bed.

Fundamentals get her interested. Game gets you inserted.

How are they equal, then?

There’s a lot to focus on in life, and little guidance. Where should you concentrate your efforts? To these 12 key areas: women, money, strategy, and more.

I’ve had guys ask me over the years what areas of their lives to focus on outside of women. And younger guys have asked what they ought to have handled as they get older. Society’s grown more complex than at perhaps any other time in history, due to myriad factors. However, one of the biggest factors has been the near-total abandonment of preparing young people for what to expect in life.

In place of lessons and guidance, we give them feel-good Hollywood films and vapid platitudes. Things that for prior generations were known and expected in life are surprises for the generations now coming of age, left to their own devices to figure these things out (or not).

So I’ve worked to set out a list here of the 12 most important things for a man to have handled before he turns 35. If you’re young, these are the items in life you need to concentrate your energy on. If you’re older and you haven’t handled all these yet, it’s not too late to start. This isn’t a list designed to make you ‘feel bad’ if you haven’t accomplished these yet – this article isn’t about ‘feelings’. This article is about masculine concerns: what areas of your life can you work on that will improve your life?

The more work you do on these 12 areas, the better your life will be.

If your life is already awesome, improve these areas and it will become more awesome. If it’s less than awesome, improve these areas and you will change that too. Note that some men have some degree of natural ability in some of these areas. But no one is a natural at them all – and every man has room to improve in each.

Fundamentals are the vehicle for your game. Game, being nothing more or less than the ability to get someone to do what you want, is itself verbal, but the performance of a seduction includes much more than that. It's the way you speak and the way you act. Very often, it's not what you say, but what you don't say.

A fun playground to practice your fundamentals is small talk. Since small talk doesn't have the intrinsic "deep value" of deep diving, you need to spice it up a bit. How do you do that?

Fundamentals.