Investment

"Can you get me a glass of water?" she asked me. "Please?" She gave me big, dewy doe eyes, and her cutest, most charming pursed lips.

"It's over there," I said playfully, pointing to the water cooler. "You can get it yourself."

"Oh!" she exclaimed in mock frustration, getting up to go get herself more water.

Does it offend your sensibilities that I told her to do that? It might offend some people's. How can a guy be so cold as to not even go and get a girl a glass of water? they think.

But it isn't about being cold. It's about returning to the basics of sprezzatura and the Law of Least Effort; it's about understanding that the men who supplicate -- the men who kiss up -- the men who try to impress women -- those men end up holding the bag.

It's about understanding what women are really attracted to... and what causes them to lose that attraction. And it's about understanding that where the line is, and how much is too much when it comes to doing for women.

Question from a reader named Sam yesterday:

Hi Chase,

Just wanted to say thanks for all the great advice and content you post here. Some of this stuff is pure gold because I have had a few "ah ha" moments, especially about the interchangeability of value and good feelings, and this I think will take my game to a better level. More importantly though, it has greatly increased my understanding of relationships, not because you didn't know this, but you "just couldn't put it into words".

Another thing I learned here was that I was making the mistake of investment, but from what I have read here, there are a few things to fix here and there on this part. Can you please write up a comprehensive post on investment? (haven't come across one here yet) And some of the dos and don'ts of it. You did mention in one of your posts (chase framing post) your would write about "comprehensive investment / compliance post".

You probably hear a lot of praise, but I'm just putting it out there that this is indeed great stuff. I honestly do wish I had come across your site earlier. All in all, you now have a regular reader.

Investment's a great topic. It's one of those things that boggled the heck out of me early on, but it pays such incredible dividends in the end. Once you really get down a strong, solid gameplan for investment and you know what you're doing with it and you have your strategy for approaching investment in whatever situation, your interactions with women run so much more smoothly.

Of course... getting there, well, that's the challenging part.

In this post, I'd like to share with you a cautionary tale. I'd like to tell you the story of a man named Shopping Guy.

Shopping Guy isn't really his name. His family and his friends call him something else, no doubt; something closer to an actual name and less of a label. But I know him only as Shopping Guy.

Ever find yourself talking to a really cute girl, and have her start acting bored and distracted?

You probably began scrambling hard to try and get her interested again. And, if you succeeded, you likely felt like you'd won a crucial victory, and you felt like things with this girl were now stronger than ever. You'd been on the brink, and recovered.

You also probably were very careful to keep her interested after that, and stay on topics she'd find engaging, and off topics she wouldn't like. You worked harder to make things work, and likely came to value her more highly than you do other women who never seemed bored with you.

I want to work on getting you doing the same thing now with women. We've talked about nonverbal communication before here; this is another piece of the nonverbal puzzle. In this post, I'm going to show you how you can use boredom and the bored look to keep women off of bad topics and on good ones, and make them pay more attention and invest more in your conversations.

This is a strategy that women use all the time. So let's even the odds a little bit and get you using it too.

Most men who've been studying the social arts a little while come to realize, either consciously or instinctually, that coming out and telling women things about themselves unasked is an inferior means of conversing than first being asked for things before telling them. People start to come to understand the laws of effort and investment intuitively, and they recognize that another person putting in effort to learn something about them is better than another person putting in no effort and learning something about them regardless.

Even then, though, this rule – a very important social rule – often flies under the radar of most men, and they continue seeking to build rapport with women (or even attempting to force rapport, you might say) by sharing as much free, unasked for information about themselves as they can.

I call this "trading information," and view it as one of the vilest, most heinous social crimes you can commit. It does two things that are positively detrimental to your efforts to be charming and engaging and delightful and seductive with women, and, after an example of what many guys do and you ought not to do, I'll explain both of those below. Then, I'm going to introduce a concept some of you may be familiar with but many are not: baiting, and how you as a conversationalist can use it to get women vastly more invested in you and your conversations with them.

I’ve always been a strong proponent of meeting women via cold approach – that is, going and meeting women who are strangers whom you don’t know and who don’t know you – rather than via social circle. Both have their strengths and their weaknesses, but I think overall that the rules of social circle put far greater constraints upon your potential success and mental well-being than do the rules of cold approach.

To give a quick summary, a man who’s meeting women through social circle is going and hanging out with his friends at parties and bars and nightclubs, talking to the same people night after night, and gradually trying to work his way into success with women in his circle. He’s generally going to be competing for the boyfriend role (see “Telling Women You’re NOT Boyfriend Material”), he’s going to be competing for it with a host of other men, and he’s going to be competing on traditional early boyfriend stuff – trying to act like a girl’s boyfriend before they get together. On the plus side, women here are more accepting of men and less likely to run off quick and be flighty, so it might feel easier.

Yesterday on my way home, the bus I was riding on came to a stop with lots of young people – in particular, lots of young college age-looking women. My interest, needless to say, was piqued. As I sat in my seat, I watched everyone board the bus out of the corner of my eye… and then, I caught sight of a cute girl dressed very fashionably coming down the aisle. Ooh.

Now, when you’re already settled in somewhere, there aren’t a whole lot of ways you can get a woman to join you proactively. You might call out to her, of course – but this is chasing pretty hard and can hurt your chances, and you’ve probably got to be feeling rather bold to do it. If you are, and you want to try it, go for it; I wasn’t yesterday, but I still wanted that cute girl to take a seat next to me.

So I pulled out my trusty ol’ come hither eyes.