Pickup

After a long break from facial hair, I decided last fall to begin sporting some again. I hadn’t had any since I’d shaved off my moustache and goatee back in 2004. This time though, at the end of 2009, I grew a chinstrap and a soul patch. And I noticed an immediate changed in the level of attraction I got from women.

Asian girls from Asia, I noticed, apparently had preferred me clean-shaven, and their attraction for me went down a bit once I began sporting facial hair. But white girls, on the other hand – whoa. Dramatic increase in attraction there. My approach toward them hadn’t changed. My style hadn’t changed. My voice hadn’t changed. But the level of attraction I got from them after growing a little facial hair – that changed over night.

Back when I first got into learning to get better with girls, one of the things I recall really struggling with was communicating to women I was interested in them.

As I watch most newer guys, they seem to consistently have as much difficulty with this concept as I used to. There’s one of two ways it usually goes with guys who struggle with this:

Here’s a short, powerful tip for getting girls feeling both attracted and special around you in a hurry: tell them you’re picky. Tell them you’re very picky – but you like them. And then have some valid reasons for why (them being beautiful does not count – there are a lot of beautiful women in the world!).

I picked this up originally from women I dated; it seems like every girl I date tells me she’s picky at some point or another. I’m not sure if that’s because I actually date mostly picky women, or if they just like to tell me that because they can tell I myself am picky. Regardless, it’s something I started telling women too: that I am picky.

Had a discussion with a friend of mine the other day where he asked me if I ever got the scenario of walking up to a girl, engaging her, and having her blankly stare at me and not respond. He asked because he wondered what it meant – in other words, what he might be doing wrong.

And it touched on something I’d been thinking about recently: on how perceptions of “rejection” change as your understanding of women evolves.

Five years ago, I took any form of non-engagement by a girl I’d started speaking to as a deep, personal rejection. It was as though she had assessed my person and found me unworthy. I felt hurt and insulted.

Nowadays, I recognize that reaction I used to have for what it was: a combination of a lack of understanding of women, and a lack of any kind of abundance mentality. Because the world is not so simple as I assumed it was back then.

Some guys are just jerks. And they’re fine with that. They think it’s the right way to get girls – it’s far better than being a nice guy, they’ll tell you. And who can argue with that? Nice guys finish last.

Me? I almost lost the most amazing woman of my life thus far before I ever got her because I was a jerk.

A little over four years ago, I pulled a really thoughtless, jerk move on my first date with a girl I really liked. It’s not important what I did, though I should note that at the time, it felt relatively minor to me, but it was major to her, and as a result, she completely cut me off following it. No answers to my phone calls or texts. No emails. No nothing. The only way I turned it around was because we were already heading off overseas on the same tour, and I put in a Herculean effort there abroad to turn things around with her.

This is one of those things that, when I figured it out, kinda made me slap my forehead and go, “Duh.” But even still, it took me five years to figure it out. And I’m going to give it to you in one post.

You’re welcome ;)

I figured it out gradually as I realized a number of things:

• I did better with women when I told less entertaining stories.
• I did better with women when I gave them less fun.
• I did better with women when they knew less about me.

If you’ve ever looked at a pretty girl and suddenly felt a surge of nervousness at the idea of going to say hi to her, you’ll get something out of this article. Because what you were doing when you felt that nervousness was you weren’t thinking in numbers.

Most men who are successful with women have a number of similar traits you can distill and learn from. One of those traits is thinking in numbers. That is to say, thinking to themselves not, “I’m going to go meet that girl… I hope she likes me!” but rather, “I’m going to go meet every cute girl I see, until I find one who likes me.”