(1) Beginner

Whether it’s the art of seduction, social prowess, travelling the world, starting a new business, or just picking up a new hobby, every man wants to be fearless. Every man wants to be able to take life by the horns, challenge his own hesitations, and take a step into making himself better.

But how do you do it? How do you overcome fear?

Not just with jobs, not just with your social life, but with everything?

Today I’m going to talk about being fearless. I’m going to show you that you can transform yourself into a person who pursues his goals with endless determination.

Let’s go.

Being charming is a trait most of us are taught to aspire to from a young age. From fiction novels to Disney movies, the ladies always seem to swoon for that man who can charm his way right into their hearts.

But how do you get to be a charming man? And how important is charm in your process of seduction?

Today I’m going to give you a comprehensive look into charm. And it probably won’t be exactly what you expect. Charm is a double-edged sword that can be a great boon in certain situations, but a harmful bane in others.

I’m going to help you figure out when it’s most useful, and how to effectively wield your charms for seductions and relationships.

Ah, empathy. At its most basic level, “empathy” simply means “understanding where another person is coming from.” I worked in the counseling field for a couple years, so I have been pretty well-trained in how to have empathy for others, and even how to make them feel understood even when you can’t fully grasp what’s going on for them.

That’s the good news: you don’t actually have to understand what someone’s experiencing in order to empathize with her. Men will appreciate this, as women so often talk about issues that we simply cannot grasp, to which we simply want to offer easy suggestions.

Let’s begin with a basic distinction, “fixing vs. understanding.” If you have female friends — which I surely hope you do — you will be familiar with a common complaint women have about their men:

“I don’t want him to fix it, I want him to understand.”

When I first discovered dating advice for men on the Internet in the mid-2000s, I was ecstatic; here were exactly the tools I was looking for to take what I was trying to do and put it on rocket fuel.

With these tools, I knew, I could shave years off my learning curve and advance at a far faster rate than I could having to figure every single thing out by myself, on my own.

It didn't take long though before I realized that many of the guys posting on seduction forums and meeting up in pickup lairs were "quirky"; there were things about them that were off, and the kinds of women they were going for were... not the kinds of women I was all that interested in.

I maintained friendships with the cooler and more "normal" guys I met through PUA - and indeed, many of these guys are still good friends of mine today, and are some of the sharpest and most improvement-oriented people I know (many are also quite successful in their businesses and careers nowadays) - but aside from them, I largely retreated to friendships with "naturals" - guys who were naturally good with women, and hadn't studied pickup and had only the most cursory knowledge of what it taught.

What I noticed was that there were some very distinct differences between the guys who were naturally good with women and the guys who were not - and while some of this went away as guys improved, some of it didn't; these differences remained.

And those differences very often meant the difference between being cool and getting the more attractive, harder-to-get girls, and not being and getting those.

In "What’s the Difference Between a Lover and a Loser?", Troy asked a question I've been seeing a lot on here lately regarding dealing with failure:

“Also chase id love to see an article on how to see failure as not bad, to love the plateau and not let setbacks stop us from pushing the times of doubt and uncertainty. Thanks and im looking for that when you can do it and it interests you as a topic for a post. The reason is because i see it in myself and almost every girls chase reader of not accepting that they will make mistakes and it makes me think. I think that if you could write on this that us readers us readers would accept failure especially beginners as essential, then every one of us would stop beating up our selves when we lose a girl and make mistakes, and then you may not need to ever be getting complaints again. then life changes. It is great to try our best but no one is perfect and we will mess up. thanks for helping and reading.”

We touched on failure and defeat a good bit already in "How to Master Anything", and I just talked about it a bit more recently in my interview with ITHP; today, I want to go a little more in-depth.

So, how does one deal with failure - especially social failure, the kind you must endure when learning to improve with women? Failure that's public; failure that's biting; and failure that cuts right to the quick of one's ego and self-esteem?

And make no mistake about it, you will take a beating to your sense of self when you set out to improve your prospects socially and romantically. There's simply no other way to get better with people than by trying and failing with people - again and again and again.

It takes a certain kind of courage - and a certain attitude about dealing with failure.

One of the finer points of approaching it's easy to get jumbled up on is approaching women who are already seated.

The typical seated approach looks something like this:

1. Girl is sitting down
2. Guy walks up to girl
3. Guy opens girl enthusiastically while standing in front of her
4. Guy asks if he can sit

... or, sometimes, like this:

1. Girl is sitting down
2. Guy plops down next to girl
3. Guy opens girl with a standard opener

... and while these two methods can work, they both are flawed: because both make the man appear to be investing a great deal more to meet the girl than the girl is investing to meet him. You'll get a pass for that from the girls who are very interested - but other girls won't be so kind.

There is, however, a better way to do each of these sitting girl approaches (where you open standing, or where you sit next to her first), but these require a bit more of an eye toward effort.

A reader comments on "How to Think About Women as You Get More Experienced", linking to a discussion on Reddit where a Redditor asks female members about their thoughts on being approached at random, and whether this is nagging them or annoying them... because he feels guilty about it. Here's the link. Our commenter here notes that this discussion has made him question whether he ought to cold approach.

I sympathize if you're newer and haven't started investing time in meeting beautiful strangers yet, and are hesitating before taking the plunge because it looks like a big commitment of time and energy to get good at and a lot of hard knocks and rejections and bumps to overcome along the way.

If you're sitting there wondering whom you ought to listen to, hearing a bunch of people say, "This cold approach malarkey doesn't even work - don't waste your time," can be pretty disheartening.

Maybe even enough to give up on the prospect of even trying in the first place.

But if you walk away from cold approach, you are walking away from one of the single most effective, uplifting, and empowering things you will ever learn to do in any way to improve your dating life, your sex life, your search for the ideal partner, and your own general confidence and happiness to boot. Few things in life will alter the direction of your life as profoundly as the ability to cold approach successfully and effectively.

If that's so though - if cold approach really is as markedly effective and life-enhancing as this - why are there so many forces trying to lead you astray?