Tactics Tuesdays

You load a barbell one side at a time. The most effective way to improve with girls is to use the same approach: one side at a time, then the other.

There is one thing that bugged me more than anything else when going out with someone new to hit on girls, and I never realized it till a few months back, and only then did I begin to put it into words.

Odds are, if you go out to talk to women, you do this at least some of the time too. Most guys do. And it’s bad for you. I’ll tell you what the thing is in a moment, but first, let me tell you about Seneca’s Barbell.

A month ago I read Antifragile by Nassim Taleb. In it, Taleb highlights the problem I noticed guys running into when I’d go out with them to chat up girls. The solution for this problem is what Taleb terms “Seneca’s Barbell”.

The idea behind Seneca’s Barbell is that when you work on part A of a two-part project, focus just on A; when you work on part B of that project, focus just on B. Do not work half and half on A and B at the same time, because you divvy up your attention between foci and prevent yourself doing either effectively.

As Taleb puts it, think of a barbell used by a bodybuilder. When he prepares the barbell, the bodybuilder places the weights on either side of the bar, not in the middle. Engage and become fully consumed with one side, then be fully consumed with the other. Never try to do both at once. Use your focus to its fullest.

Let me explain how this idea applies to picking up women.

You shouldn’t join a girl’s shopping expedition for a date. So why’s it okay to invite her along while YOU shop? The difference is the dynamic.

In my article on The “Help Run Some Errands” Date, Lawliet questions whether having a girl come help you on dates doesn’t set too much of a boyfriend frame.

As we’ve talked about before, you very much do not want to be the early boyfriend. If you act like her boyfriend before you sleep with her, you will almost never sleep with her. We’ve even talked about the misfortune that fell one poor man who decided it’d be a good idea to take a girlfriend of mine shopping and go around holding her bags for her.

So why, then, would I turn around and propose you take girls shopping with you?

Have I flipped my gourd?

Gone stark mad?

No, don’t worry. If this distinction confuses you, it won’t for long.

That’s because in today’s article, we’re going to draw a line between what happens when you help her versus when she helps you.

Gold diggers can be a problem, especially if you’re richer than the girls you’re meeting. However, there are two (2) ways to reliably screen them out.

In my discussion of the belief some guys hold that “women are evil”, a reader named SBM asks:

“The question is though, how do you screen for gold-diggers? How can you find out whether or not a girl you’re taking out on a date is in fact a gold-digger?”

It’s a good question!

I, for one, love girls who are sexy, fashionable, and confident. These are tempting qualities for me in any girl. However, one of the drawbacks of qualities like this is that they’re often – perhaps even most often – found in gold diggers.

And while I’m not wealthy enough to attract top-flight gold diggers looking for a payout all of the time, I dress well enough that I get approached by them sometimes in the U.S. (particularly in Las Vegas, that seedy den of predatory gold digging paradise). And I run into them in Eastern Europe and Asia.

Some guys like gold diggers, or are comfortable with the exchange gold diggers want. If you’re such a guy, who thinks it’s perfectly reasonable for a girl to trade her looks for your resources and financial security, this article won’t be of much interest to you. Or maybe it will be, as a kind of reverse technique. Just do the opposite of it and you’ll attract the gold diggers and repel the girls who don’t believe in this trade.

However, if you’re like me, and you dislike the foundation gold digging rests upon, then read on, and let’s talk how to screen these girls out.

You hit it off with a girl, or have a wonderful date. Then, suddenly, she has to go. You can avoid this, yet, with better time management.

Ever meet a girl on a bus or train and have a nice little chat, but before you could take her number, she stood up and said, “This is my stop,” and suddenly rushed out the door?

Or you took a girl on a date, with things going swell, only for you to try to take her home but find out she had somewhere she had to be in 45 minutes?

How you manage your time on your dates and in courtships, conversations, and pickups is key. You already know how crucial it is to move faster, hit escalation windows, and get the girl before attraction expires. But at the micro level, you must be able to manage the details of time management, too.

There are two parts of that battle:

1. The knowledge of how much time you have with her
   
2. The strategy around how best to use that time
   

The stronger you are on each aspect of courtship time management, the more success your courtships will bring you.

If you’re a busy guy, one of the best productivity hacks out there is to invite girls along with you on errands you otherwise have to run.

I know, how unromantic, right?

Well, not every date is about sweeping her off her feet and being her Prince Charming.

Sometimes, all it’s about is building the most effective path toward getting her into bed with you with as little muss and fuss as possible.

After all, you can charm her all you like once you and her are bedfellows.

Enter the errand date: where a large part of the date is structured around her helping you run some errands you have to run.

This is a super fun date, for a number of reasons... Not the least of which is that it builds in tons of compliance automatically, immediately positions you as the leader, and keeps the two of you moving, which leads to lots of shared experiences in a short amount of time... The very formula of a structured date, one of our three date templates.

But how are you going to get a girl to come run errands with you? And won’t she feel insulted? Or think you’re wasting her time?

A slew of helpful mindsets, prevention tools, and firefighting techniques for handling flakes. What do you do when she cancels on you?

Flakes are an area of dating charged with emotion. A lot of men take flakes personal in a big way. They feel insulted and like their time’s been wasted.

We have a few articles on Girls Chase already on flake-handling. They are:

• What to Do When Girls Flake
• Why Women Flake: The 5 Things You Can’t Control
• When to Throw the Ball into Her Court (and When Not To)
• How to Turn Flakes into Dates
• Tactics Tuesdays: Calling Her When Texts Don’t Pan Out

Today, I want to share with you my views on flakes. Guys at different stages of their journey will give you different takes, and there a lot of different ways to handle flakey acquaintances. At this point, I’ve spent my time in the approach grinder, bedded well over 100 women, and I’ve accepted flakes as a part of the dating game – I’m beyond taking it personal. So my views are going to be different than those of a guy trying to have sex with 100 percent of the women he interacts with.

These mindsets and techniques won’t help you hook up with everything that moves. Not even Hollywood star status, world-class game, or a billion bucks in the bank will do that. And the stage you want to aspire to reach is the one past the stage where you feel the need to hook up with everything that moves. However, along the road to mastering this skill set, men should oscillate between both extremes to ensure proper growth.

With that said, here are my tips on flaking and text game.

The alpha female is the dominant girl in her group, and to get her, you’ll have to be a little different than you will be to pick up her follower peers.

It’s been nearly three months since I wrote the first installment in this series, “Girls in Groups: How to Tell Who’s a Leader or a Follower.” I finally just sat down to write Part II: how to pick up the leader.

If you didn’t read the first part of this series, click back and give it a read. If you can’t tell the difference between leaders and followers, this article won’t do much good. We’ll talk about identifying some of the signs of leadership vs. followerdom here too, but that first article’s the real roadmap on this.

Once you’ve read that, let’s talk alpha females. First off, why would you want to pick up the leader of the group? Aren’t those usually the toughest, meanest chicks? And aren’t they often the fat or ugly ones?

Well, not necessarily on that last. And as to the rest, it’s all part of the fun.