Fundamentals

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.

Every guy new to the social arts works on his eye contact. He practices holding eye contact, maintaining it even in the face of social pressure from others who continue to hold eye contact back. He learns the importance of maintaining eye contact while speaking with and listening to others. He learns not to shift his eyes around from eye to eye while looking at someone else.

Goal setting is one of those things that isn’t a tactic, isn’t a technique, and isn’t a methodology, per se, for getting girls or having relationships. It isn’t a cool new trick a guy can go out and employ and net himself a cute, sexy new companion right away, or a means of making the girls he has right now swoon all the harder.

What goal setting is, rather, is a way of getting yourself results in both the short- and the long-term that you likely wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near as quickly without setting goals.

Really quick quiz: what’s the most powerful tool of seduction in your arsenal? What’s the one thing you have that, when used properly, can turn an ice queen into a kitten and make even the strongest women become bubbly little girls?

Is it your sense of style?

Your suave demeanor?

Perhaps your silver tongue?

Those things all are great, but there’s one thing you can use to greater effect than quite possibly all of them combined. Want to guess what it is?

It’s your smile.

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying:

Some years and an entirely other identity ago, I was a rap artist. It’s not something I talk about a whole lot these days, because the person I am today is completely different from the person I was then and anyone I meet today has a difficult time imagining me in that light.

I’ve been mentioning it for a while on here, but a friend pointed out to me recently that I have yet to actually flesh out something I’ve been referring to as the Law of Effort; henceforth referred to as the Law of Least Effort for reasons of clarity.

When I say the Law of Least Effort, what I’m referring to is a very simple, but very universal and little-understood, social rule common to all forms of socializing (not limited to courtship and seduction by any means, though certainly of substantial importance there as well, perhaps especially so). Basically, that the person who appears to put the least amount of effort out, while getting the largest amount of effort returned to him by others, comes across as the most socially powerful.

Note the italics around the word “appears” in that bolded section of the second paragraph. We aren’t necessarily talking about the person who is actually, literallytrying the least, but rather the person who is able to accomplish the most with the appearance of putting in the least amount of work.

Ever fumble it up with a beautiful girl? You set one eye on her and instantly were dumbstruck, or thunderstruck – or hey, you gave it a shot and just plain struck out? It’s unbelievably common. Most men are unsure how to act around a girl they consider to be really, really valuable.

Right off the bat, there are two problems there: the first is that the guy is unsure how to act. If you’ve been reading our articles here, you should have a good idea of how to act, for sure; but we’ll do a quick refresher here for convenience’s sake.