Submission is a result of the ambivalence between fear and attraction.

She is sitting there next to me in the bar. She is a beauty queen, this one. We are locked in conversation. I have been teasing her and connecting with her on many different levels for the last 45 minutes. Things are going “well” by any standard. I know, however, there are more words that need to come out of my mouth.

And I am gripped by fear.

I’d approached her on the subway. A casual opener asking her if this train goes to 14th street. When she told me it does, I hired her as my personal assistant. I told her I would take her everywhere with me. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s after work. You’re in the supermarket picking up some food and you see her. She’s beautiful. And sexy as hell. You want her.

Maybe in the past there would be no way you would go up to her and talk to her. But now you have a game plan. You decide you are going to approach her.

And you are gripped by fear.

Perhaps the first thing you notice is your heart start to race. You can feel it thumping in your chest.

Your rate of breathing increases. You feel a constriction in your throat. Your blood pressure rises. You may get a feeling in the pit of your stomach. Read the rest of this entry »

Fail. Fail again. Fail differently. Fail better. Fail harder. Fail quicker. Fail smarter. Fail clearer. Fail funnier. Fail badly. Fail well. Fail painfully. Fail on purpose. Fail by accident. Fail and learn. Fail without learning. Fail in the cold. Fail in bookstores. Fail in malls. Fail on the train. Fail on Valentine’s Day. Fail your friends. Fail your family. Fail yourself. Fail everyone. Fail society. Fail again. Fail when you thought you were done failing. Fail and feel good. Fail and feel bad. Fail and wonder where you are going. Fail and know. Fail and feel sick. Fail and get embarrassed. Fail and hate yourself. Fail and love yourself. Fail and get hurt. Fail and get rejected. Fail when you didn’t think you could fail. Fail and face your fear. Fail and get past your fear. Fail and find more fear.

Deeper fear.

Fail boldly. Fail majestically. Fail publicly. Fail fiercely. Fail and walk through darkness. Read the rest of this entry »

It still happens to me once in a while. An interaction with someone will go badly and I end up feeling bad afterward. Most of the time I’m fine, whether the interaction goes well or not. But once in a while I end up feeling down about it.

I may even be in a strange city and I know I’ll never see these people again. But I’ll feel bad and start to think about it. Over and over. Even as I get to another city, I’ll replay it in my mind and try to figure out what I did wrong.

Was I too aggressive and maybe busted on the girl too much? Was it something specific I said that just personally offended her?

I’ve learned over and over that the path to freedom is acceptance. Feel the feeling and move on. It is the one thing that has allowed me to stop questioning every little thing I do and instead act more confident, more self-assured and take the lead. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m at the airport in Vancouver going through immigration when I first see them. They look like rock stars. You can just tell. Aside from their look, they have a presence about them.

They are five guys, looking slightly cooler than everyone else, going through immigration together.

I’m getting the third degree from an immigration official because a few years ago I’d been arrested for a civil disobedience.

After I get through, one of the rock star guys stops me and says that he overheard that I got arrested protesting. He says he thought it was cool.

I ask him what they are in Vancouver for. He says they are a rock band on a 170-city world tour. Read the rest of this entry »

Possibly one of the most important benefits of approaching a lot of women is that you no longer pin your failure on things like looks, money, etc.

You start to realize there are other things in your personality, your body language, your voice tone, your overall behavior that are effecting your success with women.

Making small tweaks at a time, you start to tune up your game. You walk away from a “failure” and you no longer calculate your looks into the equation.

Most guys are not supermodels. Most guys have some “physical challenge” that would seem to put them at a disadvantage. But the challenge is actually slightly different than you would perceive it. Read the rest of this entry »

It was one of those sub-zero days where you don’t even want to go outside with your face exposed. I’d gone out at lunch but hadn’t found my one girl to open. So after work I decided to stop by the Barnes and Noble in Union Square to at least get one in. I’m a trooper.

I don’t see anyone at first and decide to leave. On the way out I see this girl and decide to approach.

“Can you tell me where the books on trains are?” I say.

We’re two feet away from the information booth and she begins to motion toward them “You should ask them…”

“Oh my god, you can’t even help a guy out?” I say. “Thanks a lot!” She laughs. Read the rest of this entry »

There is no reason to not escalate. You do not get any points for being the “nice guy.”

It’s only in the movies that the woman says “Wow, that’s so nice. You weren’t trying to have sex with me. You like me for me!”

This is not to say that you should constantly be hitting on her and trying to have sex with her. There is something to be said for biding your time, pushing her away after you kiss her and saying “You’ve had enough.” And then *SMACK* on the ass.

What I’m talking about is the nice guy syndrome. You want so badly for her to think you are a good, nice person, that you don’t risk taking it to the next level. Read the rest of this entry »

Before I began doing pickup, I had it in my mind that women didn’t like me. If a woman caught me looking at her, I thought I’d creeped her out.

No matter what I did–if I worked out, if I dressed well, if I changed my style–the best I could do was try hard to get women to like me. I thought that if I could talk to a girl long enough, I could possibly convince her to like me.

I’ve had a number of girlfriends. And the funny thing was, it felt like with these girls, I wouldn’t have had to do much anyway, that I somehow could have gotten those girls from the start. Read the rest of this entry »

From the twilight of day till the twilight of evening, a leopard in the last years of the thirteenth century, would see some wooden planks, some vertical iron bars, men and women who changed, a wall and perhaps a stone gutter filled with dry leaves. He did not know, could not know, that he longed for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing things to pieces and the wind carrying the scent of a deer, but something suffocated and rebelled within him and God spoke to him in a dream: You live and will die in this prison so that a man I know of may see you a certain number of times and not forget you and place your figure and symbol in a poem which has its precise place in the scheme of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you will have given a word to the poem. God, in the dream, illumed the animal’s brutishness and the animal understood these reasons and accepted his destiny, but, when he awoke, there was in him only an obscure resignation, a valorous ignorance, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of a beast.

Years later, Dante was dying in Ravenna, as unjustified and as lonely as any other man. In a dream, God declared to him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, in wonderment knew at last who and what he was and blessed the bitterness of his life. Tradition relates that, upon waking, he felt that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something he would not be able to recuperate or even glimpse, for the machinery of this world is much too complex for the simplicity of man.

-Jorge Louis Borges

For my coworker and friend, Orlando, who died last night in a weird and tragic accident.