How Long Does It Take to Be Great with Women?
by 
Eric Disco
I remember it like it was yesterday.
It was a warm Friday evening, November 2005.
I was sitting in a subway car on my way to get coaching to learn how to meet women.
It was something I had never done before.
I noticed my reflection in the window. I was wearing a new black leather jacket I’d bought just for the occasion, and a wooly brown sweater underneath.
As I noticed my reflection in the window, I wondered if I could really turn into a pickup artist.
I’d read The Game, by Neil Strauss, a few weeks earlier.
It lit me on fire.
I read it in a few days, staying up the entire night on the last day reading it. I couldn’t put it down.
Do people really do this?
As excited as I was after reading The Game, everything changed when I went out a few days later to try to meet women.
Frankly I was too scared to try anything on my own.
I went on some forums and there was a guy named Brad P who was giving coaching. He seemed to really know what he was talking about, so I signed up for a night of coaching with him.
It would be me and three other guys paying $60 for a night out with Brad.
As I sat there on the train on my way to meet Brad, I looked at my reflection. I felt helpless and scared.
I wondered, if I could project myself five years in the future, would I be able to meet women anywhere?
Five years from now, would I be looking at someone who was unafraid to approach women?
Is it possible to get better at this stuff?
I’m often asked, how long does it take to get ‘good’?
While no one expects me to respond with a specific date or even say X years, they want a timeline. Perhaps 10,000 hours.
In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about how in 10,000 hours, you can become an expert at anything, whether it’s piano, surfing, or math. 10,000 hours, says Gladwell, is “the magic number of greatness.”
After reading Gladwell’s book, Dan McLaughlin decided to test out this theory and go from never having swung a golf club, to a professional golfer by putting in the requisite 10,000 hours. He is turning his life into an experiment. (Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?)
When Dan McLaughlin first pitched his idea to Christopher Smith, a Nike-affiliated coach who has written a book about golf, Smith was not just uninterested. He was insulted. Golf is famously frustrating. Smith told Dan it was much harder than he thought. He told him to Google K. Anders Ericsson at Florida State University, a psychology professor and a leading expert on expertise.
Dan Googled him. Then called him. Then read his scholarly work. Smith started to think Dan was more committed than he had originally thought. Perhaps Dan was an opportunity. How would he teach golf to a person who was relatively fit, clearly willing and totally untouched, with no bad habits to undo because there were no habits at all? Dan persuaded Smith to coach him.
There are more than 27 million people in this country who play golf. There are 125 permanent spots on the PGA Tour. Smith has told Dan the odds of him earning one of those spots are astronomically long. He picked golf, Dan says, because he wanted something not impossible but close. He grants that there’s a “99 percent chance I’m not going to become a PGA golfer.” But that’s not the point.
“Basically,” he told the people at the conference, “what I’m trying to do with this project is demonstrate how far you’re able to go if you’re willing to put in the time. “I’m testing human potential.”
Five years ago, I began my journey to become ‘a pickup artist.’ I wasn’t looking to become the best pickup artist in the world. But at the same time, I felt I had a world of potential inside me that I wasn’t living up to.
It is possible to put in 10,000 hours and become an ‘expert pickup artist.’ But it doesn’t works quite the way one would think.
Getting better with women, I’ve always said, is a lot more akin to becoming a better runner than learning math. You could possibly study math for 4 or 5 hours a day–or even more–but you can’t run for 5 hours a day.
Getting better with women has everything to do with your body–and not just anyone’s body–your body. Every person is different in how they attack this, what they’re looking for, and how they define success.
But I’ll map out a few pointers that will help along the way.
#1: Dream Big. Have clearly defined and specific goals. You want these goals to be lofty. Make them as big as possible. And write it down somewhere.
Do you want to be living with three porn stars Charlie Sheen style? Write it down.
Do you want a super-model looking girlfriend with a PhD in astrophysics? Write it down.
Whatever you want, write that dream down. There is no way to tell whether you’ve reached your goal unless you have a specific goal.
‘Being great with women’ is not an achievable goal because you’ll never know when you reach it.
#2: Take small steps. While this seems counter to #1, you need to have manageable actions you can take on a daily basis.
Make sure it’s something you can continually and enjoyably do every single day.
Me giving you a number like 10,000 hours or 3 years or any other number can easily lead to you trying to “get it over with” instead of learning to enjoy the process.
You’re better off starting out easy and doing something really simple, like asking one person for directions every day for a week, instead of putting a ton of pressure on yourself and deciding you’re going to do five approaches every day.
Trust me, if you’ve never done it before, you won’t be able to go out and do five approaches. And even if you can, you won’t be able to keep it up every day.
And so, the big question. After five years of doing this stuff, have I become pickup artist extraordinaire?
Have I become truly great with women?
I can tell you I’ve reached all of my goals, from dating multiple attractive women, to being with head-turning hotties.
When I’m with a girl, it’s extremely rare to walk into a place where this woman on my arm isn’t the hottest girl in the room.
It’s all relative, of course. I’m still out there fighting the good fight, and mostly, challenging myself on a daily basis.
There are ups and downs.
Some days I feel like I’m king of the world. I can’t believe how far I’ve come. I’m amazed at all the things I can do now that I couldn’t before.
Other days, doubt rushes in like a tsunami and I wonder if I’m fit to tell anybody what to do when it comes to women.
Time washes away the significance of my achievements like sandcastles on the beach.
I accept all of these feelings, both good and bad.
It means I’m living.
I fully experience the thrill of connecting with someone amazing, along with the heartbreak of rejection–more so than I ever have before.
Because now, I’m empowered to take the initiative I wasn’t before.
And that makes life incredible.
Posted in Acceptance, Self-Improvement Strategies | 
17 Comments »
excellent. Arguably the best article you have posted eric.
I was waiting for something like this because after my approaches I am always thinking of reaching that elusive stage but the more I think about the more I reckon I am at the stage and getting better.
Steve
Great job reaching your goals Eric!
Thanks Stephen and Cameron.
Eric
Well done :)
On that ‘take small steps’ thing? Hugely important. I started working on this around late 2007, and by early 2008 I was making some decent progress. Then I started trying to push the envelope, trying to say and do things that really weren’t me at all in order to blow past barriers…
Didn’t work. Knocked me back to square one for a long time…and only now I’m slowly starting to break out of it at a really core level. But now I realise what I did wrong…gotta pace yourself. It’s completely different for everyone, though–you have to learn your own course.
Words can not express how forever grateful I am for you on your journey to self discovery and taking us all along for the ride. I could only speak for myself, but thank you for inspiring me!
Yes this might be our best article and to me personally, most relevant. This hit me right in the face. I started with David D and then found the game when it came out in 2005. I am better overall with women in that I have learned to tease, flirt, dress better and this has helped me be more comfortable with women overall. Great tools to use and I have been using them ever since….but I am still basically dating woman on the same level I did before. I have yet to date a real attractive woman (say a level or two above me in looks) no matter what I have learned. I read on another forum about guy’s plateauing. I have tried but its still the same level for almost 10 years now.
With leaving the holy word of “confidence” aside (my confidence is fine it is just the results are not there) are there guys that plateau on certain levels? Are there guys that no matter what they do will not and cannot (with due exceptions) date a hotter woman?
Eric do you think even with reading books such as the Game and working ones tail off, do you think guys plateau? Say hypothetically a guy that is a 6 just cannot date or attract a woman that is an 8 or an 9? That I would be interesting and I would be grateful for a reply on that.
@Thomas I know you were asking Eric to respond but I’d like to chime in too. First, a few questions. Do you take chances? Do you talk about sex? Meaning, do your conversations with women tend to get really sexy very shortly after you meet them? Do you touch her, hold her hand, hug her? Do you disagree with her, call bullshit on some things she tells you, tell her she doesn’t know what she’s talking about? When you tease her, what kind of teasing is it? Is it gentle, or is it the kind that entails a serious risk of getting blown out? When you approach women, how often do you get blown out? In other words, how often is their reaction not only negative but severe enough to be called a real blowout?
can you do a template maybe for your next post of how you construct your goals?
Thomas–
Don’t take this the wrong way, (and as Lee says I know you’re waiting for Eric’s comments) but it sounds like it really IS your confidence that’s getting in the way. You may be incredibly confident in lots of ways, but just the fact that you’re saying ‘i can get x but for some reason I JUST CAN”T get y’ means that you haven’t really let go, so you’re pressurizing yourself–whehter you realise it or not– when you see girls who you perceive as being above you in some way (i.e. how hot she is)
You HAVE to lose this ‘I’m a 7…can I get a 9????’ mentality. This is dating, not a math test. Despite what some people think, the attractiveness of the girl really isn’t much of a factor in itself (ok, maybe at a nightclub…or in South Beach, but that’s really it). You expect it to be a factor, and that’s the issue. The doofy looking guys who you see sometimes walking around with hot chicks–generally it’s not because of money, or cars–it’s because they don’t care that they’re doofy…and they don’t care how hot the girl is.
I’m not just kj’ing either…this is my personal experience.
@Lee. Yes I tease and try to set the frame as early as possible in that I touch say starting with a high five to extending my arm and twirling her. This does open well but from there is just seems to fall flat. I used to approach alot. I took the Brad P thing of “blow me or blow me out” and just approached and approached. I still do now to a degree but not as much as I used too due to time (I am having to work more and harder than ever) and just burn out from approaching. Right now I get a number about 1 out of 20 approaches. Out of those few numbers I have say 2 dates out of 10 but again thats after tons of approaches and I do not live in a community of area with alot of single women. On line has pretty much stopped after I turned 40. Funny thing, when I put my age at 35 its much more receptive but that cant last. She will find out and from that few that did, they were not very happy….As for blow outs, if I go to a bar or a night club, I get blown out across the board. The only approaching I do now is day game and thats a 1 for 20 type thing. I love tall blondes and a goal of mine was to date one. Never happened. I have approached tons of them at home, via my travels, through friends and since I have been in all this, I have never dated one and had like one number.
@Goodyearblimp. No I am pretty confident. I just want this stuff to work. Also, I rarely see attractive women with dorky guys. I travel alot and rarely do I see dorky guys with a hot woman. I mostly see likes with likes.
So with all this I question that certain guys can and certain guys cannot pickup hot chicks.
Look if I was a keyboard jockey, thats one thing. I am not doing anything so yes, nothing is going to happen. But when you spend thousands on products, bootcamps, books and approach a ton and nothing happens you have to really wonder. And I am not alone. I know a number of guys that are in the same boat. So is there a life preserver?….
@Thomas Here is why I asked those questions. Usually, when I see a guy who’s plateaued, it’s because he doesn’t take enough chances. He may approach a lot, and may even get into a lot of conversations, but he’s fallen into a kind of safe game, a game with which he is very comfortable. If a guy is average looking and has no simple means for demonstrating value – his work is too abstract, he has few interesting hobbies, etc – he can still do well if his personality is really big. But developing that kind of big personality requires taking a lot of chances – talking about sex, touching, asking her things she doesn’t want to talk about. That’s what a rock star would do. He would comfortably walk outside all of the boundaries of polite society. Say we’re in a conversation, Thomas, and I’m one of these gorgeous blondes. I will play along. Can you demonstrate to me how you’d get me to talk about sex? Let’s pretend we’re having this conversation live. You go. I’ll answer. Then you go again.
@Lee I’d love to see where this ‘conversation’ would go. Talking about sex is something I never do. Even when i was dating this bi-sexual chick who was kinda freaky, I couldnt bring it up or delve deeper into the topic mostly due to my lack of experience and knowledge on the subject. Im a lot more knowledgable now than I was just 6 months ago though but still that topic is just crazy personal. I would love to pry into it though, I cant imagine where such a fun and crazy conversation would lead to. As for your comments lee, I always love your take here on erics blog, thanks for all your input!
@Relentless Thanks for the kind words, bro. The type of sex talk I mean is not the serious – let’s explore our innermost inhibitions and how we feel about them – sort of thing. I mean you’ve just met a cute girl, the conversation is going pretty well, but you’re in that pleasant / harmless zone, so you want to turn up the heat. For example, if there is a pause in conversation the girl tries to fill it by asking something lame like “So what did you do today?” I will make a buzzer sound with my mouth – bzzzzzt – and say “That’s conversation filler. Surely we can find something more exciting to talk about. Let me see… (pause) Ok, have you ever kissed a girl, and did you love it or hate it?” She tells her story and then I have a story that I follow up with that takes us deeper into forbidden territory. A man should always be able to lead a woman away from lukewarm conversation. It demonstrates confidence. It shows that he takes chances. And the fact that he’s comfortable doing it probably means that he’s done it successfully before. This implies pre-selection.
@Lee Hmm.. What if the girl said ‘no’, is closed off to the conversation and/or got defensive? Would you keep pressing on? Change the topic to something else crazy like if she ever made love outside the bedroom? I suppose by that time if she wouldnt open up I suppose one might respond with something along the lines of how you ‘like girls who are a little more adventurous, it wouldnt work out between us” in a joking way of course but its probably the truth anyways.
Thanks bud, now I gotta something to say when I run out of things to say. Talk about a ‘secret weapon’ lol.
Yes, teasing her for not playing along is great. I also do this thing where I make a surprised face, raise one arm, and call out to the imaginary waiter “Check!” Or I look at my watch hand (I don’t wear a watch), shake my head, and say “Oh boy, look at the time!” Then I let her off the hook for a while, talk about something tame, and try again. In the end, if I can’t get her out of safe mode, I’m not likely to get the experience I’m looking for. So a certain number of failures — even bad blowouts — are acceptable to get more women out of safe mode. This is particularly important for guys trying to date much hotter women. They are used to guys going into safe mode around them, so when a guy takes chances and knows how to play with them, it creates attraction.
I love how you’ve coined the phase “safe mode”…..its so true :-)
Love it Lee, I’ll be sure to come back here if i ever come across some noteworthy experiences, thanks!