A Gay Friend Is The Best Wing

I have a friend who is not very good with women. He knows that I do well, so he recently asked me how I do it. Since asking that question of another individual back in 1998 is what set me on my path, I decided to give him an answer.

Caveat: I am not a “guru.” You will never receive any emails from me promising you that I have discovered the next step in the PUA evolution. I will never try to get you to buy something I made before “supplies run out.” I will never ask you to join my periodic email list. And I will certainly never ask you to pay me a monthly fee to belong to my bulletin board. Oh, how the community has changed ...

Learning pick up is simple. It’s about continuous improvement, to steal a concept from corporate America. Identify where you are today, identify where you want to be, and then make the changes necessary to get from the former to the latter.

The change from AFC to PUA begins with a nearly vertical learning curve, which quickly plateaus. I’d say from AFC to the plateau takes between six months to a year.

Allow me to define some of my terms.

I consider an AFC to be anyone who wants the company of a woman right now, and who lacks the skill to satisfy that desire.

I call you a PUA if you are always able to satisfy your need for female companionship with a phone call, or by meeting someone new at any time.

Boot camps are a fantastic way of accelerating the transition. I would say that a boot camp drops your time frame to about three months. The fastest way to get your fundamentals (body language, tonality, presence, social awareness, fashion, calibration, etc.) is to watch someone who has already been on that plateau for awhile and who is willing to provide you feedback on your abilities. Boot camps are phenomenal for this. If you can afford one, I highly recommend you go.

Research them before you buy, of course. The days where you could get a boot camp with Hypnotica, Style, Mystery, and Steve P all in the same location are long gone.

That said, I’ve heard wonderful things about the Love Systems boot camps nowadays.

Make sure what you're going to is an actual boot camp and not a seminar. Time in field separates the two.

If you can’t afford a boot camp, be very careful about how you handle your development. If you’re reading this, you probably also subscribe to other lists. You are probably a member of Strauss’s online community, and La Ruina’s, and whoever else has sprung up since Strauss’s book exposed the community’s marketability.

Those sources probably provide you with a lot of material. I’ve always said that learning pick up is analogous to learning juggling. You can read as many books as you want. You can watch all the videos you can get your hands on. In the end, you won’t learn anything until you’ve dropped a lot of balls.

So if you haven’t been to a boot camp, and if you’re not at a stage where you can walk into a group full of women you’ve never met and be accepted, ignore everything you see on the Internet. Ignore all the “OMG, , Open For The Latest Thing In Pick Up” blast emails. Ignore anything that calls itself the newest thing in pick up or the next big thing. The pick up marketers will send a lot of free videos and pdfs to you. In reality, these things are nothing more than commercials for another “next big thing.”

The basics will never change. Anyone who has ever played an organized sport will tell you that it’s the basics that win the event. I went to high school with a guy by the name of Kurt Angle. Some of you know him as a professional wrestler. Hopefully some of you know him as an Olympic gold medalist. I got to watch him go from freshman to senior, annihilating everyone that stood against him.

Do you want to know how he did it ? The duck under. Look the move up on the net. One move won him every match. One basic move that all wrestlers learn on their first day. His mastery of that move made him invulnerable. Think about that for a second ... his opponents knew exactly how he was going to beat them and still lost.

Pick up is no different. Until you hit the plateau, all of the new marketing nonsense flooding the community is of no use to you. In fact, most of it is just crap anyway. Think about the things these “gurus” are telling you:

“I’m only releasing 200 copies. If you don’t buy one right now you’ll never get one.” False scarcity. One of the oldest marketing tricks in the book. He only has 200 ? And he wants you, a person he has never met and in whom he has no personal stake, to get a copy before they run out ? Yeeaaahhh ...

“It’s the next step in pick up evolution.” I don’t even know where to begin attacking this one. Pick up is simple. There is no “next step.” There never will be. And even if there were, once you’re on the plateau, there’s very little that separates you from other PUAs that won’t come to you simply by plying (y)our new trade.

So ignore the hype when the next “guru” releases his limited edition next-big-thing. It’s neither of those things.

So … what to do ? As I’ve already said, if you are at level 0, boot camps are the number 1 solution. If you can’t afford a (quality) boot camp, allow me to suggest the following model:

1. Find a PUA. (MPUAs don’t exist. Guru’s don’t exist. Either someone is a PUA or they aren’t.) If your city has a lair, join it and explain exactly why you’re joining. Check out PAIR. Find someone who is on the plateau and who is willing to help you with your climb.

2. Stop reading emails, books, and pdfs about pickup. Well … finish this one and then stop. Remember, you’re learning to juggle, so books won’t help unless you’re looking to keep 3 or more of them in the air simultaneously.

3. Learn to dress. Learn about shoes. I accomplished this by getting some gay friends. No joke. I saw that they always dressed well, so I went into a local gay bar, walked up to the best dressed guy I could find and said, “Hi. I have no gay friends and I don’t know how to dress. Wanna be my friend ?” Chet and I are still the best of friends to this day. And I don’t have to keep track of fashion trends because he does for me. (By the way, a gay friend is the best wing in the world. Better even than a woman.)

4. Start doing something physical. I have found that if I work out before I go out, I have an easier time talking to strangers. It could be the endorphins. It could be that I’ve exhausted my body just enough that I don’t go into approach anxiety. It could just be psychosomatic. It works for me and it’s worked for everyone I’ve ever suggested it to.

5. Go out and watch your PUA mentor. No alcohol for you. Pay attention to how he stands. Listen to what he says. How does he respond to challenges from women ? From other men ? These are key skills on your journey to that plateau.

6. Go out and do it. No alcohol for you. Yeah, the first times suck. Yes, you’re going to get entirely blown out … a lot. So did your mentor. So did I. So did Mystery, Style, Brad P. … you have to push through the pain and learn from every blow out. Have your new mentor give you feedback.

(I almost don’t want to give this one away, but try saying this to one of the groups that blows you out: “Hi my name is X. I’m trying to learn how to pick up chicks. You guys just totally blew me out. Would you mind telling me where I lost it ?” And listen to them. Then recruit them as wingmen for you. Introduce them to your mentor and DHV him by saying he’s the one helping you learn.)

7. Repeat 5 and 6 until you reach the plateau. It couldn’t be any simpler.

Now get away from this computer and do it.