There are many reasons why some dating coaches maintain the attrition rate of new students in the seduction community as 95% within a 6 month period.

95%!?! For every 10 students, 9 of them give up within 6 months? That’s a huge number, if it were statistically true. I have no idea if it is. Based on my personal experience over the past 3 years I believe that roughly, for every 10 guys that join:

• 4 guys drop out without giving it significant, disciplined effort. They run into their fears and it stares them down. They start making excuses as to why PU doesn’t work or limiting beliefs about their job, race, height, weight, etc.
• 3 guys get relatively good, and make significant improvements from their original dating life. But, they end up in a mediocre relationship with the first girl that loves them (I was like this too) and then get “comfortable” without achieving true “Choice”
• 2 guys achieve true “choice”. By this definition, it is a man’s power to have options. In other words, he has the skills and abilities to CHOOSE receive sex and intimacy from a girl that he is very attracted to, at any point in time. A fellow PUA once told me: ”having 1 option isn’t really an option. It’s an ultimatum. Having 2 options isn’t really having options, it’s a dilemma. Having 3 options or more means having real options.”
• 1 out of 10 guys get super good. Some become instructors. Others use their PU skills and leverage it as businessmen, artists. These guys not only have choice, but they have a lifestyle that allows them choice with the hottest women that usually guys have to compete fiercely over.

I thought I was the shit by practicing on the occasional weekends but it wasn’t until recently that I see how much more I have to learn. You see, I made a decision to quite the corporate 9-5 to start my own business. This is a huge choice and it has impacted all areas of my life. Going out on the weekends and being a rockstar and then returning to the office on Monday and feigning beta-ness to report to the bosses just doesn’t jive, and I think may people lie to themselves about reasons as to how this could work. It doesn’t work for me. Your lifestyle must be congruent to your real identity for true happiness.

It is true that everyone has different masks and different personalities for different situations. If I was the CEO of my own company, I can’t exactly act like a rockstar in a staff meeting. Unless maybe if I was the CEO of an entertainment company (Think Ari Gold, Entourage). To get good or to find that happy life, you have to make a decision regarding your full time job and how it aligns with your personal goals in the long run. Until you do this, you will always feel a sense of disconnect and that “something’s missing” feeling, like Mr. Anderson before he was “rescued” from the Matrix.

A funny thing happened to me in field this weekend. I got ridiculously harsh reactions. I also got really good ones. Before, the bad reactions would get to me. Now, they were irrelevant. The brain does not register it. Next focus, next interaction. This has transferred into my professional life as well. Most of the tasks at hand are “busy” work. The real 20% of the work that bring in the revenue should be your priority.

Obama showed the same focus when someone asked him if a racist comment should be punished. Irrelevant. Does not help achieve goal. He eloquently dismissed it, and then focused on talking about what he’s going to do to change the game in Washington. Once you know your life goal, the regular distractions that used to shake you or show up on your radar simply becomes irrelevant. Bad set? IRRELEVANT. Bitch shield? IRRELEVANT. Shit test? IRRELEVANT. TIME TO FUCK. (Jeffy!)

Your unconscious and conscious minds join forces to filter them out. Consciously, you identity useless or negative comments that do not help you achieve your goal. Unconsciously, your mind puts up this “emotional barrier” against the feelings of attack, embarrassment so that they no longer emotional deter you. Sometimes they may still sting for the first few seconds, as social rejection is biologically imprinted in our brains as a negative association but this feeling goes away relatively quickly instead of staying with you and affecting your state over a longer period of time.

Define your life goal. The distractions will fade away.

I believe that the more interactions a person makes with someone, the more likely they are to be happy. This is because they are in touch with the world, the society around them. For example, working at the Guess! retail store has forced me to become more social, and greet all the customer that come in. Whether or not I am having a bad day, the very role of my job in greeting people makes me more social, and more happy. Imagine yourself in your daily life. Are you someone who interacts with a lot of people during the day? Or do you feel alone as you go about your day? Are the guy who people come to at work to chat about life or ask for help? Don’t these people seem to hold more power at work too, even if their positions do not have as much authority? Even leaders are more open and more aware of what is going on when they interact with more people.

Charlie Brigante says, “When you can’t see the angles no more, you in trouble” – this is particularly true because the wider a net you cast socially, the more you know and the more your feel connected with your community.

We know that women pickup on this “social value” theory, in that if you are a bartender or owner of a restaurant, people are always reacting to you because they want something from you (drinks, tables, etc). In these micro-social environments, the girls will sleep with the bartender or the manager because of his perceived social value.

I call these interactions social kinetic energy. That is, the energy that we feel when we’re socially connecting with the world around us. This is a powerful feeling and instead of taking away energy, it adds life and mana into the mana pool. You feel less tired and more alive. In other countries around the world, people understand this. Look at the slums of India or the Favelas in Brazil – people are poor and life can be hard, but the buzzing energy of the place is unexpected. Families living together, people stopping on the street to talk to one another. I believe that in order to become a true life artist, you have to build a lifestyle that involves a strong social kinetic energy momentum with the people you choose to have in your life. A perfect example of this is Hugh Hefner, who has built his own pirate empire in his Playboy mansion.

Despite poverty, Brazilian Favelas buzz with the energy of life

This idea also extends to others who are negative social influences. The more negative influences you have, the more you may hate the world. For example, the beggar who keeps getting rejected by passerbys for money. However I do believe that if you went up and talked to 100 people, you will find that most of them are nice people at the core. We know this because of the countless cold approaches we have done as PUAs.

Social kinetic energy is also only as effective as the people you interact with, and our core inner charm, to some degree. For example, if a hot blonde teacher is living in a school district, she may feel fulfilled with her job, but inside, she wants to meet people that are more like her. Maybe she has dreams of becoming a model, or meeting a more fashionable man in a bigger city instead of married men in the suburbs. Kinetic energy is most effective when it is being exchanged of people who are important to you (i.e. family) and people who reflect relevant social value to you. Think about Hugh Hefner. He has his brother by his side. His servants. Mary. His wife down the street. The playmates in the playmate house. “The Playboy Family is huge.” A man who truly has built his own social domain, now gets to enjoy it and lives a very fulfilling life.

The right social environment+ a healthy level of social kinetic energy means, I believe, a fulfilling life. As we search for these things in our capitalistic culture, never forget that. I am reminded of a this story about the people of Roseto from Outliers: The Story of Success:

Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of Rome in the Apennine foothills of the Italian province of Foggia…In January of 1882 a group of eleven Rosetans – ten men and one boy — set sail for New York. They spent their first night in America sleeping on the floor of a tavern on Mulberry Street, in Manhattan’s Little Italy… The Rosetans began buying land on a rocky hillside connected to Bangor by a steep, rutted wagon path….

Wolf was a physician. He studied digestion and the stomach and taught in the medical school at the University of Oklahoma. He spent his summers on a farm in Pennsylvania, not far form Roseto… We invited the whole town of Roseto to be tested (for high cholesterol heart attacks)

The results were astonishing. In Roseto, virtually no one under fifty-five had died of a a heart attack or showed any signs of heart disease. For men over sixty-give, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half that of the United States as a whole….

There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn’t have anyone on welfare. They we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn’t’ have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That’s it.

So, what happened exactly? Why were these people living longer and happier than those with more money or more technology?

What Wolfe began to realize was that the secret of Roseto wasn’t diet or exercise or genes or location. It had to be Roseto itself…

As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they figured out why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backwards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town’s social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saws the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under two thousand poeple. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.

In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania, the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.

“I remember going to Roseto for the first time, and you’d see three-generational family meals, all the bakeries, the people waling up and down the street, sitting on their porches talking to each other, the blouse mills where the women worked during the day, while the men worked in the slate quarries,” Bruhn said. “It was magical.”

No one [in the medical community] was used to thinking about healthy in terms of community.

Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that they wouldn’t be able to understand why someone was healthy if all they did was think about an individual’s personal choices or actions in isolate. They had to look beyond the individual. They had to understand the culture he or she was a part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town their families came from. They had to appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.”

I believe the same philosophy here applies to pickup. Nevermind looking at a newbie at night game approach after approach (although this is sometimes helpful, over focus on it and you end up being a social robot). On too many nights I have seen guys with no game getting blowout after blowout or mediocre success and flake numbers. I then turn to see “naturals” who are getting girls left and right. It was nothing to do with the mechanics of their approach. Their problems originate from their inner game, their lifestyle and their understanding of who they are in this world.

To become a master PUA, to me, is in some ways to become a man with a fulfilling life. Let us go beyond “pickup artists”. Let us become Life Artists and be happy not just with girls, but with our own lives.

Part of this is due to Accutane. 60 mg a day does takes it toll on the body. For the most part, the drug was considered a miracle drug when introduced over 2 decades ago, as the only “cure” for acne breakouts. While there has been no conclusive scientific study that links depression or suicidal thoughts to the drug, many patients have acknowledged a known depression curve when on high doses of Accutane. For me, this feeling just means that if you do nothing or have nothing exciting going on in your life, you will feel a little “blue”. Thus, a normal person with a healthy social life need not worry for the most part.

The medicine, at best, is a slight influence on how I feel. It tends to enhance any negative thoughts that you currently have. Behavior and conscious thought is still personal choice, as we deliberately control and direct them.

One of the challenges I have been dealing with is how I can reach my goals. The barriers seem insurmountable. Too hard. Too many obstacles. Impossible. I wished that I wasn’t so ambitious, and that my dream to build my own playboy mansion and have a shot at becoming really, model good looking was exactly that – a nice dream to which I can hang my hopes and dreams by, and pretend to really care about it when I talk to people that asked. But it is so much more than that. It is becoming a burning desire.

One of the problems, as correctly noted by friend and PUA Serum is that my goals are too high. As such, I go on spurts when I would go out and go “sarging“. When I don’t get the girl I want, or I end up closing a girl that I think is below my standards, I will get really angry/depressed/in denial. See Kubler-Ross model for more details.

After this “wave”, I go back to my normal routine. While I consider myself rather successful being in “normal mode”, this person, this version of AlphaWolf will not get me to where I want to go – building my own version of the Playboy mansion. To achieve this, I must become someone else. In this sense, the lessons in pickup and entrepreneurship are very real. How can you become a sexy worthy guy, if you have never actually BEEN sex worthy?  How do you develop a rich person’s mentality, when you’ve never BEEN rich?

On a deep level and to a large extent in the artist’s exterior, he or she will have to fundamentally change who they are. Being politically correct, people will always say, “become attractive! become confident! But while doing so, remember to retain your best qualities and who you REALLY are!!!”

But the truth is not that simple. I believe that on a very deep level, for a non sex worthy guy (non-natural) to become sex worthy, something in him fundamentally changes. I am starting to understand this now. As you work on this, something clicks. You no longer “value chase” girls. They chase you. You chase them for fun, not becasue you are seeking value. It is an equal exchange. There is no fake it til you make it. No bullshit. No lies. No elaborate tricks. It simply is.

YOU. ARE. A. SEX. WORTHY. GUY.

The truth shall set you free.

A word of wisdom came from an unexpected source: a shy Indian guy at work, who needed a ride home today. He is a stand up guy, but I always thought that he wasn’t very interesting. I asked him for his view on life and our goals, given our workload at the office. He said something really interesting:

“Sometimes you make ‘long term’ goals, but the long term is hard to predict and hard to see. So you have short term goals, and you work to get there within a reasonable amount of time, and short goal after short goal, hopefully that allows you to move towards your longer term goals.”

I still have not figured out how to take this mindset, and create a disciplined lifestyle around it. Too many times, I have said “fuck it” to picking up girls because I cannot take the rejection, and also because my PU skills, while it gets me laid with (let’s be frank) a decent amount of effort, it always feels like I am the one doing the “chasing”. I have seen guys who do not chase. The girls choose them. There are 2 extremes, the rich guys, who get the gold digging girls (these are broad generalizations, I know hang with me).

The other type of guy is just the “sex worthy guy”, as we describe in pickup as a guy who you know, on an exterior and subtle level, understands attraction and can trigger it in woman, and can sexually escalate to a close. The thing PUAs and the community often misses is that this guy has his inner game down. He understands who he is. He has a strange, almost untouchable sense of confidence in himself.  The inner game is the essense of the fire, and the techniques are simply ways to manipulate the flame.

AFC Adam notes in the under 21 convention, that becoming a natural requires 3 things:

1. Confidence in yourself: without confidence, you have no hope

2. Abundance: you need women in your life

3. An ability to sexually escalate

At the end of the day, pickup is pickup. It is a skill set and mindset of picking up girls. It is nothing more, nothing less. The 3 pillars of your life, wealth, health, and love must be in order in order to feel truly happy. This beings me back to my original points:

1. I don’t want to “pickup” girls because I feel like I am not at a point where my inner game and passive value traits are allowing me to be, at a base frequency, the sex worthy guy.

2.  On the same note, while I love working on business and work, doing this 100% of the time does make me depressed, because I know I am not living up to my full potential. And the reason we are running with this was to have more free time and financial resources to pursue our passions in pickup and the arts! Guitar, Martial Arts, Dance, Art.

I will continue to post my conflicts in the personal life section, in hopes that others can benefit from reading about my experience.