Friend calls you up to go out, there’s an event at a bar. Same scene, same girls. You wonder if you should muster up the courage and energy to go out, or decide to stay in and make some progress on that website you have been trying to launch in the past 6 months.

Scenario 2 – you have been doing well at work lately – new job and new promotion. 2% salary raise. Yeh. You decide to go out more this week with your friends. You get a few number closes, but none of them return or pick up when you text/call. You wonder where your game has gone wrong, and after a while decide “fuck it” and focus on some other area in your life. Maybe you’ll muster up the anger or motivation to call up a few PU friends and ask for their advice, but ultimately, the game dynamics go back to you.

You go back to focus on work, but you realize that you are working your ass off for your company and they are making all of the money. The constant ass kissing and power maneuvers at work get to you. You decide to start your own company on the side. You do some research and work, but really have no idea where to start. You write a business plan.

A friend’s birthday comes up – you decide to go. You hit it off with this girl, and decide your game isn’t so bad after all. You go out a few more times over the next 2 weeks – some nights are good, some night are not. A lot of effort is being put into this and the results of lays is not showing.

If the above 5 paragraphs sound remotely familiar, that is because I have experienced it first hand. I have been writing these “Business vs. Love” posts for…. 1 year now!

It took a some simple advice from one group member, a Stanford PhD student at our MasterAlliance meeting to wake up me, “R, maybe there are just excuses? I mean, when I didn’t want to work out, I was throwing out the exact same reasoning as you. These are just excuses that stand in your way. Maybe I am wrong, but think about it.”

He’s right. The truth is, if it came down to it, I would choose love over money. Because love transcends material things, even this life, money is only a tool we use to trade things of perceived value in this world. But achieving both often means going after something the right way. You want to pickup a girl? Focus and learn from each set’s mistake. Don’t over analyze your sets, and focus on your skill set. Film yourself if you have to to see your flaws.

Waiting for that business plan? It is not going to write itself. Stop watching porn and if you are going to blow off your friends, make a commitment to finish 20% of that plan by the time you go to sleep. These are things that are definite and require energy, but the fact is sometimes this pain of exerting energy is better than the pain of mind-numbing and time passing that comes from doing a lot of things that are 1. half assed and 2. not significant anyway.

“With Scarcity comes Clarity” – Sergey said recently in the economic downturn, and this is another sage advice that I am lucky enough to see working at Google.

It might be irrelevant here, but the term “Platonic Love” comes from Plato’s famous philosophical dialog “Symposium” (A MUST reading for any thinking person). In that dialog Plato gives probably the only definition of love in the history of human thought that can be considered as valid. Platonic Love is the complete realization of the unity of souls between the two human beings, in which they both perceive God in each other. This kind of love means complete trust, complete self-sacrifice, complete compassion, complete mutual belonging, and it can occur between two people of any gender as sexual partners or friends. So in the state of Platonic Love sex is an option but not a requirement, therefore essentially the Platonic Love can either take a form of deepest friendship or deepest romantic relationship. Therefore, the Platonic Love is the highest achievable form of friendship AND sexual love equally, the absolute form of love achievable in the material world, and as you can see, it has nothing to do whatsoever with a situation when the two people hardly know each other and make small talk.

There are many of these “intimacy” and relationship based organizations out there, and they have been around for some time. I think OneTaste does a good job in helping men (and women) understand what connection is and how to manage a relationship. Some of their approach towards PU is also useful. For example, we role played with some of women on the “tests” (AKA Shit Tests) that women play and how to negate or go around them. Below are the notes form our meeting:

1. Don’t be played by the game, become a player.

2. Women can tell when a man has been talking to women. Relates a lot of Zan’s idea of “seducer’s aura”. (I found that quite interesting.)

3. Be genuine and real with who you are and the attraction will be real.

4. Body language and pausing when asking questions, giving her some space to response

5. Women consciously or unconsciously test men -it is just who they are – you must be able to deal with these tests on your quest to become the alpha male.

6. If you are turned on, she will be turned on

Now, we realized something during this also – that they are not technique based. A lot of this is based on philosophy and more so “way of living”. Thus, I think these groups are useful for those who have more natural game styles or are in a higher level of PU where by they are already dealing with serious relationship issues. Because let’s face it – beyond the PU and the lay, it is a relationship between 2 people and and in and of itself is one of the most complex things in life.

I still believe in technique, and there are many that teach this, including TMM, RSD, AM, PUATraining (London), among others. What’s important is that the community today has become a free and growing marketplace, where one can choose to learn from whomever they want.

Going back to the nature of women – Maybe picking up a girl is easy, compared to the task of understanding women.