At a personal skills improvement course at work a few weeks back, the instructor asked us to write down a couple of topics that we wanted to get tips on before the class was over. I wrote down “how to chat up a beautiful girl at the bar“, while others wrote more serious work related stuff like “how to deal with difficult people”, “how to deal with criticism”. The heck, I said to myself, if you can chat up beautiful women, then who cares if you have difficult people around you, or if you are criticized. I never got any tips on that topic though, probably because I was too embarrassed to read it aloud.
I should recommend Neil Strauss to the company for the next training session. In between agonizing over his balding pate and lack of sex, he decided to do something about it. So he shaved his head and attended a class by ‘pickup artist’ Erik von Markovik, a.k.a “Mystery” where he transformed into a person who believed “he could seduce any woman in a club, bar, coffee shop or elevator.”
Mystery has a term for everything in the pickup game – a “neg” is a casual insult you tell a girl you’re interested in to show her you don’t think she’s so great (“Your nails look nice, are they real?” “Look, her nose wiggles when she laughs”). Walking up to a group of people and starting to talk to them is called “opening a set.” A “false time constraint” is a white lie that implies you’re not going to hang around and bother anybody (“I can only stay a minute,” “I have to get back to my friend”). Mystery encourages his students to tell stories that show DHV (demonstrations of higher value) and to look for IOI (indicators of interest) from their selected targets. (Yes, women are referred to as targets.)
A $2,250 bootcamp for 3 days is a cheap price to pay for such wisdom. Maybe I can get started by brushing up on the great ladder theory.
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