In many lay reports and game stories, you only see the tip of the spear… you see the open, the initial interactions, some dates, and the lay. You (typically) don’t see the numerous hours, days, months, years spent developing the skills necessary to get to the open and the lay.
I say this because I read some guys lamenting how game doesn’t work for them, how they don’t understand why it works for other guys, etc. To take myself as an example, I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent in the gym, at the yoga studio, or playing sports. I haven’t spent very much time on shopping/fashion, but I have spent more time on those things than the median guy (I have heard guys say things like, “I only shop at Costco”). I don’t know how much time I’ve spent working, but it’s a lot of time and seems to be more than average. I spend zero time on video games and very little on TV or social media. Many guys become invested in professional sports… why watch a bunch of millionaires you don’t know, who don’t care about you, doing something that doesn’t matter? The time other guys spend watching millionaires chase one another around a ball, I am at the gym, dating, reading, cooking, going out with friends, etc.
These practices compound over time. A guy who has been doing compound lifts for a year has advantages over guys who have been doing them for a month. A guy who has a consistent work record had advantages over guys who don’t. A guy with a lot of experience with women has advantages with the next woman.
You don’t know how many books I’ve read about women, evolutionary psychology, and desire.
You don’t know how many times I’ve failed.
You don’t know how many times I’ve been frustrated, justifiably or not.
I’m writing all this because I read about a lot of guys who are starting from a super low level. Guys who don’t realize that they are sometimes competing with guys who have spent many years improving themselves and their value delivery mechanisms. If you’re a guy starting from a low place, you may need to spend a lot of time improving yourself, your life, and your value-delivery all at the same time. You cannot get where you want to go without great, effective effort.
(“Effective” effort… a lot of guys seem to put in a lot of ineffective effort, then wonder why things are not working out for them.)
In some ways, I have been working on building and maintaining value since I was a teenager. That’s true in social network terms, in sports/athletics terms, in work terms (I have had some kind of job more or less continuously since I was 16), and in skill terms. If you are an average flabby/overweight guy whose life consists of a boring job followed by fast food, video games, porn, and TV… you may need a complete life overhaul. I’m working with decades of continual effort, and an average guy is probably not going to see results with a week or two of effort. Since I’m not trying to sell a magic self-improvement program that will help you overhaul your life in just one month for a small initial fee of $99, I can say that.
There is no easy way; there is only the hard way. Some guys are reaping dividends from years, sometimes a lifetime, of work. Some guys come from relatively fortunate backgrounds. Some guys don’t. If you come from a shit background, you may have to spend hours, days, months, years attempting to correct.
As a guy, you can start doing things right today, and your efforts may not pay dividends for months or years. But what is the alternative? That you never get where you want to go?
You are competing for young hot chicks. If you don’t want to compete, hunt for older, not-hot chicks, and you will not have to compete as much. This is why sports are so useful for young people, and sometimes older people: they teach you how to compete.
Everyone has struggle. When you are looking at porn, remember that the chick is typically being paid to be there, and that porn caters to the male fantasy of having young hot chicks readily available for NSA sex. Just like romance novels (romance novels are porn for chicks: if you do not already know this, why don’t you?), cater to the female fantasy of having a top 1% man prove his intense masculinity, then commit to a basic chick (the heroine) for no good reason. Fantasy has its place, I don’t deny that, but if you indulge in too much, you don’t get the feedback you need from reality. The Internet is filled with people, guys and chicks, who have too little reality feedback, or who can’t accept the feedback reality gives them. I will save the “Internet people problem” for another time, but, if you are one of them, get offline, the sooner the better.
Guys who get unhappy that the chicks they want are rejecting them, need to improve their value and value-delivery mechanism (aka game). Chicks who get unhappy about the way guys don’t attend to her at age 35 like they did at age 25 have the same issues… except they can’t improve their value much… call me a feminist, but I feel compassionate towards chicks who mis-use their value. I’ve seen it put this way: imagine you’re handed a million-dollar check at age 18. What would you do with it? Some guys would sensibly invest in an index fund and reap the gains for their lives, most would blow it on stupid shit. Hot chicks are getting a million-dollar check at age 18.
I don’t know who first came up with that metaphor, but it’s incredibly accurate. It is possible to get some normal chicks to behave like porn stars, for an individual guy, but it’s typically a process… a process that we call game… and game is a combination of value + value delivery.
Many guys seem not to realize that attempting game without some underlying value will always be hard. Attempting game that is in no way congruent with a guy’s underlying personality will always be hard. Many guys want fast results and don’t see the failures, the value-building efforts, and the rejection that top guys have, or must take. Women are ruthless in evaluating men and most guys don’t know what women actually like, want, and look for. Most guys want the same type of hot girls, often without building up through lower-value girls. Most guys have spent way too much time watching pornography and TV and way too little time with actual, real-world girls. Real-world girls provide the best educations, educations that can’t be gotten only through reading. The more time spent with real-world girls, especially time spent trying to seduce and f**k them, the better the player will get. Older guys who’ve not put in this time will have problems. Younger guys should be striving to put in this time. These statements are compatible with Female “friends:” the comprehensive statement, if you read both posts carefully and comprehensively. Even time spent with girls who are on the border of attractiveness is better than time spent with phones and TVs.
The Red Quest 
I have a lot of stories about girls… more than the average man. I had two dates today, both from daygame, with cute girls (one was Chinese, actually, she was wonderful), that I met, with no connections… sounds good, huh?
I have also approached about 7,000 girls on the street in the last 4-5 years. That is not an exaggeration. I am about to do the numbers for Shanghai, but let’s assume I approached ~150-200 girls from that trip alone. I have already done that many here, and I’ll do over 400 before I leave Japan. That is just the last 4 months.
Yes, I get some dates. I get laid… not as often as I’d like, but I do. But it takes work.
But the real advantage is the EXPERIENCE I have. I barely notice the losses, the blowouts, the rejections. They sting, but they are not memorable. They are part of the game. But I do notice each time I claim a new REFERENCE EXPERIENCE. Ref exps are the keys that open the next seduction, and the harder seductions, and the more rare situations. And these lessons are hard to learn.
I have heard some of RedQuest’s stories. I can’t imagine the “spell book” of reference experiences that guy has. Hard earned.
This is how mastery is built.
Yes… game is not easy. But it most definitely works. I am 46 years old, I should not be able to do this. But you got to work at it. You got to earn it.
And earning it… is hard, but it’s fun. It’s talking to girls. It can be a wonderful lifestyle… but you got to get started. And work at it.
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Man, I admire your tenacity and work rate. That’s an incredible number of opens.
I think that if I were more of a maximizer and less of a satisficer, I would have gotten some hotter chicks… but in pure numbers and experiences, I’m quite content. By accident I figured out some things that worked for me, and I’ve been working those things since.
I think it takes a lot of experience to make a modern relationship work, too. As I think about a long-term relationship… I am also thinking about many of my shorter-term experiences, and trying to aggregate those into a model for mutual cooperation (which is hard to achieve in modern society, as modern society encourages the short term so much).
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> Man, I admire your tenacity and work rate. That’s an incredible number of opens.
It’s talking to girls. When I’m not doing it… I miss it. If you like women, it is a wonderful way to spend your time.
> I think that if I were more of a maximizer and less of a satisficer, I would have gotten some hotter chicks
It has been a surprising breakthru for me that the “hotter chicks” thing is less and less of a focus. I want hot chicks… I like BEAUTY… I like to look at the face of the girl I am with and say, “Wow, you are beautiful.” “What a great body.” But that is less and less what it was when I was younger.
I think men don’t know what they want until they have had a lot of experience. What is “hot” is more/more subtle for me. I might take a more irregular body with “perfect skin.” I know I completely reject “instagram” hotness. That is not what I am after at all.
I think a lot of guys are after what their “eyes”/mind THINK are hot, and not what will actually make them hot in terms of sex and relationship. I am not talking about “love” here. For me this is something like how feminine she is (but likely more subtle than that)… and how a woman could be “hot” but not feminine and I would think she was gross. About how she could be “hot” but “cold and empty” and I would have no interest at all.
This is more/more true for me.
> By accident I figured out some things that worked for me
This is a great line. Many of our big “breakthrus” are likely accidents. This is part of the “work.” Get out there, do a lot of things… and be surprised as you start to “get it” in ways you weren’t expecting.
Xsplat made a comment about “trying to grow phantom limbs.” That is a great metaphor for trying to grow into something you can’t even articulate. A lot of progress in that domain will be “accidental.”
I can run approaches… but the lessons from those approaches are often a surprise.
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@Nash
>>This is a great line. Many of our big “breakthrus” are likely accidents. This is part of the “work.” Get out there, do a lot of things… and be surprised as you start to “get it” in ways you weren’t expecting.
I have been trying to notice things that work and then do more of those things. I also try, not always successfully, to get the ego out, and to focus on what I want and on what works. I wrote the book to try and let players know that there is this alt ecosystem available… that most guys are not aware of.
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Brilliant post. One of your best. Such great life advice described into so few words. Very well put.
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More and more, I understand that, when people ask, “How did you get to the place you’re in?”, the answer has years, sometimes decades of background… and it’s like, the real answer, “Because of everything I have done over a long period of time.” No individual day or action is that important… it’s all of them put together.
No one wants to hear that, though. And there are obviously some exceptions; some guys are born rich and attractive, for example, and with women they get to coast. But they are so rare that they can be safely ignored by most guys.
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So many truth bombs!
On that note, it would be great to hear some ‘failure’ stories – they are the best learning experiences.
Great writing man.
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That’s funny, I have one slotted already.
I will try to come up with some others. I write about a few in the book too.
A lot of the failure stories are not very interesting. Chick blows me out in the approach, or the approach is good but I don’t get the number. I get the number but she flakes. The interesting stories are usually in the dating sections, as blowouts, declines, ghosting, and flaking are all pretty normal. Many of the failures don’t stand out much in the mind. They happen, then I move on.
I’m probably guilty of letting chicks go somewhat prematurely and moving on to the next one. There are probably chicks I could’ve closed with better game, but I just got tired and was like, “whatever.”
A lot of my dating has also been couple-to-couple or couple-to-girl, and that has a whole separate bunch of interaction points.
Online, chicks just disappear or just don’t respond to messages.
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Agree Red Quest this is one of your best yet. Too many guys see game as a “hack” so they don’t also have to do the work of building their value.
My view of a man’s success in game is much like that of success in business…you need to work on all three:
1. Your value. In game you are the product. The more you build your value (confidence, charm, charisma, physique, fashion, influence and social connections, sexual abilities, etc) the more women will want you. If you’re not attractive the best game in the world will do you no good
2. Your actual game. This is sales of you as the product. If you have high value but don’t approach women you won’t get laid. They need to learn about you in an attractive way, and then you need to lead them from interest to close. You need a systemic way of doing this (nightgame, daygame, online, social circle) and manage this whole sales funnel like a process.
To Red Quest’s point this is the part most men focus on. In part I think a lot of lazy guys are looking for “game hacks” so they can avoid the hard work of building value which takes years.
3. Your dating market in which you leverage your value and game. Are there a lot of attractive younger women relative to men where you live? Personally I now see I’ve made things much harder for myself by living most of my life in the worse counties in the country for men to date. It likely contributed to me getting married as young as I did.
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It seems like too few guys are analyzing the “full stack” of the dating/mating experience, in my view. There is a question about one aspect of one part of the stack, but it’s impossible to answer one question about one thing in one part of the stack without getting into the whole rest of the stack.
I think a lot of successful guys have good full stack, and their “game” consists of doing the full stack right. Same as in business, as you point out.
Guys who are unsuccessful may be doing one part wrong but are often doing the whole thing wrong.
Chicks have something somewhat similar going on, but their value comes from somewhat different places and their end goals can be different than a man’s. But a chick with good full stack, and who understands her game (whether it’s to get laid and have adventures or to lock a guy down and have a family), also tends to get what she wants. A lot of chicks who have problems, have problems because something is missing in their stack.
A guy who has good full stack, including good game, probably doesn’t need to post that much online (unless he’s selling something, or unless he’s a nerd like me), because he’s doing all right and is working on himself.
Guys with good full stacks also don’t get tooled as easily by chicks… if the chick is badly behaved, she gets the boot, or relegation to her proper place (booty call, etc.).
As usual, I have written a post in the comments.
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I think it was LaidNYC who came up with the “young chick handed lottery win” analogy, but I can’t find the post so I may be misremembering it.
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Cool. Thanks dude. Whoever said it first, the idea is so memorable and accurate that it’s stuck with me.
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Two of the biggest players I know both admitted that they had very little experience with women until the age of 21 … and then after that their results soared into the hundreds and beyond. One is now 30 and in a new relationship, the other 39 but married for 7 years.
I surveyed them; I never had that experience in my twenties (until my mid thirties, really). There were a series of commonalities between them:
1. Both said that they made a rule at that age that they would enjoy themselves as much as possible
2. High numbers of approaches (including a lot of blowouts and failures)
3. Test and re-test their Game on new women
4. Give women an Adventure (one of them called it “spice”)
I can’t compare – my work rate was super low until 35 and has only picked up now at 38. Yet, in comparison, other aspects of my life have had a high work rate (bumpy but progressing) and those skills become effortless (music, languages, work). I don’t expect to reach peak-Game until my early forties.
Great article. Game breakdown at its philosophical best.
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>You don’t know how many books I’ve read about women, evolutionary psychology, and desire.
>You don’t know how many times I’ve failed.
>You don’t know how many times I’ve been frustrated, justifiably or not.
I’m not sure what you’re going for here, but it’s inspiring. Realizing the peak of the mountain is far beyond the clouds is as exciting as it is intimidating. But knowing that successful players have hiked the hill from the bottom to plant their flag at the top is a reminder that an aspiring journeyman has a chance to summit.
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Responding to the guys, most on Reddit but sometimes not, who have been telling me that it’s easy for me. They see the successful FRs and are skeptical, especially of the group sex. It’s like watching a high-level athlete shoot a basket, or a high-level engineer diagnosis a problem. It may LOOK easy in that moment, but if it looks easy, that’s because there’s 10,000 hours of deliberate effort behind it.
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