Most players are born and not made. They’re really good looking, amazing athletes, or have a sense of humor that makes everyone jealous. They have an innate advantage that gives them the confidence to approach women. The trait that helped me become a player was a birth defect.
I was born with the delusion that I was irresistible to women. I’ve always had enough self-awareness to know I’m not good-looking, but I’ve always thought I was irresistible. Over time, through much trial and considerably more error, this belief has become less delusional.
I never went through a phase of not liking girls. One of my first distinct memories comes from when I was four-years-old. I convinced an eight-year-old girl to get naked for me. Outside of a porn fantasy, it’s the rare girl who’ll take off her clothes for you if you don’t ask. I started asking at a very young age.
No one, no matter how many natural gifts they have, is great when doing anything for the first time. Everyone starts out a beginner, and beginners make mistakes and they fail—they fail a lot. My belief that I was irresistible was impervious to rejection. When I graduated from high school, I was 5’9” and weighed 104 pounds. I had a stick-like body with a huge head; I looked like a human lollipop with ears, and I got girls that should have been out of my league.
I began competing in martial arts while in college. After two years of intense training, I gained twenty-five pounds of muscle. I had five percent body fat and could lift any friend under 180 pounds over my head. Getting a better body barely budged my success rate with women. My appearance had almost nothing to do with my success.
Whenever I got rejected, I modified my approach. Through trial and error, I became more and more successful. I became enough of a player that my friends noticed. They wanted to know how and why I was successful. At first, I had no idea why I got girls and they didn’t. Most of my friends were taller and better looking than me.
The drinking age was 18 when I went to college. When we went out drinking, I’d watch my friends as they approached women. I came up with the hypothesis that fear is unattractive. If you break out in a cold sweat and stutter when you talk to a girl, the chances of her giving you her phone number are pretty much nil. Because of my mistaken belief that I was ‘hot,’ I was never fearful. No matter how attractive the girl was, I stayed confident.
Confidence—even error-based confidence—is attractive. To varying degrees, my friends were always stressed out when they approached women. Some were better at hiding their fear than others, but almost all of them were afraid. They were the very antithesis of ‘confident’.
I explained my hypothesis to my friends. I told them they had to stop being afraid. They didn’t find my advice helpful. According to them it was much easier said than done; so I challenged them to a game to test my theory. We all put money in a pool—as much as we could afford— and then went out on the town looking for women. The guy who got rejected the most took all of the money at the end of the night.
Instead of being afraid of rejection, I convinced my friends to seek it out. They went up to the hottest women in the room—ones they knew they had no chance with—so they could be rejected. This was a game you couldn’t lose. If you got rejected, you made a lot of money. If a girl said yes, you got to go out on a date with a girl you thought was out of your league.
It didn’t take very long for my friends to stop being petrified at the thought of rejection. As they became more comfortable, they approached more women and a higher percentage of the women they asked out said, yes.
Do it often enough and even rejection can become fun. Back when I was younger, I was bit of an ass (okay I’ll admit it, I still have jackass tendencies). My friends were nice guys. They went out of their way not to hurt people’s feelings. But every once in awhile, we’d come across a girl who was so stuck up that even the nice guys got pissed. We’d spread out in the bar and go up to her one by one about five minutes apart and use this exact same pickup line, “Are you a model?” and watch the horror grow in her eyes. Then we’d all get together where she could see us and start laughing.