The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists

Read “ The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists”. It’s ultimately a work of fiction but there are some mind fuck ideas and perspective shifts there that are worth toying around with as a young man and searching for your own balance between his ideas and your vision of yourself.

This might sound odd, but try reading The Game by Neil Strauss: http://www.amazon.com/Game-Penetrating-Secret-Society-Artist... (http://www.amazon.com/Game-Penetrating-Secret-Society-Artists/dp/0060554738?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957) . It's superficially about how to pick up women, but a lot of it is actually about how to understand social life, what incentives operate on people, and what kinds of things most "normal" (for lack of a better word) people like. Don't use "negs," don't get too wrapped up in his questionable tales of sexual bravado, but do consider what he writes about how to understand the world.

Yeah, I'm not trying to be a big-time PUA or anything either. But as a guy who was the stereotypical geek in at least one regard - being horrible at meeting and interacting with women - I've learned a ton since reading The Game and joining some of the PUA forums and reading some of their material. I've gotten more dates and had more success in the past year and a half than I probably had in my life up to that point. Truth be told though, I think it's as much "magic sword" syndrome as anything. I big part of being successful with women is confidence, as we've all been told. Unfortunately you can't just tell somebody "go out and be confident with women" if they're not confident with women! But you can say "Here, here's this opener and some routines and some theories about attraction, and if you use this stuff you'll be successful" which gives them a certain form of confidence, which leads to some success, which leads to more confidence, etc. I look at it as way to kick off a positive feedback loop. Sorta like giving a young knight a "magic sword" to give him the confidence to go out and slay dragons.…

The Game is an interesting book for a lot of reasons; I don't agree with the idea of picking up tons of random women or some of the methodology he espouses, but it's a powerful book for making people sit up and realize that yes, you can change your life, and yes, you have the tools to do it. It says that "Hey, people think in certain ways and you can hack that," which may be the first time a lot of people encounter any kind of social engineering.

I can think of a handful of books that have had a major impact on me. Off the top of my head: Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury The Game - Neil Strauss The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand Four Steps to the Epiphany - Steve Blank Business @ The Speed of Thought - Bill Gates The Art of the Start - Guy Kawasaki

The Game - I never became a PUA per say, but it helped me a lot in dealing with co-workers, team members, investors, customers, and random people I come across every day.