@Sub-Zero,
Sub-Zero said:
I thought Chase said that San Diego wasn't that good? I think it was either too much competition or not enough single women ?
Correct me if I'm wrong tho.
I never said San Diego was "not that good." San Diego's great. There is tons of opportunity there -- I just said
it just requires you to be operating at a higher level:
Chase said:
You even see this difference between different cities. I moved to Washington, D.C. right after university, where I had a relatively easy time (as far as this goes for a 23-year-old suburban kid meeting city girls for the first time who was making up most of it as he went) picking up new women.
I then moved to San Diego, and struggled for a while. Everyone was better dressed, more attractive, and had better game – and also, the female-male ratio in S.D. is far less favorable to the male sex than the female-male ratio in D.C., and that means fiercer competition.
On the plus side, after climbing my way up to a point where I was doing well enough for myself in San Diego, I now found nearly everywhere else I traveled a cinch by comparison. Because I had tested, honed, and shaped my skills in the fires of a highly competitive city when it comes to mating and dating, I came out on the other end ready to serve as an effective new entrant into other dating markets and clean up right away.
This is why there's such an active pickup community in San Diego. Lots of singles, beach/lifestyle town, attractive women, but also lot of competition that forces you to upgrade yourself to not get left in the dust.
Though you can still do fine there as an intermediate guy. It's a place that will force you to be better though.
@Toby,
Toby said:
What I mean by this is sure lets say you are in your 20s, single and have money to throw around. In order for social life to work, you have to find others in your situation who also want to enjoy good times and have fun but it seems like almost everyone settles into marriage or an LTR at that point. It is just recently that guys like you and PUA guys have broken from that to chasing women as a single guy in your 20s but how do you make new friends and make it work socially?
I've never particularly cared for "good times" or "having fun." I like building, achieving, accomplishing things. If I can do that through a party (e.g., build or maintain a social circle... improve social skills... pick up a chick... etc.), that might be a worthwhile party. Otherwise it's just going to be a bunch of pointless revelry that ticks away some hours of my life without giving me anything I value back.
When I started out, for the first 6 months of me going hardcore I did nothing but cold approach and dates, mostly ignoring social circle. If I ran into guys I knew in the club, I'd say hi and be a little social, then get back to approaching. I moved to a bigger city and found a wingman through a private pickup forum I was on for alumni of the bootcamp I'd taken. And pretty much my social life was either me spending time with girlfriends, me going out with my wingman to meet girls, or me going out alone to meet girls, with the occasional business happy hour thrown in.
At no point did I feel like an "outcast." I never had a desire to belong to the "cool kids" group -- I WAS the cool kid! The "cool kids" were sitting around on their asses drinking beer and getting man-tits. I was going out by myself into bars and nightclubs gulping down Jack & Cokes and picking up chicks and getting rejected and getting laid. I was banging fashion models and diplomats' daughters and crazy chicks and sexy immigrants. I was doing what everyone else watched movies about doing. I was mother-fucking James Bond.
Then I changed cities, met a new wingman via another friend in the private pickup alumni board, and he would take me out with his group of friends. I discovered I was pretty terrible at navigating through established social circles without being stuck on the outside. So I started throwing myself into every social opportunity I could to improve. I went to Meetup groups and shagged girls from there and hung out with people from there. I went to alumni groups for my university and hung at those parties (and shagged girls from there). I found an invite-only social network I wanted to join, discovered one of my friends from the pickup alumni board was on there, and asked him for an invite. Because invitees reflected on the inviter in that network, he asked me to make sure I made a lot of friends there to reflect well on him, and I did -- I went to every meeting or party they had, connected with everybody there, and scoured the list of people traveling to San Diego and would invite them to meet up (especially the girls!), and we would. I made friends with a talented natural who became a new wingman for me off there, and shagged girls I met off the platform. I went to bartending school and met girls and made friends through that. I went to surfing class, archery class, salsa class, Spanish class, and took up Krav Maga. I let girlfriends introduce me to their coworkers and friends. I hung out with coworkers and made close-ish friends with some of them and got to know their friends. And at the same time I was going out 2-5 nights a week, hitting the bars, hitting the nightclubs, hitting the lounges, picking up one-night stands and taking phone numbers to set up dates for the days I did not have girlfriends to meet up with (and occasionally making friends too; some of my best guy friends over the years have been guys I met at bars or clubs while we were both there chatting up girls). I went to the gym at work and between sets talked to the huge ex-Navy guy; the fitness model girl; and the cocky meathead guy who ran the fitness model competition and treated me like a nobody for a long time until I finally broke through with him. I was busy, busy, busy, busy.
There were times for a while I felt like the weird guy outsider, once I started all this social circle stuff. I couldn't talk to them about girls/picking up, because either they didn't care, or they were focused on social circle and had already shagged half the girls in the group and I hadn't. And all the other stuff they cared and talked about I didn't have much to say on. Despite the discomfort, I just kept going, kept hanging out with as many sufficiently cool people as I possibly could, and over time I grew better and better and better at fitting in with all these different sorts of people.
Eventually you realize you are always an outsider with every new group you join. Until you spend enough time around them that eventually you are not anymore. One day you show up and realize you are 100% part of the group. You know all the in-jokes and what's cool and what isn't and the girls all like you and want to shag you (or have shagged you) and the guys all have your back.
And then you meet some other people and start to hang with that group too. And you're an outsider with that new group... until you're not.
And so on and so forth.
At some point I reached a point where I'd done enough with socializing to know the pattern... if you're a sufficiently cool person, you can become an "insider" anywhere... given
time. Though you will always start out as an outsider, and spend time on the outskirts as that guy for a while. Often it takes months of hanging out with a group frequently enough before you're a full-on insider. But you discover it's something you can do, if you want to.
And then you start to end up at the top of the pile in social groups. You keep finding yourself Top Dog. Now
you are the coolest guy in the group; the one who more than anyone else decides who and what is "inside" and who/what isn't. And at that point if you're really needy for it I guess you hang around and bask in the power and attention for a while. But usually what happens is most guys tire of it after a while, retreat from socializing with groups, and go back to being loners / semi-loners with a small core of high value friends. Because big group life is very temporally and energetically demanding, but doesn't provide much you will value once you've sat atop the pile for a while.
So yeah, that's the process. Or that's how it worked for me:
- Did not feel like an outcast in the beginning, because my focus was pure cold approach and I went hard on that
- Felt like an outcast once I started to hang with groups of non-PUA people and found I didn't mesh that well
- Embarked on a journey of going super, super hard on participating in group activities and socializing with people non-stop
- Began to be more and more accepted by more and more different types of groups
- Learned to gel well with pretty much any group of people
- Made it to the TOP of the social ladder and became the coolest guy in really cool groups
- Got bored of the whole thing, started to feel like it wasn't a good use of time, went back to being the loner
- Now I have the skill set, and gel well with all sorts of people everywhere, without needing to maintain huge time-consuming circles
- Never feel like an outcast anywhere, because odds are, whatever type of group, I've been "in" with similar groups in the past and I know exactly how to socialize with them
It's a process. You go through it. Either you go hard and socialize constantly and non-stop with all kinds of people to build that ability, or you kind of hover around and hope someones takes pity on you / gives you a social handout, which doesn't really happen, and feel frustrated at being on the outside.
I did the "wait and hope" thing when I was a teen / early 20s and found it doesn't work for me. After that I switched into "if you want it, go and get it" mode and have found that a lot more productive. I recommend it.
Chase