« Previous 1 2 View All Next »
It’s generally accepted that there are two ways to be good with women. The first is to become a master manipulator, using a combination of social pressure, compliance escalation and other psychological tricks based off high-pressure sales techniques in order to get your way. Many pick-up artist schools are based upon these techniques, teaching young, poorly socialized men how to be wanna-be Svengalis and unleashing them upon the club scene with memorized routines for every possible occasion and outcome.
In fairness, this does work. I have known many people who were proficient manipulators of the female psyche who went on to get ass like a man at a donkey auction with a stolen credit card.
Of course, this course of action tends to destroy your soul; most of the friends I’ve known who followed this path inevitably had psychological breakdowns. They couldn’t keep girlfriends over the long-term and the quality of women they were attracting was… not high, to say the least.
The other path is to be interesting.
It’s not as easy, no, especially not compared to breaking every interaction down into rote memorization of increasingly convoluted If-Then statements. It takes time. It takes commitment. It takes effort.
But the rewards are endless, both in terms of women and your own life. People are drawn to interesting people. They will want to hang out with them. They want to hire them. And they want to sleep with them.
So, how do you go about changing your hum-drum life into an interesting one?
Be Able to Talk To Anyone, About Anything.
It’s an inane cliché, but it’s true: interested is interesting. You already have preconceived notions about what is interesting. This is great, provided that you’re the only ever dealing with people who are exactly like you. If you want to become interesting, you have to be able to engage with the world and with other people. This means that you have to learn to appreciate what they find interesting… even when it’s things that you find mundane or even mind-numbingly dull. You see, you need to learn to be able to find out what’s interesting in things that you have no appreciation for. And that means learning how to listen to others. Not just to hear them, but to really listen and understand.
Take time to have conversations with total strangers and listen to their stories. While you’re at it, surreptitiously listen in on other people’s conversations and take a short dip into their lives. Learning to understand others is the first step in understanding yourself and what you have to offer.
Cultivate Your Intellectual Curiosity
Allow me to digress for a moment. The I-Ching is an ancient Chinese text, collating Taoist philosophy and cosmology into 64 hexagrams, each representing a particular thought or philosophical belief. The 63rd hexagram – Already Fording – represents the end of learning or striving for mastery. Tellingly, the last hexagram – Before Fording – represents gaining the understanding that learning never ends, that the journey towards knowledge is never complete.
The relevance here is that – for most people – leaving the educational system, whether it be after high-school, college or graduate school, represents the end of gaining knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Now that we’re no longer required to study in order to fulfill some arbitrary requirement, many of us choose not to continue actively learning. Their intellectual curiosity has reached it’s limits and they’re quite happy to coast along on what they already know.
If you want to be interesting, you need to embrace your love of learning and continue collecting knowledge.
Don’t make the mistake of just cultivating random trivia or over-specializing to the point of irrelevance; trivia is excellent, but you want practical knowledge as well. Being able to discuss European history or modern politics is good. Being able to hold a discussion on European history while cooking over an open fire, repairing a ceiling fan or hanging a door? Interesting.
Expand Your Horizons
It’s entirely too easy to fall into a rut in your day-to-day life, lured in by the comfort of the familiar and routine. We eat at the same restaurants, buy the same groceries, drive the same routes to work, cook the same dinners, watch the same shows, read the same books, drink the same beers and wines. At least once a week, break out of your routine and start experimenting with new experiences. Start with food; if there’s an exotic cuisine that you’ve never tried before, now’s the time to give it a shot. Pour over cookbooks and try cooking dishes that you’ve never attempted before – the more out of your usual fare, the better. Read a magazine you’ve never tried before, especially if it’s a specialist magazine. Take a completely different route to work.
The human brain falls into set patterns easily and the repetition of experience wears grooves into your mind; as a result, we coast by on autopilot, never noticing the intricacies and tiny details that life has to offer. Once you shock your system by forcing yourself out of the same old rut, you’ll find that you’re more open to the world around you, enabling you to take greater advantage of it. Small changes in routine can lead to large new discoveries… and it’s these discoveries that can make your life fuller and more meaningful.
Refine Your Tastes
While you’re busy experimenting with new foods and patterns in your life, it’s time to start honing in on what you enjoy. Finances permitting, take time to try a quality of food or drink that you don’t normally experience; if you’re a Miller fan, try a micro-brewed Pilsner or IPA. If you enjoy wines, attend a wine-tasting or two. Similarly, if you enjoy chocolate, you should experiment with artisanal chocolate bars, the higher the cocoa count, the better. The goal isn’t to become a cultural snob; instead, you’re educating your palate in a more complex world of flavors, textures and sensations than you’ve previously experienced before and expanding the options available to you.
Being able to introduce an uncommon or unusual wine or beer while out with others is a good way to not only show a side of you that they may not know but to share what you’ve learned… and what you find interesting.
Develop Your Style
The difference between fashion and style is simple; fashion are the rules of how clothes go together. Style is knowing how to apply those rules… and how to break them. Once you’ve mastered the basics of fashion, it’s time to start learning how to develop your basic wardrobe into your own unique style. In pick-up circles you may encounter the concept known as “peacocking”, the idea of dressing flashily – even gaudily – in order to attract attention. This tends to go too far, going past the point of style and well into attention-whoredom. Instead, you want to dress in order to stand out slightly. Rather than trying to dress in a way that ensures that everyone notices you, you want to aim for just a little cooler than everyone else. Develop a style that matches your personality; if you’re a rocker, trying to dress like a stock-broker will only make you incongruous and stand out like a sore thumb. At the same time, learn how to develop the little flourishes in your style that are uniquely you.
Consider the Italian concept of sprezzatura – the idea of a deliberate, artful dishevelment. Even when you’re following your office’s required dress code, there is room for a casually deliberate imperfection or off-kilter choice… learn how to incorporate this into your style.
Fashion is universal; style is unique. Fashion is temporary; style is forever.
Learn to Take Chances
It’s understandable that most of us like to play it safe. We stick to the routine. The familiar. The predictable. The mundane.
The boring.
To live a more interesting life, you need to be willing to put yourself out there and take risks that you normally otherwise avoid. A life without risk is a life where you have very little to talk about. A quiet, monotonous life is neither exciting nor particularly interesting to others. Avoiding risk means placing the locus of control of your life in the hands of others; not taking chances leaves your life’s course up to the tides of fate rather than your own choices.
This need for risk applies in both the large and the small scale in your life; whether it’s a matter of risking making a fool out of yourself by getting up in front of a crowd of strangers and singing karaoke with a live band or finally deciding to quit your job, strike out on your own and start the company you always dreamed that you would one day run.
Or, for that matter, being willing to go up to a girl you like and ask her out without spending weeks or months trying to read the tea leaves over how she feels about you.
Yes, taking chances means that, inevitably, you’re going to fail at things. You will get shot down. You’ll make a fool out of yourself. Your entrepreneurship may go under. But the fact of the matter is, no risk means no rewards. To mangle a metaphor, you many not win every time you gamble, but you always lose the bets you don’t take. There is value to be found in failure. We learn far more from our mistakes than we do from our successes, and a story of failure followed by success is far more compelling than a man who just coasts through life, taking no chances and reaping no rewadrs.
When it comes to leading a more interesting life, you need to be willing to try things and embrace the consequences when you fail.
Develop Your Hobbies
You need to have things going on in your life beyond just going to class or going to work, coming home, having dinner and collapsing into bed – only to get up the next day and live the exact same day over again. You need interests outside of your day to day experience, things that you enjoy and pursue for their own sake rather than the need to keep body and soul together. It gives you a form of expression and a way to decompress after a stressful week and provides you with more fodder for conversation. You just need to stand out from the crowd a little, rather than following the same hobbies that everyone else enjoys. Find a way to make your expression unique, even if it’s just by excelling at it.
Whether you collect first-edition books, restore old cars, fly model RC planes, perform in local plays, play a musical instrument or take landscape photography, having a passion – and being able to communicate that passion – is interesting.
Collect Experiences
I’ve written before on the importance of telling stories when it comes to improving yourself with women… but that does you little good if you don’t have stories to tell. Just as you need to be willing to take risks, you need to be willing to go out and try the new, unfamiliar and unexpected. Whenever you’re faced with a choice, you should ask your self “Is this something that I’ll be able to talk about afterwards?” and then follow that path.
Whenever possible, you should err on the side of adventure. Travel as often as possible, especially if it means leaving the country. Jump out of a perfectly good airplane with nothing between you and death but a few yards of nylon and paracord. Climb mountains and repel down walls. Be willing to take advantage of last-minute opportunities without hesitation, even if it’s something that you normally wouldn’t try. Act on impulse and try things that you’ve always wanted to do.
Act out of character; you’ve been yourself for all your life… so maybe it’s time to find out what it’s like to be somebody else. If you’ve been an absolute angel every day of your life, it’s time to know what it’s like to be a little bad.
Just remember: the biggest regrets we ever have are the chances we didn’t take and the opportunities that we missed. By living a more interesting life, you’re living a fuller one and one that women will want to be a part of.
Stay interesting, my friends.
Related Posts
« Previous 1 2 View All Next »