Sticking Point # 15 Getting To Average

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Interesting TED talk about technology and human interaction

This is a great talk and is the inspiration for a blog post I have floating around inside my head about the effects of technology on dating in general since 2004 when I got involved with this whole thing.

In short, in less than 10 years the ways that people interact has changed especially with young people as people are now less comfortable having an in person conversation as the rise of social media and internet connectivity has led us to want to control and customize every interaction we have throughout our lives. Phone game changing was just the beginning as I feel (and this talk and research suggest) that we are rocketing towards a world where people rarely if ever interact in person if avoidable.

 I still need to crystalize my points and form an idea of what we can do about it moving forward so stay tuned for that stuff...

JS

Re-Visiting Sticking Points

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Hey it's a new blog post!

 Hey there,

 It's been awhile.

 I wish I had a cool reason I haven't been posting. It started off when I went on vacation. Then I just kinda didn't ever get back to posting or looking at the blog until last week when I was reminded that people still come to the blog and that there were a decent amount of comments.

I deleted all the comments cause they're old and I didn't feel like sifting through the spam and penis pill links to find the quality comments made by real human beings.

Another reason I haven't been posting lately is that I now have a lot more commitments for creating content than I had when I started this blog in 2006. It's hard to sit down and write about pick up and dating after you've spent 8 hours creating videos, audios, doing interviews and coaching students all on the same subject.

Plus after having written 1100 plus blog posts I think I just kinda needed a break from having to write this blog. It's been almost 7 years after all with no real prolonged break at all.

So that's why I wasn't blogging, I haven't become bitter and disillusioned or decided to move to Ecudor I was just taking some time off.

Talk soon,

JS

Semi-Advanced Post: Attraction is highest the first time

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Get STD Tested!

 I just got back from passing my HIV test with flying colors and I have to say as harrowing of an experience as that is, you NEED to do it and not just for HIV.

Begin Public Service Announcement.

We big up promiscuity a lot in this blog and that's cool but the best kind of sex is safe sex. I always use condoms and get tested at least once a year. That's pretty much all you have to do and trust me if I can do it ( I literally had a panic attack at the Dr today convinced I was going to be told I'm dying) then so can you.

Most STDs are not that big of a deal for men and can be cured with a few pills, obviously HIV is a life ruiner but if you use condoms and don't have sex with women who exchange needles with others you're probably not going to get it. Though that won't stop me from freaking out about it again next year, gotta love hypochondria :)

The year's coming to a close and I know you'll feel better with the peace of mind of getting a clean blood test back, in most cities you can even get a free test that will have you out the door with results within 20 minutes.

That's my good deed for the year back to getting laid content on Fri

JS

"Fools Mate" The Most Low Self Esteem Idea EVER

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Escalating On High Points

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The Charisma Myth Notes and Exercises

 I finished this book a couple of weeks ago and I've been waiting for a chance to go through the notes and stuff I made on the kindle about this book since it's pretty relevant to what people come to this blog to read about, I figured I would post my notes here.

Quotes

Deciding to change your belief about what happened (cognitive reappraisal) effectively decreases the brain's stress levels. This came to light through research performed at Stanford University using functional MRI machines. The researchers concluded that deciding to change beliefs was a far more effective and healthier solution than attempting to repress or ignore emotions.

The key questions are: Which mental state would be most useful in this situation? And which version of reality would help you get there? For charisma, you can use this technique whenever a situation threatens your level of warmth or confidence. For minor events, simply imagining an alternative explanation is often enough to reduce anger or impatience and generate compassion instead.

The Internal Charisma Checklist:

1. Take a deep breath and shake out your body to ensure that no physical discomfort is adding to your tense mental state.
2. Dedramatize. Remind yourself that nothing serious is happening. This only feels uncomfortable because of how you're brain is wired. Zoom out your focus to see yourself as a little person dealing with certain chemicals flooding your system. Nothing more.
3. Destigmatize. Remind yourself that this is normal and everyone goes through it from time to time. Imagine countless people all over the world feeling the same thing.
4. Neutralize. Remind  yourself that these thoughts are not necessarily real.
5. Consider a few alternative realities that are not as negative.
6. Visualize a transfer of responsibility. Imagine the weight of this problem being transferred to the universe god etc...

Self Compassion as a 3 step process:
1. Realize you're experiencing difficulty
2. Respond with kindness and understanding towards ourselves.
3. Realizing that whatever we are going through is commonly experienced by all human beings.

Concepts:

The core of charisma is involves behaviors that project: Presence, Power and Warmth.
Charisma begins with an internal state

Exercises:

Destigmatizing Discomfort:
1. Remind yourself this is normal and that we all experience it from time to time.
2. Think of all the other people who have gone through this especially people you admire.
3. Remember that right now in this very moment many others are going through the same thing.

Neutralizing Negativity:
1. Remember these thoughts may not be accurate.
2. See your thoughts as tiny little electrical impulses in your brain or as graffiti on the walls of your mind.
3. Depersonalize the experience.
4. Imagine the earth from a far and imagine zooming in on your tiny little problem.
5. Imagine your mental chatter as coming from a radio and turn the volume way down.

There's also a good visualization at www.Charismamyth.com/metta

Overall I'd give this book 3 out of 5 stars it was an interesting new take on some of the same old information in the persuasion world.

JS 

Call her little

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Humble Bragging and DHVs

 Hey there,

 I got real sick last week and spent the entire week in bed hacking my lungs up.

 It was not tight.

 I did get to do some reading though which was nice.

One of the books I read was the Humble Brag book by Harris Wittels and one of the things I couldn't help but notice was how much humble bragging seems like what used to be taught as demonstrations of higher value.

A humble brag is a brag where the person conceals the outright brag by adding something that is supposedly humble to either the beginning or the end of the brag.

For example:

"Just recorded my Radio Spot for XM. I lead a weird weird life"

 " I am wearing hands down the most ugly shirt ever made and 4 co-workers have told me it's beautiful. I work with fucking liars and idiots."

The idea of a humble brag much like a DHV is that you brag about something that makes you cool (Being on the radio or having 4 ppl tell you your shirt is beautiful) then you pretend to be annoyed, put off or angry about the thing you just bragged about. Usually in humble brags this takes the form of saying something is weird or acting like what you just bragged about isn't a big deal even though it clearly is because you went on twitter to post about it.

So how does this help you with girls?

Well humble bragging/DHVing (I'm just gonna call it Humble Bragging from here on cuz fuck acronyms) can be an effective way to get attractive pieces of information out about yourself. It's often been said that you shouldn't brag or boast about yourself but IME people are not smart enough to get subtle displays of value and humble bragging works much better than hoping that someone will be able to infer things. So while HBing can alienate some people like myself an the writer of the book it's still remains an effective way to communicate the cool things about yourself without just outrightly telling the girl you're a genius millionaire like myself :)

JS- The King Of Content



 

Interesting Social Proof Experiment

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27 Ways To Convey You're Good In Bed

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Sexual Momentum and Screening

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Thinking Fast And Slow Highlights

 One of the best books I've read this year is "Thinking Fast and Slow" By Daniel Kahneman the Nobel Prize winning behavioral economist.

The book breaks down the difference between cognition and heuristics to explain why we think the way we do about things.

In essence he argues that there are two systems of thinking:

System 1 is instant and not bound by the rules of logic EX: Driving a car or reciting your #
System 2 is deeper thinking with well supported thought out ideas and arguments. EX: arguing about politics or explaining how to bake a cake.

Here's some quotes and ideas that interested me:

System 1 provides impressions that often turn into your beliefs and is the source of the impulses that often become your choices and actions. It offers a tacit interpretation off what happens to you and around you, linking the present with the recent past and with expectations about the near future. It contains the model of the world that instantly evaluates events as surprising or normal. It is the source of rapid and often precise intuition and it does most of this without your conscious awareness of it's activities.

The sequence of characteristics we observe in a person are often determined by chance. Sequence matters however because the halo effect increases the weight of first impressions sometimes to the point that subsequent information is mostly wasted.

WYSIATI- What you see is all there is. One of the ways System 1 distorts reality to make us feel correct.

Overconfidence: as the WYSIATI rule implies neither the quantity nor the quality of evidence counts much for subjective confidence. The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of story they can tell themselves about what they see, even if they see a little. We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgement is missing- what we see is all there is.

An example of basic assessment is the ability to distinguish friend from foe. This contributes to our chances of survival in the wild.  Alex Todarov of Princeton has explored the biological roots of rapid judgement of how safe it is to interact with a stranger. He showed that we are hardwired to look for two facts about that person: How dominant they are and how trustworthy they are.

Substituting questions. If a satisfactory answer is not found quickly system 1 will find a related question that is easier and answer that instead. The target question is the assessment you intended to produce. The heuristic question is a simpler question you answered instead.

Anchoring Effects- This happens when you are given a # or idea to prime you before being asked a question. For example if you are asked if Gandhi was more than 114 years old when he died you will guess a higher age than if you are asked if he were older than 35. The same thing happens with asking prices of homes etc...

Availability- This refers to how people's impressions are altered by a requirement to list a specific number of instances. In the experiment they asked people to list 6-12 instances in which they behaved assertively and then evaluate how assertive they were. People who had just listed 12 instances rated themselves as less assertive than those who had listed 6. Furthermore participants that had ben asked to think of 12 examples of times they had not behaved assertively ended up thinking of themselves as very assertive. If you cannot easily come up with 12 examples of meek behavior you are likely to conclude you are not meek at all.

Subjective confidence in a judgement is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgement is correct. Confidence is a feeling which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not that the story is true.

We are confident when the story we tell ourselves comes easily to mind with no contradiction and no competing scenario.

Low probability events are much more heavily weighted when they are described in terms of relative frequency 1 in 100,000 children will die than in percentages 0.0001

Attention is key. Our emotional state is largely determined by what we attend to, our current activity and environment

Affective forecasting- knowing the odds but believing they don't apply to you. Like couples who know most marriages end in divorce on their wedding day but do it anyway believing they are different.

Miswanting- bad choices that arise from errors of affective forecasting. Most prominent when people are asked how happy they would be after a tragedy followed by comparing that with happiness ratings of people who have had misfortunes.

There's a bunch of really interesting stuff in the book and I highly recommend you pick it up if you want to understand why we all make the choices we make.

JS

Reminder: Go To Filtered Venues!

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Project Hollywood House 2, PUAS 0

 So word around the campfire is that the Speer and Vince Kelvin led version of the Project Hollywood house (yes the same house as 2005) has broken up badly as Pick Up Partnerships tend to do. I talked to Speer briefly and a couple of other dudes who have a little bit of knowledge about the situation. I'll post more details if/when they become available.

Also Vince is apparently in the hospital now for either a heart attack or panic attacks. No one I've talked to seems to know exactly what, but hopefully he gets better. I bust on the guy cause he's ridiculous, but I don't wish bad health or serious harm on anyone.

Which brings me to the title of this post, that house on Londonderry is undefeated against the PUAS. They come in, and none of them lasts more than a year. Which is understandable at 12K a month in rent...

I bet when the owners see a group of guys come in to look at that place their eyes just turn into little $$ like in the cartoons.
 The question now is will another group of PUAS try their hand at the house that eats PUAS for dinner?

JS

Guest Article: Taking The First Step

Taking that first step is often the most difficult part of embarking on change. Often, if we could only take that first step , write that first sentence in your novel, do that first push up, say hello to that beautiful girl ‚ then the rest of our endeavor becomes easy and flows like honey.

Sometimes we all need a little motivation to kick start whatever we are trying to accomplish. There is no shame in that. The men who are the most successful with women know that they are willing to do whatever it takes to improve themselves and improve their game.

Here are a few tried-and-true tips that deal with getting motivated to take action to get better with women.

Tip #1

1. Pump it up. A really savvy strategy that can get you pumped up to make that first phone call or hit that club with confidence is to do a little groundwork before you even leave the house. Find some music that really gets you pumped up and crank it as loud as you can. (If you live in an apartment, you might stick to headphones!)

The music might even motivate you to start dancing around the house, which will make you feel even better. This strategy is successful for a few different reasons: Listening to music that makes you happy automatically improves your mood and therefore your self-confidence level. When we are happy, our self-esteem usually tends to be at its highest. In addition, listening to our favorite music releases endorphins that give us a boost of energy and feel-good hormones preparing us to meet challenges head on.

Tip #2

2. Become friends with other like-minded men. You can do this online through pick up forums or you can do this by finding other men who live in your area. You will not only learn from encouraging them to get out there, but they will be the ones who can motivate you and stroke your ego when you are feeling insecure or unsure about your dating skills and abilities with women.

Having another guy to run scenarios by is a great strategy to motivate you to tackle the dating world. In addition, you can act as each other's wingman and get out there supporting and helping each other improve your game with women.

There is power in numbers and getting someone else's take on a situation or even an outfit to wear to the club can be invaluable when it comes to getting better with women. A good guy friend will be honest, but not a jerk about giving his opinion and advice and in return you do the same for him. Often we learn the most by helping others and critiquing their efforts will usually improve our own game.

Tip #3

3. Read everything you can get your hands on about how to be successful in approaching and attracting women.

What happens when you start reading books about self-improvement and techniques that work, you automatically, almost subconsciously start itching to get out there and try it for yourself.

And the beauty of this motivation method is that while you are motivating yourself, you are also arming yourself with knowledge that will make you successful with women. Even if you are not aware of it consciously, your words, actions, and behaviors will be influenced by what you read.

Deep down, you already know what works and what doesn't and it will naturally incorporate itself into your game. As a result, with very little effort, you will not only be motivated, but you will be taking action to get better with women naturally.

Bill Preston

Why Men And Women Can't Be Friends (Video)

 By far the most frequently commented on post I've ever written is my post about not trusting girls with all guy friends.

 Read it here: Never Trust Girls With All Male Friends

Here's a great video that captures my point even more succinctly.



Comment Below

JS

The Greatest Pickup Video Of All Time

This might be the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life...

Couple of extras about Smash 99 the legend.

He's Asian despite speaking with what one can only call a "Blackcent"

He has 100s of these videos some of which include his actual approaches which are as hilarious as one would assume from this video.

He's 100 percent serious.

If you find more vids like this post them in the comments this guy deserves the attention.

JS