2 thoughts from this weekend’s field work:

1. Direct peacocking can work for flash game.

I’ve been reading The Four Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss. It’s a good read. In it he maintains that about 80% of your sales tend to come from about 20% of your clients. It’s that 20% you should focus on to maximise efficiency.

With this in mind, I was scouting out locations in town to meet people. I’d noticed a bar with a great atmosphere and where I had been getting lots of non-verbal IOIs from my previous two visits. I decided to follow the 80/20 rule and invest more time and effort in this place because it had a good vibe. It seemed a matter of being there at the optimum time to meet the right people.

So last night I was there and wore my ‘Kiss Me’, T-shirt. It’s a flash game/one night stand kind of peacocking but that is what I was screening for last night

I had a 3 set of chicks stand opposite and one approached me within 20 seconds, look at my T-shirt and she kissed me full on the lips. That was very cool because it came from a minimum investment on my part. I hadn’t had to do anything – no buying her drinks, no hanging around listening to any bullshit. It was just a matter of noticing the right environment and being ballsy enough to peacock for the good-time girls I was looking for.

Having got with this 3 set chick, a gay guy in a wheelchair opened me. He was subtle but good – implanting suggestions that we should go to a gay bar together. Initially I felt for him because he was in a wheel chair. My guard was down and I thought I was doing him a favour in befriending him because he seemed a disabled man on his own. But within about 10 minutes I saw he was a player, just as much as I am and I even found myself wondering if the wheelchair was a prop for him to open and lower people’s guards. That’s cynical, I know, but in these huge sarge environments, it’s how my mind works. I run through 100s of scenarios in real-time and even if I discount 85% of them, they still linger in my mind as possible future occurrences or field tactics that might prove effective.

After bailing from this good vibe bar (and leaving gay wheelchair guy wanting to buy me a drink), I hit another bar where I was one of the few quality guys among a bunch of AFCs and wall flowers.

2. As an extra twist on what I said in a recent post about environment giving you social proof, I saw tonight how it was not just the environment but how you use it. It did not take much to stand out in this bar which I and the Mixed Blessing Wingman hit up. Just by sending out a good vibe by moving with the beat and being animated and fun in an environment where the other guys were frozen, was enough to get tons of attention.

I know we sometimes second guess ourselves and think along the lines of ‘if I say this, she will think this and then this will happen’, and SO much of it is bullshit. It’s often all in our heads and operates as an excuse not to do anything!

These fantasy ruminations are wall flower thoughts and usually self-limiting enough to keep us within our comfort zones – the thoughts of the self-conscious, the thoughts of people with too much time on their hands and not enough socialising behind them. Or they’re the thoughts of people with too much psychologically invested in the possible outcome of a social interaction.

In a seemingly increasingly computerised world where we can hide behind a screen, it is easy to convince ourselves that we are part of the social world. But unless you are out in the real world, meeting real people, able to socialise and successfully interact with those who interest us, we are not truly flexing the social muscles that we need.

So many times I’ve heard friends making excuses about not talking to a particular girl because they are saving themselves for that ‘special one’.

What they don’t realise is that by speaking to people in general and to girls in particular, they are training themselves and readying their skills for when that ‘special one’, does come along, so they will have the skill set necessary to successfully interact with her. It is by practising with people that we ready ourselves for the times that matter and help ourselves to reach our potential as social operators.