Outcome Dependence

I'm going to expand a bit on my last post. I had an interesting conversation with Mayson tonight, which elucidated some of my current sticking points. A bunch of guys have been very helpful in the past couple of days - if you read my posts, you can see that I've been going through a sort of crash for a couple of weeks now. At first, I tried to plow through it by just opening a lot of sets, but that didn't work.

So, about two days ago, I realized that it was time to wake up and figure out what was going wrong. I have talked to three guys who I have a lot of respect for (Mayson, Doc Holliday, and Maximus Testicles), and each gave me some vital advice. When I put it all together, I think that it will put me on the right track.

Basically, over the past six months, I have gotten pretty good at going out and opening sets using natural game. I just go up and vibe with girls, and when all is well, I do pretty well. I had this one night about a month ago where it was clearly on between me and a girl who I found to be genuinely attractive and cool. So much so that her friend started reciting her phone number out loud. I had another great set that night with a bona fide cutie. Ironically, Unfortunately, that was pretty much the peak of my game. After that, I lost both of my best wings, I started abhorring my internship, and in general things took a turn for the worse. I kept going out, started doing more day game, found new wings, and attempted to plow through. This had always worked in the past, but my shitty outcome-dependent inner game was shining through.

Every time I went out, I would focus on opening a lot of sets. If the first sets went well, this would reinforce itself, and I would have a good night. If the first sets went poorly, well, I would have a shitty night. The "quality" of my night was judged by the quality of the girls' responses to me, which is pretty fucked up. I would have "process nights," which consisted of getting blown out a lot and reassuring myself that shitty nights are what make you good, and "outcome" nights, where I was on the top of the world, and usually ended up with a couple of numbers (probably flakes) and one or more makeouts.

The problem here is that my goal wasn't to have fun, but to get positive reactions from girls. Or, failing that, to reach my predetermined goals for the night. No wonder that I viewed this as "work." No one likes doing "work" when they go out to have fun with their friends.

So the resolution is to figure out how to make my own fun. Every time I go out, I will have fun, and if I happen to meet a cool girl, that will just be a byproduct of the process. Its funny - as I was writing this, Maximus Testicles put a post on the Boston Lair that discussed this. He basically said that game is dependent on doing the following three things:
- Learn who you are.
- Learn what you want and how to find it
- Learn how to express who you are freely.

Once you do that, everything else will follow. Mayson pretty told me the same thing when I talked to him. My next post is going to be an analysis of who I am, and what makes me tick.