The world bursts at the seams with people ready to tell you you’re not good enough. On occasion some may be correct. But do not do their work for them. Seek any job; ask anyone out; pursue any goal. Don’t take it personally when they say “no” – they may not be smart enough to say “yes”.

– Keith Olbermann

Personal development books are full of recipes for goal achievement. You’ve got to get clear about what you want, become a “vibrational match” for the financial success you desire, make the decision that you will attain your goal at any cost, and by the way, here’s an anecdote about some guy you’ve never heard of, who followed every step of my Unlock Your Inner Genius Master Course (TM), and is now, like, super happy to have traded his $300,000/year job on Wall Street for the simple, hunter-gatherer life of a fisherman on a remote island in the South Pacific.

Hmmm…

Okay, okay, I am being a bit harsh. The goal of this post is not to rant against personal development books. Rather, I intend to talk about the actual process of achieving personal goals, using a recent example from my own life. And the first point I want to make is this: There is no secret and no system. There is no frequency that needs tuning into, and no visualization clear enough to guarantee that things will happen.

There is only hard work and hustle, uncertainty and despair, pressing forward when you have no clue where to start, and the inevitable criticism put forth by a seething, vocal minority of non-doers.

Of course, there are also all the upsides that come from giving everything you’ve got to hopefully, maybe, at least give yourself the chance to get exactly what you want. But I’ll talk about those more later.

The recipe for achieving personal goals that I am about to offer you is, in fact, not a recipe at all. It is just a story about one fairly major attempt I made at doing things on my own terms. In some ways it was amazingly successfully. In other ways, things didn’t go as expected. But either way, I’d do it all over again.

In fact, I am doing it all over again. More on that later too.

Moving to Vancouver

In the spring and summer of 2009 I was shopping around for a new place to live. Not just a new house, but a new city — maybe even a new country. I’d been living in Montreal for the last five years, and absolutely loved it, but I didn’t want to let that blind me to exploring other parts of the country and/or the world. In the worst case, if things really didn’t work out, I could always just move back.

After spending a few months in Europe, I ultimately decided — for reasons that would be too off-topic to get into just now — to return to Canada. I was itching to start a new project, wanted a place that would present as few obstacles as possible to building new things, and eventually selling said things, and ultimately decided to move to the West Coast. I ended up in Vancouver.

The Itch

I touched down in Vancouver on August 15, 2009. Before I’d even moved into my own place (I was still crashing on my buddy’s couch), I immediately set to work on coming up with a new project. Carpe diem, etc.

For me, there is a fine line between business and self-actualization. I see the former as a vehicle for the latter. I don’t tend to think of business ideas in terms of what’s hot and what’s trendy. Instead, I tend to think in terms of what’s missing. In the summer of last year, after a few months of being single, the biggest thing that was missing for me was a quality relationship.

Of course, I had no idea at first that the goal of finding a quality long-term relationship would result in an idea for a business. That’s where Twitter came in.

You Are What You Tweet

By last summer, I’d been using Twitter for a couple years. Indeed, I have a link to my Twitter account in the sidebar of this blog, since I think it offers a great way to interact with readers. I also use it to follow people who interest and inspire me.

As I used Twitter more and more, I started to see its potential in helping me achieve the goal of finding a mate. I say this even as someone who swore off dating sites, and for that matter, still does.

As a potential platform for online dating, I saw that Twitter provided a unique window into someone’s life. Unlike typical online dating profiles which are easy to fake, a user’s Twitter stream tells you a lot about who they really are: what kind of work they do, what their social life is like, whether they actually are into all kinds of sports, how influential they are, etc. Sure, you could make up everything about yourself in your tweets, but I personally have yet to see that happen with anyone I come into even vague contact with on Twitter.

As I thought more about the things Twitter is good at, I saw an opportunity to combine a personal goal with the itch I had to build something shiny and new. Since Twitter itself is really bad at being a dating service (and so it should be), why not build something for people who are interested in connecting with Twitter peeps beyond their 140 character limits?

People like, erm, me.

After running the idea by a few friends, there was no doubt that I had to get started on it as soon as possible. My personal goal of finding a great relationship had merged with my interest in the world of followers, at-messages, and tweets. I was going to build a platform on which Twitter users could take their interactions beyond single sentence exchanges and into feature-length conversations. I was going to build a Twitter dating website.

From Thought to Action

The distance between when I started thinking about this idea and when I started implementing it could be measured in hours. I knew that inspiration is perishable, and that if I didn’t act immediately, it just wouldn’t happen.

Because of the sale of my house earlier in the year, I had the bankroll to allow me to focus on building the site full-time, at least for a little while. From the moment I started working on it, I devoted every second of every day to it, seven days a week. I had no idea what the hell I was doing, no grand vision of the business model or the marketing strategy, so I just barfed out my ideas in code and gradually massaged them into something that sort of worked.

Within a couple weeks of starting, I convinced a buddy of mine to quit his job and join me on the project full-time. He’d previously founded and sold a network of Canadian classified ad sites, and I thought his experience would be a great asset moving forward.

In the mad rush of August and September 2009, we ate slept and breathed this project. We were maniacs on a mission and were fairly confident that world domination was imminent. Even though it wasn’t quite ready — hell, we weren’t quite ready — we launched the site on October 1st. We called it Plenty of Tweeps.

The Magic of Just Friggin’ Doing Stuff

Our initial version was pretty crappy. It was fairly stable and bug-free, but it was also somewhat feature-free too. And the user interface, while easy to use, was a little too Twittery in its look and feel.

But here’s the really cool thing about actually doing stuff, even when you have no clue what you’re doing or if it’ll work: people notice. People start talking about you. And people started talking about Plenty of Tweeps. I got interviewed by a popular local newspaper, Mark caught the eye of some of his investor friends, and even one of the founders of Twitter tweeted about us!

More recently, Plenty of Tweeps got mentioned on CNN and on one of the most popular social media blogs in the world, Mashable.

Even as I reflect on this now, I have no idea how this happened. I’m a decent programmer, but I’m no rock star. And while I have a keen interest in user interface design, I learned probably half of what I know from the building of Plenty of Tweeps itself.

And I haven’t even gotten to the really cool part yet.

Single? Use Twitter? Awesome.

There is another highly useful side effect of scratching your own itch: You get to actually use the thing when it’s done. And use it I did.

The product worked exactly like I hoped it would. Reading a person’s tweets gave me about as good a sense of them as you can get without actually meeting them in person. So I just went ahead and liked some profiles to see what would happen.

Surprisingly, people started joining. I exchanged messages with various girls on the site, and went on a couple dates. Going on a date with a girl you met from a dating site you built is a pretty trippy experience, to say the least.

A couple months after we launched, I met someone off the site that I really clicked with, @alicia_CHt. That’s her on the Plenty of Tweeps homepage. ;)

If You Build It…

When I say Alicia and I really hit it off, I mean it. She’s Australian and also lives in Vancouver. Just weeks after we met, she flew back to Australia for a month to spend the Christmas holidays with her family.

A few days after she left, we were chatting on Skype, and she was joking about how I should come over, “you’d have free accommodation!”, etc. I knew she was teasing, but I also knew that a month apart was a long time for two people that had just met. Not one to waste time, the next morning I booked a ticket, and a couple days later, I met her at the airport in Sydney.

Fast forward to today: We recently celebrated our nine month anniversary, six of which we’ve been living together. Building a dating site that I personally wanted to use turned out to be a pretty good idea after all.

The Present

Plenty of Tweeps continues to move forward, and while it hasn’t yet been a runaway commercial success, it continues to attract new signups every day. It’s obviously been a huge personal success, and a great addition to my consulting portfolio.

In the past several weeks, I’ve started doing the whole thing all over again with a new project called Quitfest, dedicated to the thousands of people who have commented on my post on quitting drinking. For the past few years, that community has been using a blog post to communicate with each other, and I think I can build something much easier and more fun to use for that purpose.

I spent all of this past weekend working on it, I’ll be on it all day today the second after I hit Publish on this post, and I’ve shifted back to an early riser schedule to help me finish my billable consulting hours early enough to allocate a few hours each day to Quitfest.

In the same way that I had no idea what I was doing with Plenty of Tweeps, I’m fumbling my way forward with Quitfest too. I can’t tell you if I’ve picked the right feature set, the right pricing model, or the right marketing strategy, or even the right idea for that matter, but I’ll find out soon enough.

But here’s what matters most, and here’s the entire reason why I wanted to share this story with you: I haven’t succeeded yet. I haven’t yet reached that glorious point where I can claim to support myself entirely from my own projects. Every fucking time I do anything, I get criticized for it. If you read the CNN link, you’ll see what I mean. Hell, I’ve gotten severely flamed on this blog for some of the things I’ve written. I’ve even gotten severely flamed for not writing for a while.

And that bit about meeting Alicia? Here’s one thing I left out: I liked 199 girls on Plenty of Tweeps. That is not a typo. One. Hundred. Ninety. Nine. While I exchanged messages with quite a few after that, I only actually went on two dates, the second of which was Alicia.

(I left that detail out because Alicia wanted me to. Sorry, baby! I love you. ;)

But one thing I can say for sure is this: I am trying my friggin’ heart out. I can’t think or do any harder. I can’t fall back on that whole well-I-know-if-I-really-put-my-mind-to-it crap. I have no excuses and no rationalizations. This is me running at full power.

And that, to me, is the most important part of achieving personal goals: Not wondering where to start — just starting. Not fearing the damage of rejection — going out and getting rejected. Not needing the advice of some “guru” to tell you what to do — giving yourself permission to live.

When in doubt, go for it. Good luck.

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The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.

– Oscar Wilde

A while back I read a book called Real-Time Relationships, by Stefan Molyneux. It’s a book about creating relationships that are healthy, enjoyable, loving, and virtuous. The author hosts a philosophy podcast called Freedomain Radio, which deals with everything from overcoming procrastination and how to be a good parent, to the ethics of taxation and philosophical analyses of current events.

This article is not a review of the book, so I’ll avoid any comments on its read-worthiness as a whole. But I would like to share with you an extract that forever changed the way I look at things. It’s a quote from the book that concisely summarizes what the whole thing is about:

The Real-Time Relationship (RTR) is based on two core principles, designed to liberate both you and others in your communication with each other:

1. Thoughts precede emotions.
2. Honesty requires that we communicate our thoughts and feelings, not our conclusions.

Molyneux’s point is that so much of the negative communication in relationships arises because we treat feelings as facts, and tend to skip over the thoughts that underly those feelings. This results in arguments that are, in essence, based on mythology.

So let’s say one day Alice says to her husband Bob:

You’re so lazy! You never help around the house!

This is an example of communicating a conclusion — that Bob is lazy — rather than communicating just her thoughts and feelings. It is not necessarily true that Bob is lazy. Perhaps he doesn’t help clean up after dinner because he assumes that, since he cooked dinner, the cleaning task should naturally fall to Alice. Or maybe he left washing the dishes to Alice because he did the vacuuming earlier in the day.

Alice calling Bob “lazy” bypasses these possibilities. It’s a conclusion derived from anger, rather than an honest deployment of what she’s experiencing on the inside. A more sincere approach would be for her to tell Bob that she feels frustrated because he left her to do the dishes, which makes her feel disrespected, makes her think that Bob doesn’t care, and so on.

Replacing the name-calling with an accurate testimony of what it made her feel opens the door for Bob to address those feelings. On the one hand, it might make Bob realize that he really is lazy, and if he cares about his partner he better work on that. On the other hand, he has a chance to clarify a misunderstanding. He could talk to Alice about how he assumed that since he cooked dinner, he thought it was okay if he left the clean up to her.

Whether that division of labour is something they can both accept is a separate issue. The point is that communicating with integrity requires describing your thoughts and feelings, not rushing to conclusions about what’s really going on.

RTR’ing Yourself

In my experience, the Real-Time Relationship is an excellent model not only for productive communication between two people, but also for communicating with yourself. In particular, it’s a powerful tool for dealing with negative emotions.

Let’s revisit those two core principles of the RTR, to see how they apply to dealing with one’s own negativity:

1. Thoughts precede emotions. Emotions, in and of themselves, tell you nothing about the facts of reality. Feeling hopeless about your chances of meeting an amazing girl does not actually mean that you have no hope of meeting an amazing girl. And just because losing that game damaged your confidence so much that you feel like you’ll never win again does not mean you actually will never win again.
2. Honesty requires that we communicate our thoughts and feelings, not our conclusions. The best way to deal with negative emotions — which are often negative conclusions we’ve come to about ourselves — is to examine the thoughts and feelings behind them.

For example, I have always had a fear of losing. As a chess player during my teenage years, this fear surfaced in the form of offering draws to higher rated players when I had a clearly better position. Other times it just kept me out of tournaments altogether: by not playing, I guaranteed not losing.

Recently that fear resurfaced when I started playing go (a board game invented in China 4,000 years ago.) One particular loss a few weeks ago was particularly hard to swallow. I was a solid 50 points ahead in the game, and my opponent was ready to resign. But my follow through was so terrible that he ended up beating me by about 50 points instead.

I don’t mind when I lose because my opponent just outplayed me, but I get really frustrated when I outplay myself. And after this particular loss, my confidence was deeply shaken: How the hell could I play so badly? Why did I try to get so fancy? It’s impossible to blow a lead that big. If anything I had to congratulate myself for being able to fail so spectacularly.

And on it went, to the point that I wondered whether I should just quit playing altogether. What was the point of all the studying I was doing if I was just going to blow games like that? How would I regain my confidence to actually win a won position? Would I ever even win another game again?

Challenging Negative Thoughts

When you start thinking negative thoughts like this, don’t try to ignore them. If you’ve ever tried to repress negative feelings you know that it just doesn’t work. If anything, it amplifies them. Further, trying to stamp out bad feelings gives you no actionable way out of that state. There are underlying premises, beliefs, and assumptions about you and the world around you that have led you to feeling that way, and those need to be addressed.

So the way out of negative emotional loops is not to ignore them, subdue them, or even “just let them be there”, but to challenge them. Confront the negative self-talk directly and identify exactly why you feel that way. Extract the thoughts that precede the emotions.

Returning to my go example, I knew I loved the game and I had no intention of actually giving it up, so I forced myself to figure out how to better handle major upsets like the one I’d just endured. I did that by taking a close look at the thoughts that were going through my head. Here are some examples:

• How could I play so badly? Easy: by making mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. When a doctor makes a mistake, he might kill someone and/or get sued. When a computer programmer makes a mistake, it might lead to a huge security flaw in his software. When an investor makes a mistake, she might lose a few million bucks. And when a go player makes a mistake, he loses a game of go.
• How could I lose such a won position? Because deserving to win is not the same as winning. And by the way, this probably won’t be the last time you blow such a big lead. This is more like “the first major screw up of the rest of your (go playing) life.” But the more it happens, the better you’ll learn to deal with it.
• Will I ever win again? Erm, seriously? Do you really think that if you play another five or ten thousand games you’re going to lose all of them? Do you really think that if you spend a couple hours a day studying and playing go, and constantly seek out opportunities to learn from stronger players, that you’re going to be the same strength in five years from now that you are today? Not. Likely.

The more I cranked up the resolution on my thoughts, the more I realized how silly they were. Sure, I still fear losing and I still hate blowing won positions, but challenging those feelings and forcing myself to reveal the thinking behind them has greatly diminished their control over my actions. And they no longer threaten my continued enjoyment of the game.

I’ve intentionally given a rather tame example here of course, but I use these same principles to confront all kinds of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I have the same kinds of worries about my writing, my consulting work, my health, my relationships, etc., and I’ve found this process to be extremely helpful for putting things in perspective.

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The networking that matters is helping people achieve their goals. Doing it reliably and repeatedly so that over time people have an interest in helping you achieve your goals, because they have a stake in it.

– Seth Godin

I wouldn’t call myself an introvert, but I am definitely a not-extrovert. I am reasonably good at meeting new people, but only for the same reasons that I am reasonably good at building websites or playing chess: I’ve treated it as a problem that can be solved through directed thinking and deliberate effort.

As a geek, I see getting one’s social life off the ground not as a lottery, but as a knowledge activity. Clearly there are wrong ways to go about meeting people, which means that there must be right ways to go about it too. I don’t believe in premeditated interactions — the only script I offer is “Hi”, with the rest left as an exercise to the reader — but there is a lot to be said for foundational knowledge: cultivating the right attitude, managing your expectations, embracing rejection, setting goals, and so on. Ultimately, problems in your social life are just like any other kinds of problems: they can be identified, characterized, and worked on.

One of the most common questions I get asked by social skydivers, both male and female, is: Where the heck do you meet people?

In fact, having recently moved halfway around the world — from Montreal to Berlin — it’s a question I’ve had to ask myself. But even though I arrived here less than three months ago, I’ve already started to weave my way into the fabric of Berlin life. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting some really interesting people and have enjoyed getting to know them.

In this article, I’ll share with you the approach I’ve taken, including a list of the specific events and activities that I find most useful for bringing me into contact with the kinds of people I want to get to know.

Developing the Right Approach

Before I list my favourite places to meet people, I’ll start by outlining the principles I use to come up with these ideas in the first place. Using these guidelines, you’ll be able to tweak my later list of suggestions to fit your own tastes.

• Who can you help? Not just in a humanitarian sense, but in any sense that involves enabling other people to achieve their goals. For example, if you’re a geek working at a startup looking for Ruby programmers, why not visit your local Ruby group and spread the word? If you speak French and English fluently, why not go to a language exchange group and help other people become fluent too?
• Go open source. Don’t try to copyright your connections. The best way to build your social life is by giving things away, including your knowledge, your time, and your support.
• It’s not about meeting people, it’s about building things. Or learning things. Or teaching things. Shared pursuits are the ultimate social lubricant. When you have a common goal, you don’t have to try to meet people, it just happens. If you actually care about the interest that brought you together, you will need each other to advance.
• Be flexible. Remember the Weird Idea Radar? Turns out this is more than just a tool for discovering your passion — it’s also a great way to meet people. If you want to maximize your social potential, then you’re going to have to be open-minded. If you’re wondering whether some group is really your kind of thing, do it. If looking at their website makes you wonder if you’ll be the only person who shows up at the next meeting, do it. If you’re unsure whether you even know enough about the subject matter to talk about it, DO IT! Be willing to act on uncertainty. I’ve discovered some of my favourite interest groups by plowing through my initial hesitations.
• Be creative. Meeting people requires a capacity for original thinking. You should always be thinking of ways in which you can offer value to others, not as an entertainment monkey of course, but as a volunteer, a connector, and an enabler.
• Be an initiator. A lot of people wait for others to make the first move. I’d be lying to pretend I’m not guilty of this myself at times. I know there are at least a few people I should know a lot better than I do right now, but I’ve been waiting for them to inaugurate our friendship. And I can tell they’re probably waiting for me to do the same. But building social connections is not a game of chess — in a stalemate, both people lose.
• It won’t happen overnight. Allow for at least a few months before you expect to start connecting with people outside of the groups that brought you together. This is especially true if the group meets only once or twice a month.

Where to Meet People

With the above principles in mind, here are some of my favourite places to meet people:

• Philosophy groups. The more focussed, the better. You needn’t be a diehard adherent to the group’s philosophy to participate. For example, I’d hardly call myself an Objectivist, but I am a fan of Ayn Rand’s work. So I got involved in the Montreal Objectivist Club over a year ago and remained a member right up until I left for Berlin. Good food and great discussions which never failed to challenge my way of thinking.
• Couch surfing. CouchSurfing is a travel community that helps people wander the world by making it easy to find, and share, crash space. While this is particularly useful if you’ve just arrived in a new city, it’s also a great opportunity for locals. CS’ers organize regular parties and other events, and travelers are a fascinating bunch to get to know. I attended some CS events in Montreal. My polyglot buddy Benny travels the world acquiring new languages, and uses CS as a key part of building his social life in foreign places.
• Expat forums. This is also not limited to out-of-towners. Most people on expat forums are keen to mix with locals. In Berlin, I’ve made ample use of Germany’s most popular English-speaking expat forum and I’ve found many Germans present at the gatherings I attend.
• Meditation groups. You needn’t be New Age to sit quietly in a room with other people. I’m an atheist, but I find meditation to be a great way to relax and refocus.
• Language exchange groups. To language junkies, the benefits here are obvious. But even if you’re monolingual, you can still use your mother tongue to help others learn the language. It was through attending a language exchange group in Berlin that I met Lijit founder Stan James. He’s a brilliant guy to converse with, and we’ve parlayed our interest in German into discussions about startups, social media, the paradox of choice, “procrastiflation” (the idea that the likelihood of completing a task decreases exponentially with every day you put it off), and various other geeky subjects.
• Coworking. Coworking means sharing an office space with other people who would otherwise be working from home too. This is a great way to meet people who share the social challenges of self-employment. Coworking environments often bring together people with complementary skill sets — graphic designers, web developers, photographers, marketers, copywriters, etc. — which tends to create lots of opportunities for everyone involved.
• Take your online activities into meatspace. I did this a couple years ago with online poker. I started participating in real-life tournaments and met lots of people who were equally passionate about the game. Recently, I’ve replaced the time I normally spend playing go online with going out two nights a week to my favourite go clubs in Berlin.
• Toolchains are social objects. People love getting together and talking about the tools they use to build things. I’ve attended many different programming language groups in Montreal and more recently attended an Ubuntu BBQ in Berlin.
• Political change groups. I’m cheating a bit here, because I haven’t yet done this one myself. But I will soon be on my way to Vancouver and I am really looking forward to participating in ChangeCamp, which its website describes as “an open community and a set of tools and ideas designed to give citizens and governments the ability to work collaboratively in new ways to make change and to better address real-world challenges in our communities.” Wordy, but intriguing.

If you’re serious about getting your social life moving, I would encourage you to try every one of these suggestions, even if they seem a bit outside your range of interests. In the worst case, it might cost you an evening. But trying something that doesn’t work is never a waste of time if it brings you closer to finding something that does.

Exercises

So now that you have some ideas for developing the right attitude to building your social life, and several examples of where to meet interesting people, how do you put these ideas to work? Here are three ways to get started:

1. 30-day challenge. Make a commitment that, for the next 30 days, you will go to some kind of event or activity at least two nights a week. Be willing to stretch your definition of a good time if you have to. The priority is to get out of your house. I did this from the moment I arrived in Berlin (but more like four or five nights a week) and it is the main reason why I feel connected to this city, rather than feeling like an outsider who has a hard time breaking through.
2. Initiate, Initiate, Initiate. Make a list, either in your head or written down, of all the people with whom you have wanted to initiate a get-together (e.g. to hang out outside the gatherings where you normally see them), but have been too shy to do it. Then do it! Try for a minimum of at least three people to get started.
3. Where do you meet people? Add a comment below to share the specific activities that have worked best for you. While suggestions like “user groups” or “taking a course” are useful, it’s easy to overlook exactly what those might be. So the more detailed your suggestions, the better.

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If you got the skin to be rejected 800 times in a row, 801 is gonna be a crazy play.

– Social Media Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, describing the Hot Girl Rule (~45:10)

Having travelled and moved around a lot in the past several years, I’ve been through a number of social resets. I like exploring the world, so my reasons for moving have a lot less to do with jobs, family, and other social connections, and a lot more to do with adventure. I am addicted to culture shock.

But my reasons for starting over have not always involved relocation. Sometimes I’ve just fallen out with a few key people and find myself, socially speaking, back at square one.

This is not an easy place to be. I think I spent my first year in Montreal just feeling sorry for myself: Why is it so hard to meet people? Why can’t I just find a girl who loves me? Why can’t there be someone out there who worries about me?

It was around that time, a little over four years ago, that I realized that self-pity is self-destruction. The reason it was so hard to meet people was because all I did was sit on my own ass and whine — to myself — about how hard it was to meet people. The reason I was single for the first year I lived in Montreal was because I rarely went out. Except maybe for a walk to contemplate how lonely I was.

Having been through this experience many times, I eventually forced myself to adapt. Blaming the world for problems I created was just not a long-term option. I realized that this feeling that “nobody cares” wasn’t what caused my loneliness. Far from it. In fact, it was only by truly understanding that nobody cares that I was able to finally make sense of my social life issues, and figure out how to solve them.

Why Meeting People Is Hard

Building your social life is a lot like building a business. The currencies are different, but the mechanics are similar.

The startup entrepreneur starts out in a war against indifference. But those that succeed at attracting customers do well because they know this: Nobody cares. Nobody cares about your architecture. Nobody cares about your website. Nobody cares that you’ve reached Inbox Zero. Nobody has even heard of the event at which you won that award. Nobody knows that you have something for sale. And even if they do, they probably still don’t care.

And the same principle applies for startup socialites as well: Nobody cares.

Nobody knows that you exist. Nobody wants to meet you. Nobody cares that you are interesting to talk to. Nobody is going to coax you out of hiding. And that bikini-clad babe who just moved in next door? Borrow some sugar? Bottle of wine? Night of unbelievable sex?

Uh, no.

“Nobody cares” is not meant to be cynical or patronizing. Rather, it is a natural byproduct of the scale of humanity. In business, your potential customers just have so much stuff to choose from that they can’t possibly notice more than the tiniest fraction of what is out there. They might not even realize that they “need” what you are selling, and even if they’re aware of their need, they may not understand that your product fulfills it.

In social spheres, the barriers to entry aren’t nearly as high, but there are similar forces — and similar filters — to contend with. Overcoming loneliness means fully accepting that these forces exist and working with them, instead of against them.

So how does “nobody cares” translate from a reality check for entrepreneurs to a wake up call for expanding your social life? Here are some thoughts:

• Don’t buy the rhetoric that “it’s hard to meet people” where you live. Those are the words of an energy vampire. That’s like a business owner saying “it’s hard to find customers in this city.” Of course it’s hard. It’s hard to find customers in any city. Welcome to Planet Earth. Population: 6.7 billion. Retaining one’s sanity here requires an unconcern for the vast majority of things. And — by default at least — that includes you.
• 80% of businesses fail. Which means that 80% of the time, indifference wins. If you’re hitting it off with more than 20% — even 10% — of the people you make contact with, I have only two questions for you: 1. How are your writing skills? 2. Wanna write a guest post?
• Get out of your house. Nobody cares. And if you’re staying at home, taking long baths to “think” about things, and repeatedly promising yourself that tomorrow is The Day that you are really going to crank it up, then they will keep not caring.
• Salespeople are the masters of rejection. They spend most of their day getting brushed off by people that don’t care. And they make a hell of a good living at it too. If you’re willing to expose yourself to massive rejection, you win.
• We buy products for the same reason that we choose friends and lovers: they make us feel better and do better. Social success isn’t about you kicking ass, it’s about helping other people kick ass. So consider: What do you know that you can share with others? What can you help other people be better at? What do you want to see changed in the world, and where might you find others that want the same thing?
• Be honest: How many people where you live even know that you exist? 50? 100? Maybe 150? What about as a percentage of your city’s population? 0.00005%? Unless you live in a smaller place, cracking even 1% is almost impossible. An entrepreneur who doesn’t advertise his product would not get depressed if nobody bought it. And yet a lot of people do get depressed when they don’t “advertise” themselves (by going out, meeting people, talking to strangers, etc.) and nobody comes knocking.

Ultimately, if you are in a social rut, I am there with you. I know what loneliness is like and I know there is a way out. Nobody cares does not mean that nobody will care. It’s just a reminder that there are forces and filters that, while helping us cope with information overload, also make us invisible to each other. And the way to social savviness is not to ignore them, but to incorporate them into your action plan.

As I mentioned in the beginning, I’ve moved a lot. And a few months ago I moved again, to Berlin. But unlike when I moved to Montreal, this time I wasted no time waiting for the world to come to me. I have built an active social life since arriving here. I’ve met some brilliant and interesting people. I will write more about this later this week, including the specific places I go and the activities I participate in that have exposed me to a wide variety of people who have been fun getting to know.

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A common recipe for personal growth is to start with what you have, identify what sucks about it, and try to make it suck less. Software developers call this “fixing bugs.”

“Fixing bugs” may seem like a natural metaphor for personal development, but in most cases this is actually an extremely limited, even harmful, perspective. When you focus on fixing what’s broken, the standard by which you measure your progress is whatever you started with. If what you started with was crap, then the standard by which you judge your results is crap.

If your software currently crashes 20 times a day, making it crash only 15 times a day is “good”, only 12 times a day is “better”, and a mere 10 crashes a day would be “excellent.”

You might even get a raise.

This way of thinking is its own worst enemy. Patching a bad situation often still leaves you in a bad situation. Even worse, you might get the impression you’re doing something useful. Sure, 10 crashes a day is a lot better than 20 crashes a day. Perhaps you even used your Employee of the Month bonus to upgrade to the 500 channel cable package that Bob and Alice have been raving about.

But it’s still a profoundly shit way to live. Fixing a bug doesn’t necessarily fix anything. You may think you’ve uncovered a solution, when all you’ve really done is found a rut and made it deeper–a little more like a grave.

Death by a Thousand Service Packs

If it’s been three years since your last promotion–if you’ve spent almost every day for as long as you can remember arguing with your girlfriend about absolutely nothing–if you’ve swallowed up the last six months going on about how hopeless you are with women, yet you’ve approached only a dozen girls in that time, then reality has a message for you: The data has spoken. There is no bandage large enough to cover this wound. There is no way to alter this cause to produce the desired effect.

You cannot fix what was built on this foundation. You have to replace the foundation entirely.

The day after my cousin died several weeks ago, I quit my job. I’d been working on a contract for the last several months, but it just wasn’t me. It couldn’t be me. And no amount of tweaking, tuning, or patchwork could fix that.

It’s always a little terrifying to shake things up, but there is no better way to live. Until last Thursday, I was scratching someone else’s itch. Now I’m scratching my own.

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Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom.

– Thomas Jefferson

Deception is cancerous. The first mutation of a truth charts a path to colonize its host. One fib demands another, two lies need the proof of two more, until eventually even the most innocent half-truth metastasizes into a falsehood requiring surgery.

A lie is a deliberate attempt to fake the nature of reality. So a scientist who reaches a flawed conclusion through an error in her experimentation method may hint at incompetence, but she is not lying. But a guy who trades his own happiness for a fat paycheque and calls himself “successful”, must be charged with first-degree bullshit. His deception may succeed temporarily but he has not altered the facts, and the moral transaction is still charged to his account.

Why is faking the nature of reality bad? Because reality exists. No matter how hard you try to treat things differently than they really are, they still are. A job that drains your will to live is a job that drains your will to live. A girl who doesn’t respect you, doesn’t respect you.

When the disconnect with reality comes from a genuine error, the mistake is open to correction. The evidence of a fallacy shows up in the form of contradiction, and logic and reason can help stitch things back together. But intentional deceit makes the perpetrator a fugitive; sometimes physically, always intellectually. For whenever a liar’s evidence contradicts itself, he must flee further and further from the facts to maintain his sliding grip on sincerity.

The safe haven from the perils of denying what is, is radical honesty. To commit to radical honesty is to take an oath sworn directly on the face of existence. It’s a pledge–in your work, in your relationships, and to yourself–to see things exactly as they are, to the best of your ability. It acknowledges that almost all things are small things and that nothing is bigger than the truth.

Radical Honesty at Work

Few relationships will last longer, or have a larger effect on your day-to-day life, than the relationship between you and the value-producing activity that is your work. Applying radical honesty in your work means creating things that are of value to you personally.

Can each of us really do work that is of value to us personally? On what planet would we ever find someone to specialize in the manufacture of, say, toilet paper? Someone who would claim that such work is of value to him personally? You’d find that guy on the planet where ass-wiping technology doesn’t yet exist, where there’s a guy who’s sick of using his bare hands for the task, and where he is the only man alive annoyed enough to scratch this particular itch himself.

The things that are of value to you personally are entirely dependent on your environment and how you relate to it. For example, I couldn’t care less about growing my own food. There are lots of lots of people–”farmers” as they’re called–who already do this. And they’re willing, with the aid of an elaborate supply chain, to take my money in exchange for their food. If I didn’t have access to anyone who was willing to grow food, maintain livestock, and sell me either when I needed them, then I’d pretty quickly become interested in this problem. I value my own life and I need food to live.

What most frustrates you about the world? Almost every answer to that question is a business idea with your name written all over it. And when the work you do pays the bills both financially and spiritually, you have truly become your own boss.

Radical Honesty in Relationships

There’s a strong tie between your work and your relationships. Asking “What most frustrates you about the world?” is not only a means of identifying opportunities to create value in your life, it’s also a compass that directs you towards the people that will help make those dreams come true.

Radical honesty in relationships–whether platonic or intimate–requires self-respect. Self-respect is a seed planted by the standards you set: How do you treat people? How do you let them treat you?

Purpose is also paramount. In geek terms, your mission is like an Uninterruptible Power Supply, a primary source of energy and the motive power behind all the moving parts of your life. The relationships worth having are those with a voltage high enough to match your own, not those that cause a power failure.

Maintaining integrity in relationships means addressing problems that come up in real-time. Emotions are not chess pieces, and love is not a game of strategy. If you sense that something might be wrong, seek to identify and resolve the issue on the spot. If you’re constantly met with responses like the Solemn Downward Stare, followed by the Evening of Awkward Silence, and the Night Without Sex, then be warned: the game you’re playing isn’t worth winning.

Radical Self-Honesty

The hardest person to be honest with is yourself. Really, the only person you can be honest with is you. All delusion is ultimately self-delusion.

Radical self-honesty requires a matching dose of humility. Whatever score you give yourself in any category is almost surely inflated. If the currency by which we measure others is pounds, the currency by which we measure ourselves is yen. Some of these feelings of superior knowledge, skill, or judgement are no doubt justified. But many, if not most of them, aren’t. The moment you become conscious of this, your self-awareness expands. You begin to ask yourself more honest questions and give yourself more honest answers.

I find journalling to be an effective way to keep myself honest. I reach for my journal whenever I feel there’s an idea or milestone–good or bad–worth documenting. For example, I’ve got an overwhelming appetite for change. So when several months ago I started getting bored with my day-to-day routine, I made a journal entry about it. I even made a list of specific adjustments I wanted to make to shake things up. Looking at that list now, I’ve installed about 60% of those tweaks so far with more currently in progress.

How Honest Is Too Honest?

In the honesty business, there’s a fine line between radical and reckless.

Reckless honesty is the result of pushing the authenticity envelope so far that you shoot yourself in the foot. Radical honesty is having the balls to walk up to a girl and say “Hi” because you think she’s attractive and you want to find out more. Reckless honesty is walking up to the same girl and saying “Wow, you are absolutely gorgeous. There’s nothing I’d like to do more right now than to take you into the nearest bathroom, rip all your clothes off, and fuck you to God.”

Both approaches are, technically speaking, completely authentic. But one is obviously somewhat more productive. The border between radical and reckless must be patrolled by your intuition. Sometimes that line is obvious (like in the example above), but sometimes it’s not. As a general rule, accuracy is more important than precision.

If you have a habit of stopping short of saying what you really think, turning things around will take time. But there is no challenge more worth tackling. Authenticity accrues a compound interest, and even a few extra cents of veracity today could become a large down payment on your happiness tomorrow.

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It’s not who you are that holds you back, it’s who you think you’re not.

– Author Unknown

If your primary goal in life is to meet an amazing woman, you probably won’t.

Setting out on a mission to find a girlfriend is like starting a company to get rich: It focusses you on the wrong things and you eventually realize that the game you’re playing isn’t worth winning.

When money is your center of gravity, you make decisions based on dollars rather than sense. Instead of being a Merchant of Wow, you become a Merchant of Ow, building boring, ugly, and painful things, hoping you might flip before you flop. By trading passion for profit you confine yourself to mediocrity, blazing a trail to unhappiness and unwealth as you sink ever deeper into spiritual overdraft.

Likewise, when you make women your focal point, you let go of your I. Instead of asking what you want most in life, you ask what women want most in life: What traits do women find attractive in a man? What kind of social events do hot women go to? What kind of hobbies do women consider sexy? What should I say to a girl when I approach her? Will she be turned off if I do XYZ?

Questions are like shovels: they unearth the truth. But when you ask questions like these, you dig your own grave.

There Is No Secret

In How to Meet Women Without Really Trying, I suggested that the best way to meet women is by talking to them. This advice is so simple that it’s almost impossible to understand.

I’ve experienced the entire spectrum of success with women, from being a chess-playing, virgin, overweight cookie monster in high school all the way to where I am now, where I don’t even think about meeting girls anymore and It Just Happens. I know how easy–and, more importantly, how hard–it is to accept and apply the idea of meeting girls by talking to them.

What do I mean by “talk” to women? What do you say? What’s the best opener? What do you say after that? Where do you meet them? How do you get them interested in you? How do you ask for their number? How can you possibly meet hot girls without using magic potions and super sekrit seduction techniques?

To demystify the mechanics of making a connection, I’ll describe exactly how I met the girl I’m currently dating. I’ll include some philosophical context to paint the bigger picture that led to us finding, meeting, and connecting with each other.

This story is only coincidentally about seduction. It’s really more a tale of me just living my life, and how that inevitably leads to meeting charming and beautiful creatures.

Shared Interests Are Everything

I never go out to meet girls anymore. The success or failure of my social engagements is never measured by how many approaches I did (ugh), how many numbers I walked away with (ugh!), or how many kisses I got (UGH!@#*!).

Every activity I’m involved in is fueled by self-interest. For example, I organize a personal growth group in Montreal because I want to surround myself with like-minded, positive people, and create an environment that promotes the conscious pursuit of happiness. The more I care about that goal, the better the group gets. I’m helping organize BarCamp Canada, a geek conference coming up later this year, because I’m interested in helping smart people talk to others about what they’re working on. And every article on this blog is, first and foremost, a letter written to myself. Writing helps me crystallize my thoughts and make sense of my experiences. I use my content to build traffic, rather than letting traffic build my content.

The natural consequence of defining your own hierarchy of values and pursuing them to your utmost ability is that you meet people who share those interests. For example, by stepping up to volunteer for BarCamp, I’ve created the opportunity to work with smart hackers. My choice to start a personal growth group has resulted in forming friendships with some hot girls and cool guys. From there I get invited to parties and other social events, which leads to meeting more interesting people. And, of course, starting this blog has added a whole new dimension to my world.

Which brings me to how I met Mary.

Seduction Secret #172: Live Your Own Life

Mary was yet another girl I crossed paths with while doing something that mattered to me.

You may remember that a few months ago I did a 30-day trial on learning to cook. Since I started from almost zero, I had to make regular trips to a funky little kitchen boutique nearby for crockery and cookware.

I was in there a few times a week during the challenge. The girls that worked there were really sweet and we started talking more and more. My requests for kitchen advice eventually led to discussions about the rest of our lives. I told them about 30 sleeps and how I was learning to cook, and we all got more interested in each other.

There was one girl in particular there who caught my eye. She had dark hair, a pretty face, a gorgeous body, and radiated an irresistibly feminine sparkle. We never got around to exchanging names, though I couldn’t help but make a mental note of her.

Eventually, I completed the 30-day challenge and my culinary needs died down. Time passed. Life went on. I didn’t get around to the store much anymore, but I kept bumping into that cute girl around the neighbourhood.

Girl Approaches Guy, Film at 11

One day I got an email from a reader of my blog. She told me that my articles inspired her. She confessed a little embarrassment to be writing me out of the blue, but said she had just read my article How to Get a Life and found it really interesting. One of the points I make in that article is how powerful it can be to just email someone you want to get in touch with. That’s exactly what made her decide to email me.

But it wasn’t until I reached the bottom of the email that I finally put two and two together.

“I hope you haven’t stopped cooking!” she said. Signed Mary.

Opportunity Will Knock

When opportunity knocks, you either answer the door, or you light up your internet connection and spank away your sorrows. So a few days later, I invited her out to a social gathering and things took off from there.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that pursuing your goals will make the women you desire chase after you. In most cases, you’ll have to make the first move. But shared interests plant the seeds for a healthy social life, and a healthy social life plants the seeds for a healthy sex life. 99% of the girls you meet will never end up in your bedroom, and that’s fine. Mary is the one girl I did connect with out of the dozens and dozens (and dozens) that I didn’t.

You don’t need pickup skills to meet girls; you need goals that have absolutely nothing to do with girls. Attracting worthwhile women into your life happens only when you throw the entire force of your existence into creating a life that matters.

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You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.

– Dale Carnegie

Positive relationships are the foundation of an interesting life.

Regular readers of my blog know that I advocate talking to strangers as a fantastic way of shaking up reality. But that’s not the whole story. If your interactional energy is misspent, you can end up in a repetitive cycle of drive-by friendships, random sexual adventures that are as fun as they are meaningless, and a general sense of wondering why you seem to always end up back where you started.

Making your own introductions is a life-changing force. But how do you channel this bravado into building relationships that last? How do you find friends that will raise the ceiling of your potential rather than criticize you for your passions? How do you meet girls that belong in your world and not just in your bedroom?

How do you get a life?

Love Being Alone

The prerequisite to building a healthy social life is, ironically, being comfortable by yourself. If you’re starting from zero, the reasons for this are obvious: you don’t have much choice. If you have a few friends but find that they drag you down, withdrawing from that crowd and starting anew will probably require staying in more frequently. Also, being too desperate for the company of others will hinder authentic interaction. You’ll be more worried about external validation instead of just letting it flow and being open to discovering connections.

Appreciating aloneness starts by consciously acknowledging the freedom it brings. When you enjoy your own company you can be flexible about who you choose to hang with, instead of letting the ego’s fear of being alone suck you into social scenes you don’t really like.

It also helps to have interests that can be pursued on your own. I’m fortunate to have many: reading, writing, cooking, software development, and online poker, among others. I’m just as happy staying in as going out, as long as I keep a good balance between the two. You can even use your alone time to apply the ideas in this article to help build your social life.

Start With Who You Already Know

Getting a life means becoming a person who initiates interactions, instead of always waiting for others to make the first move. A great place to start is with the people you already know. Most of us can probably think of one or more people that we’re horrible at keeping in touch with. These might be former acquaintances, people you met while travelling, someone you enjoyed working with in the past, old friends, or even current friends. When making this list, reach as far back into your past as you can, as long as you keep finding examples of people you wish you’d stayed in touch with.

Then contact them. I prefer email, especially when it’s someone I haven’t talked to in a while. If you don’t have the person’s email address, try Google. Alternatively, you might have a mutual friend who can put you in touch.

I did this several weeks ago. It was easy for me to think of many people with whom I’m horrible at keeping in touch. I ended up sending over a dozen emails to former coworkers I enjoyed working with, friends in other cities, and even local buddies who I don’t talk to nearly enough, often because I rely on them to always ping me.

I got responses from all but two people. I ended up going for lunch with one girl I’d never socialized with outside of a party setting. I reconnected with a former boss of mine from Quebec City who travels to Montreal frequently, and plan to have lunch with him next time he’s in town. And I reestablished contact with some friends I was starting to lose touch with.

The ROI on this simple gesture made me wonder: Why the fuck haven’t I been doing this all along?

Generosity Is Golden

It’s one thing to take the social initiative with people you already know, but what about with someone you’ve never met?

Sometimes I’ll get an email from a fellow blogger who wants to “network” with me. This is the greasiest way to introduce yourself to anyone. When making a new connection, start with generosity. Focus on how you can help the other person get where they’re going. This is an idea I got from Keith Ferrazzi’s excellent book, Never Eat Alone.

Do you have information that may interest them? Do you know someone whom they could benefit from knowing too? Can you volunteer to help their cause?

For example, I recently moved into a coworking space in Montreal called Station C. It’s a group of independent consultants and entrepreneurs who don’t like working from home. I think Patrick and Dan have done a fantastic job setting it up. It’s an amazing workspace with a great mix of people.

One of the first things I did when I moved in was volunteer to help build the office’s scheduling application. I have a lot of respect for the project and, now that I’m involved as a member, it can only be a good use of my time to make it even better. I also introduced myself to most people in the office early on and asked them to show me what they were working on. I wanted to get a sense of what skills they had and consider ways in which I could give them more work. In showing my own interest, I found others naturally reciprocating. I’ve already been getting work offered in my direction.

One of the best investments you can make in yourself is to take a genuine interest in other people.

User Groups

The best places to plant the seeds that will improve your social life are user groups. A “user group” might be a professional association, a political party, an orchestra, a yoga class, or any other gathering of people who have a common passion.

To start down this road, make a list of keywords for everything you enjoy and every issue that matters to you. For example, mine looks like:

• personal growth
• spirituality
• private health care in canada
• cooking
• longboarding
• grassroots geek conferences
• design
• usability
• eco-friendly housing
• etc.

Do a complete brain dump. If you haven’t got at least 50 lines of output, you aren’t trying hard enough. When finished, head to Meetup.com and see what you can find. Alternatively, add the name of your city to each line and you’ve got a Google search query. This will help you find local user groups, bloggers, discussion forums, businesses, and other organizations related to these topics.

What if you can’t find a group that fits your needs? Organize it. This is exactly how I started a personal growth group in Montreal. The downside of being an organizer is that it takes a little more time and energy. The upside is everything else.

Finding a great group of people that like what you like may require some detective work, but it’s worth it. A shared interest is the active ingredient in building positive relationships.

Don’t Limit Yourself

When I was doing my 30-day trial on learning to cook, I took inspiration from Laura Calder’s show French Food at Home. I think she has a unique charm and her enthusiasm for cooking is contagious.

Then I thought: Why not email her?

So I did. And she replied.

Next thing you know, we’re exchanging email about The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle, spirituality, and general thoughts on the art of happiness.

Don’t limit yourself. Take a look at your bookshelf, for example, and ask yourself: Which of these authors might I like to get to know? Email them. Authors in particular seem to have more easily accessible email addresses than other public figures. It’s unlikely that you’ll meet or even get a personal response from most of the people you contact this way, but it’s still fun to make a connection with someone that inspires you.

I’ve turned this last one into a 30-day trial. Every day I email one person I want to know more about, whom I might normally consider out of reach. I find some of the most fun 30-day trials are the ones related to meeting new people. If you feel like you could use some help in the social arena, why not make now the time you choose to break out of your bubble?

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Flow with whatever is happening and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.

– Chuang Tzu

95% of everything you’ll ever need to know about meeting women can be summed up in four words: Go with the flow. Instead of trying to meet girls, focus entirely on yourself. Create a life that’s interesting and worthwhile to you, not because that’s an attractive quality to women, but because it’s your life and you are all you have. If you can’t live your own adventure, you’ll never be happy.

Funnily enough, doing things to impress women is pretty unimpressive. Neediness will bury you. The only way to attract the types of girls that actually belong in your life is to direct all your energy into being a world-class chef, rock star computer geek, champion race car driver, or whatever else lights your fire.

And then just talk to the people that show up on your path. Whether that path is the sidewalk on the way to the grocery store, the poker table, the front row of the audience at your show, or a bar or club that you’d be going to anyway, even if you already had a girlfriend. No matter what you do, there will be people all around you. The guy who asks, “Where’s a good place to meet girls?”, assumes that he can’t say hi to the gorgeous girl picking tomatoes beside him at the grocery store, or that he can’t walk up to a girl in a room full of seated people and just start talking to her.

Believe it or not, you can. It’s not the situation that stops you. It’s your ego that stops you. Getting rejected by a girl poses a serious threat to who you think you are. But here’s a little secret: If you’re constantly getting rejected, you’re constantly getting laid.

Fear of Rejection

You can’t do anything to change what a girl thinks of you. The moment you try to change someone’s opinion of you, you’ve conceded to their reality, instead of living life on your own terms and letting social polarity work out the details. The vast majority of guys who think they have no idea how to meet girls are really just making excuses for having a lethal fear of rejection.

How do you meet girls? By talking to them.

If you have the balls to talk to girls anywhere, anytime, you’ve nailed down a crucial 20% of the secret to attracting women that belong in your life. The other 80%, of course, is to be doing something so interesting with your life that women become an enjoyable diversion, rather than the foundation of your happiness. If you don’t respect yourself enough to approach girls that appeal to you, and find it hard to ignore being laughed at sometimes by the sexually frustrated masses, then you’re going to have to settle for whatever girl decides to allow you to have sex with her.

There Is No Try

The girls I meet are interested in me right away. If they aren’t, I’m not going to try and change their minds. In fact, I usually don’t even respond to anything less than a smile. If her reaction was anything but warm and receptive, I’m already talking to someone else. No hard feelings, but at the same time, life is too short to waste on the Nos. If Montreal weren’t full of astoundingly beautiful women, I might have to reconsider my wholesale approach. Thankfully, natural, high-fashion beauty is available here in bulk.

In fact, these days, I get approached more and more. The most recent example of this was New Year’s Eve. I was out with my buddy Yas, partying it up, when this girl came up to us and asked for a light. My buddy started talking to her really interestedly. A few minutes later, we all walked back inside. As I walked towards the dance floor, the girl grabs me from behind and pulls me over to introduce me to her friend. Here we go again…

This seemed pretty fun, so I stayed tuned in for several minutes. Then a good song came on so I headed to the dance floor once again. I noticed that the girl didn’t join me, but it didn’t matter either way. The Now moment is the only moment that counts, especially when it comes to social interactions.

During the next hour or two, I met a bunch of other people, and lost track of my buddy. This happens just about every time I go out to large social gatherings with friends. It’s also why I can have such a great time, even when I go out on my own.

By midnight, I was on the dance floor, dancing with these girls I had met outside about 20 minutes earlier. When the New Year hit, the girl who approached me and my buddy earlier finds me on the dance floor to come wish me Happy New Year–with a kiss.

We start dancing, and she ends up inviting me to her place afterwards. Rather, she didn’t invite me, but was saying things like, “Yeah, when you come to our place later on…” Hmmm, okay.

But apparently that kiss was a commitment. This girl eventually starts getting possessive towards me. She gets visibly jealous seeing me talk to other girls. Fast forward to a couple hours later, and I’m outside talking to a couple dudes about Quebec’s equivalent of Woodstock, how awesome Montreal girls are, and various other things, when this girl taps me from behind.

“Bye Brad. We’re leaving.” Whoa, she’s pissed now.

“Okay, have a good night!” I reply, with a goodbye cheek-to-cheek. And back to the conversation…

The more people you meet, the more you’ll see patterns emerge, and the less you’ll take it personally when things go sour. Sometimes the drama takes a few days, weeks, months, or even years to unfold, but it all boils down to the same ego-based insecurities. And it’s no big deal. Just go with the flow, and be thankful when you find things out up front.

No one is good or evil. We’re all just a bunch of egos passing judgement on other egos, to help keep our own ego intact. Strange but true.

Self-Created Problems

A guy who gets both legs amputated has a walking problem. A guy who loses his front teeth in a hockey fight has a dental problem. A guy who says, “I can’t approach that girl! What if she rejects me!?” does not have a problem meeting women. He’s created the problem in his head, but it isn’t real. So at any moment, you can delete this self-destruction from your life.

What do you say to a hot girl when you see her? Anything you want. Even asking that kind of question is just an excuse to not be alive, out there in the world, making yourself vulnerable, speaking your truth, and living with the consequences.

If there’s anything good about self-inflicted misery, it’s that only you can change it, and the present moment is always giving you permission to let go.

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This article talks a lot about my philosophy of success with women in general, so even if you have no interest in meeting girls online, you may still find it helpful.

I’ve already written about the pros and cons of online dating. One of the things I talked about in that article was the myth that there are no quality women online. There are loads of extremely beautiful women on online dating sites. But I haven’t yet said anything about how I met these girls.

Tim, a 30 sleeps reader, writes:

I’d love to pick your brain a bit about online dating. I just started my match.com account. Any wise jedi tips would be appreciated. I am curious:

How much importance do you place on the picture and profile you put up there?

Did you follow what seems to be community logic and just be an asshole online?

What kind of emails did you send out? My initial emails teased the girl about something in her profile, then gave her a question to answer. So far (this is like week 2) that seems to work, although I get less responses from hotter girls.

Finally, did you run any controlled experiments, like sending out the same emails with a different profile, etc? Again, thanks a lot for taking the time to read this and I hope to hear from you!

Tim

Great questions Tim. I’m going to offer a general introduction to meeting women online, while making sure to address these specific questions along the way.

Is Online Dating Right for You?

The first thing I like to ask before I try to solve any problem is: Do I need to solve this problem?

So before we talk too much about the ins and outs of online romance, the first question should be: Is online dating right for you? When it comes to meeting girls, is online dating the most valuable use of your time? In my opinion, probably not.

I don’t consider online dating to be the ideal way to meet women anymore. It’s inefficient, one-dimensional, and yet another distraction (all that instant messaging) in a world where we need no more distractions. And if it’s not the ideal use of my time for that purpose, then it’s a waste of my time. The absolute best, most mentally healthy, character-building and efficient way to meet women is to start social skydiving and build your social and love life up from there, to create a lifestyle that suits you. SS’ing changed me in a profoundly beneficial and lasting way that goes way beyond just women. Online dating changed me somewhat, but on nowhere near the same level that real life risk-taking did.

In my opinion, online dating is appropriate only for guys who have a lethal amount of approach anxiety. If you’ve never done SS’ing before, you might think that includes you. It probably doesn’t. Here’s how to verify if you truly have a life-threatening fear of talking to strangers, rather than the standard Oh-my-God-talking-to-women-is-fucking-impossible fear that is the default for 90% of men worldwide, multi-millionaires and world leaders included:

1. Go out with a buddy to a social gathering where there will be a lot of women.
2. Give your buddy $100. Don’t bet that amount; give him the money.
3. Tell him that you get your $100 back if, and only if, you say “Hi” to at least one girl that you don’t know.
4. If you get your $100 back, give yourself a huge pat on the back for living dangerously, forget online dating, and continue your pursuit of standing up for your own truth even in the face of overwhelming social pressure.
5. If you don’t get your $100 back, join Lavalife, Match.com, or Plentyoffish right now and use the rest of the advice in this article to help get you on your way.

Creating Your Profile

Okay, so now you’re out a hundred bucks, you’ve proven to yourself that you’d rather be dead than say hi to a girl you don’t know, and you’ve registered with an online dating site. It’s time to create your online dating profile.

When it comes to having an intimate relationship with someone, looks are just as important as personality. For this reason, your photo will be the centerpiece of your profile. You want to use a photo that is you looking your best, but only to the extent that you can actually look that good in real life when you make the effort. I always used self-shot photos, which a lot of online daters do, because it gave me more control in creating a good, but realistic, photo.

Keep it simple. Ignore seduction theories about including social proof and breathtaking adventure in your photos as a way to make you look more attractive. Don’t waste your time on girls that are wooed by ego-driven variables like that. If you have a really good photo of you with your friends, so be it, but don’t try to engineer a Kodak moment just to get a girl’s attention. If you use a photo with many people in it, make very clear which one is you. It’s funny, but I’ve seen several girls’ profiles where I was left wondering who’s who.

Strong writing skills are helpful. I’ve been riding the wave of my linguistic pride for the better part of my adult life. With online dating, I think this proved useful in catching the eye of girls that interested me. It’s worth investing a chunk of time to create a well-written summary of who you are and what you’re about. This includes knowing exactly what type of relationship and girl you’re looking for, and being clear about what you want in your profile. If hard drug usage is a deal breaker, say so. If you’re interested primarily in girls of a certain age or ethnicity, let it be known. If you want a bisexual girl who’s open to threesomes with other girls, the truth will set you free.

Remember, social polarity exists online too. Your particular desires and interests may annoy or even repulse some girls, but who cares? Happiness in life is all about enjoying the company of Yeses, not catering to the Noes. You’ll be that much more attractive–and noticeable–to women that fit your criteria and they’ll appreciate your directness. I’m not suggesting you go into disgusting detail about your dolphin-related fetishes, just that your profile be clear enough to exclude the kind of women you’re unlikely to be interested in.

Interacting with Women Online

So, you’ve got a photo of you looking your best, and you’ve fashioned an authentic snippet that tells the online dating world what you’re about. Oh, and your friend has $100 of your money burning a hole in his pocket. Now what?

First, when searching through profiles, always get a photo. The one and only time that I failed to do this, it was a complete disaster. The sites I’ve used allow you to filter your search to include only profiles that have a photo.

Next, message only girls that live within a 30-45 minute commute of you. Long-distance relationships are a symptom of a scarcity mindset. In fact, a big factor for me in choosing a place to live is that I have to be attracted to the women that live there. If you’re living in a city where you claim that there are no high-quality, attractive women, start by addressing that problem before creating yourself the new problem of having a relationship with someone that lives a $5000 plane fare away.

As for Tim’s question about being an asshole online: If you have to ask, the answer is no. Just be yourself and live with the consequences. Authenticity is the currency of seduction. You don’t need to hide behind a cocky funny, alpha male character to impress women. Veracity, charisma, and an unshakeable sense of self-worth are the byproducts of living life on purpose, and those are the attributes that will win the hearts and minds of your target audience.

There’s a reason why I write articles on everything from finding your passion and landing your dream job, to achieving the impossible and how to flood your life with beautiful women. It’s because all of these subjects are tightly intertwined. A discussion of flooding your life with beautiful women is incomplete without also talking about how to create a fulfilling life that goes way beyond any particular girl.

You cannot be a passionless, burger flipping, rat racer and an alpha male at the same time. Sure, there are many “gastronomical engineers” that get laid by beautiful women, but truly happy, healthy relationships require that each person involved be independently happy and healthy. In my opinion, that means living a life that inspires you, challenges you, and gives you a sustainable outlet for creative self-expression.

Since social polarity exists just as much online as in real life, it doesn’t matter what you say in your messages, as long as it comes from your heart instead of your joystick. What’s most important is that all the time you spend not-online-dating is invested in the creation of your ideal life. If your happiness is made or broken by a girl, she’ll find out soon enough, and when she does, you’ll get hurt. And by “hurt”, I mean that when she drops the breakup bomb, you’ll feel the nuclear winter in the depths of your soul.

After sending out several dozen messages to women whose photo and profile I like, I’d usually get a tiny handful of responses. I often spent about a week or two interacting with each girl online and on the phone before meeting. One of the great things about online dating is that the girl gets to know your personality before she gets to know your body, so make the most of it. Instant messaging also allowed me to be considerably more congruent than I would have been under social pressure, at least at that point in my life.

I know that my approach was much slower than what a lot of the online dating “experts” would recommend, but my success rate with the women I met from dating sites was insane. I was consistently meeting high-quality, beautiful women, and in the few years that I spent doing this, I probably hit it off with about 80% of the girls I met face-to-face.

Controlled Experimentation

Online dating sites would seem like an ideal testbed for social experimentation. You can try tons of different techniques and there’s almost none of the risk of embarrassment like there is when trying stuff out in real life. But my advice for running social experiments online is: Don’t do it.

Experimentation implies outcome dependence. It means you’re trying to see “what works and what doesn’t”, as if finely-tuned tricks and techniques are what you need to have great relationships with women. Trying a technique is, by definition, an authenticity leak. The key to success with women is not to try to be someone that a woman would be attracted to, but to live your own adventure and let her join your for the ride, if she wants to. I’m living proof that you don’t need any of those poisonous, reaction-seeking, social robotics to meet the girl of your dreams.

(For anyone who looks at my photo and thinks nature gave me a helping hand, I’m going to try and track down a photo of me when I was 17 or 18 years old, 50 pounds heavier than I am now, a two-and-a-half-chinned, shabby ass, chess-playing virgin bum, so you can see how huge of a difference you can make if you focus on making the most of your DNA. Almost anyone who needs a helping hand in the looks department can add at least two or three points to their physical appearance if they make a concerted effort to do so. Making the transition from a needy, pathetic, reaction-seeking, dick slave to an authentic, purpose-driven, self-led man is worth at least a couple points on its own.)

So, Tim, I hope this article answers your questions about meeting women online and then some. It’s impossible for me to talk about this subject without also addressing issues that have nothing to do with women. It’s also hard for me to be completely honest without also sounding a bit harsh in some places. A lot of guys are looking for attraction techniques instead of focussing on following their own lead and letting social polarity sort out the details.

The good news is that you’re on this road at all. Opinion openers, cocky funny, group theory, social proof, and all those other halloween masks were a useful, albeit unnecessary, stepping stone on my own path to self-actualization. The even better news is that, whether online or offline, an honest individuality grown from living an intentional life allows you to break all the rules that the “canned game” gurus try to teach you.

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