One thing that continually surprises me about guys I meet who want to improve their social and sex lives are the amount that want to “do it themselves.” There are many, many guys out there who actually don’t want to learn social and sexual skills from anyone else. Rather, they want to “figure stuff out on their own” and “do it their way.”
This strikes me as an absolutely brain-dead way of learning social skills, sexual skills, or any skill for that matter.
Why is this? To learn a skill on your own, it takes a tremendous amount of work. Plus, you have to be either a genius or incredibly talented. To learn a skills from a teacher, all you have to have is an ability to learn and the willingness to put a reasonable amount of effort into learning.
For example, suppose you tried to “do it yourself” and learn Calculus on your own. This would be incredibly hard — Isaac Newton was a genius, and it took him many years to discover basic Calculus principles. If you slaved over it your entire life, it is doubtful that the average person would ever get as far as he did.
However, you don’t have to be a genius to learn Calculus if you have a teacher. If you have a good teacher, all it takes is a willingness to learn and a few months to devote to the topic.
Now, social and sexual skills are far from Calculus — but learning them works in the same way. To discover how to do these things on your own, it takes many years and a tremendous amount of effort. However, if you learn from a mentor or teacher, it takes much less time and effort to learn the same amount.
I recognized this myself when I was first learning social skills, which is why I sought out mentors. Mentors such as Vin DiCarlo were tremendously instrumental in my rise to social success, and I doubt I could have done it without them.
When I was learning sexual skills, I also tried to seek out teachers. There was nobody that I could learn from live at the time — so I sought out knowledge in the form of books and other informational products. Unfortunately, everything I tried was absolutely terrible. Although I would have greatly preferred to have learned sexual skills from a teacher, there were none out there that I could learn from
This is why I created the Sex God Method. It would have been much easier and faster to have learned from someone else — it took me years and years on continuous experimentation, analysis and tweaking before I came up with it. It is also why I wrote it all up in the Sex God Method — so that guys don’t have to duplicate all my hard work, and can learn sexual skills much faster.
So: If you’re learning a skill, don’t try to reinvent the wheel and “do it yourself.” A much more effective way of learning is to get a mentor or teacher to instruct you, so that you can benefit from their knowledge. You’ll learn much faster, and much better.
Errr. dude. I have read many of your posts and have found them to be very insightful. Plus, I love natural, mainly because I’m kinda lazy and don’t like relying on routines; I just like to flow. However, this particular post of yours, to be very euphemistic since i think you had good intentions, rings very False.
Sure, learning by yourself without a coach or any notes written by others are tough. However, people that you claim are learning by themselves are not really learning by themselves; they are perusing countless articles written by pickup gurus (or at least i hope they are.) Therefore, they aren’t really learning by themselves. Sure, they aren’t physically with a guru, but they surrounded by their opinions and guidelines. Yes, as you’re thinking right now, they can read it but they can’t really understand it in its fullest. That is were the field comes into play. In reference to your calculus statement, being the lazy guy i am, i skipped all my calc classes in school, so all that was left was to teach myself from a book, which i did.
Also, Sure, learning by yourself can become frustrating, but by studying and analyzing yourself you begin understand yourself more. Its sort of like meditation where you sit by yourself and just think, or pounder life, your future, your goals etc. Someone, that practices by himself will learn what exactly works for him and what doesn’t.
Also, sure, it takes forever, but it out the best you and not the best of someone else in you.
All this said, I do not have anything against learning from teachers, or others (hehe, well my bank account does;). I believe like you were saying you can learn faster with a teacher. I would even go so far as to say that, you can learn faster if you study by yourself first and then later see a teacher, or in two wingmen: one better than you and one worse than you. These two will be your teachers: one will tell whats wrong because he knows, the other will SHOW you whats wrong by making terrible mistakes, giving you an insight into what to avoid.
Still, having a teacher or not, about 90% of your gain will always stem from learning yourself, as is evident in any martial arts or class room, or pick up. A person that went out infield and practiced by himself before coming to a pick up class, will always do better than someone who just gets up, with no practice, and just strolls into a pick up class. Why? because the first guy understands himself more than the second.
I think you are cool. I think you had good intentions. Refrain from using such offensive words as brain dead, indicating that those of us pioneers like me, you, vince, n dmitri are brain dead. Learning by yourself is vital. Also, you do not have to spend money to get good.
Here is where I am coming from on this:
In 2 years of keyboard jockeying, I didn’t get laid except for a few lucky flukes.
In about 1 year of going out and sarging religiously with lair guys, I didn’t get laid, again except for a lucky fluke or two.
In 3 months of learning from Vin and other teachers, I had three girlfriends in three months. Plus, I was hooking up with other girls on top of that.
In all my time in the community, I have NEVER seen anybody who made any kind of serious progress just learning on his own. I know I didn’t — I was in field all the time, but I just kept making the same mistakes over and over again. But, I know many of my students and many students of other teachers who have made great progress.
This isn’t to say to written materials, DVDs, etc. aren’t valuable. I’ve learned a lot from the writings of Swinggcat, Juggler and others. This stuff definitely enhanced my game, but if I didn’t have someone to teach me on top of that it wouldn’t have done me any good.
And, of course, you have to practice by yourself after you are taught. However, I don’t think that those who practice on their own necessarily are better than those who don’t before they get teaching. I know in a lot of the programs I’ve taught, I’ve had to spend half the time undoing all the bad community stuff that guys have learned. While going out by yourself and with lair guys is good to get over approach anxiety, it also sticks you with a lot of bad habits which you’ll later have to work to undo.
I’m not seeing the nobility in being a “pioneer” when you can learn the same thing in much less time with much less effort from a teacher. And, this isn’t to say you can’t develop your own style after — I learned Natural Game from Vin and others, but I later developed Sex-Driven Game — AFTER I had learned and incorporated what they had to teach me.
Believe me, if there was anybody who taught sex when I was learning it I would have jumped on it in a heartbeat. It tooks tons of experimentation and bad sexual experiences before I finally mastered it. Where else, if I had a teacher I could have been having great sex much faster.
You don’t have to spend money for a teacher, sometimes there will be a natural friend who will be able to teach you about sex or seduction. However, there’s also no point in being overly stingy in this area of your life. If you can find someone else to give the high quality teaching for free, just do it. But if you can’t, why waste time poking around when you can just drop some cash and get it handled? Think about it: in the time you waste trying to re-invent the wheel, you could be earning more money and probably easily recoup your investment in 6 months - 1 year. Plus, what is saving years of frustration and rejection worth to you?
That’s my take on this. Thanks for the well-thought out response though — I find that I can articulate myself best in a dialogue rather than a monologue.
-Dan