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Having to go meta and strategizing means that you are having trouble in the natural way. I think a similar reaction can be elicited among cool guys when the uncool guys are theorizing about how to make friends and how friendship is about transactionally giving each other access to social circles and a friend should be had to the extent of their usefulness and their network and social status, and you have to strategically choose and drop friends to gain social influence etc.
It all sounds like being manipulative and using people as instruments. As a man I would personally find it creepy if some guy is obsessed with books like "How to make friends and influence people" and I spot him trying the techniques recommended in there on me (e.g. ask for small trivial favors first, etc).
The default, high status, correct vibe is not looking for strategies and metagame analysis, but just doing the object level stuff of being entertaining, ambitious, skilled, talented, and being someone other people want to tag along with for their journey.
People are more fine with discussing similar things in more clearly transactional contexts, like job search and hiring, but even there it can be very emotionally loaded and telling someone that they are not good enough for a certain tier of job can be hurtful, and often people just want to commiserate and hear "you were too good for that job anyway".
Being open about these things requires a deeper level of connection. I wouldn't say it's impossible to talk about with women, I would assume they touch on these subjects with their best female friends.
I mean how to win friends and influence people is objectively awesome and I won't stand for this slander
The book? It's a bunch of aw-shucks name dropping, self-promotion, and advice about as actionable as "buy low sell high".
At the time it was released it was original, even churches didn’t provide that kind of folksy hustler energy. The entirety of popular culture and advice changed in response to it, it’s like saying The Beatles sound generic.
Whether it was novel at the time or not, it's still not useful.
To social autists or even people who just aren’t that smart it contains a lot of genuinely useful and true social advice, like that getting people do to things for you endears them to you more than doing things for them, and that small talk is very important in selling things and yourself.
If these sound stupidly obvious, real life is full of people who haven’t grasped them.
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There is no natural way. The Chads strategize too; they're just naturally good at it.
Depends on how Chad the Chad is and what woman or women he is interested in getting with at the moment. Chad might strategize if it's a question of how to sleep with a gorgeous woman he feels is out of even his league. Chad might strategize if for whatever reason he has become particularly interested in a given woman, if he has started to think about her in more than just a hit-it-and-quit-it sexual way. But when it comes to just run-of-the-mill getting laid, I don't think Chad strategizes much. He just feels sexually confident, playful, and relaxed. This projects out effortlessly from him in his eyes, facial expressions, body language, vocal tone, and subjects of conversation when he is interacting with a woman. He experiences interacting with women as something fun, pleasurable, and playful rather than like an existentially fraught job interview. This too communicates itself to them. Normally I think the extent of his strategizing is to just come up with some "excuse" to start talking to a given woman or women, if an excuse is even necessary. Once the interaction starts, I don't think he's thinking much about what he's doing at all. This all applies whether he's a Chad who is Chad because he looks great or if he's a Chad who is just sexually confident without necessarily having great looks.
Maybe the difference is in the definition of the word "strategize." You seem to be using "strategy" to mean "thinking," whereas I (and presumably The_Nybbler too) think of "strategy" as "which move to make." For example, complimenting vs negging a girl would be two different strategies. Chad very naturally makes strategic moves. Non-Chad must learn these strategic moves until they too are naturals.
Yes. If you're still actively thinking, you haven't internalized strategy deeply enough yet.
My claim is a bit stronger: Not only is Chad making these strategic moves, he knows he's doing it. Compare throwing a baseball. Pretty much everyone when they're a kid or with their off hand, throws a baseball badly. Even pitcher-Chad does when he's starting out. The difference is pitcher-Chad figures out the right way really fast and without explicit instruction, whereas pitcher-Virgin is still throwing with his forearm after 10 years of failure.
Then when pitcher-Virgin experiments with different techniques, tries to get more live ABs with hitters, asks for tips and exercises to improve his pitching, tries to breakdown and emulate pitcher-Chad’s form and grips, and/or wonders if being shorter is a disadvantage when it comes to velo and delivery angles: pitcher-Virgin gets scorned and shamed by hitters and told to just be himself, to stop being such a tryhard and creepy strategizer, that height doesn’t matter for pitching (taller pitchers just have an easier time pitching because they aren’t toxic and insecure like shorter pitchers are), to just focus on respecting hitters and treating them as people, and one day the strike outs will Just Happen.
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As usual, it’s contingent on how well one understands the workplace rules.
Chad knows how to confidently put his best foot forward and read the room; Brad is a tryhard who deploys sleazy PUA tactics and attempts to exploit the meta.
The biggest approach machines I’ve known tended to be natural Chads who were quite self-aware and intentional about playing the numbers game, and cognizantly strategic during approaches too. It makes sense since Chads get more positive reinforcement in the form of converting approaches to lays. They’re also less affected by rejection, take women less seriously, and have strong abundance mentality (who cares what thot #67,869 thinks? NEXT!).
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For sure. It takes a lot of effort to look effortless. But you should still look effortless.
But I'd also say that you can get results in a more natural and less strategic way as an ambitious, successful, decent looking man who moves in mixed gender circles, as long as your goal is just having a normal relationship with a normal woman, and not maximizing body count and seduction of party girl types. I know many couples where they more or less just formed in friend groups etc, hanging out, then stayed together. It takes some conscious effort to plan things out by the guy, but not necessarily this full analytical approach.
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Correct. I've heard my lothario friend lay out his exact method. He has it down to a precise series of steps and it is brutally effective. When he runs those steps, though, it appears effortlessly natural, and that's the trick.
Is your friend's name Dennis, by any chance?
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