There’s one commonality I see over and over again among people who have the hardest time dating: they have shitty attitudes. You’ll see it in the way they talk about others, about themselves, about women and the whole process of dating. Everything is pointless, nothing is going to fix them, they’ve done all this work for nothing, people suck, so forth and so on. .. why would anyone want to spend time around Captain Eeyore?
As I’m always fond of saying: dating success is 80% attitude, 20% skill and presentation. But the thing that people miss is that it’s not about sending out “positive vibes” or other woo-woo bullshit. Your attitude has measurable, practical effects on your performance… and a shitty attitude is going to hold you back at every level.
Small wonder that they’re not having any luck in dating
But then, that’s one of the secrets about self-improvement that almost nobody will tell you: any form of improvement is never going to be cougar life date instant. If you want to get good at something, you have to work at it – and that’s going to take time. This is part of the appeal of Pick-Up Artists: why spend time incrementally improving yourself as a person when you can slap a few gimmicks together and promise mastery within 30 days? You don’t want to miss out on all that pussy you could be diving through do you? They leverage the fear of missing out against the time it takes for true lasting change. The same mindset applies to “Lose Weight Now” fad diets and weight-loss supplements – why do all the “boring” things like exercise and changing your eating habits when you can just take this pill or do nothing but eat cabbages for 30 days and be all skinny and sexy in a third of the time?
“Why listen to actual experts when I’ll tell you everything you want to hear and only charge you twice as much?”
One of the most common complaints that I hear from people is that they did X, Y or Z to fix their dating lives and it didn’t work
Real change takes work.When you’re trying to improve your dating life, you’re frequently having to unlearn years or decades of bad habits. That takes time and effort, especially if you want to make lasting, healthy changes. Trying to rush the process and prioritizing speed over quality means you pick up bad habits that end up hurting or even crippling you in the long run. But our brains are inherently lazy – they’re going to want to stay as they are instead of expending the effort to develop new patterns and habits. You have to stay motivated and energized in order to get over the mental humps and plateaus that come with any improvements.
This is where your attitude comes in. Having a shitty attitude makes it almost impossible to improve because you’re continually cutting yourself off from your own progress. Part of what keeps you motivated is recognizing your own progress; you may not be 100% where you want to be, but look at what you’ve accomplished!
Take working out, for example. For the longest time, I could not do a pull-up to save my life. The only way I could get my chin up to that bar was to use an assist – and let me tell you, that can wound the ol’ ego. It took working those muscles – individually and as a group – in ways that didn’t necessarily seem related to my desire to do pull-ups to get to the point where I could do one. Once I achieved my first pull-up, I was… actually even more depressed. Great, it took me how much of my life to do something other folks have been doing since high-school? Fucking fantastic, go me.