If you started asking around the manosphere who is the most frequent pest in DMs, I think many of the men would point at me. I’m quite a prolific brain picker, whether that means asking Goldmund a few questions about Camera Game before I tried that the first time, checking in with Well Built Style or Tanner when I’m looking to upgrade my wardrobe, getting some day game info from Troy or TD, Beard tips from George Bruno, workout tips from AJA Cortes or this week when I asked the whole Red Man Group about an issue I was having with turning one-night stands into plates. The reason why I do this is that it’s much more efficient to ask someone who has a lot of information and experience on a subject to give you some quick input than it is to gain their experience and knowledge for myself. I consider myself very lucky that I’m in a position where I can ask these men questions about their field of expertise and not get DM blocked. I think Rian Stone found the best term for this on his blog which he refers to as “Men Swapping Notes”.
One of the main reasons why I ask all these questions is that there are areas in life where I’m an expert, and there are other areas I want to bring up to par, I don’t need to be an expert, but I need to know enough that I have that area of my life handled. A couple of years ago, I would probably be featured in an “Average Guy Style” or “Trash shoes” thread, now I won’t. I’m a far way from being GQ cover material, but at least I’m not wearing jeans that are two sizes to big with 3 year old Nike Airs everywhere. A second reason is that the more information I can aggregate up in my head, the more patterns I’m able to discern that then can become blog content. This is one of these threads.
At about 1 AM, after finishing a conference call I put out the following twitter thread about work load and game:
This was based on information that I’ve gained from different men practicing different forms of game, my own experience and on my sales funnel theory of game. For quite a few years, we’ve referred to game as a “numbers game“, for the reason that a higher number of attempts tend to correlate strongly with number of lays. If we visualize this approach for a theoretical man doing day game, we can make a chart such as the one below:
This chart shows that for each level, there is input volume, this volume can be broken up into two parts, one that becomes the input volume for the next step, and one that is the drop off experienced at that step. For instance, if we take a man who does 100 approaches, and either number closes or insta-date closes 20 of them. He has a throughput of 20% for step 1 in the pyramid. He also has a drop-off rate of 80%. The insta-dates would go directly to the next step in the process, whereas the number closes require more work. If we assume an 80/20 ratio for these as well, that becomes 16 that go to the next step in the process and 4 that go directly to the dates phase.
The throughput of 16 then become the input for the next step in the process, where he attempts to push as many of them as possible through to the next step, namely a date. If this man has a throughput of 20% at this step of the process as well, that means that out of 16, that means he has 3 (rounding down from 3.2) that go through to the next step.
In the dates step, the input is 7, so the man goes on 7 first dates, 4 of those were insta-dates and 3 of those came from a number close. Out of those 7, some will flake, some will attempt to reschedule or will be in a non-optimal situation. If we use the same 80-20 ratio for this step as well, we find that out of those 7, 5.6 will drop off, and 1.4 will continue to the next step. So, from those 100 approaches, he got 7 dates, and 1.4 lays.
If we make some time-spent assumptions, lets say that each approach took 15 minutes on average, that’s 25 hours spent just on the approaches. Let’s say he spent 5 minutes on average on the phone with the 16 that he number closed that’s 1.1 hours spent on the phone, to land a total of 7 dates. If we assume an average of 2 hours spent on each date, that adds up to another 14 hours. Which comes out to a total of 40 hours spent that month running game. That’s an average work-week.
This is part of the reason why Donovan Sharpe says “Being a player is a full-time job“. This math doesn’t even take into account how much time you had to spend in the field to do those 100 approaches. You can do a maximum of 4 approaches per hour (on average) if you assume 15 minutes per approach, plus being able to chain-approach without breaks, which requires a very target rich environment. Let’s say that you can manage 3 per hour, which gives you a little time between each approach, being able to do 100 would require 33.3 hours of real time.
This is why success in game correlates strongly with how much time you can put into it, and why a lot of those who have become the most skilled at game are those that could focus on it full time and immerse themselves in the art of game for long periods of time. To re-iterate, being a player is a full time job.
Bottlenecks and Efficacy
From the intro to this essay, we can wonder, what would be the most efficient use of time. A bottleneck is the point of a process that dictates the throughput for the total process, for instance if you can take delivery of- and warehouse 100 tons of iron ore every week, you can process 50 tons of ore into ingots every week, and you can ship 30 tons of finished product every week, then your bottleneck is in shipping, thus it makes very little sense to take delivery of more than perhaps 40 tons of ore every week (depending on a bunch of other factors such as delivery reliability, spot prices, and so on). In the same way, different forms of game have different bottlenecks that limit your success ratio. For instance, the guy above has a ratio of 1.4/100, if he could increase this ratio to 2/100 or 3/100 it doesn’t cost him much extra time but greatly improves his results over time at little to no extra expenditure.
He didn’t increase his inputs, but by increasing his throughput he was able to increase his output quite substantially over the course of a year or two. In short, he got more output from the same input. This is one of the reasons why I’ve discouraged the “spam approach” method that some advocate, because other than as a tool to get rid of approach anxiety through exposure therapy , I don’t see much use in it. The results will be much better if one does a lower number of approaches, but focus on learning as much as possible from each approach.
One of the things Rollo has repeated quite a lot on various Red Man Group episode is that when his wife does something, he doesn’t mentally run an analysis of her actions and chose a response, it runs on auto and his default response is the red pill response. This is a reflection on which level a person is at when it comes to a given area of competence, when you learn to drive with a manual transmission, you have to think about when to clutch, the gear shift pattern, the sound of the engine and do them consciously, when you’ve been driving a manual for years, you do all the same thing but you don’t have to think about them.
I got some flack a while back for a tweet where I said that every guy has some form of semi-scripted game, because every guy who practices game a lot will develop a semi-structured script. A guy just starting out who goes on 5 dates, may tell 5 different stories, then he notices that 2 of those dates had better results than the other 3. So, for the next 5 dates he only tells 2 of the 5 stories, he notices that one of them performs slightly better with a given type of woman. For instance, with girls who are “rocker chicks” his story about getting wasted at a concert, stumbling onto the band bus, and getting a tattoo while doing lines with the band works great, however, with conservative girls his story about helping his nephew learn to read works better. So he starts using these stories with all girls depending on type. This is just a case of figuring out what works and doing more of that, figuring out what doesn’t work and doing less of that. This is an example of something that will increase throughput because over time performance becomes tighter. This is simply a case of action-analysis-adaptation in practice, over time one eliminated
Another way to improve the throughput is through getting higher quality inputs. A commonly cited issue for day-game guys is that they end up spending a lot of time on poor leads, for instance spending 30 minutes during what appears to be a very successful interaction with a woman, only for her to drop a “It was nice talking to you, but I’m married“, or otherwise rendering the investment void. Flaking is another issue that virtually all avenues of game have an issue with, I had a week during October where I was running a 50% flake ratio, that I partially rectified by adopting 2 methods, always send a text earlier in the day with something like “Whoever is late tonight pays the first round” if they don’t respond I assume they will flake, and if possible book an alternative an hour or two later.
A third way is screening/filtering of prospects earlier in the process. I’ve cited the “Dream Johnson” opener for Tinder a couple of times on Twitter and that opener is simply a screening device that works to eliminate those women who do not fulfill the criteria that Anthony wants in a woman. In sales, the talk is of “Hot“, “Cold” and “Lukewarm“, alternatively “Yes“, “No” and “Maybe” leads. The hot leads are ready to buy at this moment, in some cases they even contact you. The cold leads are not really in the market to buy, they may enjoy the attention for a little bit, but with practice you learn to spot Colds very quickly. The worst type of lead are the lukewarm leads, these are the “convince me” leads that usually end up taking up a lot of time and effort but never end up buying anything. I think every guy in his teenage years had that crush on a cold prospect and spend time chasing after it, all the while ignoring the burning hot prospect right next to him.
Summary and Conclusions
When I wrote that twitter thread I linked at the start of this essay, I had no idea that it would turn into this essay, but it was a good way to summarize some of my thoughts on the statement “It’s a numbers game“. This has often been seen as purely an approach problem and for a lot of men it is, they simply have too few leads coming into their funnel. However, for some men that have their leads sorted out, the problem changes from generating traffic to conversions. Once you have solid traffic numbers, improving your conversion number can do much more to improve your sales than driving more traffic and at this point it becomes a question of which one to prioritize. Having a great site set up for conversions doesn’t matter without traffic, but a ton of traffic that you are unable to convert is just as bad.
In “Of Lifestyles and Limitations” I introduced my P.I.E.C.E model, this stands for Populate – Initiate – Escalate – Close – Enduring. I created this model as a diagnostic tool to help men diagnose at which step of the sales funnel they have a problem, and thus where they can generate the most bangs for a buck. This is because of an observation I’ve made that many people tend to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results, through intuitive behavior, instead of deliberate and analytical practice. In the corporate world it’s quite common to keep throwing more money at a problem, without understanding the nature of the problem. A man who has a ratio of 200 approaches per lay, is spending 60 – 70 hours per month just doing approaches, add in text game, and actually going on dates, and there is a natural upper limit to where he will not be able to do more approaches in a week, at 33.3 hours per 100 approaches, this line comes at 504 approaches, provided that he’s constantly approaching, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If we add some realism to that, and give him a full time job and let him get some sleep, he may be able to do 100 approaches a week, which means he gets laid once every 2 weeks roughly.
He would be much better off spending half his time approaching and the rest improving his throughput and his efficacy. To use an analogy from weight lifting, if you’ve been going to the gym 5 days a week for 2 years and you’re not bigger and stronger than when you started out, you have 2 choices, keep wasting time or figure out what you are doing wrong.
A note:
I recently launched a Patreon page where I will be posting additional content every month for those who support me and I will do a Google Hangout for the highest tier Patrons (limited to 10 people).
I’ve also had some requests for consults, which I’ve declined up until now, but due to demand I’ve chosen to open up for doing some consults on request. For details please check out my Consulting and Patreon Page
As always you can buy my book Gendernomics at Amazon.com as both paperback and Kindle
Links:
https://goldmundunleashed.com/
https://www.wellbuiltstyle.com/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCghz8w8iOn3PDpYi9QuC3bQ
