Raise your hand if you've ever thought this: "I'm going to get out there and start dating, …just as soon as I get in shape. (Or go off to college, or move out of your parents’ house, or whatever your issue is.)

This is a very self-defeating mindset, and I'll give you three reasons why:

Reason the First! You are creating a huge weakness in your game. Specifically, that weakness is a complete lack of experience when it comes to socializing and attracting women. Granted, you probably have that same weakness now, so it’s not like you’re getting worse, but the problem is that you’re undermining all the other work that you’re doing by letting that weakness persist.

Imagine you spend the next 3 months, or 6 months, or 12 months, getting in shape, working on your style, focusing on your career, or whatever, and then you finally go out sarging. What’s going to happen? You’re going to get super nervous, have no idea what to say, be awkward, spazzy, and probably come across like a giant creep. Why? Because you have no experience talking to girls, that’s why. It doesn’t matter if you get all that other shit in order if you can’t approach or hold a conversation.

And to make matters worse, the rejection at this stage is going to be very disheartening. You’re going to think that all your self-improvement efforts have been worthless. It’s like working on the engine of a car for a long time, and not putting wheels on the thing. Of course it isn’t going to go anywhere. Doesn’t mean that your engine sucks, but it is damn disappointing when the car just sits on blocks no matter how hard you press the gas.

On the other hand, if you keep getting out there and talking to girls even while you're going through your self-improvement process, then by the time you've hit all your targets you're also going to be a veteran PUA. Your game might still need a bit of stepping up, but you at least won't be completely lost.

But what if I get rejected? Won't that discourage me from continuing with my self-improvement? I need to go into a criticism-free bubble for 6 months!

Bollocks. Until you've hit whatever your self improvement goal is, you have a perfectly plausible scapegoat for every rejection you get. Go with me on this…

If you can blame the rejection on a trait you've already committed to getting rid of, rejection is going to sting a lot less. Imagine how much better it's going to be with 6 months or a year where the sting of rejection is highly mitigated, that's the best time to put yourself out there. (You do want to try to be honest with yourself about why you’re getting rejected, so if you know for a fact it was something else, put that on your list of things to work on. But often times we just don’t know for sure, so rather than spending your time naval gazing wondering what went wrong and getting stressed out, just chalk that shit up to whatever it is you’re already fixing.)

The analogy I like to use is a kid who wants to be a baseball player. But he’s only 8 years old. He’s not even four and a half feet tall. He’d have an impossible strike zone to pitch against, but the kid’s just not big enough, strong enough, or fast enough to be a professional baseball player. So, should he just hold off on playing baseball until he’s 18 or 20 years old and physically mature enough to be a pro? Hell no. He’d just be a 20 year old with zero coordination who doesn’t have a clue how to hit, throw, or catch. What he needs to be doing is playing in little league so when he does get older he’s already got the basic skills down. Same idea with sarging and self-improvement. Getting in shape and putting together an awesome wardrobe is wasted if when you finally get out to a club you don’t know how to open a set. (The “little league” of pickup are bars and clubs. That might seem like the majors, but really it’s the easiest place to open sets and get practice.)

Reason the Second! You will never get to your "just as soon as" goal. Maybe a few of you will, but we all know what happens to New Years resolutions and every single diet anyone has ever started. You set something reasonably ambitious, get a third or halfway there, and then it plateaus or backslides a little bit, and you give up and never get any further.

If you've set meeting that goal as a precondition to getting out in the dating world, then you've almost guaranteed you're going to be staying at home every weekend for the rest of your life.

Or there's an even worse possibility, you will hit that goal and replace it with a new goal. You thought losing 10lbs would do the trick, but you realize you're still not happy with how you look, so you add losing another 5lbs. If you hit that goal, you'll add something else, maybe your hair isn't perfect yet. Your shoes could be cooler. Basically, you're afraid of getting rejected, so you're going to try to make yourself rejection-proof by becoming perfect, but as we saw with Reason the First! you can't do that. Social skills play a role, and no matter how many new self-improvement goals you tack on, you still have to figure out the basics of dating, and that can only be done in-field.

As a slight reversal of that, you can tell yourself "I'm going to go on dates with 10 girls, and then after that I'm going to start getting serious about this." That lets you loosen up a bit and not be so outcome dependent.

Reason the Third! You lose sight of your value. When you exist in a self-improvement bubble, you tend to focus only on what's left to improve and you lose sight of the value you have. I run into this a lot with writing (I'm in a creative writing MFA program). I'll go into solitary writer confinement for a few weeks, working on something I'm going to submit to workshop, and in the first draft maybe I like 50% of what I've written. Then I go back and edit and edit and edit, and now I like 80% of it, but that 20% I don't like contains a lot of the original 50% I did like. Then I edit some more and after that round of edits I like ...still only 80% of it. I hit the editing again, and again I only like 80% of it. The reason is that no matter how good it is, there will always be a weakest 20%, and compared to the parts I really like, that weakest 20% will always read like complete garbage. Then I submit to workshop and discover that no one thought any of it was garbage, and the parts I thought sucked are things some people liked the most.

The same thing can happen with self-improvement. There will always be some weak link in your appearance or personality, but when you go into a bubble, you have no idea just how weak it is. It could be that your weakest link is stronger than your strongest link when you started. When you get out there and meet girls and go on dates, you get feedback, and you'll probably realize that no one is critiquing you half as hard as you’re critiquing yourself, and that things you thought were flaws might actually be quite endearing.

The only way to get any feedback is to go out in to the field, and you will never progress with stuff without massive amounts of experience and feedback. You cannot improve to the point where you will guarantee success. That doesn't exist. A boxer does learn to avoid punches, and to put his hands up to block, but he goes into the ring expecting to take some hits. Getting hit is something he doesn't want, but it's also something he isn't afraid of.

If you want more like this, find it on the blog I'm writing with Tofu Tofu.