Here's a short (2min) video of Ira Glass talking about what it's like to be a beginning creative writer, and I think the advice is relevant to a lot of people starting out as novice PUAs.

First, a synopsis of the video: When writers first start, they tend to have really good taste in writing, that's what drew them to the field. But, they don't have the skill, so there's a gap between what they recognize as good and what they can create. They're in a weird position of knowing that their writing is crap. And, Ira's advice is just to plow through this, keep writing, eventually you'll build up the skills, and to remember that this part of the process is totally fine and extremely common.

So now how does this relate to PUA? A lot of us got into this after having read The Game, or Art of Seduction, or whatever, and we see lots of legendary field reports, and we read advice on how to run these great routines, and what we're consuming is seduction performed at a masterful level. Then we go out, flub a line, act all awkward, and get blown out. And just to make things worse, because we've been studying seduction theory, we're aware of all the little things that have gone wrong! This is the same gap; we know what polished game looks like, but don't have the skills yet.

Try to keep that in mind the next time you find yourself being discouraged by making rookie mistakes, not having your confidence all the way up, running out of things to say, pushing too hard, becoming a dancing monkey, or whatever. It's okay to be a beginner! And the way to get better isn't to sit at home reading advice, it's to get out there and keep approaching.

I'll finish with some similar advice I heard from David Sedaris when he was on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me a couple weeks ago. He said that everybody has 200 bad poems in them, and if you want to be a poet you have to first write all those bad poems and get them out of the way. I think the same thing is true about opening sets, though the number is going to be much lower. Maybe 30-50 bad sets, but you have to get those out of the way, and after you've gone through that crash and burn phase, then you're really ready to start producing results.