Alright, before I get started some background on myself. I used to follow a few PUA forums back in college, but got out of the game after I started dating my ex at the end of my junior year. After college, I joined the military, broke things off with my ex, and moved to a small border town in southwest Texas for pilot training. I’ve been here for seven months now, and if being in a relationship for 2 years didn’t kill my game, Del Rio, TX certainly did.

Put simply, there aren’t many good looking girls here, and if you’ve ever seen Top Gun you can imagine how that’d work out with a few hundred pilot candidates running around who eat, drink, and piss Alpha. If you haven’t seen the movie, imagine ten AMOGs hitting on a 6 like she’s a 10. Then imagine the nine guys who couldn’t close moving on to her friend who’s at best a 4.

Not proud to say it, but there were definitely nights where I was one of the guys moving on to the 4… and I still got blown off. It sucked. So I came back to the community and discovered Seddit. After that, things turned around real quick. Started living life on my own terms again and rediscovered that success in the game doesn’t come from chasing women but chasing a better life.

Okay, so on to the point of my post and the unexpected lessons I learned about the game last night. Yesterday I get a text from a girl on base asking me if I was going to be at our squadron Christmas party. I told her I was planning on it but I didn’t have a ticket yet. Turns out tickets were sold out a week ago and security at the venue was pretty tight so my plans for the evening were a bust. However, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise. What I ended up doing was more fun, gratifying, and eye-opening than any party I’ve ever been to. Hours went by like minutes, and when I finally pulled my phone out to check the time I thought, “Oh shit, it’s already 2AM!” Which brings me to my first lesson.

  1. Carpe Noctem. Seize the night. Every free night literally holds endless possibilities. Go out. Stay in. It doesn’t matter. Do something that makes you feel alive and has you saying “Oh shit, it’s already 2AM!”

So what did I end up doing that night? Did I go to Mexico and help smuggle an impoverished family with five kids and a dog across the border? Did I drive to Austin where I entered an underground poker tournament, lost every penny to my name, and then won it all back on a bluff? Did I sit on my computer and beat it to the most mind numbing porno of all time? Nope. I tried oil painting.

I’d never oil painted before, but I love watching Bob Ross and had always wanted to try it out. So I went to Walmart, got some cheap supplies, watched some youtube tutorials, and got down to it. Which brings me to lesson number two.

  1. Just do it. There were a million reasons why I shouldn’t have been oil painting that night. For one, I live in a small room - smaller than most college dorms - and oil paint is notorious for getting everywhere (it did) and being impossible to remove (it was). But instead of giving in to the self-sought excuses, I said fuck it and put paint to canvas. The same principle applies when approaching women. You can come up with countless reasons not to approach a girl, but you own the excuses. The minute you say fuck it, they’re gone and you can’t fail.

So I started painting, and quickly found that the techniques I’d seen effortlessly demonstrated in youtube tutorials didn’t work for me. Which brings me to my third lesson.

  1. Figure it out for yourself. From my first dab into a glob of blue paint I realized painting wasn’t as easy as the videos made it look. I swear for the first hour or so the paint just didn’t want to stick to the canvas. So I went back to the tutorials and scrutinized every movement the artists made, but their techniques just didn’t work for me. Maybe it was the cheap paints I bought. Maybe it was my shitty brushes. Most likely it was a combination of these things and the fact that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Regardless, I had to figure it out for myself. Experimenting with brushes, strokes, and methods of paint application I finally achieved a semblance of the landscape I had in mind. It wasn’t until later on, when I had a feel for what I was doing, that I was able to modify the techniques I’d watched on youtube, which brought my painting to the next level. Again, the same goes for the game. You can watch a video of Julien Blanc grab a girl and start making out with her in minutes, but no matter how closely you emulate his words, body language, and overall swagger, your not going to do that right off the bat. First, you have to struggle. Then, once you have a feel for yourself and your environment, you make true and tried PUA techniques your own and take your game to the next level.

Disclaimer: If you haven’t seen Julien’s stuff stop reading and go watch this video from Real Social Dynamics (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w65qBE-5fWg&spfreload=10). It's long, but worth every minute.

Back to the canvas. There I am with an okay looking painting that was already far better than I thought I’d be able to do on my first try. But, I knew it could be better. So I kept going. Which brings me to my last three lessons.

  1. Mistakes are how you figure it out. Taking risks is how you make mistakes. As I already said, the entire process of oil painting was one big experiment for me. And I made plenty of mistakes in my experiment. But I embraced them. Every time I tried something new, I learned something new. About the materials. The tools. The mentality of an artist. Sometimes I made a mistake that was so horrendous I had to scrape it off immediately. Some mistakes I was able to work around. And then there were the mistakes that showed me a spontaneous beauty that became an instant part of my style. Painter. Sculptor. PUA. It doesn’t matter. Boldly embracing mistakes by taking big risks will only make you better in the long term.

  2. Good is the enemy of great. (First line out of one of my favorite books, Good to Great by Jim Collins. If you haven’t read it, do. If you have, do it again.) Like I said, there were several points where I looked at my painting and said to myself, “that looks pretty good.” But I knew it could be better. Whenever you have the feeling that something in life could be better, trust it and keep pressing.

Love you guys. Hope this helps.