Most guys who start researching seduction or pickup start because they have a friend who is super successful with women. They watch this guy always seem to be flush with dates, have lots of girls flirting with him when they go out together, or they know he gets laid more in 6 months than they have in their entire lives. They open up Google or Reddit and type in something like…

• How to tell if a girl likes you • How to be a player • What are girls attracted to • How to get a girlfriend

Inevitably they are met with a barrage of pickup-related materials promising techniques, phrases, and the "One Weird Trick" to instantly drench a girl's panties. They will also be met with diagrams of how a modern man should dress to attract women (coupled with lots of older info about "peacocking"), diet plans and 30 Day Ab Mega Shred programs to give them the best chance to attract a woman physically. They will see 3000 word landing pages with all kinds of psych-up language, but devoid of any actual information, designed to sell them seminars and private coaching at hundreds of dollars per hour, all with the promise of turning them into seduction superstars with harems of 20 women ready to drop everything and come over and pleasure them at a moment's notice.

What they won't find is anyone telling them the real problem. The problem is not that they can't get women to be sexually attracted to them; the problem is usually that they are unaccomplished, insecure, ashamed, and do not have much of a sense of their own masculine identity. If you ask one of these men about themselves--who they are, what their hobbies, dreams, goals, aspirations, or accomplishments are--they often will have no answers. This doesn't mean that they don't enjoy things--just that they don't really have a sense of what their values are, what they are passionate about. They reply that their hobbies are Netflix, Reddit, or video games--which are not hobbies, they are pacifiers (they can be entertaining, but not much else). This empty self-identity and life of least resistance is often the result of long-unaddressed issues related to self esteem, childhood bullying, body image issues if they are overweight, or even negative early relationship experiences as young men that left them feeling emasculated and impotent. Not being able to attract women is a SYMPTOM, not the problem itself.

If not being sexually attractive to women is not the problem, this naturally means that becoming sexually attractive to women is not, by itself, the solution. Instead, solving the problem of a lack of masculine self-identity will in turn make a man naturally more sexually attractive to women. A man must figure out who he is, what his values are, what his aspirations are, and he must accomplish things that he set out to do with purpose. The girl is not the goal. The goal is to become a happy, driven, successful, self-assured man.

Before all of the lines, openers, techniques, push-pulling, "negging," DHV's, and other seduction tricks even come into play, you MUST be a complete man who is grounded, self-assured, purposeful, and happy in his own skin. A confident man who has ambition, hobbies, and his life together to a minimal level is the baseline for attracting women. If you do not meet this description, stop reading pickup info, and go get your life together. Here are some ways to do this:

  1. If you don't have a job, get one. It doesn't even really matter that much what it is, to start with. Making money, no matter how you do it, opens up literally every other category of opportunities for you.
  2. Get in shape. If you are fat, research CICO (Calories In/Calories Out), calculate your TDEE, and eat less than that everyday to lose weight. If you are tiny and scrawny, do the same, but eat more than that everyday to gain weight. Join a gym and start a weight lifting program like Starting Strength or Stronglifts, or do bodyweight exercises each day if you can't afford a gym membership. Get plenty of sleep and eat a relatively clean diet.
  3. If you have a hobby you love, find others who love it and join a club or meetup group. This will help you actually force yourself to make progress with your hobby rather than just tinkering around in stagnation. If you are a musician, find a weekly open mic, go as often as possible, and play every time you go. This will force you to…
  4. Be as social as possible. Go out as often as you have time and can afford to. Accept EVERY invitation you get from friends: parties, happy hours, Free Comic Book Day, whatever. If you can afford it and you have the time, go do it. Putting yourself in as many social situations as possible will get you used to meeting new people, and will give you lots of interesting stories to tell when you do.
  5. Think about the future. What is it you want to be doing a year from now? Five years from now? Are you building a business? Do you want a family? Do you want to run an ultramarathon? Think about what you want out of life, make a plan for getting there, and execute, execute, execute. Always be improving.

When you focus on becoming the best version of yourself, women find this naturally attractive. Yes, you can still benefit from breaking down and analyzing the social dynamics between men and women, and we can still get better results through techniques and theory. But there is no technique for attraction as powerful as becoming a man who knows what he wants out of life and goes out and gets it.