Running the past week through my head, I think I finally understand the purpose of the three second rule. I've been doing game for about 3-4 months and haven't followed it at all. My thinking has been that I'm doing OK without it; it seems awkward and difficult; and most importantly, I think I fundamentally misunderstood the purpose behind it.

Until now, my thinking has been this: the three second rule exists because once you give yourself time, you'll psych yourself out and won't approach. My logic up to this point has been that, I still approach, just after a few minutes, so I must not need the three second rule. I am realizing that this is not the reason the rule exists.

Running this week's approaches through my head, I realized that my best approaches were all off-the-cuff, no hesitation, not-thinking-about-it approaches. I wasn't intentionally following the three second rule, but I was warmed up, in state, and simply went in as soon as I saw a girl I wanted to approach.

Contrast this with when I 'thought about it' before approaching. Typically, it goes like: see a set I want to approach, take a drink from my beer, talk to my buddy for a minute, then approach. Of course, during that time, I'm running the approach through my head. I start looking for situational openers. What are they drinking? Are they with friends? Is there some part of their outfit I can comment on? So by the time I approach, I've got an opener that, logically, I'm fairly confident in, but I'm already in logic mode rather than confident/alpha/super-happy-fun-time mode. And nobody in a bar likes logical guy. Worse, the fairly part of "fairly confident" means that I'm almost certainly giving off some negative signals. My thought-out opener becomes my enemy.

I've decided that I'll adopt the three second rule, at least for the next couple of weeks, and see how it goes.

Edit: italics