NOTE - this is a work in progress, so I am interested in hearing your thoughts.

One of the newest “buzzwords” in the self-improvement movement is “living in the moment.” “Living in the moment,” is just a buzzword and like a lot of things, is a broad term that encompasses certain things you SHOULD do and certain things you SHOULD NOT do.

It’s a plain fact that you should not “live in the moment” at every moment of your life. An intelligent person plans for the future and looks at the long term consequences of the things they are doing (I’ll call this planning). An intelligent person also takes stock of the mistakes they’ve made and learns lessons from the past (I’ll call this reflecting). If you constantly “lived in the moment” you would never plan or reflect, and instead you would descend into stupid hedonism that will negatively affect your life.

On the other hand, you need to learn to “live in the moment” at least some of the time for two reasons: 1) to enjoy the thing you are doing and 2) to excel at the thing you are doing. Simply put, you simply cannot enjoy life and be good at things if your attention is not 100% focused on the task at hand and you are thinking about the future or the past. To truly excel at something, or enjoy something, you need to put every other thought and emotion out of your head during that time. Think about it – if two people were playing chess, who would you expect to win: the person that was completely immersed and devoting 100% of their thoughts, energy and attention to the game, or the person who was devoting 80% of his thought, energy and attention to the game and 20% to the fight he had with his girlfriend, his dog’s health, his financial situation, etc...

The solution to “living in the moment” is simple: you need to devote a certain part of your day to reflecting and planning, and devote other parts of your day to the particular activities that you want to enjoy and excel at. So take maybe an hour a day and think about all the things you need to in your life: your errands, your relationships, your long term goals, your short term goals, your financial situation, your diet, your budget, etc... Make a plan for each of them and, better yet, write them down somewhere so you have tangible evidence of what you need to do. Furthermore, when planning it’s a good idea to take people’s advice and learn what the actual best plan is. Once your planning and reflecting is taken care of, then you can focus on the things that you need to do with 100% of your attention and concentration. It is my belief that intelligence is not the best predictor of success – it is focus. The person can focus on specific tasks and block out of everything else is a lot more successful that a person who is generally “smart” but is trying to do a million things at once.

But once you’ve set up a concrete plan, stop thinking about it. I don’t worry myself about going to the gym because I know I have a fixed plan and schedule to do it. Now, part of becoming successful at something is becoming “obsessed” with it and thinking about it every moment of your life – you need to be careful to not get “obsessed” with any one thing because it may detract from the rest of your life. Personally, I loooove working out and I would love to be one of those guys that spend four hours a day in the gym building a perfect body and learning every little new piece of workout science. But I can’t do that because I have a job that requires me to work many hours and if I tried to “obsess” over working out and my job I would end up drained, overwhelmed and anxious. Part of planning and reflecting is ordering the priorities in your life, figuring out what you want to do, and scheduling time accordingly. I’ve decided that, although I love working out, I want to succeed in my career more so working out has to take a back seat in my life and can only take X% of my time.

Controlling your reflecting and planning is easier said than done. Most people don’t have a set time and place where they reflect and plan; instead they just reflect and plan at random times, usually whenever fear or anxiety strikes them, and usually when they are supposed to be doing something else. Because they don’t have a rational way to reflect and plan, they do it poorly and always end up with shitty, half-finished plans and shitty reflections. Even worse, some people don’t reflect and plan at all – they just feel depressed because of the past and feel anxiety for the future – but their thoughts just torment them and nothing productive comes out. That is why I recommend an actual time that you set aside to figure out a methodical, intelligent, productive way to reflect and plan. The goal is to reflect and plan so well that you won’t have to think about things again during your day.

Because this is a seduction forum, I will tie this in with picking up girls.

Most of you have trouble approaching and/or talking to girls because of your crippling anxiety and negative thoughts. You are worried that you are not tall enough, good looking enough, rich enough, successful enough, well dressed enough, etc... Even worse, these self-defeating thoughts usually strike right as you are about to approach. The normal advice for these concerns is “don’t give a fuck” but you know that can’t be right because it’s clear that girls care about those things and if you if you actually “didn’t give a fuck” you will never do better.’

Here is my solution: it is totally normal, and even required, to “give a fuck” about your tangibles and how you come off to people. You should always be working on getting in shape, dressing better, being more successful, doing better in social situations, living an awesome life, etc... Of course, you shouldn’t worry about things you can’t control, like your height, but you should go full speed ahead and fix the things you CAN control. That said, you should have a concrete plan and time to fix those things. Set yourself a workout and diet plan, figure out a work schedule that will ensure success, pick a time to go shopping, etc... But once you’ve figured that stuff out, get it out of your head. Like I said earlier, it’s easy to “obsess” over things and let it take over your life. While we would all love to look like and dress like David Beckham, the fact is that most of us don’t realistically have the time to do all that – we just have to figure out a schedule that works for our lives and stick to it.

When you are out hanging out with girls you absolutely CANNOT think about your tangibles. At those times, you need to “live in the moment.” When you approach a girl, you absolutely cannot be thinking about whether you are tall enough, whether you are rich enough, whether she is in your “league,” whether she will fuck you, what to talk about, what’s going to happen, etc... You need to go up to her and let the moment happen. You don’t need anybody to teach you to have a conversation with another person – you already know how to do that. It’s in your genes. You just need to do it. You see, a large part of pick-up isn’t “learning” how to do things – instead, it’s learning how to forget things and how to disregard your fears and anxieties. There is a charming, awesome, funny person within you – that guy has just been covered up with callouses caused by anxiety, fear, rejection, society’s lies, etc...

You may retort “I can’t just live in the moment when I talk to girls because I’m wracked with anxiety.” My response is that anxiety, like all your emotions, serves a useful purpose. Anxiety is there to make you worry about things that you may be doing wrong so that you can improve. But you need to indulge your anxiety at its appropriate time – your planning and reflecting session. Listening to your anxiety when you are actually talking to girls isn’t going to help you. You shouldn’t ignore your anxiety forever, but for that moment, you should ignore it.

The reality is this: human beings are wired evolutionary to connect with each other. Girls and guys are wired to have a deeper connection with one another. And, putting aside whether or not you fuck or even have a romantic relationship, talking with girls is inherently FUN! There is nothing more fun than shooting the shit with a girl, teasing her, talking about deep stuff, laughing, etc... Most of you probably don’t see talking with girls as fun because you are wracked with anxiety, fear, guilt, shitty memories, pain, and other negative emotions. Furthermore, most of you see the “point” of talking with girls as fucking them, so if you don’t think a conversation will lead to sex, you lose interest. That’s a bad mindset. For one, if a girl thinks you are talking to her just because you want to fuck her she will be turned off. Secondly, as a matter of reality, you won’t fuck most girls you talk to. Third, making fucking a “goal” for you is going to cause to be anxious during the conversation because you are constantly going to be thinking about the future and not live in the moment of whatever you guys are saying.

Most people, men and women, are wracked with anxiety and it causes tons of pain and discomfort. Women are attracted to confident men because they appear to have no anxiety so the women can “wash” her emotions in him and by the law of transference, she will feel less anxiety when she is with him. If you come off as bulletproof to women, they will know that you are a repose for their anxiety and they can count on you to feel better. But to do this, you need to not show any anxiety at all – and the only way you can do that is by living in the moment.

Like I said – human beings are wired to connect with one another. But most people build walls because of their previous bad experiences, with shitty, manipulative people. When you go to a club and you see hot girls being “bitchy” they are not acting that way because they think they are better than you – they are usually acting that way because so many creepy guys have hit on them with weird promises and manipulative tactics that they put up a wall to protect themselves. The way to bring down this wall is by being genuine, thoughtful, intelligent, and honest (or as Mark Manson says, “vulnerable”).

Furthermore, girls are very emotionally sensitive, so they can tell if you have something on your mind when you are talking to them. There is a clear difference between a guy who is 100% focused on and invested in what he is saying and a guy who has an ulterior motive or is thinking about something else. Let’s say you walk up to a girl at a music festival and say “I fucking love this DJ” – the girl will immediately be able to tell if you said that because you really love the DJ or if you are just saying that to pick her up. And to be honest, it is incredibly “creepy” when a guy has an ulterior motive in a conversation. That’s why being direct “hey may name is X” is oftentimes less creepy than a bullshit approach “hey can you tell me where the bathroom is”?

A lot of you guys are afraid of approaching girls because you don’t want to look “creepy.” But there is nothing creepy about talking to a girl or even expressing interest in her. What’s creepy is having an ulterior motive, lying or trying to manipulate a woman, which, by the way, is what 99% of guys do when they try to pick up girls. And like I said, girls can tell. I was really smart in high school and a lot of people wanted to copy my math homework – and I could immediately tell when somebody was being nice to me just to copy my math homework. People weren’t nearly as slick as they thought they were.

Human social interactions are 99% subconscious and 1% conscious. And people evolved to be read other people’s subconscious emotions. Even if a person is saying the right things, a lot of times you can read between the lines and tell from their tone of voice and body language that they have ulterior motives. For that reason, you will so much more emotional impact on a girl if you go in there guns blazing with 100% of your thoughts and emotions “in the moment.”

PUA Guides

Most PUA advice on the internet is absolute garbage because it causes you to overthink things. The human mind can only have 7 or 8 conscious thoughts in their head at one time – the rest is subconscious stuff that has just become a habit. If you are trying to talk to a girl and you are trying to think about every single thing you are doing (how’s my eye contact, am I touching her, what should I say, should I do a routine, etc...) your brain will become overloaded and you will forget things. Worse yet, if you are thinking about every single thing you are doing the girl will be able to tell that you aren’t 100% present in the conversation and she will lose interest. Like I said, girls can tell if you are not 100% there and it creeps them out. It’s like talking to a zombie or a creepy salesman that just wants to take your money. A lot of PUA material is just good-looking, confident guys teaching socially awkward guys to do shit that comes naturally to confident guys.

On the other hand, you can’t just “be yourself” because there are SOME things you have to learn. Girls are different from boys and girls have a weird desire for confidence that bits don’t understand, so boys need to be taught how to act. The best way to do it is to learn one or two principles, and then try to integrate the new knowledge in your normal social interactions. For example, tell yourself “today I will make eye contact” but then act normally otherwise. Slowly, you will develop good habits and “making eye contact” will just become part of “being yourself.” It will take a little time, but the way to get good at PUA is by practice, not just by reading the rule book.

A big mistake guys here make is that they read a bunch of materials and chock their head full of information, and then they go out to the club and are frozen with anxiety (or they approach and fail over and over again). It’s because they are overloaded with “knowledge” and because their subconscious emotions, which are the real driver of social interactions, are not there yet. They try to over-rationalize everything they do and they don’t realize that to approach a girl your subconscious emotions MUST be there or it won’t work. They come off as robotic and instead of “living in the moment” they are overthinking every word, bodily expression, etc...

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