One thing I see on Seddit all the time is someone posting something like: “I know everything about pickup. I’ve read all the books, watched all the YouTube videos, even taken a couple bootcamps. My game is flawless. But I’m a 29 year old virgin and I can’t get laid. Help!”

This always cracks me up. In what other field of study could something like this happen? You’ll never see “I read all the medical books, watched videos of some surgeries, and yet my last 100 patients died. But I know I’m a master surgeon.” At the end of the day, if you aren’t getting laid, you don’t know pickup.

The problem is usually a failure to understand the distinction between Pickup™ and pickup.

Pickup™ is an online cottage industry designed to sell you books, seminars, and in-field boot camps. Half the people teaching know what they’re talking about (though half of them probably can’t teach for shit) and half the people don’t.

The problem is you can read this stuff all day every day and get nowhere. Girls don’t care that you watched every Justin Wayne video, in fact they’d probably be creeped out by it if they knew. What they do care about is beyond the scope of this post (and what the whole industry exists to teach you) but I promise it ain’t that.

Pickup™, however, isn’t pickup. Pickup is the process of getting a girl to let you put her penis in her. There’s a clearly defined scoreboard. Are you able to put your penis in a girl pretty much every time you want to? Then you’re a master at pickup. (I’m not, for the record, but I’m improving.) Do you spend every Saturday at home fapping and wishing? Then you might be a master of Pickup™, but you still suck at actual pickup.

Pickup™ isn’t useless. It’ll help you win at pickup. It has a purpose. And that purpose is to give you a framework to evaluate what happens when you’re out in the field doing pickup. Full stop.

You don’t need me to tell you to stop reading and get out in the field. You’re a master of Pickup™ after all, and every book says that. You just need me to tell you that Pickup™ and pickup aren’t the same thing, and if the number on the scoreboard isn’t changing, you need a little less Pickup™ and a lot more pickup.