everything is pickup

i am a pickup artist. and so are you.

allow me to explain.

around the turn of the millennium, the advent of the internet enabled men from all over the world to share notes with each other about how to pick up women. primarily for casual sex. the result was the rise of the pickup artist, or PUA. unsurprisingly, they developed an unsavory reputation.

but here’s the thing:

they weren’t sitting at home in their mother’s basement playing video games. they were out in the real world interacting with real people.

and they weren’t writing Men Are From Mars, The Five Love Languages, or The Notebook. 

through relentless trial and error, the pickup community revealed more about how humans interact than the whole of academia.

foremost among them was a man named Mystery—real name (sort of) Erik von Markovik. he starred in VH1’s The Pickup Artist and as the central figure in Neil Strauss’s The Game.

but Mystery’s greatest contribution?

he developed an algorithm.

an algorithm that made seduction testable, teachable, and repeatable.

it was called the Mystery Method—and it laid the foundation for Dave’s Method, and eventually, Colin’s Method.

Mystery taught his theories to his acolytes, such as Neil Strauss. In The Game, Strauss outlines the method, as well as his exploits using it. 

Strauss’s alter ego “Style” became so successful, in fact, that he bemoaned the ease with which he could sarge and bed any particular woman. 

Strauss wrote:

One of my main frustrations with sarging was repeating the same lines over and over. I was getting tired asking girls if they thought spells worked or if they wanted to take the best friends test or if they noticed how their nose wiggled when they laughed. I just wanted to walk into a set and say, "Love me. I’m Style!"

But after [a while], I began to think that perhaps routines weren’t training wheels after all; they were the bike. Every form of demagoguery depends on them. Religion is pickup. Politics is pickup. Life is pickup.

Mystery may not have fully realized at the time and Strauss ironically poked fun at the truth of how people behave. 

Strauss continued:

Every day, we have our routines, which we rely on to make people like us or to get what we want or to make someone laugh or to endure another day without letting anyone know the nasty thoughts we’re really thinking about them.

we all have scripts we follow, patterns that we think are personal, but are really just… Game.

as Rollo Tomassi puts it in The Rational Male, “Every guy has a Game.” 

some just run it better than others.

not only in the sociosexual marketplace, but in everyday interactions. whether it’s the bedroom or boardroom. friend or foe. sex or sales. 

everything is pickup.

and the sooner you see that, the more control you’ll have over the game you, and everyone else, are already playing.

Colin

p.s. in less than 48 hours i’ll be teaching Colin’s Method to the Ground School. reply “pickup” to secure your spot.