CHAPTER 21: CREATE YOUR MATING PLAN AND GO FORTH
A goal without a plan is just a wish.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
This is it, the final chapter. If this were a film, this would be the dénouement. That little bit right before the credits and just after all the action has concluded, where the conflicts have been resolved, the story has been wrapped up, and now the main characters are telling you what’s next for them while explicitly restating all the lessons you would have learned in the previous ninety minutes if you’d been paying attention.
Every man who has read this far has a similar goal: to attract more and better women to have sex with him, date him, and/or marry him. Our goal has been to teach you exactly how to do that.
Here’s the thing about a goal though: without a specific plan for how to achieve it, it’s just a wish. A fantasy. And fantasies aren’t going to get you into relationships with real women.
When we were younger we wished we had a book like this, but it didn’t exist. When we got together as grown men to create this book, we developed a detailed plan to create it, and here we are—the book you are reading is no longer a fantasy. It’s in your hands.
A plan isn’t just a dream with a deadline; it’s a dream with every step from here to there laid out in as much detail as you’ll need to execute your next steps.
So as we near the closing credits, the final question is: what do you do now?
If your answer isn’t “put all this knowledge to work in a systematic fashion to improve my entire mating life and achieve my mating goals,” then you should close this book, pick it up with both hands, and hit yourself in the head with it.
Because the time for hemming and hawing is over. No more theories or ideas, no more principles or postulations. This is the precise mating plan you are going to use to actually go out and get women. It’s a straightforward 6-step process that pulls together a lot of themes from earlier chapters into a clear, actionable process that anyone can work.
YOUR MATING PLAN
1. Clarify Your Mating Goal
2. Highlight Your Attractive Traits and Work on Your Weak Ones
3. Mating Market: Find the Places and Groups That Fit You
4. Start Small, Get Wins, and Build on Them
5. Focus on Social Life and Fun
6. Try, Learn, Repeat
The process is simple, but it requires a fair amount of honest self-evaluation, a little bit of risk, and some plain-old work.
The upside is that the payoffs are immediate. If your plan is a good one, you’ll quickly see improvement and find your groove. If it needs some work, you’ll get instant feedback that allows you to learn from your setbacks, make changes, and see better results. If you can do that, you can end up with a plan that will turn your wish into a goal and your goal into a reality.
1. Clarify Your Mating Goal
Do you remember what your mating goal is? It’s been a while since we’ve talked about it explicitly.
Do you just want to hook up with a lot of women? Maybe date a few and see how you feel? Possibly find the ideal long-term mate? Somewhere in between? Any of those options is a viable mating goal. If you remember, plug your mating goal into Step 1 of the Mating Plan template below.
If you don’t remember, or you feel like things have changed since you started reading this book, go back to Chapter 3 and redo the Mating Goals quiz. See where your score comes out compared to the first time you took it. Then come back and we’ll move forward with building out your mating plan.
Sample Mating Plan
22 years old, recent college graduate, a good entry-level job, in a medium-sized city
Step 1: Mating Goal
My mating goal is to meet a lot of different women and maybe find a girlfriend.
Step 2: Highlight Attractive Traits & Work on Your Weaknesses
Strength
I am…
… funny
… smart
… generous
… kind
… good at building things
Weakness
I don’t…
… have a lot of athletic ability
… have much money
… have a lot of experience
… have classic good looks
Step 3: Find the Right Mating Markets
Places that reward my strengths
improv classes
volunteering
school groups
online dating
Places that show my weakness
Sports leagues
Dance clubs
Hotel bars
Big cities
Step 4: Accumulate Small Wins
Improv Small Wins
—Sign up
—Go to 1st class
—Get my first laugh
—Go out after class w/people
—One-on-one conversation with a female classmate
Volunteering Small Wins
—Find an organization
—Go to an event
—Meet the people
—Lead a group
CrossFit Small Wins
—Join a gym
—Successful onramp
—Go to first workout
—Introduce self to the coach
Online Dating
Small Wins
—Create your profile
—Find women you are attracted to
—Send your first message to one of them.
—Have a conversation
Step 5: Focus on Social Life and Fun
Fuck it, just meet new women and have fun with them (this is the same for all of you)
Step 6: Try, Learn, Repeat
Evaluate your progress and feedback, consider any changes that you might need to make to your plan, given your current mating goal, strengths, and weaknesses.
2. Highlight Your Attractive Traits and Work on Your Weak Ones
The middle of this book was all about understanding the traits and proofs women find attractive, then teaching you how to display and improve them in order to build the best version of yourself and cultivate greater attraction.
In terms of your mating plan, there are two things you have to do in this area: (1) you have to highlight your attractive traits and (2) you have to work on your weak ones. The questions we asked you in the traits and proofs chapters should have given you a good sense for which traits fall into which categories.
There are a few reasons this step is important. First, highlighting your attractive traits will boost your confidence. When we struggle with women, we often think there is nothing at all attractive about us, when in reality there is a whole list of things that we have simply forgotten and thus haven’t leveraged.
Secondly, figuring out what you need to work on can give you motivation and goals to work toward that aren’t explicitly about success with women (which you have less control over than success with yourself). They’re about self-improvement, which pays dividends in all areas of your life.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, clarifying what’s working for you and what isn’t helps you choose the best mating markets for you, given your goals and preferences at any particular time.
Go back to steps 2 and 3 to review your attractive traits and the weak ones that need some work. Plug the strongest and the weakest into your mating plan below. Give extra emphasis to those traits, both good and bad, that are most important to the women you want to attract.
For example, if you’re horribly unathletic and you’re attracted to artsy hipster girls, your athleticism isn’t one of the weaknesses you need to worry about so much.
3. Mating Market: Find the Places and Groups That Fit You
Now that you have examined your strengths and weaknesses, remember what we told you: one of the most important decisions you will ever make in your mating life is picking the right mating markets.
You can put absolutely none of the other self-improvement knowledge in this book into practice, but if you put yourself in the right places for your current goals, preferences, and attractive traits, you will increase your mating success by a huge amount.
In the Mating Markets chapter, we broke them down by size and specificity, like a Russian nesting doll of sexual availability. We even taught you how to use OkCupid to find the neighborhoods, cities, and regions with the highest concentration of women who are 80+ percent matches. Still for many of you, the larger markets (country, state, city) are going to be fixed for some time. Moving to the Philippines to find a woman who “finally gets you” is a major life decision that few are actually prepared to make. Moving to San Francisco after college takes a chunk of change you might not have for a while.
So your focus needs to shift to the smaller, more discrete mating markets defined by simpler choices under your control (where you spend your free time, social groups you join, colleges you apply to, part-time jobs you take).
Then ask yourself two simple questions:
1. What mating markets are accessible to me and have the types of women I like, who value my attractive traits?
2. Which mating markets are disadvantageous to my prospects, given my weakest traits?
With those questions in mind, in your Mating Plan below, fill in the mating markets that would be best and worst for you in light of your goals, your preferences, and your traits. Respectively, those are the places you should concentrate most of your effort and, conversely, avoid entirely (or at least avoid spending time there with unrealistic expectations).
This might still feel somewhat abstract, so let’s look at an example:
Say that an examination of your traits reveals that your strongest qualities are that you are intelligent, thoughtful, well-read, and a good listener. And your weakest qualities are that you are not classically good-looking, socially confident, or athletic.
The best mating markets for you might look like this:
• highly ranked, academically focused colleges
• most graduate schools
• intellectual social groups (book clubs, arts charities, issue activism)
• bookstores
• specific cities (Austin, TX; San Francisco, CA; Portland, OR)
• specific neighborhoods (hipster neighborhoods in larger cities)
The worst mating markets look like this:
• athletic leagues
• big cities full of high-status men (LA, New York City, Las Vegas)
• most fraternities
• Tinder
Now, if this is you and you go to undergrad or law school at UNLV, you’re looking for a girlfriend, and you tend bar at TAO nightclub to pay for tuition, you can’t be too surprised if you’ve come up empty over and over again—despite drowning in a sea of drunk, short-term-mating focused girls ready to party every weekend. What you have to offer is not what the girls you spend the most time around are looking for. You are spending a lot of time in at least a couple suboptimal mating markets.
Once you understand what you have to offer women and where the women who value those things are, the next step is obvious: GO THERE AND INTERACT WITH THEM!
Seek out these mating markets, spend time in them, join their social groups and integrate yourself as fully into them as you can. That’s where you will find women who will find you attractive.
This is called leverage: taking something you’re already doing (using your current level of attractiveness), spending a little more time thinking about where it is valued, and using it to multiply the results dramatically. And it is completely different than what most guys do.
Like our hypothetical undergrad-bartender in Las Vegas, they take something that’s not working (trying to find bookish, intellectual girls in clubs) and try even harder to make it work. Or they just do the same thing over and over, without thinking about why. If something isn’t working, don’t try harder or do more of it.
Avoid this strategy entirely. Do something that gives you leverage. Move someplace (eventually) with more women you match up to. Remember, you can’t fit a square penis into a round vagina.
4. Start Small, Get Wins, and Build on Them
Now you’re probably thinking, “That’s great, but where do I start, and how the hell do I do all of this?” The first three parts of the Mating Plan are about identification and preparation. This part is about execution.
Don’t worry, we’re going to start by stealing a tip from Olympic swimmers. Researchers tracked the techniques used by USA Swimming to get its athletes ready to compete in the Olympic Games. Rather than focusing on gold medals, coaches set numerous small, achievable goals that the athletes focused their work toward, and then built from there. Medals were never mentioned or talked about.
They might spend a week working only on a specific aspect of their backstroke or two weeks just on starts. The result was not tedium or apathy, but rather satisfaction from numerous small and defined achievements, which in turn gave them the confidence to attempt more improvements and the energy to keep them dedicated to their training process, even though the Olympics are sometimes years away for some competitors.
They kept doing this for years, the progress accumulated, and before they knew it, they’d made substantial progress—and then won gold medals (as evidenced by the US domination in Olympic swimming medals).
Many studies have shown that painful setbacks reduce motivation much more than positive outcomes increase motivation. What this means is that when you are starting something new, it’s easy for your goals to get derailed by failures at the beginning, as surely many of you have experienced. The way you overcome this pattern is to create a continual sense of forward motion by getting small wins—controllable opportunities that produce visible results and momentum.
For example, going to sign up for improv class is a win (that’s identifying a good mating market, and working to improve your traits). Going to the first class is a win (that’s entering the mating market, and taking a risk). Going out for drinks with everyone after the class is a win (that’s socializing and creating relationships). Having fun and making jokes with your class out at drinks is a win (that’s displaying attractive traits and creating social bonds). That’s FOUR wins, before you even begin to think about any of your mating goals with any of the girls.
By themselves, none of those wins are that important. But when you string them together, this series of wins gives you confidence, shows that you are on the right path, helps you attract other people, and lowers your resistance to doing other new things. That is the positive feedback loop of creativity and productivity. And that is what we call the power of small wins.
The US Olympic Committee wasn’t the only group to figure this out. Video game designers understand it as well. Video games are by their nature mostly very long and hard tasks of increasing complexity that, if you try to do all at once, produce miserable failure and the urge to throw your controller through the television.
That is why almost all games are designed with levels and numerous small goals along the way. You earn enough small rewards that you feel incentivized to keep going and going and going. They are designed precisely to capitalize on the power of small wins—which is also why they’re so addictive.
If you structure your approach to new mating markets and women this way—creating momentum from small wins—you will build a meaningful track record of success and the confidence that comes with it.
5. Focus on Social Life and Fun
Almost all guys are nervous talking to really hot women. But virtually no guys are nervous talking to a sweet old grandmother.
Why?
Because of the stakes. You want the hot girl to like you so she’ll mate with you (that’s your goal), and that’s all you’re thinking about, so you focus on being perfect, not saying the wrong thing; you overanalyze everything, you overcorrect, and you choke. The science of choking is very clear—it occurs because you are worried about the outcome (the goal), which causes you to overanalyze the process.
But with Grandma, you don’t have an outcome in mind. You don’t have a goal. You just relax, talk like a normal person, have fun, and the conversation goes great. There is nothing at stake, so you don’t choke, because you aren’t worried about having a perfect process.
Well guess what—the only difference between the two situations (besides grandmas being huge attention sluts) is how you frame it in your mind. That’s it. So how do you change the frame so you feel the same around a hot girl as you do a grandma?
You don’t think about your goal at all.
Totally flush it from your mind, as if it didn’t exist, and replace it with a new goal: having as much fun as you can in the moment, with the people around you. In the last chapter we talked about sex not being the goal—this is the same idea.
We call this the “love your work” model, and it works far better than any other behavioral model—especially in mating.
If you set a goal, then forget about it and instead focus on creating an enjoyable process that you love and find personally rewarding, what happens is that you end up doing better at achieving the goal you set in the beginning.
Tucker discovered this trick at twenty-four years old. His mating goal at the time was exclusively short term hookups, and by not thinking at all about short-term hookups when he talked to women, he immediately tripled the number of women he was having sex with, while putting in 50 percent less time per woman and getting higher quality women who liked him and wanted to have sex with him.
It fundamentally changed his life, and all he did was stop thinking about sex in order to focus on meeting new women and having fun with them. If this sounds similar to the approach to good conversation we discussed in Chapter 19, it should, because they’re virtually identical. Both approaches are about removing sexual pressure and replacing it with fun.
You can do this too, right now, no matter your mating goal or your mating market. It’s very simple: every time you enter your mating market (or any social situation for that matter) do this:
Tell yourself that your only goal is to meet new women and have as much fun with them as possible.
We are not telling you not to care about your mating goal. Yes, your goals still exist, and yes, they are still ultimately why you are out there.
But if you leave your mating goals aside, and instead focus on the process of meeting women and having fun, those women you meet will be much more attracted to you, and that will allow you to come off as far more attractive to them.
We know it sounds counterintuitive. We also know it works—both science and experience point to this simple mindset shift as the key for most guys to greatly increase their success with women.
6. Try, Learn, Repeat
Over the course of his life, Tucker has gotten so drunk he quite literally shit his pants in a hotel lobby, he danced with himself in a mirror, he puked on a girl’s dog, fought a minor league hockey mascot, and nuked his testosterone levels by getting a blowjob in an x-ray machine.
Despite all of this, he is rich, famous, and happily married to an amazing woman. Which is to say that at some point, as you form good habits and produce positive changes in your life:
• You will screw something up.
• You will regret a decision you made.
• You will suffer setbacks.
• You will come across new information that causes anxiety.
• You will misunderstand some of the advice we are giving you.
• You will discover something very unpleasant about yourself.
Every man on earth who is successful with women has hundreds, if not thousands, of stories about setbacks, moments of ignorance, mistakes, and bad experiences. That is how Tucker got famous—he wrote about his!
Not only should you expect mistakes, you should welcome them, because mistakes are how you learn, and learning is how you get better.
It’s all about how you frame things: if you see setbacks as evidence that you are a failure, or as a threat to your identity in some way, then you are going to stop trying to improve so you can avoid any setbacks, and you will never get anywhere except exactly where you are.
But if you look at your actions from a learning perspective, it’s much easier to deal with failures because you see them as opportunities. Remember the Brazilian jiu-jitsu saying we mentioned all the way back in Chapter 1? Well we love it so much, we want you to write it down and put it on your wall:
“In training, there is only winning and learning. The only way to fail is to not train.”
And guess what? Your whole life is training. There is no finish line for learning (except for death). That includes learning to laugh at yourself. When it comes to rebounding from failure and growing as a man, regardless of your other goals, there may be no more important skill.
Do you know why Tucker wrote four books’ worth of stories about all the stupid things he has done?
It wasn’t because he knew they would form the bedrock of a new literary genre and sell millions of books (he just got lucky in that regard).
He wrote them to help alleviate all the negative emotions that arose in his life after more than a decade of doing incomprehensibly stupid things and failing with women in a breathtaking number of different ways.
It sounds counterintuitive to most young people who have spent the better part of their high school years trying to avoid detection and humiliation, but the best way to not feel awful about yourself for something stupid you did is to admit it, laugh about it, take the inevitable teasing that will come, and then move on. Don’t just move on, move forward.
Remember, there is no exact checklist for life or love. There is no step-by-step, paint-by-numbers process that works for everyone. You have to think for yourself. You have to build your own goals, your own plan, your own life. We gave you the principles; now you have to plug them into the specifics of your life.
YOUR MATING PLAN
Step 1 Mating Goal
My mating goal is
Step 2 Highlight Attractive Traits & Work on Your Weaknesses
Strength
I have/am…
Weakness
I don’t/am not…
Step 3 Find the Right Mating Markets
Places to spend more time, that reward my strengths
Places to avoid that show my weakness
Step 4 Accumulate Small Wins
[Place #1]
[Place #2]
[Place #3]
[Place #4]
Step 5 Forget About My Goal
Fuck it, just meet new women and have fun with them
Step 6 Try, Fail, Learn, Repeat
Evaluate your progress and feedback, consider any changes that you might need to make to your plan, given your current mating goal, strengths, and weaknesses.
WORK THE PROCESS
This book is your new starting point. It outlines a process to use in your life that you should refer to constantly, because if you do it right, the process never actually ends and you are never done getting better.
That being the case, the most crucial piece of wisdom we can leave you with is this: Keep mating a fun learning process, not a stressful chore.
We’ve dedicated our lives to understanding how mating really works. We’ve had thousands of conversations with women, hundreds of dates, dozens of relationships and breakups. We’ve woven everything we’ve learned from our own highly experimental lives into this book.
But we hope you won’t just take our word for it. You can cultivate your own experimental attitude in your own mating life. You don’t need a Ph.D. to be a scientist when it comes to dating. You just need to reconnect with your childlike curiosity about how the world works and how you can affect it. Be interested, skeptical, and inquisitive. Try things and gauge feedback; then repeat and improve the things that work, and forget the things that don’t. The more playful and open-minded you get about your dating life, the more attractive to women you will become.
Mating is a lifelong journey. Success comes from learning, improving and, most importantly, having fun along the way.