5 Life Lessons From My Favorite Pick-up Artists
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
-The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
Some days you feel like a rock star. You nailed the new material, you’re light on your feet, you’re surprising yourself, you’re making huge discoveries, you’re just about to run down a high five tunnel until — BAM.
You hit The Wall.
The Wall fucking sucks. It is a vulnerable place. You feel like a cockroach stuck to the bottom of a leaky bag of garbage that should’ve been taken out three years ago. Negative thoughts and insecurity strike like daggers to the heart, leaving you feeling raw and weak.
No one wants to be a sprinkler system in front of a group of people they just met, no matter how fantastic the group is. It is an annoying struggle between needing to maintain the facade of independence and needing to share what’s going on with others.
One of the gifts of being an actor is that you are closely connected to your emotions. For me they are often right under the surface, ready to be called into action at the slightest provocation. Sometimes too ready, damnit.
Around the time I hit my first wall in week 2, I started reading The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists by Neil Strauss.
I’m hella inspired by pick-up artists.
It puts a fire in my belly to see puny mice turn into audacious lions. Most people aren’t willing to face the weakest part of themselves let alone take it on full force. Sure, some of them are horrible people — loser sex addicts that can’t get their lives together — but some of them just want to have the confidence to be their best selves. Their persistence has my respect and my attention.
These people are usually men that start out with absolutely no confidence. Maybe they haven’t even held a woman’s hand and their last “relationship” was in middle school. When one guy started learning pickup, he walked into the club, stood for five minutes in a state of paralysis, and walked his ass right back out. From these humble beginnings, these men shed their chrysalises and become brazen seducers.
The Game is merciless, but it’s undeniably effective. They play with reality, they don’t accept excuses, and they’re best friends with failure. Meticulous and unrelenting, they’re some of the greatest fear-busters and social psychology experts I’ve ever read about. Some are also emotionally unstable losers with fractured and soul-sucking lives.
That said.
1. When you hit the wall, lean on tools.
“All your emotions are going to try to fuck you up,” Mystery continued. “They are there to try to confuse you, so know right now that they cannot be trusted at all. You will feel shy sometimes, and self-conscious, and you must deal with it like you deal with a pebble in your shoe. It’s uncomfortable, but you ignore it. It’s not part of the equation.”
Wise words from a manic depressive man-child. The tools for a pickup artist are his routines. When you’re freaking out and that bilious shock of fear is wreaking havoc in your stomach, lean on your tools and rock it anyway. In the interactive theatre game, we have many kinds of tools.
Do it before you know: do something physical — anything (grab at your knee, pull at your hair, clean out your fingernails) and let whatever language follows follow.
Say it before you know: start with a sound and let yourself say whatever word/words come out of that sound: R — ampent zombies are headed our way!
Start in the middle: start a scene in the middle of a sentence without knowing how it will end: “I can’t believe you would give a homeless man our TV!”
Jump scenes: take an element of a previous scene and introduce it in another scene. Maybe in the first scene, the characters are baking a cake and a cockroach gets in the batter. In another scene, they might be setting up bug bombs. It doesn’t have to be that obvious either. Perhaps you’re playing Monopoly in one scene, and you decide to purchase some real estate in the next.
Take the hit: allow something the spect says to influence you or “hit” you. You can take the hit no matter what the spect says, whether the spect says something emotionally charged or completely innocuous. This adds texture and invites new elements of the story to come to light.
Gatekeeper: create mild obstacles for a spect. The gatekeeper can be the bouncer at the club who doesn’t want to let the spect in. The spect tries some tactics to get into the club. The bouncer/gatekeeper allows the spect to have an effect on her, considers, and eventually concedes. Having overcome a roadblock, the spect feels more empowered in the story.
Speaking of roadblocks, another important thing that interactors and pickup artists alike understand is that people like to earn things. They don’t want it to be handed to them.
2. You have to earn it.
Every great pickup artist knows that before they can walk up to a girl and ask for anything, they have to show value, i.e. earn it. Maybe they’ll have an entertaining comment, interesting story or fact, maybe they’ll perform magic or hypnosis. By the same token, they will make the girl work for it by pushing her away and pulling her in strategically. If you make it too easy, she won’t be as interested.
As interactors we understand that deep connections have to be earned through some struggle for people to value them. Think of your closest friendships. The strongest ones come from going through difficult experiences together, from challenging each other, and from letting yourselves be uncomfortable at times. We feel most satisfied and alive when we overcome struggle, and if you want to have a deep connection with someone fast (like in Long Lost Family), you have to be willing to create friction as well as rapport.
We call this friction a speed bump. It means intentionally having an adverse reaction to something the spect said.
Spect: Sometimes I feel like people are too hard on themselves in college — they push themselves too much.
Interactor (taking a suddenly annoyed tone): I feel like it’s important to push yourself or else you won’t go anywhere. You have to work hard to get what you want, even if it’s uncomfortable.
Spect: Well… I didn’t mean that you shouldn’t work hard. You should.
Interactor: I don’t think I understand.
Spect: I mean that there is a point when it’s a negative thing to work too hard.
Interactor: Can you tell me more about that?
Spect: If you’re running around trying to do too much, it will take a toll on you, and you won’t be able to do anything well.
Interactor: Like it leads to an unhealthy lifestyle?
Spect: Exactly. You need balance.
Interactor: Hmm. Yeah, it’s a fine line. I remember when I pushed myself too hard and it caused me to neglect some important duties I had at my sorority. You gotta have balance.
And then you find rapport again. You can always get it back, but you have to have those moments of challenge for it to be a full experience, even if it’s scary.
Challenges shape us into who we are. Nelson Mandela always said that he was an ordinary man, molded by the struggles of his time into the leader he became. It reminds me of why I’m at the Deep Dive — to be molded by a challenging experience into my best self.
In a shocking production by Derren Brown, Apocalypse, an unknowing participant is led to believe that the apocalypse is actually happening on Earth. If you don’t believe that someone could be convinced of such a ridiculous scenario, you have to watch the production on YouTube.
An average young man, Steven, has no appreciation for anyone or anything in his life. He doesn’t have the confidence or desire to take on challenges and he calls himself irresponsible and listless, lacking a strong love for his family. After he experiences the world being attacked by infected meteors, he takes on the role of a brave leader (through an elaborate series of events and with the help of actors and realistic sets) and comes out of the experience a changed man. With a newfound love for his life and his family, he earns an unshakeable confidence that comes from going through a character-testing struggle. Yes, Derren Brown actually made the world look like it was being attacked and infected by these meteors and set it up so Steven would have no choice but to believe it.
Interactors also make the spect earn it by creating opportunities instead of instructing. We don’t tell spects what to do, we just create negative space they are welcome to fill (or not fill). We mention that we wish we could get that heavy window open, we don’t have a dance partner to practice with, or that we’re too short to reach the cookie jar. The spect often chooses to help solve these problems, and they feel more empowered because no one just told them what to do. They saw there was a problem and they chose to do something about it. We make sure there is breathing room for them to co-create the story, and we only give them as much support as is needed for them to to play.
You might think that getting a mattress in the mail is nothing to write home about, but after getting entangled for hours in customer service knots with Macy’s and my credit card company on three separate days, its arrival was like Christmas morning. When you work your butt off to get something and you finally get it, it’s gold in your eyes no matter what it is. By the same token, when you make someone else work for something, it makes them invest in it more. I spent the next couple days blissfully mooning over this inanimate object, bonding with my new fantastically perfect prize.
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons.
“[Y]ou will have to play the game over and over to learn how to win. So get ready to fail.”
This is something that everyone and their grandmother tells you but becomes visceral when you see someone actually living it in terrifying social situations. Pickup artists recognize that the path to greatness is paved with embarrassment, rejection, and lessons learned. After an evening in the field, they don’t get caught up in their failures. They raise the hood of the car and analyze what happened, making plans for what they can do strategically to be successful next time. They live in their own reality, unfettered by social restrictions. While teaching new AFCs (average frustrated chumps/new pickup artistry students) in actual night clubs, master pickup artists would walk straight up to their students mid-action and advise them in front of groups of women. Reality was a game to them, and they didn’t take it too seriously. Sure, it was about getting the number/kiss/what have you *cough cough, but it was also about building a skill set and mastering the building blocks of confident interaction.
4. It’s not enough to be yourself, you have to be your best self.
“The reason I was here — the reason Sweater and Extramask were also here — was that our parents and our friends had failed us. They had never given us the tools we needed to become fully effective social beings. Now, decades later, it was time to acquire them.”
We grow up in a culture that is constantly telling us to be ourselves. Our parents and grandparents are supposed to love us for who we are, our friends and family — the people who shape us most — are not supposed to want to change us. Be yourself! What if yourself is a fearful, socially crippled man/woman in clothes that are three sizes too large? In the pickup artist game, the illusion that being yourself is enough is immediately shattered. You have to get some exercise. You have to wear cool clothes that actually fit you. You have to get a stylish haircut. You have to learn about social psychology, get a game plan, and unlearn your socially accepted timidity and politeness. You have to want to change. It doesn’t mean that you abandon everything about who you are, it just means that it’s time to shed those bad habits.
5. Shoot in front of the bird.
When you’re shooting a high bird, you want to aim in front of the bird, not actually at it. If you aim right at it, you’ll miss it. In The Game, the men create aliases — characters that they hope to become. They shoot before the bird and take on these names before they have fully embodied them. Neil Strauss went by Style, and Erik Von Markovik became Mystery. Each of the Deep Divers is creating his/her own title that they will embody by the end of the nine months. What’s yours?
