How to Pick Up Girls: The Success Factor

The Three Pillars of Dating Success

The modern dating community emphasizes three core pillars that define your success with women:

1. Inner Game: This refers to your mindset and confidence. How you perceive yourself and handle situations impacts your attractiveness.

2. Outer Game: These are your verbal and non-verbal skills. What you say, how you act, and the timing behind your actions all play a crucial role.

3. Lifestyle: Your connections, lifestyle, and how fun or exciting it is to be around you shape how women perceive you.

While all three aspects are important, there are three factors that have an even greater influence on your success with women:

1. Your Looks: Although it’s often overlooked or downplayed, physical appearance plays a significant role in initial attraction. But don’t worry—there are ways to leverage your strengths, no matter how you look.

2. The "X-Factor": This is your vibe, charisma, and personal magnetism. It’s the intangible quality that makes people gravitate toward you, and this is something anyone can develop.

3. Your Game: This refers to conventional dating advice like body language and conversation skills. However, it's important to note that game only amplifies what your looks and vibe have already established.

If you're great-looking or highly charismatic, you may not need much game. However, if your looks and vibe are lacking, even the best game won't save you.

Some people, like a friend of mine who’s good-looking, charismatic, and skilled in the art of attraction, have all three and perform exceptionally well with women. His success highlights the importance of combining these elements for optimal results.

In this guide, we’ll dive deeper into the X-Factor and help you leverage your strengths to enhance your overall dating success. But first, let’s clear up some confusion about the importance of a man’s looks.

Do You Need Good Looks to Pick Up Girls?

It is true that very good looking guys fight a downhill battle… when they approach women, they will often find them to be extremely receptive right off the bat… and the only two things they need to do are: 1. escalate, and 2. not do anything VERY stupid.

But the short answer to the above question is - no… you do not have to be good looking in order to pick up girls. How handsome a woman perceives you to be might very well be the most important factor in how well she will respond to you... especially initially. However, this is not the be all and end all.

Three pieces of good news about the importance of looks:

• Tastes differ.

  You may have noticed this yourself when you were out with a friend. Maybe he approached women that you would never feel attracted to… or inversely, the one you thought was the most beautiful woman present that night left him totally cold.

  It’s the same for women… Some even find Brad Pitt completely unattractive. On the other hand, even an average looking guy will happen to be many women’s specific archetype that they find unbelievably attractive.

  The website HotOrNot.com used to display a bar graph that showed how many people had given what rating to a specific picture. For me for example, I usually got rated a seven by the great majority of people. But there were always a few that rated me an eight or a nine… some even rated me a ten.

  Sometimes I run into those women who just happen to think that I’m ridiculously hot. And then, the rule that looks DO matter a lot works in my favor and the entire process becomes ridiculously easy.

  In fact, it would almost be hard NOT to end up hooking up with these girls.

• Women can be won over. When I was a teenager, I had a mentor who, aside from being very well traveled, successful and just an all-round interesting person, was also very successful with women. He was always dating at least four beautiful women – and I took every chance I got to pick his brain to learn how to pick up girls.

  I remember one day we were traveling in a large group and he had already been flirting with several of the women present… and they were all responding very well to his advances.

  Except for one girl… she had an attitude and when he talked to her, she pretended to be flirting with him over the top, in an ironic and sarcastic way, batting her eye lashes exaggeratedly and then blowing him off.

  When I talked to him about it later, he just said six words that I still remember to this day, 15 years later. “Her heart can be won too.”

  And that’s true for many women. While we often decide in the blink of an eye whether we’re attracted to a girl or not, women often judge a man’s strength (especially his inner strength), his status and his personality over time.

  If you are an interesting, high value guy (and we will cover what that means in a future article), women will become more and more attracted to you as you interact with them longer.

  The caveat is, of course, that you need to escalate with them in the first couple of hours – if you don’t make your intentions known and make your move after a while, they will still like you, but their attraction will go cold… this is the friend zone. Not good.

  But the bottom line is that men can do a lot to win a woman over with their personality. Women are not in such a fortunate position… if a girl is overweight and unattractive, she’s often out of luck. A man’s sexy personality usually has more leverage than a woman’s.

• You have more control over what you look like than you think. The importance of your appearance should NEVER be a cop-out. On the contrary… it means you’re even MORE responsible for your results. You need to do everything in your power to maximize your looks as much as possible.

  Work out regularly – at LEAST three times a week. Women DO love muscles… as long as you’re not so beefed that you walk like a robot. If you can get a bit buff, you will often create attraction just by merit of your biceps alone… or of your six-pack, if you meet girls at the beach. At the very least, stay slim and in shape.

  Get enough sleep. Unless you’re picking up girls in gothic clubs, dark circles under your eyes are NOT sexy… and you will also not be able to get into your most resourceful emotional states if you’re bleary-eyed.

  Eat healthy food. No excuses. Nobody’s asking you to turn into a health nut. But there is no reason why you shouldn’t follow a healthy diet at least 80 to 90% of the time. It will do WONDERS for you.

  It will make it ten times easier to get into great physical shape and develop your body – yes, nutrition is even more important than working out if you want to get a fitness model physique that makes girls break into SWEAT!

  What’s more, your skin will look better and you will have more energy – both of which will help the way women perceive you tremendously. You will look healthy – and health is sexy.

  Get a sexy haircut. Many people recommend getting a male, gay hair stylist, and this can be good advice. Personally I prefer to seek out whoever has the most experience in the salon… and it has to be a salon that caters to a stylish crowd. You may have to test a few hair dressers before you find the right one for you. Tip him well and keep coming back once you’ve found him.

  Get an expert to give you fashion advice. Ideally a guy who’s very good with women and very well dressed. There is also a wealth of information on fashion blogs and the like.

It’s unhealthy to walk around believing that for getting success with women it doesn’t matter what you look like. It will divert your attention from working on your appearance, which IS a very important factor.

It will also set you up for berating yourself when you meet a girl you can’t seem to win over. Instead of wondering what was wrong with your game, consider that you may simply not have been her type.

And that’s okay.

Really.

Chances are the next girl might think you’re a 9… just because of her personal taste in men.

The Magic Power That Trumps Game

The X-Factor: The Hidden Magic of Dating Success

Now that we’ve tackled the topic of looks, let’s shift our focus to the elusive “X-Factor”—that almost magical quality that makes some people irresistibly attractive.

If you’ve ever seen someone who seems to possess this special charm, you know what I mean. Some individuals, despite not being conventionally good-looking, effortlessly captivate even the most stunning women. They manage to draw them in, turning initial skepticism into genuine interest, with smiles and flirtatious behavior following shortly.

Here’s the scoop:

The Bad News: The X-Factor is Elusive

The X-Factor, or “vibe,” is challenging to pinpoint and even harder to change. It’s deeply rooted in our subconscious and often shaped during our formative years. This is why it’s rarely covered in traditional dating advice, but it’s not entirely out of reach.

The Good News: You Can Cultivate It

For those of us who might not have the perfect looks, the X-Factor offers a real opportunity to boost our dating success. It’s the reason why some average-looking guys consistently attract top-tier women, defying the notion that looks are everything.

The reason many men studying dating advice struggle is often due to a mismatched vibe. No matter how well they dress or what they say, if their vibe is off, they’ll struggle to make an impact.

Stay tuned for Part II to discover how to unlock and enhance your own X-Factor.