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Chief, you are one of the youngest good PUAs in this forum - you started young - whst your take on the topic from your own experience
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- Information takes on real meaning when you can relate it to previous experiences or knowledge. This is called Constructivism. Younger guys typically have little or no dating or sexual experience. Teaching them PU is like forcing someone live in a house with no bed in it.
- Without prior experience/knowledge, our brains have no criteria to judge the value of incoming info. This causes all the incoming info to be assigned equal value. This is called beginner's mind, and often causes massive confusion, as the student has difficulty filtering between the relevant, the minor, and the irrelevant.
This.
I'm currently 22 and, as some of you already know, I started studying pickup material when I was 14 back in 2003.
Some people already mentioned that there are many different schools of thought in pickup, implying that certain schools are more harmful to developing mindsets than others. Agreed.
Obviously, the whole "improve your whole life" approach taught in pickup is useful for everyone regardless of age. Other facets of pickup, though, aren't entirely all that beneficial to kids.
I started out with David Deangelo's material, learning to think in terms of evolutionary psychology, being all confident and shit, and trying to be cocky/funny...
I was a fucking dick.
Sure, I actually applied the material and got a girl to like me, hooked up with her (what "hooked up" means to a 14 year old, at least), and that got me
addicted to pickup. After years of growing up with fucked up issues causing me to be absolutely desperate for female affection without having the skill to attain anything more than the LJBF, pickup was the answer to all my prayers.
I was still messed up, insecure, and socially fucking weird sometimes, though. Try teaching Cocky and Funny to an insecure, angst-ridden teen and see what you get.
I then moved onto Mystery Method (not to mention I studied pretty much every method I could get my hands on during this whole time). What. A. Shit storm. I
think this was sometime in between 16 and 19 years old, but my memory of that timeline isn't that great. It was also a bit on-and-off because of a LTR.
After trying to practice MM for a while, I developed a very awkward reputation in high school and college. People started saying that everything that came out of my mouth sounded scripted. Fuck you, Mystery. Modeling your behavior was NOT a good idea. I did notice, however, that going to bars and clubs with a fake ID gave me slightly better results.
That's because I was fucking weird thanks to pickup. Weird people are quite appealing when you're drunk in a bar or club. In the end, though, I was still weird and missing out on other valuable, more genuine experiences like non-calculated dating as a teenager.
The difference between a 17 year old and someone older is that the older man will actually have a better idea of who the fuck he is and will apply material through his own identity; the younger boy will try to BE Mystery and will thus utterly fail.
Joining a Fraternity, as well as just living longer and experiencing more of life, helped a lot in becoming less weird and more of a chill guy. Still, joining the ranks of rAFCs and trying to become a PUA when I was so young MADE ME WEIRD. It took a lot of work to untangle that mess to become the awesome fucker I am today.
I still have issues that I have to deal with thanks to starting pickup so young. We all know that confidence is a good thing, but what no one ever told you is that it's annoying when you're visibly confident
all the damn time. Yes, I actually sometimes annoy people with my confidence that I just can't seem to fucking turn off. I've been told that it's like I'm being confident for no reason, as if I should have nothing to be confident about. It's not even that I'm being cocky; it's just one of those things that normal people are just really not used to.
It's true that pickup has done me a lot more good than bad. I pretty much based my life on it thus far and I pretty much don't have a choice but to think that way; I got the most "good" out of what I could get with pickup. If you dedicate yourself to ANY discipline to this level, it will do you a lot more good than bad. However, there are a lot of other things that kids should be dedicating themselves to other than pickup.
With that said, pickup prepares you with a lot of skills that are very useful to become successful in life across many areas. As they teach us in America, "it's not about what you know, it's about who you know," and I've certainly been using the skills I've developed through pickup to get me further in life. When someone turns 18, it's time to really start getting ready for the adult life. You are legally allowed to vote at this age, which is one of the highest responsibilities anyone can have. 18 is when you need to stop screwing around and start taking
some shit a little more seriously. 18 is when someone should be ready for pickup. By the way, the 21-age drinking law is absolutely ridiculous. If you can die for your country then you should be able to have all the fucking rights anyone else has.
Before 18, however, you're still a kid who doesn't know who the fuck you are. You may even be 20 and not know, as evidenced by J Slay when he said:
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Your identity is never formed completely EVER, you are always changing.
While that does have some truth to it, any grounded 50 year old man would most certainly see the bullshit in that statement. Why I can see some of the bullshit in that statement while I'm only 22 is beyond me, but I
know that there will be a point where I stop and say "this is who I am as a man" and be absolutely certain about it.
Before the age of 18, you have less responsibilities and you're a lot more impressionable. The fact of the matter is, there's a lot of garbage taught in pickup that shouldn't be taught to kids. For example, a lot of what's taught can be interpreted as misogynistic mindsets, whether the message was intentionally misogynistic or not. An older, more mature man can ignore the bullshit misogyny and take the lessons for what they're really worth while angst-ridden heartbroken teenagers will use this information to further justify their bitterness toward women, missing the entire point of pickup altogether (which is, of course, to bring men and women TOGETHER rather than driving them further apart).
Even I went through a misogynistic phase. The conditions for it were perfect: I got rejected a shit ton before I got into pickup, I was heartbroken and bitter, and the "women don't have power over you" messages taught in the community were VERY easy to misinterpret as "women suck and revenge is sweet."
Just take a look at this garbage I posted on a different pickup forum when I was like 15 or something:
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Her First Kiss ... in a trash can?
Here's a funny little sumn sumn for yalls:
Ok, so yesterday, i was out with this inexperienced girl. I was giving her the Silent SPAM (long story) while she was just following me around just BEGGING me to talk to her. It was after school, and we walked to jamba juice while i didnt say anything to her. After that, we walked to the park and i sat down on a bench. I signaled her to sit down and she did. Eventually she caught on to the silence thing cuz i was laughing when she was begging - "you're not really mad at me, are you!?"
Twas funny sh!t.
While i started talking to her again, i initiated lotsa kino and told her to come into my arm. There was cuddling on the bench and etc. Eventually, she had to leave, so we stand up and i hug her. Then, i pick her up and start walking to the trash can. She was all "OMG" and she was squirming and tryin to fight herself out (in vain, of course)
then i hold her halfway in the trash can and shes all freakin out, so i tell her to relax and calm down. I tell her to close her eyes, then i gave the girl her first kiss. She responded well and reciprocated. After that, i leave her in the trash can and walk away

Great and embarrassing first kiss for her, eh?

Still a little funny, but insanely disrespectful and utterly immature regardless. One can only imagine the kinds of mindsets I possessed to give a girl her first kiss after putting her in a fucking trash bin. If you think that kind of shit is awesome then fuck you and you need to stop secretly hating women on the inside lol
Another thing that you have to keep in mind is not just your own developmental phases, but the girls' as well. Women of different age groups behave and react just as differently as men of different age groups. You all may think that learning pickup earlier will help you learn it better and faster, but the truth is that it makes the learning process SLOW AS SHIT. Well, it was at least for me since I was
usually pursuing girls my own age at any given time. As you get older, it's like you have to learn about girls all over and over again because you CANNOT assume that the same shit you did when you were 16 will work when you're 20. You're different from when you were 16 and
she's different from she she was 16. This would be a moot point for guys like TVA_Oslo, but he's been hitting up clubs ever since he started so he's mostly just been dealing with club girls the whole time.
I may be the only mod on this site who is fully in support of making this place 18+ only, but I've got my reasons and the personal experience to back it up, ironic as that may be.