The session starts badly. It rains. Your logistics are wrong. Three women in a row aren't interested. You drop your phone and break the screen.
What do you do with that?
For a lot of guys, every additional inconvenience becomes another argument for going home. The harder the evening gets, the less they want to do. I described the opposite reaction in The Dark Hustler.
The more difficult it gets, the more focused I become on the work.
Competitiveness has a price
I opened the episode with an example from the world of hedge funds. Julian Robertson's emphasis on competitiveness interested me because it pointed beyond having an intelligent explanation for everything.
How do you respond when the work becomes uncomfortable and the result you wanted hasn't arrived?
It is easy to call yourself competitive when you are winning. The interesting part comes when continuing asks something of you. Can you tolerate frustration? Can you return to the task after a setback? Are you prepared to give up the comfort of having an excuse?
That is what I mean when I talk about personal sacrifice. You want a demanding goal, but you would also like the pursuit to feel pleasant at every stage. You may have to give up the second requirement.
Make the setback work for you
In the podcast, I describe turning the city into my opponent. London is making it rain. London is giving me awkward logistics. London has another inconvenience waiting around the corner.
It is a way of framing the session. Instead of taking each setback as evidence that I should stop, I use it as a challenge.
What else have you got?
That question changes how I respond. I am still dealing with the same weather and the same practical difficulties. But I have stopped spending all my attention explaining why the evening is unfair.
You cannot choose every circumstance. You can work on the response you bring to it.
Carry your state into the next interaction
One distinction in this episode matters. I explain that the purpose is to preserve and rebuild my state for the next woman. It is not a project to turn a woman who said no into somebody who has to say yes.
Her no ends that interaction. The question is what you carry into the next one.
If you spend the following hour replaying the rejection, it becomes much larger than the conversation itself. Now you are treating a new person as though she already gave you the previous person's answer.
The work is to regain your focus and continue meeting people. Keep the intensity directed at your own effort.
Intensity inside, ease outside
I describe feeling intense internally while appearing relaxed and easygoing in the interaction. Those things can coexist.
The commitment is about staying with the work and knowing what you are trying to do. It doesn't require you to dump your frustration on the person in front of you.
This is also where practice matters. The lines, moves and patterns need to be familiar enough that you can use them without stopping to organise a lecture in your head. Intensity on its own doesn't replace learning the material.
The public episode introduces this state of mind. I discuss how I developed it in the longer member recording.
Look at the moment you usually quit
I connect this attitude to the wider question of effort and setbacks in Universal Laws. You can understand an idea perfectly and still abandon it the first time reality makes it inconvenient.
Think about your last difficult session. What happened immediately before you stopped trying? Was there a practical reason to end it, or did you simply decide that feeling discouraged meant you were finished?
That is the moment to examine. You don't need the entire evening to become easy. You need to recognise what you do when it isn't.
