I opened up Pat Stedman’s latest email this morning (one of the very few lists I read regularly) and I like the question he poses here. Email was all around excellent and if you haven’t received it, I suggest you join his list so you won’t have to deal with that problem in the future.
Humans have a tendency to forget the pain & the bad over time and just remember the good. You can see this clearly with people who are pining to get back together with their ex. The relationship didn’t last because there were many downsides, but 2 years later you’ve forgotten all of those and you just remember the good times you had together.
It’s good we have this tendency though. Life would be very depressing if all you remember is the bad things, but this tendency to look at the past through pink goggles does lead to issues.
Pat addressed one of those issues in his email. “Just lift, get money, be social and have a strong frame bro” is the kind of advice you give to a guy because you can’t remember yourself how hard doing these things were (either that or you’ve never actually done any of these things and you’re just saying what you think is true).
And I’ll be honest here, I also sometimes suffer from the pink glassed hindsight bias. Sometimes I’ll get DM’s from guys and my first thought is: “This is so simple! How can you even ask such a thing?”. But then I think back to 17 year old me and I realize to him this probably would have been a difficult situation as well.
Stay dumb, stay hungry
As you may know, I started training for a half iron man 6 months ago. I wasn’t too fussed about either biking (I’m Dutch) or running (I’ve got plenty of experience there). Swimming however… now that was something I have no experience with. I can swim of course (I’m Dutch), just not competitively.
So I took swimming classes to learn how to properly do freestyle swimming. And it went awful at first. I couldn’t even do 10 meters without getting completely winded and half sinking to the bottom of the pool. In other words I was a complete beginner.
I asked a few friends who have done competitive swimming for advice and they all told me: Ow it’s quite simple. You should just extend your arms as much as possible for maximum results per stroke and make sure you don’t turn your body too much when you go up for breaths.
And they were right. It really is that simple… for them. But for an absolute beginner who has no idea what he’s doing, they’re incredibly difficult to do. Because you have to simultaneously make sure your arm strokes are long and effective, your legs are doing their part effectively, you keep your body posture in a straight line, you keep your legs high, you don’t let your front arm sink when you come up for breath, you don’t come up too high for breaths, you control your breathing out, you control your use of energy so you don’t get out of breath, you properly stick your arms into the water so you don’t hit your elbows before your put in your hands, you keep your arms under the right angle underwater and you make an S shaped movement with your hands etc etc etc.
But once you get all of these things down properly (which is a matter of years, not months) then suddenly it really is just about just making sure your strokes are nice & long and you do proper body rotation.
Dating is just like that. A man who’s done a 1000 approaches can just go up to a girl and say hi. He can do it because he knows he’ll instinctively know what to say or do next to move the conversation forward.
However if this is your very first approach ever and you just walk up to her and say hi… then where do you go from there? You can’t blame the inexperienced guy for not knowing these things any more than you can blame the inexperienced guy for not knowing what to do once he jumps into the water. Everything is complex until it becomes simple.
Contrapoints
I do want to give a contrapoint to Pat’s email. He is absolutely right that you cannot reduce something as complex as dating to something as simple as “just look good and say hi”. However the whole online dating sphere also has a long history of doing the opposite. Where a bunch of guys that haven’t even gone up and said hi to any girls are reading 15000 word articles on how to use soft dread to keep her loyal long term and how to get your wife to do threesomes with you.
Sure, over-simplifying things can harm beginners. If all the advice I ever got was “just make long strokes and breathe properly” I would have given up on swimming by now. But if the opposite had happened. If I had been given a 300 page book and 169 instruction videos on how to properly execute freestyle for long distance swimmers, I would have given up by now as well.
It’s because I got a swimming coach that knew how to divide everything into smaller lessons, that I got on the right path (I’m still very much a student of swimming and probably will be for at least 18 more months). So whilst it’s true you don’t want to oversimplify, you also don’t want to overcomplicate.
Instead, learn to focus on the right things. What are your 3 biggest problems right now? Focus only on those. If right now you have never had a date, you have never done an approach and you don’t know how to dress. Focus purely on those 3 things. Don’t waste your time reading about how to maintain frame in a long term relationship or how to spot women who are only after your money.
Because here’s the thing no beginner ever wants to hear: You’re going to fail. You’re going to fail many times. The only way to ever start winning is by focusing on the right things and by getting experience.
You’re not going to get married with the first girl you approach. I can guarantee you that. You’re going to have to approach at least 10 girls to get a date and you’re going to go on at least 10 first dates before you get your first girlfriend and you’re going to be dating at least a few girls before you find the one you settle down with. And those are conservative estimates.
Storytime
May 28th I had my first sprint triathlon race. I had been training my swimming for 4 months and today was going to be the big day where I do my first 750 meters of swimming freestyle. So I get to the place. Put my stuff ready in the transition zones for post swim. I go to the waterside, put on my wetsuit and wait for the starting gun.
*pang* and we’re off. 120 people around me all frantically flailing their arms and legs trying to go as fast as possible. I tried to stay a bit outside of the pack but somehow I got caught right in the middle. I got hit in the face by someone’s foot. I got slapped in the face by someone’s arm. It was total chaos. If you’ve ever seen a documentary about massive herds stampeding across the African savannas, it was that.
Not going to lie, I panicked. Not in a “oh no I’m going to die” way, but in a “I can’t get my breath and form under control” kind of way. I started out in the front end of the pack and within 3 minutes I was near the back. To make matters worse, I hadn’t put on my wetsuit properly. I’d only gotten it 2 weeks earlier and hadn’t had the chance to test it properly. The result was that my wetsuit was strangling off my shoulders & arms. Every stroke felt like I was overhead lifting a 6 pound dumbbell. Which might not sound like much, but you try doing that 400 times with each arm and then come back to me.
So it went awful. I had to revert to swimming slowly for most of the race and mostly did backstroke. I left the water 5th last and couldn’t even run to the first transition zone because I was so tired.
4 months of preparation and everything went to shit within 3 minutes. And you know what? That’s just how it goes. No matter how much you train or how much you read up on all the info you can find, you will run into unexpected things the first time you go out.
And not just the first time either. Second race I did was a 1500m swim out in the open sea. This time I made sure my wetsuit was on properly. I made sure to stay out of the pack... And then I got hit by a very strong current. I suddenly had to swim faster and more efficiently than I had ever done before and I couldn’t do it. It went ok enough for the first 15 minutes and then it got worse the second 15 minutes and then it went awful the 3rd 15 minutes. And that was just to get to the half way turning point. On the way back I was tired and nauseous from the tiny bits of salt water I kept swallowing in during the swim, yet I still managed to do it within 15 minutes thanks to the incredibly strong current. I was so tired when I got out of the water, the first transition took me 10 minutes when it should have only been 5.
New race, new problems. This Sunday I have my third race and I’m sure I’ll discover new issues there as well. But they’re all issues that you just have to experience to learn. Nothing could have prepared me for swimming against a current for the first time, or swimming in a pack for the first time. They’re just things you have to experience and fail at a few times.
2 years from now I’ll be swimming in the middle of a pack against the current and I’ll be smiling at how simple it is. But until then I’ll have the difficult task of learning all these things.
Dating is just like that. One day a few years from now you’ll be having a successful date, thinking at how smoothly things are going and how simple dating really is. But until that time you have to go through the difficult process of learning.
If you’re looking for a dating coach that can do for you what my swimming coach has done for me, then look no further and apply here
And if you haven’t signed up to Pat Stedman’s list by now, make sure to do it here
Till next time,
Niels