Today, I’m going to talk about technique #3 – obliterating friction.

This is the idea of getting rid of friction permanently.

Permanently?  Yes, permanently.

In Taoism, this is called wu wu-wei – doing not doing.  Basically, all actions follow naturally from the core of your being.  You never get in your own way, and if there’s an obstacle, you flow around it instead of getting hung up on it.

‘Being like water’ is a metaphor that I use a lot in The Tao of Dating for Men. It’s all about the principle of effortless flow.

Now, I’ve gotta warn ya, buddy – this ain’t easy.  This is a lifetime’s work.  I’ll tell you right here, right now: I have no quick fixes for this.

Sure, I can lead you through a guided meditation and you’ll feel like the River Amazon for a few hours or maybe a day after.  We’ll do that in the Approach Clinic.

That’s the state of flow.  The goal is to get you the trait of flow.  So it’s a permanent resident of your neurology.

What I can do is to get you started on a practice that will get you there.  Think of me as a personal trainer for your brain.

I can give you the workout.  I can assign the nutritional plan.  And yes, all of them work – when you apply yourself to them.  I can’t be standing there over your shoulder telling you to do every workout or keeping you eating healthy.  I guess I could, but you wouldn’t be able to afford me

What I can do is get you started on a lifelong program of meditative practice so you get to that state of effortless grace eventually.

The Japanese call it shibumi.  The Italians call it sprezzatura.  I call it the State of Awesome.

So here’s a simple meditation practice to get you started.

Get a cushion and put it on the floor, arm’s length from the wall.  Sit cross-legged facing the wall.  Do lotus position if you can; no worries if you can’t.  Look straight ahead or slightly down.  Feel free to defocus your gaze if it’s easier like that.

Put the palm of your right hand under your left hand, and touch the thumbs together.  Put the hands in your lap at navel level or so.

Set a timer for 20min and begin.  If thoughts come, just acknowledge them and let them go.  There will be a lot of them – no worries.  Just sit.

This is the essence of zazen – zen meditation practice.  Simple.  Straightforward.  Utterly transformative when done regularly.

‘When done regularly’ is a big thing.  If you eat a Big Mac every day, you will eventually get fat and sick.  If you read men’s magazines every week, you will feel jittery and inadequate.  If you meditate every day, you will get to the State of Awesome.

If you want more on meditation and friction, I refer you to this outstanding video of Shinzen Young, courtesy of Google Tech Talks.  It’s about an hour long, and quite possibly the most beneficial hour you’ll spend this week:

Shinzen Young: Divide and Conquer — How the Essence of Mindfulness Parallels the Nuts & Bolts of Science

Another thing you can do to obliterate friction is mono-tasking.  Or mindfulness.  Do only one thing at a time at all times.

If you’re eating, eat.  Savor the food.  Feel yourself chewing it.  Experience all the flavors and textures inside your mouth.  No reading.  No talking.  No gawking.  Just eating.

If you’re walking, just walk.  No talking on the phone.  If you’re talking on the phone, talk.  Stop driving, pull over, and just talk (this advice may very well save your life).

‘Distracted from distraction by distraction’ — that’s what T.S. Eliot said in his immortal work Four Quartets, and it was his description of modernity.  In the 1940s.

Since then, it’s all gotten 10,000 times worse with the advent of TV, cable, radio, internet, Twitter, Facebook, Crackberries and iPhones.

Your mission, if you choose to accept it and strive for the State of Awesome, is de-fragmentation your attention.  Consolidate.

I gave you two ways of doing that in this article: zazen and monotasking.  I’ll elaborate on those and give you more in the Approach Clinic. Sign up here, and use the ‘APPROACH’ discount coupon code to get $60 off, making the class a mere $39.95.

And you thought it was all about meeting girls.  Ha.

The power is within you

AB

Today, I’m going to talk a little bit about how to overcome friction.

Basically, here’s the scenario: you’ve seen her. You’d like to meet her, but you’ve taken too long and your brain’s ‘aw crap’ mechanism has already kicked in. You’ve started thinking about it, which is the essence of friction.

Well, I would have preferred that you’d gotten in there quicker, but hey — this situation’s going to come up, so let’s deal with it, shall we?

What’s happened is that some kind of prior emotional state of friction has started to settle into your neurology. Our goal is to change your state, because the behaviors that you want are state-dependent. Get the right state, get the right action.

This is the essence of Taoist thought: “The master does nothing but accomplishes everything.” I interpret this as meaning that the master allows right action — te, the middle word in Tao Te Ching — to emanate from him naturally, vs. having to force things.

This is freakin’ profound, so I’m going to repeat it: the right action arises from the right state. So if you want to execute the right action, get in the right state.

So what are some states in which it’s natural for you to just go up to people and say hi?

For me, it’s right after yoga class or a deep meditation session. There’s no barrier between me and anything, so for a few shining minutes, I’m less of my asshole self and more of an open, loving person.

Another time is when I’ve gotten some great news or some big triumph. I feel like I have the world in the palm of my hand, and I can go up to anybody and say anything.

Ever felt that way when your team won? Or maybe when you were watching the game tying goal in the US vs Canada hockey game?

Now you may be thinking, “It’s not very convenient for me to leave the party, take an hourlong yoga class or meditate for half an hour and come back. Is there an easier way, doc?”

Yeah, yeah, wiseguy. I hear ya. There IS an easier way.

It’s called anchoring, and it allows you to re-evoke any past mental state basically instantly.

All you have to do is this: associate a unique stimulus with the peak of that desired state. Say, a snap of your fingers. Or the ringing of a bell (remember Pavlov?). That’s your anchor to the state.

Now, every time you fire that anchor again, you get that state back. Neat, eh?

You’ve already got a whole bunch of anchors running inside your head – you just don’t know it.

Does the ringtone of your cell phone make you jump up and scramble, even when it’s someone else’s phone?

Does a loud honk for a car on the road put you on edge?

What happens to your head when you hear the song you first made out to? Or made love to? Or the perfume of your first girlfriend?

If you’re American, what happens when you hear ‘The Star Spangled Banner’? Does it make you want to automatically get up, put your right hand on your heart, and sing along?

What does the sound of your mom’s voice admonishing you do to your head?

The point is this: you’ve got dozens if not hundreds of unconscious anchors running inside your head. Your brain is a connection machine. It’s job is to connect stimulus with state and behavior. You see sabre-toothed cat, you run. Same idea.

So why not give you some useful anchors designed to make you happier and more effective in life? Better than going about it all haphazardly.

In the Approach Clinic, http://bit.ly/cdJomw, I’ll teach you in delightfully excruciating detail how to set anchors on yourself – and also set some really useful ones so you have them handy.

Heck, now that I think about it, I should just do a whole workshop on anchoring.

I’ll also teach you another Overcoming technique – what I call ‘The Brain Eraser.’

Don’t worry, it’s only temporary – you’ll get the content back. Well, most of it at least. Assuming there was any there to start with.

The idea with the Brain Eraser is that you can either overcome the unhelpful state by replacing it with a more useful state, OR you can just blank it out and start with empty.

Fun.

Here’s the great thing about these techniques: once I teach them to you, you can teach them to your friends. They’ll think you’re the coolest guy, like, ever and they’ll owe you serious beer. As a bonus, you’ll learn it better yourself.

So to make this more interesting, I propose a contest: whoever comes up with the best/worst story about an approach that he botched or wished he had done differently gets to attend for free – AND get a 15min consult with yours truly on a topic of your choice. (If you’ve already signed up, we’ll make it a 30min consult.)

I know that you guys find the notion of getting crap for free highly motivating, so there’s my marketing ploy for the day.

Post your stories as comments below.

The Approach Clinic is approaching fast – Tuesday March 9 is right around the corner. So sign up, like, now: Approach Clinic registration. Use coupon code ‘APPROACH’ to get 60 beans off.

Take it away,
AB

Seems like we touched a nerve there, since so many of you signed up for the Approach Clinic before even knowing what time it was happening.

Good to know the natives are hungry.

Well then. I’m happy to serve, so let’s deliver some more.

In the last piece, posted on the blog yesterday, I talked about 3 ways of handling friction:

1) Bypass it.
2) Overcome it.
3) Remove it entirely.

The techniques I will share with you in the Approach Clinic will fall under these three categories.

To give you a preview of each method – you bypass friction by using your head cleverly.

You overcome friction by setting up physiological responses that give you a surge (or erase your thoughts) when you need to. We’ll be using some hypnosis and NLP techniques for this.

You remove friction through meditative techniques.

Today, I’m going to tell you a little about bypassing.

The simplest way, of course, is to act fast. This is because, contrary to popular belief, thinking often precedes feeling.

One of the most fascinating things you could see on TV around 11 September 2001 was the interviews with people on the street. The reporter would approach random people and ask them how they felt. Many responded like this:

“I don’t know how to feel.”

Think about that, because it’s pretty profound. “I don’t know how to feel.”

Well of course you don’t. It’s not like some switch from the outside world plugs into your brain and tells you how to feel! Unless you stubbed your toe or got knifed in the stomach, you get to interpret events and choose how to feel.

The ‘know’ precedes the feeling. You have to *think* about how to feel! Feeling isn’t necessarily automatic!

Certain scenarios have occurred with enough frequency such

that you’ve made a pretty good circuit for automatic behavior.

Just the other day, I was in a church service when a phone went off with my old ringtone on it. Immediately, I got hyperattentive, started to look for my phone to turn the ringer off, felt the beginnings of shame… then realized that my ringtone is different. AND my phone’s in the car.

Sure we’ve got free will. Uh-huh.

99% of people are in a robotic fog 99% of the time, responding to their enviroment like Pavlov’s dogs to a tuning fork. You cut me off? I flip you off. You insult me? I insult you back. You’re a pretty girl? I’ll get afraid real quick so I can’t talk to you.

You don’t have to be one of the automatons, brother.

But if we’re so good at behaving robotically, why not program the robot to do things that are good for us? Like exercising regularly, eating our vegetables, and talking to pretty girls whenever we feel like it?

So here’s the simplest bypass technique I know: go say hi to her before you have a chance to think about it. Call it the ‘just do it’ technique, the ‘3-second rule’, or whatever the hell else you want to.

You count one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, and by four one thousand you’d better be talking to her.

This works.

Another bypass technique involves changing your physiology such that you never have a chance to create friction in the first place.

One that I talk about extensively in the Metamorphosis Program and will share with you in the Approach Clinic is called ‘going into the state of the bond.’

Basically, you imagine that you’re about to bump into your best bud whom you haven’t seen in eons, and go into that state. That super-friendly version of you has no trouble approaching women at all.

There’s also ‘host physiology’ – acting as if you own the joint. The host has carte blanche to speak to anyone he wants — “Hey there, having a good time? Thanks for making it to the party.” So, if you’re not hosting your own party (always a good idea), then pretend you are. We’ll be going even deeper into that in the Clinic.

That’s three bypass techniques for ya. I’ll talk about overcoming and obliterating techniques later this week.

I have no problem giving away all this stuff because the Approach Clinic is 90 min of me talking away, which is about 45 pages worth of stuff. And guided meditation, hypnosis and other tools which are impossible to convey in print.

So go test out the stuff I’ve given you so far, and then join me in the Approach Clinic next Tuesday, 9 March at 6pm PT/9pm ET. We’ll record it for your future reference so you can reinforce the learnings at your leisure.

My plan is to help you solve this issue once and for all such that it becomes your secret weapon, the bazooka in your back pocket – and a cornerstone of your growth as a man.

You can still use the coupon to get $60 off the $99.95 tuition. Just enter ‘APPROACH’ as the coupon code when you’re signing up for the clinic, and it’s $39.95. You can do it here: Register for the Approach Clinic, yo

The power is within you,
Dr Alex

PS: If there’s one social skill that can turn around your entire love life, it’s your ability to meet new women. The more of them you meet, the more options you have, the less needy you’ll act, and the more confident you’ll act. If you’re ready to turn this part of your life around, the Approach Clinic is an excellent start: http://bit.ly/cdJomw

PPS: In the next piece, I’m going to talk about the book that’s required reading for the Clinic and will re-mold your brain — if you let it. Stay tuned.

I first heard that when I was a teenager, and frankly it made no sense.

Then I heard it again after studying some Eastern philosophy, and I thought, “Yes, that is profound indeed.”

Now after really getting into Eastern wisdom and understanding it at a feeling level and not just an intellectual level, it doesn’t make sense anymore.

That’s because the enemy is inside you, but it’s not you. The enemy is friction.

Now there is good friction and there is bad friction. Simply put, the bad friction gets in the way of your getting some good friction.

Long-time meditators know what this bad friction is; science is slowly catching up with them.

When you’re experiencing discomfort, neurological friction is that part of your brain that puts up resistance to that discomfort.

This is what turns mere pain into suffering. It’s not just “Ow, I stubbed my toe”, but “Ow, I stubbed my toe – why me? Doesn’t the world suck? Whine whine moan.”

If you were to remove the “the world sucks” part from the equation, you’d probably just experience pain – or maybe not even that. It’s the friction that turns discomfort into something more.

As the Tao Te Ching says (Chapter 23):

Express yourself completely,
Then keep quiet.
Be like the forces of nature:
When it blows, there is only wind;
When it rains, there is only rain;
When the clouds pass, the sun shines through.

Same thing happens with pleasure. Your body resists the feeling, and you diminish the pleasure. If you don’t think you do this, just think about the last time you received a compliment, and then immediately said something like, “Well, but I’m really not that special.”

So friction makes you lose both ways. Turns the pain into suffering AND reduces the amount of pleasure you can experience.

The best scientific explanation I have for this is that your body has two kinds of nerve fibers when it comes to feeling. One kind goes up to your brain, reporting on what’s happening. The other kind comes down from your brain to your sense organs, telling them what they should be perceiving.

If that’s not interesting enough, consider this: scientists say there are twice as many descending fibe rs as they are ascending ones. Twice as many nerve fibers telling you what you *should* be feeling, as determined by your cortex, than what you really *are* feeling, as determined by your sense organs.

Hmmmm.

So let’s take the task of approaching a pretty woman. Initial impulse from the primitive brain goes “Cute girl! Me wants!”

Then the friction kicks in. Now you have to work up your courage to overcome the friction to go speak to her. Or you can wait until you’re fully paralyzed and can’t speak to her at all.

Moreover, the friction may also kick in and diminish your enjoyment of the fact that she’s a cute girl. “Aw, that’s dirty. You can’t be thinking about her like that.” This is especially pernicious if you were brought up in a religious tradition that made pleasure dirty – particularly that of the flesh.

Of course, the friction doesn’t stop here. Even if you do get the girl, the friction is on for the ride all the way, brother. It’ll get in the way of your enjoyment of her when she’s with you, it’ll poison your solitude when you miss her, and it’ll aggravate the pain when you’re not getting
along.

Friction’s a bitch, I tell ya.

So, like a good ayurvedic doctor, I told you what creates the problem. Diagnosis complete. Now what are we going to do about it?

Incidentally, as a quick aside, the ayurvedic announcement formula goes something like this:

First, announcement of the symptom. This is the ‘what’: ‘The patient suffers from approach anxiety.’

Second, the announcement of the source of the symptom, or the ‘why’: ‘The patient has friction.’

Third, the solution: ‘The patient needs to engage in mind exercises.’

And fourth, the process for attaining the solution – the actual prescription: ‘The patient needs to do meditation and take classes with Dr Alex.’

If this sounds familiar, it’s because that’s how the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism are framed – they’re cast in the guise of a traditional ayurvedic diagnosis and prescription.

Returning to our topic, there are three ways to fix this friction problem: bypass it; overcome it; and remove it entirely.

One of the reasons why bad boys and jerks tend to be good with women is because they don’t experience as much friction as the nice guys. They see a woman who turns them on and they just go for it. No apo logies, no pussyfooting – just
pure action.

It’s the same lack of inhibition that makes them borderline or florid psychopaths, so this ain’t 100% a good thing. Gentlemen, please hold on to your frontal lobes – it keeps society functioning.

At the same time, there’s something to be learned here. In The Tao of Dating for Men, this is what I call getting out of your own way.

So next Tuesday, I’m conducting the Approach Clinic. It’s 90min in which I give you every tool imaginable to destroy friction when it comes to speaking to strangers – especially cute women.

I’ll teach you how to bypass (easy). I’ll teach you how to overcome (more work). And I’ll teach you how to remove it entirely (serious work, but also fun).

Getting rid of friction may be the one thing that will improve the quality of your life more than anything else. I’m not exaggerating here. So, to say the least, this is a worthwhile exercise.

We’ll do some hypnosis work, some meditation work and some cognitive work. I’ll give you a bunch of foolproof techniques that work in any situation, and also help you develop your own.

This one’s $99.95 The first 30 to sign up can apply the coupon code ‘APPROACH’ for $60 off — so you can sign up for only $39.95:

Sign up for the Approach Clinic

More power to ya

AB

PS: If this is the one part of your dating life that’s been dogging
you forever, isn’t time to take care of it? Exactly. Sign up here:
http://bit.ly/cdJomw

In other words, Bart has made a lot of great decisions in his life, and continues to do so every day.

Except that some time ago, he got engaged. And none of his friends thought it was a good idea. We all predicted disaster, of the Hindenberg up-in-flames variety.

Bart did get separated a few years later, and you probably know someone who was plenty smart who made a similarly disastrous decision. Whether it was taking the wrong job, buying a Hummer, selling off Microsoft stock in 1989 or launching into a destructive affair, this kind of thing happens all the time. Perhaps it’s even happened to you.

It’s easy to see all of this in hindsight. But what if you could see the faulty decision-making while it was happening? Then, instead of an “I told you so” story which helps little and irritates much, we may actually accomplish something useful — like helping avoid the error in the first place.

Psychologists who’ve studied our decision-making processes have observed cognitive biases that tend to get us in trouble.

Remember that these biases don’t make you a bad person — they just make you human. As far as we can tell, they’re deeply-ingrained features of our brain function. The more you’re aware of them, the better chance you have of avoiding them. There’s a slew of them, so I’ll highlight some of the big ones:

1) The fundamental attribution error.
This bias makes us attribute the failure of others to character and our own failures to circumstance. “Jenkins lost his job because he was incompetent; I lost mine because of the recession.” It also attributes our own successes to our competence, discounting luck, while seeing others’ successes as products of mere luck.

This lands you in hot water when you assume that bad stuff only happens to other people: you’re not going to be part of the 50 percent of people who get divorced, and the price of your house will go up even though 90 percent of them have dropped in price. I’m going to marry Charlie Sheen and make it work because I’m different; those 4,000 other women were just stupid. They did something wrong, but I know what I’m doing. The fundamental attribution error’s a pernicious one, and it nails all of us at some point.

2) The confirmation bias.
This one has two parts. First, we tend to gather and rely upon information that confirms our existing views. Second, we avoid or downplay information that goes against our pre-existing hypothesis.

Say you suspect that your computer has been hacked. Then every time it stalls or has a little glitch, you blame it on the hackers. Or you think that your boss has it in for you. Then everything she says or does you interpret as part of her plan to undermine you. It’s a bit like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If you identify with a political party, you probably do this all the time. If you’re a scientist, you do this inadvertently as part of the scientific method. And if you’re a trial lawyer, it’s your job to do this.

If you’re interested in moving an agenda forward, then the confirmation bias works in your favor. If you’re subject to this agenda and don’t like it, recognize the confirmation bias for its fallacy. And if you’re interested in the truth, start without preconceptions. Outwitting the confirmation bias means exploring both sides of an argument with equal diligence.

3) The overconfidence bias.
I call this the ‘my guess is better than yours’ bias. People’s confidence in their own decisions tends to outstrip the accuracy of those decisions. Your friend will say he’s “100 percent positive” about something — e.g. his choice of wife – and only be right 50 percent of the time. A disastrous form of this happened in the doomed 1996 Mt Everest expedition described in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, resulting in the death of many climbers.

4) The availability bias.
We tend to estimate what’s more likely by how easily we can come up with an example from memory. The availability of our memories is biased toward vivid, unusual, or emotionally charged examples. So we tend to make those more salient, then come up with weird decisions based on them.

As a result, you may cancel your trip to the Canary Islands because mom tells you the biggest plane crash in history happened there. Or you stop going to hockey games because you heard someone in the stands got thwacked on the head with a puck last week. Or avoid investing in stocks because those crashed last year.

To bypass the availability bias, be sure to look at all the evidence around a particular decision, not the stuff that jumps to mind first. If only 1 out of 100,000 plane landings resulted in a crash, it’s safe to fly to the Canary Islands. If one out of ten million hockey fans gets nailed by a puck, you can watch a hockey game.

5) The sunk cost fallacy.
I call this the slot-machine effect. You put a quarter in a one-armed bandit, and pull the lever. You win nothing. No big deal – you put in another quarter. And another. This goes on for a while, and you start thinking, “Well, I’m invested in this machine now. It’s going to belch an avalanche of quarters any second!”

The truth is that every pull of the lever has the same winning probability of nearly zero, regardless of how much money you’ve put in. The money is effectively gone forever – it’s a sunk cost. There’s no quantifiable expectation of future return, so it’s not an investment.

This is a big one in jobs and relationships. You can be stuck in a crappy situation for a while, and then think, “But I’ve invested three years in this! I can’t just throw that away!” The fact is that those three years are never coming back – you’ve already thrown them away, so don’t worry about it! The sooner you cut bait and go for a better situation, the better off you are.

So next time you have smart friends who are about to make an unbelievably dumb decision, follow this five-step plan:

a) Look through this list, or an even more comprehensive one
b) Empathize with them for being human, coming up with an example of a time when you made a similarly boneheaded choice – “Boy, was I a goober!”
c) Instead of saying “What the hell are you thinking,” say “I have a lot of faith in your judgment, so help me understand how you came up with this decision.”
d) If you’re still convinced they’re smoking something funny, only then offer gently some insight on cognitive biases, and see what happens.
e) If they still don’t get it, take the frying pan from behind your back and give them a compassionate but bracing thwack upside the head. It probably won’t change their mind, but it’ll feel pretty satisfying.

(CNN) — Poets, novelists and songwriters have described it in countless turns of phrase, but at the level of biology, love is all about chemicals.

Although the physiology of romantic love has not been extensively studied, scientists can trace the symptoms of deep attraction to their logical sources.

“Part of the whole attraction process is strongly linked to physiological arousal as a whole,” said Timothy Loving (his real name), assistant professor of human ecology at the University of Texas, Austin. “Typically, that’s going to start with things like increased heart rate, sweatiness and so on.” Continued here

Her name was Emma. She was also 19, with an irresistible English accent and very cute to boot. I was pretty sure that I was going to marry her.

Except that she dumped me, pulverizing my heart into nanoparticles. It was the only time in my life that I got depressed: poor sleep, suppressed appetite, lotsa Kafka. It kinda sucked.

The next kiss didn’t come for another 4 years, when I was in medical school. That’s also when my career as a professional virgin came to an end. To understate things, I was a late bloomer in the realm of romance.

I wasn’t stupid or ugly. No hermit, either – knew most people on campus. No, I was just clueless.

Turns out that the skill set required to navigate the tricky waters of romantic interaction wasn’t in any book I had read or any class I had taken. Mom, dad, the sex-ed teacher – none of them had taught me any of this stuff.

This is a serious omission, since our relationships with others are the biggest determinants of happiness in our lives. And it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that most people’s lives revolve around their primary love relationship.

So towards the end of med school, I started to read some pertinent books and hanging out with guys savvier than me in this dating realm. Slowly, I caught on that everything I knew about dating and women was wrong.

A few years later, right about when I was a pre-med advisor to Harvard undergraduates, I noticed that my friends and advisees were in a similar pickle. Here were smart, funny, good-looking guys surrounded by single women who were dying to be asked out – and not a whole lot was happening.

See, I like smart people. Smart people created nearly everything that I value – Beethoven’s late string quartets, my HP laser printer, Feynman’s lectures, Four Quartets, and Zippy (my Prius*). I like to see smart people succeed — even created a blog for smart people.

That’s why I wrote The Tao of Dating for Men. Why should anyone suffer like I did? Clues cure cluelessness, so I provided some clues for the smart boys.

But the big reason why this is important is that I’ve seen entire lives derailed by romantic maladroitness.

I was pretty lucky to bounce back after a couple of months.  Other friends weren’t so fortunate.

One of them, Victor, who is my age, is a superbly gifted man – equally talented in both literary and scientific realms.  Since the bastard was smarter than me, I predicted he would go on to do great things.

He fell in love with the tall, blonde and comely Kristin in his sophomore year.  The tumultuous relationship turned out to be his undoing.  He ended up flunking out of his classes (really hard to do at Harvard – trust me) and being asked to take a leave of absence.

He’s doing okay now, happily ensconced in a stimulating career and engaged to a woman he loves.  However, I can’t help but think how things would have turned out differently had his brilliant academic career not been derailed by romantic woes.  Could he have been a world-class physicist, a literature professor, a top-notch entrepreneur, a Nobel contender?  Who knows.

Another example is Mariana, currently a junior at Harvard (yes, she’s a girl, but the story still applies).  She had one of the most impressive high school resumes going into college, having aced 20 Advanced Placement (AP) exams.  For those of you a bit removed from the rubrics of high school achievement, just know that it’s kind of a big deal.

Once again, I predicted great things for her.  And once again, a romance gone awry felled a rising star.  After her breakup, Mariana flunked out of her classes and was asked to take a leave of absence.  She’s back in the saddle again, and at the age of 20, she has most of her life ahead of her.

So this goes out to all my boys out there at places like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Columbia, Duke, Swarthmore, Penn, Cornell, Berkeley, Brown, Dartmouth, Oxford, and Cambridge. To all you who work at the likes of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, D.E. Shaw, McKinsey — all the geeks, nerds, grad students, techies, hackers, engineers and gadgeteers. It goes out to all the 20-year old virgins, the still-unmarried 45-year olds, and the already-divorced 30-year olds who don’t know what hit them.

I’ve seen a lot of preventable train wrecks out there, so let’s make sure the right information gets to people at the right time.  If there were a dating bible for the smart man, these would be its commandments:

1. Don’t just wait to get lucky – make stuff happen.

As a teenager, I always wondered, when would it happen for me? When would some beautiful girl walk off the pages of Maxim, take me by the hand, look deep into my eyes, appreciate all my wonderful quirks and make out with me torridly?

Wake up, buddy. You create your own luck. If you like a girl, talk to her and ask her out. You don’t expect to ace an exam just by getting lucky, do you? So step up and put in some elbow grease.

As a man, on the dance floor of romance, your job is to lead.  So advancing the interaction isn’t just a good idea — it’s your duty.  Which brings us to…

2. Have a spine.

Wimpiness may be the root of all the dating woes of smart men. I can’t tell you in how many pernicious ways this manifests in the love lives of men.  The deadliest part is that if you don’t work on having that spine and end up with a woman anyway, it’s a setup for failure downstream.  She’ll either own you or get tired of the spinelessness and leave.

So quit being chicken already. Ask her out (again). Set up the whole date: where, when, how, and in what outfit. Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want or to get righteously indignant when warranted. Have strong boundaries. Worry less about offending people, more about having fun.  Oh, and learn how to say ‘no’.

3. Be comfortable in your own skin.

You’re a science geek? Fine. You love computers, baseball cards, classical music, anime? Fine. You’re a horny little devil? Fine. Own it! Quit fighting yourself.

People only love us for who you are, not who we pretend to be.  So that nonchalant facade you’re carrying around, the show you put on, all your efforts to fit in — chuck ‘em.  Because even if the ploy works and you end up with someone, eventually she’ll catch on to the real you.  And if the store is different from the storefront, she’ll walk, and you lose anyway.

I know it’s fashionable amidst the smart set to be dissatisfied with yourself and to keep striving for more, bigger, best.  Hey, I’m all for growth.  However, women will tell you that there’s nothing more attractive in a man than self-acceptance (which is not the same as complacency). So start where you are, and keep on growing. When you accept yourself, the world accepts you.

4. Accept the nonlinearity of women and romance.

As guys, a lot of what we did in physics and math class was to try to straighten crooked stuff out. Model it with an equation. Do a linear regression. Simplify variables. Round things off.

But you know what? They were all approximations anyway. And most things in life don’t follow linear equations – not your breath, not your heartbeat, not your Apple stock, and most certainly not women and romance. It’s nonlinear! It’s chaotic! It’s crazy!

So don’t come and tell me that women don’t make sense to you.  That’s a bit like saying water is wet.  Unlike thermodynamics, women are not intuitively obvious**. Sometimes she’ll come to you when you ignore her and leave when you declare your undying love – deal with it. Women have curves — that’s why we like ‘em. Love is paradoxical and counterintuitive. Realize that and work with it, not against it.

That’s the essence of Taoist thought: observing the world as it is, instead of wishing it to be as we want it.

5. Quit trying to buy your way into a woman’s favor.

This is how it works in the movies: the man does nice things for the lady – buys her dinner, presents – and the lady likes him in return.  It may also be how your mom told you to court a lady.

Newsflash: life is not a movie. And I’m guessing your mom never courted a lady successfully.  Of the two dozen reasons I can think for why this protocol sucks, here’s one: you’re trying to bribe her into liking you. And bribes don’t work! They’re given before the desired behavior has ever happened, so she has no incentive to like you. In fact, many times it has the opposite effect: “Why is this guy kissing my ass when he doesn’t even know me?”

In neurological terms, you want to give a positive reinforcer – like a present – after someone exhibits a desirable behavior. That increases the frequency of that behavior in the future. When you give the positive reinforcer before the desirable behavior, you reinforce nothing. So you’re increasing the likelihood of getting – nothing.

Here’s a second reason: the subtext of your action is that somehow your company isn’t enough, and you need to sweeten the deal with something else.  What if you were so cool, so fun to be around, such an uplifting presence that women would be willing to treat you and buy you stuff?  Wouldn’t that be an interesting world to inhabit?  Chew on that.

6. Quit thinking girls should like you because you’re smart.

A smart guy values smarts above all – and thinks the rest of the world does, too. So he’s bewildered when the jock/frat boy gets the girl and he does not. But those lugs probably think Hubble is some kind of gum and Perl scripts are oyster recipes! How could she possibly choose them over him?

Well, it just doesn’t work that way, buddy. A woman will like you based on how you you make her feel. So make her feel stuff – preferably good stuff. That’s the essence of it. Write that down, engrave it on a plaque, tattoo it on your forehead backwards so you’ll read it every time you brush your teeth in the morning. It’s like, axiomatic, dude.

How do you make women feel good stuff?  I wrote a whole chapter on that, but in brief: be compelling.  When you’re compelling, people have no choice but to respond to you.  My five favorite ways of being compelling:

1. Be a little mysterious. Leave some missing information to be discovered.
2. Be excellent. Do something exceptionally well.  The movie The Tao of Steve is all about this.
3. Give her your undivided attention. It’s a rare thing nowadays, so it’s powerful when you do it.
4. Be outlandish. A little crazy without lapsing into clownhood is good.
5. Be fun. Bring the awesome.  Be the party.

7. Go get rejected – a lot.

Smart people are used to success, not failure. So they’re reluctant to risk social rejection. They’re also frankly terrified of it, then rationalize that it’s just not all that important to be socially successful. A wise man once said, “People either play to win, or play to remain in their comfort zones while maintaining moral superiority.”

So if you’re not getting rejected, that means you’re not out exposing yourself to opportunity. You’re also not exposing yourself to danger, the crucible in which manhood gets forged. So be a man – get out there and get turned down.

Everything you want is outside of your comfort zone. Complacency never impelled anyone to greatness. So if you’re breaching your comfort zone early and often, you’re condemning yourself to a life of mediocrity and dissatisfaction.

Here’s the bright side of putting yourself out there: even if your success rate’s a measly 10%, after asking a mere 10 women out, you’ll have yourself a date. Fortune favors the bold.

8. Allow yourself to be pursued a little.

Evolution decrees that in the Homo sapiens sapiens mating dance, the male pursues and the female is pursued. Fine. But let up every once in a while. Just like water flows downhill and electrons go from high to low potential, there is also an attraction gradient. So be less interested in her than she is in you, or at least pretend you are, so she has a chance to move towards you.

9. Get good by practicing.

Like playing the violin or writing code, success in dating and romance is a skill: you get better at it the more you practice. It’s not some kind of god-given talent that you’re either born with or without. So seek out some good dating resources and put in the same amount of zealous effort that you’ve put into your achievements all your life, and you will be rewarded.

I’m restarting the new & improved version of my super-elite commando Metamorphosis training program for men starting Tuesday 16 Feb.  The free preview call is tomorrow, Tue 9 Feb at 5pm.  Sign up here to get on the call — if your love life has been in a slump as of late, it’s going to be a pretty good kick to the rear.

* Despite all the hoopla, just wanted to say that my Prius still rocks

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A fun, funny and wise book written by Gretchen Rubin, a regular HuffingtonPost.com contributor, it’s a distillation of the wisdom of the ages on happiness. It provides eminently practical ways to amplify your happiness pretty much immediately (e.g. gossip less; exercise more; launch a pet project).

In this video review, I share my impressions on The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun. Be sure to check out also my interview with Gretchen, her excellent blog, and the supremely useful resources of her Happiness Project Toolbox.

If you like the video, please show signs of life by rating it and leaving comments!