Last night a couple of  lady friends and a dude friend and I went out on the town. Our first stop was at an over-packed college bar with an electricity running through the crowd. What was all the buzz? Well, the school’s basketball team just scored a buzzer beater with 0.3 seconds left in the game to win! The people in the bar were high-fiving and smiling and becoming best friends.

My group of friends were chatting and somehow during our conversation the girls became aware that there was a 1:1 ratio of guys to girls in the bar. This was ridiculous! In bars here, it’s normally like 5:1. I asked if they were afraid that they weren’t such a rare find anymore,  and the two girls haughtily denied such fear and brought up a contest saying they could get double the phone numbers than me and my friend. My friend and I laughed at their confidence and they lowered it to just getting more numbers than us, not twice the amount…

We set the bet as a round of beers and with that the game commenced!

I walked over to a table full of girls and told them about the little contest and then told them to all just give me their numbers. Some of them looked at me incredulously and then looked away. Others rolled their eyes but smiled, and some just laughed. One girl who had looked at me like I was some sort of diabolical criminal caught my fancy so I asked why she wouldn’t give me her number and why she didn’t want me to win. She said it’s because I’d be cheating the game. “Okay,” I said, “would any of your friends help me out then?” She said yes and pointed to another friend. I went over to this girl who was just a couple seats away and said, “hey, your friend said that you’d be the type of person who would cheat at a game, what gives?” while smiling at the first girl. Creating this playful riff in their friendship was funny to me. We played back and forth about how girls were so mean to each other for a few minutes and I ended up getting their numbers. To make the night better, my friend and I won the competition! Free beers for us at some later date

The thing about the little  interaction is that I had no idea what was going to happen when I told all the girls to give me their numbers. I just threw it out there to see what would happen. My analogy that I’ve come up with is that approaching girls is kind of like fishing. You just have to throw out some bait and see what catches. I realize now that during the couple years when I was constantly reading all the pickup stuff, I had a deep down desire to make sure there would be no chance of rejection when I talked to a girl. What I would compare that to now would be like hunting an animal in an enclosed room with unlimited ammo and a shotgun. But since I never felt completely sure that I would have 100% success, I would  just keep trying to find out more ways to ensure that the girl would like me – basically gathering more and more bullets. As a result I didn’t approach girls at all.

Actually taking action and trying stuff out has shifted my perception and now that I think of it, having the possibility of being rejected is what makes approaching girls fun. If you got every single girl you talked to, it wouldn’t be exciting, there wouldn’t be that edge of uncertainty. During the contest with my friends, I definitely didn’t get some girls’ numbers. The important thing was that for the ones that I did, I had fun. And for the girls who I didn’t get their number, I still had fun.

If you take anything away from this post, take this: knowledge alone doesn’t benefit you, it’s applying the knowledge that you have in your actions that are going to get you where you want to be.