**Reposted from the first Lair, original date: 12/19/03
There was an excellent post on the PLAY list asking a question which is a very good one. Basically, the guy who posted said that he’s a good looking guy, but that he seems to hurt his pick-ups with being too cocky and not funny enough. He then goes on to ask the question: What is the proper way to use cocky/funny?
For those of you who might not know, cocky/funny is the primary theory behind David DeAngelo’s Double Your Dating material. His theory is that by projecting a cocky attitude while being funny, you can up your success with attracting women. I know Mystery likes to say he disagrees with this in a slight way, because he thinks it should be more cocky/playful than cocky/funny. However, I tend to disagree with both. I believe that ALL COCKY can be much more powerful.
Why is that? Well, to me, being cocky does so many things initially that will help you in your seduction. The first thing is that cockiness is a way of prizing yourself. You put other people in a position where they are inferior to you when you are being cocky, which naturally leads to them qualifying themselves. Cockiness also sets a powerful frame, which is always the most important thing in a sarge. When you control the frame, its your reality that the girl is sucked into, and she becomes beholdant to it. Thirdly, you are also putting yourself in a power position where you can judge others. I think that judging others is probably the most powerful thing you can do, because it makes them qualify themselves and puts you in power.
But if what this guy is saying is true, he’s already being all cocky and its not working for him. Supposedly, this guy looks like a male model, so he can’t understand what’s wrong. The thing about looks is — I have seen good looking guys who are bad with women because they are socially inept. So looks may be important, but usually not as much as most people think.
The trick with being cocky is to not do it in a malicious way. If you come off TOO STRONG with being cocky, you are going to drive people away from you. Cockiness is meant to be a way of challenging people and lure them into qualifying themselves to you. It comes down to ABJ — Always Be Judging. If you’re self-assured, smart, and judgmental, you can very sneakily get people to fall into your qualification trap (after all, attraction is nothing but an intense need for qualification). However, if you make it so that these people can NEVER get the validation they seek, they will dismiss you as an ass hole and move on. That’s where the “funny” or “playful” part comes in, but you don’t necessarily need to do either to qualify the other person. There are different ways to do that, but both work.
So looks have nothing to do with whether or not cocky/funny works. Rather, its the way in which you present the frame that determines whether it works. You have to be inviting and detached, not closed off and sarcastic. For instance, if you were to say to a girl:
“I don’t like you. You’re annoying. Go away.”
What would happen? Well, it depends on how you say it. If you say it seriously and forcefully, it will come across like you REALLY don’t like her, you REALLY think she’s annoying, and you REALLY want her to go away. By the same token, if you tell her the exact same line, but do so with a smirk and a subtle wink in a way where she can’t tell if you’re being serious or not, she’s not going to know if you mean what you say or are playing with her. So she’ll be more likely to stick around and try to find out, and then BOOM! You got her.
If you watch a natural or a regular ass-hole work, you’ll often see this. They don’t really care if they get the girl or not, so they can be cocky, but are congruent with the way they present themselves and usually succeed in sucking people into their frame.
So, long answer short: Cocky/Funny will always work, no matter how you look. You just need to do it right.
If the guy who posted that reads this, you gotta work on your presentation and delivery. That’s the bare bones of the matter and where I think your problem may lie.
If you happen to be a good looking guy, the best PUA to study in my opinion would be Sickboy. He actually IS a male model, but his game is very effective because he has no ego about himself. But he does have an understanding of attraction and qualification. You might want to try searching for him on mASF or hunt down his Interview Transcript in the PLAY archives. Its definitely worth a read.
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