Insights from the Mind of a Seducer

I'm listening to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets on audio right now. It's a good and insightful listen, and a good refresher, though not much different from what you'll already be familiar with if you're well-acquainted with the effects of happenstance on the world around you. Randomness and luck is an important topic when you talk about pick up and how to get lucky; it was the subject of one of the very first posts that ever went up on this blog, all the way back in December 2008: the brief "Randomness and Success," where I talked about another book I was reading at the time and the need for including quantity in your approach to meeting women.

Last night I had a discussion with a business partner of mine about the nature of randomness and its influence on success. "Surely, it isn't all randomness," she said. "Skill has a big part to do with it."

"That's true," I replied, "skill does have a lot to do with it. A lot depends on the time horizon you're looking at, however. If you're looking at how someone performs over the course of a single week, there's going to be a lot more random variation in there compared to how they perform over the course of a month, which will be a lot more random and less skill-based than how they perform over a year, and so on and so forth. The smaller the time horizon, the bigger the part randomness will play."

A friend of mine has been going through some growing pains recently as he's grappled and come to grips with the fact that he makes promises all the time... and often doesn't deliver on them. I've longed been used to having people make a promise that doesn't get delivered on around me, and I've long since learned to not put much faith in people who do so.

When I was first studying relationships in my teenage years, I noticed one theme occurring over and over, wherever women were hurt in a failed relationship: they were accusing men of breaking their promises. It was so incredibly common that I started to see this as a major pattern that a number of relationships hewed to:

1. Man makes woman a promise, either to allay her concerns or in the height of passion
2. Woman plans her life on the basis of that promise
3. Man later breaks the promise
4. Woman's life is turned upside down

Now... women aren't necessarily totally innocent victims here either, and I'll explain why below. But as a man, you need to understand the impact and effect you have on a woman when you make a promise to her - and how a promise binds both you and her.