Teachable moment from Neil Strauss' The Game
byRazor Xon 31 Jul, 2010 22:54
I stumbled across some excerpts from Neil Strauss' The Game about the makeover he received from the people who were teaching him how to become a pickup artist: "You're going to have to shave your head," he said as he looked at me.
"No thanks. What if I have a strange-shaped skull, or weird marks on my head like my dad?"
"Look at you. You're wearing glasses because your vision sucks. You have a hat on to cover a huge bald spot. You're ghostly white. And you look like you haven't seen the inside of a gym since grade school. You're doing well because you're smart and you're a fast learner. But looks count, too. You're Style, so start being Style. Just snap: shave your head, get Lasik, join a gym."
Notice that he didn't say, "Get a hair transplant" or "Get a toupee."
Moments later at the barbershop:
... Mystery sat me in a chair, told Marko to instruct the barber to remove my tumbleweeds, and then supervised the procedure to make sure the barber shaved down to the skull.
"Balding is not a choice, but bald is a choice," he said.
....
When the barber finished, I looked in the mirror and saw a chemo patient staring back at me.
"It looks good," Mystery said. "Let's see if there's a tanning salon around here. We'll have you looking like a thug in no time."
....
My first thought when I was shaven-headed and tan was: What took me so long? I looked much better. I had transformed from a 5 to a 6.5 on the attractiveness scale ....
"Tumbleweeds" great, has all the right mental images.
#2
byTyleron 03 Aug, 2010 08:20
That's a very cool and inspiring chapter in that book that can show how quickly someone can make a transformation into a confident person in a matter of days.