Where there's a will, there's a waaaiitasec--

[crow]

A dispositional question is the kind of thing you only ask if you're predisposed to questioning justabouteverything. It's Galileo asking "is it *really* flat?" Game, itself, started with just such a question: can you-pick-him guy get good with women?

Here's another: is willpower important to getting good at game? Most guys take it as a given that to get good at this stuff, they have to go through a pain period. Do they?

Really and truly, I'd like to have a dialogue here, but just to speed the plow, I'm going to try to get the early back-and-forth squared away.

Side 1. Willpower matters because guys that don't muscle through internal resistance to, say, approaching a set, don't tend to thrive.

Side 2. Willpower is forcing yourself to do something. That works for making money or grades, but not for relationships. If you habituate a willpower brain regarding women, it'll fuck you up later.

Side 1. No it won't. You have to break in a new habit of doing something strange: approaching women is a good thing, and if you aren't used to it, you gotta have a willpower phase. You can drop it later, once you're acclimated to the new way of being a social and seductive man.

Side 2. But if you want to be that kind of man enough to use willpower, you're already thinking that way. The exercise of will isn't about being social or seductive, it's about something else: fear of rejection, lack of congruity, feeling insecure, etc. Willpower doesn't lead you to get over that shit, it masks it. It's better to deal with those things head on rather than ignoring them and "plowing."

Side 1. So . . . Years of therapy? Game is about shortcutting the need to obsess on what's wrong with you. If you approach enough women, you won't have to deal with those things. After "plowing" through enough sets, whatever issues you have will sort themselves out.

Side 2. No they won't. You'll just feel like girls are idiots for not realizing you don't really have your shit together. Instead of "faking it til you make it," take your resistance to, okay, approaching, as a signal that you're messing up. There's a stress-free, organic way to talk to girls. If it feels like something's wrong, it is. You're in the wrong venue for you, or you're talking yourself into talking to women who you aren't really that into, or you don't have a way to accommodate your goal's ends (your apt isn't dressed for female company, for instance).

Side 1. That sounds ridiculous.

--that's part of where this dialogue goes, anyway. Now I'll say what I think.

[crow]

Willpower=bad.

I'd encourage other posters to put their vote up top, too, to make it easy to keep score.

If the responses trend too much toward one side or the other, consider making the minority-view argument just as an exercise and to keep the thread balanced and useful.

For now, I'm not going to say why I think it's bad. If this thread gets, say, seven responses then I will. But I will say, importantly, that I've seen it work both ways. That is, I've seen guys who exercise willpower succeed, and I've seen them fail, just like I've seen some guys that avoid using willpower succeed and some others fail.

I'll also say that what I think isn't in the "dialogue" above. The dialogue above is just how I've seen the early part of this conversation go, so I wanted to get it out of the way.

Alright, so that's where I'm at, for now. What about the rest of everybody?

[Kool]

We all use the word "willpower" in different ways. Your use of willpower is different from mine. When I think of willpower I think of self-control of ones emotions and reactions. An example would be a guy who has difficulty making eye contact with a girl. The guy needs to control himself and focus on that part of the game. Going up to a girl, in my opinion, has to do with courage and fear of rejection.

[backpacker]

Willpower = GOOD

Webster's defines it as such "The strength of will to carry out one's decisions, wishes, or plans."

All of us on this forum have the WILL, wishes, and plans to improve ourselves, social lives, and skills with the ladies. Without this internal willpower we would cower away in fear and stay in our same mind state as we have always been, and thus lose out on the chance to grow.

I am a firm believer in neuroplasticity and neuro-reprogramming. I know that when my willpower forces me to get out of my shell, do things out of the norm and that are uncomfortable, then my brain will eventually grow the necessary neurons to make these interactions more normal and come with ease. Thus improving myself in the areas I mentioned above.

[crow]

I'll take a shot at rehearsing your view. Tell me where I'm mistaken.

Your definition if willpower is the ability to exercise executive control over your actions, in accord with your plans, despite in-the-moment anxieties. Further, you're saying willpower is necessary to learn new good habits (and, I assume, to break old bad ones).

My definition of willpower is friendly to yours. Where we differ is on the judgment of good and bad. You think that a person can self-assess, determine an undesirable behavior, and habituate a new way of doing things. I agree with that, too.

I have other disagreements, but I'm holding them back so as not to derail the thread. But tell me if I got your thinking right.

[backpacker]

In general, you have it right. I am genuinely curious to see how you view willpower as a negative trait (not in a confrontational way, just a genuine intellectual curiosity).

I believe in inertia both in physics and within ourselves, willpower helps us overcome this pesky constant.

[crow]

Willpower is a symptom of internal incongruity. You need it when you have to sacrifice in the present to achieve a future gain. That might work for exercise or moneymaking, but it's less certain for relationship initiation.

Why?

Two reasons. One, in the world of pick-up, doing something you don't want to do with the promise "it'll work" leads to bad outcomes. Generally speaking, because goal-oriented self-expression isn't really self-expression at all. I can say more about that if it matters. For instance, if you want to know why using a scripted opener leads to bad outcomes, I can speak to that.

More importantly, two, resorting to willpower is a symptom of something being wrong. Willpower is to the mind what pain is to the body. If something hurts, and you keep doing it, you'll cause permanent damage. With the body, you'll end up with a limp. With the mind, you'll end up with doubts. Those doubts are lacking a sense that she likes you as you, instead of as the persona you're presenting.

Now, if that were the end of the story, you could say, "But there's no other option. If I want a girl, I have to force myself to approach."

Not true.

There's always a fun way of going about something. Meeting women can and should be fun, and it's most often the case that making it fun requires minimal innovation. But that innovation will never occur if you believe "unless I execute X opener in the perfect way, no good will come of my talking to the girl."

Now, there are reasons to disagree with what I'm saying, and I'd love it if the argument went a bit longer, so . . . Shoot.