Models by Mark Manson - Study Guide
Models by Mark Manson - Study Guide
PART I: REALITY
CHAPTER 1
Non-Neediness
● A man’s attractiveness is inversely proportional to how needy he is. The
less needy he is, the more attractive he will be to women on average.
● Neediness is when a man places a higher priority on other’s perceptions of
him than his own perception of himself.
● Neediness is a feeling, intuited by women. It is instinctual.
● Narcissistic men, who only care about themselves, will end up in
relationships sometimes, but only with narcissistic and shallow women.
● Developing non-neediness requires one to move their yardstick for success
from external goals (more dates, more sex) to internal goals (better
relationships, more emotional fulfillment, overall happiness).
The Seduction Process
● Status is based on behavior and not simply assets.
● Seduction is the process by which a man induces a woman to become as
invested in him as he is in her.
o There are two ways for seduction to occur, either a man creates the
perception that he is far less invested in a woman than he actually
is (neediness disguised as non-neediness), or a man is actually less
invested in a woman (genuine non-neediness).
o The first method is “performance”. The second method is a passive
process that permeates every aspect of his behavior in the long
term.
● Learning techniques and pick-up lines without doing genuine,
identity-level work in order to permanently decrease your neediness ends
up only being a band-aid solution.
● Take a moment to consider… that before meeting a woman, instead of
worrying whether or not she will like you, you could wonder if you will
like her. That instead of feeling the need to impress her, you could wonder
if she impresses you. That instead of sitting there silently wondering what
to say next to make her like you, you could sit there silently wondering
what she will say to make you like her. That instead of waiting around for
her to call, you could find something else to do while she waits for your
call. That instead of worrying if you’re tall enough or good-looking
enough or skinny enough, you could decide whether they’re too
superficial to recognize your great qualities. That instead of trying to come
up with the perfect date, you could decide that a woman who really likes
you for you doesn’t need a perfect date. That instead of looking for a
conversation she’ll enjoy, you could talk about something you enjoy and
see if she takes interest. That instead of looking for her approval, you
could decide whether or not to give yours. That instead of getting upset
about why she doesn’t want to be with you, you could decide that it means
you probably wouldn’t want to be with her.
● Change yourself to become what you want to be, not what you think
women want you to be.
Narcissism and Overcompensation
● Narcissism in a relationship is built on the idea of always being dominant
and in control. It is a nebulous mixture of selfishness, assertiveness, and
domination that is achieved not by investing more in oneself, but by
minimizing the importance of others.
● Narcissism is focusing on your own wants and desires to the point of
imposing them onto others.
CHAPTER 2
Power in Vulnerability
CHAPTER 3
The Gift of Truth
● Rejection exists for a reason – it’s a means to keep people apart who are
not good for each other.
The Three Categories of Women
● All the women you’re attracted to can be divided into three categories:
Receptive, neutral, and unreceptive.
● Women who are unreceptive are unavailable or uninterested in having a
sexual/romantic relationship with you. Spotting this is as simple as not
reciprocating your signs of interest or showing signs of disinterest. Men
waste a lot of time convincing themselves that unreceptive women may
actually like them. If you really aren’t sure, just ask her out.
● Women who are neutral do not stay in this category. They eventually do
polarize to receptive or unreceptive. If you never advance, they will
polarize towards unreceptive (friend zone).
● With neutral women, the jury is still out. The goal is to polarize them with
your words and behaviors. This means flirting or teasing. It may mean
asking her on a date. It may be as simple as smiling from across the room.
The goal is to take an action that forces her to decide how she feels about
you.
● Women who are receptive are women who are sexually/romantically
attracted to you. You can recognize this with the following two ways:
o 1) They initiate with you.
o 2) They reciprocate your actions enthusiastically.
● There is a subtle difference between a woman who reciprocates your
advances and a woman who is neutral towards your advances. A woman
who is neutral will not respond at all. A woman who is reciprocating will
respond positively. Most interested women will reciprocate on small
signals to show that they’re interested in you.
Strategies for Each Category
● The goal with unreceptive women is to identify them and move on as
quickly as possible. They’re time sinks.
● Strongly believe in the idea of “fuck yes” or “fuck no”.
● You must express sexual interest, or you will end up in the friend zone.
● The goal with neutral is get them to stop being neutral as soon as possible.
You need to express your vulnerability and identity freely. If you
demonstrate that you’re not only non-needy, but also frictionless for her,
then she will become receptive.
● Many men think they need to behave in a way that makes every single
woman like them – as if women were all the same. This is
counterproductive because by altering your behavior to fit whatever she
wants, it means you are not being vulnerable and, therefore, you are being
needy and unattractive.
● Receptive women are the best because they are the most rewarding
interactions with the smallest amount of effort. The goal is simple – to
escalate.
● Women who are receptive to begin with will often stay receptive almost
indefinitely.
● The percentage of women who are receptive will increase proportionally
to the quality of your lifestyle, your social status, and your looks. The
percentage of people you move from neutral to receptive will depend on
how good your “game” is, or how well you’re able to communicate and
express yourself with women. And your ability to sort through each type
of woman and meet as many as possible will be determined by how
fearless and bold you are when it comes to meeting women.
● Polarizing women into rejecting the real us, the vulnerable and unabashed
us – does us a favor by sorting out which women are going to make us
happy.
● You cannot be an attractive and life-changing presence to some women
without being a joke or an embarrassment to others.
Polarizing to Attract
● The simple act of polarization demonstrates non-neediness and will inspire
neutral women to become receptive than other strategies or tactics.
● Surprisingly, a lot of women respond positively to polarization.
CHAPTER 5
Rejection and Success
● Your ability to deal with failure will determine how much you get to deal
with success.
● Being rejected by a woman is polarization, and polarizing women is more
important than being pleasant to them.
It’s Usually Not About You
● There is a lot to be said about “the right person at the wrong time.”
● Approach women to see if they fit your values, and not the other way
around.
● Instead of thinking “I wonder if she’ll like me?”, think “I wonder what
she’s like?”. Instead of thinking “I hope she doesn’t reject me”, think “I
hope I’ll find out if she’s right for me.”
● You either want a “Fuck yes!”, or a no. It’s better to have a no than a
“Meh, ok”.
Redefining Success
● Define success in a qualitative way: maximizing happiness with
whichever woman/women you prefer to be with.
● Find relationships that will maximize your happiness.
● There are three ways in which we are honest.
1. Living based on our values (lifestyle)
2. Becoming comfortable with our intentions (boldness)
3. Expressing our sexuality freely (communication)
● Lifestyle, Courage, and Communication are the three fundamentals.
CHAPTER 6
The Three Fundamentals
● The three fundamentals all make a man less needy. Improving each one
will improve results, sometimes drastically. They can be worked on
independently, but improving one often benefits the other two indirectly.
● The three fundamentals once again are
1. Creating an attractive and enriching lifestyle.
2. Overcoming your fears and anxiety around socializing, intimacy,
and sexuality.
3. Mastering the expression of your emotions and communicating
fluidly.
● The three fundamentals can be referred to as Honest Living, Honest
Action, and Honest Communication.
● Honest Living correlates directly with the quality of women that you will
attract.
● Honest Action is overcoming your fear and anxiety around women. If you
see a beautiful woman and want to meet her, to not take action to meet her
is a form of being dishonest with yourself. Honest Action correlates
directly to the quantity of women you meet and attract.
● Honest Communication is learning to express yourself freely and
effectively. It is communicating your emotions and intentions freely. This
will determine the efficiency with which you are able to attract women
who are compatible to you.
Natural Advantages/Disadvantages
● People tend to have natural strengths/weaknesses in the three
fundamentals.
● Identifying the fundamental(s) you need to work on most will the quickest
approach to improving your love life.
Two Types of Men
● Almost all of men who struggle with relationships fall into one of two
categories: socially anxious, or socially disconnected.
● Socially anxious men are too aware of what other people are
thinking/feeling and therefore, have a lot of social anxiety.
● Socially disconnected men are oblivious to what others think/feel.
CHAPTER 8
Lifestyle and Presentation
● Not everybody is born good-looking. But any man, with some time and
effort, can become attractive. And in the end, what women want is a man
who is attractive.
● Your outward appearance reflects your self-investment (or lack thereof).
And your level of self-investment will make you less needy towards
others, therefore making your behavior more attractive. If you don’t put a
lot of time and effort into how you look and how you present yourself to
the world, women look at that and make unconscious assumptions about
your status as a man.
● The first and obvious step involves grooming and general maintenance.
Fashion and Fitness
● Being in decent shape and dressing well will make every phase of the
process easier and smoother, from meeting women, to attracting them, to
getting physical with them, to dating them, to staying in a relationship
with them.
● There are a few rules to dressing well:
1. Wear clothes that fit.
2. Wear clothes that match.
3. Dress to your personality.
● Exercise is non-negotiable. It makes you look good, boosts your energy,
raises testosterone, relieves symptoms of depression and anxiety, and
generally makes you feel better about yourself.
● Improve your diet, cut out sodas, fast food, desserts, and candy.
● Nutrition goes beyond making you look sexy. It makes you feel better,
gives you higher energy, makes your sex better, increases your moods, and
can even save you a lot of money.
Body Language
● Remember: shoulders back, chin up, eyes straight, feet straight, shoulders
swagger, arms swing. Always look straight ahead. Don’t ever look down
at the ground unless you think you’re about to trip. Look people in the eye
as they walk by — particularly attractive girls.
● Always make other people break eye contact with you before you break it
with them.
Vocal Tonality
● It’s not just having a sexy voice that’s important; it’s having an expressive
and a loud voice.
● If people are constantly asking you to repeat yourself, and it’s not loud in
the room, you may speak too quickly.
● Not only do better body language and vocal projection engage other
people more effectively, but good body language has also been shown to
affect your moods positively.
Developing Character
● An attractive man with depth and character is a man who has opinions and
openly expresses those opinions.
● When it comes to deciding what one likes and doesn’t like, most men have
very lukewarm reactions one way or the other.
● Here are some concepts to keep in mind as you go through your life
experiencing art and media:
1. Assume everything has a form of value; it’s your job to find it.
2. When expanding your horizons; start with what’s generally
considered the best.
● Being a well-rounded individual with opinions will expand your
demographics by quite a bit.
● “You read literature because you can never meet enough people.”
Bringing It All Together
● Poor lifestyle choices reflect a lack of investment in yourself, which in
turn causes you to be less confident around others for validation.
● Get your life taken care of. Get healthy. Find a happy group of friends.
Find a few hobbies that you love. Develop opinions. Start caring about
what you spend your time doing. This increases your self-investment and
will make you less needy around others. This, in turn, will give you the
courage to take the correct action and the wherewithal to communicate
effectively. This is honest living.
● We all have our own weak spots, and those weaknesses each have their
own form of resistance to the change we want.
● What stories do you tell yourself? Because until you’re aware of your
stories, you’re not going to be able to change your behavior.
● The only important "skill" in dating is learning how to stop buying into
your own bullshit, to stop believing your own stories. You’ll have to flex
your mental and emotional muscles, and build up your body of
self-awareness, but here’s the good news: those are the muscles chicks
actually dig.
Defense Mechanisms
● Many of us have fear and shame bundled up in our sexuality. These
anxieties are manifestations of neediness and an unwillingness to be
vulnerable.
● The sad fact about anxiety is that once you have it, it’s there and figuring
out why it’s there doesn’t help you much. You can either avoid it the rest
of your life, or do something about it.
● When we are confronted with our fears or anxieties, we have a pattern or
strategy that we usually use to deal with them. Here are some of the
common patterns:
o Blame Game: When confronted with something he fears, a man
blames something/someone else for his fear. This often comes with
anger and frustration. The anger can pile up and lead to some bitter
and irrational beliefs about women.
o Apathy/Avoidance: A man convinces himself that he doesn’t care,
and that it doesn’t matter if the girls he likes don’t find him
attractive.
o Intellectualizing: Instead of doing something, you look up an
answer that you can study. There comes a certain point where
learning more about a subject is no longer beneficial and on the
contrary, is just going to get you more mixed up and confused,
since you have no experience to actually apply your knowledge to.
● These patterns aim to avoid the fear and they usually do it by convincing
themselves of something that’s not necessarily true.
You Are Not a Victim
● “If it’s a question of me being screwed up or masses of people being
screwed up in the same way, then it’s far more likely that it’s just me being
screwed up.”
● Men make negative assumptions and stereotypes about millions of women
for no other reason than to shirk responsibility for their own shortcomings.
This is a victim mentality.
● I believe strongly in taking responsibility for everything that happens to
you in your life. Our minds are always looking for ways to avoid pain and
failure and rejection, and so they constantly churn out rationalizations to
keep us impeccable; it’s them who fucked up, not us. We're fine. We did
everything right. It's that fucked up world's fault we're not happy. Blame is
yet another form of neediness. As long as it’s their fault you don’t have to
make yourself vulnerable.
● Challenge yourself to find the good and beautiful thing inside of everyone.
It’s there. It’s your job to find it. Not their job to show you.
Sexual Motivation
● Porn harms your motivation to pursue women in real life. End all
pornography immediately. Starting today. Delete everything from your
computer.
● Limit masturbation to once a week. Schedule it. When you masturbate,
you’re only allowed to fantasize about women you’ve met and have not
had sex with.
● When you masturbate, use lotion or lube. Do it slower than usual. Drag it
out longer than 10 minutes if you can.
CHAPTER 10
How to Overcome Anxiety
● What is your intention? Are you trying to impress her (needy) and
therefore bragging? Or are you sharing yourself (vulnerability) and
therefore polarizing her?
● Women are more in-tune to intentions than men.
● A man who is extremely needy will have intentions dominated by seeking
validation and approval and will therefore be unattractive regardless of
just about anything he says. A man who is non-needy will have intentions
dominated by vulnerability and will therefore be attractive regardless of
what he says.
● Remember, women don’t see your features, they see how you present
yourself. They don’t hear your words, they hear your intentions.
Creepiness
● There’s no such thing as a man who is adored by women who isn’t also
creepy some of the time.
● Creepiness is behaving in a way that makes a woman feel insecure
sexually.
● The more comfortable you are with women finding you creepy, and the
more uninhibited and vulnerable your actions and words are around
women, and the more aware and respectful you are of their interests and
desires, the less likely they will be to find you creepy.
Sexual Tension
● Flirting is expressing your sexuality to a woman in a way that makes her
feel secure expressing her sexuality back towards you.
● Two methods of flirting: teasing and boldness.
● If a man begins to flirt with a woman by teasing her, then suddenly he
adds a new dimension by creating uncertainty: Does he like me or not?
Why is he flirting with me? But if a man goes the bold and vulnerable
route, and is willing to risk rejection, he is rewarded by creating massive
amounts of sexual tension, because in a single stroke you have transported
the context away from, “What do we talk about next?” to “What will he
say or do with me next?” This is extremely powerful.
Developing an Emotional Connection
● Your ability to connect with a woman emotionally is proportional to how
self-aware you are of your own emotional processes and motivations.
● The blueprint of seduction: a strong, high status, attractive exterior
(lifestyle and looks), fearless, and able to open up and share your
vulnerable side with her.
● When you connect with women emotionally, they really open up to you in
ways that you can’t imagine, your interactions and relationships with them
become these rich and unique experiences that can never be replicated, the
sex is far better, and all mind games, flakes and ambivalence goes out the
window.
● Feeling slutty is about sleeping with a man who doesn't care about her or
who hasn’t connected with her. If she doesn't trust you or isn't 100%
convinced that you really like her and care about her, then she's not going
to do it. And if she does, then she’ll regret it and feel dirty.
● Basic pattern for making stronger emotional connections.
o Becoming aware of your own emotions, motivations, and life story.
o Taking the lead by sharing those emotions, motivations, and life
story first.
o Sharing first creates trust and encourages her to open up and share
herself in return.
o Ideally, the more this goes on, the more personal the stories
become and the deeper the emotions are by which you connect.
● The most important rule of emotional connection is to relate to feelings,
not facts. Seduction is about feelings, not facts.
Building and Breaking Habits
● Your communication skills are a series of overlapping habits.
● Habits are hard to break. They take time. And you have to do them
repeatedly to break/build them.
CHAPTER 12
How to Improve Your Flirting
CHAPTER 13
The Dating Process
● The dating process usually follows the order of: trading of contact details,
talking through text or phone conversations, going on dates, sex, and
figuring out what kind of relationship (if any) will result.
Phone Numbers
● The way to prevent flakes is to meet and attract women who are so
interested in you that they would never consider flaking.
● Men spend way too much time obsessing over unimportant details like
how many times to text each day, how soon to call her, when to ask her
out, etc.
● Setting rigid rules such as “wait three days to ask her out” or “never text
her twice in a row,” greatly limits you and will hinder the unique
connection you spent your time developing with the woman.
● Only ask a woman for her phone number if she seems genuinely attracted
and interested in you. Only ask for her number if you can see yourself
wanting to hang out with her again or having time to hang out with her
again.
● Just ask her for her number. If you’re attracted to her, you shouldn’t be
afraid to hide it. If she’s attracted to you, she’ll be more than excited to
give it to you.
● Flakes happen to everybody. Get used to it. There are simply too many
things going on in most attractive women’s lives to figure out why each
one flakes.
The Perfect Date
● Save dates for the nighttime. It builds a greater sense of expectation.
There’s more flexibility to spend more time together. It’s more of a
commitment. And neither of you are in a rush to be anywhere in an hour.
It also leaves the option open for you or her sleeping over.
● Avoid movie dates and dinner dates. Good date locations are locations that
are active, participatory, and allow for touching and flirting. Alcohol can
be helpful as well if that’s your style.
● The underlying concept to have on a date is that you should try to
constantly be leading. Every decision should be yours and she should be
expected to follow it.
● Your conversations should be getting deeper and more personal. There
should be less teasing and playful banter and more conversations about
your lives and what’s important to you. Learn about her past, her passions,
her dreams, what her favorite things are.
CHAPTER 14
Physicality and Sex
CONCLUSION
What If It Was a Gift?
● Whatever happens to you, no matter how bad, no matter how bleak you
feel, ask yourself, “What if it was a gift?” and then try to rationalize a way
it could be so.