Commonly drawn uncommon attention
My go-to technique for cold approaches.
Cold approaching people you find interesting – for romantic purposes or not – is hard. I’ve done it during the day and during the night, and I’ve noticed this goes smoothest under circumstances which people surprisingly don’t usually talk about.
Day game: CUDA
There is one magical (sufficient but not necessary) ingredient that never fails to make smooth, instant connections with people of both sexes: I call it “common uncommon drawn attention (CUDA)”.
There is CUDA when you and the other person have the same (Common) acute (Uncommon) event happen to you that takes priority over whatever else you were doing, putting both of you in a clear state of mind (Drawn Attention) and inviting teamwork among those who noticed.
Examples
From my own life, I can recount plenty of times CUDA led to me making an instant connection with someone:
- You’re both doing laps in your local swimming pool’s crawlstroke fast lane, when suddenly you are both held up by a clueless foreigner who has made their way into that lane, swimming with a slow and clumsy breaststroke, and most acutely, head completely submerged so that there is no way to signal to them.
- You’re being driven home by charter bus from a prom night, and you and the person opposite you are the only sober ones there, while the other travellers are drunkenly yelling and pushing. Or, perhaps there is only standing room left and the only handle a shorter girl has within reach is your arm.
- You’re on the dance floor and somebody bends down with a flashlight, looking for a bracelet they’ve lost.
- You’re in line waiting for ice cream with one other person behind you, and the family in front of you has an obnoxiously indecisive in-law taking ages to choose a flavour and deciding who will pay, all while narrating the whole thing like a cartoon character.
- At the shoe store, you’re looking for multiple specifications (is this shoe in this colour, does that shoe come in this size, …), but all the requests keep coming back negative and hence you’re about to leave.
- At a café, you and a girl are sitting across from each other reading a book, and a guy walking past your table trips over his own feet and barely sticks the landing. You both look up, make eye contact (“WTF just happened?”) and smile (“Aren’t you glad neither of us is that guy!”).
- On the sidewalk, a schizophrenic woman starts talking nonsense to you and another bystander, and then swims away.
CUDA also features in dating coach content:
- Two examples given by Jack Denmo: you’re both looking for a place to sit but realise that all the park benches are wet; or you’re at a thrift store looking at mugs when you spot a mug with a mug printed on it, in the peripheral vision of a girl next to you.
- Tristan Yoder once encountered the scene of a moped accident, and instantly converted it into a pickup of the girls beside him.
- We even have comedic understanding about CUDA: I once saw a video where a guy would sneak up behind women walking on a campus with summer foliage, carrying a freshly cut lightweight tree branch with many small leaves on it. He would then throw this impressive-looking branch over them while yelling a well-timed “Watch out!” with the whole punchline of the video being “it looks like their attention was suddenly brought together by an external event (CUDA) whilst the audience knows that this is a false impression since he was in on it”.
And I can come up with any amount of artificial examples of CUDA:
- A weirdly coloured cloud appears in the sky and you notice someone looking up at it or taking a picture of it, so you go stand beside them.
- You are walking next to someone in the city and the people in front of you are unfathomably slow.
- You are at the gym and someone is loudly grunting like they are having an orgasm.
- You see a person in a funny outfit, anywhere.
All it takes is a little bit of perspicacity.
Why does this work so well?
The reason it is hard to cold-approach people is fundamentally this: when you just walk up to someone and start talking to them, what you are doing is putting yourself in control of their time and attention. People do not like this, and you don’t like doing it because you know they don’t like this. You were not invited by them. You have assigned yourself the power to take as much of their time as you want or need to run through whatever script you have prepared, and you have imposed yourself as the centre of their attention, away from what they were previously paying attention to. This means you are overstaying your welcome from the first word you speak to them onward.
When people are executing a routine task, they cruise at a more sedated, unaware level (thank God). Attention is the expensive mechanism overtop that unawareness which is only activated when things become unpredictable. And, because attention is so expensive, demanding it from someone is necessarily entitled: this is why it feels uncomfortable to approach someone while they are walking to a destination, working out at the gym, driving, swimming, dancing, jogging, shopping, working a shift, … as it requires an interruption of a steady state and a heightening of their perception.
The essential ingredient in CUDA is that the other person is caught in a heightened state of consciousness in your presence, but not due to you. When an external event does this for you, the resulting CUDA creates massive opportunity to connect where it previously felt highly inappropriate.
There are several aspects to CUDA that make it work so well:
- You have a unique topic of conversation.
- You don’t need to carry the conversation because continually assessing the situation is enough to let the conversation be carried for you.
- You can show off your intelligence, ability to take charge, helpfulness, cooperation skills, and ability to put things into perspective.
- You don’t have to feel guilty about disturbing the other person’s day, which is the most common reason polite men don’t approach.
- You don’t invite yourself into the other person’s consciousness. The situation invites you there, meaning there is a non-zero span of time where you are not overstaying your welcome. I will come back to this.
What if there is no CUDA?
If there is no CUDA, it is either because your target’s attention is not drawn by something that draws yours, or because there is nothing to draw anyone’s attention. Although these are more difficult situations to start a conversation with someone, you can sort of generate CUDA yourself in these cases, to avoid falling into the usual suboptimal circumstances of cold approach.
Drawing attention
By being perspicacious, you can kickstart a conversation by commenting on something that you have observed. In the easiest cases, this is something that is external to both of you, and essentially you are just raising their state of consciousness so that there may be CUDA. It doesn’t always work, because someone may be aloof enough to just react with “Oh, yeah.” rather than starting to think about that thing.
The harder cases are when you comment on something that involves them directly, e.g. commenting on something they are holding or wearing. These cases are harder because you are trying to turn something that is ordinary to that person into something extraordinary: you could fail because they still just don’t think it’s that interesting, or you could fail because they think you are trying to turn them into a kind of zoo exhibit. So, you have to be socially calibrated going about this, or you may come off as a creep or at the very least a busybody, getting you responses like “I didn’t ask your opinion” or “What makes you think you can go up to someone to tell them about themselves?” and so on.
If you want to see how to do it properly, Devin Giamou (justapproach) and Malcolm Mathews (povexpert) are the absolute kings of this type of approach, bar none. They are better at generating authentic, creative interactions in everyday situations than anyone I have seen.
Creating the situation that draws attention
Rather than cold-approaching somebody, you could create a situation which is quirky enough that people will participate “for the plot”.
For example, you could start carrying a deck of UNO cards and turn any situation into an impromptu game of UNO. In that case, you are now the uncommon event that draws their attention. Perhaps you’ve also seen the guy who asks people to “build LEGOs” on college campuses, which again is sufficiently out-of-pocket that people agree to it.
It may be artificial, but if you live in a place where people are tempted to say “Why not?” rather than “…Why?” you may have success with this.
Relax, this won’t be the last time
Although of course you should not have just one tool in your belt for cold approaching, in my experience, nothing so far has beaten CUDA. For connecting with women I find attractive, my strategy is to either go in when there is CUDA, and if not, I just let them walk without ever finding out who they are. By accepting that the moment just didn’t allow it and that that’s okay, you learn to tamp down your scarcity mindset.
Night game
I will now speak a bit on my experience approaching specifically women in “night life” (or the bar/partying scene).
Preface
I should mention that I really do not like the EDM-underscored, alcohol-fuelled night life. I find night life to be a waste of time. It is a completely artificial and body-centric form of entertainment, starving the mind. You go to a bar to intoxicate your body, after which you go to a dancing to feel the bass of the same tired set of songs vibrate your body, where you then flail your body in a way that is locally seen as aesthetic but really is not, perhaps finding another body to exchange a poorly executed kiss with, and in the most degenerate case you end your night by finding a place (be it a dorm or a seedy toilet) where you use that other body as a set of genitalia (inconveniently attached to a living, breathing, feeling human) to pleasure your own body. Nowhere in this entire process was a mature, interesting thought conveyed.
And how could there be in such an environment? For one, it is absolutely impossible to have any sensible conversation (for example, one with words) over loud music in the dark. Solo dancing can (rarely) be fun, but it gets quite repetitive after entering the \(N\)th bar to dance to the \(M\)th repeat of one of the twenty 2010 electro-pop songs that somehow still dominate playlists. Besides, it’s not even the edifying kind of dance – the kind where you’re making art with someone else – but at best the same hip and arm movements over and over, desperately attempting to make an undanceable tune danceable, without bumping into the zombies sharing your fate.
The other reason I am consistently bored out of my mind in night life is that the people outside the bars and dancings have drunk themselves into a state of incoherence. Unfortunately, alcohol’s biggest benefit of reducing self-awareness is also its biggest drawback, making you much less interesting to talk to and instead much more obnoxious and less sophisticated. I don’t mean the latter in an elitist way; what I mean is that all the fun of flirtatious conversation is in the small details, the quick comebacks, timing, inflection, … and all that fun is the first thing to go when you lose control over your mind.
The silver lining to being sober in a zombie wasteland is that if you can find another solo person who is sober, the mere observation of the absurdity of the people around you is enough CUDA to connect. Perhaps that stranger can accompany you for 30 seconds while you’re crossing the street, but it’ll be a down-to-earth and sympathetic interaction.
Even in the best case, it’s still the worst case
Now let’s assume that your target is not in a bar or club and is not intoxicated, which clears the above problems. The biggest problem I find with night game is that there is overall extremely little CUDA. Think about it: the entire reason people are there on location is literally them being there on location. Nobody is really there with the stated goal to meet people, because otherwise we would call night life a conference. Indeed, at a conference, you can talk to almost anyone at the venue without being brutally rejected and whisked away for daring to approach them. Nobody thinks it’s an insult to open a conversation at a conference. The contrast with night life is very stark.
So, given that the social contract is not that we’re there just to be social and entertain small conversations, you need a reason to approach someone, like CUDA. In the likely case that they’re just standing there, the fundamental issue with a cold approach is that you have overstayed your welcome immediately upon opening the conversation. Both of you know that the only reason this conversation exists is that you, the approacher, want to exchange contact details with the approachee. But of course, because she won’t give out her contact details to any unvetted stranger, you end up in a weird dance where you invite yourself into somebody’s evening and where, since you can’t yet ask for contact details even though you both know that this is the implied question, you subsequently take up an indeterminate amount of her time to qualify yourself as an interesting person, pretending that you aren’t looking for contact details. It is a direct test of her patience since she already knows where you’re going.
Imagine an acquaintance (which is even still less jarring than a stranger) ringing your doorbell unannounced – you might be having dinner, watching a movie, in a Zoom meeting – and after you open the door, they walk in and start talking to you, with no cue as to when they will stop and leave again. The moment you opened the door is the moment they overstayed their welcome. Every second after that, you’re wondering when they will go away and how it is that your time is currently being managed by an uninvited acquaintance. You know they’ll leave eventually, but when?
It would be much more pleasant if social interaction was encouraged in night life, since then there would be no need for CUDA and no weird dance where we pretend that we don’t already know the ending of the interaction. Too bad. Night life is not the place for that. There is something deeply antisocial about going to a place where there will be people, only to not want to talk to people.
Quality issues
As these things go, most people you find in night life are people with a tendency to be found there. This is bad for two reasons.
Firstly, it is bad because people whose highest form of entertainment is entirely physical and substance-reliant, generally have impulsive and shallow personalities. These are not people you want to introduce into your life. And even worse, the longer you bathe in this pool of low-quality people, the more you will drop your threshold for what you consider a worthwhile person or interaction. You will absorb a scarcity mindset and become a beggar for scraps and crumbs, exactly like being a man on a dating app. You start out with a reasonable standard, and gradually, your threshold for wanting to connect with a woman is basically just “Can she write one coherent sentence?” or “Does she have a hobby that isn’t eating sushi?” and thus you have constructed a clown world for yourself.
Secondly, as far as women go, the fact of having existed for a long time in night life will have changed them for the worse, regardless of what personality they started out with. It’s only natural: these are the women who have put themselves in a position to be approached many times over, and are hence also the women that have been approached most, compared to women who are found in public merely to go about their day. For this reason, the women of the night gradually lower their threshold for being annoyed by any particular approach, and simultaneously have an ego inflated1 enough to channel this annoyance into all kinds of nasty, contemptuous and inhumane behaviours.
From personal experience, I can absolutely confirm that most women I’ve interacted with during the day were pleasant individuals, whilst women during the night have generally been arrogant, entitled, jaded, angry, and soul-deadeningly boring, unable to have even a short interesting and/or humorous exchange.
If you really must
Now, even with night game being absolute pointless, that doesn’t mean it’s a skill without levelling, and that skill might carry over into day game.
When you start learning a new skill and carefully document your mistakes and lacks after each session, you can improve faster than if you had only strategised and informed yourself about the skill. It makes sense that you are often better at bootstrapping yourself than reading about a skill can, because your own feedback is tailored towards exactly one person (you) whilst external info casts a wide net.
Here are some of the tweaks I’ve learnt to up my night game (specifically when approaching women, not just anyone):
- Ask for a name. This should be one of the first things you do, per Dale Carnegie.
- Statements are clearer filters than questions. Whether she likes you or not, in her mind a question you ask may be interpreted as not needing an elaborate answer. A statement, on the other hand, is answered with either a cold statement (“…ok then”) or a question back that shows interest. Of course, make it polarising and thought-provoking: “the weather is nice today” is not inviting to further questions.
- For groups, address the group first. You can’t cherry-pick from outside a closed circle. So, when opening a set, address the entire group first, not an individual you want to talk to, unless the group has already dispersed/flattened.
- Convince less, eject more. Convincing is generally a bad mindset to have. Firstly, because you should be approaching for self-amusement, not for convincing. The need to convince means you have outcome dependence. Secondly, it’s pointless to try, because it’s basically impossible to convince someone to change a lack of interest for you – which, if it ever forms, will be formed quickly after meeting you. Thirdly, you shouldn’t even want to connect with the people who need convincing: would you really want someone to give you a chance who has only just barely been nudged over the threshold of being interested? They should be far over that threshold. So really, the only reason you feel the need to convince someone that actually you are a good person to connect with is ego. Due to all of this: once you pick up on a “no thanks” vibe, you should be way quicker to just leave than you probably do.
- Assume what you don’t care about. You don’t want to talk about what she does for work. She doesn’t want to talk about what she does for work. The whole point you are both not at work is to not think about work. So, assume all the information you don’t care about. Does she look doctor-y? Then she’s a doctor. Does she talk back? Lawyer vibe.
- Question questions. If a man asks you “How old are you?” you reply with your age. If a woman asks you, tell her she’s nosey, tell her she seems to be considering you to fill the open position of her husband and is trying to disqualify you based on the age gap, tell her she’s making her kink for older men too obvious by needing to know your age. Same goes for “Where do you live?”: assume she has the ulterior motive of stalking you. Now she has to qualify herself as not being dangerous.
- Pulling is better than pushing. You can gauge interest by moving backwards. You know this works because, if a woman you’re approaching pulls back, you intuitively step inward. Don’t follow that intuition. Best case, you now know whether she’s into it. Worst case, you’ve given her breathing space, and you can self-(r)eject easier and/or pivot to another group member. And if she just doesn’t want to budge, you can throw in a neg like “You seem afraid!”.
- Do not neg clothing choice. I was once at a bar where a girl was wearing a fancy sparkly cocktail dress, with ragged AllStars shoes underneath. I told her in my approach that the dress was lovely, but that the shoes were a mismatch. She did not like that (in hindsight, probably a great test of her personality). For a more pleasant interaction, don’t lie, but turn your authentic opinion into either a positive comment (“I like how you thought ahead and prepared for a long night of dancing, that’s much smarter than those who came in heels”) or into a curiosity (“I have a question: do you miss wearing heels with this dress?”). Because you did notice the choice of shoes and you do have an opinion about it; it just matters how you present it.
- Fake humble is better than fake arrogant. I have an engineering master’s in computer science, which is broadly understood in my country to be the most revered degree after medicine. I generally don’t brag about it – I have more friends who don’t know what I studied or what I do for a living than friends that do. Now, students will sometimes ask about my degree out of curiosity. In such cases, playing up your humility is in my experience better-received than playing up your arrogance. Both of these are roles you can act out, and although I find it easier to play up arrogance (e.g. when speaking to bio-eng students, telling them I am “the cooler kind of engineer”), people don’t like when you try to outshine them. They want to discover that you do. An example scenario that happened: I told a girl it must be nice to have a full 3 months of vacation from school. She then said it was a flattering assumption, but that she had X amount of exam retakes. I then said I’d always wondered what that would be like since I never had any. She asked what I had studied, and I answered “oh, nothing impressive, you don’t want to know”. She insisted, I told her, she started complimenting my achievement.
Closing thoughts
Faking works
I have lived all of my conscious life with quite severe approach anxiety, and have passed up way more opportunities than I’ve taken. Recently (second half of 2024), I went out to an evening concert with an acquaintance from high school, with the intention of approaching everyone we deemed interesting enough. I ended up doing more by far, and he remarked that this sort of stuff is much harder for people who “don’t have so much intrinsic confidence” as me. In actuality, I was terrified the whole time, and also, out of sight, I received rejections so brutal that they still haunt me, which is the sort of thing approach anxiety protects you from. Nobody wants to be whisked away with one uncaring swipe of a hand, or be ignored as if invisible, not even worth one breath to be addressed. I don’t think I will ever understand acting like somebody’s mere polite presence is an insult to you, but then again, we should be thankful that the most toxic frogs also have the brightest colours.
My buddy’s remark reminded me of something Chris Williamson has talked about: if you do something that is completely out of your comfort zone whilst feeling insecure and uncomfortable and resistant and anything but brave, that is exactly what it means to be brave. In the same vein: if you approach while feeling anxious and nervous and self-conscious and inadequate and unsure and anything but confident, that is confidence. It’s not “you’re confident” or not, but “what you did had confidence”.
I’m also reminded of a clip of Jordan Peterson wherein he says that social anxiety can be overcome by trying to reduce the anxiety of the other person, not your own. Your social anxiety is there because you don’t want to have a bad interaction with others (for a variety of reasons: not wanting to disturb their day, not wanting to be confronted with own inadequacy, …) and thus by making them feel at ease, you guarantee that your anxiety is unwarranted. Whether that clears up your anxiety or not, doesn’t really matter: at the end of the day, you wanted an outcome, not a feeling. If you could get the outcome you wanted while feeling socially anxious, you would choose that over feeling at ease but not getting your outcome. Like lacking confidence, doing the thing despite a lack of feeling at ease makes up for the lack of feeling at ease.
At least, that’s what I tell myself to cope when those rejections flash before my eyes before falling asleep every night.
Why you should learn cold approach
On a more optimistic note: not only will learning to cold-approach make you better at selling whatever you want to sell, but also, now more than ever before is the best time to learn the skill of cold approaching. This is because you could make the case that the supply of cold approaches has been diminished due to the existence of dating apps: men who would have been your competition are now distracted by an alternative way of meeting women (or the illusion of it) and so they never develop their skill and are no longer your competition. The demand hasn’t changed while the supply has fallen, so the value has increased. More return on investment than ever.
It is ego inflation – i.e. becoming such that they estimate themselves to be much higher up in the desirability hierarchy than they are – exactly because men drop their standards specifically in the night. During the day, a man will approach a woman if she meets his predetermined thresholds. During the night, a man may approach the women he finds most attractive relative to the rest of the room, but I’ve been in plenty of rooms myself where that woman would not have gained my interest during the day. The impetus for a man to approach is completely different than during the day, and of course, women know this intuitively, which is why they dress up to go out in clothes they wouldn’t wear at work or around the house. They are at war with the room. In any case, because approaches in night life happen out of local scarcity rather than global attractiveness, the two are conflated, and perceived desirability rises. Being the best choice in the room rarely makes you the best choice outside that room. ↩︎
