A heuristic is something that serves as a quick problem-solving aid—a sort of mental shortcut. You probably used some heuristics in school. For example, “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Noodles” is a heuristic commonly used to quickly remember the eight planets in the solar system.

In seduction, I use the term heuristic to mean a technique that instantly primes the brain for a certain behavior. It’s opposite is theory, which works primarily on the intellectual level and only changes behavior through the slow accumulation of knowledge (i.e., by reading blogs like this).  

Theory must be firmly grounded in truth, whereas a heuristic doesn’t have to be. Imagine an athlete walking onto the field for a championship game and thinking to himself “I’m a winner”. Unless he’s never lost a game, this won’t be entirely true. But it will probably do far more to set him up for a win than if he tried to mentally rehearse everything he learned during the season. In this way, heuristics are self-fulfilling.  

When it comes to seduction, there are two reasons why heuristics are vastly superior to theory.

The first is that the mind can only be occupied with a few ideas at a time (the latest research suggests four). In dynamic social situations, such as a night out at the bar, you can’t seamlessly draw upon knowledge you’ve read in the past—it’s too cognitively difficult.

Even if you managed to say or do just the right thing at just the right time by thinking back to what you’ve read, you’ll probably appear robotic. In fact, this is where seduction theory can be especially counterproductive: it crams the brain with too much information, which will ultimately bog you down and make you overly self-conscious in real world situations. The Book of Pook is so many men’s favorite seduction book precisely because it advocates abandoning rigid formulas and acting more freely.

The second reason heuristics > theory is that attraction is mostly about tonality, body language, and posture. It’s not what you say but how you say it. It’s emotional and visceral. Sex (and it’s all sex) is rooted in emotion—words simply don’t exist in the realm of sex and attraction.

So before you approach a woman or walk into the bar to meet your date, rather than pore over your notes from all the reading you’ve done, or reach back into your memory banks for the juiciest nuggets of theory, simply prime your brain with a heuristic.  

Examples of heuristics

A great example of a heuristic comes from the film Swingers. Trent (Vince Vaughn) is counseling Mike (Jon Favreau) about how to approach a woman who is sitting at the bar:

Now when you talk to her, I don’t want you to be the guy in the PG-13 movie that everyone’s pulling for. I want you to be the guy in the rated R movie who you’re not sure if you like.

That, gentlemen, is what seduction is all about. You can stop reading this blog now. The countless words written each day in books and blogs and online forums about how to be successful with women can’t put a candle to “be R-rated“.

Here are a few other heuristics you can use:

Note: just pick one and apply it in real life. If you simply read what follows without using it, that’s just more theory for your never-ending collection.

Wall: This heuristic comes from Jerr rreJ’s The Wall Speaks. Imagine there’s an invisible wall separating you from the rest of the world, and you are perfectly content behind it. As Jerr rreJ writes, “a man behind the wall exists mainly in his own head and so therefore he should like that space more than any place on earth.” This primes you to behave in a manner that’s self-sufficient, non-needy, and perhaps a touch mysterious. Of course, you don’t want to overdo it and come off coarse and robotic. The happy medium, according to rreJ, is to be “an amused stone”.

Amused stone: “That is what his wall should be,” writes Jerr rreJ, “like an amused stone. Why amused? Because amused is a micro expression that projects confidence and contentment. A woman needs to know with small gestures that a man is genuinely enjoying himself behind his wall.”I love this because women are constantly expressing the need for a man to be her “rock”. Unfortunately, men too often overcompensate and sacrifice their fun side. You should be grounded but also having a good time. Putting yourself in the mindset of an amused stone will achieve both.  

Dice thrower: The dice thrower heuristic makes you think of every possible action within reach as a throw of the dice, a gamble. It makes you think in cold probabilities, and it primes you to take risks. You can’t get anything in life without taking risks, so why not throw the dice? As Pook says “paradise, spoken slowly, is literally a ‘pair-of-dice’. Gamble what you have.”

Father figure: When you’re with a woman, if you adopt the mindset that you’re her father – i.e., you have a commanding yet playful presence, and nothing she says gets under your skin – then you’ll hit just the right masculine chord women deeply crave. “Here’s how to get women to chase you,” writes Corey Wayne in How to Be a 3% Man, “by understanding the love and relationship dynamic between little girls and their fathers. Little girls tend to go to their fathers and sit in their laps for love and reassurance….He is her rock. Her unmovable Mountain that is always there and always accepts and loves her unconditionally.”

Amused mastery: Rollo Tomassi writes a lot on the topic of “Amused Mastery“, which he defines as a frame of mind that “puts you into a position of maturity while still remaining playfully approachable.” He writes that he never fully appreciated the power of Amused Mastery until he had a daughter. “I found myself naturally using it with her because that’s the actual, unforced relation I have with her.”

Antlers: This one I found on an internet forum. “Interesting technique I developed for training your brain to be confident at all times”, reads the post’s title. “I pretend I have the majestic horns of a giant stag. I picture myself and all women with deer antlers. The women only have studs.” It’s certainly a bizarre method, but it works.

Liquid sex: Another one I found somewhere on the internet. Someone wrote that before they go out, they tell themselves they’re “liquid sex”. Nobody knows what it means, but it’s provocative.

Yoda: In his book The Practicing Stoic, which every man should keep by their bedside, Ward Farnsworth writes that stoicism can essentially be viewed as “an effort to help us toward the state of mind we might reach on our own with more time….Stoics try to respond to temptations and hardships in about the way they might if they were experiencing them for the thousandth time.”

Imagine you’ve been seducing and dating women for 900 years (roughly the same age as the Star Wars character Yoda). Eventually, you’ll have seen the same tired patterns arise over and over again, to the point that nothing could possibly faze you. So how would you respond when women test you? You’d respond the opposite of how you responded the first time you were tested. Without fail, you’d smirk and shrug it off. After all, you’ve literally seen it all before.

Multiverse: A variation of the Yoda heuristic is to imagine that you’re living in just one of an infinite number of universes. In each of these universes your behaviour varies, so that on one end of the spectrum (i.e. in one universe) you’re behaving in a way that would repulse you, while on the other you are doing and saying all the right things. There are an infinite number of universes in-between, where your behaviour is a mixture of good and bad.

People talk a lot about being “the best version of yourself”. What the multiverse heuristic does is makes you imagine what that best version is doing right now, in another universe. It makes you envision his words and actions so you can emulate them in real time. I like to imagine that I jump straight to the best version—I simply be that guy.

James Bond: Rather than read endless books and articles on how to be charming, actually watch someone who has charm and try to put yourself in their frame of mind. The James Bond films are a masterclass in charm, wit, sophistication, a sense of danger, and subtle deviousness. Step into the Bond frame of mind (not, I should stress, trying to emulate his words and actions, but simply framing your reality through his eyes), then you will project an aura of enormous value.