Manson - Models: attract women through honesty

About Models

You can become irresistibly attractive to women without changing who you are.

So says Mark Manson, superstar blogger and author of the international bestseller, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, a book that delivers self-help right between the eyes.

Mark brings the same approach to teaching men what they need to know about attracting women.

In Models he shows us how much it sucks trying to attract women using the tricks and tactics recommended by other books.

Instead, he says, men need to focus on seduction as an emotional process not a physical or social one. What matters is the intention, the motivation, the authenticity. To improve your dating life you must improve your emotional life how you feel about yourself and how you express yourself to others.

Funny, irreverent and confronting, Models is a mature and honest guide on how a man can attract women by giving up the bullsh*t and becoming an honest broker.

Contents

In April 2011, in a cramped and horribly overpriced hotel room in London, I began the outline for a dating advice book.

For anyone who has tried to write a book, they know that starting it is the most daunting part. There were so many considerations, so many ideas, so many goals and ambitions. And for a few days, I was paralyzed with all of the potential.

But I soon decided to limit myself to one specific aim. I asked myself, What book do I wish I would have read when I was single and struggling in my dating life? If I had only read one book, what do I wish it had told me?

As the weeks went by, it turned out that I wished it had told me a lot. The book spilled out of me in a somewhat involuntary manner, a kind of intellectual vomit. I was touring Europe, giving talks and coaching live at the time, and I would often finish up a session with a client or do a Q&A with a small audience and immediately run to my hotel room to jot some of the ideas that had spewed out of my mouth into the now ballooning book.

I also decided early on that I wanted to make the book different stylistically. I had read pretty much every other dating advice book on the market and thought most of them were garbage. I already knew the core ideas of this book were going to be different deeper, more personal, more emotional. But I also wanted the style of the book to be different. Perhaps I was up my own ass with self-importance, but I wanted to give it a bit more of a literary flair. I wanted the beauty and joy of the dating experience to come across in the writing itself. I didnt just want to lay out step-by-step plans and information to be memorized, I wanted to move the reader, since after all, the whole point of the book is that dating and romance is about just that: allowing yourself to be moved, both emotionally and physically.

I wrote the book in less than three months. Most of it was written in hotel rooms and small apartments across Europe: first London, then Bristol, then Prague, then St. Petersburg, and it was finally finished in Budapest.

The first version of the book was long and sloppy: 366 pages, with at least that many typos, grammatical errors, and dumb tangents. At the time, my aspirations were fairly pedestrian. I wanted to be able to make some money online without having to physically be in one spot, as almost four years of constant travel to do the coaching thing was wearing on me.

But I also wanted to get my ideas out into the world and hopefully make a dent in the dating advice industry since, at the time, I felt that what I had to say was quite different from the vast majority of toxic Pick Up advice that was being taught to men.

The book came out on July 5th, 2011. It was self-published through Amazon and my own website. That first month it only sold a few hundred copies mostly blog readers and former clients of mine. Many of them reported to me many of the mistakes and helped me edit it over the proceeding weeks and a few small updates were released soon after. By the fall of that year, I felt good that it was out there and people liked it and soon moved on to other projects.

But as the months rolled on, the book began to take on a life of its own. With no marketing, no publicity, no promotion, and a shitty cover I made myself in Photoshop, the books sales grew exponentially each month. Like a mind virus, infecting peoples brains so that they could move on and infect others, men began recommending it to their friends, and then their friends recommended it to their friends, and soon their friends friends were buying it for their brothers and cousins and even newly divorced fathers and uncles. It was soon being recommended on websites and forums so much that I began to get emails asking me to stop spamming. But I wasnt spamming. I wasnt doing anything. It was simply the readers.

By early 2012, to my pleasant surprise, I was earning enough to make a living as an author. So I quit coaching and focused solely on my writing. That same summer I also gave the book its first real revision. I hired a designer to create a real cover. I chopped about 50 of the more pedantic and excessive pages. I simplified some of the terms and theories and tried to make them more reader-friendly. What I consider the first professional version of Models was released in August of 2012.

From there the book went on to become the highest selling mens dating advice book for years at a time, outselling mainstays such as Neil Strausss The Game and Erik Von Markoviks The Mystery Method, often even outselling most womens dating advice books, which is kind of unheard of in the industry. It was a perennial bestseller in the category on Amazon and has actually reached a point where many popular mens dating advice forums and sites list it with a read this before asking any questions note in their FAQs or side bars.

By 2013, I felt as though I was finished with the book. I was ready to move on. I was preparing to relaunch my site and start writing articles for both genders with topics ranging from personal psychology to the cultural effects of smartphones and newsfeeds. I was leaving dating advice behind for good.

Over the next two years, my sites popularity exploded. Over 20 million people read it in 2015 alone. Yet Models has always persisted, always there in the background. Always a throbbing reminder of where I came from, as well as the virtue of taking a calculated risk and seeing where it led me.

Because, most people dont realize this now, but Models was a huge risk when it came out.

See, back in 2011, few pieces of dating or relationship advice talked about blunt honesty, about accepting rejection or even polarizing people for negative responses. Vulnerability was considered a vulgar word among most men and anything that didnt get you laid as soon as possible was often deemed pointless, or even worse, being beta.

And, god forbid, you talk about emotions or trauma or feelings of inadequacy. Like really, who the fuck wants to hear about that, you pussy? Go approach more!

But I had known from working with hundreds of men around the world that most of their dating problems had little to do with knowing what to say or tactics to get women to sleep with them sooner. The vast majority of these mens problems were emotional. They were rooted in deep inabilities to experience intimacy. They were born out of an irrationally negative self-perception that came from a lifetime of feeling inferior and inadequate around women. They came from men who were scared to look reality in the eye and still smile.