The 7 Golden Rules of Being a Wingman

Winging is your chance to interact with women in a no-lose setting.

Nick Savoy

Attractive women rarely fly solo—or date men who do. Having a solid wingman by your side can mean the difference between the two of you sharing the night with a bevy of chicks [1] or a basket of chicken wings.

However, playing Goose to your buddy’s Maverick is about more than telling every woman he meets the highly exaggerated story about how he once rescued a nun from a burning building. (Because the building wasn’t actually on fire. And she wasn’t actually a nun. Though she did have a habit.) It’s also your job to entertain her friends while keeping your eyes peeled for potential rivals, whose wings might need to be clipped with a swift “Alpha Mike Foxtrot.” (Look it up.)

Winging can also do wonders for your own confidence: It’s an opportunity to interact with women in a nothing-to-lose setting. Soar in your role, and you’ll gain a loyal wingman in return.
Consider this your field-tested guide to being the ultimate wingman, forged from more than 2,000 nights at bars [2] and clubs teaching men how to attract beautiful women. Abide by its rules the next time you’re out with your friends, and you’ll be armed and ready for any approach.

Wingman Basics: First, Do No Harm

Rule No. 1: He who approaches, chooses
It takes balls (and skill) to go over to a group of women, risk being shot down, and start a conversation that goes somewhere [4]. Hence the essential rule: Whoever makes first contact becomes the primary pilot and gets first choice.

Rule No. 2: Maverick is always right
Women learn a lot from how you and your buddies treat each other. Act like your friends are the coolest people in the world, and women are more likely to agree. Blowing off your friend for a woman you’ve known for 10 minutes just tells her you’re desperate.




Rule No. 3: Respect the ratios
Your friend is talking to three women. You join. One of the friends [6] seems to like you, and now you want to take her somewhere private, away from the group. Should you? No. If you do, you’ve left your buddy with the woman he wants—and her friend. In other words, you’ve left him needing a wingman. Wasn’t that your job? (However, if it’s just two guys and two girls, leave with the other woman if you can. We call that a win-win.)

Rule No. 4: Say what your friend can’t
Wait until your buddy goes to the bathroom to talk about his best qualities. For bonus points, don’t talk directly to the woman he’s interested in. Tell one of her friends instead, and wait for her to repeat it.

Rule No. 5: Do what your friend can’t
If your buddy is too direct with his girl, it might turn her off [7]. But you can suggest one last drink to enjoy the view from his amazing rooftop. Or, if you know she drove there, explain an “emergency” to your friend and why you have to go, and ask his girl if she’d mind driving him home, since you were his ride.





Rule No. 6: Act like the game Is over
Act like your friend and the woman he’s talking to are a couple. Talk about them as a unit. You’ll be amazed by the effect. It’s a technique called “framing”: Women are more affected by subcommunications than by what’s actually being said.

Rule No. 7: Communicate
Women talk in private. Men don’t. Text instead. That way you can discretely call any necessary audible, like, “Are you sure you’re not beer -goggling?” or, “Don’t tell the nun-in-the- burning-building story—I already did.”

Why Successful People Leave Their Loser Friends Behind

By Brenton Weyi on April 25, 2013

We all want to be amazing. We all want to be successful, happy, and regarded as important figures in our fields. I am sure that you’ve heard all of the keys to success before: planning, hard work, perseverance, etc.

But today we are going to look at the one factor that will likely make or break your success: the people you surround yourself with.

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” – Jim Rohn

Want to be Amazing? Surround Yourself with Amazing People

The Make or Break List

A good friend of mine once told me of a man he knows who brought himself up from rags to riches.  Living paycheck to paycheck was a luxury for this man, and he decided that he was tired of being trapped by his own life. The poor man looked around at his friends, and noticed that one of them – who wasn’t particularly smart or more talented – had become quite wealthy. He asked this man how he accrued this wealth, how he was able to become a millionaire. The wealthy man’s response was simple: “keep the right company.”

The man took that advice to heart. He quickly noticed that all of the other friends he had hated hard work and had no desire to improve themselves. So he sought out new friends, he went around to conventions and seminars to connect with people who had made something of themselves. After he had completely replaced the people in his network, he decided to make a list. This list was simple. It had a column for people who would improve his life, and a column for people who would drag him down.

If someone could improve his life, he spent as much time around them as possible. If someone could drag him down, he never spent more than five minutes around them.After following his “make or break” list, the man was able to become a millionaire within three years.

No One does it Alone

The five-minute rule may be a little extreme, but there is an important lesson to learn from it: if you surround yourself with positive people who build you up, the sky is the limit.

There is an ideal in our society of the “self-made” man – a man who is able to find success through his own efforts. Now, don’t get me wrong, success does require an immense amount of determination and personal grit. However, success also depends on the ability to connect with people who have already made it.

There was once a man named Ernest Hemingway. If you aren’t familiar with Ernest Hemingway, he was one of the greatest American writers of all time. Even a great writer like Hemingway didn’t succeed on his own. He worked at a newspaper where his boss – a writer named Sherwood Anderson – helped him get his first novel published. Hemingway then connected with other no-name writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce.

This community of great writers helped to influence his style, success, and drove him to write every single day and become one of the greatest authors of his generation.

Hemingway is a testament to the fact that innate talent alone does not equal success. It’s hard to keep up a strict schedule to perfect your craft or improve yourself if you don’t have people around you with similar interests. Your network – your five key people – will determine the way you think, the way you act, and the way you approach your life goals.

Three Essential People

A mentor once told me that no matter how many close people you have in your network, if you want to be truly great, you must have three essential people in your life at all times: 

1. A person who is older and more successful than you to learn from
2. A person who is equal to you to exchange ideas with
3. A person below you to coach and keep you energized

A great figure of history who embodied this principle was Aristotle. Aristotle was one of the greatest minds to ever grace this beautiful Earth, but this was only so because he was constantly challenging himself and working to refine his talents. He exchanged ideas with other Greek philosophers in the “Academy,” learned from his mentor Plato, and taught a young boy named Alexander…who would later become “Alexander the Great.”

Every great person was, is, or will be successful because of the company he or she keeps. They will make an impact because of a successful network of driven peers who provide both inspiration and healthy competition.

If you want to be remarkable, you must constantly challenge yourself and surround yourself with remarkable people. So think about what your goals are, and take a look around you. Do you need to write a “make or break” list?

Do you have the kind of people who are going to lead you to live the life of your dreams?

“Don’t join an easy crowd. Go where the expectations and the demands to perform and achieve are high.” – Jim Rohn

Strive to be better. Strive to be more. Strive to beamazing.

Plateau Busting: How to Take Your Life to the Next Level

by BRETT & KATE MCKAY on AUGUST 14, 2011 · 

In our quest to become the best men we can be, we’ll often hit plateaus where we feel like we aren’t making any progress at all. Those flat-line moments in life can be a real soul sucker. You can see where you want to be as a man, but you’re stuck at a level just below your desired goal. It seems like no matter what you do, you’ll never be able to improve.

Well, fear not, good men. Though you may feel destined to a purgatory of perpetual pedestrian plateauing, with a few minor adjustments to your view on life and your routine, you can punch through the cement wall of mediocrity and level up to the life you want.

Road Map to Plateauing

Back in the 60s, two psychologists, Paul Fitts and Michael Posner, set out to uncover why we plateau. They discovered that when we acquire a skill, we go through three stages.

The first stage of skill acquisition is called the cognitive phase. In this phase, we must concentrate intently on what we’re doing as we figure out strategies on how to accomplish the skill more efficiently and effectively. The cognitive phase is riddled with mistakes as we learn the ins and outs of our new pursuit.

The second phase of skill acquisition is the associative phase. During the associative phase, we make fewer mistakes. Consequently, we feel more comfortable with the skill and begin to concentrate less on what we’re doing.

The final stage is the autonomous phase, or what Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein, calls the “O.K. plateau.” We reach a skill level where we’re able to capably do the task without having to really think about it at all. Remember about how much you thought about what you were doing when you first got your driver’s license? Now driving is fairly automatic, like brushing your teeth.

This progression to the the O.K. plateau shows up in all areas of our lives. The plateaus we experience in our career, in our fitness level, in our love life, or in our spiritual life often follow this three stage process.

There are areas of your life where being okay is, well, a-okay. I don’t have any desire to be able to drive like Mario Andretti, and it’s handy to have many of life’s tasks set on autopilot.

But then there are areas of your life where you’ve hit a wall, and you’re not happy about it–you’re doing fine, but you’re still plagued with a restless feeling that there’s something more out there, a higher level you’d really like to reach.

People used to think that you couldn’t break past these plateaus because a plateau represented the limit of your genetic ability. No amount of exertion or education would help you overcome this wall. But Fitts, Posner, and other psychologists have discovered that with the right approach and a few attitude adjustments, all of us can bust through our plateaus and reach even higher.

How to Overcome Plateaus

Take risks. Growth comes when we stretch past our comfort zone. The big reason many people (especially high-achievers) plateau is because they don’t like to fail. Instead of taking on challenges that will help us grow, we stick with routines that we know we can successfully do. To protect our ego, we’d rather do the wrong things correctly, than do the right things wrongly. This aversion to risk is a recipe for plateauing.

Embrace the suck. To overcome your aversion to risk, you have to give yourself permission to fail and be mediocre. Instead of avoiding the things that are hardest for them, the greats of the world specifically focus on those things; they purposefully concentrate on the areas in which they make the most mistakes. This keeps them from getting stuck in the autonomous phase and propels their progress. So instead of seeing failure as a negative thing, think of your failures as steps to success. If you choose to learn from your failures, they can bring you closer to your goal; when you cut a string and then tie it back together, it’s shorter than it once was.

Step out of the echo chamber. Another reason we plateau is because everyone around us is telling us everything is gravy. We often confide in people who tell us what we want to hear, not what we need to hear. I know I’m guilty of doing this. I’ll finish a project and take it to somebody for some “constructive criticism,” when really I just want some positive affirmation on what I did.

If you feel stuck in an area of your life, seek out mentors who won’t pull any punches and will give you the honest criticism you need to improve. Yes, your ego will get bruised, but that’s the price one must pay for personal and professional growth.

Learning to accept criticism is something that simply takes discipline and practice. First you work on taking the criticism into consideration at all. Then you work on shortening the time period between your initial reaction of “What?! There’s nothing wrong with what I did you noodle-brain knucklehead!” and the time later when you’re able to calmly reflect and see if there’s value in the criticism. I suppose the next stage is to skip that momentary urge to punch the criticizer in the throat altogether, but I’m not there yet myself!

Practice deliberately. Fitts and Posner discovered three keys to breaking through your plateau: 1) focus on technique, 2) stay goal oriented, and 3) and get immediate feedback on the performance. In other words, you need to practice deliberately to break through plateaus.

When Joshua Foer was trying to improve his memory in preparation for the United States Memory Championship, he hit a plateau where he stopped progressing. Despite a strict training regimen in which he looked at flash cards during his spare moments and constantly memorized things wherever he went, he couldn’t seem to get any better. To bust through this plateau, he had to deliberately push himself harder than before:

“To improve, we have to be constantly pushing ourselves beyond where we think our limits lie and then pay attention to how and why we fail. That’s what I needed to do if I was going to improve my memory. With typing, it’s relatively easy to get past the O.K. plateau. Psychologists have discovered that the most efficient method is to force yourself to type 10 to 20 percent faster than your comfort pace and to allow yourself to make mistakes. Only by watching yourself mistype at that faster speed can you figure out the obstacles that are slowing you down and overcome them. Ericsson suggested that I try the same thing with cards. He told me to find a metronome and to try to memorize a card every time it clicked. Once I figured out my limits, he instructed me to set the metronome 10 to 20 percent faster and keep trying at the quicker pace until I stopped making mistakes. Whenever I came across a card that was particularly troublesome, I was supposed to make a note of it and see if I could figure out why it was giving me cognitive hiccups. The technique worked, and within a couple days I was off the O.K. plateau, and my card times began falling again at a steady clip. Before long, I was committing entire decks to memory in just a few minutes.”

After a year of practice, Foer was able to memorize the order of a shuffled deck of cards in under two minutes.

Get back to basics. Whenever I hit plateaus in my life, my first response is to look for something new I can do to get me out of it. I think, “If I only find the right workout or the right planning system, my life will change and I can start making progress again.” Sometimes changing things up can help us break through a plateau, but in my experience, I just waste more time searching for that new, magic thing that will change my life for the better. So instead of spending time on searching for the new, I start focusing on the basics. When I hit a plateau with my writing, I’ll review my composition skills by doing some exercises from a book. When I hit a plateau with my weight lifting, I’ll reduce the weight, focus on my form, and slowly start adding weight again.

On numerous occasions, I’ve found that even when you’re advanced at something, delving back into the basics can actually give you fresh insights that help you progress even further.

Think long term. When we think short-term, we have a tendency to feel that plateaus are permanent. But when we take the big picture view of things, we start to see plateaus as temporary way stations that we’ll eventually get past with a bit of hard work. Moreover, by thinking long term, we give ourselves more latitude to take risks and fail because we see that missteps are just momentary setbacks in the long journey of life.

To cultivate this attitude, reflect on a time where you felt you had reached the end of your development in some area, only to later bust through the plateau. If it was possible then; it’s possible now. If you don’t have that experience yet yourself, ask a friend to tell you about one of his.

When I was learning Spanish while living in Mexico, I hit a point where I felt like I had stopped  progressing, and I didn’t feel like I could get any better. But I couldn’t shake the niggling feeling that I was wrong. So I made another push–I started reading my basic Spanish grammar books again, and I stopped being afraid to make mistakes. I just went for it when talking with people. And lo and behold, my fluency rose to a whole new level. Now when I reach a plateau in another area of my life, I simply remember that example, and realize that the feeling that I’ll never get any better is nothing more than my darn lazy brain selling me a bill of goods.