The Tao of DJ Fuji

Merry Xmas, all. Hope you are all spending time with family and loved ones. I actually have a present for all of you which I’ll get to in a minute.

But first I wanted to address a question I received via email today that I’m guessing a LOT of you are wondering about:

Hey man, love the blog. I have a question about routines. When I got started I used a bunch of routines for the attraction phase and got decent results out of it. By the end I could get phone numbers on a pretty consistent basis, and some were flaky but some were solid. I wanted to check my skill level without routines so I started using a social opener, and then following it up with relying on my conversation skills off the bat. What I find is that most conversations went well, but some girls would just stand around and give one word input indefinitely. I imagine this is sometimes because they aren’t interested, and sometimes because they are just boring, so in either case I usually just walk away after a minute. Is there something I am missing here? Am I being too quick to judge? If so, what’s the best way to deal with this contingency? -J

Read the rest of this entry »

I'm so tempted to troll this caption with pickup company names

Hey guys,

Another (relatively) quick tip of the week here. Last week Dan from WordOfDan commented on the dancing monkey syndrome:

I’m curious how you’d suggest guys using routines adopt this mindset. After all, if you’re learning a line someone else gave you, that THEY found funny and had success with, it seems like it would come off at best, dancing monkey. Your physical jokes seem to be able to bypass that a little bit, but what about other people’s stories, teases, etc.?

Really, really good question that I probably should have thought about in the original article. I’ll expand upon this more in a future segment of my Routines Series Articles, but the short answer is to follow the same Read the rest of this entry »

Note: This is the first part in a running series of articles about the use of routines in learning game. For more information on routines, see all articles on routines.

Routines, scripts, lines, things to say. Some love ‘em, some hate ‘em, nearly everyone misunderstands them.

For those who are unfamiliar with the term, a routine is simply a memorized script of varying length. So in essence, both our kneejerk “fine” response to “how are you?” and a memorized, pre-scripted story are routines. One is simply longer and more complex than the other. Obviously, all of us use routines in one way or another.

Routines (whether yours or someone else’s) can also take the form of being canned, meaning that you’ve practiced them over and over again until you can deliver them well, or Stock, which means they’re generic, off-the-shelf scripts, usually created by others. Both can be very useful tools, especially if you don’t have a lot of natural talent.

Now before we move on, let’s take a quick quiz. Read the rest of this entry »