Rules of the Game

Welcome to my Rules of the Game book summary!

“The guy who succeeds at the game is the one who goes out and makes other people feel good about themselves.” (p. 125)

One-Sentence-Summary: A comprehensive 30-day plan plus foundational self-improvement to level up your ability to attract a woman by the world’s greatest pickup artist.

I’ve finished reading Rules of the Game by Neil Strauss.

booboo real-time book rating: ★★★★★ (percentage of books with this rating: 8%)

Highlights from the 30 Days

A tip for projecting your voice with authority in Day 3: “..instead of speaking to your friend or the recorder, aim your voice at a spot six to ten feet above.” (p. 31)

Day 4: Alexander Technique for posture

Don’t excuse yourself to start a conversation: “Where men are initially attracted to beauty, most women are initially attracted to status. And a man of high status never apologizes for his presence.” (p. 59)

“As soon as you’re caught trying to impress her, trying to get validation, trying for attention, or trying too hard in any way, the game is over. One of the paradoxes of the game is that it takes a lot of effort to appear effortless.” (p. 61)

Day 12: A in-depth, personalized project to develop the stories you tell which conveys your values in a particular way.

When telling stories:

“..make sure your last sentence leaves the listener with laughter, excitement, shock, admiration, disbelief, or any strong, positive emotion.” (p. 92)

“..find a place in the middle of each story to inset an opporntiyt for listeners to interact.” (p. 95)

Day 15: Cold Reading. Everyone loves to learn about themselves.

Day 22: discussion about how to frame or reframe situations, criticism, obstacles, etc. so give you a better outcome. One key point was to zoom in or out the current situation, zoom in to be more focused or specific, and zoom out to take into consideration more things.

When you have self-doubt or negative thoughts: “Reframing criticism and limitations as ‘how’ questions can turn a dead end into an open door.” (p. 156)

Day 25: Phone game. How long to wait for the first contact? As long as you can taking into consideration your interaction. If it was long and deep, you could wait a week because she’s not going to forget you. If it was brief and she’ll be meeting may men, then next day. What should your first text say? Ideally in the conversation create a nickname or something unquie in the convo that you can refer back to. Do not re-introduce yourself in the first text and don’t ask her out. Start the conversation as if it is ongoing and she already knows you. And to encourage a response without asking a question say an open loop: I just found out the name of the fifth ocean. Or, I just met another Stephanie at work so you’re officially Stephanie number four now. If you need to send a same day text: Just checking to see if you got home safe (do not respond).

As I read the book, you will find my in-progress Rules of the Game review and book summary notes below.

Neil Strauss’s 14 Laws of Learning

1. Acquire and apply knowledge in small chunks.

2. There is no such thing as rejection, only feedback. If you possess the ability to learn from your mistakes, then failure is literally impossible, because each rejection brings you closer to perfection.

3. It’s never her fault. It’s always your fault. And that’s a good thing, because it means you’re in control.

4. Learn actively rather than passively. The guys who win the game are the ones who can apply the strategies.

5. Don’t rehearse negative outcomes. If any of these scenarios happens to occur in real life, then find out what to do. This isn’t skydiving: There’s little to no risk of actual harm from being unprepared.

6. Understand how your mind learns. The psychological field of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) offers a useful four-step model of how the mind learns. It can serve as a yardstick to measure your progress.             

• Unconscious incompetence: You’re doing something wrong, and you don’t even know you’re doing it wrong.             
• Conscious incompetence: You’re doing something wrong, and you’re aware that you’re doing it wrong, but you haven’t yet fixed the problem.             
• Conscious competence: You’ve learned the right way to do it, and you’re doing it correctly with focused attention.             
• Unconscious competence: You no longer have to think about something or work on learning it—you automatically do it correctly. In the parlance of the game, this is when you finally become a so-called natural.

7. Be willing to go through the pain period. Here’s what Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his iron-pumping days, had to say about it: “If you can go through the pain period, you make it to be a champion. If you can’t go through it, forget it. And that’s what most people lack: having the guts—the guts to go in and just say… ‘I don’t care what happens.’”

8. Don’t look to friends or family for approval.

9. Be willing to test new ideas, even if they don’t seem logical. Before I learned the game, I considered myself an intelligent and successful person. Yet the logic that had gotten me so far in the world wasn’t getting me anywhere with women. In order to make a change, I had to try some new behaviors, even if they didn’t seem logical. I said things I thought would drive women away, but instead they attracted them. I wore outrageous clothes I thought would get me laughed out of the room, but instead they motivated women to approach me. And that’s when I realized that I’d never really been using logic in the first place—because, as any good scientist knows, before dismissing a new hypothesis, it’s necessary to test it first.

10. Once something works, figure out how and why it works. There are some men who do great just following these instructions and repeating the routines. But the ones who become superstars are the ones who, after a series of successes, figure out why the routines worked and what made them work. There’s only one rule of pickup, and that rule is: There are no rules, only guidelines. Once you understand the principles behind each idea, you’ll know when to follow the guidelines, when to dismiss them, and when to invent new ones.

11. If you don’t know what to do, don’t leave. If you run out of material when talking to a woman you’ve just met, you’re not going to learn anything by running away. Stay in the conversation and, if you run out of things to say, push it five, ten, twenty minutes further—even if you have to violate the guidelines and buy her a drink or ask interview questions. It’s the best way to learn something new for next time.

12. Hang around someone better than yourself. If you don’t know anyone who can fill this role, instead of going out to meet women one night, go out to befriend someone who’s good with women.

13. Make sure that your ratio of effort to results is increasing. Make sure you’re increasing not just your knowledge but also your results. If you’re not, then take a break, review these rules, examine what you’re doing, and push yourself beyond your comfort zone.

14. Finish what you begin. Simply by not giving up, you’ll already be in the top 5 percent of men out there.

This blog will contain both my summary and review of the book Rules of the Game.

The Courtship Process Model

You are reading my book review and summary by Neil Strauss. Be sure to check out my digital bookshelf for 100+ book summaries.

Love or Lust

I read The Truth by Neil Strauss, hoping to get some answers on my own, similar journey of love. Why can’t you befriend (long-term relationship) some of the girls that you otherwise would have hooked up with (short-term relationship), and other girls without hooking up with them in order to have a strong and extended web of friendships instead of one, likely weak bond with a woman you’ve been forced to live with for 40+ years?

That book did not answer my questions. In fact, after Neil’s divorced in 2018 and his having a second child (when he is 56) with Ingrid in 2025 while they are separated, only. confirmed my current thoughts. The woman of your desire is, and should be, different than the mother of your child.

So I found it interested when Rules of the Game gave more concrete answers as to why pick marriage with one.

“When you’re with someone you grow closer to over time instead of apart from.” (p. 373) This is a great measuring stick for marriage or long-term relationships, but there is a problem: what if after 5 or 10 or 15 years of marriage, you start to grow apart because humans grow and, often, in different ways?

Niel says to his friend: “‘So what happens a few years into the relationship fi I feel the call of the wild and just want to go have sex with someone new? How do I control that, or not resetn her for keeping me from those experiences?’ (p. 372)

The response: “..you think about how that would affect the project you’ve dedicated your life to. People who work in banks generally don’t steal the cash. Although they want more money in the moment, they value their future more.” (p. 372)

This makes sense. You are opting for long-term instead of short-term. But what if the long-term turns out to be not worth it?

“The saying should be: you can’t eat your cake and have it..it means you should be glad you were lucky enough to experience the luxury of a cake in the first place. So stop staring at it and worrying about what you’ll lose by committing to it-and start enjoying it. Cakes were meant to be eaten, not collected.” (p. 373)

Value arguments indeed, and in need of a further conversation. I’d ask Neil: if he could do things over, would he choose one marriage and try to make things work? He did try that, and it didn’t. So, why not? Are you currently living an optimized life, or do you have regrets about your past?

Did you know I’m an author? I wrote four books on real estate investing, travel, and language learning.

New Words!

crone (n) – old woman who is thin and ugly (the building had a crone as the administrator who sat on a stool all day at the entrance)

haughty (adj) – arrogantly superior (the people of Monaco and their haughty demeanor ruins the vibe sometimes)

indolent (adj) – preferring to avoid activity, or lazy (She was indolently content to let her husband do all the cooking and cleaning.)

alcoherent (

Thanks for visiting and thanks to Neil Strauss for writing Rules of the Game!

Date Started: Sunday, December 17, 2017

Date Finished: Thursday, May 1, 2025 (2,692 days)