Bill Cammack » learning

Follow The Leader [Hunters, Part 02]

Bill Cammack — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:08:25 +0000

In response to Wingman Responsibilities [Hunters, Part 01], Reader “C Jay” writes:

“One thing i wanted to ask is about the whole follow the leader thing. Doesnt it make more tactical sense that the wing be the leader, i mean except for target selection he basically determines everything else.”

This is an excellent question and one I’ve never considered before. The short answer is: “The Top Gun leads the rap unless the ‘lesser dude’ in the situation has exclusive recon that makes him the one that should be calling the shots”. Therefore, there are actually TWO configurations you have to deal with.. Who is the leader when neither one of you has a chick yet and who is the leader once ONE OF YOU gets a rap and the other becomes “wingman” by default?

Training Grounds

I really like this question, because I spent A. LOT. OF. TIME. as NOT THE TOP DOG when it comes to pulling chicks. There are two ways you can deal with this.. Fight against the pecking order and still try to pull the top girls or go with the flow and benefit from the trickle-down as well as learning what the players did to be successful so you can emulate them in the future.

When you first start out in the game, you don’t realize you’re at a SEVERE DISADVANTAGE because you don’t know what guys are doing to attract chicks. You think it’s pot luck. “I went somewhere, a chick liked me, I got on”. Little did you know that tricks of the trade were being used to send primitive indicators to girls that they should select the next guy instead of you. If you pay close attention for long enough, you figure out what they’re doing.

You have the same jeans on, but theirs are perfectly ironed and creased. You have the same jacket on, but they work out and they’re in better shape than you. They go to the barber shop before the weekend so their “line is tight” and you don’t. They have a job, so they have more money than you get from your allowance. They spent $50 on a flimsy gold chain that they FINALLY got out of layaway, but they also bought a nice medallion that chicks flock to and want to look at and touch, while you have enough money to buy that same chain right now in your pocket, but there’s nothing for chicks to SEE, so you lose. They have the slow jam tape on them and you don’t. They took a virtual BATH in Egyptian Musk and you didn’t……

Protect The Leader

What you figure out eventually is that you’re walking into the war without your vest and without your gun.

I’ve never been in an actual war and I’m not going to be.. I’ve been in innumerable wars via FPS video gaming.

I remember being in a HALO game with my crew after we acquired a female player we call “Angel”. We were playing team deathmatch, and as the squad leader, I’m in charge of figuring out how we’re doing and determining our strategy second to second.

So every time I hit the button to check the individual and team scores, Angel’s K/D (kill-to-death ratio) is going UP while the rest of ours are going DOWN and the game is pretty much even. I’m not a shooter, I’m a strategist and I tell other people who to shoot, so I wasn’t going to be a factor in putting us in the lead for good.

The simple fact the numbers were telling me was that when Angel was UP, our team was advancing, and when Angel was DOWN, the other team was advancing. The executive decision I made as soon as I figured this out was that *EVERYBODY*s job for the rest of the game was to make sure that ANGEL stayed alive.

Anybody you see shooting at Angel, CAP him. If she’s in a firefight, shoot the guy she’s shooting. If there’s a powerup or ammo for her weapons, leave that for her. If you’re getting shot while you’re helping Angel, too bad for you.. You’re SOL (**** out of luck). You don’t turn around and shoot that person. You stay on your assignment, and when that dude drops you, he’s going to have to reload and Angel’s going to get our kill back.

Fortunately, the rest of our teammates believed in my time-proven ability to strategize and sacrificed themselves, as did I, to keep Angel Blazin’, and we ended up crushing the other team decisively.

This is the same way raps need to be handled. Whomever is being EFFECTIVE, RIGHT NOW is the one the team has to rally behind to facilitate his efficiency. If he’s rapping to the girl you wanted?… You have to eat that. Maybe you get the best chick next time. All you do by fighting over or rapping to the same chick is make your entire crew look like Busters and then none of y’all deserves the rap! :D

Meanwhile, whomever has the favor of the crowd has to not be selfish. Recognize that you’re able to do what you’re doing right now because other guys are warding off cockblockers and sacrificing their own desires so you can rap to a chick they want for themselves. It’s YOUR JOB to put in a good word for your boys and facilitate THEIR raps to the extra chicks instead of riding your current success to glory in Valhalla.

There’s No “I” In TEAM!

So.. To answer C Jay’s question, the leader in a situation where two guys head out to pick up chicks is dynamic, not static.

Optimally, BOTH GUYS have an equal grasp of the game and either guy is likely to get a rap at any point of the night.

When that’s the case, it becomes a flow, like hockey players on a 2 vs. 1 break. It’s not important that one particular guy scores. It’s important that THE TEAM goes ahead by one goal.

If the team goes +1, there’s a good chance that EVERYONE will end up with the “W”. If the guys on the break are selfish, they might screw up their advantage, nobody scores, and the team isn’t any better off.

This is one of the reasons why Wingman Selection is so important. You have to actually be HAPPY if your boy gets on and you go home with nothing or waste hours distracting her homegirl from blocking your boy’s action. Dudes that don’t have this kind of rapport with each other start getting sour and sabotaging raps and making the whole crew look like clowns.

Bada Bing, Bada Boom

So, assuming you have equal dudes working together, the leader is the one that has the best idea for how one or both of them are going to get on tonight. You saw this in “Jersey Shore” when Mike & Pauly were standing out in the street deciding whether to invite the chick and the grenade home to hop in the hot tub. Mike has a line on the girl he wants to hook up with. That chick comes with an extra chick that needs to be distracted, which is going to be Pauly’s job.

Pauly says to him “We don’t have anything better, right?”. This means that they’ve kicked all the game they’re willing to kick for the evening and it’s time to disappear with some chicks. If Pauly had pulled a chick that HE wanted to bring back, he would have said so right there. Since he hadn’t, he was willing to facilitate Mike’s rap and help him try to score.

At that point in the game, the leader was Mike, because he had a direct connection to a girl he was trying to hook up with. Best-Case Scenario for the evening was Mike +1, Pauly +0 = Team +1. Once they got home, Mike dropped the ball and didn’t isolate his chick fast enough before Pauly got tired/bored/annoyed with covering for him and bailed. We don’t know what happened, because that’s an edited show, but Pauly SHOULD have told Mike to hurry the **** up and make it happen.

At that point, as C Jay is suggesting, the wing is actually the leader, however, I suggest that he took over because he had a better grasp of the situation, which was that Mike wasn’t pulling the trigger and something good needed to happen QUICKLY, or else.

Unfortunately, I really doubt this is the case in most situations. I think most of the time, either one or both guys don’t know the first thing about what they’re doing with chicks and it’s a Keystone Cops / pot luck scenario, thus the term “Getting Lucky”, because guys have no idea how they got laid. \o/

Experience > Current Advantage

When you have one guy that knows what he’s doing and one guy that doesn’t, there is NO. CHANGE. IN. LEADERSHIP. The other guy’s not qualified to make any decisions.

Regardless of who’s working on someone at the time, the ‘lesser’ dude doesn’t suddenly have wisdom bestowed upon him because he happens to currently enjoy the best chance of getting on.

I found this out the hard way in a couple of scenarios. In one of them, 4 or 5 of us rolled up on several chicks and I was talking to a pretty nice-looking girl until to my chagrin, the Top Dog broke from the girl he was rapping to and rolled up on my conversation, rendering me immediately invisible. :D hahaha OH. MAN!.. I. Was. Mad. As. A. ****!!! :D

The other situation was that I was talking to this chick first but didn’t kick the proper game. I wasn’t “Street” enough for her tastes, so eventually, this SCRUM (lowlife) came over that was part of my crew and started talking to her and she fell for it immediately.

This dude probably LITERALLY had DUST in his pockets, was dumb as a box of rocks and at the time had no earning potential whatsoever… BUT… he was wearing trendy clothes and had an earring and sounded like he was from the ghetto, which he was, and the chick immediately went out like a sucker.

I think I even TOLD HER THAT DAY that my homeboy wasn’t about JACK (not to try to cockblock him, but because I could see her future from the way she was blindly jocking him so hard), but she didn’t want to hear it. She was too busy sweating him. A few months later, I run into her in the street and she’s all crying and distraught because she’s pregnant by him and he threw her number in the trash. C’est La Vie. \o/

The point being that I didn’t come to the table with the “Toolry & the Jewelry” to turn these chicks’ heads, so I didn’t have any say in the raps whatsoever. My effect on the situation was minimal, so my choice in the matter was to follow the leaders and depend on the trickle-down unless the leaders decided to swoop in and bag that up as well. :D

Critical Recon & Intel

The *ONLY* time the lesser dude has any juice is when he’s privy to exclusive and important information that changes the game.

Sometimes, even though you’re not even trying, a chick is just sweating you for some unknown reason. She likes how you look… She likes that you’re not pressing up on every chick in the place… She likes that you sound educated… You’re at the beach, so she can tell you’re in FANTASTIC SHAPE compared to your more-suave homeboys… You actually listen to her and talk to her instead of nodding at her until you can get laid….. Whatever it is, there are some circumstances where the lesser dude has a chick locked down, and that’s when HE becomes the most important guy in the crew.

He’s still not the SMARTEST when it comes to this, so it’s in his best interest to pull the Top Dog to the side and explain the situation so the tactics can be determined. The fact remains that he’s currently THE MAN, so the team’s goal is to make sure he’s as successful as possible and everyone else gets whatever they can salvage from the evening.

Another common intel situation is that chicks are often too scared to kick it to the Top Dogs. For the same reasons that guys find it insanely easy to talk to girls they’re not attracted to, some chicks will approach lower-level dudes and TELL THEM DIRECTLY that they’re interested in the guy they’re scared to talk to. This is your opportunity to not be a ******* HATER and share the wealth. If you see that your boy’s wasting time trying to kick it to a different chick when this one’s already down with the program (assuming of course that they’re interchangeable, looks-wise), find a way to interrupt your boy and let him know what time it is. If he’s happy with his current chick, he might send you back to get her number for future reference. If he’s tired of putting in work and wants to get down to the nitty gritty, he’ll probably pass this chick off to you and go talk to the “Sure Thing”.

Do NOT let your feelings of jealousy cause you to sit on intel. Sometimes, it’s just not your day. Sometimes, your boy gets all the raps and you have to be cool with that or you’re in the wrong business. Go solo if you hate seeing your friends enjoy themselves.

Of course, conflict can occur when both guys happen to get on simultaneously with different sets of chicks, haha in which case, they’ll have to agree to split up and handle each group separately or one guy needs to get contact information and close out so he can assist his boy with the other set.

Dynamic Allocation

So we wind up back at the short answer. The Leader is determined dynamically, based on the situation and the guy’s respective skillz when it comes to pulling chicks. Both guys have to know each other’s styles and both have to respect each other’s games to the degree that they’re willing to take one for the team this time, knowing that their boy’s going to do the same for them when THEY’RE in an advantageous position. Without that inherent trust & camaraderie, the whole thing falls apart and it’s every man for himself.

I’d also like to add that the game starts before you leave the house. You need to walk out the door envisioning how the night’s going to go for you AND your boys. You have to understand your friends’ strengths and weaknesses so you can see the playing field properly when the evening’s chicks show up and it’s time to make it happen. You have to understand where you’re going and which wingmen are going to be effective in that particular environment.

E-Stalking [Part 1]

Bill Cammack — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 05:42:19 +0000

So I stopped by Melissa’s blog, and I’m skimming/reading her ideas, and I see this post called Stalking 101. The reason I decided to blog about reading her post is that she was blogging about exactly what I was doing at the time. :)

I decided to check out her reasons for googling people (searching for references to their names or sites they author or are a part of like, Bill, for instance :D) to see if they were similar to my own.

To paraphrase, here are her reasons:

1 ) Being an introvert (including potentially appearing “maladroit at small talk”)
2 ) Needing context for conversations
3 ) Wanting to ‘get to know someone’ before engaging them in “inspiring conversation”
4 ) Attempting to form a fairly complete picture of you based on your online thoughtstream
5 ) Giving the stalkee the respect of wanting to know more about them
6 ) Respecting the time you’ve spent in putting information about yourself on the net
7 ) Wanting to have a meaningful interaction with the stalkee IRL
8 ) Relieving them of redundantly explaining their life story

My reasons for e-stalking overlap with hers at several points, but I have a couple of different ones, which I’ll get to…

Another thing that was funny to me after I read Melissa’s post was that we had met each other “cold”… purely by accident. She happened to be standing with a group of friends of mine, and since I hadn’t met her before or seen her around, I introduced myself. I figured that even though I hadn’t seen her before, I’d be familiar with her twitter name, so I asked her what that was…. No dice. Never heard of that name before. :) So, now… Here I was, at a social media event, having ZERO point of reference for who she was. To me, this was like falling off a cliff into a chasm, with a cheap greenscreen effect to show me supposedly falling away from the camera. It was like a system shutdown. To illustrate how strange this was, I could have taken a rock and hit no less than 45 people that I knew in the same room with us. I mean, no walls between us at all, and I couldn’t draw ONE connection between her and any of them OR anybody else I knew on the social media scene. So the next question I had was something to the effect of:

“So… You’re from out of town?”

Which she wasn’t, which made me fall farther from the camera into the chasm. :) What I realize now is that I was doing what Melissa describes in her post. I was attempting to latch onto some sort of internet-based understanding of “who she was” in order to have some form of useful conversation with her. Once I drew a complete and absolute BLANK, I had no point of reference and probably seemed like I didn’t have anything to say to her. I’m sure I had lots to say to her, except as I mentioned in Chris Brogan’s post, “Five Levels of Social Conversation”, I’m not a small-talker. I’m interested in USEFUL conversation, and by now, I’m very used to knowing what conversation is useful to whom because of what they post to the net.

Anyway… A mutual friend standing in that group was already in social media contact with her, so I decided I was going to “quit while I was in the middle of nowhere” and just google her the next day. To her credit, she struck up a conversation later on, based on what was on my shirt and I found out that we shared a mutual interest. That’s always a good thing. :)

So it was really interesting to me that in the process of e-stalking her, I arrived at a post that talks about how she e-stalks people, and why. :D I thought it would be interesting (to me) to see where my reasons and Melissa’s paraphrased reasons overlap…

1 ) Being an introvert (including potentially appearing “maladroit at small talk”)

I’m not an introvert at all. I may actually qualify as an extrovert, haha. However, as I mentioned above, I don’t small-talk. I’m not interested. I’d rather say NOTHING than say (or listen to) nothing interesting. I don’t care about the weather. I don’t care which direction you brush your dog’s hair OR that you even HAVE a dog. At the same time, I don’t want to bore you with things that *I* think are interesting that YOU don’t care about. E-Stalking helps to avoid this, because I know that Charles likes politics and Grace likes food and Annie likes to read books. I know ahead of time what conversations I’m going to get into, so I’m properly prepped for the evening’s events.

2 ) Needing context for conversations

I don’t *need* context, but it’s good to have. It’s way more efficient to walk in the door knowing what someone thinks instead of deciphering it halfway through a conversation. Context is what I was struggling for when I met Melissa. Is she in video? Is she in web design? Is she in finance? If I had heard of her ever in life beforehand, I would have known these things by the time I physically met her and I would have had some intelligent questions/statements. :)

3 ) Wanting to ‘get to know someone’ before engaging them in “inspiring conversation”

I agree with this, entirely. E-Stalking is fantastic for understanding what someone’s passionate about ad how/if their mind works. It’s one thing to say you have a dating blog. However… What are you REALLY talking about? Are you original? Are you regurgitating stuff you see in movies or read on other blogs? Is your material useful to ANYBODY past a basic, surface level of dating idiocy, such as “you messed up, so buy her flowers”? Being able to read people’s material ahead of time saves you from wasting the time, energy and breath of starting a discussion that you quickly find out you’d like to end. :)

Another thing is that people involved in social media are more likely to post something to the net than bring it up IRL. I found out, for instance, that Melissa’s been to China. I would never have asked her about that, because, to me, “travel” falls under the category of small-talk. Besides… I’ve been to ChinaTOWN in NYC, DC, Philly, etc, but actual CHINA never enters my mind as far as a topic of conversation. Since people are more likely to post on the net that they went to China than to blurt it out randomly in an IRL social setting, e-stalking helps you to know who has stories you’d like to hear about places you never plan to go.

4 ) Attempting to form a fairly complete picture of you based on your online thoughtstream

Spot-On. This is one of the best parts of e-stalking! :D You can meet someone IRL so you know how it is to be around them and how they carry themselves and how they speak, smile and laugh… then you get to figure out on your own time and at your own pace what level of interaction you’d like to have with them, going forward. Of course, this works in both directions, haha. Your social media presence could enhance your relationship to someone or delete it entirely. :) Assuming that what you’re posting is a good representation of what you really think or feel, even deletion is a good thing. Social Media allows people to passively opt-out of socialization with someone, due to irreconcilable differences based on personality, activity or philosophy. If someone decides not to like you for some reason, they can carry on that relationship with themselves, and you don’t even have to be aware of it. :)

5 ) Giving the stalkee the respect of wanting to know more about them

This is definitely true. It takes a lot of time to read people’s blogs and watch their videos and read their forum comments and twitter posts and emails. Every minute you devote to someone else’s self-expression on the net is a form of respect, IMO. Then again, it could also be a form of your own personal entertainment, assuming you read blogs of people that you don’t respect yet find entertaining.

6 ) Respecting the time you’ve spent in putting information about yourself on the net &
7 ) Relieving them of redundantly explaining their life story

This was one of the things I really, REALLY enjoyed about starting my own site… as far as business and as far as pleasure. The first time social media hooked me up was when a company wanted me to bring them an editing demo reel, and I was able to point them to the URL to see samples of my work on their own computer screens and I got booked on the spot. I used to waste SOOOOOO much time redundantly telling people what I do. Now, I just point them to my site. My site URL is the same as my name. If you can’t remember my name, google “Bill”. That’s all I have to say. Also, I bring my iPod Nano with me with my video blog on it. I can show you what I do and you can read about the rest of it on the net. Lovely. :)

8 ) Wanting to have a meaningful interaction with the stalkee IRL

This is similar to (3), except once you already know the person. Bre moved from doing videos for Make Magazine to doing videos for Etsy. I learned about it via social media, so when I hung out with him the next time, I asked him about it. It was a much better conversation than the weather or something that we weren’t mutually interested in. It’s useful to have the option to gather this info ahead of time and increases the amount of quality conversation, accelerating people getting to know and appreciate each other.

I think I’ll add my e-stalking reasons in Part 2…