Review Detail

It is very hard for me to surmise what I learnt this weekend in terms of COLD HARD FACTS. Notes? I have about 4 loosely-spaced pages of notes. That's not the important stuff. The important stuff is what changed INSIDE me. Inside my mind.

I have had to unlearn many bad habits. As far as I am concerned, '10Pin' - or at least, the 10Pin of old - is dead. He loved to get positive reactions and praise, and the absence of that would get to him. In other words...attention junky. Wanted the validation. When we were sitting down in the restaurant on Sunday, Ozzie had us sit down and we talked about spike questions and plotlines. More often than not, my spike questions were coming from a place of 'being outrageous' - in order to get a reaction:

"CONTRIVED WEIRDNESS vs SINCERITY OF EXPRESSION"

I didn't really realize it - I used to think 'bringing the party' meant going WILD - but Ozzie pointed it out. On Saturday night in the field, he even had to tell me to 'calm down' with my dance floor game Thing about Ozzie is, despite all his rep as a high-energy player, he wants to build CONSISTENT players. He kept talking about this.

And its funny, because whilst I'd posted up some crazy LRs and FRs in the past, I'd also posted up a bunch of questions asking, 'How do I get consistent?'

I realized how to do this this weekend. Opened about 30 sets with, 'Hey. What's up? I'm ...', and EVERY set opened and hooked. Sure, some staled out - most did - because Ozzie said we couldn't do outer game. We just had to plow. But hey, everything's an IOI in Ozzie's book, so provided they still stood there and listened its all good.

It's crazy though. Because I see some people's bootcamp reports and it seems to be like, 'WOW YEAH I K & FCLOSED 5 girls each night' or something. In terms of 'results' it was actually a fairly disappointing weekend for me - only 1 pull - but I learnt SO much. In fact, this focus on 'results' was what was SCREWING MY GAME in the first place.

Ozzie pointed things out, and directed me to learn the lessons about myself. And when you learn something for yourself, the knowledge tends to become more solidly ingrained into you than it does when you are passively absorbing someone else's knowledge.

That's why, for all the DVDs and eBooks and whatever, God do I wish I had taken a bootcamp first instead.

No bad habits to unlearn. No conflicting advices to resolve. Blank slate, to be built upwards. For anyone out there now, I would advise stopping with the forums, stopping with everything and just going to bootcamp so you don't learn any of the bad advice which permeates every single place on the internet.

The whole weekend was a lot different to how I'd expected. All this talk of 'nimbus' and so on...didn't really get that. Ozzie was not trying to pump our state all weekend. It was actually very chilled. Instead, I just got a massive enlightenment, and learnt a lot. Ozzie is the man. The real deal.

I feel now like I am in a period of rebuilding my game, and refocusing it as a consistent player. As a result, I don't think I will be checking into the forums anymore, though I still plan on staying in touch with some of you. I will only return when I am sure my ego is not being built up online by praise; when the praise and the criticism is in balance with myself. But otherwise its 'up on the forums, everyone thinks I'm some mad playa etc'...ego building. Certainly, I let it build my ego. I enjoyed it because I used to suck so horrendously with women.

I gotta let that go.

I feel profoundly that, this weekend, my game has been totally broken down, and I have been given the pieces to rebuild it in the most positive of ways.

It's been a pretty profound, reflective experience for me.

Anyway, that's my bootcamp experience. I hope that is of some help to you guys, particularly those who are already fairly skilled in the game and wonder what a bootcamp can offer them.

I'd also hope that RSD really start switching completely over to this way of teaching. Foundations is a good product but wildly different to the experience you can expect to find on bootcamp (and bootcamp is where it is at, in my opinion).

It was a really great experience. Thanks guys, thanks Ozzie. It is up to me to use this to move forward in my game, and in life.