Mark Manson's Models and the honest approach
Most pickup books promise a method for getting a specific result. Models made a stranger promise: if you stop trying so hard to get the result, you'll be more attractive, and the people who aren't interested will sort themselves out. Mark Manson self-published it in 2011, years before he became famous for something else, and it's still a common recommendation for anyone who wants dating advice without the manipulation.
Who Mark Manson is
Manson was born in 1984 and grew up in Austin, Texas. He graduated from Boston University in 2007. According to Wikipedia, he started his first blog in 2008, writing dating advice, and in 2010 launched a men's advice blog called Postmasculine.
Models: Attract Women Through Honesty came out in 2011. In 2013 he moved his writing to markmanson.net and broadened it to general life advice. In 2016 he published The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, which reached No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list and stayed in the top ten for years. He followed it with Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope (2019) and co-wrote Will Smith's memoir, Will (2021).
So the dating book came first. A lot of the ideas in his later bestsellers, especially about values and accepting rejection, show up in Models in an earlier form.
What Models argues
The book's official page pitches it as a guide to attracting women "without faking behavior, without lying and without emulating others." Here are the main ideas, in plain terms.
Non-neediness
The book's central concept is neediness: caring more about how other people see you than how you see yourself. Manson argues that neediness is what makes people unattractive, and that most pickup tactics are just neediness in disguise. Memorized lines, status displays, careful scripts: they're all attempts to manage someone else's opinion of you.
The non-needy version is not acting cool or detached. It's being invested in your own life and values to the point where one person's reaction doesn't decide your mood.
Vulnerability
This is where Models breaks hardest with pickup. Instead of hiding your intentions, Manson argues you should show them. Saying "I think you're cute and I wanted to meet you" is vulnerable because she might say no. That risk is exactly what makes it attractive. It shows you're comfortable enough with yourself to be turned down.
In practice, this means things like:
- Telling someone directly why you came over.
- Admitting when you're nervous. "Honestly, I almost didn't come over. Glad I did."
- Asking for a number plainly instead of engineering a reason.
There's more on direct openers in how to approach someone you're attracted to.
Polarization
Manson argues that being clearly yourself will put some people off, and that's good. If you blur your opinions and personality to appeal to everyone, nobody feels strongly about you. If you're honest about who you are, the people who like that will like it a lot. Rejection becomes a filter, not a failure.
A small example. Someone mentions she hates hiking. The people-pleasing reply is "Yeah, it's overrated." If you actually love hiking, the polarizing reply is "Oh no, that's my favorite thing. What happened, bad experience?" She might find that charming. She might not. Either way, she's reacting to the real you, which is the only reaction worth having.
Honesty as the method
The thread through all of it: say what you mean, show what you want, and let the other person make a real choice. That's why the subtitle is "Attract Women Through Honesty."
Why it mattered
By 2011, pickup had a reputation problem. The Game had made it famous, the VH1 show had put it on TV, and plenty of men who tried the tactics felt fake doing them. Models offered a way to keep the useful part, going out and meeting people, while dropping the tricks.
It also fit a broader change. Even Neil Strauss, whose book took pickup mainstream, said in 2015 that he'd come to believe "any manipulation is not a good thing." Models had made a version of that argument four years earlier. You can read about that turn in Neil Strauss and The Game.
Where to read it with care
In Flow's view, Models is the best book the old pickup world produced, but it's still a product of that world.
It's written for men attracting women. If that's not you, much of it translates, but the framing doesn't.
"Polarizing" can be misread. Being clearly yourself doesn't mean being abrasive or contrarian to provoke a reaction. That's just a different tactic.
Its goal isn't quite Flow's. Models is about attracting women, sexually included, while Flow's goal is meeting someone you genuinely connect with. Read it for the mindset, and apply it to whatever you're actually looking for.
Non-neediness can be faked. Pretending not to care is still caring about how you look. The real version comes from having a life that's full regardless of how one conversation goes.
How to use it
The most practical thing you can take from Models is a new definition of success. If you approached honestly, said what you wanted, and handled the answer well, that was a good approach, even if she said no. That's how you build the kind of confidence that doesn't depend on outcomes. How to handle rejection when you approach and how to build real confidence meeting new people both build on the same idea.
It's also why Flow counts rejections as approaches. A "no" you handled well is progress, and your success rate is only one number on the Stats screen. For a broader reading list, see pickup and dating books worth reading.