How many of you are always waiting for your friends so you can do things? You want your friends to do things with you. You want to go to this place or that place. You want to go out and meet women.

You always have to wait for your friends to go with you before you can do anything you want to do. How many of you do that?

How many of you have that mentality of always waiting for your friends to join you? How many of you live alone with no roommates, and you basically don’t have anyone to run with? How many of you work late all the time because you really just don’t know what else to do with yourself?

This is what I tell everybody, and this is what I do myself. You have to start dating yourself. In order to be able to go and meet somebody, you’ve got to start dating yourself.

So here are some things I used to do all the time. I would take myself out to dinner. Instead of going to Whole Foods and bringing dinner home, I’d go there and sit at one of their tables and eat. There are going to be other people there doing the exact same thing you are.

Instead of renting movies from Netflix when I wanted to see a new movie, I made sure that I went to the video store so I had an opportunity to meet somebody. Instead of making tea (since I don’t drink coffee) at home, I’d go to a coffee shop and sit there to drink my tea. I’d bring a newspaper, hang out and just talk to people there.

You have to start dating yourself. You really do.

You’ve got to start doing things with yourself. You’ve got to start enjoying yourself.

It’s almost like a new form of masturbation. You have to go out there. You have to entertain yourself. You have to go and do things on a consistent basis, because nobody else is going to bring the people to you.

What happens when you are always waiting for your friends to do things, is that you have all sorts of pressure because you’re always waiting for them. You finally get your friends to go out on Friday night, so you put all this pressure on that Friday night as your one opportunity to meet people.

So spend a few days a week dating yourself. Ask yourself out. Call yourself up. Send yourself a text. Send yourself a text and say, “Hey you, what do you want to do tonight?” Then text yourself right back and say, “I don’t know. What are you in the mood for?” Then text yourself again and say, “How about dinner at Whole Foods tonight, or why don’t we we go to that great little place up the street and have dinner at the bar?”

Go out and start communicating with people. The point is to build up your social network. When you go out and do all this, don’t just go out and wait for the most beautiful person to arrive before you’ll talk to anyone. Talk to everybody.

What happens when you do that is that you start to build up that social network. You will start to communicate with people all the time — men, women, kids, dogs, older people, younger people, everyone.

Then a month later, you’ll run into the woman you talked to at Whole Foods one night. You may not have been attracted to her, but you chatted with her a bit. You had a great conversation over Whole Foods dinner. You may run into that woman when she is with six of her friends, and you will immediately (and without any pressure) have an “in” into that group of women.

Even though you weren’t attracted to her, she was still a nice person to hang out with at the time. And now that you did that, when you see her now with her friends, you can walk right over to her and say, “Oh my God, it’s my dinner partner from Whole Foods a few weeks ago!”

So you’re building yourself a network that way which takes off some of the pressure. Instead of always having to do these cold approaches 24/7, it takes off that pressure and enables you to go and start building up a social network.

This is what I did, and this is how I know so many people. No matter where I go, I know people. If I fly to London tomorrow, I can call ten people for dinner and they’ll bring ten new people along. If I go to Wisconsin tomorrow, I’ve got a group of people I can hang out with. It’s called being a friendly person, dating yourself and meeting other people.